Before I came to New York, I only had a few pictures of the city in my mind. And you know 'That Girl?' Marlo Thomas jumping with her hat? I always loved that, and I wondered what that double street she crosses is. And it's Park Avenue! And that's wha...
Generally speaking, rural drivers are a much better behaved species than city drivers. I'm not sure whether they're intrinsically this way, or there are just fewer opportunities for them to do behave badly. You can't go around running red lights if t...
I started collecting baseball cards and basketball cards when I was younger. I have a CD collection that turned into a DVD collection, and I have a Jordan shoe collection. And I don't drink, but I have a wine collection. I just started a sweatshirt c...
I like to use the analogy of going to the gym. If you go to the gym and your goal is, 'I want to look just like David Beckham,' then that drives you to do certain things. You may never look like Beckham, but it is a goal. Cities need the same thing. ...
Sociologists in the 1960s, reaching for an explanation of why cities were burning, often spoke of the problem of 'rising expectations.' It wasn't that the times were especially miserable for blacks, or even that the neighborhoods that rioted were the...
I am a marathon runner. I ran the New York City marathon and almost died. I tried to run, like, a two-minute mile early on in the race. I was crazy enough to think I could win. After seven miles I thought I would die, but I slowed down my pace and ke...
I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, alwa...
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would af...
Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities ...
I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back ...
My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression ...
Sitting on the airplane seat today, I was thinking - I have been in different cities every week. Most of the time, it's because of golf tournaments. But occasionally, I also attend various events. All of a sudden, I feel like I am a business woman. A...
For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority action...
My dad has always been very proud of me but I think I have exceeded his expectations. When I told him I wanted to be an actor and moved to New York City, I think he assumed I would be playing the guitar on the subway and collecting spare change in my...
The very first role I ever played was as a 17-year old South African girl who dreamed of being a star and left home to meet her mother in the big city so that she could pursue that dream. I left South Africa and met my mother in Vancouver and not lon...
In certain parts of the world - where I'm at right now in New York, you're going to pay a whole lot more. In Los Angeles, your average starter home is a million dollars. So I need more money in Los Angeles to live like a normal person. If I live in a...
I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I'll ...
I was taken out of school by my dad when I was 11 and lived in Mexico City, then later in Paris. I went with him to excavate in Bolivia and Peru. I never finished high school. I was a straight F student anyway. My father admitted to me later that he'...
Music was in the air when I was growing up. My siblings Katy, Dave and Phil were musical; my dad worked in inner-city New York where a musical revolution was taking place - folk music, rock n' roll, gospel music. My sister taught me to sing. My broth...
I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light ...
You know, in 1975 I couldn't get a job in New York City because I was American. The kitchens were predominantly run by French, Swiss, German, and basically I got laughed at. I had education, I had experience, but got laughed at because I was American...
