In Borges' Labyrinths, the first story introduced to us is the epistolary "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Radiating the aforementioned author's pathos, it begins with a mystery: the hunt for the fictional country of Uqbar, which then devolves into a pedagogical study of the planet Tlön, the subject of Uqbar's folklore. As we reach the story's conclusion, the narrator realizes that the imagined reality, albeit manufactured as a Tower of Babel allegory by a drunk billionaire, has actually begun to invade the world, due to its language founded in neologistic idealism. Coming to Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected Mayor of New York City has effectively become the world's most popular politician within the last year. Not only is he considered America's mayor at this point, but he has become the fresh face of change for a great deal of youth across the world. He represents an optimism in politics that had been missing for a lot of people for a long time. Lastly, and my most beloved, the New York Knicks. The Knicks have won the 2025–26 NBA championship, ending a 53-year title drought — the last won in 1973 on the excellent play of basketball legends Clyde Frazier and Willis Reed. Apart from the entertainment of the games themselves, the world got to witness an outpouring of emotion from the large and passionate fandom (including me, who wrote interpretative poetry about Jalen Brunson's eyes). The large watch parties powered by unbridled optimism, and what seemed like public-friendly messaging from New York's political elite, made it unlike any other win in the city's history. It truly brought New York together. My reason for thinking about all three things together rests on the simple notion embedded at the heart of Borges' story: is it possible to will a reality into existence?
Before digging into the meat and potatoes, we must first grapple with Borges' conception of Tlön. The idea is to take consistent idealism structured around Berkeley's esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, or, to be is to be a rumor and then ask what would happen if it turned out to be the true structure of the world. Tlön has no nouns, and that compresses metaphysics into syntax. It is a language built entirely around perception: a thing unperceived is a thing that ceases to be. It has no fixed center, and its language changes with its geography. It remains entirely dependent on there being no central foundation. Much as Derrida theorizes, it persists as a system of differences. Central to this concept is the hrön. Because reality on Tlön is mental, expecting an object can bring it into being. Borges's example is of two people looking for a lost pencil; the second finds not the original but a second pencil. That conjured object is a hrön (plural hrönir): the patient counterfeits of longing. In this world there is no line between finding something and making it, and so to search for a thing is to create the thing itself.
Georges Sorel, in Reflections on Violence, writes about the political myth. He calls it a mobilizing fiction that does not need to be accurate but rather creates the conditions for a praxis, a fiction that moves people to act. Its job makes no predictive claim; it does not forecast, it mobilizes. Sport is the purest version of this idea. The Knicks fanbase has been galvanized for decades around a single end-goal — the championship — for which there was no material guarantee and mostly counter-evidence. We are a proud team, but we have not always been a winning one. The championship is the hrön in its purest form: the object produced at the far end of a half-century of expectant, patient searching. The 2026 championship is not the one people in 1973 were promised, nor the one from the Patrick Ewing teams, and definitely not the ones from the Carmelo years. It is an entirely different object. A copy of a copy that deforms across generations, until an accidental purity appears and shows a line of clarity. Each season of heartbreak warped that expectation further, until it was reshaped into something the original mourners could not have pictured. I know that at some point it becomes fashionable to shame the people who keep saying "We did this," but I do not choose to live in a world of such barren rationality. Even though the cold hard truth is forty-five points off Brunson's hand, decades of belief filled the arena, funded the team, and solidified the home-court atmosphere wherever the Knicks played.
When it comes to the political aspect, the drought of hope for the Knicks is the same one that exists with politicians at large. The renter who has stopped expecting the rent to fall and the fan who no longer expects his team in the playoffs are managing the same exercise: rehearsing the same small renunciation, a pre-emptive surrender that protects one from the heartbreak of expectation. When Mamdani's strategists planned a campaign that felt like a Sidetalk video after a Knicks win, they were able to channel that untapped hrön through him. And yet, his optimism is also itself a copy of a copy, a deformed inheritance of Occupy and the Sanders campaigns and every progressive hope that has curdled before it. One cogent point here is Borges' theme of yielding. For most of its length, "Tlön" is a story about the time before the yield, when the invented world is merely an eccentric set of documents in a library that reality serenely ignores. The decades of loss, the post-Covid loss of NYC staples, and the shuttering of some of its most premier cultural institutions behave the same way. The willed city and the willed championship exist only as documents, an imagined New York the real one declines to become. Yielding is the rare event in which the document overtakes the fact. The resignation holds true for most years, but the breaking of realism is inevitable one day. It is not automatically a virtue or a vindication; it is the giddy instant immediately before triumph or resignation arrives and it is always difficult to tell, from inside the crack, which one is coming. The danger is not that the city has gotten a Mayor it is proud of and a trophy in his first term. The danger comes from those two instances when a city is tempted to seduce reality. To mistake itself for the place where the wanted-world and the imagined city finally come alive.
In Borges' story, the encyclopedia is the mechanism by which a totalizing document disseminates the invented world through a society until people inhabit it as reality. Mamdanistan is its own optimistic encyclopedia: the campaign, its insistence on joy, its throng of fervent supporters. The Knicks follow the same line of accumulated near-misses and expectations. At the center of all this, the Mayor offers an infinitely pertinent quote: "As a fan, I didn't want to jinx it. As mayor, we'd been preparing the logistics." The jinx is the shadow of the hrön with its superstitious, left-handed twin. If the hrön is the object summoned by expectation, the jinx is the folk-conviction that expectation, voiced too confidently, can repel that object and make it flee. Both stem from the same idealist intuition: that mind and outcome are coupled, that what you believe leaks into what occurs. Mamdani is the culmination of expectation, not just for a great number of New Yorkers but for a great many progressives who believe change can genuinely occur. The Knicks are the same as a deep, long breath the city has held, finally let out. The Canyon of Heroes is the one place and hour in which New York's imagined self and its real self briefly share coordinates: Anderson's imagined community made physically visible for a single morning the color of confetti, a single believing body, convened by the mayor who authored the belief.
There is one cynical nerve left in my body, however, and it twitches in the direction of Ernst Bloch who insists that the wanted-object can be a latency called the "Not-Yet." Even though it is present in its conditions as a possibility, it uses hope as the engine that perceives and actualizes it rather than the delusion that fabricates it. One can argue that the fan's hope was perception, reading off the team's recent playoff successes; and perhaps, on some level, an affordable New York can be read off the same way. On the other hand, the problem at the crux remains: from inside the hope, Bloch's Not-Yet and the hrön are phenomenologically identical. The real latency and the fabricated object feel exactly the same to the person who is hoping. You cannot tell whether you are perceiving something that was always there or summoning something that was not.