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…
1) Most schools employ outmoded models of learning We learn and teach in institutions that were designed to train citizens for the Industrial Age. From compulsory public schooling for K-12, to the birth of the research university, virtually all of the apparatus of “school” was designed to retrain farmers and artisans to the Industrial mode…
The celebrity autographs pictured here come from a souvenir book Kiki’s great aunt kept when she worked as a “Harvey Girl” on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the 1930s. The Chicago-to-Los-Angeles luxury cars saw a lot of celebrities in the days before jet travel, and it was common practice for Harvey Girls…
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, July 1954) Recently I drove from Garrison-on-Hudson to New York on a Sunday afternoon, one unit in a creeping parade of metal, miles and miles of shiny paint and chrome inching along bumper to bumper. There were no old rust heaps, no jalopies. Every so often we passed a car…
Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond, That dreams at the gates of the day? Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies, And ever so far away; Alluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls, And ye of the trail overfond, With saddle and pack, by paddle and track, Let’s go…
From The New Yorker, June 17, 2002 (an excerpt) In the summer of 1977, I saw Star Wars twenty-one times, mostly by myself. I was thirteen—that kid alone in the ticket line, slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me, impatient to get to my favorite seat. All twenty-one viewings took place at the Loews…
Every so often university students interview me about my travel-writing career — particularly its origins — and some of these exchanges are worth publishing here, since these questions are relevant and worth making public for the sake of other aspiring writers. The exchange below was initiated in 2018 by Marleigh Love, a creative writing student…
There is this sense from Before Sunrise that life, when it adds kinds of completeness and continuation, never equals the potential those youthful moments once contained.
An expanded version of the music-memoir essay that appeared in the 2019 Bloomsbury anthology The 33 1/3 B-sides: Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums.
