The New YorkerModify

Like “Lolita,” the new campus comedy “Vladimir” takes its title from the object of its protagonist’s delusional obsession. The series’ Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall, is a rising literary star and a young father who’s just arrived at a sleepy upstate college, where he and his wife are set to teach. More relevant to his new colleague, M (Rachel Weisz), a creative-writing professor, he is also fantastically hard-bodied, as dedicated to his gains at the gym as he is to the life of the mind. M’s infatuation with Vladimir might be interpreted as an idle distraction from the sex scandal engulfing her husband, John (John Slattery), if not for a flash-forward in the show’s opening minutes. There she is with an unconscious man tied to a chair in her cabin, part-Humbert Humbert, part-Annie Wilkes.

The initial scene inspires little faith. M looks into the camera and addresses the viewer directly, bemoaning the woes of middle age. Her adult daughter no longer needs her. Her students find her lectures passé. Worst of all, she may never again provoke a “spontaneous erection” since, “as an older woman—truly, what is more embarrassing—I will have lost the ability to captivate.” Coming from someone who looks like Rachel Weisz, one of the most gorgeous women alive, such sentiments are a little hard to swallow. Being taken into M’s confidence feels like being cornered at a party by the least self-aware person in the room. Later, she remarks that the scope of her Women in American Fiction class is “a bit broad,” then adds, lest we miss her brilliant wit, “that was a pun.”

Despite this unpromising start, “Vladimir”—adapted from the 2022 novel of the same name by its author, Julia May Jonas, and the showrunner Kate Robin—proves strangely compelling. Even when we think we know where the series is going, it remains as slippery as its unreliable narrator, difficult to nail down in both genre and intent. Much of the early fun lies in the gap between how M thinks she comes across and how she actually does. In the pilot, she crows about the harvest salad she brings to a faculty retreat—a “real fuck-you salad,” she intimates to us, “the kind that makes everyone a bit embarrassed about what they brought.” It’s beautiful, but it goes untouched. When her “best and favorite” student opts to take a course with Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), in lieu of M’s own, she assures the girl that Women in American Fiction is oversubscribed anyway. The numbers say otherwise.

“Vladimir” is about as invested in the mores of the university as “The Morning Show” is in the mechanics of the newsroom. The adaptation retains traces of its literary roots—there are multiple nods to Nabokov, including a bakery named after Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother—but its bookishness is mostly window dressing. The show’s depiction of the ivory tower is full of improbable dramas: one subplot involves a texted request for a letter of recommendation sent at 11 P.M. and fulfilled within the hour. M struggles with an unshakable case of writer’s block that set in fifteen years ago, after the publication of her acclaimed first novel. Vladimir, who’s working on his sophomore effort, is more dismayed than soothed when she says of tenure, “Once you get it, you never have to go anywhere else.”

M isn’t just a creature of the academy, but its happy captive. While her husband charms their daughter and her partner by holding forth on the Kardashians as the Greek tragedies of our times, M would probably be content forever teaching “Rebecca”—a text that one of her students declares unrelatable because it features “a mousy-ass woman married to a toxic man.” (To her credit, M mounts a persuasive defense of the book’s universality as a story about “the inescapable pull of your lover’s lover.”) Her fear that her professional irrelevance has come too soon—an anxiety not often explored in Hollywood’s midlife-crisis narratives—is unexpectedly affecting.

That feeling of obsolescence comes to a head when a half-dozen former students lodge complaints of inappropriate behavior against John. M’s adoring acolytes reassure her that she doesn’t “have to do the whole supportive-wife thing”—but, once she declines to distance herself from him, she begins to be seen as complicit herself. The series is largely sympathetic to M’s nostalgia for an era when affairs between teachers and students were “fun not despite the power dynamic, but because of the power dynamic,” and her pupils are believably overbearing in their certainty that rigid moral frameworks can be applied to any relationship. They also exhibit a boner-killing tendency to label every impulse with hyper-specific jargon; one boy asks for an extension on a paper because he was busy coming out as “gynesexual,” or attracted to femininity in any gender. (M would prefer not to overanalyze pleasure: she and John have enjoyed what she calls “an open marriage, but without all the awful communication.”) While she decries the way today’s young women seem to deny their own sexual agency, she’s desperate to assert her own. When Vladimir confesses that he and his wife have had a fight, she looks downright hopeful as she asks, “About me?”

The series follows M down this rabbit hole, less interested in relitigating the #MeToo movement than in showing what happens when a woman’s lust becomes an imperfect vehicle for self-renewal. At first, it’s easier to fantasize about Vladimir in hackneyed, uncomplicated erotic scenarios than to confront her domestic reality, which bristles with decades of pent-up resentments. But when Vladimir divulges Cynthia’s history of depression or overburdens her with child care, you start to wonder if M just has a thing for assholes. At least John—who strongly recalls Roger Sterling, Slattery’s “Mad Men” character—boasts a roguish charisma; Vladimir is such a drip that even his wife muses aloud that he could benefit from the life experience of having an affair.

That Vladimir never deserves M’s admiration is beside the point. It’s desire itself that resuscitates her, even when wanting someone so badly makes humiliation unavoidable. M inadvertently drops hints that she thinks about Vladimir constantly; when he texts her an emoji, she has to ask her daughter what it means. But he’s less important as a lover than as a muse. After meeting him, M begins to write again—though, because the show seldom shies from absurdity, she pens the entire manuscript by hand, filling dozens of legal pads. Fittingly, she takes them to bed: in the end, she’s most intoxicated by her own thoughts. ♦

Download a transcript.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter.

On this episode of Critics at Large, with the ninety-eighth Academy Awards just around the corner, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz are joined by their fellow staff writer Michael Schulman to take stock of Oscars season. They discuss the biggest races and consider whether the year’s Best Picture nominees—many of them both critical and commercial successes—might represent a return to the bygone era of “grownup movies.” At the center of all this pageantry is the host: a notoriously tricky role for even the most seasoned performers. Together, the critics revisit the highs and lows of Oscars hosting history, from the long tenure of Bob Hope to the golden age of Billy Crystal. These m.c.s’ success hinges on their ability to walk a fine line, embodying the celebratory spirit of the evening while also poking fun at its absurdity. “It’s about that insider-outsider aspect. You are the court jester,” Schwartz says. “Are you really wanting to be vizier to the king, or are you O.K. in that jester role?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Oscar Wars,” by Michael Schulman
“Marty Supreme” (2025)
“Sinners (2025)
“The Secret Agent” (2025)
“One Battle After Another” (2025)
“‘Come to Brazil?’ The Oscars Just Might,” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)
“Sentimental Value” (2025)
“The Mastermind” (2025)
“Peter Hujar’s Day” (2025)
Billy Crystal’s opening monologue for the 1990 Oscars
Chris Rock’s opening monologue for the 2005 Oscars
Ricky Gervais’s opening monologue for the 2020 Golden Globes
Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue for the 2026 Golden Globes

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

Getting nominated for an Oscar may be great for your career, but it’s not exactly healing. Just ask Wunmi Mosaku, a Best Supporting Actress nominee for “Sinners,” in which she plays Annie, a hoodoo healer whose knowledge of mysticism helps keep vampires at bay. The other day, Mosaku ordered chai at a coffee shop in Flatbush, feeling nauseated from the car ride over. On top of the exhaustion from the campaign trail—she was wearing a powder-pink trenchcoat and pants, chosen for a morning taping of “The Kelly Clarkson Show”—she is pregnant with her second child, a fact that she revealed on the red carpet of the Golden Globes.

Before “Sinners,” Mosaku said, “I knew nothing about hoodoo. All I had ever heard of was voodoo and that it was a scary, bad, evil thing. Then, when I was doing my research for hoodoo, I learned it was connected to Ifá, which is the traditional Yoruba spirituality system.” When she was a baby, her parents moved from Nigeria to Manchester to get Ph.D.s—her father in architecture, her mother in chemistry—and they raised her as a Christian. “Ifá was something I was told to stay away from,” Mosaku said. But her father grew herbs in his garden. “I now realize that he uses traditional medicines. I always thought he was a bit woo-woo—like, ‘Just take a Tylenol, Dad!’ That knowledge is still in the culture.”

To play Annie, Mosaku consulted with a hoodoo priestess, who showed her how to bless the mojo bag worn by Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) in the film. As a child, Mosaku felt orphaned from her Nigerian roots; her favorite film was “Annie,” which she’d watch over and over. As a teen-ager, she realized that acting was her calling. Albert Finney, who played Daddy Warbucks, had gone from Manchester to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, so Mosaku went there, too. In 2020, as she was “grappling with what was happening racially across the globe and how much I had tried so hard to assimilate,” her husband gave her a gift of a Yoruba class at U.C.L.A. She’s been taking private lessons ever since. “Yoruba is a tonal language, so I get the tones wrong a lot,” she said. At the Globes, she wore a yellow dress, a reference to the Yoruba proverb “Iya ni wura,” or “Mother is gold.”

But the pregnancy and the awards-season grind had left her feeling less than golden. In Flatbush, Mosaku visited Sacred Vibes Apothecary, where she had arranged to meet the shop’s master herbalist, Karen Rose. Rose, a bubbly Guyanese woman, opened the store in 2009 and teaches classes online. One of her students, a Buddhist lama, had just conducted a workshop on the medicine of “Sinners,” with guidance on how to “get rid of energetic vampires,” Rose said. “Every herbalist’s favorite part of that movie was the apothecary scene,” she told Mosaku. “All of our houses look like that!”

Rose stood at a counter in front of an antique mirror draped with lavender bunches; around her were fragrant shelves of teas, tinctures, elixirs, and anointed candles. “I teach Western herbalism, but I concentrate heavily on plants that I grew up with—hibiscus, ginger, thyme,” she explained. Mosaku said that she loves hibiscus tea, but that Google had warned against drinking it while pregnant. “You can,” Rose assured her. “This is why ancestral medicine is so important. Hibiscus is really good for building your blood and preventing preeclampsia.”

“That’s what I thought!” Mosaku said, banging the counter.

Rose recommended ginger and cinnamon, for morning sickness, and lemon balm, for postpartum depression. She also had candles called Black Madonna (for a safe delivery) and Success (for Mosaku’s new batik maternity line). Anything for awards-season stress? “I would say nervous-system support with lemon balm and then an energetic shield—astragalus,” Rose advised. She showed Mosaku a home-blessing kit. “Every time you open your door, it’s a different kind of energy, even if it’s delivery people. So I’m really protective of the home.”

Mosaku agreed. “A woman I follow online—she’s from Louisiana and a spiritualist—says not to put a welcome mat outside your door.” This is more or less the moral of “Sinners”: don’t invite the vampires in.

Rose asked her son, Zion, to pull down jars of lavender, chamomile, and hops, to mix a bath blend for Mosaku’s two-year-old daughter, who has had trouble sleeping. They stirred it in a steel bowl before ringing it up, along with the candles, a tea called Calm Your Nerves, one of everything from Rose’s pregnancy line, and, for Mosaku’s husband, a men’s longevity tonic called Zeus Juice. Mosaku vowed to sign up for Rose’s next online class. “Thank you so much for reconnecting me to the joy and the purpose I felt playing Annie,” she told Rose, giddily. “I have been, like, ‘I want to get back! I want to get back!’ But I haven’t known how.” ♦

If you never have to explain yourself, you can’t really ever be wrong. In recent decades, few things have been as famously wrong as the political theatre surrounding the Iraq War: Colin Powell showing his satellite images in front of the U.N. Security Council and repeating the phrase “weapons of mass destruction,” Donald Rumsfeld’s word puzzles about known unknowns and the absence of evidence not being the evidence of absence, George W. Bush’s triumphant “Mission Accomplished” episode aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. These displays worked in the moment; support for the Iraq War was much higher among the public than some might remember now, and the media mostly filed in the back of the Administration’s dance line. They have since become synonymous not only with a loss of faith in the government’s duty to put American lives over profit but, perhaps more enduringly, with the end of the country’s trust in the media.

The Trump Administration, in contrast, has, in its own approach to war, simply skipped the explaining phase. This makes sense in a perverse way. You can consider the past half century of American military adventures as a continuum where the lessons of Vietnam—the first televised war, which delivered intimate footage of American draftees fighting in the jungle—instructed Desert Storm (a brief conflict, represented on TV largely by faraway shots of Patriot missiles), which, in turn, influenced the spectacle around Afghanistan and Iraq (wars of regime change, accompanied by images of liberation). It follows that, for our latest incursion into the Middle East, the Administration in charge would do away with the alleged moral imperatives and grand imagery of the previous wars and move straight to the bombs. The sight of a high-ranking official making his case in front of the U.N. Security Council now feels quaint and almost comical. Patriotism, apparently, is something you talk about during the Olympics and maybe during halftime at the Super Bowl but something you need not invoke when putting troops in the line of fire.

To date, the only explanations offered by the Administration have been confusing more than anything else. “We didn’t start this war,” the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said at a press conference on Monday, pointing out that President Trump, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and the special envoy Steve Witkoff—evidently, the Iran negotiating team—had “bent over backwards for real diplomacy.” He also said that Iran had a “conventional gun to our head,” reiterating that America had no choice but to go on the offensive.

But he also struck a tone of nihilistic defiance. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth said. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” In other words, all the old patriotic and moral justifications for our forever wars no longer applied. We just do it because we want to “win,” even if we can’t really tell you what we’re winning. On Wednesday, Hegseth fired up the cliché factory again, saying, “Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps.” If you don’t like that, well, then, Hegseth and the Trump Administration are telling you that they don’t care.

Last year, when writing about how the public would remember the war in Gaza, I asked what happens “when every image becomes a site of contestation; when the rare sights we all see together, whether joyous or devastating, quickly fray into thousands, even millions, of threads, each with their own grip on reality”? In the two years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve asked some variation of this question on several occasions, because I still don’t really know whether the internet as we now experience it—constantly, on our phones—has made it impossible for any narrative to stick with the public, and whether this, in turn, makes it impossible to tell any story that might inspire abiding dissent.

Like so many brooding young men of my generation, I was quite taken, when I was in high school, by the novels of Milan Kundera. At the time, my interest was divided between trying to understand totalitarianism and horniness, but one passage in particular from “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” stuck with me and seems relevant today: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” These days, we forget because there’s too much to try to remember, and because we can’t tell what’s worth holding on to and what’s online trash. On Tuesday night, the U.S. Southern Command announced that it had launched joint operations with Ecuador against “Designated Terrorist Organizations.” Meanwhile, the list of elected officials who have made conflicting or meaningless statements about Iran keeps growing, and now includes Chuck Schumer, who said, “No one wants an endless war but we certainly don’t want a nuclear Iran,” a statement so noncommittal, gnarled, and koan-y that it sounds like it was written by history’s most frustrating Buddhist monk. (On Wednesday, Schumer, making the case for a war-powers resolution, said, “Americans overwhelmingly oppose war with Iran. And Senate Republicans have a duty to stand up for Americans by forcing Donald Trump to reverse course.”) We are aware that stuff is happening that we should care about, but the fog of bullshit surrounding this stuff is so thick that we can barely make out its shape or heft. Less than six weeks have passed since Alex Pretti was shot dead by C.B.P. agents in Minneapolis, and yet that, too, already feels like yesterday’s problem.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t remember anything. Whatever resistance does form against our new war in the Middle East won’t come out of deep knowledge of the conflict or even disagreements over its justifications—when none are offered, how can we argue against them?—but, rather, out of the collective memory of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Trump Administration is making a bet that this remembering will be obscured by all the news and trash we take in every day. And, as long as American boots do not hit the ground in Iran—which would take the war from our phones into the family living rooms of the servicepeople who are deployed—Trump might well get away with it.

If we do forget the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, it won’t be on account of a revisionist history about those wars, one that has swayed us with jingoistic propaganda about a caring military or some paean about spreading democracy. Instead, Trump will have won by simply refusing to tell a story at all, outside of Hegseth’s absurd football-coach talk. Hegseth, in a way, is right: nobody believes in those stories anymore, so why would he bother spinning them? Just say, essentially, nothing, and hope that, eventually, we’ll all go back to our phones. ♦

Much of politics is asking for money, as anyone who has received text messages from, say, their close personal friend Nancy Pelosi can attest. This is even more true if you are a young socialist mayor with many big expensive plans: for Zohran Mamdani, becoming New York City’s leader has required swift public training in the art of making such requests.

Currently, for example, the Mayor is asking the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, to let New York City raise taxes on wealthy residents, something she has made clear that she does not wish to do. During the mayoral campaign, Mamdani presented taxing the rich as a first step toward fulfilling his policy promises, but also as a slogan in itself—“tax the rich” was useful shorthand for an entire political orientation. In October, when Hochul addressed a preëlection Mamdani rally in Forest Hills, the crowd heckled her by chanting “Tax the rich.” Mamdani resolved the tension by joining her onstage and taking her hand; cheers rose from the audience. Since assuming office, he has attempted to maintain the position he held in that moment: standing at the head of a movement with stark demands while offering himself to the Governor as an ally. He has been at pains to emphasize their partnership, particularly on child care, as a contrast with the bad old days when Andrew Cuomo bedevilled Bill de Blasio from up in Albany. Mamdani endorsed Hochul’s reëlection bid in early February.

The power of playing nice was visible—in the way that a billboard or skyscraper is visible—during a meeting between Mamdani and Donald Trump last week. On Thursday, Mamdani made an unannounced (and initially unexplained) trip to Washington, D.C. His public schedule for the day had been empty, to the consternation of City Hall reporters; he wore a mask and a hat on his flight to avoid being recognized. The secrecy was apparently in deference to the President’s desire for privacy.

Mamdani emerged from this shroud of mystery triumphant, posting a photograph on X of himself, firmly straight-faced, standing alongside the grinning President. A press release that followed explained that Trump was entertaining a proposal from the Mayor to build twelve thousand units of affordable housing in Queens with more than twenty-one billion dollars in federal grants. The evident coup de grâce was a mock up of a Daily News front page that Mamdani’s staff had provided to the President. “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD,” the wood read, above a reproduction of the President’s glowering official portrait. “Trump Delivers 12,000+ Homes. Most Since 1973.” As a feat of ego-stroking, this ploy was breathtakingly unsubtle and yet, to judge by Trump’s smile as he held the page aloft (in a photo taken by his own staff, according to Mamdani’s communications director), entirely effective. Later that day, Mamdani’s tête-à-tête also appeared to have secured the release of a Columbia student who had been kidnapped by ICE that morning.

The day before the Mayor flew to D.C., he had skipped a “Tax the Rich” rally in Albany. Organized by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (which Mamdani has called his political home) and Our Time for an Affordable NYC (an independent organizing group dedicated to advancing Mamdani’s agenda), the event was co-sponsored by almost two dozen other advocacy groups and unions, and billed as an Albany takeover: there were speeches, singing, a march, and a delegation from New Yorkers United for Child Care with kids in tow. The goal was to push the state government—and especially the Governor—to support legislation raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Hochul “needs to understand that it’s her fight, too,” Phara Souffrant Forrest, a State Assembly member who represents, among other areas, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, told me. “There’s so much room for the executive and the legislature to work together.” Forrest, who is a member of the D.S.A.’s “Socialists in Office” caucus, has introduced the Fair Share Act, which would allow a two-per-cent income tax on city residents who earn more than a million dollars a year.

“I’ve been told that the Governor is not very happy with us,” Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the N.Y.C.-D.S.A., said from the rally stage, with a note of pride. He went on to riff about witnessing the wealth of the Tisch family (of which Mamdani’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, is a scion) during his days as a gallery assistant. “Alice Tisch had paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that sculpture,” he recalled, of a work owned by the commissioner’s aunt. This was, presumably, the sort of scene that the Mayor had been inclined to avoid.

His choice not to attend was reportedly a gesture toward maintaining good relations with the Governor, but it presented a challenge for his comrades: a headlining mayor might have made it easier to get New Yorkers onto predawn, post-blizzard buses outside Barclays Center that Wednesday morning. His absence also left an opening for someone to serve as the event’s public face and master of ceremonies.

That role had been accepted by the City Council member Chi Ossé—although, by his own account, somewhat reluctantly. “It took multiple asks,” he told me on Tuesday afternoon. “I really do not love going up to Albany,” he said. “It’s cold. It’s far away.” Getting there would require a 5:45 a.m. departure. “But this is for a good cause,” he added. Ossé has emerged as a bit of a foil for Mamdani—he is another young left-wing upstart with an aptitude for explainer videos—though his choices have seemed to lack the strategic discipline and focus that defined Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. (Late last year, Ossé sought the D.S.A.’s endorsement for a longshot primary challenge to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jefferies, and Mamdani took time out from his mayoral transition to make the case to D.S.A. members against endorsing him.) In Albany, Ossé filmed a video, rife with quick cuts, of himself walking around briskly in a dark suit and talking about the Fair Share Act.

Still, his ambivalence about the day’s trek may have been representative. The organizers had chosen a rally venue that could accommodate forty-three hundred attendees, but the turnout on Wednesday was a bit under two thousand, Divya Sundaram, the deputy director of Our Time, said. She called the event “proof of concept” for her group’s push to organize New Yorkers beyond Election Day. “We would have loved to have the Mayor there,” she told me after the rally. “And also, you know, this is the tension of organizing from the outside, independently of the administration. Sometimes, we have to lead.” Hochul, as it happened, missed the rally, too; she was in New York City.

Mamdani deviated sharply from his general strategy of playing nice at a February press conference where he proposed his preliminary budget. In the event that the Governor does not deliver a tax increase, as few expect her to, Mamdani said that he would ask the City Council to increase property taxes, a prospect that was greeted with general horror and incredulity—“a non-starter,” in the words of the City Council speaker, Julie Menin. According to Mamdani, taxing the rich and taxing property owners represented the “two paths to bridge the city’s inherited budget gap,” even if the latter would place the burden on “the backs of working- and middle-class New Yorkers” (as the rueful Mayor put it).

It’s unclear how Mamdani might go about forcing Hochul’s hand. The Governor, at the moment, has no challengers from the left, and, in any case, Mamdani has already endorsed her. He issued his budget demand the day after he and the Governor announced an agreement to provide $1.5 billion (in addition to money she has already promised for expanding child care) toward the city’s budget gap. In January, Mamdani had said this gap stood at twelve billion dollars, a figure he later updated to seven billion, and then to $5.4 billion.

The preliminary budget will go to the City Council for public hearings this spring, after which the Mayor will issue an updated version, followed by more negotiations, with a finalized budget required by the end of June. This process has traditionally involved a degree of political theatre, albeit of a sort less theatrical than Trump and Mamdani’s public-facing performances. New York’s mayors typically underestimate the city’s revenue and then demand cuts, which are later (at least partially) restored when better-than-officially-expected revenues arrive—a ritual choreography known as “the budget dance.” Michael Bloomberg, for example, would typically propose closing firehouses; the City Council would typically protect them.

“I think we are in a different world,” Andrew Perry, the Director of Fiscal Research at the Fiscal Policy Institute, who has written about the dance, told me. Mamdani’s revenue estimates look realistic rather than usefully bleak; notwithstanding his perplexing series of revisions, the gap appears to be real. If Mamdani does not receive the money he’s asked for, he will be in the unhappy position of having to ask New York to spend less—a possibility he elided when he mapped out his “two paths” for the budget. Doing so will not be easy.

“If you want to find five billion dollars in the budget, you have to go to things that cost a lot of money, and the three biggest spending items in the city are schools, social services, and police,” Perry said. “So you’d be talking about hiring freezes for teachers and not meeting our class-size mandate. You’d be talking about having to go to City Council and roll back social services that New Yorkers are currently entitled to. And you’d be talking about relitigating the police budget, which I don’t think there’s an appetite for on any side. That’s what you’d have to be talking about—there aren’t other, secret places where you can find five billion dollars.”

Several days after the rally, I caught up with Ossé at his office near City Hall, where he lamented a water stain on the drop ceiling. “I shot a video recently about dog shit, and if you look up in the video, there’s just, like, a stain,” he said. “I don’t have one of the nicest offices. I don’t have the worst office, either—there are some windowless offices here.” He told me that the Albany gathering had had “great energy,” and that he’d heard a number of productive meetings had taken place. “It was a really beautiful, well-produced event,” he said. “There was lighting, there was a stage, there was a backstage, there were performers, there were cue cards, there were people seated behind me with signs that were produced for the event. There was a large crowd.” Especially in the context of Trump’s tax cuts, Ossé called taxing the rich “a moral duty,” if not an easy sell politically. “I know we don’t have the most leverage at this point in time,” he said. He speculated that perhaps after a successful reëlection campaign the Governor would change her mind. ♦