"Sound carries faster through water than through air, and soon we heard a plink-plink-plinking. It was followed by what sounded like bacon..."

"... sizzling in a frying pan, which turned out to be a bubbly photosynthesizing elixir of microbes, decaying muck and insect larvae. Then there was a clicking — possibly aquatic snails... — and the quiet pops of fish mouths opening and closing, a miraculous sound that this lapsed fly fisherman thought she would never hear. Somewhere in the humid thickets a bullfrog croaked... During the pandemic, he... started listening to tidal pools along the sea walls — hearing nothing at first and then drawn by a 'persistent scraping.' It turned out to be limpets: aquatic snails that have teeth stronger than Kevlar to feed on algae and excavate rock. (He said he wouldn’t mind being reincarnated as a limpet.)... On our walk, we 'ear-witnessed' a Sabrett hot-dog stand’s hot buzzy generator before taking the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge, where he captured its vibrating walkway and staccato of speeding cars clip-clopping over metal plates."

From "It’s the Summer of Soundwalking. He Is Your Sherpa. 'We may be hearing but not listening,' Jacek Smolicki said, showing a reporter how sound travels through tree roots in Central Park and amplifying the scraping of aquatic snails" (NYT gift link)(lots of photos and sound recordings).

"A comedian and his friends are transforming a vacant retail space at the West 4th Street station with freebies, art and puppet shows to make commutes more enjoyable."

I'm reading "A Newsstand That Aims to Delight N.Y.C. Subway Riders" (NYT gift link).

Trading cards that highlight fun facts about retired subway conductors and operators. Key chains with a fake rat’s foot for “good train luck.” A bucket hat with a sliding veil that riders can borrow to cry in private.... The transit-themed newsstand will have no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers....

Nice photos. I like this kind of art installation. Comical. For the people.

"Midtown residents, workers and tourists ran for their lives from homes and offices near a buckling building Tuesday..."

"... and now have no idea when they can return to the evacuated 'frozen zone' around the site. Nine buildings had to be suddenly cleared after 8 a.m. when crucial support columns began caving in the under-construction 37-story former Pfizer headquarters on East 42nd Street near Second Avenue — and City Hall would not say when anyone might be able to return to the area...."

From "Massive ‘frozen zone’ around buckling Midtown NYC building leaves hundreds out on street — with no idea when they can return" (NY Post).

"New York City bodega owners came to City Hall last week for a 'roundtable discussion' at the invitation of Julie Su, deputy mayor for economic justice..."

"... only to get barraged with 'intrusive' questions about their businesses, a source close to the situation said.... 'What items are sold the most at your stores?'... 'Where is your profit margin the greatest?' sources said. The bodega reps declined to answer.... 'They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don’t answer our questions and that’s why there is distrust,' said a bodega rep who did not want to be identified.... Mamdani’s plan to subsidize the grocery stores with taxpayer funds so they can offer rock-bottom prices on essential items threatens grocers who operate on 2% to 3% profit margins.... 'What is the main thing people come into your store for? What else do they buy while there?' 'It seems like a clumsy, one-sided fishing expedition,' a food policy expert who did not want to be identified told The Post.

From "Mamdani officials scramble to ease concerns about public supermarkets — but local business leaders aren’t buying it" (NY Post).

Su insisted that the city "wanted to understand is whether there are key products bodegas sell and rely on that we should not sell." And "That’s how serious we are about not undercutting them." The whole idea is about undercutting them. Now, the city seems to be trying to assure them that they won't undercut them too much. But the bodega owners don't trust the city. If there's a "2% to 3% profit margin" generally, but the city wants to know "Where is your profit margin the greatest?," it looks like the city wants its own operation to take advantage of the most profitable items. 

"I understand that the job market is rough, but what is it with this lemming-like behavior where so many young people feel they need to be in NYC?"

"It shows a real lack of imagination. NYC is not that great; there are alternatives."

"Move. Go elsewhere. Find meaning and joy in your life outside of NYC. It exists. This is a big country."

"I must be the one confused …. it seems. Average student debt of $38k but move to the most expensive city without a job and complain about the affordability of hip-hop dance classes?"

Those are the top 3 highest-rated comments on the NYT article "In a City of Big Dreams, Many Young Adults See a Cloudy Future/A bleak job market. Rising rents. Huge debt. In New York and other cities, traditional milestones of adulthood feel further away for some 20- and 30-year-olds."

Right under the headline, there's a photograph of a 24-year-old man, lying flat on his back in bed and clutching a pillow. He looks despondent. We're told he "feels guilty telling friends he can’t join them for dinner. He wants to start a family one day, but worries. 'I can’t even afford myself, so how am I going to afford someone else?' he said. And he laments that he can’t pursue some of the hobbies that have always brought him joy, such as hip-hop dance. Classes are too expensive: about $25."

"Lonardo met Skiles’s biological mother, Cheryl Brown, in the late 1970s while they were both stationed at Fort Dix. During a weekend off..."

"... they decided to travel to New York City together. They stayed at the Hotel Chelsea, Lonardo recalled, and visited the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. They had a fleeting romance, and shortly after they returned to Fort Dix, they went in different directions and never spoke again. But for nearly five decades, Lonardo has kept a bar of soap from the hotel...."

From "For years, he didn’t know he had a daughter. At 66, he adopted her. Jennifer Skiles said hearing her father’s voice for the first time 'felt like home.' Four years later, their emotional bond is now a legal one" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can read the whole story, which will make you cry, unless you never cry about strangers).

Unique Way/True and Life.

My son Chris sends another photograph from New York City:

How New York City really looks in the snow.

My son Chris happens to be sojourning in NYC in the midst of the big blizzard, which doesn't seem too overwhelming. 

He sends these pictures, which make things look more amusing than calamitous:

Hey, that's a cop car!

"They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school."

Said Hunter College professor Allyson Friedman, at Community Education Council meeting, interrupting a black public school student who was speaking out against the proposed closing of her West Side school.

Quoted in "Hunter College to Review Professor’s ‘Abhorrent’ Remarks at Meeting
A student objected to the potential closure of her New York City middle school. The professor, speaking on a hot mic, said, 'They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school.' The comment was assailed as racist" (NYT).

It was an unwitting interruption. Friedman "was attending virtually and was unaware that her microphone was turned on." She now says she was "'trying to explain the concept of systemic racism' to her child, who was in the room with her, 'by referencing an example of an obviously racist trope....

Hasn't Canal Street always been funky?

Man takes a stroll through New York City..

This place is absolutely COOKED. 💀💀 pic.twitter.com/Lc9Yx5kPUd

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) February 22, 2026

I watched that video, and yes, it looks awful, but has it "metastasized" and "gone insane"? It's Canal Street. The voiceover declares it's the "most expensive" part of New York and calls it "Tribeca" and "Soho." It's Canal Street, being Canal Street. 

I looked at those wares vendors had laid out all over the sidewalk, and I'd like to bring some lateral thinking to the problem. The product you see there is almost entirely women's handbags. It could become utterly uncool and dumb to carry a handbag. A handbag is literally a burden. It makes you vulnerable to theft. You don't need it. Designers whose clothes you may not be able to buy make a customer out of you by offering this carrier of their name, causing you to feel that you need it more than you do. Wake up to the post-handbag world and those guys hawking handbags will disappear. 

What, beyond your iPhone, do you need to carry these days? The closer you can get to nothing, the better you are. That's the idea to sell, but who is motivated to sell it? I know I'm being silly, at my age and my distance from New York, to try to influence the anti-handbag trend, which has to hinge on the pleasure and freedom of the consumer, not hatred of street vendors. These are guys making a living, and if your aim is to walk down an uncluttered, uncrowded street, reroute off Canal Street.

By the way, I used to live in NYC — from 1973 to 1984 — and 2 things about me back then: 1. I avoided Canal Street, unless I was swooping into that one place where I bought art supplies, and 2. I never carried a purse, I went out of my way to figure out how to carry everything in various pockets, I had a whole feminist/hippie conception of what I was doing, and I regarded women with purses as embarrassingly uncool. 

"As a lawyer, I feel most strongly about the least-discussed benefit: Eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system..."

"... lowering the crushing caseloads that prevent our judges, prosecutors and public defenders from focusing their attention where it’s most needed. I was a public defender, and in one of my first cases I was asked to represent a woman who was not a robber or a drug dealer — she was someone who had failed to pay the fare on public transit. Precious resources had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America...."

Writes Emily Galvin Almanza, in "Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free" (NYT).

Speaking of poverty and traveling about, I see the NYT pushes this headline at me as the next thing I ought to click on and read: "Help! JetBlue Mangled My Vintage Louis Vuitton Bag and Won’t Pay Up."

"New York City Could Get a Foot of Snow. Mamdani Knows It’s a Test."

The NYT puts its finger on why this foot of snow is such a big deal. It's hitting political hot spots.

Subheadline: "Plenty of New York City mayors have faced blowback over their handling of blizzards. In several appearances this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has sought to show he is prepared."

I guess his opponents are hoping for a snow nightmare.

As for Mamdani, he's getting out in front of Snowmageddon and endeavoring to seem lovable:

Stay warm, stay safe New York. pic.twitter.com/aFbDsOkzLn

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) January 18, 2026

"'Fun Times Square' said no New Yorker ever...."

‘Fun Times Square’ said no New Yorker ever...

— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) January 17, 2026

A lynch mob? A crowd chants "Kristi Noem will Hang!" in New York City.

NOW: "Kristi Noem will Hang!" Huge crowd chants in Foley Square NYC, also "Save a life, kill an ICE" as they gather to protest the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Some in the crowd condemn the talk of killing. pic.twitter.com/ifrXNZB0dz

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) January 8, 2026

Democrats who hope to win back power need to act now to reconnect with peace and good order. They seem to have encouraged the chaos yesterday, and they need something quite different today lest they be seen as they wanted us to see Trump after January 6th, as having incited insurrection.

"I think the reality is that for centuries we really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good and..."

"... in transitioning into treating it as a collective good and towards the model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families — especially white families, but some POC families as well — are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

NYC Mayor Mamdani's Tenant Director, Cea Weaver:

"We'll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good. Whites especially will be impacted." pic.twitter.com/RZSdCs8oEa

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 5, 2026

See also "Zohran Mamdani’s new NYC tenant advocate called to ‘seize private property,’ blasted home ownership as ‘white supremacy’" (NY Post). Excerpt: "Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, made the statements and urged her followers to elect more communists in several lecturing posts on her now-deleted X account that were unearthed by internet sleuths. 'Seize private property!' she said on June 13, 2018.... 'Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,' she said [in August 2019]."

"It was almost like a magical object...."

"It brought New Yorkers together, that everyone had one in their wallet and we had that in common, and it's the way of the world — you can't stop it...."

"After six hours of Magafication, I hobble home and wash off the drag. I pull off the lashes; the fake tan pools in the shower tray.... The relief is indescribable. "

 

That's Poppy Sowerby in The London Times. The experiment was performed in Manhattan — uptown on Fifth Avenue and downtown, in the East Village, where she lives.

"Zoran Momani has been elected.... So what?... What's the big deal? Obviously he was going to win.... You can just leave...."

"But there are people out there who... are finding it increasingly difficult to afford New York City. Those people — the paint-by-numbers/pin a ribbon on me/I did all of the right things/I have all of the right views/I post all of the right things on social media.... They're normies.... They're just boring and vapid and surface and dull and pointless.... and their concerns are so small and petty.... That is the coalition that Zoran has. He has a coalition of angry, boring, mediocre people that have done the right things and have gotten very little for it....

"'Shame on Sliwa! Shame on Sliwa!' dozens of people at the front of the room jeered, apparently blaming Sliwa, a Republican, for Cuomo’s loss."

"At the bar, one man told his friend it was 'embarrassing.'... With people clearly losing interest, campaign staff sprang into action. They hurried the remaining crowd to the front of the stage.... Cuomo immediately tried to cast his loss as a success, telling the crowd: 'This campaign was to contest the philosophies that are shaping the Democratic party, the future of this city and the future of this country.' He said tha[t] 50% of New Yorkers had not voted for Mamdani’s agenda...."

I'm reading "Nobody likes a sore loser – but Cuomo declines to bow out gracefully/Despondency reigned at the Ziegfeld Ballroom – and then the defeated candidate found it hard to praise the victor" (The Guardian).

Cuomo was a terrible candidate. He should take responsibility for that. New Yorkers had an array of clowns and picked the one with the smiley face.

AND: "Only a uniquely hated politician with his connections and campaign coffers could bungle an election versus a political unknown this badly. Whether it was his bare-bones daily schedules that spent more time with donors than voters or his desperate flip-flopping on issues like closing Rikers Island during the campaign, Cuomo proved one thing to be true: the only thing he has ever believed in is his own ambition" — from "Andrew Cuomo’s embarrassing loss to Zohran Mamdani in NYC mayoral election ends Cuomo family political dynasty" (NY Post).

"How are you? Guess what, I’m waiting in the street because everything is closed for you," said French president Macron telephoning Donald Trump from a street in New York City.

Quoted in "France’s Emmanuel Macron calls Trump for help as he’s forced to walk through NYC to avoid UN traffic" (NY Post).

Bizarre video showed the European leader begging an NYPD cop to help him get through on Monday, soon after he finished giving a controversial speech to the United Nations.... The French leader was then forced to make the next 30 minutes of his journey on foot through the streets of Manhattan.... Macron appeared to take the potential diplomatic incident in stride, smiling and posing for pictures with gawking passersby.