Travel

The Northeast corridor is America’s busiest rail line. Each day, its trains deliver 800,000 passengers to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and points in between. The Northeast corridor is also a name for the place those trains serve: the coastal plain stretching from Virginia to Massachusetts, where over 17% of the country’s population lives on less than 2% of its land. Northeasterners ride the corridor and live there too. Like “Rust Belt,” “Deep South,” “Silicon Valley” and “Appalachia,” “Corridor” has become shorthand for what many people think of as the Northeast’s defining features: its brisk pace of life, high median incomes and liberal politics. In 1961, Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona wished someone had “sawed off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” In 2016, conservative F.H. Buckley disparaged “lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies and high...

Outdoor recreation is on track for another record-setting year. In 2022, U.S. national parks logged more than 300 million visits – and that means a lot more people on roads and trails. While research shows that spending time outside is good for physical and mental health, long lines and gridlocked roads can make the experience a lot less fun. Crowding also makes it harder for park staff to protect wildlife and fragile lands and respond to emergencies. To manage the crowds, some parks are experimenting with timed-entry vehicle reservation systems and permits for popular trails. For all of their popularity, national parks are just one subset of U.S. public lands. Across the nation, the federal government owns more than 640 million acres (2.6 million square kilometers) of land. Depending on each site’s mission, its uses may include logging, livestock grazing, mining, oil and gas production, wildlife habitat or recreation – often, several of these at once. In con...

Salman Rushdie, the celebrated Anglo-Indian writer, once declared that the “most precious book” he possessed was his passport. Rushdie had already published dozens of works, including novels, short stories, essays and travelogues, to wide acclaim and considerable controversy. But he acknowledged that it was his British passport, doing “its stuff efficiently and unobtrusively,” that enabled him to pursue a literary career on the world stage. On the other hand, Rushdie viewed the Indian passport he had held as a boy in the 1950s as “a paltry thing.” “Instead of offering the bearer a general open-sesame to anywhere in the world,” he recalled, “it stated in grouchy bureaucratic language that it was only valid for travel to a specified – and distressingly short — list of countries.” Today, global mobility is on the rise. According to The Passport Index, an interactive ranking tool created by the investment f...