- No Recommendations yet - go add some!
- A fun piece and I love the idea of the interactive map.
However, it's just sloppy reporting and misleading to include references to the private spur under the Waldorf and to the 1844 Atlantic Avenue Tunnel when discussing planned but never completed parts of the subway transit system. Both were part of mainline railroads and neither was ever part of the IRT, BRT, BMT, or IND. By including them, you slip from educating your listeners to misleading and misinforming them.
- I'm a fan of Mr. Bitttman's culinary writing and found him charming in those little recipe videos he did for the Times. I can also see the logic of what he's proposing, and appreciate how the symmetry of taxing bad food to subsidize good food must appeal to him.
But I find myself very uncomfortable with this degree of intrusion by the state into our private lives. This particular flavor of discomfort has a long history in our country, which began, you may recall, when a "non-essential" part of our diet -- tea -- was taxed.
Subsidizing vegetables is a good idea, but lets find the money for that by ending the subsidies for industrialized crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton.
Mr. Bittman repeatedly makes analogies to laws requiring us to wear seat belts in cars and helmets on motorcycles, or to the taxes on cigarettes. But the analogies are false.
In all those case, the only people paying the tax or subject to the safety rules are those actually engaging in driving the cars and cycles or addicted to the cigarettes. For example, if I take the subway and never get in a car, the seatbelt law doesn't affect me.
But under Mr. Bittman's proposal, I'd have to pay a soda tax or a french-fry tax even if I only bought them occasionally and consuming them had never caused me to become obese or otherwise unhealthy.
I just can't see supporting a law that punishes the innocent along with the guilty.
- I think our public school teachers have a very hard job and I have only the greatest respect for them. I also don't think we yet have a good way to fairly evaluate their work. But I don't understand why tenure even exists in our public schools.
My understanding of tenure is that it's necessary in colleges and universities as a way of guaranteeing academic freedom. But is academic freedom an issue for those who teach third grade? Are public school teachers doing original research? I don't think so.
So I don't understand why elementary school teachers should be different in this respect from any other public employees.
- Maybe I didn't hear him right, but it sounded to me as if Brian described the deductions as if they were tax CREDITS rather than deductions.
Tax deductions reduce your taxable income and then indirectly the total tax you owe. They don't directly reduce your tax liability.
- I believe you misspoke about Time Magazine's circulation. It's still over a million. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704388504575419202376842786.html
- I've worked in the science fiction field since the 70s. One of the old masters of the genre I had the privilege of knowing was L. Sprague De Camp, who knew Hubbard well going back to the pulp magazine days.
Sprague told me that in the late 40s or early 50s, Hubbard told him and some other colleagues that he'd figured out that "The best way to make a lot of money is to found a religion." I think that speaks for itself.
Although he had some talent as a writer of pulp SF, to this day I consider L. Ron Hubbard science fiction's greatest embarrassment.
- I enjoyed Kurt's conversation with Phil Patton about the proposed new Apple HQ, but would like to point out that one of the examples Phil gave for the fate of iconic corporate headquarters was not well chosen.
The Chrysler Building was not originally designed by William Van Allen for Chrysler but for another developer, from whom Mr. Chrysler bought it, nor was the building ever owned by the car company; it was the personal property of Walter Chrysler. Indeed, it's more accurate to think of it as being named for the man than the company.
Here are two relevant quotes on these points from a New Yorker article published in the November 18, 2002 issue:
"The Chrysler Building would not look as it does if Dreamland had not burned down in 1911. Coney Island's white-towered Freudian fairway had been the brainchild of a real estate entrepreneur named William H. Reynolds, whose reputation for public mayhem was such that when a short circuit in the "Hell Gate" exhibit set the entire blocks long place ablaze, some newspapers as sumed that it was just another stunt. Financially drained and cured of his taste for artificial fantasy, Reynolds turned his attention to the real-life fantasy of Manhattan, where he proposed to erect the tallest building in the world. Although the Woolworth Building beat him to the punch, in 1913, and the war slowed him down, by the time the late-twenties boom began he had got hold of a choice piece of land at the new city hub around Grand Central Terminal, and had hired William Van Alen to execute the design."
The land was actually owned by Cooper Union, from which Reynolds leased it. Chrysler subsequently bought the lease and the rights to the design from Reynolds.
"The money came from a personal account. Although Chrysler had been searching for a site for his business headquarters since he'd set up his corporation, just three years earlier - during which time it had gone from thirty-second place among car manufacturers to third-this was not a corporate acquisition. Chrysler wanted the building as a project for his sons . . . "
Chrysler did have Van Allen make a number of changes, including the addition of the various automotive icons, and the overall design continued to evolve through the construction and the famous competition with H. Craig Severance's Bank of Manhattan Building, but the essential form was there from the start, before Chrysler was involved. Robert A.M. Stern's NEW YORK 1930 has an instructive and fascinating four-panel illustration showing how the design changed on p. 604.
- No discussion of smoked salmon in which cream cheese comes up should be allowed to pass without pointing out that since, as Niki says, smoked salmon is "delicate," it really doesn't work very well with cream cheese on its own. (Adding capers is a good idea in that case.)
That's the reason smoked salmon has NOTHING to do with classic bagels and lox (despite what's served under that name in many diners and delis). As they'd be happy to explain at Russ & Daughters, lox is salt-cured salmon and is NOT smoked. Its stronger, salty flavor is well-balanced by cream cheese and doesn't get overwhelmed as smoked salmon is.
With or without capers, you haven't had real bagels and lox if it was made with Nova Scotia or other smoked salmon. Hence my motto, "Save the lox! Nova difference."
- As someone fanatical enough about bagels to have had letters on the topic published in the Times, I'm always pleased by coverage that stands up for bagel authenticity. So naturally I enjoyed your conversation with Adam Kuban.
I was left with one question, though. The teaser for the piece referred to bagels in Paris. There was no mention of that in the segment proper. I assume it got cut for time. Can you tell us what we missed?
- Jani, there appears to be a transcription error in this excerpt, but I wasn't able to confirm it because I don't have the book, and the page I'd need to see is skipped in Amazon's "look inside the book" feature.
However, my guess is that the reference here to the kugel being "left to stew in the oven overnight" is probably talking about the way this recipe was done in the old days, when people in a village would bring their Sabbath food (cholent, kugel, etc.) to cook slowly in the baker's unfired oven overnight by its low retained heat. Ms. Nathan doesn't intend for you to do that now, but rather to bake it more rapidly at 350 as she specifies.
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