Wine Enthusiast Magazine Debut

In the June/July issue of Wine Enthusiast, I write about my time at the extraordinary, not-to-be-missed Big Sur Food & Wine Festival. Here is a snippet:

We would walk that morning on private coastal land fenced off from the public. The festival is famous for finding breathtaking vistas few have ever seen, and this one especially had everyone eager to get going. “I’ve lived here my whole life and never seen it,” said one anticipant attendee.

Thirsty though we were, no one complained about the delay, which somehow made the proceedings all the more charming—a dramatic pause before the big reveal. The festival is entirely volunteer run; every dime flows right back into the community. As such, despite the opulence of the gathering, all the good wine and meals prepared by a battalion of award-winning chefs, the entire weekend feels as though its planners are just barely one step ahead of every event, Indiana Jones-charging across a collapsing stone floor. Somehow, they manage to pull it off with panache.

Read the rest here, or pick up a copy at your local bookstore or newsstand.

Image Credit: David W. Brown, made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Journey to Doomsday

In the November 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, I have a magazine cover story recounting my most recent expedition to Antarctica. Here is the opening:

I first saw our icebreaker, the RV Araon, when we were due to leave for Antarctica. The largest icebreakers are more than five hundred feet long, but the Araon was only the length of a football field; I wondered how it would handle the waves of the Southern Ocean, and how it would fare against the thick sea ice that guards the last wilderness on Earth. Its hull was painted a cheerful persimmon color, and its bow was conspicuously higher than the rest of the ship, with a curved shape suggesting that icebreakers don’t so much carve through ice as climb and crush, climb and crush. It was January 3rd, summer in New Zealand. In the heat, ice was a little hard to picture, let alone icebreaking.

Our voyage would last two months. We would spend a week or so sailing from Christchurch to the edge of Antarctica, then break through the pack ice of the Amundsen Sea, before arriving at Thwaites Glacier—one of the fastest-retreating on the continent. Our expedition was led by the Korea Polar Research Institute, which had brought some forty researchers from around the world to the Araon. They would have a month at Thwaites to conduct their respective research projects before the return trip began.

I had been “on the ice,” as Antarctic explorers say, once before, in 2019, while researching a book. There’s no room for passive observers on the most remote expeditions, and so, on that trip and this one, I’d signed on as a field-research associate, sponsored by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation, an Earth-science nonprofit. For the second time, I would be working alongside Jamin Greenbaum, a forty-two-year-old scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego. We’d be hurling torpedo-shaped probes from a helicopter into cracks in the ice, with the aim of studying the warm ocean water that is melting Thwaites from below.

We had successfully placed sensors in the water during our first expedition, on the eastern side of the continent, throwing them from the back of a refurbished cargo plane from the Second World War. We weren’t sure we could repeat this feat. Weather on Thwaites is notoriously hostile, and, because dense cloud cover makes satellite reconnaissance virtually impossible, we wouldn’t be able to identify promising fissures until we were flying over the ice. Greenbaum’s style of adventure is less romantic than world-weary. “Antarctica occasionally lets you pull something off,” he told me. “But not often.”

You can read the complete story online here.

A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow?

Three things struck me recently at Magic Kingdom while riding the Carousel of Progress. 1. The crowd. 2. The crowd's enthusiasm. 3. The state of the ride. My family and I had a single day budgeted to attend Walt Disney World while in Florida recently, and rather than choose a park (an impossible task), attempted instead a modified "four parks challenge," in which we did the things that matter (ride the "mountain" rides at each park, see a live show, watch the fireworks, eat too much food, etc.) while disregarding the things that would detract from the fun (e.g. "Participate in five Kidcot activities"—my daughter is a year or two too old to enjoy them anymore, and a decade or two too young to enjoy them again).

My two favorite rides are the world famous Jungle Cruise and the Carousel of Progress. Don't ask me to choose a favorite. But while the Jungle Cruise feels safe (a millennium from now, guests will still hear the same jokes, e.g."Please exit the ride the same way you got on—pushing and shoving")—the Carousel of Progress, inexplicably, does not. Of all the rides at Disney that should have absolutely been preserved post-9/11—we needed this ride! We still do!—it was the Carousel of Progress that was shuttered, apparently in the wake of declining park attendance. It later reopened as a "seasonal" ride, though today seems again to be  year-round. Thank goodness.

I know why I like the Carousel. The boundless optimism. The magnificent, unforgettable theme song. The humor. The artistry and craftsmanship. The history—not only represented, but also of the attraction itself. There's something distinct about a Walt Disney attraction—a ride touched by the man himself—that cannot be replicated. I'm not even talking about abominations like Stitch's Great Escape or Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, both of which would have killed Walt Disney were he not already dead, but even great attractions like Soarin' or Mickey's PhilharMagic. They're just missing...something. (The closest you'll get to Walt-Disney-the-man-level magic is Animal Kingdom park, which is just an astoundingly triumph down the line. I fear that Avatar Land will diminish the near perfection of that park, but I fear change in general.)

So when we conceived our own Four Parks Challenge, Carousel was of course on the list no matter what. I feared, however, that it wouldn't even be open first thing at Magic Kingdom (we started the day at the rope drop) and that we would have to circle back later in the day. My fears were for nothing, however. Not only was it open at 9:45 a.m., but it was packed! That just made my morning. And not just old people already tired of standing. All ages, races, nationalities. The ride still has it! And before it begins, the old black-and-white television broadcast of Walt Disney describing it, and singing "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" with the Sherman Brothers. Well, there's something so distinctly Disney about the whole thing. It positively brims with magic.

So our turn came up, and the crowd filled the Carousel. The lights lowered. The narrator introduced the ride. And the Carousel began. AND THE CROWD—this massive, diverse crowd of normal human beings—SANG THE SONG! The whole thing. We all knew the words! Everyone of course knows the lyrics by the ride's end—but from the start? Well it's like the ghost of Walt decided to find a way to make the morning even better.

And then the ride broke. OK, it didn't break. It jammed? After 1900, it stayed at... 1900. So I wasn't exactly upset about this turn of events, or lack thereof. But the cast member running it kept having to interrupt the second viewing to say, "Please stay seated," which, look, after the first time, everybody got the message. Anyway, 1900 repeated, and then all was back to normal. The carousel continued. And if that had been it, it wouldn't have beared mentioning. No ride is perfect. Not even perfect rides.

But then we got to the "present." Now, look, I've done this ride a lot of times over the years. I know what it's supposed to look like. So when I say that Father looked... dejected? defeated? malfunctioning?... I know what I'm saying. He stood there, said the words, sang the song, but he was somehow slumped over the stove. His mouth moved. His eyes twinkled. He still prodded at whatever it is he's supposed to be cooking. But it's like he needed a few bolts tightened so that he could stand upright. His head needed a little adjustment so that he would look at the audience rather than the footlights. It just looked... sad? Maybe it is a sly commentary on masculinity today. After all, Father in 1900 was The Man of the House, and in "today," he's cooking slaving in the kitchen while Grandma fights an interstellar war. But I don't think it's supposed to be commentary. (God I hope it's not.) What it looked like, during that brief interval, was an old, unmaintained ride. That worries me.

Thankfully, everyone seemed to enjoy it, and the crowd left the Carousel singing. But I get the feeling that someone at Magic Kingdom is slacking on the job. The Carousel of Progress is not just any ride. It's the only ride in Orlando actually, physically touched by Walt Disney himself. (It was previously a Disneyland attraction, installed while Walt was still alive. It was transferred to Magic Kingdom in 1975.) It's like the T-Rex in a natural history museum—the most important attraction, even if it isn't technically the most important attraction. It must be maintained, preserved, protected. The Carousel of Progress embodies the Disney spirit. The Sherman Brothers described "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" as Walt's theme. I like that. I hope it was. It certainly represents everything I like about Disney Parks in general. It's the heart of Tomorrowland and the exemplar of the plaque above the entrance archway of the park: "Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy."

If Beijing Is Worried about Its Air Quality, Worry.

The front page of the New York Times today features an astonishing story about Beijing that begins: "Residents across this city awoke to an environmental state of emergency on Tuesday as poisonous air quality prompted the government to close schools, force motorists off the road and shut down factories." Abstractly, it is the kind of story you read, consider for a moment, and go about your day. "Smog," you think. "Just awful." Had I not visited Beijing last year, I'd have thought the same thing, and immediately forgotten about the problem. But having been there, I'm thunderstruck by how horrible things must actually be this week for the government to admit there's a problem, let alone close the city down.

Beijing is the kind of city where you're never more than ten minutes from a marvel of human history. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, Lama Temple, the Summer Palace—they all just seem so impossible, so immense, so stunning to behind and impossible, really, to comprehend. The city's parks are splendid, and the food and the vibe and the people—it's a terrible place to have to leave.

But the air pollution is scary. Not the way weepy environmentalists find everything not made of hemp to be scary, but scary in a humanity-cannot-survive-this sort of way. If you don't believe humans can be the cause of climate change, visit Beijing.

Nobody warned me about China's pollution problem in advance, and I'm not the sort of person who notices that kind of thing. When I close my eyes and visualize the word "pollution," I see a toxic waste dump (or what I imagine a toxic waste dump to look like), with barrels floating on a lake of sludge. Anything short of that tends to escape my attention. So upon arrival, I thought, "Wow, foggy day."

Within two days, my eyes were burning. It wasn't like seasonal allergies, where your brain acknowledges the discomfort, you complain a bit, and then go about your business. This was alarming on a visceral level. My eyes were burning simply because I was using them. And that deep part of your brain that knows when something is definitely Not Right was at red alert. Whatever was burning my eyes wasn't natural—wood on fire, say—but artificial and chemical, something that human beings did not evolve to handle.

It didn't ruin my trip, and I don't want to sound (too) apocalyptic about all of this, but it did give me a new appreciation for the urgency of addressing human environmental impact. At the top of this post is a photograph I took of the city that is representative of every photograph I took there. This is what Beijing looks like on a clear, sunny day, when nobody is particularly worried and the city government wants everyone to go about their business. I can only scarcely imagine how much worse things must be for them to panic.