“Mamdani’s Victory” By Nate Cohn

(Nate Cohn of NYT is considered guru of poll analysis). Some excerpts of article.

“Usually, there isn’t much to learn from a single idiosyncratic primary election. But not this one. The New York Democratic mayoral primary was about much more than the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates, and as a consequence there’s a lot more to learn.”

“Today, liberal Democrats outnumber moderate and conservative ones by 12 percentage points, according to Gallup, 55 percent to 43 percent. In 2016 and 2020, liberals were essentially even with moderate and conservative Democrats.

Similarly, Democrats have moved to the left on Israel. Gallup found that 59 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis (21 percent). This is a huge reversal from 2013, when Democrats sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians, 55-19.”

“And while Mr. Mamdani’s campaign will be hard to replicate, progressives can attempt to copy much of the way he campaigned. They can try to catch fire with viral videos on social media. They can criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank with confidence that Democratic primary voters are sympathetic to their views. In doing so, they would put many mainstream Democratic politicians in a difficult spot, as the general electorate still sympathizes more with Israel.”

“Most of all, they can focus on affordability. This might seem obvious. Mr. Mamdani’s campaign was different. He focused on the cost of living. By talking about the prices of chicken and rice, groceries, rent and buses, he spoke much more directly to the concerns of ordinary people than he would have if he had campaigned on a Green New York Deal or Medicare for all of N.Y.C,”

“Affordability and Israel give them new opportunities and put mainstream Democrats in a challenging spot.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/upshot/zohran-mamdani-democrats-progressives.html

posted by f.sheikh

“What is never mentioned about the grand inventors, artists, scientists and doctors of our world who have done amazing deeds for humanity with their minds and hands is that they all failed in their attempts before they made it.”

“What we creatives are often unaware of is that talent isn’t everything. Sure, talent helps – but just as important is something else we rarely think about: repetition. The repeated movements of our craft – the physical routines we practise over and over – follow us everywhere. Whether we call it practice or technique, these repeated actions shape our brains in powerful ways, often without us even realizing it.”

“They form unique connections in the brain – linking movement, memory and emotion. These connections stretch across the parts of the brain that control movement, wrap around the areas responsible for memory, and reach deep into the emotional core of the brain – the limbic system. That includes the insula, a region that helps manage both our physical health and our inner sense of self.

‘Muscle memory’ doesn’t live in our hands or legs. The real control centre is in the brain. This is where movement begins, guided by systems that plan and initiate what we do. From there, messages travel through long chains of nerve cells – from the brain down the spine and out to the rest of the body. Millions of tiny electrical signals, known as action potentials, move back and forth, telling our muscles, organs and even the tips of our fingers what to do next.

The idea is to ‘program’ the right moves in our brain so they become so automatic we can use them to, yes, feel, and to find flow.

One thing is for sure, if you keep chasing flow by some sort of celestial action, waiting for your inner genius to strike from nowhere, you’ll keep failing. Because that genius, apologies for being blunt, is, in fact, nowhere to be found. Genius is work.”

You need to build mastery in order to find your flow | Aeon Essays

posted by f.sheikh

In December 2013, not long after the publication of Mike Tyson’s autobiography, The Wall Street Journal asked him—along with forty‑nine other distinguished writers, academics, artists, politicians, and CEOs—to name their favorite books of the year. Among Tyson’s selections was a Kindle book, Alexander the Great: The Macedonian Who Conquered the World.

“Everyone thinks Alexander was this giant, but he was really a runt,” wrote Tyson, who nevertheless, at the height of his own megalomania, commissioned a seven‑foot likeness of Alexander (along with congruently sized statues of Genghis Khan and the Haitian revolutionary Jean‑Jacques Dessalines) by the pool of his Las Vegas home.

“Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, even a cold pimp like Iceberg Slim—they were all mama’s boys,” wrote Tyson. “That’s why Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother.”

Boxing is permeated with every variety of Oedipal construct. In the last decade or so, the prevalent strain is fighters not merely driven by their fathers but actually trained by them. These dads tend to be street guys who may or may not have boxed themselves. And while the fighter inevitably wants to surpass all paternal expectation, he (or, yes, she) also wants to make Daddy proud. And rich.

Then again, I still see plenty of fighters who just want to kill their fathers, typically for abandonment. Mike might’ve fallen into this category, at least judging from his recollection of Curlee: He and my mother never spoke to each other, he’d just beep the horn and we’d just go down and meet him. The kids would pile into his Cadillac and we thought we were going on an excursion to Coney Island or Brighton Beach, but he’d just drive around for a few minutes, pull back up to our apartment building, give us some money, give my sister a kiss, and shake me and my brother’s hands and that was it. Maybe I’d see him in another year.

So much for the paternal side of the equation. But it’s the true mama’s boy who seems to me the most dangerous kind of fighter.

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh

(Christians, mostly sub-Saharan migrants, take part in a Sunday Mass in a cathedral in Rabat, Morocco, in 2019. The largest share of Christians, an analysis found, can be found in sub-Saharan Africa. (Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP)

WP; While Christians remained the world’s largest religious group at the end of the decade that ended in 2020, Christianity’s growth did not keep up with global population increase. But Islam — the world’s fastest-growing major religion — increased its share of the world population, as did the religiously unaffiliated, the Pew Research Center found in a report released Monday.Even as the overall number of Christians — counted as one group, across denominations — continued to climb to 2.3 billion, the religion’s share of the world’s population decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 28.8 percent, a falloff driven in large part by disaffiliation. The Muslim population, on the other hand, increased by 1.8 percentage points to 25.6 percent, according to the report, which examined changes in religious demographics through an analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys. Muslims grew faster than any other major religion.” The report attributed the growth in Islam to a younger Muslim population — with an average age of about 24, as opposed to a global average age among non-Muslims of about 33 as of 2020 — along with higher fertility rates in some areas and lower rates of disaffiliation as compared with other religions, including Christianity. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population did not identify with a religion in 2020 (24.2 percent), as opposed to 23.3 percent in 2010.The world’s biggest unaffiliated population is estimated to be in China: 1.3 billion people, out of 1.4 billion, followed by the United States, with 101 million disaffiliated out of 331.5 million, and Japan, with 73 million out of 126.3 million. Another group that underwent significant a loss in population were Buddhists, the only religion that had fewer members in 2020 (324 million) than in 2010 (343 million); this was due to disaffiliation and a low birth rate. Those who identified as Hindu and Jewish maintained rates steady with the world’s population, the report found. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/09/islam-christianity-global-population-pew-survey/