NYC

New York City in the Fall only gets better when incredible food and delicious wine enter the picture. YumSugar is partnering with Food & Wine to make that experience possible, just for you!

Spend a weekend in the Big Apple exploring the New York City Wine & Food Festival alongside our YumSugar editors, discovering new delicacies and learning the art of wine pairing from experts. Your favorite personalities, chefs, culinary stars, and wine connoisseurs will teach you everything you need to know about your favorites and introduce you to new discoveries.

Enter to win — and spend a weekend changing the way you think about food. To whet your palate for the New York City Wine & Food Festival, check out YumSugar's coverage of the Aspen Food & Wine Classic!

Rachel Sterne, the newly appointed chief digital officer for NYC, released her first report on the city's digital roadmap, and goals she'll be implementing over the course of the year that will provide connectivity for its citizens. While I haven't finished reading the entire 60-page document yet, I am pretty impressed with all the digital tools the city already enjoys. Below are just a few I've already found published in the report:

• More free WiFi in public places, including parks.
• An official @nycgov Twitter account, updating followers on city happenings, news, and alerts.
• Online bill payments for city dues like water, parking tickets, and property taxes.
• 311 service requests, which allow users to report incidents, sanitation issues, taxi or noise complaints, and a number of other issues via a mobile app or website.
• Condom finder iPhone app.
• School-based iZone tools that allow teachers to track progress of their students in real-time, and customize learning plans to individual student needs.

Does your city offer any of these digital perks? What kind of digital progression woud you like to see in your own town?

Without hesitation, Vena Cava is on my shortlist of must-wear brands, and the designer duo and BFFs Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock are two of the coolest PopSugar City girls I know. The ladies haven't taken a break since debuting their 2011 Fall collection in February. Currently, Buhai and Mayock are in Vietnam, rounding up inspiration for Spring 2012 (talk about springing forward). They just launched their awesome new ecommerce site, and even a world away, they still managed to give us the inside scoop on what every New York girl should have in her Spring wardrobe, where they find inspiration in the city, the best street "treasures" they've come across, and more.

PopSugar NYC: As a fellow West Coast defector, I'm curious, what was it about NYC in the initial stages that made you stay indefinitely?

Sophie Buhai: We both attended Parsons, so school is what brought us out to NYC. New York is really the place to be if you want to start a small fashion line; the industry is very supportive, and you have access to amazing production and all the editors. We felt very connected to an emerging group of designers who were all starting brands around the same time. The early 2000s were when the word "young designer" was exploding, and the economy was ripe for new talent. We were lucky to be in New York during that time, I don't think that could have happened if we had been in LA. We hope to make it out to LA at some point . . . perhaps when we launch our caftan line!

To find out what else the ladies have to say, head over to PopSugar NYC to read the whole interview.

Kids who skip school in New York City may be answering to Magic Johnson. In order to get truant students to school, Mayor Bloomberg has launched an initiative that sends recorded celebrity messages to lackadaisical youngsters and encourages them to get to class. A New York Times report said:

The campaign, appropriately named "Wake Up! NYC," rolls out next week. It will focus on the 6,500 students who have been absent for 10 or more school days in a single year and attend one of the 25 schools whose principals volunteered to join the effort. If it yields results, it will be expanded citywide, where roughly 250,000 students miss at least one month of school in a given year, officials said.

Children who shake off school can grow into uneducated adults, so empowering people at the get-go is a common-sense approach. What do you think of this program?

Don't these tigers look just like giant cozy kitties all snuggled up together? It was a Winter-white snow day at the Bronx Zoo, and while some animals like to play in the snow, these felines are keeping it mellow. See the purrrrty pictures below!

Peppers are in season — a fact that marzbars proves with this stunning photo from the Savory Sights group. Aren't the purple ones beautiful?!

We were walking through Union Square in NYC and found this market, I just had to take a photo.

Do you have pictures of delicious-looking produce? Share them in the YumSugar Community! Your photo could be featured here!

Ever bought a foundation that's exactly the right color, but somehow it winds up looking crappy anyway? It could be that the stuff in question was just a bad texture for your particular skin type. We asked NYC New York Color makeup artist Mathew Nigara (who has worked with stars like Jessica Simpson and Kate Winslet), to explain which foundation textures work for varying skin types. To see his recommendations, just keep reading.