Tag: Page Turner
‘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.
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Yahoo! BuzzMatt 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?
Blog to Watch: Jet Lagged
by Michael Yessis | 12.06.07 | 9:59 AM ET
The New York Times has just launched Jet Lagged: Navigating the Unfriendly Skies, a group-written blog boasting some contributors familiar to World Hum readers. Among them: Wayne Curtis, Elliot Hester, Patrick Smith and Pico Iyer. Iyer kicked off the proceedings yesterday with a contrarian idea: “Air travel is in fact as comfortable and reasonable today as it’s ever been.”
Q&A with Paul Kvinta: Travels With Rory Stewart in Afghanistan
by Michael Yessis | 06.28.07 | 10:40 AM ET
To report his inspired profile of Rory Stewart in the latest issue of National Geographic Adventure, Paul Kvinta ventured where few Western travelers are going these days: Kabul, Afghanistan. Stewart, the author of the books The Prince of the Marshes and The Places in Between, now leads a nongovernmental organization in Kabul called the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is working to save the Old City. His exploits as a writer—“Places” is based on Stewart’s solo walk across Afghanistan—and, as Kvinta writes, his “significant clout and talents” have enabled him not only to help focus the world’s attention on Kabul, but put him in a position to affect real change in the country.
Everest Base Camp: ‘The Himalayan Version of Burning Man’
by Jim Benning | 06.18.07 | 8:26 AM ET
Even though I have no interest in climbing Mount Everest, I’ve always thought it would be fun to poke around Base Camp during climbing season, taking in the highly adrenalized, gear-laden, multinational assemblage. Kevin Fedarko did just that last year, and his story about the experience in the July issue of Outside is a great read. Base Camp has a reputation for being a zoo, and, sure enough, he found plenty of excesses in what he calls the “Himalayan version of Burning Man.” But he found more than that. “In addition to presenting a rather grotesque perversion of pretty much everything that alpinism is supposed to represent,” he writes, “Everest Base Camp also happens to be—and I’m afraid there’s just no other way to put this—an absolute fricking blast.”
What’s the True Cost of Travel? Excerpts From ‘The Final Call’
by Michael Yessis | 05.24.07 | 11:50 AM ET
Leo Hickman’s The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays comes out early next month, and the Guardian has posted two excerpts—part one and part two—from the book. Hickman, who is the paper’s ethical living editor, also fielded questions online today, covering issues ranging from the effectiveness of buying carbon credits to why travelers might want to shun Dubai “to send the signal that much of what is going on there is environmentally insane.”
Eating Japanese: The World’s ‘My Boom’ Food
by Michael Yessis | 05.21.07 | 10:03 AM ET
Japanese cuisine is having a moment. As we’ve noted, Western chefs are beginning to embrace kaiseki, a 500-year-old Japanese eating tradition. The Los Angeles Times recently highlighted it, and the writers of that story also hit Tokyo’s restaurant scene with Spago chef Lee Hefter. In Sunday’s New York Times T Style Magazine: Travel, Adam Sachs takes his own “professional eating” tour through Tokyo, offering up a quick history of Japanese food and his take on a dining scene that, for depth and variety, “has no equal.”
An Anti-Travel Point of View: ‘It’s a Staple, Like Soymilk’
by Michael Yessis | 03.30.07 | 7:03 AM ET
We’re unabashed supporters of travel in its varied forms. Road trips. Heartbreaking trips. River trips. Surf trips. Naked trips. Virtual trips. Meta trips. We could go on. Even when a trip makes us sick. And we know why we travel. Now, some space for an opposing point of view: James Morris’s artful, funny take on why we shouldn’t travel in the Winter 2007 issue of the Wilson Quarterly.
Stephen King vs. Dante: Why Traveling With the Right Book Matters
by Michael Yessis | 03.21.07 | 11:51 AM ET
It could be a guidebook, or Dante’s Divine Comedy, or even an atlas. In Jay Parini’s case, the books he takes along when he travels depend “a great deal on my mood and the context of the journey,” he writes in a terrific little essay in The Chronicle Review. “Weeks before any journey, I begin to worry about what books I’ll bring,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a short hop for the night or something more adventurous, I wonder what I’ll read en route (if I’m going by plane or train) and what I’ll read while I’m there, perhaps sleepless in a hotel room. There’s nothing worse than being without the right book in those situations. Yet—given the restrictions and demands of travel—one has to be selective.”
Next Up on Hollywood’s Travel Book Adaptation List: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’
by Michael Yessis | 01.18.07 | 12:38 PM ET
Julia Roberts is on board to play the lead in Elizabeth Gilbert’s critically acclaimed bestseller “Eat, Pray, Love,” which World Hum books editor Frank Bures calls hilarious, moving and deeply engaging. Will a movie version of the book work? Bures, who also interviewed Gilbert for Poets & Writers, thinks it could. “It’s hard to say how much the film will resemble the travel book, but Julia Roberts is a fine actress,” Bures says. “She might not be quite as funny or quick-witted as Gilbert, but I’m sure she’ll be great. You can’t really lose with Julia Roberts playing you.”
‘Has the Romance Gone Out of Travel?’
by Michael Yessis | 01.15.07 | 9:17 AM ET
Michael Bywater argues it has and Alexander Frater says no way in a he said-he said debate this week in the pages of The Observer. I stand with Frater, a former chief travel correspondent for the paper, who writes: “To those who say the excitement has gone out of travel, I say ‘cobblers’. Curiosity continues to tug us around blind corners and over interesting hills, so that even something as innocuous as a sightseeing day trip in Ladakh can become a small adventure, a genuine golden moment.” The Atlantic has a similar story this month, as Virginia Postrel explores how glamour has been eliminated from air travel.