Back to the Stone Age

Newsweek, July, 2004 by Maggie Cutler

The Bing Hamptons. That's what I've taken to calling the upstate New York area where my husband and I spend weekends, my joke being the horrific contrast between the fashionable, exorbitant Long Island Hamptons and the increasingly destitute city of Binghamton, which lies about an hour north of our place. After a few trips up and down the social ladder that spans these two areas, you begin to notice something touching: namely, that whereas rich Americans have a lot of projects, poor Americans have a lot of fantasies.

Hardheaded practical types abound in the Bing Hamptons. Still, many heads up there teem with mental phantasms of escape. (Vegas! Florida!) Others nurse fantasies of vindication. ("After the next terrorist attack those downstaters will wish they lived here.")...

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