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.
