“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” ― Simone de Beauvoir
Libraries are under assault. Ideologues—concerned that libraries might contain material they personally object to—are defunding them to protect people from knowledge. Political opportunists—eager to score points with constituents who aren’t exactly big book readers—are threatening librarians with fines and even jail time for checking out or even showing...
Six years is a long gap between travel recommendations. After my 2016 stay in Porto, I wrote a post with my recommendations for the city that I’ve probably shared a few hundred times, but time and, I suspect, Covid, have led to some of those great spots closing down. Farewell, Moustache Cafe! But as some places close, others emerge, and while I only had a few...
In the seven years since I first visited Porto, the city has changed. Massive construction projects in the city have blocked dozens of roads, and the traffic is so bad in some areas that police work at every intersection. The abandoned warehouses lining the river that were the setting for some amazing photos have been replaced with new construction and bars. The...
When I first started traveling in earnest, I was skeptical of tours in cities. As much as anything, I love wandering through new places and discovering corners on my own. I worried that these organized trips were the province of tourists, not travelers, that absurdly Manichean distinction that seems to allow many of us to justify our habits while feeling just a bit...
I was in Malta five years ago when I realized the loneliest hours of solo travel almost always occur during the evening in the hours when people head out for outdoor dinners with their friends and families. In The Great Gatsby, Nick describes the feeling of being at a party but not in the party as a feeling of being “simultaneously within and without,” and I think...
Bosnia July 202253 photos
While I love to travel by rail in Europe, my last experience until this weekend on a train in the United States happened when I was five or six years old when my entire elementary school got to ride the Amtrak from Shelby to Cut Bank, Montana and back for a field trip. That trip was a big deal. The local newspaper covered it, and I believe a photo of my sister even...
The list of frugal habits I didn’t acquire from my grandmother is embarrassingly large. As we—and I—seem to embrace the idea of a more disposable society today, the idea of collecting bacon grease on the stove for future use, for instance, seems awfully quaint, even if probably eminently sensible. One element of her frugality was that I imagine my grandmother likely...
The potential and panic of being unfinished.