Month: March 2026

Lots of discussion in certain circles last week (probably didn’t enter conversation on the porch of the general store, for instance) about the egregious behavior of star chef René Redzepi, of the restaurant sequence Noma. Verbal and physical abuse of his employees for decades, unpaid servitude billed as “internships.” Angry men excused again and again for their behavior because, somehow, they are brilliant. Same thing throughout history in art, in science, in fashion, in architecture, in MFA programs… abuse too often overlooked, or even expected, even celebrated, in the pursuit of the sublime.

Nothing new to see here. What prompted me to write today was Helen Rosner’s very smart article about it all in today’s New Yorker Food Scene newsletter. She raises important questions about what a restaurant is for, but I think she answers them in a way that itself contributes to this culture of abuse.

I think the goals that the restaurant pursues, and that its vast and largely anonymous corps of workers achieve—novelty, technique, narrative, surprise—are, in many ways, the only things that matter in restaurants, once the bare physical fact of hunger has been satiated.

In this formulation, restaurants appear only at the base and the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid. We either eat and survive, or we eat for intellectual stimulation. And I say that misses so many things that a good restaurant can do.

A good restaurant can comfort the exhausted, give us a warm place and a night off.

A good restaurant can be the place where we know we’ll see our friends every Wednesday.

A good restaurant can become the anchor that defines a neighborhood.

A good restaurant can make us feel like friends, welcomed back, celebrated again.

A good restaurant can make its magic visible, without docents, and leave us feeling like we might try something like that ourselves.

A good restaurant can make its workers visible, so that we might appreciate everyone who created our evening.

If you really want to spend $1500 per person to “accept the potential artistic merits of this type of formal play,” that’s fine. You could stack some red-enameled metal in the middle of a city block, too. But you could instead aspire to kindness and welcome, much less expensive and much more accessible.

You may have heard about the red protest hats, drawn from similar hats worn in Norway during the Nazi occupation as a wordless sign of resistance to authoritarianism. The Minnesota fiber store Needle & Skein is selling patterns for knitting and for crocheting at $5 per, and have raised nearly three quarters of a million dollars for immigrant support services by doing so. It’s hard to get red yarn right now because of the power of this moment. Nora has hosted knit-ins for the past three weekends, and everyone in the room has been working on their red hats. We have friends in Canada and in Sweden who’ve knit their own in support.

However, we recently got word of this Instagram post about Crochet.com asking their “influencers” not to mention the name of the company in any posts having to do with the creation of these hats. Apparently, they’re trying to not piss off the petty tyrants in the administration, and would like to just be left alone to make money, please.

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Let’s take a step back. Crochet.com is owned by another company, called Local Crafts. Isn’t that a sweet name… Local Crafts has assembled an extensive roster of fiber-arts companies: Knit Picks, We Crochet, Madeline Tosh, Jimmy Beans Wool, Berroco Yarn, Connecting Threads, HandiQuilter, and Della Q. Probably others. Each of those was started by a person who cared about yarn, about knitting, about fiber arts. And each of them was eventually sold to a company that doesn’t.

From the Local Crafts website, we see that their CEO, Veronica Collins, is “a seasoned ecommerce leader. Veronica has also focused on scaling tech enabled consumer companies across industries both organically and through targeted M&A.” Sounds like every knitter you know, right? And guess where she trained before this MBA word salad? At Amazon and at Bain, Mitt Romney’s old vulture shop.

Local Crafts itself is owned yet further upstream, by Premier Needle Arts, which is a nice shell name for one of the twenty companies or conglomerates owned by Blue Point Capital in Cleveland. Blue Point Capital doesn’t specialize in any particular industry—their companies range from post-fracking industrial washout services to rubber and plastic gasket makers to blank t-shirts and merch for the promotional-printing industry. What they specialize in is operational efficiency for “lower mid-market” companies of $5M to $50M in annual sales. Doesn’t matter what you make, it only matters how much. As the former president of US Steel once said, “We don’t make steel. We make money.”

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I don’t begrudge anyone who comes up with a good idea, builds it, and then later decides to sell the company and buy a house or send their kids to school or whatever. I get that. But what happens far too often is that the company lives on as a zombie, a corpse with no heart left to it, roaming the streets in the lurching pursuit of cash. Madeline Tosh Yarn started out as an Etsy shop twenty years ago. Jimmy Beans was a neighborhood yarn-and-coffee shop in Truckee, California. Knit Picks was launched by a husband and wife who used his engineering and her knitting experience to start manufacturing knitting needles and crochet hooks. In each case, the founders wanted to bring pleasure and human connection. Now those hollow names just shamble through the world consuming dollars. If industrial washout services make more money, yarn will be abandoned without a second thought.

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Four decades ago, I spent a miserable year working in the kitchen at one of the outlets of Bennigan’s Tavern. Bennigan’s Tavern was a subsidiary of Steak and Ale, itself owned by Burger King, itself owned by Pillsbury. In the regular human world, all of these shell companies and holding companies and subsidiary agreements would be called “aliases,” and would mark you as wholly untrustworthy. In the corporate world (and as Mitt says, “corporations are people, my friend“), they’re everyday practice. It’s enormously difficult to untangle who owns what, and it shouldn’t be.

The fiction of the corporate entity allows enormous malfeasance, because everyone is protected from the implications of their decisions. I mean, you can’t blame a zombie for eating brains, right? It’s what they do. But don’t hide behind the name of the corpse. Just call yourselves YarnCo and be honest. Shareholders don’t care what the company makes, as long as it makes money. To quote Napoleon (ruthlessness recognizes ruthlessness), “Money has no motherland. Financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”

I’m doing some assessment research, and one of the steady findings is that students in the program feel less welcomed by the professionals around them at mid-project than they did when they started. This shouldn’t be a surprise. For a lot of people, the day they were hired was the last day anybody told them that they were smart, or that they were valued. After that glorious honeymoon, they’re just furniture. Increasingly familiar, shopworn furniture.

Think about that transition from college or from grad school to workplace. A person goes from having identifiable humans giving them specific feedback on a regular basis to… well, to what? To the mechanical arms of the HR mother, giving annual review notes and a COLA?

That transitional band ought to be a structured adjustment from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, from external rewards to internal satisfactions. But often, it’s just silence. And when the performance monitor suddenly flatlines, we don’t know if the monitor’s unplugged or we’re about to die.

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Let’s talk about intrinsic motivation. It’s easy to get all shouty-grandpa about kids needing constant validation and participation medals, but let’s slow down and think about another aspect of that transition from school to workplace, which is the bait-and-switch. I think about this a lot with architecture students, going from a high-design, high-autonomy environment to being the third desk on the left doing endless flashing details for a branch bank drive-thru. Job titles and job descriptions are largely lies. I once had a job called Director of Research that should actually have been called Director of Justification, because the work was to tell our funders that their programmatic investment had paid off and they should give us another infusion. (And friends, sometimes you have to search through a big old pile of horseshit before you find a pony.)

Before that, I’d finished my dissertation to high acclaim and near-immediate publication, only to find myself a spreadsheet jockey telling my boss how many kids the Butte County Probation Department were likely to have in juvenile custody in thirty years. There wasn’t any intrinsic motivation to be had in that job, which is why they ran through a rotating cast of analyst associates for years. It kept the rent paid and the car fueled, but that’s not enough to make you eager to go to work in the morning.

Far too often, we ask young people to go from a high-autonomy, high-feedback, high-growth environment to a low-autonomy, feedback-starved, static environment, in which the rules of business outweigh the rules of intellectual honesty. And we don’t understand “kids these days…”

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Learn to say thank you, and to remember to do it. Learn to spot the flashes of enthusiasm in the pan, and find ways for that enthusiasm to be challenged and fulfilled. Just because your own job title doesn’t say “mentor” doesn’t mean that you aren’t one, either through action or inaction.

Having gotten the above dog last summer, I’m now going through dog training for the first time. Small treats are a central element of the training. You reward good behavior with a click and a treat, you lure the dog away from bad behavior with a treat, you get the dog’s attention with a treat. And one of the terms of art, when a dog is highly distracted by all the other dogs and handlers and scents in a class setting, is that you might need a “higher-value reward.” [String cheese, as it turns out, is maybe the highest-value treat there is. The gas station convenience store near the training center recently started stocking string cheese just because so many dog owners were stopping in on their way to class. Makes me wonder what proportion of string cheese is going into grade-schoolers’ lunchboxes, and how much is for dog class.]

For me, the highest-value treat in my life was a grade. An A, or a 100, were the core markers that I’d been a good dog, that people loved me. I still remember learning the “times tables” in third grade; every time you felt ready for the next step, you told the teacher that you were ready to do your threes or your fours. Then the teacher’s aide would take you into the next room, and you’d say four times one is four and four times two is eight, and so on through twelve. (Why twelve? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?) If you got it right, your little marker on the chart at the front of the room got moved forward a step. (Why was it important for us to treat this as a competition and introduce shame yet again into some kids’ experience? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?) Anyway, I finished my twelves while everyone else was on fours and fives, and I remember being really disappointed that I couldn’t go on and do thirteens. (Why couldn’t someone be interested enough in something to do more than the curriculum mandated? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?)

13-26-39-52-65-78-91-104-117-130-143-156-169, and yes, I did that in my head just now, faster than I could type it. Where’s my cheese, bud?

From reading in kindergarten through winning an architectural history award as an undergrad, from multiplication through dissertation, I lived in a world of high-value rewards. I’d done what was asked, done it in an exemplary way, and people loved me.

So what happens when people don’t love you any more? When the rewards don’t match the behavior? When the treat bag goes empty?

More tomorrow.