A full transcript of Rolf’s 2025 video essay about the role places play in cinema.
What’s the Best Way to Explore Kenya? Join a Local Hiking Club.
Rolf sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.
“Marco Polo Didn’t Go There”: An introduction to Rolf’s second book
The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in…
“Picturesque World”: Intro to The Best Travel Writing, Vol. 11
By Rolf Potts Most any journey can, at moments, have a way of making a traveler feel like he’s navigating a blurred line between present and past. Walk through the urban slums at the outskirts of modern Mumbai, and you can get a sense for what New York’s Lower East Side might have felt like…
Five of the best Deviate podcast episodes about life-affecting personal experiences
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…
Thoughts on watching the Before trilogy in a single day, 25 years on
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.
Jane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s Shocking”: A Personal Testimony
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.
The Future of Travel After the Coronavirus Pandemic
News analysis: Rolf and writers like Pico Iyer and James Fallows speculate on what travel will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stranger Things is the story of my youth (and my mid-1980s journals prove it)
Cultural criticism/personal essay: Rolf reflects on the journals he kept between 1984 and 1986 – a time when he played D&D, bicycled everywhere, and pretty much watched the same movies as the boys in Stranger Things.
5 Ways Indie Travel Has Changed — And Stayed The Same — Since 1999
Cultural criticism: During a journey across south and southeast Asia, Rolf reflects on the changes he’s seen over the course of 20 years as a vagabonding traveler.
Why Travel Writing Matters
Literary criticism: Travel writing has long been a part of our serious literary fabric, and perhaps more than ever, the power of travel writing to create a dialogue across cultures is crucial.