| If, like me, you are a Six Feet Under fan, you might recall that early in Season 3, newly enrolled art student Claire Fisher and her friend Russell check out Los Angeles' Watts Towers, very late at night. Watts Towers was built in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s by Italian immigrant Sabato Rodia, a coal miner and construction worker who hauled around 10,000 seashells from the coast to his property in Watts, where he constructed "a whimsical fantasy" of concrete walls, arches, and 100-foot spires. In 1954, Rodia handed over his keys to a friend and left Los Angeles, never to return. After the city threatened to tear it down, Watts Towers became somewhat of a museum and cultural center for the area's Italian-American immigrants. This week, in an essay published in partnership with Hakai magazine, Krista Langlois uses Rodia's work of art as a point of entry to investigate why humans, across time and cultures, are so obsessed with seashells and what this reveals our history. We have used them as jewelry, as currency, as symbols of life and procreation, to adorn cemeteries and graves, to signpost the Camino de Santiago pilgrim trail. But environmental changes are coming for them too. A marine biologist to whom Langlois speaks notes that Watts Towers is more than an architectural curiosity: it's also a time capsule of that era's biodiversity—which is now largely gone, because some of the towers' most common species from the California coast are now locally extinct or rare. Langlois writes that across the world, shells and the places we hunt for them are becoming more scarce—but worth holding on to. Krista Langlois, by the way, also wrote our Know Before You Go to the Marshall Islands guide, one of the more unusual destinations (and least-visited countries) we've covered, in a very crowded field. Not a bad place to escape the madness 2020 promises to be. On The Trip podcast, we're saying Bonjour hi (an unloved phrase in Montreal) to Quebec with journalist, columnist and radio host Patrick Lagacé, whose work attempts to translate (in more ways than language) between English and French Canada. Patrick hosts the province's number one drive-time radio show, but he also has the mixed honor of his very own "L'affaire" associated with his name—which refers to the time Montreal police spied on him through his iPhone in a sting operation on their own officers, on top of other shady activities such as larding their affidavits with "bullshit". It's a pretty crazy story, and Patrick won the Canadian Press Freedom award for the way he fought back. He tells us all about the fallout of "L'affair Lagacé," explains the roots of Quebec's linguistic disputes, what Canadians really think about Justin Trudeau—and why Americans come to Quebec (it's not just the progressive alcohol- and lap-dancing laws. Or is it?).
—Alexa | 
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