What We Loved This Week: Tijuana Art, Canadian Road Tripping, The New Yorker’s Food Issue and More

Rolf Potts
On Tuesday I traveled to Metuchen, New Jersey, for a reading at The Raconteur Bookshop. It was the first time I’ve read publicly from Where No Travel Writer Has Gone Before, and I recruited audience members to read the Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura lines from the fantasy sequence in Part Two. They did great, and the whole reading proved quite a hoot.

The Travel Benefit Young Americans Should Envy

Australian Ayden Fabien Férdeline writes in a New York Times op-ed column about Working Holiday visas, and why America should follow suit and offer its citizens the same benefits her country offers. Férdeline makes a good point:

I owe a great many adventures to this program and I’ve gained an appreciation for the differences that make us human. When I hear the French stereotyped as snobby, for example, I know better. When I worked in France, the people I met were warm and welcoming, despite my mediocre language skills.

The United States could gain some similar good will by making it easier for Americans to work abroad, and by opening its doors to the world’s young.

Photoshopped: Himalayan Horn Blowers

Mischievous Fark photoshoppers are playing with a photo from the Big Picture.

Photo You Must See: The Thin Yellow Line in Chongqing

REUTERS/Stringer Shanghai

Yellow cabs line a viaduct in Chongqing, China, while waiting to get their tanks filled during a shortage.

Jan Morris Reveals her Favorite Cities

She fields this question in the Guardian: What is her favorite of them all?

Dear God, what a question! To my mind cities are distillations of human life itself, in all its nuances, with all its contradictions and anomalies, changing from one year to another, changing with the weather, changing with history, changing with the state of the world, changing above all in one’s own personal responses. How can I have a favourite? Sometimes I prefer one city, sometimes another. Inconstancy governs my responses to cities—fidelity in personal matters, promiscuity in civic affairs.

Morris does have a ready answer, though, when asked about her least favorite city: Indianapolis. (Via @ben_coop)