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A titanic artist’s death is a terrible shock. In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I’d expected—without necessarily hoping for—a faint premonition, perhaps a grim tingle in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his European art-film contemporaries, cut an almost oracular figure. The greatest of the nine features he directed, among them “Sátántangó” (1994) and “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2001), felt handed down from on high, bearing the ominous weight of a prophecy. But what, exactly, did Tarr foretell? The end of the world, surely. To watch his dank, brooding studies in social collapse, most of them filmed in long, loping black-and-white takes, is to embark on an oddly luxuriant descent into Purgatory. His work is imposing and thrilling, earthy and magisterial, bleak and mesmerizingly beautiful, and suffused with an apocalyptic grandeur.

Tarr knew when the end was nigh, including the end of his own career: after unveiling his film “The Turin Horse,” in 2011, he declared that it would be his last. So it was said, and so it was done; not for him the post-retirement waffling of a Hayao Miyazaki or a Steven Soderbergh. Tarr’s admirers bemoaned his early departure, but no one who saw “The Turin Horse” could have doubted the wisdom of the decision. The film begins with an anecdotal reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, and the cold, circular story that follows—about a woman and her elderly father, trudging about a dimly lit cottage on a remote, wind-lashed steppe—might have been founded on the Nietzschean principle of eternal recurrence. Set to the frenzied churnings of the composer Míhály Víg, and filmed in immense blocks of real time by the cinematographer Fred Kelemen (both among Tarr’s regular collaborators), it’s a declaration of human futility and despair, as haunting in its finality as anything I’ve beheld in a theatre. Where could a filmmaker have gone from there?

To Sarajevo, of course. In 2012, Tarr, fed up with the strongman politics of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, moved to the Bosnian capital and founded an international film school called film.factory, where he devised a mentorship program that was at once practical and innovative. He closed the program in 2016, citing funding issues, but not before the list of visiting faculty had grown to include the directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa, and Gus Van Sant (whose films “Gerry” and “Elephant” bear an acknowledged Tarr influence). For a few glorious years, the school worked to inculcate an intellectually rigorous and formally adventurous a grasp of the medium among a new generation of filmmakers.

Tarr received no such training. He was born in 1955, in Pecs, in southern Hungary, to parents who worked in Budapest’s theatre and film industries. I confess that I never saw Tarr’s acting début, when he was a child, in a TV adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” in 1965, and few can claim to have seen Tarr’s first short film, “Guest Workers” (1971), a now lost 8-mm. documentary that he shot when he was just a teen-ager. From the start, his filmmaking was inextricably tied to political activism: “Guest Workers” focussed on local Romani laborers seeking permission to travel to Austria for work, and drew the scrutiny and ire of Hungary’s Communist government, which blocked the young director from attending university, where he had hoped to study philosophy. The irony is rich, and not just because Tarr can be plausibly hailed as one of cinema’s truest philosophers. (A notion he would have scoffed at, but no matter.) In trying to punish him for his activism, the authorities effectively pushed Tarr even further into filmmaking, and thus handed him his most powerful tool of anti-authoritarian denunciation.

Tarr’s first few features were naturalistic domestic dramas with social-realist underpinnings, accomplished but prosaic in comparison with his later works. In the tense, rough-hewn “Family Nest” (1979), he critiqued Hungary’s housing shortages by dramatizing the dissolution of a marriage in unbearably cramped quarters. The film, with its extended takes and extreme closeups, feels conceived under the spell of Cassavetes. After directing “The Outsider” (1981) and “The Prefab People” (1982), plus a TV adaptation of “Macbeth,” in 1982, that unfolded in just two unbroken shots, Tarr made a fascinating transitional work with “Almanac of Fall” (1984). This was a rare jolt of color in his mostly black-and-white filmography—and what color! The film, a claustrophobic chamber drama, peered at several bitterly unhappy characters through a hothouse palette of aquarium blues and darkroom reds. The talk and the action shuddered with violence, but the camera glided through each scene with a rapt, languorous intensity that Tarr refined in his later works, even as he drained away the warm hues and committed himself to a chilly, monochrome austerity.

Such was the case with his gorgeously gloomy black-and-white noir “Damnation” (1988), which situates a James M. Cain-style triangle in a coal-mining town that’s positively drowning in stormy weather. The film was made shortly before Hungary’s Communist era gave way to democratic reform, in 1989, and for Tarr, it signalled a major new phase. “Damnation” was the first of the director’s career-crowning collaborations with the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in October. Krasznahorkai’s dense, flowing, sometimes chapter-length sentences found an imperfect, hypnotically immersive visual equivalent in Tarr’s sinuous long takes. The director worked with Krasznahorkai on all his remaining films, most notably on two small-town parables adapted from Krasznahorkai novels: “Sátántangó,” a dense allegory for the collapse of Communism, and “Werckmeister Harmonies,” a sharp indictment of encroaching fascism. These are what we think of as classically Béla Tarr movies, though he co-directed three of them with his longtime partner, Ágnes Hranitzky. (She also edited eight of his nine features, starting with “The Outsider.”) In these films, the weather is wretched, the mood deeply unsettled. A few dribbles of narrative break up the quotidian atmospherics. The camera prowls the terrain, for minutes at a time, with stubborn, sombre deliberation. The air is thick with metaphysical portent and mordant humor.

Tarr was an avowed atheist, but he was far too keen an observer of human nature not to allow for the beliefs of others, and for attendant hints of the irrational to seep into his work. His stories, largely devoid of what you’d call plotting, can nonetheless swell to biblical proportions. At the heart of “Werckmeister Harmonies” is a large stuffed whale, the centerpiece spectacle of a travelling circus that has arrived in a remote village. Janós (Lars Rudolph), a local mail carrier, peers for several unforgettable moments into the whale’s enormous, wide-open, yet unseeing eye, and marvels, “How mysterious is the Lord, that he amuses Himself with such strange creatures.” His sincerity can make you weep.

Tarr may not have shared his character’s religious awe, but his films nonetheless believe, to an almost metaphysical degree, in the existence of evil—in signs of creeping nativism and mounting social apathy, and in more individualized instances of depravity. Witness a young girl’s shocking act of animal cruelty in “Sátántangó,” or the chilling sight of a zombified mob marching toward destruction in “Werckmeister Harmonies.” In a 2001 interview with the film journal Senses of Cinema, Tarr acknowledged the thematic and aesthetic shift in these later works, their pivot away from social realism and toward a moody, magisterial formalism. Or, in his own words: “We knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos.”

It’s impossible for me to think about Tarr’s three most cosmic shitstorms—“Sátántangó,” “Werckmeister Harmonies,” and “The Turin Horse”—without remembering the venues in Los Angeles where I first encountered them. The reasons are more than purely nostalgic. These films, when surrendered to properly, in the enveloping darkness of a theatre, take on an almost physical, elemental weight. (The sound design proves as crucial to this effect as the imagery: “Sátántangó,” with its muck and rain, and “The Turin Horse,” with its howling gales, become meteorological experiences.) It’s the peculiar nature of Tarr’s spell that, even as you sit there, transfixed, you become strangely more aware, not less, of the spaces and the people around you. The misery that floods the screen is transfigured—through the fact and flesh of the audience’s presence—into an experience of highest exhilaration.

I still recall seeing “The Turin Horse” at a late-night screening at the A.F.I. Fest in 2011, at what was then Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and feeling a subversive thrill at the very idea of Tarr briefly commandeering this iconic Hollywood palace. (Introducing the film that was about to play on the enormous screen behind him, the director seemed a touch bemused himself.) I was moved to tears at a revival screening of “Werckmeister Harmonies,” sometime in the mid-two-thousands, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s historic Leo S. Bing Center. (Years later, long after the demolition of the Bing, in 2020, the memory prompts a different kind of sadness.) I spent a day at the Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood, to see all seven-plus hours of “Sátántangó,” Tarr’s longest work and his greatest succès d’estime, famously championed by Susan Sontag in a 1995 essay, “A Century of Cinema.” By the end of the film, I felt permanently bonded to viewing companions whose names I didn’t and will never know. Once the lights dimmed, I saw no one move from their seat—not during an animal-abuse scene, and not even during a long, pitilessly observed sequence in which revellers dance around and around, their frenzied, exhausted bodies manipulated by forces seemingly beyond their control. This isn’t the “Satan’s tango” referenced by the title, but it feels no less like a dance with the devil.

Tarr’s films, unapologetic in the demands they make of our time and attention, are often grouped under the handy yet reductive rubric of “slow cinema”—alongside the work of filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, and Lav Diaz. The more derisive term is “endurance test,” which isn’t half the insult some think it is (to the extent that they are thinking at all). Existence, too, is an endurance test, and, even for those of us with no experience of rural Hungarian customs and limited knowledge of Eastern European politics, Tarr’s granular moment-to-moment realism feels astonishingly true to life. I suspect that, at the revival screenings that justly await, the visionary force of Tarr’s cinema will cut through the dreck and noise of our culture more forcefully, and to greater illuminative effect, than ever before. Tarr’s prescience grasped the looming threat of far-right demagoguery in Europe and beyond. His camera, though duly transfixed by buildings and landscapes, beheld humanity with a shattering clarity—in all its cruelty, indifference, foolishness, violence, and, on occasion, grace. Now he is gone, but I can’t shake the sense that his consciousness lives on, Leviathan-like, in the monumental body of work that he leaves behind. His is the wide-open whale’s eye that watches us. ♦

The U.S. Institute of Peace, a monumental white building across from the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, has an undulating glass roof in the shape of a dove, with wings that appear to be flying high above and beyond the exterior walls. The institute was founded by Congress during the Cold War to be an independent think tank dedicated to resolving international conflicts. Last spring, it was seized by the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, with the help of the D.C. police, even though the building isn’t government-owned. The staff—including hundreds of leading specialists on global crises, who advised all branches of government—were fired. The takeover coincided with the startling decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and downsize the State Department. Just a few days before Christmas, about thirty ambassadors were recalled from their posts over vague accusations of insufficient loyalty to President Trump’s “America First” priorities. Keith Mines, a career diplomat and former vice-president for Latin America at U.S.I.P., told me that “pulling out our whole diplomatic architecture” was a “stunning” change and would severely limit American capabilities during instability abroad. (In full disclosure, I was a senior fellow at U.S.I.P. for fifteen years, but left to join another think tank months before it was taken over.)

Now, in just the first week of the New Year, both allies and adversaries have expressed increasing alarm over Trump’s bellicose bravado and mercurial threats after the shocking U.S. military operation to extract Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan leader, and his wife from Caracas. The leaders of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Spain jointly denounced the U.S. intervention as a violation of international law. “Such actions set an extremely dangerous precedent for regional peace and security and for the rules-based international order,” they wrote in a statement, while Europeans publicly fretted about Trump going rogue and no longer being bound by convention.

Trump’s rhetoric in 2026 seems to hover between fuzzily belligerent and crudely provocative. The neocolonial “Donroe Doctrine,” a term used by Trump in the press conference after Maduro’s capture, is a clumsy reference to the Monroe Doctrine of the nineteenth century, which was originally intended to keep European nations from intervening in the Western Hemisphere. “It’s such a stupid phrase,” Mines said. Two centuries later, Trump’s updated version aims to flush out any foreign presence in the Americas, as outlined in the nationals-security strategy, a report on the White House’s foreign-policy and defense priorities, released in November. Mines explained that the policy “kind of gave us carte blanche, I guess in the Administration’s mind, to do whatever we felt like in Latin America.” He cautioned that “within Latin America, it’s going to be a really hard sell. I mean, we basically traded all the carrots for sticks, and that’s just not something that’s ever effective in Latin America.”

Trump has also invoked primitive vulgarities about his hemispheric campaign. Hours after the Maduro operation, the White House posted a black-and-white photo of the President, looking stern with his lips pursed; the backdrop included Air Force One and the Beast, his armored limousine. The caption read “No Games. FAFO,” the acronym for “Fuck around and find out.”

Suddenly, the President sounds like he’s launching a blitz to create a huge buffer zone stretching from the Arctic, down the northern Atlantic coast, south to the Caribbean, and across into the eastern Pacific. The day after Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, Trump threatened the Colombian President, Gustavo Petro. The South American country is “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, en route to Washington from his long holiday at Mar-a-Lago. “He’s not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you.” Questioned in the same press conference on whether the U.S. might launch an operation within Colombia, Trump replied, “Sounds good to me.” He also predicted that Cuba “looks like it is ready to fall,” since it has long been heavily reliant on oil from Venezuela. He said that the U.S. would “have to do something” about Mexico, too, because the government has been unable to curtail the cartels or prevent drugs from pouring across the border. The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the largest warship in the world, carrying thousands of U.S. forces, will remain in the Caribbean Sea, just north of the South American coast, indefinitely, and, in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said that U.S. oversight of Venezuela could last for years.

“The risk of US policy overshoot is high—especially now that Trump has a successful raid under his belt,” Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, wrote in his weekly newsletter. Trump “will be tempted to double down on what has worked so far and push further,” whether by sanctioning a foreign leader, meddling in an election, underestimating how much allies will compromise, or boosting his endorsed candidates in the impending elections in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru. In the process, Trump “risks planting seeds of anti-Americanism and pushing conflict, traffickers, and cartels into new places,” which has happened “on almost every continent where America has overextended itself,” Bremmer wrote.

Europe is equally uneasy. On its eastern front, the war in Ukraine is still raging nearly four years after Russia’s invasion. Trump has increasingly been handing off responsibility for supporting and arming Ukraine to Europe. Meanwhile, on Europe’s western flank, Trump this week renewed his quest for Greenland, the self-ruling and mineral-rich island that is part of Denmark. “It’s so strategic right now,” Trump told reporters. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.” He added, “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.” The timeline may be short. “We’ll worry about Greenland in about two months—let’s talk about Greenland in twenty days,” Trump said. Hours after Maduro was captured, Katie Miller, the wife of deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted a map of Greenland covered by the American flag. “SOON,” the caption read. Her husband has been an architect of the Venezuela intervention and an outspoken advocate for annexing Greenland, by force if necessary, he said this week.

The fate of the largest island in the world could upend transatlantic ties, in turn undermining the most important political and military alliance in the world. Denmark is one of the original members of NATO. After Trump’s comments, Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, warned about the consequences: “If the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” On Tuesday, a joint statement by seven European countries asserted that Greenland’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as part of Denmark, were protected by the U.N. Charter. Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, called picking a fight over Greenland “a colossal mistake.” Douglas Lute, a retired three-star general and another former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, predicted that European allies “will be increasingly reluctant to depend on the United States, as they have for nearly eighty years, and not only because Trump and his Administration are focussed on the Western Hemisphere but because what the President says cannot be trusted.”

And, in the Middle East, the President notified Iran—on his Truth Social account, the day before the operation in Venezuela—that U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” and ready to intervene if the theocracy used lethal force when responding to peaceful anti-government demonstrations that had erupted across the country. Over the weekend, the State Department’s Farsi account posted another warning superimposed over a black-and-white photo of Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the C.I.A. chief, John Ratcliffe, as they watched the raid on Venezuela. In huge red letters, in Farsi, the message read, “Don’t play games with President Trump.” It added, “President Trump is a man of action. If you didn’t know, now you know.” The U.S. threats followed Trump’s meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last week at Mar-a-Lago, when the two leaders jointly vowed to again strike Iran if its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs are rebuilt.

In December, the State Department rebranded the U.S. Institute of Peace by tacking on “Donald J. Trump” in big silver letters above the entryway. A White House spokesperson said the peace institute’s rebranding “beautifully and aptly” honored a President “who ended eight wars in less than a year” and was a “powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.”

Except Trump has not really “ended” wars anywhere, he has only spun fragile ceasefires as examples of lasting peace. One of the wars the President claims to have ended was the long-standing conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The President presided over the signing of a peace treaty between the two countries last month. But the reprieve lasted only a few days. And, in the past month, hundreds of people have reportedly died in new fighting along the Rwanda-Congo border.

Former senior American and European officials scoff at Trump’s claims of being the President of peace. Lute, who served as the deputy national-security adviser under the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, chuckled when I asked him how many wars Trump has ended. “Zero,” he replied. “He may give himself credit to have paused eight conflicts, but I don’t count any of these as resolved.” Trump has even upped the numbers. “Now it’s eight and a quarter,” Lute noted. “He has this new math on Cambodia and Thailand, which he said he had to sort of solve again. So, he’s giving himself another point-two-five.”

Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza is far from fully resolved, despite a Trump-brokered agreement last fall. “It’s not very clear what happens first and what happens next,” the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Espen Barth Eide, said at the Doha Forum in December. Without imminent progress, all parties risked a return to war “or descent into total anarchy,” Eide said. In May, Trump notably claimed to have ended hostilities between India and Pakistan, a conflict that dates back to 1947 over control of predominantly Muslim Kashmir by predominantly Hindu India. The President said that he used trade concessions as incentives to get both countries to end a four-day skirmish in the Kashmir region, last spring. After a ceasefire was announced, the government of Pakistan, which had already nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, thanked him, but India claimed to know nothing about any concessions. “They’re not shooting at one another,” Lute said. “But that doesn’t stop the underlined conflict between India and Pakistan.” The ceasefire did not address the long-standing issue of Kashmir, and troops of both countries remain deployed along the volatile border.

By attacking Venezuela, the President has established a precedent for other leaders—notably Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, and Xi Jinping of China—who want to take military action against countries in their respective regions. There is a growing debate among scholars about whether the world could be divided into three spheres, with the U.S., Russia, and China each creating their own “First” policies backed by the use of force. Lute warned, “We seem to be moving in that direction, but it certainly won’t be a smooth transition, and I think it portends a lot of instability and violence.”

Last month, the State Department justified changing the peace institute’s name to honor “the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” Marco Rubio posted on X, “President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace. It’s time our State Department display that.” Yet, over the past year, Trump has commissioned more than six hundred and twenty air strikes in seven countries across three continents, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. Venezuela is only the latest target. Some military campaigns have lasted weeks; others, months. Between February and December, the U.S. struck targets in Somalia more than a hundred times. In Iraq, the U.S. and coalition forces hit ISIS fighters and sites in February and March. In Yemen, Operation Rough Rider hit Houthi rebels several times between March and May. In June, Operation Midnight Hammer unleashed bunker-busting bombs for the first time on three nuclear facilities scattered across Iran. Since September, Operation Southern Spear has struck some thirty-five boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accused of transporting “narco-terrorists,” killing more than a hundred people. In Syria, Operation Hawkeye Strike carried out dozens of strikes over nine days in December. On Christmas Day, the U.S. hit alleged ISIS sites in Nigeria, killing multiple militants. By comparison, President Joe Biden ordered seventy-one fewer air strikes during his entire four-year term.

In his Inaugural Address a year ago, Trump pledged that his Administration would “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” His proudest legacy, Trump said, would be “peacemaker and unifier.” He has already blown that goal. ♦

When President Trump announced the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the cartoonist Barry Blitt decided that his image for the cover of the January 19, 2026, issue could hark back to Gilded Age political cartoons that skewered the oil barons and petty tyrants of the era. “After years of depicting Donald Trump, I did not need any photo reference to draw this,” Blitt said. “His features are chiselled into my visual memory, and I’m not particularly thrilled about it.”

For more covers by Barry Blitt, see below:

“Bad Reception,” by Barry Blitt

“Yearning to Breathe Free,” by Barry Blitt

“Back to the Future,” by Barry Blitt

Find Barry Blitt’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.

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In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a new film directed by Mona Fastvold, Amanda Seyfried plays the founder and leader of the Shaker movement—a woman believed by her followers to be the second coming of Christ. Fastvold uses song and dance to convey the fervor that Mother Ann shares with her acolytes. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how such depictions of religious devotion might land with modern viewers. They trace this theme from Martin Scorsese’s docuseries “The Saints” to “Lux,” a recent album in which Rosalía mines the divine for musical inspiration. These stories, many of them centuries old, might seem out of step with modern concerns. But we’re still borrowing their iconography—and anointing saints of our own—today. “The bracing and sort of terrifying thing about them is precisely that they are human beings,” Cunningham says. “What they say to us is, ‘If you had the juice, you could do it, too.’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Marty Supreme” (2025)
“The Testament of Ann Lee” (2025)
“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” (2024—)
Rosalia’s “Lux”
“Conclave” (2024)
Michelangelo’s “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”
“The Flowers of Saint Francis” (1950)
Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”
“The bizarre rise of ‘convent dressing,’ ” by Eleanor Dye (The Daily Mail)
“What Kind of New World Is Being Born?,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“Patricia Lockwood Goes Viral,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

From time to time, a piece of vocabulary comes along which the public didn’t realize it was missing and soon enough can’t live without. “Commie Corridor”—to designate the precincts of Queens and north Brooklyn overrun with youthful lefties—is one such phrase, a zippy addition to the city’s lexicon of pop anthropology. Its sudden currency was the handiwork of Michael Lange, a twenty-five-year-old political analyst and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who used it in his Substack newsletter back in June, just as early voting in the Democratic primary began. Zohran Mamdani, Lange wrote, might just be able to win, if he could inspire staggering turnout in this “young and hungry” base; when Mamdani pulled it off, the New York Times published Lange’s analysis, bringing the coinage to a wider readership.

From the lawn of Gracie Mansion, the shores of the Commie Corridor are visible across the East River. Mamdani has said that he and his wife, Rama Duwaji, will leave their apartment in Astoria for the mayoral residence later this month. When they do, they’ll be going from a stronghold of supporters to a place—the Upper East Side—that could reasonably be characterized as enemy territory. Yet even in Mamdani’s new neighborhood it’s possible to see a microcosm of the demographic trends that propelled him there.

Lange has a patchy beard and an air of winningly earnest enthusiasm, and on the day that we met for coffee he brought a laptop brimming with election data. We were at the Mansion, a diner a few blocks from Gracie which has been open since Fiorello LaGuardia’s mayoralty, and we were sitting in a blue vinyl booth beneath photos of Eric Adams, Michael Bloomberg, assorted Cuomos, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I might try my hand at another one or two,” Lange told me, when I congratulated him on the success of his phrase. Among the areas he was considering christening: “The whole stretch of the neighborhood that’s, like, Park to Fifth, from Fifty-ninth maybe all the way up to 100th, that’s become a naturally occurring retirement community.” Sometimes shortened to NORC, this urban-planning jargon refers to areas where a preponderance of residents are aging in place—in this case, atop a cushion of phenomenal wealth. “What could you call that?” Lange mused. “I thought, Oh, the Capitalist Corridor. My father was, like, ‘No, call it Oligarch Alley.’ ”

This is the slice of the Upper East Side that has tended to define the neighborhood in the cultural imagination—the part that served as a playground for the spoiled children of “Gossip Girl” and as a personality for Charlotte on “Sex and the City,” a place of rarefied co-ops and tulip-lined avenues, of Truman Capote’s Swans and Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” Notwithstanding the John Lindsay-era postures Wolfe lampooned, it’s a neighborhood that makes an incongruous setting for a millennial socialist. But even in the broad strokes of pop culture there are other visions of the area to be found. Picture the shabby railroad apartment that Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale’s characters, two publishing underlings, occupy in the 1998 film “The Last Days of Disco,” or the bohemian squalor of Julia Fox’s childhood—these, too, are the Upper East Side. (Fox might disagree: “I didn’t grow up in the Upper East Side, I grew up in Yorkville,” she insisted in a 2022 TikTok, referring to the area’s northeasternmost region. “The Upper East Side kids did not fuck with us. Like, they thought we were poor.”) Head east, past Second or Third Avenue, uptown and out of the Seventies, and a different landscape comes into view—one where relatively modest rentals have traditionally attracted younger residents. “The age gap in the neighborhood is so pronounced block by block, the renter-homeowner gap,” Lange said. “The renter-dense parts of the neighborhood are very defined and finite.”

Lange has a taste for granular political geography: on the eve of the general election, he issued block-by-block predictions of the results. But Yorkville is an area he knows particularly well. “I lived here almost my whole life,” he told me. Although today he has decamped to the West Side, he grew up in several Upper East Side and Yorkville apartments; one, on Second Avenue, would shake when tunnels were being dynamited for the Second Avenue Q, a long-awaited subway extension. The line opened in 2017, bringing an influx of new activity to the area. Lange, who moved back to the neighborhood in 2021, after college, recalls being startled to see restaurants from Brooklyn and the East Village establishing new outposts in the neighborhood of his youth—and surprised, too, to see the crowds gathered at the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Carl Schurz Park during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. “I remember how much bigger it was than you’d think,” he said.

The affordable side streets at a remove from Central Park and the water make up the core of Mamdani’s support in his new neighborhood. At the diner, Lange pulled up a map of returns from the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary on his laptop. “You basically see the Cuomo wall along Central Park,” Lange said. “All of East End—which is, I would say, from a class and age perspective, more similar to Park than it is to Second—you see a lot of Cuomo support.” He indicated a row of blocks in between. “From Eighty-eighth, between First and Second, on up, it’s all Mamdani,” he said. “It’s very young; it’s very fifth-floor walkup.” He pointed out pockets of support elsewhere—such as a block just above John Jay Park, between York and the F.D.R. Drive, where Mamdani beat Cuomo by more than fifty percentage points in the primary. Lange toggled to look at the general-election results for the block. “Still resolutely Mamdani,” he said.

Michael Lange sits in a booth at the Mansion diner.

The week after Lange and I met, I went to visit that block, a stretch between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth Streets on York Avenue. It had, I’d learned, a long history of defying expectations. A six-story complex of pale brick buildings bristling with fire escapes, it was said to be the largest low-income housing development in the world when it was built, in the early years of the twentieth century. The company that funded it, City and Suburban Homes, was run by a group of New York’s philanthropic élites, who hoped to provide an improved alternative to the era’s standard tenements. “There is light and air in abundance, steam heat in winter in the latest ones, fireproof stairs, and deadened partitions to help on the privacy that is at once the most needed and hardest to get in a tenement,” the Progressive Era muckraker Jacob Riis wrote in “The Battle with the Slum,” regarding City and Suburban’s buildings. The York development “was desirable not only because the rents were low but because the living conditions were so wonderful,” one longtime resident recalled in a 1988 history of the building, decades after first moving there, in the forties.

Today, the York Avenue Estate’s rent-stabilized studios tend to cost between twenty-two and twenty-six hundred dollars, and the one bedrooms between twenty-eight and thirty-one hundred dollars. These figures can no longer be called “low,” but, for the neighborhood, they also aren’t bad. Steve Goldenberg, who has been a superintendent there for more than thirty years, told me that many of the residents are medical personnel who work in the area’s hospitals. “Here you’ve got Sloan, you’ve got Cornell, you’ve got Lenox Hill,” he said. “During COVID, we recruited a lot of nurses and doctors.” A century ago, the building was home to nannies who cared for the neighborhood’s children and craftsmen whose handiwork ornamented its mansions. Today, it houses the kinds of professionals who help keep a NORC in working order.

Goldenberg himself had not voted for Mamdani. (He was a retired N.Y.P.D. sergeant, and the new mayor “has negative things with the N.Y.P.D.,” he said.) But, for the building’s many residents who did, “renter,” in Mamdani’s New York, has the potential to emerge as its own kind of political identity. Last week, immediately after his inauguration, Mamdani visited a rent-stabilized building in Flatbush where tenants have been organizing to protest neglect as their landlord, Pinnacle Group, faces bankruptcy. An auction of Pinnacle properties is scheduled to take place today; the Mayor has said that the city will intervene, if necessary, to protect tenants.

At issue in the Pinnacle bankruptcy is the question of how profitable an apartment building ought to be. (On the flip side of affordability is generally someone else’s desire to make more money.) For City and Suburban, which continued to operate its York building and others into the sixties, the answer deliberately established at the outset was “not very.” The company was structured as a “limited dividend corporation,” meaning owners voluntarily confined their profits to a dividend of about five per cent. Pinnacle’s business model, meanwhile, involved purchasing rent-stabilized buildings in the hope of converting them to luxury condominiums.

Housing policy has been at the forefront of the new mayor’s first days in office, and his signature proposal to freeze stabilized rents is a promise to Upper East Side tenants at the City and Suburban complex as much as the Pinnacle tenants in Flatbush—just a few of the many New Yorkers for whom an apartment constitutes not a financial asset but a place to live. ♦