The World samples a half-century, peripatetically. It selects its subjects as it goes along. Its title may perhaps imply a more considered and objective collection, the sort of memoir in which a philosophically minded novelist might reflect upon his times, or a retired columnist from a quality broadsheet. Do not be deceived. This portfolio of…
In addition to interviewing other people about their travels and travel-expertise, one joy of the Deviate podcast is the opportunity it affords me to reflect on my own best travel experiences – often with the very people who went on those journeys with me many years ago. My five favorite Deviate episodes about my own…
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Asher Ross for an upcoming book from Kinfolk on souvenirs. What thoughts do you have on bringing home souvenirs for friends and family? If seeking to preserve an ephemeral experience in an object is often hopeless, even for ourselves, what does it mean to try to…
I met Kiki Bush on dating app about two months into the pandemic of 2020. I should have been off traveling in Italy that month, she should have been in Berlin; instead, we met in our shared childhood home-state of Kansas, and we had our first date on the rural property where I stay when…
(An excerpt) Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names, belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or…
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, December 1965) One noontime last spring a photographer, two assistants, a lady editor and a fashion model turned up at the corner of Bleecker and Leroy Streets, in Greenwich Village. This is a tenement block and a market district, the nucleus of what is left of the old Bleecker Street…
From the outset, the “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast was meant to give me the occasional pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore my other interests. My five favorite music-themed Deviate episodes are outlined below. Though later seasons of my podcast have episodes riffing on bands like Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, and Iron…
Late last year, a Spanish researcher named Sergio Gonzalo contacted me with some questions for a multidisciplinary study on travel. “I am trying to approximate how different sciences or disciplines have approached travel as an activity and as a phenomenon,” he wrote. “For that reason, some specialists from different disciplines (such as Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology…
Ants are not fond of margarine. Like us they prefer Butter. They do not have cholesterol problems Because as yet they do not own TVs. For centuries They have toiled in order that they might be able to Take a night off and watch the Northern Lights which Are their version of canned laughter. They…
Some of my most popular Deviate podcast episodes have been about the craft of writing (and, often, travel writing specifically). This has dovetailed nicely with the creative writing classes I offer in Paris each summer — and I have, over the years, featured interviews with such Paris co-teachers as Major Jackson, Hala Alyan, and Elena…
It is commonly known that travelers, when thrown together overseas for extended periods of time, will eventually start to obsess on the idiosyncrasies of their bowels (Tim Cahill has commented on this at length). And, in places where toilet paper seldom exists (such as Asia), there is much debate about just how sanitary it is…
