FAQ NYC

As summer wraps up, the political landscape in New York City heats up with Jerrold Nadler's Congressional departure signaling a call for generational change. The mayoral race intensifies as Zohran Mamdani pulls ahead, bringing focus to urgent issues like public safety and affordable housing. Campaign strategies are being shaped by small dollar donations, showcasing a divide in voter engagement. Meanwhile, potential changes in NYPD leadership loom as discussions swirl around law enforcement challenges. The buzz isn't just political; cinematic risks are also on the table as Spike Lee's latest film gets mixed reviews.

Just two lawyers have remained inside 26 Federal Plaza every day as it’s become the epicenter of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda in New York City, with “large masked men with guns” stationed outside of courtrooms to drag away people showing up for civil hearings. Allison Cutler and Benjamin Remy of the New York Legal Assistant Group’s Immigrant Protection Unit talk with Harry Siegel about what what’s different now than in Trump’s first term as he’s now targeting institutions as much as individuals, what they’ve witnessed inside the courthouse building in Lower Manhattan — and why those scenes are coming soon to a street near you.

Katie Honan never wants to be the story and is "tired of telling the story" but she recaps and reflects on a very weird week, why she's "filled with sadness about Winnie," and the film-noir feeling of getting left, quite literally, holding the bag full of crumbled chips and $300:

It's an Off Cycle episode, with photographer Stanley Greenberg sitting down with Harry Siegel and guest host Lizzie Walsh to talk about the epic new Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York. He discusses how the DEP tried to stop his first edition of Waterworks from being published after 9/11, how COVID helped lead him to create a totally new second edition, and much more.

How did the mayor end up so far behind the 8 ball that he's polling in the single digits in his independent run to win a second term? His press strategy, if that's even the word for it, is one part of the problem, and the signs of a city for sale as he's likely on his way out aren't helping.

What is Andrew Cuomo thinking with his weird new approach to social media, and wild swings at Zohran Mamdani? Will yesterday's leaders ever clear the stage, and will tomorrow's likely leaders get seriously vetted before they're vested with tremendous power? The FAQ NYC hosts discuss all that and much more, including the Trump pressure test on his old hometown that's just ramping up, Kathy Hochul's Frogger dance as she tries to stay in the middle without ending up as roadkill, and much more.

Hosts Katie Honan and Harry Siegel dig into a stunning Midtown shooting — the second in seven months in which a gunman traveling to New York City to murder businesspeople — and how the mayoral candidates responded to that. Plus, Katie goes deep on one simple trick for getting free drinks in a bar: Finding a gun left behind in a bathroom . And she explains how a “no moshing” sign at a nightclub led her down a rabbit hole to when Queens was America’s sweater capital.

In the latest episode of LIT NYC, host Alyssa Katz talks with J. Hoberman about his new opus, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. “Certainly the cheap rents are essential. And the fact that there were areas of the city, of Manhattan, which had been in a way deserted because various light industries had left and there were spaces that artists were willing to colonize. You know, the original lofts were nothing like these designer lofts that you see. Cold water, some of them didn't have electricity. It required a lot of ingenuity on the part of the artists to even make these places livable, but the fact that you had these places was a stimulus to a community and see that's another thing that I wanted to stress in this book,” Hoberman says, noting that they made art at a time when the government was busting comedians and banning films here. “I guess people can appreciate that there was a time before cell phones, but a lot of the people in this book didn't have telephones at all. That was a luxury that they couldn't afford. So how did they meet? How did they connect? There were bars and cafes that they went to, there were neighborhoods that they lived in, there was a sense of community that the city fostered kind of in its indifference.”

The FAQ NYC hosts dig into the Trump administration’s latest demands for compliance, why Mayor Eric Adams insists New York is powerless to enforce its own laws and ordinances inside of the federal office building in lower Manhattan now doubling as a makeshift jail, and how the Department of Homeland Security has the city and the country totally krossed out, and wiggida wiggida wiggida wack. Stick around to the end for Prince, Muppets, and a legendary parodists’ paean to pigeon poisoning.

In the latest episode of LIT NYC, host Katie Honan talks with author Radha Vatsal, a speechwriter at city hall by day, to discuss her new novel about old New York, No. 10 Doyers Street, and “a past that was not as black and white as we make it out to be today.” Vatsal, an immigrant herself, explains how she came to tell a story of Chinatown in the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of Archana "Archie" Morley, the only woman at her newspaper and one of just a handful of Indian immigrants in New York City at the time. While her editor and husband try to steer her away from covering notorious gangster Sai Wing Duck, AKA Mock Duck, Archie chases down the story of his adopted daughter being taken away from him by the city as it also plans to raze Chinatown.