Mamdani Beyond New York
In this post, I wrote about Zohran Mamdani, bagels, Victor Wembanyama, the World Series, “Our Town”, "Wicked", and more. LFG.
GO DIRECTLY TO:
- Mamdani Beyond New York
- Such a Great World Series
- Wemby
- “Our Town”
- NYC Bagels, SF Bagels, Las Vegas Bagels
- MrBeast Sucks
- A Great Expository Movie Scene
- Wicked For… Meh
- New Nightmare App Dropped
- Through 4 Episodes of “Pluribus”…
Mamdani Beyond New York
The excitement about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race was a lightning bolt through my Very Online circles. Since I went to school in New York, I’ve got a bunch of friends there, so perhaps I was more exposed to the Mamdani phenomenon than regular Bluesky-addicted freaks. However, even though I wonder if he’s fundamentally “more liberal” than Bill de Blasio — who was deeply connected with Hillary Clinton, remember — the core proposition of the Mamdani campaign should be applicable in other major American cities.
Take my city of San Francisco, which has a reputation for being loony leftist, but has had city government largely captured by, variously, big tech money and the police department since at least the 1990s. The last mayoral race boiled down to four major candidates, none of whom prioritized building housing in a serious way, and the eventual winner is a guy who’s still defining himself, politically, but part of what’s come into focus is that he’s very enthusiastic about sweeping unhoused people off the street without actually providing housing. All that’s to say that I’m convinced a Mamdani-style happy warrior who is relentlessly focused on material conditions and cost of living would do gangbusters here, because even people whose households bring in $200,000-plus feel anxiety about the cost to live in this city. Moreover, the tenor of San Francisco city politics often takes on a tinge of disgust that there are people in our city who are in trouble, in misery, and visible to those who care to see and those who don’t. A mayoral candidate to plainly loves all this city has to offer, celebrates the city, and wants more people to be able to afford to live here would be extremely welcome, I think.
Related: An argument that Mamdani has leverage on FIFA
Related: The Chinese restaurant at the end of a long argument about housing
Such a Great World Series
The day after the World Series ended, I thought it was among the greatest MLB championship series of my lifetime, and nothing since has swayed me from that. I’ll go so far as to say it was at least in the top four, right there with 2016 (CHC over CLE), 2001 (ARI over NYY), and 1991 (MIN over ATL).
That’s just my personal vibe check, but there are statistical measures for this, too! To begin with, Championship Win Probability Added suggests Game 7 of the 2025 World Series featured “three of the 12 most pivotal plays in baseball history”. If you felt that final game was a taut thriller, it turns out there were an unusual number of consequential plays in the game that dramatically swung the teams’ odds of winning, more than in any other World Series game before. Want more? There were two at-bats with a “golden pitch”, in which either team can win the World Series depending on the result of the pitch, an occurrence that hadn’t happened since 2016.
Wemby
I started writing this before he got hurt, but that doesn’t change my broader thought on Victor Wembanyama, which is that though his calf injury may keep him from winning MVP honors this year, I think we have reached the point where he is among the three to five most impactful basketball players on the planet.
There is plenty of statistical evidence that in his third year in the NBA, he’s basically a standard All Star on offense and an all-time great on defense. But, more than anyone else in a sport where style carries so much weight, the way that Wembanyama moves on the court and achieves all of this has scrambled my brain. A guy who’s (allegedly only) 7-foot-5 should not be flying around the paint the way that he does, let alone dribbling in iso outside the three-point line into a crossover stepback swish.
Do yourself a favor and make sure you watch him whenever you get the chance.
“Our Town”
I saw a youth production of “Our Town” the other week, the first time I’d ever seen the play. Some of the kids were great, others were — well — kids, but though I expected the play to be pretty good because classics are often classics for a reason, I was unprepared for how hard it would hit me in the same way the movie “Coco” hits me.
A few days later, I fired up Kanopy to watch the 2003 filmed stage production with Paul Newman as the stage manager (also on YouTube) because I wanted to see it again knowing the characters’ futures, and during that viewing I saw myself in the theater with my child, watching the play, looking over and seeing this beautiful 11-year-old giving full attention to the drama being acted out by teenagers who probably won’t fully grasp what they were portraying in the final act until they reach middle age, themselves.
NYC Bagels, SF Bagels, Las Vegas Bagels
Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to visit New York for a few short days to see friends, and as part of that trip grabbed breakfast one day at Russ and Daughters. The Super Heebster bagel sandwich was delicious, especially given that I ate it on a bench a block from the store, under a leafy tree on a cloudless sunny morning.
Russ and Daughters has a devoted following, and the line at opening was about 20 deep, but the experience also reinforced for me that great cuisine is possible anywhere. In San Francisco, there are great bagel places — my favorite is Schlok’s, and both their Smoked Ends and Feta Nova sandwiches are brilliant. I went to Las Vegas last year and ended up eating multiple times at Siegel’s Bagelmania.
It is possible to make great bagels anywhere in the country. Be open to it.
MrBeast Sucks
A while back, my child went through a MrBeast phase. Thankfully, it was short-lived and it appears not to have imbued them with any of his fucked up worldview, in which every aspect of a person’s existence is calibrated to maximize what they can get transactionally from anyone else.
With that in mind, it shouldn’t have surprised me that he’s planned a “theme park” in Saudi Arabia. Of course, it also shouldn’t have surprised me that the actual execution would hew closer to a Running Man vision of entertainment than a Disneyland vision, where attendees are “competing” for cash prizes that will be given out at the end of a set period of time.
Once again, I urge all these people who are making many millions of dollars before they turn 30 to heed the example of Tom from MySpace, who got the bag and ever since has done whatever the hell he wants in total comfort, without trying to prove anything else to the world. You’ve already won! There’s no need to keep playing the game!
A Great Expository Movie Scene
The actor Colin Farrell recently went on Late Night with Stephen Colbert and recounted that he needed 40-plus takes to do a scene in “Minority Report” because he was inebriated. The scene in question is actually really well done and shows director Steven Spielberg’s penchant for good exposition. (See, also, the scene with the federal agents in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.)
It’s pretty good writing that in less than 90 seconds, the “Minority Report” characters explain and dramatize the premises and rules of the movie’s central conflict while also deftly answering questions that an alert viewer is likely to have while watching the scene.
A few people commented that, upon rewatching the scene after Farrell’s comments to Colbert, they noticed the other actors smirking, as if they realized that Farrell had finally gotten his lines right. However, I think this is actually just good direction and acting that also echoes the movie’s themes. The guys talking with Farrell are all smirking because they believe they know in advance how this conversation is going to go. They've been presented this question before, they have their answers, and they are acting out their roles in semi-scripted patter. It dramatizes their cockiness and assuredness that it is possible to be certain about the future.
Wicked For… Meh
(Spoilers ahead) A while ago, I heard someone mention that American musicals, even the good ones, uniformly seem to run out of gas in the second half. That sounds right to me, and though I’m sure there are exceptions, “Wicked: For Good” fits the pattern. I’m not familiar with the stage show, so I couldn’t tell you if the source material is to blame, but much of it simply didn’t make sense. For example, how does Dorothy get home? In this movie, she’s left calling after the Wizard as his balloon goes up. I can see a revision to the idea that the whole thing is a figment of her imagination, but you’ve got to get her home, right? Other examples of rushed or otherwise sloppy storytelling include completely eliding how Boq and Fiyero end up with Dorothy, never mind whatever it is that Fiyero was doing with Dorothy the whole time before meeting up with Elphaba again.
The first movie was exhilarating in a way this once can’t really be because the songs just aren’t there — “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” are pop cultural breakouts for a reason — but even so, the movie just doesn’t come together.
New Nightmare App Dropped
An app that promises to let people talk to AI avatars of their dead relatives: What’s not to love?
Really, though, the relevant Black Mirror episode is more than a decade old. I don’t blame people for, perhaps, being intrigued by this shit, but at a certain point, the proliferation of unscrupulous entrepreneurs trying to leverage lack of shame and care for other people means it’s our responsibility to learn about, become conscious of, and reject anti-human technologies and products such as this.
Through 4 Episodes of “Pluribus”...
(Spoiler territory here, obviously.) “Breaking Bad”, “Better Call Saul”, and now “Pluribus” are all marked by their literacy and trust that the audience will pay attention and follow along with complex themes so long as the action and drama is clear. Vince Gilligan’s shows seem to have more confidence in their characters than any other productions, and that means we see them thinking things through and we get their full thought processes. With rare exceptions, very little is withheld from the audience that we would normally see if we were perched on our protagonists’ shoulders.
I’ve caught up with “Pluribus”, and there is one specific idea presented by the show that I keep turning over in my mind — an idea I trust the show’s writers to pay off eventually. I am not talking about the explicit question posed to Carol of whether the hive is bad or not. She does not articulate her answer beyond saying that none of the people who have joined the hive are actually themselves anymore, and that they did not choose to join. Though no one on the show has said it outright, she seems to conceive of the individual self as the fundamental unit of personhood, and is horrified by the notion of losing that identity. Just as bad, Carol is horrified by the people who aren’t as disgusted as she is with the hive mind’s use of individuals’ bodies.
Rather, I am thinking more about the issue raised obliquely in the third episode when Carol convenes the English speakers who have not joined the hive around the Air Force One conference table: What about the people who do not conceive of the individual as the fundamental unit of personhood?
I think this is why Carol is unable to relate to the unjoined others she met in Bilbao: they might not put it this way, but they do not conceive of themselves as individuals first; they see themselves as part of a larger unit already, and so their family members being a part of the hive mind is not nearly as horrifying.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime. And subscribe to the Kids Popcorn Podcast.
(Photo: "Zohran for Mayor" by Eden, Janine and Jim. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)