Hustle culture may be the norm at tech companies in the AI era, but the work will stop tomorrow at publishing platform Medium. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine is giving the company's employees permission to take the day off to participate in tomorrow's nationwide general strike protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Activists behind the general strike are calling for 'no work, no school, and no shopping' amid a push to defund ICE, which has escalated raids in U.S. cities, killing several people, including two U.S. citizens earlier this month in Minneapolis. 'Whether or not you want to fully take the day away from work, or do a partial work day, or orient your work towards something that feels aligned to the goals of the strike, that is up to you,' he wrote in a general announcements channel. Of course, the publishing platform has an important role in helping people share news, opinions, insights, and analysis around politics, culture, and other topics. So that it can allow its employees to take the day off to protest, Stubblebine said Medium will coordinate with the necessary teams to ensure there's a plan for 'business continuity' on Friday....

One popular strain of urban-policy thinking opposes gentrification'the arrival of affluent people into poor neighborhoods'and argues that poverty should be rectified by ever greater expenditure on public housing. The opposite might be true: Government spending can help, but it can also hurt, as badly designed public-housing projects have done. So long as gentrification brings rich and poor together, and offers the latter greater opportunity to take part in a healthy economy, it looks less like a villainous process and more like a heroic one. Few places illustrate the aspirations and failures of American housing policy as well as the Techwood Homes in downtown Atlanta'one of the first federal housing projects. Its completion, in 1935, even drew the attendance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who switched on its electricity. To make way for the development, the old slums'in which roughly a quarter of residents were Black'had been cleared away. But the 604 new units were for white tenants only until 1968, when civil-rights laws forced integration. Like the ramshackle shacks it replaced, Techwood fell into disrepair. By the 1990s, Techwood had resegregated, becoming almost exclusively Black, and turned into a byword in Atlanta for urban decline. Gates and windows lay shattered; residents complained of squalid living conditions; drug trafficking and gang violence were out of control....

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz worries that the violence in his state could produce a national rupture. 'I mean, is this a Fort Sumter'' he mused today in an interview in his office at the state capitol. The island fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, is where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Now it's federal forces that are risking a breach. 'It's a physical assault,' Walz told me. 'It's an armed force that's assaulting, that's killing my constituents, my citizens.' Walz bowed out of his reelection race earlier this month. The 2024 vice-presidential candidate said that he didn't want politics to interfere with his work amid an intensifying federal probe into welfare fraud in his state. Two days later, his phone rang, and it was Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. Renee Good had been shot and killed by an ICE officer, one of thousands of federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of what the Trump administration declared the largest immigration-enforcement operation in history. 'Get yourself prepared,' was the mayor's message, Walz recalled to me. He had understood instantly that the kind of unrest not seen since the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, could be returning to Minneapolis....

In 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt criss-crossed the country as a champion of what he called 'Americanism.' The concept was becoming commonplace in American discourse, marking a stand against what he referred to as 'hyphenated Americanism.' The persistence of such identities'German American, Italian American, Jewish American'was for Roosevelt 'the one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,' creating a 'tangle of squabbling nationalities.' 'The foreign-born population of this country,' Roosevelt said, 'must be an Americanized population'no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace.' In 1916, the writer Randolph S. Bourne offered a rejoinder in The Atlantic. In his essay, 'Trans-national America,' Bourne wondered: If Americanization on the terms that Roosevelt and others had defined failed, what of it' Should immigrants not shape their own lives as they see fit' Should they deny their own cultures and identities' To be open to this sort of cultural diversity was not, Bourne wrote, 'to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean.'...