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Neil C's avatar

Try to get to a High School Football game when you're in Texas

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Schwarzgeist's avatar

Ah darn most of those places are too far afield for me to meet up sadly. My friend is trying to get me to visit New York and I might take him up on it and schedule it to coincide with your trip but otherwise too far afield. Let me know if you end up in Illinois, Pennsylvania, or Ohio somehow.

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Ed West's avatar

Pennsylvania is not impossible I’ll message you

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Schwarzgeist's avatar

Haha OK but don't go out of your way or anything. Would be fun though!

I'll have to also make sure I'm more financially secure then as I'm between jobs now (massive project with biggest client just now wrapped up, so working on finding new ones). I'll keep you posted.

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Thomas Jones's avatar

thanks Ed I love these newsletters. That is indeed a terribly sad wiki page, I thought immediately of Waugh, as this phenomenon was to some extent his motivation for Brideshead, and he does feature. The loss of country houses was a regular theme of his, I remember one of his more playful novels there is someone rebuilding their country house in the modern style, with concrete.

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

Yiddish also used to be widely spoken in New York City. One can still see old photographs of whole neighborhoods with ubiquitous signs featuring its distinctive script:

https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/visualizing-jewish-new-york

The story of this once widespread language of Ashkenazi Jews is I think a really sad one. The heartland in Eastern Europe was devastated by genocide and among the Yiddish-speaking diaspora, it just gradually fell out of favour among the aspirational upper and middle classes in places like the United States and Britain.

I personally think Yiddish has real potential to actually be a lingua franca beyond its core Jewish population given how widespread it already was in big Anglosphere cities in the late 19th and early 20th Century and how influential Ashkenazis have been otherwise (entertainment, merchants, etc).

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Rob Henderson's avatar

When New York?

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Ed West's avatar

25 October - 2 November

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