Leftanista

I. The Shrug in the East End In the Magnolia Park neighborhood of Houston's East End, the "K-shaped" economy is not a line on a Bloomberg terminal. It is the physical architecture of the street. Between the gleaming downtown skyline to the west and the refinery stacks to the east, the people who keep the city running live in the gap, doing the work the ledger makes invisible. The morning after the 2024 election, I watched a colleague absorb the results. She is a woman who cleans our office: Mexican, speaks little English, essential to the daily functioning of the building and entirely absent from the calculations of those who own it. She was beaming. "President," she said. "Strong." I didn't argue. Not because I agreed, but because I understood. Understanding it, really understanding it rather than pitying it, is the only way to make sense of where we are. She wasn't wrong that the world had rewarded strength. She wasn't wrong that the p...