No. 72: Young World is Already Here

Are You Ready for It?

When Zohran Mamdani was 12, I worked for his mother.

His mother being Mira Nair, the long-acclaimed director of the films Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay, The Namesake.

It was my first job after being fired as a pharmaceutical consultant — a tentative swerve into the world of the arts. I’d applied to Columbia Film School and been waitlisted, the Dean telling me point-blank that given my Ivy League education and sudden pivot from consulting, the committee assumed I was an aimless dilettante. Get work experience in film, he told me, then maybe reapply in a few years.

Which is why I found myself in Mira’s office a few months later, offered a position as her personal assistant.

“You’re not going to leave and go to film school all of a sudden?” she asked warily.

No, I promised. I wasn’t getting in anytime soon.

So I started work at Mirabai Films.

Six months later, Columbia Film School accepted me off the waitlist — telling me explicitly it was only because the school was so expensive, they’d lost too many of their accepted applicants. I was last on the list. Even so, the Dean said I’d be an idiot to come to his school. That I should reject my spot and stay working for Mira.

In theory, I agreed with him.

Only an idiot would leave Mira’s side.

And yet, I knew in my heart I had to go. An artist’s life was calling.

Twenty years later, the memory returns.

Because Mira’s son has just won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor at the age of 33, and barring any sudden twists, he’ll be the favorite to win in the November general election. The boy who once traipsed in and out of his mother’s office, poised to be the leader of America’s most storied city.

What I remember of Zohran from those days is that he had the exact same megawatt smile that captivated voters today.

But the more important takeaway is that he is not a unicorn dropped from the sky.

There is no question in my mind that the miracle of Zohran’s rise is a direct result of his parents. The sheer force of charisma and intelligence and drive passed from mother and father to son.

Power flowing down from Old to Young.

As it should be.

This is the point of youth. To take the baton from the ancestors and run, run, run.

It’s something I talk often about in this diary — and indeed have spent the last three years carving into YOUNG WORLD — namely the biological reality that old people die and need to make room for the young to succeed them.

Only that’s not happening in this world. The old are clinging to power longer and longer and not only obstructing the youth from rising, but literally borrowing against their future and gorging, glutting on the embers of the earth in order to enrich themselves in the waning years of their life.

It’s embarrassing, really. And I wrote YOUNG WORLD in a furious, years-long rage that the youth hadn’t caught onto the scam. That they were ping-ponging between Red and Blue looking for a savior and finding themselves stonewalled out of power again and again.

But then June 24th happened.

Andrew Cuomo, the very grumpy 67 year-old disgraced ex-governor and favorite to win the primary, dumped aside for a sunny, untested, unqualified kid.

A strange mirror to the inciting incident of the YOUNG WORLD novel, but more importantly — the canary in the coal mine.

The youth just figured out how to disrupt elections.

Qualifications don’t matter. Experience doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re on the side of the young.

And I’m telling you now, after writing 140,000 words in a book about it…

This is going to start happening a lot, lot more.

I happened to be in New York City on June 24th. The streets were crowded with teenagers and 20-somethings in Zohran t-shirts, crowding you at every corner, like bulls at Pamplona, running you towards the polls. The energy was buzzy, infectious, young. I wasn’t even confident these kids knew all of Z’s platform or had a clue what they were voting for. But they wanted to be part of something. And when the young identify with something or believe in their youth as a cause… they are a juggernaut that cannot be stopped.

Two other thoughts come to mind. One, that Donald Trump is fairly unstoppable as a political force, because he has no ideology and no shame, a combination which makes him unassailable. But he does have one Achilles heel… He’s old! And no one young has been given enough power yet to take him on. Hillary, Kamala, Schumer, Jeffries, Newsom… Maybe young next to Trump. But still: old!

Mamdani is something else entirely. If Trump picks a fight with him, he’ll learn his own biological reality. That when Old is pitted against Young… Old looks Old.

In fact, Trump tried his luck after Mamdani’s win — bloviating that Zohran “looks TERRIBLE” and his voice is “grating,” even though Mamdani’s honey-smooth voice and handsome smile launched a half-million votes. And truth be told, it’s all the old can do against the rizz of the young. Lie. Gaslight. Shake their fists at the sky. Like they’ve done for hundreds of years, believing the young are too fractured, too stupid, too lazy to organize against them.

Not anymore.

I’m thinking of Wimbledon now, which sounds like a silly digression, but the same tournament between Old and Young is playing out this week on its grass-court lawns.

Novak Djokovic, pushing 40 years old (which is 80 in athlete years), has won everything there is to win in tennis. 24 grand slams, an Olympic gold medal, 100+ tournaments. Meanwhile, the new gen is here, represented by Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, both well under 25.

I was at Wimbledon this past week, watching Djokovic play, desperate to keep up with these youngsters and prove himself supreme. And indeed: he does beat Alcaraz and Sinner sometimes. But the trend lines are clear — his time is coming to an end, the youth eager to dispose of him.

Sports makes clear what every other arena seems to have trouble accepting. That at some point, there is a futility in holding onto power, in pursuing the crown, because your legacy is already cemented and the work is done. Djokovic might win more tournaments, even more grand slams, but I just keep thinking of Tom Brady, and how he played football a few seasons too long, and lost his marriage, dignity, and chipped away at that hard-earned legacy in the process.

Granted, every athlete should retire on their own terms. It’s their choice and right. But is it the love of the game that drives the Old to keep going? Or is it the delusion that they can outpace youth forever? The same delusion that makes old politicians see their young successors as the enemy?

All of these are questions wrestled with in YOUNG WORLD and I landed on some pretty surprising conclusions. But perhaps the most surprising conclusion is that the book I’ve written doesn’t appear to be a novel anymore. It seems to be a living handbook to an unfolding revolution on the verge of going mainstream. In the right tinderbox at the right time: that young teenager or 20-something at your office or in your classroom or even at your dinner table…? They might have real power, real soon.

Your turn.

Should the Old make way for Youth? Or is up to the Youth to revolt and take their place?

Until next week —