Coming soon: affliction-free day of atonement!

In which Bill de Blasio showed up before I did (!) and had insightful things to say about the Mamdani moment and more.

The Eric Adams years have been very good to real estate developers, who today are one step closer to claiming the Red Hook ports and soon will have a shot at the area of Long Island City Amazon wanted for HQ2.

Curtis Sliwa crossed paths with Daniel Penny on the subway while @smaldo.bsky.social was reporting this story. Sliwa shook Penny's hand and remarked: "You run into everyone in the subway."

I think @justinbrannan.bsky.social just killed the Coney Island casino bid. www.brooklynpaper.com/op-ed-coney-...

Blaming his dismal standing on the Campaign Finance Board’s refusal to give him public matching funds is exactly the kind of nonsense that sunk him in the first place.

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A big piece of unfinished business for Eric Adams: after many false starts it looks like the Brooklyn Marine Terminal will be going to a task force vote, clearing way for housing development along the industrial waterfront south of Brooklyn Bridge Park. @smaldo.bsky.social has the scoop.

It’s a @spectrumnewsny1.bsky.social night for me, talking politics with Bobby Cuza and Gerson Borrero. Inside City Hall is free for anyone to stream on ny1.com from now till Election Day! Airing at the lucky hours: 7 & 11

Genting is running the table. It runs the existing Resorts World in Queens and will withstand a vote on its expansion to full gaming, while other contenders for the three new state licenses fall to community opposition.

A constructive sizing up of rent-stabilized housing and how to help keep it affordable while not letting it fall apart. And a perfect metaphor: "We can no longer afford to treat other policy objectives as if they’re freeloading guests at a resort who can sign their bar tab and charge it to housing."

Truly, I will volunteer proofreading for @mta.info. If you can say what’s wrong with this picture, join me!

The Eric Adams fundraiser charged with bribing her way into a city shelter program for her Queens hotels is now also charged with helping the program boss liquidate part of that alleged bribe — a $107,000 Mercedes — as the feds closed in.

Seeking asylum in the U.S. has been hell for anti-Putin activists trying to get out of Russia, locked up for months under Biden and now facing Trump administration judges dismissive of their persecution claims.

Who's giving to the Eric Adams reelection super PAC? Real estate developers getting City Hall help on their projects. From @gregbsmithnyc.bsky.social

Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work

A longtime anti-gun violence advocate and current campaign proxy for Eric Adams got fired from his Adams administration job for social media posts calling Charlie Kirk racist.

Digging into the New York Times mayoral candidate poll: Cuomo actually does better than anyone on the “would be an effective mayor” question but it doesn’t matter, many of those same respondents say they do not plan to vote for him. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The current Hakeem Jeffries district map only highlights why he's holding out on Mamdani: aside from any national party concerns, the bottom half of the banana is Republican-friendly territory.

We’re looking for a developer-journalist to join @propublica.org’s News Applications team. You would write code, analyze data, build interactives — all in the service of public interest journalism. Check it out: job-boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/j...

Happy first day of school, NYC!

I've been laid up this week with COVID at an auspicious time. My one vaccine booster was in early 2022 when my job required it. I thought: many people were getting infected despite vaccination and I'd already had COVID, so why bother? I'll tell you why: these symptoms are brutal for brain and body.

Seems as good a moment as any to ask why Eric Adams, a career law enforcer, was so worried about the criminal charges his lawyers said were baseless that he torched his prized achievement. Why such lengths to avoid a trial? What else might have come out?

New York’s strict ballot laws are no joke. Even if they do get jobs as an inducement to suddenly leave the state, Adams and Sliwa will likely have to fight to get their names off. And I don’t see Sliwa ending his New York story like this.

My 2025 contribution to the Summer & THE CITY series is, once again, about how I fell in with some awesome people by the water in Brooklyn to learn how to do new life-enhancing things, and you can too!

Jesse Hamilton hitched his star to Eric Adams two decades ago and is now charged in the latest corruption cases to rock City Hall. The indictment portrays an operative who kept his well-paid job at City Hall even as scrutiny grew over apparent favors for administration benefactors.

Trash ethics: a helpful qualification for advancement in the NYPD.

Always a pretty wild reminder of the scale of NYC’s school system to see the class of new teachers assembled in the same place

I caught Trump taking a homeowner tax exemption on his Trump Tower suite while living in the White House. If falsely claiming a residence for financial benefit is cause for dismissal… www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/u...

Wore this @thecity.nyc shirt to Russian shoe repair guy in Brooklyn to get new holes in my Birkenstocks. He reads my shirt: “What’s that, fake news?” - No sir. “Don’t blame you for what then?” Corruption. “But we all corrupt in the head.” - So what do I owe you? “Whatever you want my friend.”

It was $300, not $160, and there are very clearly chips still in the bag. Please use this moment to update your priors about the chip incident

Including exclusive view from @katiehonan.bsky.social: chips still in the bag.

How the sausage is made and delivered, by @clauirizarry.bsky.social.

NYC DEP/DOB make it significantly more expensive to replace these lead pipes than elsewhere in the U.S., by banning plastic piping – the cheapest and easiest to work with material – at the behest of the plumbing companies and unions, which want the work that comes from harder-to-use metal piping.

NYC is going to be extremely hard-pressed to get property owners to replace more than 100K lead service lines connecting the city water system to homes. @ekwalsh.bsky.social reports on evidence that the toxin is widely leaching into drinking water.

Meanwhile...the NYPD is moving its school safety division to be managed by the head of its uniformed officers. It's been in community affairs and had previously been slated to move out of the NYPD entirely.

Indictment is out against Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Eric Adams' former chief advisor, and associates, w/multiple threads here @thecity.nyc has been covering. One co-defendant, Tian Ji Li, headed Adams' 2021 Flushing, Queens, campaign office with Winnie Greco, she of the bag-of-chips cash.

In my lifetime, I have read probably 10,000 stories about municipal government in some place or other… and this is easily in the top 5. www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/w...

Having trouble giving away your cash? Why not donate it to THE CITY donorbox.org/nycdonate

I donate money to @thecity.nyc pretty regularly but I am going to throw another donation at them for that stunning report about chip-based bribery and I strongly encourage other people to donate as well: donorbox.org/nycdonate

As someone who had covered Asian American communities for a few years, I've never been bribed with cash by any of my sources

What a way to end my work day: arranging for law enforcement to pick up a potato chip bag stuffed with cash.

Manhattan DA is bringing another round of public integrity cases against officials in Eric Adams' administration and donors who influenced them. We'll find out tomorrow what the exact charges are.

Ukrainian war refugees in the U.S. are losing work permits and getting desperate amid uncertainty about whether they can stay at all. In her first story for us Mariia Fedorova, a visiting journalist from Germany doing a stint with @thecity.nyc, profiles some struggling to survive in New York.

In the "opinions, occasionally" department: I predict spending at least $16 billion to cram jail towers into NYC's borough downtowns and closing 415-acre Rikers Island, where gardening is an activity, will go down in history as a mistake. The new jails aren't even big enough for expected population.

Yet another front in the media meltdown: public access channels are getting defunded because so many cable customers are cutting the cord.

The lull continues this week, hearing there are no masked federal agents today in 26 Federal Plaza. ICYMI, a TRO is limiting ICE's capacity to hold people it arrests, and fewer people are showing up to court. www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/15/a...

Emails and video @gregbsmithnyc.bsky.social has surfaced show Eric Adams' first schools chancellor and public safety deputy use their offices to help their brother, an unregistered lobbyist who brokered access. All three are under federal law enforcement investigation.

ICE splits a Queens family into three, sending a 7-year-old to a newly reopened family detention center in Texas. @gwynnefitz.bsky.social reports on the behind-closed-doors deportation arrests targeting young kids.

My editor brain asks: No mention of Jan. 6 and the pardons?