“O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree, how lovely is thy pothole?” A McComb, Miss., man decided to add a bit of holiday cheer to a pothole in the middle of a city street by erecting a wiry tree on top of the traffic cone marking the damaged pavement. After other residents added decorations and presents to John Drummond’s tree, the Rev. Leon Hitchens of Webb Chapel Church wrote a song about it. “If a man can take a pothole and bring the whole world together, the question is what are you doing to spread the Christmas joy?,” asks the lyrics to “Pothole Christmas Tree.”

A New York moment: 

On Sunday night I was walking on the eastern side of Midtown near Trump Tower, and noticed police everywhere with checkpoints and dogs. But my mind didn’t put two and two together, and I asked a police officer what was going on. 

“Trump,” he said.

Roughly 1,000 New York restaurants that offer foie gras—the fattened liver of a duck or goose—will likely have to strike the dish from their menus. Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to sign a bill banning the sale of the French delicacy after the New York City Council passed it on Wednesday.

A New York moment: 

For the last century New York City, particularly Manhattan, has been a place that families leave once they have school-age children, a migration mostly due to high rents and a spotty education system. Last week smart New Yorkers—The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz, and property developer Brad Hargreaves—gathered at a Manhattan Institute event to discuss this issue over the clatter of tiny plates of cured meats and marinated olives.

Prickly social critic James Howard Kunstler once said “suburbs are the embodiment of existential evil.” Critics regularly condemn them as wastelands of cookie-cutter construction, social conformity, anomie, and racial segregation—and yet that’s where 55 percent of Americans live.

A New York moment:

On Monday night almost 200 people packed out an upper room of W83 Ministry Center, the Upper West Side building where Redeemer Presbyterian Church meets, to talk about housing. It’s a hot topic in one of the most expensive places to live in the country and where homelessness is at the highest levels since the Great Depression.

Fourth in a series on changing cities

On a clear morning in mid-February, a giant boom and a billowing cloud brought a dramatic turn in one of Colombia’s most infamous storylines. Engineers in the northern city of Medellín triggered 180 detonators and demolished the six-story building that drug-lord Pablo Escobar once called home.