"To this day, across the developing world, foreigners sacrifice their lives and energies, often heroically, in order to help the locals attain a better life. Yet frequently in the process they try to protect the places they visit from the very technology, freedom of movement, and material plenty that they have enjoyed in getting there. They want the local to honor the spiritual purity and postcard ancientness that they have gone to find — not Britney Spears, McDonald's, and MTV. The travel writing of the American Empire may sometimes be possessed by feminist concerns or anti-capitalist impulses, seeking nature more than art, the jungle more than museums, the raw above the cooked, but that is still colonialism by a different name. However self-lacerating and respectful, its approach can be as hostile to real exchange as overweening arrogance and imperial condescension are. If the old form of travel writing said, 'Look at these laughable people different from ourselves,' the new one advises, 'We should listen to and learn from the greatness of these people so other than ourselves.' In both cases the final emphasis is on 'ourselves.' The idea that the traveler is always right is simply replaced by the idea that the traveler is always wrong. The song remains the same."

–Pico Iyer, Travel Writing: Nowhere Need Be Foreign, Lapham's Quarterly, Summer 2009