I read Tom Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again in the fall of 1975, at Oberlin College, before I dropped out. In the autobiographical novel, a young white man from Asheville moves to New York City and then returns to the South where he feels he no longer belongs....
Iceland is a land of ghosts and ghouls, sea monsters, and an earth that howls. It is an island of volcanoes and fjords, endless flat petrified lava fields, green valleys, black, white, and grey mountains, outdoor swimming pools, and salted fish. It is also a land of...
To understand the so-called Troubles of Northern Irleland one must remove the veils of religion, ethnicity, and even nationalism, and begin with economy, which means learning about the unique properties of the flax plant and the geography of the North Channel. The...
Every adventure should include a messenger who provides the lesson of your visit. Oslo is on a hill. From the central train station, it climbs steadily. Four miles up is Frogner Park— a grand stretch of green. Advancing to the pinnacle, we passed a mass of bronze,...
We are staying in a town, a fifteen-minute train ride from Oslo. Our place is atop a hill: two rooms in the back of a house with a view of fjords and islands. We can hear the freeway at the bottom of the hill but can’t see it. A family of deer frequents the yard,...
While we were in Groningen, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, head of the recently defeated Neo-Liberal WD, (a political party for free markets, social freedoms like euthanasia and same-sex marriage, the EU, and support for Ukraine) became NATO’s Secretary General. The New...
