Vol. XIV · A Weekly Dispatch from 84 Correspondents Worldwide
Every Sunday morning, our editors send a single letter from the road — one long-read dispatch, three short field updates, and a destination we’ve personally re-walked since the last issue. No listicles, no recycled SEO, no algorithm tricks. Just the notes our correspondents wish they’d had before they booked the flight.
What’s in the Envelope
Each issue opens with a long-read dispatch filed from the field, gathers three short notes from correspondents on assignment, and closes with a single destination we’ve re-walked since the last issue — the kind of place our editors would still book on their own holiday.
This Week · Issue No. 612
Our Maghreb correspondent spends an evening with a third-generation weaver repairing a 19th-century Berber carpet, weaving together the city’s craft economy, the politics of the medina’s restoration, and a small argument about what tourists actually want when they say they want “authentic.”
Read the full issueField Update
Our Balkans correspondent files a quick dispatch on a refurbished ferry-and-train route that locals have been waiting on for a decade.
Field Update
A small piece of culinary reporting on a 96-year-old tea house that just rewrote its menu for a generation that prefers cold-brewed leaves.
Destination of the Week
Our Iberian desk returns to the country’s first capital to revise a guide that had drifted out of date since 2014. What changed, what didn’t, and where to stay now.
From the Archive
Field Notes has shipped every Sunday since 2011 — no gaps, no rebrands, no skipped weeks. Browse a handful of recent covers below, or step into the full archive.
A Note from the Desk
Field Notes began in 2011 as an internal memo circulated among three editors who had just left a glossy travel magazine. We were tired of ranking restaurants we hadn’t eaten in, of hotel picks dictated by press-trip budgets, of guidebooks rewritten by staff who’d never boarded the bus to the airport. So we started sending each other a weekly letter from wherever we happened to be — honest notes on what worked, what didn’t, and what we wished we’d known.
That memo turned into a publication. Today it is sent to 380,000 readers every Sunday, written by 84 resident correspondents in 195 countries. Every destination guide on this site is rewritten after an actual visit — our average refresh cycle is 47 days, the fastest in our category — and Field Notes is how we share the thinking that doesn’t quite fit inside a guide.
We will never run pay-to-play hotel rankings. We will never recycle an old guide and call it new. We will never claim to have eaten at a restaurant our correspondent hasn’t eaten at, or stayed at a hotel our editor hasn’t stayed at. When we get a tip from a tourism board, we say so, in plain text, at the bottom of the note.
What you’ll get, every Sunday, is the letter we’d send a friend. What you won’t get is anything else.
— Maren Halverson, Editorial Director
By the Numbers
Independently vetted, editor-led, and ad-free in the newsletter itself since issue No. 1.
A Closing Offer
Subscribe to Field Notes and we’ll send you our 142-page Destination Handbook — the field-tested planning brief our editors hand out to friends before they leave. It covers the questions we’d ask ourselves: when to go, what to skip, where to stay, and what the guidebooks always get wrong.
