Even the headline of the short essay in the New Yorker was meant to offend, and it did: “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.” The piece, by Dan Piepenbring, has been read, attacked, defended, and ridiculed by far more people than ordinarily read the New Yorker. If the editors’ goal was to attract online readers, they succeeded.

Piepenbring makes no effort to veil his contempt for the famously clean and friendly fast-food restaurant, of which there are now four in Manhattan. He visited the grand opening of the largest and most recently built one, on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. “The air smelled fried,” he writes. And yet