A South Shore car wash is becoming a welding shop, gallery and artist residency, three years in the making. Floating Museum's co-directors say the space will fabricate art "at cost" while training up the next generation, though no opening date is set yet.
— via Block Club Chicago, Maxwell Evans
"Reacher" spinoff "Neagley" just hit number one on Prime Video, and it's already Chicago to the bone: an "L" track death, a South Side backstory and a lead character defined by three lines in 30 books. Star Maria Sten took a real winter trip through the city to build her out, even though much of the show was shot in Toronto.
— via Block Club Chicago, Clint Worthington
A Wendy's worker who stabbed a colleague in the face and head while screaming "I am going to kill you" got 12 years, well short of the 30 she could have faced. She'd threatened to kill the same co-worker a month earlier, prosecutors say, and video caught the whole attack.
— via NY Post, Chris Bradford
A new ranking crunching health scores and Google reviews across 11,000 NYC eateries crowns Gramercy Park's Pizzazz the city's top pizzeria, scoring an oddly fitting 81.18 out of 100. Manhattan claims 60% of the top slots, with only Queens breaking up the borough's dominance in the top five.
— via NY Post, Reda Wigle
AOC says she'll wait until after the midterms to pick between a Senate bid, a 2028 presidential run, or walking away from office entirely. Polling has her favored over Schumer in a primary, but her statewide numbers are slipping, and one columnist argues that not needing to win may be exactly why voters would let her.
— via NY Post, Post Editorial Board
A 1971 conjecture Ronald Graham dreamed up, possibly while thinking about juggling, just got closed out 55 years later. Four papers and a heavy dose of randomness later, mathematicians confirmed that any set of nonzero integers on a finite "clock" can always be reordered so no two partial sums collide.
— via Quanta Magazine, Shalma Wegsman
At a public library event, an author compared Israel to a "dog shelter" and said Zionism has made Jews look worse than anything else in history. The interviewer, a fellow anti-Zionist, lobbed softballs, no one pushed back, and now critics and a City Council office want answers.
— via NY Post, Carl Campanile
One shop owner says sidewalk shrinkage and legal fights over vibration monitors have cost him $1 million and cut sales 40%. Down the block, a tile store lost 90% of its contractor traffic after the MTA took over its loading zone and, he says, went silent on promised fixes.
— via NY Post, Haley Brown
Emilio's Ballato chef Anthony Vitolo is teaming up with Salvatore Sorrentino to open a supper club in a gutted Garden City space, born from a pop-up planned in a single day. The deal came together over drinks at 2 a.m., and Ballato's meatballs and secret-menu dishes are headed to the new hybrid menu.
— via NY Post, Alex Mitchell
A Bronx cabbie collapsed dead in a fried chicken shop bathroom mid-shift, still owing $3,800 on a taxi contract despite dialysis three times a week. He's one of at least four yellow cab drivers who died on the job this summer, reviving fears from 2018's medallion debt crisis that never really went away.
— via Gothamist, Ramsey Khalifeh
A Ukrainian immigrant who once scrubbed toilets now runs a nail salon empire in Old Irving Park, and this year opened a school to fix what she calls a rare combination: techs who are licensed and actually skilled. Her fix: hands-on training the state exam skips, plus salaried jobs with benefits instead of contractor gigs.
— via Block Club Chicago, Molly DeVore
A painted barbershop pole turned viral "slap cactus" helped launch Te-Qu, but the day before its grand opening, the city told founder Daniel Silva the space was zoned residential, no business license possible. He canceled, started rezoning, and pushed a street pop-up instead while planning a new opening Oct. 10.
— via Block Club Chicago, Francia Garcia Hernandez
A viral Giants broadcast joke turned into 80 million views and a wave of harassment aimed at a couple who were actually grieving a friend's death, not fighting over ketchup. The mom now says the real story behind that clip is nothing like what the internet assumed.
— via Hoodline, Emily Johnson
A century-old Humboldt Park church turns out to have started as a vaudeville house and movie theater, and its new owner is bringing the screen back. He's naming it La Reina, a deliberate swap of the old Rex Theatre's "king" for "queen," with 55 to 60 seats and a nonprofit mission to let neighbors shape what plays.
— via Block Club Chicago, Rory Quealy
Oklahoma City just ranked last among the 50 biggest US cities for transit, scoring 31.36 out of 100 on usefulness and accessibility. The city points to a new $97 million bus rapid transit push, but ridership keeps missing targets and the average resident boarded transit just 3.4 times in 2024.
— via Hoodline, Amelia Claire Grant
One stole a pig and got shot for it; another rebranded himself into a respected councillor. A look at how Australia's convict past went from shameful secret worth a name change to something descendants now boast about.
— via The Conversation — History, Kristyn Harman, Professor in History, University of Tasmania
A vaudeville comedian who married science with showmanship, Harry Burrell built a portable "platypusary" to keep the notoriously elusive animal alive in captivity, getting stabbed by poisonous spurs along the way. His underwater tank produced the first known footage of a platypus swimming, proving it navigates by touch alone.
— via The Conversation — History, Meg Foster, Chancellor's Research Fellow, School of Communication and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
Four astronauts lift off no earlier than Oct. 1 aboard a Dragon capsule that's already flown once this year, ferrying stem-cell experiments on heart disease and Parkinson's to the station. Jessica Watkins becomes the first NASA astronaut to fly twice on SpaceX hardware.
— via NASA Breaking News, Mark A. Garcia
The Artemis II crew flew 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the human spaceflight distance record Apollo 13 set in 1970. They'll detail the mission publicly for the first time in Houston on Sept. 30, with media able to RSVP for an earlier Q&A.
— via NASA Breaking News, Wendy K. Avedisian
