Chris Blattman

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Who is a New Yorker?

The dreamers simply outbid us for our New York, and in the process, they created a city we no longer loved quite so much. This is apt to make such musings hard reading for us.

…I do not mean to insult you, Non-Native New Yorker. I am sure you are a very fine and authentic person, doing many authentic things in that fourth-floor walk-up you struggled so many years to achieve. But I have to be honest: To us, most of you will never be New Yorkers. You just don’t have it in you.

Real New Yorker status can be acquired. Both my parents had it, though it probably took them decades. I know others, scattered here and there. But it cannot be acquired by reading Joan Didion and investing all of your adolescent angst in a few square miles of concrete. It cannot be acquired by going to awesome, funky bars that are totally different from the ones at home and meeting a heroin addict bartender/freelance sex worker who wears cowboy hats and Doc Martens and quotes Allen Ginsburg while the two of you smoke cigarettes underneath the High Line. It is not displayed by your encyclopedic knowledge of the best places to buy exotic foodstuffs.

That is Meg McArdle ruminating on her past life as a New Yorker. Superb essay.

Why We Fight - Book Cover
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