Our contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days
Eva Holland
I loved buying my first car. I’ve been plotting a trans-Canada road trip/relocation, from Ontario up to the Yukon, and now—with my tentative start date just 10 days away—I’ve got the wheels to make it happen.
That equation comes from a James Fallows post, and he's talking about language habits
That equation comes from a James Fallows post in the Atlantic, and he’s talking about language habits.
That is: in France and Japan, the deep-down assumption is that the language is pure and difficult, that foreigners can’t really learn it, and that one’s attitude toward their attempts is either French hauteur or the elaborately over-polite and therefore inevitably patronizing Japanese response to even a word or two in their language. “Nihongo jouzu! Your Japanese is so good!”
News broke yesterday that a movie version of the classic board game is in the works, with Will Smith as a producer and possible star. Blogger Colin Boyd is excited about the project, but I’m not so sure.
My favorite thing about the game was always the board itself—if you haven’t guessed that I’m a map geek by now, you haven’t been paying attention—but I can’t imagine how a movie would capture that global sweep, the bird’s-eye view of people moving across the continents. I can only hope the producers care enough about that element of the game to try.
Two cases of the explorer's abandoned stash have been discovered in Antarctica
Two cases of the explorer’s drink of choice have been discovered under a hut at Cape Royds, apparently left behind after a failed 1909 polar expedition. The question now, of course: What will happen to the excavated bottles? If they do go to auction, maybe the lucky buyer will want to BYOB on Shackleton’s ship-turned-restaurant.
The famed structural anthropologist has died at 100. We blogged about his 100th birthday—and some of his travel-related accomplishments—just under a year ago:
Travel lit readers know him in part from his 1955 travel memoir of sorts, Tristes Tropiques, which begins with the memorable line, “I hate travelling and explorers.” More importantly, as NPR points out, Levi-Strauss “changed the world’s perception of so-called ‘primitive’ tribes in Asia, Africa and America.”