For the March issue of Boston Magazine, I helped edit our annual Best Places to Live guide. For my part of the packages, I crunched a lot of numbers to put together a market snapshot of real estate trends in Greater Boston (which are a bit scary right now) and also assembled a list of tips for buyers and sellers.

I wrote the weekend guide to Provincetown and the surrounding area for Boston Magazine’s summer travel package, and immediately fell in love with the region. It’s always hard reporting a summer travel package in April, but heading to the Outer Cape before the season really started was an amazing way to explore the area for the first time. Bonus: P-town is delightfully dog-friendly, so we brought our pup with us on this trip. I’m looking forward to making another visit to the the area soon.

[Boston Magazine: The Outer Cape, For Escape Artists]

Also in this month’s issue of Traveler: My “Go Now: Louisville” item. Louisville is a surprisingly funky city, aiming to be the Austin of the north (as I say in the piece) and the 21C hotel is honestly one of the best I’ve ever visited. NuLu is a fun, eclectic neighborhood, and Butchertown is still a real deal meatpacking district — legend has it that a woman wearing a red handkerchief set off a stampede down its main streets. I’m still dying to get there for the Kentucky Derby, which is just all the more reason to go back.

Old time Syracuse

In the second talking head moment for me in a week, I was invited up to Syracuse this past weekend to speak at the journalism school about travel writing–which went off really well despite being a somewhat surreal experience.

It feels like I was just sitting in graduate school, watching panels and dissecting the creation story of the unwitting journalist who was chattering in front of me, trying desperately to imagine a point where I’d actually be employed by a magazine or news outlet instead of being an intern for the rest of my life. Suddenly I had 80 sets of eyes on me as I was espousing my love for Joan Didion and telling people that they had to be good writers first–that being a travel writer was a perk for great writers who were smart enough to find interesting angles about places that travel editors know through and through. And that it was work–reporting a travel story is not vacation–no matter how good it sounds. It was kind of great.

Oh what wonders Google will dig up for you when you’re a narcissistic journalist (and who among us in this profession isn’t?). Behold: A random credit in the Kitty Kelley biography of Oprah:

Turns out that my effort following Jonathan Franzen into an elevator and literally cornering him to get him a quote for New York Magazine worked out well for Kitty Kelley, who used it on page 285:

Somehow, I feel vindicated. And that much closer to Oprah.

There was a time in my life that I wanted to be an essayist. It started in college, when I discovered that E.B. White was a writer’s writer, and had done much more with his life beyond Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web (though now knowing that he did write those children’s books makes him all the more endearing). I devoured his painstakingly perfect essays in Here is New York, one of the most erudite and graceful books on the city that’s ever been written. I remember reading this exquisite paragraph in the wake of 9/11 and thinking how it seemed to encapsulate the terror and fear and fragility of a place and a time, despite having been written 50 years before the events took place:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

I came to realize that the life of an essayist is fairly impossible in this day and age (what, no one will pay me to sit in my room and muse on topics of my own making?), and turned to journalism instead (a far more lucrative venture). But when I was asked by Carlo Rotella, my fabulous American Studies professor in college, to contribute an essay to the literary magazine Post Road, I leapt at the chance. I’d been taking a storytelling class at the time, which had me flexing my nonfiction muscles, and I ended up taking the opportunity to put the same story I had been working on telling aloud down on paper. So I submitted a piece on my time at the Office of Public Security, which was my first real job out of college. It was around before the Department of Homeland Security was created, and suffice it to say that its role as a government office was primarily to calm the public’s psyche. And despite my earnest desire to help with counter-terrorism, I quickly became disillusioned with the entire effort. It was a long two years.

I don’t think I had White in my mind when I decided to write about my security job, but it’s funny now to realize his imprint on my subconscious. It was only when I got a copy of the magazine and recalled my essayist intentions that the two aligned in my head. And I’m glad they did.

I need to go and read some more White.

[Post Road]

Oh, what’s that you say? When you go to Louisville you should go to the Brown Hotel and get a dish that was created for drunken dancers back in 1926? That is (rather unfortunately) named the Hot Brown? Ok, fine. Fine.

Turkey, bacon, bread, Mornay cheese sauce, and tomatoes. Delicious. This will probably not make it into the article I’m writing on my visit. But it did make it into my stomach.

I’m inordinately amused by internet memes. A Sad Keanu or Cigar Guy mashup will make me giggle for hours. So when I saw the adorably awkward face of one Mr. Blobby, a creature of the deep sea, I decided he was imminently meme-worthy, and blogged about it today at work. Lo and behold, I not only found a burgeoning meme working under the ‘blobfish’ moniker, but my good pals even went so far as to make me a mini-meme. Thanks Jess and Mike!

I may not ever get a Pulitzer (you don’t get those for magazines anyway, I realize), but these Peep portraits are now apparently part of my journalistic legacy. Our second annual Peeps in Places contest went off with a little less fanfare than last year (apparently you just don’t book the Today Show and Good Morning America on the same day two years in a row). But plugs from ABC News, NPR, Jezebel, Black Book and a few other places doesn’t hurt. Dear god they’re cute.

Photo: Leslie Kuba