Travel
Gilles Khoury: The Heart of the Lebanese Revolution
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The Chief Rabbi of Barcelona
This week on The Trip podcast: Mexican-born Rabbi Daniel Askenazi on leading Barcelona’s Jews. There are few things in Western Europe older than the Jews of Spain. They were there in biblical times, under the Moors, and afterward. Then came Torquemada and the inquisition and for six centuries, the only Jews in Spain were crypto-Jews, who hid their faith until it was all but lost. And now, the Jews are back in Barcelona, and their leader, the chief rabbi of Barcelona, is a big bear of a man, a beer-drinking Mexican who was raised on gefilte fish tacos (that is apparently a thing) and has charmed his new community. How do I know? My cousin, actually, Julie from southern California, is a part of that community, has been for decades as she and her Syrian-Argentine husband, have raised a family...
Matt Goulding: The Writer’s Life in Barcelona
This week on The Trip podcast: Writer Matt Goulding on his city, his life, and his work. A warehouse toward the edge of Barcelona. On the loading dock they smoke cigarettes sprinkled with hash, and drink beers from plastic cups. Inside, a hundred or so people stand toward the stage, nodding thoughtfully to a mashup hiphop and acid jazz. Beards, knit hats, urban scarfs. This is a early-aughts reunion episode, starting with this concert, the one-night revival of long-dormant open-mic series from years ago in Barcelona. One of the MCs who used to frequent those nights years and years ago is back on the mic. It’s Matt Goulding, who still calls Barcelona home, and is still writing, is writing, at least part of the time, as my partner and co-founder at Roads & Kingdoms. I’ve had a lot of dri...
