Essays and Media Criticism

All essays are listed in chronological order below, from newest to oldest. For a collection of Rolf's best travel essays from his first decade as a writer, check out his newest book, Marco Polo Didn't Go There.

One Traveling Man's Weak-Dollar Dating Survival Kit
Satire/Relationships: Travel to distant cities has always carried a whiff of romance for American men. Separated from the dull restrictions and routines and workaday life, we can embrace the spontaneity of each moment and (let's face it) hook up with the kind of women who'd never go for us back home.
[Appeared in World Hum on 02/13/09]

Che: The Ronald McDonald of Revolution
Commentary: "In Cuba, Guevara's ubiquitous image appears to fill the role of both Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald — a sainted martyr of unwavering purity who also happens to promote a standardized (if not particularly nutritious) political menu." An analysis of Che's legacy in light of Steven Soderbergh's 2009 movie biopic.
[Appeared in World Hum on 01/27/09]

The Henry Ford of Literature
Media history: How one nearly forgotten 1920s Kansas publisher's "Little Blue Books" created an inexpensive mail-order information superhighway that paved the way for the sexual revolution, influenced the feminist and civil rights movements, and foreshadowed the Age of Information.
[Appeared in the September 2008 issue of The Believer]

Focus Films' "City Confidential"
Film commentary: To mark the DVD release of In Bruges, Focus Films asked Rolf and a panel of select travel writers (including Pico Iyer, Heidi Julavits, Tony Wheeler, and Ayun Halliday) to outline their favorite cinematic portrayals of cities. Films mentioned in Rolf's profile include Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, and Alexander Payne's About Schmidt.
[Appeared in Film in Focus on 06/16/08]

Humor Doesn't Translate Internationally
Media criticism: In recent years, the most vivid legacy of B-movie gimmickry has been the emergence of "mockbusters" — cheaply produced straight-to-DVD films with names like Transmorphers and Snakes on a Train. What sets mockbusters apart is that these films are deliberately released on DVD just as their blockbuster namesakes hit the big screen, thus creating a niche market based on simple consumer confusion.
[Appeared in the March/April 2008 issue of The Believer]

One Man's Odyssey into 'Eat, Pray, Love'
Book review: For men, reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book is like traveling the world with a lovely and intelligent girlfriend who can't stop talking about herself: You've come to admire this woman — and you wish the best for her — but you wish she'd stop yapping about emotional minutiae so you could both look out and enjoy the scenery from time to time.
[Appeared in World Hum on 02/11/08]

The Trouble With 'Smile When You're Lying'
Book review: Chuck Thompson's 'Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer' slams modern travel writing as mediocre, if not dishonest. But glossy magazines aren't the only venues that create a fictional matrix to lure audiences: Books like Thompson's tend to sell themselves on overstatement, as well as the exaggerated sense that the reader is getting privileged information.
[Appeared in World Hum on 01/02/08]

We Don't (Really) Know Jack
Commentary: Though innovative and inspiring, "On the Road" is a bad blueprint for life on the road. Kerouac's characters might cover a lot of miles between San Francisco and New York, but their adventures along the way are rarely more remarkable than what one might encounter in the freshman-pledge wing of a fraternity house.
[Appeared in World Hum on 09/05/07]

The Death of the Mile-High Club
Commentary: Regardless of how you try to sugarcoat the flight experience, planes have functionally become flying buses — and the only people who would consider having sex on public buses are invariably on their way home from serving 18-to-24-month prison sentences for crystal-meth possession.
[Appeared in World Hum on 07/25/07]

The Last Antiwar Poem
Literary criticism: 50 years on, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" reads like a drug-addled, homoerotic variation of "Jackass." If we aspire this year to recognize the anniversary of a Ginsberg poem that still seems relevant and challenging, we should fast-forward ten years to 1966, when the iconic Beat poet penned "Wichita Vortex Sutra."
[Appeared in The Believer, 11/08/06]

The Tourist Who Influenced the Terrorists
Literary criticism/travel anthropology: How One Egyptian's Bad Haircut from a Greeley, Colorado Barber in 1949 Provided Ideological Fuel for 9/11.
[Appeared in The Believer, October 2006]

The Worst Tourists in the World
Travel-culture essay: Disparaging one's fellow travelers by national stereotype is a time-honored parlor game. Does it serve any purpose?
[Appeared in Yahoo! News on 10/09/06]

Slumming the Golden Arches
Travel-culture essay: Within certain hipster circles of indie travel, announcing that you patronize McDonald's is kind of like confessing that you eat your boogers. But the contempt sophisticated travelers hold for McDonald's has less to do with ethical principle than the fact that fast-food franchises ruin the fantasies of otherness that are an inherent part of travel.
[Appeared in Yahoo! News on 06/05/06]

World Hum's Top 30 Travel Books"
Book reviews: In a round-up of top travel books for the Travel Channel's World Hum, Rolf sings the praises of Pico Iyer's Video Night in Kathmandu (#8), Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (#11), Tim Cahill's Road Fever (#21), Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map (#26), and Jeffrey Tayler's Facing the Congo (#28).
[Appeared in World Hum in May of 2006]

Why We Buy Dumb Souvenirs
Travel-culture essay: Souvenir hunting is not a meaningful examination of place so much as it is a litmus test of our own whims and preconceptions as travelers. At a certain level, buying an electric blender is more representative of day-to-day Indian life than buying Kashmiri silk (though, admittedly, a blender would not look as good in your living room).
[Appeared in Yahoo! News on 05/09/06]

An Open Letter to Lewis Lapham
Commentary: Though the outgoing Harper's editor's opinions invariably carry a left-wing slant, Lapham would seem to be a profoundly conservative thinker -- someone who has never questioned the insipidity of his elite, east-coast patrician-intellectual assumptions.
[Appeared on Vagablogging.net on 12/13/05]

The Tourist is Always the Other Guy
Travel-culture essay: The rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity: it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash.
[Appeared on Vagablogging.net on 10/20/05]

Signs of Confusion
Travel-culture essay: As alarming as it can be to find "Fried Rice With Crap" on a menu in Asia, bad translations can go both ways. Indeed, it's only a matter of time before someone travels to China and discovers that the "Crouching Tiger" Chinese ideogram on his butt cheek (purchased in good faith in Seattle) is provincial slang for "Adult Diapers."
[Appeared in World Hum on 12/03/04]

Lost in Translation
Commentary: Just as a conversation with a stranger at a nightclub carries a host of interpretations in your own hometown, a phrasebook-aided (or pantomime-aided) cross-cultural conversation can be filled with untold possibilities that arise only when you're unable to say exactly what's on your mind.
[Appeared in World Hum on 01/09/04]

Remembering the Hippie Trail
Book Review: As David Tomory's A Season in Heaven reveals, the wanderers of the 1960s and 1970s were creative and intrepid -- but they also tended to be petty, competitive, self-ghettoizing, and self-deluding. In short, they had the same charms and weaknesses as any self-conscious, authenticity-seeking counterculture movement of the last half-century.
[Appeared in World Hum on 07/02/03]

The Ironic Rise of Asia's Abe Lincoln
Political commentary: Dissident politician Kim Dae-jung was not (as Time declared upon his inauguration) "Destiny's Choice" to lead Korea into the new millennium, but the beneficiary of mudslinging, opportunism and circumstantial luck amid a wacky 1997 election season.
[Appeared in the Wichita Eagle on 06/24/98]

In Korea: 'Ich Bin Ein Sidewalker'
Commentary: Simon Peter once found that a relatively small amount of faith allows a man to walk on water, but he was never faced with the more relevant prospect of navigating intersections in a city where 15.5-ton Hyundai buses careen four abreast down streets originally designed for oxcarts.
[Appeared in the Wichita Eagle on 09/15/97]

Apex of Mankind Always 40 Years Ago
Book Review: Robert Bly's The Sibling Society is the latest doom-oracle for those born after the advent of polyester clothing. Conveniently, society is never as good as it was during the time when a given doomsayer came of age, and everything since has been a slippery slide on the downward spiral.
[Appeared in the Wichita Eagle on 09/16/96]