Issue 011: Travel

Frozen drinks with little umbrellas have their place—usually involving a white-sand beach. But when inveterate wanderer Hans Christian Andersen wrote “To roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live,” he didn’t mean cruise ships and high-walled resorts. Vacations are nice, but they’re not the same thing as traveling: wandering through marketplaces, sampling food of indeterminate origin, and, most important, meeting new people. It’s an old-fashioned but effective way to remind us that we’re all in this together. Certainly, we would all be better off right now if a few people in the Pentagon had spent a little more time drinking tea with locals in Iraq.

This doesn’t require a transcontinental flight—a New Yorker could learn as much from a trip to Kansas as to India. All we require is a willingness to break out of the bubbles most of us live in, to be shocked and moved and a little bit scared. Don’t worry, you can grab that umbrella drink next time.

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This issue is available in the GOOD Exploration bundle: $15 for 2 issues.