Eight shows from Gothamist's September gig roundup — indie pop at an East River heliport, death metal at the reopened Saint Vitus, ambient sets inside churches, and Erykah Badu with De La Soul at Forest Hills Stadium.
Festival Sunday before Labor Day: free Caribbean jam at Smorgasburg Prospect Park, a free-book fair on 31st Ave Open Street, Ralph Ellison jazz and a Bargemusic world premiere at 2, Met Opera HD screens Frida y Diego at 8 - then Monday is the West Indian Day Parade.
Quiet Sunday — three items at the floor, with the GPT-6 Astra launch still the story into day three. The lead: Fortune’s archive snapshots document OpenAI quietly editing Astra’s published evaluation numbers after launch — hallucination …
Thoughtworks CTO Rachel Laycock argues code review was quietly doing five jobs at once — and that teams should shift judgment left and review by exception instead of automating the ceremony.
Oberlin's Yeomen went winless last season, and a student columnist's plea to back the team sparked a campus war over whether anyone at the famously progressive liberal-arts school should care about football at all. Jesse Dougherty reports from a fight about class, culture, and what a college is for.
With his Iran war grinding on without victory, Trump is courting Kim Jong-un for a summit Kim remembers ending in humiliation. Kap Seol reads the courtship as a distraction exercise — and a moment for the Left to push an antinuclear peace campaign from below.
Ahead of the close of the Nottingham attacks inquiry, Mind's chief executive says the sector has 'softened the truth' about violence risk in a minority of people with severe mental illness — and that the silence has not protected anyone.
The 950-year-old embroidery that narrates the Norman conquest has left France for the first time, bound for the British Museum — a 300-mile move that took a hinged folding screen called le paravent, a vibration scientist who argued with the spec, and ninety handlers in blue latex gloves.
Gloria Steinem died September 2 at 92, and the tributes crowned her the personification of women's liberation. Jenny Brown reads the record differently: the CIA-funded youth festivals, the foundation-steered Ms. empire, and a feminism that made peace with corporate power while erasing the radicals who built the movement.
Peter Yang builds four games in one night with GPT-6 Astra on the $20 ChatGPT Plus plan — Star Fox-style shooter, train FPS, Starcraft-like RTS, and a roguelike deckbuilder — using free Blender/Godot MCP servers, concept art, and mostly lazy voice feedback.
A new simulation-graded benchmark measures frontier models on real circuit design — Claude Opus 5 leads at 61.6%, but tolerance, cost, and supply trade-offs still trip models up.
A Spotify engineer's recipe for token-cost sanity: route bulk file reads and boilerplate generation to a cheap model, keep the frontier model for actual reasoning.
The West Indian American Day Carnival parade steps off Monday 11 a.m.–6 p.m. along Eastern Parkway — free costumes, steelpan, soca, and jerk chicken. J'Ouvert starts 6 a.m.
Claude produced the first computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days — 13 million lines of Lean code — and the real story is what it means for trusting math written by AI.
Doreen St. Félix's Critic's Notebook on the Whitney's The Lost World retrospective — Minnie Evans, the self-taught visionary who drew because a voice told her to draw or die, and the condescension that still trails her work.
South Africa's Special Branch killed anti-apartheid journalist-intellectual Ruth First with a parcel bomb in 1982 — Christopher J. Lee on the lifelong communist whose Marxist work on postcolonial Africa outlived her assassins.
A free-music Saturday before Labor Day: Bargemusic chamber music at 2pm, jazz at Nook tonight, Met Opera HD's Eugene Onegin at Lincoln Center, free Shakespeare night 3 in Astoria and Tales from the Hood at dusk - plus the NYC Unicycle Festival's open-streets days in Jackson Heights.
AI incident responders are getting great at routine outages — which is exactly the problem, because routine incidents are how engineers build the intuition they need for the rare, hard ones.
Saturday was a medium news day with a landmark up top: Anthropic says Claude worked “largely autonomously” over 11 days to produce the first end-to-end, computer-checked proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Lean — a formalization the community …
The IPPR finds friendlessness among England's young has risen fivefold since 2014. The researchers Jessica Murray interviews point less at phones and more at the disappearance of cheap, casual, in-person places where friendships start.
In a Jacobin interview, Francis Fukuyama discusses the American right’s transformation, the limits of anti-bureaucratic politics, executive power, and what Democrats could learn from economic-populist politics.
Eryk Salvaggio reframes the OpenAI–Hugging Face hack: the danger is not machine rebellion but human-designed systems optimized, unleashed, and left unmonitored.
Postpartum psychosis is missed not because doctors are careless but because its first symptom is energy, and perinatal care is built to screen for the opposite. A writer who was treated for it reads the Lindsay Clancy mistrial against her own case.
The New York Times reports that companies are moving routine AI work to cheaper open models, while reserving expensive closed systems for demanding tasks.
Teresa Torres on error analysis, four eval types, and baseline-driven experiments for AI products and workflows.
September is sold as a second New Year, a month for returning as a better worker, partner, parent and friend. The burnout numbers and the research on connection, boredom and rest all point the other way.
MoMA stays open late every Friday with free admission for New York State residents, 5:30–8:30 p.m. Reserve up to a week ahead; same-day film tickets are free after 4 p.m.
Willoughby Britton set out to prove meditation was good for you. Instead she became the researcher who documented its harms — insomnia, dissociation, even psychosis — and the backlash from the meditation world that turned on her.
Every Friday through Oct. 2, saxophonist Patience Higgins hosts a free jazz jam at Patricks on the Hill in Hamilton Heights — no cover, an open second set, and $10 suggested for the band.
Players at the 2026 US Open describe spectators betting on matches who talk at them mid-play to change the result. Nothing in the ATP, WTA or grand slam rule books gives umpires anything to act on — while the tournament itself signed Kalshi as a partner days before it began.
Texas bans online sports betting and its attorney general once ruled daily fantasy contests illegal gambling. He has not joined the 44 states arguing prediction markets are unlicensed betting — and Politico reported $12,000 in Kalshi-linked contributions to his PAC and Senate campaign.
A 16,893-session experiment finds coding agents disagree on the same tool 58% of the time — and that being mentioned is not the same as being chosen.
Psychologist Peter Gray's Restoring Childhood argues kids today aren't wrecked by phones — they're suffocated by adult surveillance, over-schooling, and the disappearance of unsupervised play. Joshua Rothman weighs Gray against Jonathan Haidt's Anxious Generation.
Maxxing is what optimization culture looks like when it turns inward — looks, sleep, protein, testosterone, all measured and maximized. Bogost's case is that wonder, not more discipline, is what the habit crowds out.
Friday was a launch-plus-reckoning day: OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra with first-party day-1 specs, and ARC Prize’s independent eval landed the same cycle as the month’s best hype-check — 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 with the standard provider-neutral …
Andrew Ng on the Silicon Valley Girl podcast: why the AI doom drumbeat is incumbent-driven regulatory capture, why AI doing 30-40% of job tasks makes the human 60-70% more valuable, why LLMs as commonly used are terrible for learning (and his new Learn Vector 1-to-1 tutoring bet), the context advantage that keeps human judgment relevant, and the 'product management bottleneck' he says is now the real constraint on building.
Free Friday is stacked - the first-ever Bryant Park Brass Festival, Met Opera HD Festival night three (I Puritani), free Shakespeare night two in Astoria and free comedy at Shillelagh - plus Tales from the Hood Saturday and School of Rock + Ralph Ellison jazz on Sunday.
Convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić died in detention on August 27 — and days later Belgrade woke to a fresh mural glorifying him. Lela Vujanić on why the nationalist myth survives genocide convictions, and what breaking it would require.
The Next New Thing rounds up 10 GitHub projects for interactive architecture diagrams, global tracking, AI-generated courses, scientific skills, small models, SEO, and forecasting—plus seven viewer submissions.
Nandan Thakur (BEIR, MIRACL, TREC-RAG; now Microsoft Research India) on agentic search: BrowseComp-Plus as a reproducible eval, why the retriever moves accuracy more than the model does (60% → 88% on the same LLM), ORBIT's zero-budget 20k-question synthetic data pipeline, and HawkEye trajectory analysis for the leaderboard trap where 95% accuracy hides 210 search calls.
Week five of the fully AI-built fishing game series: a redesigned fishing minigame with a bank button and a real push-your-luck loop, hex turn-based scrapped for real time, and the series' best workflow advice yet — build in-game editors instead of prompting the AI for perfect placement.
California's Proposition 40 would tax roughly 200 billionaires to fund health care for millions. Sergey Brin's $150 million counter-campaign produced something new: a lobby whose only client is the billionaire class itself.
Victims of repeated violence remember in gist, not clean episodes — and research shows judges, juries and interviewers read that ordinary pattern as dishonesty. Helen Paterson's forensic psychology work, recognised this month with a Eureka prize, argues the inconsistency defence is a misreading of how memory behaves.
Dismissed for a century as timid municipal reformers, Milwaukee's 'sewer socialists' were actually the most successful socialist organization in US history — and a working model for Zohran Mamdani's New York.
Claude Code rebuilt Rabah Shihab's 1993 Amiga game Babylonian Twins into Godot: 34K lines of C++ in an evening, 72,758 lines of 68000 assembly decoded byte-identically, all five level formats reverse-engineered — and the places the port went wrong.
Claude Code rebuilt Rabah Shihab's 1993 Amiga game Babylonian Twins into Godot: 34K lines of C++ in an evening, 72,758 lines of 68000 assembly decoded byte-identically, all five level formats reverse-engineered — and the places the port went wrong.
A developer builds an NPC that tracks the player with a Bayes-filter occupancy grid and finds no prior art in shipped games — the thread explains why discrete belief won and probabilistic tracking stayed in robotics.
An Ingham County judge converted a temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction blocking Kalshi's sports wagers in Michigan, with a $500,000-a-day geolocation penalty — and her findings name under-21 customers, unmet mental-health protections, and school, city and tribal revenue.
A new biography reads Victor Serge's Mexican exile as a slide into Cold War anti-communism. Three writers from anarchist and revolutionary-socialist traditions argue he never stopped being a socialist.
Six free things today - lunchtime piano in Bryant Park, Golden Hour at Greeley Square, saxophonist Grace Kelly at Bryant Park, the Astoria Players free Shakespeare opener, the Little Island bake sale, and night two of the Met Opera HD Festival - plus a free brass festival tomorrow.