Elliott Hester's Adventures of a Continental Drifter book tour
Elliott Hester, my fellow former Salon.com travel columnist, is currently touring in support of his new book, Adventures of...Read this article
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David Downie's Paris, Paris book tour
Travel writer David Downie, who visited my Paris American Academy classes last month as a guest lecturer, will be...Read this article
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People I Wanted to Be, by Gina Ochsner
While browsing a bookstore in Florida last week, I was startled to discover that my old college friend Gina...Read this article
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A Sense of Place in SoCal
Michael Shapiro is still on tour promoting his excellent 2004 travel book, A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk...Read this article
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Travel classics in Bookmarks Magazine
The May/June issue of Bookmarks Magazine has a feature on adventure travel books, and I serve as a panelist along...Read this article
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The Best Travel Writing 2005
Travelers' Tales has just released their second-annual Best Travel Writing anthology, which includes selections from the likes of Pico Iyer,...Read this article
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Short-term work opportunities overseas
The current issue of Transitions Abroad magazine is a great reference for those seeking to integrate short-term jobs with their...Read this article
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Help me send Vagabonding vagabonding...
This blog may be somewhat silent in coming days, since I'll be in New Orleans for the New Year holiday...Read this article
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Vagabonding for Christmas
I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of readers who've written me in recent days to tell me they are...Read this article
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San Francisco area book events
If you live in the Bay Area, there are several upcoming book events worth checking out: Saturday, December 11: Jen...Read this article
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Who was the real Alexander the Great?
Oliver Stone's Alexander should now be out in theaters (I can't be sure, since I am in Mexico at the...Read this article
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Top-10 world-travel destination lists -- new and old
In the midst of more random Baja reading from The Book of Lists #2, I came across a 1980 list...Read this article
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Alexander's momma had stink-ass breath
"There was also dispute about [Alexander the Great's] parents. Much of this was posthumous legend; the Persians later fitted Alexander...Read this article
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Did Richard Nixon invent the Internet?
The following quote -- which appears to infer that Richard Nixon dreamed up a kind of Ur-Internet in the early...Read this article
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Alexander the Great had sex with men
As Oliver Stone's new film Alexander nears theatrical release, I wanted to reveal some more facts about the historical Alexander...Read this article
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The Best American Travel Writing 2004
The Best American Travel Writing 2004 anthology, which was guest edited this year by Pico Iyer, has just been published...Read this article
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Whatever happened to Bradley Goldstein?
In the house where I do my writing in Baja, there is a copy of The Book of Lists...Read this article
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Alexander the Great wore a mullet
One of the best books I've read so far this year was Robin Lane Fox's historical biography, Alexander the...Read this article
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The Olympics craze, old-school style
As the 2004 Athens Games wind down, I wanted to share a few more notes on the ancient Greek games,...Read this article
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Gina Ochsner fiction in The New Yorker
I was happy to discover this morning that my college classmate Gina Ochsner has a piece of fiction in the...Read this article
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In ancient Greece, the Olympics would be over by now
Though far more culturally important to the Greek world than the modern Olympics, the ancient games took place over the...Read this article
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Historical Time-Line of the Ancient Olympics
Those of you following the Athens Olympics of TV will see a lot of travel-writer Tony Perrottet in coming days,...Read this article
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In the event you'll be vagabonding in Kansas...
Those planning on vagabonding through Kansas on late-summer road-trips might be interested to know that my father, George Potts,...Read this article
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Travel, pilgrimage, and the Greek Olympics
The Athens Olympics are due to start any day now, and -- amidst all the hype -- I wanted to...Read this article
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Young Pioneers: A Journal of Independent Travel Culture
I've been curious about the independent travel 'zine Young Pioneers ever since the editor, Dan Eldridge, intereviewed me over a...Read this article
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New poetry: Pursue, by Nhan Trinh
Nhan Trinh, an old friend of mine from our days back at Wichita North high school (he later went on...Read this article
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The Best Travelers' Tales 2004
My favorite indie travel book publisher, Travelers' Tales, is celebrating ten years in the publishing industry by putting out a...Read this article
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L.A. Confidential, and other books that have become movies
I just finished reading James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, the first piece of crime-genre fiction I've read in years. It was...Read this article
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What I read in 2003
I just tallied up all the books I read last year, and (counting only the books I completed in their...Read this article
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Excerpts from a book written by my nephew Cedar, who is 4 years old
My nephew, Cedar, who is four years old and lives on a farm in Kansas, wrote a book for me...Read this article
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The Kindness of Strangers
This month, Lonely Planet released a new anthology for its "Journeys" series, entitled The Kindness of Strangers. Edited by Salon.com...Read this article
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Annie Dillard's For the Time Being
Though Annie Dillard isn't exactly a travel writer in the traditional sense, I included a profile on her in Vagabonding...Read this article
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Remembering the Hippie Trail
For independent travelers just now beginning to travel in Asia, the legendary overland "Hippie Trail" of the '60s and '70s...Read this article
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What I Just Read: Dyer, Perrottet, Dalrymple, Tayler, Buruma, Stone, et al
Part of the task of being a good writer is being a good reader, though at times one has to...Read this article
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Notes on Alan Rabinowitz's Beyond the Last Village
Conventional wisdom has long insisted that there's nothing new left to discover on the surface of the earth. "The time...Read this article
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Notes on Tanya Shaffer's Somebody's Heart is Burning
A long-standing debate among travel-lit critics is the issue of perspective: Should travel authors involve themselves as active, changeable characters...Read this article
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Notes (and a tangent) from Tim Cahill's Hold the Enlightenment
I just finished Tim Cahill's newest book Hold the Enlightenment, which is tough to evaluate thematically, since (as is always...Read this article
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Playing the Moldovans at Tennis
As a satirical concept, Tony Hawks's travel-humor book Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is brilliant. The premise, as Hawks describes...Read this article
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Notes on Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel
I recently finished reading Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel -- a book I'd been meaning to read ever...Read this article
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