Sophia Dembling asks three questions to kick off an intriguing blog post: “Now that the price of flying is skyrocketing, will the world start getting larger again? Will travel become less egalitarian than it has become in recent decades, as fewer people can afford to do it? And would that be, necessarily, a bad thing?” Dembling recently wrote Traveling While Texan for World Hum.

Update: May 2, 11:09 a.m. ET: A USA Today story outlines how “[r]ecord-high oil prices are threatening to ground millions of travelers who have grown accustomed to flying for fun and business during the past 30 years.”

Stories by Peter Hessler and Amy Tan anchor what looks to be a terrific May issue of National Geographic. Hessler has the cover story, and Tan writes about the Dong people, who have no written language. Also of note: a reprint of a 1955 story by Heinrich Harrer, My Life in Forbidden Lhasa. 

In anyone else’s hands, Annapolis Royal: Enchanted Valley would likely be just another roundup of “cute” shops in a “quaint” historic town. But when Noah Richler (son of Mordecai, and with at least some of his father’s enormous talent) is the writer, it becomes a meditation on the turning of the seasons. “Summer plays tricks on Canadian visitors,” he writes, and it has “done so since the nation’s very start. ... How cruel it must have seemed to the Frenchmen in the New World that a place so utterly idyllic in summer would prove so difficult to endure come winter.”

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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.”

“What constitutes a meaningful cultural difference?” That’s the question that The Smart Set contributor Michael Gorra is faced with after a bedsheet-shopping expedition in Hamburg. What follows is a thoughtful essay on the traveler’s search for differences, our inevitable comparisons to the familiar and our efforts to make it all add up in the end. Laced with references to the peculiarities around him (Berlin’s new golf courses, or the way cashiers in Hamburg make change), the essay left me reassessing the way I take note of the world around me when I travel. It also left me craving the “cool pilsner tingle” of a mug of German beer.

Photo by Jan the manson via Flickr (Creative Commons)

As usual, The New Yorker turns to big-name writers for its Journeys issue: Jonathan Franzen, Jared Diamond and Caroline Alexander among them. Also as usual, several of their stories aren’t online. Two that are: Alexander’s journey through the mangrove forest of Bengal, and Paul Goldberger’s intriguing look at the architecture of airports. “The best new airports in the world right now are in Beijing, where Norman Foster’s Terminal 3 has just opened, and on the outskirts of Madrid, where Terminal 4 at Barajas, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, has been in operation since 2006,” he writes. “Foster has achieved what no other architect has been able to: he has rethought the airport from scratch and made it work.” A conversation with Franzen about his trip to China is also online. 

Sadly, I think so. During my recent travels to New Orleans, Austin and Los Angeles, I took eight cab rides. During two of them I barely said a word to the driver. Not because I didn’t want to, but because the cabbie was on his cell phone, yapping with someone else. I was annoyed by the chatter, but also deflated. 

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Congrats to Gene Weingarten, whose story about “internationally acclaimed virtuoso” Joshua Bell busking at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington D.C. won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing today. I posted about Weingarten’s Washington Post story a while back.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Once’ and the Art of Busking

The “I’ in question here is Seth Stevenson, so I’m pretty sure it’s so he could mine the Mouse for laughs and cultural insight. And, typically, he does so in an entertaining Well-Traveled series this week at Slate. In his own words, though, he says he decided to spend five days entirely within the Disney universe basically “to figure out what the hell’s going on in this place. Because America has clearly decided it’s hallowed ground.”

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The once-isolated country has welcomed tourists, satellite television and Matt Lauer in its efforts to engage the world. Now, as Arthur Lubow writes in the latest Smithsonian, the country has begun efforts to preserve its culture by displaying it outside its borders. Two major exhibitions are set for the United States this spring and summer, displays of Buddhist art in New York and San Francisco, and “demonstrations of traditional Bhutanese dancing, weaving, metalworking, woodcarving and herbal medicine” at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. Lubow traveled to Bhutan to see how these efforts, as well as larger issues of globalization, are changing the country. 

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Hessler’s China’s Instant Cities, a story we noted last June, has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the Reporting category. Also nominated in the category: William Langewiesche’s Vanity Fair piece City of Fear. 

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A man known online as Chinabounder went to Shanghai “to teach English and, apparently, have a little naughty fun on the side,” writes Mara Hvistendahl in a New Republic story. That allegedly included “gallivanting with local women” and blogging about it, which inspired an online posse to get Chinabounder kicked out of China. 

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