It’s Feel-Good Friday, and Unpacked host Aislyn and producer Nikki are joined by a guest they’ve been waiting weeks to record with: Afar senior editor Lucy Kehoe, who also edits our UK sister title, Suitcase. Three stories, all good news, landing fittingly on Juneteenth.

This week’s stories:

• A landmark opening in Chicago lands right on Juneteenth: a nearly 20-acre campus on the South Side, a decade in the making, that’s less presidential library and more civic gathering place, right down to an Oval Office anyone can sit in.
• Five new museums are arriving in one famously museum-rich city this year, from a vertigo-inducing glass storehouse where you can watch conservators at work to a love letter to teenage subcultures, Walkman included.
• A newly protected stretch of the South Pacific roughly the size of the Amazon rainforest. One that's Indigenous-led, tourism-friendly, and home to about three-quarters of the world’s coral species.
• Plus: Nikki’s very specific dream of finally meeting a dugong in the wild.

Tune in every Friday through June for a fresh trio of stories from Afar’s favorite travel writers and editors. We’ll see you next week.

Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome to Feel-Good Friday

00:02:00 You Are America

00:04:00 London’s Museum Boom

00:08:00 Protecting the Coral Triangle

00:11:00 In Search of Dugongs

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