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Today in The New York Review of Books: Corey Robin, Deborah Eisenberg, Willa Glickman, and Michael Greenberg look at the future of Mamdani’s New York; Isma’il Kushkush finds himself trapped in Khartoum; Yiyun Li goes on an adventure with Beryl Bainbridge; Michael Dirda revives the sci-fi innovator Fitz-James O’Brien; and, from the archives, John Carey on Robert Burns.

Mamdani’s New York

Corey Robin
Democratic Excellence

Among Zohran Mamdani’s rhetorical innovations has been his declaration of war on mediocrity.

Deborah Eisenberg
The Radiance of Tentative Hope

Zohran Mamdani’s victory has restored some of the city’s bounce—for now.

Willa Glickman
Until the Next Storm

With the deadlines imposed by New York’s signature climate law looming, Zohran Mamdani will have to enforce the city’s green transition.

Michael Greenberg
Wielding the Ice Pick

Zohran Mamdani has revealed himself to be a hard-nosed practitioner of realpolitik, especially within his own coalition.

Isma’il Kushkush
Leaving Khartoum

When war came to Sudan’s capital, I was trapped in my apartment complex with neighbors I hardly knew. Suddenly we were all we had.

Yiyun Li
A Talent for Living

In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.

Michael Dirda
Panoply of the Weird

Little known today, Fitz-James O’Brien deserves serious attention for developing some of science fiction’s most familiar tropes—among them microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, and robots.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s November 5, 2009, issue, John Carey, who died in December at ninety-one, wrote about Robert Burns, Scottish national icon, poet of no little sentiment, womanizer, occasional revolutionary, and the author of “Auld Lang Syne.”

John Carey
‘The Master Poet of Democracy’

“Burns always remembered [his mother] in his childhood singing to him lullabies, love songs, and ballads, all in the Scots tongue. Thanks to her, his imagination was fed by oral culture and folk wisdom and, as importantly, his ear was trained.… It was his mother’s gift. The great literary project of his later life was the creation of an anthology of Scots popular poetry and song, and some of his most famous poems, such as ‘O my luve’s like a red, red rose’ and ‘John Anderson, my jo’,’ reuse and reshape verse from the popular tradition.”

Recently in the Review

Suzanne Schneider
L’Affaire Carlson

“Thus far most of the American right has managed to make room for antisemitism without abandoning its commitment to Zionism. For all the ink spilled about Carlson and Fuentes, elected Republicans remain nearly unanimous in their unconditional support for Israel, a sturdy alliance that will require a generational shift to undo. The robustness of this coalition has motivated some Jewish groups to accommodate the conservative movement’s open anti-Jewish sentiment—as has those groups’ almost singular obsession with left-wing anti-Zionism.”

Nawal Arjini
East Side Story

“Even if you managed to avoid the hysterical marketing campaign around the film—the Marty Supreme jackets seen on everyone from Misty Copeland to Tom Brady were also briefly available for purchase at a pop-up store in Soho—Chalamet’s cheekbones and spaghettine body, notable even when covered with Marty Mauser’s pockmarks or Bob Dylan’s shrugging overcoats, are a reminder how sleekly the film world intertwines with that of fashion. The film’s multi-month publicity tour, which involved several bizarre videos, is also a reminder of the ever-stranger relationship between art and selling things in general.”

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