Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/16-10/29/17 i New York Magazine

IN THE LATE 1940S, as a Cooper Union student, Alex Katz found that he couldn’t finish his drawings before class ended. “I was desperate to learn to draw more quickly,” he recalls. “I started drawing on the subways, at bars, at jazz concerts, coming home late from dates.” Commuting from his parents’ house in Queens for three years, he filled a whole closet with sketch pads. Then he stopped (“I didn’t want to become a sketch artist”). By the 1980s, he was one of the best-known painters in the world. His subway drawings emerged only this spring, in a New York show at Timothy Taylor Gallery that is now on view in London. For this issue, we asked Katz, who is 90, to head underground once more. On the afternoon…

THIS IS IN answer to your request to readers who have eaten Japanese cold noodles … you called them “Zaru,” but my dentist and hairdresser, both of whom are Japanese, call them “Udon” and in Japan I had them as “Soba.” The choice of name is yours. By any name they were amazingly delicious. Mimi Sheraton June 17, 1968 AS SOMEONE BOTH involved and named by Mr. Wolfe as being involved, I would like to register disgust and disquiet at your issue devoted to Leonard Bernstein and Radical Chic, whatever that is. (Let me say right away that I’m not a relative of Mr. Bernstein.) It seems impossible that a responsible magazine would distort reality and attack a fundraising event in support of radical rights without even a sideswipe at…

I MOVED TO New York City to take a really splendid job as an editor in a well-respected publishing house. The work was both familiar and challenging. Familiar because I had been a university professor for six years and accustomed to evaluating essays, term papers, fiction, etc. Challenging because I had never worked in a place where the value of writing was measured in sales. Except for small irritants, living in a midtown apartment was comfortable. All I had to do was get there—which soon became a major irritant. There were no black cabdrivers then in that part of New York, and no other taxi drivers would stop for me. They traded their quick glances at me for profiles of disdain. One day after work, Eileen, a young white woman,…

Kevin Isola, 47 “I said the line ‘Agent Willis, look at this funny little finger.’ Kind of a miracle that I got that out with a straight face. In the morning, I took a ‘butter bath,’ which is what it sounds like. Drop in three sticks of butter, a bit of heavy cream, some raisins, lather up; you’re good to go. Makes the skin look great and relaxes the muscles.” Kohl Sudduth, 43 “On my train ride, I tried to immerse myself in the world of a deeply traumatized man. How would he experience the cacophony of the subway?” Zack Robidas, 34 “I kept thinking about my pit stains. It was unusually warm for October, and the train was a nightmare. I was rushing around and sweating profusely. I didn’t…

What Luca, 4, of Manhattan, said: “Blue.” What Enoc Perez made: Chrysler Building, 2017, work on paper. What Lucia, 2, of Brooklyn said: “Parque-palo-lechuza.” (“It means ‘park stick owl’—because she loves to go to the park with her special stick and look for owls—although I am not sure she has ever seen one.”) What Luis Gispert made: Parque-palolechuza, 2017, chromogenic print What Eli, 5, of Queens, said: “Nothing Penis Butt Bam Music Loud Buildings Painting Crowded Fun Good People Cars Train Pink Chicken Korma Home Subway Train Traffic Boom Boom Bam Piss Pot Tall Buildings Loud Noise Queens Dirty People Crowded.” What Kate Gilman made: Eli—New York, 2017, vinyl shower curtain, spray paint…

1. It’s after the school day, and she pauses by the homeless man, on Eighth and 44th, who holds a sign asking something like: “Am I invisible?” She stares at him. She has nothing to give him but her eyes. 2. He is the Mandé Uber driver from Côte d’Ivoire whose perfect English is accented with a French r and whose linguistic musicality reminds me, somewhat, of my own West African home. I ask him how many languages he knows. He lists: Jula/Dyula, French, English, and pidgin English. I got the sense that his list was not long enough. 3. She wears an Iron Maiden tank top and multicolored Lycra workout pants. One can almost make out the individual bundles of muscle that link her together. Her smile is as…

I HEARD SEAN before I ever saw him. Screeching electronic beats would fly through the air near midnight into my previously quiet $800-a-month studio in the back of an unattractive two-story building on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx. When it started, I had lived there only a month, in exile from a Brooklyn that seemed to hold only dead-end living situations and closer to my job as a visiting professor at a university I owed tens of thousands of dollars to. The sound was soon followed by the smell, the saccharine stink of menthol cigarettes creeping into my flat from our shared hallway, where my neighbor stood to smoke. Sean often left his door open at night, and so I followed the rhythm of his day, the sounds of movies…

SOCIAL WORKER Gemma Barriteau, Brooklyn IN THE ’80S, I worked in adoption and foster care as a caseworker. I had a mother who was 24, 25 years old. The man she was with was probably in his 30s. And he was the father of her nine children. Three of them were with his mother, and the rest were in different homes. At the time the mother gave birth to the ninth child, I went to see her at the hospital, and I ran into him. His clothes were dirty and kind of hanging on him. You could see that, you know, life was hard. Drugs were definitely a major factor. I asked him to step outside with me so I could speak to him in private. And I asked…

NEAR WHERE I used to live in Stuyvesant Town, there was this great bodega where an older Mexican lady and her husband would hand-make world-class burritos. Their chorizo burritos were the best but for some reason a limited commodity, so I struck up a texting relationship with their son, Ruben, who would tell me if they had chorizo. This went on for three years. Sometimes he would text me to say they had chorizo, but other times he would give me weather updates or let me know they were going to be on Bizarre Foods. Once, I accidentally texted him instead of my husband and offered to do his laundry, and he texted back, “Too late homie, it’s being washed as we text.” Then, one day, all of a sudden,…

1. THE FIRST MAN I sleep with is an Englishman who crossed the Atlantic to join me at the Buchanan on 48th Street. We go to Serendipity to have frozen hot chocolate. Every morning he brings me paper-cup coffee in bed from the grocery store. 2. He lives in the Hotel des Artistes, but he’s a businessman. The front page of the New York Post thrown casually on a chair bears a photo of him dancing with a Ford heiress. The next week, and the week after, and the week after, that copy of the New York Post is still there. I take a closer look; it’s a fake, printed for a party. 3. I’m in love at last. He’s French, and he really prefers black girls. When he takes…

BEVERLY LECHNER-KLEIN : Hello? SARAH PAULSON: Hi! How are you? I wonder if our memories of meeting for the first time are the same. There was this program you ran: Students were supposed to meet with their mentor once a week. You’d have dinner, do something cultural. I always wonder why the head of the drama department recommended me. At that time, I weirdly think it was Mr. Cappelletti. BL-K: It was not Mr. Cappelletti. SP: It wasn’t? BL-K: No, it was Ms. Ferbel. Mr. Cappelletti … I shouldn’t say this out loud, but he wouldn’t have had the sensibility. SP: I never knew. I didn’t understand what they would have seen in me at the time or what they thought I needed. But anyway, I went up to your…

YOU’RE GOING to have to learn about Wall Street,” a wise friend warned when I first started working at New York Magazine in late 2007, when the industry was high out of its mind on mortgage-backed securities. New in town, with nary a clue where to begin, my first step was, naturally, to watch the movie Wall Street. (To be fair, I also tried reading The Intelligent Investor but fell asleep, repeatedly.) A few months later, after the market collapsed, the world of Oliver Stone’s movie—with its giant cell phones and trading in actual, tangible products—seemed remarkably quaint. Which is probably why Stone felt compelled to make his ill-advised sequel in 2010. Which he needn’t have—really, he needn’t—because watching the original again after a decade of covering people in the…

“THIS IS PROBABLY the last gasp for gossip columns. I deplore what it’s become. It’s much too vile and vulgar. Soon, they’ll put a camera in the bottom of a toilet and shoot up. When I started writing a column 38 years ago, gossip columns weren’t so nasty. I would never out anyone. I would never tell about someone who is married and is dating someone else. Being a gossip columnist used to be one of the most glamorous things in the world. My husband, Joey Adams, had a very popular column in the New York Post, a humor column, like Bennett Cerf ’s. He was the “adopted son” of Fiorello La Guardia, so some of the best judges that money could buy were made in my living room. Joey…

IN MY HIGH SCHOOL in Norman, Oklahoma, the senior English students were traditionally secret Santas for the junior English students. I was assigned a beautifully pale young man who dyed his long hair black, wore John Lennon glasses, and often carried his violin. I anonymously gifted him a chocolate bar and, I think, a Number Slide puzzle. The idea was that a yearlong correspondence would form. A few days later, I received a note, marked up in thick black marker, which started off something like “To Der Führer: I received your capitalist gift …” Years later, someone was handing out flyers for the Socialist Worker paper on the Columbia University campus, and when I looked up at the distributor, there he was, my old pen pal. I experienced a deep…

“This one likes bacon-egg-and-cheeses and is a student at the ballet theater nearby. Of course, every couple of years, the students change.” “She doesn’t come in every day—maybe twice, three times a week. Sometimes people look at her. She’s something different. But she’s very nice.” “He gets two sandwiches every single day. Very educated. He used to wear suits and ties, and now he dresses like this, very casual.” “He’s a taxi driver and gets a bagel with scallion cream cheese and a coffee in the morning. He stops usually three, four times a night for coffees and to use the bathroom.” “He gets a whole red chile pepper that he eats like a piece of chocolate. Then he buys one pack of peanuts.” “This woman, every day, iced coffee.…

NEW YORK’S FIRST ISSUE WAS DATED APRIL 8, 1968. While it was still on newsstands, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed. Two weeks after that, Columbia University students rioted and occupied five campus buildings. In the decades since, New York—the city and the magazine—has lived multiple lives. But here is what the magazine’s founding editor, Clay Felker, said 50 years ago in his mission statement for the launch: “We want to attack what is bad in this city and preserve and encourage what is new and good. We want to be its voice, to capture what this city is about better than anyone else has.” The issue in your hands is the first of two, bracketing our anniversary year. (The next will appear in October 2018.) It returns…

The city is many cities, that’s the beautiful thing. Everyone builds their own New York, mostly out of the people who surround them. But everyone shares the sidewalks, too. And we trade apartments, sometimes finding someone else’s peroxided hair between the floorboards. We fight over cabs (and Citi Bikes) and close elevator doors on one another. Every busy intersection is a kind of rat-king tangle: chance encounters, drag-out fights, families making their way, transactions and missed connections and hustlers of one kind or another pulling scams of one kind or another on rubes of one kind or another. Which means—look around—that we are always, constantly, starring in one another’s city. Guest-starring, at least. The woman behind the deli counter; the man who bumped into you outside, somehow ruining your day.…

I MOVED INTO my apartment 40 years ago. I had this neighbor, Mary, and she was about to go. I don’t think I got her apartment. I think she was across the hall. I started on the fifth floor and moved down pretty quick to the third but I think she had been up there on the fifth, one day she invited me in. The building faced a forest of ailanthus trees. We called them sumac in Massachusetts and regarded them as junk, what grew behind the dry cleaner’s, etc. But that was New York as it turned out and we had so many of them back there it looked like a jungle. It was pretty wild but I’m mentioning it because the jungle was bright green, filling the windows…

“IN 1994, when I decided to run for office, the gut check was really my dad, who knew nothing about politics. He was the shtetl kid who went to CCNY, did well, understood success was a great thing, but “use it for something.” So he was thrilled. After I lost in ’94, he said, “You’re not stopping now. Of course, that’s up to you—you can go back to law, you can come to the family business. But you’ll be bored for the next 30 years. Politics is exciting, dynamic, challenging. Keep at it.” Oh, sure, I knew I was making some significant enemies as attorney general. Hank Greenberg is still suing me! But you know what? We were right. I wouldn’t change a single thing we said or did about…

MY EXPERIENCE OF ENVY was the most banal type you can think of, among the most ridiculous and to me initially really confusing. I envied the youth and beauty of a young girl! This is not normal for me. I sometimes envy youth and beauty in a general way, but I don’t often compare myself to specific people, especially not to girls who at this point in my life are in a completely different category. She was someone I met at a belly-dancing school delightfully called Bellyqueen, which is the kind of intensely multicultural place that is unique to New York City. Some students will plainly go pro, and some already are. Some are performance-addicted amateurs, some are, like me, more casual. Everybody who stays with it does so because…

WHERE DO OUR thoughts go when we are growing up and suppose that we have no further use for them?” Diana Trilling asked at the end of an essay about her experiences at summer camp in the late 1910s and ’20s. “The Girls of Camp Lenore” ran in The New Yorker in 1996, two months before her death. I would be among the mourners at her funeral, 20 years now separating me from the time I worked for her as a secretary, really a girl Friday. I find that I say that line to myself a lot, half in wonder at the mysteries of memory and half in love with the sound of the words—especially whenever my mind reels back to the summer of 1977, when, in addition to Diana,…

WHEN I WAS IN seventh grade, we moved to Brooklyn and got a dog, two signs of domestication my father had sworn he’d never embrace. There we were, on our Sesame Street–perfect block of carriage houses, with a terrier who rode in the back of a gray Volvo. “This is fucking humiliating,” my father muttered as he loaded us in for a drive to brunch. But I took to our new neighborhood as if I’d been waiting my whole life for the chipper sitcom that is Brooklyn Heights. “Good morning, Mr. Construction Worker Leering at My Non-Breasts! Pleasure to see you, Old Lady With Substantial Day-Drinking Problem!” I tacked my business cards up in “Pet’s Emporium.” EXPERIENCED PET GROOMER, they said, though experienced simply meant I’d purchased a pair of…

BENJAMIN ROBERTS: I had just left the gym; I had a little pump going. In the caption on the photo posted on Hot Dudes Reading, the account owners guessed that I was a CrossFitter, so they nailed that one. The photo was 100 percent candid, though I did have this weird sense that I was being watched. That day, I was reading Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, which is a classic Chinese novel. I had only started it a couple of days before, so that’s why it looks like I’m about 20 pages into it. My girlfriend at the time was the one to break the news that I was officially a Hot Dude. She said that a couple people from work told her about it. Afterward,…

I TALKED TO my mother before Hurricane Irma, and she was like, “Oh, you know us islanders—we’ll be fine.” Then before Hurricane Maria, she was like, “I’m scared. This is gonna be bad.” That was the last time I talked to her. I had a plane ticket for a while, but I couldn’t get ahold of her to tell her. She has two sisters, but they’re an hour away. One of my aunts called my cousin, who found my mom on Saturday and told her, “You’re leaving Monday.” She’s 62. She lost everything. She’s coming here permanently. She just put a few things in a backpack and that was it. —Marie Singh, Hartford WE’RE WAITING for my two nieces. They live in the mountains, and nobody wants to deliver water…

THE HOUSE belonged to a film director who was always “in Belize.” His young wife invited her transient friends—and her friends invited their friends—to live with her in the house, which was invisible from the street because the city had built a block around it. I was a friend of a friend. I rarely saw our roommates. They did coke and drank red wine while I slept. They recovered behind one of the many closed doors while I completed job applications atop their morning-after stick. For about 48 hours, a man shared the day with me. He was moving to Hungary to start the Paris Review of Budapest. He didn’t want to be a model or an actor or an actor-model. (“Fabulous nobodies” is what a coworker at my eventual…

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“PAUL FREDERICK, former security director, New York Hilton: People just do weird stuff in hotels. The traveling businessman you see going to work in the morning isn’t the same guy at three in the morning. We had one regular guest from a big-four accounting firm who’d be in his room yelling “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!” all night long. I once found a woman at the bar masturbating under a hotel blanket. And people leave guns in their hotel rooms all the time. You’re not supposed to have guns in New York, so people just stash them in the nightstand and forget. I had a situation where Bill Clinton was supposed to give a speech in our ballroom, and that morning a maid found a rifle in the closet. The Secret Service interviewed…

“HOW THINGS ARE HUNG is so important. Once, at Brown University, we were up in a small faculty room and I was so taken by the fact that these pictures—they were by nobody of note—were set up where they weren’t straight against the wall. And when I got up to straighten them, nobody could believe I was so affected by it. Now, at MoMA, I can tell somebody, “It’s a little askew.” But in somebody’s house, I really am tempted to do it, too. I don’t like things to not be as they should be. I think I started being like that because, when I was little, my father used to pick up rubbish off the street. For the first half a year I was living in New York, I…

IN MY LAST YEAR of college and for some months after I graduated, I lived in an apartment on West 107th Street, just east of Broadway. I had various roommates in different combinations, and a parakeet. I first went out to work from that apartment. My starting job was with a temp agency, which I quite enjoyed because of its variety—a different place every week or two—and because the work was generally easy, if tedious, like putting files in alphabetical order in a windowless basement room. After a while, I was hired at W.W. Norton & Co. as an editorial assistant. I played chess with my boss at lunchtime, and typed letters from a Dictaphone. It was on the doorsill of that apartment that I had an encounter with a…

ELIZABETH BRANCH: I work midnights as a toll collector at the Holland Tunnel. I’ve been working for the Port Authority for 52 years. When I started, they didn’t have a maternity leave. Women would lose their jobs if they had children. So the other collectors and I got together and fought to have maternity leave. This was the early 1970s. All the children that were born then are adults now. I’ve seen some celebrities. I saw President Nixon come through a few times. I also saw Patti LaBelle! We had a stoppage in the tunnel that night. Her driver asked, “Is there any way we can get through?” and told me he was carrying Patti LaBelle. I said, “I don’t believe it!” but she let the back window down and…

IN THE MIDTOWN apartment building where I live, there are five other apartments within farting distance of mine. I don’t know any of the people who live in any of them. We just don’t interact. If I had to give a eulogy for my nearest neighbor, it would go something like, “My fondest memory of the guy from 6D is that he owned a welcome mat.” So it took me a while to notice when the apartment next door began to be used exclusively as an illicit Airbnb. Every few days, a new European or Asian or Floridian family would announce their arrival with rolling suitcases and clattering keys. Lots of clattering. None of them could ever seem to figure out how to unlock the door. Some stood in the…

Pat Kiernan served on jury duty with AdiaRevell. morning-news anchor real-estate agent, former basketball coach PAT KIERNAN: You’re stuck together in a room for two weeks, so you become … familiar. ADIA REVELL: I knew that he looked like someone. Then, one of the other jurors was like, “Wait, that’s the guy that’s, like, on TV or something.” PK: Adia and I were counterparts in curiosity. The other jurors may have thought we asked too many questions. AR: Some people were like, “I want to get home.” PK: When we finished, we all went out drinking at Rocco’s Tacos on Adams Street. AR: Pat ended up paying. My daughter’s father picked me up, and I’m pretty sure that was the night she was conceived—I have a picture of Pat and…

There’s a tired stereotype of the spoiled millennial, but RBC’s recent survey of high-net-worth millennials showed an engaged generation that’s eager to learn. ▪ They’re early starters: On average, these millennials started learning about wealth at age 20—12 years earlier than baby boomers. ▪ They’re open to parental feedback: 51 percent say they receive guidance from their family along with their inheritance. ▪ They’re curious about giving: 41 percent plan to give money while they’re alive. ▪ They’re savvy self-educators: 69 percent say they regularly do their own research to learn about wealth and money—more than any other age group. ▪ They’re surprisingly prepared: 38 percent already have a full wealth transfer plan , compared with only 26 percent of overall respondents. ► Learn more at mspmag.com/rbc…

1 Make sure you have a will. (Only 54 percent of high-net-worth RBC respondents surveyed said they have one.) Don’t stop there—draft a health care directive and power of attorney while you’re at it. 2 Update, update, update! Make sure you’re regularly updating your estate plan (e.g., beneficiary designations) every three to five years or after a major life event. 3 Properly title your assets (such as home and bank account). “Those are the things that really will cause some issues after someone passes away,” says O’Leary. “It’s a big family hassle and can cost a lot of money to straighten out.” ► Learn more at mspmag.com/rbc…

An engaged reader In late 1972, RitaSue Siegel showed up at the door of New York’s offices, then located on the top floor of 207 East 32nd Street. She asked to see Milton Glaser, the magazine’s co-founder, “The Underground Gourmet” food critic, and design director. Milton Glaser: We were in this walk-up, this one sprawling, undifferentiated space, and this woman walked in, huffing and puffing, having done the four flights. And she says, “Is Glaser here?” Someone pointed her in my direction. And she said, “I have a Nixon eggplant.” RitaSue Siegel: I don’t remember where I found it—it says Sloan’s Supermarket on the page, so I guess it was at Sloan’s. I had always admired Milton, and I thought this would be perfect and he’d appreciate it. Glaser:…

For cocaine: M. is from Ramallah. Palestinian-Christian. We speak Hebrew together. Sometimes we text in Hebrew. Sometimes he forgets and slips into Arabic, which I don’t understand. Each time he comes by, he drives a different car. Toyotas. Nissans. A Ford Fusion. All of them are new and black with Uber decals on the windshields. Another change brought about by ride-hailing apps is that, whereas M. used to have me sit up front, as if I were his friend, now he has me sit in back, as if I were his paying passenger. I am. He gives me my bags, takes my money, and drops me off around the block. He has a wife and two kids and is saving up to study “how to work with the environment.” For…

“CO-OWNER ORIENTE MANIA: Last Sunday, we had Martin Lipton, the Tisch family, the Leon Black family, the Kravitz family, the Steinberg family, the Gristedes, the ex-wife of the former president of France, the Blumenthal family, Larry Leeds, Richard Cohen, Richard Lefkowitz, Bob Jeffrey, the Murdochs, the Lauders. Everyone on Sunday all went to give condolences to the Newhouse family, because they come every Sunday to the same table. Table No. 11, by the window. Woody Allen wasn’t there because he was out of town, but he typically comes for dinner every Sunday. The wife comes for lunch. Joan Didion knows we are really busy Sunday, so she comes during the week with the friend who takes care of her. They order spaghetti with basil and tomatoes and chicken paillard, half…

“I JUST TURNED 76, and I’ve been a broker for 51 years. When I started, there were only seven or eight firms, and everybody knew each other. Now everyone is part of a “team,” where one person shows the apartments and another negotiates, like an assembly line. I studied the buildings on Fifth Avenue. I could walk a client from the Sherry-Nether-land at 59th Street up to 97th Street and point out building by building: That one has summer work rules; that one, you can’t put in air-conditioning because it will freeze the outside of the building; this building might have an 11-room apartment for sale, but most of the rooms are on an air shaft. I can do the same thing with Park Avenue. The first apartment I sold…

THE DOORS CLOSE and then the floor drops from beneath us and then it’s back under our feet. He looks at me and I look at him and I say, “Oh my God,” and the floor jolts away and back again and he grabs my arm. I look at the control panel and can’t figure which possibility is the right one—firefighter helmet? Oh. That’s not a button, it’s a light or else just some plastic thingamajig. My companion is saying something quickly. I think it’s a prayer. “Should I press this one?” I ask the man. His shoulders raise a little and his head rattles on his neck. He’s telling me he doesn’t know. I press the one that says EMERGENCY CALL and a loud alarm goes off. “Hello! Are…

“WAY BACK, like 1939, my father-in-law, Daniel L. Burrows, had been in the State Assembly. He knew all the people, politically, and he wanted to see that his son-in-law got a break. And it was he who first introduced me to Ray Jones. Ray’s nickname was “the Fox,” and that was appropriate, because he was tough, very smart, and smooth. He was our local district leader, and he became the first black leader of Tammany Hall. The political clubs, that was the method of networking in that day. A lot of lawyers were members, and they’d come once or twice a week and help people with their legal problems for free. Ray would also help people get jobs. One of his favorite sayings was “Nobody does anything for nothing.” So…

FOR SOME TIME, I wasn’t sure if Jimmy Love was his actual name because he talked quickly and mumbled. It turned out that the “Love” was an “I’m a lover not a fighter” personal statement and his surname was something else entirely. As a new immigrant to New York, I wanted to fit in. I knew that the culturally appropriate thing would be to hire a shrink and a trainer, but I couldn’t afford both. So I walked through the doors of an East Village gym and signed up for a trial session. Soon, I was doing push-ups as Jimmy held his cell phone in front of my face, the screen displaying a motivational image of a BMW convertible, chanting ecstatically, “Good money! Good money! Good money!” The car was…

“THE KID MERO: I used to take the bus all the way up Tremont Avenue to West Farms, and my cousin Jochi would have me out on the block, hanging out with the older dudes. Just being there with the guys in front of the building, talking shit, listening to music. A lot of my comedy came from that. I was an 8-, 9-, 10-year-old hanging out with dudes that were like 20, 25. Just having to defend yourself in that atmosphere—these dudes know a lot more than you, they’re funnier than you, but you gotta hold your own. It was the essence of Bronx culture. There’s something very specific about the Bronx. You had Jamaicans, you had Dominicans, you had Puerto Ricans, you had West Africans, East Africans. Just…

“I GREW UP IN THE LES. In the ’80s and ’90s, we had a lot of drug problems and a lot of different gangs, like the gang my family was part of, the Champions. A lot of people died. I was always with my aunt. She was 14 years old when she was taking care of me as a toddler. She was considered a queenpin, and I got to see how she operated. Fast-forward to 1996, my aunt and my father had gone to prison. Giuliani did a massive sweep, took everybody. It worked out, because, you know what, they were either going to die or be degenerates in the street all their lives. So I was by myself, and there was a computer there. My aunt bought it for…

Corinne Pierre-Louis A floral dress from Zara. Before the job, I’d worn a lot of black. But I knew Anna liked color, so I went shopping for girly pinks, pastels, florals. I never went back to wearing black. Luisana Mendoza I wore an off-the-shoulder black top with a bright-green tank top underneath. Plus my mother’s Manolo Blahnik slingbacks, which seemed like a safe bet. I knew I’d made a mistake the minute I walked in. Indré Rockefeller Red-blossom-print Thakoon dress and a pair of very-high-heeled beige YSL shoes. Looking back now, the heels were probably too high to be sensible, but I learned to move very quickly in them. Grace Hunt I wore a gray tweed A-line Rebecca Taylor skirt. I thought it was a nod to Chanel. It really…

WHEN I WAS 25 YEARS OLD and I interviewed for a job as a fact-checker, the boss asked me my SAT scores. Arthur Carter was a sculptor and a pioneer of the leveraged buyout; he was also the owner of the New York Observer, the salmon-colored weekly newspaper that at that point—it was 2000—was best known for its coverage of New York real estate, media, and social gossip. It had been eight years since the test: I had been to college, waited tables and scooped ice cream, worked as the personal assistant to Harvey Keitel and as a secretary at Talk magazine; in none of these contexts had anyone spoken to me about my SAT scores. To be clear: I was not sweet Mae from the country, innocent of the…

“I STARTED MY BUSINESS IN L.A. around 1977. It wasn’t even a gallery; it was more of a poster shop. I started traveling to New York fairly regularly because it was clear that New York was the center of the art world and I would have to spend time there if I wanted to grow my business. But also I fell in love with the city. I was enchanted and stimulated by the energy. I met Leo Castelli because I had done a small show with a photographer named Ralph Gibson who had a studio on West Broadway. He was represented by Castelli, which I didn’t even know when I’d first reached out to him. I just liked his work. I wasn’t really ready to do major business, but I…

LIEUTENANT CHRIS ZIMMERMAN: Patrick was taking out the trash with his foster mother when he went missing in 2010 from the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn. They were in a hallway and she turned around and he was gone. He didn’t have the correct clothing on for the month of January. They were searching buildings, searching parks, using bloodhounds. Thousands and thousands of people were interviewed. We pulled credit-card receipts from gas stations to see who got gas that night. We weren’t looking at these people like criminals; we were just asking, “Hey, listen. Did you see this kid?” There was a kid in Brooklyn who was seen in a McDonald’s. He looked like him, but Patrick had a unique scar on his left eyebrow that this kid did not have.…

“MY FATHER WAS IN the textile business, and so I had no experience in real estate. In 1959, I’d taken an apartment on 78th between First and Second, in Yorkville. I had a duplex, the ground floor, and the garden. I met this guy who was buying 25-foot-wide tenements and cutting them into four pieces, which substantially increased the occupancy. The city had a regulation where if you substantially increased the occupancy of a building, you could get possession of the rent-controlled and rent-regulated apartments. I admired what he was doing, and I said to him, “Real estate, it seems so exciting. I’d like to work in real estate.” And he said, “Nah, nah, you can’t. I don’t have the money to pay you.” I told him I’d work for…

IT MUST HAVE been around mid-January, during one of those long winter breaks. I had run into her in the corridors of Lehman College in the Bronx, and, with nothing to do, we decided to take the downtown Broadway local from 225th Street. She said she had to drop something at home; I did too. She said she wanted to pick up a blouse she’d had altered somewhere on Broadway and 93rd Street. I said this was close to where I lived with my parents. We stopped by her mother’s apartment on Fort Washington and 161st Street; she fed her cat, took some clothing off because it was getting warm inside, then she played some music. We sat on the rug in the living room, facing each other, close but…

“When someone challenges my serenity, I bless them, because Jesus said, ‘Agree with your adversaries quickly.’ And if I can’t deal with them, I do a physical thing, like putting their name in my Bible and saying, ‘God, you take care of that.’ ” —The Reverend Joyce E. Anderson, New Thought Christianity “There’s a ritual called takembeng, which happens when there is a great injustice. A group of older women wear white, and they have a red scarf. Sometimes, if the crime is so despicable that they cannot speak about it, they put a green leaf or a stick on their mouth. They come to your door and publicly shame you until you decide to make forgiveness. They used it here when the president of Cameroon visited in September.” —Mafor…

IN JULY 1984, six months after I’d become the third-string film critic at The Village Voice, Pauline Kael introduced herself in a movie line and said nice things about my work, and within a week I’d gotten calls from concerned colleagues. One said not to get close because she’d eat me alive. Another took a longer view. I should keep my distance, he said, because the association would harm my career: I would be forever known as a “Paulette,” a member of a claque of youngish men who were said to take marching orders from the queen bee. My votes at critics’ societies would be suspect and my style viewed as slavish imitation—though it was probably viewed that way already. (Four years earlier, my voluble college film professor had told…

When music legend Prince died last year, it shocked fans around the world. And as time went on, another shock emerged: The multimillionaire had no will in place. As it turns out, this baby boomer wasn’t unique in his lack of preparation: In a recent RBC Wealth Management* survey of high-net-worth individuals, only 54 percent of respondents said they have a will. And while 26 percent said they have a full wealth transfer plan in place, a surprising 32 percent said they had done nothing to prepare yet. These numbers become increasingly relevant as you consider that we’re on the brink of a historic transfer of wealth: As the wealthiest generation in U.S. history ages, it’s estimated that some $30 trillion will be passed to the next generation in the…

In 1980, 13 members of the Benziger family uprooted from New York to Sonoma, California, to follow a family dream. The now-world-renowned Benziger Family Winery was a small business at the start, with three generations living together and building the winery from the ground up. We talked to two generations of Benzigers about their secret to creating an enduring legacy. There’s an old adage: “Shirtsleeve to shirtsleeve in three generations,” meaning it typically takes three generations for a family to build up and then spend all the family fortune—with a similar trend for family businesses. Why do you think your family business has been so successful? MIKE BENZIGER, 2ND GENERATION: Most small family businesses are so focused on being successful on a day-to-day basis that they never really think about…

HIGHBROW The new subterranean Penn Station makes us miss the grand old one. John Kenneth Galbraith writes a novel: The Triumph. It’s anything but. President Johnson reportedly had taken to wearing makeup even when not on-camera to appear the picture of glowing health. Robert McNamara’s hypercautious book on his seven years as secretary of Defense. Leda Had a Little Swan at the Cort Theatre: mods and their offspring, set in the 1980s. What does the SDS want at Columbia? Why do liberal white people think The Battle of Algiers is an allegory for Vietnam, while some black people seem to take it as a description of what it’s like to live in America these days? The city’s murder rate keeps going up. The GM Building replaces the Savoy-Plaza with an…