Hopscotch

🇦🇬 18 blissful days in Antigua & Barbuda 🇦🇬 June 6–23, 2025 🇦🇬

🇦🇬 Come for the beaches and diving 🏝 stay for the amazing hikes 👟 and walks on Antigua 🇦🇬

Antigua Hiking – Another Way to Get Away From It All Beyond The Beach When most people think about getting away from it all in Antigua and Barbuda, they think about beach

Antigua & Barbuda 🇦🇬 June 6–23, 2025 🇦🇬

"On the front lines of climate change, the archipelago of 365 islands may all be underwater by 2050. But there is hope. In Panamá, Guna Yala is an archipelago of 365 islands, 49 of which are home to 32,000 people. 🇵🇦

Panama’s Guna Yala is, in many ways, the antithesis of the glossy magazine version of a destination: The archipelago (formerly known as ) has no resort hotels, no cruise ships, no teens on jet skis.

Almost all the 32,000 people who live on its 49 inhabited islands (of 365 total) are , the first Indigenous community in to gain political autonomy exactly 100 years ago, in 1925. Beyond the polychromatic reefs and alabaster sands, the most Caribbean thing about Guna Yala may be the dilemma it faces in the fight against rising sea levels."

And the week-long trip I took by small boat between Colombia & Panamá over a decade ago, while hammock & tent camping on various islands, remains in the top 10 trips I've taken. 🇵🇦 🇨🇴

In Panama’s Guna Yala Archipelago, a Different Sort of Caribbean Vacation Awaits On the front lines of climate change, the archipelago of 365 islands may all be underwater by 2050. But there is hope.

Quintana Roo & Yucatán, México 🇲🇽 July 2025 🇲🇽 Isla Holbox, Valladolid, Playa del Carmen & Cozumel 🇲🇽

The students weren’t repelled by the media badge hanging from my neck—it seemed to impress them. But within 90 seconds, the knowledge that these youths and I inhabited unbridgeable realms of truth plunged me into a surprising sadness.

One level below, boredom waited—the deepest mood of American politics, disabling, nihilistic, more destructive than rage, the final response to an impasse that resists every effort of reason.

Identity is a pernicious form of political division, because its appeal is based on traits we don’t choose and can’t change. It’s inherently irrational, and therefore likely to lead to violence.

Identity politicians—and Trump is one—don’t win elections with arguments about ideas, or by presenting a vision of a world more attractive than their opponent’s. They win by appealing to the solidarity of group identity, which has to be mobilized by whipping up fear and hatred of other groups.

Unlike identities, ideas are open to persuasion, and persuasion depends on understanding and reaching other people.

But when partisanship itself becomes a group identity, dividing us into mutually unintelligible blocs with incompatible realities, then the stakes of every election are existential, and it becomes hard to live together in the same country without killing one another.

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George Packer’s massive reported feature on Phoenix, Arizona, the most American of cities starts with scorching weather. “New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing,” he writes, “but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.”

The piece turns out to go much deeper, into the politics that divide the country. A hugely impressive piece of journalism.

Very worth by George Packer in the latest edition of The Atlantic Magazine (or click to listen to audio version about 2.5 hours) 📖 No paywall. This article was a gift from an Atlantic subscriber.

What Will Become of American Civilization? Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city