The City That Wonât Shut Up Fills Two New Books With Its Babble A sign directing people to a Statue of Liberty ticket office in Battery Park, in Lower Manhattan. In New York, much of what surges by is unexplained, including basic questions like who is a New Yorker.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times By Craig Taylor By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Image Before reading a word of Craig Taylorâs âNew Yorkers,â I decided to construct a dramatis personae to keep track of the characters in his intriguing oral history. My canât-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard hunch was borne out after only a few pages, when I read that he had conducted long interviews with more than 180 New Yorkers, filling 71 notebooks and nearly 400 hours of audio recordings. Wow.