It was 1996 and the Minnesota winter was just closing in when Christine Fruechte, then a rising star in the advertising world, got a job offer in Honolulu. She jumped at the chance. “When I got there,” Fruechte recalls, “it was 20 below in Minneapolis and 90 degrees in Hawaii. People said, ‘That’s over 100 degrees difference. I can’t even imagine it!’”
Fruechte could imagine it. She even enjoyed it. And just a few years later the lure of the Twin Cities pulled her back.
The best meal I ever ate was at a roadside restaurant in the middle of Nigeria. I was in a microbus heading north through an otherworldly landscape strewn with giant boulders. It was mid-morning when we pulled over at an open-air restaurant. The counter where people were ordering was jammed. An old man, seeing my confusion, explained the menu and ordered for me.
We sat down, and the waiter brought our food: a ball of pounded yam and a bowl of egusi soup, made with crushed melon seeds and containing a hunk of beef. The waiter asked if I wanted utensils. I looked around. No one else had them.
The old man leaned over. “You know,” he remarked, “they say your food tastes better when you eat it with your hands.” Sometimes I still wonder why that meal was so transcendent.
Bangkok has found its way into the works of authors including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener, all of whom spent time in Thailand’s capital city. Recommended reading about the city, from Four Reigns to Bombay Anna to The Beach here.
For 50 years, Paul Theroux has been traveling the world, and writing about it. The author has penned some of the best-loved travel books of all time, including The Great Railway Bazaar and Sunrise with Seamonsters, as well as many other titles (more than 40 in total) informed by his journeys.
In The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), Theroux steps back to ruminate on the act of travel itself. He has collected a half-century’s worth of insights in one volume, and added much more.
Once upon a time, humans could not hold conversations or sing songs together. Now we chatter incessantly, not only with speech but also through text messages, tweets and status updates. How we transformed into the highly social species we are today remains the subject of many theories.
Two competing hypotheses center on whether our capacity for language is an innate skill that 
grew stronger through natural selection or whether we lacked any such ability and instead trained our brains to collect new information using objects and sounds in our environment. In his new book Harnessed, Mark Changizi stakes out the middle ground: cultural—not natural—selection explains our language ability.
The infamous afternoon showdown – with Wyatt Earp, two of his brothers, and Doc Holliday on one side and the Clanton gang on the other – is often shorthand for a confrontation between lawmen and bandits, justice and crime, good and evil, and for the moment the West was finally won
The truth, as Guinn points out in his book, The Last Gunfight, is more complex. Earp, often portrayed as a straight-shooting crimefighter, was a more ambiguous character: socially ambitious, status-hungry, and sometimes self-mythologizing – a man who needed a high-profile arrest or capture to help him win the upcoming election for sheriff of Cochise County.
Long before bedbugs had become the plague du jour, my wife and I set off for New Zealand.
The year was 2000, and we arrived in April to pick apples for a couple of months before buying a barely running car to get us around. We slept in hostels, which had comment books filled with advice about where to stay – and where not to. Many of the entries mentioned bedbugs, which we assumed must be a creature native to New Zealand.
“Whatever you do, don’t stay at … (unless you want to be eaten alive by bedbugs – 122 bites to be precise),” warned one entry. By then, we had already stayed there and had each gotten a few bites, but we hadn’t thought much about it.
I didn’t know it then, but we were close to – in fact, right across the Tasman Sea from – the launching pad for an imminent worldwide explosion of bedbugs.
In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was chosen to run as the democratic vice-presidential nominee under George McGovern in the race against Richard Nixon. But it soon emerged that Eagleton suffered from depression and had received shock treatment for it. A scandal erupted, and Eagleton stepped down, forming a cloud that still hovers over politics today.
Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi thinks the public is mistaken in wanting leaders who appear sane and mentally healthy. In A First-Rate Madness, he proposes that Eagleton may have actually been the best candidate to deal with a national crisis because of, not in spite of, his depression.
The crux of Ghaemi’s argument is that people who are depressed exhibit what psychologists have dubbed “depressive realism.”
“Where is Mr. Frank?”
Mr. Frank was hiding in the back seat of a truck, in the south of Guyana, when he heard the words. He tried to duck down a little, because he knew what was coming.
“Oh,” I heard a woman in our group say, “He’s over there.” She pointed my way. A few moments later, a face appeared in my open window.
“Hello, Mr. Frank! Do you have something you can bath me?”
It was Sebastian, the guide from the village who had just hiked up and back down a mountain with our group. We were in a part of the world where tourism had only recently arrived, where not long ago there was barely even a cash economy, and where people’s English, although it is the official language, was not always so good.
“Bath you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I puzzled over the word for a second, but I already knew what he meant. I nodded wearily and dug in my pockets for some money – not a lot, but then again, maybe too much. I had no idea. We’d been told that at the end of the trip, we would give a group tip that would be divided among all the guides who had helped us. But the rules for these things were murky.
One morning when I was young, I went out to our garage to get on my bike and ride around our neighborhood. It was a red and white Huffy Pro Thunder, and I loved it more than anything I owned. I remember feeling so fast on it, like I could go anywhere, jump anything, and get to any part of town.
But the bike was gone. Slowly, I realized that it had been stolen, and that I might never see it again. A few weeks later, it turned up in a parking lot, its wheels beaten into shapes like bananas. We put new ones on, and I rode it again.
There is a particular kind of pain that comes with a bike theft. Mayb
e it has something to do with the way body and machine work together, the way the bike is almost an extension of you. For many of us, a bike is more than a possession, and when someone steals one it’s more than a theft. There’s an intimacy to the violation, as if a part of us has been stolen and made into part of the thief.
That’s why, when I heard the story of Brad Rogers, I knew his bike meant even more than that. Rogers had ALS and was confined to a wheelchair when someone stole it out of his shed. You can read the story of how he got it back in the September issue of Bicycling.
