WEEKEND READS: Bread and roses
The best from around the internet for January 3, 2026
Happy Saturday, Ink readers!
As we do each weekend, we’ve collected some of the most interesting writing and thinking we’ve come across during our weekly research. And as we look ahead to the promise of a new year, we’ve brought you some thoughts on possible futures and what it takes to build a better one, notes on imagining and illustrating a collective vision, cautionary tales of authoritarianism and artificial intelligence, and more.
Welcome to today’s edition of Weekend Reads. We invite you to read along with us.
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Mamdani’s revolutionary tradition
The hysteria of this elite over Mamdani’s ascent would have seemed bizarre to so many of their great-grandparents. In New York at the turn of the century, Jewish workers created a secular, socialist, but specifically Yiddish world. By the time my own great-grandfather turned up in Ellis Island in 1904, this sort of socialism was alive on every Lower East Side street – in the mutual aid societies, debate clubs, picket lines, night schools, and the lectures that Jewish workers obsessively attended. Socialist Yiddish papers sold 120,000 copies a day. The socialist Workmen’s Circle attracted tens of thousands of members in hundreds of branches across America and educated thousands of children at their secular Yiddish schools. Two garment workers unions, led by former Jewish revolutionaries, represented more than 100,000 workers between them. And in 1912, the Yiddish, socialist newspaper The Forward constructed a beaux-arts skyscraper on the corner of Rutgers Square on the Lower East Side. “Where is the synagogue of our Jewish workers? Where is the temple of freedom, of equality, of brotherhood?” Forward editor Abe Cahan asked. That building was his attempt at an answer. [The Guardian]
