Egypt can feel thrilling, maddening, stunning, and frustrating all at once. It is an overwhelming experience, and its chaos can either make you fall in love with the country or have you booking your flight home early. After visiting Egypt 8 times, I can say that I’ve felt both ways during a single day, yet that is all part of the adventure that makes this a one-of-a-kind place. No matter how many times I said it was the last time, I keep finding myself back at the Cairo airpo

We knew we had stayed in the right Airbnb when we drove through the isolated gravel road surrounded by yellow grass fields to our home for the next three days in the Dark Sky Reserve. As novice astrophotographers, this would be our chance to take those pictures we had always seen on National Geographic, where the Milky Way meets the mountain tops and shooting stars dart across the night sky in vivid reds and greens. Driving along the bumpy path to reach the house, the rolling

Opening the Substack home page has felt like a strange homecoming I didn’t know I needed. Getting lost in a rabbit hole of someone’s archive, scrolling through notes that seem oddly personal and vulnerable, and exploring the host of recommended readings like a chat with a librarian, has brought me back to Earth as if I’ve been on a whirlwind jet ride that's taken me far from my world and myself. In the era of social media algorithms and doomscrolling, I became an unwilling pa