Hello Smarties—Your Weekly Recs Are In!
Hello Smarties—Your Weekly Recs Are In!The New York Desk Weighs In on Off-Script Politics. Plus: Anna Wintour, Hedy Lamarr, Lorde, The Bear, Panda Bears, and Much, Much More...
Letter from East 88th StreetDear Wags, We must have stumbled over some algorithmic tripwire, because we’re suddenly drowning in ads for courses on how to use AI for career reinvention. Which is funny, since we’ve been banging on about AI since the Bronze Age. Plus, the whole creepy appeal of AI is that you don’t need to learn anything. You could be Methuselah with a flip phone and have it crank out manifestos and meal plans in seconds. Being sourpusses, we’ve spent a few column inches waving our canes at the dark potentialities here. For one, frictionless tech—gee-whiz spiffy as it is—always sparks new friction. Derek Thompson (ever the teacher’s pet) can walk you through how generative AI corrodes familiar economic and social arrangements. Or just look at your own habits. Millions of Americans already deploy AI for everything from clerical help to emotional support to exam cheating. Tech giants are sprinting toward a hyper-profitable, not-at-all-terrifying superintelligence. Brace yourselves against the railing; iceberg dead ahead! We’ve always maintained that the biggest threat posed by AI isn’t some Robot Apocalypse, but the terminal withering of genuine human connection in favor of more insular, painless alternatives. When it comes to buying paper towels or knowing the capital of Bhutan (Thimphu!), who can complain? What’s clear is that we have fewer genuine humans to share such little triumphs with. Robert D. Putnam wrote the groundbreaking Bowling Alone—that hymn to American alienation—way back in 2000, when we had little but Survivor and ER to distract us. Jonathan Haidt dropped The Anxious Generation, his jeremiad against social media suffocation, in 2024. In another twenty years and change, bots may take over writing big books of social criticism. By then, even the smartest of us may be too tranced out to read. But there’s a scruffier, corresponding trend: a pull away from the slick and programmatic toward musky authenticity. The more technologized we become, the more sloppily human we seem to get—tossing civility out the window for wolf-pack dynamics, online and off. We may be addicted to robots, but we really don’t like people who talk like them. Which (pivot!) is why the Democratic Party’s hard drive seems to be crashing. Did New York City Democratic primary voters resoundingly pick 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani because of his inspired—or alarming—policy ideas? Not really. They voted for him because he was willing to go anywhere to press actual flesh, not more buttons. His campaign message, despite detractors’ best efforts, wasn’t Globalize the Intifada (at minimum, a reckless and alienating phrase)—it was The Rent is Too Damn High. None of this means Mamdani—should he get past deeply unpopular Eric Adams in the fall—will be a capable mayor of a famously ungovernable polity. But it does show that New York Democrats, like Ohio Republicans, are done with whatever they define as the establishment. They don’t want princelings from creaky political dynasties. They aren’t fond of the billionaire class, whether it’s Bezos (half the planet seems to be doing a rain dance for his wedding), Musk, or Soros. They don’t like anyone policing their words. And they don’t care who former presidents or poobahs anoint as the “sensible” choice—though in this case, they made it easy by backing the unsavory Andrew Cuomo, who thought he’d glide to Gracie Mansion in a town car. The 21st-century version of someone you’d want to have a beer with is someone willing to sit for a three-hour podcast. In that way, Mamdani has more in common with Donald Trump than either would care to admit. Both know how to seize a message with blunt memetic power—Make America Great Again! Food, Clothing, and Shelter!—and hang on. Both answer questions without focus-grouping a reply, then charge ahead no matter how the media reacts. And boy, do they inspire loathing. Mamdani’s haters on X, cable news, and in Congress have already hit spectacular depths—and the general election is still four months away. Trump says whatever pops into his head, and it powered his political rise. He’s obdurate to the point of lunacy when it comes to admitting weakness or defeat. Mamdani is smooth, but bloody-minded too. He has repeatedly and eloquently condemned antisemitism. But he also refuses to concede that Israel should be an expressly Jewish state. That position, however sincerely held, was expected to cost him dearly in the most Jewish city outside the Levant. Time will tell, but it doesn’t seem so. Like Trump, he’s saying what he thinks—even if it infuriates critics—and drawing disaffected voters (in this case, young people Democrats are losing) into a coalition. Like Trump, he comes from privilege and has a flair for showbiz. Look, they’re not twins. For one thing, Mamdani needs to be liked. That may also be true of Trump—somewhere deep down—but his craving for attention curdles into bitterness and revenge, the old, thin-skinned tough-guy routine of New York politics. Nothing about Mamdani seems tough. Which raises a fair question: how will he deal with cops, sanitation workers, and teachers—among other bruising constituencies—while chasing his starry-eyed vision of municipal abundance? As a state assemblyman representing a district in Trump’s home borough of Queens, Mamdani has never led anything remotely like the government of New York City, with its 300,000 employees. Unlike Trump, he risks being undone by actually trying to manage such a goliath. But you can’t say he doesn’t care—and that, in the end, is his star quality. Whatever happens next, what Mamdani’s pulled off is remarkable—and a shock to an entitled establishment that’s spent too much time in the Hamptons and not enough in Bay Ridge. You know he’s caught fire when Trump calls him a “100% Communist Lunatic” who “looks terrible.” (That last bit says everything.) Forget the free buses—the candidate tapped into broad unease about the cost of living (remember the price of eggs?). He arrived at a moment when a frustrated polity isn’t looking for talking points or long résumés. Americans have endured generations of pedigreed politicians who failed to make institutions work for them. They keep insisting—sometimes spectacularly—that they want something new. Is what they want realistic? That’s not the point. This explains Trump, too—despite his vastly different instincts when it comes to government, and just about everything else. Mamdani is already a loony-left poster child to MAGA, but Trump also serves as his foil: a symbol of authoritarian overreach, and a motivator for the very voters who crave a radically different kind of leadership. Mutual antagonism lifts all boats. The challenge for drifting Democrats (not just MAGA Republicans and Democratic Socialists) is to figure out how to run against the sclerotic elites so many Americans dislike—and then go one step further: actually deliver competence in government. The leader who cracks that code, and pulls the country out of its era of corrosive outrage politics, will be the real disruptor—historic, enduring, and sorely overdue. As the world slides further into simulation and away from tactile engagement, we’re witnessing the rise of figures who can break through screens and offer something unvarnished, imperfect, and human. That will look different in Texas than it does on the Upper West Side, but one thing’s clear: the old style of talking-points politics—Right or Left—died with Trump. Whether Mamdani succeeds or fails, his rise is another sign that the Democratic Party, like the GOP before it, is plunging into upheaval and uncertain reinvention. The new style of leadership isn’t mellifluous or media-trained. It’s not cautious. It can be vulgar, light on detail, illogical, and emotionally volatile. But it’s also deeply felt, disarmingly direct, and exhilaratingly off-script. In short, it’s not something a bot would generate. As tools learn to mimic everything else we do, our flawed standard-bearers are being chosen for the capacity to be genuinely themselves. Yours ever,
The Beast in the Clouds by Nathalia Holt Let’s assume Theodore Roosevelt could be a bit much as a father, with all that bluster, hyper-energy, and compulsive derring-do. Nathalia Holt delivers a fascinating book about his sons, Kermit and Ted, who inherited their old man’s need for adventure but none of his skill. In the 1920s, the pair set off for China under the auspices of New York’s American Museum of Natural History to find a giant panda—a creature no Westerner had ever seen. Knowing these bamboo-munching cuties as we do now, it’s startling to learn the Roosevelt brothers expected to face a fearsome beast. Their grand expedition went tits up, and the two turned on each other as everything unraveled. Neither was ever the same. Holt spins an epic of thwarted ambition, bad science, and the steep price of arrogance. — Evelyn Carnahan
Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams Toni Morrison arrived at Random House in 1972, when America was in the throes of an earlier cultural revolution. She was an editor with a Master’s in English from Cornell, working at a small house Random had gobbled up; the publishing giant’s leaders saw her talent and believed she could build its credibility with Black America. That she did, publishing Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, June Jordan, Huey Newton, and Muhammad Ali. She championed and tirelessly promoted rising talent—and along the way, her own literary reputation blossomed. Williams, a dean and professor at Howard, shines a light on Morrison’s brilliance and determination in a forgotten role. — Lisa Matthews
 It’s Getting Hot in HereSmoke (Apple TV+). Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a town is on fire. Two serial arsonists are on the loose, and local authorities are getting nowhere fast. Dennis Lehane’s moody new procedural, based on the true crime pod Firebug, stars Taron Egerton as a firefighter burned by his past. Now an arson sleuth, he teams up with a local detective (Jurnee Smollett) to crack the case. A crew of worthies—Greg Kinnear, John Leguizamo, Rafe Spall, Hannah Emily Anderson—round out the cast. Now and again, things get a bit too murky, but Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine smolders as one of the suspects. — Guy Montag Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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