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Hi New York!
Did you know? On today’s date, January 12, 1969, the New York Jets shocked the sports world by defeating the Baltimore Colts 16–7 in Super Bowl III, making NYC sports history.
In today’s NYC Newsletter:
Under The Radar Theatre Free Ticket Giveaway, nurses on strike, transportation policy changes, hidden gems and local news this week.
Let’s get to it.
– Sofia Kurd.
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New York Question Of The Day
Want to participate? Reply directly to this newsletter. No cheating!
The answer to last week’s trivia: A) Fortune telling.
For decades, New York City required fortune tellers to obtain a city-issued license, a rule rooted in early-20th-century efforts to regulate fraud and “mystical” professions. While the law was often unevenly enforced—and frequently challenged on free-speech grounds—it made NYC one of the few major cities where predicting someone’s future, tarot reading, or palmistry was technically regulated by the government, long after piano players, street photographers, and shoe shiners were left unlicensed.
NYC TRIVIA:
Which NYC borough was the last to get a subway connection to Manhattan?
A) Brooklyn
B) Queens
C) The Bronx
D) Staten Island
Best Events
Under the Radar (Jan 7–25) (Check the free ticket giveaway)
A citywide festival presenting experimental theater, dance, and performance works across more than 20 venues, featuring both New York–based and international artists.Company XIV: Nutcracker Rouge (through Jan 31)
A staged reinterpretation of The Nutcracker combining dance, circus, and live music in an adults-only production at a Bushwick theater.Winter Jazzfest (Jan 8–13)
An annual multi-venue jazz festival featuring over 100 performers, with marathon concert nights in Manhattan and Brooklyn.Chamber Magic (ongoing)
A seated parlor-style magic performance by Steve Cohen held in the Madison Room at Lotte New York Palace; cocktail attire required.Man Ray: When Objects Dream (through Feb 1)
A Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition examining Man Ray’s cameraless photography and experimental techniques, featuring over 160 works.Renoir Drawings (through Feb 8)
A Morgan Library exhibition focused exclusively on Renoir’s works on paper, including drawings, pastels, and watercolors.Sixties Surreal (through Jan 19)
A Whitney Museum exhibition exploring how artists responded to mass media, television, and political imagery between 1958 and 1972.Carreau Club
An indoor pétanque facility in Industry City offering multiple courts alongside a full bar and French-inspired food.Monet and Venice (through Feb 1)
A Brooklyn Museum exhibition bringing together Claude Monet’s Venice paintings, accompanied by archival material and an original musical score.MoMA Mart — MoMA’s Design Store turns “grocery shopping” into a design prank: shelves of fake food that are actually lamps, candles, stools, and sculptural home objects (Jan 6–Mar 29; SoHo + Midtown; free to browse).
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Hidden Gems
The Pickle Guys
An old-school pickle shop that does small-batch, barrel-fermented pickles, but the fun part is their seasonal limited drops—pumpkin spice pickles in fall, bright-pink beet-soaked pickles, and spicy horseradish ones that sell out early.Ms. Yoo
A Korean-American comfort-food spot with fun small plates (Korean wings, kimchi parm fries), neon lights, and cocktails in cute glassware. Has a “late-night bites” deal on some weekdays.Shirokuro
A totally immersive dining experience: an omakase restaurant where every surface—walls, floors, even chairs—is hand-drawn in black and white to look like a sketchbook.
Local News
1. Nearly 15,000 nurses at major NYC hospitals have begun what is now the largest nursing strike in city history, after union negotiations with hospital systems failed.
2. NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani is continuing to focus on early administration priorities, including expanding access to public bathrooms in West Harlem and accelerating public works announcements.
3. New York City Department of Transportation announced a nearly 20-block extension of the Madison Avenue bus lane to improve transit speed along one of the city’s busiest corridors.
4. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in discussions to host a weekly radio show on WABC after his loss in the 2025 mayoral election, giving him a new public platform.
5. The National Retail Federation’s Retail’s Big Show and NRF Rev events are taking place in NYC at the Javits Center, bringing major industry leaders and exhibitors to the city.
6. NYC government’s official calendar confirms upcoming public services and announcements, including eligibility reminders for kindergarten enrollment and city services.
7. Deputy Mayor Julia Kerson emphasizes improved bus transit system performance as part of calling for faster, more efficient routes in Manhattan.
8. Under the Radar theater festival’s free ticket giveaway reflects a citywide effort to make arts participation more accessible for New Yorkers.
New York City Fact
Columbia Neuroscience
In the early 2000s, a team of Columbia University neuroscientists quietly built one of the most influential datasets in modern brain science—stored not in a lab on campus, but in a converted apartment on the Upper West Side. This project, known as the Human Connectome Pilot, was one of the first attempts to map real-time neural activity in healthy adults using high-resolution fMRI, long before “brain mapping” became a mainstream research goal. Today, versions of those early tools impact how researchers around the world analyze neural networks and build machine-learning models that mimic them. |
Those early NYC scans became foundational training material for algorithms studying memory formation, perception, and even the architecture of artificial neural networks. Before Silicon Valley obsessed over “AI inspired by the brain,” Columbia’s researchers were logging thousands of hours of neural data in a little lab off Broadway, sketching the earliest computational outlines of how the mind moves. |
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