View this email in your browser 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.

October 26, 2025

On Today’s Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:

Dissatisfaction with democracy is high across the Western world. It feels like the erosion in public confidence during the 1970s, Fareed says, but with an important difference: Today, people doubt government’s legitimacy, not just its competence. Fareed argues that this crisis will end only when we decide democracy is worth believing in again.
 
Early voting has begun in New York City, where residents are choosing their next mayor. The clear front-runner is Zohran Mamdani, who just celebrated his 34th birthday, identifies as a democratic socialist and has campaigned on affordable housing, free city buses, free childcare for kids up to 5 years old and raising taxes on the highest earners. What does Mamdani's rise say about the Democratic Party’s future nationwide? Fareed talks with elections expert Elaine Kamarck and political journalist Astead Herndon.
 
The AI race is driving economic growth. But it also comes with significant consequences, using vast amounts of water, land and energy. Karen Hao, journalist and author of the book “Empire of AI,” joins Fareed to discuss.
 
One striking feature of the US–China trade war has been Beijing’s consistently bold responses to American pressure. Is Chinese leader Xi Jinping ready to take on US President Donald Trump? Fareed talks with China expert Dan Wang, author of the new book “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
 
Finally: For months, the Trump administration has accused Europe of stifling free speech. And as Fareed argues, it may have a point: Some of the continent’s restrictions on speech are outdated and chilling. But shouldn’t the Trump administration be practicing at home what it preaches abroad? Fareed examines.

Rumble in the Bronx

The New York City mayoral election’s political typology is very 2026. It features Andrew Cuomo, 67, a scandalized former governor and established center-left Democrat; Zohran Mamdani, 34, an avowed democratic-socialist state Assembly member; and Curtis Sliwa, 71, the activist and Guardian Angels founder who has focused almost exclusively on urban crime since 1979.
 
Mamdani, who leads in polls, has rocketed to fame. His young age and his criticism of Israel’s war effort in Gaza have drawn attention. Mamdani has declined to condemn the controversial phrase “globalize the intifada” when asked (though he has said he will not use it, himself). The conservative National Review has called him a “public menace” for it.
 
Mamdani’s democratic socialism, however, is the main point of fascination. Plans for free buses, frozen rent in rent-stabilized apartments, and city-run grocery stores are viewed by many as implausible. Writing in the conservative City Journal, Manhattan Institute fellow Ken Girardin warns: “A review of [Mamdani’s] statements fails to reveal any sort of limiting principle with respect to private property or the extent to which Mamdani thinks the economy should be market-driven, if at all.” Not everyone is afraid. At Politico Magazine, Brookings Turkey Project Director Asli Aydintasbas writes that publicly funded grocery stores seemed to work in Istanbul, recounting a visit to one. The store was available only to families with low-enough incomes, and its shelves were stocked mostly with items from “cheaper brands sourced from small manufacturers that I had never heard of—companies happy to donate goods to the city stores because they could write them off their taxes.” In that neighborhood, at least, the store was popular.
 
Moreover, Aydintasbas points out that Trump is conducting his own experiments with statist economic management, e.g. directing the sale of TikTok and taking a government stake in Intel. Politically, “[m]aybe the answer to right-wing populism isn’t cautious centrism, but a more daring form of left-wing populism,” Aydintasbas suggests. “Mamdani’s municipal populism may or may not work in New York. But the idea behind it is hardly fringe.”
 
Still, Mamdani is sparking both hope and fear, as the longtime national political columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. writes in a New York Times guest essay. His “charm and intelligence” are helping him win, for now, the argument over whether his policies would bring improvement or devastation. And yet, Dionne writes: “For history buffs, Mr. Mamdani has done the service of rekindling an interest in a largely forgotten American tradition, the ‘sewer socialists’ who ran a significant list of cities in the last century.” They were mostly concerned with “repairing the grubbiest of urban amenities because doing so underscored their aim of running corruption-free governments that did whatever they could to improve the lives of working-class people in their jurisdictions,” Dionne notes. They enjoyed a run of success: “The most durable among them was Daniel Hoan, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940. You don’t get re-elected that often by being a failure.”
 
Sliwa may be underappreciated for his intersection with Trump-era crime politics. Trump has deployed the National Guard to US cities. Urban crime is a problem, although it has receded to pre-2019 levels. On one side of the debate are liberals who see a power grab by Trump; on the other, those who appreciate an effort to “do something.” In many ways, Sliwa emblematizes the latter. Under his signature red beret, Sliwa “has promised to keep [the Rikers Island jail] open, advocate for reinstating cash bail, hire seven thousand new NYPD officers, and restore their qualified immunity, which protects them from most personal liability in civil lawsuits if they violate a citizen’s constitutional rights,” Willa Glickman writes in a New York Review of Books essay.
 
As Glickman details, Sliwa came to prominence in the 1970s, during a New York City budget crisis that weakened the police, after government services had already been shrinking. He founded the vigilante-adjacent street-safety group Guardian Angels, which would patrol the subway and streets, looking to stop muggings. Sliwa’s anti-crime ethos, as Glickman portrays it, stems from a perception that crime can be eliminated if we stop being afraid. It sits near the “broken windows” theory of policing, perception and crime—which holds that fixing cosmetic problems and cracking down on petty crime can foster order, broadly—but with less concern for civil liberties. “Sliwa is a singular figure, an oddball with little chance of seizing control of New York,” Glickman writes. “And yet we live in a city that he had a hand in creating. … Whether it’s called broken windows or quality-of-life policing, this approach has shaped the last three decades of life in New York, from [former Mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s high of 685,000 stop-and-frisk incidents in one year to the police ‘omnipresence’ that [current Mayor Eric] Adams aimed for in the subway system and the ‘Q-teams’ of officers now dispatched to resolve 311 complaints filed by citizens. These are policies that Sliwa came to strongly support, and still does.”

Lost in Translation

Google Translate now enables complex conversations without any shared language. Apple’s AirPods offer “live translation,” right in your ear. AI chat tools can even explain the translation choices they make.
 
But much is lost in this process, author and Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson writes in an essay for The Hedgehog Review. What’s missing from automated translations, Gibson argues, is the particularly human sense of context and background that can inform word choices. (It’s not unlike what a recent Der Spiegel feature identified as the common sense—understanding of the surrounding world and of other people—that makes a human better than a robot at picking the correct items to fill customer orders in an Amazon warehouse.)
 
As translation software has evolved, some errors have been comical. In 1997, AltaVista introduced the service Babel Fish, named after the Babel Fish of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series, a small and fictional fish that translates intergalactic languages in a user’s ear. Toying around with it, the Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco noticed that in an English-to-Italian translation, AltaVista’s tool rendered Polish people (Poles) as the ordinary Italian noun for poles, the kind that hold up telephone wires. Other shortcomings are more nuanced. The Anthropic AI tool Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash offer unsatisfactory (to Gibson) translations—and explanations of them—of Eco’s use of the Italian “indisponente,” which connotes something annoying. (Seeking an appropriately nuanced rendering, Gibson comes away annoyed.)
 
The old, human method of translation “reminds us that the whole world cannot be accounted for using the satchel of words that we ordinarily bear about with us,” Gibson writes. It “exposes the limitations of our language, even while gesturing toward the possibilities of [other languages] through shrewd incorporations. Translation, at its most human, tugs familiar words into foreign realms of meaning, renewing and extending them, and inviting us to follow there that we might sample the local flavors for ourselves. The developers of machine translation have achieved remarkable technical feats, and surely more are to come … But we ought to be apprehensive about what the Babel Fish whispers in our ears. Automatic machine translation is being marketed as a means to expand our little worlds. It may just as easily render the world back to us on ever more narrow terms.”