SEX AND THE CITY

Before Sarah Jessica Parker ever slipped on a Manolo Blahnik, there was Candace Bushnell—whose first Sex and the City column ran in The New York Observer in November 1994, capturing 1990s Manhattan with a precision that no television adaptation, however beloved, has ever quite matched. The column was a love letter and a warning shot: to the city, to ambition, to the particular madness of trying to have it all—the career, the apartment, the man, the shoes—while remaining, somehow, stylishly intact. A generation of women learned how New York actually worked from these pages, and now, with a new wave of fascination sweeping through the culture around 1990s New York—stoked by renewed interest in figures like JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, who embodied that same electric, doomed glamour—the original columns feel more vital than ever. HBO made a very good show. Bushnell made the real thing.