Dynamist Blog

Has the Romance Gone Out of Travel?

El-Dorado.jpgIn an exchange that echoes some of the themes in my recent Atlantic column on airline glamour (link good for three days), two British writers square off in the Guardian's Observer section on the question of whether travel has lost its charm along with its hardships.

"The casual ease of travel now is a source of bewildered distress to my father's generation ('What do you mean, you're going to Bruges? For the weekend? On a whim? But you haven't even booked the ferry!')," writes Michael Bywater, who concludes "Travel is easy now. It is no longer exciting; so we have to bring our own excitement with us, in our luggage or our mind's happily deluded eye." Alexander Frater disagrees: "It is claimed too that travel has become self-delusional, that we only do it to make ourselves seem sexier, more glamorous and important. So what? All that matters is that it continues to lift the spirits and quicken the senses, and keep us alive to a world which, despite the state we've got it into, remains a place of astounding interest, beauty and variety. We're only here once, and I simply cannot understand why absolutely everyone isn't consumed by an unquenchable desire to get out there and see every last bit of it."

Since I travel constantly yet rarely leave the United States, I have none of these problems. I can go to Florence or Paris or London or Tokyo and still find plenty new to see--and those are places I've already been to at least once. At any rate, I suspect that The Guardian's audience is not as well traveled as they think they are. Outside the major cities in the United States, for instance, the only foreign tourists you usually find are Germans, who will go just about anywhere and rent RVs to do it. How many Guardian readers have driven through the desert Southwest or the Blue Ridge? And that's just the United States, which has modern conveniences and a more-or-less common language. Have they really explored all of India, China, and Brazil?

The shot above is from the Braniff archives at UT-Dallas. That's Ginger Rogers wearing the civilian clothes.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 15, 2007 • Comments

Kidney Blogging, Cont'd: Special MLK Edition

Kidney disease, which is often associated with diabetes, is an epidemic among black Americans. "We all know someone who needs kidneys," the Rev. Nelson "Fuzzy" Thompson, a local civil-rights activist, told Kansas City Star columnist Steve Penn after Thompson received a kidney from his goddaughter. He didn't say "we black people," but it's clear that's what he meant; relatively few white people know someone who needs kidneys, which may be one reason the system is so hard to reform. African Americans make up a third of the nearly 70,000 Americans on the waiting list for cadaver kidneys, even though they are less likely to be put on the transplant list than whites with kidney disease. (The reasons for the disparity are disputed.) Columnist Penn, whose brother received a kidney transplant, has used his column to encourage more blacks to become donors.

As legal scholar Michele Goodwin points out in her book Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts, opponents of incentives for organ donors often treat blacks only as potential victims of markets and never as beneficiaries--even though they would likely benefit most. And the ideology that says that the families of deceased donors should have no say over who gets their loved ones' organs discourages blacks to donate. Distrustful of the medical system for historical reasons Goodwin documents--Did you know that southern medical schools used to be known for teaching anatomy better than northern ones, because their suppliers could easily rob black graves to get cadavers?--many blacks indicate that they would be more likely to donate organs if they could be sure the parts would go to other blacks. That idea would horrify many ethicists, who hate the idea of race-conscious organ allocation, but it would benefit everyone on that humongous waiting list.

Meanwhile, as the NYT's Richard Pérez-Peña reports there are 350,000 Americans on dialysis, and those in New York State tend to fare worse than others. In an article that could have been headlined, "Anti-Corporate Bigotry Hurts Poor, Sick Blacks," he reports:

At New York dialysis centers, those being treated are more likely to suffer from anemia and are less likely to have enough impurities and excess fluid removed from their blood, allowing more damage to their bodies, according to the records.

Experts say the disparity is caused in part by the fact that New York is dominated by small dialysis providers, many of them run by people with little background in medicine who entered the business to meet the surging demand.

Many of the smaller centers provide good care, experts say, but a lot also lack the money and staff training to compete on a quality-of-care basis with the national dialysis chains that dominate the market across the rest of the country.

Newly released patient data show that people who receive their dialysis from a national chain generally fare better than those treated by an independent provider.

But the chains are largely blocked from operating in New York by a state law that effectively bars publicly traded companies from owning health care facilities in the state.

In a system that is terribly difficult to reform, fixing that law should be relatively simple--if only the beneficiaries weren't too sick and weak to campaign for reform.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 15, 2007 • Comments

When Bathrooms Become Spas

In an excellent Slate slideshow, Witold Rybczynski traces the evolution of the American bathroom to its current luxurious state. Reflecting a common equation, the headline writer mistitled the piece to suggest that today's fancy bathrooms are status symbols, when Rybczynski concludes otherwise: The trend is about pleasure--though it's easier to purchase that pleasure if you've got the dough (and, as I note in The Substance of Style, if the prices of marble and granite are falling).

The widespread consensus that marble is the pinnacle of bathroom aesthetics is tough on people like me, who far prefer ceramic tile in all its gorgeous incarnations. The pursuit of resale value says put in marble, while current consumption argues in favor of tile. So far, I've stuck to tile.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 11, 2007 • Comments

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