An Imperial Birthday

Perhaps I should give it another try, but Revolutionary Era America has never been high on my list of times in history that intrigue me, nor that I find particularly instructive to our present moment. The extent to which commentators of all political stripes try to harness the Founders for contemporary purposes, or to which modern jurisprudence is grounded in that era, do not, I think, do us many favors in our attempts to construct a just or opportunity-driven society. The more one digs into it, the more the Revolution feels like a sideshow of squabbles among small-colony elites in a far greater drama from which the putative loser of that struggle, the British Empire, rose to an unprecedented position of dominance over the globe that it would hold for the next century-plus.

No, the best way to understand America remains a road trip across it in the here and now, to see all its different corners and glories and complicated stories. The sheer size and scale of this country, even in a digital age, will always render its project somewhat imperial. I don’t use that phrase pejoratively; I just mean that it is going to have to accommodate a ton of different people, and that it will always be hard to govern in a communal, more parliamentary manner. To the extent that history can be a guide I am more drawn to tales of empire: Rome and Byzantium and Britain, and at the more local level I will always cast my lot with the Greeks. But I also think there are limits to the benefits of historical knowledge in a very different world, too.

After 250 years, I will submit that the United States’ triumphs are real. Its political origins were at the front end of a global wave, ideas that then trickled across the pond and southward to Latin America and eventually filtered into institutions we Americans imposed on the world when we supplanted the British for good after World War II. I don’t have a ton of use for hagiography of the US Constitution or political system, but they were achievements for their time. Some aspects have aged well, others less well, but none of them unrescuable, and I will forever acknowledge my incredible good fortune to be born in the time and the place that I was. Much of how we wound up here are products of geography and wealth and the exercise of raw power, but some of it was visionary and shrewd decision-making, sometimes very admirable.

I will not be saying anything new when I claim that the foundations of American exceptionalism are in its engine of growth and hunger, and in the belief in new beginnings inherent in its early colonization. From the conquest of the frontier to space age pursuit to Silicon Valley’s present rush into the virtual future, the US sets a frenetic pace, less constrained by trappings of culture and tradition than anywhere else. The drawbacks of some of these rushes forward are well-documented: the extermination and subjugation of people who already lived on that frontier, the vacuousness of consumer culture, the anti-human profit hunger of some people on the cutting edge of the technological arms race. But to it we owe incredible material wealth and comfort.

Like any great power the United States has behaved venally and exercised its might, sometimes with great consequences. What has made it at times exceptional was the range of its vision, and the humanity with which it pursued some of these goals; the Marshall Plan and some Cold War era artifacts like the Peace Corps and foreign aid played a longer, more careful game, one that understood that careful long-term foundations could produce far more peace and stability than endless crude power politics, at the same time creating new markets for export and isolating geopolitical rivals. These strategies were often self-interested and carried certain excesses, but in the sweep of human history, they are a high point of hegemonic leadership. The great power peace and rampant acceleration out of poverty enjoyed by billions since 1950 are direct products of that vision.

The US is now drifting out of that role. Shortsighted politics is a key part of that story, but like the British in their late imperial phase, American overextension is real, and the long-term fiscal picture makes the same footprint hard to sustain. Trump Era America simultaneously knows this but wants to maintain the illusion, and uses its characteristic spectacle to try to achieve it cheaply, sometimes to dramatic effect (Venezuela) and sometimes disastrously (Iran). But the Biden Administration’s fumbling Afghanistan withdrawal and attempts to say America was back and unchanged on the world stage were much in the same vein. As it enters its next 250 years, the renegotiation of the imperial footprint is one of the two great questions looming over the United States.

I say renegotiation because, for as petty and miserable as its politics have grown, the US colossus looks firm in its absolute position. Europe is comfortable and beautiful but has lapsed backward economically, in need of at least some reinvigoration lest it drift into a senescent old age and see its incredible cultural wealth and diversity fade into mere kitsch. Developed East Asia faces similar pressures, likely even more to the extreme. China is of course the great rising power, theoretically capable of displacing the US with its remarkable trajectory post-Mao, but its demographic time bomb is real and its over-engineered culture runs greater risks than America’s legalistic one; moreover, Chinese civilization’s global pretensions have never matched the totalizing beliefs of the West, to which we Americans are heirs. Russia is an impoverished imperial rump, armed and dangerous but a model to no one. India is interesting, but still has a long way to go. The Middle East, as the Iran War has brought home, remains a bloody basket case, even behind the veneer of Dubaian towers and Saudi scheming. Africa has demographics on its side but little else. Latin America nestles somewhere between all of these worlds, with no claims to much beyond its shores. Someone has got to guide the rule-setting in an anarchic system, and it might as well be us.

There are a few different ways this renegotiation could go. The British, for example, managed a retreat from empire with little loss of their own lives and a national myth largely intact. The impact of that retreat on the nations they left is much less consistent (ask the Indians and Pakistanis about that partition), and we could argue about the extent to which Britain’s increasing ungovernability today is downstream of that imperial fade. But reorientation with dignity is possible, especially when there are allies who understand the stakes and adjust accordingly, as the Americans did with their erstwhile colonialists. Further back in history there are the Habsburgs, brilliant balancers of power for centuries. There is the example of Byzantium, the Roman successor who, while diminished, remained the golden center of the West for another thousand years, and the mythical ideal for Europe for centuries after that. And if things go badly awry there is the model of St. Benedict and the retreat from the worst of a fallen world into intentional communities, there to preserve knowledge and carry something forward on into modernity. I list these examples not as prescriptions, but as pathways of understanding on how things can go.

The second great question facing the United States is one of national identity. The US has done as well as anywhere at integrating a sweeping range of immigrants into a loose national culture, and even haltingly coming to terms with its two great early sins, slavery and the annihilation of Native Nations. In this, the US once again better resembles some empires of old, which had to tolerate a certain level of cultural diversity and decentralization because they were so sprawling and contained so many peoples, and periodically tore down the statues of the old gods and replaced them with new, more useful ones. This stands in stark contrast to the nationalist bloodbaths that consumed Europe between the Napoleonic Era and the Second World War (and in some places beyond), an impulse that turned catastrophically destructive when the hunger for national glory blurred with designs of old-school imperial growth, whether in Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. We see a version of this hunger now bubbling on the American right, though lacking obvious pathways outside of niche Greenland fantasies.

The integrationist impulse is under direct attack now from a right that wishes very dearly that the US had a more coherent, rooted sense of self; one that could somehow encompass 350 million people from very different places and of very different origins that somehow also does not settle for the lowest common denominator of 20th century mass culture. It has also taken some blows from a left on a doomed quest to throw out any sense of American history as tainted; a more moderate left couches the US’s role strictly in the realm of noble but somewhat airy ideals, as if rootedness in place and time is an abstraction we can wave away. A few things are simultaneously true: immigration has been a powerful force for American innovation and dynamism, a through-line of new energy. But shared culture is the secret to the success of the strong state (including, and perhaps especially, a welfare state), and beyond a certain level of immigration, there is a regular and extreme backlash that makes such cultural cohesion hard to attain. At the policy level, it requires a balancing act that satisfies few people with strongly held ideas about nationhood or human rights.

Even in an era of optimized algorithms, the US’s size and built-in variety make reproducing a true national culture here a tall order. It is no wonder that American culture so often reduces itself to what can feel like an empty consumerism and commitment to a relentless economic engine: it’s the only thing big enough to bind it all. As a localist who accepts the reality of empire, I do not necessarily mourn this weakness of national unity. It gives us good reason to double down on the more local and tangible, and it lets the rich variety of this country come out. But it does bake in an inherent tension between the rooted hunger for community and the crusading desire for universals baked into the American founding project, twin strands visible anywhere on the political spectrum. The centralizing forces, especially in an increasingly less physical world, threaten to overrun the unique pockets that are at the true heart of the American mythos.

So I once again urge: step out of the imagined community and appreciate the reality on the ground. Immerse yourself; see the great spaces of the West and the immigrant neighborhoods of a global city, the endlessly reinventing metropolises and the struggle for a renewal in an old industrial or agricultural town. Appreciate the commonalities, respect the differences and why they came to be. See us as the empire we are, great and sprawling and flawed. At 250, we are neither a melting pot nor a salad bowl but instead float in a soup. It contains many ingredients all bathed in a general broth, some flavors coming out stronger in certain bites but none coming to dominate the whole meal.

It seems appropriate to see a World Cup played on American shores at time of the Semiquincentennial. Of course the US team’s performance was the same as it ever was, generating irrational hype with victories over such powers as Bosnia and Herzegovina before succumbing when faced with a halfway respectable opponent. (Emphasis on the halfway.) From visa trouble to an overturned red card, the bluntness of American power has been on display. But this is, largely, a pageant that gets past the dumb geopolitics and FIFA corruption. Some of the greatest fun has been in seeing foreigners marvel at such American wonders as air conditioning and Buc-ee’s and parking lots larger than some European micro-states. A love affair grew between Boston and the Scottish masses that descended upon it, and between a Lawrence, Kansas and the Algerians who set up their team camp there. Here is Lionel Messi in an SEC football stadium, uniting the two most rabid fan bases in sports; there is Erling Haaland, the Norwegian cheat code of a striker, trying on a cowboy hat. Amid it all one can still see a sense of how the United States can still be a benevolent hegemon, and of how people from everywhere can find a home here, if only for a little while. The empire’s reach is long, but its touch can still be light.

Return to Adams Lake

I. The Struggle Itself

On a clifftop campsite above Malberg Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota, the western painted turtles have staked out their maternity ward. They climb some twenty-plus feet along a slope of loose dirt and rounded rock to dig holes and lay their eggs. They plod up slowly, their stubby limbs seemingly inadequate to the task. Their eyesight doesn’t appear much help either, as they fumble over the same stretches of rock and take brainless routes along the site. The holes they dig are all on the same small stretches of dirt in the center of a campsite that gets decent use, which doesn’t seem like a good way to keep one’s offspring from disruption. Humans in the campsite draw their wary eye; get too close and they will hustle into the underbrush as quickly as a turtle can. But they persist. Duty complete, they then poke about in an equally agonizing search for a descent, shuffling partway down the cliff before usually then falling five feet or so, at which point they find their legs again and drop back into the narrow arm of lake at the base of the camp.

The whole operation seems questionable at best. But can this many turtles all be wrong? My dad witnessed the same ritual at this site years ago, with several making their march upward each night. Something must be working. The Sisyphean turtles of Malberg Lake continue to roll on up the hill, fulfill their need to seed a new generation, and head back down, mission accomplished. We must imagine the turtles happy.

II. The Return

My dad and I have had Adams Lake on our minds for a few years now. We paddled through it on a day trip when base camped south of here on Malberg in 2021; we knew we needed to return. An overambitious attempt to reach it from a different direction last fall came up well short. This summer, we make it.

We spend two nights on a small island at the heart of Adams. This site is everything a BWCA camp should be: a cozy kitchen surrounded by cedars, giant sitting rocks with wide-open views, ample space for tents and hammocks, the right balance of shade and sun, tucked-away corners and views out to the lake beyond. Nothing notable occurs during our time here, no weather events or camp surprises or turtle invasion. We do a short day paddle, scope out the other sites, go in search of the portage on to even more remote Boulder Lake and encounter only an uninterrupted stretch of swamp. The cliff-lined northwest arm toward Smite Lake is beautiful in repose; it’s a shame the campsites back here have nothing on our island. In the days after our return from the wilderness, those 40 hours on Adams feel like something out of a half-remembered dream, a state at remove from all the rest.

The whole world outside fades away. Time becomes irrelevant. On Adams there are no notifications save whatever signs the clouds hold for the weather, our only memorable company some heckling angry birds. Two canoes glimpsed in the distance inspire speculation not unlike Robinson Crusoe’s when he encountered one human footprint. We see no one else on the lake.

Everyone should feel this release from time to time. It is a gift to drift, to see so much of import fall away. Hunger grows; what time is it? It doesn’t really matter, you decide if it’s time for a meal. It gets a bit cool, rocking in a hammock in the breeze: what temperature is it? It doesn’t really matter, adapt as you see fit. End the slavery to the external signals and live as you choose, if only for a little while. Read, write, just zone out: follow your compunction, attain your own state.

III. Wilderness Companions

The loon is the icon of northern Minnesota lakes, but on this trip they are shy and reclusive, offering only occasional haunting calls from a distance. The kings of this stretch of the BWCA are instead the white-throated sparrows trading their call-and-response songs, the east coast classicists with their rising two-note cadences and the west coast cool kids with their descending three-note reply. Ducks shoot up the arm of Malberg Lake with their metronomic quacks. Swans cruise regally, their cygnet charges kept behind them, their necks bobbing at the sight of an intruding canoe. A discordant honk comes out when they open their beaks. The geese are also escorting their young, hiding them away. Bald eagles soar past, sometimes escorted by grumpy tiny birds. On one swampy, beaver dam-bedeviled stretch of the Kawishiwi River, red-winged blackbirds rule the roost. On the island on Adams, dark birds hidden in the trees squawk in anger every time someone ventures back to the latrine. The BWCA is known for its larger fauna: bears raiding food supplies, moose lurking in marshes, perhaps a distant howling wolf. But the feathered inhabitants are the ones whose imprint is most felt.

There are two others who rise to the top. The first is especially irksome on routes that feature rivers: the ever-industrious beavers. They build dams here and there, forcing awkward rammings or pullovers, and in some cases outright portages. From the site on Malberg we watch nature’s engineers swim back and forth, off to frustrate some future canoers. On a landscape with a light human touch, the beavers remake things more than anyone.

The second, of course, is the mosquito. The winged terrors of watery wilderness everywhere make nightfall in the BWCA a ticking time bomb. At some point after the sun sinks, they emerge. As I settle into my tent, over one hundred may be buzzing between its mesh and the rain fly. Next time, I muse, I should keep a tally on my total mosquito slaughter, though the count quickly blurs. Even in a paradise, blood gets sucked.

IV. Return from Return

The journey toward Adams, even a few days on, has faded into a gentle blur. The return trip is somewhat more eventful. Unshackled from the clock, we rise by the sun and complete a day’s journey at an absurdly early hour. Happily, the beaver pond that had made one portage a miserable slog five years ago has drained. We stop at the same site on Malberg again, watch another turtle at work. Some rumbles of thunder drive us to take shelter on a stretch of shoreline on Lake Polly. Our journey is slowed, but the threatened cloudburst does not come, and I am strangely pleased by this opportunity to disappear into a patch of virgin forest covered in cushions of moss so thick that I think I could curl up and fall asleep here. Any harbor in a storm, but sometimes those least expected harbors are most accommodating.

Further south, after deeming several campsites mediocre for hanging the tarp we anticipate will be necessary and one uninhabitable under the pain of death on account of a biblical plague of mosquitoes, we set up on Kawishiwi Lake. The lake takes on a tinge of eerie liquid gold, the monster clouds open up, and a deluge pours forth. We spend two hours under the aforementioned tarp, but the blasting southward wind that carries on well into the night is perhaps more worrying, testing the limits of a sleeping hammock and making us wonder just how the return journey to the landing could go if it doesn’t settle down. It only does so late at night, after another cloudburst and amid rising heat. But the next morning dawns still and comfortable, and it is an easy weave through the islands of Kawishiwi back to the landing before the heat of day rises.

V. Eternal Return

Are ventures like these an escape? In part, but I am not an escapist; if that were the goal, a bottle or a bong would provide a much easier course than muddy and mosquito-filled portages. Are they mental resets? Yes, certainly, but our reasons for entering the wilderness are not merely instrumental.

Instead, they provide immersion. Everything is tangible, real, embodied and felt directly rather than in transmitted vibes. One might argue this is a reveal of human nature, humans in nature released from external pressures, beings-in-the-world. We could take this to an existential level, if we please: Heidegger called this Dasein, an authentic embodiment of a life force, consciousness of one’s own self within the world and standing athwart the unthinking drift of the self into something imposed from vague outside forces.

One of the more heartening things I’ve read recently is how easily, when deprived of their phones, kids slip back into the streams in which homo sapiens has swum for most of its existence. On day one I glance through a few old pictures, the compulsive phone swipe inescapable. But by day two, I am forgetting where I have left my phone. There are no ephemeral emails, no doomscrolling through distant news, no pictures against which to compare. This just are as they are. It’s not that I forget the outside; I wonder what friends and family are doing, what’s happening in the World Cup or baseball, and as with any boy a few lusts will flit in and out. But that all can wait for its proper time and place.

I’ve never been accused of being a free spirit, nor do I want to be a hermit. But I do want to be around people who fight some version of the same fight, who immerse themselves fully and know the liberation that comes from an escape from linear time and dabble on the edges of that mythical age, what Mircea Eliade called the eternal return. The call to wilderness comes, perhaps now more urgent than ever. Dip your feet in and remember that world of your youth, when the immediate was everything. So it can be again, if you wish it.

28

As I watched the cars crossing the Galata Bridge, the back neighborhoods where a few wooden houses still stood, the narrow streets, the crowds heading to a soccer match, or the thin-funneled tugboat pulling coal barges down the Bosphorus, I’d listen to my father’s wise voice telling me how important it was that people followed their own instincts and passions; that actually life was very short; and that also it was a good thing if a person knew what he wanted to do in life—that, in fact, a person who spent his life writing, drawing, and painting could enjoy a deeper, richer life—and as I drank in his words, they would blend in with the things I was seeing.

Before long, the music, the views rushing past the window, my father’s voice (“Shall we turn in here?” he’d ask), and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway, that true happiness and meaning resided in places we would never find and perhaps did not wish to find, but—whether we were pursuing the answers or merely pleasure and emotional depth—the pursuit mattered no less than the attainment, the asking as important as the views we saw through the windows of the car, the house, the ferry. With time, life—like music, art, and stories—would rise and fall, eventually to end, but even years later those stories are with us still, in the city views that flow before our eyes, like memories plucked from dreams.

–Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Happy 28th, little bro.

May 2026 Reading

For a while on here, I ran a series where I would collect interesting articles that I had read in recent weeks. It faded into oblivion a few years back, but, after a spurt of inspiration this past week, it has returned, at least for today.

I was first driven to write something because I wanted to memorialize the late John Sterling, the longtime voice of the New York Yankees and also of countless childhood summer nights. I don’t have much more to add that I didn’t write upon his retirement from the booth a couple of seasons ago, but the sentiment came over me deeply again as the Yankees trotted out their memorials to a man who lived his dream.

Why did Sterling have that effect? While Ross Douthat grew up on the wrong side of baseball’s greatest rivalry, he right about the rituals of baseball allegiance in a recent New York Times op-ed, especially for a child of a more information-scarce era where checking the box scores in the newspaper every morning was a required rite. Unlike Douthat, my faith is still intact, perhaps because my loyalty was never dependent on sad underdog status (even the Yankees’ recent state, one of imperial decline, is never boring), but also probably because I do not have five children. And so I maintain my rituals, whether as committed viewing or casual background noise as I go about my evening business, and this year may or may not be coordinating my social calendar somewhat around the starts of budding legend Cam Schlittler.

In other worlds, love my alma mater dearly, but there is one college I do somewhat regret applying not applying to back when I was going through that cycle: Deep Springs College in the California desert. This may not have gone well for the 140-pound pencil I was as an 18-year-old (in fact the threat of manual labor is probably why I didn’t apply), but Deep Springs’ mission inspires a sense of deep rightness within me. Michal Leibowitz recently wrote in the Times to remind us of its lessons, its ever-more-valuable ethos, especially in an era of much self-doubt in higher education.

I am glad the likes of Deep Springs exist to remind mainstream culture what it is missing. I am also glad, though, that it is as small as it is. I am not against experimental colleges or homeschooling or classical academies; they can provide useful reminders of what matters. But I am also well aware that the vast majority of the country will never get to experience them, and I would not necessarily sign up my hypothetical children for them unless they are very, very particular. This may just be the public school kid in me coming out, but I want the mainstream to learn from these prophets in the wilderness. We cannot all be them, but we can all be a little more like them.

Also, I apparently last opened the document where I started this series of article collections in 2022, and in it I had saved this article by Josh Barro on the day he decided to get married. I still like it, so I am sharing it. As a person who is reasonably happy, there is no shame in being happy, even if the present happiness is not the end goal. Revel in it every day and find that resonance, just like the students at Deep Springs.

What Duluth Can Teach the World

Today I write about the gifts my city can provide to this present moment. I am not writing about a political program or an economy or even necessarily confining myself to the city’s boundaries; there is some inherent blurriness on the edges. I am instead talking about a culture, a life that is possible here, and the general sentiments invoked by the very name Duluth.

For this enterprise, I am using the imprecise tool of the English language to capture the feeling of a place. None of these things on their own are truly remarkable; many cities share some of these traits. But few, if any, share all of them. Duluth is within American culture and Minnesotan culture and probably a dozen other regional monikers, all of which find a harbor here on the westernmost end of the Great Lakes. I’m not arguing that Duluthians have made any remarkable insights, but rather that the mix of things that come together in their city offer something interesting.

I am also spelling out an ideal. Obviously there are regular moments when Duluth and its people fall short, just as there are with any place. I recognize others may also have very different associations with Duluth, some rather less positive. This piece is certainly not an argument that the entire country should copy Duluth’s choices, or that its ways of life are for everyone. But I think I am getting at a core here, and I highlight the things I do because I think some of Duluth’s sharper edges have something to say to the rest of the country.

Duluth’s distinctive culture stems from its deep, intense rootedness. Visually, it is the Midwest’s most striking city, and its relative isolation and memorable weather set it apart from any easy comparison town. This place works its way into people for life, no matter how far they travel. Many fall in love with it, a few define themselves against it, others move on but look back wistfully. People who are from Duluth will always be from Duluth.

I will not sugarcoat it: rootedness can mean sacrifice. It limits options, from career advancement to the dating pool to some of the luxuries of life available at more urban (or rural) scales. I understand why some people do not want to make Duluth’s potential sacrifices and pursue other paths. But to have the conviction to choose, and then believe in that choice, can overpower an awful lot of existential uncertainty. People who have chosen Duluth have chosen something more than a city that someone chooses for a job or a school district or because it happened to have the right house. They have, consciously or unconsciously, slipped into a stream that will carry them in certain clear directions in life.

My list of what Duluth can teach isn’t exhaustive, but here, perhaps, is a start.

Duluth teaches respect for forces beyond. Duluthians get regular reminders that they are not in control, and that they cannot bend nature to their wills. There will be days when it is twenty below, or when the incoming snow makes travel nearly impossible. There will be gale-force winds and days of awesome fury on the lake. There are also just days of monotonous grey and fog. The woods are at hand, and they contain secrets, require some sense and preparation from people who explore them. Duluthians know these vagaries of nature are part of life, and while they are not above grumbling here and there, they know what a gift it is to have a day of absolute beauty, whether a still winter morning or among golden autumn leaves or a glistening day of summer sun and Lake Superior-provided air conditioning, will come. (I still have nothing nice to say about spring here.)

Those forces affect the city’s growth and economy, too. Rock and water constrain development, and will keep Duluth from ever booming the way some Midwestern small cities on the flatlands have, though they also should not be excuses for raising up the lift bridge against incoming traffic and locking this city in as it is. Instead, Duluthians can adapt to these natural challenges, build in ways that respect or even take advantage of them, but their lives will always be defined by them. In a city like this, it is hard to forget that in the long run, nature always wins.

Duluth invites reflection. The easy access to nature simplifies the context shifts that help to strip away thoughts that cloud the mind. No matter how grumpy or down I may be in any given moment, I am a short walk or run away from a good mood. This built-in reflection makes it easier to hone certain disciplines, to think of inward turns not as retreat but instead as pauses that renew and refine beliefs. I do not believe that simply walking into the woods can solve all mental ills, but it certainly creates more conditions to do so than sitting in traffic on a ten-lane freeway does.

Duluth spurs a human pace. So often I see friends in other cities, exhausted or run down by frantic work paces or the panicked need to choose the right school or neighborhood or otherwise trapped in a doom loop of achievement for its own sake and I just think, “you need a little Duluth in your life.” These attitudes exist here too, of course, but they are tempered somewhat by less glaring extremes and a sense of remove from the starkest national divides. It’s easier to remember how small all of these concerns are and turn off that striving upper middle class anxiety brain that has become the assumed default mode in so much of American media. While I have spent much of my life in or around that milieu, I am very happy to live among salt of the earth northern Minnesotans who help put things in perspective.

A Duluth life is an active life. Duluth is a city of outdoor recreation, lending itself to easy walks, runs, skis, skates, paddles, rides, or other forms of movement that keep people going. Getting outside and touching grass comes naturally here, and some version of the free-range childhood (or adulthood!) lamented as lost in other parts of the country still exists to some degree in Duluth’s parks and streets. I want that life, and I want it for future generations. Since I moved back here ten years ago, I have (somewhat improbably, for people who knew an earlier version of me) become a workout machine, doing something nearly every day, taking advantage of both Duluth’s recreational bounty and the free time I enjoy because my working life is at some remove from the all-consuming achievement machine in some sectors of the economy.

Duluth is on the trailing edge. No one would accuse Duluthians of being the first adopters of new technology; at times there is a skepticism of change or creative ideas that, more than any of the other items listed here, drives me nuts. But, when I step back and look at the grand sweep of things, I think that reticence is generally a healthy thing. Duluth is a place where people have time to stop and think about how to use tools well instead of adopting them blindly, to make sure we are putting them to our service instead of letting them dictate how we spend our time and money. This city may not be where the thrilling innovations are always happening, but it may have something to tell people who are always trying to optimize and integrate every technical tool they can but still can’t figure out why those tools don’t consistently make life better.

Duluth rises from ruins. Just as Duluth commands respect for the natural world, it commands respect for human struggle and failure, and it gives opportunities to rise up from it. The 1980s economic collapse and Duluth’s subsequent reinvention is the largest scale and most recent telling of this story. But there are many others: a resurgent local Native American population, a city willing to acknowledge and memorialize a lynching before any other in the country, even something as simple as the collegiality among neighbors after any blizzard. Duluth has conditioned me to enjoy visiting other cities and countries with deep and sometimes fraught histories, not because I see them as monuments to disaster or guilt but because I think they tell far more interesting stories of human achievement during and after our darker moments. Humans fail and do horrible things. But Duluthians go on, remember and rebuild, and can, with time and effort, write stories of triumph.

And, finally, Duluth has fun. This is not some staid retreat center: Duluthians get to live in a place where other people go to have fun, and someone who fully revels in it will, well, have a lot of fun. Its early years had some Wild West moments as it boomed and saw the arrival of sailors from all over, and it was ahead of the curve in building breweries. It is a college town, and that provides some life; its arts scene punches above its weight. I appreciate that Duluthians don’t usually go full-on into the culture of endless self-optimization and can enjoy a good time. Turn off the stupid trackers and go enjoy that precious summer day on the beach.

Europe 2026, Part VII: Split Wisdom

This is the seventh and final post in a series that began here.

I head home via Dublin, with a pause long enough only for a single Guinness. Two weeks of solo travel is enough, and I am ready to be back among my people, enjoy shared meals and more robust conversation in my own language. But as my flight soars over Greenland, provides that God’s-eye view of its snow-capped peaks and fjords, I find a powerful release, that sense of being carried to an unknown realm. I will never lose my hunger for the world, in part because there will always be somewhere to go next.

After two weeks away I am happy to head home, toward a land where public bathrooms are free and the showers are not higher than the bathroom floor and where people actually believe in regular hydration. I am ready to stick to a single currency after revolving through lira and forints and korunas and euros. On the flip side, I will miss truly walkable downtowns and regular trains and people who are not degenerates enjoying open containers. The Europeans do leisure so much better than always-hustling Americans, make it a part of life rather than some sporadic eruptions of excess and self-care. A vacation in Europe, while itself a burst out in that tradition, makes it so much easier to internalize a pace, to recognize different possibilities for how to live.

My agenda over these two weeks underscored split identities. Istanbul is a living monument to the pulls between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, while Budapest finds itself in a tension between Europe and governance styles further east. Vienna strives to protect a cultural inheritance in a world with outside pressures; in a distinct way, so does Prague. Berlin was torn apart by calamitous conflict and now builds back, at once trying to remember and move forward. As someone who so often feels these different pulls, I am at home in these borderlands and tension-filled phases. I am split between a love for home and hunger for the world, a desire to stay in and write and a thirst to close down the party, to class it up at the opera or belly up to a basement bar, to draw strength from both reason and faith, to restore myself in both moments of solitude and by feeding off others’ energy. Over time I have learned to sit in this blurry zone, even revel in it, knowing a full life can have it all.

Traveling in Europe is an immersion in history, something that Americans like me, raised in a city where “old” means 1920 and cut off from drama by two great oceans, know only marginally. It is also a cautionary tale against wanting too much such history: Europe’s past is a story of a thousand tragedies, some of the sort that recur every generation or two and some on the scale of the greatest barbarity mustered by humans. As the Renaissance altarpieces and Gothic spires and mosaic saints remind us, we are a fallen race. These reminders have dual purposes, both cautionary and inspirational.

The continent is at a strange crossroads. The last people with living memory of World War II and firsthand knowledge of its brutality are fading away. With them goes a lived appreciation for the postwar miracle of Europe, those moments when a continent that had bloodied itself beyond belief for centuries before two epic orgies of destruction between 1914 and 1945 consciously turned away and, like Athens in the myth of the Oresteia, put aside its arms and deep passions and found a way to coexist in peace. Now, over time, one of humanity’s greatest innovations has been made boring and sometimes even cruel in its institutional, bureaucratized power. There are very reasonable worries about how Europe can hold up as it stops reproducing and as the world’s other powers play by different rules.

But great European cities also show the triumph of people who pour their souls into beauty, build things to last, and, when the inferno comes, rebuild, brick by painstaking brick. Europe’s power comes in its endurance. As China rises and Russia rediscovers some old muscles and the United States drifts off on its own strange path, Europe will need to find new ways to cultivate that old strength. I suspect that movement may need some doses of Charles de Gaulle or Otto von Bismarck instead of just a litany of small-state nationalists or milquetoast social democrats. Maybe it looks like Péter Magyar, firm in national pride but still within the bounds of a larger liberal project; it is much too early to put any stock in him. The divisions between Europe’s cultures, so often drifting toward Balkanization, make nothing easy. But I wouldn’t bet against some of the world’s most persistent nations and their recognition that, out of idealism or necessity, they need to present a somewhat united front. When at its best, the visions of life Europe can offer are the envy of the world, and I hope we Americans who venture across the pond can bring back some of those bits and apply its wisdom where we can.

One of the better pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to take two-week vacations. This is enough time to truly forget obligations back home for a moment and turn loose. It works. My time in Europe fills me with a vital force, ready to be tapped at any moment when the reserves run low. I can flash back to any one of them. The romance of Topkapi, even in Istanbul’s melancholy rain, and a golden cruise across the Bosphorus to open a door to a new continent. Delighted turns down back streets of Istanbul, on to another Byzantine wonder. Drifting away in a Hungarian bath. The toll of the Pummerin; Parsifal rising toward its apex. A beer-fueled crowd in a Prague bar, and a serendipitous stroll home when I’ve had my fill. A final currywurst and a walk through the Brandenburg Gate on my last night.

It is another very American belief to think that one of these bursts outward can lead toward epiphany; to think that, because of some moment of awe or insight, things will never be the same again. Schooled on Europe’s eternal cautionary tales, I am not so deluded. But they can be useful signifiers of change, or plant seeds that, someday, grow into something. Unexpected side streets appear, new gates open; some old ones close, too, perhaps never to be seen again, and that is alright. It is the task of the traveler to sit down back at home to sort through these interruptions of all routine and decide how to remember these journeys, and which ones may come next.

Europe 2026, Part VI: Up from Ashes

This is part six in a seven-part series that began here.

I am sad to leave behind the Prague party, could certainly have lingered, but my pace demands another journey. The train from Prague to Berlin follows the Vltava and Elbe Rivers to Dresden, through dramatic sandstone cliffs not unlike the Driftless Area of Wisconsin and Minnesota, only with some castles added for good measure. For this leg I share a seat with Andrés, a Chilean-born architect who lives in Marbella, Spain with his German wife and two kids, all of whom are on their way from vacation in Prague to visit family in Dresden and Leipzig. We scroll around Google Maps discussing our routes and our roots, and he picks out architectural features of the apartment blocks we pass. Eight-year-old Milo inserts insights on the games he plays on his tablet.

Andrés and family debark in Dresden, where he points out the old towers that have risen from the ashes of World War II carpet bombing, rebuilt as they were. Further north, the landscape melts into generic countryside, with only the occasional Schrebergärten plot to liven it up. The land is flat, the trees only showing the first hints of spring, and I understand why German migrants felt at home in the Midwest. Berlin arises in some charming, green suburbs, and then the train descends into a tunnel before entering the Hauptbahnhof.

After a series of historic, intimate city centers, Berlin is jarring. Here is a giant modern city, authoritative and commanding, any quaintness blown away by the Second World War. In some ways, the result hardly feels European. The flat land, grey skies, and elevated trains trip comparisons to Chicago in my brain, though the eastern Tiergarten feels more like the National Mall in Washington DC. The interiors of blocks reveal secrets: once, trying to find a restaurant, I wind up in the silent courtyards of a hospital; later, I slip into one and find a modern brewery that suits my needs for the night. And did I mention the beer? Berlin is a place where contributing members of society may be casually sipping cans on the subway at noon. Biergartens are everywhere, right in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden and scattered in any stray park, ready to welcome visitors for a casual night or a long descent into the German national drink.

The hostel where I have a private room is huge and utilitarian, my one lodging misfire on this trip. The clientele appears to be 80 percent under 22 and 19 percent over 50, and I find myself in a liminal zone. I am, finally, probably too old to pass for some 20-something traveler with all life commitments ahead of me, a state I could pull off even a couple years ago; I am still closer to them in energy, but it is no longer a natural fit to slide in. Any peers my age or somewhat older are with partners or families, and not really looking to meet random people. I am also too young to take on grizzled globetrotter status quite yet. And so I drift about, take a beer in the hostel café and chip away at my notes for these essays, glancing up here and there to watch the show passing by.

Mostly, however, I wander again. Berlin is a shift after all those walkable, quaint downtowns: while the pedestrian infrastructure is still good, this city is big and spread out, I make good use of a tourist metro pass. Around I go on subways and trams and elevated trains, popping out to see what the German capital has to show me. My first two days here are cold and on the bleak side, but my last full day in Europe is resplendent in sun, and I stroll across the Tiergarten and find a sprawling terrace to drink a lager and eat a full chicken. (“How many fucking chickens died for this place?” ask some Brits as they wander through and survey a host of Berliners enjoying this afternoon.)

Any visitor to Berlin should understand what it was before the Allied bombers unleashed their barrage and the Red Army marched in. Here was a city that was rising to surpass London and Paris as a center of culture and art, the confident capital of Europe’s largest, most ambitious state. The tale of twentieth century Germany is in part a story of tragic hubris and in part a story of what can only be described as pure evil, made somehow more discordant knowing that it came out of this refined, cultured, technically proficient young state at the heart of Europe. A nation fused out of old principalities by Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s was on a meteoric rise before the nonsensical charnel house of World War I and humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles fed into the toxic brew that unleashed a genocidal explosion.

The war and its aftermath hang over all of Berlin’s great tourist attractions. This city’s cosmopolitan feel, I suspect, comes from the fact that so many people in recent decades have had a chance to add their own bricks to its rebuilding process, rather than just inheriting the pristine old order of a Vienna or a Prague. It is unlike the rest of Europe because it is almost entirely a new city that rose from complete devastation in 1945. Many of contemporary Berlin’s cultural markers are gifts from later arrivals: doner kebab and currywurst may be its best culinary offerings, and the range on offer here beats anything else I’ve seen in Europe. Even the beer scene, while honoring its German roots, pulls from beyond; I spent a delightful night at Bierirei, with beers on tap from all over the world (including Central Waters in Amherst, Wisconsin!), and chat with a Belgian brewer and a crew of Swedes, all passing through to sample the fun.

The recovery process from past devastation, impressively rapid in the West but dragged out over decades by the division of Berlin, continues. Even Museum Island, with its remarkable collection of antiquities and artwork, bears the scars of war. The museums sustained damage, and though many great works were stashed away in bunkers, fire came for some of them, too. The Soviets made off with troves of loot after they sacked Berlin, and the ownership of many works remains a sticky topic. Even with these lasting wounds, Berlin’s collection of cultural capital is remarkable.

Alas, the Pergamon, home to a reconstructed Greek temple and Babylon’s Gates of Ishtar, is undergoing a three-year renovation. Berlin has atoned for its absence by creating the Pergamon Panorama, a museum across the street that features a few statues and friezes from the temple and a giant, four-plus story, 360-degree panoramic installation of what Pergamon might have looked like in the 100s AD. Next door in the Neues Museum I find the Bust of Nefertiti, along with some pieces from German antiquity and some Greek statues and a lot of Egyptology. The Germans do museum atmosphere well, too: the halls of the Neues have moody art and some Egyptian zodiacs on the ceilings, while the collection of sarcophagi in the basement very much feels like a tomb. Next door, the Bode Museum, home to sculpture and Renaissance and Byzantine art (because I just can’t quit the Byzantines), is a palatial structure. Giant doors open and close with slams, footsteps echo across cavernous rooms, and the occasional elevated train rolls by to break the silence of an early Saturday morning, a haunting aura given to the frescoes and altarpieces on display.

Most of Berlin’s history, however, is from the last century, and it is often heavy. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, right in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, starts as a row coffin-shaped concrete blocks that get taller the visitor descends into a maze, a brutal logic unfolding at the scale of a mass ordered slaughter. Peek down one row and an empty expanse extends toward the end of the memorial, down another a child flits in and out from behind the tombs, down yet another someone purposefully walks away, whether toward an exit from the madness or deeper into it one cannot really tell. A little ways south, by Potsdamer Platz, the Topography of Terror carefully documents the depravity of the Nazi regime. On the site of the old SS headquarters, a series of exhibits methodically outlines the choices made by National Socialist leaders and the fates of the perpetrators. Near the end it offers diaries of three different Berliners, all of different political backgrounds and orientations, revealing their thoughts as the depths of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis slowly came out.

Perhaps the most eye-opening thing for a first-time visitor is the extent to which Berlin is still rebuilding from the dramas of 1945 and 1989, even today. The antiquities collections are a window into a painstaking restoration still in progress, trotted out slowly after cleaning. Many great buildings have been rebuilt as they were, history nursed back to life with great care. Checkpoint Charlie preserves an older border station between East and West; here and there along the River Spree are memorials to people who were gunned down as they tried across the barrier to freedom.

And, at times, markers of past terror can be transformed into beauty. The East Side Gallery is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall remaining, and the art installation created after Germany reunited East and West tell a story of unity, reconciliation, and creative flowering. Here, artists came from around the world to put into vivid color their dreams of peace and triumph over communist cultural flattening, and three and a half decades later, it still speaks to the power of a halting but real achievement, perhaps does so more than ever in a world that has drifted from such ideals.

The culture that created the Gallery is not really that of Berlin today. 35 years after the Wall came down this city is less grunge and more corporate; new developments line the riverfront, and the Mercedes-Benz logo revolves atop a nearby office tower. The Berghain, the famed club that is the inheritor of that post-Cold War ecstatic burst of freedom, now has an hours-long line of tourists trying to get in. (I ponder joining the queue, but in the end use my limited Berlin hours elsewhere.) This is, after all, the capital of Europe’s largest country and largest economy, and in Angela Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship, it became the continent’s power center and de facto capital. Merkel’s Germany has shaken off the shackles of history and raced to lead the successful, if rather mundane, European present.

This is twenty-first century Germany: cushy, in command of Europe, its territorial ambitions now a distant memory, though its manufacturing-heavy economy has some brittleness to it. I hear things do not work quite as well as they did a decade ago, and the German habit for legalese and bureaucratic impulse is a regular frustration. (Said the British mom on the train out of Vienna who had lived in both countries: Austria is a logical society, and Germany is a legal society.) A general blandness pervades its politics, jolted only by some troubled murmurs from the far right AfD. What more, exactly, can the modern German state stand for?

Part Seven is here.

Europe 2026, Part V: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is the fifth post in a seven-part series that began here.

I board a train from Vienna and spend a pleasant hour in a compartment with a British family on Easter holiday who are also on their way to Prague. We change trains at Breclav just across the Czech border, and are separated as we wedge into a standing room only Czech train. The flatlands of the Carpathian Basin fade away and we rise up through the Bohemian Forest hill country, springtime bringing forth flowers and fresh leaves and sunlight dancing on the stream along the tracks. Czechia lacks Austria’s pristine order but remains well-kept and takes on a bucolic air, more integrated with nature than in the crisp Teutonic lines cross the border.

My first impression of Prague, after dumping my bag and walking to the Old Town Square two blocks from my unit, is one of overwhelming charm. It is dusk, and the light of day melts into the lit-up glow of historic buildings. An Easter market is open in the square, little huts all selling traditional Czech fare, and the trees are spangled in springtime ribbons while traditional choir music floats in on the light breeze. I piece together a meal from the various stands, sample a mulled wine, and drift from one corner to another. If Vienna is grand and stately, Prague takes the same instincts and scales them down to something heartwarming, a fairy tale Europe spared the worst of the World Wars and ready to welcome in the tourists.

And oh, does it welcome them. Prague is surpassed in tourism numbers only by the grandees of Europe like London and Paris, but is a fraction of their size. There is about as much Mandarin and English as Czech on the Old Town Square. I am warned by multiple people that British bachelor parties are known to swamp the city. At peak times, especially this holiday week, some of the streets around attractions are truly clogged; on main streets, there is a steady soundtrack of suitcase wheels trundling over cobblestones. At U Sudu, a marvelous cave complex of a bar, I wind up in a catacomb populated mostly by American and British college kids, here on some mix of study abroad and spring break trips, all experimenting with the heretofore forbidden pleasure of smoking indoors while drinking. Count on the Euros to give the Anglos a good crash course in hedonism.

In Prague I’ve taken a studio unit attached to a hostel, which, after a week of eating out on hearty central European fare, offers a welcome opportunity to pick up some basics from a Czech greengrocer (no signage in the windows necessary these days) and enjoy a few meals in. Consistent solitary eating out may be the weirdest part of traveling alone, though at least in Prague it is always accompanied by good beer, and a duck I have a few blocks off Old Town Square is the best of that bird I’ve ever had, melting away in my mouth.

Here in Czechia I have left the lands of imperial aspirants and entered a nation state pieced together out of a few old fiefdoms that shared a general language. The history of north central Europe is one of stray principalities and duchies and margraviates, electors of Holy Roman Emperors who only nominally led them. Eventually the Habsburgs chipped away at parts of this world, including Czechia, and nationalism rose alongside Napoleon; a subsequent century was defined by the rise, conquests, and struggles to contain Germany. Now, Czechia has reached a stable state: comfortably its own little self, at peace with the Germans and Austrians and buffered somewhat from Russian revanchism to the east. It is the most affordable city I visit on this trip (with an asterisk on Istanbul, which is cheap in some ways but extracts every last lira for its attractions). As a society it reminds me somewhat of Portugal: safe, stable, reasonable, and deeply rooted, therefore proving alluring to outsiders, trading wine and coastline for beer and woodlands.

The history here feels more obscure than in other parts of Europe. My knowledge of Bohemian kings is limited to a single Christmas carol about a good one who fed a peasant. The less good ones devised some impressive torture instruments, many of which are now on display at Prague Castle. As in Budapest, it’s less a castle than a sprawling complex, home to the presidential palace and some houses of worship along with old residences of kings and their attendant households. St. Vitus’ Cathedral is a gothic skyscraper with stellar stained glass, and the Czechs claim to have some of Moses’ staff; I wonder if they’ve compared notes with the Ottomans on this, as the Turks had the whole thing on display in Topkapi Palace.

The Castle is a worthy destination, but Prague is best experienced by idle strolling. Only in Venice and perhaps Madrid have I enjoyed more serendipitous walks around town. A planned venture to dinner or back for a nap turns into a meander of double the planned distance, because doesn’t think alley here look like it deserves an exploration? There are highlights: the Orloj astronomical clock tower on Old Town Square, the Franz Kafka head, the Powder Tower, the Eiffel Tower knockoff. On these warm spring days, Prague is most resplendent along the Vltava River, where a series of old stone bridges span its waters and boats ply about and a climb up into the park north of the center will take one to a giant metronome (the Czechs like their timekeeping devices) and a lovely terrace overwhelmed by Lithuanian basketball fans. To the east, I’m tipped off on the best hill to watch the sunset, not far from the weird tower with babies crawling up it, and I spend a happy evening among Czechs parked on blankets or in the grass, playing a little music and sipping a few drinks, pleased that spring has arrived.

Prague has made itself the city an American might dream of when coming to Europe. It is easy to forget this country was occupied by both Nazis and Soviets not that long ago, and underwent a divorce with Slovakia even after its triumphant Velvet Revolution. Unlike Budapest, it does not commemorate much of this history in monument in the city center, and Wenceslas Square, home to the protests of both the crushed Prague Spring and the successful revolt that toppled the communist regime, is largely torn up for reconstruction. The National Museum at the far end of the square tells some of this story in its modern wing and in a video display in a tunnel between buildings, but the great domed structure is more focused on a hall of gemstones and some more distant Czech founding fathers and, for some very deep history, the skeleton of Lucy the Australopithecus. Unlike the Hungarians, the Czechs appear content to nod to the past and move on, settle for their very large party in the present. For a few days, I am happy to kick back with a few pilsners and drift into its flow state, at one with it.

Part Six is here.

Europe 2026, Part IV: Viennese Harmony

This is Part Four in a 7-part series that began here.

My journey continues. I board the 1:40 out of Budapest bound for Munich and make my way to Vienna. The train crosses the Austrian border, and while there is no physical barrier, the differences are immediate. Suddenly, it is all cleanliness and order, clean lines and fresh paint on every structure, even the duller apartment blocks and industrial buildings lining the tracks. I have arrived in an orderly society, as the woman who is upset that my suitcase has occupied the left side of the escalator in Hauptbahnhof station makes abundantly clear.

Even with Budapest as an interlude, the contrast between Istanbul’s chaos and melancholy ruins and Vienna’s crisp opulence is eye-popping. Vienna is all refinement, all religiously tended beauty. The monuments here are rarely to war; while the Viennese did twice hold off the Ottomans and thus safeguard the heart of Europe, the Habsburg dynasty was instead built on a long lineage of strategic marriages. (“Let others wage war; let you, happy Austria, marry,” says the famous line.) The Habsburg peace allowed them to build a capital that cultivated high culture, a comfortable home that, like many diverse empires, was more welcoming than many modern nation-states. “The genius of Vienna,” writes Stefan Zwieg in The World of Yesterday, his elegiac look back on his prewar Vienna childhood, “had always been that it harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures…Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that I have in part to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” Vienna’s civic achievement is not all artifice, either: this city has, arguably, gone further toward solving the housing problem facing so much of the West than anywhere.

I live nearly my entire Vienna life inside the Ringstrasse, the former city wall now turned to a ring road with leafy biking and walking paths beside it. Over most of a day I make the circuit and fill my bingo card of the city’s greatest hits. I stop at this palace here and that composer’s statue there, past monuments to Habsburgs (mostly Franz Joseph), basking in its parks on a 75-degree day. Wiener stands offer lunches, and when I need a longer rest, there are cafes with coffees and sachertorte. As Zweig writes, “the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee.”

It is Easter weekend in Vienna. I am too late to properly enjoy the Easter markets, but I join the string of the curious who peek in on the candlelit Saturday mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. St. Stephen’s great Pummerin bell, made from melted down Ottoman cannons after the Turks’ 1683 failed siege and reforged with additional such cannons in storage after it fell amid Allied bombing in the Second World War, tolls out the good news. It rings only a few days a year, and chills go down my spine as I lie in my hotel bed two blocks from the cathedral, winding down around midnight after a long day of exploration and travel, and suddenly hear its deep, rich booms.

Another rite of Easter takes place at the Vienna State Opera, where Richard Wagner’s Parsifal plays. Parsifal clocks in at five hours with its intermissions and so is a bold choice for a first-time operagoer. It is Wagner’s final opera, a soaring work of spiritual and philosophical complexity. Its composer called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel (because of course there is a German word for “sacred festival stage play”), a Good Friday sermon on innocence and compassion’s triumph over the will, a break from some past Wagner (much to the Nazis’ disappointment) and a turn toward redemption. The Vienna State Opera has reset the drama in a modern prison, a Sartre-inflected take on how us modern knights might win our grails.

“This is ugly. This scene is supposed to be in a garden,” mutters my neighbor, a regular at the State Opera. But the music, he says, is sublime, and indeed Parsifal builds toward resolution, resolves in images of the titular hero wandering in snow-covered woods to a ruined temple, where he lights a fire and a new faith burns forth, ambiguous but still edging toward that redemption story, a reach toward a higher belief.

The rest of my time in Vienna is less about transcendence and more about enjoying the good life. I climb 343 stairs to a tower inside St. Stephen’s for a commanding view of the city, the Alps settling downward to the west and the Carpathian Basin opening up to the east. I visit the State Hall of the library at Hofburg Palace, a sterling collection of old books and maps, and a display of manuscripts and works on the nature of love. I peek into the Karlskirche (Karl’s church!) at the right time in the afternoon to catch perfect beams of sunlight filtering through. I sip a few glasses of Grüner Veltliner, a crisp white wine native to Austria, and make do with clean but unremarkable local beer. I make sure I’m back in front of St. Stephen’s for the second ringing of the Pummerin at noon on Easter Sunday.

Vienna is a monument to Western civilization, a bastion that has held firm to protect some of its creative peaks. Its annexation by the Nazis in World War II perhaps showed the limits of Habsburg-style accommodation, but it has settled back into its role. The opera clientele, while still greying a bit, was substantially younger than any such crowd in the States; there seems to be a certain understanding that Vienna will continue to fill this function. Sure, many European city centers are museums to a cultural past with well-kept squares and quaint streets and expensive traditional food on patios alongside luxury shopping, but in Vienna it seems like what the city is meant to do, to offer up to us passers through. It’s just as Billy Joel said: Vienna waits for you.

Part Five is here.

Europe 2026, Part III: Choosing Europe

This is part 3 in a 7-part series that started here.

My Orient Express dream died when I chose the reverse route for this trip, and so, when posed with a choice between two nights on Bulgarian national railways and a $150, 1.5-hour flight from Istanbul to Budapest, it is an easy choice. The travel experience is a breeze: Istanbul’s airport is a grand one, gracefully reminiscent of the city’s mosques. Turkish Airways offers a full meal and free booze on this puddle-jump into the heart of Europe, proof we Americans are suffering for no good reason.

My cab in from the Budapest airport shows me I’m in a different world. Suburban-style box stores line the highway, and my driver blasts his classical music; we start with Smetana, presaging my visit to Prague, but as a good Hungarian, a Bartok station is in his presets. We roll into the historic center past a grand central train station, lit up for the night, and the sounds of boisterous crowds echo down the streets when I’m dropped off.

I’ve taken a private room in a hostel, Jo & Joe, in Pest’s Jewish Quarter. Some grand old synagogues line these streets, though so too do memorials to the ghetto and subsequent trains to concentration camps organized by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Now, the Quarter is a trendy neighborhood home to good nightlife, laden with lángos and goulash and beer purveyors, along with the cosmopolitan smattering of options you’d expect in this part of a large city. It’s an easy walk from here to both the Danube in one direction and in the other to Széchenyi baths, where I bask in a series of thermal pools the following afternoon. The highlights of Széchenyi include a beer bath, which includes both hop water and a tap easily drawn from the adjacent tub, and the Adventure Pool, where a strong current around a central circle results in a seemingly endless conga line of delighted swimmers, all circling in the same direction. Life is rough.

On the west side of the Danube, in Buda, hills rise sharply from the riverbank. The first I climb is the Citadella, its statue of liberty at the top set to be reopened after restoration the week after my visit; various armies shelled the city from up here, and the Soviet soldier who had been gazing up at lady liberty has been replaced by a cross. On the next hill is Buda Castle, still in restoration after World War II bombing and subsequent neglect, iteration after iteration of a grand fortress that has been through it all. Past a gilded Habsburg gate is the palace of the President of Hungary and a postcard village of an old town. Hungarians like to charge for entry to churches, so I skip Matthias Church, though I do shell out the few forints necessary to climb the stairs to the Fisherman’s Bastion with its views of the Danube. Back over in the flatlands of Pest, an underground memorial to the 1956 Soviet slaughter of civilians sits in front of Parliament. A block away, Liberty Square features statues of external liberators: Ronald Reagan, an American general, a proletarian Soviet soldier. It is a curious take on liberty.

I loosely knew Hungary was a nation of settled-down nomads before coming here, but that reality is underscored in Budapest. Grand monuments stand in honor of mustachioed men in funky helmets, not the regal kings and buttoned-up knights of Western Europe. Some traditional Hungarian music at a festival in a park features a woman banging a leather drum, a man on a sort of bagpipe known as a duda, and a singer who every so often pulls a gun out of his belt and fires blanks over the crowd to punctuate certain lines in the song. Ah, culture.

Hungary sits somewhere on a spectrum between Istanbul’s east-west split and firmly European Vienna, where I will head next. The Magyars, the ancestral Hungarians, rode in from Asia and found a home in the Carpathian Basin in the 800s. Like Poland to the north, their plains have left them torn up by great powers neighbors like the Ottomans and Habsburg Austria; they were periodically invaded by one or the other and eventually became a junior partner in the late-stage Habsburg empire. Hungary has had the misfortune, somewhat of its own volition but most often not, of being on the losing end of both World Wars and the Cold War, losing substantial territory over time. Now it has spent the better part of the past two decades on another distinct path, this one under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most successful contrarian.

I visit Budapest one week before Orbán’s ouster after 16 years in power. On April 12, a disaffected ex-member of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, Péter Magyar, led his upstart Tisza party to a dominant victory. I will not pretend my 40 hours in Budapest gave me any great insight into the election; I was merely a witness to lot of attempts by Fidesz to tie Magyar to Volodymir Zelensky and Ukraine, while Magyar ran hard against corruption and kleptocracy. (The Two-Tailed Dog Party, meanwhile, promised free beer for everyone.) What I glimpsed, however, looked like the run-up to an election in any Western country, not a worrisome civilizational struggle against an authoritarian, and while I understand the story is more complicated in some corners of Hungarian society, I also suspect that mundane reality shows where Hungary’s future lies.

In the end, Orbán’s defeat likely has less to do with ideology and more to do with the rot that comes with ideologues staying in power too long. It is far too early to see if Magyar can sustain his broad anti-Orbán coalition, if it can deliver on its promises to revive a slumbering economy crack the endemic Fidesz corruption. But his victory puts a crack in the Nationalist International that had set up shop in Hungary in recent years and edges his nation back toward the idea of a unified Europe. That European vision has obvious limitations, but when the alternatives lead toward climbing in bed with the Russians or some of the weirder radicals floating around on the global right who wanted to use little, homogenous Hungary as a laboratory for changes they sought to impose on Europe’s larger powers or, even more bizarrely, a multiethnic empire like the United States, Europe starts to look alright. Today’s Hungarians ask the same question posed by Cold War era Berliners: does the world look better to the west, or to the east? For a country stuck in a civilizational struggle it did not choose, where does the brighter future look: in league with Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, or amid the bland, process-driving European bureaucracy that, for all its flattening influence, aspires to something resembling equal opportunity in life?

For a small country that never owned a colonial empire, Budapest is as monumental a city as one could imagine. The endless efforts to memorialize the past, both distant and recent, gives a sense of how much repair work is necessary to reclaim snippets of old glory, and how much it means to proclaim an identity so often battered from the outside. Within this context, Orbán makes some sense as a historical force. A proud people resists being sucked in the with rest of the European machine, wishing for virility as a small nation. There is a small-C conservatism on display here, a wish to be left alone by the outside to which I am sympathetic, but Hungary’s history suggests it often does not have that luxury. Like Turkey, its soul has some splits to it, but it is not hard to see where its fate lies. Its lot is in with the European experiment, and its new leader is an intriguing figure for trying to bust through the bureaucratic excesses and anomie that can represent the worst of the EU.

Of the five cities I visit on this trip, Budapest is probably the one I’d be least likely to revisit. But this isn’t because I disliked it at all: there was a lot to enjoy on these charming streets. Goulash, it turns out, is great, as are lángos, which I’d liken to a frybread-based pizza with a sour cream base. The churches and synagogues are appropriately grand, and I sense this country has the ability within it to strike the right balance between the benefits of joining up with a powerful economic union and holding on to the proud (or just plain fun) bits of its own unique self. Show us the way, Hungary, and do it in your own style, part of a broader whole but never losing that distinct touch.

Part Four is here.