Even in these times of layoffs, shrinking page numbers, and general gnashing of teeth, new magazines are born. Here to the right is the cover of the first issue of Afar, a new international travel publication. What’s the story? This magazine caters to travelers who search for the local character of the countries they visit. If you like to climb the walls of the resort, sneak off the bus tour, meet local people, and get yourself invited to dinner then this publication might be worth picking up. In fact, you can order a free copy of the first issue and see for yourself if you like it.

My own contribution to the magazine is an article on the Czech word pohoda. One of those words that doesn’t translate easily into English, pohoda once meant pleasant weather and in recent years has come to describe those especially blissful moments in life when all is well. It’s the sort of feeling we have all had the joy to experience, most likely on a Saturday or while on vacation, when we are totally relaxed and unworried. In other words, pohoda is when you don’t have a care in the world.

It’s a popular word with Slovaks, too. So popular that it’s used as the name of the country’s largest and most beloved summer music festival where, as a newbie journalist, I managed to score an interview with the stupendously soulful Detroit techno producer and DJ Carl Craig. Listen to something nice by him here. I took this photo of him, too, and just couldn’t understand why the design department of The Slovak Spectator didn’t want to publish it. That clip helped me land my first freelance story outside of Slovakia, for a music magazine. Definitely a moment of pohoda!

Come to think of it, a lot of my life in Slovakia was pohodlny (that’s pohoda as an adjective). I had a fun job, no real responsibilities, and almost every Slovak I encountered was psyched to meet me. The scenery helped too. It’s pretty darn peaceful over there:

Here’s the first paragraph of the new article:

Matt Jones contemplates activity by architecture affective sculptures that abort to carbon it. A alum apprentice in art at Stanford University, his investigations accept led him, a part of added things, to use an air compressor to breathing a respiratory arrangement ancient from old bike close tubes, and to motorize a carpeting of zip ties abstemious with LEDs to almost a pulsing, acclaim respiring, bristling hide. His goal: to aggravate out the basic aspect that makes the active live.

Debate over which version’s writing is of higher quality will undoubtedly have the comments section hopping for months, so I’ll keep my own judgments to myself. I’ll bet, though, that the magniloquent program behind this recreation would interest Italo Calvino, who stuck a word-counting, genre-analyzing computer into his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It’s probably child’s play for Philip Parker, who has turned automated internet searches into hundreds of thousands of books for sale on Amazon, and claims he’s working on software that will generate romance novels.

Welcome to the Internet, a convenient place to find my new blog and news about the articles I’ve written. I was on NPR talking about my latest story today — a guide to hot ecodisaster travel destinations in the United States, published by GOOD magazine. It’s a roundup of five super fascinating spots like the Berkeley Pit in Montana, the country’s largest body of toxic water, and Centralia, Pennsylvania, a ghost town on top of an underground coal fire that’s been burning for over 40 years. Sounds like a joke, but it’s not. They charge admission to the viewing platform at the Pit, and another of the sites — the Salton Sea in southern California — used to attract more visitors than Yosemite!