Tom Wolfe. Gloria Steinem. Jimmy Breslin. Nora Ephron. Since its debut in 1968, New York Magazine has published some of the most notable names in journalism. This collection is meant to showcase some of the best work from the magazine’s current crop of writers—a group that, in our view anyway, upholds, and advances, that tradition.

A sort of modern-day New York’s Greatest Hits list, the 26 stories collected here represent the most popular pieces the magazine has published in the past five years, as measured by traffic to our website, nymag.com. (Contrary to popular wisdom, New York’s long-form stories are often among our best-read pieces online.)

Among the work you’ll find in these pages: Frank Rich tackles America's class war, and Jonathan Chait tells us why liberals have gone mad. Steve Fishman talks to Bernie Madoff in jail. Tina Rosenberg profiles the only HIV patient believed to be “cured” of the disease. Vanessa Grigoriadis chronicles Lady Gaga’s rise from downtown New York obscurity to international megastardom, and Sam Anderson portrays James Franco not as the latest Hollywood hunk of the moment but as a canny postmodern celebrity. Jennifer Senior reveals the secret no mother or father wants to admit (parenting can, well, suck), and Wesley Yang exhorts his fellow Asian-Americans to eschew the stereotype of the dutiful Asian and be more bold. We’ve also tossed in a bonus story: “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster,” by New York national-affairs editor John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Although that piece wasn’t written for the magazine—it’s an excerpt from the veteran political journalists’ best-selling account of the 2008 presidential election, “Game Change”—we’ve included it because it, too, was one of the most popular pieces we published during this period.New York Magazine’s Most Popular, a New York Magazine / Byliner Book, is a collaboration between New York Magazine and Byliner.

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