They are popular in a lot of cities around the world and Philadelphia...

They keep their jobs....

Clara Wu Tsai has a lot on her plate. She’s vice chair of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the company behind the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, and Barclays Center, and she serves as the Liberty’s governor.

She’s also a film producer: most recently of Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. She co-owns the National Lacrosse League’s San Diego Seals and is a trustee at Stanford, NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, and Lincoln Center.

But for one of Wu Tsai’s projects in Brooklyn, the return can’t be measured in dollars alone.

In August 2020, amid racial justice protests on the plaza outside Barclays Center, Wu Tsai and her husband, Alibaba cofounder Joe Tsai, pledged $50 million over 10 years to social justice and economic mobility initiatives, prioritizing Brooklyn. The result was the Social Justice Fund, which Wu Tsai directs. Six years in, its stated mission is to support economic mobility across the borough by funding programs that address gaps in education, health, and wealth.

Its latest plan may be its most ambitious. Some of the fund’s money is earmarked for a guaranteed income program for new mothers in Brownsville, a neighborhood where poverty has long outpaced the citywide rate, the New York Times reported this month. Guaranteed income, which means regular, no-strings cash payments to a targeted group, is different from universal basic income, which would go to everyone. 

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/13/clara-wu-tsai-liberty-guaranteed-income-brooklyn-moms/?utm_source=reddit/

I'm all for expanding higher-level math in middle school and carefully adding some seats at the five newer specialized schools if they can handle it without dropping standards. But replacing the SHSAT or adding grades, recommendations, essays, or "background" to the admissions process is a nonstarter.

Both of my kids took the test. One of them, who is Latino, got in. The other didn't. The difference was that the one who got in studied hard for three years. The other only prepped for a year and not very seriously. The test rewards kids who put in the work, regardless of income. About half the students at these schools come from poverty or lower income households.

Changing the admissions rules just to force different racial numbers doesn't fix the real problem of uneven preparation in the earlier grades. It just weakens the schools that currently work for hardworking kids from every background.

The Knicks owner is urging New York’s business elite to abandon Gov. Kathy Hochul and has spent millions to back her opponent, Bruce Blakeman.

Starts at 11 AM and heads south on Avenue B, from East 13th Street to East 7th Street at Tompkins Square Park. The festival block is on East 6th Street between Avenues B and C, 10 AM to 4 PM.

The iconic hotel is closing for a much needed face-lift.

“Do you have a cool job and a big heart?,” read a sign taped to a New York City lightpole. “Let me shadow you. I’m 16 pls.”

The flyer is from high-school junior Avi Lichtenstein, who is so worried about his future that he’s asking strangers if he can follow them to work. 

“Every night I’m like, ‘What am I going to do with my life?,’” the curly-haired teen says. “I just couldn’t put my mind to rest.”

He came up with the plan last month. Using about $500 of his savings, he paid two guys he found on Craigslist to plaster the city with more than 300 flyers. His goal for the school year: follow one person a week to get a better idea of what he wants to do before he applies to colleges next year. 

It’s working. He’s shadowed a dog groomer, a radio show host and a ramen shop owner, and is reviewing requests from an airline captain and a tattoo artist. One went so well, he was offered a part-time job. 

We tried the new AI feature on 311 and found it lead into a maze of links and many dead ends that did not help the issue at hand (in this case, a backed up sewer driving a foul smell into the apartment building). The city says it needs the AI feature to keep up with demand and help people navigate 311 faster. But even with all the AI (instituted in December), a simple google search got to the right forms much more efficiently.

Have you used the AI 311 feature yet, and have you found it helpful at all? Interested to hear if others have found it helpful yet.

There are 5 Ballot Referendums or questions on this years ballot. We are focusing on #5 in this post.

You asked how to vote on the Referendums. 1-4 are up to you. We don't see any issue on those. On #5 - it is a HARD NO

QUESTION 5: VOTE NO.

Vote NO on Question 5 : because it doesn’t go far enough to protect New York City’s Retiree Health Benefit Trust Fund

First - what is the Retiree Health Benefit Trust? It is a fund that was created to pay for retiree healthcare in times when the budget has severe gaps - like in a major fiscal crisis - so funds can otherwise be allocated to other expenses. Your pension is guaranteed by the state constitution, but your healthcare is not. Your pension is also funded, but your healthcare is NOT! In 2006, the Council and Mayor created the Retiree Health Benefit Trust to make sure money was saved and invested to cover health care costs in a crisis. Unfortunately, the Mayors, including Mamdani, have taken money from the trust fund and used it for budget expenses when we were not in a true crisis. He left a $3.7 billion IOU in the fund in January to hopefully replaced in December.

The State Comptroller, TOm DiNapoli and the past 3 City Comptroller urged the City put rules in place how to save money to put into the fund and controls on how and when money can be taken out and replaced. That is not in the question. This version allows the City to do what it wants with this cash like a slush fund and that is not the safety net it was designed to be.

The City has had years of strong revenue growth, yet it has made only one deposit into its Rainy Day Fund which is designed to be tapped to use for the budget shortfalls. The fund has about $2 billion, when it should have nearly $14 billion to cover two years of a recession. Instead - they also take from the Retiree Health Benefit Trust. So we need to protect this and invest in it so current and FUTURE retirees have protection to fund their healthcare - or you might not have any security. Let's make them do this now.... the RIGHT WAY. VOTE NO.

So what does Question 5 actually accomplish? Not enough.

• It does not require deposits when the City has strong revenues. The City could still use other factors to justify not putting money aside to increase the savings.
• It still allows withdrawals for almost any reason, including the RETIREE HEALTH BENEFIT TRUST. That defeats the purpose of having money set aside for a real financial crisis.
• It creates a 12% target that could effectively be cut to just 6% by counting other reserves toward the goal. That would leave the City with enough to cover only about eight months of a recession—not two years.

We shouldn’t change the City Charter just to make it look like we’re fixing a problem. If the rules still allow the City to avoid saving money when times are good and take it out when it wants, then we haven’t solved anything. We’ve simply put the status quo into the Charter and made it harder to demand real reform.

The City needs stronger rules: mandatory deposits when revenues are strong, a Rainy Day Fund equal to 16% of tax revenues, and strict limits on withdrawals during recessions and severe emergencies.

Voting NO is not voting against a Rainy Day Fund. It’s voting against a weak proposal that could give the public the impression that the problem has been fixed when it hasn’t.

New Yorkers & Retirees deserve a real financial safety net—not another policy that sounds good on paper but falls short when it matters most.

And they should not be allowed to use the Retiree Health Benefit Trust as a budget gap filler like the Mayor did this year and other before him.

Even for a born pitchman like Eric Adams, a data center was always going to be a tough sell.

So when video surfaced of the former New York City mayor being mercilessly heckled by angry residents in a central Wisconsin library as he tried to convince them of the benefits of building a 150-megawatt data center at the site of an old paper mill, the record-scratch, freeze-frame questions asked themselves.

How did Adams spend his time in Wisconsin? What was his plan to make this work? And who, exactly, thought this was a good idea?

We traveled to Wisconsin Rapids to find out.

According to interviews with residents and opponents of the data center, and documents they obtained through public records requests, Adams did not handle the assignment well: He attempted to jam months of planning and outreach into a little more than six weeks, and he failed to show up to a fraction of the events he had promised to.

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