10 essays filed from North America.
New York, United States
Most first-time visitors to New York spend three days running between the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, and a Broadway show. The better trip picks one neighbourhood per day and walks it until you have a coffee place by Thursday.
May 23, 2024
Oaxaca, Mexico
Oaxaca is the small colonial-era capital of the Mexican state of the same name, and the centre of one of the deepest regional food cultures on earth. The seven moles, the day-old corn tortillas, the dozens of indigenous languages, the mezcal — Oaxaca rewards a long, slow week.
February 9, 2024
Mexico City, Mexico
Mexico City was, for a long time, written off by Western travellers as too big, too polluted, too dangerous. The decade since 2015 has rewritten that conversation. The city is now, by most measures, one of the best food capitals in the world.
November 30, 2023
Vancouver, Canada
Vancouver is a small, wet, west-coast Canadian city with a serious mountain range starting two kilometres north of downtown. The city's gift is the immediate access — you can be in old-growth rainforest within twenty minutes of a downtown apartment.
August 8, 2023
San Francisco, United States
San Francisco is geographically tiny — 7 miles by 7 miles — and topographically intense. The city's gift is that almost every walk involves climbing a hill, and almost every hill ends at a view.
April 20, 2023
Banff, Canada
Banff, Jasper, and the Icefields Parkway form one of the great mountain landscapes of North America. In July and August, the parking lots fill at 6 a.m. In May or late September, the crowds thin to a manageable level and the mountains are themselves.
September 12, 2022
New Orleans, United States
New Orleans is the rare American city that is structurally not American. The Creole, French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean inheritances combine into a culture — and a cuisine, and a music — that exists nowhere else on the continent. Skip the French Quarter early in the day; the city is bigger than its postcard.
March 26, 2022
Havana, Cuba
Havana is a city of crumbling baroque facades, 1950s American cars, the most particular post-Soviet political economy in the world, and a daily life that does not, despite the photo-tourism economy, perform for the camera. A short guide to the city's depths.
October 19, 2021
Tulum, Mexico
Tulum's transformation from a sleepy palm-shaded strip of palapa cabins to a brand-saturated wellness-tourism corridor has been one of the more dramatic coastal-tourism shifts in Latin America. The cenotes, the Mayan ruins, the wider Yucatán remain.
July 12, 2021
Quebec City, Canada
Quebec City is the only walled city north of Mexico, the oldest continuous French settlement in North America (founded 1608), and one of the rare places where you can spend a week speaking French without anyone switching to English on you. The deep winter is the right time.
January 25, 2021