Story travel video: Why we watch other people travel
The video essay has become the armchair traveler's window — and the reasons we keep looking are older than the format.
Essays
Essays and first-person writing about place: returning somewhere after years away, the contradictions of being a visitor, borders and belonging, and the parts of a journey that resist a clean summary. Arguments are welcome and clearly attributed. For readers who take travel writing as literature rather than a booking aid.
Essays on returning to a place, the contradictions of being a visitor.
What Spain's drove roads still hold open
More than 125,000 kilometres of public ground, guaranteed by law for animals walking twice a year, and the seeds, plant genes and medieval tolls that travel with them.
The night train is a genre, and the sleeper cars are its library
A century and a half of departures at dusk has produced a literature and a logic of its own — and the night train's revival is really a revival of a way of arriving.
The month between months is when a place is most itself
Shoulder-season travel is usually sold as a discount. The better argument is descriptive: the weeks on either side of high season are when a destination's ordinary life is audible.
The underrated pleasures of the city with nothing to see
Travel ranks cities by their monuments. Georges Perec spent a week cataloguing a plain Paris square; the exercise reveals what the ranking hides.
There is no such thing as a traveler, and never was
The tourist/traveler distinction has been policed for two centuries. The scholarship says it was never a real difference — only a way of paying oneself in status.