Chef, author and former human rights campaigner Yasmin Khan seems to have a mission statement very like our own at Roads & Kingdoms. That is, pay attention to what’s on the plate in a way that might spark some change and bring people together (and have a damned good time doing so). There aren’t many books that try to do all of that as gorgeously as Zaitoun, Yasmin’s new book about Palestinian cuisine. We met a while back at the Roads & Kingdoms office in Brooklyn as Yasmin somehow hacked a pretty decent Old Monk hot toddy from our office kitchen. Her book Zaitoun is out this week in the United States, and we’re a better country for it.

Episode 26 Show Notes:

Yasmin's gorgeous cookbooks

Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen

The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen

The Roads & Kingdoms Perfect Dish series with Anthony Bourdain and Yasmin Khan:

Perfect Dish Okinawa

Perfect Dish Tokyo

From the closing notes

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham BUY THIS BOOK TOO. It's excellent

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Iranian-American Jason Rezaian, native of Marin County, was just trying to report on the daily lives and hopes of the people of Tehran. But as his gripping new book Prisoner details, he instead ended up in the notorious Evin Prison, a chess piece in an international showdown between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. He sat down with host Nathan Thornburgh over classic Cokes and talked about the day he and his wife were arrested, what he thinks of his captors, and his stubborn hopes for Iranian society.

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You’ve seen this man's illustrations on the cover of TIME magazine or Der Spiegel, or on signs wherever the Trump-phobic meet and rally. His depictions of the 45th president as an ISIS executioner, a klansman, or just a melting orange mess do exactly what he intended. They provoke, they inform, they communicate the loud perils of our moment, wordlessly. When host Nathan Thornburgh started The Trip podcast with Anthony Bourdain a year ago, he knew exactly who he wanted to get to design our logo: Edel Rodriguez. Edel joined Nathan in The Trip’s Brooklyn studio to drink a bunch of bullshit coconut waters, and to talk about how his childhood in Cuba prepared him for becoming as Fast Company has called him, the Illustrator-in-Chief.

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Not all revolutionaries wear bandoliers full of bullets. Some of them tend beautiful little gardens next to a wooden cottage they built in a neighborhood called Dandelion. That’s the kind of revolutionary that Tanja Fox is. Tanja has spent her entire life living a little bit differently, in one of the world’s most fascinating districts, the commune of Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.

As a social experiment Christiania has been remarkably resilient, a bit of squatted military base turned hippie utopia that has lasted more or less independently almost 47 years now. As you’ll hear in this episode, is under threat like never before, from the twin menaces of a hardcore narcotics trade and, increasingly, mass tourism. Tanja and Nathan sat in Tanja’s house last spring, while birds plucked from a Disney film serenaded them, and talked about how to live your politics in one of the world’s great, complicated social experiments.

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One of host Nathan Thornburgh’s New Year’s resolutions is to stop just stepping past all the human misery in New York City and actually think about helping. But how?

Jennifer Ching might know. She’s an immigrant, a Harvard grad, a lawyer, and now the executive director of North Star Fund, a community foundation that focuses not on just giving money, but also giving power, to the oppressed and the underserved of New York. She and Nathan drink Flor y Machete herbal tea (from an activist herbal collective of course) and talked about the joy of pushing for longterm systemic change in an era of fresh daily outrages.

Read more about North Star fund, and goddamnit just donate if you can.

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For 25 years, photographer Yuri Kozyrev covered conflicts from Afghanistan to Chechnya, Iraq, Libya and beyond. His combination of frontline fearlessness and human compassion won him the highest awards in his industry. And then, he chose to stop covering war.

He talked in Moscow with host Nathan Thornburgh, who worked alongside Kozyrev throughout Russia and the Caucasus while they were both at TIME Magazine. They talked about the late great Stanley Greene, about traveling with mujahedin, and about why it was hard to quit war for good.

For more from this extraordinary journalist, see a glimpse of Arctic: New Frontier, a project supported by the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, which funds investigative work on human rights violations, geostrategic and environmental issues around the world. Or check out Yuri's work on returning ISIS widows in Chechnya for Roads & Kingdoms. Or, alternately, watch a 2008 TIME Magazine roadtrip video from Russia with Thornburgh and Kozyrev while reporting on Putin's Person of the Year package. There is a camel in it.

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Matt Orlando has worked at some of the great restaurants on this planet. Per Se in New York; The Fat Duck in the UK; Noma in Copenhagen, where he was head chef under Rene Redzepi. But it wasn’t until he opened his restaurant Amass—and looked in his own dumpster—that he found his true calling. As you’ll hear in this episode, his vision for a zero-waste restaurant is idealistic, inspiring, and is somehow also super delicious. Host Nathan Thornburgh sat down with him in Galway—the last of The Trip guests from Food on the Edge this fall—at a very early hour and drank instant coffee with him. Because, you know, world-class chefs demand a hot cup of Bewley’s coffee crystals.

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Journalist Michael Snyder writes about food, conflict, the environment, and fishing. That slurry of interests brought him to the Bolivian Amazon for an investigation into the invasive Paiche, a hulking, invasive fish that is destroying old ecosystems and building new economies. In this episode, host Nathan Thornburgh talks with Michael about the resulting Roads & Kingdoms feature Invasion of a River Fish, and they get to the important business of both insulting the fish's intelligence and explaining how it ended up for sale in your local Whole Foods. Read the condensed transcript of the conversation on Roads & Kingdoms 

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This year's Emmy Awards were a big night for the people who worked with Anthony Bourdain, with Emmys going to Roads & Kingdoms, Zero Point Zero, and—for his own brilliant show—to W. Kamau Bell, who had traveled to Kenya with Bourdain for a recent episode of Parts Unknown. They are two very different hosts with very different shows, but they shared a common drive to make important television that is entertaining as hell. Bell talked through all this with Nathan Thornburgh while sipping on an arsenal of Japanese energy drinks.

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One of the great shortcomings of northern Europe—an otherwise pleasant place with soft sunsets and universal healthcare—has always been the utter lack of quality Mexican food. Rosio Sanchez, a celebrated restaurateur and chef from Chicago who has worked at some of the best restaurants on earth, is changing that. She talked with Nathan about living in Copenhagen, cooking fjord shrimp in salsa diabla, and what authenticity means to her.

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