At Thrillist, I worked as a Cities Editor, responsible for editing guides and features across the publication’s many editorial markets. I oversaw 11 cities and worked with dozens of trusted freelancers, but I came away from the job particularly proud of a franchise my fellow cities editors and I worked on that I just happened to christen with a name: Key to the City.

The series’ premise was to tell magazine-y travel stories using the reliable local knowhow of our freelancers. The results were a run of joyous local features that each captured something specific about a given city — New Orleans’s Vietnamese food, the history of Boston’s North End, and Nashville’s hip-hop scene, to name a few. I conceived more of these than I wound up editing, but I love the whole run.

Image via “Why You Can’t Leave NOLA Without Eating Vietnamese Food” by E.M. Tran, for Thrillist’s Key to the City series.