ABOUT LAST NIGHT

Publisher’s Note

Last night we tried our luck at four separate restaurants without a reservation. Each time we were turned away, having just missed an open table or the last two seats at the bar. This was temporarily infuriating, but not surprising. New York offers lots of good things, and sometimes we're asked to wait for them: a meal at a hot restaurant, a romantic relationship that works, a reasonable living arrangement. In the meantime, there's usually some consolation – for our part, we ended up at an older place with a menu accurately described by someone on the internet as "pretty straightforward." It wasn't even close to perfect, but at the end of the night we were well-fed and easily drifted off into the dehydrated, drunken sleep of young people the world over.

You might encounter something similar here. Newest York isn't after anything groundbreaking. Who hasn't harbored – for a moment or two – the secret hope to start something basically like this: a general interest, locally-focused publication that aims only for its readership to end up feeling relatively charged and nourished? The big idea, if there is one here, is to bet the house on what a city might reveal if explored more regularly, more carefully, and with a little more structure.

There's an obnoxious Updike line about people who don't live in New York being, "in some sense, kidding." But it might be worth asking whether that's true of people here, too. It's easy to exaggerate boredom or bitterness for laughs, but it's not as funny if you forget that you're just messing around. 

Newest York is here, hopefully, to help you remember. 

Thanks for stopping by!