the atlantic gets into travel content

Look, we all want to write off those hotels...

Dude I had this really insane week where I went to Denver for a wedding, Mexico City for a friend’s birthday, and then Puerto Escondido “to relax” (which was honestly worth the extra travel though—this hotel was unsettlingly inexpensive and nice; you will just need to rent a scooter while you’re there to get around those dirt roads!) all in the space of…eight days? Came back to New York on Friday with a miserable cold obviously **but** also a tan, so those are net gains. xoxo d

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Maybe there aren’t any more media dreams jobs, but there sure still are some dream assignments floating around out there: The Atlantic is launching a series called “The Writer’s Way,” which sounds like they’re basically them sending writers abroad to produce some travel essays and recommendations. Nice work if you can get it! Caity Weaver got sent to Paris, and according to the “coming soon” section, Lauren Groff went to Kyoto. It’s kind of genius, considering the level of TikTokified slop that travel content has come to otherwise. Plus, every writer knows that getting to write off travel expenses as “work” is truly The Way. The Deez Links Denver guide dropping soon, I guess…

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Really tragic that one of the best remaining Twitter/X accounts, @apastoraldream, has ceased posting, mostly because, as the owner sweetly explains (on Substack of course), “I’m sort of creatively spent these days!” Fair enough. Hopecore has lost a valued general.

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But fear not for we still have Willy Staley reliably tweeting too close to the sun, and honestly, we the public are better for it: Two weeks ago he got @dieworkwear-ed but somehow emerged relatively unscathed thanks to the supportive community of dads who can also kickflip. Then last week, it appears he manifested a viral trollish tweet into a real NYT trendpiece on how Gen Z-ers won’t open bar tabs. At the end of the day, all the good journalism in the world is done by people who will Simply Not Let Things Go, isn’t it?

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(And as for the king of X himself, things are getting fully political over there! Curious where things will go…he’s a spicy one!…)

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Unrelatedly lol, have you ever seen a subhead this brutal? (If you are a normal person and don’t have a Vox membership, do not feel bad, that one workaround still works here). The good news is that writer Alex Abad-Santos gets bleak (“This is a generation that often can’t afford the home or family life to throw away, never mind the new sports car”) before getting overall optimistic-ish:

Compared to generations before them, millennials have had more options to shape how their lives will unfold. Whether it’s taking a gap year, going to grad school, waiting to get married, taking more time to have children, or not having children at all, millennials have been less locked in than previous generations when it comes to what their adult lives should look like.

“Boomers and maybe even Gen X-ers, there was this sense that you’re supposed to live your life based upon this set of rules — your parents’ set of rules.” Conley says. “I don’t think that there’s this feeling where millennials are waking up one day and saying, Whose life is this?”

My read is that if we’re part of a generation that’s already been mired in questions of self-actualization and “living the best life” since like, birth (or, okay, the moment we got online), it’s less of a surprise wallop at 40. (Millennial life as perma-crisis? ha) But I could be wrong! Will keep you posted as I start sliding down that particular terrain…

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I got through half of Henry James’s novella Daisy Miller in the pool on Wednesday and finished it (it’s fast and fine; I feel like I still need to read the giant forward to fully get it, especially the mysterious night Colosseum illness? though) on Saturday night while slurping down Mucinex. So this piece from The Nation, What Was ‘Expat Lit’?, felt perfectly timed: it’s a review of Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten but contains this very fun graf:

If James’s and Hemingway’s Europe was an indomitable fortress of cultural legitimacy waiting to be penetrated, the Europe of this new class of Expat Lit authors—Ben Lerner, Elif Batuman, and Lauren Oyler come to mind—is something more like a fucked-up playground. With nothing by way of writerly credibility to prove, decamping to Europe is, for the contemporary American, less a necessity and more an opportunity to temporarily escape the bloated beast of alienation, isolation, and ahistoricity that is postmodern America in search of a more authentic, more historically cognizable, and altogether more fun lifestyle.

Proof that it’s just travel content all the way down…………