Plus, New York City launches a campaign to support Chinatown businesses — and more intel

Seltzer Land is coming to the Brooklyn Expo Center

In what can only be a natural progression after the summer of White Claw, a hard-seltzer festival dubbed Seltzer Land is coming to Brooklyn. The one-day-only festival is scheduled to land in Greenpoint on May 16, at the Brooklyn Expo Center, according to the Wall Street Journal. Like a wine or beer festival, attendees pay an entrance fee — starting at $29 per ticket — and then spend the day perusing booths and sampling hard seltzers from dozens of vendors.

In what is perhaps even more depressing news, it may not be long before Seltzer Land has some competition in the field. The WSJ report noted that Fizz Fight, a Denver-based hard seltzer festival, is also looking at expanding to new markets, including New York. Hard seltzer sales have skyrocketed in the last few years and some industry analysts expect the market to be valued at $2.5 billion by next year.

In other news

— New York City launched a new campaign called “Show Some Love to Chinatown” to help generate support for Chinatown establishments after local restaurants and other businesses have reported slowing sales amid widespread panic over the new coronavirus.

— Discounted restaurant booking app Seated is also running a promotion to support local Chinatown restaurants. Diners currently get an extra 5 percent off when they book seats at participating Chinese restaurants on the app.

— Mario’s Pizza, located on 2342 Arthur Avenue, turns 100 years old today.

— Turnstyle, the underground food hall inside the Columbus Circle subway station, just launched a mash-up series featuring collaborations between its vendors. The first mash-up includes Pizza Dumplings (from Lisa’s Dumplings and Champion Pizza) and the Drunken Panda (an alcoholic bubble tea from Panda Bubble Tea and Merchant’s Gate). The menu runs until February 21.

— The hit-making team behind wine bar Ruffian and Mediterranean restaurant and bar Kindred are now heading up the kitchen at Black Emperor, a casual East Village bar. Expect classic dive bar menu items with Southeast Asian twists, like Thai curry tater tots with Massaman gravy, and umami croquettes.

— Resy is giving away 500 free Sicilian vodka pizzas from Pasquale Jones to celebrate Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Reservations for the free pizza will be available through the app starting at 10 a.m. today; pick-up takes place between 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow.

— Whole Foods is taking reservations for a free Italian pop-up dinner next week, on February 20. The six-course meal will be hosted by Whole Foods’s culinary team, and 20 seats are available.

— 5-A all the way:

Chase just launched a very interesting new promotion in partnership with DoorDash, offering discounts on the company’s DashPass unlimited delivery program.

For $9.99 per month, DashPass customers receive lower service fees and free delivery on all orders of more than $12. According to the company, members save an average of between $4 and $5 per order. The fee is normally waived for all customers for the first month, but now select Chase cardholders will get a significant discount for the first membership year. Some Chase cardholders get it for free.

You can activate the offer by visiting the website here or you can download the DoorDash app.

There’s a good chance you’ll be able to take advantage, since four of the eligible cards make our list of Chase’s best cards of the year, including:

• Chase Sapphire Reserve®: Best for dining and travel
• Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card: Best overall mid-tier card
• Chase Freedom Unlimited®: Best for non-bonus spending
• Chase Freedom®: Best for rotating bonus categories

Both Sapphire-branded cards offer free DashPass for the entire first year, while the Freedom cards above will get you three months for free and then a 50% discount for the rest of the first year. You’ll also be eligible for that latter offer with the Chase Freedom® Student Credit Card, along with Chase Slate®.

To register, simply add your eligible card to the DoorDash app and click to add the offer, anytime between today and Dec. 31, 2021. Just be sure to add a calendar reminder for 12 months out so you can reevaluate then — otherwise after the first year, the DashPass may renew at the full $9.99 monthly price.

Unfortunately, the $120 in annual dining credits you’ll receive with the American Express® Gold Card only cover DoorDash competitors GrubHub and Seamless. You can, however, pair DashPass with DoorDash’s new customer offer that gives you $15 to spend between your first three orders when you sign up using TPG’s referral link.

Featured photo by Eric Helgas/The Points Guy.

The National Audubon Society has announced the winners of the 2019 Audubon Photography Awards competition. Photo credits from top to bottom: Kathrin Swoboda, Kevin Ebi, Shari McCollough. Here’s Swoboda describing how she got her amazing shot of a red-winged blackbird blowing smoke rings:

I visit this park near my home to photograph blackbirds on cold mornings, often aiming to capture the “smoke rings” that form from their breath as they sing out. On this occasion, I arrived early on a frigid day and heard the cry of the blackbirds all around the boardwalk. This particular bird was very vociferous, singing long and hard. I looked to set it against the dark background of the forest, shooting to the east as the sun rose over the trees, backlighting the vapor.

Ebi shared some of his other photos of the eagle stealing a rabbit from a fox in this blog post.

You can see the Audubon’s longlist of 100 images here. Birds are awesome! (via in focus)

Eagle-eyed viewers of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Showtime series Who Is America? may have noticed a familiar name deep in the first episode’s closing credits. Nathan Fielder, the guerrilla satirist and tender boy from Comedy Central’s Nathan For You, was listed as a consulting producer. There’s something lovely about…

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Amazon is swooping in to revive the show after Syfy’s cancellation, bringing relief to a devastated fan base and furthering the company’s mission of finding the next ‘Game of Thrones’

A good measure of a TV series is how you feel when that series gets canceled. For example, when Syfy announced earlier this month that it wouldn’t move forward with The Expanse following its third season, my entire life was derailed. I was quite literally getting texts from friends that started with, “Hey man, sorry to hear about The Expanse,” as if a loved one just passed away. There were questions I just couldn’t answer: Why this is this happening? What’s even the point of Peak TV if the best sci-fi show since Battlestar Galactica gets an early ax? Should we just end television as a medium forever? My point is: The Expanse is a great show.

And thankfully, it’s not dead yet. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Amazon and the show’s production company, Alcon Entertainment, are finalizing a deal to bring The Expanse back for a fourth season on Amazon’s streaming platform, which already owns the North American streaming rights to the series (Netflix owns The Expanse’s global rights, which is probably one of many things being sorted out in negotiation).

This potential move is, for starters, extremely dope, and enough to make me pull back the curtains in my apartment and consider living life again. It’s also apparently something Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been clamoring for for years. The Reporter notes that Bezos was “livid” when Syfy first acquired the series, and smartly points out that making this new deal would fall in line with Bezos’s vision of finding the “next Game of Thrones” for his streamer.

The forthcoming Lord of the Rings series is Amazon’s flashiest new IP, and the one that’s bringing the most hype, but The Expanse shares a lot more of Thrones’ DNA than you might expect. Based on the book series of the same name from James S.A. Corey (a pen name for writers Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham ), The Expanse dovetails narrative threads from across the solar system that slowly start coming together; there are moments when someone from Earth finally runs into characters from a stolen Martian spaceship, and it packs the same wallop as Tyrion Lannister bumping into Daenerys Targaryen. There’s also a mysterious biological substance called the protomolecule that could potentially wipe out all of humanity—the show’s equivalent to the White Walkers. I could keep going, but I’ll just say this: Abraham  has collaborated with George R.R. Martin and clearly took some lessons from the author in regard to world-building and subversive narrative twists.

Still, the question would remain: Can The Expanse ever come close to the popularity of Game of Thrones? The underlying numbers at Syfy weren’t too promising: The show hit around a half-million viewers per episode, which likely spelled its demise on the network, along with an agreement with Alcon that placed a greater emphasis on first-run linear rights—meaning there was a greater emphasis on live-viewing, which is an increasingly archaic way to profit off a show. The Expanse’s live viewership numbers don’t account for DVR plays or the number of people who’ve binged the earlier seasons on Amazon—or, if you live overseas, on Netflix. Amazon and Netflix keep their metrics close to the vest, but the fact that Amazon is even considering acquiring The Expanse suggests it’s seen enough interest from subscribers to warrant a fourth season.

However, even if the numbers aren’t overwhelmingly high, fans of The Expanse are nothing if not really passionate about the series. In the week-plus since the cancellation was first announced, fans created a Change.org petition for Netflix or Amazon to pick up the show (yeah, of course I signed it); the likes of George R.R. Martin, Wil Wheaton, Patton Oswalt, an actual astronaut, and Paul Krugman voiced their support; and, most impressively, the most ardent fans raised enough money to fly a #SaveTheExpanse banner over Amazon HQ in Santa Monica, California.

The Expanse even got an uptick in viewers in the first episode to air following the cancellation news, with #SaveTheExpanse trending on Twitter last Wednesday evening. The whole enterprise lent The Expanse its own miniature news cycle; last week was probably the most the show has been discussed online since it premiered in 2015. All of it may seem like noise, but there’s a fact at the heart of it: The Expanse is a great, special sci-fi series. When the hoopla around it begins to dissipate—i.e., whenever the news of Amazon reviving the series becomes capital-O Official—it still deserves to be part of the zeitgeist. A show that deals with tribalism and international (er, interplanetary) relations, features a supernatural metaphor for nuclear armageddon, and champions onscreen diversity without ever making a big deal about it never should’ve been on the brink of cancellation. If Jeff Bezos and Amazon do pick up The Expanse—and so help me God, they better—they wouldn’t just be getting the next Game of Thrones. They’d be getting something better.