Gridskipper

Mark Jolly, the founder of the luxury travel website, globorati and a writer for for Conde Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure, has been guest blogging for the NY Times' The Moment this week. A recent entry starts off as a condemnation of former travel writer Thomas Kohnstamm's new book about lying and cheating his way through the travel industry, and selling a few drugs in the meantime. Can Jolly relate? Not exactly. "Even during my lean years I never accepted a guidebook commission since the pay was always pitiful," he says. Duh, if Kohnstamm had just gotten a job with Conde Nast none of this ever would have happened. All the same, though, "the real shock is that [Kohnstamm's] the first to blow the whistle on the travel industry's dirty little secret."

The real kicker, however, is that Jolly (god, what a name) ends the piece with a bit about how lonely life as a travel writer can be. Yes, yes it is. Especially when you're of the blogging variety and are forced to work all by your lonesome from home as your new office may not have room for you, and your old office has banished you like the plague.... I mean, I love travel! As Jolly says, "Despite the dream spas and the white-powdered beaches, there's a component of the job — and it is a job — that's lonely: tables for one, single cabanas, and slipping in between the shadows of all those shiny, happy people on holiday."