Is Journey Damaged? | The New Yorker

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It’s a complicated time to journey. Tourism is projected to hit record-breaking ranges this yr, and its toll on the tradition and ecosystems of widespread trip spots is more and more arduous to disregard. Social media pushes hoards to locations unable to resist the visitors, whereas the rise of “last-chance” journey—the frenzy to see melting glaciers or deteriorating coral reefs earlier than they’re gone endlessly—has turned the precarity of those locations right into a promoting level. On this episode of Critics at Giant, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discover the query of why we journey. They hint the wealthy historical past of journey narratives, from the memoirs of Marco Polo and nineteenth-century accounts of the Grand Tour to exhibits like Anthony Bourdain’s “Elements Unknown” and HBO’s “The White Lotus.” Why are we compelled to pack a bag and set off, given the rising variety of causes not to take action? “One factor that’s actually necessary for me as a traveller is the expertise of being international,” Schwartz says. “I’m beginning to understand that there are locations I could by no means go, and this has truly made different folks’s accounts of them, within the deeper sense, extra necessary.”

Learn, watch, and hear with the critics:

“The New Vacationer,” by Paige McClanahan
The “Lonely Planet” guidebooks
“The Travels of Marco Polo,” by Rustichello da Pisa
“Of Journey,” by Francis Bacon
“The Innocents Overseas,” by Mark Twain
“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Travels via France and Italy,” by Tobias Smollett
“Anthony Bourdain: Elements Unknown” (2013-18)
“The White Lotus” (2021-)
“Conan O’Brien Should Go” (2024)
“It Simply Obtained Simpler to Go to a Vanishing Glacier. Is {That a} Good Factor?,” by Paige McClanahan (The New York Instances)
“The New Luxurious Trip: Being Dumped within the Center of Nowhere,” by Ed Caesar (The New Yorker)