Maps have power. They can make the illegible legible and the invisible visible. They can make the obvious even more obvious and the impossible seem possible. When Stamen Design mapped the routes of the private buses that ferry techies between their homes in San Francisco and their jobs in Silicon Valley for the 2012 Zero1 Biennial, the aesthetic choice to render the map as a transit-system schematic made an open secret within San Francisco obvious to the world. The city is becoming a suburb of the Silicon Valley suburbs.
Tag: travel
Street art from New York, Paris, Naples, Rome, Beijing, Shanghai, Montréal, LA, and San Francisco (among others). Street Art, a set on Flickr.
Only once I started traveling on my own, at 18, did I understand that, as Vanessa Veselka says "a man on the road is solitary. A woman on the road is alone. This is not cute wordplay, but a radically different social experience." The mild suspicion of everyone from strangers on trains, to hostel staff, to groups of fellow travelers was first surprising, then irksome, and then wearily anticipated. While I'm sure that, on average, single men meet with far more suspicion than single women, it was made quite clear to me that in this context men were seen as being adventurous, while I was a cause for concern—"a dangerous blank."
Travelistic.com was a start-up travel video portal and blog where I was the resident travel blogger until the publisher, Diversion Media, decided to shift their business model. Read an archived selection of my posts.
A selection of writing from my tenure as Assistant Editor at Condé Nast Traveler.
Kristin M. Miller 
You must be logged in to post a comment.