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Katz’s Deli, the iconic New York deli, has been serving its customers for well over 100 years. Getty Images Elon Musk once compared building a business to “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” George Orwell, for his part, once described writing a book as a “bout with a long illness,” a sentiment that many entrepreneurs and creatives would agree with. The point is: No one would willingly subject themselves to any of the suffering that goes into building something if they thought their efforts were going to disappear with the wind. Yet the truth is, most businesses and most art does disappear. It might be easier than ever today to start a business—a few bucks on LegalZoom and you’re the CEO of a brand new LLC. What is still hard and what has always been hard it keeping your doors open, staying in business, and keeping customers happy over the long term will never be easy. In a world obsessed with the new and the trendy, we don’t tend to give enough credit to people do ma...

Some say the East Village is dead, Manhattan has been murdered, and New York City has lost its soul. Some say that if you stand in the right place and squint hard enough, it can almost seem like the old city is still alive. Jeremiah Moss likes to think of the city as a crime scene, which he is investigating for clues, searching for the cause of death. In his new book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul , Moss sets out to chronicle what, exactly, has gone wrong with New York, where greed, hypergentrification, and government policies have conspired to kill off the unique character of dozens of neighborhoods. “I want it to be a body of evidence—this happened, this happened, this happened. When you lay it all out like that, it’s undeniable,” says Moss during a recent walk around the East Village. “It is not a natural change. It’s very deliberate, it’s very planned. It’s from policies, and the policies have values behind them, and the values are very clear. They favor the ...