How to be a good guest in someone else's ritual
A quiet guide to attending ceremonies, festivals and worship as an outsider: when to go, what to ask, and when to put the camera away.
Stories
Long-form reporting from the road, told through the people met along it.
What the Paris–Vienna night train still carries
The Nightjet that returned between Paris and Vienna in December 2021 carries more than sleepers — it carries a European argument about what travel is for.
How Norway's mountain huts still run on a stranger's honesty
Across Norway's high country, thousands of hikers let themselves into unstaffed cabins, cook from an unattended pantry, and pay for what they used before moving on — a trust-based system the Norwegian Trekking Association has run since its founding chapter formed in 1868.
The volunteers who answer the Cornish coast
The RNLI's lifeboat crews have launched to ships in trouble from Cornwall's coast since the institution was founded in 1824, and the crews are still overwhelmingly volunteers: fishermen, teachers, and builders with pagers on their belts.
The salt fields of Guerande are still worked by hand
On the Guerande peninsula north of the Loire estuary, some four hundred paludiers harvest sea salt from clay basins laid out in the Middle Ages, in a cooperative trade whose rules would be recognizable to their medieval predecessors.
The salt that still leaves the mountain at Hallstatt
Salt has been mined above Hallstatt for some seven thousand years, the Iron Age that bears the village's name was financed by it, and a brine pipeline built in 1607 still runs the mountain's product to the works at Ebensee.