Tag Archives: NYT

Adventure Travel: Rafting 30-Miles In South Alaska’s Tongass National Forest

October 21, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Photographs and Text by Christopher Miller for The New York Times – October 19, 2020

As Bjorn and I push through thickets of devil’s club and trundle over chest-high nurse logs, the trees seem to grow before our eyes. The forest stands as a witness to the passage of time, and a nearby stream as a lifeline to the past.

The saplings at the confluence of the stream mark the present, while the giant spruce and hemlock at its source likely predate the European colonization of the Americas — so that the only humans who could have witnessed the birth of this stand of trees are the area’s Tlingit and Haida peoples.

It’s late April 2019, and my traveling companion, Bjorn Dihle, and I are on a four-day, 30-mile excursion through the heart of Prince of Wales Island along the Honker Divide Canoe Route, the island’s longest trail. We have forgone the canoes and opted for packrafts due to their size and weight; they’re easier to schlep over logs and across the many short portages.

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Investigations, Politics, Videos

Political Videos: The 2020 Election Will Will Be Most Secure One Yet (NY Times)

Video October 19, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

With early voting underway, states are working to reassure voters that their ballots will be counted as cast. Our video shows how states’ responses to Russian hacking and the coronavirus crisis have helped make the election more secure than ever.

Investigations, Nature, News, Videos

Video: ‘Origins Of The Destructive Almeda Wildfire In Oregon’ (NYT)

Video September 21, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

The Almeda fire left a path of destruction as it tore through the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon. About 24 hours after it started, an estimated 2,350 homes had been left in ashes. We used satellite images, videos and social media posts to track what happened.

Adventure, Books, Photography, Travel

New Travel Books: “New York Times Explorer – 100 Trips Around The World”

August 4, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

NYT Explorer. 100 Trips Around the World takes travel beyond the obvious with adventures in exotic places and new perspectives in familiar ones, all based on the distinguished travel journalism of The New York Times. Each journey features a first-person narrative and postcard-perfect photography, capturing the unique personality of the destination—as well as practical information to help get you on your way.

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Whether it’s a culinary adventure in vibrant Mexico City, an historic and meditative train ride through Siberia, or a solo trip to Paris, get your bucket lists ready and share in the discoveries of Explorer a collection of 100 dream destinations—four volumes’ worth of adventures in one—from the Travel pages of The New York Times.

The Times writers offer guidance, from the personal to the practical, along with a wealth of color photographs that capture the catch-your-breath awe of each destination. Motor past pink sands and bougainvillea in Bermuda with Andrew McCarthy, follow Virginia Woolf’s footsteps through the English countryside with Francine Prose, or dare to pilot a boat through the Venice lagoon with Tony Perrottet.

The editor

Barbara Ireland edits the 36 Hours, Explorer, and forthcoming Cultured Traveler series of travel books in collaboration with The New York Times and TASCHEN. A writer and editor based in upstate New York, she is a former deputy Travel editor and deputy Op-Ed page editor at The New York Times. She is a graduate of Cornell University and was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University.

Podcast Essays: American Western Writer Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) By NY Times Critic A.O. Scott

Audio June 5, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Scott discusses his first in a series of essays about American writers, Wallace Stegner, and David Kamp talks about “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America.”

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called “The Dean of Western Writers”. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

Culture, Food, Reviews, Travel

Food & Travel: “Bangkok’s Fresh Food Markets” (NYT)

June 2, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

From the New York Times (June 1, 2020):

The aromas here are rich and pungent — smoked, cured, dried and fresh seafood, along with many forms of meat, both raw and cooked. The awnings over the stalls create a shadowy atmosphere that’s punctuated by thin streaks of dancing light.

Finding Euphoria in Bangkok's Food Scene - New York Photographs and Text by Louise PalmbergTimes June 1 2020 — Photographs and Text by Louise Palmberg

Early this year, in search of inspiration beyond the food scene in New York (and not yet locked down by the spread of Covid-19), I spent two weeks visiting and documenting life among the fresh markets and street vendors in and around Bangkok.

It made for an unlikely itinerary since tourists in Thailand often spend only a day or two in the capital before heading south toward the country’s many islands.

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Interviews, Podcasts, Travel

Interviews: Travel Guru “Rick Steves” (NYT Podcast)

Audio May 9, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Rick Steves is a travel evangelist, always in motion, traversing faraway places and inspiring others to do the same. So when the world shuts down, and Rick Steves can no longer travel, then who is Rick Steves?

Sam Anderson, a writer for The Times Magazine, profiled the travel guru last year. Today, Sam asks Rick how he’s been expanding his horizons from home. Dreaming of travel, we learn, is nearly as sweet as the real thing.

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Arts & Literature, History, Travel

Travel & Quarantines: Author Frances Mayes Writes Of Poet John Keats In Naples, Italy In 1820 (NYT)

March 26, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

From the New York Times (March 26, 2020):

I have seen Naples from his vantage of a ship anchored offshore — one of the most sublime locations in the world, that sweep of coast stacked with apricot, carmine, azure and rose villas; the blue, blue U of the harbor; the emphatic Vesuvius anchoring the view.

In October of 1820, typhus raged in Naples. With his artist friend, Joseph Severn, the British poet John Keats rocked in the city’s harbor for 10 days, not nearly the quaranta giorni — 40 days — that give us our word quarantine.

Before this journey, Keats always felt intense melancholy. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” he wrote “… mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.” (And in the smooth pentameter of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I have been half in love with easeful death.”) Not a holiday, this voyage out of England was a desperate trip to the sunny climate of Italy. His cough had grown steadily worse. Since the morning he’d seen a splotch of blood on his pillow, he knew he had little chance of surviving the consumption that had invaded his lungs. His last-ditch: Go to Rome. Meanwhile, exile at sea.

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Health, News, Podcasts, Reviews

How China And South Korea Are Containing “Coronavirus / Covid-19”

Audio March 12, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Global health officials have praised China and South Korea for the success of their efforts to contain the coronavirus. What are those countries getting right — and what can everyone else learn from them?

Real-Time Covid-19 Update

Guest: Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Background reading:

While world leaders are finally speaking out about the gravity of the pandemic, their response lacks unity with the United States absent from its traditional conductor role in managing global crises.
Stocks tanked again as the outbreak was officially declared a pandemic and policies to address its impact proved lacking or ineffective.
All flights to the U.S. have been suspended from Europe. Many schools announced they would close indefinitely, some nursing homes banned visitors, and workplaces across the country have urged their employees to work from home. Here are the latest updates.

Arts & Literature, Books, Fiction, History, Interviews

Inteviews: 67-Year Old British Author Hilary Mantel – “Extraordinarily Probable Fiction” (NYT)

February 25, 2020 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Excerpts from a New York Times interview (Feb 24, 2020):

Hilary Mantel by Ellie Smith for the New York Times — “All that time I was listening to the past, and now I’m almost talking for a living,” Mantel said, “and it feels very frivolous and empty compared to the stillness that there used to be in every day.”Credit…Ellie Smith for The New York Times

“Hilary has reset the historical patterns through the way in which she’s reimagined the man,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford theology professor who published a new Cromwell biography in 2018. “It’s fiction which is extraordinarily probable, and it’s remarkably like the Cromwell I’d been excavating myself.”

Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library. She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she’s been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.

“And then when you wake up,” she said, “you’ve got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don’t know what the sentence was.”

To an unusual degree for a novelist, Mantel feels bound by facts. That approach has made her latest project — a nearly 1,800-page trilogy about the 16th-century lawyer and fixer Thomas Cromwell — more complicated than anything she’s undertaken in her four decades of writing.

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