The 53rd annual Third Avenue Festival was held Oct. 4, after being postponed from Sept. 27 due to the nor’easter.

A huge crowd enjoyed the wet 25-block party from 69th to 94th with rides, games, shopping, vendors, food and live music. Performances included students from Beyond Dance and local bands.

Happy Thursday in a city that continues to change faster than we can adjust, nowhere more so than at the subway turnstiles.

As anyone who regularly takes the subway will have noticed, the city has been implementing a lot of new gate designs, since records show that the basic old turnstiles were rife with fare evasion. An ever growing number of stations in the city are now equipped with turnstile fins and spiked fences to deter hoppers; certain high-traffic locations have been equipped with plexiglass doors that automatically open and close to let people through, to say nothing of the retirement of the MetroCard and the corresponding OMNIfication of the city’s public transit.

Regardless of how you feel about them, these evasion-beating tactics have been working, so much so that they’re getting an expansion. Governor Hochul announced yesterday that the saloon-style plexiglass doors cut fare evasion by an average of 35% in the first half of the year, with a high of 72% at some stations. That equates to millions of dollars in recouped revenue for the MTA, and that’s just at the 20 locations where the doors were installed. They also improve access for people in wheelchairs or pushing strollers.

As a result, the MTA plans to invest $1.1 billion to install the doors in 150 other locations throughout the city. “Based on the results of this pilot, we already know that this will save taxpayers nearly $100 million a year that otherwise was stolen in fares,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a press conference. “That means in a span of a number of years, the gates will literally pay for themselves.”

Of course, a new generation of evasion defense spawns a new generation of evasion innovation. What will we see next? Parkour? Pole-vaulting? Maybe hacking via smartphone?

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In the heated news coverage of what’s at stake in the 2026 midterms, state supreme court races are drawing relatively little attention. Yet these are highly significant elections.

Thirty-one states are holding supreme court elections in 2026, with voters nationwide picking judges to fill more than 60 open seats.

As a law professor whose research and writing focuses on reproductive health, I’m watching these races closely. That’s because in the coming years these courts will have the final word on many consequential legal fights around abortion and trans healthcare.

Read on to learn more.

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