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Jezebel • Jan 26, 2026

Even Trump Is Clearly Scared of the Alex Pretti Shooting Fallout

Following the shooting of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti, Donald Trump refused Sunday to say whether he supported the Border Patrol shooter.

New Republic • Jan 26, 2026

Trump’s Path to a (Real) Nobel: Press Israel to Free Marwan Barghouti

President Trump’s Board of Peace and plans for Gaza and Israel-Palestine won’t bring peace or garner him his coveted Nobel Peace Prize. But freeing one Palestinian from Israeli prison could possibly achieve these goals. Marwan Barghouti has sat in an Israeli prison since 2004, serving five life sentences plus 40 years. Fadwa Barghouti, his wife, along with her youngest son, Arab, granted me their first recent interview with an American journalist, on my recent trip to the region just after the New Year. While the Barghouti family has never engaged with Trump or any members of his administration, the president has mentioned Barghouti’s name several times recently, most likely after mentions of him by French President Emmanuel Macron and the Saudi leadership. I met Fadwa and Arab in their modest Ramallah apartment, where I’ve visited them for the past three winters. Fadwa is a lawyer, who gave up her own practice to work full-time for her husband’s release. She is active in Fatah, a strong feminist, and a founder of Fatah’s Union for Women’s Rights. Arab, 35, is the youngest of four children. Previously, we spoke on background because the family feared for Marwan’s safety in prison. Now, that same concern makes them speak out. (I have been writing about him since 2006, most recently in this magazine in 2024.) For a family that lives in fear for Marwan Barghouti’s life since his incarceration, both Fadwa and Arab emit a hope that stands in contrast to the extraordinary anger and hatred that has captured the region and the world since October 7, 2023. They are rightly concerned about the cavalier way that the Netanyahu government is treating this prized prisoner with National Security Minister and longtime Kahanist Itamar Ben Gvir running the prisons. Ben Gvir recently posted a video of himself threatening a visibly gaunt Barghouti in prison, followed by a post on X wishing for Marwan’s “execution.” An untraceable phone caller claiming to have been in prison with Barghouti called Fadwa to say her husband’s ear was cut and his teeth knocked out. Their Israeli lawyer visited the prison at the end of December, confirming this was a lie. (His wife has not been allowed to see him for three years; his children or grandchildren even longer.)Marwan, a Fatah leader presently held in the notorious Megiddo Prison in Israel, was convicted by Israeli court in 2004 for his leadership role in terrorist attacks against Israelis during the second Palestinian intifada. Marwan and his family deny the charges and didn’t recognize the court proceedings. Since October 7, 2023, he’s been moved several times and kept in solitary confinement, as have all Palestinian security prisoners, in conditions that the Association for Civil Rights Israel has argued violate international laws. This is a political incarceration. Barghouti, almost without dispute, is the only potential candidate for president of a future Palestine who could beat both a Hamas leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas or any potential P.A. leader since the P.A. is deeply unpopular. Khalil Shikaki, the Palestinian pollster, this past October found that in a race between Barghouti and Khalid Mishal of Hamas, the vote would be 58–39 Barghouti. Barghouti forged ties with the Israeli peace camp for years. When he took over the reins of the popular Fatah uprising in 2000, he was a young and incorruptible alternative to Arafat. As the uprising spiraled, and as spokesperson for the intifada, he became a wanted man by the Israeli government led by hard-line Ariel Sharon.  Six months before Barghouti’s arrest, the Israel Defense Forces raided his home, remaining for three days. “They quarantined me and my children in a small room in the house,” Fadwa recalled. “They put the Israeli flag on our balcony.” Marwan couldn’t return to the apartment. His son added: “We used to go to demonstrations to be able to see him, just for a few minutes.”Fadwa last saw Marwan under the cloak of secrecy near Ramallah for the last time on March 28, 2002, 17 days before his capture. “He advised me that either he will be arrested or killed,” she said. “I told him, ‘God willing, you will be arrested and not killed because at least we will be able to come and visit, and I can tell you that our children have finished university, our children got married, and so on.’” Meanwhile, the family prepared for what they thought would be a short internment. “As a lawyer, not just as his wife,” Fadwa told me, she didn’t expect his sentence to be so harsh. “I thought, it’s going to be five years, maximum ten. We never expected in our worst nightmare that it would be like this. We knew that he was never involved in actual operations and violence. He never denied his role as the spokesman for the intifada, calling for the people to demonstrate, to resist the occupation, and he even supported resistance in Palestinian territories according to international law.”The trial, which lasted for almost two years, was of course major Israeli news. Then Prime Minister Sharon took a daily personal interest. At the end of the trial, Barghouti flashed a victory sign with his fingers that was seen around the world as a symbol of the Palestinian struggle. Fadwa recalled why her husband staged that photo. “He told me that despite body pain from the long trial, he forced himself to raise his arms in a victorious salute, which flashed across screens everywhere.” Barghouti has been at the top of all the prisoner exchange requests from Hamas since October 7. Israel never acquiesced. There seems to be truth to his son Arab’s speculation: “In the last 14 years, 800 Palestinian detainees have been freed by the Israelis: very complicated security cases, according to the Israeli courts. Yet they keep excluding Marwan. We need to ask ourselves why. Not because he’s a security threat, obviously, but because he’s a political threat.”Arab asks: “Why is he that effective as a leader? He’s a unifying figure … something that we lack in Palestinian politics. [Israel] is happy with the status quo, which is scattered Palestinians: Hamas ruling Gaza, the P.A. very weak ruling the West Bank, Jerusalemites on their own, the Palestinians in Israel on their own, the diaspora, and so on.“The second reason is his popularity gives him legitimacy from the people and not from the Israeli government or even from the international community. And that’s something that we Palestinians really appreciate. There’s nobody else here who can do that. “And the third thing, which he believes is why the Israeli government insists on not releasing him, is he believes in coexistence. He has a track record of meeting with Israelis, of being a moderate. He still makes it public that he believes in the two-state solution, and he doesn’t lose that popularity. But the Israeli government is not interested in any peace process, even if it’s going to bring stability, because stability is not their incentive or motivation. Their motivation is full domination on the land.”Arab’s message to supporters of Palestinian freedom is especially striking in his compassion. “We don’t want people to be pro-Palestinian. We want them to be pro-justice. And for them to be pro-justice, we must look at how we can come up with better solutions.” After leaving Ramallah, I visited Ami Ayalon at his home in central Israel. Now 80, Ayalon is a former Shin Bet leader (2000–2005), a former admiral of the Israeli Navy, and a former Labor Party politician. He is part of a small cohort of previous security and military leaders who are outspoken against Netanyahu’s government, including its conduct during the war against Hamas. Ayalon was a featured speaker at the regular Saturday night Tel Aviv demonstrations against Netanyahu in early January. For the last several decades, Ayalon has been a forthright promoter of justice for the Palestinians as a way to secure Israel.Ayalon insists that Marwan Barghouti be freed from prison, and that if Palestinian elections are allowed, a victorious Barghouti will attempt to negotiate a sustainable future for both Palestinians and Israelis. To answer critics who say that Barghouti has “blood on his hands,” Ayalon says: “When we say somebody has blood on his hands, what do we mean? I have blood on my hands. I killed many people. I’m not proud of it, but this is why you send soldiers and warriors to the battlefield, not to negotiate. If you want to negotiate, you send diplomats. “I’m saying it as a director of the Shin Bet: Marwan himself did not kill anybody, personally. But yes, he was a commander. So when we say blood on his hands, yes, he commanded.” That’s why he was arrested. But today, Ayalon says, Barghouti is no longer in prison because of any acts he may have committed: “If you ask me today, why is he in prison? Because in the eyes of the Palestinians, he is the only alternative. He became a symbol.”Indeed, Ayalon’s arguments echoed what Barghouti’s son told me regarding the political reason for Marwan’s continued imprisonment. The former Israeli warrior concurs with Fadwa Barghouti about the causes of the second intifada and the emergence of Marwan’s leadership: “The second intifada was a popular uprising against the reality. “Palestinians see [and saw] more settlements, more security, more soldiers, etc. Arafat’s administration was totally corrupt, and the Palestinians saw it.” Barghouti has always been respected by Palestinians because he is seen as uncorrupted, unlike Arafat and Palestinian Authority leaders today. Ayalon described how Arafat latched onto Marwan Barghouti because of Arafat’s vulnerabilities. “Marwan was second to Arafat. And we know that Marwan gave orders to lead terror. In the eyes of the Palestinians, this was a war of independence. In the eyes of the Israelis, it was pure terror. This is why he was arrested and tried.”Ayalon told me that in his view, there are two types of people left among Israelis and Palestinians: messianists and pragmatists. A pragmatist himself, he includes Barghouti in that sphere and therefore hopes for his freedom. Ayalon hopes too that a post-Netanyahu government could be pragmatic. “The future of the Middle East will be decided between MBS [Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman] and Trump. These are the two people who can shape the future of the Middle East,” Ayalon told me.Though the Barghouti family isn’t in touch with the current White House (they previously engaged with the State Department and other U.S. officials), they are in frequent contact with the Saudis, Egypt, the EU, France, and the U.K., all of whom want to play critical mediating roles. It’s likely that one of these countries’ leaders is whispering Marwan’s name in Trump’s ear, because he has mentioned Barghouti several times in recent interviews. Meanwhile, the family is building an international campaign of support that most recently was endorsed by Bono, The Elders (the peace and justice campaign founded by Nelson Mandela), and hundreds of celebrities. Celebrities won’t free Barghouti, but they are keeping his name in the spotlight. In this Israeli election year, it’s hard to imagine Netanyahu releasing him, even with pressure from Trump. However, a new Israeli prime minister—if he is a pragmatist too—could be guided by security recommendations that point to a different political agenda. The United States and Saudi Arabia hold keys that could unlock prison for Barghouti, giving Palestinians—and Israelis—a chance for livable and reconcilable futures. And, then too, maybe Trump could actually earn that Nobel Prize.

New Republic • Jan 26, 2026

Donald Trump Wants This Chaos. It Means More Power in His Hands.

Can anyone doubt now that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want chaos in American streets? I submit to you that at this point, there is no other conclusion that may reasonably be drawn. Consider: It was less than three weeks ago that their thuggish agents executed a woman, a U.S. citizen, in cold blood. If for no other reason than the fact that it sparked international controversy, a normal democratically elected government that felt the normal degree of humility toward public and world opinion would have sent out a memo telling their armed agents to go easy for a little while until things cool down. The elected leader would issue the usual calls for calm.Yet 17 days after the execution of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent, border patrol officers carried out another execution of an American citizen a mere two miles away. Trumpers can carry on all they want about Alex Pretti’s gun—which he was allowed to carry legally because the state’s Republicans decided back in 2003 that passing such a law was a grand idea—but the different videos make it obvious that at the time of his death, Pretti was on the ground, had been disarmed, and posed no mortal threat to anyone. That’s when they put 10 holes in him. With Good, I noted at the time, we could, maybe, bend over backward and grant a smidgen of ambiguity around the first bullet. But there was nothing ambiguous about the second and third ones, fired from point-blank range through an open car window. Likewise, about 10 shots, there is nothing ambiguous. This too was an execution.These people are very clearly under orders, of at least the nudge and wink variety, to shoot first and ask questions later. Besides, when they watch their leaders smear the people they just executed with their itchy fingers, what lesson do we suppose they take away? Good, said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, before her body was cold, committed an act of “domestic terrorism.” Pretti, Noem announced on Saturday, literally within minutes of his execution, “attacked” agents. If you’re wearing a badge and a mask and carrying a gun, you hear that clearly as a green light to do it again. And just in case you didn’t, Noem added: “We will continue to let this process go forward and not allow people like Governor Walz and Mayor Frey … to lie about what actually unfolded on that street.”There will be more executions, of citizens and noncitizens alike. Every victim will be smeared by the state. Protests will mount. Rage on the left will grow. Eventually, at some point, someone on the anti-MAGA side of this argument will cross a line. An ICE officer will be shot. Then what? Well, first of all, they’ll make a martyr of this modern-day Horst Wessel. Maybe Kid Rock will write a song about him, as the Nazis did about old Horst. And then will come the real business, the day Miller probably anticipates with an almost sexual excitement: Martial law will be declared. I’m not sure it will even require the shooting of an ICE agent—just more ICE shootings leading to a degree of unrest that reaches critical mass. For these people, that would be excuse enough.What would martial law mean exactly? It’s hard to say, but the other-than-reassuring basic answer is: whatever Donald Trump wants it to mean. Suspension of certain rights—like, say, the right of an arrestee to know the charges on which he was being detained. That’s protected by the Sixth Amendment. If I’d written a column during the campaign calling Trump a threat to the Sixth Amendment, polite, mainstream, non-MAGA opinion would have said: Oh, there goes Tomasky. I ask you how far-fetched it seems today.Curfews, checkpoints, restricted travel? Not for the good people of Red America, of course. They voted the right way. But in blue states? What law or convention will exist to hold Trump and Miller back?The military, interestingly, might be a problem, from Trump’s point of view. When JD Vance said last week that the Insurrection Act was not needed at this point, it struck me: Of course! The military has rules of engagement—and unlike ICE, a culture of professionalism. Its soldiers wouldn’t execute Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And even if they did, it would be in direct contravention of orders, and they’d face consequences. So, no—Trump doesn’t want the military involved. They’re a bunch of woke creampuffs!So let’s start to sum up. Over the summer, ICE will grow and grow. Remember—the budget was tripled last year. They can’t spend the money as fast as Congress is sending it to them. They doubled the size of their force in the second half of 2025, and in the next few months, they’re going to double it again. ICE will be wherever Trump and Miller want it to be.That mostly means places where ICE isn’t wanted. That means protests and confrontations. That means shootings and executions. That means an excuse for martial law. And that, finally, brings us to the matter of November’s elections. Don’t worry—presidents can’t unilaterally stop elections from happening. Under the Constitution, elections are run by the states. So blue states, at least, will have them. But red states? It will depend on what Dear Leader commands at the moment. And even in blue states, there are red regions, and Republicans who represent them. And there are Republicans sitting on elections commissions. There’s no question that schemes are being cooked up in those boiler rooms that you and I couldn’t even imagine.And finally, the Democrats? I hope now that every one of them, up to and including the most trusting liberal and the most timid centrist, sees what is happening in this country. For starters, I’d like to see all 260 elected Democrats in Congress, along with governors and other statewide officials, descend on Minneapolis this week. They could march from the spot of Renee Good’s execution to the spot where Alex Pretti was executed. They should keep the speeches to a minimum. Just be there. Light candles. Sing Prince and Bob Dylan songs. Grant moral witness to this historic tragedy, this shameful besmirching of our history and our aspirations to be a better people.Let the American people see this bearing of witness. Let them know that on Saturday night, after Pretti was murdered, there was a party in the Trump White House celebrating the upcoming release of the Amazon-financed Melania biopic, where a full military band played “Melania’s Waltz.” Let them know that two million Epstein files have not been released, in contravention of the law. Let them know that Renee Good and Alex Pretti should be alive today. And let them know that millions of Americans are mad, yes; but more than that, they are in pain: They are, as an old high school friend put it on Facebook over the weekend, sick to their souls over what these people are doing to our country. This is no longer about politics. It’s about who we are as a nation.UPDATE: And after I wrote this Sunday, I saw that Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Tim Walz outlining steps Walz could take to “bring back law and order to Minnesota,” one of which was turning over the state’s voter database to her department to “confirm” that the state’s voter registration practices “comply with federal law.” Hmmm ...

New Republic • Jan 26, 2026

How Zohran Mamdani Can Revolutionize Public Safety

Every day in New York City, familiar scenes unfold on repeat: A man yells and gestures erratically on a subway platform. A mother calls 911 because her son hasn’t slept in days and is pacing the apartment, terrified. An unhoused woman collapses outside a bodega in summer heat. Someone shouts. Someone panics. Sirens draw near.In the United States—and particularly in New York City, the nation’s foremost urban experiment—we have been trained to believe this is what “public safety” means.But what actually happens next tells a different story. Police officers wait for an ambulance. Emergency rooms hold people for hours, sometimes days, because there is nowhere else for them to go. Shelters cycle people back onto the street. Jails become overnight psychiatric wards. Nothing stabilizes. Nothing sticks. Over time, crises simply multiply and intensify. And, each year, as in two instances in New York that occurred within a six-hour span earlier this month—one involving a man who was already being treated in a hospital—some number of these crises result in police firing their weapons and killing a person in distress.While most Americans agree that this represents a collective ethical failure as a society to care for our most vulnerable members, moralizing responses have done little to produce meaningful change. Worse, they often obscure what’s truly needed. To change our long-standing reality, what’s essential is to confront that this is first of all a failure of political definition. Across every borough, New Yorkers suffer from a long tradition of misidentifying what safety is—and as a result, billions of dollars are poured into the wrong institutions, which then fail to deliver.That is the problem Zohran Mamdani has inherited. Much of his campaign was built around addressing this conundrum by redefining danger not as the absence of enough policing but as the persistent policy failure to invest public resources in crisis prevention. This is why his proposal for a Department of Community Safety now matters for far more than simply retooling the city’s mental health crisis-response systems—its most visible task.To be successful, and to avoid inadvertently repeating narrow policing frameworks that fixate on reaction rather than preemption, Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety must refuse temptations to fixate on crisis and “serious mental illness” alone. Instead, this agency must insist upon reframing crisis moments—and the mental illness associated with such moments—as the consequence of years of failed opportunities to ensure the care, community, and resources people need to be safe.This entails a public education mission that faces immense challenges and is twofold, requiring intertwined redefinitions of both mental health and safety. New York, like the rest of the country, has been taught to partition mental illness itself into two categories: “serious mental illness,” or SMI, and everything else. Management of SMI is then said to require exceptional emergency systems—built around police powers and involuntary treatment—while everyday care for anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, grief, and isolation are pushed into the private market or left for families to manage on their own. That is, until they can no longer do so and crisis erupts, resulting in a sudden category shift, by which public systems—but only crisis-response systems—are suddenly implicated.The embedded, decontextualizing conceptualization of SMI and mental illness in general as simply neurobiological conditions separate from social conditions is not medically defensible. It is an administratively convenient political construction, providing a scapegoat—namely, people living with psychotic experiences—for policy failures. Crisis does not emerge from nowhere, nor does it arise simply from inside one’s brain. The crises associated with SMI are typically the end point of years of untreated or unsupported distress: Someone finally breaks down in public, after earlier needs for care and community have been ignored. Reacting to this by building variations on crisis-response systems without rebuilding everyday community mental health systems that provide support to people long before a crisis looms is how American cities have manufactured permanent, perpetual emergencies. And they’re still doing it.Based in large part on this false notion of mental illness and extreme distress, New Yorkers have been told, relentlessly, by both media and politicians, that safety comes from force, police visibility, and the number of uniforms present on the scene. It hinges on police powers to remove “dangerous” people from public space, insisted former Mayor Eric Adams and his mental health adviser Brian Stettin, as they insisted that only expanding arrest powers could save New York from the unhoused and mentally ill people they represented as a scourge on the city. This kind of story is repeated by tabloids and leading national newspapers alike, by mayor after mayor, by police commissioners, and by technocratic liberals at all levels of U.S. government. Their insistent claim: While the nation’s reliance on policing as a substitute for care may be regrettable, it is nonetheless unavoidable—and we always need more of it.The everyday reality of the city at a block-by-block level tells another story. When a mental health crisis unfolds in Harlem or the South Bronx, police are rarely the first or even the primary actors keeping anyone alive. EMTs, nurses, social workers, shelter staff, outreach workers, family members, and strangers on the street do the work of holding things together. Police mostly manage the edges: controlling space, documenting events—and sometimes dangerously escalating situations they were never trained to resolve.In practice, New York already relies on everyday care to produce safety. Its politicians and police leaders have just refused to admit it—or to fund it as such. Instead, the city treats the care as an afterthought and the crisis as the main event. It spends lavishly on the institutions that are last to arrive, while starving the ones that might have prevented the emergency altogether.The political fantasy behind this distinctively American vision of public safety is that force can substitute for social stability. That if police budgets are large enough and sentences long enough, the city will feel secure.New York, like cities across the country, has tested this hypothesis for decades. The result is a city that, while it may be safer by narrow crime metrics that are at their lowest point in decades, has grown ever more anxious, more unequal, and more brittle in everyday life. Although most American cities are, in a sense, safer than at any point in the last 50 years, their residents repeatedly insist that they feel more unsafe than ever. While many commentators have pointed out the disconnect between this subjective feeling and objective crime statistics, the fact is that this widespread intuition of danger is not in fact wrong: We are, collectively, deeply unsafe. Mental illness, crises, and suicides have dramatically increased, not decreased. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Jails function as psychiatric warehouses. Homelessness, or the threat of it, haunts huge swaths of the public as an unaffordable housing market controlled by megawealthy investors and corporate landlords squeezes people dry. More and more people are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to afford adequate food and health care. Public space feels tense not because it is lawless but because so many people are barely holding on.What gets labeled as “disorder,” “danger,” and “SMI” is the visible residue of public abandonment: It’s the housing that never materialized, the benefits that never arrived, the care that was never available until “crisis” erupted in public and other people’s discomfort compelled a response. The shouting man on the train platform is not evidence that the city is too permissive and inadequately policed, as Eric Adams repeatedly preached. He is instead evidence that everything meant to help him earlier quietly failed offstage.Up to this point, New York’s leadership has tried to solve this problem by adding programs rather than building systems. Pilot projects. Demonstrations. Grants with expiration dates. Crisis teams without places to send people afterward. These efforts often work—briefly. And then they collapse under their own fragility and inability to meet public expectations without adequate public investment.The city’s non-police crisis-response programs have shown that sending care teams instead of armed officers reduces arrests and violence. Violence interrupters have saved lives. Outreach workers and supportive housing have stabilized people living with psychotic experiences in the subway. None of this is speculative. What’s missing is not the evidence that these policies work. It’s the infrastructure to make it so.New York treats care like charity and policing like plumbing. One runs on unstable funding and moral appeals; the other is permanent, protected, and politically untouchable. No one asks whether the NYPD should survive the next budget cycle. Essential care programs are asked that question every year.The most radical thing about Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety is not that it proposes to deemphasize policing. It’s that it refuses to treat care as optional.The success of Mamdani’s safety plan ultimately hinges on whether he manages to build a large, publicly funded care workforce whose job is to stabilize daily life before crisis takes over. Not clinicians alone, and not volunteers—but paid, trained community care workers embedded in neighborhoods, schools, libraries, housing, and transit hubs.The heart of such an approach is people whose work is not emergency extraction but continuity: helping someone keep benefits, mediating conflicts, eldercare, parenting coaching, accompanying people through grief, addiction, reentry, postpartum distress, psychotic experiences, loneliness. This kind of care hinges on lay caregivers trained in task-sharing roles in coordination with professionals to provide psychotherapeutic support for anxiety, depression, and grief and to provide everyday companionship to those living through extreme states. As all honest psychiatrists know, even if proponents of involuntary psychiatric treatment (like those who ran Adams’s mental health policy) refuse to acknowledge it, psychotic experiences are very often unresponsive to psychiatric medications, which impose such substantial side effects that the majority—even under controlled, supervised study conditions—stop taking them within 18 months. What people living with such experiences need is rarely more medication, coercion, or hospitalization. They need intensive social care to help them maintain housing and interpersonal connection in their communities. This is the unglamorous labor of community caregivers that no police department can perform and for which no psychiatric unit, clinic, or medication can substitute.Crucially, this workforce refuses the simple distinction between “serious mental illness” and “mild-to-moderate” or “common” mental illness. People do not live their lives in diagnostic categories or symptom-severity ratings. Psychosis, suicidality, addiction, despair, panic, and withdrawal from shared reality rarely arrive fully formed; they emerge along a continuum shaped by housing, work, relationships, loss, stress, and time. As studies around the world have shown, the same kind of community care that helps someone through depression or grief is often what prevents a psychotic delusion or hallucination from developing into overwhelming anxiety and a violent police encounter. If the Department of Community Safety becomes just another crisis-response unit, another hotline, or another pilot, then it will become yet another revolving door for unending crises. Eventually, this flawed creation will be swallowed by the same dynamics that defeated earlier reforms. Crisis will remain hypervisible while everyday care will remain invisible. Police will retain their role as default responders. And opponents will declare the experiment a failure.Without a credible alternative to police at the moment of crisis and bold investment in a public care infrastructure behind it to prevent crisis and durably stabilize people after it occurs, no reform will ultimately survive the crushing inertia of the status quo. The danger facing Mamdani is not backlash from the right—that is inevitable. It is the risk of aiming too low.This is not just a debate about safety. It is a debate about what kind of city New York is becoming. Care is how people learn whether and how they belong. When help arrives only after crisis has already boiled over, and when it then arrives defensive or armed, people learn to expect abandonment. When the most consistent presence of the state for people who are suffering is either police or psychiatric coercion, people learn to fear public institutions rather than trust them.That is the soil in which authoritarian politics grows and neoliberal disinvestment from public systems intensifies. But a city that invests in care as infrastructure teaches a different lesson: that help is not a privilege, that crisis is not a crime, and that safety is something produced together rather than enforced from above. By investing in public systems with which to support neighbors in caring for one another, New York would be investing in caring for democracy itself, or what my colleague Gary Belkin has called “democracy therapy.”As NYPD’s $11 billion budget makes clear, New York has the resources to do this. It has clear evidence that it’s effective. It can build the workforce. What it has lacked is the political spine to identify public care systems for what they are—the city’s real safety system—and to allocate public resources accordingly, not just to crisis response but to the full spectrum of neighborhood-based care across the lifespan that’s required for community safety to become a reality.

New Republic • Jan 26, 2026

The Narrative Genius of Heated Rivalry

I don’t like hockey. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Pittsburgh Penguins were building their dynasty. It was arguably one of the greatest places and times to be alive as a hockey fan in the United States. The thing that hockey fans tell you if you tell them you don’t like hockey is that you can’t watch it on TV. The unique genius of the sport does not translate to the small screen. While basketball’s speed, muscle, and craft; football’s strategic gamesmanship and sudden violence; and baseball’s pastoral beauty are all apparent on television broadcasts, hockey looks like a bunch of faceless cubes gliding around chasing an object that’s only intermittently visible to the audience. For all that close-quarters slicing and grinding, you’d think they’d score more.Hockey, its fans may tell you, is a sport you have to fall in love with live. Its physicality, its brutality, the virtuosity of its skaters, the precise and perilous movements of the sticks, the operatic anger, the balletic movement—these are all things that are visible only if you are in the audience, face pressed up against the glass. To really appreciate what’s going on on the ice, you have to be in that big refrigerator, shoulder to shoulder with the raucous crowd, bodies flying at you left and right. It’s exhilarating; it’s just not great TV.This November, though, a little Canadian series called Heated Rivalry figured out how to make hockey work on television. It’s not necessarily a strategy ESPN can replicate.Based on the popular Game Changer novels by Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry is maybe the most sexually explicit romance adaptation on TV since Outlander. The six-episode series tells the story of the forbidden queer love affair of two professional hockey players, and it does so by documenting each of its lovers’ dalliances at length and in languorous detail. It’s been working. Since its release in November, the show has become a huge word-of-mouth hit for HBO Max (which picked the show up from Canadian network Crave). While it isn’t ascending to Bluey levels of global streaming dominance, what’s unique about the show has been its growth. Between the week of its debut and the week of its season finale, on December 27, viewership grew tenfold—from 30 million to 324 million streaming minutes logged—with a growing and notable majority of viewers being women. Heated Rivalry’s fans can’t stop posting about it on social media. It’s hard not to see why. The show feels unique. It’s physical and intimate, surprisingly quiet, and it moves strangely, telling its story in lurches and skids. It doesn’t feel like hockey, and it doesn’t feel like anything else on TV right now; it feels a little bit like falling in love.Heated Rivalry is, almost exclusively, the story of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two high-level professional hockey prospects who fall in love. One’s Canadian, the other’s Russian; one is soft-spoken, the other is brazen and bombastic; one is a squeaky-clean national hero with a supportive family, and the other is a “bad boy” lothario with a family that despises him and bleeds him dry. And they are men. While Heated Rivalry is a romantic fantasy, it’s set in the real world of professional sports, where there is currently not a single out athlete in any of the major men’s professional leagues of North America. (This is not the case in women’s professional sports.) While the show’s effort to reproduce realistic gameplay on the ice is cursory at best, its dialogue can occasionally lapse into made-for-TV movie stiltedness, some of its contextualizing side plots can feel paint-by-numbers, and its choppy progression through time can feel like a 10-car narrative pileup, its depiction of the secret relationship between Shane and Ilya gives it unaccountable life.The world of Heated Rivalry is radically narrow. In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry. There are intra-team dynamics, friends and former lovers, complex family situations, international political imbroglios, and social lives outside of the succession of hotel rooms in which these lovers meet. But the show rigorously abstains from too much investment in any of that other stuff. Trimming its plot of almost every bit of material that doesn’t directly impact Shane and Ilya’s affair, Heated Rivalry has a kind of ruthless narrative economy. Trimming its plot of almost every bit of material that doesn’t directly impact Shane and Ilya’s affair, Heated Rivalry has a kind of ruthless narrative economy.One of the most jarring features of the show, which becomes apparent quickly into the first episode, is its skimming-for-the-good-parts storytelling style. In the first 11 minutes of the show’s pilot, for instance, there are four separate time jumps—“One Week Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later.” While the pace slows a bit after that opening hopscotch, the time jump remains the show’s signature structuring device. I found myself laughing about it as the series began, but, as episodes unfolded, there started to be something almost hypnotic about the constant yada-yada’ing of everything that didn’t involve our two leads. This is a show about the slow, slow dawning of a love story between two people, but, from the jump, the show is already formally in love with them. Time-jumping and globe-trotting to show us every single time they hook up over the course of about a decade, the show’s immediate devotion to their affair starts to bleed out into the viewer’s perception and anticipation of it. Heated Rivalry almost literally can’t wait to get Ilya and Shane into a room together, almost before the characters themselves feel that way. With a few notable exceptions, this is basically all the show does. It builds a narrative machine around the developing intimacy between Shane and Ilya. Championships are won and lost, peripheral friends and family members enter into frame and scurry out just as quickly, and neither Ilya nor Shane has recourse to the kind of voiceover narration or even open conversation with friends that might give us insight into their thoughts and feelings. But feel they do! Long stretches of the show are just two guys quietly having sex, with little dialogue save for heavy breathing. The degree to which they must “keep it quiet” in their lives is reflected in the show’s formal patience about saying anything out loud. The story is told, largely, through the performance of Shane and Ilya’s physical chemistry, as well as the loaded moments when that chemistry disappears, freezes up, or transforms into something else. There is a momentary break in this dynamic in the third episode, when we return to an earlier moment at the Sochi Olympics and follow Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), a fellow hockey player who’d mostly only appeared at All-Star games and award ceremonies to this point. In this stand-alone episode, we watch Scott come to terms with his own sexuality, begin secretly dating a barista named Kip, and see that relationship run up against the wall of Scott’s inability to come out. This episode is counterprogramming to the Ilya-Shane romance. These men communicate with each other, they are demonstrative, and they have a lot of long sex scenes, but we also get to see the texture of them as a couple. It’s everything the show doesn’t give us of Shane and Ilya. For a moment, it seems as though the show is shifting gears, but it isn’t. While the narrative eye returns to our titular heated rivalry, and things begin to loosen up with their own communication, it eventually becomes clear that the Scott Hunter episode is mostly there to set up later plot developments between Ilya and Shane.Though, for what it’s worth, the moment when that happens, when these two plotlines converge, is one of the most electrifying sequences I’ve seen on TV in the past couple of months. It’s easy to write off this show as prestige Skinemax or a guilty pleasure, but there’s nothing to feel guilty about when a show can hold onto its viewers’ feelings with this kind of patience and confidence. Its unrelenting focus on the chemistry between its two protagonists turns out to be a generative constraint. Over time, and thanks to incredibly self-assured performances from newcomers Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie—an heir to the steamy charismatic legacy of Friday Night Lights’ Tim Riggins—we learn to follow a story told mostly through the intimate physicality, bodily expressiveness, and wordless intuition that develops between them. It’s a spectacle, but it’s a complex one. This is, I might guess, what good hockey is like.Even in their darkest moments, both Heated Rivalry and The Pitt show a vision of humanity that is constrained by unjust systems but ultimately open, ready to love.I was catching up on Heated Rivalry this January, just as I was also beginning to blitz through new episodes of the second season of HBO Max’s other viral hit, The Pitt. These shows are very different. The Pitt has nearly a dozen series regulars in the main cast, another dozen recurring characters, and many dozens more who filter in and out of the E.R. for multi-episode arcs. The Pitt trains its focus on this one place and this one time (per season), but it cares about everyone who passes through. Heated Rivalry really only cares about two people.But it’s the care that stands out. Both of these shows are shows with intense temporal constraints, big emotional swings, and an aesthetic taste for the graphic. In the terms of film theorist Linda Williams, they are both series within the realm of “body genres”—dramas built around showing the body in moments of distress and/or elation. And they have a corresponding effect on the bodies of viewers. The Pitt with its spectacular scenes of surgery and body horror has one effect on the viewer; Heated Rivalry causes quite another. It’s hard to watch either and not feel something. Perhaps that’s because both, even in their darkest moments, show a vision of humanity that is constrained by unjust systems but ultimately open, ready to love. They’re shows about what it means to care and be cared for. And they approach that topic with a radical, formal devotion to their characters. Blood and sex are both effects viewers register with their own bodies, but so too is time. You can feel the heartbeats.