Journeys and Visits

“Journey” and “journalism” share a linguistic root. I often think of this when I read The New Yorker. Each of its fact pieces is a sort of journey, or at least a visit. This year, the magazine took me on some amazing armchair trips: to Delaware Bay to see horseshoe crabs (Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods); to Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore one of the deepest caves in the world  (Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep”); to the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, in the south of France, to view ITER, “the most complex machine ever built” (“Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Star in a Bottle”); to the Cairo Police Academy to see the trial of twenty-one Muslim Brotherhood leaders (Peter Hessler, “Revolution On Trial”); to Berlin’s Berghain, “the most famous techno club in the world” (Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin Nights”); to a café in Kiev, as Russian tanks mass on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders (Keith Gessen, “Waiting For War”); to Aspen, Colorado, to view the construction of the Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum (Dana Goodyear, “Paper Palaces”); to the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles to visit the Soylent headquarters (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The End of Food”); to a convention center in Villa Park, a western suburb of Chicago, to attend a conference of fast-food workers (William Finnegan, “Dignity”); to the Ebola wards of the Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone (Richard Preston, “The Ebola Wars”); to Washington State University’s Bread Lab, in Mount Vernon, to gain a better understanding of the role of gluten in our diet (Michael Specter, “Against the Grain”); and many more.

I’ll soon be compiling my “Best of 2014” list. Expect to see at least a few of the above-mentioned “travel” pieces on it.

Credit: The above artwork is by Istvan Banyai; it appears in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights.”