New City Reader, Food Edition

I recently took advantage of Target Free Thursdays at the New Museum to view their exhibition The Last Newspaper, which uses the newspaper "as a platform to address issues of hierarchy, attribution, contextualization, and editorial bias." As someone who relies on newspaper archives almost every day, I was fascinated by the way the curators played with the print news to create new narratives based on the artists' idea of the journalistic emphasis.

The exhibition spans three floors of the New Museum; one floor is almost completely devoted to the people creating stories, including the talented editors behind New City Reader.

New City Reader is an ephemeral piece of ephemera: a pop-up newspaper exploring a different theme each week until the Last Newspaper exhibition closes on January 9th.

I was honored and thrilled to be asked to contribute a piece in New City Reader's food issue, which is still freely available at the Museum (and soon-to-be-online). 

Nicola Twilley, of the always fascinating and inspiring blog Edible Geography and one of the food issues' editors, asked me to write about commemorative cocktails.

Commemorative cocktails, as I wrote in the piece (and which you can read in full on Nicola's blog), are born out of an incredible assortment of historical events, from monumental achievements and epic heroes to fleeting trends and otherwise insignificant peculiarities, such as the Strikes Off cocktail (to mark the end of the 1929 General Strike in Great Britain) and the Moonshot (a industry-created cocktail to mark the Apollo 11 flight).

Other features in the food issue include an interview with Alan Stillman, he of T.G.I. Friday's fame; an app idea for a Coffeehouse Commons; a fantastic mapping project to chart the food prep kitchens in the city; and one of my favorite pieces called Is This a Bodega?, Jeff Sisson's crowd-sourcing project wherein users are asked to identify bodegas around New York in order to document every bodega in the city.

The Last Newspaper is on view until January, 2011 and back issues of the New City Reader can be viewed online or by going to the Museum.