The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, and reportage from around the world. Its aim, to break down barriers and introduce the essence of the place. Packed with essays and investigative journalism; original photography and illustrations; charts, and unusual facts and observations, each volume offers a unique insight into a different culture, and how history has shaped the place into what it is today.
Going beyond familiar stereotypes, each volume portrays the shifting culture and identity of a place, the sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, conflicts, and open wounds.
In The Passenger, original pieces and essential previously published essays are combined with inventive infographics, illustrations, book and film recommendations, a section of “false myths debunked,” a country-specific Spotify playlist, and—thanks to a collaboration with Prospekt—original photo essays by internationally renowned photographers.
Brimming with intricate research and enduring wonder, The Passenger is a love-letter to global travel.
CONTRIBUTORS
David Abulafia, Jake Adelstein, Giorgio Amitrano, António Lobo Antunes, Stefania Auci, Tash Aw, Jazmina Barrera, A. Igoni Barrett, Elif Batuman, Sara Baume, Fatima Bhutto, Leonardo Bianchi, Egill Bjarnason, Carmen Boullosa, Irena Brezna, Jan Brokken, Floriana Bulfon, Ian Buruma, Francisco Cantú, Pino Cacucci, Ben Coates, Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Paolo Cognetti, Francesco Costa, Alex Cuadros, Najat El Hachmi, Marco D’Eramo, Catherine Dunne, Claudia Durastanti, Najat El Hachmi, Sonia Faleiro, Roberto Francavilla, Rivka Galchen, Paolo Giordano, Lauren Groff, Arnon Grunberg, Amira Hass, Toine Heijmans, Hallgrímur Helgason, Christos Ikonòmou, Prem Shankar Jha, Alicia Kopf, Kostas Koutsourelis, Nicola Lagioia, Michel Laub, Jon Lee Anderson, Max Lobe, Erlend Loe, Richard Lloyd Parry, Valeria Luiselli, Paolo Macry, Andri Snær Magnason, Daniele Manusia, Jo Marchant, Petros Markaris, Gabi Martínez, Michele Masneri, Colum McCann, Tommaso Melilli, Marzio G. Mian, Marco Missiroli, Murakami Ryū, Letizia Muratori, Siri Nergaard, Guadalupe Nettel, Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, Cees Nooteboom, Matteo Nucci, Mark O'Connell, Francesco Pacifico, Connie Palmen, Brian Phillips, Leonardo Piccione, Francesco Piccolo, Edward Posnett, Christian Raimo, Arundhati Roy, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Tiziano Scarpa, Peter Schneider, Daniel Schulz, Sekiguchi Ryōko, Taiye Selasi, Elif Shafak, Raja Shehadeh, Nuno Artur Silva, Fredrik Sjöberg, Leïla Slimani, Burhan Sönmez, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Morten Strøksnes, Leo Tuor, Olivier Truc, Enrique Vila-Matas, Juan Villoro, Mirza Waheed, Frank Westerman, Anna Wiener, David Winner, Samar Yazbek, Yoshimoto Banana, Elisabeth Åsbrink.
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In recent years, Naples has been the subject of countless books, films and TV series, making it even more difficult to imagine a Neapolitan normality, if it exists at all. As Naples becomes the most filmed city in Italy, where to look for the ordinary, the average? Maybe we need to "go up" to Vomero, a neighborhood considered almost alien to the city, middle class, homogeneous, peaceful? A reality in sharp contrast with the over-the-top life of the historic centre, crossed as it is by a thousand stratifications - architectural, historical and social. And yet even there we find an alternative reading: the city as a model of coexistence between ancient and modern.
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Will be published September 2024
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Eighty years ago, at the end of a devastating fratricidal war, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, completely dependent on the United States for security and development. Today it’s the tenth economy in the world, dynamic and innovative, a lively and participatory democracy that sits at the table of the great powers. “Hallyu” – the Korean wave of contemporary entertainment – has reached every corner of the world. This rapid, astonishing transformation inevitably brought with it rifts and contradictions. If global youth look at Korea as previous generations looked at Hollywood and New York, young Koreans, on the other hand, view it as “Hell Joseon”: an aging country, an economic system dominated by powerful families, with a fiercely competitive education system, a wide generational gap, and, at the centre of it all, the role of women - one of the keys that The Passenger has chosen to decipher a complex, fascinating country, central to the dynamics of the contemporary world, very often exoticized and idealized in equal measure.
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Will be published August 2024
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The word “Mediterranean” evokes something larger than geography, and has historically marked a distinct cultural space, one where different people have met, traded, and clashed. Today the Mediterranean appears to be in crisis, neglected by the EU, and at the centre of one of the greatest migrations in history. While millions of tourists flock to its shores, hundreds of thousands of people face a dramatic journey in the opposite direction—to escape wars, persecutions, and poverty. The liquid road, as Homer called it, is increasingly militarized, trafficked, and polluted—as well as overheated and overfished. But the Mediterranean remains a source of wonder and fascination — a space not entirely colonized by modernity, where time flows differently, and where multiple cultures and languages are in very close contact and dialogue.
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Mexico: once synonymous with escape and freedom, better known nowadays for widespread violence, narcotraffic, and migration. Sea, beaches, ancient ruins, tequila: under the patina of mass tourism there's a complex, neurotic country trying to carve out a place for itself in the shadow of its hulky neighbour. The most populous Hispanic country in the world, 89 indigenous languages are spoken: a contradictory legacy reflected in its political, social, religious (and food!) culture. With a fifth of the population identifying as indigenous, rediscovering and revaluing the country's pre-Columbian roots informs much of public debate. The controversial Mayan train project connecting Mexico's Caribbean resorts with the South's archaeological.
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Since gaining independence from the UK, Nigeria has been in a state of permanent crisis. Dependence on oil is the glue that has kept together a country deeply divided but obsessed with an ideal of “national unity”. But this dependence has eroded institutions, compromised socio-economic development, caused corruption, coup d'états, and environmental disasters. The arrival of democracy in the 90s failed to bring much improvement. It’s estimated that over 100 million Nigerians live under the poverty threshold. Violence is widespread: from the Boko Haram terrorists to the armed secessionist movements and the growing scourge of kidnappings. How to live in a country where the state is absent?
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Thirty years after the 1992 Olympics, which redefined the city’s contemporary identity and changed its destiny, The Passenger travels to Barcelona to understand the history and future of one of the cradles of political, cultural, and urban change in Europe. From the debate about the impact of mass tourism to the search of new and sustainable models of economic and social development; from the eternal rivalry with Madrid to the rediscovery of the city’s rich tradition of political activism: this volume of The Passenger offers a panoramic view of a city striving to trace a new path forward out of the current crisis, and find a way of life centred on the well-being of its citizens.
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In the 1960s, the rivalry between the superpowers brought us into space, adding a whole new dimension to human life. The last frontier was open: between 1969 and 1972 twelve men (but no women) walked on the moon. No one has since. The space race revealed itself for what it really was: a political and military competition. Space agencies, however, have not been idle and the exploration of the solar system has continued with probes and robots. Without politics, science has thrived. But the lack of government funding has opened space exploration to the forces of capitalism: the race has started again, with different rules and different players. For those of us who remain on Earth, space offers a spiritual dimension, and the search for answers to age-old questions. Colonizing Mars might not be the solution to humanity’s problems, but the promise of space—whether expressed in a tweet by Elon Musk or a photo taken by a NASA rover on Mars—keeps proving irresistible.
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California has stood for more than a century as the brightest symbol of the American dream. In recent years, however, the country’s mainstream media has been declaring with increasing frequency—and thinly veiled schadenfreude—the “end of California as we know it.” The pessimists point to rising inequality, racial tensions, and the impact of climate change as evidence that the Californian dream has been shattered. Between extreme heat, months-long droughts, devastating wildfires, and rising sea levels, looking at California is like watching the trailer for what awaits the world if we don’t act to reduce global warming. Faced with these pressures, more and more Californians are leaving the state, leading to an unprecedented decline in population that could change the cultural and political balance of power in the country at large.
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To the problems faced by all large capitals, Rome has added a list of calamities of its own: widespread corruption, the resurgence of fascist movements, rampant crime. A seemingly hopeless situation perfectly symbolised by the fact that Rome currently leads the world in the number of self-combusting public buses. However, if we look closer, this narrative is contradicted by just as many signs that point in the opposite direction. The majority of Romans wouldn’t consider “betraying” their hometown, and the many newcomers are often indistinguishable from the natives in the profound love that binds them to the city, leading to a lack of the mass emigration. Rome is a place of contradictions, yet to understand Rome and “fix” its problems, we should consider it a normal city, “not unlike Chicago or Manchester.” Only, incomparably more beautiful.
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The radiance of the “city of lights” can be blinding even for tourists: the clash with the real city, so different from the one depicted in films and books, results in some of them developing the so-called “Paris syndrome.” That said, the cracks in the postcard image of the city seem to multiply: terrorist attacks, the demonstrations of the yellow vests, the riots in the suburbs, Notre-Dame in flames, record heatwaves. Meanwhile, soaring living costs are forcing many Parisians to leave the city. Yet these are not just a series of unfortunate events. They are phenomena—from increasing population density to climate change, from immigration to the repercussions of globalization and geopolitics— that all metropolises in the world must face. And in Paris, today, the mood is not one of defeat but of renewal: from ongoing environmental and urbanistic transformation to the children of immigrants who take to the streets for the right to feel French, and the women determined to break the sexism and stereotypes that dominate the fashion industry. Is there anyone who seriously thinks they can teach Parisians how to stage a revolution?
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“Berlin is too big for Berlin” is the curious title of a book by the flaneur Hanns Zischler, who joked about the low population density of a city so spread-out and polycentric—one of the reasons why it still inspires feelings of freedom and space. But the phrase also carries a symbolic, broader meaning: how can a single city encompass and sustain such a weighty mythology as that of contemporary Berlin, “the capital of cool”? In order to find out, it is necessary to go back to the origins of today’s Berlin, when time seemed to have stopped. The scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The city’s youth seemed to have appropriated—and turned into a positive—the famous phrase pronounced by Karl Scheffler at the beginning of the 20th century: “Berlin is a place doomed to always become, never be.”
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From its very first contact with the West, India has been subject to great mystification as the survival of ancient rituals, and its variety of languages and cultures, continues to fascinate the world. This narrative is intertwined with a newer one that sees the frenetic change of a society at the forefront of innovation. Success stories coexist alongside stories of daily struggle. A large slice of the population still does not have access to drinking water, and agriculture (still the main source of livelihood for most of the 1.3 billion people who live there) is threatened by climate change. India is a country that does not know how to eradicate one of the most infamous forms of classism/racism: the caste system. From the resistance of the Kashmiri people to that of atheists – hated by all religious communities – from the dances of the ‘hijra’ in Koovagam to the success of the female wrestler Vinesh Phogat, learn about the contradictory, terrible and joyful chaos that lies at the heart of India.
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The birth of the “New Turkey”, as the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called his own creation, is an exemplary story of the rise of “illiberal democracies” through the erosion of civil liberties, press freedom and the independence of the judicial system. Turkey was a complex country long before the rise of its new sultan: born out of the ashes of a vast multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, Turkey has grappled through its relatively short history with the definition of its own identity. Poised between competing ideologies, secularism and piousness, a militaristic nationalism and exceptional openness to foreigners, Turkey defies easy labels and categories. Through the voices of some of its best writers and journalists–many of them in self-imposed exile—The Passenger tries to make sense of this fascinating, maddening country, analyzing how it got to where it is now, and finding the bright spots of hope that allow its always resourceful, often frustrated population to continue living, and thriving.
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In the second half of the 20th century Brazil made extraordinary contributions to music, sport, architecture. From “bossa nova,” to acrobatic soccer, to the daring architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, the country seemed to embody a new, original vision of modernity, at once “fluid, agile, and complex.” Seen from abroad, the victory of the far right in the 2018 elections was a rude awakening that suddenly turned the Brazilian dream into a nightmare. For locals, however, illusions had started fading long ago, amid paralyzing corruption, environmental degradation, racial discrimination, and escalating violence. Luckily, Brazilians are still willing to fight to build a better future. Today the challenge of telling the story of this extraordinary country consists in finding its enduring vitality amid the apparent melancholy.
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Few countries have received more media attention in recent years and even fewer have been represented in such vastly divergent ways. There’s a downside to all this attention: everyone seems to have something final to say about Greece. News headlines replace people’s individual stories, impressions substitute facts, characters take the place of people. In this volume of The Passenger, we chose to set those opinions aside in order to give to the stories, facts, and people of Greece the dignity and centrality they deserve.
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Visitors from the West look with amazement, and sometimes concern, at Japan’s monolithic social structures and unique, complex culture industry; the gigantic scale of its tech corporations and the resilience of its traditions; the extraordinary diversity of the subcultures that flourish in its “post-human” megacities. The country nonetheless remains an impossibly complicated jigsaw puzzle whose overall design eludes us. Its inscrutability has made the country an inexhaustible source of inspiration for stories, reflections, and reportage. The subjects in this volume range from the Japanese veneration of the dead to the Tokyo music scene, from urban alienation to cinema, from sumo to machismo. Caught between an ageing population and extreme post-modernity, immobile yet futuristic, Japan is an ideal observation point from which to understand our age and the one to come.
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