‘Tis the season for lots of vacation talk, and so the Capitol Hill crowd turned its attention to shrinking vacation syndrome this week: First, a British columnist speculated that Americans “find it hard to relax” because of their Puritan heritage. Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein responded : I’d say it’s more closely related to the fact that it’s hard to pass social welfare legislation in the American political... 

Album Tacos . Brilliant. Just one example of many:  Read More →

Larry Habegger rounds up global travel news  Read More →

On the trauma of luggage gone astray (and how an inconvenience turned into an obsession)  Read More →

Anyone who has ever tried to learn even a few words of Chinese will appreciate the difficulty of the task. It turns out it was a serious challenge even for a woman with a Ph.D. in linguistics and six languages already under her belt. That would be Deborah Fallows, author of the new book, Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language . NPR just profiled her. My favorite passage from the radio piece concerned her attempt to order... 

What was it? A battle? A shot over the bow? Maybe, looking back, it was just a misfire. But it got L.A. Mexican foodies pretty excited for a few days. At a talk in Orange County last week, Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold— a hero of ours who has made a career of championing great hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants in SoCal—took a shoot at PBS TV host and restaurateur Rick Bayless. The chef, whose Frontera Grill... 

Fascinating story in the New York Times about how language shapes our thoughts and feelings . Here’s but one interesting nugget: In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork ( la fourchette ), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly... 

The Canadian Coast Guard removed 110 passengers from a cruise ship stranded in the Arctic Ocean this weekend. The ship was exploring the Northwest Passage when it got hung up on an unmapped rock—presumably, we’ll see more of these incidents as the passage becomes increasingly viable , so Canada, keep your icebreakers sharp.  Read More →

The travel-themed show had won every year since the reality TV category was added. This year’s upset winner? Top Chef .  Read More →

Claire Bushey couldn’t stop thinking about the handsome actor she met on a trip to England. Then she did something she’ll always regret.  Read More →

Eva Holland “At Sea,” Jonathan Raban’s ode to the simultaneous isolation and civility of the seagoing life. It’s a 1996 magazine story that I came across in The Best of Outside —here’s a favorite section: In the society of the sea, it is the duty of every member to keep his distance from all the others. To be alone is to be safe. It’s no coincidence that those two most English of attitudes, …  Read More →

This passage in a New York Times story about the downsides of frequent exposure to information and entertainment on mobile devices caught my eye: At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their  Read More →

Giving directions is an art form, one we’re losing in the age of GPS and Google Maps. Ren  Read More →

Conor Friedersdorf digs up an old gem from the Atlantic’s archives: a dispatch from a native New Yorker , returning to the city after an extended stay in Paris. It’s a must-read for NYC-philes. Here’s a taste: In a word, this returned New Yorker finds few familiar landmarks; and the few he does find seem to have lost most of …  Read More →

For starters, the television company hypes the country’s “savage wildlife.” A crew has been filming the next season of the hit TV show in the beach town of San Juan del Sur—it will debut on CBS next month. Reports the Los Angeles Times : Government officials apparently think “Survivor” could be good for foreign business investment and tourism, even though the CBS commercial  Read More →