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The new Mayor of New York and at just 34, the youngest since 1892, is sworn in. He is the first Muslim and Indian American to lead the nation's largest city. Zohran Mamdani was born in Uganda, Africa, to parents of Indian descent and it was a childhood filled with bird song and nature. He was seven years old when his family moved to New York, to Manhattan's Upper West Side and that's where Mamdani began to make his mark. He started making music as rapper, Mr Cardamom but after releasing only a few songs, it seemed politics was a better fit.

Zohran Mamdani ran an impressive campaign, recruiting an army of volunteers 100,000 strong to pound the pavements and knock on doors. His social media videos in multiple languages credited with vastly increasing voter turnout from a range of South Asian communities. A left-wing democratic socialist, his message was laser focused on affordability; he promised to freeze the rents and make buses free, all paid for by a tax on New Yorkers making over $1 million per year. But now he's won the election can he actually deliver on those promises? Mark Coles hears from Mamdani's mother the filmmaker Mira Nair, colleagues and journalists to find out what shaped the man making history.

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Just in time for January, I joined NPR’s “Life Kit” to talk about New Year’s resolutions, why they fail, and a more effective way to build better habits and make real progress in 2026.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Visit Gretchen's website to learn more about Gretchen's best-selling books, products from The Happiness Project Collection, and the Happier app.

Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices.

One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?” It’s a question I got from a book of the same name, by Stephen and Martine Batchelor. In that book, they are describing an approach to Buddhist meditation built on the cultivation of doubt and wonder. You can see that as a spiritual practice, but it’s also an intellectual and ethical one. It is, for me, a practice that has a lot of bearing on politics and journalism.

Stephen Batchelor’s latest book, “Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times,” explores those dimensions of doubt more fully. And so I wanted to have him on the show to discuss the virtues of both certainty and uncertainty, the difficulty of living both ethically and openly. You can see this as a conversation about our inner lives or our outer lives, but of course they are one. And Batchelor, as you’ll hear, is just lovely to listen to.

Mentioned:

Buddha, Socrates, and Us by Stephen Batchelor

What Is This? by Martine Batchelor and Stephen Batchelor

Ethics of Care by Carol Gilligan

Book Recommendations:

Children of a Modest Star by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman

Work Like a Monk by Shoukei Matsumoto

The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Bryan Washington joins Deborah Treisman to read “A Small Flame,” by Yiyun Li, which was published in The New Yorker in 2017. Washington, a winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, is the author of the story collection “Lot” and the novels “Memorial,” “Family Meal,” and “Palaver,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2025.

We’re taking a quick break for the holidays, but in the spirit of New Year reflection, we’re sharing our very first episode of Question Everything. 

Brian talks to fellow journalist, Gay Alcorn, who called his most well-known work – the hit podcast S-Town – “morally indefensible.”

You can read Gay’s column here. Subscribe to our newsletter to read Gay’s full reaction to this episode. 

You can listen to S-Town here. 

If you’re having thoughts of suicide, please reach out for help by dialing 988 or clicking here. 

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. 

This episode originally aired on September 11th, 2024.

Adrian Tchaikovsky came on the show to talk about how he writes fantasy and science fiction. He won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his book, Children of Time, and has written more than 60 books and novellas.

He spends his life thinking about how to make believable worlds and how to build characters that have weight to them. My favorite thing is how he writes a fight scene, how he thinks through the pacing and all the action. If you want to write imaginative stories filled with wonder and fantasy, you're going to like this episode.

About the host

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on. Tom and Tom discuss the machinery – narrative, theoretical, economic, psychological and literal (those windmills) – which underpins Cervantes’ masterpiece.

This is a bonus episode from the Close Readings series. To listen to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Karl Miller on ‘Don Quixote’:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n03/karl-miller/andante-capriccioso⁠

Michael Wood: Crazy Don

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n15/michael-wood/crazy-don⁠

Gabriel Josipovici on Cervantes’ life:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n05/gabriel-josipovici/the-hard-life-and-poor-best-of-cervantes⁠

Robin Chapman: Cervantics

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n16/robin-chapman/cervantics⁠

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Yanis Varoufakis about the unsettling rise of AI-generated deepfakes, using Varoufakis’s own experience as one of the most synthesised figures on YouTube as a chilling case study. The conversation delves into the "techno-feudal" power structures of Big Tech, where algorithms prioritise engagement and "rent-seeking" over truth, allowing misinformation to spread rapidly while the victims struggle to reclaim their own digital identities.

Moving beyond the personal, they explore an imminent future in which audiovisual evidence can no longer be trusted, debating whether this will lead to a new era where arguments are judged solely on their merits, or a return to a medieval-like state where high-quality information becomes a luxury for the elite while the masses are left to navigate a sea of fabricated content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seventy-five years ago, Radio Free Europe started broadcasting news to audiences behind the Iron Curtain.

It initially broadcast to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania and programmes were produced in Munich, Germany.

It now reaches nearly 50 million people a week, in 27 languages in 23 countries.

Rachel Naylor speaks to former deputy director, Arch Puddington.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.

(Photo: An engineer at Radio Free Europe in 1960. Credit: Bettmann)