Episode 522: Mamdani’s Roughest Week Yet

Katie Honan sends an audio postcard recapping her reporting trip to Puerto Rico, while Alex Brook Lynn calls in from Paris to help explain the ongoing street protests there. Plus Christina Greer and Harry Siegel talk about deadly lithium-ion battery fires, ICE’s push for migrant shelters records and much more right here in New York City.

Just before Election Day. hosts Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel dig into what’s at stake in the mid-terms, and much more.

COGE Commissioner Emma Wolfe and Executive Director Ann Cheng visit the podcast to explain the questions on the back of every NYC ballot and make the case for how voters approving a few changes to the city's charter could cut red tape, modernize municipal bureaucracy, and make city government run faster. Plus, hosts Christina Greer, Harry Siegel and Katie Honan dig into early voting turnout so far, the City Council bills bills that are about to become laws, and much more

The City Reporter’s Gwynne Hogan joined hosts Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel at the Tenement Museum for a live taping just before early voting kicked off in New York City. They dug into this year’s races, what’s at stake locally and nationally, how immigration is playing into those politics, and much more.

New York City is poised to finally pass a carriage horse ban after more than a decade of talk about that — but it's far from clear what will actually happens after that. Hosts Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel discuss and much more, including the court records that led to Katie’s story for The City Reporter on the remarkable life — and afterlife — of a journalistic trailblazer, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman's low-blow closed-door attack on Mayor Mamdani, and much more.

Hosts Christina Greer and Harry Siegel discuss Mamdani’s response to the Marble Hill ICE shooting and how it seemed to show the limits of his relationship with Donald Trump and the rising pressure from his allies on the left to somehow push the feds out of the city and maybe Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch along with them.

Hosts Katie Honan, Christina Greer and Harry Siegel look at Gov. Kathy Hochul's decision to appoint Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor looking into the deeply disturbing gang rape accusations at Cornell, and the legal, political, journalistic and moral fallout from that story, and much more.

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine makes his maiden voyage on the podcast — “I guess I’ve made the big time!” — to talk about the warnings he’s been sounding about artificial intelligence, his concerns about next year’s looming budget deficit and much more, including a hopeful last word: “I love the fact that the people building these tools live in a diverse New York City and ride the subway every morning. We have the most creative, entrepreneurial population, and we're still the most dynamic economy. I ultimately believe that we got this and that we'll come through stronger.”

In the final episode of FAQ NYC’s special series, A Knickerbocker History of America, Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel sat down with Asad Dandia in front of a live audience at P&T Knitwear to dig into the history of terrorism in New York City. For Dandia, the Brooklyn borough historian, that history includes a decade in which he went from being a CUNY student who learned he was being surveilled by the NYPD to being a part of Zohran Mamadani’s kitchen cabinet: