Travel
fromConde Nast Traveler
23 hours agoHow I Travel: Emma Straub Has a Favorite Bookstore in Every City
Traveling disrupts routines and allows people to explore different versions of themselves, as experienced by Emma Straub on cruises.
"It's a really special spot. When you start at the top and move down the gently sloped ramp, you almost feel like a marble tumbling down, looking at art as you roll by. The slight slant plays with your sense of perspective and grounding."
"We've all been in the restaurant industry for a long time, in many different ways. We met a couple of years ago, and one night, after they had been out all day surfing, they just proposed that I join them in opening a restaurant."
On May 2, 2025, arts and cultural organizations across the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded. This was part of a larger initiative by the Trump Administration to dismantle not just the NEA, but also other arts advocacy programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
The most common titles on hold with the longest waits include The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, Project Hail Mary by Andrew Weir, Heart the Lover by Lily King and Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden.
"It's so thrilling to have a record number of bookstores participating in this year's crawl, with a diversity of genres and missions," said Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo, owner of Greenlight Bookstore and an organizer of the Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl. "Our community includes used and new bookstores, stores specializing in romantasy, food, art, and horror, queer bookstores, Spanish language bookstores, bookstore bars, and a growing number of Black owned bookstores, for a true and wonderful reflection of the Brooklyn we love."
Running out of a tiny kiosk in Clerkenwell, Exmouth Cultural Kiosk is a secondhand bookstore and self-publishing project that sells books for as little as £2. The selection rotates often and can include everything from Tennyson to its own guide to Clerkenwell pubs.
Bacon, egg, and cheese, man. Come on. People always put it on a croissant or something. That's no good. You need strong bread-strong bread to withstand the heat and the grease. This exchange between the author and Andrew Proctor captured the essential philosophy of breakfast sandwich construction, emphasizing the structural integrity required of the bread to properly support the fillings.
Agnès Varda's sprightly late-career documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) is more complex than it first appears. The film follows foragers of all forms, from dumpster diggers to oyster scavengers, while drifting into meditations on waste and art. Varda becomes a gleaner in her own right, gathering images and ideas that most wouldn't give a second glance.
Louise Pearl's one-woman show Pass the Nails and Shame The Devil recounts the experience of her family's ordeal building their own house amid Oakland's 1980s crack epidemic as her strong-willed, Louisiana-born mother and gather a motley crew of men to make this dream home into a reality.
The third Wednesday or Thursday evening of each month, comic book shop Books with Pictures ( 1401 SE Division St) hosts this open-invite book club devoted to a wide variety of graphic novels-from the Bitter Root series, about a family of sympathetic monster hunters during the Harlem Renaissance, to an illustrated retelling of the 1872 queer vampire murder mystery Carmilla. Sometimes artists and writers join to talk about their latest work.
Join us outside on YBCA's Third Street Courtyard for a poetry and spoken word reading by Kevin Dublin, Magick Altman and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Enjoy the performances designed to bring together intergenerational and diverse voices from the Bay. Included with gallery admission. Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur. Address: 701 Mission St, San Francisco, CA
Good news, the Mercury's reader Valentines are back, and they're in print and online! DID YOU GET ONE? CHECK AND SEE! That's right, we've been collecting hundreds of your 150 characters love notes-many of which are crammed into our current print issue, on the streets in more than 500 spots around the city-and online right here! And while you may have missed our print deadline, DO NOT FRET!
Walk among evergreens The Sunnyvale Urban Forest Advocates will lead a tree walk around the Sunnyvale Public Library on Jan. 17, noon-1:30 p.m. Participants will learn the differences between deciduous and evergreen trees and about evergreens' resilience and their role in the ecosystem. The program will meet on the Library Plaza, 665 W. Olive Ave. Registration is required to https://bit.ly/4qEQTVd.