Newmark's Door

. . . I"ve seen in a while. The context is the closing of H&H Bagels in New York City.

This bastardization wouldn’t be a big deal if H&H were an outlier producing an interesting variant—something like the City Bakery’s pretzel croissant, one of the most delicious things in existence. The problem is that many people, even many New Yorkers—call them the Toothless Revisionists—have come to believe that the squishy-sweet H&H-style bagel is the quintessence of the form. Just as the economist Sir Thomas Gresham once posited that bad (i.e., debased) currency drives good money out of circulation, bad bagels, with their easy chew and cozy sweetness, made the good seem ascetic, rendering them all but extinct. The pretenders are an unstoppable, invasive species, like kudzu or the Kardashian sisters.