What we Loved This Week: ‘Heat,’ Home and Pomegranates

In a new Friday feature, World Hum contributors share a favorite thing they read, saw, heard or experienced in the past seven days.

Joanna Kakissis
My first non-soupy meal after a week sick with bronchitis was a green salad with feta and lots of pomegranate seeds—a meal which seemed to heal and make me restless all at once. Is it because pomegranates are said to give one wanderlust, as an Iranian student once told me? Or did those magical little seeds just feed my current high on Falling Cloudberries, the fabulous cookbook by Tessa Kiros inspired by her peripatetic life.

Frank Bures
I’m reading a travel book called Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America, which is a fantastic story about Michael Muhammad Knight’s trip across the country looking for his own version of American Islam. It’s like like Kerouac with a Koran, as he looks for spiritual place he can call his own.

Eva Holland
After reading my post about Ike Turner’s recent death, my mom passed along a link to The Devil and Ike Turner—a great piece from Slate, speculating about what Ike might have sold his soul for if he ever wandered down to that famous Delta crossroads. My favorite line from the story? “Ike’s concept was simple: The band plays tight; Tina goes berserk.”

Jim Benning
I’m reading Heat, Bill Bufford’s 2006 account of learning Italian cooking in the kitchen of Babbo and then heading off to Tuscany to learn more. It features lines like this: “Jointing rabbits, I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher’s looping knot and was so excited by the discovery I went home and practiced.” In the (bloodied) hands of a lesser writer, it could really suck, but Buford pulls it off nicely.

Julia Ross
I spent a good hour this week poring over the stunning China photos featured in this month’s National Geographic Traveler. Most were taken by local photographers who capture the country’s sweeping diversity through portraits like that of a Uighur girl weaving or a Mongolian man herding camels. I’ve been wavering on whether to book tickets to Beijing to attend the Olympics this summer; these photos were all the tipping point I needed.

Michael Yessis
Richard Ford’s writing generally rubs me the wrong way, but after reading World Hum’s stories by Rolf Potts and Matt Gross about home—and pondering leaving my current apartment—his piece in the Smithsonian about the concept of home really resonated. “[I]s it so bad if we don’t have a rock-solid sense of home?” he asks. “Or only have a weak one? Or maybe just don’t have one yet?”

Share your own favorite travel-related thing you read, saw, heard or experienced this week in the comments.

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