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New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
If You Put Her in a Scene, She Will Steal It
On the most recent season of the HBO comedy 'Hacks,' viewers were introduced to a new character named Randi. She is a former Hasidic Lubavitch Jew from Crown Heights who recently shed her religious upbringing, moved to Los Angeles, came out as queer and took her first-ever job as the unlikely assistant to Jimmy and Kayla, a pair of celebrity managers. With her heavy Brooklyn accent, no-nonsense delivery and hilarious back story (she just saw her first movie — 'Speed' from 1994), Randi quickly became a fan favorite, even though she appeared in only a few episodes. The character is unusual, but feels deeply authentic. And she should, as Robby Hoffman, the comedian and actor who portrays Randi, has a remarkably similar back story. (The role was written with her in mind.) Ms. Hoffman, like Randi, was born in an insulated Hasidic community in Brooklyn. She was the seventh of 10 siblings raised by a single mother, and when she was young, the family relocated from Brooklyn to Montreal, where they struggled to make ends meet. 'We grew up no frills, is how I would say it,' Ms. Hoffman said in an interview. 'We were going to be fed, sheltered and educated,' but there was little money for luxuries like going to the movies. Her upbringing instilled in her a strong work ethic, as well as her own sense of style. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
5 days ago
- General
- New York Times
A Garden in Brooklyn Bridges a Gentrification Divide
Good morning. It's Tuesday. Today we'll find out why a block in Crown Heights is Brooklyn's greenest. We'll also get details on the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration in New York City. People on Eastern Parkway describe the block between Franklin Avenue and Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights as one of the busiest around, with a station where trains from three subway lines stop. They also say it's one of the most organized blocks anywhere, with a block association that tends communal herb gardens and paints benches where passers-by can linger. As of today, they can also describe it as the greenest block in Brooklyn. It won that title, conferred by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in an annual contest, beating 10 other finalists from among more than 100 entries. Adrian Benepe, the president of the botanic garden, said that Eastern Parkway was a departure for the contest, which began in the 1990s: It was the first winner from a block made up mostly of apartment buildings. Past winners have been quieter residential blocks with one-to-four-family homes that had 'lots of places to do the greening,' he said. That part of Eastern Parkway has mainly four-to-six-story apartment buildings with smallish front yards. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
31-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Trump's Medicaid Crackdown Is Fueling This $22-Million Backed Healthcare Startup's Expansion
Nikita Singareddy (middle) and her cofounders Courtesy of Andreessen Horowitz When Nikita Singareddy, Cydney Kim, and Ben Wesner first thought up Fortuna Health from a Crown Heights apartment, they saw opportunity in one of the least modern but most utilized corners of American healthcare: Medicaid. The legacy program offers free health insurance to 80 million Americans, but the current enrollment process is complex, slow and sometimes entirely paper-based. To bring a much-needed software update to the nearly $870 billion government program, the three founders leveraged their backgrounds in healthcare, strategic operations and technology to launch Fortuna in 2023. The SaaS startup offers a user-friendly web-app for patients to easily submit and renew their Medicaid applications. While the typical enrollment process requires users to send materials online or via snail mail—then wait upwards of 45 days for a decision—Fortuna completes it in under a minute thanks to its AI models that flag common errors like missing pay stubs on employment verification forms. Fortuna makes money by selling its technology to insurance agencies and hospitals, which benefit from keeping patients insured because it increases the amount of money they get from the state. Here's how it works. After a person applies to Medicaid, their provider sends a push notification powered by Fortuna, directing them to an online portal with instructions for accessing benefits. Fortuna's software then guides them through a personalized and multilingual experience—similar to a one-on-one interaction—that can respond to unique situations such as households with a mixed immigration status or seasonal employees who don't earn income throughout the year. Last week Fortuna Health closed an $18 million Series A led by returning investor Andreessen Horowitz. The goal? Expand its service into more U.S. states and territories (they're currently active in eight) and the development of AI-powered workflows. The Series A brings their total funding to $22 million. Nikita Singareddy declined to comment on Fortuna Health's most recent valuation. 'We've experienced an 11x increase in users since last year and the growth is not entirely new,' Singareddy said. 'But because we've already laid the groundwork with our partners we have seen more customers that are ready to activate with this new sense of urgency.' Singareddy, a healthcare policy wonk who got her start interning on Capitol Hill in college, worked on different sides of the healthcare industry from insurer Oscar to venture firm RRE Ventures. But it wasn't until her work at a Federally Qualified Community Health Center, otherwise known as 'free clinics,' where she saw firsthand how outdated technology created a barrier for people to access Medicaid. Experts estimate that 70% of Medicaid churn—which is when eligible people lose coverage—is due to procedural hiccups that could have been avoided with clearer instructions. 'There is a totally different healthcare system for people who are lower income and under-resourced versus commercial health insurance,' Singareddy told Forbes . 'Coming from policy being my area of passion, I saw that discrepancy and wanted to solve it.' Fortuna raised its seed round shortly after the Medicaid unwinding period when pandemic-era protections expired and members had to verify that they still qualified for the program. Health plans and states needed a tech-enabled third party to manage the millions who suddenly lost coverage, generating early traction for Fortuna in the Medicaid SaaS field that has few competitors. 'We always say there are no bad ideas, just bad timing and what generated so much momentum for Fortuna is that they picked the perfect time to enter the market,' says Julie Yoo, a healthcare investor at Andreessen Horowitz. Two years later, the startup is generating more momentum—thanks to politics. President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, which includes strict oversight on Medicaid, making the already analog process more complex like increasing the frequency in which users have to renew their coverage from once a year to every six months, and a new 80-hour work month requirement with additional documents required to prove employment. 'We've never wavered from our mission to be the TurboTax for Medicaid but the bill has forced our hand to move quicker on expanding into all 56 U.S. states and territories that have Medicaid programs,' Singareddy said. While fully integrated into eight states, Fortuna has yet to scale nationally. The latest Series A will go toward building infrastructure to meet demands in new territories, but entering new markets will require a go-to-market strategy tailored to each state's unique Medicaid system. To apply for Medicaid via Fortuna, enrollees need their health provider to grant them access to the platform. That makes securing contracts with insurers, hospitals and health plans in each region critical for the startup's growth. 'They're only in a handful of states, so they either need a major payer or health system to get behind them in each new market,' a healthcare analyst at William Blair Ryan Daniels said. 'But how do you get them on board without consumer awareness? And how do you drive consumer awareness without the payer behind you? It's the classic chicken and egg problem.' The One Big Beautiful Bill itself could mitigate this problem as Singareddy says Fortuna has already seen an increase of general inquiries from users about how the policy changes will affect their coverage. Fortuna is also building localized relationships with organizations at the state and county level to drive consumer awareness in new regions. 'We are not new to this problem. We didn't get created just to solve the Big Beautiful Bill,' Singareddy said. 'I'm glad we've spent so much time obsessing over how to modernize Medicaid so that we can be in the hands of many more people for this moment.'
New York Times
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
From a Year's Worth of Sidewalk Debris, 365 Works of Art
On a morning in late June, the artist Yuji Agematsu, eyes down, walked along Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, looking for things in the dirt and crab grass that no one else would notice: lollipop sticks, bottlecaps, broken glass. 'So many stuff,' he said. 'So many disposable dental floss, very iconic object in this district. By the seating area, so many candy wrappers, ice cream sticks.' He patted the ground affectionately. 'I'm interested in fragments. Each reminds of what used to be.' Since 1985, Agematsu has been foraging daily on the streets of New York, finding castoffs he eventually transforms in his studio in Dumbo into a little sculpture that he encloses in the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack. After the year ends, he places each assemblage on a shelf or in a vitrine, which is organized like a calendar to mark the day it was collected. Two years' worth are on display, on Fridays and Saturdays through the end of August, at the Harlem house of Gavin Brown, the art dealer and gallerist, where 2023 is on view, and at the Judd Foundation in SoHo, showing 2024. Like his way of working, Agematsu's art requires a slowing down. It takes time to appreciate what is driving his small, subtle compositions. He doesn't alter what he gathers. He simply makes combinations. In one grouping at Gavin Brown, two wires are stripped above the insulation, so that frayed copper filaments spread like the tops of palm trees. In another, a metallic red, green and yellow candy wrapper is folded to create a fishtail, while a bent Q-Tip rises above it like a ghostly arm. Arrayed in Lucite vitrines, these sparkling miniatures when seen from a distance might be an exhibit of Roman glass. At the Judd Foundation, the pieces rest on wooden shelves — inspired, Agematsu says, by the stripped-down furniture made by the artist Donald Judd, who bought the five-story cast-iron building in 1968. Since Judd's death in 1994, the building has been maintained by the Judd Foundation. Starting in 1996, Agematsu, who is 69, worked there as superintendent and handyman, until he quit in 2018. 'I came from another country, I came from the bottom,' he said. 'I needed the challenge to be a full-time artist.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
How Mamdani connects climate policy to his affordability agenda as he runs for New York mayor
As she canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in New York City on Tuesday last week, Batul Hassan should have been elated. The mayoral candidate – a 33-year-old state assemblymember – was surging in the polls and would within hours soundly defeat Andrew Cuomo on first preference votes in the Democratic primary election. But Hassan's spirits were hampered by record-breaking temperatures. In Crown Heights, where she was the Mamdani campaign's field captain, the heat index soared into the triple digits. 'I couldn't think about anything but the heat,' she said. 'It was so dangerous.' Early that Tuesday morning, Hassan visited a public school polling site, where elderly workers sweltered without air conditioning. The city board of elections sent over paper fans, but they were no match for the heat. If Mamdani is elected, that school could be retrofitted with air conditioning and green space to bring down temperatures as part of his green schools plan, or could even be transformed into a resilience hub for communities shelter amid extreme weather events. 'Seeing total infrastructural failure on election day emphasized the stakes of what's happening with the climate crisis and the importance of the election,' said Hassan, who took time off from her day job at the leftist thinktank Climate and Community Institute to canvass. Mamdani's green schools plan is just one of his schemes to slash carbon emissions and boost environmental justice. If elected mayor, his plans for New York City would make residents 'dramatically more safe' from extreme weather, said Hassan. But the democratic socialist, who was endorsed by the national youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement and student-led climate group TREEAge, did not place the climate crisis at the center of his campaign, instead choosing to focus relentlessly on cost-of-living issues. The model could help build popular support for climate policies, supporters say. 'Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns,' Mamdani told the Nation in April. 'They are, in fact, one and the same.' Over the past two decades, Democrats increasingly focused on the climate. But often, their proposed schemes have been technocratic, Hassan said. Carbon taxes, for instance, can be impenetrably complex, making them difficult candidates for popular support. They can also be economically regressive, with 'working class people experiencing them as an additional cost', Hassan said. More recently, Joe Biden coupled climate plans with green industrial policy and plans to boost employment. But even those projects can take years to affect tangible change, critics say. As president, for instance, Biden achieved historic climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But its green incentives disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and its job creation remains invisible to most people around the country. One poll found only a quarter of Americans felt the IRA benefited them. 'Now with Trump, we see the pitfalls of the IRA, where there is real difficulty in consolidating enough political support to defend those climate policy achievements,' said Hassan. Mamdani 'learned from some of the mistakes' of the Biden administration, said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported Mamdani's campaign. His housing plan, for instance, aims to lower planet-heating pollution by boosting density, but his signature promise is a rent freeze. That pledge could ensure residents are not priced out of New York City and forced to move to more carbon-intensive suburbs, and prevent landlords from passing the costs of energy efficiency upgrades or air conditioning installation to renters, preventing displacement, said Hassan. Similarly, Mamdani's headline transit goal was to make buses faster and free, which could boost ridership and discourage the use of carbon-intensive cars. 'Public transit is one of the greatest gifts we have to take on the climate crisis,' Mamdani said at a February mayoral forum. Biden's IRA placed little focus on boosting public transit, said Gordillo. This was a missed opportunity to cut emissions and also lower Americans' fuel costs, he said. 'We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis, which hasn't been a priority for the Democratic establishment,' said Gordillo, who is an electrician by day. 'But we also need to expand it because we want to improve people's lives right now.' As a New York assemblymember, Mamdani has backed explicitly green policies. He was a key advocate for a boosting publicly owned renewable energy production. The effort aimed to help New York 'live up to the dream of our state as being a climate leader', he said in 2022. He also fought fossil fuel buildout. He coupled that climate focus with efforts to keep energy bills low, consistently opposing local utilities' attempts to impose rate hikes, said Kim Fraczek, director of the climate nonprofit Sane Energy Project. 'His growing political influence is a clear win for communities demanding a just transition: renewable power, democratic control and relief from crushing energy costs,' said Fraczek. Progressive cities like New York are often climate leaders. But if they price out working people, only the wealthy get to see the benefits of their green policies, Mamdani's backers say. By crafting popular climate policies, the Democratic nominee is also building a base of New Yorkers who will work to defend those plans in the face of threats from the Trump administration, they say. 'New Yorkers want an affordable city, clean and green schools, fast and free buses, and a rent freeze,' said Daniel Goulden, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America ecosocialist working Group. 'But most importantly, New Yorkers want a future – one where they can live and thrive in New York.'
