A great way to create memorable travel experiences in a distant place is to “approximate, as best you can, in the short time allotted you, the life of a local.” That is, instead of checking-off a list of travel-industry certified “sights” when you go to a new place, simply seek out the same gatherings, amusements,…
Often our old friends date back to childhood neighborhoods, or school, or sometimes work. The great thing about long-term travel is that you meet people (often folks from your own culture) who are uncommonly attuned to life, since meaningful journeys have a way of bringing that out in a person. Last month Kiki and I…
“Las Vegas is hard to capture in art without leaning on cliche. The movie Casino doesn’t lean on cliche because it created the cliche. The Hangover created the cliche for this next generation. Culture is is causing people to act a certain way when they get to Las Vegas.” – Tod Goldberg In this episode of Deviate,…
I’ve come to the point where I feel nostalgia for videos I first watched on YouTube. Not traditional media clips uploaded to the platform, but clips I know only from having watched them on YouTube. With the major-league baseball postseason now underway, I’ve been reminiscing about the 2014 American League Wild Card game — a…
When Annie Dillard died at age 81 last week, I immediately thought of my father, who kept a copy of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on our family bookshelf. My dad, a science teacher, saw Annie Dillard as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. When I eventually…
A few times each year, a reporter from some traditional venue (outlets like Reuters or the Washington Post or Foreign Policy) will reach out to me, as a veteran travel writer, for my professional perspective about some aspect of the travel experience. Since I find travel and tourism to be endlessly fascinating, these interviews are…
“That first day in Mumbai, there was the slum to the side of us, there were sports cars that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars next to people walking with no feet next to 200 people crammed into a bus. Separating those layers in a nuanced way lifts the writing that shows that…
On nostalgia On travel photographs On human nature On the souvenir trade On mortality More about the book
By Rolf Potts Back in 1981, when I was ten years-old and in the fourth grade, I drew a poster that illustrated everything I loved and hated about the world. For some reason I’ve kept it after all these years, and not too long ago I hung it up in the mudroom of my house.…
“All writing is trying to destroy a stereotype, and the individual that you’re writing about — the figure in the landscape — is actually the ideal.” —Paul Theroux Paul Theroux‘s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, My Other Life, and The Mosquito Coast. His 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar is credited with revitalizing the genre of literary travel writing, and…
(author’s note, 2026) The following short story was published in the August/September 1998 issue of an online literary magazine called Eclectica. While fictional, the story is a roman à clef evocation of a certain time in my life, when I was coming to terms with the fact that the manuscript for my first travel book…
