She was the subject of an almost unfathomably ill-advised profile in that self-same magazine. I can understand why Callard would bubble in an intellectual ejection seat this way, and honestly I’m tempted to give this one a pass out of sympathy for her. Thus we return to the central plaint of modern culture writing - someone reminds me of myself in a discomfiting way. The essay becomes not really an invective against travel, but about a certain mindset towards travel, which you can rest assured the average New Yorker subscriber does not hold. And that too is all culture writing now: a simulacrum of provocation with an escape hatch through which an essay’s author and its fans can slither, if the pushback proves too fierce. But despite the fact that the piece is titled “The Case Against Travel,” it contains enough caveats and provisos and backdoors that, when it falls under criticism, its defenders will say “It’s not really a case against travel!” The headline is just how they get you to click, see. Like all culture writing now, including mine, it has no true object other than what it finds irritating in other people. It’s about Callard’s annoyance that other people find something transcendent in travel. To be concise: Agnes Callard’s recent New Yorker piece isn’t really about how travel is bad.
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