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NYC MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS A DIGIMON FAN New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is getting attention from anime fans after naming DIGIMON as his favorite anime. His love for nostalgic Japanese pop culture apparently goes beyond Digimon. In a recent interview with mitú, Mamdani recalled going to see a POKÉMON movie as a kid and hoping to get a Mewtwo, a reference to the promotional Pokémon cards given out around Pokémon: The First Movie. Mamdani has also embraced gaming culture in public, previously using Mario Kart references while discussing New York politics and later playing Mario Kart World during a Twitch livestream. He has even shown support for Anime NYC, welcoming the convention and its attendees to the city.

On the morning of October 9th, forty-one combines came over the hill at sunrise. In a line. Headlights still on. Engines so loud the ground hummed. Like an army that had decided to be kind. My coworker's son, Hiroto, was standing in the field when they came. He was sixteen. He didn't know what he was looking at. Hiroto had spent the year as an exchange student with the Lindgren family in eastern Nebraska. Corn and soybeans. Nine hundred acres. The same family had worked that ground since 1911. The first month was a comedy. Tom, the father, woke him at 5:30 to feed the cattle. Hiroto had never seen a cow up close. The cow was not impressed. He asked Tom how many kernels of corn were in the field. Tom thought about it and said, "Oh, about forty million." Hiroto stopped asking questions about corn. The farm dog, a scruffy old heeler named Biscuit, decided on the second day that Hiroto belonged to her. Nobody was consulted. And there was Cody. Tom's son. Seventeen. Quiet. Arms like fence posts. For the first two weeks, he didn't say a single word to the Japanese kid sleeping across the hall. Then one night, in the truck, they fought over the radio. Country music versus Japanese pop. It got loud. It got serious. Tom laughed so hard he had to pull over. After that, they were brothers. Nobody decided it. It just was. In July, Tom collapsed in the north field. Heart attack. He was 52. He was gone before the ambulance found the road. Grief in a farmhouse is quiet in a specific way. His boots stayed by the back door. Laced. Like they were waiting for him to come in for supper. Nobody could move them. Ellie, nine years old, started sleeping in her father's seed cap. It came down over her eyes. She wouldn't take it off. And Cody, at the funeral, said exactly one sentence. "I'll bring in the harvest." Nine hundred acres. A job for a whole crew. Tom had brought in every harvest for thirty years. He had never missed one. Not for a broken arm. Not for a blizzard. Not once. Cody was not going to be the Lindgren who missed one. So in September, he started. Alone. Up at four. In the combine before the sun. Back after midnight. Hiroto couldn't drive a combine. So he did the only thing he could. He rode in the cab next to his brother. All day. All night. He held the thermos. He talked. In bad English, about anything. Baseball. Japan. Girls. Biscuit. Anything to keep Cody's eyes open. Some nights Cody fell asleep at the wheel for a second, and Hiroto would shake his arm, and Cody would say, "I'm good, I'm good." He was not good. One night, around two in the morning, in the middle of a dark field, Cody stopped the combine. He put his forehead on the steering wheel. And he broke. All of it. Everything he hadn't let anyone see since July. Seventeen years old. Alone in the middle of nine hundred acres, in his father's machine, in the dark. Hiroto told my coworker he didn't know a single English word that could help. So he put his hand on Cody's back, and said the only word that came. In Japanese. "Niichan." Big brother. Cody didn't know what it meant. He knew exactly what it meant. They sat there until the sun came up. Two weeks later, on the morning of October 9th, Hiroto heard the sound first. He walked out of the house, still in his socks, and looked up at the hill. And they came. Forty-one combines. Grain trucks behind them. Semis behind those. Neighbors from three counties. Men who argued with each other at the co-op every Monday. Men who hadn't spoken to each other in years. Old men. Young men. The high school football team, driving grain carts. Church women unloading folding tables and coolers of sandwiches at the edge of the field. Nobody had called them. Nobody had to. Cody came out of the house and just stood there, staring. He couldn't move. An old neighbor named Arlen, eighty years old, climbed down out of the lead combine, walked across the dirt, and put his hand on Cody's shoulder. "Your daddy helped every single one of us, son. Every one." Then he pointed at Tom's combine. "Get in. You're leading." And Cody climbed into his father's combine, and pulled out in front, and led forty-one machines across his father's land. They brought in nine hundred acres in one day. At sunset, there was one row left. And without anyone saying a word, every combine stopped. They pulled off to the edge of the field. Forty-one machines in a long line, side by side, headlights on in the gold light. Two hundred people stood by the trucks. And they let Cody take the last row. Alone. With Ellie in the cab beside him, in her father's cap, pushing it up out of her eyes so she could see. When he reached the end of that last row, forty-one horns went off at once. You could hear them, people said, in the next town. Hiroto came home to Japan in June. His father asked him what the most important thing was that he'd learned in America. He expected English. Or baseball. Or maybe something about corn. Hiroto thought about it. Then he said: "In Japan, we say a family is the people under one roof. In Nebraska, I learned that family is whoever comes over the hill." Every October now, Hiroto gets a photo from Cody. Always the same picture. A line of combines coming over a hill at sunrise. Always the same three words. "They came again."

[A Structural Breakdown of Sanae Takaichi's Résumé Fraud] 1. Takaichi once claimed the title of "U.S. Congressional Legislative Analyst" — a designation that does not exist. This fabrication has already been thoroughly debunked. 2. Her official profile currently lists "Congressional Fellow." In reality, she was nothing more than an unofficial intern. This is the crux of the matter. 3. This is not a dusty old scandal of résumé padding. It is an active, ongoing deception — one that a sitting prime minister continues to perpetuate to this day. 4. Conclusion: The evidence strongly suggests that a consummate con artist has infiltrated Japanese politics and ascended to the office of Prime Minister. What makes this still more damning: Takaichi has openly admitted — in her own words, published in Classy magazine — that she falsified her résumé to gain entry to Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder's office. From her very first step onto the political stage to the present day, Sanae Takaichi is a figure whose entire career rests on a foundation of lies and fabrication. She is, by any reasonable standard, an antisocial actor wholly unfit for public office — let alone the highest office in the land. To allow this to go unchecked is unconscionable. #Takaichi# #JapanesePolitics# #Japan# #Disinformation# #SanaeToken#