Perhaps you saw footage of Zohran Mamdani at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau: he was there on February 5th, to surprise six couples by officiating their weddings, and to film “The Happiest Government Building in the World,” a mayoral YouTube video released on Valentine’s Day. Or perhaps you caught him atop the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, in a clip announcing plans to open the roof to public visitors. In case you missed those, our new mayor has also appeared on sidewalks and in the back seats of cabs, explaining 3-K and pre-K application procedures on LinkNYC kiosks and Taxi TV. (“Finally my work can be enjoyed as it was meant to be,” Donald Borenstein, the director of video for the Mamdani campaign, posted, with a shot of Mamdani onscreen alongside the fare for an $11.80 cab ride.) The Mayor was filmed riding the W train on his second day in office, and he held a press conference on a bus in the Bronx last week. Mamdani’s early weeks in office have been an exercise in ubiquity. The Mayor is here; the Mayor is there; the Mayor is everywhere.
The Mayor making an appearance anywhere constitutes an event—or, more precisely, a pseudo-event, a term coined by the historian Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1962 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” which describes a phenomenon that he saw flooding American culture. A pseudo-event, he writes, is a media spectacle that has an “ambiguous” relationship to any underlying reality. It is “not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. . . . It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.” A press conference is the archetypal pseudo-event; award ceremonies and interviews also qualify. Boorstin was writing in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s famous debate triumph over Richard Nixon, at a time when pseudo-events took up the many on-air hours of television news and the many column inches of afternoon papers, which needed to be filled when a day’s actual happenings had scarcely had a chance to occur. “We used to believe there were only so many ‘events’ in the world,” Boorstin writes. That was no longer the case.
The book gives a particularly trenchant account of the pseudo-event’s role in politics, a realm where canny officials soon realized that they could advance their own agendas by feeding the media’s decreasingly satiable demands. Joseph McCarthy, Boorstin writes, “was a natural genius at creating reportable happenings.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, too. He addressed the public “with a new intimacy,” Boorstin writes, but also “a new subtlety and a new calculatedness.” Poets and playwrights worked alongside speechwriters on his staff. “When the President spoke, almost everyone knew it was a long-planned group production in which F.D.R. was only the star performer.”
The prescience of “The Image” looks obvious in the age of the infinite scroll. (A celebrity social-media post that sets in motion the dutiful production of content would be a prime example of a contemporary pseudo-event.) Mamdani’s deft touch in navigating this reality has been invaluable to his ascendancy, as have his in-house filmmakers and strategists, who are themselves now objects of media attention. Boorstin observed a paradox for anyone attempting to critique a pseudo-event. “Whenever we describe the lighting, the make-up, the studio setting, the rehearsals,” he wrote, “we simply arouse more interest.”
I thought of Boorstin on a Thursday afternoon early this month, as City Hall reporters trooped into the Blue Room, the traditional site of mayoral press conferences. Half the room’s seats had been cordoned off. A staffer directed members of the press to the right, then clarified—“Stage right,” i.e., the left. At the front of the room, next to the main lectern, stood a second lectern approximately half as high. We waited for an unseen curtain to rise.
The Mayor’s public schedule had promised a “child care announcement” with the New York City Public Schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels. The announcement turned out to be that the city was releasing an R.F.I. “Like so many of you, the first time I saw it, I said, ‘What is an R.F.I.?’ ” Samuels told the assembled press. “Well, it is a request for information.” The city was putting out a call for providers interested in participating in its new 2-K and established 3-K programs, something that, in the case of the latter, had not happened in the past five years. (“Today, we say, ‘No more,’ ” Mamdani said.) This worthy, if dry, news offered a pretext for the afternoon’s real show: watching as the Mayor joshed amiably with his other guests, four pre-K students from District Two.
Julian Shapiro-Barnum, who runs a web series called “Recess Therapy,” on which he interviews small children for his 3.2 million followers on Instagram, was seated in the front row of the press area. Reporters were instructed to confine themselves to on-topic questions, but Shapiro-Barnum was allowed to interpret this expansively. “Do any of you have a favorite farm animal, or aquarium animal?” he asked the intermittently on-message group gathered around the short lectern.
“My favorite one is a gold snake that can move and it has gold eyes and it has a long tail, a super, super-duper tail, and it can snap cars and crash the cars,” a boy with shaggy blond hair said.
“And, Mr. Mamdani—”
“It’s also the golden snake,” the Mayor said. He then delivered a précis on the 3-K and pre-K application process and encouraged parents to submit applications by February 27th.
Shapiro-Barnum posted a video of the exchange two days later, followed by a companion video a few days after that, reminding parents about the deadline. If different in form, these were not far removed in tone from the videos the Mayor’s office itself releases, bouncy and uncowed by any risk of sounding corny. For a spot promoting public bathroom access, Mamdani washed his hands in a Harlem park men’s room; for a video about municipal finance, he explained the rudiments of the city’s “incredibly confusing” budget process. (“What can I say? We’re perfectionists. And bound by the reforms of the nineteen-seventies fiscal crisis.”) His droll explanatory mode calls to mind the “Hamilton” era of educational entertainment for adults—a twenty-tens wave of earnest pop-culture optimism that New York magazine once termed “Obamacore.” But if do-gooder didacticism has worn thin in the context of, say, a streaming series (think of Aziz Ansari diligently explaining why sexism is bad on “Master of None”), it has now found a more appropriate home. If anyone’s entitled to a cheerful, dorky P.S.A., surely it’s the city government.
Mamdani’s approach seems intended to project a new relationship between New Yorkers and City Hall, one that relies on insistently personal terms and emphasizes care and communication. (In the time since the new administration took over the official mayoral social-media channels, Instagram posts regularly inspire engagement orders of magnitude greater than they did under Eric Adams, despite the former mayor’s rivetingly weird presence.) The P.S.A.s, the social-media posts, and the special guest appearances constitute a parasocial civic bond—and, maybe, something more. In a culture even more media-saturated than the one Boorstin described, I have at times wondered whether such pseudo-events might come back around to being real. Creating wide awareness and participation is essential to a universal program like 3-K; if an onslaught of cute videos inspires sufficient public engagement, will it be fair to say that cute videos were instrumental to that program’s success? After all, before “performative” became a buzzword meaning “only doing something for show,” it meant, essentially, the opposite: saying or doing something that actually changes reality.
The weather—now there’s a brute-force phenomenon to blow away theoretical abstractions like “performativity,” or so one might think. The winter storm that bore down on New York City last month was generally agreed by the news media, in breathless headlines, to be a test: “Mamdani’s First Big Test,” a “Major Test,” specifically a “Major Governing Test.” (“Mamdani Knows It’s a Test,” the Times affirmed.) Yet the Mayor’s task seemed primarily to be a matter of remaining extremely visible and communicative, while committing no egregious public blunders, as members of the municipal workforce did their jobs. The snow fell; the snow was plowed; the Mayor was everywhere, offering constant updates at press conferences, in videos, and on the radio. “There’s snow doubt about it: there’s a big winter storm headed our way,” he began a clip filmed at a Department of Sanitation facility, which had him striding alongside D.S.N.Y. trucks outfitted with plows. The media had done its best to make a pseudo-event of the weather, and on these terms—as should have surprised no one—the Mayor succeeded. “OK Zohran, So You Aced the Storm,” City & State conceded.
But as the cold persisted into the next week and then the one following, a new test emerged, one more impervious to a communications strategy. The count of New Yorkers who had died outdoors ticked grimly upward, passing fifteen and then twenty. It was difficult to blame this on a particular misstep by Mamdani’s administration, which did not stop critics from trying. (The Post, not known for excessive sympathy toward the unhoused, now took up their cause with righteous fervor.) The deaths had a mute irrefutability. On February 4th, the day before the Blue Room child-care press conference, the city rolled out a LinkNYC P.S.A. directed at homeless New Yorkers that sounded almost plaintive in its request. “If you are staying outside, please come indoors,” the Mayor said. “We want to help keep you safe.” Under state law, involuntarily removing a person from the streets requires that he or she “appears to be mentally ill” and likely poses a danger to themselves or others, which includes an inability to meet their own basic needs. These standards had not changed under Mamdani, but their salience had: now they became a proxy for the new Mayor’s attitude toward using force. Mayoral press conferences and news releases began to include a running tally of involuntary transportations—an acknowledgment, perhaps, of some outer limit to the power of asking nicely from a screen. A thaw finally appeared in the forecast; a City Council hearing on the deaths passed with minimal incident. “I know we’ve been making a lot of videos about the weather,” the Mayor said, in a video released as temperatures rose last week. “Let’s keep taking care of each other.”
The weekend after the Blue Room press conference, I watched footage of the pseudo-event circulating online, and, even having been there in person, found myself captivated. (CNN: “Kid Charms Crowd at Mamdani News Conference.”) The shagginess of the live show—kids milling, sitting on the floor, repeating themselves—had vanished, as had the explanation of the R.F.I. The press corps had essentially been drafted into serving as extras. The Mayor ad-libbed gamely, the children basked in adult attention, and, as the proceedings concluded, Shapiro-Barnum started to clap. He stopped himself when no one else joined in, but it was, in all fairness, a reasonable error. ♦
