Helping haul eighteen boxes of secondhand books, £17,000 worth, into the back of a UPS truck was one of my tasks at Plurabelle Books, the bookshop where I worked over the summer. Most had been on our shelves for years, accumulating a thick layer of dust, but were soon to be on their way to a warehouse in Chicago. Postal pickup day usually excites thoughts of whose fingers will soon turn the pages of the book you just packed for shipping, but these books were never going to be in the hands of...

Starting from the airport departures board, every stop of your holiday is connected by a Google Maps dot-to-dot designed to carve out the fastest, most efficient route, but is the journey ever only about the destination? Any line connecting two points on a map can itself be composed of countless destinations, each containing the possibility of an encounter, a surprise, or what the Situationist International called situations. Active in Europe between 1957 and 1972, the Situationists were...

In the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, I stood in front of Van Gogh, who was blue and post-impressionistic. The green of his eyes, like the green that rimmed his hat, brought out the red hues of his cheeks, lips, and ears. The thick brushstrokes gave so much movement to the portrait that, for a moment, he felt alive — you could almost see the paintbrush and Van Gogh’s accompanying hand gestures. I cried. A woman asked me to move out of the way, which was fair enough given I was standing right in...