One of the reasons I named my podcast Deviate (as opposed to, say, Vagabonding) is that I wanted the creative freedom to veer away from the travel issues I’ve covered as a journalist for the past two decades, and explore other intellectual themes. Since my interest in cinema and screenwriting is as old as my…
How the people we meet by accident as we travel can deepen the journey
“One of the things that young writers falsely hope exists is inspiration. A lot of young writers fail because they aren’t putting in the hours. …I think it’s crucial that we have some kind of rhythm. Whether you can write all day every day, or whether you can write four hours on Sunday. Whatever it…
How to take the attitude of long-term travel back home with you.
Author Meghan Daum on career-reinvention, flyover country, and voices of generations
1) On the twenty-year gap in generational nostalgia In the seventies, people lived the fifties, reminiscing over the preordained conclusion that it had been a better time to be alive (Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley on TV, American Graffiti and Grease in movie houses). In the eighties, people fixated on the sixties, and particularly…
1) On the joys of traveling in the United States To really see America, you need to drive it mile by mile, because you not only begin to grasp the immensity of this beautiful country, you see the climate and geography change with every state line. These are indeed things that cannot be learned from…
Pascal once wrote that all mankind’s misfortunes spring from just one cause: ‘he does not know how to sit still in a room.’ I like that: it makes me less ashamed to admit that I am a poor traveler. Places interest me, but more and more often the mechanics of getting to them defeats me,…
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French genius who blessed the world by inventing the hypodermic syringe and the calculating machine (if such things can be counted blessings) took a singular view of man’s liking for travel. It was an ironic view, considering that he also invented the world’s first public bus service: for so far…
The “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast gives me the pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore most any topic that interests me — and often I end up exploring affecting and meaningful episodes from my own life. I have, for example, produced episodes about my childhood fascination with the 1976 Sears Christmas…
What it must be like to be an angel or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner. The last time we go to bed good, they are there, lying about darkness. They dandle us once too often, these friends who become our enemies. Suddenly one day, their juniors are as old as we yearn to be.…
