sweatonthelawn:

Or, ‘Ed Levine’s Existential Bagel Crisis’

“They aren’t calling to me,” said Ed Levine—a man who had once written the sentence “No city, perhaps in the history of the world, is so closely identified with a breadstuff as New York is with the bagel.” Who had used words such as superb and terrific and huzzah! to describe the very same bagels that sat before us.

There was only one bagel that the tasters rallied around—and that was one from the neighborhood bagel shop, a dark horse, one we’d thought little more than a control.

Ed hung his head, a full-blown mid-life bagel crisis coming on. What was going on?