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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 ...
R&K Insider: World without Travel edition
This is a great time for people who are interested in soup and masturbation. Greetings from Day 6 of Austria’s quarantine lockdown. Travel has always been a privilege and a luxury. Despite being a well-traveled, far-flung bunch, we tried to never take that privilege for granted—but all our worlds just got smaller, fast, and it’s breathtaking. We believe in the power of travel to remind us that the world map is sometimes no more than a cruel geographic lottery—all the more so right now—and of the simple truth that a country’s people are not their governments. So it takes a rare thing for us to tell people not to go, pack, leave, experience. But we are. Stay home. If Ireland can close its pubs 36 hours before St Patrick’s Day, you can do without spring break in Clearwater, Florida ...
Pepe Raventós: Forever sparkling wine
This week on The Trip podcast: Pepe Raventós and 500 years of Catalan winemaking. It’s early winter, it’s a baby lamb on a hill in one of the oldest wine estates in the world. It’s a little green glade under a canopy of trees, a horse paddock, a nearby river, a full view of the sawtoothed mountain range they call Montserrat, where the eternal soul of the Catalan people lives in collapsing grottos under limestone cliffs. This week’s guest, Pepe Raventós, is the 21st generation of his family to work this estate. And this here is the perfect place, the perfect vista, from which to contemplate the calm and everlasting nature of things. Especially now, from self-quarantine in New York City, when the news cycle seizes in the chest like a heart attack, when the only thing we know is that we have ...
17 megadiverse countries of the world
We profile the world’s megadiverse countries, from obvious contenders like Ecuador and Brazil to one or two surprise entries It should be comforting to know that a mere 17 countries hold more than 70% of the world’s species. It should be easy to rally this small group of ‘megadiverse countries’ to protect the planet’s extraordinary biodiversity. Alas, some of these countries are also the world’s biggest consumers and polluters. In July 2000, the UN’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre recognised 17 megadiverse countries which hold the majority of Earth’s species and high numbers of endemic species (i.e. those unique to an area or country). To be termed megadiverse, a country must have at least 5,000 of the world’s plants as endemics and have marine ecosystems within its borde...
Map projections of the world: which one is the best?
We explore the most common map projections of the world, how they work and which one is the best Kia is usually described as the geek in our relationship. She’s the one with a computer science degree, she’s the one with the editor’s eye and she’s the Star Trek fan who describes herself as Seven of Nine… which is cool apparently? A friend of hers recently described her as “the one who puts the apostrophe in rock ‘n’ roll”. That said, I have a few streaks of geek in me too. I’m a bit of a history nerd and can talk at great length about photography lenses and filters. But above all, I love maps. One day, perhaps when we win the lottery and can afford a house with more than one bedroom, I will have a cartography room dedicated to my scores of Ordnance Survey maps, my collection of outdated cla...
