Worlds

Worlds is a weekly personal essay series from The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute, scheduled to launch in January 2027.

Published each Sunday, the series will explore global citizenship through lived experience, memory, place, movement, identity, work, language, belonging, and everyday life. Inspired in part by the spirit of the long-running Lives column in The New York Times Magazine, Worlds seeks to create a space for reflective, human-scale storytelling in an interconnected age.

The essays will not be travel writing in the conventional sense, nor academic commentary. Instead, they will offer grounded personal narratives situated somewhere specific: a classroom, an airport, a border crossing, a kitchen table, a neighborhood, a migration, a misunderstanding, a return home, a conversation between strangers. Some stories may feel outwardly global; others may unfold in deeply local or intimate spaces.

At its core, Worlds is guided by a simple belief: global citizenship is not only something studied intellectually, but something encountered through lived experience, relationship, and reflection.

Together, the series asks: What worlds do we inhabit, inherit, imagine, and carry within us?