Letter From the Editor

IN THIS PRINT EDITION OF DEPARTURES, our cover star is Mexico. From its spectacular landscapes and cuisine to the incredible traditions of Indigenous craftsmanship and the vibrant modern design, film, and art scenes, it is a country with a wealth of stories to tell. Covering such a diverse and, frankly, enormous country in just a few pages is of course impossible (the food itself could fill a whole library, let alone a magazine). So while we have touched on all of these things in this issue, what we have really tried to capture here is the spirit of the place. And that is something I am particularly excited to share, because Mexico is somewhere I deeply love.

I can’t identify precisely when that love affair began. It wasn’t one moment but more of a slow unfolding — an appropriate experience for somewhere so complex. I had been five or six times, both as a tourist and for work, and kept feeling compelled to return. Eventually, on a vacation when my kids were young, my family found ourselves so inextricably drawn to Sayulita, the small town we were visiting, that we ultimately decided to move there.

Vacationing in a place is one experience; living in it, another. To visit is to see the best version of it, the shined-up self someone shows you on a first date. To live somewhere is more like marriage — one long enough for the polish to wear off. The habits that once charmed can become infuriating when we live with them day after day. But like marriage, living in a place allows you to see it more truly, to understand it more deeply, and for it to become yours. My claim to Mexico is that of a foreigner who lived there for two years (before the pandemic bounced us abruptly back to Brooklyn). But the marriage metaphor does hold here: If you allow it to, a relationship can change you entirely.

When I close my eyes and imagine Mexico, I think of the softness of the air that hits me stepping off the plane every time I arrive. I think of the sounds: waves crashing all night long heard through the palapa roof of the house we lived in our first year, the tinny notes of ranchera music drifting up at night from the town below, waking up slowly to the strange calls of the chachalacas in the trees outside my window. I think of the people — always the people — because, ultimately, it’s the people who make the place. I think of everything their warm and generous country gave me and my family, like the smile of my daughter, her legs scraped and strong, her hair tangled with salt and sand, riding her bike through our small town, having a glimpse for those years of a kind of childhood I had back in the ’80s, a kind I had thought was gone for good. And I think of all the small moments of tremendous natural beauty: the sky lit up like a disco by a thunderstorm ripping across the Pacific, or the mango trees in the late spring, heavy with fruit, or a trip to Baja California Sur, where I drove alone through a desert in bloom, alight with thousands of tiny yellow butterflies.

It is the natural splendor that draws many visitors to Mexico, where they first experience it through its hotels and resorts. There are luxurious places to stay there, no doubt. But beyond them, there is even more.

It is the even more that we seek to explore in Departures — a slightly different version of the story you may think you already know, whether that means broadening the view of a vacation destination like Mexico, exploring a late-in-life pivot for the iconic singer Patti LaBelle, sharing Bret Easton Ellis’ memories of the Los Angeles of his youth, or interviewing a female hotelier reshaping the Thai tourism industry. During this holiday season, we offer you the gift of a new way of seeing things, hopefully making this wide, wonderful world even bigger.