I was wondering what Mamdani's first executive order would be, and I'm not disappointed by this. He has wiped off the books EVERY Eric Adams executive order issued on or after September 26, 2024, the day Adams was indicted on federal bribery charges.

"It has a deep red binding with a simple floral medallion and is written in black and red ink. The script is plain and readable, suggesting it was created for everyday use rather than ceremonial display. 'The importance of this Quran lies not in luxury, but in accessibility.'"

If you are a huge nerd like me, you may be wondering, "what about No. 6 trains that use the old City Hall Station to turn around at the end of their runs? What will they do during the Mamdani swearing-in?" Fear not.

Eric Adams is going to use cryptocurrency to fight antisemitism. Eric Adams is going to use samurai swords to fight food waste. Eric Adams is going to use 100 rubber duckies to fight prostate cancer. I would believe literally any combo of words hellgatenyc.com/eric-adams-s...

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

EXCLUSIVE: @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social will be sworn in as mayor on midnight on January 1 inside the old abandoned City Hall subway station, saying that he sees the venue as a symbol for the aims of his upcoming administration.

The latest version of the NJ Senate low-speed e-bike registration, license and insurance bill proposes a 1 year ban on selling of e-bikes over the internet. The legislature has 3 more work days to ram this bill through. www.njleg.state.nj.us/bill-search/...

Agrivoltaics boost crop yields even when the solar panels aren’t generating power. New research from Canada shows that shading crops with elevated solar panels creates a cooler, wetter microclimate that can lift yields and improve performance across dozens of crops. buff.ly/6eqClf1 #ShareGoodNewsToo

Insane but true fact: making US roads as safe as Canadian, Australian, or European roads would save more lives than eliminating murder from the US.

We are thrilled to partner with @jctheatercenter.bsky.social to host an evening with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, the co-hosts of @thewaroncars.bsky.social podcast and authors of Life After Cars at White Eagle Hall on Wednesday, January 21. Tickets: www.eventim.us/wafform.aspx...

🧵 Our mutual aid hub has been a HUGE draw for our immense volunteer base, many of whom have never wanted to be involved politics before now. This model isn’t just about the immediate impacts: It’s about showing our values, building a community, and reaching voters — without selling our soul!

Every Democrat running for office needs to promise investigations and full prosecutions from top to bottom, remove its funding bloat then break up the agency and distribute its core remaining useful functions across other agencies.

here's a list of readings on the myth of job replacement by AI. i might turn this into a blog post as a sort of lesson plan for anyone who wants to use it, but it's just a reminder that every time we see "self-driving" cars or delivery robots, invisibilized workers are always behind the scenes.

Robot door closing as a service, LA area. Waymo can only automate some human driver tasks, needing many & various ppl to mitigate the residual robot defects. Without them, nearly every Waymo robot would get stuck before needing a charge. Human dependent robots. OP: tiktok.cesarroadsideassistance

The science breakthrough of 2025 is Solar Energy, not because it is new but because of how successful its deployment has been. This year renewable energy surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide. Hopeful sign for what’s to come. www.science.org/content/arti...

I can’t decide if the “Dream Big” tagline of MARTY SUPREME is intentionally ironic or not.

“Enough, Baris Weiss, your opinions suck!” youtu.be/GsWj7Q5iPus

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (April)

“Enough, Baris Weiss, your opinions suck!” youtu.be/GsWj7Q5iPus

This slots into a wide discussion (beyond AVs) about “can AI do XYZ”, primarily in the sense that humans have expert bias about billions of processes we perform without conscious awareness of the complexity of our day-to-day manoeuvres and accounting for infinite variables/adapting to novelty

This is the story Bari Weiss apparently doesn't want you to hear. Trump has been sending people to the camps. talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things...

Americans & Europeans needlessly exposing African babies to preventable diseases just to see if they can find something that would justify their preexisting antivaccine beliefs is not only unscientific and actually anti-science, it is very much reminiscent of colonialist, racist human rights abuses

Back when I was writing regularly about baseball, circa 2012, I crunched the numbers & the likelihood of becoming a tenure-track professor in one of the MLA disciplines was almost precisely the same as getting from a college baseball team to a MLB roster. Nothing has gotten easier since then.

There's one old-school "urbanist" idea that I think still holds weight - a neighborhood is safer, is better, will thrive with more "eyes on the street". Rounding up/pushing out street vendors makes everything less safe and it's not just for providing food to tired, hungry, and inebriated people.

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

I don’t know how anyone can still talk about “the AI revolution” with a straight face. Reuters story about a railroad company that has sunk $300,000 into “developing AI products” and appears to have made…a chatbot that doesn’t work? archive.is/2025.12.17-0...

Due to a windstorm-related utility power outage at the NIST, time may soon be destroyed

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

The portal invites community members to apply for various positions within the new administration. jcitytimes.com/solomon-laun...

At 1 square mile, the City of Hoboken is basically the size of a neighborhood, and via its policies was doing the equivalent of putting up a gate barring residents of neighboring more diverse cities from seeking opportunity there.

I'm not sure if people realize the murder strikes are taking place across a large region. It's quite staggering. www.newsweek.com/map-us-strik...

I had to read it again.

Prints available here! www.cougarmagic.com/Prints/i-n7K...

I guess this has probably already gone viral somewhere but I am simply dying at this picture of a bear that looks like it hired a photographer to do a glamour shoot

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Look, there’s a simple solution to private equity buying up and enshittifying the software that keeps us safe: a handful of municipal fire/rescue departments should team up, collaboratively build and share better software, and release it into the public domain. This is a common pattern!

Articles about substack’s nazi problem: www.anildash.com//2024/11/19/... www.thehandbasket.co/p/substack-a... thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-... www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv... (Free link: archive.is/uyugO)

Let's be totally clear here: not only does Substack let Nazis host their shit; they actively encourage them, sometimes paying them six figure salaries to host their shit. Substack actively courts Nazis to their platform. Ghost and beehiiv will actively help you move off that platform.

Everytime I read something like this it makes me so angry. The fact that a society has been letting this happen for so long and so often that there are now regularly people who live through a second mass shooting before even finishing their education is the most shocking indictment of US politics

"artificially slow" sir you're driving a 4 ton pile of metal around, none of this is natural

I took a detour to the edge of the city to take a picture of these amazing sundogs over Winnipeg caused by ice crystals blowing around in the sky.

A tiny trial in New York has shown that personalized mRNA vaccines can provoke massive, lasting immune responses against pancreatic cancer, even as sweeping federal cuts now threaten the fragile labs required to produce them. theintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-breakthr...

100% agree. Ironically, this is the only version of "broken windows" that actually makes any sense, because it has to do with the individual behavior of one person going from getting away with small crimes to getting away with big crimes, instead of being some vague theory about general contagion.

Air pollution dropped not just in the congestion pricing zone, but across the 5 boroughs and greater metro area. Quote from article "This tells us that congestion pricing didn't simply relocate air pollution to the suburbs by rerouting traffic.”

We're thrilled that Kathryn Garcia has been named the next head of the Port Authority! She has a proven track record of working regionally, advancing big infrastructure, and collaboration across all levels. (We're also lucky she's a friend — here she is at our 2025 Assembly with our board)

Warner Bros. has accumulated $53 billion in debt from four failed mergers. Its CEO will "earn" a $500 million payday if the company sells itself. And lurking over all of this is an attempt to roll back the clock to a time of Hollywood's vertical integration era: prospect.org/2025/12/10/w...

In addition to all of the other benefits already reported about NYC congestion pricing, "In the first six months of the program, air pollution – in the form of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller – dropped by 22% in the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ)" news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

The big @citibikenyc.bsky.social expansion in southern @jerseycity.bsky.social has resumed in earnest! At least 7 more new stations have been installed and activated this week, all in Greenville; check the app to see when they are balanced with available bikes. The ~50% expansion … 1/3 🧵