A Facebook message arrived overnight, one of those moments when the multiverse collapses back into a single, quite familiar strand. Sai Shankar is a blogger who runs pulpflakes.com, fascinated by pulp magazines and the artists who brought their stories to life. He had stumbled across my great-uncle John Alan Maxwell’s work and reached out. “While researching him, I found you were his nephew,” the message read. “I thought your article on Maxwell for the exhibition John Alan Maxwell: Illustrator of Romance would be up my blog's alley, and wondered if you have a copy I could publish.”

This November, I managed to sprawl myself across three continents—North America, South America, and Europe—and for the first time, I noticed just how far Black Friday has traveled. What began as a chaotic post-Thanksgiving ritual in suburban America has transformed into a global retail season, stretching far beyond a single day and far beyond the borders of the United States. I was shocked—not just by its sheer scale, but by how seamlessly it has embedded itself into places that have no connection to Thanksgiving, or even to the idea of a “Friday” day after as it’s understood in the U.S.

As an American who has boldly — or perhaps foolishly — staked a claim a mere hop, skip, and an awkward stumble from La Rambla, I’ve come to understand that living in Barcelona’s Gothica and El Raval districts is akin to participating in an ongoing, unscripted comedy show, where the city is the star and I am often just a punchline or a sidekick. In the last year, my life has intentionally become a living, breathing experiment in urbanism known as the “5-Minute City.” The concept is simple: everything you could possibly need — groceries, entertainment, a quick espresso or gelato, or an even quicker divorce — should be just a five-minute walk, or about 400 meters, away. It’s an urbanist’s dream, promoting sustainability, walkability, community, and, most importantly, minimizing the need for those pesky, unused gym memberships. It is a dream that pushes even the boundaries of Carlos Moreno’s 15-Minute City concept.

On a Friday day of prayer, I shared an early morning hike to a remote wadi near our NEOM camp with some colleagues. The arid landscape of the upper wadi featured clusters of date palms, twisting canyons, and a number of remarkable heritage sites, including a Nabatean village from the first century CE.

The next morning, I dozed for most of the hour and a half flight from Cairo to Luxor, suddenly waking as we began our final descent over the swaths of fertile agriculture that dominated the serpentine banks of the Nile River. Just north of the city, as we crossed the imaginary line from Qena Province into Luxor, the lush islands near Nagaa Al Uwaydat shimmered in the morning sunlight in a wide vee of the river. As we descended, I was struck by the number of lush farms and orchards that sprawled along the river banks.

Feeling isolated, anxious, and uncertain about the future? You’re not alone. As we catapult ourselves into the second quarter of the 21st century, many of us are experiencing what feels like a modern echo of the 19th-century Romantic movement. Rapid technological innovations like AI, social and economic upheaval, job replacement, cutthroat capitalism disguised as inflation, and constant connectivity have many of us longing for simpler times. This sentiment is vividly reflected in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, whose works capture the timeless struggles of the human condition.

The Southern Appalachian region, including cities like Asheville, has a long history of climate-related disasters. Yet, emergency planning across the region often seems reactionary, not grounded in historical patterns or proactive resilience strategies. The unfolding devastation of Hurricane Helene is not without precedent, but recent climate resilience studies seem to ignore more than a century of available climate data.

Crossing the Río de la Plata this morning from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento on one of the fast ferries feels like stepping through a veil between worlds—one foot in Argentina’s vibrant sprawl, the other in the storied calm of Uruguay. There’s a nomadic pulse to it: ferrying across a massive estuary that spans 180 miles, where the Paraná and Uruguay rivers collide and stretch out into an almost mythical bay. On a clear day, the water is wide and reflective, shimmering silvers and undulating, alluvial browns under the ferry’s churn. Today, the waves turn almost wild, the color of a frothy cafe con leche driven by gusts borne from slate-colored storm clouds carrying the history and secrets between these two shores.

Landing in Buenos Aires, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was stepping back in time—not because of old buildings or crumbling relics, but because here, the city itself remembers something we’ve globally lost. This is a place where life spills out into the streets, where green space isn’t a commodity but a right. Recoleta and San Telmo feel like living rooms open to everyone: parks that seem endless, plazas that don’t just serve as shortcuts but as destinations, marketplaces that have been beating in the same rhythms for generations. People come here to live, to gather, to just be. And I can’t help but think: what happened to American cities? Where did we go so wrong?

In a dimly lit gallery of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights, I’m staring at a vision from 1946 that feels more like it’s out of 2046. It’s a tribute exhibition of Gyula Kosice’s La Ciudad Hidroespacial, his “Hydrospatial City,” an ambitious experiment in science-based futurism that makes the wild ambition of space feel strangely familiar. Kosice—a mad visionary—conjured this ethereal city suspended in the cosmos, blending elements of water and space into a seamless whole.

I came to Praia do Campeche, or Campeche Beach, on the eastern shore of Brazil’s Santa Catarina Island on the hunt for a legend, one that started nearly a century ago when a windburned French aviator made this wild stretch of sand his sanctuary. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the guy who wrote The Little Prince, landed right here on numerous occasions, looking for a break from his death-defying airmail routes and maybe, just maybe, something deeper.

On a brisk evening in late November, I leaned against a stone railing near the Barceloneta, the Mediterranean stretched out before me, restless and dark under an autumn sky. The scent of salt and roasted chestnuts hung in the air, mingling with the laughter of tourists and the distant wail of a busker’s guitar. Just as the last blush of daylight faded into twilight, they appeared: a flock of thousands of starlings, emerging from the treetops somewhere near Montjuïc and swirling across the sky, a murmuration of pure, fluid grace.