This week on The Trip, writer Drew Magary talks about his new novel Point B. Journalist Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan calls from Singapore to talk about her time in a quarantine hotel. Le Monde photo editor Pauline Eiferman talks pandemic photography from Paris.

Show notes:

Point B by Drew Magary

Drew Magary on Twitter 

Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan on Twitter

Within French Borders, Le Monde photo series curated by Pauline Eiferman

Pauline Eiferman on Instagram

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More than 15,000 people have died of COVID-19 so far in New York City. Marketing director Tamika Hall lost her grandmother to the disease in Rockaway just before her father died of terminal cancer in Harlem. But with hospice services in the city all but suspended, Tamika had to learn on the fly how to give her father a good death.

Show notes:

Gone from my Sight: the Dying Experience

Tamika Hall (@LadyBlogga) on Instagram

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Sometime over the last week, after the 7 o’clock cowbells and airhorns and clapping couples on their balconies died down each night, I started to hear a baritone echoing off the sidewall of the hardware store a block away on Broadway and 98th. It wasn’t until Saturday evening, when I walked the dog down Broadway itself, that I realized that this was no mere living room hobbyist. There were at least a dozen people, properly spaced, including a Mt Sinai ambulance crew on break, who had come to hear this man sing out from his little French balcony on the fifth floor of his building. You forget living uptown sometimes that Broadway Street is also that Broadway, and so it turns out that this man, as I read later, is Brian Stokes Mitchell, a legend, a Tony-Award-winning actor. I don’t go to musicals and I didn’t know his name, but I’m fairly certain now that he must be some kind of superhero: He was diagnosed with Coronavirus less than three weeks ago, battled high fever for over than a week, and then, the moment he was better, flung open his windows and every night onward sang The Man of La Mancha as a tribute to his city and to the people who are busy saving it.

The choice of musicals seems right for the moment. Coronavirus has made us all so small and absurd; our little homes are our kingdoms now, many of us have lost our jobs maybe our careers, and our carefully constructed hauteur has been, at least for now, laid low by elemental fears about health and survival and family. We are the butt of this joke, we are all the hidalgo Don Quixote. And yet, like the deluded nobleman, here we are still toiling and declaiming and tilting at a future that appears to be mocking us.

I’ve got three guests on The Trip this week. There’s journalist April Zhu, on the phone from Nairobi, talking about her feelings during this uneasy moment in Africa-China relations. There’s Brian Ashcraft, an author and editor at Kotaku, who has lived in Osaka for almost twenty years, on the surreal pain of losing his father in Texas while he is stuck in Japan. And the first guest you’ll hear from, my old friend Jason Rezaian, talked to me about little lessons for quarantine that he picked up in solitary confinement as a political prisoner in Iran. 

This is Nathan Thornburgh, and from Roads & Kingdoms, you’re listening to The Trip: The World on Lockdown. Now, here’s Jason Rezaian:

Show notes:

Jason Rezaian full episode on The Trip: Episode 25

Jason Rezaian at Washington Post

April Zhu portfolio site

Shimura Ken English Lesson

Brian Ashcraft’s Saké Bible (pub date Aug 2020)

NY Daily News on Brian Stokes Mitchell’s nightly performances

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Now this is a place I never thought we would record from. This is my apartment, on west 97th street, in Manhattan, New York, USA. That sound is our daily 7pm cacerolazo outside. The cacerolazo, the banging of pots and casserole pans, was a South American invention, a form of earshot solidarity for times of government lockdown. I heard it in person a few months ago in Beirut, during their street revolution. It had already spread across the globe, even ahead of the virus, a contagious good, a clanking cri de coeur of all those who want to think up a better world.

Our family is, thankfully, in good health. Many of our friends are not, though they have largely been able to slog through their fevers, uncounted and untested, in their apartments. A couple weeks ago, I thought about fleeing New York. We saw what was coming: we took our kids out of middle school a few days before the school system shut down. But the panic that gripped me left soon enough, and reason took over. I knew from talking to my aunt in Madrid that it was people like me, panicky city-dwellers who wanted to wait out the pandemic in the countryside, who actually helped spread the disease. So I stopped googling rental cars and with my newfound moral resolve I wrote an essay for The Atlantic Magazine about the selfish folly of escaping New York City in the middle of the pandemic. The title, which my editors overruled, was going to simply be: I’m not fucking leaving.

Now I am faced with a similar question, about this show, actually. This show has had its share of pivots over the last couple years, from the death of its co-creator on down the line, and in light of a total and indefinite lockdown, it did cross my mind last week to just fold it up. But I can’t. The world and the people in it are too fascinating, especially now, when every country on earth is facing the same problem all at once.

So, The Trip will continue. Instead of the old format of a single in-depth, in-person interview each episode, this version will checking in with a handful of people around the world each week to hear about their lives in lockdown. Seven minutes or so each from each person, just enough for a flavor of their lives in this moment. The scheduled guest for this week, according the old calendar of The Trip, was going to be Berlin-based author Musa Okwonga. Instead he’s on this episode telling me what he’s going to wear to dazzle Berlin the day the curfew breaks. Saba Imtiaz, an old friend of Roads & Kingdoms, calls in from Karachi in part to tell the story of a pigeon who became too bold in the empty streets. That aunt in Madrid I mentioned before, Alexis Meyners—she’s technically my aunt but she’s my age and she’s a close friend—talks to me about falling in love with her neighbors during their long and harsh confinement. And chef Magnus Nilsson, late of Fäviken restaurant, a favorite collaborator of mine, talks about disease and rebirth in his apple orchard in southern Sweden.

The Trip is now available on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your rating and review make a huge difference. I’d would also love to hear from you directly on Instagram @nthornburgh or on Twitter. I’m looking for more people in more places to check-in with around the world under lockdown, from Boise to Baku. If you know a person with a good lockdown story, or if you are one yourself, let me know. We will meet you there.

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In the center of Cabot Square in downtown Montreal, there is a high column topped with a statue of the spice trader John Cabot, who landed on Canada’s coast more than 500 years ago. Sitting on the benches all around the statue—unloved, unheeded, unhoused—are the descendants of the people Cabot landed on, a semi-permanent population of homeless, mostly indigenous, mostly Inuit, people who live in or around the square.

This episode was recorded on Canadian Thanksgiving, a holiday that is all too similar in its origins and implications to the U.S. version. What am I thankful for? I’m thankful for a holiday that, in its sheer gouty revisionism, offers at least a chance to raise a question that all non-native people in the Americas should ask of ourselves more often: what the fuck? What have we done? What the fuck are we continuing to do?

Canada may have a cuddly reputation down in the States, but there’s blood on this corner of the commonwealth. And even, as you’ll hear in this episode, in those moments where the country has flashed good intentions, they’ve often been built on the backs of some deeply racist shit. The land theft, the political pillage, the cultural erasure, are an ongoing multigenerational trauma, as my guest on this episode puts it.

Her name is Nakuset, a name that she had to reclaim after growing up as an adoptee in a Jewish family in Montreal. She not only has a profound and moving life story, she is also the longtime Executive Director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. Together with one of her collaborators, David Chapman, whom you heard delivering McDonald’s like some kind of hamburger Santa Claus of Cabot Square, Nakuset is also the driving force behind the new Resilience Montreal center.

That center will be right across the street from the statue of John Cabot, and it is no less a monument. A monument to community, a monument to older and better values than settler capitalism, a monument to the incredible survival skills of native Canada, a monument to Resilience.

All of this plays out in Nakuset’s professional life, and it plays out in her personal life. So I should also warn that we are going to laugh and joke and drink our mocha and coffee and we’re also talk a bit about a suicide. If you, or someone you are close to, are in distress, please take a moment to reach out for help. I’ll put some resources in the show notes.

If you or someone you know is in distress, please reach out for help or just a conversation: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Stolen From Our Embrace, a book about the 60’s scoop, forced assimilation, and the indigenous children who survived it. By Suzanne J. Fournier and Ernie Crey

CBC mini-documentary on Nakuset and Sonya

Christopher Curtis’ stories for the Montreal Gazette

Donate to the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal

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Ah, chatting about the weather. A bit of timeworn small-talk, favored by fumbly podcast hosts everywhere. But that pleasant chill in the air in Nairobi in early summer; that is at the heart of everything we’re going to be talking about over the next weeks here in Kenya. That cool climate, it seems, was Nairobi’s original sin, the thing that first drew British civil engineers to build a rail depot here in 1899. Pity the poor colonizer, who had been trying to subjugate so many peoples in the unbearable heat. Here at more than 5800 feet above sea level—way higher even than Denver—the air is dewy and lovely and it makes perfect sense that it would make an appealing homebase for your average gin-soaked sadist from Old Blighty looking to queen over all of East Africa. So Nairobi was born as a European city, and this whole region of East Africa became known as the White Highlands, where the land was stolen from the Masai and Kikuyu with such vigor and arrogance that, well, you had the Nandi resistance and the Kolloa Massacre and the Mau Mau Uprising and finally a free Nairobi, capitol city of the independent Republic of Kenya. Its airport was built in part by Mau Mau prisoners held by the British in ghastly conditions, and today the airport is named after freedom fighter and first president Jomo Kenyatta. That’s just the first taste, for any arriving visitor, of the conflicting strands of DNA that weave around each other throughout this city.

My first attempt to untangle it all starts with Wanuri Kahiu. When we put Nairobi on the calendar, she was the first person we thought of having on the show. When she said she lives in Karen, a particularly dewy and green district of Nairobi with a view of the Ngong Hills, that’s where I decided to stay. She is a leader that way, through her work and in person, she communicates this sense of humor and lightness mixed with intimate moral urgency, a push to see the world as she sees it, knows it, films it. If you are a fan of film and disturbed by censorship, you’ll know her film Rafiki, the first Kenyan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, even as it was it banned by the Kenyan authorities for reasons relating to, well, gay-ism. But as you’ll hear in this episode, the fights she fought with Rafiki are still ongoing, and so are her triumphs, which will be coming, with more of that quiet and effective force, to your favorite streaming platform soon.

Welcome to Nairobi, this is first of five episodes from this city, each featuring a different interview with artists, filmmakers, journalists and musicians.

Show notes:Rafiki trailer TEDx Wanuri Kahiu talkKenya Supreme Court Anti-Homosexuality RulingHajooj Kuka’s documentary Beats of the Antonov Afrobubblegum

For more episodes of The Trip, visit luminary.link/thetrip

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For the next two weeks, this show will be in Philadelphia, to give a taste of this fine American city.

Over the past few decades, Philadelphia has had real problems, but also a lot of image problems: a local police detective decided to label a whole part of the city’s north as the Philadelphia Badlands and just last week someone noticed that Google Maps was still actually labeling it that. Which is bullshit. Back when I was a reporter covering the northeast U.S., I dipped into Philly quite a bit, from the upscale Gayborhood in Center City to, yes, that 25th police district in North Philly, and it’s a hard town not to like, from grit to Gritty.

The place I got to know back then is well represented by this week’s guest, fashion designer Walé Oyéjidé, a Nigerian-American designer, writer, musician and lawyer whose designs, under clothing label Ikiré Jones, have appeared in Black Panther and elsewhere. The man is good with a strong drink in the morning (The Trip editor Tafi Mukunyadzi fixed us up with some caipirinhas), he’s got strong ideas about how fashion can engage with the global south, and he was a pleasure to talk to.

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If you want to know the best thing about Gardena, in south central Los Angeles, I’ll tell you. I think it’s Diana’s, a Mexican lunch counter with apocalyptically good machaca and fresh masa sold by the kilo. It’s especially good if you can meet Yukio Iwamasa there. Yukio, an artist and entrepreneur approaching his mid-80s, lives around the corner from Diana’s, in the house where he spent half his childhood, back when Gardena was a Japanese-American enclave filled with strawberry farms and Buddhist churches.  For this final episode from Los Angeles, though, I wanted to talk to Yukio about the other half of his childhood, the part where he and his family were imprisoned for being Japanese-Americans, locked away in Manzanar in the middle of the desert for four years during World War Two. In its own grim way, it’s a distinctly American story. And it’s a personal story for me—Yukio is my father-in-law, the grandfather of my children. His testimony about life in the camps is important to hear—for them, for me, for any American who didn’t live through it. 

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The last time I had seen Kris Yenbamroong, he and his partner Sarah St Lifer were giving me a ride into downtown Chiang Mai from a village on the outskirts. I had thought about interviewing him in Northern Thailand, since we were there, and since his Night+Market restaurants in Los Angeles are nominally Thai places. But the more he talked about his restaurants, and about himself, it was clear, as we put it in this episode, these aren’t Thai Restaurants. These are LA restaurants.  

That’s why, for our second of three LA episodes, I’m so psyched for this conversation. California plus Kris, that’s what makes Night+Market. We talked about that combination, about why wines are such a huge part of what he does, about how he ambushed Jonathan Gold at a public event and ended up having him be a huge Night+Market fan. 

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