Stephen Nessen

Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the passage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Work Progress Administration. In addition to putting 8.5 million Americans to work, the WPA was instrumental in creating public art across the country. Much of it has ...

RFK tribute to MLK.

It was no April Fool's Day joke in 1970 when President Richard Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act.

While the state has cut funding for public libraries around the city and many have been scaling back their hours and cutting services, it's not all grim news for the New York Public Library system. Today, a new branch is opening at Battery Park City.

Many critics say we are living in a soundbite culture, and they blame everything from the 24-hour news cycle to the cavalcade of emails we receive daily to Google. But any student of Marshall McLuhan knows that the medium has been shaping the message ...

(Courtesy of the Department of Health)

The latest gross-you-out-of-smoking campaign is out. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the latest batch of anti-smoking ads from the city's Department of Health is the most graphic yet. The $2.3 million campaign features ...

Winning design-- the electronic power button, by Luis Acosta

The first city with it's own branded condom now has a new wrapper. More than 15,000 online voters chose the 'power-on' design by Luis Acosta from Kew ...

(Image courtesy of Ann Fraioli)

This morning, a couple of teachers from the Harbor School were down at the Newtown Creek in Brooklyn and snapped this photo, of what they believe is a dolphin. Could it be the nearly extinct ...

Rep. Charles Rangel (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Harlem residents have mixed emotions about news that their Congressman, Rep. Charles Rangel, is stepping down temporarily as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means ...

Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger sits in the ...

Look for this sign (Courtesy of TLC).

For commuters tired of cramped subway and bus rides or paying full fare for a taxi, there are now other options for getting from point A to B. ...

On this day in 1933, Fay Wray's iconic scream rattled ear drums for the first time, while her co-star's subsequent roar terrified moviegoers.

(Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

Due to an increased black bear population, hunters in New York State 'harvested' the second highest number of black bears ever recorded last year, according to the State Department of Environmental Conservation. They ...

Stephen Abraham, the president of the local National Air Traffic Controllers Association at JFK (Photo by Stephen Nessen)

Starting Monday, air traffic controllers at John F. Kennedy International airport are going to have to work with one less runway. The busiest ...

While a print by Damien Hirst recently fetched £12,655 at auction, that's nothing compared to a copy of Action Comics #1, in which the Man of Steel makes his first appearance (at that time, Superman was simply known as 'The Man of ...

Here at WNYC, we combed the archives and present an episode from Adventures in Research, a radio program produced by KDKA Westinghouse Labs that explores the invention and creation of nylon.

WayFinder app

The winners of the city's 'BigApp' competition, which invited software developers to devise applications for smart phones and the Web using the city's raw data, were announced Thursday night. The Best Overall App goes to a program called

New York, NY —

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the expansion of the No. 7 subway line is on schedule and on budget. On a tour of the half-finished tunnel, more than 100 feet underground, with MTA chief Jay Walder nearby, the mayor says workers have not run into unexpected ...

Howard Zinn (photo by Douglas Brown/by-nc-sa)

 

The historian and civil rights activist Howard Zinn died last Wednesday. Perhaps best known for his book of historical revisionism, “A People’s History of the United States,” Zinn examines American ...

On this day in 1880, Edison patented the electric light bulb: U.S. Patent 0,223,898.