The ferry docks, the doors open, and suddenly you’re forced to make a life-altering decision at the ramp: bus, train, or accept your fate and wander Staten Island like a confused tourist with a MetroCard. We relive the nightly chaos of shoulder-to-shoulder exits, disappearing buses, and the unspoken Olympic sport of walking aggressively with purpose. Then, in what might be the best bargain in New York City history, we unpack how nine whole dollars somehow became a meaningful step toward City Hall—proving once again that in local politics, the price of admission is lower than a combo meal, but the paperwork is somehow worse. And finally, we close with The Last Word, a group therapy session disguised as a podcast segment—checking in after the first full week of the new year, when resolutions are already wobbling, alarms feel personal, and everyone’s pretending they’re “back in the groove” while clearly lying.

In the headlines on #TheUpdate this Friday, the NYPD fatally shot a man wielding a sharp object who barricaded himself in a Brooklyn hospital room.

The summertime shooting of an off-duty federal border patrol agent at a Manhattan park by a pair of scooter-riding immigrants sparked a massive roundup of Big Apple gangbangers, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced at a Lower Manhattan press conference.

And as anger and outrage spilled out onto Minneapolis’ streets over the fatal shooting of a woman the day before by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, a new shooting by federal officers in Oregon left two people wounded and elicited more scrutiny of enforcement operations across the U.S. Meanwhile, in the American west in Portland, Federal immigration agents shot and wounded two people in a vehicle outside a hospital in Portland, a day after an officer fatally shot a woman in Minnesota, authorities said.