"To the well-known political, economic, and cultural revolutions that inaugurated capitalist modernity, we ought to add a fourth: a pharmacological revolution, one that began innocently enough with a variety of foreign substances — coffee, tea, chocolate — and culminated in a multi-billion dollar regulatory regime responsible for adapting subjects to their alienating conditions of existence. Forget 'the opium of the people': actual drugs have done and are doing more to prop up an increasingly delegitimized system than any mere ideology. Like broader cultural developments, the history of drugs offers a unique lens through which to glimpse the inner workings of capitalism, and specifically the demands it makes on its human subjects. Perhaps no drug more revealingly illustrates this claim than coffee, a stimulant uniquely and consistently praised by the ruling class since its introduction to the west. ..."
The Outline
2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops
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