Check the time with NYC Street Clock — telling the time using more than 20,000 Google Street View images found around NYC .

I can be an infinite bore when it comes to giving travel advice. Over the years I’ve learned to temper my enthusiasm and try and only share travel suggestions on request. However, that doesn’t stop me from sharing other folks great advice. So here are some excellent “Pro-level travel tips.” 

“I love traveling to new places and getting to enjoy new experiences. And as much as I love travel, it can be chaotic.

A friend once said that if you’ve ever tried to meditate and failed to quiet your jumbled mind, you should take a trip instead.

Because when you travel, your entire world distills down to finishing a single task to keep yourself safe and alive, letting everything else fall away (just like meditation!).

First, you have to find your plane. Then you have to find your luggage. Next, you have to find your hotel. Then—surprise!—you need to find dinner at 9pm in a city you’ve never set foot in. Good luck!

So here’s a bunch of tips I use to keep the chaos at bay, to feel more at home when I’m traveling, and bring some semblance of control back into my time in new places.”

Sometimes going to a museum can transport you to another time and place, so it’s no wonder that when filmmaker Michel Gondry and his visual effects artist brother Olivier Gondry created this retro-futuristic short for the Musée du Louvre, the museum’s Pyramid structure would blast off into space and land on the moon.

The bande-annonce, a promotional trailer titled Louvre-Moon-Love, was gifted to the Paris museum for their philanthropic Le Grand Dîner du Louvre 2026 event. The theme: ‘Le Louvre, la nuit’—The Louvre, by night.

With a computer graphics vibe from late 1970s and early 1980s analog technologies, the Gondry directing duo mixes the whimsical and surreal with paper craft, synthwave hues, fuzzy scanline textures, and glowing vector lines.

Cadgy. OneLook, a terrific resource for all things word-related, recently launched a new and slightly addictive word game. Creator Doug Beeferman explains: “In Cadgy, you get a new grid of letters every day. You find 5-letter words by clicking one letter from each of the columns.” Grids contain 20 words each day, except on double days when there are 40. Beeferman says he stumbled on the word cadgy while testing the game: It’s “a Scots and northern English term for ‘cheerful’ or ‘merry’, with occasional notes of ‘amorous’.”

When I was at one of my favorite indie bookshops ( Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ) searching for some appropriate titles for my nephew’s 8th birthday, I could have used this wonderful new tool. Dream Books A terrific resource for parents and teachers. Dream Books is a well-organized database for finding kids’ books by age, grade, reading level, series or award – with a community layer that lets children/families build a library, share progress and see what friends are reading.

cain culto & xiuhtezcatl – ¡basta ya!

I’ve tried a dozen or so types of instant coffee to bring on my travels and have yet to find a brand that I would rate as good , although Blue Bottle’s instant is okay.