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These are fractious times for the fraternal duos of filmmaking. The Coen brothers, once inseparable, have parted artistic ways—Joel with a black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), and Ethan with two colorful bursts of slapstick noir, “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024) and “Honey Don’t!” (2025). The Safdies are also flying solo: this past year brought us Benny’s “The Smashing Machine,” a lightweight but bruising portrait of a champion wrestler, and Josh’s “Marty Supreme,” a whiplash-inducing tale of a Ping-Pong powerhouse. Fittingly, more than a few observers have been eager to turn art into blood sport, pitting Coen against Coen, Safdie against Safdie, and theorizing about which sibling is the greater talent.

God forbid we should ever wage such a debate over the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who, on the evidence of their new drama, “Young Mothers,” are neither splitting up nor slowing down. Over roughly three decades, the Dardennes, now in their seventies, have built a filmography of such remarkable artistic, dramatic, and political consistency as to suggest a single cinematic consciousness in two bodies. In their breakthrough work, “La Promesse” (1997), they spun a taut realist thriller about a scrappy Belgian teen-ager, an exploiter of undocumented immigrants whose first stirrings of conscience began with the simplest thing: a promise he made, and refused to break, to a dying man. With that film, the Dardenne brothers effectively extended a vow of their own to the audience, one founded on closely held principles: sharp-edged realism, keen observation, and, crucially, extraordinary speed. A typical Dardenne movie runs about ninety minutes and spans, at most, a few days of narrative time. (The labor-rights drama “Two Days, One Night,” from 2014, is hardly their only film that could have borne that title.) A protagonist’s history matters, the filmmakers know, but life’s most significant confrontations—the ones that reveal who we are and what we’re made of—have a way of assailing us in an instant.

Decades later, the Dardennes’ impact on cinematic realism can scarcely be overstated, and they have, to some extent, been eclipsed by their own much revered influence. Their jagged techniques, absorbed by filmmakers the world over, have softened; they still follow their characters about in handheld long takes, but gone is their habit—deployed most radically in “The Son,” their masterpiece from 2003—of zeroing in on the back of a protagonist’s ear. Even so, they have never come close to breaking faith with those essential principles. At the heart of their work is the question of what we owe one another—what decency spurs us to do, and at what cost. In “The Son,” a carpenter weighs the possibility of avenging his child’s murder. In “The Kid with a Bike” (2012), a hairdresser is compelled, by forces beyond her understanding, to intervene on behalf of a young boy who has no one else. The realities of poverty, neglect, racism, and violence are harsh constants in the Dardennes’ working-class universe, but the filmmakers believe no less intently in the persistence of goodness—a force that is all the more powerful, they insist, for the stubborn unpredictability with which it can take root.

Goodness is not hard to find in “Young Mothers.” The film is set in and around a maternity home in Liège where the staff look after their charges, all teen-agers, with tough-minded compassion. Most of the mothers have already given birth, though the first one we meet, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), is in the final days of her pregnancy, which she spends trying to meet with her own biological mother, Morgane (India Hair), who gave her up for adoption years earlier. But Morgane is reluctant, and Jessica’s sense of abandonment, a lifelong wound that has now reopened, flashes into an intensely physical neediness: back at the shelter, she weeps and clings to a care worker, practically biting into the woman’s shoulder.

Jessica intends to raise her daughter—she’s already picked out a name, Alba—partly as a corrective to Morgane’s “dumping” of her: “Not even an animal would do what she did,” she says. But the shelter workers know better, and so do the Dardennes. Their camera will soon alight on Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan), a grave, clear-eyed girl of fifteen who has decided to have her newborn daughter adopted, and knows in her bones that it’s the right thing to do. Her mom, Nathalie (an unnervingly steely Christelle Cornil), disagrees, and urges Ariane to leave the shelter and move back in with her so they can raise the child together. Ariane refuses, and a trip to her mother’s apartment clarifies why: Nathalie is an alcoholic, with a vicious temper and a history of dating violent men. There’s no future there for Ariane, or for her child.

Perla (Lucie Laruelle) takes a more conditional view of her situation: she wants to keep her infant son, Noé, but mainly to hold on to the father, Robin (Günter Duret), who has just been released from juvenile detention. One look at Robin, who accepts a joint from Perla but barely acknowledges the stroller she’s pushing, tells us that family stability is not in the cards. Perla, maddeningly, takes longer to catch on, but her stubborn pursuit of a romantic-domestic fantasy is also proof of the Dardennes’ rigor: realization takes its time, if it comes at all. And, even then, it isn’t always enough. Another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), initially seems the most fortunate of the group, as she and her boyfriend, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), are committed to each other and to their little Mia. Yet both parents are recovering addicts, and not even Julie’s awareness of the difficult path ahead can keep her yearning for a fix at bay.

The Dardennes had planned to center the story on just one young mother until they visited a real-life maternity home in Liège and, struck by the range of experiences they encountered, expanded their narrative focus accordingly. (They shot much of “Young Mothers” at the home, with no additional lighting or décor.) The result is something relatively novel for them: a film that juggles four protagonists—five if you count a departing resident, Naïma (Samia Hilmi), though we spend mere minutes in her company, most of them at a farewell lunch where she thanks everyone for helping her get back on her feet. “You showed me,” she says, “there’s no shame in being a single mother.”

I wanted more of Naïma, who comes from a Muslim family, and whose reference to shame—compounded by her description of her relatives’ refusal to see her or her baby daughter—has an obvious cultural dimension. But those struggles remain offscreen; Naïma’s season at the shelter is coming to an end, and the movie, graceful yet pragmatic, knows that not every story here can be told. Perhaps that’s why the Dardennes don’t belabor the dynamics among the mothers themselves, who all get along well enough. We catch stray glimpses of naps, feedings, and meal-prep schedules (a diaper-change disaster might have heightened the realism), and we see the reflexive sternness of the staff—they’re here to guide, not coddle—when a mother shirks her responsibilities. The home is a lively hub of activity, but its solidarity and support go only so far. No wonder the film spends so much time outside the shelter, where the women have to figure things out on their own.

Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.

Yet “Young Mothers” holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face. The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm. One woman kisses her granddaughter for the last time; another meets hers for the first. Ariane asks a pair of adoptive parents to teach her daughter to play an instrument; Julie and Dylan look on, delighted, as their baby hears a dazzling burst of Mozart. The Dardennes, typically allergic to the manipulations of music, here remind us that life is as cyclical as a rondo, and just as swift. Best to spend it, while we still can, with those we love. ♦

I wait all year for January to roll around again—it’s New York’s hottest time of the year, theatrically speaking, when the city fields as much experimental work in one month as it does in the other eleven combined. Several of my favorite festivals happen simultaneously, including the much-loved and long-lived Under the Radar, which this year spreads its umbrella over thirty-two productions.

Marianne Rendón in Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s “Friday Night Rat Catchers.”Photograph by Maria Baranova

Anne Gridley’s “Watch Me Walk,” directed by Eric Ting, will be at Soho Rep (at its current digs in Playwrights Horizons); Elevator Repair Service premières its version of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at the Public, applying its deconstructionist fervor to the postmodern masterpiece; and Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein bring back their “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” after a run at New York Live Arts. This last show contains a beautiful, tragicomic solo for Engelstein, in which she becomes a sort of slow-motion avalanche, dancing as rock after rock drops out of her coat onto the floor.

Under the Radar also provides a vital connection with international work, at venues such as the Irish Arts Center, which will host the Dublin-based company Brokentalkers, and PAC NYC, which welcomes “The Visitors,” a “first contact” drama from Moogahlin Performing Arts and the Sydney Theatre Company. At the same time, the catalogue groans under the weight of all the local talent working at the cutting edge of the form. Tina Satter, the HawtPlates, and Eric Berryman all have pieces on display.

The Prototype festival includes my most-anticipated work in the month’s lineup, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s reconstruction of the “post rock” opera “What to Wear,” at BAM, which was originally a 2006 collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the much-missed avant-garde director Richard Foreman. And the Exponential Festival, which contains the fringiest offerings in the January slate, will be in a number of Brooklyn spaces, with pieces like the Goat Exchange’s “Time Passes,” which incorporates text from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” and—this seems almost too obvious, given the weather—“Jaws.” I think that show might sum up my excitement for the whole micro-season. You jump into the ocean, hoping for the best, but also a little scared. Wild things are waiting in the water.—Helen Shaw

The Nashville guitarist William Tyler has spent his career outlining the reaches of ambient country, with instrumental epics that meander into a vast expanse, tinkering with folk, pop rock, and Americana. After stints in the bands Lambchop and Silver Jews, Tyler ventured into psychedelia as a soloist in 2010, with rustic music that feels infinite. He joins the Virginian guitar virtuoso Yasmin Williams to perform a set as part of Winter Jazzfest’s Brooklyn Marathon. Together these dextrous artists showcase not just the boundlessness of the finger-style playing but its power over the imagination.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Jan. 10.)

If you watched Richard Linklater’s new film “Blue Moon” and found yourself wondering whether Lorenz Hart was right to hate “Oklahoma!,” or if his bitterness over his breakup with Richard Rodgers simply clouded his ability to enjoy it, there’s a way to find out. This January, treat yourself to clarity—and toe-tapping—at Carnegie Hall, where the Orchestra of St. Luke’s presents “Oklahoma! In Concert.” Starring such musical-theatre pros as Emmett O’Hanlon, Micaela Diamond, Jasmine Amy Rogers, and “S.N.L.” alum Ana Gasteyer, the concert will do away with the corn-y set dressing and focus on the music. Hart may have questioned whether that’s a good thing, but you can be the judge.—Jane Bua (Carnegie Hall; Jan. 12.)

Pam Tanowitz’s “Pastoral.”Photograph by Maria Baranova

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 is called the “Pastoral” Symphony because of its evocations of birdsong, brooks, and heavy weather. In “Pastoral,” a delightful collaboration among the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, the composer Caroline Shaw, and the painter Sarah Crowner, Shaw cleverly samples and remixes Beethoven’s score using a live woodwind trio, archival tracks, and field recordings of crickets. Floral paintings by Crowner cover curtains and flats with which the graceful dancers wittily and poetically rearrange space, as Tanowitz’s choreography swirls in complex patterns. This “Pastoral” is as much about the contemplation of art, and the making of it, as it is about nature.—Brian Seibert (Rose Theatre; Jan. 11-13.)

In Molière’s seventeenth-century satire “Tartuffe,” the titular religious grifter (Matthew Broderick, keeping his powder too dry) buffaloes a wealthy man, Orgon (David Cross), who doesn’t notice that his spiritual counsellor has designs on his wife, Elmire (Amber Gray). Lucas Hnath’s sometimes-amusing new adaptation, directed by Sarah Benson, does contain certain vigorous touches: the outraged flouncing of Orgon’s son, Damis (Ryan J. Haddad), for example. But Enver Chakartash’s furbelowed, ballooning costumes set a tone of sumptuous buoyancy that the ensemble as a whole rarely finds, despite the efforts of several excellent clowns; Hnath’s awkward new verse keeps weighing them down, and there’s rather more comic inertia here than farce.—Helen Shaw (Reviewed in our issue of 12/29/25 & 1/5/26.) (New York Theatre Workshop; through Jan. 24.)

“Ñañigo Burial,” from 1976.Art work by Ana Mendieta / Courtesy © the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC / ARS / Marian Goodman Gallery

As the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta’s star has risen, what she did during her life has sometimes been overshadowed by the dramatic circumstances of her death. (In 1985, at the age of thirty-six, she fell out a window in her apartment; her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with and acquitted of murder.) This exhibition goes “Back to the Source,” to borrow its subtitle, reëstablishing the haunting and visceral terrain of Mendieta’s work. The focus is her “Silueta” series, from the nineteen-seventies, for which she photographed outlines of figures that she made in the earth. They showcase a rooted, searching spirituality and her gift for turning absence into presence, as in the exhibition’s only sculpture, “Ñañigo Burial” (1976), which reads as a kind of premonitory memorial: forty-seven black candles melting down into a topographic silhouette of Mendieta’s body.—Jillian Steinhauer (Marian Goodman; through Jan. 17.)

MOMA’s annual series “To Save and Project” gathers noteworthy restorations and rediscoveries from around the world. This year it unearths a set of short films made between 1908 and 1913 by D. W. Griffith, including a giddily eccentric comedy, “Those Awful Hats,” set in a movie theatre where action is taken against viewers who refuse to remove their elaborate headwear. The supreme stylist of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau, directed an audacious silent version of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” in 1925. Murnau turns the comedy, about a faux-pious fraudster, into a seething melodrama—and a cautionary film-within-a-film; MOMA presents it in both the U.S. version and the longer, recently restored German one.—Richard Brody (MOMA; Jan. 8-Feb. 2.)

The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in “Holiday,” from 1938.Photograph from Everett

“Holiday” (1938)

One of three pictures that the director George Cukor made with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, this witty, melancholy masterwork builds to one of the greatest New Year’s Eve-party sequences ever captured on film—a simply magical interlude, in which two characters, who have fallen in love before our eyes, see their dreams realized and perhaps dashed in the same instance. Few films leave you with a more hopeful sense of life and love’s possibilities, but fewer still are also more achingly aware of how fragile—and elusive—those possibilities are.

“Breathless” (1960)

Jean-Luc Godard’s sixty-five-year-old début feature, presently being saluted in Richard Linklater’s terrific making-of comedy, “Nouvelle Vague,” remains one of the freshest starts in movie history. To see it again (and again) is to feel an intoxicating sense of creative rejuvenation in every cut and frame.

“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974)

Ellen Burstyn justly won an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s wonderful drama, about a recently widowed mother who, determined to seize a new life from the jaws of tragedy, moves West with her son and sets out to revive a long-ago-aborted singing career. See it especially for the great Diane Ladd, whose death in November made 2025 that much harder to bear.

“Into Great Silence” (2007)

Every new year calls for an altitude adjustment. In 2002 and 2003, the German director Philip Gröning spent months filming at the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery located high up in the French Alps, and emerged with one of the most genuinely awe-inspiring nonfiction films of that year, or any year—a cleansing, rigorously patient immersion in the daily and even hourly rhythms of Carthusian monks, whose vows of silence incline the viewer toward their own state of contemplative rapture. “Into Great Silence” isn’t available for streaming in the U.S., so, barring a revival screening near you, you’ll have to purchase a DVD to watch it, which is fitting for a film that encourages patience and the avoidance of shortcuts.

“Brittany Runs a Marathon” (2019)

I have run a few half-marathons in my life, but have never (and never will) run a full one. But whenever my inspiration flags and laziness makes me loath to jog for even a mile, I flash back fondly on Paul Downs Colaizzo’s winning comedy of self-care. Jillian Bell is terrific in the title role of a New Yorker who, as the movie begins, can barely make it to the next corner—and, by the end, has defied everyone’s expectations, her own most of all.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Come again, Connor Storrie?
• High highs and low lows
• Let Sandra Oh fix the masculinity crisis

Last fall, the jewelry designer Kindred Lubeck took an elevator up six floors to a high-end showroom in New York’s diamond district. She was buzzed inside a fluorescent-lit vestibule, then waited; the front door had to lock securely behind her before a second could open. On the other side, a man in a gray suit named Chirag Mehta greeted her.

Mehta is the president of Sim Gems USA, a diamond dealer that sources investment-worthy stones for discerning billionaires; his customers include Nita Ambani, the wife of the richest man in Asia. Mehta had only recently learned of Lubeck’s work. In August, she was revealed as the designer of Taylor Swift’s engagement ring—an old-mine brilliant cut set in a yellow-gold band that Lubeck engraved by hand. (Good luck zooming in on the photos.) By October, Lubeck had been tapped by Sotheby’s for a closed-bid online auction of three engraved rings; in December, she auctioned two more, including one five-carat, old-mine-cut stone with an obvious resemblance to Swift’s.

Lubeck, who has aquamarine eyes and long, wavy hair, cuts an ethereal figure, like an elven noble. Her father is a goldsmith, and she spent much of the pandemic in her home town, a coastal community in Florida called Neptune Beach, shadowing him at his shop. She became obsessed with metalsmithing, and started pursuing it full time, honing an antique-inspired aesthetic that quickly gained traction on social media. By the time she moved to New York, in 2024, she had started her own business, Artifex Fine, and she had a loyal following in the indie jewelry world.

Swift showed one of Lubeck’s Instagram videos to her fiancé, Travis Kelce, a year and a half before their engagement. “When I saw the ring, I was, like, ‘I know who made that, I know who made that!’ ” Swift said in a radio interview. For Lubeck, it was an enormous break; now she has the trust of dealers such as Mehta, who are often willing to loan stones to designers for speculative projects. On Lubeck’s visit, Mehta opened a safe the size of a refrigerator and plucked out a fifty-carat-plus natural diamond—“Bezos-level,” he said—and set it on a gray fabric tray for her to examine. All Mehta asked was that Lubeck take a photo with him for social media.

In the past, enormous gems were typically used in cocktail rings, for special occasions. Engagement rings were meant for everyday wear. But many of today’s celebrities prefer to blur the distinction: Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s diamond was rumored to weigh in at around thirty carats; the stone that Cristiano Ronaldo gave to his girlfriend, Georgina Rodríguez, whom he met at a Gucci store in 2017, has been estimated to be thirty-five carats. Swift’s stone is large—industry experts have estimated anywhere from seven to ten carats, or about the size of a rounded-oval press-on nail. Yet its style diverges significantly from the icy, minimalist chic that has shaped engagement-ring tastes in recent years. (In 2018, Hailey Bieber’s ring—an oval-cut diamond on a thin, solitaire band—set the standard.)

Swift’s diamond is an old-mine cut—a faceting pattern that typically indicates that a gem was cut in a period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the world’s major diamond mines were still in Brazil and India. Lubeck couldn’t share the stone’s provenance. On social media, the rare-gem dealer Anup Jogani, who supplied Lubeck with the stones for her recent Sotheby’s auctions, called it the “ring of the century.”

In the antique-jewelry scene, the reveal was the equivalent of a Super Bowl victory. “I think I cried,” Marion Fasel, the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings,” told me. “My vintage-jewelry world was so excited—they lost their minds.” Historically, old-mine-cut diamonds have been a niche obsession. Compared with the ubiquitous round-brilliant cut of today (think: diamond emoji), old-miners tend to have large, chunky facets and taller profiles, with thick crowns and long pavilions. Fasel was able to classify Swift’s ring as an old-miner because of the small, dark circle, or “open culet,” visible at the center—unlike many popular diamond shapes today, which taper to a point, old-miners have flatter bottoms.

At the time these stones were fashioned, light was often provided by candlelight or gas lamps and lapidaries, or gem cutters, did everything by hand, meaning that their work was not always perfectly symmetrical. Compared with modern cuts, which are often described as “sharp,” “intense,” and “quick” for the way that they refract white, or “brilliant” light, old-miners manifest a different kind of romantic fantasy, with a warm glow that calls to mind the sepia of an old Hollywood movie. “I just watch it like it’s a TV,” Swift said, of her ring.

At the Sim Gems USA showroom, Mehta gestured at a table that had been laid out with dozens of shimmering, round, brilliant-cut diamonds worth millions of dollars. “These are regular,” he said, shrugging. “People know what this is. But after what happened”—he glanced at Lubeck—“people are looking for something different.”

The natural-diamond industry, which, with the advent of lab-grown gems, has been experiencing a prolonged and costly identity crisis, was thrilled by the ring, too. “What a diamond!” Al Cook, the beleaguered C.E.O. of De Beers Group, wrote in a LinkedIn post, which restrained itself to only one awkwardly interjected Swift lyric. (“Bejeweled!”) Cook became C.E.O. in 2023, not long before the business’s majority shareholder announced its intention to divest from the company. Later that year, De Beers cut prices across the board by more than ten per cent—a historically large reduction, according to Bloomberg. “Taylor’s ring might be extraordinary in its size and rarity,” Cook wrote. “But it is a reminder that every natural diamond is a unique and ancient treasure from the Earth.”

De Beers was formed in the late nineteenth century, when its reviled founder, Cecil Rhodes, consolidated the operations of a network of mines in South Africa, securing near-total control of the market there. Since then, the history of diamonds has essentially been a history of De Beers’s marketing campaigns. The company spent the better part of the twentieth century convincing Americans that the most valuable diamonds were heavy, brilliant, colorless, and free from internal flaws or external blemishes. But achieving this sort of purity is precisely what lab-grown diamonds do best.

In 2016, according to one industry analyst, a high-quality one-and-a-half-carat lab-grown diamond could sell for about ten thousand dollars—seventeen per cent less than the cost of a similar-quality natural diamond. Today, amid a glut of competition from labs in China and India, the price difference can be as high as ninety per cent. At Walmart, which started selling diamonds in 2022, a one-carat, lab-grown, round-cut solitaire engagement ring might retail for a hundred and fifty dollars. The natural-diamond industry seems to be betting that this price collapse will deter customers who want their rings to cost a meaningful amount of money. (There is still a prevailing belief that a diamond ring ought to cost a man two months of his salary—an idea that came from an old De Beers ad campaign which has taken on a life of its own since.)

But Americans love a good deal. A recent survey by the wedding-planning website the Knot found that more than half the engagement rings purchased in the U.S. featured lab-grown diamonds, a forty-per-cent increase from 2019. Last year, when the Natural Diamond Council put up fly posters in midtown Manhattan that featured blown-up photos of identical-looking diamonds labelled natural—“the OG”—and lab-grown—“the dupe”—it seemed only to underscore that we live in a society in which even wealthy women are buying Wirkins. Swift’s engagement ring might have set Kelce back something like a million dollars. But at Vrai, a lab-grown brand favored by Swift, fans can buy their own elongated, cushion-cut diamond for a thousand dollars or so.

“In the past, most people bought small, low-quality diamonds to fit in their budget, so there was an imbalance between what you desired and your reality,” Jean Dousset, a great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier, told me. After working in the high-jewelry business for decades at well-established houses such as Van Cleef & Arpels, he started his own brand in Los Angeles. Diamonds are typically graded based on four criteria: cut, clarity, color, and carat weight; shopping for one can become an exercise in deciding how much imperfection a couple is willing to tolerate in a symbol of their love. Dousset told me that he grew tired of selling couples natural diamonds with yellow coloring and internal flaws that cost tens of thousands of dollars. He didn’t feel that the price was worth it, and he saw the stress and tension it caused people. He pivoted entirely to lab-grown diamonds in 2023. (“I haven’t heard from my peers since,” he said.) Now it’s much easier for him to sell people what they want. The industry has “found the cure to enjoying buying diamonds,” Dousset said.

For some couples, synthetic diamonds have an ethical appeal. In the nineties, ghastly revelations about the mining conditions in countries such as Sierra Leone, shed harsh light on the back end of the business. Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of “Blood Diamond,” a blockbuster of dubious quality that nonetheless raised awareness about the issue, told Time that he would “certainly not” let his date wear diamonds to the Oscars, and later invested in Diamond Foundry, the most prominent American producer of lab-grown diamonds. Things have gotten better. In 2003, the United Nations implemented the Kimberley Process, a certification system to deter illegal trade; the program has eighty-six participating countries, and it is widely considered to be a successful intervention. But the taint lingers: bad actors still exist; mined diamonds figure in global money-laundering operations; and whatever its current partnerships De Beers was, after all, a company built on colonial exploitation. The sister of one of my friends, a sustainability adviser, told me last year that she gave her now fiancé explicit instructions that she did not want a “blood diamond.”

Still, lab-grown diamonds have yet to fully overcome their name. Christine Cheng, a fine-jewelry specialist, put it this way: Would you rather have a diamond formed naturally in the earth, “over millions of years,” or one “cooked in a microwave, basically?” She told me that antique diamonds offer a “secret third” option for buyers. “They were mined long ago, so we’re not using new resources,” she said. “When everyone has access now to a huge diamond that used to be the dream, how do you differentiate? How do you signal your taste? How do you signal your knowledge? It’s through connoisseurship of certain cuts, of certain designs from previous eras, and/or personalization. The status comes from a story.”

Very little about modern life is romantic; we get our thrills where we can. Gabrielle Katz, a publicist in New York who works with bridal businesses, told me that, after going through the indignities of looking for love on the apps, she wanted a ring that anchored her to a different sort of tradition. “I really went through the wringer with dating, so I was getting the real thing, in both a husband and a ring,” she said. Her fiancé proposed to her with an old-mine-cut diamond last summer, shortly before news broke of Swift’s engagement. “I have to be honest: thank God I had it first,” she told me.

The supply of antique diamonds is limited, so their audience will likely remain niche. If the status is in the story, then couples who swore off “blood diamonds” might not feel all that inclined to buy into a narrative that elides the conditions in which these gems were discovered; the alluvial diamond mines in, say, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil were largely run by enslaved laborers. Still, the aesthetic influence of stones like Swift’s is transforming the jewelry world. “Judging by the tens of millions of people who are showing their excitement on Instagram, we can now expect a resurgence in old mine cuts and other heritage ring designs,” Al Cook, the De Beers C.E.O., wrote. Simone Paasche, the co-founder of Spur Jewelry, a company that adapts heirloom jewels to modern tastes, told me that she’s seeing fewer “finance-bro engagement-ring flexes”—round, brilliant-cut diamond rings that cost something between twenty and thirty-five thousand dollars. Instead, people are requesting the sort of hand-engraving and antique-cut gems in which Lubeck specializes. There’s been an uptick in customers asking for something “ancient,” she said.

To remain relevant, natural-diamond companies are rewriting narratives about rarity and perfection, even if it means contradicting themselves. Brown diamonds, once considered so worthless that they were sometimes used in drill bits, are seeing a resurgence, as are other stones that have been considered “cloudy,” “milky,” and “textured.” In October, De Beers launched a campaign called Desert Diamonds, touting a collection of earth-toned diamonds that its executives likely would have sniffed at thirty years ago. After a press trip to Namibia, which was sponsored by De Beers, Tariro Makoni, a writer and brand strategist, wrote, “In my book— Cut, Color, Clarity is being replaced by Cut, Color, Clarity, and CHARACTER.”

After Sim Gems, Lubeck took me around the corner to a gemstones, diamonds, and jewelry wholesaler co-founded by Jay Moncada, whom Lubeck met at the Ethical Gem Fair in Brooklyn in 2023. The business sources stones that are much smaller and less rare than the ones we’d seen earlier that day, priced in the tens of thousands rather than the millions. More “down to earth,” Lubeck said.

In his office, Moncada, who was wearing jeans and a plaid button-down, pulled out a small Peruzzi-cut diamond. From some angles, it looked green; from others, it looked honey-yellow. “There’s so much happening in this one, I’m going a little bit cross-eyed,” Lubeck said, placing it in between the crevice of her ring and middle fingers. She passed me the magnifying glass. “Being in the era of A.I., when everything’s feeling computerized and automated, [it’s exciting] to get a stone where you’re, like, ‘This doesn’t look anything like that,’ ” she said. “There’s no uniformity. It doesn’t look machined—there was a human behind it. I think for me, that’s a huge draw. And I think I’m not alone in that.”

I’ll admit it: up until that moment, diamonds were not doing it for me. Garish gems seemed to be everywhere I looked. They distracted me during New York Fashion Week, when editors waved them around in the front row. Recently, on the subway, when a woman took her hand out of her pocket to reveal a diamond the size of a peanut M&M’s, I found myself blurting out, “Holy shit,” and reflexively backing away. Before meeting up with Lubeck, I had read a market analysis by McKinsey & Company that laid out, among other possibilities, a nightmare scenario for the mainstream diamond industry: “assuming consumers cannot tell the difference between natural stones and LGDs”—lab-grown diamonds—“all diamonds could simply go out of fashion, lose their appeal, and are no longer seen as a must-have for engagement rings.” It didn’t seem like such a bad outcome. Jewelers like Lubeck would be fine, and there are plenty of other alluring stones out there, like Montana sapphires. Of all the twentieth-century institutions to tear down, a place such as De Beers didn’t seem like the worst candidate.

Still, I was transfixed by the honeydew diamond. I thought back to a conversation that I’d had with Ope Omojola, a Brooklyn-based jewelry designer who prefers to work with natural stones. “They look like little terrariums,” she told me. “There are all of these geological circumstances that create unusual phenomena. Like, O.K., so you’re telling me that because of the circumstances of dripping water, heat, time, and all of these other things, now this piece of quartz has a blob of water trapped inside of it? And that water is tens of millions of years old? That’s crazy.” I imagined the many hands that the stone had passed through, the multiple marriages it might have seen. There was an appeal to the idea of an engagement ring that carried in it a residue of life.

Lubeck asked Moncada for a UV light. Sometimes diamonds undergo an elementary reaction during the crystallization process which produces a fluorescent glow under the UV. “I’m just always looking for weird things,” she said, with a shrug. The diamond lit up like a blue glow stick at a rave. This time, I was the one to gasp. “You’re telling me that if I wore this to laser tag or a bowling alley everyone else’s ring would stay quiet, and mine would—” I gestured as though a firework were exploding off my hand. Lubeck nodded and laughed: “Anything for a little attention.” ♦

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. ♦