What had broken Blue Bottle’s nearly yearlong run at the Brooklyn Flea? What was the root cause of this rage and frustration? The answer: pour-over coffee, a seemingly simple but incredibly time-consuming method of coffee assemblage which wreaks destruction wherever it appears, a gastronomical ascot whose chief benefit seems to be that it roughly triples the time it takes to make a cup of coffee and allows consumers to then imagine that they can taste a difference.

It was a little over a year ago that The New York Times heralded the arrival of pour-over coffee in a trend story titled “Coffee's Slow Dance.” The writer Oliver Strand described the method by which pour-over coffee is created—water is poured from a specially made kettle into a suspended cup of coffee grounds, through which the coffee seeps to the waiting cup below (that the specialized equipment needed comes from Japan likely will not surprise you). While allowing that the process might sound "precious or tedious" to some, he enthused that the resulting coffee was, in the intricacy and delicacy of its flavor, like “picking up a drafting pen after only writing with Magic Markers.”

This sort of praise is typical of pour-over enthusiasts. Taylor Janes is a 20-something farmer’s market cheesemonger who designs brass brackets for pour-overs in his spare time. (I know him because he's a former classmate of mine at that bastion of Manhattan liberalness, The New School. Yes, I know.) He doesn’t care that it can take roughly four to five minutes to brew a single cup. “I want it to take longer,” he told me. “From opening a bag and inhaling deeply, practicing my pour technique and watching the bloom, to the industrial handsomeness of the galvanized steel pour station, the observance of and commitment to a morning ritual results in a refined sense of personal satisfaction.”

What is it actually like to drink pour-over coffee? I can’t deny that there is something a different about it—its flavors are richer than is usual in drip coffee, hiding underneath a layer of physical heat and slowly unspooling themselves on your palette in the moments after a sip. For this piece, I sampled several pour-overs at Blue Bottle’s Williamsburg outpost, and on at least one day I was struck with an unusually intense caffeine high that left me vibrating and sweating in my desk chair, feeling like I'd been whisked through here.

The technique had its devotees, of course, long before The Times wrote about it. And in the year since the piece ran, there's been even further advancement in the world of coffee pour overs. The Hario VDC-02W Dripper V60 Size 02 White Ceramic Funnel, an unassuming white cone that sits atop a cup of coffee and serves as a pour-over coffee filter is, at the time of this writing, the top-selling item in Amazon’s “Coffee Servers” category (other assorted pour-over tchotchkes fill up three more spots in the top ten). The Hario VKB-120HSV V60 Coffee Drip Kettle Buono, another pour-over accessory, is a sensually ribbed teapot with a long, S-curved spout protruding from its front, giving it the appearance of a cartoon baby elephant, or an incredibly rare orchid. It also sits atop its category (#1 in Kitchen & Dining > Tabletop >Serveware > Teapots & Coffee Servers > Teapots).

Blue Bottle, the only New York coffee cult name-checked in The Times piece, is expanding, too, opening two Manhattan branches in addition to it Williamsburg coffee bar/roastery/shipping facility. There are now more than a dozen other places selling pour overs in the city: Abraço in the East Village, PORTS in Chelsea and O Café in Greenwich Village. Another is Joe the Art of Coffee, whose new Upper East Side location will feature pour-overs, according to this December write-up:

"Rather than batch brewing in big urns, it’s more theater," owner Jonathan Rubinstein said of the art of pour-over. "The way we’re building this, we’re putting in a window pane as a permanent fixture. And how we’re lighting it, we’re making it a glass stage, for lack of a better word."

A visit to that location a couple weeks ago, however, turned up nothing more than two lonely-looking pour-over filters perched atop rather grimy glass pots. Asked about the gleaming coffee bar on a hill promised in the press, the barista on duty sheepishly said it was “under construction.”

Nevermind the mystique; the actual mechanics of pour-overs are more or less those of a broken coffee pot: hot water slowly goes through coffee grounds, making only one cup of coffee at a time. That is all it is! It's not magic. It’s just kind of a more elaborate, maybe slightly tastier way of brewing coffee. But, you know what? It’s not really suited to pleasing a big crowd, even when it’s the kind of crowd you might think would be predisposed to waiting 20 minutes for a cup of coffee. Because, actually, I do not think that person exists. Granted, wait times for pour-overs can vary wildly—I've waited anywhere from two to eight minutes at Blue Bottle’s proper storefront. But when there's a line, it can take much, much longer—which brings us back, full circle, to where we started: Blue Bottle and the Brooklyn Flea.

Blue Bottle is a fine institution and a great local place to buy coffee, but they found themselves overextended here. The pour over requires many things: time, a reliable electrical system and a patient clientele. Their potential customers, perpetually in a line a dozen or so people long throughout the holiday season at the Flea’s winter home—a stall in the lobby of One Hanson, a heartbreakingly ornate former bank and clock tower built in 1927, that served as Jason Schwartzman’s home and detective agency in the most recent season of the (criminally-cancelled) HBO comedy "Bored to Death"—did not cooperate any more than the building’s 80-plus-year-old electrical system. The official line is that the building's wiring was the real culprit, perpetually shorting out and leaving the outpost with only lukewarm, un-pour-overable water. This left everyone involved a little grumpy, including the staff of Blue Bottle, who told me in exactly the same words, with exactly the same mixture of barely-contained rage for two consecutive weeks, “We’re just having a little… problem? right now, with our… heater. So… it will just be a few minutes.” People stole coffees obviously ordered by other people. Some people just wandered off and never returned, despite paying a bit more than you might expect for a humble weekend-morning cup of coffee. There was strife and discord.

Immediately following New Year's, Blue Bottle announced they would not be returning to the Flea until they moved locations in the spring. They’ve since been replaced by Crop to Cup. Who serve coffee out of nice, big, coffee vats like you might find at a movie set or a PTA meeting. And you know what? It tastes great.

Chris Chafin writes for a few places about things you can listen to, play or consume. Here's his Tumblr, which isn't super compelling. Photo by akpoff, via Flickr.

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2. Menus written in chalk on walls of restaurants

3. Conversations about how mosquitos seem to be around longer this year

4. INXS songs on the radio

5. UFO sightings

6. Machines shaped like animals

7. Unironic usage of the word "pal"

8. Skirt steak

9. Police brutality

10. Incorrect predictions of rain

(Whoops. That last one sort of is.)

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It wasn’t always easy. When my date at Max Fish ordered a can of PBR, I didn’t tell him that my grandpa and his VFW friends considered it treason to drink anything that hadn’t been bottled in Milwaukee. When my neighbor wore a Green Bay Packer jersey over her skinny jeans, I kept quiet about the fact that my father, like all decent men born and bred in Wisconsin, owned a small piece of the team. And when a photographer at a birthday party in Brooklyn patiently explained to me how she recently canned garlic scapes, I refrained from sharing my mother’s recipe for pepper jelly.

But what a year! With Bon Iver’s second Wisconsin-recorded album in heavy hipster rotation and Chad Harbach’s Wisconsin-set The Art of Fielding on seemingly every Kindle on the L train, a strange realization occurred to me: Instead of leaving my tiny hometown in central Wisconsin to live in the white-hot center of cool, I could have just stayed in Waupaca (population 6,265) and churned out Styles section pieces for the New York Times until the cows came home—because, literally, there are cows down the street from the house. Without even trying, it seems, I was born in the coolest place on earth—and now everyone is trying to catch up.

To wit:

Cornholing

The New York Times credited Bill Hemmer, a Fox news anchor, with bringing the traditional backyard game of Cornhole—along with, one imagines, countless bad ‘cornhole’ jokes—to New York. Hemmer said, “I find it to be a very charming, passive, social summer game.” But my dad could have brought his monogrammed Cornhole set to the big city years ago. Like my old man always says, “You know it’s summer when it’s warm enough to Cornhole in the yard.” And while on the subject of corn, it's worth mentioning that while some New Yorkers have no problem waiting on line at Cafe Habana for the Brooklyn eatery's "famous" corn, my parents have an actual entire cornfield in their backyard. No waiting required. Except for the actual growing.

Cheese Curds

Earlier this summer, the Times excitedly announced the opening of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, a cheese factory and retail store, in the Flatiron District. Beecher’s sells fresh cheese curds for the princely sum of $22-a-pound. Maybe these curds are so fresh they squeak when you bite into them, as required, but Cheesie Bob, of Cheesie Bob’s Bleu Cheese House boasts that “In Wisconsin cheese making is not only an art but a significant part of Wisconsin’s heritage.” Oh, and Cheesie charges $5.25 for a pound of fresh cheese curds. For non-locals who don’t know that Friday is the best day for curds, Cheesie puts out a sign letting tourists know.

Canoeing

All summer long my Brooklyn boyfriend has been begging me to go canoeing on the Gowanus Canal with the Gowanus Dredgers, a group that offers paddling trips on the highly polluted water. "We’ll have to be careful not to splash ourselves,” he keeps telling me. I grew up on the Chain O’ Lakes, a series of 22 glacial lakes, where it's still safe to get mildly moist. And at least there I can go for a dip and never see a single "Coney Island whitefish."

Deer Hunting

According to the Times, the closest most young New Yorkers get to deer hunting is playing Big Buck Hunter, an arcade game with a dedicated subculture. One of the game's champions, Alex DerHohannesian, was quoted in the Styles section back in May, saying “I’ve never really hunted before." Although DerHohannesian ("DerHo," to his friends) admitted that he "shot a squirrel once for Pioneer Day in middle school… cooked it and ate it, and it was god awful.” In June, in a Times magazine profile of Justin Vernon (yes, Bon Iver), Jon Caramanica went for what could only be described as a bit of Wisco porn, quoting the indie howler and Kanye West protégé on hunting: “The first time I ever did it, it was kind of beautiful... I was like, wow, I feel more mortal. I feel less important.” Well, three of my uncles have decorated their basements with head trophies (likely years before Taavo Somer raided his first country rummage sale) and boast that their venison is the best in Waupaca county.

As I write this, I'm sitting at my parent’s kitchen table, wearing my Grandfather’s old flannel shirt and looking out at the cornfield. The salt lick my dad placed out in the yard earlier this summer has been licked to nearly a nub by deer and I'm finding myself at a bit of a crossroads: Should I go back to New York to live among the squares? After all, everyone in New York is just so exceedingly tardy to discover trends. Maybe I'll just stay here and finally start that pie shop with my mom on the site of the old Waupaca Café. Together we can count down the days until the Styles reporters show up for a profile.

Megan L. Wood has written for the Matador Network, Centro y Sur and CNN.com. She's still waiting for Cribbage to make it big.

Photo by Claire L. Evans.

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• "Kirk is hardly alone in his decision to sell sex in order to pay for school." (Just alone so far in this story but hey, we get more anecdotes later!)

• "An increasing number of gay male students"

• "In addition to a lackluster job market"

• "While young gay men exchanging sex for money certainly predated the financial collapse"

• "recent events have pushed some students to consider"

• "risky behavior that in more robust economic times might have been unthinkable"

• "according to several owners of websites that broker such hook-ups."

I. Can't. Even.

There's an expert who "studied the gay sugar baby culture as an undergraduate at George Washington University." (Ooh, an undergrad research paper. Although to his credit he interviewed 100 kids and sounds smart!) And "an assistant professor of public health at Brooklyn College." And it ends with an anecdote of a dude who can't even get picked up on the "sugar daddy" websites.

Also the reporter randomly goes to a straight sugar daddy party for some color. It's perfection. This is the end of trend stories: a glittering conjuring up of a thing that is to some unknown extent real, packaged into 3D, co-produced by Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer in a big gay SEO cuddle-puddle. I LOVE IT.

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The Wall Street Journal went big in 2007 with an A1 story that explained that the berries are "a slightly tart West African berry with a strange property: For about an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes sweet." Then NPR couldn't wait to tell all of their listeners about it. The New York Times waited a full year and first wrote their "berry trend piece" in 2008 with a story called "A Tiny Fruit That Tickles The Tongue." This part of the article is pretty smutty:

Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”

It's so persuasive! "The new party drug: berries," wrote the Globe and Mail in 2009. "Every Wednesday night Three Sheets offers to mess up people's taste buds but good at a 'flavor tripping party,'" wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution"; "Never before had I seen anyone smile with lemon juice dripping down their face," wrote the Montreal Gazette, both in mid-2010. And even a few weeks ago: "Miracle fruit berries sweeten sour world" was a recent piece by a "horticulture instructor at Trident Technical College" in the Charleston Post and Courier.

Worried that this trend was in danger of petering out, I decided to take action to save it. I ordered the berries in pill form from Amazon and they arrived within the same week. My group of friends usually congregate on Wednesdays for our usual mid-week slosh-fest so I figured it would be a good day to try them out.

We huddled around my tiny East Village kitchen and "slowly rolled the berries around" in our mouths, just like the package said. I cut up some of our edibles in the mean time.

"I feel like we all just took acid!" one of my friends said. He was right! There was definitely that sense of group experimentation of the unknown that only drugs can give a group of friends. (This drug comparison crops up in about 30% of "miracle fruit" trend stories.)

The zinc-tasting tablets dissolved in a slow cough-drop-like way (not in a fizzy way). We then picked up some fruits from the cutting board and tried our first bites.

The lemon tasted like the sweetest lemonade in the world! The limes tasted just like a slice of Key Lime Pie from a great southern diner! Raspberries were way sweeter than ever before—tartness completely removed. The assortment of sour gummies? Sweetest candy we'd ever tried! (This assertion appears in about 100% of "miracle fruit" trend stories.)

The standout was by far the spoonfuls of cream cheese we eagerly scooped from the container. It tasted like a perfect bite of cheesecake.

The granddaddy of all trends had come and rocked our world. We worshiped at the throne of The Mighty Trend Piece and came out with near bliss. And we can safely say that this magic trend piece will never die, because there's a need to overshare about it.

A friend had to run quickly to a local bar, No Malice Palice, and immediately texted back: "just had a slice of lime with a Tequila shot. Holy shit!" He tried to explain to his bar friends what was going on but they just thought he was crazy. So thank goodness there are all of these articles out there to convince the non believers.

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The food porn party creates two works of art at once: the edibles, and the documentation of that which is eaten. The dishes are chosen for their potential attractiveness. The food, after it is created, must be styled—and then it must be shot to be glowingly attractive. But unlike actual magazine-level food porn, you can't use hairspray to make your pork look shiny, because you're actually going to eat this. In real-life food porn, you can only fight fair.

We met at my friend Jake's apartment—he's a first rate photographer and a Bushwick resident. He was to be the James Cameron of my food porn Titanic dreams. (Obviously, I was cognizant that shooting the pictures in Bushwick would contribute to the success of my trendsetting.)

The food chosen to star in the pictures, naturally, had to be seasonal. After some debate—"Should we just put bacon on top of a lot of stuff and call it a day?"—the theme of "summer's feast" was chosen for the porn at hand.

A note on bacon: it's is to food porn what "Don't Stop Believin'" is to karaoke: a standby that's sure to get a rise out of even the dullest and drunkest. Even if people don't like the song and/or food that much, it's exciting for everyone! But it's really a tired trick, in both cases, and should be approached with caution.

The menu was fairly easy to pick out once there was the "Summer Feast" theme to play around with. For a main course we had lobster rolls, which were paired with a pickled watermelon salad with heirloom tomatoes, creamed corn and cheddar biscuits (an homage to Red Lobster, naturally). Oh and a huge dish of Magnolia-style banana pudding for dessert, because I'm gross like that. (And pudding? This is a tricky choice, visually speaking! But a gamble well worth it.)

Riding the L train to the Dekalb stop with arms of groceries and a huge dish full of banana pudding is a harrowing experience. People really gawk at you when you're holding something with a clear plastic wrap covering. (The worst is when the man next to you hovers his nose over your dish to catch a whiff.)

After a couple hours of cooking in the Bushwick summer heat, all of the plates were prepared and Jake got to work. He rigged up a light in the kitchen to successfully backlight the food and shot some closeups of my smutty little stars.

Food porn, like real food or real porn, is actually quite difficult labor! It's not so much the cooking that's tough—but there was a lot of styling: wiping plates totally clean, stacking biscuits ever so perfectly. Your perspective on cooking shifts a bit: instead of prodding that thing in the oven to find out if it's done, you're thinking: does this look done? Does it have just a little delightful browning?

The trend legitimacy quotient is pretty high here. There's artistry afoot, as well as Internet sensationalism—and some choice niche travel. It could really take off anywhere from "the eastern end of Long Island," in the trend piece vernacular, as well as "in Greenpoint" or even NoLIta. Really, anywhere that people like to perform their lives by way of Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr or Facebook. A surefire trend! Just remember that bacon themes are already over.

Myles Tanzer might do absolutely anything this weekend. Photographs by Jake Moore.

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Here are some of our favorite headlines from the glory days of ten years ago, after half the staff was laid off, and the publication began to be stuffed with content from sibling publications. Picture it! 2001. So many questions to grapple with. How will newspapers survive? How will people make money on the web? Will reality TV take over the networks?

September 28, 2001
Electronic Publishing vs. the Land of the Free
In preparation for a meeting of minds at next month's Frankfurt Book Fair, it's time to ask: With the abundance of free material available on the Web, how will writers and publishers get paid?

September 30, 2001
Contentville Closes Its Books
Contentville, Steven Brill's e-commerce concept for selling everything from books and magazines to transcripts and Ph.D essays, was shut down on Friday and its 15 employees laid off.

October 15, 2001
Al-Jazeera, All the Time
With the only broadcast news bureau in Afghanistan and exclusive footage of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the Al Jazeera network has heightened its presence on global satellite systems. But criticism from the Colin Powells of the world that the network can be a soapbox for extremists may slow its much-needed revenue growth.

October, 2001
Struggling Primedia Woos Employees With Stock Options

October 15, 2001
Inside.com and Brill's Content to Close — This Time We Really Mean It
Awkward marriage between polar opposites on the hipness spectrum ends, as relationship between Steven Brill and Primedia unravels. 38 lose their jobs.

October 17, 2001
Who Watches Reality TV?
American Demographics While some media experts believe reality television will alter the topography of TV land, others are sure this season will mark the beginning of the end of the genre. Of course, the viewing public — nearly 50% of all Americans — will cast the ultimate vote.

October 25, 2001
Premium Channels Boosting Production of Their Own Movies
Premium networks, including Showtime and HBO, are aggressively moving ahead with plans to pump up the ever-growing pool of popular original films and series, despite recent cutbacks from other networks and production companies.

October 26, 2001
Geeks Rule At Comedy Central
Comedy Central is making rich fare out of bland ingredients.

November 2, 2001
The News Internationalist
Hard news is back, and for that Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker is glad. As the country heads to battle against a shadowy foe, the 20-year veteran of the newsmagazine relishes the chance to draw the attention of his readers back to foreign affairs.

November 2, 2001
High Speed Slows Down: New Media Technology Hits a Wall
It's not just the media economy that's receding. According to new findings from a consumer tracking study, so is the adoption rate of new media technologies, including broadband and dial-up Internet access and cell phones.

November 9, 2001
Newspapers Feel the Heat
With a weak advertising market further pulled down by the events of Sept. 11, the third quarter of 2001 proved to be one of the toughest for newspaper companies, with average revenues and cash flow losses for public companies.

November 16, 2001
Cyberspace Redefines its Concept of Advertising Space
The New York Times Co. on Thursday introduced a new online advertising unit that could fundamentally alter the way advertisers and agencies value and plan online media. Instead of selling traditional banner ads posted on disconnected Web pages, the Times’ Internet unit will offer advertisers the opportunity to follow specific users through their actual user session – or series of page views – on the NYTimes.com site.

November 30, 2001
Agencies Say Tsk, Tsk, Tsk to Would-Be Manager of Media Risk
This year began with a major outside player announcing plans to enter the ad business in a way that would have supplanted a key role of media agencies: to hedge advertisers’ risks in the media marketplace. As the year winds down, it is now clear that player, Enron, could not even manage its own risks.

December 11, 2001
Recession? There's a Recession?!
Think the ’90s were the decade of superstore expansion? That was just the beginning. Build, build, build continues to be the mantra for the nation’s biggest book chains, which plan to keep up, or even accelerate, their pace of superstore expansion in the coming year.

December 17, 2001
Yahoo! Grasps at Profitability
With a combination of cost-cutting measures and new paid services, Yahoo! is trying to get to profitability as quickly as possible, despite inclement economic weather.

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There are about 154 million Americans in the civilian labor force. About 140 million of them are employed. About 114 million of those employed are white people. White men who are older than 16 have 61 million of the jobs. So white men have 43% of all jobs, while white men make up about 36% of the U.S. population. White women 16 and older have about 53 million of the jobs (37%—about proportionate). That's already 114 million of the jobs (81% of all civilian jobs), leaving just 26 million jobs.

So there are about 15 million black people with civilian jobs in the U.S. (out of about 40 million black people in total), leaving 11 million jobs for the Asians and "Hispanics" and the "everyone else"—and the Asians have like 7 million of those.

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