Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i AFAR

ONE DAY LAST YEAR, I asked my father what he loved about fishing. A wistful look came over him. “There’s just something about standing hip-deep in a Montana trout stream,” he replied, “or on the bank of a Vermont lake shaded by pines.” I nodded, then pointed out to him that he’d never done either of those things. Fantasy and reality commingle on the angler’s plane. A hardened realist doesn’t continue to stuff clattering rods into the back of the hatchback, results be damned. Even on those occasions when the fish deign to bite, the moment exists within a larger fantasy that this is somehow a Special Thing, and not just a scaly animal on the end of some string. My dad, 82, absorbed my correction but merely shrugged. In…

WHEN THE WALDORF ASTORIA New York opened on Park Avenue in 1931, it didn’t take very long for it to become a benchmark for luxury hospitality in Manhattan. The hotel—a 1,400-room art deco masterpiece taking up an entire city block—was the first in the world to have electricity on every floor. Ginger Rogers performed in the chandelier-lit Empire Room, well-heeled diners tucked into eponymous Waldorf salads, and former president Dwight D. Eisenhower lived out the last years of his life here. In 2017, the hotel closed for a much-needed overhaul. After shaking off years of dust and patchwork additions that allegedly cost billions, the Waldorf Astoria New York—part of Hilton Hotels & Resorts’ luxury portfolio—is poised to make its comeback, and is accepting reservations beginning September 1. Led by the…

“I’M EXPERIENCE FIRST, photos second,” says Los Angeles–based photographer Brian Chorski, whose new book, Another Patch of Sky (Guest Editions, 2025), offers a seductive, and strangely intimate, impression of natural beauty in the western United States and Mexico. The title signifies Chorski’s freewheeling mode of travel, “just stumbling upon another patch of sky,” he says. And the book presents a kind of pastoral voyeurism in its collection of photos from trips made with friends between 2019 and 2024: swimming in California’s Mammoth Lakes, hiking in Montana’s Glacier National Park, fishing in Baja, Mexico, and more. “I hope it’s obvious that I had an amazing time,” he says. “I could confidently say I would have been happy having gone on those trips without making any photos I was happy with.” A…

TO KICK OFF OUR 18-MONTH CELEBRATION OF AMERICA’S 250TH BIRTHDAY, HERE’S AFAR’S GUIDE TO THE BOLDEST, ARTSIEST, BUZZIEST, FRIENDLIEST, TASTIEST, BOOZIEST THINGS GOING ON ACROSS THE U.S. RIGHT NOW. GEORGIA ESCAPE TO A SWAMP THAT’S EVEN MORE MAGICAL AFTER SUNSET Though it doesn’t quite have the name recognition of the Everglades, the Okefenokee, on the Georgia–Florida border, is a wetland of mammoth proportions: North America’s largest blackwater swamp, it could fit D.C. within its borders nine-plus times. The water gets its tealike appearance from the tannins in decaying plants, and the night sky above is just as inky. No wonder the swamp’s Stephen C. Foster State Park was named the first “gold-tier” Dark Sky Park in the Southeast, due to its exceptionally low light pollution. The best way to experience…

I WAS INTRODUCED to our country’s national park system by the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Captivated by her portrayals of rural Black life and of nature as both a source of beauty and a wellspring of hardship, I followed her trail to Everglades National Park in 2013. Accompanied by my parents, I learned more about the landscape replete with mangroves and sawgrass marshes. Together, we marveled at the jewel-colored purple gallinules and watched alligators sunbathing along the banks. I discovered that, decades ago, such individuals as conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas were responsible for protecting these very flora and fauna from the interests of developers. This history sharpened how I thought about U.S. national parks, often touted as “America’s best idea,” a phrase first credited to writer and historian…

The Bronx EST. CIRCA 1639 IN 1947, when 13-year-old Mike Amadeo moved from Puerto Rico to New York City, the Bronx hummed with the sounds of salsa, mambo, and plena. There were scores of music venues, from the Tritons Club to Hunts Point Palace, where Latin jazz star Tito Puente played as a young man. Today, many of the dance halls have closed—but you wouldn’t know it to visit Casa Amadeo, the oldest continuously operating Latin music store in New York City. Founded in 1927 as Almacenes Hernández, the shop was rechristened when Amadeo took it over in 1969. It still operates out of the same space, barely a block away from the elevated 4/5 train. When I visit in late spring, from the outside, Casa Amadeo appears small. But…