Travel

This week on The Trip podcast: Beirut-based, Syrian-Filipino rapper Chyno on Lebanon, rap, and revolution. I’ve been thinking here in Beirut about the many-sided… let’s call them gifts, that America has given to the Middle East. And of course when you wade into it, when you look at yourself and your country in the mirror, you’ve first got to walk your mind through a vast swamp of evil action and intention. From cluster bombing to propping up Saudi hoodlums to supporting the instincts of Israel’s politics, there’s a lot to regret, past, present and future. But tucked inside the exports of empire, sort of the opposite of a poison pill, there’s also this wonderful counter-programming, an exported American liberalism, a real and instinctual belief in free speech that is a beacon for many ...

This week on The Trip podcast: journalist (and protestor) Gilles Khoury on what sparked the Lebanese revolution and what’s next. Welcome to the Egg, the battleworn concrete theater that has become epicenter of Lebanon’s revolution, where today a rally of small business owners and entrepreneurs kicks off with a singing of the national anthem. Small business is the heartbeat of Lebanon’s economy, and they’ve been terribly affected by the banking crisis since the revolution began, leading to a wave of layoffs across the country. Our guide here is a singular voice in Lebanese media, a young writer named Gilles Khoury who writes a weekly, whimsical slice-of-life column for the French-language paper L’Orient Le Jour, about Beirutis and their hopes and dreams, and lately, about their revolution. ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...