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TEXT: Hi, your dad’s friend Bill here. He mentioned that you’re freelancing now, and that you may need some help with your taxes.

SUBTEXT: Hi, your dad’s friend Bill here. Neither your father, nor I, knowing very little about you, have any confidence that you can be expected to handle filing your taxes by yourself.

TEXT: Please be sure to update the spreadsheet with your writeoffs for the year.

SUBTEXT: What did you waste your money on that we can try to justify as a business expense?

TEXT: Time to get organized again!

SUBTEXT: I’m really trying to help you, though I’m not sure why.

TEXT: So, I see that you’ve decided to spend another year as a freelance writer.

SUBTEXT: Have you considered doing something more practical, like being a C.P.A. in the nineteen-seventies? Worked out well for me.

TEXT: Whenever you receive income that will result in a 1099, you should take twenty-five per cent and put it in a separate account. Don’t touch that account except to pay taxes (estimated or at year’s end). That way, you will have money to pay your taxes!

SUBTEXT: You have the financial acumen of a fifth grader.

TEXT: Is this the total income for 2025?

SUBTEXT: It would take you three lifetimes to amass the wealth that I have accumulated, even though I did everything pretty normally. I know that you can’t help when you were born, your gender, or the economic circumstances created by my generation that your generation now suffers under, but I am going to judge you harshly for all of it anyway.

TEXT: Happy Passover.

SUBTEXT: Happy Passover.

TEXT: I’m still waiting. Please send details by April 1st.

SUBTEXT: It’s times like these that I wonder, Maybe I shouldn’t have let your father save me back in Vietnam.

TEXT: I have several trips planned for the end of March, so I’d like to prepare your returns sooner rather than last minute.

SUBTEXT: God, I hope you don’t want kids.

TEXT: Please read this Financial Times article. It summarizes a tax-court case regarding a writer who got in big trouble with the I.R.S. for taking deductions that the I.R.S. said lacked a profit motive.

SUBTEXT: Did you ever stop to think that your minor indiscretions could lead to jail time for tax evasion, and how embarrassing that would be for me, to have a friend whose daughter went to jail for tax evasion?

TEXT: It looks like you had a good year!

SUBTEXT: I am well aware that this message will be the exact validation that you desperately seek from an older authority figure, and, because I have been withholding any kind of praise for the work you have done, it means that much more to you. I did not think about this sentence until I typed it, and I will not think about it again, ever, after I am done typing it. I will pretty much immediately go back to thinking that all of your life choices are wrong.

TEXT: You can’t write off rent on your taxes.

SUBTEXT: Damn. I should’ve bought in Williamsburg when I had the chance. ♦

If, by chance, you know my story, you will understand why I’m spending my days fixated on the fast-changing news and the terrible images from Iran. I am an Iranian American, a citizen of both countries, the son of a rug merchant from Mashhad, a city in the northeast that is home to three and a half million people and to the holiest site in the country. In January, Mashhad was the scene of immense anti-regime protests. Now many of those protesters—the ones who survived the Islamic Republic’s violent backlash—are in prison, and the city is under bombardment.

For a long time, Iran was home. In 2001, while living in California, I started making periodic trips, and, in 2009, I fulfilled a dream by moving to Tehran, where I worked as a foreign correspondent, mainly for the Washington Post. In Tehran, I met and married an Iranian reporter, Yeganeh, and, for years, we did our work the best we could within one of the world’s most restrictive media landscapes. Over years of interviewing, we met countless people who dreamed of a day when the regime might give way to a more humane government, perhaps even a democratic one.

In July, 2014, at the height of negotiations between the Islamic Republic and world powers over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, my wife and I were arrested and thrown into Evin Prison, a notorious facility known throughout Iran for its cruelty. She was never charged with a crime, and was released after seventy-two days. I was charged with espionage and became the latest American hostage of a regime that has never hesitated to use innocent people as bargaining chips. (There are currently at least six Americans wrongfully detained in Iran.)

After a year and a half in Evin, an experience that I describe in my memoir, I was released and immediately transported back to the U.S., with Yeganeh. We left behind many family members and countless friends. Now, as I follow the war—through telephone calls, WhatsApp and Signal messages, social-media D.M.s, and cable news—I am both here, living in the suburbs of Washington, and there, in a home we never properly said goodbye to. The reports I get arrive sporadically and without warning, and they describe the chaos and the destruction with a nonchalance that is unsettling.

During the first week of the war, I had not connected directly with anyone inside Iran until I saw an Instagram Story posted by a young relative in Tehran. Our grandmothers were sisters. He and his parents were our first family members to move from Mashhad to the capital. Their home, in northern Tehran, was the first one I ever visited in the country, a large flat on the top floor of a multi-unit building, with a view of the sprawling city below. When we first met, he was seven, precocious and always smiling. The image he shared, which I viewed just seconds after he posted it, was of an exploding building in the distance—I recognized the view—over which he had written, “Why won’t it end?”

I sent him a message immediately to see if he was all right. “Hi cuz. I’m at home. I’m fine,” he wrote. “Stressful, though.” I pressed him with more questions, but I could tell by his vague responses that he was watching his words, aware of potential surveillance by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Even the V.P.N.s that many people use to get online are controlled by the government.

My cousin said he would check in whenever he could. I have not seen a digital trace of him since. Such wartime silences are common; my wife has two elderly relatives we were particularly concerned about, but they went silent, and we feared the worst. Several days passed before the husband phoned us. “Don’t worry. We’re alive,” he told me.

The few calls that we receive are always brief, revealing little information or emotion, but we do learn things. For example, people now take care to wear shoes at home in case an explosion shatters glass, or there’s a need to evacuate immediately. Most of the neighborhood bread kiosks that are still standing remain open, but there are strict limits on the amount individuals can purchase. Many checkpoints once manned by Basij paramilitary forces have been destroyed or abandoned.

As far as we know, none of our family members have been killed. We have been lucky. Another former Tehran correspondent, now living in Washington, heard from a childhood friend still living in Iran. Her aunt had resisted leaving the capital for two weeks, but was finally convinced to evacuate. Realizing she’d forgotten her medications, she returned home to retrieve them. Her apartment building was bombed as soon as she went back inside. Her niece watched it happen from the car.

Once communications return to normal, stories like this will be frequent. Yet there remains a stream of messages that are undeniably optimistic. There is a sense of hope that grows whenever another high-level official is killed. The latest was Ali Larijani, a fixture of Iranian politics and repression, and one of the slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s most unflinching loyalists.

It’s impossible to say how much support the ongoing military campaign enjoys inside Iran, but it’s not insignificant. Even as civilian infrastructure is levelled, the fact that I’m still hearing this optimistic sentiment, almost four weeks into this operation, is a strong indication of how reviled the Islamic Republic has become inside Iran. That feeling could change if Trump follows through on threats he made over the weekend to “obliterate” Iran’s electrical power plants if the regime doesn’t fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. (On Monday, Trump asserted that his Administration was engaged in “very strong talks” with Iran, and that he had instructed the U.S. military to postpone the strikes for five days.)

Some of those I hear from in Iran dream that the U.S. and Israel will somehow put an end to the Islamic Republic from the air. “I am staying because I truly hope this is the final battle and the regime gets the hell out of here,” a young software engineer from southern Tehran told me. “People are still in good spirits, even though the bombing is much worse than during the Twelve-Day War,” he said, referring to the conflict last June.

This kind of remark is not surprising. I’ve heard calls for foreign intervention from inside Iran since 2003, the year of the American invasion of Iraq. “When will it be our turn?” Iranians kept asking. “When are the American commandos coming to liberate us?”

Iranians’ desire for American intervention cooled as sectarian violence spread across Iraq—much of it fomented by Tehran’s regional proxies. After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, Iraq’s Shiite holy sites in Karbala and Najaf reopened to international pilgrims. Iranians were among the first wave to visit, but they were witnesses not to liberation and prosperity but to chaos, violence, and ruin from terrorist attacks.

In many ways, Iran would have been far more prepared for a transition toward democracy at that time than either Iraq or Afghanistan, and, frankly, more prepared than it is right now. It was a society yearning for more social liberties and integration with the rest of the world. Time and again, in tightly controlled elections, Iranians voted overwhelmingly for candidates seeking to take steps to liberalize the country.

Without diplomatic ties or other windows into Iran, the transformation taking place inside the country was difficult for Washington to imagine. Since the 1979 Revolution and the four hundred and forty-four-day siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran that followed, hawkish policymakers like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham have built careers on seeking vengeance on Iran. “Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran” has been a favorite line of neocons who consider regime change in Iran to be the ultimate goal. This mentality underscores the U.S. foreign-policy community’s fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian society; for generations, our stance on Iran has been solely focussed on crippling the government, when our greatest leverage has always been with the Iranian people, who are among the world’s biggest believers in the American brand.

Yeganeh has always told me that, for Iranians, “America isn’t just a place or a government; it’s a phenomenon that happens to us.” People experience it in many ways, but it’s unavoidable—in the Islamic Republic’s official antagonism, and its calls for “death to America,” certainly, but more viscerally in the fragmented influence that America has on daily life, through popular culture beamed in via satellite and all manner of products that have managed to sneak in across porous borders.

Most of all, Iranians covet an American education. This is a crucial element of American soft power that the Trump Administration has undermined, with attacks on U.S. universities, a reduction in the number of foreign students, and a travel ban on Iranians. At the height of U.S.-Iranian relations, in the nineteen-seventies, when Iranian women were wearing the latest styles from New York and Paris, nearly one in five foreign students in the U.S. was from Iran. Now such opportunities for Iranians are vanishingly rare.

No one questions the power of U.S. military capabilities, but at this point it’s hard for Iranians to understand American intentions. There seems to be little plan for anything other than further strikes. After issuing confused bromides about “regime change,” the President has had little to say that is coherent about helping the Iranian people. It is more than likely that Trump, sensing the perils of rising oil prices, economic chaos, and political opposition, will, within a matter of weeks, declare victory and end the bombing. The announcement, last June, that the U.S. and Israel had inflicted “monumental damage” on Iran’s nuclear program proved only one thing: that there are no clear indicators of success, only manufactured victories.

Regarding what will follow, several grim scenarios are possible. The regime will declare a victory of its own—its survival in the face of American and Israeli bombings—and it may well grow even more oppressive than before, increasing its hold on the economy and surveillance over its people. New crackdowns have already begun, including executions, last week, of protesters arrested in January. With each new round of repression, the country’s cycle of violence continues. The vehement desire for vengeance grows within the population as well, and hopes of a just future for Iran dwindle.

As analysts have pointed out, most of our leverage has been squandered, and the Islamic Republic may very well disdain all future negotiations and build the nuclear weapon that they could have built, but chose not to build, before. A more plausible and equally unattractive outcome is the kind of deal that Trump seems to want to strike with Tehran—one that would put limitations on uranium enrichment and missile production but totally ignore the plight of the Iranian people and the promises he has made.

Following decades of antagonistic policy that has hurt Iranians by design, it was always unrealistic for them to expect to be liberated by the U.S. and Israel. But an outcome that sets them back in their quest to live in a free society will stand out as a cruel and historic mistake.

Until the strikes stop and the aftermath becomes clearer, every analysis remains little more than an underinformed guess. For now, there is but one certainty—that the hopes and lives of Iranians don’t matter. Not to Israel, not to the U.S., and certainly not to their own regime, gunning them down in the street. ♦

Last week, CNN rolled out some experiments in form and in manufactured authenticity. Anderson Cooper wore his sleeves rolled up for a roundtable discussion among a clutter of clunky microphones on a desk; Jake Tapper recorded a show from his home office, near a clothes rack of dress shirts and blazers, and talked about bringing viewers to the actual desk where he and his team do their journalism. The impression wasn’t particularly subtle—someone had obviously suggested that the network try to make its shows look more like the podcasts that millions of people now watch on YouTube or see clips of on TikTok and Instagram—and it certainly didn’t succeed in making CNN come across as more trustworthy or natural, which was presumably the goal. It felt like watching Ronald Reagan take off his shirt, paint on some jeans, and start screaming like Jello Biafra. The podcast industry’s currency, deservedly or otherwise, is oppositional: people don’t listen to Joe Rogan because they think he’s better at his job than CNN; they do it because they hate CNN.

The podcast aesthetic—casual, long-winded, sometimes profane—directly opposes, perhaps not coincidentally, the sterility and bizarre right-this-minute quality of cable news, on which everything seems incomplete and therefore manipulative, and yet somehow endless. The visual style of podcasts is purely functional, with the pandemic-inspired appearance of remote work: people are talking at you from boxes on your screen. I record my podcast, “Time to Say Goodbye,” in my basement, and have a pretty standard setup: a Shure SM7B microphone, my daughter’s art work in the background, poor lighting because why bother, and some soundproof foam panelling that’s slowly peeling away from the wall. My co-host, Tyler Austin Harper, sits in front of a bookshelf in his home office. Over the dozens of episodes we’ve recorded together, we’ve never changed the “look” of what we’re doing, because we understand that nobody really cares. Just as the best talk radio feels like a phone conversation you’re having with a friend, we want the podcast to seem like a slightly unhinged Zoom call you’re having with your annoying cousins who won’t stop ranting about why the Democrats keep losing.

But, in the past few years, podcasts have trended toward what we can loosely call professionalization, which made CNN’s recent effort even odder. The COVID-era signature of bookshelves in the background and plug-in USB microphones in the foreground has slowly given way to generic studios featuring some decent wood panelling and a couple of plants. Webcams, which produced a washed-out and slightly pixelated image, have been replaced by stand-alone video cameras that capture podcasters in deeper and richer tones. (This is one reason that so many of the big podcasts you see these days look like they borrowed the dark and moody interview sets of “Wild Wild Country.”) I doubt that these production changes will erode the supposed authenticity of an already beloved podcaster, but I also don’t see any likely benefits. Kylie Kelce, who hosts the enormously popular podcast “Not Gonna Lie,” splits her time onscreen between a standard Zoom square with her kids’ art on the wall behind her and a studio where she sits on a beige couch and talks to her guest in person. To someone who watches her clips on Instagram, there’s no meaningful difference.

What happened in podcasting is that money arrived, and some of it went into producing video clips. (“Not Gonna Lie” was created by Wave Sports & Entertainment, which produces and distributes content that features popular athletes.) Now, whenever any new media venture is launched, a whole lot of people with related experience get hired, and they start buying equipment, renting studio space, and booking production time. There’s also an acquisition war going on, with podcasts such as the sports-chat show “Pardon My Take” moving to Netflix, which might demand higher video quality than social media. Previously, the credibility that podcasters enjoyed stemmed from their opposition to mainstream media, and the low-tech and intimate videos reflected this. Today, all the professional podcast sets look similiar—a table of microphones, some swivelly mid-century-modern chairs, a dark wall—and they convey nothing at all, really. As the industry has expanded its budgets, and added more line items for improved production, the aesthetic currency of the old D.I.Y. podcast look has decreased. CNN’s experiments in information populism, then, feel doubly tragic: the network isn’t fooling anybody, and it has also misdiagnosed the value of its appropriation, like the kid putting on a Misfits shirt after Hot Topic popped up in every mall in America.

If CNN’s flirtation with podcast fashion is a bellwether for the news industry, it’s not because of what it tells us about cable networks or legacy media companies. After all, CNN has rolled out poorly conceived and wildly derivative online products for the past thirty years. The problem with all these projects is an old and recurring one: you can’t dress up like a revolutionary when you’re the reason that the revolution is kicking off. Sometime soon, we will see CNN reporters live-streaming on Twitch and YouTube from Capitol Hill. (“Hey, chat, I see Marie Gluesenkamp Perez walking up the stairs. . . . Super-chat me a question to ask her!”) Eventually, someone will pull the plug, because they’ll realize that nobody wants to subscribe to a CNN Twitch stream, just as they don’t want to watch a CNN anchor doing a video podcast from his living room. But what does it say about podcasting that its visual signals are so bland and neutered? Or that, when you scroll through your time line, you see the same types of sets, the same lighting, and, increasingly, a man at a desk talking directly to the camera, in the style of a news anchor? Right now, podcasters can still signal their authenticity by saying, “Hey, we aren’t the mainstream media.” But, as those institutions die out, and podcasters get more and more tied up with big money, the relationship between CNN and Big Podcast might start to resemble something we saw in the late two-thousands, when legacy media and well-funded startups tried to corral bloggers into a corporate shape, which held for about a decade before people scattered again, flocking to Substack and to independent podcasts. Media is always fragmenting, reconsolidating, and then fragmenting again, as yesterday’s disruption inevitably becomes today’s institution. I’ve been sitting in the same basement for almost six years now, recording the same podcast I started with my friends during the COVID lockdowns, and sometimes I think about how dated it already feels. But what I’ve concluded, and perhaps what CNN should figure out, is that you can’t really fake the insurrectionary energy, or its aesthetic. You just have to hope your audience grows old with you, before you give way to whatever comes next. ♦

If you filled out a March Madness bracket, I have bad news. The team you picked to win it all won’t. For the ninth tournament in a row, your bracket is busted by the second round.

And you’re left asking yourself questions. “Why did I pick them?” or “Why do all the kids on the team look older than me?”

All valid questions, but there’s no time to sulk. You must figure out who you’re cheering on for the rest of the tournament until they inevitably lose in heartbreaking fashion. Don’t worry, I’m here to assist you. (Get it? “Assist”? Weaved a basketball term in there. By the way, I did it again with “weave.”) Here are schools to root for in March Madness once your bracket fails.

The School Your Mom Went To
Your mom’s alma mater is a good team to root for. It’s where she had a class with that other student she copied all her answers from. She also named you after that student. You owe it to that school to support them in their quest for the title.

The School with the Child of a Celebrity
There are some prominent public figures who have kids playing collegiate sports. Those kids probably get weird treatment from their peers because they’re seen as “nepo babies” or because their parents illegally arranged for them to attend the school. None of that may be true, and, if it is, let’s cheer for their success while we can, before the authorities rain on their parade.

The School That Has the Cool Cinderella Story
We love a good underdog story. In the Big Dance, that team is called the Cinderella; they’re a lower seed and are surprising everybody by advancing. They’re fun to root for. Plus, while they’re stunning everybody, you can lie and tell people you picked them to go far.

The School Whose Merch You Already Have
Forget talent, stats, and matchups. Just find a school that you already own merch from. Doesn’t matter if it’s a hat, a sweater, a tote bag, anything. You can pull it out and act like you went there. When people ask if you did, it’s none of their business that you attended community college online.

The School with the Youngest Coach
The N.C.A.A. tournament is filled with first-time or very young head coaches just starting out in their careers. They have full heads of hair, they wear cool Jordans, and they’re even good at social media. Support that young coach. Don’t be bitter because he’s living his dream at only twenty-four years old and you’re not. Use him as inspiration for your goals and your outfits.

The School with the Lowest Tuition
Whichever school is keeping its tuition low should have our support. Who cares if its basketball facilities are subpar and its fraternities are known for odd hazing traditions? All that matters is that it is allowing students to leave with the least debt.

The School That Would’ve Accepted Your SAT Score
The SATs stumped most people. However, some schools try to act like the test really measures your knowledge and your abilities (not factoring in that you didn’t eat breakfast that day and nobody is good at math when hungry). That’s why we should root for the schools that took those factors into account. The universities that give grace and low-SAT-score students a chance to flourish. We’re rooting for you.

The School with the Seventh-Year Senior
Some teams have players who should’ve left the school years ago. However, those students found loopholes to stay enrolled and avoid entering the job market. Well played. This economy is terrible. Enjoy the free shelter and transportation while you can. Let’s root for them to get that championship before they endure the stress of job hunting.

Anyone but Duke
I’m out of reasons, but no matter what happens with your bracket do not root for Duke. Why would you want to be that person? ♦

The largest dump in the world, the Fresh Kills landfill, used to sit on Staten Island, the least populated borough of New York City, from 1948 to 2001. Each day, rubbish from the other four boroughs was collected and ferried to the island’s western shore, through a marshy inlet—a bit like the island’s armpit—where it was unloaded, compacted, arranged in layers, and left to rot. The piles were taller than the Great Sphinx in Egypt; the smell floated across highways and through house windows. Vito Fossella, who was born on the island in the sixties, remembered how the odor would hit him like a wall. When he went to the mall as a child, Fossella would sprint from the car to get inside and escape the air. “Every day, it was a stench,” he said. “There were seagulls flying everywhere.”

It made a few people bitter. “We had five per cent of the city’s population and we got a hundred per cent of the garbage,” Fossella, who is now the Staten Island borough president, told me recently. “Staten Island was dumped on, literally and figuratively, and the rest of the city said, ‘Too bad.’ ” The dump was eventually closed in 2001 under Rudy Giuliani, who had narrowly won the 1993 mayoral election against David Dinkins, a vote largely swung by Staten Islanders. (Giuliani also made the Staten Island ferry free.) That same year, the island’s residents also considered, in a nonbinding plebiscite, whether they even wanted to be a part of New York City anymore. Sixty-five per cent voted no.

Lately, the fever to secede has descended again. Shortly before Christmas, Sam Pirozzolo, a Republican state assemblyman who represents parts of western and central Staten Island, wrote a declaration of independence for the island—modelled after the national one—and read it out loud at the former site of a tavern where, in 1776, British soldiers first heard the original. Andrew Lanza, a Republican state senator, has also drafted legislation that would make secession possible.

Notionally, this push was prompted by the election of Zohran Mamdani, whom Pirozzolo has said epitomizes the way that New York City doesn’t reflect Staten Island’s values. But the discontent runs deeper. Staten Islanders have tried to secede from the rest of the city at least a half-dozen times. In 1900, two years after the modern City of New York was consolidated, two hundred Staten Islanders gathered at a public hearing to say they were “ready to cede.” (Staten Island, one man told the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune, “is the Ireland of Greater New York. We want home rule.”)

The island is richer, more suburban, more conservative, more car-dependent, less dense, and cut off from the rest of the city by the deep water of New York Harbor. There is a sense on the island that the rest of the city doesn’t listen to them, and that they pay for city initiatives they don’t want.

In 2024, the island voted for Donald Trump by thirty points. And, in recent years, Staten Islanders have protested the opening of a migrant shelter, speed cameras, marijuana dispensaries, and the placement of a battery-storage site too close to homes, all of which they say have been foisted on them by the city. (Worst of all, Fossella told me an anecdote about an ugly metal fence that suddenly appeared on a “beautiful” stone wall in Clove Lakes Park, because the Department of Transportation claimed that it was near a waterway. “If Staten Island were a separate city, that would never have happened.”) Another indignity? “Staten Island is the only borough in the city without a high school for performing arts,” Fossella said. “It’s almost like that movie—they’re just not into us anymore. They keep doing things that we don’t support.” In the nineties, the city clung to the island through a legal principle known as home rule, which would require the mayor and City Council to sign off on Staten Island leaving.

Giuliani never did. The reaction veered to extremes. In 1995, an angry resident of Oakwood, in the borough’s southwest, wrote to the Staten Island Advance, “We no longer are in a mutually agreed upon union with the other four boroughs. It is now more reminiscent of the Anschluss that joined Austria to Germany in 1938, with some overtones of the later occupation of Czechoslovakia.” Pirozolo told me, “If we vote to leave, keeping us would be indentured servitude or slavery. You pick.”

Do the secessionists have a point? Recently, I spoke to Howard Husock, an academic at the American Enterprise Institute who studies secession movements. There’s a strong theoretical basis to secession, he told me. “Geographically, it’s really part of New Jersey.” As he described it, the reason to leave is less about Mamdani and more about local control. If Staten Island were to part ways, the proposal is that it would become an independent city within New York State. It would determine its own zoning and oversee its own school boards, meaning residents could control the curriculum, something Husock said Staten Islanders would probably value.

Other nearby cities and counties that orbit New York City—such as Montclair and Bergen, in New Jersey; or Manhasset, on Long Island; or Westchester, above the Bronx—are demographically similar to Staten Island, and run themselves. “They look out over the water and see them,” Husock said. “They see the suburban Montclairs of the world, and they say, ‘Wait a minute, they get to call the shots in their own communities, and we don’t.’ ”

But what would actually happen? If the City of Staten Island were created tomorrow, it would immediately become the second-largest city in New York State. (Population: nearly half a million.) It would keep a lot of its bus routes, because the M.T.A. is managed by the state, and Staten Island still falls in the Metropolitan Transit District. (“They’re not seceding from that,” Husock said.) The ferry, though, is operated by New York City. It would probably still run, but it may not be free.

It’s possible that Staten Islanders would individually pay more taxes, but they might like that. The voters of an independent Staten, Husock said, could choose to pay more for the bundle of services that they want. A report from the Independent Budget Office, from 2024, estimated that secessionists would need to fill a budget gap of at least a hundred and seventy million dollars. It also warned that the island would lose out on New York’s economies of scale. Staten Island would, for example, have to renegotiate its deal with Spectrum and Verizon.

In addition to handling schools, Staten Island would have to run its own fire department, trash collection, hospitals, and snow removal. But so do other cities. “Buffalo is a city!” Fosella said. “It’s smaller than Staten Island. So clearly it can be done. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Sam Pirozzolo, a New York State assemblyman for the Sixty-Third District of Staten Island.Photograph by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty

The police would be a big sticking point. On an independent Staten Island, the politics of policing seem to flip. Paul Costello, a lifelong resident, who was one of the field leads for Staten Island for the Mamdani campaign, told me that the Republicans who are pushing to secede would miss the N.Y.P.D. “As a person who is hypercritical of the N.Y.P.D., it is the best-funded police force probably on the planet,” he said. The department’s annual budget last year was $5.8 billion. “For a pro-police person, they have everything they want right now,” he said. “They’re basically saying they want to kneecap them, which, hey, I’m all for. But it doesn’t really make sense.”

There’s a utopian model for what Staten Island could be, and it’s Yonkers. Yonkers, Husock explained, is a predominantly white, working-class community, of two hundred thousand people, connected to New York City by the Metro-North and buses, and governed by center-right Democrats. It runs its own police, fire, and schools. “I think they have Yonkers envy,” Husock said. “They’re not going to become Scarsdale, obviously, but they would become Yonkers.”

Not everybody agrees. “It’s not a good idea,” Costello told me. Being a part of New York City, he said, means that “we get literally the best services available to anyone in the country.” “It’s an old feeling,” he said, of secession, “but it’s not founded in financial literacy.”

Costello, who is thirty-one, grew up on Staten Island’s north shore, went to high school and college on the island, and now lives in St. George, near the ferry. “I love Staten Island with all my heart,” he said. But every time secession rolls around it can feel like living through the Civil War. “It’s like I’m a guy on the border between the Union and the Confederacy. And I’m like, ‘No, I’m part of the fringe that lives here that actually agrees with the North.’ ”

I asked Husock, the advocate of local control, why every borough couldn’t make the same argument as Staten Island. “I would make that argument for every neighborhood,” he said. “The logical policy extension of Staten Island secession is deconsolidation of New York City.” Even the boroughs could be sliced further into smaller neighborhoods, Husock said. “In my ideal configuration, it would be a patchwork of smaller municipalities that had certain shared metropolitan services. It’s really a thought experiment,” he added. “But Staten Island is forcing the thought experiment.”

At one point, much of Brooklyn didn’t want to be a part of New York City, either. In the nineteenth century, Brooklyn and Manhattan were independent, competing cities that often squabbled over shipping lanes in the East River. Consolidation was put to a popular vote in 1894. In Brooklyn, it passed by only about two hundred and fifty votes, and then a consortium of politicians from the borough went to Albany and filibustered it for years. In that same election, Staten Island voted for consolidation by a huge margin—seventy-eight per cent said yes. (Yonkers voted no, while Queens voted sixty-two per cent to join and the Bronx had already been fully annexed in 1895.)

Who would win the breakup—Staten Island or New York? Nobody really knows. The 2024 report from the I.B.O. relied mostly on studies from the nineties. Fossella, the borough president, announced in 2023 that he was commissioning his own economic report, but there has been no progress. “We’ve put out feelers for entities that could do it,” he said. “They have to get back to us.”

The other day, I met Pirozzolo, the drafter of the Staten Island declaration of independence, in a quiet room with shag carpets in the archive of the College of Staten Island. He wore a blue suit and a snazzy tie patterned with green and blue diamonds. A stack of boxes was wheeled in by James Kaser, a soft-spoken librarian in glasses, a blue polo, and green slacks. The college is home to one of the largest collections of documents—financials, committee reports, white papers—from the 1993 secession push. “We typically go one box at a time,” Kaser said.

Pirozzolo was focussed. “I’m looking for something that says, ‘New York City Police Department. Costs a million dollars, and that includes ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D,’ ” he said. His chief of staff, Nick Robbins, who was wearing a bright-blue New York Giants jersey, pulled out an overstuffed folder of files. Records included “Staten Island Secession: The Price of Independence” and the original secession bill. “Bingo!” Pirozzolo said. In another trove, they found a table that listed city budgets in 1991 from across the country—Atlanta, Austin, Denver. “This one is awesome,” Pirozzolo said. Another page had an itemized list of Staten Island’s on-island expenditures, in the nineties, from various departments: education, health, the library, sanitation—everything that a stand-alone city would need. Pirozzolo traced his hand down the page, quietly reading them out. “Mental health, parks. This is gold,” he said.

Kaser came in, balancing a new pile of booklets. “Now that I know what you’re looking for, there are stacks of this,” he said. “That looks like ancient stuff!” Pirozzolo said. “I don’t know if I want to touch it.” Kaser said, “It’s not ancient. It’s from the nineties.” Pirozzolo waggled “The Price of Independence.” “Can I slip this in a briefcase or something?”

A spokesman for the Fiscal Policy Institute told me that it was unlikely that Staten Island gives more money to the city than the city gives it. He estimated that the island contributes 3.4 per cent of the city’s revenue and receives 5.2 per cent of its spending.

Despite his digging, Pirozzolo is still nowhere closer to knowing what the price of independence, in modern terms, would be. But, he told me, “Now when I go to the city budget, and I say, ‘I need these numbers,’ at least I know what I’m asking for.”

Until 1975, the official name of Staten Island was Richmond, after the title of the youngest illegitimate son of King Charles II. (He had at least twelve.) The sense of estrangement has lingered. “There’s always been the forgotten-borough trope,” Costello, the Mamdani campaigner, told me.

During the final debate of the mayoral primary, in June of last year, the various Democratic candidates were asked which borough they had spent the least time in. In succession, Adrienne Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, and Whitney Tilson all answered—to escalating laughs—“Staten Island.” Costello was watching the debate at a bar with friends. I asked how it made him feel. “I would have been surprised if any of them answered differently,” he said. “It’s kind of expected. But, of course, it takes a little hit. You’re, like, ‘Ah, come on.’ ”

When Costello was growing up, his high school was right next to the dump. As he got off the school bus and walked to class, he could see it in the background. But he also saw it changing. For the past twenty years, the dump has been slowly beautified, rewilded, and converted into parkland. Now known as Freshkills Park, it will be one of the biggest stretches of nature in the five boroughs—nearly three times the size of Central Park—when it’s completed in 2036. One of Costello’s friends works there as a field educator and gives guided tours. Birds have started returning. Maybe because of this, Costello doesn’t feel the burn of the metaphor like older residents do. “If anything, it’s funny that I went to high school next to a dump,” he said. “As they fixed it, it was kind of pretty.”

Since the campaign, Mamdani has stopped by the island more often: he ate at a local soul-food restaurant, Shaw-naé’s House, and attended evening prayer at a mosque in Dongan Hills during Ramadan. In early March, he made a major child-care announcement, about the expansion of 3-K, at a pre-K center on the island’s north shore. (Staten Island had been excluded from an earlier 2-K announcement.) That same month, a new Democratic candidate, Allison Ziogas said that she would challenge the island’s sitting Republican congresswoman, Nicole Malliotakis, from a pro-labor, economic-populist angle. Generations of Democrats and Republicans, Ziogas said, in her campaign launch, had failed in representing the island. “People talk about Staten Island like we have nothing to offer,” she said. Ziogas, who is originally from Connecticut, added, “I like to say that I’m a Staten Islander by love.”

“I’m one of the biggest evangelists for the island,” Costello told me. “There are some amazing restaurants, some amazing people, and the most parks anywhere in the city.” (Staten Island has some of New York’s best Sri Lankan food.) The only way he’d abandon the island is if the rest of its residents actually quit New York City. “It takes a lot to think about leaving,” he said. “The reason I would ever leave here is because of how many other people don’t want to be here. It’s not because it isn’t a good place to live.” ♦