A friend introduced the idea to me back in 2016. I had just moved to New York for graduate school, and I hated the city: It was too loud, I was always lost and everything reeked. But I was an active Wikipedia user, and began accumulating mostly useless facts in the hope that they’d make the city make sense. Walking down Wooster Street, I would stop and tell my companions to look up. “On the second floor of this building, there’s a room with nothing but 280,000 pounds of dirt in it,” I’d tell them. “It’s called ‘The New York Earth Room,’ by the artist Walter De Maria.” Passing by the famous Flatiron Building on 23rd Street, I’d allow out-of-town visitors a moment of silent appreciation before pulling them across Fifth Avenue. “This is not just any Starbucks,” I’d say. “This is the house where the novelist Edith Wharton grew up.” In isolation, each detail amounted to little more than a point in bar trivia. Individually, those facts felt meaningless; together, though, they made me feel at home in the city. I imagined that leading a real tour would give form and function to all the information rattling around inside my head.