Mayor Mamdani has created a new program—70,000 free tickets, every year, for students, citizens, residents, workers, immigrants, toddlers, grandparents, homeless people, anyone and everyone who lives in the city, to go to the Metropolitan Opera. To see La Boheme, Macbeth, Cosa Fan Tutte, Tosca, The Magic Flute, Samson and Delilah, Aida, Parsifal, and more. Sign up here.

While you’re waiting to sign into the lottery, savor these words of John Maynard Keynes, writing at the height of World War II, reminding us what the idea of a “commonwealth” really means:

I should like to see that war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population. Why should we not set aside, let us say, 4.50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and much more. Anything we can actually do we can afford. Once đone, it is there. Nothing can take it from us. We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?