It’s Wednesday, August 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Liel Leibowitz on why New York will never be “Habibi City.” Maya Sulkin talks to the white-collar Zoomers who feel owed their mental-health leave. And much more.
But first: Welcome to “Habibi City.”
The city formerly known as the Big Apple is now “Habibi City.” So declared a viral cover story in New York magazine this week, announcing the arrival of a new cadre of Middle Eastern residents building community and defining contemporary New York by resisting “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.”
We wanted to make sense of this trend ourselves, so we turned to Liel Leibovitz, himself an immigrant from the Middle East to the United States.
He moved here, he writes for us today:
. . . for the one and only reason anyone should ever come to America: Because I believe it, firmly and passionately, to be the greatest nation ever endowed by God with the mission of spreading liberty and light to a benighted world, and because I consider it the honor of a lifetime to partake in the solemn work of making America ever greater. Apparently my fellow Middle Eastern immigrants have very different feelings.
Don’t miss Liel on “Habibi City” and why the viral essay gets the story of New York, and immigration to America, exactly backward.
—The Editors
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Burned Out? Hate Your Manager? Take a Mental-Health Leave. |
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Mental-health leave has gone from a seldom-discussed, stigmatized break to something that younger employees not only openly talk about but a workplace perk they feel entitled to. But what’s a manager to do when half the team is on mental-health leave? Maya Sulkin has the story on the Zoomers and millennials who reset, travel the world, become influencers, and even look for new jobs—all on the company dime. | |
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Americans Are Patriotic. Why Aren’t Our Politicians? |
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Rumors of the death of American patriotism have been greatly exaggerated, argue Ruy Teixeira and Karlyn Bowman, and in the midterms, whichever party embraces a hopeful nationalism will see a boost at the polls. While one side of the aisle posits that America has faded from past greatness, the other doubts it was ever great at all. Today, Teixeira and Bowman dig into the data behind America’s patriotism gap—and the lessons each party can learn from it to win crucial races in the midterms this fall. | |
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This High School Wouldn’t Fix Its Antisemitism Problem |
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At a high school in Arlington, Virginia, Jewish students were mocked, threatened, and chased—then their desperate requests for help were met with indifference by school officials. In Rupa Subramanya’s latest investigation, she talks to students and their families about the double standards when it comes to fighting discrimination, and how a school’s failure to tackle antisemitism threw children’s lives off course. | |
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