Updated, 5:25 p.m.

What we’re hearing around the water cooler here at City Room is a lot of talk about water: what kind of water to drink, how to drink it, how to order it at a restaurant, what it costs, how it tastes and so forth.



In the Sunday Styles section, Alex Williams wrote about how bottled water, once considered a healthy convenience, has become a symbol of waste.

The Times’s editorial page said to choose tap water over bottled because “The more the wealthy opt out of drinking tap water, the less political support there will be for investing in maintaining America’s public water supply.”



On the Diner’s Journal Blog, Frank Bruni discussed the complex politics of ordering water at a restaurant.

The Week in Review section calculated that drinking eight glasses of water a day will cost you about 49 cents a year if you take it from a New York City tap and $1,400 a year if you buy bottled.

Marian Burros reported for the Dining section in May that some New York restaurants, including Mario Batali’s Del Posto, have stopped selling bottled water as a form of environmental activism.

Aquafina turned out, like Coca-Cola’s Dasani, to be just tap water in a bottle. In July, PepsiCo Inc. decided to start including the words “Public Water Source” on Aquafina labels.

Earlier this summer, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a piece about New York City water after city officials launched a brief poster campaign called “Get Your Fill” intended to promote drinking city water. The city health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, told NPR: “We have great water here. New York City tap water has been described as the Champagne of municipal tap waters.”

At ABC News, Jon Stossel ran a taste test, offering people New York City tap water and five other bottled waters.

We found out that if you want to pay $30 a bottle for luxury water you can go to Via Genova, Westchester’s first water bar:

We also learned about the risks of excessive hydration (not to mention the menace of dihydrogen monoxide.)

We’d like to hear what kind of water you drink and what kind of water you think everyone else should drink.

An update: James Dobbs asked a question below about the drinking water available at the offices of The New York Times. Various brands of bottled water (both spring water and filtered tap water) can be purchased in our cafeteria and from vending machines. Our drinking fountains and kitchen taps supply New York City water that is filtered in the building. We do not use bottled water coolers such as Poland Spring because the complex electrical wiring beneath the building’s floorboards could be compromised by a large spill. In short, the answer to Mr. Dobbs’s question is: we use both tap water and bottled water here at The New York Times.