Friday, March 13, 2009

Cookies

Photo: Scott Cole

Today Bernard Madoff went to jail. Today my friend Scott was upbraiding himself for eating too many chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are, in Scott’s case, an occupational hazard: he serves delightful breakfasts and lunches at his Caffé Pomo D’oro in West Stockbridge (MA), doing all of his own baking, so as part of his job he makes some of the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Of course he’s going to eat them.

In a conversation about the financial crisis, so much of it having been caused by Wall Street greed, my friend Arthur, art director at TIME, said: “You and I like to make money, it’s a benefit of doing the work we do, but it’s not why we do it. Our occupations have many satisfactions, of which making money is only one. One of the problems in the current situation is that we’ve created a segment of the population whose only purpose in life is to make money.” True, they’re supposed to be making it for other people as well, but what’s to keep them from dipping their hands in the cookie jar?

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