A new Urban Institute report finds that 62% of New York City families—rising to 78% among Hispanics—lack the resources to meet the “true cost of living,” a metric more taxing than federal poverty lines. Children and single-parent households fare wor…
A strike by Long Island Rail Road workers stopped North America’s busiest commuter line on Saturday, upending the routines of some 250,000 New Yorkers. With contract talks stuck, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s shuttle-bus plan will barely blunt the blow, aiming to move just 13,000 commuters each peak. Remote work is encouraged—presumably for those whose jobs survive the extra time spent getting there.
With 88 lives lost, the World Health Organisation has now declared the Sudan strain of Ebola a global public health emergency; unlike its infamous cousin from Zaire, this variety enjoys no vaccine and boasts a fatality rate of around 30%, leaving medical teams scrambling for more than rubber gloves and steady nerves as they juggle containment and appeals for international aid.
At 12:01 a.m. Saturday, 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers staged the system’s first strike in over three decades, halting a critical artery for New York commuters. Harper Freeman, helming The Chief, weighed in on “Weekends On 1” as negotiations sputtered. We can only hope the trains run on time again before New Yorkers perfect the art of walking to work.
When a fire last Thursday shuttered two Amtrak-owned East River tunnels, snarling Penn Station’s delicate rail ballet, the MTA could only remind Amtrak that it had warned against fixing tunnels by closing them entirely—rather than at night and on weekends, as with the L train in 2019. That Amtrak and the MTA are already feuding in court makes cooperation less certain than a timely arrival.
A trio of universities has found that AI-driven hiring systems in the US, such as those powered by GPT-4o, routinely favor resumes written by similar AI over ones crafted by humans—by margins as high as 81.9%. Applicants increasing turn to the very tools that evaluate them, while those sticking to homegrown prose, especially in immigrant communities, risk being ghosted by algorithms before a human ever reads a word.
New Yorkers and much of the eastern United States will trade spring for steam as a dome of high pressure bakes the region early next week, with temperatures forecast to hit 95°F on Tuesday and challenge decades-old records in both the city and northern New Jersey. Relief should arrive by Thursday, proof that in climate as in politics, nothing in the Big Apple stays overheated for long.
A Real Estate Board of New York report notes that property-related taxes will deliver $39.6 billion—half of all locally gathered tax revenue—to New York City’s coffers in fiscal 2025, easily outpacing income and sales levies. While Mayor Zohran Mamdani bemoans billionaire penthouses, it seems the city’s finances, like those apartments, rest on solid foundations—though we doubt the mayor’s next video will offer a guided tour.
A heat wave has knotted the air over New York City and much of the Northeast, triggering an air quality alert and gentle nudges for vulnerable residents to hide indoors on Sunday. The city’s authorities, apparently unfazed by irony, urge everyone to breathe easy—by going outside as little as possible—while we wait for a reprieve, or at least a breeze, from the summer’s unwelcome warm-up act.
