‘This American Life’ on Mapping Your World

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  10.25.07 | 9:50 AM ET

imageMapping doesn’t mean just plotting places on a piece of paper. In a particularly brilliant This American Life episode, host Ira Glass says you can explore your world by mapping each of your five senses. “Every map is the world seen through a different lens,” he said.

Though the TAL contributors surveyed their immediate surroundings—neighborhoods, offices, their own bodies—their insights could easily be applied to travelers scoping out a new locale. Imagine filtering out the chaos of the world and focusing on one sensory aspect—for instance, the scents of a souk in Tripoli, the sounds of a Jewish bakery in Paris, or the tastes of a boulevard in Los Angeles.

The story about the taste map was my favorite. The Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold actually mapped Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles in the early 1980s using his sense of taste. The experience changed his life. He discovered each place had its own enigma, context and culture, as if it were its own country. 

Related on World Hum:
* Mapping ‘Where I’ve Been’: Hope for America’s Lost One-Fifth?
* Maps, Mumbles and Miss South Carolina
* Google Maps: Is it Changing the Way We See the World?

Photo by Frabuleuse, via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Tags: Audio-Video, Food, Geography for Fun and Profit, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


2 Comments for ‘This American Life’ on Mapping Your World

Marilyn Terrell 10.27.07 | 9:11 AM ET

Here’s a micro-regional food map from National Geographic which shows you where to find garage mix, kringle, toasted ravioli, buckeyes, livermush, and more:
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0709/local-foods.html

Hilarious spoof of This American Life here:
http://www.kasperhauser.com/

Joanna Kakissis 10.28.07 | 2:21 PM ET

Great map! Gotta try that Texas caviar! As for the spoof, I think I might have gone to a Phantom High School too.

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