Leading off Wednesday Morning Links today is “We Are So Good Together,” the underground icon of, well, different things for different folks I suppose. The full story is told by the artist himself on 20×200′s site, where prints from a numbered edition are available, for the last time, ever, for $50 USD. Are you so good together?

Next, a must-read for food lovers is Everyone Eats: But that doesn’t make you a restaurant critic, an article on the history and current state of food journalism and criticism in the Columbia Journalism Review by the inimitable Robert Sietsema. Sietsema doesn’t hit us over the head, but guides us through a romantic history with its roots in an America where chicken a la king was haute cuisine and housewives were the only ones to read the Food Section of the New York Times; “colloquially referred to as the Women’s Section,” says Sietsema. Unfortunately it isn’t until the last page that Sietsema lays it on us: “I’m all for everyone having his or her say, but when it comes to cultural criticism there is a strong case to be made for professionalism and expertise.” Too true. Here’s hoping that the CJR publishes part two. New media means democracy, but it also means chaos. I’m excited for voices like Sietsema’s to guide us, reasonably and ethically, into new territory.

I just discovered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blog The Medieval Garden Enclosed written about the Cloisters Museum and Gardens. Their most recent post is about myrtle, which they call Love’s Herb. The post provides delightful history, mythology, and literary references to the plant. Previous posts include pictures and information about some of my favorite botanicals including Butcher’s room, boxwood, and strawberry tree.

Image of myrtle via The Arboretum at Arizona State University

Who doesn’t love a good debutante exposé piece? The new issue of the Believer (of which both the web and paper issue is appropriately pink) offers Becoming a Lady: British Reality Television and the Development of Good Manners by Amelie Gillette. There’s only a brief snippet available online, but it’s enough to goad me into wanting to read the whole thing. My horror at the opening scene of a late-nineties rave after-party is balanced by my affinity for these words: “From what I understand, entry into the demimonde of New Orleans debutantes amounts to an accident of birth. If your mother was a debutante, you can be one too, even if you’re battling some kind of terrible deformity like a cleft palate, an unfortunate unibrow, or a Yankee father.” As a debutante born of a Yankee father, I can’t demur.