A Year of List-Making in New York City
Reflections on one year of making lists of NYC events
In February 2023, I asked myself the question, what would I do if I had no responsibilities for a full month in New York City, along with unlimited time and money? So for fun, I posted a list online with one event per day. The list comprised events that I’d like to go to. Concerts, dance performances, art exhibitions, endless musical theater.
Creating the Blankman List
The list required a lot of labor but gained some traction. So in August, I called it the “Blankman List” and started a Substack. Before joining, I had never actually used Substack; it just seemed the best solution to the problem. Send a newsletter, accept payment. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t think many of the details through, like how to account for Substack’s feature of saving emails as webpages or how to think about free subscribers.
I bring this all up because while I enjoy writing about New York City, I am more than my city. I was born in Baltimore and grew up in the nearby suburb of Columbia, Maryland; my closest non-American ancestors came from Eastern Europe; I have family in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, DC, Florida, Washington, Colorado, and California; throughout my life I’ve developed obsessions with the Galápagos Islands, Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela, along with the languages of Japanese, Russian, and especially French; and I made questionable financial decisions in my teens and twenties just to make sure I could keep taking trips to Paris. I care about many parts of this country and this world!!!
On New York City
I have a lot of praises to sing about this city. I love how easy it is to find representation from around the world within the arts, food, and events happening here. But NYC is not without its faults. By living here, I see many kinds of people and hear many languages—my favorite part of this city—but 8.5 million residents is a lot, and I see people hurting practically every time I get on the subway.
There is no question that this city can be cramped, smelly, and expensive, although sometimes I find joy in the anonymity of dense crowds. Like I am part of something bigger. Living in NYC during the pandemic cracked these flaws wide open. For months I was without museums or libraries or theaters or concert halls, confined to an overpriced shoebox and advised to stay inside.
I hear criticism especially about crime and safety in this city. While empirically tracking crime is nuanced and difficult,1 it is worth being clear that NYC is overall quite safe.2 But just because crime rates are down, that doesn’t mean that crime doesn’t happen. If you’re the one being attacked, you don’t give a crap what the odds were of it happening. I personally feel unsafe at times, a feeling shared by many people here,3 and also a feeling by no means restricted to NYC.
Making a List, Checking It Twice
Making the list every month has caused me to look at the city differently. For example, an early piece of feedback was to look for food events. I had never before seriously investigated the range of food experiences available in this city. I’m embarrassed to admit how poor of a cook I’ve been for most of my adult life and always dismissed being a “foodie” as simply going to (and paying for) Michelin starred restaurants. But I have since learned that passion for food does not require deep pockets or haughty diners and have researched food tours, garden workshops, cooking classes, happy hours, cookbook talks, restaurant-held events, and so on. As a result of reading and thinking about food in a way I’d never before, I notice changes in myself. I’m more mindful in what I cook and eat.
And that’s just the food! In transitioning to a paid newsletter, I’ve found myself digging into all sorts of different event categories—gaming, shopping, social meet-ups, dating mixers, masterclasses, workshops, the list goes on. I’ve called to confirm locations, researched credentials to vet quality, and performed all sorts of tasks in the pursuit of finding high-quality events and representing them accurately. Once I texted my friend P.: “Hey, I don’t know this genre of music. Is this guy like . . . any good?”
My monthly list still has a focus on the arts, though I try to cover as much as possible with relatively few events. I often face absurdly specific tasks like, “What I’m really missing right now is a classical music concert on a Tuesday in Queens, ideally for under $20 and with Renaissance-era works.” The list still takes me hours to make, and so to those who subscribe, even for a month, thank you. Without your support, I wouldn’t be able to justify the labor. Plus, I continue to find joy in it. I suppose I’m a specific kind of millennial, the kind that tinkered with PC parts and had an ICQ account. Assembling the bibliography for my NYC skateboarding post was a labor of pure love. I don’t mind the online research and feel proud to put the skill to good use.
This paid newsletter teaches me more than where to find classical music on a Tuesday. For many people—i.e., tourists—this newsletter only has utility for one month. While that’s, uh, not optimal relative to annual recurring revenue, I am flattered to help welcome a tourist to this city. It also means that every month I gain new free subscribers, and by now I’ve had some time to think about that audience. My current goal is for every month to have at minimum three posts:
The monthly Blankman List, which requires a paid subscription;
A free post connected to the Blankman List, for example free highlights; and
A free post that can be about anything but is centered around NYC (like this one).
On Turning 40
In 2024, I will turn 40. (If only we lived in a base-13 world.) I try to shake some of the inevitable questions, but I can’t completely: What have I done? Is that it? I find myself looking backward and how I felt so out of place when I was young. So have many people—of course—and I think we all seek our own ways of reacting and compensating. I reacted by trying to learn voraciously. I studied piano and guitar. I created basic computer programs. I read, read, read. I was a wandering soul in search of an identity, and I found that identity in libraries and lists and archives and arrays and formulas. This reaction has shaped the last several decades of what I read, what I learn about, what I experience, what I care about.
This Blankman List project is in some ways an expression of that identity, and I am thankful to have such an outlet. I debated whether or not to even publish this post, but thought, to hell with it, I’m almost 40. So to all of my subscribers, those who pay, those who paid for just one month, and those who have no intention of ever paying for an email newsletter, I hope this newsletter helps you—even just a little—to express your identity, as well.
I urge anyone who disagrees to consider more critically how to measure crime. Total recorded crimes? Should there be an attempt to measure unrecorded crimes? Should all crimes be weighted equally? Should the motive (or lack thereof) be taken into account? In 2019, for example, Wang et al. proposed a geographically weighted negative binomial regression model to account for the fact that crime incidents in different neighborhoods may be associated with different socioeconomic factors.
There is substantial evidence that crime in New York City has overall been declining since the 1990s, a phenomenon examined, for example, in Understanding New York’s Crime Drop (Rosenfeld, Terry, & Chauhan, 2020).
The New York Times covered this phenomenon in great detail last August.
Have you thought of adding conventions? Things like New York Comic Con? I know a lot of people who do things like NYCC and it would be interesting to read about what to expect at these conventions.