Meet Zohran Mamdani – NYC’s New Mayor! 

On Monday, I sent a note to four of my friends that live in New York City, warning them that I had heard they and their fellow city dwellers were on the verge of electing another one of those “Progressive” or “Socialist” Democrats and urging them to vote, instead, for the Republican candidate, Curtis Silwa, the man who founded the Guardian Angels.

My message was worded passionately but it was entirely disingenuous, which, I thought, would be crystal clear. After all, they were all coevals of mine – Baby Boomers who, in our college years, were anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-government, and anti-Big Business, and then went to respectable colleges and universities that reinforced those ideas.

Since 2015, however, our generation had undergone a major ideological shift in which a vast number of us were infected by an allergic reaction to Donald Trump as a politician, which was tenacious and inflammatory and eventually presented itself as TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome, characterized by a reflexive disagreement to everything Trump does or says).

There are many curious symptoms of TDS, but the most noticeable is that millions of people that once were anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-government, and anti-Big Business are now staunchly pro-war, pro-interventionist, pro-government, and pro-Big Business.

Of course, there were some of us who maintained our original biases, which, through five decades of living in the real world, turned us into Conservatives.

Anyway, back to my digital poke…

One of my friends must have thought I was serious because he wrote back and said that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for the Republican candidate because he “lacked the managerial experience.”

I suppose I could have said, “I was joking!” Instead, I wrote, “You don’t need ‘managerial experience’ to be Mayor of New York City. You need an open pocket and a red beret.”

Curtis Silwa, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Zohran Mamdani 

The next day, thinking about my friend’s comment about Silwa’s lack of managerial experience, I wanted to find out what experience Mamdani has had, especially considering New York City’s newly adopted ranked-choice voting system.

According to Alex Berenson (one of a very few journalists I read regularly), Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, and grew up in a heavily subsidized apartment in Manhattan with an interesting education, thanks to his father, Mahmood, a professor at Columbia who specializes in “post-colonial studies” and “the politics of knowledge production.”

From Berenson:

Mamdani went to Bowdoin College in Maine – think Oberlin with worse weather – where he founded (okay, co-founded) a chapter of Students for Justice and Palestine along the way to earning a degree in “Africana Studies” a few months short of 23.

After college, he “worked” as rapper called “Mr. Cardamom” before becoming a “field director” and “foreclosure prevention coordinator.” No matter that getting foreclosed on, much less evicted, in New York is nearly impossible. The state’s protections for tenants and homeowners verge on the absurd.

In 2020, Mamdani ran for New York’s state assembly on the promise of putting rent and mortgage payments on a “moratorium” until the end of COVID, with no back payments due later. Not surprising, he won.

In his bid for the mayor’s position, he has been promising a freeze on rent for all rent-stabilized tenants in New York City, which sounds like a really good idea unless you know how to count.

The core housing problem in NYC, which is no secret to anyone who lives there, is that there aren’t enough rental units to satisfy the city’s need. Despite the ever-rising crime and filth, the perception of the city as a springboard for wealth, fame, and power continues to attract 20,000 new residents every month.

Officially, the city has a population of 8.3 million people. Counting illegal immigrants, the number is closer to 9 million. (Interesting: In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was watching The Naked City, there were about 7 million.)

But building in New York is tediously difficult and crazy expensive. This has made it all but impossible for builders to risk new construction for lower- and middle-level-income families. The only option from a P&L perspective is high-end buildings for high-net-worth customers, leaving the housing shortage just as it is.

Berenson:

A rent freeze will do nothing to change these dynamics, and a lot of Mamdani’s other suggestions will make them worse. New York City’s budget, about $112 billion, is approximately as large as the state of Florida’s – though Florida has close to three times as many people.

The city depends hugely on the income taxes paid by the top 5 percent and particularly the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent of its residents. In 2021, the top 1 percent of filers paid half of all personal taxes the city collected.

These hyper-wealthy New Yorkers are not the reason New York is so expensive or crowded, and they’re certainly not the reason the city’s government is so bloated and inept. But they are the people that pay for half of what the city spends each year!

So, after Mamdani and his supporters get done celebrating his all-but-certain win, they should sit down and face the facts: If they want New York to continue supporting its cherished million-plus population of unemployed drifters and grifters, of mentally disabled streetwalkers who have no homes, of the professionally unemployed and perennially needy lay-abouts and half a million illegal immigrants, they’d better start thinking about what will happen to the city’s tax revenues when this tiny group of its citizen (probably 0.3% of the taxpayers) begins to move out of the city for a better tax and quality of life experience elsewhere.

As a former New Yorker, I don’t like to root against them. But as someone who is living in a state that will probably net at least 30% of those uber-rich who will be leaving NYC during Mamdani’s administration, I’m looking forward to the benefit it will bring to us.

Magatte Wade

Magatte Wade is the Director of the Center for African Prosperity at Atlas Network, the leading organization of African free market think tanks. She was listed in Forbes “20 Youngest Power Women in Africa,” and was recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and as a TED Global Africa Fellow. A sought-after speaker, Magatte has presented at the United Nations, Aspen Institute, World Economic Forum, TED, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and UC Berkeley. She’s been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Fast Company, Fortune, Jordan Peterson’s Podcast, and Lex Fridman’s Podcast. Learn more about her here.

Ray Dalio 

Ray Dalio is the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on Long Island and began playing the stock market at age 12. He started Bridgewater out of his apartment in New York in 1975 and enjoyed some success until 1982, when he predicted an imminent depression, bet on it, and plunged his firm into serious trouble. After laying off most of his employees, and with the help of a $4,000 loan from his father, he began again and built his company to a financial powerhouse managing over $150 billion.

David Hockney 

David Hockney has one of the most distinguished and impressive careers of any still-living artist I know of. He was recognized as an up-and-coming master by the time he turned twenty (in 1957) and his reputation as an important modern artist has not diminished since then.

That’s nearly 70 years. And he’s still making art. And not just reproductions of what he did at his creative apex (like Picasso, for example) but art that, for me at least, rivals anything the younger artists, working with digital technology, are producing today.

He was born in Bradford, England in 1937, the fourth of five kids raised by a Methodist mother and a pacifist father who’d been a conscientious objector during World War II. Like so many great artists before him, Hockney’s talent for art was evident in his childhood. And like those same artists before him, he did his university-level studying at a great school of art – in his case, the Royal College of Art in London.

It’s not surprising, considering that he was at the Royal College during the late 40s and early 50s, that he became friends with a crowd of other young artists who were intent on taking art forward in some way. In their case, it was the British pop art movement.

Although Hockney respected and encouraged his friends and their ambitions, his own early work was very different – more experimental and expressionistic.

This one, titled We Two Boys Clinging, is said to reflect both the poetry of Walt Whitman and Hockney’s own “emerging homosexual identity.”

I don’t see that. I see the influence of Philip Guston:

In 1964, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he developed the first of many “signature” styles. The first one had a lot to do with swimming pools, clean, horizontal lines, and a spectrum of pastel reds and blues – e.g., A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures):

(By the way, Portrait of an Artist became the most expensive work by a living artist when it sold for $90 million at Christie’s in 2018. But the record didn’t last long. In 2019, Jeff Koons reclaimed the title with Rabbit, which sold for $91 million.)

These works by Hockney remind me of some of Edward Hopper’s paintings – like this one, Room by the Sea:

Images of swimming pools and sun-soaked scenes kept Hockney’s interest for several years while he lived in LA. Soon, however he was moving on.

During the 1980s, Hockney had a new “signature” style. It retained the vibrancy of his early Expressionism, but with additional distinctive colors added to the palette he had been relying on for more than 20 years. Most noticeably, these paintings employed perspective and structure. I don’t see how you could not say that, in creating yet another “distinctive style,” Hockney was also creating his own distinct brand of Surrealism.

Again, I find these works to be – not derivative, by any means, but reminiscent of some of the great established modernists of the time.

Throughout his career, Hockney kept reinventing himself, moving from painting to printmaking, photography, and digital art.

Also in the 1980s, he began creating “joiners” – photo collages made from hundreds of Polaroids or 35mm prints, which he arranged to give a Cubist-like sense of time and movement.

It goes without saying that these pieces are reminiscent of some of the Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque.

By the late 1990s, Hockney was spending more time in Yorkshire, his childhood home, where he began painting landscapes again. These works, like those of Garrowby Hill, below, were massive, made up of dozens of smaller canvases that combined to create sweeping panoramas.

These, too, remind me of another great modern artist – perhaps someone who was painting in the 1990s and early 2000s. But for the moment, I can’t remember the name.

So far, I’ve said nothing about Hockney as a portrait artist. In that regard he is second to none. His subjects included friends, family, and acquaintances, as well as people we might recognize.

As the new millennium opened, Hockney was not going to allow his art to be a thing of the past. He began experimenting with new technology, including fax machines, photocopiers, and eventually iPads.

These are not single canvases but assemblages of as many as 60 individual images he created. We saw this one at the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition. (See “My Journal,” above.) It was amazing!

And what artist does this work remind you of?

In 2018, he even designed a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey using an iPad.

Hockney also produced some amazing theatrical pieces, huge, beautiful backdrops for well-known plays. We got to see several of these at the exhibition.

And finally, in very recent years he’s produced some amazing, animated art works, which we also saw.

Hockney’s personal life has been as colorful as his art. He’s been openly gay since his student days and had several long-term relationships with men who became the subjects of his work, including Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans. His current partner, JP, works as his chief assistant. Hockney still paints every day, often using digital tools, and despite some health challenges – including hearing loss – he remains as prolific and inventive as ever.

From classic Pop Art to iPad landscapes, from LA pools to Yorkshire fields, Hockney’s work is a kaleidoscope of color, humor, and the sense of wonder that keeps him painting well into his 80s.

You can read a review of the show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here.

And you can watch a 5-minute video about it here.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann: 
The Architect of Modern Paris

Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891) was a civic planner who, during the reign of Napoleon III, led a vast renovation of the city in 1853.

He had no formal architectural training. His working experience was in administration and law. In one way, that worked in his favor in that his knowledge of how to make things happen in Napolean’s government, combined with a reputation as a demanding, almost authoritarian task master, allowed him to get done in a few short years what should have been impossible.

Haussmann’s Mandate: 

Renovating Paris was Napoleon III’s idea. Before the transformation, it was a fast-growing, densely populated, and historically important city that was dirty, decaying, and dysfunctional. The mandate he gave Haussmann was to make it modern, clean, and beautiful – and to get it done asap.

Among his many accomplishments, Haussmann replaced the city’s ancient and unsanitary sewer and water systems with an underground network that significantly improved public health. He widened many of the city’s narrow, medieval streets, and added the grand, tree-lined avenues that define Paris today.

Another major contribution that Haussmann made to Paris was the introduction of public parks and squares. Our favorites: Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes, Parc Monceau, and Parc Montsouris.

In looking into Haussmann’s transformation of the hardscapes and softscapes of Paris, I wondered how it might have impacted the city’s population – i.e., how they lived and worked. I asked Nigel, and this is what he said:

Impact on Parisian Society: 

* Social Segregation: Haussmann’s restructuring forced many working-class Parisians to relocate to the city’s outskirts, as the newly designed central districts became too expensive. This effectively pushed the poorer populations to the periphery, a socio-economic pattern that persists to this day.

* Modernization vs. Heritage: While the new Paris was visually stunning and functionally modern, it came at the cost of demolishing entire neighborhoods. Thousands of buildings were razed, and residents displaced. Haussmann was accused of destroying the old Paris to build an imperial city, prompting mixed reactions from the public.

* Economic Implications: The project was immensely costly, plunging the city into debt. Critics dubbed the project “Haussmann’s Folly,” but the improved infrastructure laid the foundation for Paris to become a global metropolis.