Aaron W. Gordon

In which @suryamattu.com and I try to answer the age-old question: Are we smarter than Billy the Cat, the World Cup-predicting phenom? The answer is, definitively: No.

“The players reached out to me and said, ‘Thank you for what you have made.’ They told me story after story of what they did. The letters coming from people’s deathbed telling me, ‘Thank you, High 5. Thank you, High 5.’ People with cancer saying, ‘You got me through this. Thank you."

He thinks it is named after the state www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Today in Guess Who Wants A Pardon

One thing working on this series helped me realize is how long it can take regulatory failures to manifest in people's lives. In these cases, we're talking decades later. www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

One thing I wrote about here is how technology has made buses *way* more convenient while techno-futurists were obsessed with flying taxis and self-driving cars.

I wrote about how surprised I still am a candidate for NYC mayor won in large part by talking incessantly about buses, and also about how making them fast as promised will be an immense challenge. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

New from me: Global Entry revocations are surging in the last ~2 years, well outpacing enrollment, according to data from a FOIA. People often don't know why their membership was revoked. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

There's a persistent reflex to assume that projects like this are liberally coded, only popular in progressive enclaves. But the actual evidence goes the other way. Liberals aren't the only ones who like to cross the street safely. Conservatives also ride bikes and like to do so without dying.

There are hundreds of thousands of homeowners in the US who probably don't realize there's a ticking time bomb on their American Dream in the form of a zombie second mortgage. And the agency tasked with policing this—wait for it—has been gutted by the Trump admin. www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

I am continually impressed by Alissa's coverage of LA transportation and also how insane LA's transportation spending is.

"Don't bother looking for me. I'll be next to my pool with a margarita."

Coffee futures hit a new record high. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Tell 2018 me that in 2025 Andrew Cuomo will be running for mayor and proposing the city take over key parts of the MTA and I might have had an actual stroke www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/n...

"Mansion Boy" is also good because Andrew Cuomo owned a $1.8 million, 4,000 sq ft house with its own pond until his divorce. (Reportedly it would have sold for much more but was not maintained well and was "in dire need of considerable work.") nypost.com/2021/03/03/a...

Fun fact: All of the MTA's rolling stock bought in the last several decades is capable of this too!

For Bessent’s $20 billion bet on Argentina to pay off, a lot of things have to go right. The problem is that in Argentina -- a nation with a track record of squandering other people’s money and defaulting on its own debts -- those things have tended to go wrong. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Some Personal News:

True New Yorker quizzes are fun and all but there is only one question in the actual True New Yorker test: Do You Take The Subway?

@agordon.me is so right about this buttondown.com/Booktime/arc...

A fun game is to ask people what they think "independent" journalism means and/or to rank various sources on a scale of independence. Answers vary wildly! www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/b...

Back when I did this kind of thing, the pitch for why more NYC newsrooms should have dedicated MTA reporters—not even "transportation" generally, just MTA—was that the MTA's annual budget was larger than that of 10 states.

The amazing thing about the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI development is it doesn't even include all the externalized costs like higher electricity prices for hundreds of millions of people.

Watched The Odd Couple movie with Lemmon and Matthau (so good) but the biggest laugh of the night came halfway through was finding out Matthau's character, with an 8 room apartment on the top floor of a West End Drive doorman building, was a sports columnist writing about the Mets.

Great story. Many similar lessons for buying trains, too.

If you're on a Mac the best way to OCR a page of a PDF or image is take a screenshot of it then open it in preview. You can then highlight and copy/paste. This also works surprisingly well with images/PDFs of spreadsheets.

Huh. Hmm. Well. I...ah. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

I have spent more time than I care to admit bashing columnists whom I don't hold in high regard. Gina was never one of them. It's a shame that there appears to no longer be room for knowledgeable local columnists who actually love the place they write about. We need more writing rooted in love.

'Primus becomes the first member of the STB, or its predecessor, the Interstate Commerce Commission, to be dismissed. The ICC was created in 1887.' www.trains.com/pro/regulato...

There’s a widespread myth that Americans hate traffic cameras. It’s simply not true. On the contrary, researchers have consistently found that Americans broadly support using automatic enforcement to curb crashes. And for good reason: It works. Me, in Bloomberg 🧵

Cars are getting more expensive. People take out longer loans to afford them. Longer loans means more total interest cost, adding thousands of dollars to the already expensive car. And when they go to trade it in, they find they still owe more than the car is worth. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...