What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles:
>He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.”
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>Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.”
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>“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.”
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>Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.”
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>Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
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>“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.”
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>“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.”
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>Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”
>Is he a horrible name dropper? Does he really know Marvin Davis?
This paragraph threw me off. The author goes on to quote Davis about Link - so I suppose the second sentence is to meant to be rhetorical and for effect, as in "is the sky blue?"
> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk.
It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body.
My parents (in their 60s) still think this way - they mostly use that ‘egg substitute’ that comes in a carton (I think it’s some sort of processed egg white) as the bulk of their eggs, e.g. scrambled eggs using a 4:1 ratio of substitute to real eggs. They used to almost exclusively use margarine instead of butter too.
I like eggs a lot better now that I’ve learned to make them myself.
That stuff is pretty much just egg white and food coloring. Nowadays they sell undyed egg white in cartons alongside it because the trend has shifted to high protein diets.
One of the best examples of a food industry (grains) being able to influence eating habits to their benefit.
Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it three times a day and little else. You get the idea. The problem there is "x is healthy" makes people overconsume it and ignore anything that isn't marked "healthy".
"healthy" eating takes work, study, and moderation.
At the same time, there is also a faction that appears to argue against overly studying or obsessing about nutrition science, saying that if you really just prioritize variety, moderation, and made-at-home, then you're already 90% of the way there.
> Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose.
Speaking of things from back in the day, an episode of GI Joe featured this idea (only it was dumping truckloads of apples onto a giant gelatinous blob to kill it).
People can be persuaded to silly things on silly logic.
There was a time after prohibition when the prevailing theory was that vodka was healthier than whiskey because it was clear and whiskey wasn't.
Our educational institutions marched an entire populace right into obesity because the government insisted the food pyramid was scientific, and not the result of lobbying.
Honestly it's a bit wild to me that we ever think we know anything for certain.
The street wisdom was that eggs gave you high cholesterol due to the yolk having loads of cholesterol (which doesn't get absorbed, we need to produce our own cholesterol).
There were a bunch of studies saying high cholesterol was bad and would give you a heart attack. Then also ones saying low cholesterol would make you crazy [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4215473/].
And also ones saying food high in cholesterol was bad. Then ones saying food high in ‘bad’ cholesterol were bad, and one’s high in ‘good’ cholesterol were good.
Then eventually we figured out that dietary cholesterol has almost no impact on blood cholesterol levels except in a tiny portion of the population.
It was about health. You know, trying not to grow old and get sick and eventually die. Between the seventies and about 15 years ago, educated people in the US, the sort of people who got their toehold in the middle class by doing what their betters told them to do, would look at you like you were deliberately trying to kill yourself if you had eggs and bacon and white bread toast with real butter on it for breakfast. It probably peaked around the turn of the century.
The margarine section of the dairy case was bigger than the butter section. Imitation cheese slices were sold right alongside regular processed cheese - they're now completely dairy free and banished to the vegan food section.
There's a famous scene in "Sleeper" (1973) by Woody Allen where the character wakes up in the future to find out that everything that was considered bad for you is considered good for you again. Woody Allen was born in 1935 so had been around long enough to know these things go in cycles.
I always find fun these "generalizations". Like: "Eggs are fine". If you are a 50kg person that eats 20 eggs for breakfast each day I doubt it would be fine.
We would need something like LD50, or even better a range over a period (eggs are mostly fine if you eat between 2 and 5 per week)
It's a fine generalisation because it's assumed that people eat 1-2 eggs for breakfast, not 20. "Something like LD50" can't help because it is literally another generalisation that may not apply to you personally: eggs are mostly fine unless you have an eggs allergy or problems with cholesterol or whatnot.
At least at US restaurants, a "small" omelette is three eggs and larger ones more, though. And likewise for servings of scrambled eggs. Pretty much the only case where 1 or 2 eggs are the norm is when ordering fried eggs (and those are generally accompanied by bacon, potatoes, toast, etc.)
There might be longterm malnutrition problems if you’re solely eating eggs in mass quantities (since 20 eggs for a 50 kilo person would be hitting near your daily caloric intake just in eggs), but for most people this isn’t a concern.
Having 5 eggs for breakfast (not as an omelette, which obviously has other stuff in it) every day would probably improve most people’s health.
Assuming female, 5'5", age 35, somewhat active because it's more conservative; daily caloric intake is like 1700. Your egg macros are about 5.5g of protein and fat per egg for about 72 calories per egg. A large egg is 7g protein, 7 fat. 91 calories. My math is based on large eggs, 9 cal/g fat, 4cal/g carbs and protein. To get all of of their caloric intake from eggs would be around 18 eggs.
Vitamin A in eggs is 75iu, 23ug RAE. RDA is 700ug for this person. 30 eggs. The tolerable upper limit is 3000ug. 130 eggs.
Macros:
126g of both fat and protein. Carbs in eggs are negligible at maybe .5g each, totaling 9g or 36 cal. Harvard recommends .36g/lb for protein, which is about 40g. They also set the theoretical upper limit at 2g/kg ; .91g/lb, which is 102g. So this is 24g excessive (3.4 eggs). The quantity of too much protein is debatable, though in the absence of heavy weight lifting, this is at least excessive for most people. Harmful depends on context.
126g of fat is 1134cal. This is below what they need to maintain weight (calorie deficit) and the biggest problem with this diet so far. If this person are more than 150g of carbs per day, I would be concerned because with circulating glucose, body fat is not used readily to supply caloric need. The body may want to use protein as a calorie source, which is where the danger of eating too much protein comes from.
After being on this diet for several weeks, they will be in ketosis, which will actually make it much safer. Body fat is used more readily in ketosis to fill energy needs and could make up the 600 calorie per day deficit, totaling to a little over the safe 1lb per week recommendation for weight loss.
I would advise adding more fat and reducing protein a bit (80g should be plenty though potentially excessive still), not because this is dangerous but because it is excessive and the body will need to remove the excess protein as waste. This isn't really harmful in smaller quantities but does put more strain on the kidneys.
Maybe 12 eggs a day and another 50 of mostly fat to get 500 calories, 500 deficit. If trying to maintain weight, increase fat by another 50g. Mix carbs if you want under 300 calories (75g) with that amount removed from fat intake and preferably in one meal with protein.
With the help of a stochastic parrot I've determined the following: Consuming an LD50 quantity of eggs (400–500 eggs) would amount to about 29% of a 70 kg person's body volume. This suggests that such an amount would be physically impractical to ingest in one sitting, even before metabolic toxicity becomes an issue.
Idk my grandma was like 5'6" and tiny, probably like 120lbs. She ate a dozen eggs for breakfast often and lived a very long healthy life before passing of lung cancer at an old age.
> Then Irving would either walk back home to his wife and two children
What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the hotel?
The article mentions that he'd go home for dinner, up until his wife died. The hotel pool was apparently also where he did his "job": being a deal-making middleman for a 2% cut, per a later description in the article.
His job, or at least his former jobs, paid well enough to have a home in Beverly Hills, drive a gold lexus, and wear beautiful suits every day.
So they weren't necessarily estranged - he just worked long days every day that afforded a very nice lifestyle.
Owning a home is always good no matter what the finance influencers tell you. In fact, earlier the better. Its not even the buying vs renting thing, renting is bad, you don't get to own anything at the end of the journey, and often the kind of things you have to put up with to save rent, or avoid getting homeless in case of of a job loss or other life crisis is just worth your mental health. Most of your life is spent paying up for the landlords ownership.
People often arrive at the scene when most of the options are gone years back, and they wish they bought at the price that existed back then. Get disappointed and lawyer through the arguments to justify renting a home.
Assuming fixed rate mortgage, in most places the rate at which rent can grow is faster than rate of property taxes+insurance can grow. So the cost of ownership will generally be cheaper than renting. Not to mention increasing equity in an asset with time
Not in the US, but I live in a CoL place in Europe and when I bought my first apartment I was baffled by the amount of money I was saving every month. My previous rent was about the same as my mortgage, but 40% of my mortgage was going down to reduce the principal. And I only had 15% downpayment.
Bought the apartment in 2018, sold in 2024 (close to the bottom of the local-market slump). Still profited ~10% (before fees) compared to buying price. All that principal amortization payed for the downpayment (and some) of my much bigger current apartment.
Oof - it cuts both ways. Its near impossible to own a home in London when everything is on land-lease. You're just buying the house for a while...so...renting. Because some generations old family owns the land.
If you stay long enough, buying is cheaper. But if you move after just a few years, you'll have mostly paid interests on your mortgage, you had closing tax, your house may even have lost value... So there are many cases it would have been cheaper to rent.
How long you need to stay to make your purchase worthwhile depends where you live.
Agreed. Over a decade ago, to try to overcome my fear to make such a large purchase, I did the math and decided to bake very conservative assumptions into my decision-making. My rent then was $1800 a month, so 5 years of that is $108k. If I kept a similar mortgage payment as my rent (in reality, my payment was actually more like $1450), I realized that all I had to do was stay there 5 years while having it lose ($108k minus property taxes paid) in value and I'd break even in terms of cash flow, whereas the upside, if it stayed flat or appreciated, was that I'd have built up substantial equity.
(In the end, the gamble paid off great - the condo appreciated by about 300k in those 5 years)
Japan would like have a word with you. Houses in Japan are like cars. The moment you buy it it's now "used" and worth less and it keeps doing down in value.
That's actually not (much) less true in other places. It's just that in eg the US the land is typically a lot more valuable, and people tend to mix up the value of the land (which doesn't really deprecate) and the value of the structure on top.
How does that even apply here? Assuming you aren't living with family it's fair to assume you have to spend money on housing. So the question is, do you want to keep some of that money in the form of equity or give all of it to your landlord?
That's a good reason to sell an extra home when you need/want cash, not to rent where you live. Even if you don't have children to inherit, it's nice to own a home, but I guess it depends on ones lifestyle.
its not renting vs owning that's the problem, its renting vs mortgage where mortgage is improperly considered synonymous with ownership. but that's because its so rare to be able to own the home near the places you can rent.
so sure, renting vs buying a home in cash will give the cash ownership a leg up. but then it shifts over to people that would love to espouse about the 'time value of money' and leverage, where putting all the cash down is suboptimal vs a mortgage. the % increase of the home value isn't amplified when using cash up front either.
so lets optimize this further, renting vs mortgage with the option to pay it off at any moment is always better. but nobody has that cash, so we're back at square one.
if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that renting will be a better deal for you for over 10 years straight, before the mortgage pays dividends.
From where I come(South Indian Muslim), there is a saying that how quickly you own a home, get married and have kids decide the overall affluence you have in life.
If eat that frog is a think for daily schedule, there is also such a thing for life itself. You just have to get a few things done as early in life as you can. Or you end up living for other people.
> if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that renting will be a better deal for you for over 10 years straight, before the mortgage pays dividends.
How do mortgages pay dividends?
In any case, it's all about opportunity costs, and yields.
To give an extreme example: if the house costs 100x the yearly rent, you are probably better off putting your money in the stock market instead of buying the property, and paying your rent from the returns on the stocks.
For starters, people don't buy a house to live in solely because of the financials around it. They also buy the house because they want it.
When it comes to mortgage vs. buying outright, it just depends. I managed to get a very low interest rate for my primary home; the money I didn't put into the house is busy making quite a bit more than that very low interest rate for me yearly. If I were to rent out the house, I could probably get more for it than what I'm paying in mortgage interest + property taxes, so renting isn't really better (and then I'd be subject to the rent-jacking whims of my landlord). But even if I couldn't, I still just... want this house to be mine. There's value in that to me.
> if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that renting will be a better deal for you
This is very regionally-dependent. There are places where rents are significantly more expensive than mortgage payments, and places where homes cost so much that most people rent at a fairly reasonable rate in comparison.
>its not even the buying vs renting thing, renting is bad, you don't get to own anything at the end of the journey
let's say you are an investor (crypto and day trading, living at home rent free in your parents' basement: "more tendies mom!")
but alongside your crypto and day trading, you scrape together enough cash to buy a house as an investment. it's an investment, you rent it out and earn rental income. What's rent? let's say it's $10,000 a month. Great! so, in addition to the appreciation of the property over time, you also get $120,000+ a year (the + is because you get some of the money at the beginning and middle of the year and you can pour it into lucrative day trading and crypto)
with me so far? nothing up my sleeve.
now you're feeling flush and you figure with your success, you don't have to live in mom's basement any more. Heck! you own a house, you can live there! and eat your cheetos in the the living room instead of the basement! So, you move in.
If you live in the investment house you own, you no longer get the $120,000+ a year. Why...why...why, wait, it's just like you are paying $10,000 a month rent!
Moral to the story: owning does not save you from paying rent, you are still paying rent, forgoing that income on your investment. Yes, that "it's so obvious everbody knows it" personal finance advice you read in major publications is complete and utter garbage.
don't thank me [tips cap] glad to help. And now you know how i feel sharing the planet with people, "experts" even, who don't have a clue what they are talking about.
Is this sarcasm? Because this entire story is predicated on the fact that while you’re renting the home you bought you’re living somewhere else and that somewhere else is either something you’re renting or something someone else has bought and you’re living in there rent free.
Quite limited view thats valid in certain times in certain cases, in certain countries etc.
What about drawbacks of owning a house? You will spend non-trivial amount of your time, energy and money just to keep it up, keep fixing all things that deteriorate. And everything deteriorates. I mean really non-trivial, count how much your hourly rate is and how much you will waste instead of making some fun good activities, getting more healthy, enjoying life, resting, traveling and so on. Is that really how you want to spend some part of your me-time?
You are also locking yourself down at very specific place which may be a craphole in a decade, without good jobs around etc.
Also it will in normal cases vacuum your savings, degrading quality and fun in life in (at least) initial years after purchase - those are often the best years of one's remaining life.
People tend to look back with rosy glasses on the past, highlighting positives and shrinking negatives, thats basic psychology of each of us. Looking back at period of ownership people mostly look at money made, not all that stress and time with just keeping some property in same state.
Middle grounds are apartments, very little maintenance compared to house&land, much lower costs, but also less privacy and less feeling of 'in my own'.
There is room for each approach, ie right out school locking oneself in specific place may not be the smartest idea. Maybe you will earn some money on sell but maybe also some much better opportunities and better life will be missed due to inflexibility. Freedom is invaluable, properties ownership tends to take some of it away.
>>You will spend non-trivial amount of your time, energy and money just to keep it up
To up keep your home! You also pretty much up keep your rented home too. And at the end you spend to maintain other people's home.
>>Is that really how you want to spend some part of your me-time?
Most of the times its not that bad, you talk like you are on-call 24x7 throughout the year.
>>You are also locking yourself down at very specific place which may be a craphole in a decade, without good jobs around etc.
That's called stability, and that brings wealth and happiness. Honestly people look down upon these things, people use wrong words(lifer, coaster etc) to put down stability. In reality stability, with a predictable schedule is one of the best things that you do to your health, and overall life stability/happiness.
>>Also it will in normal cases vacuum your savings, degrading quality and fun in life in (at least) initial years after purchase - those are often the best years of one's remaining life.
This is mostly an assumption, in my experience the exact opposite is true.
>>People tend to look back with rosy glasses on the past, highlighting positives and shrinking negatives, thats basic psychology of each of us. Looking back at period of ownership people mostly look at money made, not all that stress and time with just keeping some property in same state.
Its always a bad idea to make any investment today, and you feel deep regret to have not made an investment 20 years back. Im not talking about real estate in specific, but even things like education, or exercise, look pointless and something you can do without today, but you wish you had done more or atleast started decades back.
>>Middle grounds are apartments, very little maintenance compared to house&land, much lower costs, but also less privacy and less feeling of 'in my own'.
You don't even own walls in a apartment, its like the worst of all the worlds.
You have described London. There are no taxes on owning a property at all, the growth rate has slowed somewhat since the 00s heyday but it's still going up.
>>he just worked long days every day that afforded a very nice lifestyle.
Some people do work jobs where affluence and a nice lifestyle are kind of baked into it.
I do know quite a few people who travel for work often, they stay in luxury hotels, business class travel, great food and fun opportunities at a often basis.
Many do today, but in those days nearly everyone did.
These days we realize that two unhappily-married parents can often be worse for the children than if they get divorced and continue to be active parents.
A woman I dated about 15 years ago came from a household where her parents clearly did not like each other.
She treated our relationship as being adversarial. She felt like she had to "win" every conversation, and one time even admitted to choosing to take a side that she knew was factually wrong just to stir things up. I think she truly believed that love was constant bickering.
Within a year of her and her sister's moving out, her parents divorced. They stuck together "for the kids", and as a result, the kids got a terrible impression of what a loving relationship is supposed to look like.
I have no doubt this is a widespread behavior, but I do have doubts as to whether or not this benefits children. Children seem to benefit primarily from watching relationships that genuinely make both parents happy. There's very little evidence to support that faking it yields results of children reacting as if you weren't faking it. You might as well divorce.
> Children seem to benefit primarily from watching relationships that genuinely make both parents happy.
I think you'll find the data supports chidren benefiting from a happy loving home. Not from the concern of the parents relationships with others.
My childhood friends were mostly from divorced parents and it very much impacted them all in negative ways. Parents are security blankets for children. It's who they run to when scared and need love. They are dependent on them survival. Ripping that apart causes harm.
> I think you'll find the data supports chidren benefiting from a happy loving home. Not from the concern of the parents relationships with others.
I don't know how you'd exclude the influence of parents relationships from impacting the happiness of a home. If a kid is aware of a relationship, they're absorbing.
I don't think anybody will disagree that watching parents divorce is harmful to children.
But I think parents sticking together for the kids is worse. Kids can see the contempt between their parents and might get the wrong impression that that's what a normal relationship looks like.
It's not all just about the relationship, but about the father and mother. Both offer very different aspects of life that help children develop in a way they'd never get from something like a 'visiting' parent, let alone the Big Brothers/Sisters program. Those latter things are of course much better than nothing, but the ideal is an ever present father and mother. For but one example, the most obvious is that a father understands what a 13 year old boy is going through in a way a mother never could, yet that mother will do a far better job with that same boy in his early years than the father ever could.
Statistically children from two parent households just do dramatically better by just about every single measurable metric, with 0 control for the quality of that household/relationship.
My friend in high school suffered from depression in part because he was well aware of that fact that his parents were only staying together until he graduated. Despite any attempt to put a rational face on it, he believed his existence was the source of his parents' unhappiness.
Another friend of mine is doing this with his wife right now. He's utterly miserable, but the racial stereotype of the missing black father weighs so heavily in his mind that he's resigned to just counting down the years (despite my own attempt to convey the above story).
I think that staying together for the kids is essential for the very early age, but if someone goes it must be the dad. My mum left when I was 1 and a half and that is obviously horrifically painful
At a certain age though the parents should split if it isn't working. It's definitely far easier to deal with your dad or mum leaving if you're 10 years old than if you're 1 year old
"As Link tells it, Nan’s attention from their births went to son Rand and daughter Gale. There was no time for his work, his life and love. Despite separating ways, Link says, they stayed married for the sake of the children. Because that’s what parents used to do."
Was looking to buy an apartment which had had a single owner for decades, likely since it was built in the 70s.
At the viewing I noticed how it looked quite distinctly worn.
Like, the ceiling above the stove was full of grease from frying and the interior of the oven had clear signs of only being used for frozen pizzas. Looked like he'd only ever made like pork chops or frozen pizzas.
The floor in the main bedroom was very well preserved, except for a noticeable worn path leading to the bed and a small oval next to the bed. Similar things in the living room.
I mentioned this to the agent, which replied: *Oh yeah, the guy bought the place so he could stay here when he needed a break from his wife. Apparently he'd come here every few weeks or so and stay for a couple of days."
Reading the article, looking at pictures from the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 70ies and 80ies, and considering the fact that Irving V. Link acted in a movie once, I get the strong feeling that an episode of Columbo in which Link played himself as a wrongfully accused prime suspect (saved by Columbo in the end) would've been excellent.
what stands out of me is a sense of place the hotel represented that isn't present anywhere today. if you were at the hotel when something occurred, the hotel was a part of america and by being there, you were there, a small part of the story. the starkness in the story to me is that the culture today lacks belonging. no matter how many followers you have, you will never belong anywhere the way this Irving character had become a fixture. he was a part of the story.
maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now.
the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor.
the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.
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.
> assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to.
In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to. Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information.
Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most intensely personal stuff
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."
One of the nice things about HN is the wide age range of the participants. I have read interesting and thoughtful comments from people who said they were high school students all the way through to people a decade or more older than me (I'm sixty-seven).
Person born in 2000 here. My friends and colleagues at university generally don't know about HN.
Have told a few people about it but the only person I really converted into also becoming a regular reader is my dad. It's good because now whenever we see each other we have a lot of topics and stuff to discuss that we both read about here.
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
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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.
Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy made so much money that he poured it into funding some amazing writing (while the standard joke was “I read Playboy for the articles,” the articles were generally quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant work in printing and typographic technology (one example: the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type on the gravure pages didn’t match the type on the offset pages, they had a custom version of Palatino made to correct the discrepancy).
Those three are still the top tier, at least when it comes to money for short fiction, although it’s depressing to read stuff from the 30s which has dollar amounts attached to publications and realize that even in nominal dollars, those would be better paychecks than most writers receive today.
Nowadays I think people just lump it into the same category as other mass-market brown-paper-cover mags from gas stations like Penthouse and Hustler, but Playboy really was different.
Hefner set out to create a respectable, top-tier publication -- by design -- that just happened to also include nudity. "Golden age" Playboy pictorials were pretty tame and generally tasteful, and they were in a magazine that'd have (as noted) top-tier fiction, excellent reporting, and high-profile interviews.
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 don't know why I found this so interesting to read.
It’s a well-written piece by a professional journalist, published in a magazine that people were willing to pay money for. It stands out against the kind of ad-supported click-optimized dreck that passes for journalism today.
one national newspaper where I live is famous for viewing everything from the perspective of 'their office'/the city they are in.
An great example of this was when they discussed something happening in a different city in same country, and they would proceed to write
"... <name of city> (that is 275 km west of here) ..."
which only makes sense when you are in their offices/city.
Article summary:
“ Irving V. Link spent 42 years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, where his meticulous daily routine of breakfast, sunbathing, and gin rummy became legendary. He was admired by hotel staff and Hollywood figures alike, symbolizing the timeless charm of a bygone era in Los Angeles. His life was deeply intertwined with the hotel’s evolution, reflecting the glamour of old Hollywood and the shifting dynamics of its clientele. The hotel’s closure by the Sultan of Brunei for renovations disrupted his routine and marked the end of an era. Link’s personal narrative weaves together memories of luxury, business intrigue, and cultural transformation. Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.”
>Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.
I wish, occasionally, AI would close with
>Ultimately, his story is a trite and shallow distraction which fails to leave a lasting impression upon the reader.
The article may indeed be a "poignant meditation" (I liked it personally). but when AI shoehorns the last sentence of every summary into this exact same sort of vaguely-positive cliche, it becomes worthless as an uncorrupted signal of real information.
A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI
"Find me a recent article that is not worth reading and has no worthwhile journalistic, philosophical, emotional, or any other kind of takeaways."
Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how it closes...
Your intuition is right. ChatGPT can suggest you a book that is not worth reading in its opinion (The Secret by Rhonda Byrne) but then its summary is basically positive.
> 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 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.
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 don't know of any memes where people say it's OK to eat fat in excess or pretend "it doesn't matter". Even the extreme low carb diets aren't about eating fat in excess - if anything, people on those diets tend to lose weight because (a) not being able to eat any carbs gets monotonous fast and (b) fat induces a feeling of fullness, so people eat fewer total calories.
> I don't know of any memes where people say it's OK to eat fat in excess or pretend "it doesn't matter".
Hang around on Reddit for a day or two and you'll see them. Or heck, remember the Atkins diet, which was explicitly advertised as "you can eat as much fat as you want"?
It doesnt' matter in the sense that like 80% of what's in the typical American diet is far worse. All that fat that got removed was replaced with salt and corn syrup.
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?
Now the acidity in artificially sweetened soda makes peoples' teeth bad. My dentist mother is furious about that people believe that it is only the sugar in the soda that is bad for the teeth.
> Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings".
This is where I am for sure. I don't trust any trends as to what people figure will kill you any more, because they're almost always wrong in the end. In 20 years if it turns out to not be recanted, then I'll pay attention I guess.
> There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
Except there really weren't studies, and this is why the nutrition "science" was so bad back then. A sibling comment mentioned a study in rabbits and points out the obvious problems with making conclusions based on a herbivore, but the general belief was that since high blood cholesterol was linked with heart disease, eating a lot of cholesterol is bad for you.
When they actually did to the studies, they found that the vast majority of people do not get high blood cholesterol from (reasonable amounts of) dietary cholesterol. There are apparently a small subset of people (like 5% or so) who are particularly sensitive to dietary cholesterol though.
That was why nutrition science in the 80s/90s should be such a cautionary tale. So much of it was bad science, or more charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses that were presented as government-sponsored "facts" that turned out to be false when they were actually tested.
> or more charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses that were presented as government-sponsored "facts" that turned out to be false when they were actually tested.
The Covid debactle could be a more recent experience. Guesses was reported as facts. Then the flipfloping made peoples heads hurt and the consensus on what to do ended in a mess and a heated political point.
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.
the current dietary advice in my local segment of society goes pretty much like this: try not to eat too many processed foods, keep it balanced, and fats aren't actually bad for you. that all sounds fairly reasonable to me
About $0.60 currently in the USA, which is quadruple what they were at this time last year. Supposedly this is mostly because many egg suppliers had to cull their flocks due to the current H5N1 bird flu. But there is also concern that egg prices have been rising in general in the long term due to industry consolidation and monopolization.
anyway, the new political administration is bound to solve the problem with costly eggs any minute now, and the soaring egg prices were without a doubt caused by the previous administration :-)
Why so expensive in Fiji? I mean it's not that expensive, but more than I'd expect from Fiji, where I can imagine chickens and pigs are running around everywhere between the straw huts and palm trees.
Our producers don't have the economies of scale that yours do. Also, our chickens refuse to stay in their cages and lay eggs, preferring to spend all their time lying around on hammocks under coconut trees sipping pina coladas.
My goodness, 42 years of sun bathing at the same latitude as Tunisia. Should he have got skin cancer or did he benefit from all the naturally produced Vitamin D?
The article takes some poetic license, and makes it seem like he sunbathed daily. There's another article in the LA Times, linked in a few comments here, that is a bit more "serious". He certainly didn't sunbathe every day, and it seems there were periods of time (not even only during his "riches to rags" time period) where it seems he didn't visit the hotel every day.
He also had a poolside cabana that he used often; cabanas are usually covered and provide shade.
Insufficient sun exposure is responsible for approximately 340,000 deaths annually in the United States and 480,000 deaths annually in Europe, while non-melanoma skin cancers account for 63,700 deaths worldwide. Skin cancer only occurs due to excessive exposure combined with a weakened immune system, which is really rare.
You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer.
