Welcome to Flung--The Substack

Let's deconstruct travel.

Welcome to Flung—The Substack. Written by me, Sarah Stodola, journalist, author of The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, and something of a recovering travel writer. Twice per month (at least), I’ll be writing here about the phenomenon of travel. Coverage will fall roughly into two categories: Reporting on and analysis of travel’s economic, climate, and societal impacts; and considerations of travel as a concept, the how and the why of it, and the history that caused it to evolve as it did. As part of the larger project, I’ll be drawing on my years of research into the travel industry and expanding on the themes I wrote about in The Last Resort, a book that approaches beach tourism, and tourism in general, with healthy skepticism.

For an industry that accounts for one out of every 10 jobs on earth and that has transformed many cities and regions for better and worse, travel’s impacts receive scant coverage. In large part, we can blame the travel media for this. While business sections and publications cover business, and sports publications cover sports, travel publications don’t so much cover travel as prostrate themselves before it, their editorial decisions driven by the mandate that travel is by default wonderful and aspirational. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that while many media outlets covered my book when it was released, not a single travel publication did so.)

I’ll be covering angles that travel magazines and influencers don’t, and never under the assumption that travel is inherently a worthwhile activity. Like most things, it is what you do with it. Travel can broaden horizons and deepen empathy. Perhaps even more importantly, it can humble a person. But it can also do none of these things, depending on how it’s undertaken. At its worst, travel can crowd locals out of their own communities. It can suffocate other local sources of income. It can enable individuals’ elitist impulses. It can destroy ecosystems. It can even dull the senses rather than heighten them.

I’ll take on all of it, in some cases shining a light on the positives of tourism, in others arguing against its merit.  Certainly, from the baseline of its present incarnation, travel can be changed for the better, and I’ll be providing insight into emerging ideas that can be useful to those within the industry, those regulating the industry, and ordinary people who suppress a nagging feeling during their vacations that there’s something disquieting about this whole thing.

In the coming weeks, look for essays here about “leakage” in the travel industry, the future of US train travel, the ways in which Covid changed travel permanently, the concept of the beach as paradise, and the increasingly flawed idea of the bucket list. For now, all content is free, although I plan to move to a paid model within a few months, which will allow me to continue to pursue investigative, thoughtful journalism around the topic of travel and tourism. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber ahead of the switch as a show of support, you can do so by clicking the button below. It will be much appreciated as I ramp up.

Things like hotel reviews and personal travel accounts, plus anything written by an author other than me, will still be published on the Flung Magazine website. This is not a replacement for the website, but an extension of it. You won’t find any travel tips, travel guides, or inspiration for your next vacation here. What you will find is original reporting and analysis, plus philosophical musings on the meaning of travel. Flung’s original tagline, question everywhere, still fits, hopefully better here than ever.

My hope is that readers will come away with a better understanding of this enormous—and enormously powerful—industry. Travel shapes the contemporary world. Flung—The Substack will examine the contours.