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I wake up in my bed and reach for my companion—the latest iPhone, charging beside me. With a single tap on the screen, I open the blinds, with another, I turn on the espresso machine, and with a third, I review the footage from my Ring camera. Once again, no criminal has tried to enter my fortress. Phew! You can never be too safe though, which is why my house is encircled by a state-of-the-art electric fence, and why I check the Nextdoor and Citizen apps religiously every morning. Besides the chill that creeps down my spine every fifteen minutes when I get a notification, I feel safer and more reassured than ever.

I get out of bed and start another optimized day. Next to my wall of self-help books, such as “How to Maximize Happiness,” sit my self-watering plants, all thriving without any effort on my part. In my former life, I’d waste anywhere between five to ten minutes a day pruning leaves and judging the wetness of soil, but now I use that time to get ahead on my next task—consuming every piece of news as quickly as possible.

Before I dive in, I take a second to bask in the heavenly silence. Over the past few years, all of the neighbors who threw parties and cookouts, with kids screaming and running around, grilled-meat smoke billowing, and music blasting late into the afternoon, have slowly shuffled out the area. Gone are the days of making awkward eye contact after having called the authorities on them to report excessive noise or a car parked half an inch too close to my driveway. Life has become so much more civil. Now the neighbor to the left of me lives abroad and vacations here once a summer, and the neighbor on my right . . . well, I’ve never actually seen them but surely someone has to be living there to take the Amazon packages inside.

I head to my living room and ask Alexa to summarize the news. Everything’s dismal for a lot of people but thankfully that doesn’t affect me. Next, I hop on my Peloton, draft my work e-mails for the day in ChatGPT, add items to my Instacart grocery order (no-contact delivery, of course), and cue up a true-crime documentary. But fifteen minutes in, I begin to have second thoughts about entrusting a stranger with my grocery shopping. What if they poison my food? Or worse, grab the non-organic version of my vegetables? Alas, I must go myself. No one in this world can be trusted.

I buckle into my self-driving car—armored with thick, cold-rolled steel body panels—and let it take me to the store. Thankfully, the same corporation that owns my car also owns this store and so it automatically charges me for everything in my cart and I don’t have to wait in line and interact with a cashier. So seamless.

During the drive, I instruct my A.I. assistant to send custom responses to all my friends’ and family members’ text messages. Some of them text back right away with laughing emojis. I guess my A.I. has learned to emulate my sense of humor. I smile, knowing how much time I must have saved today, unlike my ancestors who had to engage in the hours-long, monotonous task of corresponding with their loved ones. I look out the window of my impenetrable vehicle at people waiting at bus stops and eating in cafés next to potentially devious strangers. I’m grateful to sit back in my climate-controlled car, but I feel a little sorry for them and also for all the drivers around me who have to step on the gas and brake pedals in order to reach their destinations.

Back at my front gate, I scan my fingerprints and type in the code for my two-step verification. But, for the first time, it doesn’t work. My stomach drops. From the corner of my eye I see a shadow move behind me. My heart races. Maybe it’s just a tree branch. Or maybe it’s a robber? A serial killer? A homeless person? An illegal? Some stranger out to get me, like they all are? This is how all true-crime documentaries start. Ninety per cent of people are killed in front of their own homes . . . I think—I don’t know if that’s the right statistic. It’s from the summary of a book I listened to at 2x speed. I begin jiggling the handle and the shadow moves again. I type in the code more slowly. This time it flashes green! Breathing fast, I burst through the gate and run at full speed across my lawn to the safety of my stainless-steel appliances.

Before I can press the button on my air fryer to make salmon, my phone buzzes with an alert. It’s from my neighbor, and it reads: “WARNING! A stranger broke in next door. I called the police.”

Wow. All in less than a minute. The future is now. ♦

Watching Zohran Mamdani run for mayor often felt like watching an athlete in peak form—the vicarious jolt of seeing a candidate defy gravity during an astonishing political ascent. The conventional wisdom that his résumé—a state assemblyman for five years, a democratic socialist, a vocal critic of Israel—represented a list of liabilities seemed to wilt in the presence of the man himself. There he was, thirty-three and then thirty-four years old, smiling in a dark suit, dapping up strangers across the five boroughs. In interviews, he sounded like he genuinely believed what he was saying and also like he was genuinely interested in listening. His platform was clear and attuned to voters’ mood; his social-media operation and field organizing were expert; his charisma was unremitting. Not all skeptics have been won over to Mamdani’s agenda, but few now would dispute his political skill.

Today, Mamdani takes office as mayor. Twenty-four years ago, the city inaugurated another neophyte politician as its chief executive. Michael Bloomberg, then fifty-nine, was the billionaire co-founder and C.E.O. of a financial-technology and media company before becoming a three-term mayor who described New York as “a luxury product” and meant that as a good thing. Mamdani, meanwhile, took the opposite assumption as his campaign’s premise: that people ought to be able to afford living here. The plutocrat and the socialist could not be called allies; in the 2025 mayoral election, Bloomberg endorsed Andrew Cuomo and spent some nine and a half million dollars to defeat Mamdani. Yet, for all the mayors who composed the backdrop of Mamdani’s campaign—Bill de Blasio (whom Mamdani has called “the best mayor of [his] lifetime”), Fiorello La Guardia (to whom he gestured in his victory speech), John Lindsay (whose idealistic glamour provides a cautionary tale)—it may be Bloomberg who offers the most instructive parallel. I was surprised the first time someone mentioned the former mayor to me in the context of Mamdani’s upcoming term, but maybe I shouldn’t have been; in recent conversations with close observers of New York City politics, Bloomberg’s name kept coming up.

The two men share, for one thing, an outsized symbolic power: each is a figure who embodies an instantly legible idea about the city. During Bloomberg’s pursuit of office, a 1990 booklet in which business colleagues had compiled his witticisms surfaced. It came under scrutiny for its casual misogyny, but it also contained a moment of telling provincialism. “We live in Manhattan,” he is quoted as saying, “so we don’t have to go anyplace else.” As mayor, Bloomberg developed a finance guy’s vision of what Manhattan and the rest of the city should be—respectively, “fancy” and “more like Manhattan.” Brooklyn got a glassy-high-rise makeover; Manhattan got Hudson Yards and the High Line. Bloomberg’s unapologetically expensive, homogeneously commercial, and aggressively policed post-9/11 New York is the one in which Mamdani came of age and into an adolescent’s political consciousness. It can hardly be a surprise that the new mayor’s vision (what my colleague Eric Lach has called “the Mamdani Cinematic Universe”) often sounds like a reaction against that model—a place defined instead by diverse outer boroughs, scrappy small businesses, and moments of camaraderie during long subway rides. He is a son of the Upper West Side who made his home in Astoria.

Such visions play a role in any administration, but there’s also the work of actual city governance. When Mamdani and Bloomberg met in September, for a conversation that the longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson called “definitely cordial,” they reportedly spoke about hiring and retaining talent. Mamdani, like Bloomberg before him, arrives at City Hall relatively unencumbered by the tangle of obligations and relationships that accumulate over a long career in public service. Like Bloomberg, he is poised to hire with commitments beyond political favor-trading. “Mike was talent, talent, talent,” Bradley Tusk, who served in Bloomberg’s administration and managed his 2009 campaign, told me. “The thing he did best by far was convince a lot of talented people to come work in city government.” Mamdani’s appointment to his transition team of the former Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, a bugbear of business élites, suggests a flair for attracting eye-catching national figures (even if what role such a figure might play in his actual administration remains undetermined). In late November, Mamdani’s team reported that more than seventy thousand people had submitted online applications for jobs in his administration; his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, has expressed interest in improving the city’s civil-service hiring process.

Bloomberg had a reputation for endowing appointees with remarkable independence: when Elizabeth Kolbert profiled the then mayor for this magazine, in 2002, one commissioner told her that Bloomberg’s instructions upon giving him the office amounted to “It’s your agency—don’t screw it up.” It isn’t impossible to imagine that Mamdani’s clear need for expertise, and his campaign-trail discipline in discussing only a select handful of policy proposals, might lead him to empower his own administrators with meaningful autonomy. What will it actually take to make those city buses fast and free? And what’s the plan for schools? “Someone described Zohran to me as a socialist technocrat,” Tusk recalled, adding that, when it came to city government, he didn’t see much difference between a capitalist technocrat and a socialist one. “If he’s a technocrat like Mike was, he’ll be a good mayor.” Of course, not all Bloomberg associates agree. “The key to Mike’s success as mayor was world-class management,” Wolfson told me. “He knew how to attract and retain talent and how to meet a bottom line because he had been doing those things for years. I’m not sure what the appropriate comparison would be here.”

The 2025 mayoral race was, among other things, a battle between money and attention. Cuomo received $28.4 million from Super PACs in the general election—“the most money ever spent to support a single candidate in New York City by Super PACs,” as the good-government group Citizens Union wrote in a report last month. “In fact,” they added, “the only comparison we can make is to Michael Bloomberg’s self-financed, dollar-busting mayoral campaigns in the 2000s.” Money has been Bloomberg’s defining feature for as long as he’s been in public life: money made him mayor, money shaped his mayoralty, and money continues to announce his political will. But, if Bloomberg commands capital, Mamdani—with his eleven million Instagram followers and reliable virality—commands attention, a variety of capital whose political potency Donald Trump has proven in the course of the past decade. And, in this mayoral election, attention came out the undisputed winner.

In the wake of Mamdani’s success, it has sometimes seemed as though the only lesson that would be learned is that more candidates should get better at making short-form videos. But this undersells Mamdani’s achievement, and the qualities of his that enabled it—including a capacity for connection that feels far more natural and less sweaty than what often passes for personal appeal among politicians. The Bloomberg model of intimate engagement with the city was counting pieces of trash outside the window of his chauffeured car. So far, Mamdani has cultivated a more hands-on ideal of participation, both for himself and for his supporters. Attention, after all, is not strictly a matter of passive digital consumption; it can also be deployed actively. The experience of volunteering for Mamdani attracted young New Yorkers in search of connection, one of whom told the Times, “The people I go to dinner with, the folks I go to concerts with—my day to day is organized around Mamdani.”

In this spirit, the new mayor will celebrate his inauguration today with a public block party, “to ensure that all New Yorkers are able to take part in ushering in a new era for New York City,” as his team put it in an announcement. But connecting with constituents while explaining, say, a transit strike, or even just attending to the ordinary work of governing, will no doubt present a challenge. “The Mayor Is Listening,” last month’s twelve-hour marathon of one-on-one citizen conversations, suggests Mamdani knows as much. So does the recent launch of Our Time, a post-campaign group intended to marshal supporters on behalf of his agenda, formed by allies who will be working with Mamdani’s volunteer database but not with his direct involvement. The thing about capital, political or otherwise, is that you have to keep making more.

“There was, for a while, a very large and very famous city,” begins the 2013 book “Very Recent History,” by Choire Sicha. “For an even shorter while, the richest man in town was its mayor.” Sicha’s nonfiction account follows a collection of underpaid, mostly young New Yorkers (“c. AD 2009”) over whom “The Mayor” presides like a demigod. Sicha’s characters work in open-plan offices, just like The Mayor’s employees do; they’re always stepping outside for sneaky cigarettes, beneath the disapproving glare of Mayoral efforts to discourage public smoking. The book stretches from The Mayor’s decision to seek a third term to his attainment of this goal, which arrives as a fait accompli. “Almost everything in the City was capital,” Sicha writes, and capital’s logic bears down on his cast of broke strivers, whose only happy ending lies in going “home to be alone together while they could.” “Very Recent History” is billed as “entirely factual,” but it reads as a novelistic parable of the world view that Mamdani’s victory appeared to upend.

I am not holding my breath for a Great American Bill de Blasio Novel, but I won’t be surprised to read one revolving around the unlikely rise of Zohran Mamdani. Perhaps some of his campaign’s hundred thousand volunteers have already started writing in their post-election free time. The bookstore in my Brooklyn neighborhood (where Mamdani’s margins ran to fifty and sixty and seventy per cent) now stocks a picture book called “Zohran Walks New York.” Inspired by his pre-primary trek across the city, it features smiling cartoons drawn in bright, clear colors; the story of his time as mayor will inevitably require a bit more shading.

Bloomberg, too, became mayor in a moment of acute uncertainty. In 2002, September 11th was still an open wound, with consequences for New York and its population that had yet to fully unfold; in 2026, New York’s looming sense of external menace has more to do with the federal government, and the prospect of the National Guard or masked ICE agents on the streets. Onto center stage steps a figure who confounds expectations. No one knows quite what’s going to happen. The city is on the brink of something new. ♦

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Photograph by Cydney Cosette

Bryan Washington joins Deborah Treisman to read “A Small Flame,” by Yiyun Li, which was published in The New Yorker in 2017. Washington, a winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, is the author of the story collection “Lot” and the novels “Memorial,” “Family Meal,” and “Palaver,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2025.

To start the new year, New Yorker writers are looking back on the last one, sifting through the vast number of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the experiences that stood out. Here, a handful of writers make recommendations, as part of a series that will continue in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for the next one and, in the meantime, should you wish to grow your to-be-read pile further, you can always consult the magazine’s annual list of the year’s best new titles.

Attention Seeking

by Adam Phillips

Over the holidays, my plan is to read “Attention Seeking,” in which Phillips, a psychoanalyst who is also a brisk and elastic writer, reclaims the titular activity as prosocial, meaningful, and valuable. I’m going to be honest. I don’t think I will like this book very much. I anticipate shaking my fist and shouting, “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” But maybe I will instead discover the ways in which I am wrong, wrong, wrong about attention-seeking. Over more than twenty spry, charisma-soaked works, Phillips has riffed and reflected on seemingly under-explored aspects of everyday life: “giving up,” “missing out,” “kissing, tickling, and being bored.” He’s got a new book out in January about the gap between desire and reality. When Phillips requests my attention, he gets it.—Katy Waldman

The Stranger’s Child

by Alan Hollinghurst

I acquired a copy of this around the time it came out, in 2011, and let it sit unread on my shelf for fifteen years. Searching for something to take on a trip this past spring, I grabbed it on an impulse. The book impressed me. Hollinghurst’s novel begins in 1913, when a Cambridge student named George brings his friend Cecil home for a school break. Cecil is a swaggering aristocrat with ambitions to be a poet; when he departs, he leaves behind an arch ode as a flirtatious gift to his friend’s teen-age sister, Daphne—though it seems also to allude to a trysting relationship with George. Then the narrative jumps. We learn that Cecil died young, in the First World War, and has been lionized; that his poems, beginning with that ode, are the sorts of things that children memorize at school; and that Daphne is married, restlessly, to his brother. The novel continues across three more time leaps, to the near-present. Some characters remain in view, while others die or drift away. New people appear. Nothing enormous happens, and yet everything happens; each era becomes its own world, caught in its concerns, standing on what came before. I found the novel not just engrossing page to page—Hollinghurst at his best is a writer of human sensitivity and exquisite precision—but astonishingly true to the experience of life across time. For a narrative in the tradition of British realism, the question is how to be an interesting twenty-first-century novel rather than a costume drama. By the late chapters, Daphne and her contemporaries, now old, seem to remember less about those days with Cecil than does the reader, who came through them recently—an inspired way of calling forth the novel-ness of the novel without breaking the realist’s line. Despite leaving many questions hauntingly unanswered, or because of it, Hollinghurst’s book succeeds in catching not only the long view but the night winds of an entire world.—Nathan Heller

Friday

by Michel Tournier

In “Friday,” the French writer Michel Tournier re-dreams the island life of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Until recently, I had never heard of “Friday,” originally published (to great acclaim) in 1967. I expected the simple pleasures of a perspectival shift. But the book proved to be far more unpredictable and captivating than that, and also so funny, so full of pathos. Crusoe develops a legal system, builds a Conservatory of Weights and Measures, and falls in love with a cave. Friday’s arrival, relatively late in the book, unsettles unexpected elements of Crusoe’s order, while altering and rebuilding others. The book’s tone shifts from philosophical to playful to despairing to sensual, and on around again. Tournier doesn’t stick to the individual plot details of the original, especially in the ending. Almost magically, this makes the mirror considerations of isolation, society, and nature all the more faithful and true.—Rivka Galchen

Falling Upward

by Richard Rohr

A very dear friend of mine, who worked in construction for decades before becoming a deacon in the Lutheran Church, died, of complications from cancer, last fall. He and I had been praying and reading poetry together in his final months, and he had hoped we would be able to do a book study together as well. Life, and then death, got in the way of that plan, but the week before he passed he gave me a copy of the book he’d planned for us to read together: the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.” I started the book that very night, making it through Brené Brown’s foreword and then stopping in my tracks when I got to one of my favorite poems, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. There was a huge harvest moon that night and, as I texted my friend about the poem, I wondered if it was the last one that he would ever see. It was. But as the shadows lengthened and winter deepened, I finally turned back to the book. One of my resolutions for the new year is to honor Deacon Mike’s memory by having the conversation that he hoped we’d have about spiritual transitions with as many others as I can.—Casey Cep

Brief Lives

by Anita Brookner

One great pleasure in life is coming across a book by a writer you’ve never read before, really loving it, and then knowing that you now have that writer’s full corpus ahead of you to enjoy. This year, this happened to me with the novelist Anita Brookner, who died in 2016, and whose work I’d somehow never gotten into before, even though I must have spotted her Vintage Contemporaries spines at about a million used bookstores over the years. The novel that I started with, after finally pulling it out of the shelf at one of those stores some months ago, is “Brief Lives” (1990), which centers on the difficult relationship between a pair of what we might nowadays call frenemies—the domineering Julia and the unassuming Fay. The story is told in the first person, from Fay’s point of view. She is married, unsatisfyingly, to Owen, a solicitor in London, whose legal partner, the attentive Charlie, is married to Julia; the situation throws the women into a forced, long-standing acquaintanceship. (“Basically, I found her alarming, and she found me boring,” Fay says.) Nothing especially extreme happens in the novel, but what Brookner does beautifully is lay bare the emotional storms simmering underneath the humdrum rhythms of what might appear, at first glance, to be largely uneventful middle-class, middle-aged realities—the seemingly decorous lives of inward-turning women. In this, she reminded me of her fellow-Briton Barbara Pym, whose novels I similarly came to relatively late, and whose body of work I ended up reading to completion nearly as soon as I began it. I can’t wait to do the same with Brookner.—Naomi Fry