EDITOR'S LETTER

I first met Charli xcx in May 2024 when we cohosted a party in New York's Floral District ahead of a new album launching the following month. Charli booked a DJ I'd never heard of who called himself The Dare and, despite a dress code that suggested florals, she wore head-to-toe black. Everyone exited the party with armfuls of peonies, tulips, cherry blossoms, and ranunculus, but nobody, not even Charli herself, could have left with an understanding of what that summer had in store for her.

Eighteen months later, we know that Brat was less an album than an organism, an artistic edifice that built on itself over and over, with continuous remix releases up through a fateful weekend in July 2024, when it reached the presidential election. Kamala Harris was brat—until she wasn't. Like a Marvel franchise, it wasn't until Brat summer entered its second year that Charli herself brought the era to a close, stripping it all down into an arena tour that starred her utterly alone onstage—no band, no dancers, no backup singers—inhaling, exhaling, and literally licking up the cultural power of the phenomenon she had conjured.

So, what does a brat grow up to be? A newlywed and a movie star, so far. With no fewer than seven him projects and one new husband, Charli has officially started writing her next chapter, and we are thrilled to capture her in that moment.

Speaking of cultural phenomena: The week before I started at Vanity Fair, Zohran Mamdani, at age 33, won the Democratic nomination in the race for New York City mayor. If he wins in November, he will be the first avowedly democratic socialist in the job, and the first Muslim. Reactions—ranging from jubilation in Dimes Square to fear and loathing in the Hamptons—were as expected. Except on the very far right. Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene each praised Mamdani, if for only a fleeting moment, regarding his victory as a blow to establishment elites. (The Georgia congresswoman also posted on X a picture of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burka, ensuring that Islamophobia overshadowed any more nuanced stance.) What everyone could agree uponwith certainty is that Mamdani's ascendance has been fascinating, and important.

This month, as the general election approaches, special correspondent James Pogue brings us a profile of Mamdani ("Captain America?" starting on page 52) that is as expansive in its approach as it is incisive in its personal details. James spent several days hitting the sidewalks with Mamdani—a candidate so peripatetic, he is sometimes literally running for mayor—to discover that his similarities to JFK do not end at youth and mediagenic star quality. Like our first Irish Catholic president, James writes, Mamdani has the ability to find voters in "a bloc of poor immigrants whose values and religion had long been seen as dangerous, alien, and simply un-American." Let it be said that in 2025, it's shocking what values do and do not pass for American.

MARK GUIDUCCI

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