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New Statesman
08-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
The plot against Zohran Mamdani
Photo by Adam Gray/Bloomberg 'Why did you have to go on?' Lauren Bacall asks Humphrey Bogart at the end of The Big Sleep, the archetypal study of American sadism, cruelty and sleaze. 'Too many people told me to stop,' he answers, with a dash of valiant redemption. If Zohran Mamdani, the surprising winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, wins the mayoralty in November, his victory will have much to do with a reflexive New York City response to the ugly hysteria opposing him. Donald Trump called the democratic-socialist Mamdani – a New York state assemblyman who was born in Uganda to Indian parents and became a US citizen in 2018 – 'a communist at the highest level.' A Republican congressman from Tennessee demanded that Mamdani's citizenship be revoked for supporting 'terrorism.' (Mamdani gave his 'love' to the 'Holy Five', a group that had been convicted in 2008 of financially supporting Hamas, in a 2017 rap song.) Billionaire Trump gofer Bill Ackman deplored Mamdani's 'socialist/communist' policies. Eric Adams, Mamdani's incumbent rival, and Andrew Cuomo, another potential competitor, both denounce him for being 'anti-Semitic.' After declaring Mamdani 'unfit' to be mayor, the attention-hungry New York Times shamefully published a hacked report by an anonymous right-wing source revealing that Mamdani checked a box identifying as 'Black or African-American' on his college application to Columbia. In fact, that was the only box the application offered that came close to describing his background. It's easy to see why Mamdani is so reviled. As the immigrant son of immigrant parents, he can accomplish two things. He has the biographical equity to pull the Democratic party away from the enraging identity politics that opened the door to Trump and to move it toward cultural and economic issues that touch most people. And just as Trump is using the pretext of immigration to create the beginnings of a nationalist-populist police state, Mamdani can make the wholly disproportionate hammer-blows against immigrants symbolic of the harsh new forces the right is now ranging against ordinary Americans. The son of a prominent filmmaker and a Columbia professor, Mamdani is, predictably, being portrayed by the right as a coddled elite. But far from coddled, he seems vulnerably authentic, for all his studied iron poise. He didn't get into Columbia. The rap song seems more the result of artlessly transparent feeling than grim ideology. In the most Jewish city in the world outside of Israel, he refuses to renounce his call for a 'global intifada' and his courageous insistence on Palestinian dignity and rights, though he is emphatic about Israel's right to exist. All it would take is one ingratiating betrayal of his beliefs to win over Jews alarmed by his sympathies. But he won't do it. If anything, Mamdani, who also enjoys substantial Jewish support, recalls the stubborn, ferociously independent New York Jewish intellectuals and political activists of yore. He is as honest as Adams and Cuomo are dishonest and corrupt. The former cut a deal with Trump's Justice Department to avoid a criminal trial on charges of bribery; the latter, as New York governor, forced nursing homes to accept patients with Covid during the pandemic, then lied about the large number of deaths that followed. Cuomo also resigned as governor in the wake of numerous accusations of sexual harassment. This isn't to say there wouldn't be legitimate worries should Mamdani go on to win. Trump's Darwinian 'big, beautiful bill' has exposed right populism as the con job it always was. Mamdani has to prove that left populism is something more than rhetoric – something more than the toothless Occupy Wall Street protest movement 15 years ago. 'John Lindsay was the best mayor New York ever had before he took office,' a wag said about another romantic upstart mayor, whose lack of political judgment and skill ran the city into the ground in the early 1970s. Mamdani's objectives of freezing the rent on rent-stabilised apartments, doubling the city's minimum wage, implementing free buses, offering free childcare, opening city-owned grocery stores, using social workers instead of police to handle people who appear to be mentally ill and blocking ICE deportations would be a humane revolution in American morality. But his proposals require lots of money. As for redeploying the police, there is a reason Cuomo carried a majority of the black vote in the Democratic primary. Unlike most of Mamdani's supporters, who are well-heeled millennials and Zoomers living in exclusive Manhattan enclaves, materially struggling black people suffer more than other groups in New York from crime, just as they suffer more from police brutality. The leaders of Occupy Wall Street were a study in white privilege. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Mamdani understands the funds his reforms require. What Bill Ackman frantically calls Mamdani's 'communism' consists of Mamdani's intention to raise taxes by 2 percent on New Yorkers making over $1 million dollars per year. (Two percent of $1 million is $20,000; Ackman's Patek Phillippe is worth over $800,000.) The revenue would be a blessing on a city that Michael Bloomberg, when mayor, made unaffordable to all but the wealthiest by means of carefully engineered housing and tax policies. But it is New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, who has the only authority to raise taxes. She is not going to alienate the moneyed class. Still the 33-year-old Mamdani, with his quiet, radiantly defiant smile, is a spot of life in the zombie world of American public life, ruled by sclerotic old men, their spineless enablers and bloviating billionaire mediocrities like Ackman, Thiel and Musk who think their every word rings with profundity and could care less about the public good. The gathering forces of American darkness want Zohran Mamdani as dead as they are. One prays for him to go on, in part simply because the very worst people want him to stop. [See also: Trump's war without honour] Related
Extra.ie
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
The most controversial movies banned in Ireland
The most controversial films of all time have been revealed in a resurfaced list on a movie-review platform. Letterboxd is a brilliant website used to track, review and rate the movies you watch, all the while seeing what other people have to say about films — a great means of getting inspiration for your next watch! There is also a little known lists feature, where users can create lists such as the the best classics; the best movies of the year; the best 90-minute films and more. 1945 classic Mildred Pierce is an American melodrama/ film noir directed by Michale Curtiz and adapted from the book by James M. Cain. Pic: Getty Images One really interesting list is Banned Films, a look at 63 films throughout the years that have been banned in various countries across the world for differing reasons. Typically, the reasons are due to extreme violence or political reasons. In the list there are ten flicks that were banned in Ireland during a period of time. 1945 classic Mildred Pierce is an American melodrama/ film noir directed by Michale Curtiz and adapted from the book by James M. Cain. I Spit on Your Grave (1978) was banned due to scenes of graphic violence. In 2010, the movie was re-released with the ban re-instated. Pic: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock Mildred is a divorced mother who works to provide for her daughters but was initially banned due to the concerns about the permissive portrayal of adultery and sexual themes. The ban got lifted with the movie earning a PG rating post-ban. Similarly, The Big Sleep (released in 1946) was banned due to sexual references with the characters in the movie involved in pornography and sexual situations in the film. At the time, censorship practices in Ireland were heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, with the censorship board enlisted to protecting the morality of the public. I Spit on Your Grave (1978) was banned due to scenes of graphic violence. In 2010, the movie was re-released with the ban re-instated. At the time, the BBC reported that the Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) blocked the sale of the DVD due to the depiction of gross violence and cruelty towards humans. For the full list of 63 movies that have been banned for periods of time go here.
Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Another Simple Favour, review: Film noir sequel that's riper and slipperier than a brown banana
Film noir is a famously shadowy genre, but one of the great joys of 2018's A Simple Favour is that it less resembled The Big Sleep or Double Indemnity than a Real Housewives docusoap. From its sunny suburban setting to its cartoon-chic costumes, Paul Feig's comic adaptation of Darcey Bell's novel didn't just capture the pleasures of a schlocky page-turning mystery, but also the fun of tearing through one with an eyebrow raised. Every twist was equal parts slinky and ludicrous – and boy, did they look it. This even sillier, less memorable sequel, which is bypassing cinemas for Amazon Prime, stretches the approach to snapping point. Riper and slipperier than a brown banana, it packs Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick's eternal school-run frenemies off to Capri for the former's wedding: never mind that the last time we saw Lively's Emily, she'd just landed in prison for a 20-year stretch. This most fatale of femmes' early release has been secured by a rich and influential Italian fiancé (Michele Morrone) – an old flame who flickered back into view in the intervening years. True to psychotic drama-queen form, Emily asks Kendrick's Stephanie to be her maid of honour – and Stephanie, whose new career as a true-crime author could do with a publicity boost, warily accepts. Of course, she might end up murdered. But this online mumfleuncer knows there's power in #numbers – and the additional clicks the trip will bring to her livestream are too potentially lucrative to pass up. Since the release of the first film, Lively has weathered something of a domestic noir nightmare herself – an orchestrated cancellation campaign following a high-profile feud with Justin Baldoni, the director of her 2024 drama It Ends With Us. (Baldoni's lawyer described accusations from Lively in a legal complaint, as 'serious and categorically false'.) But that makes it doubly satisfying to see the actress on such raucously unhinged form here: there's something of Barbara Stanwyck in her weaponisation of glamour and bad-girl sexual ambiguity – and her outrageous wardrobe, again created by Renee Ehrlich Kalfus, is itself a plentiful source of shocks and punchlines. (While drifting through Capri incognita, she sports a sun hat the size of a radar dish.) As before, Kendrick is a winningly perky foil for Lively's mad machinations, and there's much fun to be had as both actresses snipe at one another from behind an increasingly tattered pretence of mutual bestie-ship. The mystery at hand is messier still: in an opening livestream, Stephanie announces she has been framed for the murder of Emily's new husband, who was somehow dispatched during the wedding banquet itself. But the plotting often mistakes wackiness for a lack of discipline. Promising supporting characters (not least a long-lost aunt played by Allison Janney) are feebly sketched, while the twists are sometimes arbitrary, sometimes obvious replicas of the original's various scandalous gambits. Yet Feig and his collaborators' poison-tipped instincts still hit the mark often enough: I had to stifle a guilty chuckle when one of Kendrick's prior true-crime scalps, a pervert who inveigled his way into a children's swimming club, is soberly referred to as 'the Speedo Paedo'. And the Kendrick-Lively double-act at its core remains a toxic treat. Pack these two off to St Tropez, Mustique, the Maldives, Skegness, wherever – I'll watch.
Boston Globe
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Geoff Nicholson, author of darkly comic novels, dies at 71
His Facebook profile once had a list of "liked" books whose first two titles were "Gravity's Rainbow" and "The Big Sleep," a thumbnail distillation of his own oeuvre of highbrow plundering of lowbrow culture. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Nicholson was a verbal jokester, whether in ambitious fiction or in more prosaic writing. For the 'About' page of his website, he annotated his own Wikipedia entry. In response to Wikipedia's assertion that his work was 'compared favorably' to that of Kingsley and Martin Amis, Will Self and Zadie Smith, Mr. Nicholson wrote, 'I don't recall anybody ever comparing me to Kingsley Amis, but I suppose they might have.' Advertisement One person who did compare him to Kingsley Amis, the midcentury British satirist, was The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, writing a 1997 review of Mr. Nicholson's best-known novel, 'Bleeding London.' "As he has done in the past," Kakutani wrote, "Mr. Nicholson nimbly weaves his eccentric characters' overlapping lives into a wacky, black-humored farce, a farce that combines the clever high jinks of an Alec Guinness Ealing comedy with the satirical wit of Kingsley Amis." In "Bleeding London," which was on the shortlist for the Whitbread Award, three protagonists are variously obsessed with mapping the city. (The novel inspired hundreds of photographers in 2014 to snap 58,000 pictures of London streets for an exhibition at City Hall.) Maps were a recurring theme of Mr. Nicholson's. In his novel 'The City Under the Skin' (2014), a kind of cartographic thriller, women are abducted and their backs tattooed with crude maps, before being freed into an unnamed dystopian city. One character is a clerk in a map store. Advertisement Mr. Nicholson accumulated maps for much of his life. He told The Los Angeles Times: 'I'm a bit of a serial obsessive in that I get deeply interested in things for a short time. And as a novelist, I'm always thinking, 'Is there a book in this?' " The protagonist of his novel "Hunters and Gatherers" (1994) is a bartender who is working on a book about oddball collectors and their heaps of stuff. 'Collecting is an act of appropriation,' the character observes, in what could be a vision statement for Mr. Nicholson. 'The world is arbitrary and disconnected. By starting a collection you start to make connections. You decide what matters and what's valuable. You make a neat world.' In the Times, Kakutani wrote, "Indeed, his own novel stands as a charming little testament to the ordering impulses of art." Other obsessions of Mr. Nicholson included VW bugs, which featured prominently in two novels, 'Still Life With Volkswagens' (1996) and 'Gravity's Volkswagen' (2009), and sexual fetishes. He was the author of 'Footsucker' (1995), a murder mystery starring an unapologetic foot fetishist, and 'Sex Collectors' (2006), a nonfiction work about connoisseurs and accumulators of pornography. Emily Nussbaum wrote in a Times review: "He's such an appealing writer that you want him to succeed. Sadly, Nicholson's chosen territory turns out to be surprisingly unsexy." Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former model who edited a fetishist magazine, Leg Show. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Hanson became the editor of sex-themed books for the luxury art publisher Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled in the 1960s kitsch of his home in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills. Advertisement Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson was born March 4, 1953, in Sheffield, England, in the industrial Midlands east of Manchester. He was the only child of Geoffrey and Violet Nicholson. His father was a carpenter. He studied English at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge and drama at Essex University. He published early stories in a literary magazine, Ambit, whose prose editor was J.G. Ballard, the author of dystopian science fiction novels. Mr. Nicholson succeeded Ballard in the role. In all, from 1987 to 2023, Mr. Nicholson published 17 novels and 10 works of nonfiction. He could be touchy about his prolificacy, which was sometimes mentioned by reviewers. "I've published 20 books in 22 years (some quite short), and I'd say that's not excessive, given that I don't have a day job," he wrote in an essay in the Times in 2009 about the fact that reviewers frequently mentioned his output. "But accurate or not, 'prolific' definitely didn't feel like an unalloyed compliment." An early marriage, to Tessa Robinson, ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Hanson. Gannon is his only survivor. She was one of the photographers on the 'Bleeding London' project, and Mr. Nicholson and she became a couple in 2018 when he moved back to England after his second divorce, to the village of Manningtree in Essex. In his later years, Mr. Nicholson's obsessions simmered down, from fetishism to strolling. He wrote memoir travelogues, for which he preferred ambulating locally to wilderness trekking. 'The Lost Art of Walking' (2008) was inspired by his habit of solving plot twists in his novels on long walks. In 'Walking in Ruins' (2013), the abandoned sites he explores include the faded environs of his youth in Sheffield. Advertisement In his final book, 'Walking on Thin Air: A Life's Journey in 99 Steps' (2023), Mr. Nicholson wrote: 'I go to places. I walk when I'm there, I look around, I write about what I see and feel. It's not the only thing I do with my life, but it's probably the best part.' The book was steeped in the knowledge that his life was likely to be shortened by cancer, though naturally he treated his circumstances more with gallows humor than with spiritual introspection. "Nicholson's writing career has been varied, admirable and courageous," Tom Zoellner wrote reviewing the memoir for The Los Angeles Review of Books. "He stops to notice uncommercial and even bizarre subjects, shunning well-traveled roads. He goes where he likes. He gets out often. Nobody can imitate him." This article originally appeared in
