The Truth About the Restaurant Booth | Accidental Education: Reality Lab

A host leads you past a perfectly good table and asks, “Would you prefer a booth?”Suddenly, everyone acts as if the restaurant has offered them a private suite.Tom wants to know who taught us this. Restaurants have been lining their walls with booths for generations, and Hollywood made them look like the place where important conversations happen. Yet nobody goes home, rips out the dining-room chairs, and installs a vinyl booth that requires the person by the wall to request permission to use the bathroom.From there, the lab heads to Greenfield, Massachusetts. The Last Ditch, a lesbian bar with a mask requirement, made Saturday nights mask optional in hopes of bringing in more customers. The online backlash arrived with the force of a town meeting conducted entirely in capital letters.Tom looks at what happens when a place built to bring people together can’t agree on who gets to feel welcome inside.Then it’s off to Philadelphia and the strange case of Hannah Gann, an activist and teacher who admitted she lied about her background after claiming Palestinian, Tunisian, and black. Why would someone build a fake identity? Tom considers the internet’s theories, including the speculation that she was an intel asset. Three stories. One question: when did choosing where to sit, who gets through the door, and who gets to speak become quite so complicated?Tom would still like a table. Preferably one with four actual chairs.

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