If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to.
As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming."
I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker, afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear, eventually...
“My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said...
The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic. Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews, The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
There’s a great scene in the movie World’s Greatest Dad where Robin Williams plays a frustrated writer. Another teacher at the school where he teaches gets a story in The New Yorker¹ and Robin Williams’s character tells him something along the lines of “how nice, I hope your next one gets published somewhere that isn’t regional.”²
⸻
1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary short fiction publishing.
2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who’s come a long way from his Police Academy days.
This is like being confused if The Atlantic had an article about the west coast, only to believe the question of topicality for the publication's article was resolved when the article mentioned the east coast.
a white guy in a nice suit spending his days by the pool side. Actors, actresses, businessmen. No mentioning of poor families with a lot of children who i'm sure would have liked to use the pool too. Was there a pool fee or some form of "face control"?
you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
One item on the rather long list of dietary advice/findings that have turned out to be wrong or overstated. Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings". A local cabarettist had a 10 minute piece about this already 15 years ago. It seems, most dietary advice holds roughly 10 years, until someone else publishes another "study" and the press picks up on it to "entertain" the masses. Remember spinace and its supposed iron content? Or the milk industry doing an ad compaign (for decades!) to promote milk for school kids? The former was a misplaced comma, IIRC. And the latter was a blatant attempt to sell more product.
> Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings".
Seems like a bit of confirmation bias here - tons of things that people were told would kill them, did in fact end up killing them. Science is wrong sometimes, of course, and science journalism even more often.
Well, eggs just triggered me. I am from the "I will stop eating eggs when there are no chickens anymore" team... And sure, you're definitely right. Learning about and eliminating aspestos, for instance, was probably one of the bigger well known positive counter-example from the previous century. However, I can't think of many great counter-examples when it comes to dietary advice and the science journalism (thanks for the word) attached to it. Maybe you can poke a hole in my confimraton bias?
The fed a bunch of cholesterol to rabbits who then got heart disease. But it turns out you’re not a rabbit and dietary cholesterol has nowhere near the same effect on humans.
> Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth—the first half circle to your left as you came in—and ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk.
TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
The article is from 1993. If you are old enough to remember that time, it was indeed when official nutritionist advice was a complete failure. Eggs were advised against because it was thought their high cholesterol levels raised blood cholesterol, which is false for most people who consume a moderate amount of eggs. This is the time during which fat was demonized (anyone remember SnackWell's???), the "foot pyramid" was the rule of the day that was based on eating lots of bread, pasta and carbs.
Fat is still bad in excess, you are just stuck in a different meme cycle where Americans pretend it doesn’t matter and surely couldn’t have anything to do with the rampant obesity.
I actually liked their devil's food cookie things. And after a quick glimpse at the internet, I am not alone in that. It's probably the major thing they're known for now.
If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to.
As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
(1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
Wonderful accompanying piece worth reading - thanks for posting
[flagged]
If, like me, you were curious about the visuals to go with this piece, it appears that this is the pool today: https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly...
That's lovely
https://archive.is/eRc3M
I can't be the only person curious about his Fortunescope: https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunes...
He made it to 101
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming."
Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.
I’d reckon that the trifles got to getting truffled around 20 years prior.
I wonder how much of the HN readership was not even born then....?
Probably a decent number. I first heard of HN around 2010 when I was in university.
I assume that plenty of university students find their way to HN still. And that many of them will have been born around the mid-2000’s.
I only barely make the cut myself to having been born a few years before 1993.
I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker, afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear, eventually...
The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic. Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews, The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
There’s a great scene in the movie World’s Greatest Dad where Robin Williams plays a frustrated writer. Another teacher at the school where he teaches gets a story in The New Yorker¹ and Robin Williams’s character tells him something along the lines of “how nice, I hope your next one gets published somewhere that isn’t regional.”²
⸻
1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary short fiction publishing.
2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who’s come a long way from his Police Academy days.
This is like being confused if The Atlantic had an article about the west coast, only to believe the question of topicality for the publication's article was resolved when the article mentioned the east coast.
I find it wonderfully clichee that the guy who's job was linking vendors and customers was called Mr. Link.
It's called nominative determinism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
There is a strange sort of cerebral experience that elicits a visceral response about glimpses into ordinary life through plain black ink…err…fonts.
This is completely all over the place, like it would be to listen to an 87yo, but I'm not too sure about the author or editor.
a white guy in a nice suit spending his days by the pool side. Actors, actresses, businessmen. No mentioning of poor families with a lot of children who i'm sure would have liked to use the pool too. Was there a pool fee or some form of "face control"?
you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
So he would just go hang out at a pool all day and avoid his wife and children? No wonder he lived to 101.
>scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs
do people not eat eggs anymore?
Not in the 1990s, no. DIETARY CHOLESTEROL BAD was the mantra of the day.
Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
Thankfully, they were let out of prison. https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/34447709/bad... (circa 1991??)
One item on the rather long list of dietary advice/findings that have turned out to be wrong or overstated. Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings". A local cabarettist had a 10 minute piece about this already 15 years ago. It seems, most dietary advice holds roughly 10 years, until someone else publishes another "study" and the press picks up on it to "entertain" the masses. Remember spinace and its supposed iron content? Or the milk industry doing an ad compaign (for decades!) to promote milk for school kids? The former was a misplaced comma, IIRC. And the latter was a blatant attempt to sell more product.
> Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings".
Seems like a bit of confirmation bias here - tons of things that people were told would kill them, did in fact end up killing them. Science is wrong sometimes, of course, and science journalism even more often.
Well, eggs just triggered me. I am from the "I will stop eating eggs when there are no chickens anymore" team... And sure, you're definitely right. Learning about and eliminating aspestos, for instance, was probably one of the bigger well known positive counter-example from the previous century. However, I can't think of many great counter-examples when it comes to dietary advice and the science journalism (thanks for the word) attached to it. Maybe you can poke a hole in my confimraton bias?
The fed a bunch of cholesterol to rabbits who then got heart disease. But it turns out you’re not a rabbit and dietary cholesterol has nowhere near the same effect on humans.
Who could have ever guessed that a herbivore would be poorly adapted to high amounts of cholesterol in their diet?
And also rabbits do not normally eat eggs, in fact aren’t even carnivores.
Have you seen the egg prices lately...? ;-)
> anymore
The article is from 1993, not today.
I came back here to comment this exact thing, this was a very confusing line.
I wasn’t around in 1993 but I’m pretty positive my parents and grandparents ate eggs in 1993.
I guess this line made more sense in the context of other news articles at the time.
billionaires do, us mere mortals can no longer afford them :)
> Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth—the first half circle to your left as you came in—and ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk.
TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
The article is from 1993. If you are old enough to remember that time, it was indeed when official nutritionist advice was a complete failure. Eggs were advised against because it was thought their high cholesterol levels raised blood cholesterol, which is false for most people who consume a moderate amount of eggs. This is the time during which fat was demonized (anyone remember SnackWell's???), the "foot pyramid" was the rule of the day that was based on eating lots of bread, pasta and carbs.
I don't remember a foot pyramid. There was the food pyramid, the $64000 pyramid, but nothing about feet. Just to have fun with an obvious simple typo
Fat is still bad in excess, you are just stuck in a different meme cycle where Americans pretend it doesn’t matter and surely couldn’t have anything to do with the rampant obesity.
I actually liked their devil's food cookie things. And after a quick glimpse at the internet, I am not alone in that. It's probably the major thing they're known for now.
This might have been during the "eggs are bad for you" part of the egg cycle.
So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at contemporary cultural mores.
My favorite part was when eggs were bad, then were good, then were bad again. Then people stopped talking about them at all.
It was a very informative time for me personally.