Journalism. I’m not convinced the perks always outweigh the drawbacks. This work can lead to debilitating happy hour tabs or mandatory time with Sean Spicer. I spend some of each week—not a lot, but still—deleting e-mail press releases about Saudi Arabian horse breeding, and was recently “pitched” by a company called BidetKing. I never dreamed of this. But there are good things.

In particular, my colleagues and I hold some of the few (legal) jobs that allow us to go to unusual places to see, and often ingest, strange things. In my own relatively humble career, this has meant changing into a suit in an Australian train station at 5 a.m., attending a mountain lion roast, and one very nervous prison tour. (Just visiting.) BidetKing can’t compete. Even when your magazine claims to be about just one city, you can get around.

During the creation of this issue, managing editor Margaret Seiler rocketed along the lonely roads of Central and Eastern Oregon, investigating haunted hotels, hot springs, and our high per-capita brewery count. (She left one garment behind in a hotel refrigerator, and I still can’t figure out how, but it sounds like she’s getting it back.) Meanwhile, senior editor Marty Patail was meeting a senator at NE 114th and Halsey; senior editor Fiona McCann was at the airport, watching movies.

Food critic Karen Brooks devoured an unhealthy number of pizzas—the sort of hazard duty that gets writers nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award. (Brooks is up against Los Angeles Times legend Jonathan Gold and Eater national critic Bill Addison for food journalism’s arguably most prestigious prize. It could be like Leicester City winning the Premier League!) The entire editorial staff shared in the risk: executive senior editor Kelly Clarke marshaled us on a metro-wide hunt for great low-budget food. The results include a secret fried-chicken bucket and some golden piroshki I devoured in the parking lot of Market Express at NE 102nd and Glisan.

Glad to do it, you know? We all are. Now, I need to get to work on our next cover story, Best Saudi Arabian Thoroughbreds.

Zach Dundas
Editor in Chief