Ross Barkan

2 weeks ago | nymag.com | Ross Barkan

A decade ago, when he still believed he had a political future, Jeb Bush aimed an insult at the new and unlikely candidate for president that he believed would cut him down. "Donald, you know, he is great at the one-liners," Bush said. "But he's a chaos candidate. And he'd be a chaos president."Donald Trump, of course, did not care, and neither did the Republican voters who would go on to hand him the nomination three straight times.

2 weeks ago | open.substack.com | Ross Barkan

Brian Wilson was more than the Beach Boys, and the Beach Boys were more than Brian Wilson. Both statements are equally true. From the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1977, no American band unleashed a more glorious, glittering, and confounding catalog of music; no one, really, could be their equal. This catalog cannot exist without Brian Douglas Wilson, the working-class son of Hawthorne, California, who dreamed in five-part harmonies and married Mozart with the Top 40.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Ross Barkan

In the United States today, there are few more powerful or influential media start-ups than Bari Weiss’s the Free Press. Founded in 2021 and run through Substack, the Free Press today boasts more than 750,000 subscribers, at least 100,000 of whom pay. Weiss, 41 and a former New York Times columnist, is a media mogul for the new age, and her reporters and columnists regularly publish pieces that are widely praised or reviled – either way, the work is rarely ignored.

2 weeks ago | nymag.com | Ross Barkan

It was becoming apparent that Yale wasn't exactly excited about the arrival of Ro Khanna, the rising-star congressman from Silicon Valley who is, like Bill and Hillary Clinton and the current vice-president of the United States, an alumnus of its famed law school. "I hate what the university is doing here, having people go through a line and preregister and not having the community coming out," Khanna told me as we shared some New Haven-style clam pizza.

2 weeks ago | crainsnewyork.com | Ross Barkan

What does it actually mean now that Jessica Ramos has endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor? The Queens state senator, who is running a long-shot campaign in the Democratic primary, shocked much of the political world when she decided to back Cuomo, a man she has fiercely criticized for years. Ramos, once a darling of the progressive establishment, said she was supporting Cuomo because she wanted to stop Zohran Mamdani, a fellow Queens progressive, from becoming mayor.