February 10, 2026

THE BIG STORY

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe for New York Magazine

In December, the film director Mira Nair was in India preparing for her upcoming feature, Amri, about the life of the Indo Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, whom she called “our Frida Kahlo.” She said these whirlwind weeks, which involved her jetting from Amritsar, next to the Pakistan border, to Kochi, near the subcontinent’s southern tip, were “deeply painstaking but thrilling because this particular film has taken me four years to cook and now we are lifted off.” The trip to India, she said, was also her “first time being in the rest of the world” since her 34-year-old son, Zohran Mamdani, won election as mayor of New York in November. “I’m in alleys and villages, and suddenly I hear people running behind me, shouting, ‘Mira Nair?!’ They’re young.” And what they were yelling was, “‘We love your movies! But your son!’”

Rebecca Traister spent time with maybe the most globally famous living Indian filmmaker to tease out the connection between Nair’s career as an artist and her son’s as a politician. 

ARCHITECTURE

Photo: FXCollaborative

The Kingsbridge Armory is the kind of place you’d be more apt to find in a children’s book than across from a billiards bar in the Bronx. The glowering, crenellated castle has been abandoned for 30 years. In a city willing to displace a community garden or a newsstand to claw back a few extra feet, the Armory’s yawning emptiness seems like poking through your medicine cabinet and finding an alternate universe behind it. And after decades of futile wishes, maybe the place is finally ready for a new life — not today, not tomorrow, but in a few feverish years. “It’ll be a safe and gorgeous version of people throwing raves in fucked-up warehouses,” producer Mike Luba, who’s working for Live Nation to make that a reality, told architecture critic Justin Davidson.  

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LIVING SITUATIONS

Illustration: Emma Erickson

In this edition of "Apartment Department," Clio Chang responds to a reader who has been wanting to buy a brownstone with their best friend: "For something like this to work, you and your friend have to go in on the same page. Not impossible, but immeasurably harder than it sounds!"

THE CITY POLITIC

Photo: Richard Drew/AFP/Getty Images

Mayor Zohran Mamdani had less than a month on the job when the January 26 shooting of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old man with schizophrenia, in his family’s Queens home, underscored the urgent need for a new approach to how the city deals with people with mental illness. Chakraborty is lucky to have survived the shooting, which looked a lot like the way cops killed Deborah Danner. And Kawaski Trawick. And Win Rozario. And Saheed Vassell. And many other New Yorkers over the years.

Mamdani and a majority of City Council members have promised to fix a system that has been broken for decades. It’s up to the rest of us to make them keep their word, argues Errol Louis. 

Photo: Jeremy Liebman

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The life and music of the murderous 16th-century madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa belong in a horror film — or, maybe better yet, in a live performance by the Gesualdo Six, staged by Bill Barclay and choreographed by Will Tuckett to dramatize the story’s sublime creepiness. —Justin Davidson

Set in the late 19th century, Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 dramedy is an indie marvel about two Jewish immigrants who move here from Eastern Europe and find their relationship challenged by the temptations of a bustling Lower East Side. —Alison Willmore

This series of interconnected tales about illness — “the night side of life,” per Susan Sontag — promises a folk-infused meditation on sickness and care-giving as well as the chance to see Mary Testa onstage, which is always a good idea. —Jackson McHenry

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