What They Said: February 2026

“Being a man is saying ‘I’m not afraid to stand up to corporations and billionaires.’” said Morris Katz, a 26-year-old consultant who has advised Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Maine Senate candidate Graham Plattner. (New York Times, 02.01.26)

“It is not clear what battlefield utility can be had from a vulnerable vehicle, with a limited armament [i.e. a tank], that approaches a fighter jet in cost,” wrote Yuri Baluyevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in 2004-2008, in The Digital War Is the New Reality. (New York Times, 02.02.26)

“It is one thing to inspire hope, but to sustain hope, you have to deliver change,” NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview, describing his administration’s push to be seen as acting with a sense of urgency. “There is a small window that you have at the beginning of your administration, when New Yorkers are asking themselves, ‘Was I right to believe?’ This is our window to show them that they were.”  (New York Times, 02.02.26)

“If the public were aware of how much of the [Supreme Court] deliberations affecting millions of people are made by 27-year-olds after happy hour, they’d be shocked,” said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  (New York Times, 02.03.26)

“Being a general in an autocracy is a thankless job,” said Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist who wrote a book about the erosion of dictatorships. “If you are seen as effective and your subordinates like you, you develop an alternative power center, and the autocrat feels threatened by you. But if you perform poorly, the autocrat also doesn’t like you.” (New York Times, 02.05.26)

“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s,” Don Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post wrote on Facebook after Jeff Bezos, current publisher, eliminated original reporting on the topic and 300 jobs at the storied newspaper. (New York Times, 02.06.26)

“In a change versus status quo election, in the overwhelming majority of instances, the absence of formal political experience is not a weakness, it’s a strength,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic House Minority Leader, said. (New York Times, 02.07.26)

"Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned, wrote Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas’ Western District, in a decision that freed an Ecuadoran asylum seeker and his five-year-old son from ICE detention. (New York Times, 02.07.26)

“My office was in Rock Center for 20 years, and I would often go across the street into Saks to look for a unique gift for my wife,” said Joseph Sarachek, a representative of 30 small vendors who are each owed between $100,000 and $10 million from the Saks corporation which recently declared bankruptcy. “I’d run into a bunch of other guys just like myself. We were not there to buy Chanel.” (New York Times, 02.08.26)

“The reality, and maybe it’s a harsh reality, is that when you have a potential donor and a favor is asked, and if the favor’s not unreasonable, you grant that favor because you’re trying to develop a relationship with the person,” said Dr. Ira B. Lamster, the former dean of Columbia University's dental college who facilitated the admission of Jeffrey Epstein's girlfriend six years after he had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. “And that, I do remember, was the attitude that I took.” (New York Times, 02.11.26)

“A ZIP code does not protect us from rising violent authoritarianism, ” said Analilia Mejia, a progressive Democratic organizer, who won a special primary to fill a Congressional seat vacated by the election of Mikie Sherrill as governor of New Jersey. (New York Times, 02.11.26)

“The nice thing about prediction markets is that you have to put your money where your mouth is,” said Theis Jensen, a Yale professor and co-author of Financial Prediction Markets: A New Measure of Earnings Expectations,“and so that highly incentivizes you to state your true beliefs.” (New York Times, 02.12.26)

A.I. is really good at extracting text from images and audio, captioning photos, assigning structure to text like emails," explained Dylan Freedman, A.I. projects editor for the New York Times.  "We can use A.I. to crack open really messy data sets, like this release of [three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein] documents, that would have previously been impossible to effectively tackle at scale. A.I. is really bad at news judgment — what information to include, whether it’s important. A.I. can be sloppy and make mistakes that are inexcusable in journalism. It’s super industrious but not super intelligent. A.I. outputs can amplify biases in society. And in my experience, A.I. is not great at producing original ideas (but decent at synthesizing or distilling them).  (New York Times, 02.12.26)

“In London and other capitals, the Europeans keep talking like this is 1939,” as the continent veered toward war, said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain. “Nobody in the U.S. is thinking this is 1939.” (New York Times, 02.16.26)

“If I were to draw a cartoon,” said the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, of his meetings over the weekend [at the Munich Security Conference], “it would be a European saying, ‘Greenland, Greenland, Greenland, Greenland.’” (New York Times, 02.16.26)

". . . almost all of art is a denial of mortality — an attempt to fix a face, or a landscape, or a story, a mythology. It’s an attempt to deny mortality. We want to be not just consoled, but resist our ephemerality in the world — and that’s so distinctly the case with these little creatures." observed author Simon Schama who has curated an exhibition focused on birds at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague and anchored by "The Goldfinch," a 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius. (New York Times, 02.16.26)

“Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility,” wrote former President George W. Bush in an essay published on President's Day. (New York Times, 02.16.26)

“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” Jesse Jackson said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. “America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.” (New York Times, 02.18.26)

" . . . when one is considering the genuineness of an individual’s remorse, simply producing a computer-generated letter does not really take me anywhere as far as I am concerned” ruled Tom Gilbert, a judge in New Zealand, after discovering that a woman convicted of arson had used AI to write apology letters to  her victims. (New York Times, 02.19.26)

“I think of all this A.I. optimization as bad plastic surgery,” said Luke Stillman, the managing director of Madison and Wall, a consulting firm for online merchants that do advertising. “You notice the ones that stand out, but you don’t notice the ones that are still standing behind the curtain.” (New York Times, 02.20.26)

"There has always been a fair amount of grandstanding by lawmakers in congressional hearings. They’re televised opportunities for members of Congress to show how tough they can be and how they’re using their positions to hold power to account, and they typically prepare their questions with an eye toward what will draw the most attention," notes Julia Hirschfeld Davis, congressional editor for the New York Times. "But in the age of social media, that dynamic has been supercharged. Everyone is looking to go viral with a particularly contentious exchange or 'gotcha' moment, and what used to be considered the rules of decorum can go out the window in those moments. What is a bit different in recent days is the sheer vitriol and disdain from Trump administration officials toward members of Congress during these hearings. Many of them come to Capitol Hill seemingly primed to attack and insult lawmakers." (New York Times, 02.20.26)

“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises,” Supreme Court  Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a ruling that tariffs imposed by President Donald L. Trump were unconstitutional. “But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.” New York Times, (02.21.26)

“[Slopulism] convinces supporters to invest their emotions in story lines rather than the substantive politics or structure behind it,” said Neema Parvini, a senior fellow at the University of Buckingham in England who is considered to have popularized the term. “It doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s just entertainment.” (New York Times, 02.22.26)

“You can’t live your life being paranoid,” said Gisèle Pelicot, the victim of mass rape by her husband and dozens of other men over a decade-long period. “I think you have to trust . . . That, too, is a message of hope: to tell yourself that at 73 years old, you can still live a love story.” (New York Times, 02.22.26)

“I’ve worked since I was 9," observed actor Daniel Radcliffe. "I don’t know what life is without some sense of this. We’ve all got to do something to distract ourselves until we die, and acting is a great, fun thing to do that with.” (New York Times, 02.22.26)

“We wired together some audio that’s out there, that’s bootlegged,” said Baz Luhrmann, director of a new immersive documentary about Elvis Presley. “We had to meet people in car parks and buy it, bless their socks. The trading of illegal Elvis stuff — there’s Colombian drug lords, and then there’s the guys that trade bootlegs, and dude, I think I’d rather work with the Colombian drug lords.” (New York Times, 02.23.26)

“Avoiding war is indeed a high priority, but not at any cost,” said Sasan Karimi, a political scientist at the University of Tehran who served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s previous government. “At times, a political state — especially an ideological one — may weigh its place in history as heavily as, or even more heavily than, its immediate survival.” (New York Times, 02.23.26)

“It was like an angry toddler throwing a tantrum except the angry toddler has full command of the English language,” said Scott Shambaugh, a Colorado engineer who incurred the wrath of an AI chatbot whose computer code he had rejected and which then berated him publicly in an open forum. (New York Times, 02.23.26)

“Andrew’s time is up,” said Sue Jones, 70, who lives near the former home of the former prince.  “If it had happened in Tudor times, he would have been slung in the Tower of London.” (New York Times, 02.26.26)

“Something has changed,” Jack Dorsey explained in a social media post announcing the termination of nearly 4,000 employees at Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal. “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.” (New York Times, 02.28.26)