Let the Great World Spin

Introducing a brand-new digital magazine about the things you love: global culture, food, style, wellness, adventure, and the pure, unbridled joy of travel

You can be comfortable at home for a thousand days, or step out the door and run right into trouble.
— Ancient Chinese proverb

If you’re anything like us, you’ve spent too many hours searching the web for smart, savvy, inspiring travel info, only to find yourself overwhelmed and underserved. Where, you ask, is the sophisticated travel content for grown-ups?

That, for us, was the starting point of Further. Most of us came up in the glossy heyday of print magazines. (Yes, kids, they were real, and they were spectacular.) Nilou and I met at Travel + Leisure; she later headed up Food & Wine and Epicurious while I was at Condé Nast Traveler and Saveur. We’re old enough to remember when people paid (!) for good travel content, which arrived via the mailbox or the newsstand. Now, like you, we spend most of our non-traveling lives online — it’s where we go to read, connect, discover, and dream up our next journeys. So why is it so hard to find a trusted source that speaks to us?

As travelers, we longed for a digital site that provides intel with insight, showing us not just where to go and what to do but why — and why it matters. A truly world-spanning travel mag covering all seven continents. A place for deep-dive destination guides, far-flung adventure stories, enlightening profiles and essays, and, yes, comic relief. (Let’s not kid ourselves that travel isn’t occasionally worth a good laugh.)

And as journalists, we pined for a travel journal that combined the richness and reach of digital with the care and cadence of print. A beautifully designed, thoughtfully curated monthly, one we’d be excited to see in our inbox.

So we thought…why not just make it ourselves? And so we did. Thanks to the generous support of our partners at Silversea, we created Further — a luxury travel magazine that delivers straight to your inbox each month, bringing stories from across the planet, all for free. (Yes, you read that right: Further is absolutely free.)

We assembled a band of well-traveled merrymakers who care deeply (perhaps too much) about global culture and the good life — and who are some of the hardest-working, most talented journalists, writers, photographers, illustrators, designers, videographers, and editors in the field. No doubt you’ll get to know them by name over the coming months.

We don’t cover everything. We cover extraordinary things. Think of our site as a filter, not a firehose. We designed Further to be a refuge from the web’s chaos and clamor, where you can tune out the noise and tune in to what you really came for: gorgeous visuals, smart takeaways, and transportive stories that inspire as much as they inform. That means no annoying pop-up ads — indeed, no advertising of any kind. Nor will we flood you with AI-driven listicles and cheap clickbait. We know you see other people for that. (No judgments!) Each month we’ll gift you a tastefully packaged collection of stories — you might even call it an “issue” — highlighting those singular, only here experiences that make travel so worthwhile.

This, to us, feels like true luxury. We hope you’ll feel the same, and will find a like-minded partner in Further. As we all know, a fine travel companion is a rare thing indeed.

Did we mention a subscription is entirely free?

For this special double launch issue, we’ve brought some delightful fellow travelers along for the ride.

• The globe-trotting Alan Cumming — hot off this month’s Emmy win for The Traitors — takes a charming look back on the journeys that shaped his life and career.

• Alan is one of three 2024 Emmy nominees in this issue. We’ve also got a rollicking Q&A with the leading ladies of Top Chef, Kristen Kish and Gail Simmons, who dish on favorite hotels, go-to restaurants, memorably bad trips, and how to eat well on the road.

• Legendary photographer Steve McCurry recounts his first encounter with Antarctica, in a photo essay that has us planning our own trips, ASAP.

• We also meet up with Beks Ndlovu, the Zimbabwean pioneer who’s changing the face of safari; Julian MacKay, the brash wunderkind who’s shaking up the ballet world on multiple continents; and photographer/activist Ami Vitale, whose riveting shots of pandas in the wild lit up our Instagram feeds during the pandemic.

• Back on asphalt, we roam hungrily through Paris with part-time expat and full-time icon Dorie Greenspan, who leads us to the best bistros, bakeries, wine bars, and food markets in the City of Light.

Putting this issue together was a journey in itself. We’re grateful to our inspiring, indefatigable team, and to all the brilliant contributors and correspondents far and wide who shared their stories, images, advice, and expertise. A few we’d like to shout out by name:

• The inimitable Anya von Bremzen (whose NYT best-selling National Dish is one of the smartest food books we’ve read in ages) uncovers a Slow Food revolution underway in Urla, Turkey, which feels increasingly like Tuscany on the Aegean. Anya traveled with renowned Nat Geo photographer Rena Effendi, whose images capture this once-sleepy wine region on the cusp of transition.

• Hoping for a glimpse of the Northern and Southern Lights, Further’s own Hillary Richard and Laura Dannen Redman lit out to chase auroras in Canada and New Zealand, and found (ahem) polar-opposite experiences. They returned with two lovely essays about traveling in pursuit of moments that might not appear. But when they do? Good lord, what a thing it is.

• Laura Lazzaroni, one of our favorite Italian food writers (favorite Italians, period), makes a compelling case for Italy’s apron-clad nonnas to put down their spoons and step away from the stove — or at least for the rest of us to stop fetishizing old-school Italian grandmother cooking, to the detriment of Italy’s more forward-looking chefs. If a bowlful of cacio e pepe didn’t already make you feel guilty…

• Our good friend Darrell Hartman, who worked with us at Travel + Leisure back in the day, treats us to two terrific pieces this month. The first is a profile of a remarkable self-taught artisan still making globes by hand in a North London atelier. The other is a feature I never imagined we’d assign, since (a) I don’t fish, and (b) I don’t read about fishing. (Further may contain multitudes, but we do not contain fishing stories.) Yet when Darrell told me about Quebec’s Grand Cascapedia River, its venerable old lodges frequented by Vanderbilts and Anna Wintour, and its prized Atlantic salmon, he had me — how do you say? — hooked. And when he mentioned he’d be joined by his 84-year-old dad for what may be their last father-son trip together, well…yeah. Darrell’s gracefully told fishing story (apparently we do those now!) had me welling up by the end, and I expect you will be, too.

You’ll find all this and much more in the first issue of Further. And next month, why don’t we meet back here and do it all again? You can subscribe for free (really, we’re not kidding!) and follow us on Instagram and Facebook to keep up with all our latest discoveries.

Thanks for joining us, friends — we’re thrilled to have you here. Now let’s see what this world can do.

Yours,
Peter Jon Lindberg
Cofounder & Editor-in-Chief
Brooklyn, New York
September 18, 2024