Who Is Writing This Stuff And Do We Really Have To Endure It For Another Three Years, Eleven Months And 21 Days?

The “eager debrief” sounds like something that happens on parents’ weekend at Summer Stock Junior:

New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was elected on an affordability agenda focused on free buses and child care. On Friday, he extended that agenda to the arts, handing out vouchers for free tickets to a long-running theater festival of experimental work and declaring that culture should be more accessible to the city’s residents.

Mamdani — the son of the filmmaker Mira Nair, a onetime rapper and a sometime patron of comedy, music and theater — this week prevailed upon the annual Under the Radar festival, which is running through Jan. 25, to make 1,500 free tickets available. And on his ninth day in office, he stood on Hillel Place in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, handing out cards with QR codes for those tickets to anyone who wanted them.

“The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said later, explaining the initiative during a news conference at one of the festival’s venues, Brooklyn College’s Leonard and Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts.

Then again, maybe he’s just leaning into the theater kid tag . . .