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The Korean Immigrant and Michigan Farm Boy Who Taught Americans How to Cook Chow Mein

In 1922, two college classmates in Detroit — a Korean immigrant named Ilhan New and an American named Wally Smith — founded La Choy, a company that mass-produced Chinese food products. One hundred years later, to Chinese Americans the brand is “synonymous with cultural inauthenticity, even appropriation.” But, as Cathy Erway explores for Taste, the […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

What Went Wrong With Substack Local

A little more than a year ago, newsletter darling Substack announced a million-dollar initiative to help fund local journalism. How’d that turn out? As Andrew Federov reports for the (non-Substack) media newsletter The Fine Print, not great. In some instances, Substack did step in to offer business support. “Substack put up a round of Facebook […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

The Ministers of Cheese

Mark Pupo lovingly accounts how a family immigrated from Kosovo to Canada and started up a successful cheese business — that thrived even during the pandemic. Pupo clearly adores this little mom-and-pop business, and it sounds like he has good reason to. As the store prospered, investors approached them with partnership and franchise proposals. Like […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

From Aardvark to Woke: Inside The Oxford English Dictionary

Pippa Bailey explores the fascinating business of defining a word. The Oxford English Dictionary remains, in many ways, a Victorian phenomenon, born in an era of remarkable innovation: of railways and steelworks, anthropology and anaesthesia, Charleses Dickens and Darwin. It is difficult, now, when the thought of consulting a paper dictionary seems so analogue, to […]

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