In the latest episode of LIT NYC, host Alyssa Katz talks with J. Hoberman about his new opus, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.

“Certainly the cheap rents are essential. And the fact that there were areas of the city, of Manhattan, which had been in a way deserted because various light industries had left and there were spaces that artists were willing to colonize. You know, the original lofts were nothing like these designer lofts that you see. Cold water, some of them didn't have electricity. It required a lot of ingenuity on the part of the artists to even make these places livable, but the fact that you had these places was a stimulus to a community and see that's another thing that I wanted to stress in this book,” Hoberman says, noting that they made art at a time when the government was busting comedians and banning films here.

“I guess people can appreciate that there was a time before cell phones, but a lot of the people in this book didn't have telephones at all. That was a luxury that they couldn't afford. So how did they meet? How did they connect? There were bars and cafes that they went to, there were neighborhoods that they lived in, there was a sense of community that the city fostered kind of in its indifference.”

The FAQ NYC hosts dig into the Trump administration’s latest demands for compliance, why Mayor Eric Adams insists New York is powerless to enforce its own laws and ordinances inside of the federal office building in lower Manhattan now doubling as a makeshift jail, and how the Department of Homeland Security has the city and the country totally krossed out, and wiggida wiggida wiggida wack.

Stick around to the end for Prince, Muppets, and a legendary parodists’ paean to pigeon poisoning.

In the latest episode of LIT NYC, host Katie Honan talks with author Radha Vatsal, a speechwriter at city hall by day, to discuss her new novel about old New York, No. 10 Doyers Street, and “a past that was not as black and white as we make it out to be today.”

Vatsal, an immigrant herself, explains how she came to tell a story of Chinatown in the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of Archana "Archie" Morley, the only woman at her newspaper and one of just a handful of Indian immigrants in New York City at the time. While her editor and husband try to steer her away from covering notorious gangster Sai Wing Duck, AKA Mock Duck, Archie chases down the story of his adopted daughter being taken away from him by the city as it also plans to raze Chinatown.

The last police commissioner is suing the mayor and the NYPD for running what he alleges was a crooked operation with Eric Adams’ cronies peddling promotions for payoffs. Incredibly, City Hall and one of those cronies responded by claiming the mayor’s pick, storied FBI agent Tom Donlon, wasn’t mentally up to the job — and on Monday Donlon put in a notice of claim against Adams and former NYPD Spokesperson Tarik Sheppherd for a $10 million defamation suit.

Hosts Christina Greer, Katie Greer and Harry Siegel discuss all that and much more, including what seems like a race to the bottom between Adams and Andrew Cuomo, before Andrew Rein of the Citizen Budget Commission comes on to talk about the deep hole the city and state are in even before Washington makes more social safety net spending cuts. When New York’s been in trouble before, the feds spent billions. Now the Trump administration is taking billions away but local spending is spiking and something is going to give.

As Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams keep playing centrist chicken, the FAQ NYC podcast digs into all the latest developments in an upside down mayoral race where polls show a generic centrist would be tough to beat but the candidates clogging the middle lane now are each way behind in an upside-down race.

Plus, co-host Harry Siegel opens the episode with a tale of two Lower East Side legends as the city honors Jack "The King" Kirby, after a promotional push from Disney, while saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins keeps getting the short end of the stick, and end it with a riff on headless horsemen, Knickerbocker dreams and New Yorkers who again "begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions.”

It seems like no one — from President Donald Trump to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Post to the New York Times — can seem to line up a clean swing at Zohran Mamdani. Instead, the young socialist who just upended Democratic politics keeps benefitting from the wild shots aimed at him while members of the establishments determined to defeat him play  wild game of chicken against each other.

FAQ NYC hosts Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel discuss all that and much more, including a summer of drones vs. sharks, Eric Adams railing at a fundraised in the Hamptons of all places about the elite press supposedly picking on him, and Cuomo’s post-primary conundrum.

What just happened, how did New York City get here, and what happens now?! Three guests with different behind-the-scenes perspectives about Zohran Mamdani's winning primary campaign and his alignment with the Democratic Socialists of America — Narrative Wars writer Michael Lange, city historian Asad Dandia, and City and State Editor Peter Sterne — join hosts Christina Greer and Harry Siegel to dig into all of that.

On an historic night for Zohran Mamdani, Katie Honan phoned in from Andrew Cuomo’s forlorn “celebration” moments after he conceded and as workers were already taking down the bunting. New York Law School Executive Editor  Ben Max joined her and co-hosts Crhistina Greer to take in the moment and consider what it all means for New York City and the Democratic Party.

Christina Greer gives her perspective on the New York Times mayoral' panel ("everyone's a trope, right"), and the mixed message the paper sent by in effect overruling that panel to publish its own editorial blasting Mamdani, quickly dismissing Lander, and suggesting, without directly saying so, that voters should back Andrew Cuomo given that the race in their telling is a choice between the two leading candidates.

Hosts Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel discuss all that and much more as early voting has started in the primary — and Mayor Eric Adams is looming in the general election.