In my household, we still get many old-fashioned, paper magazines. I love magazines, though they do tend to stack up faster than I can read them.

One magazine, in particular, holds a special place in my imagination: the New Yorker. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been haunted by the covers of the New Yorker. They give me a very strange feeling—a strong emotion that’s neither happy nor sad, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It’s hard to describe, but I think it’s a feeling of sharp yearning for New York City.

I felt this way as a child, and I feel that way now. Which is odd, because I’m here in New York City. I’ve lived here for more than two decades, I’m participating in that reality, and yet the covers distill New York City so intensely that it feels out of reach.

The images on the covers tantalize me; they evoke a pure, intense experience of New York City that I rarely managed to attain in my own life. They’re true and false at the same time, like a biography, as they depict the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop, or the streets crowded with runners during the New York City Marathon, or a couple walking their dog along the river.

And often the New York City that’s shown is not my everyday New York, but rather the New York that I rarely inhabit, the city of jazz clubs, Yankees games, rides on the Staten Island ferry, walks through Williamsburg, commutes to Connecticut, visits to fashion shows.

To embrace this New Yorker feeling, I bought the enthralling The Complete Book of Covers from ‘The New Yorker,’ 1925–1989. Over the years, Eliza, Eleanor, and I have pored over its pages for hours. These pictures invoked the real and unreal New York City of my imagination.