First, it was the bacon, egg, and cheese. Now, the price of New York City’s beloved chopped cheese could be next to rise.

Average per pound ground beef prices across the United States rose to a record high of $6.12 as of June 2025, and steaks now cost $11.49 a pound, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both are nearly a dollar more expensive than they were last June. Beef and veal prices jumped 10% year over year as of the same month.

Places like East Harlem’s Blue Sky Deli, better known to locals as Hajji’s, could feel the price pain especially hard. The corner store claims to have invented the chopped cheese, and workers behind the grill cook hundreds of the sandwiches daily.

“We’re making chopped cheese every day. We order 400 heroes a day,” said Frankie Frank Ramirez, who’s been working the bodega’s grill for 28 years.

Ramirez estimated employees use about 360 pounds of hamburger meat daily for the uptown staple. If the owners at Blue Sky Deli paid the average price of ground beef for their products, keeping chopped cheeses on the grill would cost $2,203.20 a day.

Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the iconic Broadway musical “A Chorus Line,” which opened at the Shubert Theatre on July 25, 1975.

The story of dancers auditioning for the chorus of a new musical became a singular sensation. The show picked up nine Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1976. It ran for 15 years – the most performances of any Broadway show up to that time – and had an enormous influence on today’s Broadway, including how musicals are created.

“It really shouldn't have worked on any level,” said theater historian Laurence Maslon, “because it took every convention of the American musical and turned it inside out.”

The barebones staging of “A Chorus Line” was novel at the time. When audiences entered the Shubert Theatre, they didn’t see an elaborate set or a red velvet curtain – instead they saw a black box, with a white line at the front, and performers in rehearsal clothes doing a dance routine.

The mayoral campaign of Democrat Zohran Mamdani has energized some of New York City's immigrant communities, including Muslims and South Asians. But some of his sharpest critics are also South Asian, like the candidate himself.

WNYC's Arun Venugopal joins Weekend Edition host David Furst to discuss how Mamdani's run has placed him at the center of longstanding divisions between Hindus and Muslims.

When it comes to the summer, are you a glass half-full or half-empty personality? Do you see it as a swampy, humid hellscape that must be endured on the way to autumn or do you celebrate every moment of the season? Here in late July, we spoke with people on the streets of Soho to get their take and to hear about their plans for the dog days.

New York City officials and food pantry organizers say thousands of SNAP recipients are at risk of losing their benefits under President Trump’s sweeping tax cut measure. 

Republicans say the tax and spending package is meant to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse,” but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill will primarily benefit the wealthy, leaving the poorest families worse off. 

The new law unleashes a series of new measures that food advocates say will effectively push people off SNAP, which helps 1.8 million New Yorkers afford their groceries every month. The cuts slash payments for some, kick others completely off the program and require thousands more to show proof they are working consistently if they want to keep their SNAP. 

Buffalo’s 2021 mayoral election may sound familiar: A political heavyweight tried to strut through a mayoral primary and lost to a democratic socialist. Democratic Party leaders were split on embracing the upstart, and deep-pocketed developers and business leaders put money behind an incumbent running without a major party line.

The subway system's modernization has taken so long that once cutting-edge technology for newer trains needs to be replaced. That and more in this week's On The Way roundup of New York City transit news.

For the first time, Animal Care Centers of NYC has surpassed a thousand pets in their care at one time. They are still accepting animals but asking people to drop off pets only for emergencies.

Katy Hansen, the director of marketing and communications for Animal Care Centers of NYC, talked with WNYC's Sean Carlson more about it.

On a recent Tuesday I took the 1 train up to 133rd Street to experience an increasingly popular pastime for New Yorkers: armored fighting.

The ancient form of entertainment has fallen out of the mainstream over the centuries but has regained some traction internationally this millennia — less for reenactments than for, essentially, professional-level bar brawls in chainmail.

To get a taste of this violent team sport, I attended a meetup of Santa’s Knights, a nonprofit organization that runs free weekly fitness classes that are functionally gladiator bootcamp at Harlem’s Manhattanville Community Center.

Around 20 people were in the gym the evening I attended. The week prior, the organization said it had held its first women’s class and had some 40 people show up.

“It's just getting bigger and bigger,” Damion DiGrazia, who founded Santa’s Knights in 2016, said.

The two-hour course starts like any other workout course — with stretching — then gets more specific as attendees learn the basics of using a sword.

New police data shows criminal summons have increased tenfold since a crackdown on cyclists and e-bike riders in New York City began in April.

The summonses, or pink tickets, for cyclists jumped from 561 before the directive to nearly 6,000 tickets in the second quarter of 2025.

Mayor Eric Adams has also been touting a new Department of Sustainable Delivery – funded by this year’s city budget – to regulate the tens of thousands of delivery workers on e-bikes and mopeds in the boroughs.  

Ligia Guallpa is executive director of the Workers Justice Project, and William Medina is a leader at Los Deliveristas Unidos, a division of the Workers Justice Project that advocates for delivery workers. They joined WNYC's Michael Hill to discuss the new department. 

A version of the conversation with where listeners can hear an English translation of William Medina's answers is available here.