Good morning. Every week in this newsletter, one of our most popular links is Metropolitan Diary, a column of reader-submitted snapshots of quintessential New York moments. The Times has been publishing these for 50 years. To celebrate the milestone, we took a look back and asked celebrities to share their own Diaries.

Lovers’ quarrels on the sidewalk, random acts of kindness on the subway, running into celebrities like Bill Murray while buying cat food at the deli. These only-in-New-York moments have, for half a century, been chronicled by readers of The New York Times and filed under the moniker Metropolitan Diary.

To mark the milestone, I immersed myself in the archives, devouring volumes of these reader-submitted snippets of urban poetry. What I found was wondrous. If one day New York turns to rubble and dust, these dispatches will collectively tell a soulful story of what day-to-day life was like in our fair city.

The column was introduced in 1976 by Arthur Gelb, a fabled Times editor and critic. He invited city dwellers to submit their serendipitous encounters and lyrical observations about the five boroughs. We paired the items, most a scant few hundred words, with whimsical illustrations.

Over the decades, Metropolitan Diary has published one-act plays, poems, kvetches, confessions, rants, light verse, spiels and plenty of juicy gossip overheard on Bloomingdale’s escalators. There was a short story by Delia Ephron, poetry by Eve Merriam and a reminiscence by Julia Child. But the bulk of Diary entries came from the anonymous throng of New Yorkers, capturing the tender moments that transpire amid the city’s tumult.

Singalong

Consider a subway scene from 1996, where a woman berated her guide dog for trying to exit at the wrong stop. In 2004, when a man sees Yoko Ono at a soba restaurant — and again a couple nights later at an antiques show — Ono recognizes him. A few years later, a red-tailed hawk sits on a light pole in Union Square, and nobody but our diarist notices.

The Diary itself is something of a time capsule. Early entries mention phone books and subway tokens and feature characters named Gertrude, Morris and Thelma. By the 1990s, it’s MetroCards and squeegees and Starbucks. Throughout, there have been laments over the closing of this beloved bar or that iconic restaurant. And celebrity sightings: Patti Smith stumbled into a lap on the morning commute to Midtown, Lou Reed wandered into a typewriter repair shop on the Upper West Side.

For this anniversary, we’ve asked some celebrities to share Diary entries of their own. We’re publishing batches weekly over the coming months. Here’s Sloane Crosley, author of the memoir “Grief Is for People”:

I was walking past a woman in her 20s who was dressed neatly if blandly in grays and blacks.

She was headed into an office building on 53rd Street, at 9 a.m., and screaming into her phone: “And I said I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s not going in my body unless you unplug it!”

I think about it all the time.

The actor Tony Danza wrote about a jazz band that plays outside a restaurant on Columbus Avenue on Sundays and invites people to sing. Danza had the mic one day and noticed a very interested girl of about 5 named Riley:

I said don’t be afraid and asked what her favorite song was.

“The Wheels on the Bus,” she said.

“Hey!” I yelled to the band. “You guys play ‘Wheels on the Bus?’”

“Yeah, we play that,” they yelled back.

I held out the mic. The girl took it and began to sing. She was doing really well, but then started to falter and search for the words.

On cue, everyone in the crowd started to sing along with her. It seemed as if everybody on Columbus Avenue knew “The Wheels on the Bus.”

You can read my full essay here. As regularly happens with Metropolitan Diary, it provoked scores of comments. Here are a few:

Your turn: Think you have a Met Diary item to share? Check out our challenge, with pro tips about how to find the right moment to chronicle.

THE LATEST NEWS

Venezuela Earthquakes

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Europe has been sweltering through yet another record heat wave, driven by climate change. Is the solution for the continent to embrace air-conditioning?

Yes. Air-conditioning is highly effective, and, thanks to climate-conscious government policy, its environmental impacts are relatively small. “The impressive build-out of renewable energy in Europe’s hottest places means that judiciously dialing down the temperature will not do much to melt the glaciers,” writes The Economist.

No. Installing air-conditioning is a fine fix for the wealthy and healthy, but its high cost keeps it out of reach for the poor and disabled people who need it most. “It’s the British class system with a climate-crisis spin: the more someone requires air-conditioning to survive heat waves, the less likely they are to be able to afford it,” writes The Guardian’s Frances Ryan.

FROM OPINION

Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Cottle and David French discuss the Reflecting Pool, the SAVE America Act and what to feel patriotic about before July 4. Click the video above to watch their conversation.

The economy isn’t working for most Americans, Lael Brainard and Rohit Chopra found. They crunched the numbers to figure out why.

Elle Kennedy’s “Off-Campus” Series: “The Deal,” the first installment in Kennedy’s five-book, best-selling romance juggernaut begins simply enough: Hannah, a brainy college student, agrees to tutor an arrogant hockey player so she can catch the eye of her crush. Things get complicated (and very steamy) from there. Now adapted into an Amazon Prime show — and not to be confused with Rachel Reid’s hockey-centric “Heated Rivalry” series — Kennedy’s novels are breezy, sexy fare, ideal for beach days and long nights. And there are plenty to choose from: Each of the “Off-Campus” books, which, along with two spinoff series, have sold more than 25 million copies, features a different hockey star.

For more

THE INTERVIEW

This week’s subject for The Interview is the actor and comedian Robby Hoffman, whose comedy, including her stand-up and her Emmy-nominated role in “Hacks,” is heavily informed by her upbringing.

You grew up the seventh of 10 kids in an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic family. What are your earliest memories of your life in Crown Heights?

Really bad. We didn’t have air-conditioning, but my parents had one air-conditioner in the window in their bedroom and we would sleep on the floor in our underwear. I was very afraid of my father. My father was abusive to my mother. I try to give grace. Not too much grace, but my parents were very young when they had us. My father was 35 with 10 kids; my mother was 30. So they were under a lot of pressure and stress. I’m not excusing him, but I don’t know that he had the proper resources to deal with anything. And I’m not sure how he was told to manage his family in the religious systems that he was a part of.

When did you realize you were funny?

My whole family was funny. It was always brutal and funny. Nothing was off-limits.

Was funny a way to deal with the hard things?

I’m sure. It’s cultural, and there’s a roughness to comedy. If you grow up that way, politeness and decorum is to the side, because you can’t invest in those things. It’s not always polite, and it’s not always comfortable. I think the idea of comfort generally is a rich thing. If you ask somebody how they grew up, they won’t tell you rich. They’ll say, “We were comfortable.” I’d never heard the word growing up. Comfortable? What? There are roaches in the sink. Nobody is comfortable, and we’re very comfortable being uncomfortable. But the rich are not. And they dictate what is comfortable and what isn’t. They are uncomfortable often. They don’t talk about things, like money. Whether I wanted to talk about it or not as a kid, we had one phone and my mother was screaming about money on that phone from morning till night. We heard everything.

Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

This gorgeous tart is one giant, shareable cheese Danish, made even more delicious and beautiful with the addition of a blueberry topping (using frozen berries, so it’s makeable any time of year). The base is a homemade Danish dough that is both laminated and yeasted, so the assembled tart must rise before baking. The baked crust is ultra-flaky and tender and barely sweet, so be generous with the powdered sugar when serving.

Watch Claire Saffitz make the Danish in this video.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was blowpipe.

Can you put eight historical events — including the formation of the French Resistance, the annexation of Texas and the origin of the phrase “pass the buck” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.