On Anthony Bourdain's show about travel and food, Parts Unknown, I liked that he was an old-fashioned kind of liberal, one who would make room even for uncomfortable conversations. In one memorable episode, he took a Brazilian jujitsu instructor he liked out for a meal in San Francisco and let the guy praise gentrification without apology, even casting aspersions on the scum and riffraff that used to hang around the city. In another episode, he allowed a Piedmontese with a blended Italian-German-Swiss identity basically explain that mass immigration to Europe was unsustainable — not something Bourdain wanted to hear. Occasionally, ...
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