Flashes of Panic

I think when my aunt gave me a copy of Explorer’s House: National Geographic and the World It Made, she had in mind some level of history of exploration, or travel writing, but that’s not what the book is. At its core, it’s a history of an idea, and on another layer, it’s a story about magazine publishing.

Oddly enough, I can find something like that pretty fascinating, and it didn’t hurt that of my colleagues in my magazine days, one came to RW from National Geographic, and another went to NG some time after I left RW. So I found some explanation for the bizarre stories I’d heard, like an entirely separate department for “legends”—that is, a completely different editorial crew handling photo captions, and only photo captions. Considering the page space NG spends on photography (and it turns out they spent decades living on the photographic and photo-printing cutting edge,) it makes a lot of sense.

And then… imagine four generations of the same family running the same magazine? Wouldn’t happen nowadays, not by a long stretch.

Now Playing: Words Fail You from Five Stories by Kris Delmhorst