MTA Chair Janno Lieber said next month’s retirement of the MetroCard will enable the agency to ramp up its crackdown on fare evaders. Lieber’s planned enforcement blitz would come right as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani takes office following a campaign that promised to eliminate the fare on the MTA’s buses. (Lieber has dismissed the idea as infeasible.)

This week's Politics Brief features an examination of the political dynamics between the mayor-elect and the presumptive City Council speaker. 

The newest challenge to New York’s rent-stabilization law is, on its face, a narrow dispute over a handful of long-vacant apartments. But the attorneys who filed the complaint say they’ve got a specific audience in mind: the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nonprofit libertarian Institute for Justice says it crafted the lawsuit to offer the court the kind of clean, concrete dispute that could allow the justices to revisit the constitutional limits of rent regulation.

Read more at Gothamist.

A fight over a historic Upper West Side church that has pitted A-list celebrities against a small Presbyterian congregation could finally be resolved next month.

'Pieces of April,' starring Katie Holmes, takes place on a single Thanksgiving day on the Lower East Side, jumping between parallel stories of a New Jersey family piling into the car to visit their estranged daughter in the city, and the daughter frantically preparing to host them in her Suffolk Street walkup. It’s both deeply of its time, and shockingly modern, and it almost didn't get made. 

A New York City mayor's second term is missing from the official record, and the implications span centuries. 

Greenmarkets are full of colorful varieties of kale, which are at their most flavorful this time of year when the cold weather forces the plant to produce more sugar. 

Amelia Tarpey is the Program and Publicity Manger for GrowNYC Greenmarkets. She said head to the Greenmarkets this weekend for the perfect veggie to cleanse from your Thanksgiving feast. Or, use some of your leftovers and incorporate fresh market kale to make a whole new and impressive dish.

Right now at Greenmarkets across the city, kale is going for $3 to $5 a bunch. 

A very special Thanksgiving edition of On The Way rounding up the latest transit news. 

Free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and free universal childcare. Those are just some of the policy proposals that attracted a majority of New Yorkers to vote mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani into office. Those same proposals also turned off many voters who worried about the impact they could have on the city's finances. The policies have been labeled socialist policies by both supporters and opponents. But New York City has been here before. Kim Phillips-Fein, a history professor at Columbia University and the author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, joined WNYC host Michael Hill to put this moment into historical context. 

On Thanksgiving, we're usually celebrating the turkey on the table. This year, we're also celebrating New York City's most famous turkey on the streets. 

Astoria is the only wild turkey in Manhattan. She first popped up in Queens, which is why she's named after the neighborhood.  

David Barrett runs the popular social media account Manhattan Bird Alert and often keeps a close eye on Astoria. He joined WNYC's Michael Hill to give an update on the bird's seasonal adventures.