Today marks the first day of a new class at Eugene Lang College, Tutorial Advising: Writing in New York City, which I’m teaching alongside alumnus Alex Vadukul, regular contributor to The New York Times Metro section. Our first week’s reading is Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street.” For class next week, students will be creating short character studies in the spirit of Melville’s Bartleby. The question is whether they’ll invent these characters or whether they’ll be able to find someone worth writing about among the 8.5 million of us. What makes Bartleby so fascinating is that the Melville’s narrator—whose own self-characterization is a study in and of itself—can not find “any thing ordinarily human about him.”