The Vanity and the Wayfinder

Rachel Cohen picks her filming spots the way she picks her fights, with a reason ready. On a hot morning in late July, she sat for a long interview near the Art Institute of Chicago, a block from the Grant Park paths she walks most days and films on. Cohen is 31, a Harvard Law graduate who spent three years as a corporate finance associate in Skadden’s Chicago office and left in March 2025. What she does now resists a clean title. When people ask, she tells them she works for herself.The consistent thread in her account is calculation. Cohen weighs risk and privilege before she moves, and discusses both on the record.Raised by two military lawyersBoth of Cohen’s parents were military attorneys, and she grew up in suburbs around Dayton, Ohio, often near an Air Force base. The household was organized around public service and a works-based Christianity she credits with teaching her to care about other people. Her politics moved away from theirs, and toward a structural critique they do not fully share. She keeps using them anyway. Most of what appears on her feeds, she says, is a version of an argument she has already had with someone who loves her and disagrees. Her parents were moderate through her childhood and are not now.That habit, testing a message on people who will push back before taking it public, shows up across her work. She treats persuasion as something practiced.“Most of what you see on the internet is a microcosm of conversations I’ve had with people in my real life.”A Providence classroom came firstCohen taught non-native English speakers in Providence, Rhode Island, for four years before law school. Many of her students were undocumented or came from mixed-status families. A general sense that the system was unfair, she says, became specific when she watched a teenager support himself, attend school on an attorney’s advice, and work construction hours while his paperwork went nowhere. Effective allyship, in her framing, requires proximity: higher-income or white allies who do not have directly affected people they love tend to hold the issue at a theoretical distance.Her move into law was a calculation she states plainly. A law degree preserved the widest set of options, and she is reluctant to close doors. The LSAT went well, and she chose the credential that kept the most paths open.A test she applies to herselfCohen frames her choices around a single rule. If a person never lives by their values while promising to do so at some more important moment, she argues, those may not be their values, a standard she applies to herself. She says she had accepted, well before the 2025 crisis, that her politics might one day cost her the job.Within hours of the October 7, 2023 attacks, by her account, she posted a contextualizing take that framed the violence through occupation, and was surprised that a position she expected to be common on the left turned out to be a minority one. Her characterizations of the Israeli state as an apartheid system are her own, delivered without hedging.“If we’re never living in accordance with our values and telling ourselves we’ll do it one day when it’s really important, then perhaps those just aren’t your values.”The campaign against the law firmsIn early 2025, President Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at major law firms tied to his opponents. The orders stripped the firms’ security clearances and barred their lawyers from federal buildings, and, as CBS News reported, they threatened the government contracts held by the firms’ clients, the mechanism that made a targeted firm a liability to do business with. Cohen describes a White House strategy to puncture the norm that firms could back legal challenges to government action without it being treated as a partisan act. She attributes the approach to Boris Epshteyn and is careful to say she heard it secondhand and believes reporting later supported it.Paul Weiss folded first. Within about a week of being hit with an order, the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono work for causes the administration favored, and Trump rescinded the order. Cohen and other associates had been organizing an open letter urging firms to hold the line together. More than 600 lawyers signed it, anonymized because associates feared for their jobs. She resigned from Skadden, then claimed authorship of the effort in public because she judged the story needed a person attached to it. Skadden reached its own agreement about a week after she left, pledging roughly $100 million in pro bono work, as the ABA Journal reported.The record has moved since. By CBS News’s count, nine firms cut deals and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal work combined. The firms that fought, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey, won at the district court level, where judges found the orders unconstitutional. In March 2026, the Justice Department dropped its appeals, which made those rulings final, as NBC News reported.There is a defense of the firms that settled, and it is not frivolous. They argued that they acted to protect clients and operations from retaliation, and some legal commentators have called the choice a rational reading of a firm’s duty to its clients under pressure. Cohen’s position is that a coordinated refusal would have held, and that each settlement ratified the pressure and invited the next order. The firms that litigated and won are the best evidence she has. The defense of settling rests on the exposure those fights carried, years of legal uncertainty that the settling firms paid to avoid. Which judgment ages better is still open.Her consolidation argumentCohen’s account of why the orders worked goes past the individual firms. Even a firm without government contracts, she says, serves a short list of clients who can afford its rates, the large conglomerates and investment funds that deal with the federal government constantly and can be slowed at many points. The executive branch decides approvals and antitrust questions for those clients, which hands it leverage over the firms that represent them, contracts or no contracts. She uses the government’s roughly 10 percent stake in Intel as her example, noting that Skadden represented Intel and that arrangements like it make the relationship between big firms and the executive branch, in her phrase, pay to play.From there she draws a wider claim. Roughly a hundred firms do the same high-end work at the same rates, she says, and the campaign pushes that market toward a handful of favored players, a structure she compares to the way strongman states allocate advantage and calls, without softening it, very Putin Russia. She is not defending the arrangement that existed before 2025 and does not consider herself pro-capitalism. The consolidation, she argues, is hard to justify even on capitalism’s own terms, because it rewards proximity to power over the work. She develops this line more than any other in the conversation, drawing on the three years she spent inside the finance practice she is describing.The privileges behind the modelCohen has supported herself for a year and a half through freelance writing, paid commentary, and consulting, on short contracts she describes as unpredictable and inconsistent. She lists the privileges underneath. The platform rests, she says, on being white, Harvard-credentialed, without children, and able to call parents who could cover her $2,000 monthly loan payment if a contract fell through. Without the resignation that entered the public record when it did, she says, she could not do this full time, and could not have done it at all with children to support.Her reach is real: roughly 358,000 followers on TikTok and about 278,000 on Instagram. Her first instrument was the written word, the resignation letter that traveled before any video did, and she still treats writing as the thing she does best.The creator-organizer model draws skepticism o… Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

Austin Berg wanted to talk about structure before we talked about anyone’s name. We sat down in Lincoln Square on a summer afternoon. The problem, in his telling, is the shape of the government itself, more than any one mayor.Berg has spent a decade on that argument. He runs the Chicago Policy Center, an arm of the free-market Illinois Policy Institute, writes The Last Ward to more than 158,000 subscribers, and co-wrote The New Chicago Way. What he wanted to litigate was the machinery.“Among the big cities, we have the most vestiges of a strongman, almost caudillo, sort of system,” he said. A weak council, often seated by the mayor. No city charter. No elected finance officer or city attorney. No public vote on debt or taxes. Among big cities, Chicago stands out for having none.Waiting for SupermanI asked whether the 2027 mayor’s race matters or whether it is a field competing to run a broken machine. Berg has a name for the reflex behind the question.“The mayor’s race is the lens through which Chicagoans understand city politics more than anything else,” he said. “This is a pathology.” He calls it waiting for Superman. The city looks to one person for salvation because the strong-mayor system trained it to.The office matters to him. What the city gets wrong, he says, is what it expects the office to do. “It’s a necessary condition to have good leadership,” he told me. “It’s not a sufficient condition to have a growing, thriving city.” The candidates he watches for are the ones who ask a longer question.“Public office does not create intellectual capital. It consumes intellectual capital.”Most people who run for mayor arrive without much of it, he said, because the way the city actually works sits below the headlines. His group briefs candidates across the spectrum on their real options. The ones who stand out, in his telling, ask what they can build now that leaves the city stronger on its 200th birthday in 2037, whoever holds the office by then.The $11 billionTo see the structure work, Berg said, look at last year in Springfield. A pension sweetener added about $11 billion in liabilities to Chicago. The immediate annual cost he put at $30 to $50 million, enough to double the city’s summer jobs program, one of the few Johnson initiatives he credits.The mechanics are what he returns to. “They just made the promise. They didn’t make the tax,” he said. The state assigned the liability and left the city to find the money. Chicago got no vote, and by his account, learned the full scope only days after the session closed.The city’s chief financial officer at the time, Jill Jaworski, warned in writing that the change would push the pensions toward insolvency. Berg says he was the first to publish that letter. The mayor did not fight it in public. Berg reads the silence as a symptom of the same structure. A mayor with little standing in Springfield absorbs a bill the city did not get to weigh.There is another read of the deal. The Tier 2 benefits it raised had drifted below the federal Social Security “safe harbor,” the rule that a public pension must pay at least as much as Social Security would. Falling short risked forcing Chicago to enroll those workers in Social Security or cover the gap through lawsuits, an exposure that the nonpartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability estimated at over $800 million a year. Roosevelt University’s Ralph Martire, who directs it, told WTTW the law fixes a real structural flaw, while faulting how it was paid for. Berg’s quarrel is with that second part, the promise without the money.A release valveOther cities have an exit from a bill like that. Chicago does not. “Detroit today has a better credit rating than the city of Chicago,” Berg said, and Detroit is a decade past bankruptcy. Chicago is the only city among the fifteen largest that cannot take its debts to a bankruptcy judge.He calls Chapter 9 a last resort and wants a framework for distressed cities in place before it. An early-warning system on municipal finances. State oversight when a city runs past its means. An emergency manager who can reach a judge only at the very end. Harvey, the south-suburban city that cannot collect enough property tax to cover its debts, is his warning case.The authority matters even when unused, he argues, because it rewrites the conversation with creditors and unions. “We can either negotiate in good faith right now,” he said, describing the leverage, “or this can go to a judge, and then it’s out of our hands.” He points to the parking meter deal as the price of having no such card to play.The case against the taxBerg’s tax politics start with population. “Our biggest problem as a state is three words,” he said. “People, people, people.” Illinois lost roughly a million residents over the past decade, and by his reading, the highest earners leave fastest, two out for every one in.That is the frame for his objection to the proposed 3 percent surtax on income above $1 million. He is careful about who he is defending. “I’m not asking people to shed a tear for a pinstripe-suit, Rolex-wearing millionaire,” he said. His worry is the roughly 22,000 pass-through businesses that file at that line, the tradespeople and small operators he credits with most of the state’s new jobs, and the tax base that leaves with them. He points to Massachusetts, the one state to run a comparable surcharge. “The entire pie of the income in Massachusetts shrunk,” he said.That read is contested, the migration piece most of all. Cornell sociologist Cristobal Young, working with two US Treasury economists, tracked every million-dollar tax return in the country over thirteen years for a study in the American Sociological Review. The rich, they found, change states at 2.4 percent a year, compared with 2.9 percent for everyone else. Tax flight runs only at the margins. The Illinois Economic Policy Institute reached a parallel result in 2026, finding that states with millionaires’ taxes grew about as fast as those without, and that a 3 percent version could raise more than $4 billion a year for schools or property tax relief. Illinois voters backed the idea in a 2024 advisory referendum, roughly 60 percent in favor. GrayStak holds no position.Where he draws the lineOn the state’s investment exclusion lists, Berg draws a line between the money a government spends and the money it owes its retirees."The Illinois Investment Policy Board keeps a set of those lists, built one cause at a time. Companies that boycott Israel. Firms that house migrant children. Businesses tied to Iran and Russia. Every state pension fund has to divest from the names on them and stay clear, and much of that territory already overlaps with federal sanctions. I asked whether a fiduciary duty, applied evenly, cuts against every screen on the list, whatever the cause.He said it is not an issue he has worked on closely, then split the question. A state can invest by its values, the way a university weighs its endowment, and he recalled the campus fights over how endowments should be run. “You can make values-based decisions on how you want to invest,” he said. “What I don’t like is when people think there’s no trade-offs to that.”The pension is where he holds the line. "If I'm personally responsible for managing the money of Illinois teachers' pension funds, and I need this money to exist or else someone's not getting their retirement check," he said, "my operating principle would be, you have to maximize the returns. That is the single thing you should be focused on." Political screens, whatever the cause, are "a Pandora's box" that reduces returns by necessity. Values-based choices he keeps to the operating budget, the programs a government chooses to fund.He pointed to a case. Former Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin moved to halt the city's purchases of US Treasuries, citing the city's ability to earn the same returns elsewhere. Berg's answer was that Treasuries are the safe… Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

We met Vasquez on his own turf, a North Side space he is quick to say is not a taxpayer-funded ward office. He calls it a community hub, a co-op, a place where neighbors come in to work through what they want to get done. He keeps what he jokingly calls movement merch on hand: t-shirts, hats, and the small Chicago Star butterfly pins his team made during last fall’s surge in immigration enforcement. “The public needs to be informed in order to know how to hold government accountable,” he says. The distinction matters to him, and it frames how he describes almost everything else. Power, in his telling, is something you build with other people.From the cypher to the councilVasquez, 46, is the son of Guatemalan immigrants and a former battle rapper who performed under the name Prime. His politics started with hip-hop, long before any party. Listening to NWA, KRS-One, and Public Enemy in the late 1990s, he says, gave language to things he had already lived: poverty, being treated as an outsider, friction with police. “Without thinking about the politics of it, you just know it’s a dope song,” he says. “And next thing you know you’re reciting it, you’re thinking about how it speaks to you and your environment.” When he first heard Bernie Sanders in 2015, the pitch felt familiar. Sanders, he says, “sounded like my rap records.” He knocked doors in Iowa, came back and threw a fundraiser that doubled as a concert, and met an organizer recruiting first-time candidates. In 2019 he unseated Ald. Patrick O’Connor, a 36-year incumbent and a former floor leader for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He describes his first televised debate in the terms he knew best. It “felt like a battle. Back to back to back bars.”The only socialist to vote yesWhat has defined his six years in office is a willingness to break with the left that produced him. The clearest example is on the record. In late 2020, Vasquez broke with the city’s other socialists to vote for Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 budget, which carried a $94 million property tax increase and passed narrowly. He was the only Democratic Socialists of America member on the council to support it, and the Chicago DSA chapter censured him, its first such censure. He has not recanted. He says the vote was the price of a deal to stop city worker layoffs during the pandemic, and he frames the episode as the recurring fight on the left between purity and governing. “We all agree on goals. We don’t all agree on how to get there,” he says. A movement built by people who have felt cast out, in his telling, has a habit of casting out its own. “Yo, you’re not left enough, so now you’re not a progressive. And it’s like, we’re not gaining power that way.”His critics on the left framed it as something else. On the floor of that 2020 debate, Socialist Caucus members rejected the same deal he defended as the responsible vote. “Don’t give me crumbs and tell me it’s cake,” Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) said of the budget. “We’re in a global pandemic, and there’s no way in the world that we should be balancing this budget on the backs of taxpayers.” To that wing of the left, Vasquez’s pragmatism reads as capitulation. He calls it the price of keeping people from getting hurt.Asked directly whether he still considers himself a socialist, he does not hedge.“Government is socialist. You’ve made a social agreement that you think you can do better by pulling your resources together to solve for more people.”He adds a qualifier, calling himself a coalitionist, and draws a distinction between two kinds of people who share the label. One comes to it through hardship, and he cites Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, and Harold Washington. The other, he says, is the person whose “mom and dad paid for college and I read Marx.” People who have lived precarity, he argues, learn to compromise because survival requires it. It is a framing that favors his own position, and he makes no apology for it. He sums up his method in the language of an umpire: he calls “balls and strikes,” he says, no matter “who’s on the fifth floor” at City Hall.At odds with an allied mayorThat posture has put him at odds with Brandon Johnson, the closest thing the Chicago left has to one of its own in the mayor’s office. Vasquez voted against the mayor’s 2026 budget. He says he supports taxing corporations and still calls the mayor’s signature corporate head tax a marketing ploy. The measure, a $33-per-employee monthly tax on companies with at least 500 workers, would have raised about $82 million. His objection, he says, is precision. A broad tax also falls on immigrant- and Black-owned businesses trying to scale, and the city would do better to target industries that have thrived while others have struggled.“Am I really doing something, or am I saying that we’re doing the corporate head tax, so that people out here movement-wise go, well, clearly that’s progressive?”Johnson made the opposite case in his own words. Unveiling the budget, the mayor said he would “challenge the ultra-rich,” asking large corporations and the wealthy to carry more so working families would not face higher property, grocery, or garbage taxes. When the council stripped the tax out, he called the result “morally bankrupt,” arguing there was a way to balance the budget without going after working and poor people. His finance team projected the council plan would leave a $163 million hole to be filled mid-year. Johnson ultimately neither signed nor vetoed the $16.6 billion budget, allowing it to take effect.On the left, losing the head tax read as a gift to the wealthy. Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th Ward), a fellow socialist who championed it, called the budget that passed without it “the billionaire budget” and said it was unacceptable to put the burden on the poorest people in the city. The opposition reached beyond the left. Gov. JB Pritzker, a fellow Democrat, also opposed the head tax, calling it a “job killer.” Vasquez lands in neither camp. He says he would tax corporations, just not this one.On policing, Vasquez makes a budget argument. He says the department should be audited like any other, noting that it takes up roughly half of the corporate fund’s departmental spending, the discretionary pool the city actually controls. The department’s 2026 budget runs about $2.1 billion, and its overtime line alone grew by roughly $101 million. “You talk to the cops, they don’t feel it, they don’t see that money,” he says. “So my premise is, something’s inefficient here. We’ve got to audit this thing.” Johnson, like most politicians, is unwilling to say that publicly, he argues, so the number keeps climbing.He frames the larger development as a shift in how Chicago governs. By moving the budget cycle up about six weeks, the council was able to draft and pass a spending plan over a mayor’s objection for the first time in the city’s history. Vasquez voted against that plan too, calling both it and the mayor’s version inadequate, yet he counts the council’s new independence as a gain. “The fact that the council is becoming more independent, I think is a good thing for government, because you have a counterbalance.”The ordinance that was never testedImmigration is the fight that has consumed his chairmanship of the City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and here the lines with Johnson are less clean. Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, which says city employees will not help enforce federal immigration law, began as a 1985 executive order under Mayor Harold Washington, became law in 2006, and was expanded in 2012. Vasquez says it had never been seriously tested until the past year. After a mass detention incident in June 2025 and a hearing his committee held that July, it became clear that no rule explicitly empowered the Civilian Office of Police Accountability to investigate whether Chicago officers had violated it. His own attempt to fix that was blocked by colleagues. A similar measure led by Al… Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Smalls is sitting across from me in Chicago. For six years, he’s been told he was wrong. For six years, he’s been proven right.He was right that Amazon was an unsafe place to work in the early weeks of the pandemic. He was right that workers at the Staten Island JFK8 warehouse, a million-square-foot facility with ten- to twelve-hour shifts and a thirty-minute lunch break, could win a union election against the second-largest private employer in the country, even when nearly every major labor organization in America believed they couldn’t. Now, at a warehouse where 5,500 workers still don’t have a contract, he says he is right that Amazon will eventually be forced to the bargaining table. The federal government has ruled in his union’s favor on that point twice. Amazon is in court trying to argue that the federal labor board itself shouldn’t exist.And on May 4, three weeks before this conversation, Smalls decided he was right that Jeff Bezos, the lead sponsor of the Met Gala, should not be allowed to walk a red carpet thirty minutes from the warehouse without consequence.“There’s no way I’m going to allow this billionaire to come to New York City and do a fashion red carpet gala thirty minutes away from the warehouse that he refuses to negotiate a contract with,” Smalls says. He jumped a barricade. The NYPD tackled him. He spent twenty-four hours in a Manhattan jail. He is now facing charges for resisting arrest, trespass, and three other counts. They get dismissed if he stays out of trouble for six months. His entire life suggests he has no intention of doing that.“We put so much fear in Jeff Bezos,” he tells me, “that he didn’t show up on the red carpet.”The bookIn two weeks, on June 1, Crown will publish When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. The memoir opens with a prologue on what it feels like to walk inside a grocery warehouse, then circles back to his childhood and moves chronologically through to the 2022 union victory at JFK8.It’s not a manifesto, despite the title. Publishers Weekly called it “plainspoken” and noted that it “leans more toward personal history than political rallying cry.” Smalls confirms as much when I ask what he wants readers to take from it.“A lot of people see a piece of themselves inside of me and my story,” he says. “Whether it’s evictions, whether it’s divorce, whether it’s having kids, whether it’s getting fired from a job several times, whether it’s hitting rock bottom — all of that is in the book as well. It’s not just about the success that I had at Amazon. It’s also about the failures I had as well.”That’s the thread he wants readers to follow. The book moves through his father’s stints in prison, an early Amazon firing for two minutes of “time theft” (he was rehired), a Florida community college he didn’t finish, sound-engineering classes he didn’t finish, a basketball dream cut short by a hit-and-run on the job, an ex-wife and twins, and a brief rap career. He did a showcase with Meek Mill in New Jersey, he clarifies, not a tour. Multiple outlets have gotten this wrong. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a working-class American who happened to be standing where the pressure broke first, not a labor icon.His mother was a member of the healthcare workers’ union SEIU 1199 for more than twenty-five years and never once mentioned it at home. “She wasn’t like an organizer. She just was a rank-and-file member.” When I ask if he ever imagined this life, he laughs. The skill sets he draws on now, he says, are the ones he watched his mother use to hold down their household. “The grit and the grind that I saw my mom go through, it carried over into the things that I do and how I fight back now.”The Palestine turnThe Chris Smalls who became famous in 2020 was a workplace organizer. The man in front of me in 2026 is something bigger and less easily categorized. He talks about Gaza, Cuba, ICE, surveillance, and the prison industrial complex as if they’re the same fight.Last July, he boarded the Handala, a vessel operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza with humanitarian aid. Israeli forces intercepted the ship in international waters. Smalls, the only Black activist on board, was singled out for particularly aggressive treatment, by his account and the accounts of others on the ship. He spent five days in Israeli custody, hunger-striking the entire time, before being released without charges at the Jordan border.He is now banned from Israel, he says, for 100 years.The flotilla, he tells me, is what ties it all together. “Once again, connecting the dots with Amazon and genocide was something important to me.” Amazon and Google’s joint $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract provides cloud infrastructure to the Israeli government and military. “It’s the same technology that’s being used to empower ICE over here,” Smalls says, “and the local police departments and the rain cameras and also the government contracts they have with the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.”His argument: the line between an Amazon warehouse worker in Staten Island and a Palestinian under occupation runs through the same cloud server.He invokes the longshore workers’ creed. “There’s a saying in the labor movement from the ILWU. Injury to one is injury to all. And it doesn’t say injury to one is injury to all except for Palestinians.”That position has put him at odds with the leadership of the AFL-CIO and the International Longshoremen’s Association, both of which he has publicly accused of complicity in the war. Among nationally known U.S. labor figures, he is more or less alone on this.Surveillance and sacrificeI ask him about the cost. He has been arrested in New York, detained in Israel, and most recently stopped by ICE at the U.S. border on his return from a humanitarian aid mission to Cuba.“My phone was taken by ICE,” he says. As we are speaking, he tells me, a comrade of his has just been detained at JFK airport. The agents are asking him questions about Smalls.“I’m being surveilled,” he says. “I’m being targeted, of course. I’m being doxxed. It comes with the sacrifice of the work that I have to do, unfortunately. But I ask myself if I don’t do the work, then who else is going to do it?”He grew up, he tells me, in a context where this was always going to be the cost. “I was in handcuffs by the time I was ten years old. The average Black man has probably been in handcuffs at least once by the time they’re in their thirties. I can sit here and say I’ve been in handcuffs a dozen times, and I probably have a dozen more to go.”He pauses. “Martin Luther King was arrested, I believe, twenty-nine times. So I’m trying to break his record.”You can read that line as bravado, or as something more deliberate: a claim to a tradition, a way of locating himself inside a longer arc of Black American resistance. I think he means it both ways.The institutional realityThe harder question, the one I keep circling, is what all this adds up to institutionally. Smalls is no longer the president of the Amazon Labor Union. His successor, Connor Spence, led the union through the recent National Labor Relations Board ruling that ordered Amazon to bargain. It was the most significant legal victory at JFK8 since the original union vote. Smalls’s old union publicly described his Met Gala arrest as a “lone-wolf direct action” that was not coordinated with leadership.The arc that landed him outside that institution is worth naming. The ALU Smalls founded in 2021 was conceived as a rejection of established labor. If the big unions had been capable of organizing Amazon, he argued at the time, they would have done it already. By June 2024, that posture had reversed. ALU members voted 98 percent in favor of affiliating with the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The leadership election a month later was won by Spence, who had founded the dissident ALU … Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

Teta Jalila, c. 1920. The photograph Laila Grace uses as the logo of her design practice.A conversation with Laila Grace at SAIC Galleries about her thesis, Jalila's Vanity, Palestinian futurism, and the design lineage that runs through her distant cousin Rajie Cook. Full essay below.If you have ever found a bathroom in an airport, you have used a piece of design produced by a Palestinian Christian from Ramallah.His name was Rajie Cook. The family name was Sulaiman before Ottoman officials nicknamed his grandfather Küçük, Turkish for small, which the British Mandate Anglicized to Cook. He was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1930, the son of Jalila Totah and Najeeb Esa Cook, who had immigrated from Ramallah three years earlier. An elementary school teacher told him his name was too difficult to pronounce. He became Roger. He returned to Rajie in his older years.He designed the world we walk through. The DOT pictograms (the standardized symbols for restrooms, telephones, baggage claim, no smoking, escalators, every wordless icon in every American airport, hospital, highway, and federal building) were produced by his firm Cook and Shanosky Associates for the U.S. Department of Transportation. President Reagan and Elizabeth Dole presented him with the Presidential Award for Design Excellence in 1984. The Symbol Signs are now in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.In his later years, he turned to sculptural assemblage, making small boxes that documented his fact-finding trips through Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza as a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Task Force for the Middle East. One of those works was exhibited in Made in Palestine in 2003, one of the first major American shows of contemporary Palestinian art. He died in 2021.His distant cousin, Laila Grace, has just completed her Master of Design in Designed Objects at SAIC, following a BFA in Industrial Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She describes herself on her website as “a Palestinian Christian industrial and graphic designer based in Chicago,” with roots in Ramallah Tehta, Birzeit, Jerusalem, and Al-Husun, Jordan. She has organized in the Palestinian liberation movement since 2018, and her practice spans industrial design, graphic and visual communication work for movement organizations, and photography. Her thesis is Jalila’s Vanity, named for her great-great grandmother Teta Jalila: a Falahi peasant-class Palestinian woman from Ramallah Tehta, photographed around 1920 in her best clothing and jewelry. Laila uses that photograph as the logo of her practice.Rajie Cook’s mother was also a Jalila from Ramallah — not the same woman as Laila’s Teta Jalila, but a relative on a branch of the family neither side has fully traced. The name recurs across the lineage the way names of matriarchs tend to.Laila Grace is not an emerging Palestinian artist who happens to work in design. She continues a Palestinian American design lineage that ran from Ramallah through twentieth-century New Jersey commercial design through Cold War humanitarian witness, and that runs now through Chicago.“Oppression is also design”I met Laila at SAIC Galleries during the final week of Graduate Exhibition Two 2026, the second of the school’s two institutional graduate shows. Jalila’s Vanity sits in the Loop space at 33 East Washington Street, two floors below ground. She speaks the way people who have been organizing in Chicago for years tend to speak: declarative, direct, unbothered.The first thing she said about her practice was not about art. It was about an undergraduate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who, when she asked about industrial design through a multicultural lens, told her that “white people invented design.” She has written about this moment on her own website: “This statement was not only ignorant, but also verified my realization of the need for a more inclusive and diverse approach to design.” She returned for her master’s, she told me, partly out of spite.“Especially when I went to Palestine that summer,” she said, “I really realized how design is not only in objects, but also how we design a society and a community. Palestinians are very communal people because we design our communities effectively. That’s something people in the West actually really struggle with.”Her thesis statement followed, offered without prompting:“Oppression is also design. When we see the occupation, it is not only a political occupation that we see through law and politics, but it’s also architecturally designed: through the wall, through the borders, all sorts of things. So this is also a design issue. It’s design used in a way that’s actually really bad for our society, and we need to use design to create a better future as well.”The separation wall, the checkpoints, the Area A/B/C carve-up of the West Bank, the settlement road infrastructure, the metal turnstiles at Qalandiya: each is a designed object, produced by identifiable designers, built for a function. The conceptual move Laila is making is to take that observation seriously. If oppression is design, so is its refusal.The pivot"Oppression is also design."She has been making work in this register for years, across more media than her thesis suggests. Her portfolio includes graphic design for the Palestinian movement (t-shirts for the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, Students for Justice in Palestine) alongside her industrial design pieces.Her undergraduate thesis at UIC was Tea Time Under Apartheid: a table bisected by a partition standing in for the separation wall, with Palestinian cultural beauty laid out on either side. At SAIC she made Your Bombs, Our Leisure, a hookah whose body is shaped as a nuclear bomb, an object she writes “the FBI might expect to find during a raid on an Arab-American household,” pierced through a tray of Palestinian ceramics. She made Nijma, an Eastern-style ottoman using the Al-Khalil (Hebron) star motif. She designed a chess table inspired by Gaza’s chess clubs for children. She has a sustained body of tatreez work, including Tatreez of the Future and Tatreez After Dark. Jalila’s Vanity is the culmination of that tatreez investigation, not its beginning.She calls this earlier body of work discursive design. The term comes from a real subfield (Bruce and Stephanie Tharp’s writing on objects as arguments) that Laila engages directly. The hookah bomb is discursive in this precise sense: it places the symbols of occupation and the symbols of Arab leisure into a single object and forces the viewer to hold them together.The pivot that makes Jalila’s Vanity different is that Laila has decided to stop making work that engages Israel at all.“I found that when I was making objects that were about Israel or about the occupation, about the genocide, it didn’t make people care on the outside,” she told me. “I wanted my work to make people care. I was kind of realizing people still don’t care. So I was shifting my focus more into designing purely for the Palestinian people instead of preaching to the choir or trying to change people’s minds.”This is not depoliticization. It is a tactical reading of what design can and cannot do in the current information environment. Two years into the genocide in Gaza, she has concluded that further work aimed at convincing outsiders is a misallocation of her practice. Her current work is directed instead to a Palestinian audience.“The wall is not our symbol,” she said. “We have fantastic artists who have made paintings on it, but the wall is not ours. The wall is not ours, but we use that so often.”In her artist statement she calls this mode Palestinian futurism. The term gestures toward a small body of contemporary Palestinian work (the films of Larissa Sansour in particular) that imagines Palestinian existence outside the present political horizon. Laila’s futurism is n… Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

At the Illinois State Capitol, Norma Hernandez broke down the political realities behind how legislation moves through Springfield.The conversation covered HB2723, progressive revenue proposals like the digital advertising tax, and broader fights over taxation, corporate power, and economic inequality in Illinois. But much of the discussion focused on something less visible from the outside: the internal politics of the legislature itself.Hernandez explained how lawmakers build support around bills, how coalitions form around specific issue areas, where resistance comes from, and how relationships inside the Capitol shape whether legislation gains momentum or dies quietly in committee.She also reflected on her entry into state government after being elected in 2023. Coming from a background in social work, urban planning, and policy research, she described the shift from studying political systems to operating inside one: learning the personalities, alliances, and institutional dynamics that define Springfield politics.The conversation offers a look at how power, negotiation, and political community function inside the Illinois legislature beyond the public-facing debate. Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

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This conversation took place inside the Illinois State Capitol. On its surface, it’s an interview with a policy organizer working on active legislation. More broadly, it offers insight into how some political actors are thinking about the relationship among advocacy, policy, and capital.At the center is Illinois’ anti-boycott framework and the effort to repeal it. As described in the interview, the law allows the state to investigate whether companies are engaging in politically motivated boycotts and, in some cases, remove them from state pension portfolios. That creates a point of overlap between public investment decisions and political criteria—raising questions about what role pension systems are meant to play.The implications are contested. The Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever example raised in the conversation reflects one way participants understand the downstream effects: scrutiny can lead to divestment activity, which can then influence pricing, positioning, and, in some cases, corporate decisions. Whether that chain is consistent or situational is debated, but the perception itself is shaping how people engage with the issue.What stands out is the framing. The approach described links activism, legislation, and economic pressure into a single line of effort. The focus isn’t just on narrative or elections, but on influence that runs through institutions and capital flows.There are limits. The conversation points to coordination problems—overlapping candidates, fragmented coalitions, and misaligned priorities—that make it harder to convert agreement into outcomes. In that sense, the constraint is often internal as much as external.Taken together, this reflects a broader shift. Political actors are testing how state-controlled capital can intersect with policy goals, while working through the coordination challenges that come with it. The boundaries between governance, markets, and political strategy are still being worked out.Most of this is unfolding outside national attention, for now. Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

Editor’s NoteThis interview is part of GrayStak’s ongoing coverage of political movements, governance models, and institutional dynamics in major U.S. cities. The views expressed reflect Alderperson Rodriguez-Sanchez’s perspective and are presented to understand better how power is organized and exercised at the local level.As part of our Chicago coverage, we are speaking directly with policymakers, organizers, and institutional actors shaping outcomes on the ground.The Seat Belongs to the Movement: A View from Inside Chicago’s Grassroots Political ModelI sat down with Alderperson Rosanna Rodriguez-Sanchez in her office at Chicago City Hall to understand how she thinks about power—where it comes from, how it’s built, and how it operates once you’re inside government.What she laid out is not the dominant framework most people associate with Chicago politics. It is a perspective shaped by multi-generational organizing, community-based mobilization, and a view of governance that differs meaningfully from traditional institutional models.Early in the conversation, she framed it directly:“The seat belongs to the movement.”That idea anchors how she approaches her role. It reflects a view that political authority is not held individually but is temporarily exercised on behalf of a broader base.Her perspective is rooted in early experience. She described her first protest at six years old in Puerto Rico, when her community lacked running water during a drought. In that environment, organizing was not ideological—it was a practical response to the absence of reliable public services.“We protested… and the organizing actually worked, and we were able to get our water back.”From her standpoint, that experience shaped a broader understanding of politics:“Organizing is fundamental to survival.”This framing is an important context for her interpretation of governance. It places collective action at the center of political life, in contrast to the more individualistic framing that often dominates U.S. political discourse.When applied in Chicago, this perspective leads to a different approach to electoral politics. Rodriguez-Sanchez did not come up through traditional party or institutional pathways. Her entry point was through organizing, working with immigrant communities, youth networks, and local movements, before transitioning into elected office.That background informs how she distinguishes her model from what is commonly referred to as Chicago’s political “machine.”“We are not the new machine… we are organizing people around issues that are important to people.”In her view, the difference is structural. Traditional machine politics is associated with patronage and control of resources, jobs, contracts, and institutional leverage. The model she describes is organized around issue alignment and volunteer participation.That distinction also shapes how she describes political accountability:“If the organization decides to run somebody else… I step aside.”Whether or not that model is broadly replicable, it reflects a different conception of incumbency, one where political authority is contingent on continued alignment with an organized base.Beyond framing, the conversation also surfaced how these ideas translate into governance.On immigration, she described the development of coordinated response systems to monitor and respond to enforcement activity at the local level:“We created the Northwest Side Rapid Response System.”These systems include volunteer networks, legal coordination, and communication channels designed to respond quickly to developments on the ground. They illustrate how local actors can shape the experience of federal policy in practice.On public safety, her focus has been on expanding non-police responses, particularly for mental health crises:“We need to center care, not violence.”This includes efforts to build out mobile crisis response teams and strengthen public mental health infrastructure. This approach reflects a broader shift in how some local governments are thinking about safety and service delivery.On economic policy, she pointed to ongoing tensions around taxation and revenue generation:“Rich people never want to pay their fair share.”Here, her comments reflect a broader dynamic visible in many cities where efforts to restructure revenue or shift fiscal priorities encounter resistance from well-resourced stakeholders.From a GrayStak perspective, what stands out is not just the substance of any single position, but the underlying model of how power is organized and exercised.The structure she describes is networked rather than centralized, linking local organizations, elected officials, and, at times, state and federal actors into coordinated systems. Information, resources, and response mechanisms move across those layers in ways that are not always visible from the outside.This matters in a broader context.Major U.S. cities are increasingly serving as primary arenas in which national political tensions are operationalized. Immigration enforcement, public safety, housing policy, and taxation are not just federal debates—they are implemented, adapted, and contested at the local level.In that environment, the composition and orientation of local leadership can materially shape outcomes.As she put it:“It matters who is in these seats.”That statement can be read in multiple ways—politically, operationally, and analytically.From an analytical standpoint, it reinforces a broader point: understanding political and policy risk in the U.S. increasingly requires close attention to local systems, not just national narratives.What this conversation provides is direct access to one such system—from the perspective of a policymaker who operates within institutions while being shaped by organizing traditions outside them.It is not the only model in operation. It exists alongside more traditional structures—capital-backed networks, institutional coalitions, and established political hierarchies.But it is an active one. And in cities like Chicago, where national tensions are translated into local outcomes, it is increasingly part of how power is actually being built and exercised.About GrayStakGrayStak is a media and political risk platform focused on emerging instability, institutional dynamics, and political movements across the United States. Combining on-the-ground reporting with structured analysis, we identify early warning signs and turn real-world events into actionable insights for public, corporate, and institutional decision-makers. Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe

National attention around the race for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District has begun to grow. Veteran political strategist David Axelrod recently pointed to Kat Abughazaleh as a candidate drawing unexpected attention — a sign that what began as a relatively unconventional campaign is now entering broader national political conversation.Abughazaleh’s run has broken with many of the traditional norms of congressional campaigning. Rather than focusing primarily on donor networks, formal party infrastructure, and traditional advertising, her campaign has emphasized community events, live performances, concerts, and mutual aid initiatives to embed itself more deeply in the district's daily social life.A major pillar of her strategy is digital organizing. Abughazaleh describes building an online political community through platforms like Discord, where supporters can interact directly with the campaign, coordinate volunteer efforts, and participate in discussions that shape messaging and priorities. The model reflects a broader shift in how younger campaigns are attempting to maintain constant accessibility and build participatory political communities that exist both online and offline.At the same time, the campaign has been accompanied by controversy. In our conversation, Abughazaleh addresses the indictment that has become part of the public narrative surrounding her candidacy and discusses how she believes it has shaped perceptions of the race. She also reflects on the ways traditional polling can struggle to measure candidates who build support through decentralized networks rather than conventional campaign infrastructure.Beyond the mechanics of the campaign itself, the discussion also turns to the broader political landscape. Abughazaleh shares her perspective on the Democratic Party, evolving voter expectations, and how candidates experimenting with new organizing models may influence the future of congressional politics.For observers of political movements, the campaign offers an interesting case study in how modern campaigns are evolving at the intersection of digital infrastructure, community organizing, and political storytelling.Below is the full interview in which Christopher Sweat sits down with Kat Abughazaleh to discuss her campaign, her strategy, and the broader political environment shaping the race.GrayStak conducts independent field reporting and interviews across American political movements, elections, and political conflicts — documenting the people, strategies, and events shaping the country in real time. Get full access to GrayStak Media at christophersweat.substack.com/subscribe