Welcome to the Sugary Scoop, my free weekly newsletter where I help you see and experience the magic of NYC that I love so much through curated events, experiences, artists, and community stories.

What’s new this week?

Back in Business

So it took a couple of weeks but I'm happy to announce that the SweetList is fully populated and fully operational. 

It's been a bit of a journey, but there’s now a curated list of selections once more.  Definitely check back constantly because I'm updating the list as I encounter events so there is a high probability that in between newsletters, new events will keep popping up.    

And as always if you have an event that you think should be Included in The Sweet List, submit your event HERE. 

Sugary 🍬

E Pluribus NYC

So, I won the lottery…

But not in a mega or power kinda way…

As luck would have it, on the first of the month I saw Mayor Mamdani’s  open call across social media for New Yorkers to participate in a citywide scavenger hunt.

This was part of a big push by the city’s Office of Mass Engagement to promote greater awareness and activity among members of local communities to organize and rally around meaningful activity.

They had limited spots and a lottery was instituted for everyone that applied.

And wouldn’t you know it…

…come Tuesday, I received the following in my inbox:

Hi Sugary,

Welcome to the Organize NYC Scavenger Hunt!

I was super excited I mean, come on…a citywide scavenger hunt… and one that the Mayor’s office is getting behind?!  

No brainer for me.

So, much like the mayor, I put out an open call on my social media, and I got a lot of responses from the community but I could only pick 4 people max for the team.

When all was said and done, I had a collection of friends both old and new that made up our motley crew…Fiona Fang, James Calizaire & Medha Krishen.

We were all brimming with anticipation.  Our WhatsApp chat group was filled with thoughts on what the challenges would be.

The day of the event arrived and just our luck…

…non-stop rain.

It clearly wasn’t gonna be the most comfortable of experiences, but whatever, we were hearty and among the nearly 4000 people that had won the lottery among the tens of thousands that had registered, we knew a little bit of rain might as well have meant the sky was raining lava for a good portion of New Yorkers…

…our odds were improving by the minute.

When the challenges came, we took a quick look and it became clear that this was not only a fun tour through New York, it was also gonna be a fascinating lesson in so many aspects of New York City history that none of us knew well…if at all.

From the get go, divide and conquer was our strategy. Medha lived in the Bronx and would work on that borough, while Fiona systematically tackled Manhattan and James and I would take on different parts of Brooklyn eventually converging on Manhattan since that had the greatest concentration of missions. 

Each clue was tied to some fun (or not so fun) historical fact and included everything from snapping a photo, to recording by a video or logging gps location.

For example…

…did you know that Manhattan Chinatown was the site of the largest Asian American protest in US history drawing over 20,000 people for the police beating of Peter Yew and led to major reforms that benefit Asian Americans living in this city to this day?

…or perhaps the fact that Mayor Mamdani partnered with the Groundswell project to commission 12 community led World Cup related murals reflecting the diversity of the communities…the greatest international city hosting the greatest international sport?

…or how about the fact that the bike lanes we so liberally bike and scooter across came directly from the advocacy of the Transportation Alternatives organization who work tirelessly to address the ever growing problem of urban pollution and traffic congestion?

Fun fact, in one of the challenges I was tackling in my neighborhood, I went to brownstone and snapped a photo of the building only to be greeted by a woman who immediately suspected why a random Asian boy was apparently snooping around the property.  

I explained why I was there, showed her the challenge on my phone and I used the factoid provided in the challenge to demonstrate to the cautious lady that I was genuinely interested and I meant no harm.  

I think she was impressed that the scavenger hunt included her brownstone.

I told her, “I had no idea my neighborhood was home to one of the most important archives for Lesbian history in New York City.”

Her face beamed as she corrected me, “…in the world.”

After that exchange it was all good and she apologized for “scaring me” to which I responded I was just as guilty for the misperception.  

As she left to run an errand she quipped, “ya know, you can never be too sure when suspicious men come lurking about…” she saw my face getting red with embarrassment and quickly added, “I’m totally kidding…I’m glad you’re learning something…good luck with your adventure…”

There were just literally SO many fascinating aspects to discover about how greatness in this city manifested directly through its communities who banded together to create the lasting policies that affect our daily lives today.

When it comes to any “official” government events you always run the risk of things being a bit too formal or sanitized for it to be very interesting yet this was anything but that.

All my teammates agreed this was such an amazing experience that not even 15,000+ steps, about 6 and a half miles for each of us across nearly 8 hours in the pouring rain deterred us.

Challenge after challenge got cleared with the efficiency of an ambitious stride and ChatGpt optimizing our travel efficiency along the way.

When the challenge completed at exactly 5:30pm, we learned shortly after that we were among the top 100 teams that competed and were invited to the post hunt reception at the Museum of the city of New York to honor top participants.

…fitting.

As we gorged on unlimited paletas and cider we took a professional group photo in front of Joe Macken’s masterful handcrafted model of New York City that took him 21 years to create…on its final exhibit day.

…even more fitting.

The Commissioner of the Office of Mass Engagement addressed the audience and emphasized that, “…change doesn’t happen by accident and it doesn’t happen by one person, it happens when people work together against the odds to make something happen.”  …all this below a quote from Abraham Lincoln chiseled in the marble cremolding, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him."

…most fitting.

Ultimately, we not only made the top 100, but we were among the top 25!!! Out of nearly 1000 active and 4000 total registered teams!!! 

22nd place…not too shabby.

As they prepared to announce the top 10 winners, I guessed that they would be seasoned New Yorkers, Fiona disagreed and said it would surely be young AI savvy tech folks mostly…

…Fiona was right.

As I reflected on the entire epic experience, I came on a general thought that echoed the Commissioner’s sentiment:

It is easy to assume every stone paved, every tree planted, building erected or policy implemented was always there. It’s understandable as humans take things for granted ALL the time.

But NYC is shaped through deliberate collective action over time.  

We did it together.

Once again our greatest asset has always been us.

And when mixed in with the leaps of faith we afford each other in a pool of limitless renewable talent, it’s just pure magic.

To quote Jefferson Starship, “We Built This City”…

…just with actual “rocks “ and voter/community “rolls”.

Sugary 🍬

The Art of Manga

Fujio Akatsuka, Kazumi Yamashita, Mari Yamazaki, Tetsuya Chiba, Gengoroh Tagame, Rumiko Takahashi, Hirohiko Araki, Eiichiro Oda, Jiro Taniguchi, and Fumi Yoshinaga…

These names may not be familiar to everyday Americans, but these are influential manga artists whose work helped shape Japanese popular culture. Some of their stories became major anime, while others influenced manga and animation in different ways.

For generations, manga has transported readers into extraordinary worlds filled with unlikely heroes, fantastical creatures, complicated relationships, and deeply human emotions.

Now, the Brooklyn Museum is giving this beloved Japanese art form its rightful spotlight among the world's most celebrated masterpieces.

The Art of Manga exhibition, running from October 3, 2026, through January 31, 2027, is the first major exhibition in the Americas devoted to exploring manga as a serious artistic medium.

It is making its East Coast debut after a successful debut in San Francisco and the exhibition brings together more than 600 drawings, including rare original works by some of Japan's most influential manga artists, otherwise known as mangaka.

The creative minds behind cultural phenomena such as ONE PIECE, Inuyasha, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, BLEACH, and Ōoku: The Inner Chambers are on full display.

But the exhibition goes considerably deeper than celebrating recognizable characters.

When I attended the exclusive preview of the exhibit, I marveled at how the exhibition explores how the mangaka artists use deceptively simple tools ink, paper, composition, and imagination to communicate motion, sound, humor, heartbreak, and entire emotional universes.

There seems to be an insistence that manga is far more than entertainment. Manga stories have long explored themes of identity, belonging, gender, environmentalism, social inequality, and the universal struggle to understand ourselves and others. In many ways, manga serves as almost a complement to great literature in its way of inviting us to inhabit someone else's perspective, only through a super unique visual language and style that transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Something else that is noticeable is that the museum added a preface to the exhibit that supplements your understanding of manga’s origins with a presentation entitled Manga Before Manga: Japanese Art from the Collection.  You must go through this companion exhibition featuring 21 historical works tracing more than 900 years of Japanese visual storytelling before you even get to the main feature.

Visitors can discover the artistic traditions that helped shape modern manga, including a 15th-century handscroll with visual techniques that anticipate the modern day “speech bubbles”.

There's something particularly meaningful about bringing manga into a major New York museum. I think for many fans, it’ll be a homage to their most beloved pastime, for others it will be very illuminating about the ways in which cartoon and illustration evolved along both similar and different cultural aesthetics and techniques between the East and West, and further still for some it will be their first foray into a mind expanding universe that they discover a newfound appreciation for.

For many people, their first encounter with Japanese culture wasn't through a history book or traditional artwork, but through a comic, an animated series, or a character they grew up loving. Those stories became shared reference points across countries, generations, and languages, creating communities of fans who might otherwise have had very little in common.

The Art of Manga is an exhibition definitely worth checking out.

At its core this beautiful retrospective helps us all to discover just how much creativity, craftsmanship, and humanity can live inside a single illustrated page as a reflection of our multi-paned lives.

 Sugary 🍬

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Weekly events at Fabrik HERE

Thank you for taking the time to read to the end!

I hope you found something inspiring and meaningful in my content and until next time, explore the possibilities of NYC.

-Sugary

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