Like Tapped, I find the impossibility of getting a decent bagel outside of New York — indeed, anywhere other than Ess-a-Bagel on 21st and First — a pressing quality-of-life issue, and welcome Mark Kleiman’s groundbreaking analysis of this well-known and distressing phenomenon.

But if the folks at Tapped think it’s hard to get an acceptable shmeer in DC, they should try London. As Kleiman suggests, the British supermarkets’ futile efforts to reproduce the bagel are part of the problem, not the solution. And the displaced Noo Yawka in me just can’t warm to that odd cousin on Brick Lane, the “beigel” with salt beef.