I Asked the Internet to Assign Me Headlines, and What Happened Next Will Only Slightly Surprise You

In this, my extended refractory period, I’m casting about a bit for what to do with my days. And so today, in a moment of both boredom and curiosity, I made a special request on Twitter:

Send me a headline—any headline—and I'll write the corresponding story. Just for fun. Will post @Medium. Make it random. But no lists.

— Matt Gross (@worldmattworld) January 5, 2015

And of course, my Twitter followers gave me a bunch of good suggestions for stories I’ll try to write over the next couple of weeks. Here’s a few of them:

German Chocolate Quake
Oshkosh Kibosh
The Slide Monopoly: Explaining the Economy of City Playgrounds
I Really Did Need That Horse
Gym Clash Gyros
Bummer. And Here I Thought I Was Being Original.

Like em? Want me to write others? Just suggest a headline—seriously, any headline—and I’ll do my best to turn it into an actual story. That’s why we have comments, folks!

Currency Events

Almost as soon as I retired from the Frugal Traveler column, I started hearing from a lot of editors asking me to write for them. Yay! I thought. On to the next big thing! Turns out, though, that most of them wanted me to write about, you know, budget travel—a subject I know pretty well but about which I’m a little ambivalent. Writing 200 or so articles about budget travel will do that to you.

But when my friend Todd Pruzan came calling, asking me to contribute a few pieces to Currency, a new personal-finance Website for youngish people, I caved. The site is still in beta, but several of my pieces—about street food, credit cards, and booking flights—are up. If you’re feeling “Matt Gross the Frugal Traveler” withdrawal, you might want to check them out.

Tales of a Post-Frugal Traveler

When I announced in May that I was retiring as the New York Times’s Frugal Traveler columnist, a lot of people got the wrong idea. They thought maybe I’d been fired, or that I wanted to spend more time with my family, or that I was simply tired of traveling. None of those theories—which I still hear from friends and acquaintances—is true, however. Especially the last one. I love traveling—it’s what I do. To give that up would be like giving up breathing.

And in fact, I’ve had a busy summer of travel: Costa Rica, Tunisia, Austria, Morocco, Maine, almost all of which were work trips. (The week in Maine was my first real extended vacation in four years.) And starting this weekend, you’ll be able to see the fruits of my labor, when my new series for the Times travel section debuts.

It’s called “Getting Lost,” and I won’t say too much about it here—yet. Let’s allow the premiere piece to speak for itself over the weekend, and then, on Monday, I’ll start to address right here some of the issues the article brings up.

Or rather, I’ll try to address them. See, Monday afternoon I’m off to Ireland on another work trip, and I can’t say how regular my Internet access will be. But I’ll do my best to maintain my presence here—as long as you do your best to read each and every word I write. Deal?