Bagels outside NYC

Vaguely related to Cog's recent post on American yogurt, what's the deal with the sub-par bagels outside the New York City area? We just got bagels from what is supposedly the best bagel place in Boulder, and they weren't even close in taste to our bagel place of choice in Westchester. Why are the bagels so much better in the NYC area? If there were some ingredient local to NYC that didn't travel well, I could understand, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

New Times Reader

I just installed the new Times Reader on my Mac, and it seems to work very nicely. This blog post discusses many of the improvements. For text layout, it uses a new framework implemented on Adobe AIR. Of course, the downside is you have to pay to get the full product; for free, reading the Times on the web with my multi-column Greasemonkey script is a decent substitute :-).

NYMag Top Chef Posts

For those Top Chef fans out there, I created a Yahoo! pipe that has the New York Magazine Grub Street posts on the show: here you go.