The thrill of poverty

For everybody but the poor, that is. Lively discussion of global slumming going on right now on the list of Latin American historians. Here's an example from Buenos Aires. I guess there's nothing new about the phenomenon. It was called "slumming" when the New York downtowners would go up to Harlem in the 1920s. And I imagine that well-to-do Romans, looking for a frisson, must have done the same thing back in the days of the Republic. Still, it's always interesting when somebody from the slums is slick and quick enough to take advantage of the bourgeois' curiosity to make a buck.

Geoff Fox