Which begs the question: why do we travel anyway?
Because we’re curious, of course, about places and things, but most of all, about people. Boy, do people ever want to know about other people. I once ran into an Arctic Sámi in Sweden who looked like a member of the Oxford Rowing Team. And then there was the food guide who gave us a Marxist tour of Mexico City…But I digress.
It seems we can’t get enough of other people, and the more exotic and oddly-behaved, the better. Or rather, we couldn’t until recently when, like Sartre disclaiming that “hell is other people,” our curiosity about them has turned into a rash.
Americans? Feh.
Airport security people? Don’t get me started.
Musty cathedrals? Never liked them anyway.
Aeroplan? Carry-ons? Two-star $500-a-night hotels?
And yet this summer, more people are travelling than ever in the history of travel.
4.4 billion people are on the move, not as refugees, but as willing travellers. This is more than half the people on earth. It takes 357 million people to serve these 4.4 billion tourists and international tourism alone produces $1 trillion in revenues. So, big.
But will overtourism mean the days of ceaseless growth for travel are over? Here’s an example from the peak of Mt. Everest that says yes. The end is near. And any reasonable analysis says that when the financial and psychic costs of something become too high, people won’t do it any more. And I mean really, it’s not that our lives will be poorer if we travel less; they’ll just not be richer.
But our relationship to travel is not a rational one. It is based on tradition. “How I spent my summer vacation” implies that my family goes on a big vacation once a year. Our school system enables this habituation.
That relationship is also reinforced by $10 billion a year in tourism advertising and 100 million posts each day on Instagram. It’s hard for anyone to resist that ceaseless onslaught.
But there’s another even more compelling reason we are not just driven, but fated to travel.
Our relationship is as an addict’s to their needle. Let me put that in slightly different words, or rather, let me call on that peerless essayist and travel writer, Pico Iyer, to recast the eternal allure of travel not in terms of curiosity, but of love and yearning.
Said Iyer: “If travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”
Meanwhile…
1. “Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” It’s hard to argue against the truth of Swiss novelist Max Frisch’s idea inHomo Faber written in…uh…1957. Frisch wasn’t the only credible ‘seer’ of where barely dreamable technologies could take us 65 years later. Another was Neil Postman, whose 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and still another was Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan, whose idea that the medium is the message, first spelled out in 1964, foretold the good, the bad and the increasingly ugly of media technology. All to say, the best prophets are sometimes from the generation before the future’s latest unintended consequence.
And speaking of social media mowing down our kids, here’s Jonathan Haidt on what to do about it.
2. Free Advice. First, a lifetime of psychological expertise in one minute. Next, how to dress for the job. And don’t wear your dressing gown for a dressing down. And by the way,who cares what a stranger thinks? Plus, how to stay anonymous while you protest.
And finally, a great freedom-of-speech fighter retires. Toronto’s City Librarian, Vickery Bowles, speaks to the higher purpose of public libraries. (19:42 to 27:06).
3. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. Most times, Goliath wins. And when it comes to cars, China is winning too. And when it comes to AI, humans are not winning. And Jon Stewart spits some truth about Colbert and CBS, and England’s women win a way England’s men can’t.
4. Could this be the cure for Alzheimer’s? This week Toronto hosted the Alzheimer’sAssociation International Conference. Doctors reported on a new ‘treatment called trontinemab and developed by Roche that, in early trials gives promise of being ‘a game-changer.’ On Monday, various experts said the findings were “very promising” and suggesting the drug was much more powerful than existing medications with far fewer side effects.
5. Kulcasting. Two new podcasts with a twist. Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, talks with her “ex”, former US Assistant Secretary of State,Jamie Rubin, about world politics on “The Ex Files.” Then Gill Deacon, who for years hosted CBC Radio One’s afternoon show, hosts “A Love Affair With the Unknown.” Here she is with Stephen Marche and Cathrin Bradbury.
6. Danielle Smith’s paper-thin skin. Last week Jasper, Alberta, issued a report on the wildfires that devastated the town last summer. The report claimed that firefighters’ work was impeded by the province. Premier Danielle Smith demanded an apology and a retraction, then blamed Ottawa for waiting too long to ask the province for help. In her words: “This was a federal fire.”
7. Prompting is a whole new way of writing. Last month, I wrote about how to use AI to search for things that were unfindable without AI, like planning every hour and every dollar of a 12-day trip to Japan. I learned since then that “prompt writing”, the language you use to ask AI to find or plan or create something for you is a brand new subset of the kinds of English that many of us have learned through practice to write, like legal briefs, or financial writing, or poetry, or grant applications. The first few times you tried doing any of that, it was hard and you likely failed. The same with “prompts.” They’re a skill you can learn. But because it’s AI, you don’t have to ‘learn’ in the traditional sense. You can ‘cut and paste’ to find out everything from how to get started with prompts, to how to lose weight, to how to take on insurance companies – and a zillion ‘how to’s’ in between, including everything.
Why, you can even offload your lying to AI (plus a helpful interview from the company’s founder.)
8. They do things differently there. Should we do bear drills like they do in Japan? Next, remember the Chinese cloning doctor? He’s cloning himself. And big dinner partieshit London. Plus, an app where women rate their dates with men. And finally, why windmills are bad for us all.
9. The writer I revere most is 89 and has a book to finish. Robert Caro is the world’s pre-eminent non-fiction writer. His 1974 exposé of New York’s planning commissioner Robert Moses became a 1,246-page book called The Power Brokerpublished 51 years ago and now in its 74th printing. His biography of LBJ, started in 1982 is still, four volumes and 3,000 pages later, not finished. But if you think Caro is going to give in to impending decrepitude, not a chance.
10. Poisoning pigeons in the park. I’ll never forget that song by satirist Tom Lehrerwho died this week at 97 and was immensely popular in the 60s and 70s. He was a mathematician who taught at Harvard and MIT, who played piano and wrote songs, and entertained friends at parties. This turned into The Vatican Rag, Who’s Next? (about nuclear proliferation), The Masochism Tango, and dozens more, including Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, introduced here by Stephen Sondheim in Lehrer’s last performance in 1998. Lehrer’s equally odd obit here.