If organizers learn anything from election results this year — and potentially any year — it might be a reaffirmation of the need for groups to work together in advancing progressive priorities. A loose coalition of anti-MAGA voters kicked Donald Trump out of office four years ago, but around four million of those voters chose to simply sit it out this year.

Those coalitions are just as important when the goal is to move a policy agenda, rather than win an election. A case in point is the unexpected success of a few housing organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina — known as “the Gate City,” in a nod to its once prominent role as a railroad transshipment point across the South. In fact, their recent victory might give us all a roadmap for how to win in 2025, including one particularly relevant detail: The journey grew out of a series of losses.

One reason hyperlinks work like they do – why they index other kinds of affiliation – is that they were first devised to exhibit the connections researchers made among different sources as they developed new ideas. Early plans for what became the hypertext protocol of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web were presented as tools for documenting how human minds tend to move from idea to idea, connecting external stimuli and internal reflections. Links treat creativity as the work of remediating and remaking, which is foregrounded in the slogan for Google Scholar: ‘Stand on the shoulders of giants.’

But now Google and other websites are moving away from relying on links in favour of artificial intelligence chatbots. Considered as preserved trails of connected ideas, links make sense as early victims of the AI revolution since large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others abstract the information represented online and present it in source-less summaries. We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. So it’s pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And what’s at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?

The work of making connections both among websites and in a person’s own thinking is what AI chatbots are designed to replace. Most discussions of AI are concerned with how soon an AI model will achieve ‘artificial general intelligence’ or at what point AI entities will be able to dictate their own tasks and make their own choices. But a more basic and immediate question is: what pattern of activity do AI platforms currently produce? Does AI dream of itself?

If Pope’s poem floods the reader with voices – from the dunces in the verse to the competing commenters in the footnotes, AI chatbots tend toward the opposite effect. Whether ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI synthesises numerous voices into a flat monotone. The platforms present an opening answer, bulleted lists and concluding summaries. If you ask ChatGPT to describe its voice, it says that it has been trained to answer in a neutral and clear tone. The point of the platform is to sound like no one.

Oppenheimer actor Nick Dumont has come out as transmasculine and non-binary and has shared their new pronouns.

The star, who portrayed Jackie Oppenheimer – Oppenheimer’s sister-in-law – in the film, revealed their identity via their Instagram bio, which now includes “they/them” pronouns.

“They identity as a trans masculine non-binary person,” a representative for the actor told TMZ. Despite the star updating their information on the social site with their affirmed name, their Instagram handle, however, still includes their deadname.

Given the emphasis on community and belonging in our cultural moment, the impulse to save everything we can is understandable: to restore storm-damaged buildings, hold back the tide, snuff out the wildfires, and show that by outwitting nature we are still our own masters. There’s an implicit guilt behind these salvage attempts: a recognition that our suffering now and in future is caused by what we ourselves have wrought. In Pacifica, on the California coast, the local administration talks about ‘managed retreat’ to describe its medium-term evacuation process in response to wildfires, to the dismay and anger of some residents. The episode of the podcast This American Life telling their stories was headlined ‘Apocalypse Now-ish’. Politically, it is an invidious problem – no politician wants to be accused of ‘abandoning a community’, or to tell someone who loves their home: ‘It’s time to go – and to let go.’

Can we learn to embrace impermanence? Climate realists make a compelling case, reminding us that generations to come will have to ‘find the beauty in our burnt planet’ since they deserve beauty too. The balance to be struck is between acknowledging the worst effects and likely future impacts of climate change, and insisting that we continue to resist them – pushing for changes that will save lives, communities and ecosystems. An honest appraisal of how ‘burnt’ things are becoming should not give way to climate nihilism. Letting go of settlements is not the same as ‘giving up’. In Holderness, people have been learning to let go for thousands of years.

Many observers have pointed out the financial problems facing the Canada Post Corporation—they have lost a total of $3 billion since 2018. However, the union claims that this is not because the whole enterprise is incapable of making money. Instead, it’s because the Crown corporation refuses to expand its services, spends incessantly, and is not fighting the privatization of its different parts.

“The financial situation we face is the result of Canada Post management. They have been spending as if they have unlimited funds, with non-labour spending skyrocketing[…] Our wages and benefits are not the issue here—it’s the mismanagement and overspending by Canada Post,” says Jan Simpson.

The union has even put together an entire program detailing new avenues for the Crown corporation to receive more revenue, such as postal banking, affordable food delivery, and elder check-ins. The outcome of this strike could determine the expansion of services that everyday Canadians would have access to and benefit from.

United States v. Skrmetti is not distinct from these fights over reproductive rights — it’s their next phase. Before 2020, there was not a single law that banned access to gender-affirming care for trans people. Since then, nearly 36 states have attempted to restrict trans rights. This is not a coincidence. Recognizing the conservative turn of the courts, the Alliance Defending Freedom has drafted and promoted bills that restrict access to gender-affirming care. These model bills have been introduced in various state legislatures, contributing to a coordinated and successful strategy to limit transgender healthcare. These laws “are the result of an openly political effort to wage war on a marginalized group and our most fundamental freedoms,” writes Chase Strangio, Co-Director of the ACLU's LGBT & HIV Project.

Among Resnikoff’s suggestions are left-run community hubs that would host family-centric offerings like free meals for children (something that polls ludicrously well), as well as free childcare programs and social gatherings for adults.

This kind of programming has precedent on the right and left. Resnikoff cites the community-building (and certainly identity-building) work of pro-Trump churches, as well as the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program, the latter of which was part of a broader community service program that strengthened local political networks by deploying members into direct service of their neighbors.

In Jacobin last month, Bhaskar Sunkara finds similar precedents in Europe, where social democratic parties have also suffered as their traditional working class bases peel away. Sunkara cites the Workers’ Party of Belgium, which has made electoral inroads by going all-in on programs that immediately support the working class, like providing primary health care services at party-run action centers.

The left needs a recommitment to community because no measure of digital ad spending or get-out-the-vote activism is enough to guarantee a loyal base, let alone electoral victory anymore.

“We’ve begged for a seat at the table. We begged for funding. We’ve begged for national organizations, green organizations, big funders, to listen to us, support us,” said Roishetta Ozane, a Sulphur resident and founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana. “And we said, if we had the funding and the resources, we could win this thing. We could save our communities.”

Those pleas have finally been heard. Millions of dollars from both private and public sources have poured into Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and other communities overburdened by pollution. The federal government has made $600 million available for environmental justice projects through the Inflation Reduction Act, but much of that money from the 2022 spending plan still hasn’t trickled into target communities.

Bloomberg Philanthropies has pledged $85 million for such efforts through its Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, including support for Louisiana-based environmental justice nonprofits Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Hip Hop Caucus and Rise St. James.

Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years. The only comparable beating the U.S. has taken from Category 4 and 5 landfalling hurricanes occurred in the six years from 1945 to 1950, when five Category 4 hurricanes hit South Florida. Furthermore, the U.S. has now suffered a major hurricane strike in five consecutive years. Only one other time since accurate hurricane landfall records began in 1900 has the nation seen a streak that long: way back in 1915-1919.

Hot on Helene’s tail came Hurricane Milton, which made landfall on Oct. 9 in Sarasota, Florida, as a Cat 3 with 120 mph winds. Milton killed 25 people and inflicted tens of billions in damage. But as bad as Milton was, Florida got a major break when the eye of the storm made landfall just 20 miles south of the entrance to Tampa Bay, sparing Florida’s most vulnerable city from a massive 10-foot storm surge that would have cost tens of billions of dollars.

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It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out. After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)