Notable links: July 17, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”There’s a lot that newsrooms can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York City. His latest announcement is the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, a set of dynamic, cross-disciplinary digital teams that will solve problems across the city using a rapid, human-centered approach.As Pamela Herd notes here, this is a shift from contracting out to building internal capacity:“Traditionally, the conventional wisdom since the 1990s and before was that governments could buy tech products like an off-the-shelf product. This led to a massive turn to contracting out, which was great for consultants but bad for government capacity. The outsourced approach often cost too much, delivering too little and too late.[…] What people who know tech and…