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…

By Michael Mewshaw First presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans, October 28, 2004 (an excerpt) I’ve traveled here to New Orleans from London, where I spend part of each year. And most of you have traveled some distance from your homes and universities so that I…

1) On the deepest source of wanderlust I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what. 2) On the intoxicating joy of long-term travel The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so…

Note: The following interview appears in the paperback edition of Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Rolf Potts: In the book you say that “travel reveals less about the truth of a place and hints more about how complicated the world is.” It struck me that this is also…

1) Adults are often ashamed to be novices As adults, we rarely learn fresh skills or dare ourselves to change direction. We urge our children to be bold risk-takers, to show grit and open themselves to new experiences. But us grown-ups? We hide behind the way we’ve always done things. We become so boring! Adults…

1) Travel allows one to stop acting like a new person and to start becoming one The unfamiliarity of travel jolts you out of your familiar patterns. Who we are on the road is different from who we are at home. I don’t know if who we are on the road is closer to our…

1) Genre stories help us escape the narratives of our humdrum lives Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win…

1) On what travel can reveal about the way we live If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardor and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might…

By Robert D. Kaplan Originally published in the January 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (an excerpt) Knowing the future is easy, if only we were willing to see the present. In the 1980s, it was one thing to learn about Afghanistan through fleeting and sporadic news reports; it was another to watch with a…

1) On the way empathy requires inquiry and openness Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.” 2) On the…

“The time-honored tradition of the flâneur is when the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it.” –Will Self, interviewed in World Hum “He (or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major Sights and ticking them off a list of…