I Learned to Love Wine at the Top of the World Trade Center
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The Windows on the World Wine School, the best in the city, was down the corridor from the famous restaurant by that name, at the top of the World Trade Center. The elevator took fifty-eight seconds to reach the 107th floor, and you could always tell who was taking the ride for the first time. Halfway up, everybody's stomach did the same sudden somersault, and the rookies would grasp in panic for support ... and then return the smiles of the vets remembering their own first trip.
The classroom was a ballroom filled with tables topped with columns of empty wineglasses. Everyone who entered wandered first to the long stretch of floor-to-ceiling windows. On a sunny day or moonlit night, the view of lower Manhattan from Windows on the World was like the first time you heard Frank Sinatra singing "New York, New York." It was amusing to look down at helicopters. Just thinking about the acrobat who once walked a three-quarter-inch steel cable between the tops of the Twin Towers made you wonder what wasn't possible. You had to hand it to the architect who envisioned that millions of people would travel millions of miles to dine some 1,300 feet above sea level. For a time, no restaurant in the United States took in more money, and no restaurant on the planet sold more wine.
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I first met Tupac Shakur almost five years ago, when John Singleton invited me to do a behind-the-scenes book for his second movie, Poetic Justice. It was early on in preproduction when Tupac was cast, and we were on a location scout. A production assistant was driving the van; John and Tupac were sitting up front, and I sat behind them. It was the end of the day, and we were all talking about John’s recent Academy Award nominations for Boyz N the Hood. Tupac was so clearly enamored of John, discussing scene after scene—what he thought made the movie so special, why he was so excited to be starring in John’s second film.
We started talking about the music in the film, and instead of talking about the rap songs, Tupac brought up the scene where Furious Styles, played by Laurence Fishburne, is taking custody of young Tre for the first time. He takes his son to the beach, and as they drive home in their old seventies-model car, a song comes on the radio. The song is “O-o-h Child,” and the music provides the dissolve from Tre’s youth to his teenage years in the ’hood. All of a sudden, Tupac started singing the song: “O-o-h child, things are goin’ to get easier. / O-o-h child, things will get brighter. / Someday, we’ll walk in the rays of the beautiful sun. / Someday, when the world is much brighter...”
That day, on the location scout, Tupac asked John why he hadn’t put “O-o-h Child” on the movie soundtrack. John said there had been a problem getting rights and clearances, but two years later Tupac used a sample of the song for his inspirational ode to black women, “Keep Your Head Up.” Hearing the song now always makes me think of Tupac, singing it a cappella.
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"I think you’ve lost weight,” Jake Mueser says, wrapping the tape around my chest.
I haven’t. And he knows that. But this is how you sell a suit.
It’s a balmy Wednesday afternoon in May, on the second floor of his atelier on Christopher Street, which is as close as downtown gets to Savile Row: antique triptych mirror, a patchwork of Persian rugs, floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. He pulls out options: pale gray, cream linen, a heavier taupe he thinks might work into September. Then he holds up the olive linen and says nothing. That is more or less the end of the debate. Today he is measuring me for a summer commission. Double-breasted. A day suit that can stay for dinner.
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Oh, I’m in it. I’m deep into the college-search process with my two high school daughters. College fairs. Arcane admissions data. Mailboxes stuffed with brochures from schools you’ve never heard of. We, as a family, have toured an even ten. They are starting to blend together. Lots of stonework . . . huge bookstores . . . minuscule dorm rooms. At the end of every tour, we look at one another and say, “This feels like it could be the one.” My own personal Groundhog Day.
It was when I started talking to friends who already have kids in college that I realized I was going about this all wrong. Among my generation, a new way to pick colleges has emerged. I call it the Do-Over.
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Will 2026 go down as one of the best years in video games? It’s been a long time since a single calendar year has been so completely stacked as the one we’re having right now. If you tell me there’s nothing new to play, I dare you to say it with a straight face, because you have got to be kidding.
Of course, the industry’s economic woes cannot be overstated. It’s a dark time when even prolific studios downsize and slash budgets and lay off talented developers with invaluable institutional knowledge. It’s hard to actually call 2026 a great year in gaming when it’s also been a year of heartbreak and uncertainty for the future. But the games are still great.
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Name a more opportune time to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of American History than the year of this nation’s hella hoopla’d semiquincentennial. A moment more apt than the July weekend when 45/47 stoked his raging culture war with a decree that signs would soon be placed outside the museum as a corrective to un-MAGA materials inside it.
The Sunday I visited the museum under the halcyon blue sky of an Edward Hopper summer landscape, there weren’t yet signs posted warning of the anti-American evils within, but there was gargantuan America 250 signage on its facade. Outside the entrance, sundry dozens stood blathering or roosted on benches or snapped photos or bought snow cones from a dude doling change from a wrist-thick wad of bills. Inside the museum: Diverse droves that included an old guy with suspenders yanking his jorts and a polo shirt screen-printed with an eagle, Old Glory, and “250.” Grandpas with white wisps peeking from beneath their service caps. A young guy wearing a sports jersey and neck-hung Oakleys. Hand-holding couples adorned in pride-themed accoutrements. No few trudging seniors, stroller’d babies, toddling tykes. I heard Slavic tongues, Japanese, Chinese, beaucoup Spanish. The general spirit seemed a mixture of buoyance, curiosity, pride.
But you wouldn’t have known it from MAGA’s incendiary rhetoric.
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