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I adore New Orleans. I love the food, the architecture, the music, the history, the contradictions, and the fact that you can walk around a corner and stumble into a story stranger than fiction. Every month, when we create a new Field Trip Travel Company guide, I spend weeks digging through books, documentaries, podcasts, historical records, maps, and onsite locations to build an experience worth someone's time. This month, that guide is about the Battle of New Orleans. And I

I picked up a zine on absurdist art at a local zine fest recently — mostly because it had a snarling chihuahua on the cover and I thought that was funny. Inside was a line I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Experiencing semantic instability is characterized by a dynamic process of meaning-making in which initial uncertainty can transform into insight.” That phrase, semantic instability, sounds like something a philosophy professor mutters before assigning 400 pages of reading

It was midnight in Jackson Square. I was with my friend Becky and slightly inebriated. Not irresponsibly so—but enough to feel confident in a way that suggested I should probably not be given a microphone. Somewhere between the glow of the streetlights and the quiet hum of the city, I found myself standing in front of the statue of Andrew Jackson, delivering a fully unplanned, slightly unhinged, and deeply passionate retelling of the Battle of New Orleans. To no one in partic

“Meaningful” is one of those words that sounds great… until you stop and ask what it actually means. I’m a big fan of words and their proper meaning. Not in an obnoxious, correct-people-mid-sentence kind of way—but in the sense that words matter. Each one carries not just a definition, but a cloud of associations. And sometimes, those associations get so broad that the word itself starts to lose precision. I call these hollow words: Words that sound important but don’t have a