Tag: Page Turner
The New Yorker’s Food Issue Goes Traveling
by Eva Holland | 11.17.09 | 11:31 AM ET
The new issue has a definite global bent, with stories on China’s burgeoning wine culture, spending Thanksgiving abroad and more. Most of the stories aren’t accessible online for non-subscribers, but John Colapinto’s ride-along with a Michelin restaurant inspector is available in full. There’s also a podcast to accompany Calvin Trillin’s “kamikaze” poutine mission to Quebec, and a video to go along with the Chinese wine story.
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Yahoo! BuzzSeth Stevenson: Innocents Aboard
by Eva Holland | 10.19.09 | 2:46 PM ET
Slate’s latest Well-Traveled series follows writer Seth Stevenson and three other novice sailors as they join the annual herd of “clueless” American boaters who “fly down to Tortola, rent enormous catamarans, float them out into the middle of the channel, and for the next seven days proceed to endanger every seaborne object they encounter.” It’s a good read so far.
The Mystery of the Kashiwa Mystery Cafe
by Michael Yessis | 10.16.09 | 12:43 PM ET
Cabel Maxfield Sasser calls his visit to the Ogori Cafe in Kashiwa, Japan, an unforgettable travel moment. I agree. Read to the end for the payoff. (Thanks for the tip, @sophiadembling)
George Saunders Goes to Tent City, U.S.A.
by Michael Yessis | 10.08.09 | 1:04 PM ET
It’s in Fresno, California, and he lived there this April. Saunders writes on his website:
It was a very moving, sort of scary experience, that had the effect of re-energizing certain tendencies in my fiction and in me as a person, I guess, among these: respect for the real; a distrust of the American capitalist juggernaut; suspicion of my own Pollyannaish tendencies; new enthusiasm for the variety and weirdness of the world.
His 12,000-word piece about it—and an audio slideshow—can be found at GQ.
Jan Wong: Looking Back at China’s Darker Days
by Eva Holland | 10.02.09 | 5:26 PM ET
In a powerful column, Jan Wong, the author of Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now looks back on her complicated love affair with China—from studying abroad in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution to covering the Tiananmen Square massacre from a hotel room uncomfortably nearby. As the country celebrates its 60th anniversary this week, it’s good to see some thoughtful reflection on the dark times in China’s past, too. (Via @DougSaunders)
National Geographic on ‘Vanishing Venice’
by Eva Holland | 07.29.09 | 12:22 PM ET
The latest issue of the magazine includes a lovely story on the city, and the rising flood of tourists that threatens to destroy it. (Via @italylogue)
Tradition, Change and the Fate of the Irish Pub
by David Farley | 03.26.09 | 4:16 PM ET
A couple decades ago, the authenticity of Irish pubs both within and outside the Emerald Isle was never questioned. Pubs abroad, one assumed, were likely started by an Irish immigrant, looking to offer homesick lads a taste of home and the wanderlust-stricken a rehashed memory of that last trip to Dublin.
Today, however, things are different. Welcome to the Irish Pub Company, which has birthed hundreds of near-identical “Irish” pubs from Shanghai to Sienna. Yes, the décor in that pub you’re nursing a Guinness in isn’t decades- or centuries-old; it wasn’t transported from a farm house or old church in County Cork. It was manufactured by a company that’s making a killing exporting Irishness.
Bill Barich’s fascinating book, A Pint of Plain, released in February, details the history, the present state and the inevitable fate of the Irish pub. Both in Ireland and abroad. Barich, an American in Ireland, travels around the isle, chatting up publicans and pub owners and discussing how modernity and globalization have led to falling attendance at Irish pubs as well as the movement to dispatch cheap prefabricated models across the planet. The only problem with Barich’s book is that you’ll start to wonder if that Guinness you’re crying into is real, too.
Ry Cooder’s El Mirage and Los Angeles
by Jim Benning | 11.24.08 | 11:46 AM ET
This is one of the coolest travel stories I’ve read in a while. The New York Times joined Ry Cooder in exploring El Mirage Dry Lake in California’s Mojave Desert, as well as parts of Los Angeles, both areas Cooder has evoked in concept albums. Writes Lawrence Downes:
When Ry Cooder and I got to El Mirage Dry Lake, it was 110 degrees and heading to 117, hot enough to cook your head inside your hat. The Mojave Desert in daylight will cut the gizzard right out of you, Tom Joad once said, which is why the Okies crossed it at night.
The accompanying slideshow, featuring one of Cooder’s songs, shows just how powerful a good audio slideshow can be.
Southern Mexico’s Pirates: ‘Every Story is About Money’
by Valerie Conners | 10.28.08 | 1:58 PM ET
When David Vann learned about the mysterious and brutal murder of 78-year-old sailor John Long in the waters near Puerto Madero, Mexico, he was compelled to head there to unearth the truth about Long’s demise as much as resolve his own brush with violence and corruption in the same region 11 years ago.
‘The Real Thing May be the Only Kind of Adventure We Have Left’
by Michael Yessis | 10.28.08 | 1:57 PM ET
What’s in a 12-mile walk? World Hum contributing editor Frank Bures took one in Wisconsin because he “wanted to experience what French philosopher Guy Debord called the ‘psychogeography’ of it, meaning the interaction of your mind and the place.” His story for Madison Magazine includes a slideshow.
Matt Weiland: Through 50 States With 50 Writers
by Frank Bures | 10.23.08 | 4:23 PM ET
Photo courtesy James Lester Films The coeditor of "State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America" talks to Frank Bures
‘Teacher, Counselor, Mediator and Pastor’: Welcome to Your Flight Attendant’s World
by Valerie Conners | 09.15.08 | 3:54 PM ET
If you haven’t done so already, consider on your next flight the plight of your flight attendant. New York Times writer Michelle Higgins certainly did, ultimately going undercover as an American Airlines flight attendant. Life in the “unfriendly skies” is a far (and stressful, drama-filled) cry from the heady days of Coffee, Tea or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses, Higgins was soon to learn.
Harper’s Makes David Foster Wallace Stories Available Online
by Jim Benning | 09.15.08 | 2:15 PM ET
Classy move, Harper’s. Here’s the list. Our favorite, “Shipping Out,” is here. It’s about Wallace’s experience on a Celebrity Cruises voyage in the Caribbean. Among the writer’s post-cruise observations, sure to put a knowing smile on the face of anyone who’s ever taken such a cruise: “I now know the precise mixological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel”; “I have met Cruise Staff with the monikers ‘Mojo Mike,’ ‘Cocopuff,’ and ‘Dave the Bingo Boy”; “I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children”; and “I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own cabin toilet.”
A Plea to Take Global Tourism Seriously: ‘It’s Nothing Short of a Planet-Threatening Plague’
by Julia Ross | 09.02.08 | 10:31 AM ET
In a rousing op-ed for the Washington Post, journalist and author Elizabeth Becker issues a plea to American government officials, journalists and travelers: Ignore the impact of global tourism at your peril. With 898 million people traveling the world last year, global tourism has reached a tipping point, she argues—one that has inflicted potentially irreversible damage in places like Angkor Wat and Venice, along with fueling an insidious sex tourism trade in Asia and Eastern Europe.
‘The Monster of Florence’: Murder and the Pursuit of Truth
by Frank Bures | 08.07.08 | 10:18 AM ET
Douglas Preston's latest book, the true story of a serial killer in Italy, shows that the world is far from exhausted for those who want to travel deep. Frank Bures tells why.
New Travel Book: ‘First Stop in the New World’
by Frank Bures | 06.12.08 | 5:57 PM ET
Full title: “First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century”
Author: David Lida
Released: Today
Travel genre: Into the big city
Territory covered: Mexico City
Peggy Noonan: ‘America is in Line at the Airport’
by Michael Yessis | 04.25.08 | 11:51 AM ET
The Wall Street Journal columnist writes: “America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask.” Funny beginning to an intriguing piece about the state of U.S. presidential politics as seen through the eyes of passengers at Gate 14, “small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called.”
Dan Bilefsky: Telling Counterintuitive Stories From the Edge of Europe
by Joanna Kakissis | 02.21.08 | 12:05 PM ET
The International Herald Tribune's Central and Eastern Europe correspondent has developed a reputation as one of journalism's finest voices. Joanna Kakissis asks him about "Balkan idols" and unlocking cultures.
Books for Fearful Flyers
by Eva Holland | 01.25.08 | 9:43 AM ET
Has the recent crash landing at Heathrow re-awakened your fear of flying? Or just made you curious about airplanes and the miracle of flight? Over at Slate, Inigo Thomas explains how reading everything he could get his hands on about commercial flight helped to (partially) cure his fear of flying. The list of must-reads is comforting and informative.
Related on World Hum:
* 2007: Safest Year for Air Travel Since 1963
Flying ‘Business Elite’ With David Sedaris
by Michael Yessis | 12.12.07 | 2:16 PM ET
And with the traveler sitting next to him, a 40-something Polish man who, as Sedaris learns soon after takeoff on a transatlantic flight, is flying to his mother’s funeral. In a recounting of the flight for the New Yorker, Sedaris and his row mate barely speak a word, but somehow with Sedaris’s empathy, a few funny riffs about flying business class and some mining of his own family’s foibles, he delivers one of the more powerful pieces of his I’ve read in a while.
Related on World Hum:
* Inside David Sedaris’s Paris: An Audio Tour
* Why Did David Sedaris Just Spend Three Months in Tokyo?
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