When Zohran Mamdani was a 24-year-old amateur rapper living rent-free in his parents’ Upper West Side apartment, he was interviewed on a podcast celebrating his alma mater, the prestigious and selective Bronx HS of Science, where he made clear that he was too good for a mainstream New York City public school.

Only the best would do for this privileged, Uganda-born son of a tenured Columbia professor and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.

In 2016, he told the oral history podcast “Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories” that, in eighth grade, while he was deciding which tony private school would have the pleasure of his enrollment for the next four years, he sat for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test on a whim.

He had developed “a small idea of maybe Stuyvesant” — an even more select

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