last updated January 4, 2026Comments? Send email to: fny@freenewyork.net
Episode #1041: A Cracker Barrrel and an IHOP
First Broadcast: 1/5/26
Free New York continues its wrap-up of 2025 with our recap of the second half of the year in this episode, starting with President Trump's anticlimactic military parade on June 14, which was thankfully outnumbered by all the "No Kings" protestors around the country on the same day. We continue with Trump's bombing of Iran; Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City; Andrew Cuomo's refusal to take "no" for an answer as he continued his own mayoral campaign after losing the primary; the summer movies of 2025 that we liked (and disliked); Cuomo's really bad proposal to make New Yorkers even more rent burdened than they already are; an in-depth look at the movie Caught Stealing and the late 1990s environment it depicted; the horrors of A.I. podcasting; the end of Mayor Eric Adams' re-election campaign, and the time one of his campaign workers handed a reporter an envelope full of money hidden inside a bag of potato chips; the demise of Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream Parlor and many other businesses that have come and gone in the city; the startling statistic that 42% of respondents to a particular survey did not know that POTATO CHIPS were made of POTATOES; the "No Kings" protests of October 18, which surpassed the number of people who turned out for the protests in June; Zohran Mamdani's unequivocal victory in the mayoral election, and right-wing meltdowns in response to it; how A.I. is more abysmal than even the lowest-level employees at the simplest tasks; and how the new citizenship test--along with so many other things--seems designed to reduce the number of new citizens we have in this country, and probably for the most racist of reasons. Quite a year, wasn't it? The only question is whether 2026 will have me reaching for antacid more or less often than the year that just ended, and I don't want to make any predictions, but maybe I should invest in calcium futures now...
So, what is Free New York anyway? The simple answer is that it's a
this neat little
public access TV show on
Manhattan Neighborhood Network which I co-produce with the
tremendous help of my camerawoman/editor/everything else,
Kim. The complicated answer
is that it's a project of mine to broadcast opinions and events which
don't always appear within "the mainstream media" (like The New York Times,
the major networks, local radio, etc.), and so far I think it's been working.
If you think I'm doing a good job--or not--and you feel
like sending me snail mail, the address is:
Free New York
P.O. Box 20945
Tompkins Square Station
New York, NY 10009
You can also email me at fny@freenewyork.net, which should get to me a lot faster than the snail mail.
last updated January 4, 2026
Comments?
Send email to: fny@freenewyork.net