“A great exchange rate, ChatGPT, and kimono-wearing bros have turned Kyoto into the loveliest tourist trap on earth.”
place
Posted inFeature
David Lynch Was Here
A dispatch from the real Twin Peaks, where fans of the director flocked after his death.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Eastern Promises
“In a Tokyo of tourists, the citizens have become strangers.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps
“Nostalgic for a time before ubiquitous connectivity, a writer ditched his phone and relied instead on serendipity — and maps made by people he met along the way.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Reading Joan Didion Taught Me How to Not Write About Hawaiʻi
“Didion depicts Hawaiʻi as a place that exists solely in the white American imagination, and, because of this, her journalism is a fiction.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last of the Bougainvillea Years
“A poet from Tripoli was displaced in Dubai for a decade, but suddenly it felt like home as another move, this time across the globe, was imminent.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
There are Trees in the Future, Or, A Case for Staying
“What is a city without its people, its history, its intimate relationships, its land and public spaces? If every place becomes any place, what difference does it make?”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Prince & Place
“Prince’s sound is a musical hybrid, in which the history of Minneapolis, its people, and the social forces organizing life there are brought together.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood
“But the neighborhood used to feel to me like a rough part of a softer place, and nowadays the roughness feels more general, and this makes it harder to cheer for a neighborhood that is so loud and dirty and uninterested in or unfit for human life.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Honky-Tonk Tokyo
Country music became popular in Japan after World War II. Today, Tokyo has a vibrant underground country music scene.