Notebook

Call to Action We Delivered the Votes. Now Deliver the Accountability. Send my sister’s letter to your senators, under your own name, before they choose their leader.

• Elections November 11, 2026

  Running on Fumes

  The best time to run Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president was election day. Unfortunately, nobody was electing one. For ten years the Democrats’ most reliable fuel has been Donald Trump, and on Tuesday voters filled the tank to the brim. But anger is high-octane and short-range, and in 2028 Mr Trump will not be on the ballot to refill it. Unless Democrats find out what they are for, rather than what they are against, they will roll into the next presidential race running on fumes.

  The moment to run Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president was the midterms, when an angry, reactionary electorate handed Democrats a blue wave. Nobody, alas, was electing a president.

  By Aaron Wells · 17 min read

  

• Elections November 7, 2026

  Take Two and Call Me in 2028

  Eight days ago this column compared the Democrats’ blue wave to a British summer. It arrived anyway, which is the trouble with British summers, and it washed ashore a crop of new senators who would quite like Chuck Schumer to find a hobby. My sister in Tacoma would like that too, and she has put it in writing. The harder question is what comes after. If billionaires buying the government is the disease, I have come to think socialism is the medicine, taken the way you take something for a migraine, as needed and never on an empty stomach. Read the side effects first. They are printed in Seattle, in small type, under a lot of rain.

  Democrats won both chambers in a rout, and this column’s skepticism went out with the tide. Within days the winners were fighting over Chuck Schumer, and my sister, Sarah Wells of Tacoma, Washington, wrote to her senators demanding reform first.

  By Aaron Wells · 17 min read

  

• Grief November 5, 2026

  Ninety Seconds, Then Silence

  A Learjet out of Austin fell on a Florida road and left nine people, a family among them, inside a hole full of water. Strangers have been mourning ever since, a bit quietly and a bit guiltily, and mostly without admitting it. Why does one crash out of thousands get under the skin, and why does it feel almost wrong to find comfort in the fact that one family went together?

  I have not watched an airplane video in five days, and I have never been more aware of airplanes. A crash involving nine people I never met, in a state I do not live in, has quietly rearranged my YouTube habits.

  By Aaron Wells · 10 min read

  

• Immigration October 31, 2026

  Who Switched Off the Lamp?

  America built a copper giantess in its harbour, hung a poem round her ankles promising shelter to the wretched, and then spent 140 years arguing about whether it meant it. Today the argument has a body count, a deportation quota and a sitting congresswoman under investigation. Who is actually coming, what are they running from, what does the journey cost them, and how did a country that wrote “send these, the homeless” end up building camps instead? A guided tour of where America has been, where it stands, and the uncomfortable question of where the real threat lies.

  The typical person arriving at America’s southern border is no longer a Mexican looking for work. Since 2016 most have come from further afield: Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Ecuador, Colombia and beyond.

  By Aaron Wells · 21 min read

  

• Elections October 30, 2026

  Wake Me in 2028

  America goes to the polls on Tuesday with an illness nobody will treat and a forecast nobody should trust. Democrats are once again promising a blue wave, a prediction with roughly the reliability of a British summer. Republicans are promising cheaper groceries, though nobody appears to have told the groceries. Whoever wins, the real victor is fatigue, and it has already been booked for 2028.

  The American voter is tired, and not the sort of tired a long weekend fixes. Democrats head into Tuesday’s midterms with a handsome poll lead and their favorite nautical slogan, despite a record of blue waves that turned out to be puddles.

  By Aaron Wells · 8 min read

  

• Israel and Gaza October 25, 2026

  The Liberation Nobody Will Call by Its Name

  Israel is fighting Hamas to protect itself. It is also, whether anyone says so or not, freeing two million people from a regime they never chose. Why the campaign against Hamas is, among other things, a rescue.

  Hamas has ruled Gaza by force since 2007, after winning a single election in 2006 and then seizing the territory from its rivals in eight days of street fighting. It is financed by Iran and sheltered by Qatar and Turkey, and it has attacked Israel for more than three decades, often from beneath schools and hospitals.

  By Aaron Wells · 12 min read

  

• Annals of the Internet October 11, 2026

  Where Everybody Knows Your Grievance

  The rest of the internet moved out thirty years ago. A few dozen people never got the memo, and they have spent the intervening decades telling one another to die. A week among them.

  A political chat room in one of the internet’s oldest corners, where everyone who mentions an age is between the mid-fifties and the early seventies. Over six days they told one another to die sixteen times. The room, it turns out, explains the people far better than the people explain the room.

  By Aaron Wells · 46 min read