Everybody living and working in New York shivered when the financial industry collapsed last week. Manhattan's worst-case scenario would make an excellent post-apocalyptic movie set: a landscape dotted with shells of half-built skyscrapers, vacant honeycomb-clusters of condominiums, and boarded-up luxury shops--the sorry remains of a booming economy corroded by recession.

New York has been here before. During dark times in the 1970s, filmmakers, journalists, and novelists reveled in the grimy chaos of New York. Sociologist Miriam Greenberg mapped out how the city recovered from this dystopic self-image in her timely new book, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World.

In a recent New York Times feature, the sociologist explained how the media helped rebuild the city's image once--hinting at the ways writers could help the city recover from the next recession:

"Dr. Greenberg emphasizes the importance of New York magazine, founded in 1967, which presented the city as 'a hip place to live, work, and shop for young, social climbing urbanites' ... The magazine ... helped establish the media makers themselves as cultural power brokers."