Reveling in the Rites of the City
By John Leland
The economist Jeffrey Sachs, 58, is such a citizen of the world — especially the crowded, hungry and malarial parts of the world — that it may be hard to imagine him among the creature comforts of the Upper West Side. Yet when he has a Sunday at home, Mr. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, turns his focus to indigenous Gotham rites, like navigating Zabar’s. Home base for his travels is a Columbia-owned town house in the West 80s, which he shares with his wife, Dr. Sonia Sachs, 58, a public health specialist at Columbia, and their younger daughter, Hannah, 17, a senior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
ON GLOBAL TIME I get up very early even on Sundays. Five o’clock would be normal — sometimes earlier. A lot of my colleagues and work are in Europe and in Asia, so inevitably when I get up there’s lots of e-mail traffic, some Skype, some phone calls.
THINGS TO BE DONE The work tends to be seven days a week just by its nature. The days are pretty much indistinguishable from that point of view, though the pace at home is, of course, gentler on Sundays. I make a cup of coffee, sit down to my bowl of cereal and do my e-mail and Skype. Then the newspaper tends to come around 6:30 or 7, and that’s the next hour.
MOVING OUT At this point it’s time to get ready to go out for a walk. If I can lure Hannah with me, I do that. She often is up early with a lot of schoolwork. Usually around 8:30 or 9, we can get moving to go outside.
THE ROUTE Pretty much every Sunday that I’m here it’s a walk down Columbus more or less to Columbus Circle, then a walk up Broadway to key points along the way — Fairway, Zabar’s, Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks, the farmers’ market outside the natural history museum. One of the wonderful things, and for me the biggest surprise as a new New Yorker 10 years ago, is that it is like taking a walk through your village, because you know a lot of people along the way by now.
NAVIGATING ZABAR’S You have to start with the olives, go to the nut section, the fish counter. They have the best, freshest fish, produced by the most skilled artisans. I watch them. The sculpture work is phenomenal to me — the joy of watching a nova being cut by these artisans.
QUIET TIMES THREE Sunday afternoon is generally quiet writing, reading and thinking about a nice family dinner out in the evening. I’m working on a book right now, in the final stretches, about John Kennedy’s speeches in 1963, so the 50th anniversary of his great speech on peace. The household’s usually pretty quiet with the three of us sitting around just a few feet apart, my daughter doing her homework, my wife doing her work and e-mails and writing.
FAMILY GATHERING Starting around 5, we start to fantasize about food. My mother lives on Broadway and 68th, my sister on 72nd, our older daughter on Broadway and 70th, so we’re all in the neighborhood. And typically we have some version of a family dinner, almost always at a restaurant. Ocean Grill may be our deluxe pleasure, and we have a favorite trattoria on Columbus and 90th, Trattoria Pesce and Pasta.
LAST WALK After dinner we walk to the fruit stand at Columbus and 68th and to the Starbucks there for a cup of coffee and to buy fruit for the next day. Then, depending on the next day’s schedule, possibly a late movie. The TV stays off for months at a time. I barely know how to turn it on. That’s literally true, because it’s got too many boxes.
LAST TALK The family has the laptops open as we fade into the night. Very often I give a speech at 10:30 or 11 at night on Sunday for a talk in Asia. I close the door, see the family the next day.
UNPLUGGED Usually the day ends sometime around midnight, and starts again sometime around 4 or 5.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/nyregion/on-sundays-jeffrey-sachs-revels-in-the-rites-of-the-city.html