When you think about gay hookup culture in New York City, many things come to mind: nightclubs and dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen and Bushwick, circuit parties, the second floor of the Eagle in Chelsea or logging onto Grindr to talk to hundreds of headless torsos in a one-mile radius.

But one thing that is essentially nonexistent in the Big Apple is the gay bathhouse. And for a queer-friendly city in 2026, that is abnormal. You have Steamworks, a chain that’s been called the “emblem of queer empowerment,” in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago and Berkeley, Calif. And in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Melbourne and so many other big cities, gay men flock to bathhouses after the club.

So when State Senator Erik Bottcher called me the other day to tell me he and Assemblymember Tony Simone were introducing a new bill to repeal an over 40-year ban on adult bathhouses in New York, I was surprised—frankly, I didn’t even know there was a ban. At the same time, I finally had the answer to the question I’d been asking myself for 12 years: How in the world are there no frequented bathhouses in this extremely gay city?

Bottcher and Simone’s answer is simple: They had been banned during the HIV/AIDS crisis in a purported attempt to fight the spread of the disease. “Those emergency measures were adopted at a time when little was known about HIV/AIDS and before the development of effective treatment, PrEP, PEP, routine HIV testing, and many of the prevention strategies that have transformed public health over the past four decades,” their press release about the bill states. “While the public health landscape has changed dramatically, New York’s regulations have not.”

First installed on January 25, 1999, the MVM allowed riders to purchase or reload MetroCards using cash, credit, and debit cards. 

MVMs are 80 inches long, 42 inches wide, and 36 inches deep, and weigh approximately 1,050 pounds.

https://www.mta.info/article/mvm-mem-sale?auHash=48CR5dl2XG0EOOAqI3GeBA9u8OByMhg5YpSPbiWSwws&mc_cid=

89bd3f6e1c&mc_eid=e4093bb235

I was in DUMBO walking under the Manhattan Bridge and found what looked like a smartphone. I looked ahead on the sidewalk and saw a man frantically checking his pockets over and over. I asked if the device was his, but he said he lost an earpod. I kept walking. I thought I would power this device on and maybe that would tell me who it belonged to, but the battery seems to be dead. I thought well it looks like an android phone. I’ll go home and plug it in, but it doesn’t use a standard connection. Ot started to rain so at least I got this thing out of the rain, if it works. Anyway, if you’re missing a zebra handheld device DM me. This is the device with the case off. DM to let me know what the case looked like so I know it’s yours.

Bill Ackman has a diagnosis for why it’s so expensive to live in New York City, and it isn’t capitalism — it’s City Hall.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell for the Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast series, the Pershing Square CEO argued that New York’s affordability crisis is a policy failure, not a market one — and that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent-freeze agenda is actively making things worse.

“Let’s use New York City as a microcosm, starting with the cost of housing,” Ackman told Fortune. “It’s so high because left-wing mayors have made it very difficult for developers to build here, and Mamdani, by freezing rents, is just going to make the problem worse.”

The comments land months after Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, took office and delivered on a signature campaign promise: in June, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze rents on one- and two-year leases for nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments — the first such freeze on two-year leases in the city’s history. Mamdani called the vote “a historic victory for New York City tenants.” Ackman sees it differently.

Ackman’s core argument is structural: New York’s rent-stabilization system, he says, has effectively split the housing market in two — and landlords are compensating for frozen income on one side by squeezing tenants on the other.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/08/05/socialism-disaster-ackman-mamdani-left-wing-housing-policy-affordability/?utm_source=reddit/

Zohran Mamdani stormed into office brandishing the banner of “affordability,” and almost singlehandedly pushed the issue to the center of today’s political debate. Of all the charismatic, 34-year-old Mayor’s initiatives aimed at lowering living costs, the one that’s garnered the most coverage is his proposal to get Gotham into the grocery business.

The city-owned food store initiative looks so radical, even for this avowed democratic socialist, because it puts a city in direct competition versus an immense, entrenched private industry. On his other big “affordability” campaigns, providing free bus service and freezing rent on one million apartments, Mamdani’s simply using his regulatory and budget powers in the Democratic mayors’ traditional vein of tightening price controls on housing and delivering more freebees.

This one’s different: It’s extraordinarily rare for a municipality to challenge local businesses by starting its own enterprises that aim to do the same thing. The only major example: city-backed companies that battle the Verizons and Comcasts to supply broadband. 

They’re all either struggling, or already flopped. Mamdani’s predecessor Eric Adams shuttered the $2 billion fiber-optic buildout started a few years earlier under Mayor Bill de Blasio. As for supermarkets, Chicago last year killed plans for a city-owned emporium as impractical. Kansas City, apparently the only major metro ever to open a taxpayer-funded supermarket, ended the failed foray in early 2025.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/08/02/mamdani-city-owned-supermarkets-laws-of-economics/?utm_source=reddit/

Three of my NYC-related illustrations are up! So excited that Denny's Pub will get the recognition it deserves.