mayor

Zohran won

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The meaning of a facial expression and the making of a new New York

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Anand Giridharadas 
Anand Giridharadas 

Reposting this essay from this week live from Zohran‘s campaign headquarters, where we just learned that he won.

I begin with a confession. On more than one occasion (OK, three), I have finished watching a video of Zohran Mamdani speak and hurried to a mirror to work on my smile. I have no plans to run for office, but the Mamdani grin is so striking, so politically potent, so confounding to his foes, so distinct from the projected affect of many of the New York mayoral candidate’s own allies, so full of sun in the dreariest timeline, that I have wondered about my own. Do I smile enough? Do I ever smile? Was my grandmother right that I look angry in my book jacket photos? Am I angry? Why am I so angry? What kind of life could I have had if I could smile like that guy? And in the mirror I try it, and what my brief study has found is that a smile so broad physically hurts. It doesn’t seem to hurt Mamdani, though. It may be why he wins.

Before you say that’s ridiculous, let me explain. With a smile. Ow.

To be clear, the heart of the campaign was always substance. A million New Yorkers could probably name his key policy ideas: fast and free buses, universal childcare, and a sweeping rent freeze. His opponents have struggled to offer much more than fearmongering about his substance. Mamdani is running as a Democrat who wants to do very specific and understandable things to make life more affordable, and therefore uncork the dreaming and creation that can spill forth when life becomes more than a struggle merely to sustain itself — at a time when, nationally, Democrats are struggling to figure out who they are and how to be more than just Not Trump.

As a result, I kept noticing Mamdani’s smile and minimizing it to myself as any kind of important theme. Because, naturally, it’s about the policies; it’s about the big ideas; and it is. But the question is how he has been able to turn the “capitalist capital of the world” into “the epicenter of an ascendant and impatient socialist-led rebellion,” as The New York Times recently put it. And how he has been able to rouse 90,000 people to volunteer for his campaign — a staggering figure that translates into the sight of Mamdani canvassers everywhere in New York. And how he has been able to win over enough skeptics to get to this historic precipice.

And into the mix of factors I’d throw the smile.

You know the smile. It is a face-filling, muscle-tensing, high-octane power beam that flares every time Mamdani comes to a podium, every time he is in between sections of a speech, every time he approaches a prospective voter on the street, every time he is filmed dancing in nightclubs in the dead of night, every time he hears someone in the crowd yell “Habibi!” Like every politician’s smile, it is more than a facial expression. It is rhetoric. In his case, it seems to project a mix of things — genuine joy in the process of campaigning itself, confidence and a certain aboveness, accessibility to all comers, refusing to mirror the demeanor of those who traffic in fear of him.

Ronald Reagan’s smile put an aw-shucks, gee-whiz patina on a policy agenda that would wipe smiles off millions of faces. Barack Obama’s smile cast him as cool as a cucumber, a rock star whom you wanted to follow as a fan as much as a citizen (and who would let you down if he turned out to be merely mortal). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s smile on her thronged Instagram lives is the smile of up-close-and-personal relatability in the social-media age, an insider bringing you on her strange ride.

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Heat Exhaustion

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A spark of hope in a limbo that feels like hell.

By Sarah Kendzior | June 27, 2025
 

We are at war with Iran, we are not at war with Iran. Federal lands are for sale, the sale of federal lands is prohibited. The tariffs are back, the tariffs are over. Foreign students are banned, foreign students can stay. Trump rebuffs Israel, Trump will defend Israel to the death.

To the death, to our death: the threat of death is the constant. Nothing is real except awful things that don’t stop growing and don’t backtrack. Death is behind the drapes you draw down like a gunfight you already lost. The temperature hits 100 and makes you remember when the world had centuries instead of one endless day.

The heat will not relent. Why should it when nothing else will?

Politics is a jigsaw seesaw with a push and pull that cuts. Every policy is retracted and reinstated so that you can no longer remember relief. What were its ingredients — time, promises? She inhaled a sigh of relief, you think, but all you inhale is heat. You open the front door and stick out your head and breathe like Sylvia Plath.

Slam the door: you have a choice. Slam the door on that cannonball sun.

If you could have one hour, only one hour, in the cool natural air, just one hour when things were not wrong, you could make it through the week. You imagine a lemonade stand run by children selling RELIEF to adults, pouring it into paper cups, and a line of adults so long it bests the record-breaking No King’s Day rally that everyone forgot after the King announced we were at war.

The King has proclaimed we are not at war with Iran anymore because The King Won (shhhh keep telling him that.) But his backers proclaim we are at war with a nice 33-year-old man who wants to do good deeds and has assembled a massive following.

Things don’t tend to work out well for fellows like that, especially against the forces backing The King. You take some comfort that this fellow is not a carpenter.

* * *

The air feels like an oven, but New York produced a spark. New York, of all places, gave America hope with the platform of Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. We are so used to New Yorkers taking — The Trumps, The Cuomos, The Kushners, Carl Icahn, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Adams, Bernard Kerik (RIP!), Wall Street — that it is odd when they offer something good. Affordable housing, cheap childcare, relief.

Rich New Yorkers compared the prospect of these policies to Kristallnacht.

Rich New Yorkers whined about their personal safety while powerbrokers threatened Mamdani with deportation. When they were mocked as coddled losers, they changed the narrative, claiming Mamdani, a Muslim, threatened heartland states like mine, Missouri. But the lead article on the day Mamdani won was about how much rural Missourians are enjoying the new halal menu at the Stuckey’s in Doolittle.

Zohran Mamdani has a buddy named Brad Lander who ran as a sort of co-pilot in New York’s ranked mayoral race. Lander is from St. Louis, which means he has seen affordable housing and free institutions firsthand. He can testify to New Yorkers that they are real.

Lander left St. Louis long before Wesley Bell won the most expensive race in district history with money from hard-right Zionist PACs posing under fake names like “Progressives for Missouri.” AIPAC and other lobbyists did not care about Bell or about St. Louis. Their only goal was to oust Cori Bush, who had condemned Israel’s murderous policies. The “election” was a sad spectacle. I would complain to my representative, but I don’t have representation.

There are so many terrible New Yorkers to primary, but if Lander feels homesick, we’ve got one here too.

Mamdani’s victory was a primary upset win over former governor and unrepentant sex pest Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is part of a legal team representing Benjamin Netanyahu against ICC charges of war crimes. The team was assembled by Alan Dershowitz, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Rich people who liked Epstein also like Cuomo, a fellow predator and death merchant. They need Cuomo to hold office and keep secrets.

Mamdani, unlike Cuomo, would not perform subservience to Israel, no matter how many times pundits tried. Mamdani has secrets too: like that a city can uplift its own people instead of functioning as a hub for a wealthy criminals tied to foreign states.

Rich New Yorkers are panicking because that was never a secret. It only felt like one because hardly anyone powerful said it out loud.

I’m worried Mamdani will be murdered. I’m worried he’s another faker. I’m worried he will spur a political cult, and that worry has already been vindicated: the shredding of the American monoculture has ensured every politician has a cult. Politics is the only shared pastime, which is why American life feels miserable, because the stakes are so high, and the quality of programming so low.

* * *

The heat wave hit New York. I wondered how it would affect the election. I wondered if Mamdani would win and billionaires would sue the sun. I wouldn’t rule it out.

When heat waves get this bad, the smallest effort drains you. You can feel the whole country wilting, wilting against its collective will. New Yorkers voted anyway.

I’ve said time and time again that you can’t vote out the mafia, and that’s true. But you can try not voting in the mafia. It won’t change everything. But it’s a start.

Today’s mafia is transnational but not ethnic. Its criminals have multiple passports and offshore accounts and no national allegiances. To them, countries are land masses to be stripped and sold for parts. Transnational organized crime knows no geographical bounds — but it has key hubs, and New York City is one of them.

It does not have to be. New York has been that way so long, people accept it, even take pride in it. Elite criminal impunity is New York’s currency. But what if it wasn’t? What if London and Moscow followed suit?

People fear a system crashing down because they don’t understand that it already happened and they’ve been living in wreckage sold to them as privilege. Or they understand just fine, and do not know what to do about it.

The earth is screaming. It has heat exhaustion. I do too, as I write this out, ride this out, waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the sun to set on plutocrat thieves, waiting for the sun to set me free. Waiting for the day I greet sunrise not with dread at uncertain hours, but relief at the dawn of possibility.

* * *

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Photo of a sunset I took on a nice day in 2022. What, you think I’m going out in this weather to get another?!