It is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well

From an essay by Graeme Wood in Foreign Policy, October 5, 2010: Travel Writing is Dead:

The simplest reason for this catastrophic turn is that it is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well. In 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that travel is "an unavoidable drawback" of acquainting oneself with the world: "There are hours of inaction . . . and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose. . . . The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when they have been separated from this dross." The good news for travelers is that these inconveniences are disappearing. The bad news for readers is that those inconveniences are the very stuff that concentrates the mind and transmutes narcissism into something approaching insight.