Happy 20th birthday, 'Bonfire of the Vanities'! Today, the Times celebrates Tom Wolfe's novel with a look at the ways New York has changed since 1987—it's full of rich white people now, did you know?—and interviews with some of the people who characters in the book were based on, or who knew those people. The choicest quote comes from Ronald L. Kuby, the former partner of the radical lawyer William 'Al Vogel' Kunstler. "'Bonfire of the Vanities' ... managed to create a fantasy criminal justice system where rich, white Sherman McCoy is being railroaded by a combination of craven black leaders and corrupt journalists and spineless political leaders. That was white people's fantasy, that was not black people's reality. It was a fundamentally racist novel appealing to the very worst in white people, at their most privileged and snivelly. And no, I don't think it could possibly have the same cachet today."