How to find meaning in your summer vacation

✈️ This year, global air travel is expected to finally surpass its pre-pandemic peak (of 9.2 billion annual passengers)
Today: The triple-filter test, trans (in)visibility, and a philosophy of travel. Written by Harris Sockel

It’s warming up here in the northern hemisphere, and (in my circles, at least) people are beginning to plan their summer vacations. Maybe you want to travel, through stories, to Montana or Jupiter, Florida, or the Himalayas. Want to visit Japan? There’s a publication for that. You can learn why Tokyo’s capsule hotels make it a wise destination for solo travelers and gain a basic understanding of kanji, the Japanese writing system that borrows Chinese characters. One interesting linguistic fact: Tokyo in kanji is 東京, or “east capital,” because it’s east of Kyoto (the nation’s capital during the Edo period).

My colleague Brittany Jezouit created this running list of travel stories. If you’re a member, you can download the list for offline reading while you’re in airplane mode.

And if you’re in a philosophical mood, some recommended reading there, too: In “Travel Is No Cure for the Mind,” writer and illustrator More To That says travel is a learning opportunity, but it’s not an escape — nor is it a panacea. This quote stuck with me: “We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones.”

“I view traveling as more privilege than achievement,” writes Chad Reid in a reflection on his decades-long quest to visit all 50 states in the U.S., “it’s not a thing you can be good or bad at. It’s an activity you can pursue if you have an inclination and the good fortune to do so.”

What else we’re reading

• Grant Piper reveals why Cloudflare, the web hosting company managing roughly 20% of the internet’s traffic, has a wall of lava lamps in its lobby. Apparently, the lamps are an ingenious encryption device: Above the wall is a camera recording “the position of all of the lava in the lamps and feeds it to a security program, which turns those positions into keys, which are then used to build encryption for their web traffic.”
• Ellen "Jelly" McRae opens up about being prescribed Ozempic years before it became fashionable, and the side effects that came with it. The generic term for this drug is “semaglutide” and it was inspired by lizard venom.

From the archive

March 31 was International Transgender Day of Visibility, an annual celebration of trans people’s right to self-definition. Eight years ago on Medium, Jennifer Coates published “I Am a Transwoman. I Am in the Closet. I Am Not Coming Out,” an essay that adds nuance to the conversation around trans visibility — and invisibility. This was 2016, a different time for trans rights. The U.S. military hadn’t yet lifted its ban on trans soldiers, and Obama had just used the word “transgender” in his SOTU speech, a first for any U.S. president. Coates’ story, which has sparked over 600 responses, is both a time capsule and a testament to trans resilience. In the words of one reader, “You have put into words things that are not mine but are somehow still part of me.”

🤝Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about work-appropriate honesty)

In any healthy organization, there’s room for honesty — to a degree. If you’re not sure how candid you should be at work, apply Jaime Martínez Bowness’ triple-filter test: Should something be said, should it be said by me, and should it be said now?

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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