Zohran Mamdani will be the unlikeliest mayor in New York City history. A 34-year-old backbench state assemblyman and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Mamdani ran on the promise of affordability and was declared the winner not long after polls closed tonight. On his path to victory, he thrilled young voters in a way that few Democrats have in years. But perhaps no one was more delighted by his election than President Donald Trump.

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Elon Musk wants to be anointed the world’s first trillionaire—but he swears it’s not about the money.
Over the past few weeks, the Tesla CEO has been demanding greater power over the electric-vehicle manufacturer that he has led for almost two decades.

On the first day of every month, Ethel Ingram goes to the grocery store with $171 in federally funded food stamps and a nearly impossible mission: Buy enough food for the next 30 days. She usually fails. A couple of weeks into most months, she’s forced to pursue another goal: visiting enough food banks to stock her refrigerator until the month ends and her account reloads. But this month, the government shutdown cut off food assistance to her and millions of others.

Millions of the poorest Americans are stuck in food-stamp limbo. They still do not know when their benefits will arrive—or if they will at all.
In the past few days, the government shutdown has thrown the food-stamp program, formally known as SNAP, into chaos. On Friday, after the Trump administration said that SNAP was on the verge of running out of money, a federal judge ordered the White House to tap into a reserve of funds and pay out billions of dollars in benefits.

Updated with new questions at 4:40 p.m. ET on November 4, 2025.
The 37-volume Naturalis Historia, written by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, is the world’s earliest surviving encyclopedia. In the first century C.E., Pliny set out to collect the breadth of human knowledge, and millennia later, it’s still a great document for learning a little bit about everything. It has chapters on sugar, Germany, the rainbow, Cesarean births, the art of painting, and hypothetical antipodes.