1) Your true writer’s voice is rarely an expression of intention When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. –Zadie Smith, “This is how it feels to me,” The Guardian,…
Two decades on, it’s difficult to remember how obsessively the media was fixated with the 1999-to-2000 New Year (and, in particular, “Y2K glitch” worries about computer data). I was writing my “Vagabonding” column for Salon Travel at the time, and the editor there requested that all regular contributors write a short meditation on where they…
1) On the origins of campus “political correctness” discourse Throughout the 1980s, conservative pundits warned of a multiculturalist crusade to reshape the campus. …Speech codes and sexual-harassment policies targeted those who did not display the proper sensitivities to minorities and women. The professors of the academic left underwrote these developments by unmasking the ideal of…
(an excerpt) Space-age technologists tell us that we are the first people for whom it is possible to possess any corner of the globe within twenty-four hours — the first traveler’s for whom the fourth dimension is not a mere hypothesis but an available experience. This very afternoon, you or I could leave the White…
[Update: My podcast episode about Baumbach’s Kicking & Screaming, featuring journalist and critic Michael Weinreb, is now online.] Noah Baumbach, whose new movie Marriage Story (starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver) debuts this week, is one of the most respected American indie-film writer-directors of his generation. His cinematic vision has evoked comparisons to auteurs like…
In light of the (now possibly passé) “OK Boomer” meme bouncing around the internet in recent weeks, I’ve seen a number of social-media references to a 2017 Vanity Fair article entitled “Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope,” which contained this startlingly relevant (for me, at least) piece of cover art containing pop-culture…
1) On the sheer economic power of tourism In gross economic power [tourism] is in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agriculture. At least one out of every ten people around the world is financed by the industry, according to Wolfgang Weinz of the International Labour Organization, who told me that the figure…
Friends and vagabonders, As 2019 nears its end, I wanted to check in and recap some of the things I’ve done and places I’ve traveled this year. From traversing the Indonesian island of Sumatra (as well as Sri Lanka, Dubai, and the Republic of Georgia), to speaking at the Kazakh equivalent of TED Talks, to…
1) If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion — it’s probably one of the innumerable clichés which have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that it takes a special effort not…
Long after you have swung back away from me I think you are still with me:you come close to the shore on the tide and nudge me awake the way a boat nudges the pier: am I a pier half-in half-out of the water? and in the pleasure of that communion I lose track, the…
1) On the difficulty of writing about music Writing about music is like describing the color blue. You can try to explain what you see when you see blue, but it is unlikely that a blind person will picture the exact shade you mean. Similarly, you can write about music all you want, but the…
