I sat outside at Doubles in the Amagansett Square waiting for my order the other night. I love it there (full transparency: a family investment), and they have created an incredible community spot with plenty of delicious options….and soon to be in Brooklyn Heights!

While sitting there, instead of doomscrolling, I listened to the conversation across the way. The guy had just been in DC and was showing pictures to the people he was sitting with. I haven’t been down to DC in years, but I grew up in the area and knew the places he was describing. He showed a picture that I caught a glimpse of, where Trump has put up barriers around most of the public mall. He even said that he could barely take a picture without being hassled. It made my heart sink.

I can only ask why. Granted, the Republicans have full ownership in DC now, and that is how our system works, but why have they allowed this to happen? Why have they turned a blind eye to corruption at staggering levels? The questions are endless, but the one word is why, why, why, why?

Where we will be when this ends, and it will end, is the biggest question. Going back to how things were is never a reality, but where we are going is. Our standing in the world has plummeted, our dollar is shit, and all the other countries have figured out how to survive without us.

Politics is grim, and we are all witnessing how grim it really is. Major change needs to take place to even have faith in government again, although that faith slowly eroded, starting with the lies of the Vietnam War, and plummeted with Nixon and then, of course, Reagan.

Every day I ask myself why and what the other side is going to look like?

The post Why? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I love vices. And honestly, the data says most of America does too—even if we won’t admit it. We have this strange love-hate relationship with them, one that starts young and never really resolves. We tell ourselves that we are a puritanical country. But the numbers say something else entirely. We’re not prim. We’re just pretending.

Start with the basic absurdity. You can go to war at eighteen. You can vote at eighteen. You can be trusted with a rifle and a ballot, but not a beer. You have to wait until twenty-one to touch most of our sanctioned vices. Compare that to Europe, where enjoying a drink or a smoke is treated as something you learn to do responsibly, not something inherently sinful that you’re finally permitted to access once you’ve crossed an arbitrary finish line. We’ve built a culture where even *thinking about* a vice gets coded as bad behavior — while the behavior itself quietly thrives in the background, untouched by all that moralizing.

– Roughly 54% of American adults drink alcohol — down somewhat from a high closer to 65%.
– An estimated 44 million Americans use cannabis regularly.
– Around 57% of Americans gamble in some form.
– About 20% of married men and 13% of married women admit to infidelity.

You don’t need a stats sheet to know this, though. Just look at what we watch. True crime documentaries, murder mysteries, prestige dramas built entirely around vice and its consequences — we can’t get enough of watching other people indulge.

As always in America, it’s a story about money. The alcohol industry doesn’t want cannabis competing for shelf space and social occasions. Cigarettes still find their way into hands they’re not supposed to reach, because there’s too much profit in looking the other way. Gambling moved online and exploded practically overnight, because someone figured out how to monetize it faster than anyone could regulate it. And cannabis — cannabis is a regulatory disaster, a patchwork of fifty different state approaches that will probably take a century to reconcile even after federal legalization finally happens, because no one wants to give up their piece of the pie first.

My father worked as an engineer on Cold War-era projects — the whole absurd theater of secrets and posturing between Russia and America — and his line was: the smartest thing we could do is just dump every classified document we have on top of Russia and let them read all of it, because they’re reading it anyway. In hindsight, he was onto something bigger than he probably even meant. That’s basically how our government treats vices, and a lot of other personal choices too — abortion, healthcare, you name it. They tell us how we’re supposed to behave, hold back information or access “for our own good,” while everyone quietly goes and does what they were going to do anyway, and much of it is underground because of the laws. Of course, if you have the means, it appears nothing applies to you these days.

So why not build a system that actually accounts for how people really behave, instead of how we wish they behaved? A realistic budget doesn’t ignore your actual spending habits — it works with them. Vice policy should work the same way: embrace the fact that people gamble, drink, smoke, and use, and build infrastructure around that reality. Give people a legal, intelligently regulated way to buy what they’re going to buy anyway instead of pushing them onto the street. And give the people who want out a real path — funded social programs, actual support — instead of pure prohibition dressed up as virtue.

We already know what people do. The only question left is whether we’ll keep pretending otherwise but more than likely we will just give it to the highest bidder.

The post America’s Vice Problem Isn’t the Vices — It’s the Hypocrisy appeared first on Gotham Gal.

We were invited to a wedding this past spring and the hostess added a mood board of women and men dressed up in the attire that they were requesting for their wedding. I thought it was genius. No questions to be asked such as do I need to wear a tux? Do I need to wear a long dress? How fancy is this? All the questions that everyone asks when attending an event.

We are about to go to another event, and we have all been asking ourselves, what exactly is summer cocktail attire? Do the men have to wear suits? Ties? This is a conservative bat mitzvah so do the women need to cover their shoulders? So many questions that it feels like most events feel as if nobody is quite sure what the attire should be.

My Grandmother always said, overdressed is better than underdressed although I am not sure how overdressed I would want to be, or visa-versa.

I want to start a trend where people, when they send out invites to an event, are a bit more explicit about the attire. I’d like to send that message out to many of the young New Yorkers who wear workout clothes to nice restaurants. It pains me. In a city once known for being chic, the dumbing down of the clothing choices- and I am fine with casual- drives me insane.

Next event we throw, there will absolutely be more than one line about what to wear. I guarantee you most people will be pleasantly relieved.

The post What To Wear? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I had someone over for dinner recently whose kids are right at that age where they start to roll out into the world, with their first step being four years of college. Their kids are close in age, so having three, as they do, means that at one point they will be paying for 2 kids in college. I was curious what a top private liberal arts school costs a year now. I know how much private school has gone up in NYC through friends, but I didn’t know how much college has gone up. The price is $106,000 a year, and it includes housing.

Let that number sit for a second. A hundred and six thousand dollars. Per year.

If your parents can’t cover that, and most parents can’t, you’re looking at loans or praying for scholarships. That price is for one thing only: wealthy people whose children can experience college without entering the working world in debt. A graduate carrying this debt, because of interest, could be paying it off well into their late fifties. That is a very long time to have that sit on your head. Does anyone really want to walk out of college in their early twenties already half a million dollars in debt, only to realize the life they actually want to build doesn’t require — or even benefit from — the degree that put them there?

That math doesn’t work. I’m a huge believer in the liberal arts. There is real value in having four years of your life, at exactly that age, to find yourself — to take an opera class, or a film class, to read and argue about literature, to pick up a guitar for the first time, to sit with ideas you never would have encountered otherwise. That kind of education shapes people in ways that show up decades later, long after anyone remembers the syllabus. I see it in our kids and their friends. Their knowledge of culture makes them see the world through a different lens, and that is a gift.

But is that experience worth $106,000 a year? I don’t think so. Not even close. What happens to schools that can’t justify the price, or where the entire student body consists only of wealthy kids and kids with full rides? What happens to the middle that balances out the conversations?

What happens to all the universities charging elite prices for an education that isn’t elite? Where people don’t believe the education is worth it unless they can get a degree from a top university. We are seeing that play out in law school and other graduate schools. Why bother going if the degree isn’t going to get you the job you want in order to pay back that debt? Will families keep paying? Or are we headed toward a system where only the wealthy can afford the full college experience, and everyone else gets priced out entirely?

I think AI is going to be one of the most interesting forces in this story — not as a talking point, but as something every parent will end up paying close attention to, whether they mean to or not. Will schools build AI-forward curricula that let them deliver a real education at a fraction of today’s cost? Will some version of the four-year liberal arts experience survive at a price people can actually afford? Or will the institutions that can’t adapt simply stop existing? What will happen to people entering education as professors and alike?

Education has always been personal. Most parents want for their kids what they themselves had, or better, whether that’s public school, private school, or a particular college. That instinct isn’t going away. But the price tag attached to it might make those choices either impossibly costly or, in some cases, no longer available at all.

Interesting times ahead.

The post The Cost of High Education appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Over the last decade, cannabis use has gone up by more than 40% across the globe. On its face, that sounds like a straightforward story: as legalization slowly opened the door, state by state, city by city, and country by country, people were walking in to give it a try.

I don’t buy that. People didn’t just start smoking weed. Nobody woke up the morning cannabis became legal in their state and decided, for the first time in their life, to try it. The numbers we see out of the gate in brand-new legal markets — state by state, country by country — are high from day one because the demand was never new. People have been using cannabis for decades, underground, illegally. What changed wasn’t appetite. What changed was who got punished for it.

That is the part of this story that doesn’t get said enough. Black and brown people have been arrested for cannabis, while countless white people have used the exact same substances with a fraction of the consequences. In NYC, 90% of low-level weed arrests have been Black and brown people. They are almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than white people. Legalization didn’t create demand. It just made visible—and taxable—something that was already everywhere.

In New York, there’s still a lot of talk about giving back to the communities most harmed by cannabis prohibition, about building new programs to make things right. But that opportunity was largely lost four years ago, when the state started handing out licenses without ensuring the expectations attached to them were actually met. The intention was right. The execution wasn’t. The powers that be have found out you can’t go backward. Expecting all the licensees to provide social give-back to renew their licenses when that wasn’t part of the original documentation doesn’t work now. We have been doing that at Gotham, but it was part of our plan, not the state’s.

Here’s what’s actually killing legal cannabis businesses across the country is that states legalized the product without seriously confronting the illicit market that was already saturating it. The supply chain overlaps completely. Illegal weed is cheaper — of course it is; it isn’t paying taxes, isn’t paying for licensing, isn’t funding the regulatory apparatus states built around legal sales. And yet there’s no real public effort to change that dynamic. Where are the campaigns telling people not to buy illegal weed? Where’s the oversight and enforcement against illegal shops that are undercutting every legal operator trying to do this the right way? There are also hemp products that can be sold anywhere and have zero oversight, directly taking money from the state dispensaries’ pockets, and that means less taxes for the state. States have done shockingly little.

Meanwhile, the conversation gets buried under nonsense from both directions — the “public health crisis” framing on one side, and the almost religious “cannabis will save us all” enthusiasm on the other. Neither is honest. What actually needs attention is much less dramatic and much harder to fix: an industry undermined by poor oversight and a string of poor decisions made by the people responsible for regulating it. And the unions certainly should not be the regulators of law.

Watching how badly this has been handled makes you wonder what else is being managed this way. Legal cannabis could have been a real correction — economically and in terms of justice. Instead, it’s a case study in how much damage gets done when regulation shows up without follow-through and specific social give-back legislation.

The post  Cannabis Use Is Up appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Years ago, I read a novel — I can’t remember the title now — written by a woman who’d worked at Google. She told a story about being a woman in a corporate company and navigating up to the top, eventually running a division. In her area, every day at six o’clock, the men would head out the door. The women stayed late.

One night, the women were talking about why all these men leave at six, get praised for their work, and we’re still sitting here. Her answer stuck with me. It’s because you do their job. You don’t say no. You take care of them so they don’t have to worry. This book has stuck with me, and I have retold it to many women who somehow are taking on everyone else’s work.

That story came back to me recently after an evening with friends. Two different women, two completely different situations, but the same thread underneath both. One of them was clearly not wanting to do something — you could see it on her face — and I kept asking her, why don’t you just say no? Why don’t you just say no?

It’s harder than it sounds. I think it’s genuinely hard for a lot of women to draw that line. It is easier to bear the consequences that you never wanted to deal with.

The other friend had a client who’d essentially taken advantage of her. They went around her to buy something so they wouldn’t have to pay commission, even though she spent countless hours educating them. Instead of saying, this is bullshit, she went ahead and helped them complete the transaction. She got taken for a ride. And she did the job anyway because I am sure she wanted to look like the good person here, but she should have told them fuck off.

Why do women have a no problem? I wonder a lot about how women are raised differently — how many of us are still, in some quiet way, expected to be the good girl. To say “of course, I’ll take care of that” or “no problem,” while internally we’re frustrated, doing someone else’s work, doing something we never wanted to do in the first place. Did our mothers do that? Did we do that in elementary school?

I’ve never had trouble saying no. These days, honestly, I say no to almost everything unless it falls into maybe three categories I actually care about. Our own kids taught me personal boundaries. Watching them hold a line, plainly and without apology, gave me permission to do the same. They have elevated my ability to say no.

So how do we change this for women — especially young women — before the pattern sets in? How do we teach it early enough that it becomes instinct instead of something learned the hard way after years of overextending? Therapy is a good start, but so is having your own personal boundaries.

No, I won’t do that.
No, that person isn’t being fair to me.
No, I won’t finish that for you.
No, that doesn’t interest me.
No, I don’t want to read that book.

Whatever the version, women need to learn the power of “no.” Not as an act of defiance, just as a plain, ordinary sentence they’re allowed to say out loud, as many of their male counterparts have no problem saying.

The post Women Should Say No More Often appeared first on Gotham Gal.

We’ve all been reading the headlines about cannabis-related ER visits climbing. It sounds alarming until you look at what’s actually happening in those emergency rooms. People aren’t dying. They aren’t physically ill. What’s landing them in the ER is panic — they got too high, and they’re freaking out about what’s happening to their own body. That’s a very different problem than the headlines imply, and it points to a very different solution. There is a small percentage of people who have physical reactions to cannabis, but throwing up is not death.

Back in the late 70’s maybe early ’80s, my mother went to an advertising party with her husband. Before she started her own ad sales company, my Mom oversaw all sales for an agency. There was a poster as the invitation that made a nod to pot brownies, kind of a coded, old-school warning nobody actually understood, not unlike that Seth Rogen bit in Studio when he points to the “old-school buffet,” where most people don’t realize that means that drugs are infused in the food. Needless to say, nobody should eat 6 of those mushroom-infused brownies.

Back to my Mom. They were told about the pot brownies, but they had zero idea how many to eat. They were even so excited they took a few and wrapped them up to put in my Mom’s purse for later. After indulging, they left the party in Georgetown and went to the bar, and her husband started feeling strange. Really strange. He was starting to panic. My mom suggested they just stay the night at the hotel and sleep it off, as there was no reason to rush anywhere. But he insisted on going home. So they got in the car and headed down 495. It was only a thirty-minute ride.

My mom was a small person. Her husband was a big guy. Somewhere on that highway, he turned to her and said, “Oh my god, I think I’m having a heart attack. I need to go to the hospital.” She pulled over, climbed across him, and pushed him into the passenger seat so she could drive, screaming, “Do not open the door.”

At the hospital, a young intern came out to see them. Her husband explained everything — the brownies, all of it — and told the doctor, “Listen, I’m not a pot smoker.” The doctor looked at him, clapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Well, you are now, buddy.”

He was fine. He wasn’t having a heart attack. He was having a panic attack brought on by a dose he wasn’t prepared for.

That story is decades old, but it’s the same story showing up in ER intake rooms today. The rise in cannabis-related ER visits isn’t a crisis of the drug itself — it’s a crisis of people not knowing what they’re taking, how much, or what it will feel like when it hits. That’s not a pharmacology problem. That’s an information gap.

And the gap isn’t just about dosage — it’s about how we talk about cannabis at all. I was at a dinner party recently where someone said, “You can’t get stoned here because we have young kids,” while everyone around the table was drinking freely. Nobody blinked at that. We’ve built an entire social script around alcohol — how much is too much, what a hangover means, when to call it a night — and basically no equivalent script for cannabis, even as people use cannabis more than alcohol these days and data is pointing to weed being better for you than alcohol.

Changing that starts with education, not stigma. It starts with normal, matter-of-fact conversations — the same way we teach people what to expect from a glass of wine versus a shot of tequila. And it starts at home.

The post Cannabis ER appeared first on Gotham Gal.

US consumer spending is down, and the easy explanation is obvious: people are anxious. The economy feels uncertain, the news cycle is exhausting, and when customers are worried about the world, they hold onto their wallets. Also, the cost of food, gas, and housing has accelerated. That’s real, and it’s part of the story.

But I don’t think it’s the whole story. I think something else is going on, and it’s less about fear and more about boredom.

There was a time when shopping online felt like discovery. You’d land on a site and stumble onto something you didn’t know you wanted. Net-a-Porter, Farfetch — in their early days, these places had a point of view. Now? I couldn’t tell you what separates one from the other. The curation has flattened into sameness. Everything looks the same, feels the same, sells the same handful of luxury labels on repeat.

And then there’s Amazon. I’ll be honest: I have a hard time even clicking “buy” these days, and it’s not about price or convenience — it’s about how the company treats its people. The only reason I’m still tethered to Amazon at all is my Kindle. I’ve quietly stopped buying almost everything else there. My Amazon purchases have plummeted, and so has my online shopping in general. When a purchase makes you feel a little bit lousy, and the product itself isn’t even exciting, there’s no reason to keep clicking.

If big platforms have lost their spark, where is individuality actually happening? Right now, a lot of it is happening through vintage clothing — people building their own look out of pieces nobody else has, instead of buying the same drop everyone else bought. That’s not a coincidence. When the mainstream options all start to look identical, people go looking for something that doesn’t.

I hope the next generation of retailers figures this out. I want stores that feel unique, not replicated. Not another version of the same luxury mall experience stamped out in city after city, country after country. Places where young, independent brands can actually rise up instead of getting crowded out by the same luxury names everyone already carries.

Because here’s what a great store can do that a website never will: give people a reason to linger. To hang out. To talk to each other. That’s the thing algorithms can’t replicate — a place, not just a transaction.

It’s what we’ve tried to build at Gotham. We wanted to separate ourselves from the crowd. What’s interesting is watching the effect play out with our own customers — yes, people come in for cannabis, but increasingly they’re coming in for *Gotham*, for the space and the experience we’ve built around it. That relationship is strong enough that we’re leaning further into it: expect to see more Gotham-branded products showing up in our stores starting this autumn.

Retail didn’t die. It just got boring for a while. The fix isn’t a better algorithm — it’s better rooms, run by people with a point of view who take care of you and know your style.

The post When Did Shopping Stop Being Fun? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

When we first moved to the city, it didn’t take much to become fascinated with real estate. I thought that if we could just make enough money to buy a plot of land to build a 15-story parking lot, we would be fine. A business that pulls in cash with few employees. Those days are gone.

For a long time, we never had the capital to buy anything other than a home, but I kept looking because I love building things and real estate. We were invested in venture, not real estate. There was a time in the late 90s when I wanted to start buying residential properties near subway stops in Brooklyn.  Again, not the right time for us.

Eventually, we began buying and building real estate. Given today’s real estate market, I was not the only one looking for opportunities. Unfortunately, too many real estate landlords are awful landlords. The bad ones don’t care about their tenants. We do.

There are countless small property owners who have been hit with rising taxes, insurance premiums, and, of course, rent regulations who are getting squeezed every day. Because of this, many of these buildings are not maintained, and the tenants are the ones who pay for it. Freezing the rent is not the answer because real estate is far from one-size-fits-all.

Zohran is trying to reshape real estate policy. He is trying to build more housing, changing the simple economics of supply and demand. He established the pied-a-terre tax, which I am a big fan of. Those who own second homes in NYC must pay an annual tax based on the value of the apartment. As they should. The fear is that these people will leave the city, but they won’t, because NYC is a luxury, and they all love coming here for their culture fix, which is why many own places here even though Florida is their “place of residency”. Zohran is forcing landlords to fix properties, as he should. Some NYCHA buildings are uninhabitable, yet people still live there, and it is unacceptable.

I have been reading There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone, who won a Pulitzer for this book. I keep thinking rinse, wash, repeat. The cadence of the book hits as if you are going through the highs and lows of getting housing yourself. It is painful, but maybe that is the point. Zohran makes the point, which I do agree with, that for NYC to continue to succeed, we need more affordable housing for our many working people. It is not like we have built high-speed rail lines to get people in and out of NYC with ease, so they can live in affordable areas. The social programs have been slashed, and given the cost, compared to the positive outcomes that would help many, it makes zero sense that we have so many people in need of housing. Compassion and housing go a long way.

Real estate owners have built tremendous wealth over the last couple of decades, setting prices that continue to rise without reacting to the market because being empty is fine with them. It is killing our city.

Where should the power be?

The post New York Real Estate appeared first on Gotham Gal.

The cat is out of the bag with cannabis. Anyone who thinks this goes back in the box is out of their mind — I said it last week, and I’ll say it again: more Americans partake in cannabis now than smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. Americans like to drink, smoke, gamble, and have sex. Shocking, I know. We’re not unringing that bell. So now the interesting question is what happens with psychedelics and/or mushrooms as it moves towards big pharma and legalization. And it’s moving fast.

Back in April, Trump signed an executive order directing the FDA to fast-track psychedelic drug review. Within a week, the FDA had already handed out priority vouchers — the kind that compress a 10-to-12-month review down to one or two — to three companies working on psilocybin and MDMA-like compounds for treatment-resistant depression and PTSD. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Eli Lilly announced it was acquiring a psychedelics company called AtaiBeckley for $2.8 billion in cash, with an additional $1 billion possible if certain milestones are met. That’s not a biotech flyer. That’s the company that gave us Prozac writing a multibillion-dollar check to get into this space. Their lead drug isn’t LSD, by the way — it’s a synthetic DMT compound, delivered as a nasal spray in a clinical setting, with patients monitored for a couple of hours after dosing. It’s shown real, lasting results for depression that hasn’t responded to anything else, although I know many who have done ketamine treatments for depression that have been incredibly successful.

We were talking about this at dinner last week. Are we excited, or are we scared? Because we’ve known for a long time that psychedelics genuinely help with PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, and other things traditional medicine hasn’t cracked, or we have not figured it out yet. That part isn’t in question anymore. What is in question is everything else. How does this actually get sold? Do you go to a dispensary-style storefront, or does this stay locked up in a clinical setting where you show up, take it under supervision, and go home? Is anyone going to let people walk out with a bottle and dose themselves at home, the way microdosing culture already does informally — because if so, who’s making sure what’s actually in it? Will this spur a larger illegal market?

Pharma has the money and the infrastructure to do massive, real research. But pharma also has a long history of cutting corners once something’s profitable, and I don’t think anyone’s forgotten that. How oxy was foisted on anyone with pain to become addicts was not that long ago. I don’t have the answers here. I just think it’s worth sitting with before the industry gets built. Considering the states haven’t done the best job of rolling out the cannabis industry, I fear what a mess this will be, although pharma has tons of cash with deep pockets for themselves and the government, and that is all they really care about.

What do you think — clinic-only, or eventually something more open access? I’m genuinely curious where people land on this.

The post Psychedelics Are Next appeared first on Gotham Gal.