Flying ‘Business Elite’ With David Sedaris

Travel Blog • 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.