Oh wow! Did not know that—I went off the original post by Greg and he mentioned to me after I sent him this link that someone looked at Common Crawl as well.
Either way, I updated both the git and the webpage to shout-out the week-before-this findings! I linked directly to your website, lmk if that's how you prefer it.
A companion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054879, we now had successfully recovered all the remaining li.st entries of Anthony Bourdain that were thought to be lost to time.
Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
> I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
My most memorable moment from the show was when Bourdain visited some poor farmer to see how they were harvesting yuca (or maybe yams, I forgot) and he went into the typical (I am paraphrasing) "oh look, this is the life, so perfect being one with nature, etc...". And the farmer shut him up pretty quickly with something like "How about a trade: you stay here and farm yams in the rain, in the perfect unity with the nature, and I go to live in your apartment in New York?"
Jon Krakauer pointed something similar out in relation to the native people around Everest attaining a higher quality of life (and thus more Western lifestyle) as more and more commercial Everest expeditions started happening.
Climbing tourists would be complaining that the local culture was being destroyed and that the huts they would visit would have the local kids be wearing, say, a fashion shirt and the huts themselves had amenities like a heater instead of burning dung for heat.
Basically, wealthy climber tourists wanted these people to live in stasis in a lifestyle of poverty just so the atmosphere of quaint mountain life was maintained for them. Almost like an open-air museum.
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
I wish he sticked to food, his only expertise. His Newfoundland episode in Parts Unknown is the best and most tasty piece of television I have ever watched. Why is that good? Guess what, he brought on his pals that are great chefs from that place.
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
The production crew would have used "fixers" to get insight into good locations for filming and other things of interest. Whatever fixer they used was probably just friends of and/or part of this "wrong" crowd. Bourdain and his producers made a lot of shows over the years, some are going to be better produced while others are flawed. How it goes. Bourdain and his team weren't perfect — doesn't make them inauthentic at a wider perspective.
Not only this, but depending on which season of which show of his, there may have been other reasons for why spots were chosen. For instance there was at least one season of No Reservations where episodes were themed with the location as a backdrop. The episode he had in my hometown caused a lot of locals to complain that he wasn't choosing the best spots, but the point was the whole episode was a narrative and the spots chosen fit the narrative.
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
Maybe it's just the similarity in appearance and cause of death to Carradign and Epstein making me see patterns that aren't there, but I cannot watch a Bourdain clip without getting the sense something is deeply wrong.
I know we shouldn’t be discussing website design, but using light grey font on a white background is not only ugly, it is basically illegible for anyone with oldster eyes.
The page does not have light grey text for me. Checked on desktop and mobile.
The #2B2B2B color should not look like "light grey" or be hard to read on a white background unless your display setup has a severely broken color calibration or gamma curve.
Site looks fine, in my opinion. The HN comments complaining about site design are probably best ignored.
I thought the same thing but noticed my dark mode extension changed the dark gray font into light gray. It looks fine to me with that extension turned off. Not sure if that happened to you.
If it's bothering the eyes, like many more of other websites would, feel free to pull up your favorite browser's reader mode with your preferences. Cheers!
i think the white dots add another factor to my brain i have to decipher.
It doesn't make or break the site but its like id rather not have to deal with a pattern and text. Just make the background white.
If you really love it, keep it. I dont know anything. Im just a human
thank you very much for doing this. I'm a huge bourdain fan, and despite many of his shortcomings as a human i think he was one of the MOST interesting people in the zeitgeist. just seemed so authentic, real, and visceral. his parts unknown series is some of the best human anthro content ever put on TV. this was a very interesting read!
I am big fan and it was sad to me when he died. It’s bizarre to me how much CNN runs content featuring him without ever acknowledging he is dead. You’d think he was alive based on how often they flaunt his content.
A real Kramer is often much, much more than $2,500. Kramer’s mid-line knives go, even used, for $10–$30K while his high-end, rarer stuff goes for much more. In fact, Bourdain had a real Kramer with meteorite used in its construction that sold at auction in 2019 for $231,500.
At the risk of being downvoted… for the uninitiated among us, what’s interesting about these or the person? I understand he was a chef and had several TV shows. Is it just celebrity fascination?
Hard to summarize. He created the impression of being authentic. He had an unpretentious New York accent. He was happy in and advocated for unpretentious areas, which goes against some of the stereotypes of overly social media friendly foodie stuff. He encouraged his audience to travel and understand other people.
His struggles and imperfections also evoked sympathy. He spoke about how he used to have a drug problem. His death by suicide was sad. He certainly would have had lots of interesting things to say in the last 9 years, had he been around.
He also covered up his girlfriend's abuse of underage people by paying to silence them and protected her to the end when he knew she was guilty. The shame of doing this got to him instead of setting the record straight also.
Very mixed bag of a guy imo but the internet loves him because he came across genuine.
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)
MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:
1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.
2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.
3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.
4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.
5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.
6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
> 6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
I would like to put it out there that his depression or whatever mental illness he had was on full display the whole time, and this probably resonated with people as well.
A couple years back I started re-watching all of his shows, start to finish, after watching Roadrunner. Especially the early seasons, there was rarely an episode he didn't joke about dying, being killed, or killing himself. (In the film, there was a quote from Tony about how an acquaintance observed they'd never met someone who wanted to die so much)
I think a lot of people picked up on that, and it made the whole the whole thing work. The grit, the machismo, the empathy for the plight of your fellow man. A lot of people who worked with him said he was an asshole, too. This is also not surprising that he would be at times when the cameras were off.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
> He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a
I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive. Not to mention antithetical to much of what Bourdain stood for.
He was enjoyable to read and watch, but claiming he "made it acceptable" for men to care about food, travel or culture is weird.
He was an entertainer. An interesting guy. A great storyteller who lived an interesting life. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude" or some demarcation point between the past and present.
Holding a celebrity and television personality up as the realest, most genuine person feels like missing the point. Everything you saw of this man was carefully crafted and curated. Even the "unfiltered" takes were designed to sell you on some story. You didn't know this man as a person or a friend.
An interesting question is whether any of this is good and worthy of emulation. I've been treating Bourdain as an cautionary tale and a reminder to check one's own priorities rigorously.
I asked google if he was religious, and got this: "He grew up in a home where God, sin, or damnation were never mentioned, leading to a lack of religious upbringing and belief, focusing instead on food, travel, and human connection."
And I think that's kinda the issue. The elevation of food and travel to the status anywhere on the same plain as deep religion (which I do think was the case here) is not going to lead one to good places.
So, to make sure I understand what you are saying - any person whose life is gripped by intense interest in something and simultaneously they are irreligious is lesser or on the wrong path?
Ah, the good ol' self-righteousness of religious people and how they feel above others, morally and in other ways. I guess we can't have christmas without those, can we.
You won't be downvoted by me. He wrote a fun book (Kitchen Confidential, which I enjoyed) and it was downhill from there. He detailed some of his sketchy ethics in that book and it was refreshing.
Essentially, he seemed to me to be a bit of a &*$% and people liked that, confusing it for something admirable and for authenticity. He's till celebrated, especially by CNN, who paid a fortune for his show and then lost out on the chance for future episodes... now they peddle his old content on their landing page. Probably to try to recoup their probable losses.
Foodie culture is an acquired …. taste …., for lack of better term, but if you dive into it the outsized influences aren’t that many and there is a clear genealogy between the chefs, critics, and their restaurant concepts
He was a super hipster who pretended to be an anti-hipster.
This combination allowed him to make people feel like they were getting let in a little secret and were now part of a club that was better than everyone else.
He wrote honestly about a profession he worked at all levels. His travel/food programmes sampled the fanciest of foods as well as the greasy spoons, local cuisines, and all without arrogance or false humility. He was very relatable for many people.
I would recommend reading Kitchen Confidential. Alternatively watch any of his travel shows although I think understanding the man through the book first makes it easier to appreciate the shows.
Regarding this specific find I don't see anything particularly special but for many it's one final glimpse into the life of someone they admire.
His really early ones were kind of rough. Like you could see he was still figuring it out. There was one episode where he just narrated a lonely planet guide.
People who abandon their kids don't really have anything to teach you. There's isn't much worse you can do. But in this case Anthony did that also:
> Anthony Bourdain paid a $380,000 settlement to actor Jimmy Bennett in 2018 to silence allegations that Asia Argento had sexually assaulted him in 2013, when Bennett was 17 and Argento was 37
Great role model. People see a guy that looks cool and says edgy shit and that's it, he is now a great person, lol.
I have never been particularly fond of Bourdain, nor have I fully understood the widespread fascination with his jet-setting New York hipster persona.
He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
The phenomenon is difficult to admire. It resembles a kind of cultural primitivism - an unintentional revival of archaic rituals in which consuming the body of the enemy was believed to confer insight, power, or spiritual essence. In this modern iteration, wealth functions as the enabling mechanism: privileged travelers fly abroad to ingest cuisines, aesthetics, and experiences, mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
One returns, enriched - spiritually, one assumes - having eaten well.
Your snark is misplaced to such an extent that I suspect you have not actually read his books. Bourdain is genuinely obsessed with food, and when Kitchen Confidential entirely unexpectedly became a megahit and shot him from borderline poverty to wealth and fame, he was genuinely delighted to be able to (I quote) "travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." His admiration for (most) other cultures is genuine and many of his favorite destinations are also places that can hardly be called economically disadvantaged (Singapore, Japan, France, etc).
> popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans
So would it be preferable if they stayed at home, didn't share any of their wealth with less developed countries, and marinated in completely ignorant bliss of the world outside the USA instead?
I think the point is that the attitude of enjoying rather than assimilating is not appreciated.
There’s no equivalent for this feeling in the U.S. We had Japanese tourists in the late twentieth century that were known for taking pictures of everything, but they were respectful and were localized to tourist destinations. Migrants from Mexico and Central America that have moved here but haven’t assimilated are not the same either, as they moved here for opportunity and don’t have the time or resources to learn English, so it’s quite understandable that many stick to themselves.
As an American that has travelled overseas years ago, I understand that others in the world could do without us visiting. They just want to have their normal day to day without an American speaking American English and commenting on things like an American and tipping wait staff, asking for ice, expecting things that aren’t provided, generally acting more entitled, etc.
When I visited, I just didn’t fit in, even though I wanted to. I was taught only a little bit (over multiple years) of a few other languages in school, but primarily Spanish, without any real immersion, which was useless. I didn’t grow up traveling and interacting with people from other countries in Europe, and without that experience or ability to speak in the country’s language, I wasn’t prepared.
> As an American that has travelled overseas years ago, I understand that others in the world could do without us visiting. They just want to have their normal day to day without an American speaking American English and commenting on things like an American and tipping wait staff, asking for ice, expecting things that aren’t provided, generally acting more entitled, etc.
It’s perfectly possible to visit and be aware of local sensibilities. Plenty of Americans manage it and are perfectly charming visitors.
You don’t have to adopt all of culture’s behaviours to not be obnoxious
In the mid-20th century, Americans with sufficient income or sponsorship from their employer would get Berlitz language classes before spending significant time in other countries.
Though it was unrealistic for someone to do this just for a short trip, the following scene of Betty and Don Draper captures attempt at assimilation vs. not:
I hope you aren't saying you traveled abroad years ago, didn't fit in and never did it again. Nothing broadens a person's mind more than traveling. Nobody cares if you speak with an American accent. You just need to be respectful. And in very touristy places they don't even care about that to be honest.
> He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
I only dislike these people if they blog about it. None of them are nearly as insightful as they think they are, and most of them aren’t self-aware enough to realize that this whole shtick hasn’t been “cool” since 2010.
> mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
This disparaging attitude towards tourists is in vogue among Europeans right now; there’s a group of anarchists in Barcelona that have spent the last year or two scrawling: “TOURISTS GO HOME, REFUGEES WELCOME” on the sides of buildings.
The theory goes that tourists are a net negative to cities because they cause neighborhoods to gentrify and displace those who intend to actually live within the city. The money coming in is a negative because it causes the city to deploy resources intended to cater to tourists, the tourists fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood by their very presence (the cannibalism you are alluding to), the tourists are rude, the tourists look funny, etc.
Disdain for tourists is just a socially-acceptable way for progressives to practice the xenophobia that is now in vogue among reactionaries. They can’t blame all of their problems on foreigners writ large like the reactionaries do, so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country.
> so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country
Honestly I doubt they are punching up in many cases. Sure, the Americans who holiday in Sicily are probably pretty well off, because that's expensive. But a lot of the tourists who visit the large Spanish cities or coastal towns are working class people from northern Europe for whom it may actually be cheaper to get a Ryanair flight and an Airbnb for a couple of days than to take a trip within their own country. I don't know anything about the kind of person who sprawls this graffiti around Barcelona but I suspect there's a good chance they (or their families at least) are wealthier than the tourists they are raging against.
It may be much more straightforward than you suggest, and not at all related to xenophobia.
A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply. Short-term tourism incentivises conversion of local housing to accommodate them (AirBnB, etc.) and long-term tourism results in foreigners buying local housing as their permanent or long-term holiday home.
The result is obviously a relative shortage of housing and rising prices, both of which make it harder for locals (who are often relatively poorer) to live where they need to. This pattern has been repeated from small villages in scenic areas, to big cities (e.g. Barcelona), to whole islands (e.g. Mallorca).
I’m probably one of the people that has contributed to this to some extent over time; and yet I fully understand the frustration of the locals.
It may result in apparent xenophobia in some, but its roots are rational and economic.
> A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply.
This is the explanation these activists rely on and it’s cribbed directly from posts I was reading on /pol/ ten years ago. While it sounds plausible, I’ve never found it to have any basis in empirical reality. Tourist accommodation represents a negligible proportion of dwellings outside of resort towns, and in resort towns the whole economy is based around tourism. Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural, not economic.
If you look at the signs you see in Latin America (“Expat? No! You are an immigrant!” and “Speak my language!”) or the graffiti in Barcelona (“Tourists go home, refugees welcome.”) it becomes fairly apparent that most of these people don’t have coherent objections at all, they just resent people they perceive to be wealthier than themselves; this is why the refugees are not targeted, despite their having had far greater impacts on housing markets in Latin America and cultural cohesion in Europe.
I'm not sure you've looked very hard. Let's consider Mallorca. It's not all a resort town, but no doubt it's an attractive destination.
Estimates of course vary, but there are estimates that 60% of the total housing stock is owned by foreigners [0] and in 2024, >40% of all houses sold were bought by foreigners. [1] (It's also worth noting that [1] suggests foreigners purchased >20% of houses sold in Valencia, the Canary Islands, Murcia, and Catalonia, so this isn't limited to Mallorca.)
If these numbers are even close to accurate, this would be your empirical reality, and such numbers would certainly by sufficient to drive demand, shortage, and price increases.
Tourism comprises 45% of the economy, which is what I was characterizing as a resort town. If you look at cities that have anything else going on for them, you’re looking at figures of less than 2% of housing stock. London is around 2.5%, New York City was around 2% before the ban, Los Angeles is around 2.1%.
While in some cases there may be other aspects at play, it really is the case that turning rentals into AirBnBs for visitors has dramatically increased rent in towns such as Barcelona, and even in Central Sydney where I used to live. (I say this has someone who has rented in the center of big cities, and also as someone who has taken advantage of accomodation which has been “cheap” for me, as an outsider, in cities such as Barcelona).
One can have zero racist sentiments, but if you suddenly get kicked out of your rental, because it’s more profitable for your landlord to make money from tourists, you will be outraged. (And it’s not an insignificant number if inner city apartments impacted by this). Obviously other cost of living factors have led to increased rents, but this is still a big factor in some cities.
“Sydney has 18,000 Airbnb listings, of which 80% are whole homes. This equates to around 3.2 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents or 0.9% of Sydney’s private homes.” [0]
This is about half of the usual 2% figure I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which is what the numbers are for London, Los Angeles, and New York City (before the ban).
> Barcelona
Barcelona has 19,410 listings, of which 11,828 are whole-house-apartment listings.[1]
There’s been tons of studies in tons of cities. It’s quite clear, for a landlord you make more per month on Airbnb than on a long term rental. So economically it makes sense.
Toronto had to do those studies before city council passed a law to restrict airbnb.
You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.
> You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.
Toronto had an average of 12,270 daily active listings in 2019 [0]. Toronto had a population of around 2.7 million in 2019. The majority of this impact was caused by people leaving the cities to buy in the suburbs, move in with family, or return to their country of origin.
This is just anger about the insane double standard at play - if I as a European move to Latin America, I’m a sophisticated expat and they should be happy that my rich ass is living there - whereas when it’s the other way around they are immigrants and treated like actual scum, working the lowest of low jobs.
The double standard at play makes me sad and angry even if I’m the one on the surface benefitting from it.
> Speak my language
This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit. I don’t expect you to write a doctors thesis but if you can’t even order food in the local language or have some smalltalk it’s pretty pathetic and disrespectful. Meanwhile non-English speaking “immigrants” get yelled at if they don’t speak the local language perfectly.
Not everything is as easily explained away by “progressives training to be xenophobic”
> Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural
Is that not a valid objection? I know places in Greecethat have been utterly RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon) tourists, for example Santorini or Mykonos. These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid
The expat-immigrant distinction is a simple one; an expat lives abroad, an immigrant intends to gain citizenship and stay. This isn’t actually necessarily reflective of how illegals view the country anymore; a lot of them intend to leave after working a few years so that they can retire in their country of origin. The reason Latinos get so upset by this distinction is quite simple: Very many of them move to developed countries and want to stay there. By contrast, hardly anyone moves to to Latin countries, and virtually none of those that do will ever attempt to become citizens. An Australian who moves to Peru and becomes a citizen is still an immigrant, not an expat; this just basically never happens, so a subset of Latinos wrongly assume it’s a race thing.
> This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit.
It is obnoxious. My point was that the objection these people have to tourists is not rooted in their actual economic impact, but cultural anxiety that they are being left behind or disrespected. These anxieties are warranted, the issue I take with it is that cosmopolitans will chastise Cletus for not wanting to be replaced by Mexicans who refuse to learn English but celebrate Jose for saying the same thing but in Spanish.
I've heard that Norman invasion dealt with them long before Santorini became a tourist hotspot. You probably should decrease consumption of content created by russia today.
> These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid
Isn’t this a bit of gatekeeping? What do you propose the solution is? Ban tourists? Take it another incremental step and now you’re banning immigrants too. “Don’t visit! Stay in your country!” “Go home tourists/immigrants”, it’s the same song and dance. It’s the same sentiment.
There is a solution to the tourist “problem” though, which is to just charge a shitload of money to visit. But then you’ll be accused of being inequitable or hating poor people or something.
Lottery system solves this issue but then people start thinking of reasons that they deserve to visit more than someone else and try to implement quotas affording priority access to their group (e.g. local residents, ethnic minority, etc.)
It’s an intractable problem encountered when dealing with scarce resources; the key is navigating to a point that the functional number of people consider to be fair.
Yea lottery works too though it can be a huge pain for coordinating plans. I think many everything much more expensive at least gives people flexibility in their arrangements. Like say you want to go to Paris and visit Musee de Orsay and also Versailles. You get lottery ticket to one and not the other - bummer.
If you take the current $20 prices and make them, say, $200 that would alleviate a lot of extra visitors. I guess some people say it’s not fair, but based on my visits I don’t think most people really go to these sites to do much more than check a box, which is unfortunate. A higher price at least allows those with interest to have a better experience instead of fighting crowds of selfie-takers, which is the current experience.
On the other hand, maybe some of these artworks should be more spread out to be enjoyed by more people instead of concentrated in a select few prestigious museums.
I suppose the idea is that even if tourism brings in billions of euros, makes up 15% of the economy, and provides 150k jobs in a country where youth unemployment is rampant and jobs are hard to come by...
No, actually, I find it impossible to make sense of that.
In my experience the majority of xenophobia is driven by a fear that one is not being afforded proper respect. Sometimes this fear is well-founded; half of the countries with citizens wealthy enough to engage in mass market travel (e.g. Germany, Israel, Russia, China, UK, etc.) have their own reputations for being Ugly Americans. Not every tourist is respectful, and even those who are polite may be disrespectful inadvertently.
Casual xenophobia is endemic to most societies; it’s quite normal to distrust the unfamiliar, and it strikes me as being a natural topic of conversation, and one that does quite well when sensationalized by journalists. I think most cosmopolitan westerners have this idea that xenophobia is the exclusive purview of a racism that originated in Europe and is now resurging in the Anglosphere, but from what I have observed, most of the world is like this and probably always has been.
I do think a lot of what you are talking about can be traced back to Bourdain, but in fairness I don't think it was his intention, and indeed he was dead by the time it really took off. Instagram is at least as much to blame.
A lot of it is people who like Bourdain's aesthetic and want to replicate it, but they don't know much about food, they've never worked in hospitality in their life and they're afraid to go to the sketchier parts of town.
Like with so many things travel- and tourist-related, it's okay for one person to do it and tell us about it, but when a million people all try to do the same thing it causes problems.
> A lot of it is people who like Bourdain's aesthetic and want to replicate it, but they don't know much about food, they've never worked in hospitality in their life and they're afraid to go to the sketchier parts of town.
I can kind of relate to the GP, I went back and rewatched a lot of Bourdain’s shows recently and I felt a kind of revulsion I hadn’t previously. I don’t think it’s necessarily fairly aimed at Bourdain himself but at the kind of person that has since latched onto his vibe and meme’d it to death on social media. Yet another iteration of the mall goth in a Misfits t-shirt that doesn’t know who Glenn Danzig is, only this time Bourdain is a very clear icon behind the style to cringe at in hindsight.
I'd like to congratulate you on reaching such a level of empathy and understanding that not only do you dislike Bourdain, you find yourself unable to understand why anyone would think differently!
There's a point worth making about poverty tourism here but I'm not sure the tourist should be our major concern.
Bourdain didn’t initiate the cultural practice of going on safari and congratulating one’s self. The Michelin guide was founded in 1900.
Bourdains travels also weren’t the curated tourist jaunts you’re describing. They often showing the grim and lesser known sides of conflicts and situations while presenting genuine local cuisines. It’s what the unconcerned tourist aspire to, not what they do.
> economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
There can certainly be a quite shallow "instagram" quality to some traveler's trips, but it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
> it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
Countries are not a monolithic entity. The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority, and whatever incentives they have to open or close the borders do not reflect what the people who deal with tourists on a daily basis want.
It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.
For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.
What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?
Hawaii, Barcelona, and some cities in Latin America like Medellín have had a few incidents to suggest that people are unhappy with tourists there.
A city I have stayed in banned AirBnBs to address an affordability crisis. Tons of locals went wild reporting houses they expected to were circumventing the ban. I remember looking at the press release and finding that all of the AirBnBs in the city amounted to less than 2% of the city’s housing stock.
From what I can gather, these sort of attitudes are an appropriation of reactionary xenophobia directed to an appropriate target in Barcelona, a cultural inferiority complex in Latin America (which receives virtually no tourists compared to all the expatriates they send to the developed world), and a legitimate existential crisis for the Hawaiians.
> The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority
The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials, so I’d (idealistically) say they have at least some incentive to make decisions that the general public wants.
Economic benefits by themselves are just one metric by which we can evaluate desirability, but do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
> The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials
Even assuming we are talking about democracies, you still face the same issue: policies regarding tourism are decided at the national or supra-national (e.g. EU) level, while the effects are concentrated on specific neighborhoods of specific towns.
> do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
Have you not heard of any popular protests against tourism? Speaking the local language helps here, but sometimes it is also reported in English.
> Have you not heard of any popular protests against tourism?
I mentioned in another comment that I know of vandalism that has occurred in Barcelona, some demonstrations in Medellín, and a long history of nativist sentiment in Hawaii, but I’m not convinced that these people represent a majority opinion even in tourist destinations. Have you seen any surveys or anything of the kind that would suggest a substantial portion of people are opposed to tourism?
He was a product of his era and environment. Frankly, finding a boomer Jew like him, who grew up in NYC in the 50s and 60s, who doesn't harbor a significant degree of suspicion and animus (along with covert envy) towards white people (and WASPs in particular), is the exception, not the norm, and he was especially vocal about it because he had a "tryhard" mentality and a desire to be seen as a radical, even as his wealth compounded.
> Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
Then he died alone, in a hotel room in France, supposedly by his own hand, with the belt of his silk bathrobe as the implement--despite being a heroin addict most of his life and thus ever cognizant of the possibility of a fatal overdose, and having friends, like Mark Lanegan, who died (painlessly) from a fatal overdose. But no, instead of OD'ing, he supposedly chose to "unalive" himself with his bathrobe. And he left no note. And he tweeted this out a month earlier: https://x.com/Bourdain/status/998954845146177536
I went down the same rabbit hole and did the exact same thing last week in a fit of procrastination. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46185128
Would appreciate a shout-out if you saw it and were inspired, otherwise it's nice to see others converging independently on the same thing.
Oh wow! Did not know that—I went off the original post by Greg and he mentioned to me after I sent him this link that someone looked at Common Crawl as well.
Either way, I updated both the git and the webpage to shout-out the week-before-this findings! I linked directly to your website, lmk if that's how you prefer it.
Cheers!
A companion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054879, we now had successfully recovered all the remaining li.st entries of Anthony Bourdain that were thought to be lost to time.
Please enjoy—there is nobody like Tony.
Almost all.
According to the article, we are still missing one: "David Bowie Related" 1/14/2016
The missing David Bowie related list ( https://li.st/l/7SmVwCFEU6JDQ2jKQfeJzh ) has an image preview shared on Reddit, though sadly not the text https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/40wkx3/ant...
This thread sounds like a community challenge.
Very happy to see these recovered and archived :)! I hope images are able to be recovered, super curious about which records he was talking about.
Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
> I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
My most memorable moment from the show was when Bourdain visited some poor farmer to see how they were harvesting yuca (or maybe yams, I forgot) and he went into the typical (I am paraphrasing) "oh look, this is the life, so perfect being one with nature, etc...". And the farmer shut him up pretty quickly with something like "How about a trade: you stay here and farm yams in the rain, in the perfect unity with the nature, and I go to live in your apartment in New York?"
Jon Krakauer pointed something similar out in relation to the native people around Everest attaining a higher quality of life (and thus more Western lifestyle) as more and more commercial Everest expeditions started happening.
Climbing tourists would be complaining that the local culture was being destroyed and that the huts they would visit would have the local kids be wearing, say, a fashion shirt and the huts themselves had amenities like a heater instead of burning dung for heat.
Basically, wealthy climber tourists wanted these people to live in stasis in a lifestyle of poverty just so the atmosphere of quaint mountain life was maintained for them. Almost like an open-air museum.
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
I wish he sticked to food, his only expertise. His Newfoundland episode in Parts Unknown is the best and most tasty piece of television I have ever watched. Why is that good? Guess what, he brought on his pals that are great chefs from that place.
I empathize with this as vice news at their peak did similar things in Chicago, which is why most chicagoans don’t like Vice.
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
The production crew would have used "fixers" to get insight into good locations for filming and other things of interest. Whatever fixer they used was probably just friends of and/or part of this "wrong" crowd. Bourdain and his producers made a lot of shows over the years, some are going to be better produced while others are flawed. How it goes. Bourdain and his team weren't perfect — doesn't make them inauthentic at a wider perspective.
Not only this, but depending on which season of which show of his, there may have been other reasons for why spots were chosen. For instance there was at least one season of No Reservations where episodes were themed with the location as a backdrop. The episode he had in my hometown caused a lot of locals to complain that he wasn't choosing the best spots, but the point was the whole episode was a narrative and the spots chosen fit the narrative.
Which town? I felt he did this in a few places and wondered how his team picked where he wild go.
He did the same thing with Shanghai.
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
Maybe it's just the similarity in appearance and cause of death to Carradign and Epstein making me see patterns that aren't there, but I cannot watch a Bourdain clip without getting the sense something is deeply wrong.
Deeply wrong?
Yeah, he was struggling with mental health problems.
What a way to publicly slander a dead guy that didn't commit any crimes that we know of.
What city so I can avoid that restaurant
> Great Dead Bars of New York:
> 1. SIBERIA in any of its iterations. The one on the subway being the best.
Timely, as the latest reincarnation of SIBERIA just re-opened in 59th Street/Columbus Circle station
I know we shouldn’t be discussing website design, but using light grey font on a white background is not only ugly, it is basically illegible for anyone with oldster eyes.
> but using light grey font on a white background
The page does not have light grey text for me. Checked on desktop and mobile.
The #2B2B2B color should not look like "light grey" or be hard to read on a white background unless your display setup has a severely broken color calibration or gamma curve.
Site looks fine, in my opinion. The HN comments complaining about site design are probably best ignored.
I thought the same thing but noticed my dark mode extension changed the dark gray font into light gray. It looks fine to me with that extension turned off. Not sure if that happened to you.
Ah! That was exactly the problem. Dark Night on Safari on ios.
A sudden burst of bright white on the screen really hits the eyes, I get that.
and the dotted background just ever so lightly still visible. Contrast is king
Tell me more—these colors, #2B2B2B for fg and #F7F3EE for bg pass accessibility checks. See something like coolors [1] or WebAIM [2]
You could run something like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ but contrast doesn't mean to run with black/white, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ is better on the eyes.
If it's bothering the eyes, like many more of other websites would, feel free to pull up your favorite browser's reader mode with your preferences. Cheers!
[1] https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/2b2b2b-f7f3ee
[2] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
Raw colors are not the whole story. Font weight matters too. Being just on this side of passing the check is also not great, just better than bad.
Ambient lighting and display quality matter a lot too.
Okay, any specific feedback, then? Not seeing it (shrug)—I like how it feels.
i think the white dots add another factor to my brain i have to decipher. It doesn't make or break the site but its like id rather not have to deal with a pattern and text. Just make the background white.
If you really love it, keep it. I dont know anything. Im just a human
His favorite bar, Siberia, is also back, now at the south end of the Columbus Circle subway station. Same owner, Tracy, and same no-frills atmosphere.
Any movie list that features Tampopo is good by me.
thank you very much for doing this. I'm a huge bourdain fan, and despite many of his shortcomings as a human i think he was one of the MOST interesting people in the zeitgeist. just seemed so authentic, real, and visceral. his parts unknown series is some of the best human anthro content ever put on TV. this was a very interesting read!
Worthwhile for the hotel and book recommendations.
Obviously he has better food taste than I do, so those too. I will shit like a mink and love it.
I am big fan and it was sad to me when he died. It’s bizarre to me how much CNN runs content featuring him without ever acknowledging he is dead. You’d think he was alive based on how often they flaunt his content.
>Kramer knives: I don’t own one. I can’t afford one
I highly doubt he couldn't afford a $2,500 knife https://kramerknives.com/product-category/latest-creations/
A real Kramer is often much, much more than $2,500. Kramer’s mid-line knives go, even used, for $10–$30K while his high-end, rarer stuff goes for much more. In fact, Bourdain had a real Kramer with meteorite used in its construction that sold at auction in 2019 for $231,500.
https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/anthony-bourdains-bob-kra...
See also, some current mid-line Kramer pricing: https://eatingtools.com/collections/pre-owned
The linked ones are real too. Probably just the economics of making blades might have changed.
So they are not real knives then, just rich boys play things?
Porque no los dos?
Kudos to those who performed recovery and snatched back from the sands of time.
love these, wonder what avenues still exist for the image archives
I imagine they exist in an AWS or GCP rack somewhere, too bad
Someone must have their browser untouched since 2015, which has all of the li.st content stored in their cache :D
At the risk of being downvoted… for the uninitiated among us, what’s interesting about these or the person? I understand he was a chef and had several TV shows. Is it just celebrity fascination?
Hard to summarize. He created the impression of being authentic. He had an unpretentious New York accent. He was happy in and advocated for unpretentious areas, which goes against some of the stereotypes of overly social media friendly foodie stuff. He encouraged his audience to travel and understand other people.
His struggles and imperfections also evoked sympathy. He spoke about how he used to have a drug problem. His death by suicide was sad. He certainly would have had lots of interesting things to say in the last 9 years, had he been around.
He also covered up his girlfriend's abuse of underage people by paying to silence them and protected her to the end when he knew she was guilty. The shame of doing this got to him instead of setting the record straight also.
Very mixed bag of a guy imo but the internet loves him because he came across genuine.
Kind, curious, open minded, down to earth with a big mouth . Like any other common interest. Watching his stuff shows you how to open your eyes
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)
MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:
1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.
2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.
3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.
4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.
5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.
6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
> 6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
I would like to put it out there that his depression or whatever mental illness he had was on full display the whole time, and this probably resonated with people as well.
A couple years back I started re-watching all of his shows, start to finish, after watching Roadrunner. Especially the early seasons, there was rarely an episode he didn't joke about dying, being killed, or killing himself. (In the film, there was a quote from Tony about how an acquaintance observed they'd never met someone who wanted to die so much)
I think a lot of people picked up on that, and it made the whole the whole thing work. The grit, the machismo, the empathy for the plight of your fellow man. A lot of people who worked with him said he was an asshole, too. This is also not surprising that he would be at times when the cameras were off.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
> He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a
I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive. Not to mention antithetical to much of what Bourdain stood for.
He was enjoyable to read and watch, but claiming he "made it acceptable" for men to care about food, travel or culture is weird.
He was an entertainer. An interesting guy. A great storyteller who lived an interesting life. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude" or some demarcation point between the past and present.
Holding a celebrity and television personality up as the realest, most genuine person feels like missing the point. Everything you saw of this man was carefully crafted and curated. Even the "unfiltered" takes were designed to sell you on some story. You didn't know this man as a person or a friend.
You'd think otherwise if you ever had the steak frites at Les Halles.
I love Bourdain but wanted to note he did have a culinary school background. Also came from a wealthy family.
Your list is spot on.
An interesting question is whether any of this is good and worthy of emulation. I've been treating Bourdain as an cautionary tale and a reminder to check one's own priorities rigorously.
I asked google if he was religious, and got this: "He grew up in a home where God, sin, or damnation were never mentioned, leading to a lack of religious upbringing and belief, focusing instead on food, travel, and human connection."
And I think that's kinda the issue. The elevation of food and travel to the status anywhere on the same plain as deep religion (which I do think was the case here) is not going to lead one to good places.
So, to make sure I understand what you are saying - any person whose life is gripped by intense interest in something and simultaneously they are irreligious is lesser or on the wrong path?
Ah, the good ol' self-righteousness of religious people and how they feel above others, morally and in other ways. I guess we can't have christmas without those, can we.
> He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture
That doesn't seem right. Tons of travel content existed before he got popular. Endless summer wasn't for women
You won't be downvoted by me. He wrote a fun book (Kitchen Confidential, which I enjoyed) and it was downhill from there. He detailed some of his sketchy ethics in that book and it was refreshing.
Essentially, he seemed to me to be a bit of a &*$% and people liked that, confusing it for something admirable and for authenticity. He's till celebrated, especially by CNN, who paid a fortune for his show and then lost out on the chance for future episodes... now they peddle his old content on their landing page. Probably to try to recoup their probable losses.
You're not missing anything.
Foodie culture is an acquired …. taste …., for lack of better term, but if you dive into it the outsized influences aren’t that many and there is a clear genealogy between the chefs, critics, and their restaurant concepts
Which makes it all the more interesting
Anthony Bourdain being a major one
He was a super hipster who pretended to be an anti-hipster.
This combination allowed him to make people feel like they were getting let in a little secret and were now part of a club that was better than everyone else.
He wrote honestly about a profession he worked at all levels. His travel/food programmes sampled the fanciest of foods as well as the greasy spoons, local cuisines, and all without arrogance or false humility. He was very relatable for many people.
I would recommend reading Kitchen Confidential. Alternatively watch any of his travel shows although I think understanding the man through the book first makes it easier to appreciate the shows.
Regarding this specific find I don't see anything particularly special but for many it's one final glimpse into the life of someone they admire.
> Alternatively watch any of his travel shows
His really early ones were kind of rough. Like you could see he was still figuring it out. There was one episode where he just narrated a lonely planet guide.
Yeah this is why I recommended the book first. I think you need to understand him and his humour to really appreciate the shows.
People who abandon their kids don't really have anything to teach you. There's isn't much worse you can do. But in this case Anthony did that also:
> Anthony Bourdain paid a $380,000 settlement to actor Jimmy Bennett in 2018 to silence allegations that Asia Argento had sexually assaulted him in 2013, when Bennett was 17 and Argento was 37
Great role model. People see a guy that looks cool and says edgy shit and that's it, he is now a great person, lol.
I have never been particularly fond of Bourdain, nor have I fully understood the widespread fascination with his jet-setting New York hipster persona.
He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
The phenomenon is difficult to admire. It resembles a kind of cultural primitivism - an unintentional revival of archaic rituals in which consuming the body of the enemy was believed to confer insight, power, or spiritual essence. In this modern iteration, wealth functions as the enabling mechanism: privileged travelers fly abroad to ingest cuisines, aesthetics, and experiences, mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
One returns, enriched - spiritually, one assumes - having eaten well.
Your snark is misplaced to such an extent that I suspect you have not actually read his books. Bourdain is genuinely obsessed with food, and when Kitchen Confidential entirely unexpectedly became a megahit and shot him from borderline poverty to wealth and fame, he was genuinely delighted to be able to (I quote) "travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." His admiration for (most) other cultures is genuine and many of his favorite destinations are also places that can hardly be called economically disadvantaged (Singapore, Japan, France, etc).
> popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans
So would it be preferable if they stayed at home, didn't share any of their wealth with less developed countries, and marinated in completely ignorant bliss of the world outside the USA instead?
I think the point is that the attitude of enjoying rather than assimilating is not appreciated.
There’s no equivalent for this feeling in the U.S. We had Japanese tourists in the late twentieth century that were known for taking pictures of everything, but they were respectful and were localized to tourist destinations. Migrants from Mexico and Central America that have moved here but haven’t assimilated are not the same either, as they moved here for opportunity and don’t have the time or resources to learn English, so it’s quite understandable that many stick to themselves.
As an American that has travelled overseas years ago, I understand that others in the world could do without us visiting. They just want to have their normal day to day without an American speaking American English and commenting on things like an American and tipping wait staff, asking for ice, expecting things that aren’t provided, generally acting more entitled, etc.
When I visited, I just didn’t fit in, even though I wanted to. I was taught only a little bit (over multiple years) of a few other languages in school, but primarily Spanish, without any real immersion, which was useless. I didn’t grow up traveling and interacting with people from other countries in Europe, and without that experience or ability to speak in the country’s language, I wasn’t prepared.
> As an American that has travelled overseas years ago, I understand that others in the world could do without us visiting. They just want to have their normal day to day without an American speaking American English and commenting on things like an American and tipping wait staff, asking for ice, expecting things that aren’t provided, generally acting more entitled, etc.
It’s perfectly possible to visit and be aware of local sensibilities. Plenty of Americans manage it and are perfectly charming visitors.
You don’t have to adopt all of culture’s behaviours to not be obnoxious
In the mid-20th century, Americans with sufficient income or sponsorship from their employer would get Berlitz language classes before spending significant time in other countries.
Though it was unrealistic for someone to do this just for a short trip, the following scene of Betty and Don Draper captures attempt at assimilation vs. not:
https://youtu.be/JXnoPasZdkA
I hope you aren't saying you traveled abroad years ago, didn't fit in and never did it again. Nothing broadens a person's mind more than traveling. Nobody cares if you speak with an American accent. You just need to be respectful. And in very touristy places they don't even care about that to be honest.
“So would it be preferable if they stayed at home”
After the impression American tourists gave me during my visit to Pisa last summer: Yes, please.
If you think Americans are bad let me tell you about the XYZ tourists from ABC during my trip to XJK!
> He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
I only dislike these people if they blog about it. None of them are nearly as insightful as they think they are, and most of them aren’t self-aware enough to realize that this whole shtick hasn’t been “cool” since 2010.
> mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
This disparaging attitude towards tourists is in vogue among Europeans right now; there’s a group of anarchists in Barcelona that have spent the last year or two scrawling: “TOURISTS GO HOME, REFUGEES WELCOME” on the sides of buildings.
The theory goes that tourists are a net negative to cities because they cause neighborhoods to gentrify and displace those who intend to actually live within the city. The money coming in is a negative because it causes the city to deploy resources intended to cater to tourists, the tourists fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood by their very presence (the cannibalism you are alluding to), the tourists are rude, the tourists look funny, etc.
Disdain for tourists is just a socially-acceptable way for progressives to practice the xenophobia that is now in vogue among reactionaries. They can’t blame all of their problems on foreigners writ large like the reactionaries do, so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country.
> so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country
Honestly I doubt they are punching up in many cases. Sure, the Americans who holiday in Sicily are probably pretty well off, because that's expensive. But a lot of the tourists who visit the large Spanish cities or coastal towns are working class people from northern Europe for whom it may actually be cheaper to get a Ryanair flight and an Airbnb for a couple of days than to take a trip within their own country. I don't know anything about the kind of person who sprawls this graffiti around Barcelona but I suspect there's a good chance they (or their families at least) are wealthier than the tourists they are raging against.
It may be much more straightforward than you suggest, and not at all related to xenophobia.
A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply. Short-term tourism incentivises conversion of local housing to accommodate them (AirBnB, etc.) and long-term tourism results in foreigners buying local housing as their permanent or long-term holiday home.
The result is obviously a relative shortage of housing and rising prices, both of which make it harder for locals (who are often relatively poorer) to live where they need to. This pattern has been repeated from small villages in scenic areas, to big cities (e.g. Barcelona), to whole islands (e.g. Mallorca).
I’m probably one of the people that has contributed to this to some extent over time; and yet I fully understand the frustration of the locals.
It may result in apparent xenophobia in some, but its roots are rational and economic.
> A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply.
This is the explanation these activists rely on and it’s cribbed directly from posts I was reading on /pol/ ten years ago. While it sounds plausible, I’ve never found it to have any basis in empirical reality. Tourist accommodation represents a negligible proportion of dwellings outside of resort towns, and in resort towns the whole economy is based around tourism. Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural, not economic.
If you look at the signs you see in Latin America (“Expat? No! You are an immigrant!” and “Speak my language!”) or the graffiti in Barcelona (“Tourists go home, refugees welcome.”) it becomes fairly apparent that most of these people don’t have coherent objections at all, they just resent people they perceive to be wealthier than themselves; this is why the refugees are not targeted, despite their having had far greater impacts on housing markets in Latin America and cultural cohesion in Europe.
I'm not sure you've looked very hard. Let's consider Mallorca. It's not all a resort town, but no doubt it's an attractive destination.
Estimates of course vary, but there are estimates that 60% of the total housing stock is owned by foreigners [0] and in 2024, >40% of all houses sold were bought by foreigners. [1] (It's also worth noting that [1] suggests foreigners purchased >20% of houses sold in Valencia, the Canary Islands, Murcia, and Catalonia, so this isn't limited to Mallorca.)
If these numbers are even close to accurate, this would be your empirical reality, and such numbers would certainly by sufficient to drive demand, shortage, and price increases.
[0] https://www.falcrealestate.com/en/magazine/property-market-t...
[1] https://humansofmallorca.com/balearics-lead-spain-for-homes-...
> It's not all a resort town
Tourism comprises 45% of the economy, which is what I was characterizing as a resort town. If you look at cities that have anything else going on for them, you’re looking at figures of less than 2% of housing stock. London is around 2.5%, New York City was around 2% before the ban, Los Angeles is around 2.1%.
So… except for the places where the concept applies, it doesn’t apply?
While in some cases there may be other aspects at play, it really is the case that turning rentals into AirBnBs for visitors has dramatically increased rent in towns such as Barcelona, and even in Central Sydney where I used to live. (I say this has someone who has rented in the center of big cities, and also as someone who has taken advantage of accomodation which has been “cheap” for me, as an outsider, in cities such as Barcelona).
One can have zero racist sentiments, but if you suddenly get kicked out of your rental, because it’s more profitable for your landlord to make money from tourists, you will be outraged. (And it’s not an insignificant number if inner city apartments impacted by this). Obviously other cost of living factors have led to increased rents, but this is still a big factor in some cities.
> Sydney
“Sydney has 18,000 Airbnb listings, of which 80% are whole homes. This equates to around 3.2 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents or 0.9% of Sydney’s private homes.” [0]
This is about half of the usual 2% figure I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which is what the numbers are for London, Los Angeles, and New York City (before the ban).
> Barcelona
Barcelona has 19,410 listings, of which 11,828 are whole-house-apartment listings.[1]
[0]: https://matusik.substack.com/p/airbnbs
Note that the author is pulling his data from here:
[1]: https://insideairbnb.com/sydney/
There’s been tons of studies in tons of cities. It’s quite clear, for a landlord you make more per month on Airbnb than on a long term rental. So economically it makes sense. Toronto had to do those studies before city council passed a law to restrict airbnb.
You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.
> There’s been tons of studies
Such as?
> You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.
Toronto had an average of 12,270 daily active listings in 2019 [0]. Toronto had a population of around 2.7 million in 2019. The majority of this impact was caused by people leaving the cities to buy in the suburbs, move in with family, or return to their country of origin.
[0]: Page 7 https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundf...
> Expat? No! You are an immigrant!
This is just anger about the insane double standard at play - if I as a European move to Latin America, I’m a sophisticated expat and they should be happy that my rich ass is living there - whereas when it’s the other way around they are immigrants and treated like actual scum, working the lowest of low jobs. The double standard at play makes me sad and angry even if I’m the one on the surface benefitting from it.
> Speak my language
This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit. I don’t expect you to write a doctors thesis but if you can’t even order food in the local language or have some smalltalk it’s pretty pathetic and disrespectful. Meanwhile non-English speaking “immigrants” get yelled at if they don’t speak the local language perfectly.
Not everything is as easily explained away by “progressives training to be xenophobic”
> Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural
Is that not a valid objection? I know places in Greecethat have been utterly RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon) tourists, for example Santorini or Mykonos. These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid
The expat-immigrant distinction is a simple one; an expat lives abroad, an immigrant intends to gain citizenship and stay. This isn’t actually necessarily reflective of how illegals view the country anymore; a lot of them intend to leave after working a few years so that they can retire in their country of origin. The reason Latinos get so upset by this distinction is quite simple: Very many of them move to developed countries and want to stay there. By contrast, hardly anyone moves to to Latin countries, and virtually none of those that do will ever attempt to become citizens. An Australian who moves to Peru and becomes a citizen is still an immigrant, not an expat; this just basically never happens, so a subset of Latinos wrongly assume it’s a race thing.
> This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit.
It is obnoxious. My point was that the objection these people have to tourists is not rooted in their actual economic impact, but cultural anxiety that they are being left behind or disrespected. These anxieties are warranted, the issue I take with it is that cosmopolitans will chastise Cletus for not wanting to be replaced by Mexicans who refuse to learn English but celebrate Jose for saying the same thing but in Spanish.
>> RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon)
I've heard that Norman invasion dealt with them long before Santorini became a tourist hotspot. You probably should decrease consumption of content created by russia today.
> These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid
Isn’t this a bit of gatekeeping? What do you propose the solution is? Ban tourists? Take it another incremental step and now you’re banning immigrants too. “Don’t visit! Stay in your country!” “Go home tourists/immigrants”, it’s the same song and dance. It’s the same sentiment.
There is a solution to the tourist “problem” though, which is to just charge a shitload of money to visit. But then you’ll be accused of being inequitable or hating poor people or something.
Lottery system solves this issue but then people start thinking of reasons that they deserve to visit more than someone else and try to implement quotas affording priority access to their group (e.g. local residents, ethnic minority, etc.)
It’s an intractable problem encountered when dealing with scarce resources; the key is navigating to a point that the functional number of people consider to be fair.
Yea lottery works too though it can be a huge pain for coordinating plans. I think many everything much more expensive at least gives people flexibility in their arrangements. Like say you want to go to Paris and visit Musee de Orsay and also Versailles. You get lottery ticket to one and not the other - bummer.
If you take the current $20 prices and make them, say, $200 that would alleviate a lot of extra visitors. I guess some people say it’s not fair, but based on my visits I don’t think most people really go to these sites to do much more than check a box, which is unfortunate. A higher price at least allows those with interest to have a better experience instead of fighting crowds of selfie-takers, which is the current experience.
On the other hand, maybe some of these artworks should be more spread out to be enjoyed by more people instead of concentrated in a select few prestigious museums.
I suppose the idea is that even if tourism brings in billions of euros, makes up 15% of the economy, and provides 150k jobs in a country where youth unemployment is rampant and jobs are hard to come by...
No, actually, I find it impossible to make sense of that.
In my experience the majority of xenophobia is driven by a fear that one is not being afforded proper respect. Sometimes this fear is well-founded; half of the countries with citizens wealthy enough to engage in mass market travel (e.g. Germany, Israel, Russia, China, UK, etc.) have their own reputations for being Ugly Americans. Not every tourist is respectful, and even those who are polite may be disrespectful inadvertently.
Casual xenophobia is endemic to most societies; it’s quite normal to distrust the unfamiliar, and it strikes me as being a natural topic of conversation, and one that does quite well when sensationalized by journalists. I think most cosmopolitan westerners have this idea that xenophobia is the exclusive purview of a racism that originated in Europe and is now resurging in the Anglosphere, but from what I have observed, most of the world is like this and probably always has been.
I do think a lot of what you are talking about can be traced back to Bourdain, but in fairness I don't think it was his intention, and indeed he was dead by the time it really took off. Instagram is at least as much to blame.
A lot of it is people who like Bourdain's aesthetic and want to replicate it, but they don't know much about food, they've never worked in hospitality in their life and they're afraid to go to the sketchier parts of town.
Like with so many things travel- and tourist-related, it's okay for one person to do it and tell us about it, but when a million people all try to do the same thing it causes problems.
> A lot of it is people who like Bourdain's aesthetic and want to replicate it, but they don't know much about food, they've never worked in hospitality in their life and they're afraid to go to the sketchier parts of town.
I can kind of relate to the GP, I went back and rewatched a lot of Bourdain’s shows recently and I felt a kind of revulsion I hadn’t previously. I don’t think it’s necessarily fairly aimed at Bourdain himself but at the kind of person that has since latched onto his vibe and meme’d it to death on social media. Yet another iteration of the mall goth in a Misfits t-shirt that doesn’t know who Glenn Danzig is, only this time Bourdain is a very clear icon behind the style to cringe at in hindsight.
I'd like to congratulate you on reaching such a level of empathy and understanding that not only do you dislike Bourdain, you find yourself unable to understand why anyone would think differently!
There's a point worth making about poverty tourism here but I'm not sure the tourist should be our major concern.
Bourdain didn’t initiate the cultural practice of going on safari and congratulating one’s self. The Michelin guide was founded in 1900.
Bourdains travels also weren’t the curated tourist jaunts you’re describing. They often showing the grim and lesser known sides of conflicts and situations while presenting genuine local cuisines. It’s what the unconcerned tourist aspire to, not what they do.
Most of his rise to fame came from working in real kitchens, then exposing the underbelly of such places.
He also really didn’t spent much or any (?) time in the kinds of expensive places you’d need to be obscenely wealthy to afford.
Alot of his shows we're pretty doable finance wise for people to replicate. He did like 3 episodes about El bulli though
> economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
There can certainly be a quite shallow "instagram" quality to some traveler's trips, but it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
> it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
Countries are not a monolithic entity. The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority, and whatever incentives they have to open or close the borders do not reflect what the people who deal with tourists on a daily basis want.
It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.
For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.
What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?
Hawaii, Barcelona, and some cities in Latin America like Medellín have had a few incidents to suggest that people are unhappy with tourists there.
A city I have stayed in banned AirBnBs to address an affordability crisis. Tons of locals went wild reporting houses they expected to were circumventing the ban. I remember looking at the press release and finding that all of the AirBnBs in the city amounted to less than 2% of the city’s housing stock.
From what I can gather, these sort of attitudes are an appropriation of reactionary xenophobia directed to an appropriate target in Barcelona, a cultural inferiority complex in Latin America (which receives virtually no tourists compared to all the expatriates they send to the developed world), and a legitimate existential crisis for the Hawaiians.
> The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority
The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials, so I’d (idealistically) say they have at least some incentive to make decisions that the general public wants.
Economic benefits by themselves are just one metric by which we can evaluate desirability, but do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
> The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials
Even assuming we are talking about democracies, you still face the same issue: policies regarding tourism are decided at the national or supra-national (e.g. EU) level, while the effects are concentrated on specific neighborhoods of specific towns.
> do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
Have you not heard of any popular protests against tourism? Speaking the local language helps here, but sometimes it is also reported in English.
> Have you not heard of any popular protests against tourism?
I mentioned in another comment that I know of vandalism that has occurred in Barcelona, some demonstrations in Medellín, and a long history of nativist sentiment in Hawaii, but I’m not convinced that these people represent a majority opinion even in tourist destinations. Have you seen any surveys or anything of the kind that would suggest a substantial portion of people are opposed to tourism?
He was also a racist POS.
He was a product of his era and environment. Frankly, finding a boomer Jew like him, who grew up in NYC in the 50s and 60s, who doesn't harbor a significant degree of suspicion and animus (along with covert envy) towards white people (and WASPs in particular), is the exception, not the norm, and he was especially vocal about it because he had a "tryhard" mentality and a desire to be seen as a radical, even as his wealth compounded.
One of his most famous quips was:
> Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
Then he died alone, in a hotel room in France, supposedly by his own hand, with the belt of his silk bathrobe as the implement--despite being a heroin addict most of his life and thus ever cognizant of the possibility of a fatal overdose, and having friends, like Mark Lanegan, who died (painlessly) from a fatal overdose. But no, instead of OD'ing, he supposedly chose to "unalive" himself with his bathrobe. And he left no note. And he tweeted this out a month earlier: https://x.com/Bourdain/status/998954845146177536
Come on, this is just contrarianism without substance. Or as we used to say in less pretentious times, "this thing is lame now".
Nah it's still kinda fun.