“At the end of the song, I like to change the lyric,” Broadway veteran Mandy Patinkin said about "Over The Rainbow.“ 'If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh, why can’t — we?' As opposed to ‘I.’ That’s what I feel about [Zohran Mamdani]. That’s my prayer and my wish for him and our city of all religions, all colors, all sexes, sizes and shapes.” (NY Times 01.01.26)
“How remarkable is it that on these steps today, we have three swearings-in,” said Mark Levine, New York City's new comptroller, at City Hall. “One by a leader using a Quran [Mayor Zohran Mamdani], one by a leader using a Christian Bible [Public Advocate Jumaane Williams] and one by a leader using a Chumash, or Hebrew Bible. I am proud, proud to live in a city where this is possible.” (NY Times 01.02.26)
“The chair they sat on, the books they had, the candlestick they lit — that’s where we pass down the history that they [the Nazis] tried to erase during the Holocaust,” said Agnes Peresztegi, an international lawyer who specializes in restitution cases. (NY Times 01.04.26)
“I know that [ping pong] is a great sport for anxious people,” observed Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and directed Marty Supreme. (NY Times 01.04.26)
“I really love the idea of writing about something that is very well known, the opposite of writing about discovery,” said French novelist Lola Lafon, who wrote an essay after spending a night in the Anne Frank House. “I feel the novel where you discover something is very male. I don’t discover lands. I know the lands I’m writing about.” (NY Times 01.07.26)
“U.S. foreign policy now is imperial, and consistently imperial,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of an Italy-based think tank, the Institute of International Affairs. “It’s not simply pursuing an American empire in the Western Hemisphere, but Trump accepts the very notion of empire, which is why other empires can exist.” (NY Times 01.08.26)
“A lot of kids playfully adopt the ‘theater kid’ moniker, even with its tinge of attention-seeking excess, because theater offers a space for performing a wider range of emotions and identities than much of our society allows,” said Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a recent biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Since right-wingers want to crack down on exploring gender, race and sexuality in schools, it’s sadly not surprising that they’d try to wield ‘theater kid’ as an insult to discredit progressive politics.” (NY Times 01.08.26)
“The Brazilian passport is the most wanted passport on the black market because everyone can be Brazilian,” actor Wagner Moura, star of The Secret Agent, said. “You don’t look at the passport and go, ‘I don’t think so.’ Everyone can be Brazilian — you, me, everybody.” (NY Times 01.11.26)
“I think the Venn diagram of Heated Rivalry fans consists of gay men who want much-needed representation of queer joy and women who want well-produced romances about yearning,” said Chantal Strasburger, founder of an embroidery business that specializes in turning memes and cultural moments into merchandise. “These two circles overlap in the enjoyment of hot people having hot sex.” (NY Times 01.15.26)
“Throughout Western history, the idea of commemorating and adulating yourself has been considered gauche,” said Jeffrey Engel, a historian at Southern Methodist University. (NY Times 01.16.26)
“It all ends the same for every addict, in isolation,” film director Abel Ferrara writes in Scene, his memoir. “They call sobriety finding the self of your former ghost.” (NY Times 01.18.26)
“This is the death of Davos,” said Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University. “It has no relevance, none whatsoever. And the bigger question is, did it ever have relevance outside the chattering classes that were embedded in the status quo to start with?” (NY Times 01.19.26)
“These animal ambassadors become beloved neighbors,” said Scott Sampson, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, where Claude the albino alligator delighted visitors for three decades. “They serve a really important role to connect people with nature, and I would argue that we need people to be connected with nature more now than ever before.” (NY Times 01.20.26)
“European nations won’t break up NATO because of Greenland,” said Carsten Jensen, a prominent Danish novelist and the author of We, The Drowned, a work of historical fiction about a century of Danish seafaring. “It’s too insignificant.” (NY Times 01.20.26)
“New York City is always a cauldron where something can explode, and it’s often something you don’t even anticipate,” said Ester Fuchs, professor of public policy at Columbia University. (NY Times 01.22.26)
“Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry,” Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister, told the audience at the Davos World Economic Forum. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” (NY Times 01.24.26)
“For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price” in Afghanistan, Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, reminded Mr. Trump as the two men sat onstage at Davos, “there was one soldier from another NATO country who did not come back to his family.” (NY Times 01.24.26)
“Officers interact with armed community members all the time,” said Seth Stoughton, who has worked as a police officer and a state investigator, after reviewing video footage of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. “It’s just utterly ridiculous to suggest that just because someone has a weapon on them, that that justifies the use of deadly force.” (NY Times 01.28.26)
“We’re looking at the scene after the fact, in a vacuum, not necessarily with all the other factors going on,” said Kenneth Quick, a former precinct commander at the New York Police Department and a criminal justice professor at DeSales University. “That’s where I think a lot of things get cloudy because once people are not obeying what the law enforcement on scene is telling them, that’s increasing the officers’ threat perspective.” (NY Times 01.28.26)
“Whatever the AfD or Rassemblement National believe about civilizational erasure and migration, they’re not for the American annexation of a big chunk of Europe,” said Justin Logan, a foreign-policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, referring to far-right parties in Germany and France. (NY Times 01.29.26)
“[Melania] has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing,” said Ted Hope, who worked at Amazon from 2015 to 2020 and was instrumental in starting the company’s film division. “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?” (NY Times 01.29.26)
“Don’t get sucked into the game,” wrote Patrick J. Schiltz, the conservative chief judge of the District of Minnesota in a 1999 law review article. “Don’t let money become the most important thing in your life. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring your worth as an attorney — or as a human being — by how much money you make.” (NY Times 01.31.26)
