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The New York Times Style Magazine – Nov 12, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE (November 12, 2023) – T’S TRAVEL ISSUE features the writer Aatish Taseer embarked on an epic 40,000-mile journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. What he learned was less a life-altering revelation and more a lesson in curiosity itself.

The Enduring, Transformational Power of Pilgrimage

Rows of tents and cabins on grassy terrain, next to steep clusters of rocks.
A tourist camp about 50 miles east of Erdene Zuu monastery in Mongolia. Richard Mosse

The writer Aatish Taseer embarked on a journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. What he learned was less a life-altering revelation and more a lesson in curiosity itself.

By Hanya Yanagihara

Travel, the movement of people from one place to another, has always existed. But long before we thought to travel for pleasure, we traveled for purpose: for commerce, and for faith.

Even the most casual student of the Silk Road, that fearsome, wondrous network of routes that people began plying in the second century B.C. (and did so for approximately the next 1,600 years) knows that the two — business and God, whoever or whatever your god was — often intermingled. Merchants and adventurers returned with new kinds of goods, but also with new kinds of ideas: of art, of architecture, of ideology, of faith. The Silk Road brought Islam to India, and Buddhism to Japan. It’s why travel has always been both thrilling and dangerous. You never know how a new land is going to change you; it never knows how you’re going to change it.

Behind the Story: How a Writer Prepared for a 40,000-Mile Trip

A few bands of terraced land, descending to a lake. The sky is blue with wide clouds.
The Island of the Sun in Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca, a pilgrimage site since before the Inca Empire.Credit…Stefan Ruiz

The dozens of books that T writer Aatish Taseer read before his journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq, and what he learned from each pilgrimage.

Eighteen months ago, when the New York-based T writer at large Aatish Taseer began planning his reporting trips for this month’s three-part feature story — an exploration of religious travel in Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq — he was already well acquainted with the idea of pilgrimage. His first book, the 2009 memoir “Stranger to History,” opens with what is arguably the world’s best-known faith-motivated journey, the hajj to Mecca, and ends with what he describes as a personal pilgrimage to meet his estranged father in Pakistan. In Delhi, India, where Taseer grew up, quick trips for the purpose of worship were commonplace. “People would do a pilgrimage on an ordinary Sunday,” he says, “instead of going to an amusement park.”

Culture, Magazines, Previews, Stories, Style, Tourism, Travel

Covers: The NY Times Style Magazine – Nov 13, 2022

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Inside the Mezquita in Cordoba, with its 800-odd columns: a church that was once a mosque.

Three writers go searching for echoes of a vanished culture — or a resurrected one.

– Spain: In the country’s churches and streets, the remnants of eight centuries of Islamic rule are hiding in plain sight.

– Singapore: Cuisine is one of the few ways to define Peranakan culture, a hard-to-pin-down blend of ethnic and racial identities.

– Tajikistan: While the nation’s history is being hidden behind glimmering new facades, its artisans hold on to tradition with quiet determination.

Design, Homes, Magazines, Previews, Stories, Style

Preview: New York Times Style Magazine – 10.2.2022

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In the salon of Il Palazzetto, a print by Giuseppe Capogrossi plays counterpoint to frescoes depicting scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid.
In the salon of Il Palazzetto, a print by Giuseppe Capogrossi plays counterpoint to frescoes depicting scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid.Credit…Danilo Scarpati

An Italian Villa Where Architecture Is a Family Affair

Most homes hold the history of their owners, but Il Palazzetto is as much a monument to its designers as to its inhabitants.

In Malibu, an Inflatable Bungalow for Robert Downey Jr.

The actor’s thin-shell home is at once an aerodynamic oddity and, perhaps, a harbinger of environmentally conscious architecture.

Culture, History, Homes

Culture & Design: 15th C. Tuscan Villa, Siena, Italy

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Even now, the approach to the 1,200-acre property is just as it must have been centuries ago: a long, winding ride through pale, undulating fields, leading to a dignified hilltop retreat. The three-story ivy-wrapped building is ringed by 20-foot obelisk-like cypress trees — a private citadel entered through a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the vista of olive groves, another fortresslike outcropping is visible in the distance: the mottled russet city of Siena, three miles away.

WHEN RENÉ CAOVILLA, the 82-year-old Venetian shoe designer, was first shown the Tuscan villa he bought in 1977, he fell in love with it instantly. He wasn’t only taken with the house, a 15th-century red brick monastery that had undergone a slow transformation into an austere 20-bedroom private home in the 17th century, but the Chianti landscape as well — the whole of classical history evoked in a flash.

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Culture, Magazines, Style, Travel

Travel: “The New York Times Style Magazine” – The Silk Road (May 2020)

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For years, Silk Road travelers made the grueling trek past towering mountain ranges and ancient cities now lost to time. Centuries later, one writer attempts to retrace the journey.

T Magazine - The New York Times

 

This year, T’s spring Travel issue is devoted to just five stories, each an account of its writer’s journey along a different section of the Silk Road — the ancient network of trade routes that until the 15th or 16th century spanned some 4,000 miles of the globe, from Central Asia across the Middle East to Southern Europe, and formed a vital conduit for both new commodities and new ideas. While venturing to faraway places might seem like a distant possibility now, a year after this issue began to take shape, as we reckon with the global pandemic, these pieces are a powerful reminder of our innate desire to move and explore.

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