• Williamsburg was the scene of two fires recently: in one, a man was critically injured after leaping from the fourth floor of a burning brownstone on Keap Street; a week later, a four alarm fire injured five people and damaged three buildings on Humboldt. 
• Earlier in December, cops in Williamsburg found a dead body in a car that had been parked in front of a fire hydrant for over a week- a block away from a police and fire station. As Streetsblog notes, it was parked just outside of the station’s ‘self enforcement zone,’ aka the place where cops are allowed to park on the sidewalk. 
• Last month, Bushwick sports bar Punta Cana was raided and relieved of $100,000 in cash and 12 kilos of cocaine. East Bushwick correspondent Aaron Tomey confirmed that, as of 12/30, the bar remained closed.
• Everyone is Sick:  New York had its worst ever week for the flu just before the holidays, thanks to a hot new mutant ‘super-flu’ bug called subclade K that’s been tearing across the world. It’s only the beginning of the season and something tells me we’re probably on our own with this one. 
• Butlerian Jihad: A heroic woman broke a local TikTok-er’s Meta glasses “with her bare hands” on the subway, even though he was in the middle of filming a bit that involved “making a funny noise people were honestly crying laughing at.”
• Blog bloodinthemachine.com offers a guide to getting off Spotify and taking your playlists with you, seeing as how the site is flooded with AI slop and the CEO is invested in supervillain technology.
• A YouTuber who goes by ‘The Drey Dossier’ seems to think Trump’s $300 million ballroom is really an AI data center. Hint: it’s a ballroom that costs $300 million dollars, and is also sponsored by Lockheed Martin. 

Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo and, more recently, David Dinkins.

Top photo taken by author.