Last week, Nick Williams visited Deli Edison in Chapel Hill, where owner Sam Suchoff boasted of eating a half-million bagels in his lifetime. 

ADRIAN HALPE questions the math: “I’m no journalist, but I did take two classes from UNC’s legendary Professor Shumaker and have always had an interest in the journalistic craft. It was my understanding that articles about people are supposed to contain their age, a detail the Deli Edison piece fails to include about Sam Suchoff. But let’s imagine he’s 60. Counting the extra day of leap years, this means Sam has lived 21,915 days, give or take a few. Five hundred thousand divided by 21,915 equals 22.81; that’s 22.81 bagels Sam would have had to have eaten every single day of his life since the day he was born!

“Clearly, Sam’s comment is pure hyperbole, and your article should have noted that. Moreover, it’s such hyperbole that it makes me question whether Sam is on the up-and-up, and whether he really knows bagels or not. My guess is he does not. To be an expert on this subject, one must have been raised in New York City, preferably Brooklyn, and there’s no indication in your article that Sam has that qualification.”

Williams replies: “Suchoff was, in fact, raised in Brooklyn.”

SUSIE PAGE, a social worker, has questions about the ongoing McDougald Terrace debacle: “I met with a client recently who reported multiple health concerns in her McDougald Terrace townhouse. Kitchen cabinets were leaning heavily from the wall. Floors were repeatedly flooding, and the fix via the property management office was to avoid using the bathtub upstairs to bathe her children. My client is pregnant and worried about having a newborn in a home with possible mold exposure. As there was no foreseeable plan to address these deficiencies, I could only recommend she reach out to Legal Aid.

“Now we know that HUD inspections failed McDougald’s in 2019 and 2017, citing life-threatening safety violations including misaligned ventilation systems to furnaces and gas-fed hot-water heaters. We also now know that the DHA board knew about these issues and assumed they would be addressed immediately. I want to know how crisis-management works at DHA and why the CEO’s performance review expressed regret that day-to-day management requirements were preventing him from focusing on ‘higher-level concerns.’”

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