New York Magazine September 2-15, 2019

1 In “Our Lesser Islands” (August 19–September 1), photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao and writer Robert Sullivan explored the overlooked islands of New York Harbor. Many readers were intrigued to learn more about our urban archipelago, with Whitney Hurst tweeting, “I had a view of U Thant Island [which was featured on the cover] for years and never knew the whole story behind it.” Gregg D. Merksamer called the feature “a truly fascinating window into city places most 21st-century Gothamites never see or even think about unless they’re seafarers.” Others added their own New York–island knowledge: @antisocialite wrote, “Hart Island was also part of Season 2 of @poseonfx. Many who passed during the AIDS epidemic were buried there when their bio families wouldn’t claim them and their chosen families couldn’t. Another…

SO HERE WE ARE, a generation munching on the last greens of its salad days, saddled with dull, decade-old complaints about our coddledness, our entitlement, our selfies, our political correctness—most blah-blah-blah of all, by the boring cliché of our avocado toast. In a more self-serving version of this narrative, we are the generation that disrupted salad days and made them Sweetgreen days. The generation of AOC and Rihanna and DeRay Mckesson and Glossier! Of hope and protest and changing norms! No. The world’s five most powerful millennials now, and maybe for the rest of our lives, are Jared Kushner (b. 1981), Kim Jong-un (b. 1984), Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984), Stephen Miller (b. 1985), and Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985). The globe is their avocado—to be splayed and robbed of its…

2006 Mayor Bloomberg delivers his State of the City address at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island. It’s a sign of waterfront development to come. 2008 Meir Laufer, a New York real-estate developer, reads about the 443-foot London Eye. He travels to England and meets the architect of the project. “I knew that one day New York City would have such a wheel,” Laufer later says. “I was utterly convinced that this was going to happen.” 2010 Laufer and his partner Eric Kaufman enlist Rich “Big Rich” Marin, the former CEO of real-estate holding company Africa Israel USA and an investment banker at Bear Stearns, to join as CEO. Marin would later say he didn’t think he’d ever ridden the Staten Island Ferry before taking on the project.…

THE CEO AND FOUNDER of the specialty bookseller Juniper Books is surrounded by faux- academic felt pennants that read BOOK NERD, BE HUMBLE, and DO HARD THINGS when I meet him at New York Now, the home-and-gift trade show held at the Javits Center. It’s no mistake that the coffee-table tome he recently co-authored with Elizabeth Lane—which opens with the Joan Didion quote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”—is titled For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library and not, say, For the Love of Reading. Thatcher Wine has made a small fortune marketing books as objects that can be collected and displayed in order to tell a story about you, as long as you can afford a $450 leather-bound edition of “The Chronicles of…

AVEDON ADVERTISING will be published by Abrams on October 8. WE ALL KNOW THE Richard Avedon style of portraiture: pure-white backdrop, classical pose, a Kissinger or Monroe (or even a man covered with bees) before the lens. But he also shot thousands of advertisements, many in color, most very different from his editorial work. His first was for a department-store line, Salymil Junior by Milgrim, in 1944, and his last was for Harry Winston in 2004. In the American century—so named by Time and Life, where some of these ads appeared—Avedon was one of the principal figures who showed us how he and his clients thought it ought to look. According to the first survey of his ads, Ave-don Advertising (by Rebecca Arnold, James Martin, and Avedon’s daughter-in-law Laura Avedon),…

TO REMIND MYSELF WHY New York has so much trouble growing into the modern city it should be, I find it helpful to follow my dog down the block. If he urinates on the trash bags that get strewn on the curb as per our primitive waste-collection system, he’s committing an outrage against the Department of Sanitation. If he waits for a hydrant, that’s the Fire Department’s turf. Sometimes he targets a bus stop, in which case he’s hitting a jurisdictional twofer: the Department of Transportation and the New York City Transit Authority, a division of the MTA. An orange traffic cone is another favorite, and that might be taken as a gesture of affection for the Department of Design and Construction or possibly the NYPD. He might also cross…