Are We Ready for the Return of Mass Tourism?
A new book explores the impact tourism has had on our politics, our planet, and our selves.
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It took a global pandemic for many of us to realize that we
live in what Italian journalist and social theorist Marco D’Eramo calls the
“Age of Tourism.” As he writes in his new book,
The World in a Selfie: An
Inquiry Into the Tourist Age, tourism is the defining industry of the
twenty-first century. Tourism was an $8.8 trillion business in 2018, or 10.4
percent of global gross domestic product. It is also an industry upon which, D’Eramo writes, “a galaxy