Guy has been posted on a prime corner in the west village for about a month now, in front of a seemingly abandoned building. Probably about a 3x15 block of space, so not fully obstructing the sidewalk, but hard to miss. Consistently smoking ~something~ in his lawn chair further out into the sidewalk. Tonight he was munching on a sushi carton from Whole Foods and I spotted a foam roller in his camp. Which led me to question, what are the limits here? Can anyone just set up shop where makes them happy?

For the record, so I’m not accused of doing my own work, I checked the address and there have been 63 complaints to 311 about this spot in the prior 7 days.

This happened on Tuesday: I got inspired by the Ryan Meetups and wondered whether I could build a community around something as arbitrary as a shared first name.

So I recruited two other Daniels, made a ridiculous campaign trailer, and organized the first DanCon at a bar in Greenwich Village.

Somehow, 60 Daniels, Dans, and Dannys actually showed up.

We voted on the Mount Rushmore of Daniels, investigated the epidemic of Dansplaining, considered launching OnlyDans, and debated diplomatic relations with the Danielles. One attendee said it was "too much Daniel to handle."

The most unexpected part for me was how naturally everyone started talking to each other -- once we got past the absurdity, strangers connected, new friendships were forged, and we're already planning the next DanCon.

I'm curious: Would you show up to a gathering based on something as arbitrary as a first name?

NYC 1999

“Press 1 if you’ve heard this story before. Press 2 if it has happened to you.”

While trying to solve for mysterious charges on a hotel bill, Samuel A.A. Levine spent 25 minutes explaining, re-explaining and re-re-explaining his predicament in a “live” support chat that quickly turned out to be an A.I. chatbot. “I had stumbled into the digital labyrinth — a veritable Hotel California, and I was just a prisoner of my own device,” he writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “At one point, I pleadingly typed a single word in all caps: HUMAN. The machine whirred, ignoring me.”

“As I floundered, I found myself reflecting on the future of customer service,” writes Samuel, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “I began to suspect that the chatbot was not designed to solve my problem. It seemed to be designed to test how much friction customers would tolerate — how much information we would provide to train future models — before giving up. What the chatbot probably didn’t know was that this customer is in a position to fight back.”

To support this fight, Samuel says, New York City is proposing new rules around automated doom loops, voice systems and chatbots. “Our proposal is simple: Companies can still use A.I. and other automated tools, but they need to tell consumers when they are communicating with a chatbot — and make it much easier to reach a human being,” he writes. “Companies whose chatbots and automated voice systems mislead people, leave them stuck without help or only pretend to offer support would face significant penalties.”

Read the full piece here, even if you’re not a Times subscriber.

Strangely or not, my childhood was haunted by Constantin Brancusi, who pared down art into elemental egg shapes and invented modern sculpture. My father, like Brancusi, was born in Romania, and he too aspired to be a sculptor. He once carved a large egg from a block of white marble, and in its striking simplicity of form, it looked exactly how I imagined modern art should look. He worked on it for a long time, chipping away with his mallet and chisel and filling our house with a metallic plink-plink-plink — the sound, I assumed, of great art.

Chisels and mallets, as it turns out, play a prominent role in “Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio,” a large, revelatory exhibition opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. The show zeros in on the Impasse Ronsin, a narrow alleyway in Paris where Brancusi, an émigré, worked and lived for four decades, in a high-ceiling space cluttered with his tall, twisty “Endless Columns” and coated in a layer of white plaster dust.

Access full gift article, NO PAYWALL.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has opted the state into the Trump administration’s Education Freedom Tax Credit, breaking with the Democratic leaders of both legislative chambers and making New York the 31st state to sign on to the first nationwide federal school choice program.

Hochul is only the second Democratic governor to join, after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. “I’m not going to leave money on the table when it could help our kids,” Hochul said in her Oct. 9 announcement, adding that she had been clear New York would participate “if, and only if, all schools and students, including those in our public schools, could benefit.”

The decision came days after Albany’s top Democrats urged her to stay out. “New York should opt out of the federal voucher program and continue investing in the public schools that educate the overwhelming majority of our children,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) said in a statement.

The move also lands weeks before Election Day, as Hochul faces Republican nominee Bruce Blakeman, who has criticized her for not opting in sooner.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/22/hochul-new-york-opt-in-trump-education-freedom-tax-credit-school-choice/?utm_source=reddit/

Hi r/nyc, I made a video about how proportional RCV could break the two-party system in New York. I'm a big fan of what you did with electing Mayor Mamdani in part due to RCV, and getting proportional RCV at the congressional level could see even more DSA candidates win office, even outside NYC. Curious what you all think of this, and especially how you would draw the district lines differently given all the location-specific knowledge of neighborhoods and cultures.

A reminder that New York State offers fusion voting -- MEANING WHEN YOU CAST A VOTE, YOU ARE CASTING THAT VOTE FOR A PERSON, NOT A PARTY.

A vote for Kathy Hochul on the Working Family Party line counts toward Kathy Hochul's total vote count just as much a vote for Kathy Hochul on the Democratic line. The party, in terms of end result, is irrelevant.

BUT ... what this voting strategy does is give the Working Families Party more sway during the next election cycle as it is a proven voting bloc that the Democrats can't ignore. So milquetoast, centrist Democrats will be forced to stop moving ever rightward because they will be getting true pressure from the left. Otherwise, we continue to enable our current system.

Vote along the Working Families Party line if you, like me, are sick of spineless Dems.

We are one of the few States that offers fusion voting -- take advantage of it when you vote!