The New Yorker—August 12, 2024—The one time Eric Adams went on the “FAQ NYC” podcast, he said something dumb. This was early 2020, when Adams was soft-launching his 2021 mayoral campaign. Harry Siegel, one of the show’s hosts, asked Adams if he planned to carry a gun while serving as mayor. “Yes, I will,” Adams said, proudly. Adams, who spent twenty-two years in the N.Y.P.D., also suggested that he’d fire the mayoral security team. “If the city’s safe, the mayor shouldn’t have a security detail,” he said. “He should be walking the street by himself.” These comments made news. Adams’s opponents argued that they showed he was weird, overconfident, and out of touch. Adams has not returned to the “FAQ NYC” podcast since.

“FAQ NYC” is a talk show about New York City hosted by Siegel and Katie Honan, two veteran local journalists, and Christina Greer, a political scientist who studies Black ethnic and urban politics. New episodes usually drop once or twice a week; listenership for each usually numbers in the thousands. Among those tuning in are local elected officials, bureaucrats, aides, reporters, flacks, and political operatives. Siegel is an editor at the City, a nonprofit news site, and a columnist at the Daily News. Honan is a senior reporter for the City who largely covers City Hall; she often posts TMZ-style videos of herself asking Adams questions from between three and twenty feet away.

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Siegel recently wrote an essay for Vital City, a New York-based public-policy journal, bemoaning the reduced influence and power of big-city newspaper columnists, who gave “voice” to a community’s characters and made “some sense of its plot.”

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