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Ghosts of Tokyo: A Q&A with Barry Yourgrau
An author brings his flair for the fantastic to old Tokyo. Writer and performer Barry Yourgrau is a master of the surreal, intense, funny, and sometimes very short story. His eccentric career includes writing for The New Yorker and The Paris Review (among others) as well as starring both in the film adaptation of his memoir and in a music video for the heavy metal band Anthrax. I first met him with his partner, the author Anya von Bremzen, in Istanbul sometime in the mid-aughts, but it’s his deep, long-standing relationship with Japan, where his work has a steadfast following, that fascinates me most. He is the only American author to publish short fiction specifically for Japanese cellphones—an early form of viral smartphone content known as keitai sosetsu, or cell phone novels. His next ...
Farrah Berrou: Into the Beqaa Valley
Farrah Berrou takes The Trip into Lebanon’s wine country. It’s 6:45am and Farrah Berrou, host of the podcasts B is for Bacchus and A Better Beirut, is picking me up in her mom’s car to make the climb out of Beirut, past snow-capped mountains, dusty villages, endless military checkpoints, almost to the border of Syria itself, for a full day of Lebanese wine. We’re going to Domaine Wardy, one of the great wineries of the Beqaa Valley, a winery whose roots started out actually in Aleppo, Syria, long ago. But before that, it’s time for an early-morning trip to Baalbek, the ruins of the colossal roman temple of Bacchus, the god of, among other things, wine and group sex. What a combination, what a testament to the eternal determination of the people in this part of the world to live, and live w...
Tom Tillotson: The Midnight Voter
This week on The Trip podcast: Drinking baijiu with Tom Tillotson in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. At the stroke of midnight in the high mountains near the Canadian border, in a lodge on the property of the abandoned Balsams Resort, there’s a table covered with red-white-and-blue bunting, a podium, two closet-sized voting booths. Five voters, 30 journalists, four TV trucks, two cakes celebrating the 60th anniversary of the midnight voting at Dixville Notch, NH. Now, you may think this a departure from our usual subjects. But for me, the performative small-town democracy of New Hampshire’s primaries has always been the stuff of drinking podcasts. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I were first dragged up here to Dixville Notch 16 years ago by a hard-drinking fringe presidential candida...
Gary Hirshberg: Organic Power
This week on The Trip podcast: Stonyfield Farms Chairman Gary Hirshberg talks sustainability, politics, and the role of money in the US elections. It’s the 61st Annual McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner at the big Southern New Hampshire University arena in downtown Manchester. The state party is using its quadrennial flicker in the spotlight, and all the candidates who are here like moths to the flame, to pack an arena and raise a boatload of money—bleacher seats cost $25-50 and the tickets for the white linen rubber chicken banquet tables on the arena floor, where they’ve put me, must have cost much more. They’re not serving wine at the tables, so I sneak off to ferry a camera lens or two for the photographer Shane Carpenter, who has been covering the New Hampshire primaries with ...
Eva Castillo: Manchester Defender
This week on The Trip podcast: Eva Castillo on Presidential politics and immigrant advocacy in New Hampshire in the time of Trump. So this was it, election day in New Hampshire, the real starting gun of the race is that is now settling in. And if the Democratic primary looks a bit different nationally than it did when New Hampshire’s results started rolling in (Rest in peace, campaign of Mayor Buttigieg), critics of the first-in-the-nation primary usually point to one main factor: race. The numbers don’t lie: New Hampshire is a very Caucasian state. It is 93% white; that’s like, whiter-than-Wyoming White. Not to be essentialist here, but that not only affects how voters respond to candidates, but also how candidates respond back to voters; the kind of questions they get asked in those famo...
Climbing the seven summits: a route to the top
Climbing the seven summits – the highest mountain on every continent – is an improbable dream of mine… but that’s the beauty of dreams I have always loved trekking and climbing. I usually spend several weeks of any given year on the grades of the Scottish Highlands or Welsh Snowdonia or ideally further afield such as the Arctic Circle Trail in Greenland or the K2 base camp trek in Pakistan. It was one of these trekking trips – to Tanzania in 2010 – that ignited something new inside me. It was while climbing Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, that an idea, an ambition, began to formulate. My hobby deepened into passion and I realised that I wanted to achieve something great: to climb the seven summits, the highest mountain on every continent. Mountain Continent Altitude Tech....
Life under lockdown
Kia – who prides herself on discipline – examines the effects of coronavirus on her state of mind Yesterday, I promised myself I would close my laptop at 5pm on the dot. The working hours of my week had taken on a strange, flat quality: a shallowness, like kicking my fins and striking sand. I found myself flitting from one task to another, breaking off midway to check the news, check Twitter, check one tracker and then another. In this manner, I found myself passing hours followed by yet more hours, which is why I promised to close my laptop at 5pm on the dot. Four hours later, I was still on my screen, scrolling, clicking, linking, sinking. It’s taken me six days to muster the discipline to write this post. It pains me to say that because I pride myself on discipline; on grit; on le...
How much does it cost to climb the seven summits?
Our resident mountaineer and would-be seven summiteer crunches the numbers on how much it will cost to climb the seven summits How much does it cost to climb the seven summits? About $180,000 USD give or take $10k. Climbers could significantly reduce costs by foregoing luxuries, cutting corners and taking (even more) risks to get that figure below $100,000, but I do not recommend this and certainly won’t be taking such unnecessary risks. I arrived at the above figure by looking at five established international mountain guiding companies based in the USA, UK and New Zealand. I compiled their prices for climbing all the seven summits (using the same routes where possible) and calculated the average: $162,139. There are then the costs of airfares and equipment to factor in. Flights, of cours...
10 books to transport you to the world’s most visited countries
Sample the world’s most popular destinations without leaving your home On a normal spring day, you can expect the Champ de Mars in Paris to be teeming with tourists. This vibrant swatch of green offers iconic views of the Eiffel Tower and hosts droves of visitors every year – possibly as many as 80 million. France is after all the most visited country in the world. With a pandemic sweeping the globe, however, the Champ de Mars and France’s other iconic attractions – the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, Sacre-Coeur – lie largely empty. The same goes for Spain, the USA, China, Italy and the other most visited countries in the world. There are of course ways to experience these countries without physical travel. Below, we list 10 books that will transport you to the world’s most...
7 ways nature is flourishing under lockdown
The current pandemic has had a devastating effect worldwide but there are some glimmers of light Human impact on wildlife is almost certainly to blame for the spread of Covid-19, say scientists. The virus is thought to have originated in bats with other wild animals such as pangolins also likely playing a role in its transmission to people. Humankind’s relentless incursion into areas of nature that should be off-limits puts the world at an increased risk of new diseases, say scientists from the Royal Society. In a perfect world, wild animals such as bats and pangolins would never come into contact with humans. Due to hunting, trade and habitat loss, however, the natural boundaries between humans and animals have blurred. One positive is that during lockdown, road traffic has decreased, fos...
Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Candidate
This week on The Trip podcast: Zoltan Istvan has come from the future with a message New Hampshire doesn’t want to hear. Here they are in the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office, paying their thousand dollars to be on the official primary ballot. They are the lesser-known candidates, the dramatic fringe of each presidential primary election up here. And they are the stars of my quadrennial quixotic reporting project with photographer Shane Carpenter. And listen, they aren’t like Tom Steyer lesser-known, they’re like Vermin Supreme lesser-known, Mary Maxwell lesser-known, Zoltan Istvan lesser-known. Almost nobody knows these people, but they’re running anyway. This is the fifth primary that Shane and I have spent ducking out of mainstream campaign press events to track down the people...
Electioneering on the Eve of the Virus
Nathan Thornburgh and photographer Shane Carpenter were in New Hampshire last month for their longterm reporting project on the state’s odd presidential primary. In hindsight, it looks more surreal than ever. It is unnerving to look at the pictures at this moment, in this week. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I have been working on a longterm project about the New Hampshire presidential primary for four election cycles spanning 16 years, but the things I’ve come to love about the campaign up there—the intimacy of retail politicking, the electricity of the big rallies—now just trip alarms in my mind. All the handshakes. All the pressed flesh, the leaning in, the campaign buses filled with coughing staffers, the moist microphones, the communal pens at the polls. The collective spittle of a ...
