Will New York State ever pass the budget that was due more than a month ago? And how is New York City supposed to work out its own budget, which it’s legally required to balance and pass by the end of June, without knowing how much money the state is providing?

Podcast hosts Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel dig into that and much more, including a grim projection about New York City’s shrinking public school system. 

Here’s a taste of Katie on Albany’s evidently endless ‘Big Ugly,’ which is a term of anything but endearment that journalists and politicians alike have given to the capital’s notorious budget close:

People I spoke with who know Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie very well said it was a complete shock for him to come out and say that “I’m never doing this again. There’s no deal. We spoke last night and I told her to say that ‘We’re close’ and she came out and did this” — I understand it’s a negotiation tactic on her part to kind of force the hand, but I see it as really embarrassing. 

I’m just a simple person. I cover the city budget where we have a firm deadline of when a budget is due and drop dead day to be passed. I have never heard of a mayor coming out and saying, “We have a budget,” and then the Speaker of the City Council coming out shortly after saying, “No, we don’t.” It’s just very bizarre to me.

FAQ NYC comes out weekly, usually on Mondays. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through RSS or wherever podcasts are found, or listen right here at The City.

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Lit NYC, the podcast all about the ABCs of arts, books and culture in New York City, debuts as its own show with writer and artist Molly Crabapple discussing her new book, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” how her New York City family history led her to tell that story and learn Yiddish in the process, and much more.

Molly talks with hosts Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about a movement that, she recounts, was started by young Jewish Marxists troublemakers in 1897 in Russia, probably the most wretched and miserable place to be Jewish in the world… Jewish workers there were oppressed… as workers and as Jews… They were basically oppressed as a race and a class… 

The Bund came up in a world that was violent, where people were routinely sent to Siberia for having book clubs, where there was an elite mounted police called Cossacks which would slash open people’s faces… Baruch Charney Vladeck, the father of public housing in New York City, had a scar across his face from getting his face slashed open by a Cossack. 

It was a place where pogroms were a regular occurrence, and where a certain level of violence within families was normalized, like parents beating their kids,  bosses beating their workers and masters beating their apprentices…

One of the things that the Bund did in this violent time was armed self defense against pogroms. Where traditional Jewish communities would try to pay the local government strongman to make sure these attacks weren’t going to happen, the Bund felt that was really humiliating… Instead, they armed themselves to defend their communities against these pogroms. And it was not something that just men participated in. Young women also took part in it. I found one young woman named Nadia Grinfeld who led the self defense brigades in Odessa in 1905 and when you read about these testimonies, it really is an act of self recreation…  a refashioning of who they are and their right to exist as equals, rather than just supplicants to power.

By 1903 they’d become the most popular revolutionary party in the czarist empire — not the most popular Jewish party but the most popular revolutionary party.  They’re a mass organization. They combine… militant self defense… with these labor unions, with this huge cultural arm… secular Yiddish schools… elevating Yiddish… into this proper literary language…

What the Bund wanted to do was… overthrow the czar, bring democratic socialism to Russia and for Jews to be able to live in the land where they were born… and not just to survive and eke out a miserable living but to flourish — to have beautiful lives with their own language, with their own culture, with their own institutions…

Lit NYC comes out weekly, usually on Fridays. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through RSS or wherever podcasts are found, or listen to all the episodes right here at The City.

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Zohran Mamdani’s first political endorsement since becoming mayor predictably didn’t pan out, but Lindsey Boylan wasn’t the candidate he’s betting his political capital on. 

The FAQ NYC hosts discuss all that and much more, including why bringiing casinos to New York is such a terrible idea, what’s so good about bodega cats and bad about restaurant dogs, and much more. 

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Which came first, the state budget or the city’s spending plan?

As the Mamdani administration pushes for new taxes and more money from Albany the FAQ NYC hosts discuss all that and much more, including how sports and politics are getting mushed together first between the NBA Playoffs and the coming “Trump Station,” and between the World Cup and a looming “weekend of hell” and the Mamdani administration, and much more.

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The former president with a supposedly funny name who was smeared as an African-born socialist made a surprise appearance at a Bronx pre-school that opened up on a Saturday so the tots could hang out with him and New York City’s actually African-born socialist mayor with a supposedly funny name at a very sweet and tightly stage-managed event open only to invited press.

The FAQ NYC hosts discuss the first public meeting of two guys with funny names and audacious hopes for the Democratic party and much more, including title dreams for the Knickerbockers and an epic losing streak for the Metropolitans in the latest episode of the only podcast about the only city in the world. 

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FAQ NYC hosts Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel visited the Greene Space in Soho on Thursday night for a sold-out live taping, hosted by ABNY, talking about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100 days.

“I would give him a B,” said Chrissy. “I’m a harsh grader, so I think that’s a solid grade. We’re seeing someone grow in real time. We are out of the campaign phase and deeply into the governance phase, and there are a lot of ways that Mamdani was naive in campaigning. If these things were so simple, people would have done them before.”

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The new mayor captured City Hall with historic support, and polling shows he’s only become more popular since then. But now the question is if he can deliver – despite the resistance of the City Council and Gov. Kathy Hochul to let him cash in on the “tax the rich” revenue he promised to deliver. 

The FAQ NYC hosts discuss all that and much more, including City Hall’s new racial equity plan and a horrific shooting in Brooklyn that brought renewed attention to the NYPD’s gang database.

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Zohran Mamdani has been Hizzoner for just 88 days, and he’s already navigating the “poisoned chalice” of a big budget deficit he inherited while the credit agencies that could make it much more expensive for the city to borrow money are taking an increasingly dim view of its finances on his watch.

Hosts Christina Greer and Harry Siegel discuss all that and much more, including the mayor’s different responses to two high-profile terror attempts, on the latest episode of the FAQ NYC podcast.

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An epic art show at the Lexington Avenue Armory made a young Marcel Duchamp, who was back in France, one of America’s first modern celebrities even before he first arrived in New York City for what became decades of painting, conceiving, chess-playing and love-making — though not always in that order.

John Strausbaugh, the author of the new Duchamp Takes New York, published just ahead of MOMA’s major new exhibition of the artist’s work, joins Amy Sohn and guest host Brian Berger for a wide-ranging discussion of an artist’s life in the Big Apple’s old San Juan Hill, and much more.

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The new administration is cutting off the private legal support Eric Adams extended on the city’s behalf to himself and his police officer pals, and rolling out a new Office of Public Safety that’s a far cry from the ambitious Department he’s promised.

The FAQ NYC hosts discuss all that and much more, including Zohran Mamdani’s pretty weak — not to mention all-male — list of his all time favorite rappers.

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