March 27, 2019

People Are Very Upset About the Way This Dude Cuts His Bagels

Doesn’t seem like an ideal way to cut them!

Twitter user Alek Krautmann ignited controversy this morning with his photo of vertically sliced bagels.

First things first, these bagels appear to be from Panera Bread, which may be a perfectly acceptable bagel vendor in St. Louis, but if you live in New York and you want a bagel, it’s probably a good idea to keep walking to a place whose owner is not currently attempting to “atone for his family’s Nazi past.”

But their provenance aside, these bagels have been sliced in a way that, depending who you ask, is either a major faux pas or the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The original tweet was quickly ratioed, and responses ridiculing the sliced bagel concept garnered more likes than the original post.

Even Dictionary.com chimed in, arguing that the etymology of the word “bagel” requires it to take the shape of a ring.

Sliced bagel critics say that the slices on either side of the bagel hole would be too small, and that part of the joy of eating a bagel comes from sinking one’s teeth into its thick, chewy dough. Fans have said that the bagel slices have more surface area for schmears and that some people prefer not to eat a whole bagel — a problem I can’t claim to have ever encountered. If you ask me, pizza should be folded, pasta water should be salted, and bagels should be sliced through the middle and loaded with cream cheese, maybe some lox.

Bagels are also excellent sandwich vessels. A bacon, egg and cheese just wouldn’t be the same sandwiched between wafer-thin discs. Can a slice of tomato even fit atop a bread-sliced bagel crisp?

But I won’t completely knock it until I try it. I just have to find a New York bagel shop that’s willing to butcher a perfectly good hunk of dough. After all, stranger things have happened.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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