Two good travel-adjacent articles that recently came out:

• Why travel didn’t bring the world together from FT’s Janan Ganesh (that is a gift link)
• Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? from Chris Arnade

Here is Ganesh:

Travel is enormous fun. Besides that, it can be an educational top-up, if you arrive in a place with a foundation of reading. (And if you don’t over-index whatever you happen to observe in person.) But a connecting experience? A reminder of the essential oneness of humankind? If it were that, we should have expected national consciousness to recede, not surge, in the age of cheap flights, a dissolved Iron Curtain and a China that became porous in both directions. 

To explain this away, some will insist on the difference between crass “tourism” and real “travel”. Please. This has become a class distinction, nothing more, like that between “expats” and “immigrants”.

And here is Arnade:

It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That’s true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.

It is the ‘normies,’ working-class, back-row, or whatever you want to call them, who make up the vast majority of citizens, that are tethered to live within their culture. That isn’t who is engaged in this debate, but it is who it should be about, not us cultural chameleons.

I am writing this from Zürich where I have spent a lovely spring day flaneuring in between business meetings. So, yes.