Perhaps you’ve read Jack Kerouac’s coming-of-age novel On the Road or seen one of the classic movies about road trips across America: “Easy Rider,” “Thelma and Louise,” “Sideways,” or the comedies “National Lampoon’s Family Vacation” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” These stories offer a glimpse of the variety, vastness, and grandeur of the American landscape. […]
T.L., Phone Home!
Posted September 17th, 2010 at 1:54 pm (UTC-4)
Nevada is so desolate that there isn’t even much of a highway between Reno in the north near Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas, far to the south near the mammoth Hoover Dam. You drive mostly two-lane U.S. 95, amid low brown hills, scrub bushes, Joshua trees, and rattlesnakes along the 715 kilometers (445 miles) between […]
Here, There, Everywhere
Posted September 10th, 2010 at 2:36 pm (UTC-4)
I’ve been buzzing about the country for the past three weeks, getting as far from our Washington, D.C.-based home as the northwestern tip of the other Washington in the Pacific Northwest. Over the next few posts, I’ll tell you about some places and things I encountered in this 11,000-km journey, and about the joys of […]
The Front Room
Posted September 3rd, 2010 at 7:45 am (UTC-4)
In a recent New York Times “Opinionator” blog, Joan DeJean, a University of Pennsylvania professor of romance languages, wrote — not about Portuguese declensions or the Indo-European roots of Romanian — but about living rooms, of all things. What exactly IS an American-style living room? the posting asked. But instead of definitively answering that provocative […]
