Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times depicts AAR/SBL as follows:
“It was reminiscent of the Mos Eisley cantina in ‘Star Wars,’ filled with polyglot eccentrics. Dead languages lived (He speaks Latin! She reads Akkadian!). One saw robed Buddhist monks; priests and friars, collared or cassocked; nuns, in habit or not; imams in kufis; the occasional yarmulked Jew. And thousands more in rumpled khakis, name tag on lanyard like an officer’s medals. They clutched biblical concordances, Hebrew lexicons, Gospel commentaries.”
For those who mix sci-fi and biblical studies this should be a fun and acceptable description! For example, one could argue that the Biblioblogger’s Gathering at Kitty O’Shea’s looks a lot like the Mos Eisley Cantina. If you don’t believe me, see the pictures on the right hand side!
The rest of the article is a tad more serious as it discusses the labor disputs between the union Unite Here and Hyatt hotels and how AAR/SBL navigated these disputes after originally planning on using Hyatt hotels: “A Scholarly Affair with a Side of Activism”
the archives near Emmaus 
Do you have a link for the full NYT article?
The link at the bottom of the post should access the full article.