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In her upcoming book Enchanted Islands: Travels Through Myth and Magic, Love & Loss, author Laura Coffey charts a real-life journey she took inspired by one of the most epic travel stories ever told: The Odyssey. Lale catches up with Coffey to find out how the famous poem informed where she went, the unforgettable meals she ate, and the cast of characters she met along the way.

In 2019, friend of the podcast Jessica Nabongo became the first Black woman to visit every country in the world—and document it all along the way. We check back in with her to find out how and where she’s traveling in 2024, and revisit a conversation about solo travel from an earlier episode.

Love doesn’t sleep just because you’re traveling. This episode, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re dedicating an episode to our listeners’ stories, from tales of a windswept singles resort, to a fling in a Toronto hotel, to a surprising encounter in China. Whether you love or hate this holiday, or love to hate it, we promise this episode will be a fun one.

This week, we chat with journalist Laura Trethewey, author of The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World's Oceans, about traveling to the deepest parts of the ocean, sailing on research boats across some of the most remote and roughest seas in the world, and the intrepid deep sea divers and scientists who are racing to map the ocean floors.

Twenty one countries make up Latin America—and within those countries lies myriad food cultures, recipes, and histories. This week, Lale chats with guest Sandra A. Gutierrez about her latest cookbook Latinísimo: Home Recipes from the Twenty-One Countries of Latin America, an encyclopedic exploration of the region through its dishes and the home cooks who make them. Plus, her travels in countries like Peru and Colombia, and insider tips for tracking down the best eats in a new city.

Slow travel is a buzzy term these days, but what does it actually mean? Over the coming months, we'll explore what it takes to travel slowly and more intentionally, starting with this week's episode: A conversation with travel writer and adventurer Alice Morrison, who spent seven months walking across Morocco alongside a group of nomads. 

It's a new year, which means it's time to stop daydreaming and start planning your travels for the next 12 months. Can't decide where to visit? Start listening to find out the best places to go in 2024—from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Accra, Ghana—according to Condé Nast Traveler editors Arati Menon and Sarah James.

In a special episode from The New Yorker's Critics At Large, the celebrity memoir has long been a place for public figures to set the record straight on the story of their lives. By any measure, Britney Spears’s life, as detailed in her new book, “The Woman in Me,” is rich material. The pop star rose to fame in the early two-thousands, and, after enduring a series of mental-health crises, was placed in a conservatorship through which her father controlled almost every aspect of her day-to-day existence. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the “horror story” that emerges in the memoir as the teen-aged Spears is betrayed by everyone around her: a family intent on profiting off her talent; a young Justin Timberlake, who used his romance with Spears as a stepping stone for his own career; a ravenous media that both sexualized and shamed her. The hosts consider how “The Woman in Me” fits within the broader canon of celebrity memoirs, citing the producer Julia Phillips’s “burn-it-all-down” best-seller, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” and the late Matthew Perry’s 2022 meditation on his struggles with addiction, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Ultimately, these stories are just one facet of a broader narrative—and a kind of performance in their own right. “Once you submit to being a celebrity, your music, and how you appear in magazines, and what you produce as a memoir all contribute to this one big text,” Cunningham says. “It’s this grand synthesis, and, in the end, the text is Britney herself.”

For our last episode of the year, we’re diving into something we’re all doing a lot of around the holiday season: partying. And in Ukraine, where our two guests are based, rave culture has become a necessary vehicle for letting off steam, distraction, and finding joy. Back in November, Lale caught up with Kyiv-based journalist Anastacia Galouchka, who recently penned a story on the capital’s rave scene for Stranger’s Guide, and novelist Haska Shyyan, who lives in Lviv, about what raving means to them and the power of community and safe spaces during unimaginable turbulence and uncertainty.

We dive into the thorny issue of passport privilege thanks to this week’s guest, Shahnaz Habib, author of the new book Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel. Why do some travelers gain more visa-free access than others? Who determines how a place is seen through the lens of its guidebooks? And what does the word "wanderlust" mean, exactly? Shahnaz seeks to answer all that and more, and shares some of her own travel stories.

Is there a more universally used beauty product than eyeliner? Not according to author Zahra Hankir, who chats with Lale about her new book Eyeliner: A Cultural History, which looks at the meaning and symbolism of kohl around the world, from Kyoto to Chad, as well as throughout the Middle East—and dives into her own personal history with the enduring piece of makeup.

In 1938 two women botanists broke with convention and set off on an expedition trip along the Colorado River that would see them risk their lives over rapids in the name of research. Two years ago, science journalist Melissa Sevigny retraced their adventure, whitewater rafting the same rapids and sleeping under the stars to learn more about who these women were—and why their work still influences the scientific landscape of America today.