Friday, October 9, 2026
Welcome to another Friday edition of the Tech:NYC Digest, featuring our favorite five highlights in New York and tech this week.
Programming note: We’re off Monday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.
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Why NYC is poised to thrive in AI (TBPN/X)
As AI shifts from building infrastructure to developing real-world applications, New York City has a major advantage. 🗽
Union Square Ventures investors Rebecca Kaden and Michael Mignano point to two of NYC’s strengths: its deep pool of consumer-focused talent and the density of industries where AI can be put to work.
‘Trash Talk’ TikTok star doesn’t want to clean up NYC forever. He wants you to. (The City Reporter)
One Washington Heights resident is turning neighborhood cleanup into a full-time civic movement, one tree bed, planter, and TikTok at a time. 🌱
David Clarke, the 24-year-old behind Trash Talk NYC, has spent the past five months picking up litter, planting flowers, rebuilding tree beds and turning his soil-filled apartment into a beautification “lab.”
City agencies have largely praised the effort, and Clarke is now working on a guide so more residents can maintain the tree beds and forgotten spaces near their own apartments.
How NYC students saved school lunch (Reasons to be Cheerful)
New York City students are proving that cafeteria complaints can become real policy change. Through Youth Food Advocates, teens are helping redesign menus, improve cafeterias, and make school lunch more appealing citywide. 🍎📣
Students have surveyed classmates, brought feedback to school leaders, and pushed for changes like taste-tested menu items, deli-style stations, more comfortable seating, and redesigned cafeterias.
The results are promising: more than 200 cafeterias had been renovated by December 2025, and lunch participation has risen at redesigned high schools.
Event Spotlight: POLITICO New York Outlook
What will New York City’s next chapter look like under Mayor Zohran Mamdani?
On October 14, POLITICO New York Outlook will take a deep dive into the affordability, economic, and policy challenges shaping the city, bringing together leaders and experts for a conversation about what comes next for New York.
Join in person or watch virtually beginning at 3pm ET.
Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Get in touch with POLITICO.
‘Curious and circumspect creatures’: The artist making sculptures for the rats of New York City (The Guardian)
New York’s latest public art audience is small, nocturnal, and probably already living under your building. Artist Asad Raza has been making “public art for rats,” placing sculptures near dumpsters, sewers, medians, and hidden rat pathways across the city. 🐀
The project, titled Thigmotaxis (the rat show), uses concrete, wood, and burlap structures designed around how rats move, smell, hide, and explore their surroundings.
It’s weird, very New York, and surprisingly thoughtful. Raza says the project helped him see rats less as pests and more as curious city creatures with their own hidden urban world.
Dinosaur masks, easels, 1,000 top hats: Inside NYC’s free store for teachers (The City Reporter)
The best classroom haul in New York might be hiding on the third floor of a Long Island City warehouse. Materials for the Arts is giving public school teachers free access to donated supplies, props, furniture, and creative odds-and-ends that can stretch tight classroom budgets a lot further. 🛒
On the first Thursday of each month, teachers can fill shopping carts with everything from copy paper and index cards to theater props, fake trees, dinosaur masks, and art materials for classroom projects, clubs, and school productions.
The program turns donated materials from theaters, schools, manufacturers, and New Yorkers into a creative resource for more than 1,800 public schools, democratizing art supplies while keeping useful stuff out of the waste stream.
Have an artsy weekend, New York! 🎨
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