Since I found out last week that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is set to star in Columbia TriStar’s “To Walk the Clouds,” Robert Zemeckis’s 3D feature adaptation of the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” I've wanted his people to call my people.

My first question for the writer-director and star of last year’s "Don Jon" would not, believe it or not, be related to porn. I would ask if he has read “The Man Who Walks on Air,” Calvin Tomkins’s 1999 inquiry – contained in Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker – into his soon-to-be character Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist most famous for walking a tightrope between New York City’s Twin Towers in 1974.

I’m no acting teacher – he can call Daniel Day-Lewis to hear about the dedication that drives an actor to learn to paint with his foot ("My Left Foot") or live in the woods building canoes and fire muskets ("The Last of the Mohicans") – but I have been fanatical about the riches of character study contained in Life Stories since it served as the text for an undergraduate writing workshop I took at Boston College in 2001.

During the months I was enrolled in that course – “Profiles and Personalities,” taught by Michael Lowenthal – I profiled the Irish writer Colm Toibin, visiting him in New York City and driving together, in a Flintstone-like car borrowed from my sister, to Newport, Rhode Island, where we strolled the historic Cliff Walk and gazed at the sea as part of research for The Master, his Booker-nominated novel about Henry James.

Throughout that gift of an assignment (which led to my interviewing him at a Brooklyn bar a decade later), I tried to summon the understated style and attention to physical detail as practiced by Tomkins, Joseph Mitchell, and other masters of the Profile form as it was developed (and the term, copyrighted) by The New Yorker.

In Life Stories, published in 2000 in celebration of the magazine's seventy-fifth anniversary – along with Wonderful Town, a companion collection of short fiction set in New York City – editor David Remnick highlights a selection of the magazine’s most influential and definitive fact-based pieces. In his introduction, he defines a Profile as “a biographical piece – a concise rendering of a life through anecdote, incident, interview, and description (or some ineffable combination thereof).”

The complexity and brilliance of the volume's varied approaches to observing and articulating lives in all of their nuance glimmer as if viewed through a prism. Some of these anthologized writers spent years getting to know their subjects, and their Profiles, while revealing that depth of knowledge, are connected by a unifying thread: “One quality that runs through nearly all the best Profiles … is a sense of obsession,” Remnick writes. It’s that live wire quality that brings me back to these pages again and again. It's that palpable vibration of life, as we know it and don't know it, that draws us to look up at the sky, or out at the sea, and wonder what drives a man to dwell in the clouds.