My coworker and I were sitting in a park in SoHo, eating lunch on our break. “Should I be offended that this guy asked me to get him onto the Shitty Media Men list?” she asked.

A woman I do not know holds the door for me as she’s leaving the restroom, a measure of politeness I was not expecting. I put my phone away and notice the slogan typeset across the front of her T-shirt: MEN HAVE MADE A LOT OF BAD ART.

The only thing more alien than our relationship with one another is the one we have with nature.

“We’re programmed to think that New York exists in some lofty, realizing-our-dreams sort of place,” he told me. “But really it’s right there at street level.”