#429: THE EDITORS OF DRIFT MAG

🥛 Eden soymilk (Original flavor) , 🎥 Fruit of Paradise , 🚶‍♀️ Walking everywhere, ▶️ Holiday, and more.

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Cool people like cool things, which is why we asked Kiara and Rebecca of The Drift to share a taste of their taste on Perfectly Imperfect.

THE DRIFT is a New York City-based lit mag founded by Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka. They’ve built a loyal cult following for their culture + politics coverage and buzzy launch parties which has earned them profiles in The New York Times + The Atlantic and cosigns such as gallerist David Zwirner’s (who is now the nonprofit magazine’s lead funder). The Drift is a breath of fresh air; in their own words, it “aims to introduce new work and new ideas by young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse.” The magazine prints tri-annually and you can buy the latest issue here. Lucky for us, Kiara and Rebecca are here to tell us what they’ve been into.

Without further ado

Kiara (instagram)

🥛 Eden soymilk (Original flavor)

Despite the endless proliferation of nondairy beverages, I have yet to find an alt-milk I like better than this classic that has graced the shelves of natural food stores since 1983. (The pleasingly retro packaging does not appear to have been updated since.) This company has been slinging healthy fare from Michigan for decades and you can bet they use non-GMO soybeans. The result is creamy with a malty vanilla flavor, though there’s no added sugar and, best of all, no Oatly-esque tongue residue. 

🎥 Fruit of Paradise

Czech New Wave luminary Věra Chytilová is best known for her wacky-girl feminist classic Daisies, but the stunning Fruit of Paradise (1970) is the film that made me pledge allegiance to her forever. Laugh-out-loud funny with a sinister edge, it’s a pagan Adam and Eve parable with a country/asylum sensibility. Top-notch style; endlessly rewatchable; caused the Czech government to ban Chytilová from filmmaking for 8 years. 

🌽 Corn ice cream

This is the best ice cream flavor, FYI. 

🍌 Miami Fruit

I’m a big fan of sourcing perishable foods from the internet (there’s nothing more romantic than mail-ordering a crate of oysters, or more decadent than sprinkling your rice with ikura procured electronically). Miami Fruit ranks among my favorite options for its offering of truly luscious tropical fruits, but also simply as a compelling website on which to kill time browsing the dizzying varieties of said fruits. You can mark pretty much any special occasion with a rare mangosteen, a black sapote, or a handful of Peruvian groundcherries. I have a friend who once hosted a “long avocado” brunch courtesy of Miami Fruit, and another who memorably gifted his wife a box of raw cacao. MF even stocks the famous Gros Michel banana — now incredibly difficult to find, it was the standard banana variety (and the inspiration for artificial banana flavoring) until it almost went extinct in the ‘50s and was replaced by the supposedly lesser Cavendish. Try the platonic-ideal banana they’ve been keeping from us, order a variety box, or just get, like, 30 soursop all at once. 

💠 The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

I first read this novel — the great Penelope Fitzgerald’s last — in a college class and fell in love with its simple and alluring beauty in much the same way that its protagonist, the German Romantic-era philosopher Novalis, falls for the irresistible Sophie. Disclaimer: she’s, uh, twelve. He’s twenty-two. It was a different time (1794). But this is not a Lolita story, nor does it read like a typical historical novel. It’s a mysterious, heady bildungsroman that’s so much more fun and less esoteric than it sounds, especially if you’re comfortable with a little mysticism. Just trust me: it’s perfect.

Rebecca (instagram)

🚶‍♀️ Walking everywhere

this is probably self-justification because I’m temperamentally incapable of exercise, but: why waste your time looking at your phone on the subway and your money on a gym membership or ~exercise classes~ when you can just walk everywhere you need to go?

▶️ Holiday

A Katharine Hepburn/ Cary Grant flick that was so anti-work it alienated Depression-era viewers. When I was a kid, a tattooed guy behind the counter at a video store (back when those existed...) recommended it to me, and l've loved it ever since. A movie about how to live.

📖 The Transit of Venus

Perfectly constructed novel by Shirley Hazzard about how we misread other people, and how those perceptions shape the courses of our lives. Will make you cry and believe in fate. A high wire act.

🗣️ Letting strangers talk to you

How else are you going to learn the details of an octogenerian’s decades-long affair with an opera singer he met at Dive 75, or help him proofread the “memo” he’s written coming clean to both his partners before he moves into an old age home (at which point his double life will prove unsustainable)?