On the Road: On Shaky Ground
by Bill Murray The Balkans isn’t everybody’s first choice for summer holiday, but that’s where we’re headed this year. First we’re flying to Chișinău, while we still can, and I don’t mean to be flip. Forgive my wavering confidence in Western guarantors of freedom, democracy and territorial integrity. My idea then is to press south…
On the Road: Ukraine’s Progress
On the Road, Downtown
by Bill Murray This month’s travel column includes suspiciously little travel – just two short walks, to a courthouse and a jailhouse. I live in Atlanta, where quite a bit of national politics has happened in those two buildings these last few weeks. I walked downtown a couple of weeks ago when things were going…
On the Road: Avoiding the Heat
by Bill Murray With earth set on a slow rolling boil through the rest of the summer, now might be a good time to mentally transport oneself to the cold. How’s about a winter weather sailor’s tale? St. John’s, Newfoundland and the Grand Banks People feel pain but too often fail to appreciate its absence.…
On the Road: The World’s Greatest Travel Destination
by Bill Murray In my exuberance after a spring trip to Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, I proclaimed Africa the world’s greatest travel destination. It’s only fair to defend my thesis, for surely others will disagree. First let’s dispense with the ‘Africa is not a country’ technicality by defining the travel to Africa that I have…
On the Road: Spring and NATO Come to Finland
On the Road: La France de l’Outre Mer
by Bill Murray In the typical American city where we live, the average commute time is 78 minutes a day and 97.5% of these poll respondents agree traffic congestion is a serious problem. The last place you might expect to find people who commiserate is an island forty miles long and thirty wide, 420 miles…
On the Road: Tanzania to Zambia by Train
by Bill Murray We left last month’s column worried about getting tickets on a train across a swath of Africa’s midsection, from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Lusaka, Zambia. There’s a funny system for getting on that train. You can reserve tickets over the phone but you can’t buy them online. You must come to…
On the Road Again, at Last
On the Road: Among the Non-Humans II
by Bill Murray Fourteen months ago I wrote a 3QD column titled Among The Non-Humans about sometimes obscure, often extraordinary abilities of animals and plants. Today, let’s look at a few more: Groupers visit giant moray eels resting in their crevices and shake their heads three to six times a second directly in front of the eels,…
Awe
by Bill Murray I’m scared of birds. They’re dinosaurs, you know. They descend from the Jurassic when, just like in Jesus Loves Me, ‘they were big and we were small.’ Did you see those huge dinosaur tracks they found in Texas last summer? You were a scurrying little proto-mammal, foraging and minding your own business…
What Now?
by Bill Murray After three years of pandemic and a year of war, could things be about to get better? With the defeat of Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, President Xi’s Covid problems in China and President Putin’s all-around debacle of destruction in Ukraine, could the worldwide wave of authoritarianism be breaking? If so, the incoming…
On the Road: Vanuatu
by Bill Murray It’s 6:15 on the Erakor Lagoon in Vanuatu. Women in bright print skirts paddle canoes from villages into town. Yellow-billed birds call from the grass by the water’s edge, roosters crow from somewhere, and the low rumble of the surf hurling itself against the reef is felt as much as heard. Every…
On the Road: Chile Can’t Decide
On the Road: Back Home
by Bill Murray In spring the pandemic lurked. Boris Johnson was Ukraine’s new best friend, Russia’s domination of Ukraine appeared imminent and the UK basked in the queen’s platinum jubilee. I’ve been away since spring. Have I missed anything? The war continues. Many who caution they can’t get inside Vladimir Putin’s head proclaim from in…
Sea Change
by Bill Murray I Russia’s war on Ukraine is realigning geopolitics everywhere you look. The Germans and French want the conflict to end immediately. Others won’t be heartbroken to see fighting continue to degrade Russian capabilities. The UK, Poles and Balts come to mind here. An idea is settling in that the US, too, doesn’t…
Before
by Bill Murray Anticipating war in Europe, 2022. Thursday, 13 January If an attack is imminent, Kyiv’s air raid sirens will alert residents to tune in to emergency service announcements. Cars equipped with loudspeakers will also patrol the streets to announce important information. The Kyiv City Council has posted an interactive online map, which shows…
A Few Þhings about Iceland
by Bill Murray I The boundaries between tectonic plates are where big things happen, lasting geologic things. They are among the most remarkable bits of land on earth. The mid-Atlantic ridge is one of those boundaries, the longest mountain range in the world, separating the diverging Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. Trouble is, it…
On the Road: Crunch Time
by Bill Murray Ukraine is surrounded by 100,000-plus miserable, freezing, foot-stamping Russian soldiers who are Chekov’s gun on the table in Act One of our new post-Cold War epic. We’ve moved from “surely he wouldn’t?” to “he’s really going to, isn’t he?” It’s the moment when Wile E. Coyote has run off the cliff but…