This brilliant Friday morning will kick off a stunningly beautiful weekend here in New York City, one that should make you consider how many days like this you'll be able to experience, and how you should spend them, and with whom.
Thus it is with a touch of regret that we are now going to spend the next 90 seconds or so directing you to some bullshit online about the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Oh, you've read enough about the 96-year-old queen and her 70-year-reign? Her dry sense of humor and her concentration camps in Africa? Her cold reception to Princess Diana's death and her warm embrace of corgis? All the best tweets and the worst tweets? The richest man in the world doing a cancel culture? Bourdain? Belfast? Bank of England?
Via the mayor's office: "Mayor Adams today ordered all flags on all City buildings, as well as stationary flagstaffs throughout the five boroughs, to be lowered to half-staff, beginning immediately."
Here's some slightly more important stuff we're reading:
- Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill that lowers classroom sizes in New York, which would have forced Mayor Eric Adams to restore the budget cuts he pushed through the city council this past June, except that now, the bill has been amended so that it does not take effect until next year. Tricky!
- The Adams administration confirmed to City Limits that it is considering housing migrants seeking asylum in "camp facilities," which is weird because Mayor Eric Adams has spent a lot of time demolishing homeless encampments across the city.
- Documented reports that immigrant workers at the U.S. Open have reported $4,500 in stolen wages. Fault!
- Remember when a NYCHA superintendent Zoomed into a meeting with a naked woman in bed? Vice asked for some records surrounding the incident and NYCHA apparently responded with a bunch of sensitive records of a random tenant. NYCHA head Gregory Russ, who is paid some $400,000 a year, STILL commutes to New York from Minnesota, and he was hired in 2019! Great job, everyone.
- The Post, which is still posting about the Queen's death so hard that you have to scroll a solid 10 seconds on the main page in order to get to the boobs and crime coverage, acts all shocked about these 9/11 themed menu items found at some random ass suburban club in northern Virginia but forgets that they were smearing gobs of ketchup on their Freedom Fries in 2003.
- Is it OK to take a law firm job defending companies that are destroying the planet? No, it's not. But here's the New York Times's ethicist saying it's chill.
- We feel for New York Magazine's Kevin Dugan, who had to publish his deep investigation on Scientology's labor exploitation (with Documented!) on Queen Died Day. Hell Gate's flags are at half-mast.
