Quotes from Holly Hughes

Going home does not come naturally to me. If my father's medium was silence, mine had tended to be escape. But there's no future in escape because the world is round. So the faster you run away, the faster you end up, right back where you started, face to face with whatever you were running from in the first place. Your worst fears, they're always the most patient. They'll wait up for you. That's what makes them the worst.

What if it isn't so much Indianapolis trying to be Brooklyn, as Brooklyn wanting to capture something of Indianapolis?

As a food writer, I've found myself both annoyed and a bit mystified that the social-media value of our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners is considered almost as important as their gustatory properties. While the nose never lies—and neither do the taste buds—the eyes do, all the damn time. I

Under international trade laws, "sardine" covers almost two dozen species of fish (for U.S. products it exclusively means young herring), though the true sardine, from Portugal, Spain, France, Morocco, and Algeria, refers to the young pilchard (Sardina pilchardus) caught in Mediterranean or Atlantic waters.

Like humidity, the truth thickens all air.

Then there's the newish (November) nonfiction book by hot young writer Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, which details more horrors of factory farming. Like how just one pig farming operation (Smithfield) produces more tons of shit than does the entire human population of California and Texas combined, and how that untreated waste has nowhere to go other than sprayed in a fecal mist into the air and waterways.

It's my first time in this place. Maybe like you, though, I've been here before—anyone who's walked through Williamsburg or seen an episode of Girls has. It's a landscape of under-35s, bristling with locally brewed IPAs, restaurant pop-ups, and new kinds of mustard. And everybody—literally everybody—is flaunting freestyle forearm ink. But tonight I'm not in Williamsburg. I'm in Indianapolis.

old-fashioneds made with bone marrow–infused rye

the real achievement isn't getting out of the place where you were born to build a new identity for yourself. It's better to stay put and change the culture—genuinely transform—where you are.