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People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017)
- HeavenBanned 7y agoIt's kind of like the "man on the street" interviews ...very intriguing vignettes. I quite liked the Confederate veteran story.
- suzzer99 7y agoWhen I went to college in Kirksville, MO - my friends and I were endlessly entertained to see local newspaper report stuff like "Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Freese visited Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hanover after church on Sunday." There was an entire page of this stuff. Apparently (I'm told) small town papers still do this.
- soniman 7y agoWarren Buffett has some comments about this. Apparently people like reading about themselves or people they know and it significantly increases circulation.
- jnbiche 7y agoIt's not just small-town newspapers. Think of society pages of all the big newspapers (some still have them). And for example the wedding pages of the NY Times.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MrMember 7y ago>Apparently (I'm told) small town papers still do this. They do. My grandmother writes them for my hometown newspaper.
- toyg 7y agoInteresting to note how the man clamouring for a better hotel uses size as a proxy for quality: paraphrasing slightly, "if only we had a massive hotel, more rich people would come and feel at ease!". These days one would probably demand the very opposite.
- rolleiflex 7y agoThis is quite common in parts of the world that are just getting to a modicum of wealth. For example, I landed to the new Istanbul Airport a few days ago. Its main premise, the way it's pitched to the (largely indifferent) public, is that it's the largest airport in the world, one that is the size of Manhattan. Meanwhile, I spent four hours coming into the actual city from there. It's dreadful.
- ghaff 7y agoThough that's pretty unavoidable if you need to add a larger airport to a city whose existing airport is space constrained. You often have to go pretty far out to get to lots of near-empty space where you can site the new airport.
- rolleiflex 7y agoThat is true, though it’s still shockingly poor planning to open the airport and close the old one before the bullet train interlink starts to serve the new one.
- mertd 7y agoUrban planning took a back seat because they rushed to open it before the municipal elections. Fortunately the voters are not amused by the irony anymore.
- alexhutcheson 7y agoIt seems like the vision is to turn IST into a Dubai-style mega hub for flights between APAC and EMEA & the North American East Coast. Whether Turkish Airlines actually has the operational chops to compete with Emirates, Qatar, Etihad, etc. without massive ongoing subsidies is an open question. The move is definitely way worse for people actually traveling into Istanbul. The metro expansions to the airport can’t come soon enough, but even on a metro the trip will be pretty long.
- sho 7y agoVery interesting. I confess I actually would be interested in some sort of modern equivalent, if that could even exist. Those few times I've been lucky enough to stay in truly excellent hotels, or international business class lounges, I have sort of wondered what the other people there are thinking about and what they might have to say if I were to be so indiscrete to ask. I'm not saying rich people know it all, or anything in particular - but just being present in a rarefied place like that does have some story behind it and I'm endlessly curious to know what that might be. On another note, also interesting is the frankly crap quality of the scanned text, which one unfortunately presumes is the only copy remaining in existence. Is there any current or near future OCR/ML system which might be capable of transcribing the raw scans with any acceptable level of accuracy? It's a challenging read even for this human!
- peterburkimsher 7y agoGoogle Cloud Vision is pretty good for OCR. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmokgbialjjgfhfofbgfcghhbkejac https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmo...
- badpun 7y agoI'm generally very curious about the internal lives of all people around me. I don't think that being rich makes, on average, one more or less interesting. If anything, rich people tend to be more robotic (single-minded and logic-driven), which would make them less interesting targets for dissection, if it were somehow possible.
- drclau 7y agoWhy would you think that about rich people? I'm honestly curious.
- badpun 7y agoIn order to become rich, you need to be very focused on the goal. This means that you're either naturally very single-minded, or you've managed to prune other interests, doubts, thoughts from your head, and just executed mercilessly for years. In either case, this makes you a rather one-dimensional person. Additionally, successful people tend to be in always-be-selling mode, so it's super-hard to have an honest conversation with them.
- z3t4 7y agoIm a bit suprised that the language reads like modern American English. When reading something old in my native language its very foreign.
- Aeolun 7y agoThis is 1890. It’s not that crazy, and the wording and expressions used are clearly a bit different. If you go back to 1500s english it also becomes pretty much incomprehensible. Is your native language impossible to read if you go back to only 1900? I find it difficult to believe that it could change that much, but it would be interesting.
- selimthegrim 7y agoUrdu/Hindi for example has a lot of idioms and nouns that have gone out of fashion/been superseded by English
- vidarh 7y agoI think few languages changed enough to be incomprehensible, on that period, but e.g the Norwegian of 1890 was basically Danish (over simplifying as we have a second language composed from dialects) and the Danish of the era was sufficiently closer to German that when I studied German I read a ca. 1900 Danish edition of Faust in parallel with the German because it was sufficient a 'midpoint' to help understand everything from sentence structure to vocabulary. It would definitively be readable to a modern reader, but the differences can in some texts be sufficient to require a lot more conscious effort where English from that era seems to 'just' seem a bit odd and overly formal. I do think it also depends a great deal if you know any related languages. E.g if you understand German and Danish, older Norwegian makes sense - I remember when it clicked for me that the best way of improving my German grammar was to when in doubt think about how older more formal Norwegian forms would be. I read a lot of adventure novels from the early 1900's, so I was familiar with that. But I know class mates who were totally unfamiliar with Norwegian literature from that era who while they'd certainly understand it would found it more of an effort.
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- muse900 7y agoI feel like this was a thing back then, not only because the "strong and powerful" men of that ERA where in and out of a hotel lobby but also cause journalism was based on going out to get/make a story. Nowadays I feel like real journalism is a very small fraction of the journalism field in general and I feel like most news/media outlets (paper, tv, blogs) are just copy pasting stories from others in a bad manner as well, changing them up to feel a bit more "wow this thing happened", and you end up with a story that has nothing to do with the original. We do live in the ERA of over-information and lazy journalism. A news outlet in most cases doesn't need to go out of their way to find the story and the cases that happens is very limited nowadays. The media will just display anything that comes their way on steroids to make it interesting... and thats why I don't watch the news :) On the other hand I am pretty certain there are still Hotels in Europe where the strong and powerful pass through on a daily basis, and there are up and coming smart hotels which have a lobby that I've personally seen the next tech idea being discussed from its ground.
- tnolet 7y agoSad to read you have such a narrow view of the news media. Maybe it’s that way in your home country. Or maybe some specific outlets have spoiled it for the others. If you’re ever in Germany or the Netherlands I’d be happy to show you how my partner (a journalist for a national broadcaster) and her coworkers go about it. It’s the opposite of lazy, copy & paste. It’s hard working, diligent, critical etc.
- Chris_Chambers 7y agoWow, his comment struck a nerve so hard that you perceived it as a personal attack against your girlfriend. Sorry, but the “journalism” conducted by any mainstream news outlet in Germany is guaranteed to be garbage. Her job is a joke, and so are you for defending it. What an absurd claim that you’d invite a total stranger online to go into her workplace with you to lurk and watch what’s happening. You definitely wouldn’t do that, which means you just said that as a rhetorical tool to further fuel your own passive aggressive response as you try to get that dopamine rush from defending your girlfriend from the males of the invading tribe or whatever ancient instinct has possessed you to respond in the manner you did.
- Haga 7y agoLove the cracker cartel conference on how to reduce cost of ingredients.
- giorgioz 7y agoI often wonder where is nowadays a place to meet intellectually stimulating people. Right now my betting money is on digital nomads' meetups in cities like Chiang Mai (Thailand), Budapest (Hungary) and Medellin (Colombia).
- soniman 7y agoI wonder if some of these from the "Arlington" hotel were actually from Arlington, VA? Arlington used to be part of the District before 1847. It's impossible to search for the answer, too many Arlington hotel results.
- luckylion 7y agoIf you search on google books, you'll find more relevant results, including the official congressional directory where Arlington Hotel is listed as the residence of multiple persons along other names such as National Hotel, Metropolitan Hotel, and Washington House. https://www.loc.gov/item/96503316/ https://www.loc.gov/item/96503316/ mentions The Arlington as a location in Washington D.C., published between 1882 and 1900.
- asveikau 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Hotel_(Washington,_D.C.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Hotel_(Washington,_D... http://www.streetsofwashington.com/2010/08/opulent-arlington-hotel.html http://www.streetsofwashington.com/2010/08/opulent-arlington... I was born in DC more than 70 years after said hotel was demolished, however, I can recognize by the way they write that "The Arlington" (always appearing with an article) is presumably a place in the District. No one would presume that kind of social crowd to be in Virginia, especially the further you go back in time. Googling around I found a claim that it was on the current site of the Veterans Affairs offices, which would put it on Vermont Ave NW near I St.
- tomohawk 7y ago> before two World Wars made Washington the capital of the free world More like before FDR's massive expansion of the federal government. Today, it's hard to believe how unimportant the federal government was in most areas of peoples lives.
- qaq 7y agoAs a result top 5 counties by median household income are around DC.
- esoterica 7y agoThat's largely due to the arbitrary way county lines are drawn. Parts of San Francisco and Manhattan are far wealthier than the DC suburbs, but they share a county with lots of poor people who drag the median household income down.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoIt's still fairly unimportant, just unavoidable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- threwawasy1228 7y agoLast time I met someone at a higher end hotel bar who sat next to me, it was pretty terrible. He was a truck driving member of the furry fandom from West Virginia, and he seemed pretty mentally unstable. Ruined what was otherwise a top class meal.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Abutere 7y agoImagine the old-timey headline for that encounter: "Appalachian Freight Runner Explains his Lascivious Proclivities for Fauna"
- CydeWeys 7y agoIt would be awesome if this article could be made more accessible by transcribing the article photos. I'm sighted and some of these are hard to read for me.
- smacktoward 7y agoI agree, so I went back and added transcriptions for all the images. Thanks for pressing on accessibility, it's an important and under-appreciated subject.
- bookofjoe 7y agoPrince's 1984 song: https://youtu.be/j8oxXkUjYHg https://youtu.be/j8oxXkUjYHg
- FabHK 7y agoLovely euphemism for booze: "large stocks of coolness and ennui-dispellers are kept constantly on ice" :-)
- rolltiide 7y agoI love the bit about English vs American clothes "I'm not trying to make a tariff argument out of it, but American clothes are just better!"
- karmakaze 7y agoTesla charging stations might qualify. My take would be that the industries don't have that time to spare.
- nullwasamistake 7y agoAirline lounges and expensive "dinner clubs" have largely replaced this and serve a similar purpose. Once you break the upper crust you start getting invited to fancy dinners corporate and charity auctions too
- devchix 7y agoIn the same spirit, but in the blue-collar band of the wealth spectrum, This American Life camped out for 24 hours at a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple and recorded the conversations of people who happened to be there. The episode is a gem. 24 Hours at the Golden Apple (November 2000) https://www.thisamericanlife.org/172/24-hours-at-the-golden-apple https://www.thisamericanlife.org/172/24-hours-at-the-golden-...
- whatshisface 7y agoThat's not a very social thing to do. I wouldn't want somebody camping out and recording my conversations.
- devchix 7y agoI'm sorry to be unclear, the reporter interviewed the diners and the episode was a collection of conversations of the diners with their friends (used with the diner's permissions), and of the diners with the reporter. In no way was it surreptitious.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoThe author teases Ira Barnett of Louisville, Kentucky ("He’s a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory"), but he seems to be fairly self-aware: > I don’t know as there is much in what we are doing to interest the public, except the price of the article, and, as I said before, that will remain unchanged. Basically "I make crackers. Why are you talking to me?"
- titusjohnson 7y agoThese excerpts would make an amazing coffee table or bathroom book.