As the presidential candidates descend on New York for next week’s primaries, the race to be accepted by the notoriously grouchy and pugnacious denizens of the Empire State is heating up.
Bernie Sanders has been accused of planning to campaign “like a Brooklynite”, Hillary Clinton kept on swiping that subway card until it finally worked (possibly a metaphor for her political career), Donald Trump hammered Ted Cruz for the Texas senator’s attack on “New York values”, and John Kasich messed up eating pizza, going at it with a knife and fork like a European nobleman (although he made up for it later by wolfing down an enormous meal in a deli).
Just in case you ever want to visit the Big Apple yourself, the Guardian has put together this handy guide to the real New York values you need to understand if you’re going to survive in Gotham City:
Civic pride
Since 1976, any New York resident able to provide the correct answers to three questions about the city’s rich history gets to borrow Woody Allen for the day. Have lunch with him, sit him in your passenger seat so you can take the carpool lane, use him as a coat rack, whatever you want. He loves it. The whole thing was his idea in the first place.
Endurance
If you’re going to make it in New York, you need to be tenacious. How else to survive in a city where you wake up to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue blaring every morning at 5am, and fall asleep each night to the sound of roving street gangs serenading their girlfriends and mocking Officer Krupke in song?
Equality
While an outside observer might believe that the city is harshly divided along socio-economic lines, all New Yorkers are united in agreement that no one cares what some dipshit nerd from the middle of nowhere thinks.
Discretion
Real New Yorkers understand the importance of minding one’s own business and how to keep a secret. In other words, what happens in Tony Danza’s secret grotto beneath Grand Central Station stays there.
Compromise
For thousands of years, New Yorkers and pigeons have abided by a fragile accord in which both groups cull the population of the other in order to maintain balance. It has been humans’ turn to cull pigeons for the last 399 years, but in January 2017 the tables turn.
Order
Manhattan is known for its distinctive grid layout, which makes the city easy to traverse, but few know that when viewed from above the streets take the form of an enormous Sudoku board, an attempt by early city planners to distract God from what they were really getting up to.
Being ‘in-the-know’
There are a few good spots to sample a tasty, traditional New York chocolate egg cream, but the best and most authentic source is the weird pool mysteriously bubbling up out of the basement of the Gracie Mansion.
Creativity
All you have to do in order to make it as a professional actor or musician in the city that never sleeps is convince Lena Dunham to daub your forehead with water from the Hudson river, and go back in time and convince your parents to enter an extremely high-paying profession.
