journalism's most epic walk & talk?

Welcome back, Deezers! Over what seemed like a (blessedly) trillion-year-long weekend, I came across this amazing National Geographic project you have to check out. It’s called the “Out of Eden Walk,” and it’s a phenomenal series of essays/reported pieces by journalist Paul Salopek as he walks across the world, literally actually retracing the ancestral footsteps of human migration.

Billed as a decades-long experiment in “slow journalism,” this dude started in Ethiopia and is currently somewhere in Uzbekistan as part of his 21,000-mile professional stroll (real q is how is FitBit not sponsoring this??). Think of this project as a bit like your typical study abroad blog, where Salopek chronicles his travels and the places/people/food/mules encountered — but with some serious servings of historical & cultural context into regions many of us heard about once in Bible stories and never like, stopped to consider in the context of actual geopolitics.

I’m still going through all the readings, but highly recommend the essays Tomatoes, written in Jordan, and Mule-ology, from near Turkey, to start with. Salopek still has until 2020 to make it to the bottom of South America, so there'll be essays aplenty to come, too. Send me your faves in the meantime! And thoughts on this whole ~slow journalism~ thing in general.

Like Deez Links? Forward to your fave walking buddy.