The Trip

New Orleans is so old, so fine, so big in the culture, and so vast in its disappointments and its triumphs, that it feels odd to mention just one side of the crescent kaleidoscope. But we have to call out one thing that has long attracted us to the city: New Orleans is like Disneyland for day-drinkers. In other cities, we sometimes have to apologize a bit for asking our guests to drink before sundown. When The Trip editor Tafi told this week’s guest, the food lawyer Pepper Bowen, that we were interested in a little midday hard alcohol, she wrote back immediately: “Sounds Festive!” That is our kind of lawyer, our kind of town. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is nothing more political, fascinating, uplifting, infuriating than school. The country we are as reflected in our education system is not always how we would like to think of ourselves. But the reflection is true. Take Nathan’s city of New York—last week the city’s best public school (Stuyvesant) sent out 895 acceptance letters for the class of 2023, but only 7 of those went to black students. SEVEN. In a school district where almost 70% of the students are black or Hispanic, it is outrageous. But it’s not just New York, it’s everywhere, including one of America’s greatest cities, New Orleans. A majority black city, that still failing its African-American students in some very important ways. The Trip is going to do three episodes from New Orleans, all with African-American guests—an artist, a lawyer, and a rocket scientist/BBQ pitmaster. It feels especially right to start this week in a school, talking with artist and author L. Kasimu Harris who has made education a centerpiece of his work in some ve

The morning after a wedding—any big party—is usually a little groggy. It’s not necessarily unpleasant, especially if it’s February in Thailand and the air is a little bit cool and very humid, and you’re kicking around in a quiet village along the Ping River with someone like Francis Lam. Francis, besides being a classically-trained chef, former New York Times columnist, lauded cookbook editor at Clarkson Potter, and host of The Splendid Table on American Public Media is also one of the truly good people in the world of food and letters. So, Nathan was pleased, not just to get some good stories from his time in Thailand, but also to be able to annoy the living shit out of him with one very trashy word—a portmanteau, really—near the end of the show. Nathan may not be an adversarial news magazine reporter any more, but it’s good to know that he can still piss an interview subject off for business or for pleasure. Episode 31 Show Notes: If you’re not already listening to Francis Lam’s weekly radio show, what are

The Trip host Nathan Thornburgh would not be the first person to admit to falling deeply, darkly in love with the markets of Southeast Asia. There’s just something about the slurry of exhaust, sticky air and stickier rice, knockoff Premier League kits, fresh fruit, and dried worms, wild lime leaves, mango hawkers, and sausage mongers. They hit you in all the senses. They imprint on your brain. And nobody has helped Nathan and countless others decode that imprint and make sense of those markets more than Naomi Duguid—a guide, savant, author, and all-around bridge from West to East. Naomi basically invented a deeply popular genre of book: the wandering, anthropological journalistic cookbook. With classics like Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Burma: Rivers of Flavor, and Taste of Persia. Of all the places she could have settled on Earth, she settled in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she lives half of the year. That’s why Nathan, oh so thirsty at the end of dry January, chose Naomi to help him break his fast with fermented s

In this week’s episode, you’ll hear the bird call of the Asian koel, but the real soundtrack of Bangkok is the internal combustion engine: the mopeds and the Mazda 2s. It’s a city of perpetual motion. Just be sure to look both ways before crossing. This is the first of three episodes we’ll be running from Thailand.We’re starting off with Tom Waller, a Thai-Irish filmmaker who took me for a classic Bangkok morning fix—roadside Thai iced tea—and chatted with Nathan at his home studio about a big film he’s making, The Cave. It’s the only Thai-led film in the works about the dramatic Tham Luang cave rescue in Chiang Rai. They talked about smog, tea, and filmmaking in the Kingdom of Thailand. Episode 29 Show Notes: The Last Executioner Mindfulness and Murder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shinji Nohara has been making good things happen for visitors to Tokyo for almost two decades—ever since a lanky camera-shy writer named Anthony Bourdain arrived with Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins to shoot their first television episode ever. Shinji was the fixer for that episode. First, he found out what Tony’s food-kinks were, and then he delivered those deepest desires in one single sizzling experience that, by Tony’s own admission, changed his life. That’s Shinji’s job, and nobody does it better than him. So of course, on a layover from Bangkok earlier this month, I asked Shinji to jury-rig two hours of wish fulfillment for me. In this case, it was a layup for the man: a bowl of Setagaya ramen, an extremely cold and fresh beer, and a deep conversation with Shinji in Haneda airport’s new terminal is, to be totally honest, my dream breakfast. Episode 28 Show Notes: A Cook’s Tour Kitchen Confidential Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast episode should have porn, right?” It’s an odd but necessary question to put to my old friend and former TIME Magazine colleague, Tokyo-based business journalist Toko Sekiguchi. But she’s a gamer, that Toko, and for this episode, falling close to Valentine’s Day, she’s taking us inside the world of Japanese Love Hotels. Toko and I have done this before, four years ago, while I was reporting for Matt Goulding’s book Rice, Noodle, Fish. But Japan is always in flux, and the infidelity industrial complex keeps on growing. So she and I are back. As a warning, just in case the last 26 episodes of this show haven’t made it clear: this is not appropriate content for children. Or even for spouses. Discretion advised. Episode 27 Show Notes: Rice, Noodle, Fish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chef, author and former human rights campaigner Yasmin Khan seems to have a mission statement very like our own at Roads & Kingdoms. That is, pay attention to what’s on the plate in a way that might spark some change and bring people together (and have a damned good time doing so). There aren’t many books that try to do all of that as gorgeously as Zaitoun, Yasmin’s new book about Palestinian cuisine. We met a while back at the Roads & Kingdoms office in Brooklyn as Yasmin somehow hacked a pretty decent Old Monk hot toddy from our office kitchen. Her book Zaitoun is out this week in the United States, and we’re a better country for it. Episode 26 Show Notes: Yasmin's gorgeous cookbooks Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen The Roads & Kingdoms Perfect Dish series with Anthony Bourdain and Yasmin Khan: Perfect Dish Okinawa Perfect Dish Tokyo From the closing notes Midnight in Chernobyl: The Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Iranian-American Jason Rezaian, native of Marin County, was just trying to report on the daily lives and hopes of the people of Tehran. But as his gripping new book Prisoner details, he instead ended up in the notorious Evin Prison, a chess piece in an international showdown between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. He sat down with host Nathan Thornburgh over classic Cokes and talked about the day he and his wife were arrested, what he thinks of his captors, and his stubborn hopes for Iranian society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You’ve seen this man's illustrations on the cover of TIME magazine or Der Spiegel, or on signs wherever the Trump-phobic meet and rally. His depictions of the 45th president as an ISIS executioner, a klansman, or just a melting orange mess do exactly what he intended. They provoke, they inform, they communicate the loud perils of our moment, wordlessly. When host Nathan Thornburgh started The Trip podcast with Anthony Bourdain a year ago, he knew exactly who he wanted to get to design our logo: Edel Rodriguez. Edel joined Nathan in The Trip’s Brooklyn studio to drink a bunch of bullshit coconut waters, and to talk about how his childhood in Cuba prepared him for becoming as Fast Company has called him, the Illustrator-in-Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Not all revolutionaries wear bandoliers full of bullets. Some of them tend beautiful little gardens next to a wooden cottage they built in a neighborhood called Dandelion. That’s the kind of revolutionary that Tanja Fox is. Tanja has spent her entire life living a little bit differently, in one of the world’s most fascinating districts, the commune of Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark. As a social experiment Christiania has been remarkably resilient, a bit of squatted military base turned hippie utopia that has lasted more or less independently almost 47 years now. As you’ll hear in this episode, is under threat like never before, from the twin menaces of a hardcore narcotics trade and, increasingly, mass tourism. Tanja and Nathan sat in Tanja’s house last spring, while birds plucked from a Disney film serenaded them, and talked about how to live your politics in one of the world’s great, complicated social experiments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of host Nathan Thornburgh’s New Year’s resolutions is to stop just stepping past all the human misery in New York City and actually think about helping. But how? Jennifer Ching might know. She’s an immigrant, a Harvard grad, a lawyer, and now the executive director of North Star Fund, a community foundation that focuses not on just giving money, but also giving power, to the oppressed and the underserved of New York. She and Nathan drink Flor y Machete herbal tea (from an activist herbal collective of course) and talked about the joy of pushing for longterm systemic change in an era of fresh daily outrages. Read more about North Star fund, and goddamnit just donate if you can. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For 25 years, photographer Yuri Kozyrev covered conflicts from Afghanistan to Chechnya, Iraq, Libya and beyond. His combination of frontline fearlessness and human compassion won him the highest awards in his industry. And then, he chose to stop covering war. He talked in Moscow with host Nathan Thornburgh, who worked alongside Kozyrev throughout Russia and the Caucasus while they were both at TIME Magazine. They talked about the late great Stanley Greene, about traveling with mujahedin, and about why it was hard to quit war for good. For more from this extraordinary journalist, see a glimpse of Arctic: New Frontier, a project supported by the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, which funds investigative work on human rights violations, geostrategic and environmental issues around the world. Or check out Yuri's work on returning ISIS widows in Chechnya for Roads & Kingdoms. Or, alternately, watch a 2008 TIME Magazine roadtrip video from Russia with Thornburgh and Kozyrev while reporting on Putin's Person of th

Matt Orlando has worked at some of the great restaurants on this planet. Per Se in New York; The Fat Duck in the UK; Noma in Copenhagen, where he was head chef under Rene Redzepi. But it wasn’t until he opened his restaurant Amass—and looked in his own dumpster—that he found his true calling. As you’ll hear in this episode, his vision for a zero-waste restaurant is idealistic, inspiring, and is somehow also super delicious. Host Nathan Thornburgh sat down with him in Galway—the last of The Trip guests from Food on the Edge this fall—at a very early hour and drank instant coffee with him. Because, you know, world-class chefs demand a hot cup of Bewley’s coffee crystals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Journalist Michael Snyder writes about food, conflict, the environment, and fishing. That slurry of interests brought him to the Bolivian Amazon for an investigation into the invasive Paiche, a hulking, invasive fish that is destroying old ecosystems and building new economies. In this episode, host Nathan Thornburgh talks with Michael about the resulting Roads & Kingdoms feature Invasion of a River Fish, and they get to the important business of both insulting the fish's intelligence and explaining how it ended up for sale in your local Whole Foods. Read the condensed transcript of the conversation on Roads & Kingdoms  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This year's Emmy Awards were a big night for the people who worked with Anthony Bourdain, with Emmys going to Roads & Kingdoms, Zero Point Zero, and—for his own brilliant show—to W. Kamau Bell, who had traveled to Kenya with Bourdain for a recent episode of Parts Unknown. They are two very different hosts with very different shows, but they shared a common drive to make important television that is entertaining as hell. Bell talked through all this with Nathan Thornburgh while sipping on an arsenal of Japanese energy drinks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the great shortcomings of northern Europe—an otherwise pleasant place with soft sunsets and universal healthcare—has always been the utter lack of quality Mexican food. Rosio Sanchez, a celebrated restaurateur and chef from Chicago who has worked at some of the best restaurants on earth, is changing that. She talked with Nathan about living in Copenhagen, cooking fjord shrimp in salsa diabla, and what authenticity means to her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dan "the Automator" Nakamura is one of the great music producers of our time. Someone who, like Brian Eno or Phil Spector, changed the sound of an entire decade. The fact that he did it as an Asian-American breaking into hiphop way back in the early 90s, well, there's a story. Automator mixed some excellent negronis at his studio in San Francisco and talked with Nathan about his unlikely path to hiphop immortality and why he's owning his Asian-American identity now more than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shannon Martinez is the chef behind the famed Smith & Daughters vegan restaurant in Melbourne, Australia. After soiling a couple Bloody Marys with Ireland's cheapest vodka (Huzzar!), Shannon and host Nathan Thornburgh talk about everything from meat-free pub fare to sharpie skinhead diets and why vegans just want to get drunk and screw like the rest of us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michelin-starred chef and author JP McMahon talks with host Nathan Thornburgh on the eve of his annual Food on the Edge conference in Galway, Ireland. Topics include Dingle Gin, Anthony Bourdain, and why McMahon left his kids at the bar with his credit card. Also on the conversational menu: pickled heron, swan pie and other delicious cruelties of yore.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices