A conversation with editor and designer Rochelle Udell (Self, Vogue, CondeNet, Epicurious, more).

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT MOUNTAIN GAZETTE AND COMMERCIAL TYPE

Rochelle Udell is many things.

She is all of these things: teacher, ad woman, vice president, founder, wife, creative director, mentor, chair woman, student, marketer, graduate, design director, editor-in-chief, mother, chief talent officer, executive vice president, collector, president, meditator, internet strategist, partner, art director, volunteer, deputy editorial director, artist, retiree, and baker’s daughter.

As Walt Whitman would say, “She contains multitudes.”

“As for the titles attached to my name,” Udell says, “I consider them important only in as much as they help the outside world understand who I am and what I do. My fear is that they often do more to confine rather than define one’s creative possibilities.”

The daughter of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, Udell began her career as a teacher at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, when a chance encounter with Milton Glaser launched her into the thick of New York magazine’s newsroom in the early 1970s where she and a group of women (including our Episode 25 guest, Gloria Steinem) created and launched the legendary Ms. magazine.

After that, Udell, an Art Directors Club Hall of Famer, put her talents, her hyphens, and her multitudes to work at the world’s preeminent magazines: Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, GQ, House & Garden, Esquire, Self, The New Yorker, and fashion brands, FIT, Chico’s, Revlon, and Calvin Klein.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, she was a pioneer of early-days digital media as the founder of Condé Nast Digital and its beloved, OG food blog, Epicurious.

Our editor-at-large, Anne Quito, spoke with Udell about all of it.

*Self* magazine premiere issue, January 1979

Anne Quito: I not only have many questions about your storied resume in publishing and media, but I’d like to ask about your ability to transition—or maybe to pirouette—from one job to another, from one sector to the next. I think I’ve told you that I am at a kind of career crossroads at the moment. And how lucky am I to be with you here today. This episode is also for any listener facing a similar kind of transition. So thank you for making time during this busy season. My first question: So we’re just meeting, but I feel that I know you intimately because, well, I have been reading your diary—you’ve generously published your memoir online, Adventures of a Baker’s Daughter. Could you tell us its genesis? Why this format, why now?

Rochelle Udell: Originally the thought came to me that I wanted to leave some legacy for my family. As first generation in this country, with parents that didn’t want to talk about where they came from or what they went through because they didn’t want to burden us, their children. I had very little information.

And as I became a parent—and now a grandparent—I realized that I really wanted to leave some things so that the questions that might come up in the future for my family could be accessed. And the reason for the format is twofold. One, I attempted to get something published in book form and it happened during Covid and it wasn’t particularly relevant. But then I thought to myself, if I wanted to have this to be accessible to the next generation in these small little stories, I could either print it out and do a loose-leaf binder kind of situation, or maybe have it in short-format form online.

Because I wanted to also be thought of as somebody who could transition content from one form to another. Because content for me comes first and then understanding how an audience receives content is how you deliver that content.

It could be a play. It could be a book. It could be a magazine. It could be a website. It could be a piece of music. It could be, you know, a drawing. Whatever the content is, how does the audience hear, see, feel that content?

Anne Quito: I’ve been reading it and to me, it’s kind of this labyrinth of stories. I could click on any page and it leads me to a new vignette. And for me, really built for a reader who has a short attention span, because it really pushes through stories. One of my favorite features is the scroll, it says Adventures of Rochelle Udell—Adventures of a Baker’s Daughter—but it scrolls. It says Adventures of an Information Junkie. A Tech-Challenge Person, Hopeless Balabusta, a Dog Lover, a Silly Sister, and it goes on. How did we land on A Baker’s Daughter?

Rochelle Udell: That’s how I began. I was born into a bakery, more or less. My father was a baker. He was the miller’s son. My mother’s father was a baker, albeit in another country. But, you know, there’s gluten in my blood. What can I tell you?

Anne Quito: And I understand that mythic bread project for Milton Glaser’s class earned you your first magazine gig.

Rochelle Udell: Yeah, I was a high school teacher and took Milton Glaser’s night school class. And one of the first assignments was to develop packaging for a loaf of bread. So I baked a loaf of bread and I baked a handle onto it. Wrap it up in paper or whatever, or put it in a box. I just put a handle on it. Because bread in our house never really got home. You sort of ate it on the way while you were walking.

Anne Quito: Yes. So what a clever thing. And Milton ate it up.

Rochelle Udell: Literally.

Anne Quito: So that landed you at New York magazine, yes? I know, very well, New York magazine, from when I was working on the book with Milton and Walter Bernard. I remember the floor being a bit chaotic and small. Can you take us back to that moment?

Rochelle Udell: It was on East 37th Street. The building actually was not recommended for the capacity that we were. And we were located on the top floor of Milton’s design studio. It was chaos. We were just sort of crunched in. But it created a shape for us to actually, sort of, haphazardly be bumping into each other all the time. Not just as bodies, but with ideas.

You didn’t have to email anybody. You could just sort of turn around and whisper to someone or shout across the room. And it was pretty—I’ll use a baker’s term—yeasty. Because it was rich with ideas all the time, everywhere, And it was the beginning of the first city magazine. Which was wonderful. It was wonderful fun and it was a great opportunity.

Anne Quito: I remember Walter Bernard describing the central table as the ‘kitchen island.’ And everyone comes in with their comps and their paste-ups. That’s wonderful. Now, during this time, you then found yourself as the founding art director of Ms. magazine.

Rochelle Udell: Yes, Gloria [Steinem] was working at the magazine. She had this idea for Ms. and was able to persuade Clay Felker and Milton Glaser to incorporate it into one of the issues of the magazine. So we had this insert, and they assigned me the job of being the art director for the magazine. It was just amazing.

And you think back to what we’ve lived through in the past year, in terms of Roe v. Wade. I remember laying out the article where we had so many famous women having acknowledged, pre-abortion rights, that they had abortions. And this was, you know, Billie Jean King. Of course, Gloria. Any number of very famous women signed into that. And it was important. It was seismic, and being able to bring awareness and create change, which is one of the jobs that a magazine can do. And still can do to this day.

Anne Quito: It makes me curious what magazines you read in your youth?

Rochelle Udell: I read everything. I would say there was a candy store, which was, you know, a place where you could buy cigarettes, or gum, or whatever—buy a little soda or something. But they were the place where magazines would get dropped off. And I remember standing at that place, waiting for the truck to pull up, waiting for them to cut the strings on the magazines.

I would buy everything. I got Vogue, Glamour, and Mademoiselle—everything. All of the fashion magazines. The New Yorker. You could buy them all. And I couldn’t wait to get them. Every single one. It was my after-school project.

“I was born into a bakery. My father was a baker. My mother’s father was a baker. There’s gluten in my blood. What can I tell you?”

Anne Quito: That’s incredible. Do you still read the same volume of magazines today?

Rochelle Udell: No. I read different magazines and I think that print magazines are very important as places that are forums for people to share ideas. There was a wonderful piece in the Times this morning from David Brooks about the importance of magazines as communities to foster an exchange of ideas.

I read the Atlantic. I read The New Yorker. I look at a lot of home furnishings, you know, Architectural Digest. I look at some art magazines. Short-form magazines that used to give us little popcorn bits of information are easier to get online.

But, because of the internet, you have this sort of endless scrolling that could go on, you don’t have the ability to actually hit a pause button. And so if you want to take pleasure in thinking through something, instead of the endless scroll. You want to stop, you want to slow-cook something and think about it—whether it’s a picture, or it’s a story, or an essay, a criticism—you want to invest in that. A magazine format is wonderful, and can give you that ability to reset.

Anne Quito: We’ve really answered this podcast’s golden question: Is print dead? Is print alive? It’s wonderful to hear what you said about a pause button, something that we might be able to control ourselves.

Rochelle Udell: The physical format of a magazine says, “Look at me.” It’s a page that stops. It takes that moment of time to ingest. And it’s very important. I think, in terms of the education of our children—when you think about reading to a child. My eight-year-old granddaughter gets a magazine called Ranger Rick. And she just loves Ranger Rick.

Now, of course, she uses the internet. They use it in school, all of that stuff. But Ranger Rick, she could look at what that animal is doing or what’s happening in the ecology or whatever. And she thinks. It’s a thinking thing.

Anne Quito: So back to the chronology, you are at Ms. and I am now counting at least three or four job transitions for you. You worked at your father’s bakery. You were a teacher. You worked at New York. And then Ms. And then you leave Ms., and you join Harper’s Bazaar and then Condé Nast. And at Condé Nast, you were creative director of magazines like Vogue, GQ, House & Garden, Esquire. Is that correct? And then what’s curious to me is, as you are a designer who became editor-in-chief. You became editor-in-chief of Self, someone charged to really look at the broad landscape of a full magazine, not just the visual component. How did you manage that?

Rochelle Udell: I think you have a lot of great creative directors and art directors out there that read. And I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with wonderful editors, production people, writers that were contributors. The magazine business is a collaborative business. They embrace the collaborative nature of the business.

You can create something bigger than one person can build. And I think it’s very important, because you’re not an artist sitting there alone. You’re working with other people to produce something that will enrich other people’s lives. The minute you understand that—the minute you understand about playing the team game and the benefits of what a team could do for you, then you could make a transition to various parts of other businesses more easily.

Anne Quito: Was it easy to convince people that you could be in charge of the visual realm, and words, and business of a whole magazine? Because I think you’re right about this, sometimes how we’re listed on a masthead sort of pigeonholes us, but you have somehow eluded this.

Rochelle Udell: Well, what’s interesting is Gloria Steinem didn’t want to have a masthead because she felt it was more democratic. But you need a masthead for people in the outside world to begin to connect to you. But it doesn’t mean that you have to be completely defined by that. If you begin to define yourself by that, you’re self-limiting. Unless you want to. I mean, some people really love handling just the visual end of things.

And of course they read the words, and understand the meaning, and how they get put together, but their strength is perhaps visual. Maybe the strength is in the words, or the editing, or the production—seeing how something could be uniquely displayed. But you have to make a choice and if you have the masthead choose for you and you didn’t really want it to be that way then you’re self-limiting.

I didn’t have to convince anybody. I just did it, you know? People were open. The folks that ran the business at the time—Si Newhouse, Alexander Lieberman, any number of other people—they wanted the best in the business. And they really wanted to expand how people were thinking. So they were very open minded about any number of things during that particular period of time.

Anne Quito: Now, I really loved reading about the various job interviews you went through to get these jobs. It is incredible. Could you tell us a couple stories, well including my favorite, the one with Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmo?

Rochelle Udell: Yes. I was at Harper’s Bazaar and 35 of us were all fired in one day. I was barely there. I was just there a couple of months and they actually wanted to bring in a different group to run it. And we were sort of victims of that desire on the part of management. But they were very kind and they said to me, “If there was any magazine you wanted to work for, which one would it be?” And I said, “Well, I’m really interested in Cosmopolitan.”

They said, “Well, there are no openings, but we’ll happily set up an appointment with you to meet with Helen Gurley Brown.” Which was great. And I was excited to meet her. I was taller than I am now, and much thinner than I am now, and had much shorter, darker hair than I have now. And it was a freezing-cold November day.

I walked into her office wearing a long shearling coat, high black boots, there she was in her pink and white denim outfit. And her office was filled with stuffed animals on the couch. And she said to me, “Look at you. And look at me!” You know, because she was all in pink and everything, and she said, “How can we continue?”

And I said, “Well, why don’t we just take our clothes off and continue?” And she thought that was really funny. And we spoke to each other for, I don’t know, a nice couple of hours. It was really fun. She was great.

Anne Quito: And how was it meeting Alex Liberman for the first time?

Rochelle Udell: Oh my God. Well, you know, I didn’t know the importance of all that he did. I sort of had an idea. You know, I read the masthead is what I did. But I didn’t realize the depth of influence he had in the Condé Nast building. And at that time, there were only five magazines, and some international editions. And it was in the Graybar Building, which is adjacent to Grand Central Station.

I took the elevator up to the 19th floor. I walked out of the elevator and there was the most wonderful floor. It was marble and it had blue tiles in it, and it was just absolutely romantic. And I looked at the floor, and I said, “I’ve got to figure out how to work here. I love this.” It was just great. He was wonderful.

Anne Quito: And he was editorial director then at Condé Nast, correct? And one more thing: I read you also interviewed to be president of Playboy.

Rochelle Udell: I had met some people at Playboy and realized that—I don’t want to go into the depth of that—but they set me up with Hugh Hefner, to go meet with him. I had been friendly with his daughter. We had met each other in a number of business meetings having to do with the magazine business in general.

And I got the secret code to drive to the mansion in LA. I put the code inside a false rock that was on the side of the building and went in to meet him. And it was 11 o’clock in the morning. And I was wearing a red top with a black skirt. And he came down the stairs in red silk pajamas. And, you know, I couldn’t resist. It was obvious he was going to be doing something like this, but I couldn’t resist. And I said to him, “Are you feeling well? Are you okay?”

And we sat down and we talked and then realized our hands were out on the table. And I have an old Cartier wedding band that my husband gave me. It’s a three ring band. And he had the same one. And we realized that we were both wearing the same wedding bands. And it was just a sweet moment of recognition on the part of both of us that we shared with regard to love. I call it ‘love.’ Maybe he called it ‘sex.’ I don’t know.

Anne Quito: Did you take the interview mostly out of curiosity? Would you have worked at Playboy?

Rochelle Udell: This was not a job that would be appropriate for my family at that time. It was an interesting job because Playboy was beginning to lose its readership and it was spending some time engaged in the business of creating its clubs and other forms of business.

And I’m very interested in business and how to capture the, sort of, brand identity and translate it into different businesses. I think that’s something that can be done in many cases, as times change and culture gives you an opportunity to move in another direction.

So I was very interested in the business aspect of this. I had spoken to Christie Hefner about it. I didn’t go meet him on a lark. I went there with the intention of trying to understand the business, but realized in the process of it, it was not appropriate.

Anne Quito: I love that, in the recollection of these interviews, there’s always a fashion note. You remember what you wore, your hair, and I think in Alex Liberman, you said you cut your hair short. How does one dress for an interview? Do you have a kind of strategy? It seems like you change your look depending on who you’re talking to.

Rochelle Udell: Actually, not so much. You know, it’s interesting if I go shopping and I see something in a wonderful color in the window or whatever, and I love it, and I go into the shop and I say, “I love what you have in the window. It’s so beautiful. Do you have it in black?”

So if you open my closet door, you’ll see white shirts, and a lot of black clothes, and an occasional spot of color. I’m pretty consistent and I’ve always been consistent because I’ve always done a lot of traveling for work and I’ve always wanted everything to work with everything.

And coming from New York I feel that New York’s like an overcharged electrical environment and you need clothes to sort of hush the roar. And I think, if you’re an observer, which I think most magazine people are, you don’t want to necessarily be in the spotlight. You want to be next to it and see what’s going on. So clothes, for me, have always been the opportunity to sort of be in the background. I’m very comfortable in the background.

**Udell was the founding art director of *Ms.* magazine, ca. 1972**

“Being able to bring awareness and create change is one of the jobs that a magazine can do. And still can do to this day.”

Anne Quito: All that really says that you’ve ruminated about the role of clothing and fashion—really sort of like the hallmark of someone who’s worked in fashion publishing for a long time. Now, I’m going to ask you, maybe, a goofy question. I spoke to your colleague, Wynn Dan, who is your wonderful former colleague at Condé Nast. He describes you as a ‘maternal’ figure, full of empathy. You are family, he says. Now, fashion publishing, as we know, confirmed by the documentary or the film—I call it documentary—Devil Wears Prada, is a pretty exacting and tough business. How did you skirt the cutthroat nature of fashion publishing?

Rochelle Udell: I never thought of it as cutthroat. I thought of it as doing business. And sometimes you have to be firm about that—the decisions that need to be made. And if you’re dealing in a weekly or a monthly, there’s a certain periodicity, you have to make decisions during that period of time. And that can’t be like, “I’ll get to it later” kind of answer.

I was maternal in the sense that I think a good mother will tell you the truth appropriate to your age. And I always wanted the best out of everybody. I wanted people to give me more than they even thought they had in them, but they did. I think that when you’re maternal, you’ll be there for them.

I always felt as a leader of any team, whatever team I was on, that if something went wrong, it was my responsibility. You know, like a parent is responsible. So he may have described me as maternal, and I guess many people have described me as maternal, but I also believe that in leadership responsibilities, the leader must support the team.

You must support whoever's working for you. You have to give them what they need to do their job. And if they fall, for some reason it doesn’t work out, that’s your responsibility, too. It’s your responsibility to say, “Listen, I see it now. It could have been done this way. Next time, why don’t we try it that way?” Or whatever. Because you’re there to support your team. And I guess that’s what Wynn was referring to in terms of my maternal instincts.

Anne Quito: Would you agree that this philosophy, this really generous philosophy, wasn’t shared by everyone at Condé Nast? I mean, we hear all the wild stories from this time—or maybe they’re exaggerations?

Rochelle Udell: I don’t know. I think for some people it was very real. I think that, you know, we all grow up in different ways and we all see people who have, whether it’s a parent, or a teacher, or a boss in an earlier incarnation behave a certain way, you learn, you model behavior. So people model some bad behavior.

I mean, I’ve seen bad behavior in almost every business I’ve ever been in. I’ve seen bad behavior in schools. I’ve seen bad behavior in government, yes. But there’s also the other side of it. There are also the people who do the things that further the action. Unfortunately, there’s the big business of bad news and bad behavior.

That’s a bigger business. It’s like bad weather gets more play than when the sun comes out. That’s just the unfortunate consequence of what we’re living through now.

Anne Quito: And maybe as readers, viewers, we also crave to talk about the irascible, tempestuous personalities because they’re more colorful. And then we equate it with the whole.

Rochelle Udell: Yeah. That’s unfortunate. And I don’t think it’s going to change in my lifetime, but, you know, there’s always hope. And hope is important.

Anne Quito: I’m going to go back to hope at the very end, but my next question is another wild pivot. At some point, I think it was 1989, you founded and became president of CondéNet. A real leap from print to the internet. There’s also this detail where you describe yourself as ‘a tech-challenged person.’ Can you tell us the beginnings of CondéNet, and maybe touch on Epicurious as well?

Rochelle Udell: Yes. Like my father, I was always looking for what was happening in the world. And I went into a video—do you remember video stores, things like Blockbuster? And I just thought, how am I going to figure out what I’m going to buy here? I mean, this is crazy. And I remember Wynn Dan was with me and he started talking to me about the internet.

So I became very curious. And I signed on to a thing called AOL. And it was during that period of time, at a Thanksgiving dinner, that I realized that I couldn’t fit two turkeys and the stuffing into my oven. (This was early days).

I got online and I asked a question at 6:20 in the morning—I’ll never forget it—and I said, “Can I roast a turkey on my grill outside because I don’t have room in the oven?” And within seconds, 20 people answered me and said things like, “You can do it.” “It’s going to take a long time. “Make sure you have enough fluid to keep the grill going.” “Keep checking it.” They told me to do this, that, and the other thing.

And then I had two Thanksgiving dinners. I had one with my family and I had one with the people online because everybody wanted to know how it all came out—all 20 or 30 people by that point. And it was great.

And so I went and I approached Si Newhouse and told him about this experience and said to him if he wanted to get engaged in this thing called ‘new media,’ I would be very happy to explore that with him. And he formed a team.

He was involved in Random House at the time, so he had a book person. He had me in the magazine group. He brought in Jim Woolsey, who was a newspaper editor at the Daily News. And he brought in someone from the television division. And Steve Newhouse, his nephew, was involved.

And we all marched together and we did exploratories. We went to Silicon Valley, we spoke to, you know, the Bill Gates’s of this world, the [Bill] Grosses of this world. We spoke to all of them. It was early days. And we learned a lot and got started. And it was just so great, but, as you can tell by me getting onto this podcast today, I am not technical. But I am interested in how people communicate with each other. And I am interested in keeping healthy dialogues going and the sharing of information that’s valuable and worthwhile.

Anne Quito: And you still hold on to the AOL email.

Rochelle Udell: I do. I do. I want to be the oldest user of AOL.

Anne Quito: Incredible. Again, I want to ask a little bit more about Epicurious.com. Really a pioneering site, the first recipe-sharing site online. And this was, I believe, mid-nineties. It was a time when the internet was called ‘the information superhighway.’ And there were—kind of poetic—there were about 23,000 websites. As opposed to 1.13 billion today. And the 23,000 included early versions of Amazon, eBay (then called Auction Bay), Yahoo (then called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web). And there were printed phone books of the internet that you bought in bookstores! Can you talk about this milieu and founding Epicurious.com with a bunch of people?

Rochelle Udell: So. Much. Fun. Because we were really dancing in the dark, I’ve got to tell you. Epicurious started as a brand. And it was a brand for people who liked to eat. I’m taking a little bit of detour from the internet to discuss Epicurious because I felt that people interested in food would be interested in having an Epicurious magazine, an Epicurious internet, which could be a recipe repository.

We could—remember this is going back over 30 years—we could do ‘television cooking.’ It was, you know, the beginning of Julia Child. We could have TV. We could do filming—because It wasn’t exactly video at that moment. We could do travel-through-food at that moment.

Go back 30, 35 years. You’re talking about going to places everywhere there’s food, which is everywhere. We could even have a food business. We could sell oils. We could sell flour. We could sell different things. So the Epicurious brand was for anybody who eats anything. And it could be a vegan, you know, somebody who only eats meat, whatever.

But they decided to stay very focused, which was wise, on just the internet component so that we could get up to speed. And the safe way of doing it was not to risk any brands, like Vogue, at that moment in time because you didn’t know what was going to happen with the internet at that moment.

Epicurious became its name rather than Bon Appetit or Gourmet. We decided that it would be safer at that moment in time to call it something else. And that’s how Epicurious was born into the internet. But it was born as a multi-business environment, not just a website. And the only thing we owned were recipes, because we didn’t own the other content.

Anne Quito: Did you also, under CondeNet, also help Vogue and other titles transition to the Net?

Rochelle Udell: The only one that I worked on officially was Women’s Wear Daily. I did have discussions with other editors about this at the time and it was a little bit new.

**Model Beverly Johnson, the first black model to appear on the cover of American *Vogue,* ca. August 1974**

“If you’re an observer, which I think most magazine people are, you don’t want to be in the spotlight. You want to be next to it and see what’s going on.”

Anne Quito: Okay. I read in your memoir that you love working. I mean, this is a very common statement, even from Milton Glaser, who refused to take days off. May I ask you about your latest pivot or transition? So you left media publishing a while back and you left—was Chico’s your last corporate position in fashion?

Rochelle Udell: It was my life because I was curious about retail, you know. And retail, online especially, was of interest to me. But as businesses change and grow, I grew out of those businesses. But there’s always been a component in my life that was a component of advocacy. Whether it was creating an ad in the eighties called, “I enjoy sex and I’m not ready to die for it,” which was an ad for condoms as a preventative for HIV/AIDS. Whether it was early days and working on Ms. magazine advocating for what I always call ‘better outcomes for more people.’

I live in Ossining, New York, and when people say, “Oh, you live in Ossining? Are you near the prison?” I go, “Yeah, I’m around the corner.” And so I have become an advocate for the incarcerated on a number of levels.

There’s a desire and a movement to do a museum for Sing Sing. We’ll begin to build awareness of the state of incarceration in this country, and a number of things that need to be changed so that we’re not just punishing people, but creating opportunities for rehabilitation, for reconciliation. I’m not an especially “kumbaya” person, but I am a person that does believe that there are many people out there that are not treated equitably. Let me be diplomatic about that.

And I think that—because of the state of incarceration in this country, you’re not just dealing with the person who is incarcerated. You’re dealing with the family. You’re dealing with the community. You’re dealing with potential businesses. You’re dealing with the people who work in the prisons. The Department of Corrections, or the volunteers, or the medical staff.

So that when you have somebody who has mental illness and needs to be protected, shouldn’t they be in a mental health secured facility as opposed to a prison? So I just put that question out there as an example of the type of work that I’m involved in.

And I’m very happy that clean-slate legislation has been enacted in this state where a person who has been on parole and has done well can have their dossier wiped clean so that they can get a job. Because the two big—now I'm on my soapbox, but two big things are housing and employment. And if you could give that to somebody who deserves that, then they can take care of their family, they can take care of their community, and they could also pay taxes.

Anne Quito: I also read that during your time in Vogue the editorial staff was very much involved with Amnesty International. And you really have a social component, not just fashion and fancy objects of capitalism. Would you tell us a little bit about meeting the poet Joseph Brodsky?

Rochelle Udell: Yes. Vogue, under the direction of Alexander Liberman and Grace Mirabella, who was the editor-in-chief at the time. Alex, as you know, was a Russian emigre. And the poet Joseph Brodsky, also Russian, was released through the efforts of Amnesty International. And we did a campaign where we raised money to help free prisoners through the design of posters and other things that we did.

And through that experience, a wonderful opportunity happened for me. I was a letter writer during a campaign to free a guy by the name of Fernando Flores, who was the director of finance under Salvador Allende and put into jail under Augusto Pinochet. And he became a great teacher to me.

[Excerpted from Adventures of the Baker’s Daughter, by Rochelle UdeIl]
I love headlines, calls to action, catchphrases, memes, maxims and quotes that trigger ideas, inspire, and motivate. A slew of these sorts of phrases about how to look at life, projects, business and people or how to get things done, figure things out and shift my thinking to a different speed or direction is cataloged and filed in my head. People I know have shared them with me or I’ve found them in books, plays, or songs. These quips are my whatever-gets-you-through-the-night soothers and stimulants, my open sesames to my next aha moment. I share them in the courses I teach, with the teams I work with and with family and friends — and now you.
• Everyone matters; everyone wants to be heard and recognized.
• Don’t let anyone rent space in your head.
• Don’t talk to anyone when they are angry. They cannot hear.
• If someone tells you they are humble, they are not.
• Read poetry.
• Always have a paper and pencil handy. It keeps the ideas flowing. It opens up more space in your head.
• Pay attention to your thoughts and jot down notes, even if they don’t make sense at the time. Have an idea and don’t have anything to write with? Text yourself or call yourself and leave a voicemail.
• Timelines are an organizing principle. Use them to gain confidence with a subject.
• Business is human.
• Value great editors.
• Knowledge is dynamic, not static.
• Don’t jump to judgment.
• Work through an issue — don’t just look to jump to a solution.
• Look at a situation or project brief again, and make sure you see the real problem to be solved. Think about what information might be missing.
• To think outside of the box is ultimately a decision you make for yourself or others working together on a project.
• Work with people who are agile and can adapt to change.
• When you are working together, make sure you have the same sense of purpose and values as you move toward the goal.
• Do not be seduced by speed or power.
• You need to name it to sell it.
• You need to measure it to manage it.
• Keep learning to be comfortable with revenue versus expense and keep an eye on balancing bottom-line commitments against investments.
• It is not a one-size-fits-all world. It never was.
• Different cultures create a counterpoint to the ordinary.
• To be creative is to be a steward of organizational energy.
• Accept that you may not have much power to affect the outcome, and don’t be compelled to control it.
• Be aware of the ghosts of past successes, mourn their loss.
• Remember tension is a source of energy between what is and what could be.
• Not easy, but sometimes being fired may be for the best.
• The biggest danger is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
• Thinking growth? Ask: what is the right size for this business? Should I add on or start another business?
• It takes a team — there is no one person alone who can do or fix everything and anything.
• Understand your value.
• Be careful of shiny objects.
• Simple is the hardest thing to do because great design should disappear so that the message you’re trying to communicate can come through.

When he was in prison, a father of five children, he was able to come into this country through the efforts of Amnesty International. And he, through great hardship, finally was able to secure a position at Stanford and he wrote a lot of the language that we actually use in ATMs today.

I mean, he was a guy who really began to understand how to speak into the different cultures of language. And he was just great, an amazing person. He’s back in Chile now. He’s working in education. And I’m very happy for everybody whose lives are touched by this man.

Anne Quito: That’s wonderful. You write in your memoir, “I was born worried.”

Rochelle Udell: I still am!

Anne Quito: What worries you today? And what gives you hope?

Rochelle Udell: I worry about—I mean, you just have to look around. I worry about dictatorship in any of its forms. I worry about war. Here’s a hypothesis for you. I believe that like many others, I am a child of what’s called ‘transgenerational trauma.’ You know, my parents went through nightmares.

And I think that somehow, whether it was—I don’t know how it was translated into my life. I’m not a scientist. But I think that given what’s going on in the world, I fear for all the children, all the people of this world. All over the place. Whether it’s in Ukraine, where a lot of my family is from, or in Gaza and Israel, in parts of the Sudan. You know, I just worry about that.

But what gives me hope, I recently read a book by a guy by the name of Eddie Glaude, who is head of a department at Princeton. It was a wonderful book. It’s called Begin Again. And he actually uses James Baldwin—the journey of James Baldwin—through the movement of African Americans in this country and all that they have fought for.

And how Baldwin goes through various periods in time, whether it’s a much more assertive movement, or a much more peaceful movement under Martin Luther King, he uses that as a thread to understand how to get to what we need to do in our government here, in terms of changes that need to be made.

And, you know, to go into specifics would take time, but it is one of the most hopeful books I’ve read recently. Eddie Glaude. It’s a great book. Crown is the publisher. And it’s wait, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. And it’s really about bearing witness.

And if you could tell the truth about what’s going on, you have the ability to change. If you can begin to acknowledge the truth. And you know, when you asked me the question before about what I’m worried about, I’m worried about how angry everybody is. That’s what I’m worried about. Anger terrifies me. And he says, “If people can begin to look at the truth of the situation, then they have an opportunity to understand that they’re using their anger because they are afraid to face their own pain.”

And I so understood so much of what’s going on. And if we could have that become a lesson for us and we could begin to spread that lesson rather than internalize it just for ourselves. If we can help people through that, how good that would be. Now, listen, you know, my glass is always half full, so you’ve got to know who you’re talking to.

Anne Quito: I want to go back to this idea that you first mentioned in the beginning that magazines can be a conduit for solutions. Now, your former colleague, Tina Strasberg, from your Self magazine days, asks this question. She asks, “What does Rochelle miss in the current publishing climate?” I think it’s another way of asking what type of magazine or publication does the world need at this moment?

Rochelle Udell: I think we need a lot of different kinds of publications. I think we need publications to help us on—the less emotional. Well, it is emotional. I think we need publications to escape. I think we need publications that help us dream, inspire us to think about things in our own life that give us pleasure.

I think those are important things in a form that we can hold to ourselves, as opposed to scroll through or print out on our computers or whatever. I think you want to hold them as something that’s, you know, almost collectible. Then I think you also need, on the other end of it, you need magazines that begin to dialogue or have discourse for ideas for change, where someone could write a longer-form essay and create a thought that would be good to generate into the public.

When The New York Times did The 1619 Project, I thought that was extraordinary. How important was that for all of us to see? And it led to a rash of essays, and books, and conversations, and dialogue. That was really great. So that people can begin to exchange ideas and think through things.

**The original Epicurious.com site map, ca. 1995.**

“You must support whoever’s working for you. You have to give them what they need to do their job. And if they fall, or for some reason it doesn’t work out, that’s your responsibility, too. ”

Anne Quito: That’s wonderful. As we close, I wanted to ask you a question I’ve been tussling with over the last few months. Reading about your life I realized that we have been looking at similar topics. Visual culture, food, social issues, chairs, by the way, I love art. I wanted to ask you, reflecting on the full arc of your career, does examining the good life lead to a good life?

Rochelle Udell: I think it matters how you define what a good life is. And I think that’s unique to each individual. You know, you look at cultures that don’t have fancy cars, and homes, and clean produce, and supermarkets and you’ve got some very happy people out there that don’t have these things. And they enjoy their families. And they’re fine. They’re absolutely fine. That’s a very good life.

So a lot of it has to do with the cultural context that you grow up in. And the values that you are born into, and come away with, into your own life as an adult. So I think that when you begin, everybody should look to themselves as to what constitutes the good life for them.

There are a lot of things in America, but culturally, what we seem to call democracy. Maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. We’re not going to get into that. But if you can characterize America, it was always about what’s next and what’s new. We were driven by what’s next and what’s new.

And even people buying big, expensive houses. And then they hire someone to come in and they want it to look like it’s always been there for three centuries, but have all the antiques come in a box, right? They’re missing the journey of discovery when that happens. They’re missing the journey of discovery.

So that’s their value system of wanting to have that. For me, success has always revolved around my family. And the health and well being of my family has always come first to me. It’s been very satisfying.

Anne Quito: Rochelle, back to baking and the good life, I want to know if you could whittle down the top three ingredients of a good life, what would they be?

Rochelle Udell: I think health would be number one. And it’s always been number one on my list. Both mental and physical health. So you may call that one and two or 1A and 1B.

Anne Quito: Let’s call it One. Two?

Rochelle Udell: I think ‘peace.’ If you could find peace in your life, whether it’s a way of finding a place where you can pause. I think everybody needs a pause. And so I’m calling that peace. So health and peace.

And the last thing I would say is community of some form—being able to be with people, whether they’re with you physically, or they’re on the phone, or on the internet, or wherever they are. In your heart. For me, those are, I mean, I’m just thinking about it now. I could probably give you seven others.

But you know, my kids used to ask me, “Mommy, what do you want for your birthday?”

And I would always say, “Peace. I want peace.” You know?

And then, “What’s your favorite word?”

My favorite word was always ‘freedom.’ So I’m adding freedom.

Anne Quito: Freedom. I agree with all that. I would only add a fifth: good butter. That’s it.

For more on Rochelle Udell, check out her spectacular online memoir, Adventures of the Baker’s Daughter.

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