Why I Travel
The places most people only read about turn out to be exactly what they promised — and also something else entirely. Notre-Dame in Paris, the…
São Miguel: Fog, Fire, and Tea
São Miguel arrived after Pico, which meant arriving after something — after the volcanic desolation of Faial's ash fields, after Jeff's quiet reckoning with his…
Pico: Standing on Ancestral Soil
Pico was the reason we went to the Azores. Our friend Jeff had grown up with stories of the volcanic island his great-grandfather had left…
Faial: From Green to Ash at the Edge of the Atlantic
I had imagined the Azores as something like Hawaii — tropical, volcanic, Portuguese. I was wrong about the first part. We had come from Lisbon,…
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The Netherlands: Water, Tolerance, and the City That Shouldn’t Exist
On our first evening on the houseboat, we settled onto the small deck nestled into the side of the Dutch barge with a drink as…
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Brussels: The Second Reading
Brussels was cleaner than we remembered — the soot that had darkened Sainte-Catherine on our first visit was gone, the church bright now where it had been dull. A single night in the capital, this time without day trips or rail connections outward. The city concentrated itself accordingly.
Buenos Aires: La Vida Es Buena
Buenos Aires doesn't ease you in. It absorbs you, neighborhood by neighborhood, until one morning you realize you've stopped looking at a map. We arrived…
The American South: Three States, Three Campuses, One Tornado
The American South carries a history that shouldn't be forgotten. It happened. We can't erase it. What we can do is preserve the beauty it…
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The National Mall: Reading the Axis
In 1791, a French-born engineer handed the new American republic a plan for its capital that it has spent two centuries trying to live up…
From Overload to Awe in Vatican City
Vatican City contains the greatest concentration of human artistic achievement on earth. It also contains, on any given morning, thirty thousand other people who know…