Perspectives – Flung

Christopher Wool’s New Show Redefines Disused Office Space

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:02:18 +0000

In 1967, while covering the proposed plan for a cross-Manhattan expressway that would have cut straight through the lower portion of the island, the New York Times described the structures that would be sacrificed for the project as “grimy loft buildings west of Lafayette Street. The buildings, most of them 5 to 10 stories high, are occupied largely by manufacturers and wholesalers.” At the time, a handful of artists were also living and working in those buildings, which comprised an […]

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Is Travel Worthy of Its Carbon Footprint?

Sarah Stodola — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 13:19:53 +0000

To read travel magazines or watch Anthony Bourdain’s shows or browse Instagram today is to come away always with the sense that travel, intrinsically, improves both the traveler and the world. It is to be inundated with familiar quotes that cumulatively tell us that as a concept, travel does not contain multitudes, it contains only positives. Not all those who wander are lost. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. The world is a book, and those who […]

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PowerPoint from Paradise

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:09:19 +0000

I often tell people that I became a writer at least in part because of the untethered lifestyle it offered. I knew that nine-to-five office culture didn’t appeal to me, one of the few things I got right in my early twenties. At the time, most jobs required an employee to show up to his or her place of employment on a daily basis. Writing seemed an exception. No more. In this fall of 2020, programmers are doing their Silicon […]

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Barbarian Days: Travel with Purpose

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 16:54:34 +0000

I picked up William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2016, not with the intention of reading it front to back, but to consult the passages in which he visits the island of Nias, in Indonesia, a place I’d just come home from 40 years after Finnegan. My own trip to Nias wasn’t easy, given the relatively short distance I was traveling—two flights from Singapore, then a three hour drive to the only […]

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Stuck in Traffic, a Mexico City Story

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 15:37:18 +0000

In unfamiliar cities, I tend to be a walker. I love the particular relationship it carves out between me, who doesn’t belong there, and the place that of course, belongs exactly there. I love the way walking tips the power balance just a little, emboldening me to navigate this new city as I please, to potentially discover things that no one or guide book would have taken me to. I’ll admit that I like walking in strange places also partly […]

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With Migrants and Nomads

Jaime Jacques — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 10:01:50 +0000

My friend drives me to the airport. We pull into the drop-off zone amidst dirty, day old snow and we both get out of the car. I shiver in my thin grey turtleneck as we hug, bid farewell and play out a familiar scene. I thank her profusely for the ride. She marvels at my economy in packing, at the way I am able to fit my life into a bag, at the things I am able to live without […]

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Turks, Punks, and Hipsters in Berlin’s Neukölln District

Erum Naqvi — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 16:55:44 +0000

It’s my first night in Neukölln and I’m itching for a Turkish pizza. Comprised of flatbread spread with a thin layer of curried meat and served alongside salad, mint and cucumber yogurt, plus herbs, lemons and pickles, all for you to pile on the pizza as you please before rolling it up and stuffing it in your mouth–it’s fresh and satisfying at the same time. As a Persian, anything served with minty yogurt makes me want to sing. We call […]

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When They Build It, But No One Comes

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 18:16:07 +0000

On our second day on Nias, the Bali-sized island off the western coast of Sumatra, in Indonesia, my boyfriend and I took a long walk down the shore toward the spot where the bay meets the ocean, and then beyond it, just to see what we’d find. We’d chosen Nias for a few days of vacation after some time spent working in Singapore initially because it seemed like a convenient option, geographically speaking. It wasn’t. What might have been an […]

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10 Essential Works of Literature about Delhi

Elen Turner — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:42:43 +0000

India’s capital is a full, fascinating city with a long past that prompts a certain air of nostalgia in many writers. The best are able to capture its complex historical layers while addressing the facts of the modern metropolis, with all of the benefits and drawbacks of such a position. From a book-length poem about the love affair of a Sufi saint to a Booker-winning portrayal of the city’s class struggles, here are 10 great books about Delhi… […]

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Full Historic Immersion in Granada

Sarah Stodola — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 23:18:36 +0000

Any arrival to Granada, the city in Nicaragua founded by the Spanish 500 years ago, necessarily happens via road vehicle—there is no airport or train line. As a result, the sensation getting there will be one of happening upon a lost paradise. The hot, dusty countryside seems just the kind that would play host to not much of anything. But then it gives way rather suddenly to a grid of tidy streets flanked to a one by colorful, low-slung buildings […]

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