Today, the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul — whose smile is at least in part giving Sir Nigel Thornberry, KBE — stood next to the new Mayor of New York and announced free universal childcare for kids basically all the way to kindergarten.
What a cool example of how “You Can Just Do Things” can be for a thing that isn’t, say, a war crime or international invasion or denialism about the existence of the Constitution. You identify specific, actionable things you want and when you have the power to do them, you just do them instead of spending tons of time debating bad-faith actors who want to hang you in limbo until your aforementioned power has expired.
This is opening a can of ass that can’t fully be whooped right now, but “Immediately use your power do things that are morally good and help people” is a bar that should be universally remembered for The 2026 Election Cycle and should be applied to anyone asking for that afore-aforementioned power.
But in this moment, where one political wing of America that represents 30% of Americans is using power to do the dumbest shit imaginable, it is important to take the wins where we can get them.
This is where I’d like you to insert your motivational speaker style of choice. Maybe it’s a middle aged blonde white woman telling you how to reclaim your power. Maybe it’s some at-least-vaguely-Christian professional speaker telling you that joy comes with every sunrise. Maybe it’s a brand activation video from an athlete screaming at you to rise and grind so that you can attack the day and wring the winning energy from its neck.1
Also, a recommendation: you should get the NASA app. On an iPhone (I don’t know Android life, I got an iPod touch in 2008 and can never look back) you can set up the app’s Photo Of The Day to just… be on your screen. I love the Photo of the Day, because it’s always a galaxy being born or the Mars rover showing where water was. And every photo is rated five stars. Yes, the NASA app lets you rate photos. Why? I don’t know. I cannot understand why a bunch of literal rocket scientists and geniuses who can get us video from other planets and calculate time dilation care about what Uranus420 thinks about a photo. I also don’t know why they have voting because every photo gets five stars. Yeah, the NASA app has an unsurprisingly low number of hate-downloaders - everybody is freaking HYPED for whatever photo of a quasar pops up each day. Today’s photo isn’t even from space, it’s the Artemis II crewmembers getting ready for an equipment test — guess how many stars?
Five. OBVIOUSLY. Is that because the social community of the NASA app is a bunch of sweethearts? I think yes!2 But it’s a nice piece of joy, aspiration, and the kind of humanity that America is mostly ignoring right now that you can put on your phone.
Per Adua, Ad Astra
-Greg
1 I implore you, with all my being, to watch the first 45 seconds of this video, which one of my improviser roommates in Chicago listened to earnestly as his alarm until the rest of us found out and incessantly yelled “Welcome to the grind” through his door.
2 Orrrrr people think it’s incredibly cool that bunch of astronauts are literally going to orbit the moon for the first time in our lifetimes (unless you’re old, sorry fam!) and that is one of those “humanity reaching out to the stars” moments so how could you give it four stars?
