Okay, nasty confession: I used to love the Metropolitan Diary that runs weekly in the Times Metro section. It was a little slice of an imaginary New York that never existed. There were no electrified Con Ed gratings, no J-Date date rapists, no Conde Nast bitchery, no New York magazine. It was a land where kindly elderly women, always on the cross-town bus, met charming young men from Princeton who made witty ironic remarks. (Once I tried to find this Manhattan, figuring some portal existed near the meat counter in Zabar's, but no dice.) But the Diary changed editors and it's gotten all hipped up, and now it kind of sucks. Today George Mannes at The Black Table brings back a little of the magic with some rejected submissions.
The Circular File at the Metropolitan Diary [Black Table]