The Trip

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...

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 i...

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...

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...

 Los Angeles is a place that is too big, too deep, spread too thin under the marine layer and above the concrete culverts to give you, the visitor, any idea of what the hell is really going on. I didn’t know that the first half-dozen or times I came, and I didn’t understand the place at all. And if I’ve learned anything in the decades since, it’s that you need your people. The ones who have found...

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We are in mid-city New Orleans with Dr. Howard Conyers, host of the PBS show Nourish, a rocket scientist by day and whole hog barbecue pitmaster by night and by weekend. If we have to have only one more episode in this flagrantly fabulous town, then we’re glad it's with Dr. Conyers. He is originally from the deep South, the rural South, but he chose to make New Orleans his home after Katrina. We t...

New Orleans is so old, so fine, so big in the culture, and so vast in its disappointments and its triumphs, that it feels odd to mention just one side of the crescent kaleidoscope. But we have to call out one thing that has long attracted us to the city: New Orleans is like Disneyland for day-drinkers. In other cities, we sometimes have to apologize a bit for asking our guests to drink before sund...

There is nothing more political, fascinating, uplifting, infuriating than school. The country we are as reflected in our education system is not always how we would like to think of ourselves. But the reflection is true. Take Nathan’s city of New York—last week the city’s best public school (Stuyvesant) sent out 895 acceptance letters for the class of 2023, but only 7 of those went to black studen...

The morning after a wedding—any big party—is usually a little groggy. It’s not necessarily unpleasant, especially if it’s February in Thailand and the air is a little bit cool and very humid, and you’re kicking around in a quiet village along the Ping River with someone like Francis Lam. Francis, besides being a classically-trained chef, former New York Times columnist, lauded cookbook editor at C...

The Trip host Nathan Thornburgh would not be the first person to admit to falling deeply, darkly in love with the markets of Southeast Asia. There’s just something about the slurry of exhaust, sticky air and stickier rice, knockoff Premier League kits, fresh fruit, and dried worms, wild lime leaves, mango hawkers, and sausage mongers. They hit you in all the senses. They imprint on your brain. And...

In this week’s episode, you’ll hear the bird call of the Asian koel, but the real soundtrack of Bangkok is the internal combustion engine: the mopeds and the Mazda 2s. It’s a city of perpetual motion. Just be sure to look both ways before crossing. This is the first of three episodes we’ll be running from Thailand. We’re starting off with Tom Waller, a Thai-Irish filmmaker who took me for a classi...

Shinji Nohara has been making good things happen for visitors to Tokyo for almost two decades—ever since a lanky camera-shy writer named Anthony Bourdain arrived with Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins to shoot their first television episode ever. Shinji was the fixer for that episode. First, he found out what Tony’s food-kinks were, and then he delivered those deepest desires in one single sizzling...

This podcast episode should have porn, right?” It’s an odd but necessary question to put to my old friend and former TIME Magazine colleague, Tokyo-based business journalist Toko Sekiguchi. But she’s a gamer, that Toko, and for this episode, falling close to Valentine’s Day, she’s taking us inside the world of Japanese Love Hotels. Toko and I have done this before, four years ago, while I was repo...

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 cuis...

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 t...

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...

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 socia...

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...

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 TIM...

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 so...

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 Riv...

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 i...

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 diabl...

Dan "the Automator" Nakamura is one of the great music producers of our time. Someone who, like Brian Eno or Phil Spector, changed the sound of an entire decade. The fact that he did it as an Asian-American breaking into hiphop way back in the early 90s, well, there's a story. Automator mixed some excellent negronis at his studio in San Francisco and talked with Nathan about his unlikely path to h...