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The Voyeur's Motel

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!, Apr 6, 2016.

  1. Gay Talese, pens a New Yorker article about a motel owner and his wife who spent decades watching and chronicling his guests sex habits and experiences.

    He may have also witnessed a murder.

    The Voyeur’s Motel
     
  2. FileNotFound

    FileNotFound Well-Known Member

    This is very much worth the time to read it. Fascinating and creepy. It's amazing the lengths to which people can go to convince themselves that they are perfectly normal.
     
  3. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    Does it have an Erin Andrews suite?
     
  4. There's some debate on my Twitter feed about Talese indifference to the murder as well as Foos' Peeping Tom tendencies.

    I think Talese is one of the best writers of the 20th century. I also think he's probably the most amoral.
     
  5. gravehunter

    gravehunter Member

    ....or justify their actions
     
  6. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    Good read. Pretty sad that the cops lost the evidence in the murder after all these years.
     
  7. swingline

    swingline Well-Known Member

    "I've seen enough" seems a little too convenient as an ending.
     
  8. Ice9

    Ice9 Active Member

    Thirty-five years of running dialogue and building up trust with this guy, and then he drops this graf:

    It occurred to me that Foos had something in common with another American who wanted the world to read what he had written: Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In 1995, after he had already killed three people and injured twenty-three others with homemade bombs, he promised “to desist from terrorism” if theTimes or the Washington Post would publish his manifesto condemning industrial society. Kaczynski’s wish was granted, but he was later discovered and arrested. His brother had recognized him by his writing style; the Unabomber was done in by his manuscript.

    Man, cold-blooded.
     
  9. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    Precisely what I thought.
     
  10. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    Question: What would you have done upon receiving the letter that came to Talese on Jan 7, 1980? Send it to the Colorado State Police? Or would that put every motel owner in metro Denver -- except one -- under unfair suspicion? Whenever I think I'd have contacted the cops, I remember that this guy is an unhinged surveillance expert who would know I had tipped off the authorities.
     
  11. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    The drama Gay Talese has unleashed in the past week is hysterical.

    The Times got themselves all twisted up over it.

    The Washington Post discovered he once asked an assistant to make him tea.

    And longform writers are defending him on message boards simply because, of course, Nan Talese couldn't possibly be married to to an old man who had sexist views.

    But, yeah, maybe we should discuss the ethics involved in reporting this story:

     
  12. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    What a shit show:

     
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