“Dare to do Dirt”: Seeking rural places (and how to best experience them)
“Dare to do Dirt”: Seeking rural places (and how to best experience them)
Vagabonding audio companion: Why (and how) travel souvenirs matter
This image, taken a few years ago at the Go Viral festival, a SXSW-style “influencer” gathering in Kazakhstan, evokes an anecdote I share on page 166 of The Vagabond’s Way. I had been invited to Almaty to talk about digital nomadism and travel storytelling to the assembled audience of Central Asian artists and entrepreneurs. Since…
Everything feels new at the outset of a journey (online book club remix)
A look at how museums work (live from a presidential museum and a Barbie doll museum)
Internet cafes were so central to the lives of long-term travelers 20 years ago that my memories of vagabonding through Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s are inseparable from occasional stop-offs in these little storefronts full of dial-up-connected computer terminals. At the time, internet cafes felt revolutionary in their ability to connect travelers…
A “Vagabonding Audio Companion” remix of a GFU study-abroad podcast.
Author and actor Andrew McCarthy on walking across Spain with his son.
1) Reading stories is an act of imagination for the reader Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. Reading is often seen as a passive act: we lie back and let writers pipe joy into our brains. But this is wrong. When we experience a story,…
Matt Kepnes on how to preempt (and deal with) travel burnout on the road
This image from my trekking journey in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands figured into the recent Deviate episode wherein Ari Shaffir and I discussed the idiosyncrasies of travel onstage at KGB Bar in NYC. Specifically, we talked about the tourist desire to see a “pure” vision of distant cultures, and how years of working with travelers in…