AwesomeCapital

Friday, June 6, 2025

Joke, just not a funny one: 'MTA gives subway Rex-treme makeover with dino store, ‘whimsical’ art'

NYC’s art scene is going back underground — literally.

As the Big Apple’s subterranean newsstands, shoeshine parlors, barber shops and other vintage conveniences roll down their gates for the last time, the MTA has been experimenting with a creative way to fill the voids — with eye-catching installations.

Dubbed the Vacant Unit Activation program, which the agency said is aimed at making stations “more welcoming and whimsical spaces for riders,” a number of artists are being given a platform to show the world their stuff.

Mira Atherton, senior manager of MTA construction development, told The Post that the spaces had been determined as unfit for rental for a variety of reasons.

“These are often units … that are in old stations, typically ones that have been there for over a hundred years. They are funky shapes. They’re small, they have often a lot of utility issues,” she said. “They don’t have water or a waste line. They might be in stations that are not as well-trafficked.”

By giving drab corners a Gotham-style glow-up, Atherton said the agency aims not only to inspire riders, but also provide “affordable space for artists and nonprofits who often have trouble finding space.”

Since the 2023 inception of the project, run by the MTA Real Estate initiative, there have been 12 total activations — with eight running currently.

As a service to busy commuters, we’ve done the legwork and wrangled five stops to keep an eye out for.

The land before Time magazine

Real newsstands may be going the way of the triceratops, but any scaly straphangers waiting for the 2/3 at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza station will find all their needs catered for at Rex’s Dino Store.

The newly opened spot, overseen by the eponymous 7-foot-tall T-Rex proprietor, offers up 50 punny primeval products — from copies of the Maul Street Journal and the Jurassic Park Slope Courier to Snarlboros and Three Tusketeers.

There’s even an appearance by the prehistoric doppelganger to New York’s favorite tabloid — The Pangaea Post. (On the cover — a tyrannosaur in handcuffs, with the headline: SMALL ARMS DEALER.)

“It’s a bodega for dinosaurs,” co-founder Akiva Leffert explained to The Post of the Rex-treme makeover — which he collaborated on with fellow creative and former stand-up comedian Sarah Cassidy.

“We were riffing on this idea of just old newsstand, really old newsstand. Really, really old new stand,” Leffert said. “And the jokes just kind of started writing themselves.”

The shop, which sits behind protective glass to keep it safe from modern-day marauders, reportedly took over a year to complete, including four months for Rex himself — he’s made of chicken wire covered in paper mâché — with ping-pong balls for the eyes.

In accordance with code, this was then fireproofed by certified professionals — to prevent any mass-extinction events.

How to train your subway performer

Between throngs of commuters, trains and soaring assaults, the subway platform can seem like a dangerous place for performers. As a service to buskers, nonprofit Art on the Ave NYC has established the Sound Booth, a music box on the 81st Street-Natural History Museum stop for local musicians to serenade passersby.

“It’s great because it gives them a relatively safe place to perform in the sense that they’re right close to the ticket office and right by the turnstiles,” Barbara Anderson, Executive Director of Art on the Ave NYC, told The Post. “And they can just go in there.”

Along with providing three walls, the Sound Booth is outfitted with speakers, amps and more so performers “don’t have to bring all of their equipment,” per Anderson. There’s even a musically inspired mural featuring Billie Holiday, The Beatles, a DJ and some tambourines.

Originally opened in June 2024, the installation was originally supposed to run for six months but they kept it going because it was such a hit, according to the Art on the Ave boss.

To date, the Sound Booth — which is open four days a week for three-hour slots — has attracted over 50 artists, including the famed “Saw Lady” Natalia Paruz; The Meetles (a Beatles cover band), an acapella group from Fordham University; a flute trio, DJs and the Motown singers, who cruise the subways most weekends.

Starting June 10, the installment will be home to a Sing For Hope Piano — artist-designed ivory boxes that are sprinkled around the city — marking the first time the nonprofit has had a piano in the subway system.

Calm in the storm

Finding solitude during a hectic commute can seem impossible at times. Fortunately, patrons of the proletariat chariot can grab a moment of quiet reflection with the serene “Nympheas Rouge: Reflections of Spring” installation located on the 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue E train downtown subway platform.

With the help of the MTA and ChaShaMa, a nonprofit that transforms derelict real estate into art spaces, artist Kathleen Marie Ryan converted this defunct newsstand into a 24-square-foot immersive display with her painting of waterlilies on three walls and a mirrored floor serving as a reflecting pool.

Coincidentally, the tranquil triptych, which took over a year to complete, is located just a block away from Monet’s water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art.

“After studying how people interact with art in museums, I wanted this microenvironment to give passersby a moment of calm and beauty in one of the most stressful parts of the city,” said Ryan. “A tourist from Sacramento said it felt ‘like a moment of calm in a storm.’”

In 2019, international researchers found that subterranean art installations can even help the depression and tension caused by subway spaces.

Thanks for the memories

East New Yorkers are bringing color to Brooklyn commuters’ day with a nostalgic wall montage featuring maps, historic photos and other memorabilia that pays tribute to the legendary neighborhood’s past.

The installation, called Memories Matter, was a community collaboration between local residents of all ages, the East New York Community Land Trust and the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Along with map collages and floral displays, the display also features historical photographs of the neighborhood, as well as images from community newspapers and excerpts from interviews with local residents.

It’s a hot new track

The subway platform soundtrack is no longer screeching subway tracks and raving EDPs. Located at the Chambers Street metro station, Chamber Hum was created to restore the auditory balance by playing various experimental and ambient compositions — each of which run for one month — on a multichannel sound system.

This month’s buzzy track is reportedly inspired by a mysterious humming noise in Taos, New Mexico ,that’s reportedly only able to be heard by 2% of the town’s population.

In fact, the sound has even been blamed for insomnia dizziness and other symptoms, but here the version serves to create ear-quilibrium amid the metro carriage cacophony.

The installation is “active 23 hours each day, with a short break between the hours of 4AM and 5AM,” organizer WPZSCH writes on the site.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/06/lifestyle/dino-store-the-latest-in-mtas-underground-art-movement/

Proud Boys Sue DOJ For $100 Million Over Jan. 6 Prosecutions

Five leaders of the Proud Boys are suing the Department of Justice after the Biden administration found them guilty of engaging in a seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

The lawsuit, filed by Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, seeks $100 million, and claims that federal authorities violated the Constitution in an effort "to punish and oppress political allies of President Donald Trump, by any and all means necessary, legal, or illegal," WaPo reports.

It comes on the heels of Trump's January pardon of virtually all Jan. 6 defendants - which could saddle the Trump administration with the ironic task of defending the prosecutions, which many on the right view as political weaponization of government.

Leftist academics (at least one) are freaking out over the suit, suggesting that it would vindicate Jan. 6 rioters in the court of public opinion.

"A settlement would suggest that the violence of January 6 was entirely justified," Matthew Dallek, a George Washington University political historian told WaPo. "It would say to the country that these Proud Boys who were convicted in a court of law, in a fair trial, were wrongfully prosecuted and victims. It just turns the entire day on its head."

Or, asshole, it would prove that the Biden administration weaponized the DOJ like everyone with a functional brain witnessed.

Tarrio, who wasn't even at the Capitol on Jan. 6, was sentenced to 22 years for 'plotting' to attack - while Nordean, Biggs and Rehl allegedly stepped into their leadership roles and led what prosecutors claimed was the first breach of the Capitol's west enterence.

Nordean, Biggs and Rehl received sentences of 18, 17, and 15-years respectively for seditious conspiracy, while Pezzola was sentenced to 10 years for conspiracy to obstruct Congress.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of a May agreement to settle the wrongful death case brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol policeman (who got off scot-free) while she was involved in the demonstration.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/proud-boys-sue-doj-100-million-over-jan-6-prosecutions

Pulmonary Rehabilitation for COPD Pushes Forward

Home-based pulmonary rehabilitation has been slowly gaining momentum for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but access is still a challenge.

"The science shows that there is greater benefit from pulmonary rehab than any pharmacology we can give a COPD patient, so a patient will get more bang for their buck out of doing pulmonary rehab than taking all of their bronchodilators," Linda Nici, MD, of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, told MedPage Today. Improvements in shortness of breath, functional exercise capacity, and quality of life have been observed, as have improvements in overall survival and rehospitalizationopens in a new tab or window.

Much like cardiac rehabilitation for patients with heart disease, pulmonary rehab is a multi-domain medical intervention that incorporates education on disease, medication, behaviors, and how to change those behaviors, as well as individualized exercise plans.

However, fewer than 5% of patients who are eligible for pulmonary rehab actually get it, according to Medicare dataopens in a new tab or window. One big problem is that relatively few of these traditionally hospital-based programs are available nationwide.

"They often are not accessible to people in rural or near-rural areas and some of the elderly COPD patients have difficulty with transportation, so access and availability have been huge issues," Nici said.

Christopher Mosher, MD, MHS, medical director of Duke University's pulmonary rehabilitation program in Durham, North Carolina, noted that home-based pulmonary rehabilitation, also known as virtual or telehealth pulmonary rehabilitation, could be one solution.

"It's very much at the infancy stage," he told MedPage Today. "Currently they are available through a number of commercial entities that take advantage of some billable coding, but these are oftentimes not associated with any kind of healthcare hospital system in terms of academic centers or even community practice groups."

One U.S. center, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which has been pioneering real-time video pulmonary rehabilitation for adults with COPD too far from the center to attend in person or without insurance coverage for it reportedopens in a new tab or window no difference in improvements in shortness of breath or exercise capacity compared with conventional in-person attendance, nor were there any safety events.

The biggest evidence base is a Cochrane reviewopens in a new tab or window from Australia in 2021 that pooled together data from 15 studies. It concluded that teleprograms had equivalent improvements in exercise capacity and quality of life to in-person pulmonary rehabilitation, "which is a huge deal," Nici said. "The challenge is the small number of studies, small number of patients, very heterogeneous in what the intervention was. But that gave us a lot of evidence that this is actually something to pursue."

While Australia, the U.K., and Canada have been more forward in adopting it, U.S. centers that had begun to experiment with virtual pulmonary rehab during the COVID-19 pandemic stopped as public health emergency funding expired in 2023. Now, "CMS does not have a way to reimburse for virtual programs through those locations," Mosher noted.

The little data that have been published from that time have been positive.

The VA Boston Healthcare System turned its center-based pulmonary rehabilitation program into a synchronous virtual program in response to the COVID pandemic using a secure two-way audiovisual communications technology platform. Comparison with participants during the pre-pandemic period showed similar safety, acceptability, and completionopens in a new tab or window of classes.

One important question is whether synchronous exercise from home together with a group that's in a center -- "which we think is probably the one that has the most fidelity to center-based pulmonary rehab," Nici said -- is on par with asynchronous exercise on a mobile app or website not done at the same time with an exercise physiologist or a physical therapist.

Even more critical is the question of how to reimburse telerehabilitation going forward.

"You just can't get around that," Mosher said. "If health systems can't be reimbursed for that service, then there's just no way that it can be effectively delivered, even if they were to partner with some kind of commercial entity that can provide maybe some of the software or interfacing."

There's strong advocacy to push for a legislative solution to get reimbursement for telerehabilitation and even improve what center-based programs are getting, Nici said. Bills in the Senate and House, though, would only cover virtual rehab if it was delivered through two-way audiovisual communication in a synchronous manner.

"We did advocate to have bills put to the floor for reimbursement, but it's been very, very slow. And I think part of that is the current political climate. You know, it's on page 47 of priorities, I'm sure," she said. "It has been slowly gaining some steam over the last year or two. But, you know, that's anyone's best guess right now."

For now, patients who are unable to access a center can still be encouraged to get moving at home and progress to greater levels of activity aiming for 150 minutes per week at moderate intensity.

Senior centers, the SilverSneakers program, the YMCA, walking clubs, or just getting a walking partner can all be options.

"If there's any kind of mall or grocery store, even some kind of large business that they could go to and then walk in there, that's also an option for them to just kind of think creatively," Mosher said. "If they want to look into doing other things like resistance bands or weight, that's great ... But starting with 5 minutes three times a week, that's a perfectly good place to start and then just increasing from there in terms of other lifestyle changes."

Nici noted that "activity is great, and we love people that use pedometers and walking apps and motivational apps. But to really do pulmonary rehab, you need an exercise prescription and exercise training." She recommended checking the American Thoracic Society's pulmonary rehab locatoropens in a new tab or window first: "Do a little research; make sure that there isn't availability."

Disclosures

Nici disclosed no relevant relationships with industry.

Mosher disclosed research funding from the NIH, AstraZeneca, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, as well as consulting for the COPD Foundation, GSK, Genentech, Guidepoint, and International Consulting Associates.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/spotlight/copd/115915

More marketing: 'Cancer Patient Treatment Choices After Getting a Second Opinion'

It’s natural to seek out a second opinion when evaluating your surgical options for breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancer — many surgical oncologists encourage it — but what makes a cancer patient stick with that second-opinion surgeon for their treatment, instead of going back to the surgeon that gave them their initial treatment plan?

It’s a question that Alec McCranie, MD, a first-year resident in the University of Colorado Department of Surgery, sought to answer in research recently published in the Journal of Surgical Research.

“We noticed we were getting a number of patients coming to us for a second opinion, meaning they had seen a prior provider, gotten a treatment plan, and were interested in seeing what the other options might be,” says McCranie, a graduate of the CU School of Medicine. “We wanted to know what influenced the patients to stay at our institution, rather than staying with their original provider. We wanted to look from both a clinical and systems-level perspective to see how we can improve patient experience and resource allocation.”

Under the supervision of his research mentor Sarah Tevis, MD, associate professor of surgical oncology in the CU Department of Surgery, McCranie analyzed 18 months of patient data, finding 237 patients who came to CU for a second opinion after being seen by another provider. Though he didn’t interview patients directly about their experiences, he found several aspects of care that increased the likelihood patients would remain at CU for their treatment.

In pancreatic and colorectal cancer, the research found that access to the advanced or potentially curative options available at an academic medical center such as CU was a big factor in patients remaining for their care after receiving a second opinion.

The data around breast cancer patients revealed more opportunities to adjust the circumstances around a patient’s second opinion.

Plastic surgery, radiation oncology

For instance, McCranie found that breast cancer patients were almost 90% more likely to remain at CU for their care if a plastic surgeon was part of the multidisciplinary clinic (MDC) that evaluates new patients during their first visit.

“We think that’s because it allows for more of an informed decision on reconstruction,” he says. “They like having more of that education and feeling like there's an end to what they're going through — starting with the surgery, then ending with reconstruction.”

Similarly, McCranie’s research found, having radiation oncology involved in the breast cancer multidisciplinary clinic helped retain patients as well.

“A lot of that, we think, is because there's poor access to radiation oncology in the community, and it's also usually pretty expensive out in the community,” he says. “There are studies that show that rural patients are less likely to continue to follow up with their radiation oncologist, because often there aren’t any nearby.”

Spanish-language support

One of the biggest growth opportunities McCranie saw in his research was that non-Hispanic patients were more likely to stay at CU after a second opinion than were Hispanic patients.

“That showed us a big opportunity to be able to involve more of the Spanish-speaking Hispanic population,” he says. “We’ve now gotten more Spanish-speaking medical assistants and more Spanish-speaking faculty, which is something that patients seem to appreciate. All of our consents now can be in Spanish, and we have a lot more translators available as well.”

Improving the second opinion

The Department of Surgery is acting on the research in other ways as well, encouraging plastic surgeons to meet with patients during the MDC or shortly thereafter and working with plastic surgery schedulers to ensure that the plastic surgeons patients meet with initially are the same ones who will perform their surgery down the line.

“We want to make sure that the surgeons they’re seeing are going to be the ones who can help with reconstruction,” he says. “A lot of times, the first phase of reconstruction can happen the same day they get a lumpectomy or a mastectomy, so we want to make sure the surgery is aligned timewise.”

Action items

Now that the research is published, McCranie says, other cancer centers may use the findings to implement similar changes at their institutions. It’s the actionable nature of the study that led the Journal of Surgical Research to feature it on the cover of its February 2025 issue, along with a digital illustration, created by McCranie, of a woman in silhouette, confronted by crisscrossing and overlapping paths.

“It’s about understanding what drives patients to choose a treatment provider and being able to take that information and design health systems to be more efficient in allocating how they how they use their resources, or look at what they can change to increase their retention,” he says. “I think that's why they wanted to feature it, is because we give, at least for breast cancer, modifiable things you can do in your practice to be able to increase the retention for these patients.”

https://news.cuanschutz.edu/department-of-surgery/cu-resident-cancer-patients-second-opinion-research

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