I bought a bag of arugula at the farmers’ market on Sunday, getting it from a reputable vendor, and included some in my salads Sunday and Monday. One of those bags often lasts me a full week, and well into the second week; this time, the arugula was getting a bit dubious on Monday, so I put a couple of napkins into the bag, to absorb excess moisture.
By Tuesday evening, the arugula was on its way to turning into compost, and I live in an apartment with no garden or compost pile. I salvaged a few undamaged looking leaves for my salad, and the rest went down the garbage disposal.
My check-in: Long brainstorming convo with my other cheerleader last night. If we have not solved my problems, we have clarified objective and means. Today I followed up 150 words of notes and 500 words of story.
When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!
This is our song for me and MyGuy. When we met in 1977, we both lived right on Lake Mendota. We walked everywhere — fortunately, Madison is a lovely city for strolling.
The cool thing is we actually did talk about all the things in these lyrics
Wouldn’t it be nice to walk together
Baring our souls while wearing out the leather
We could talk shop, harmonize a song
Wouldn’t it be nice to walk along
I’ll show you houses of architectural renown
Some are still standing, some have fallen down
Farm houses buried under Canada’s snow
Spanish villas on the Boulevards of Mexico
And I’ll learn to tell the ash from the oak
And if you don’t know I won’t make no joke
We’ll climb to the top to view the world from above
Or carve our initials in the trunk like teenagers in love
And when we get hungry we’ll stop to eat
Gotta think of our stomachs and rest our feet
If we get thirsty we’ll have a drink or two
In a mountain top bar with a mountain top view
And when we get tired we’ll stop to rest
And if you still want to talk you can bare your breast
If it’s Winter and cold we’ll take a rooming-house room
If it’s Summer and warm we’ll sleep under the moon
And we’ll talk about the sports we played
‘Bout the time you got busted or the time I got laid
We’ll talk blood and how we were bred
Talk about the folks both living and dead
This song like this walk I find hard to end
Be my lover or be my friend
In sneakers or boots or regulation shoes
Walking beside you I’ll never get the walking blues.
[May 13, 2026] – The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is excited to announce that Hudson River Trading (HRT), a global leader in quantitative trading, has made a commitment to support Python and the PSF as a Visionary Sponsor.
HRT’s "Visionary" sponsorship—our highest tier—will help to support the foundation’s core work of advancing and protecting the Python programming language and supporting a diverse and international community of Python programmers. HRT is the first quantitative trading firm to become a PSF Visionary Sponsor, alongside companies including NVIDIA, Google, Fastly, Bloomberg, Meta, and Anthropic. Contributions at this level directly fund the critical work that keeps Python thriving, including:
CPython Development: Ensuring the core language remains fast, stable, and modern.
PyPI Infrastructure: Maintaining the Python Package Index, which serves billions of downloads to developers worldwide.
Community Programs: Supporting Python workshops, events, and user groups globally, as well as hosting PyCon US each year.
Security Initiatives: Hardening the ecosystem against supply chain vulnerabilities.
A Shared Commitment to Python
Hudson River Trading is no stranger to the power of Python. As a leading multi-asset class quantitative trading firm, HRT relies on Python for research, data analysis, and engineering workflows. With this donation, HRT is giving back to the tools that empower their engineers and helping to ensure that Python remains flexible, effective, and welcoming in the ways that have made it one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Read more about Open Source at HRT on this page.
“Python is a cornerstone of HRT’s research and trading infrastructure. Our engineers use Python extensively to build cutting-edge tooling that enhances our developer workflows, and we believe strongly in contributing to the open source software that makes our work possible. We are proud to support the PSF as a Visionary Sponsor helping to safeguard Python as a robust, accessible, and community-driven language for years to come.” – Prashant Lal, Partner at Hudson River Trading
“Part of HRT's edge is our engineering, and one of our core values is 'Make It Better'. Our support of the Python Software Foundation – alongside our contributions to many other open source projects – reflects our desire to remain active, collaborative participants in the OSS engineering community over the long term, for the benefit of all.” – Hashem, Lead Software Engineer at Hudson River Trading
“At HRT, we’ve always believed that the best way to advance Python is by working hand-in-hand with the community. Our internal work on lazy imports gave us deep expertise in the problem space, and we channeled that experience directly into open collaboration by contributing to the development of PEP 810. We pride ourselves on being exemplary participants in both the trading markets and the open source community, and our sponsorship of the Python Software Foundation reflects that genuine spirit of collaboration.” – Pablo Galindo Salgado, Lead Software Engineer at Hudson River Trading
As part of its ongoing participation in the Python ecosystem, HRT will be open sourcing some of its own projects and announcing additional OSS contributions later this year. To learn more about HRT’s open engineering, research, and data science roles, visit https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/.
The PSF is grateful for Hudson River Trading’s support, alongside that of each of our Visionary Sponsors, and we hope you will join us in thanking them for their commitment to the PSF and the Python community!
About Hudson River Trading (HRT)
Hudson River Trading (HRT) is a leading quantitative trading firm at the forefront of technical innovation in global financial markets. Every day, we bring together the world’s sharpest minds to collaboratively solve challenging problems and build technology that will drive the future of trading. Leveraging one of the world’s most sophisticated computing environments for research and development, we trade across asset classes and time horizons on more than 200 markets worldwide. We are a leading voice advocating for fair and transparent markets everywhere and dedicated to creating a better trading landscape for all. For more information, visit www.hudsonrivertrading.com.
About the Python Software Foundation (PSF)
The Python Software Foundation is a US non-profit whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. The PSF supports the Python community using corporate sponsorships, grants, and donations. Are you interested in sponsoring or donating to the PSF so we can continue supporting Python and its community? Check out our sponsorship program, donate directly, or contact our team at sponsors@python.org!
In October 2011,
Michael Woodford received what should have been the best news of his career.
After thirty years working at Olympus,
the Japanese optics and medical equipment company,
he had been made chief executive:
the first non-Japanese person to run the company in its history.
Six months later, he was fired.
Woodford had found something wrong with a series of acquisitions the company had made.
The amounts paid were enormous,
the assets were nearly worthless,
and the accounting explanations made no sense.
He hired KPMG to look into it and took the resulting report to the chairman,
Tsuyoshi Kikukawa.
Kikukawa’s response was to call an emergency board meeting and vote Woodford out.
Woodford went public.
The Olympus board denied everything for a few weeks,
but then the numbers collapsed, Kikukawa resigned, and criminal charges followed.
The fraud—a sustained effort to conceal $1.7 billion in losses—had been running for nearly twenty years,
through the tenure of multiple CEOs.
What is notable about the Olympus scandal is not that individuals behaved dishonestly.
It is that they weren’t necessarily bad people.
It was as if the organization had developed a mind of its own,
and successive leaders served it rather than the other way around.
Three years before the Olympus scandal,
the Canadian legal scholar Joel Bakan published The Corporation.
He asked Robert Hare,
the psychologist who had spent four decades developing
the clinical tools used to diagnose psychopathy,
to evaluate a publicly traded corporation against his Psychopathy Checklist
as if the corporation were a person.
The checklist was designed to identify individuals who are:
callously indifferent to harm they cause to others,
skilled at charming and manipulating people around them,
incapable of genuine guilt or remorse,
unwilling to accept responsibility for their own failures, and
willing to lie and deceive when they believe they can get away with it.
Hare’s conclusion was that publicly traded corporations fit the profile.
In most jurisdictions,
corporate executives have a fiduciary duty to shareholders:
they are legally required to pursue shareholder interest,
and a board that sacrificed profit to benefit workers or communities
with no defensible business justification
could be held legally liable.
The resulting entity is therefore prohibited from having a conscience
in the way an individual person might.
It can behave ethically when ethics is good for the brand,
but not when the cost cannot be justified by future returns.
None of this requires any individual inside the organization to be a bad person.
It requires only that the rules governing the organization create incentives
that produce a certain kind of behavior.
However,
this argument becomes harder to sustain
when you look at who rises to the top of large organizations.
In 2005,
Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon surveyed 39 senior managers and executives in the United Kingdom
and compared their psychological profiles to a matched group of patients at Broadmoor,
a high-security psychiatric hospital.
The executives scored higher than the Broadmoor sample on three personality disorder traits:
histrionic, narcissistic, and compulsive.
The researchers called this pattern “successful psychopathy”:
the traits that lead to hospitalization or criminal conviction in their extreme form are,
in a milder and better-managed form,
associated with reaching senior management.
Paul Babiak and Robert Hare spent years studying
how psychopathic individuals navigate organizational environments.
Their estimate is that
roughly one percent of the general population meets the clinical threshold for psychopathy,
while corporate managers cluster around three to four times that rate.
The mechanism is not mysterious.
Psychopaths tend to perform exceptionally well in job interviews.
They are confident, articulate, and skilled at saying what an interviewer wants to hear.
They feel no social anxiety in high-stakes situations,
and can fabricate credentials and relationships convincingly
because they feel no guilt about doing so.
Once hired,
they are evaluated primarily on how they appear to those above them in the organization,
and making a strong impression on a small number of people across a limited number of interactions
is something psychopaths do better than almost anyone else.
This is where a closely related concept becomes important: impression management.
The term was introduced by the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman in 1959.
His observation was that social life is fundamentally theatrical:
people perform different versions of themselves for different audiences,
and success in social situations depends heavily on managing those performances.
In a small organization where everyone works closely together over years,
this has limited scope because your actual behavior is too visible.
Colleagues know when you take credit for other people’s work,
when your confident predictions turn out wrong,
and when your charm disappears because you no longer need something from someone.
In a corporation with thousands of employees,
on the other hand,
promotions are typically decided by people who have less direct contact with the person in question.
They evaluate based on presentations, meetings, secondhand reports,
and the impressions formed in a relatively small number of interactions.
This is precisely the environment where impression management skills are most valuable,
and where the gap between managing impressions and actually performing well is hardest to detect.
Researchers who study the dark triad of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism
have consistently found that individuals high in these traits do particularly well
in the early and middle stages of corporate careers.
Narcissists project confidence and vision.
Machiavellians are skilled at reading and exploiting organizational dynamics.
Psychopaths can absorb stress,
make decisions that harm others without losing sleep,
and deliver bad news without visible discomfort.
Each of these is a behavior that,
in moderation and over short time horizons,
looks like leadership.
Failure only occurs when a crisis requires something the dark triad cannot supply:
integrity,
honest self-criticism,
or concern for people the leader does not need.
Dutton’s research on which professions attract the most psychopaths put CEO at the top of the list,
followed by lawyer, media professional, salesperson, and surgeon.
What these jobs share is a combination of high stakes,
limited direct accountability,
and the need to remain calm under pressure,
which are precisely the traits psychopaths happen to have.
Wirecard was a German payments company whose rise was celebrated as a European technology success story.
By 2018 it had joined the DAX, Germany’s index of its thirty largest listed companies.
Its chief executive,
Markus Braun,
appeared at industry conferences as the model of a visionary, unflappable founder.
When the Financial Times published articles suggesting that
large portions of the company’s claimed revenue did not exist,
Germany’s financial regulator filed a criminal complaint against the journalist who wrote them.
When the fraud collapsed in 2020,
€1.9 billion turned out never to have existed.
Braun had not built a company.
He had built an extremely convincing impression of one.
South Korea’s chaebol are a structural variation on the same theme.
The heads of Samsung, Lotte, SK, and others
have faced criminal convictions for bribery and embezzlement—and received presidential pardons,
typically on the grounds that their imprisonment would harm the national economy.
This pattern of prosecution followed by pardon describes an organization
that has achieved something psychopathic at the institutional level:
the normal consequences of harmful behavior have been suspended
because the organization is too important to be held accountable.
None of this means that every large company is led by psychopaths,
or that organizational scale inevitably produces moral failure.
It means that the selection pressures of large hierarchies are not neutral.
Hiring processes that rely heavily on interviews systematically favor candidates who are good at interviews.
Promotion decisions made by people with limited direct observation
systematically favor candidates who are good at being observed,
and performance reviews based on self-assessment systematically favor
candidates who think highly of themselves.
These processes aren’t designed to select for the dark triad,
but they are all structured in ways that make dark triad traits an advantage.
The Olympus fraud ran for twenty years
because each successive layer of management found it easier to maintain the deception than to stop it.
No individual needed to be a psychopath;
the organization’s incentives reproduced psychopathic behavior regardless of who ran it.
Bad people come and go;
structures that reward bad behavior reproduce themselves.
Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare:
Snakes in Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office
(revised ed.).
HarperBusiness,
2019,
9780062697547.
Bakan2005
Joel Bakan:
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
Simon and Shuster,
2005,
9780743247467.
BoardFritzon2005
Belinda J. Board and Katarina Fritzon:
“Disordered Personalities at Work.”
Psychology, Crime & Law,
11(1),
2005,
10.1080/10683160310001634304.
Dutton2013
Kevin Dutton:
The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2013,
9780374533984.
Goffman1959
Erving Goffman:
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Anchor,
1959,
9780385094023.
In Firefox for Android, sharing a remote PDF will now share the file itself, rather than its URL, that you can still share by copying it from the awesomebar.
To ensures a seamless browsing experience, when a PDF or internally handled file finishes downloading, it now opens in a background tab if you have switched tabs or closed the original page.
The other day on Facebook I read a post that was a repost of an earlier conversation from Tumblr (I'm sure you've all seen this sort of thing). Anyway, the topic was a discussion of whether or not a vampire policeman (a la Forever Knight) could use a judicial warrant to force you could grant them permission to enter your house. The discussion seemed to divide into two camps:
Yes, they can.
No, they can't, because the permission forced from you by the warrant is not a true expression of your will.
Recently I've been reading Seanan McGuire's October Daye series (highly recommend, if you haven't read them), which contain a lot of this sort of verbal jiggery-pokery tied into the magic system. This got me to thinking further about the vampire policeman problem and how, as the person in the house, it seems like there's got to be some combination of words that you can say which will simultaneously keep you out of trouble with human law (by honoring the validity of the warrant) while at the same time protecting yourself from the vampire (by indicating to the vampire that you do not freely give permission for them to enter your house), and which further could be stated in such a way that a bystander who is not aware of the existence of vampires/fairies/etc. would not find anything amiss in what you said. I was mulling this over while doing some chores and listening to some music when the Grateful Dead's "Trucking" came on and (in my opinion) handed me the answer on a silver platter[^1]: "If you've got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in." It simultaneously acknowledges that the warrant grants the power of entry and fails to grant your open personal permission to enter.
[^1] Upon writing it here, I'm wondering if "on a silver platter" has any relevance to faerie. Expect a post on that in the future.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani rolled out his executive budget proposal that included help from the state and no new property tax hikes on Tuesday. Photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By Ryan Schwach
Property tax increases that officials claimed would have greatly harmed Queens residents will not be included in the city’s budget, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday as he rolled out his $124 billion executive spending proposal.
The mayor said the nine percent property tax increase he floated earlier this year would not be necessary to close what he said at the time was a gargantuan $12 billion budget gap. Queens locals, mainly in Southeast Queens, who had feared that any increase would be detrimental to renters and homeowners alike in the borough, are now thankful it didn’t make the cut.
“This budget does not raise property taxes and it refuses to slash services,” Mamdani said. “We are often told that to govern responsibly, we must scale back our ambitions to provide little and then ask those we serve to expect even less.”
Instead, the city will fill the budget shortfall through savings and an additional $4 billion in state assistance that was announced hours before the executive budget proposal was rolled out.
The help from the state and Governor Kathy Hochul includes $500 million worth of revenue from a pied-à-terre tax on second homes, money for school aid, $3 billion worth savings stemming from delays in pension payments and wiggle room for the city on implementing the state’s new class size law.
The state’s assistance totals $8 billion over two fiscal years.
But while the new money was a reason to celebrate for some, Queens officials and locals appeared most excited that Mamdani had walked back his threat to institute the property tax increase, which he floated in February as a “last resort” if the state did not come through with more funding and higher taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers.
James Johnson, a Southeast Queens community leader, rallied with locals in opposition to the property tax.
“Property taxes should have never been mentioned in the first place,” he said. “This is a major win for homeowners across New York City, especially the homeowners in Southeast Queens.”
Johnson’s message to Mamdani – don’t try it again.
“I’m sure the mayor understands now that if this is brought up again next year, he will face the same strong and ferocious opposition from homeowners across the City of New York,” he said.
Following Tuesday’s budget announcement, officials were glad that the property tax increase was no longer being seen as an option to fill the city’s budget deficit.
Western Queens Councilmember Phil Wong said he was “pleased to see that the property tax increase proposal is off the table”
“The Council made clear from day one that New Yorkers cannot continue to shoulder additional tax burdens,” the freshman lawmaker said in a statement.
Borough President Donovan Richards, a Mamdani ally, was quick to criticize the mayor when the idea was first proposed, calling it a “nonstarter.”
He took a different tone on Tuesday.
"Today's announcement represents a much-needed step in the right financial direction for our city, especially for Black and brown New Yorkers who had been facing an unacceptable property tax increase that would have priced them out of their communities,” said Richards. “I thank the mayor for rightfully withdrawing such an increase from this new budget proposal.”
On Tuesday, Mamdani said the additional help from the state and savings found at the agency level made a balanced budget possible without the need for increased property taxes or cuts to city services.
He called his balanced budget proposal a “win” for the city.
“We scoured for savings and demanded greater efficiency from every part of city government. We partnered with Albany, securing billions in new funding,” he said. “We taxed the rich, asking those with the most to contribute a little bit more to support those with the least.”
“Through new revenues, savings and a renewed partnership with the state we pulled New York City back from an existential fiscal crisis,” he added.
It will now be up for the mayor to get the other side of City Hall on board with his spending plan.
"We had a productive meeting with Mayor Mamdani on the executive budget, and we appreciate that the administration has moved toward an approach championed by the Council that identifies savings and avoids raising property taxes or raiding reserves,” City Council Speaker Julie Menin and Finance Chair Linda Lee said in a statement. "We have important work ahead to advance key priorities including affordability, public transit access, and investments in the services New Yorkers rely on every day."
Queens Representative Grace Meng introduced legislation that would create a virtual option for migrants who need to appear in court. AP file photo by Pamela Smith
By Ryan Schwach
A Queens representative proposed legislation that would give migrants the option to attend legally-mandated court appearances virtually and potentially avoid arrest by federal immigration officers. But the bill faces an uphill climb in the conservative legislature.
The Safe Check-Ins for Immigrants Act, proposed by Queens Congressmember Grace Meng would create the virtual option and make it far less likely a migrant is detained by federal law enforcement officials while checking in on their immigration status.
Meng said the bill is a step in protecting people who are just following the law when they head to the courthouse.
“They are following the law, and we're legislating that this be a better option for them,” Meng told the Eagle in a phone interview. “They don't have to go in and risk being detained for no reason at all when they were literally trying to follow the law.”
“We believe that it would help protect families,” she added.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has targeted immigration hearings, detaining migrants who attend them regardless of what a judge decides in the case.
In New York City, the arrests have predominantly occurred at the immigration court inside 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.
Meng, who represents a large foreign-born contingent in her Central Queens district, said the most common question her office gets is from constituents asking if it's safe to go to a court check-in.
“We get calls, I would say, definitely every week, almost every day, from people who are asking if it's safe for them or someone they know to go in for a lawful check-in,” she said. “It's making our communities less safe. It's causing them not to trust law enforcement, and it's separating families.”
Meng introduced the bill in April, and it currently sits in committee.
The legislation has the support of many local immigration groups, including New Immigrant Community Empowerment, which is based in Queens, and the New York Immigration Coalition.
In a statement to the Eagle a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said that Meng’s bill was “reckless” and would “not become law under this administration.”
“Entering the United States illegally is a crime,” the spokesperson said. “While New York City continues to provide safe harbor to thousands of criminal aliens murdering, assaulting, and robbing New Yorkers, this Department of Justice will continue to work with our counterparts at DHS to deport illegal aliens and keep the American people safe.”
Meng’s proposal has an uphill battle, and is not likely to have success in the current legislature.
Meng and her Democratic colleagues in Washington have proposed other legislation that would reign in ICE and Trump’s heavy handed immigration enforcement and mass deportations.
Bills that would have required ICE to unmask, and wear badges and name tags like local law enforcement all failed to gain traction in the Republican-led House of Representatives.
Fights over ICE’s authority and funding ultimately resulted in the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that lasted a historic 76 days.
However, Meng argued the importance of continuing attempts to regulate and control Trump’s DHS.
“ICE is running around lawlessly,” she said. “They're not even following the rules that they were originally intended to follow. I've put a bunch of legislation out basically requiring that they follow basic rules, asking that they are following the same rules that other federal law enforcement have to follow.”
The State Commission of Correction received their expanded board on Saturday, but currently lacks the members necessary to enforce their powers.AP file photo by Mark Lennihan.
By Noah Powelson
While an expansion of the state’s prison oversight agency went into effect over the weekend, the agency cannot function until the governor and legislature appoint new board members, advocates warned this week.
The State Commission of Correction received an expanded number of commissioners on Saturday, as part of a series of reforms detailed in the state’s Prison Reform Omnibus bill. The commission’s board was expanded from three commissioners to five, one of which must be a formerly incarcerated person.
However, the SCOC only has two sitting commissioners after their former chair retired at the end of the previous year. With only two of their legally required five commissioners currently appointed, the SCOC is without a quorum, leaving the agency with little ability to employ its powers until a majority board is established.
Advocate groups, including the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, called on Governor Kathy Hochul to appoint new commissioners, which must also be confirmed by the State Senate, as soon as possible. The commission’s next meeting is scheduled for May 27.
“As jails and prisons across New York face crises and dangerous conditions, it is unconscionable that New York's independent watchdog agency is currently unable to function,” Yonah Zeitz, advocacy director of the Katal Center, said in a statement. “With three out of the five commissioner seats vacant and without a quorum, Gov. Hochul must swiftly appoint new commissioners to ensure the agency will no longer sit idly by while incarcerated people face violence and abuse behind bars.”
A spokesperson for the governor’s office said they are currently working on identifying potential candidates for the commission.
“Governor Hochul has been clear that the safety of all staff and incarcerated individuals is a top priority, which is why she has implemented fundamental, systemwide changes to ensure the State's correction system prioritizes safety, accountability and transparency across all facilities,” the spokesperson said. “This administration began working diligently to identify candidates for the Commission prior to the effective date for the new law, and will continue to coordinate with the Senate to schedule confirmation hearings to fill these new roles."
The commission’s expansion was part of the Prison Reform Omnibus bill that passed last year, a package of bills meant to reform the state’s troubled prisons following the high-profile deaths of Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi, who were both killed inside state correctional facilities. The bill, which was sponsored by Queens and Brooklyn State Senator Julia Salazar, created a slew of new transparency requirements for reporting the deaths of incarcerated persons, and expanded the ability of prison oversight agencies to conduct investigations into state correctional facilities.
Under the legislation, the SCOC received new investigation requirements and an expanded board. One of the new members must be a formerly incarcerated person and another commissioner must be a professional with experience in working with or assisting incarcerated persons, such as an indigent criminal defense attorney or healthcare professional.
Currently, the commission does not have a formerly incarcerated person sitting on the board.
“New York prisons have had a systemic pattern of violence and abuse for decades, with little to no oversight,” Salazar said in a statement. “The SCOC was designed to provide oversight, but has not had the capacity or diverse expertise to do so. The Prison Reform Omnibus Bill rightfully expanded and diversified the Commission to address this problem. Current vacancies must be quickly filled with reform-oriented commissioners so that the SCOC can more adequately fulfill its constitutional mandate of ensuring all local jails and state prisons are safe, stable, and humane.”
Why are so few engineering teams reaping the benefits of AI? On this week’s episode, Paul presents Rich with the findings from a recent report from CircleCI and Thoughtworks on the productivity of enterprise teams using LLMs. While there’s been a dramatic increase in throughput—the amount of code produced—across the board, just 5% of orgs are seeing real gains from these tools, while the majority struggle with errors, bugs, and lower productivity than before AI was introduced. As Paul puts it: “The advantages of this technology are not equally distributed.”
We've sent your assignments and we hope you enjoy them! Works are due on July 2. Reach out to jukebox.mod@gmail.com if you have a question.
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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.
Correctional officers on Rikers Island who commit alleged abuses will now be investigated by a new unit that falls under the direct authority of the remediation manager, Nicholas Deml. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
Investigations into alleged abuses by Rikers Island officers will no longer be handled by the Department of Correction, according to a new organizational structure that puts a court-appointed remediation manager in charge of probing misconduct inside the jails.
According to a new court filing first reported by the Eagle, Nicholas Deml, the remediation manager who was granted sweeping authority over the jail system by a federal judge earlier this year, will have final say over a new investigations division on Rikers Island. The new unit will inherit the largest use of force investigation caseload in the country.
The unit will probe both alleged staff abuse and gang activity in the jails, and will recommend whether officers or detainees should face discipline. Final disciplinary decisions, however, will be made jointly by Deml and DOC Commissioner Stanley Richards, who has characterized his work with the remediation manager as a “partnership.”
Indeed, the collaborative relationship between the two officials was detailed in a new organizational chart Deml sent to federal Judge Laura Swain last week, the first publicly documented communication between the remediation manager and the judge since Deml officially took office in February. Deml and Richards are listed atop the chart, on equal footing, despite the fact that Deml only has to answer to the judge.
The new investigation unit, which will be led by a yet-to-be-appointed senior deputy commissioner, is the biggest change from the current structure of the DOC detailed in the organizational chart.
The new approach to staff accountability is an attempt to address the abuses at the heart of the civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
While the DOC has at times come into partial compliance with staff investigations and accountability provisions, it has often quickly reverted to non-compliance after periods of improvement.
Swain said in her 2024 ruling that the DOC’s Investigation Division “still cannot consistently identify misconduct when it occurs” and that “consequently, some DOC staff are not held accountable for misconduct, and corrective action is not always applied.”
The new investigative unit will absorb a number of existing DOC units, including its Special Investigations Unit, which leads staff investigations; the Correctional Intelligence Bureau, which investigates detainee gang activity; Adjudications, which determines discipline for detainees; Trials and Litigation, which conducts staff accountability; and Command Discipline, which conducts informal staff discipline.
The DOC commissioner will have no authority over the unit, according to the organizational chart.
Chart via Court filing
The quality of the DOC’s investigations into staff appeared to take a nose dive following former Mayor Eric Adams’ appointment of former Commissioner Louis Molina, according to Steve J. Martin, the federal monitor appointed by Swain to track conditions in the jails.
Martin said in an April 2023 report that a “disturbing trend” in the investigations unit began to show itself half a year after Molina took office.
“Beginning in summer 2022, a discernible deterioration in the quality of investigations conducted by ID was identified and there was evidence that ID was not consistently addressing or analyzing the available evidence and their conclusions did not appear to be objective,” the monitor said at the time.
According to Martin, a greater number of investigations were being closed without action, a significantly smaller number of cases were being referred for further investigation, and misconduct was being identified much less frequently than in the past.
He also said that staff at the unit “had been influenced or prompted, either overtly or implicitly, to adopt a more lenient approach when assessing cases and to change their practice in ways that compromised the quality of the investigations.”
While the DOC began to address the issues within the investigations unit, it still has not been able to come into full compliance with the consent judgment.
In the monitor’s most recent compliance report, which was issued in January, Martin said that while the investigation division had “emerged from the state of turmoil that began in 2022 and ended in spring 2024…addressing the damage from ID’s mismanagement will take time.”
According to the monitor, the DOC’s inability to consistently conduct rigorous investigations has contributed to its troubles with reining in use of force incidents and other claims of misconduct by staff.
Though the rate of use of force incidents has declined by 6 percent over the last year, it remains higher than it did before the pandemic, according to DOC data.
The monitor described a number of disturbing use of force incidents in his January report. Among them was an incident that unfolded in December 2025 when a group of correctional officers were walking a detainee back to his housing area on Rikers Island.
With the detainee’s hands cuffed behind his back and his feet in shackles, he fell to the floor and began convulsing. Thinking he was faking the episode, six officers told the man to get up, while a seventh officer walked into a janitor’s closet, away from the cameras in the hall.
Inside the closet, the officer covered the bottom of his boot in pepper spray, and then walked out and put his boot directly in front of the detainee’s face. When the man began to convulse again, an officer turned him on his side and moved him closer to the closet, putting his face directly next to an orange bootprint. After the man began to complain about the pepper spray on the floor, the officer bent the detainee’s wrists, causing him to scream in pain.
“Don’t resist, sir,” the officer said.
The incident was under investigation by the Investigation Division at the time of the report.
Benny Boscio, the president of the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association, said in a statement that the union “will have a strong voice advocating to protect the rights of our members…[r]egardless of how the new DOC organizational chart is structured.”
“It’s imperative that decision makers at all levels tap into our institutional knowledge, which can be harnessed to maximize our common goal of enhanced safety and security for everyone in our facilities,” he added.
The new investigation unit was not the only change to the DOC’s structure created in the new organizational chart.
The chief of department, the highest-ranking uniformed DOC officer, will now begin to report to both Deml and Richards – the commissioner will provide daily operational leadership to the chief of department, while the remediation manager will oversee officer deployment, the creation and implementation of operational reform efforts, and changes to operational policy.
Top deputies in the commissioner’s office will continue to report directly to Richards, who, alongside Deml, will have dual authority over the DOC’s finances, facilities, procurement practices, labor relations, legal matters and more.
Demolition might conjure images of bulldozers, sledgehammers and wrecking balls slamming into structures that crumble dramatically.
But in New York’s Good Cause Eviction Law, the definition of “demolish” is not straightforward. What does it mean to demolish a home? And can a landlord demolish just an apartment, or an entire building?
Those are questions looming over tenants whose landlords opted not to renew their leases by citing an intent to demolish. It’s one of the few reasons a landlord can evict rent-paying tenants in unregulated apartments under the 2024 law, which caps rent increases and requires landlords to offer most tenants renewal leases.
“We don’t know what demolition of an apartment means,” said Ellen Davidson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society who worked on the law. “It’s a live question.”
For several tenants in New York City, the right to remain in their homes hinges on the answers — like for roommates Feryal Nawaz, Carla Orlandi and Parisa, whose landlord refused to renew the lease for their East Village apartment, citing a plan to demolish it.
The roommates, all 27 years old, were excited to stay in their three-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment. They’d become close, hosting movie nights and decorating for each other’s birthdays. Their home became a central gathering place for friends; they kept deflated air mattresses in a corner of the living room for guests staying over.
The East Village apartment along 2nd Avenue is slated for purported demolition work, May 8, 2026. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Over many previous months, the roommates had rebuffed their landlord’s offers of several thousand dollars to leave early. But then the landlord officially said they had to leave when their lease is up at the end of June. Facing the uncertainty of the Good Cause Eviction Law, the roommates have been reaching out to tenant hotlines, lawyers and their local representatives to seek insight before they make plans to either move out, or head to court.
“There’s so many loopholes in these laws,” said Parisa, who declined to share her last name. “If it’s really meant to protect us, you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer. You shouldn’t have to go to court and fight and hope and pray.”
The roommates said they’d make a decision about next steps by the beginning of June.
“As May still plays out, I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” Nawaz said. “I want to make sure that we put up a fight regardless, even if we do end up leaving.”
David Hazout, an agent of the LLC that owns the roommates’ apartment building, declined to comment. A lawyer representing the LLC had sent the roommates renovation plans that show the kitchen and one of the bathrooms would be relocated within the unit. Permits filed with the Department of Buildings in March show plans to renovate 10 apartments in the building, records show.
But does a renovation count as a demolition? And what is the definition of a “housing accommodation”? That’s the opaque term the Good Cause law uses to refer to where tenants live.
Shafeeqa Kolia, a spokesperson for Sen. Julia Salazar, sponsor of the Good Cause law, said the provision was intended to refer to the demolition of a whole building. Kolia said the Senator’s team would look into drafting legislation to clarify the definition of “demolish” in the law.
Absent a legislative update, those key questions must be answered in court.
Defining Demolition
Already, there are at least two cases in Housing Court that are grappling with what “demolition” really means.
One case concerns some tenants of two apartments in an East Village building, just three blocks north of Fawaz, Orlandi and Parisa. In March 2024, those other tenants got notice from their landlord that their leases would not be renewed. In that notice, the landlord indicated the “housing accommodation” would be demolished; in later courtdocuments, the owner said they would renovate the apartments.
The tenants’ lawyer, who declined to comment for this story, cited the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of demolish in court documents: “pull or knock down (a building)”… “to tear down,” “to destroy,” “to flatten,” “to raze” and “wipe off the face of the earth.”
The lawyer argued a single apartment cannot be demolished, and that a demolition is not the same thing as a renovation.
Tracy Ferdinand, the judge presiding over the case said that an individual apartment — not an entire building — could be considered a “housing accommodation,” but left open whether a renovation counts as a demolition.
The landlord submitted architecture reports and cost estimates for the renovations. But the judge, too, resorted to a dictionary definition of demolish — this time, from Merriam-Webster — to cast doubt on whether those documents established plans to demolish the apartments, and ultimately said they failed to do so.
The case will go to trial. But whatever the court decides, it likely won’t affect other tenants fighting similar evictions. Legal precedent can only be set through appeals courts.
That means another case in Housing Court may end up with a totally different outcome compared to what happens in the East Village tenants’ case. The second case concerns the tenants of five apartments in an Upper West Side building, whose landlord would not renew leases because of demolition plans. (The tenants declined to comment for this story.)
The landlord of 303 W. 74th Street on the Upper West Side did not renew their tenants’ leases citing demolition work, May 8, 2026. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
The building is a Renaissance Revival-style townhouse in a historic district, and the lawyer representing the tenants, James Fishman, pointed out demolition would require the approval of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission. He, too, argued that demolition was not the same as renovation, and that a single apartment in a building could not be demolished.
“I think the whole point of the statute is to protect tenants in their apartments, and this is kind of a loophole,” Fishman said.
Neither the landlord nor the attorney representing the landlord in the Upper West Side case responded to requests for comment.
Worth the Fight?
While “demolish” stays undefined as it relates to the Good Cause law, risks remain for tenants who want to try to stay in their apartments while a landlord is claiming demolition.
“You have to decide whether it’s worth fighting when we don’t know for certain how the statute is going to be interpreted,” said Davidson, the Legal Aid lawyer. She said she’d ask the landlord for records of permits and architectural plans for any proposed demolition.
Sherwin Belkin, an attorney who represents landlords, said he would tell any clients who would want to evict tenants under Good Cause that they’d need to pursue at least a gut renovation.
“You’re leaving the four walls of the apartment and maybe some of the partitions, but I wouldn’t leave in much more. The more you leave, the more there’s issues about whether or not you’re demolishing,” Belkin said. “Your best case is to create a blank box.”
The owner of 141 Second Ave. in the East Village cited demolition work in not renewing tenant leases, May 8, 2026. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Housing lawyers do not expect courts to come to a final determination on what “demolish” means for at least a year as cases and appeals proceed.
In the meantime, tenants like Nawaz, Orlandi and Parisa are left to navigate uncharted waters.
“It does suck being the guinea pig, but I’m not entirely mad about it,” Nawaz said. “I do think this is probably happening to a lot of people out there … It’s not just about us.”
The roommates suspect the landlord will renovate the apartment — as has been done with other units in the building — and increase the rent. They’re already paying about $6,200 for their apartment.
They’re also worried about the prospect of finding a new place. Nawaz and Orlandi have been in the apartment for almost three years, the longest they’ve lived in a place since college, they said. Parisa moved in last year after coming from Atlanta and not knowing anyone in New York, but made fast friends with the two others.
Above all, the three roommates are frustrated about the ambiguity in the Good Cause Eviction Law.
“This was supposed to be put in place to help out the tenants,” Orlandi said. “But they made the lines so blurred and all the words so vague that no one knows — not even lawyers, not even ChatGPT — no one knows what that even means.”
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