When the New York Times mentioned my podcast, Deviate, back in June, this came as both good news and less-than-good news. The good news was that America’s most widely read newspaper had declared that I hosted a “reliably thoughtful and inspiring” podcast. “Although travel is a central theme,” the article noted, “Deviate is less about…
“That’s part of the fun of travel. Methodically crossing items off a Bucket List is less exciting than reimagining things as you go. It makes your life’s journey part of an ongoing conversation rather than just a static list of things to be crossed off.” – Rolf Potts In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jamin talk…
The movie Spinal Tap II: The End Continues has stuck with me months after watching it. In part because there was something grotesque about its comic attempts to bring humor out of its original 1980s incarnation — a movie about an aging heavy metal band, and all the cliches and absurdities that come with its…
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
