"Ugh," I thought, "why am I feeling weirdly migrainey? My Next Phase Of The Menstrual Cycle is very much not due for like another week? I've been weirdly super regular basically since it reasserted itself post-surgery?"
... TURNS OUT that I had lost track of time a bit and I'm not a solid week early at all, it's a whole two days. This Means Some Things:
... still super regular by my pre-surgical standards,
I will not be at the worst stage of my cycle during Significant Travel next week, and LAST BUT VERY MUCH NOT LEAST
the migraine is still in fact very clearly associated with hormonal changes even when I'm not expecting them, take THAT Headache Is The Second Most Common Form Of Psychosomatic Pain ~statistics~ (and ongoing anxiety).
Most of the seats in the ornate wood-paneled courtroom of Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho Tuesday were filled with supporters of Mohamed Bahi, the former aide to Mayor Eric Adams who was about to be sentenced for arranging illegal straw donations for the mayor’s election campaigns.
Missing from the scene was Eric Adams, the man whose candidacy put Bahi in that courtroom awaiting his fate.
And Ho — the same judge who’d reluctantly dismissed Adams’ campaign finance fraud case at the request of the Trump Justice Department after Adams promised fealty to the administration — wasn’t about to let that go unnoticed.
“There’s a notable absence here of the person at the apex of the pyramid,” Ho remarked, making clear his belief that the guy at the top had managed to walk away while Bahi, a relatively low-level City Hall functionary, was the guy, as his defense lawyer put it, “left holding the bag.”
Adams was a couple of hours away from jetting off to Uzbekistan, a particularly rich coincidence. Bahi, once the mayor’s liaison to the Muslim community, had admitted that he’d orchestrated the straw donation scheme through an Uzbek contractor based in Brooklyn.
Despite the mayor’s absence, Adams was very much at the heart of the proceeding, in which Ho sentenced Bahi to three years probation, including one year of home detention, and ordered him to pay $32,000 in restitution to the city Campaign Finance Board.
Bahi admitted that in December 2020 he convinced contractor Tolib Mansurov, a local leader in the Uzbek community who had ties to the Uzbekistan government, to pull together $10,000 worth of donations, which is well above the amount an individual can contribute. Mansurov and four of his employees gave $2,000 each, and the boss later reimbursed his staff.
Mayor Eric Adams holds a roundtable with Uzbek community leaders, including Tolib Mansurov of United Elite Group, July 17, 2023. Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Offi
Throughout the hearing, Ho repeatedly brought up the mayor, questioning how he should handle the fate of a mere aide involved in campaign finance fraud on Adams’ behalf when Adams himself walked away more or less unscathed, leaving Bahi the man in the middle.
“I know this is a hard question,” the judge said, addressing the prosecutor handling Bahi’s case. “What am I to make of a person above Mr. Bahi, the mayor, who had his indictment dismissed against him?”
A member of the audience quietly clapped his hands. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Sobelman dodged the question, instead stating that the case was only about Bahi’s personal actions.
Bahi’s defense attorney, Derek Adams, also made use of the mayor’s absence, noting that after his client had pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy earlier this year, the press kept asking “How do you feel that Adams’ charges were dismissed and you were left holding the bag?
Ho later quoted the lawyer, noting, “It’s hard to escape the notion that, as [defense attorney] Adams said, that Mr. Bahi was left here holding the bag.”
The judge also sought to take the case farther up the ladder, asking Bahi’s attorney “who’s the architect” of the straw donor scheme Bahi admitted to.
In a filing with court prior to sentencing, the lawyer described Bahi as somewhat naive about politics and ignorant of campaign finance laws that restrict how much contributors can give candidates. He claimed that another mayoral aide, Ahsan Chughtai, told him the mayor won’t show up at an event unless at least he could be promised $10,000 in donations.
After Bahi informed Mansurov of the minimum, the Uzbek contractor offered to write a $10,000 check himself. Bahi then asked Chughtai, who told him about the $2,000 per person limit. Chughtai, Bahi claims, then told him it would be okay for the contractor to reimburse his employees for their contributions.
Bahi’s lawyer said “the instructions Mr. Bahi got came from Ahsan Chughtai. Whether it stopped with him or went to Mayor Adams, that’s not something Mr. Bahi knows.” Chughtai lost his job as the mayor’s liaison to the South Asian community and had his home raided by the FBI, but he was never charged with a crime.
Bahi also lost his job as a mayoral aide and, during his sentencing, said he worried that a jail sentence would prevent him from continuing charitable efforts to raise money for the needy that he’d devoted the last 15 years of his life to. He asked the judge for one year’s probation.
“I can’t undo the past, your honor, but I can choose the person I am going forward,” he stated. “It’s not incarceration, it’s not probation. It’s that leaving court today as a convicted felon — that hurts.”
The judge acknowledged Bahi’s case presented a “challenging sentence,” balancing what he said was Bahi’s “extraordinary record” of charitable service to his “very serious offense,” noting that the Adams campaign received public matching funds based on the illegal straw contributions arranged by Bahi.
“Straw donations like these are a serious offense,” he noted. “It may seem like it’s a victimless offense, but it’s not. The victim is the public.”
In the end, Bahi’s three-years-of-probation sentence was a compromise of sorts. The probation department had recommended two years probation, Bahi had requested one year probation, and the prosecution sought one year and a day of imprisonment.
Bahi is now the second casualty of the Adams campaign’s fundraising tactics. Erden Arkan, a Turkish businessman who pleaded guilty in a similar straw donor scheme, was sentenced to one year probation by Ho.
But there are many others implicated in Adams’ fundraising who appear to have escaped a public display of their actions, starting with Adams.
In September 2024 Adams became the first New York City mayor in modern history to be indicted. He was charged with soliciting and accepting illegal straw donations as part of his effort to obtain what would ultimately be $10 million in public matching funds. The indictment alleged that he’d continued this scheme in his bid for re-election.
Mayor Eric Adams stands beside his lawyer outside Gracie Mansion after being indicted on federal corruption charges, Sept. 26, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
In February, soon after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice moved to toss the charges, arguing that they inhibited the mayor’s ability to cooperate in the administration’s immigration crackdown. The then-acting Manhattan U.S. attorney and several prosecutors handling the case all resigned in protest, and the motion for dismissal was taken over by a top Justice Department lawyer who also happened to be one of President Trump’s personal attorneys.
In April, Ho agreed to dismiss the case “with prejudice,” meaning it can’t be reopened. But he made clear his feelings about the dubious nature of the transaction, writing, “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
As a result, the public did not get to hear the evidence against Adams assembled by prosecutors, the FBI and the city Department of Investigation. Former mayoral aide Rana Abasova and Adams’ campaign fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, both of whom featured prominently in the investigation, did not have to appear as witnesses and faced no charges themselves.
After the campaign finance investigation exploded into the headlines in November 2023 when FBI agents seized the mayor’s phones, word of a broader investigation began to spread.
Another mayoral aide, Winnie Greco, whom THE CITY had linked to other potential straw donor schemes, had her homes raided by the FBI and DOI in February 2024. She later resigned and remains under investigation by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney.
Meanwhile the mayor now goes about claiming his indictment was the result of the Biden administration’s “weaponizing” of the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office after he criticized their failure to get the U.S. border under control. The investigation actually began in September 2021, before Adams had even begun his tenure at City Hall.
On Tuesday his office announced yet another round of taxpayer-funded travel, this time with the mayor wrapping up his trip to Israel to jet off to Uzbekistan. There, his press office stated, the mayor will participate in a “multi-day trip to meet with government, business, tech, sports and religious leaders to discuss how New York City can partner with Uzbekistan to bring innovation, businesses, and jobs to the five boroughs.”
If that’s to happen on the mayor’s watch, however, it will have to happen quickly. Since he dropped out of the race in October, his tenure at City Hall now expires in just over six weeks.
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is seeking a federal trial for a charge he was hit with during an act of civil disobedience against immigration agents inside 26 Federal Plaza in September — rejecting an offer to drop the case.
Lander was arrested with 10 state lawmakers on Sept. 18 by Department of Homeland Security Police after an hour-long standoff in the elevator bank of the 10th floor of the building, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has several holding cells for recently detained immigrants.
Following an appearance in federal court Tuesday morning, federal prosecutors offered Lander and the other elected officials a deal to drop the obstruction charges against them if they avoid being arrested inside a federal building for six months, the lawmakers said.
While the state lawmakers agreed to the deal, Lander refused it.
“I believe the crime is not what we were doing. The crime on that day was on the other side of the 10th floor door, where ICE agents are keeping our neighbors in cruel detention conditions,” he said, speaking to a gaggle of reporters outside the federal courthouse after the appearance Tuesday. “That’s why we were there. That’s what we wanted to see.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately return a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
Among those who agreed to the deal were left-leaning members of the legislature, including state senators Jabari Brisport, Gustavo Rivera and Julia Salazar and assemblymembers Emily Gallagher, Jessica Gonzalez Rojas, Marcela Mitaynes, Tony Simone and Claire Valdez.
“We were afforded due process today, but so many have been robbed of that right,” Valdez said, referring to ICE’s arrests of immigrants that have been spiking since May.
On the day of their arrests, Lander and the state lawmakers were demanding to inspect conditions of ICE’s holding cells, where THE CITY had reported on rampant overcrowding where detainees were described in one video as being held “like dogs in here.”
A federal judge’s order in August, however, appears to have improved conditions for detainees and restricted the number of people ICE can keep there at once. In the months since, most people arrested in New York City are now transferred much more quickly to detention centers in New Jersey, Nassau County or Orange County or elsewhere.
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
In 1958 and ‘59, an unprecedented study was conducted by the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea was to apply the latest psychological tests on the world’s most famous and accomplished architects to try and determine what makes them so creative and successful. In studying them, could some magical key to creativity be discovered?
Astoundingly, some 40 major architects volunteered, including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, George Nelson, Louis Kahn, and A. Quincy Jones. The group spent three days being subjected to a battery of tests, sitting for interviews, even evaluating the creative and design prowess of each other. While the idea was to publish the results of the tests at the time, besides some news and fluff pieces about the study, and some superficial conclusions about the nature of the creative impulse that drove these design superstars, the full results of the study have remained unpublished until this impressive new release from Monacelli Press.
The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study is a lovely and thought-provoking time-capsule of a book. Through its numerous black and white photos and reprints of the research materials, correspondences between the subjects of the study and the psychologists, and news clippings of the day, the book paints a surprisingly evocative picture of this unique study and the era in which it was conducted. Reading the test results, in the architects’ own hands, and the evaluations of the researchers, is fascinating.
So, what conclusions did the study finally reach? Nothing earth shattering. Going into the study, the research group had circulated a list of “genius” attributes from a 1957 book about Freud, which included things like “the power of deep concentration, tremendous patience, and self-discipline…” and “ability to generalize from the particular and to separate the significant from the unimportant…” Drawn from the data, the conclusion of the study: “What propels creativity is the unfettered expression of the self,” “finding the solution to a problem is not sufficient to bring them personal satisfaction: there is a further demand for the solution to be elegant,” and the discovery that creative individuals “consistently safeguard their self-determination in order to stay their course and pursue what interests them no matter what, in a fierce escape from conformism of thought and behavior.”
The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study doesn’t contain any easy, replicable recipes for living a creative life, for becoming a design god. But what it does do is curate a captivating collection of literal and figurative snapshots from a peak time in design history and the creative genius that drove it. And that is ultimately very inspiring.
HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES – NEIL GAIMAN AT HIS BEST WITH FANTASTIC CHARACTER MOMENTS
How to Talk to Girls at Parties by Neiman Gaiman (author), Gabriel Bá (illustrator), and Fábio Moon (illustrator) Dark Horse Books 2016, 64 pages, 6.9 x 10.5 x 0.4 inches
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman short story of the same name, originally published in his collection Fragile Things. As adaptations go, this one tells the story pretty exactly as it was done by Gaiman. Two teens named Enn and Vic go to a party with the intention of picking up girls. Vic is handsome and confident, while Enn is shy and awkward. Enn doesn’t know how to talk to girls, and this becomes the central problem of the story. His attempts to seem cool and desirable are both humorous and relatable to anybody who has ever tried talking to a potential love interest. As the night moves on, it becomes clear that something is amiss at this party, but exactly what is unknown to Enn, and a little ambiguous to the reader.
I really like this book. At first glance it might seem like an odd choice for a comic – the story doesn’t reach the heights of some of Gaiman’s other work, for example. But it’s short and sweet and so unique. The story is Gaiman at his best in terms of information release and character moments. You’re never completely ahead of the plot and it is so easy to sympathize with Enn’s awkwardness. The charm of the original story was Gaiman’s ability to play with a young man’s feeling that girls were practically another species, and that aspect thrives in this version. In terms of visual storytelling and artistic prowess, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá are absolute masters, and I cannot recommend their work here enough. They have an incredible ability to draw worlds that look like reality, but maybe just a few degrees more fantastic. What perfect partners for Gaiman’s work.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties gets my highest recommendation, both for fans of Gaiman and/or Moon & Bá as well as fans of unique sci-fi. It’s a short book you can breeze through pretty quickly, and then immediately restart to find more hints of what’s really going on. A film adaptation directed by John Cameron Mitchell (Rabbit Hole) is set to debut in 2017, so at the very least this interesting comic will prepare you for the film. – Alex Strine
PyCon US 2026 is coming to Long Beach, California!
PyCon US is the premiere conference for the Python programming language
in North America. Python experts and enthusiasts from around the globe
will gather in Long Beach to discuss and learn about the latest developments
to the Python programming language and massive ecosystem of Python projects.
New in 2026: Security and AI talk tracks!
Brand new this year are two themed talk tracks: “Trailblazing Python Security” and “Python and the Future of AI”.
We want to hear talks from you! The PyCon US Call for Proposals (CFP) for PyCon US 2026 is now open through December 19th, 2025.
Don’t wait to submit your talks, the earlier you submit the better.
If your company or organization would like to show support for a more
secure Python ecosystem by sponsoring the “Trailblazing Python
Security” talk track check out
the PyCon US 2026 Sponsor Prospectus or reach out via email to sponsors@python.org.
We’ve made three sponsor slots available for the track: one lead sponsor and two co-sponsors, so act fast!
We’re also looking for mentors! If you’re an experienced speaker and
want to help someone with their proposal, the PyCon US Proposal Mentorship Program is for you! We typically get twice the number of
mentees seeking support than we do for volunteer mentors. Sign up to mentor via this form by November 21, 2025.
What’s next for Python security?
If you're interested in Python and security: why
should you attend PyCon US 2026?
You’ll be among the first Pythonistas to hear about these new features and chat with the developers and maintainers of PyPI.
Open Space about handling vulnerabilities in Python projects
PyCon US always has many opportunities to learn about the latest in Python security. Last year at PyCon US 2025 hosted a “Python Security Mini-Summit”
Open Space with speakers discussing the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), CVE
and Open Source, and supply-chain within the Scientific Python
community. Expect even more security content this year!
The conference talk schedule includes many talks about using
memory-safe systems programming languages like Rust with Python,
authentication with popular Web frameworks, how to handle security
vulnerabilities as an Open Source project, and how the “Phantom
Dependency” problem affects the Python package ecosystem.
We hope you’ll consider joining us in Long Beach, CA for PyCon US 2026. See you there! 🔥🏕️
Inspired in part by the software development simulator
that Elisabeth Hendrickson and friends built,
I’ve been toying with the idea of using SimPy to create something
that could be used in a half-day workshop to
(a) show people how powerful discrete event simulation can be, and
(b) demonstrate why simple measurements of developers’ work are almost always misleading.
It’s been thirty-five years since I did this kind of simulation,
SimPy uses some features of Python that I haven’t kept up with,
and I’ve never taught this topic before,
so I’m planning to do a few blog posts about how it works and what I’m learning.
Generators
A generator is a Python function that creates an object
which uses its stack to maintain persistent state.
That probably doesn’t make any sense unless you already understand it,
so here’s an example:
The magic is the keyword yield,
which tells Python that this function creates a generator.
(I think the code would be easier to understand
if a keyword like gen had to be used instead of def,
but that ship sailed a long time ago.)
We can use our generator like this:
gen=gen_char_from_string("one")try:i=0whileTrue:ch=next(gen)print(f"{i}: {ch}")i+=1exceptStopIteration:print("ended by exception")
As this code shows,
calling gen_char_from_string creates an object rather than immediately returning a value.
Each time we call next on that object,
it advances to the next yield.
The generator object preserves its stack,
so the local variables text and i persist from one invocation to the next.
When execution reaches the end of the generator,
Python thows a StopIteration exception to tell us it’s done.
Why go to all this trouble?
First,
for loops understand how to interact with generators,
so we can rewrite the snippets above as:
defgen_char_from_string(text):forchintext:yieldchcharacters=[chforchingen_char_from_string("two")]print(f"result as list: {characters}")
Second,
we can do things like create “infinite” generators:
Discrete event simulation models a system as a series of events,
each of which occurs at a particular instant in time.
We can simulate such a system by advancing the clock one tick at a time,
but it’s more efficient to have each process tell us when it’s next going to do something
and then jump ahead to the least of those times.
Note: we’re using the word “process” to mean “something active”
rather than “an operating system process”.
I prefer the word “actor”,
but “process” is pretty deeply embedded in discrete event simulation terminology.
SimPy handles all these details for us.
All we have to do is:
Create an environment that stores all the SimPy-ish stuff
like the list of running processes.
Give it some processes to run.
Tell it to run the simulation until all the processes are done.
importsysimportsimpydefmain():env=simpy.Environment()env.process(random_worker(env,worker_id=1,num_jobs=3,job_time=2))env.process(random_worker(env,worker_id=2,num_jobs=3,job_time=3))env.run()print(f"Simulation completed at T={env.now}")
The key thing here is that random_workerisn’t a normal function call.
Instead of handing a value to env.process,
it creates a generator for the environment to run.
That generator yields env.timeout(delay) to tell SimPy
that it wants to wait for a certain length of time,
e.g.,
to simulate being busy.
(Processes can yield other things as well—we’ll see some in future posts.)
A couple of workers doing fixed-size jobs, completely independently,
isn’t a particularly interesting scenario.
The next post in this series will look at two things:
How do we make a more realistic simulation?
How do we create more comprehensible output?
These questions are equally important because
there’s no point building something whose results we can’t understand (and check).
Stay tuned…
For years, I have been warning of the Great Recession of 2026, based on Georgist economic theory and the eighteen year real estate cycle. On Saturday, there was an online membership meeting of the Henry George Institute, and in addition to official business, there was some general discussion. One Georgist (who used to work for Fannie Mae) said that there had been a recent fall in real estate prices in some parts of the country; there seems to be a consensus among Georgists that we can expect another major crash soon.
I have previously moved some of my Federal Thrift Savings Plan funds from stocks into bonds, and yesterday I made a further move. About sixty percent of my money was in the C Fund, common stocks, tracking the S&P 500; I moved one half of that to bonds, and I may move more. The C Fund has returned over 15% this year, but I do not expect it to continue doing so; I expect a stock market crash in the near future, in response to the bursting of a land price bubble.
If you have investments, you may wish to consider a similar reallocation of funds in stocks or real estate into bonds or cash. If you don’t have significant investments, I advise keeping a reserve of money, in case you lose your job or face other difficult circumstances.
If our society and country do not collapse altogether, and no major Georgist reforms are made, I expect in due course to give advance warnings of the Great Recession of 2044-2045.
This morning I was reading the September 2025 issue of American Historical Review and I happened across two things that struck me as particularly interesting.
The first thing was a typical graphical matter. A page in American Historical Review contains 21.5 cm of text, of which 1 cm is occupied by the divider separating the article text from the footnotes, so 20.5 cm of actual text. A typical page is divided up with somewhere in the nature of 13 cm of text and 7.5 cm of footnotes. However, this being history writing, footnotes are prone to swell up to take more of the page. But I had never, in all my reading of history, encountered a page like page 1044[^1] of this issue, which contained 3 cm of text and 17 cm of footnotes! To make matters even more extreme, when I started looking at the footnotes, I noticed that one of the footnotes continued over onto the next page, so that actual ratio was 3 cm of text to 22 cm of footnotes! This was in the section of a paper that detailed the background historiography of the matter being discussed, so more extensive footnotes are to be expected, but even so, I've never seen anything like this before.
The second thing was a historical matter. It was at the beginning of Giuliana Chamedes' paper "Unpaid Debts: Socialist Internationalism and Jamaica's Bid for a New International Economic Order" (which also contained the extensively footnoted page above). I was so amazed by the first paragraph of this paper that I'm going to type it out in its entirety in order to share it with you:
In 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by an overwhelming majority. The initiative called for the literal and figurative settling of the debt between imperial and formerly colonized countries. Rather than just redistributing wealth within countries, the time had come to address wealth inequality on the world scale. To do so, the NIEO called for the reorganization of international trade, debt relief, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the institution of oversight for multinational corporations. It insisted on the protection of economic sovereignty for decolonized and decolonizing countries to "correct inequalities and redress existing injustices," suggesting that decolonization was an ongoing struggle. Many countries participated in the NIEO's drafting, including Jamaica, one of the founding members of the Group of 77 (G77). A "high point in the expression of a new internationalism, namely, that of countries emerging from colonialism," the NIEO represented a landmark in global history, as Sabrine Kott and others have argued. But by the early 1980s, the project was dead in the water.
My mind was blown upon reading this paragraph. Despite having a master's degree in history and having done a lot of reading outside of school in matters of history and politics, all of this information was new to me. I'd never even heard of the Group of 77. I read this paragraph a couple of days ago, I've done a lot of thinking about it since then, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how different the world would be if the NIEO had proceeded as planned.[^2]
[^1] American Historical Review uses continuous numbering across a volume, so this issue actually started on page 1009.
[^2] The phrase "the early 1980s" should give you a clue: The Reagan and Thatcher governments played a large role in stopping the NIEO.
The book includes dozens of interviews with autistic adults, their parents,
caregivers, researchers, and professionals. Everyone’s experience of autism is
different. Reading others’ stories and perspectives can give us a glimpse into
other possibilities for ourselves and our loved ones.
If you have someone in your life on the spectrum, or are on it yourself, I
guarantee you will find new ways to understand the breadth of what autism means
and what it can be.
Susan has also written two other non-fiction autism
books, including a memoir of our early days with our son Nat. Of course I
highly recommend all of them.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Not every open source software project can or should live on forever: priorities change, technologies evolve, and interests shift over time. From a corporate perspective, you don’t want to have neglected or abandoned open source projects with security vulnerabilities owned by your organization. However, responsibly sunsetting an open source project is more than just clicking the archive button on your repository. You should also be thinking about how you communicate the change and give any existing users time to transition.
Your organization’s customers and the users of your open source projects might trust the projects found in your repositories because of their relationship with your organization. This is why it’s particularly important for companies to monitor the open source projects owned by the organization and responsibly sunset them when they will no longer be updated. One of the benefits of having an OSPO is that they can help the rest of the organization with processes and best practices for responsibly sunsetting projects.
When I worked in VMware’s OSPO, we had a process for monitoring and sunsetting projects that we’ve documented in the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project. This guide uses change requests, new issues, and forks as metrics that can help you identify abandoned or neglected projects along with people who might still be using those projects. The guide also has communication steps for what to do before you archive the project, and there is even a section with special considerations for sunsetting active projects, which can happen when a company is making a shift in strategy and no longer plans to work on a project.
All of these details can be found in the guide, and you can also listen to the CHAOSScast podcast episode where Stefka Dimitrova and I recently discussed the guide and the process we used at VMware. Here’s a short quote from the guide:
“Many open source projects, even widely used ones, become abandoned for a variety of reasons (e.g., evolving interests, family situations, employment changes), but abandonment can be done in a responsible way by proactively sunsetting the project (Miller et al. 2025). Sunsetting is an important consideration for corporate environments where it can be easy to lose track of projects that were created by employees who later walked away from the project and left if abandoned. You don’t want abandoned open source projects with security vulnerabilities sitting in your organization’s source code repositories where someone might trust that project simply because they trust your organization. Finding inactive projects and responsibly sunsetting them is a good business decision and something that many open source teams / Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) do on a regular basis.”
Stefka Dimitrova on When and How to Deprecate an Open Source Project (Part 1 and Part 2) along with a video from the Open Source Summit in Europe in 2022 about Simple Steps for a Calm “Sunset”.
Terrence told jail officials again and again that he’d been raped — five times, he said, over the course of multiple stints in city custody.
He filed reports, flagged officers and in two instances, pointed to video that seemed to back him up, including one in which a fellow male detainee is seen leaving the victim’s cell with what appears to be a wet spot on the front of his pants.
But each time, jail investigators brushed his claims aside, labeling them “unsubstantiated” or “unfounded.”
Now, New York City is paying the 32-year-old $4 million to settle three separate August 2020 lawsuits in Bronx Supreme Court.
The agreement, recorded in recently filed court papers, ends a case that accused the Department of Correction of not meeting the most basic duty of any jail system: to protect the people it detains.
“The Department of Correction failed Terrence,” his attorney, Josh Kelner, told THE CITY. “He relied on corrections officers to protect him from harm. He instead was repeatedly victimized, and no officer or assailant was ever held accountable. His tragic case is yet more evidence of the systemic breakdown at Rikers.”
The Correction Department referred questions to the city’s Law Department, which declined to comment.
The settlement comes as Laura Swain, chief district judge for Manhattan federal court, is in the process of selecting a so-called remediation manager to take over large parts of the troubled jail system.
The payout also comes as the jails continue to be besieged by claims alleging violence between detainees, excessive use of force by officers, dangerous conditions of confinement and other forms of misery behind bars.
Those claims have risen in recent years, the most recent data available shows. In fiscal year 2023 alone, 4,559 claims were filed against the agency, marking a 38% jump from the previous fiscal year, and just shy of a pre-pandemic peak.
Correction officers were stationed outside the Rikers Island visitor entrance, Aug. 28, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
The legal payout in Terrence’s case was made public six years after the department touted how it had finally “achieved compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).”
To comply with the 2003 federal law, the DOC implemented reforms to train staff on how to handle sexual abuse allegations, boosted ways for detainees to report such assaults and expanded teams to review reported abuses.
None of that mattered for Terrence, who asked that his last name be withheld due to the nature of the case.
Across three years and two jail complexes, DOC staff ignored clear warning signs, failed to preserve crucial surveillance footage and allowed unsafe conditions to persist, discovery obtained during the legal proceedings showed.
The first attack came in January 2019 at the Manhattan Detention Complex in Lower Manhattan, according to the lawsuit.
Terrence reported that another male inmate forced his way into his cell and raped him. Security footage showed another detainee entering the cell and closing the door. A correction officer walked by during the incident but did nothing, the video shows.
DOC investigators ruled the complaint was unsubstantiated.
The detainee walks out of the cell after a few minutes with what appears to be a visible wet stain on the front of his pants, the security video shows. He denied assaulting Terrence and said the two were talking about a book, according to an internal Correction Department record obtained via discovery.
Security cameras kept watch at Rikers Island, Dec. 8, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
In November 2019 at the Anna M. Kross Center (AMKC) on Rikers, Terrence said he was in the law library when another male detainee threatened to stab him if he didn’t comply with a sexual assault. Cameras captured the men walking to the recreation yard, where the sexual attack occurred, the lawsuit said. Investigators again found the allegation unsubstantiated, noting that “it is uncertain as to whether or not the engagement between the two (people in custody) was consensual.”
The remaining incidents all took place in 2022 at AMKC, the lawsuit alleged.
In March, Terrence reported that a detainee accessed his cell through a broken lock during the overnight shift and raped him. While the city saved portions of the unit’s surveillance footage, it failed to preserve the angles covering Terrence’s cell, according to documents obtained via the lawsuit. The officer assigned to the area resigned two weeks later. The case was deemed unsubstantiated.
A month later, Terrence told jail officials that he was sexually assaulted in a shower. Although he reported it the same day, DOC’s investigations division later claimed the relevant footage “expired” before it could be reviewed. And in June, investigators determined that yet another rape allegation was “unfounded” because video did not show a detainee entering his cell even though that detainee admitted he had. The accused attacker denied sexually assaulting Terrence, saying they had only smoked marijuana together, according to internal department records.
Kelner, who represented Terrence, believes he was particularly susceptible to assaults behind bars because he is gay and has some developmental disabilities.
He was in jail for multiple charges like harassment and assault, according to court records.
Records reveal that DOC is increasingly facing legal liabilities.
Of the 15 largest individual tort claims paid out by the city in Fiscal Year 2024, 13 involved civil-rights claims tied to the Department of Correction and the NYPD, according to a dashboard created by the city comptroller’s office.
The single biggest payout was $171.52 million for a DOC settlement stemming from the city’s failure to promptly release people who had posted bail.
In total, the NYPD led the city in tort-related settlements and judgments last fiscal year, with $309.56 million, followed by DOC at $252.87 million. The Department of Education, Department of Transportation and NYC Health + Hospitals rounded out the top five, with $128.07 million, $115.27 million and $45.77 million in payouts, respectively.
Claims payouts for DOC totaled $38 million last fiscal year, with a growing share resolved before formal litigation. Between 2019 and 2023, the comptroller’s office preemptively settled 69% of DOC-related claims through pre-litigation efforts. The agency is also facing a wave of class actions tied to wrongful prolonged detention, inadequate pandemic conditions and deaths in custody.
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Last week, I was in Toronto facilitating a conversation on equitable grantmaking with a group of brilliant colleagues, including several funders and impact investment leaders. During the rise of authoritarianism, it is vital for funders to understand what’s at stake and to act accordingly.
I reminded the workshop attendees that conservative funders fund five key things: Institutions, politics and politicians, judges and judiciary systems, media and narrative work, and cultural warriors. This is why conservative movements have been running circles around progressives.
But it’s also HOW they fund that makes them effective. I went through this chart, the Equitable Grantmaking Continuum, which anyone here can access. Feel free to print it out and see how your foundation is doing; or if you’re a nonprofit leader or consultant, mail it to your funders, maybe with a severed stuffed unicorn head Godfather-style for particularly egregious ones.
The discussion that ensued was lively. However, one question a colleague asked has been sticking with me. I’m paraphrasing: “Sorry, but what about accountability? I mean, we can all move toward being Level 3 funders on that Continuum and give general operating grants and 20-year investments and so on, but we need to talk outcomes and accountability, eh?”
This is a question we hear all the time, and I know colleagues who ask it mean well, but it is truly one of the most annoying questions of all time, and I always have to recall a song my kids learned from a children’s show, Daniel Tiger, to help calm myself down when I hear it: “When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, and count to four.”
Here’s why it’s so annoying:
It’s condescending and paternalistic: The assumption behind the question above is that if nonprofits weren’t forced by funders and donors to write detailed proposals, budgets, and reports at regular intervals, if they were granted unrestricted funds, they too would be unrestricted in their actions and would just run amok like feral children, with no aims or goals, and it would just be chaos and madness. It must be up to funders then to be adults to keep an eye out on these organizations.
It's based on a lack of understanding of how nonprofits operate: Most nonprofits and movements have outcomes they’re working on that are clearly spelled out everywhere, including in grant proposals. Accountability structures are already built into their operations through mechanisms such as annual reports and formal tax filings where they list what goals and outcomes they accomplished and how they spent funding for the year.
It fosters an individualistic, retail-like mentality embedded in philanthropy: Many funders and donors have been trained to buy into the retailification of the sector I wrote about earlier, where funders and donors believe they can purchase specific outcomes that align with their own priorities. That’s why many funders won’t accept nonprofits’ annual reports which list out all outcomes achieved but require unique snowflake grant reports that details what their grant specifically bought.
It conditions nonprofits to think small and incrementally: “Accountability,” the way many funders currently envision it, is not about how effective nonprofits are in achieving their mission and vision and advance equity and justice, but about how effective they are at conforming to the fickle whims and requirements of various funders and donors. Over time, this trains nonprofit leaders to focus only on the short-term, easily measurable, easy-to-explain outcomes that would satisfy these whims and requirements, foregoing more ambitious visions and goals.
All of this is incredibly destructive and helps explain why progressive nonprofits and movements have been falling behind conservative ones for decades. The paternalistic, condescending assumption that nonprofits are inherently untrustworthy and need funders to keep them “accountable” has been toxic and preventing progressive nonprofit and movement leaders from doing their work.
I often use the metaphor of a village that’s on fire, and nonprofits are like firefighters trying to put out the flames. Funders and donors provide the funding to purchase water and hoses and firetrucks and pay the firefighters’ salaries, and so on.
Some funders though only want to pay for the water, and not the hose, since they consider the hose to be “overhead.” Others make the firefighters write burdensome applications and wait six to 12 months before giving them money to fight the fires. They require the firefighters to submit reports accounting for how they spend money, but it must be in their reporting format, including their own chart of accounts. Most only provide funding to save houses for one year, maybe two, and the firefighters must constantly scramble for more funding, which means the fires are never put out, and they keep spreading.
And when asked why they keep forcing firefighters to do all these things, funders and donors' response is “Well, we want to make sure everyone is accountable and are achieving outcomes.”
No, what they are doing is wasting everyone’s time, including their own, and allowing the fires of injustice to spread.
With everything on the line now, we need funders and donors to give multi-year general operating dollars (MYGOD), fund faster, give more, remove barriers they impose on nonprofits —basically do what conservative funders have been doing for decades for their grantees. Get over these paternalistic, condescending philosophies and assumptions and act like true partners.
The irony of progressive-leaning funders’ hyper focus on “accountability” is that it lessens accountability, because it diverts time, energy, and resources away from what matters, like working together to solve entrenched systemic issues. If there were fewer barriers in firefighters’ way, they would be MORE effective in putting out the fires.
Similarly, if there were fewer burdens and restrictions in nonprofits’ way, they would be MORE likely to meet outcomes and be more accountable to the communities they’re serving and to the collective vision of a just and equitable future.
As Daniel Tiger sings: "Lifting something heavy/Can be hard to do alone /But you're much stronger/With your friends than on your own."
Nonprofits are lifting some heavy stuff right now, so be that friend!
Mayor Eric Adams may be on a visit to Israel, but Monday he left Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a headache. He increased the budget for city government spending in the current fiscal year by about $2 billion to $118 billion, bequeathing a projected $4.7 billion deficit to be closed before the 2027 budget is adopted next summer. And he offered no plans to deal with federal aid cuts that could reach billions of dollars.
The November report provides an update on where the city stands financially with the current fiscal year and the three future years it is required to project. Mamdani will have to propose his own budget by Feb. 1, a month after taking office.
The mayor’s added spending included new commitments Adams has been touting in recent weeks including money to start adding 5,000 additional police officers — while Mamdani has said he wants to keep the police force at its current level of about 34,000 officers.
Adams’ move came in for criticism from outgoing Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) and finance chair Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn), who called it irresponsible to saddle future budgets with money for new police officers without addressing the fact that the city is unable to keep staffing at current levels because it can’t retain officers.
The mayor also increased money for rental assistance and expanded a caregiver program for elderly residents by 3,000 spots.
The mayor also increased expected revenues in November for the first time in his four years in office, adding a little more than $400 million for 2026.
And he says he is leaving the city in good financial shape.
“Over the course of four on-time, annual budgets, our administration has delivered for working-class New Yorkers time and again, and this November financial plan update is another example of how our strong fiscal management is making New York City safer, more affordable, and improving New Yorkers’ quality of life,” he said in a statement.
NYPD officers arrest an anti-ICE protester outside the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, June 9, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Budget experts don’t agree. The Citizens Budget Commission responds that the administration is underestimating costs by as much as $4 billion, including at least $1 billion for city-funded housing vouchers and $600 million for homeless shelters. And police overtime is almost always higher than projected in the budget.
“This plan simply reaffirms that Mayor-elect Mamdani’s first budget proposal will have to close a $5 billion to $8 billion budget gap, prepare for federal hits, and fund progress on his priorities,” CBC President Andrew Rein said.
Budget experts say the coming year’s deficit may be much smaller than Adams estimates. A booming Wall Street is expected to boost income and corporate taxes for both this fiscal year and next. A new health plan for city workers is expected to save almost $1 billion a year. And the city is likely to do some debt refinancing to lower its interest costs.
But then the fiscal outlook darkens.
The city gets a little more than $7 billion in federal aid each year, which is expected to shrink during Mamdani’s term even if Trump doesn’t follow through on threats to cut off aid entirely.
The state is expected to see much bigger losses in federal aid, which the Fiscal Policy Institute estimates at about $8 billion a year, primarily in Medicaid and SNAP food aid to New Yorkers, including in the city. It will be under tremendous pressure to replace the federal funds. When faced with budget troubles in the past, the state has forced local governments to assume more costs, especially for Medicaid.
Eventually, Mamdami will have to propose ways to fulfill his agenda including free child care for all, free buses, building 200,000 affordable housing units over a decade using relatively costly union labor and opening city-owned grocery stores.
Free buses have been estimated to cost $700 million a year. Estimates of universal free child care are as high as $6 billion a year, especially with his pledge to raise the wages of many of the workers. He has pledged to spend $100 billion on affordable housing, $70 billion of it borrowed.
Mamdani’s transition team did not immediately respond to the new Adams budget numbers.
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Ate something regrettable on the plane and had night visitors:
Dreamed our New York apartment needed extensive repairs. What New York apartment? The real owners came home and were very nice about my delusion
Dreamed my new bff Gwyneth Paltrow came back from a shallow grave in the woods, writhing and sweating out a strange clear gel as she transformed into an anime ninetail fox
Dreamed my ex-wife (what ex-wife?) came by the beach house trick-or-treating, wearing a horse’s head quite cleverly fashioned from a steel bucket and flowerpot
I may not be cut out for business travel after all.
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kaberett
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