Journal

As head baker of Panera Bread, Tom Gumpel is at work on an almost impossible task. We asked an expert to taste test his GF progress.

One day earlier this year, Tom Gumpel left work feeling terrible. The head baker of Panera Bread—the Downton Abbey of fast food with a nice classy-to-trashy ratio—Gumpel had been tasked with coming up with a gluten-free product for the company to offer. But he’d failed. What’s more, he didn’t even know if success was possible. He didn’t know what to do next. He wasn’t even particularly interested in doing anything gluten free. He was a baker, after all, not a trend follower!

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Eccentric Brooklyn artist Dustin Yellin creates 3-D optical illusions that look like Body Worlds of pop culture ephemera.

Dustin Yellin, a 40-year-old Brooklyn artist who has posed naked for Vanity Fair, dated Michelle Williams, and billed as the art world’s next “it boy,” is a fun guy to interview. Over the phone, he asked me if I thought God had fuzzy bunny ears, and thought that after you died, you went to a level-select screen, like in some giant cosmic video game. Talking to him is like being dropped into a kaleidoscope where references to art, pop culture, and the metaphysical all sort of swirl in explosions together.

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