When the Washington State–based travel guide and TV host Rick Steves decided to return to Europe in early 2022, he wasn’t sure how many of his favorite local spots had survived two years of pandemic life. Steves, who has hosted Rick Steves’ Europe for the past two decades and operates tours aimed at introducing American travelers to the continent, was pleasantly surprised by what he found: Many of his beloved places—the kind of mom-and-pop places that have been owned by the same families for generations—had made it through, and the streets were alive anew. “They’re kissing cheeks with a vengeance in Paris right now,” he told me. “And I’m really thankful for that.”

Steves and I caught up to discuss the rebound in tourism and how travel has changed since the start of the pandemic. He also warned that this summer may be a particularly busy one—perhaps the continent’s busiest yet—and offered practical tips for traveling amid crowds. (Consider heading to less-popular destinations, and don’t bother checking a bag!)

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Is COVID the biggest challenge that you’ve been thrown in your career?

Rick Steves: With every terrible event that stops travel for a little while, the demand does not dissipate; it just backs up. And then, when the coast is clear, all of those travel dreams are dusted off, and people turn them into reality.

In the course of my career, we’ve been through many tragic disruptions, but they didn’t really stop people from traveling. But for COVID, we were out of business. I had 100 people on my payroll and no revenue for two years. And that’s really tough to get through. Everybody in tourism is really thankful to get back at it. Guides are tearful on the bus after they’ve had a chance to give their historic walk to ancient Rome or through the back streets of Venice.

[Read: For one glorious summer, Americans will vacation like the French]

Nyce: There’s always the big, philosophical question of “Why do we travel?” Did the answer change for you during the pandemic?

Steves: If we travel, we are better connected with other nations, and the family of nations can work more constructively together. And to me, that means all of us are individual ambassadors—individual forces for peace. When we travel, we get to know each other better. We humanize people that we don’t otherwise understand.

Nyce: We most often associate travel with leisure, but you’re making a geopolitical case for it.

Steve: Well, if you want a rationale for why: I’m feeling very serious about climate change lately. When people travel, they contribute to climate change. A thoughtful traveler—an ethical traveler coming out of COVID—can reduce the toll of travel by paying for their carbon.

Nyce: Do you have any other tips for the ethical traveler of 2023?

Steves: Recognize that we have sort of a herd mentality when it comes to travel these days.

Nyce: The Instagram effect.

Steves: Exactly. It’s Instagram, crowdsourcing, and Tripadvisor. When I started my work, there was not enough information. Now there’s too much information. As consumers, we need to be smart and know where our information is coming from. Who’s writing this, what’s their experience, and on what basis do they say this is the best hot chocolate in Paris? People say, “Oh, this hot chocolate’s to die for.” It’s their first time in Paris, and they think they know where the best hot chocolate is.

Also, the crowds are going to be a huge problem. Just like in the United States, it’s hard for restaurants to staff the restaurants and for airlines to staff the planes. That means you need to double-confirm hours and admission. You need to anticipate chaos in the airports. Book yourself a little extra time between connections, and carry on your bag.

Another thing is that museums and popular cultural attractions learned the beauty of controlling crowds by requiring online booking. At a lot of sites, you can’t even buy a ticket at the door anymore.

Everybody goes to the same handful of sites. If you just go to those sites, you’re going to have a trip that is shaped by crowds. Or you can break free from that and realize that you can study the options and choose sites that are best for you. You can go to alternative places that have that edge and that joy and that creative kind of love of life. “Second cities,” I call them.

[Rick Steves: I’m traveling, even though I’m stuck at home]

Nyce: How much have you had to update your guidebooks since COVID? Are there favorite spots of yours that have closed because of the economic ramifications of lockdowns?  

Steves: In 2019, we were euphoric about how well our guidebooks were doing. Everything was up to date. And then, of course, COVID hit, and everything was mothballed for two years.

In early 2022, we decided to go back and research. The things that distinguish a Rick Steves guidebook are all of the little mom-and-pop places. And I was really, really scared that these were going to be the casualties of two years of no business.

The great news is, by and large, all those little mom-and-pops survived. There were very few closures. There were lots of changes with bigger companies and places that just focus on tourists. But our local favorites—the little bed-and-breakfasts and bistros—they survived. They’re mission-driven. They’ve been in the same family for generations. They just trimmed sales, hunkered down, and got through this. Last year, they were back in business, and this year, they expect to be making a profit again. We’ve cleaned out the places that did close.

Nyce: What have you noticed about the post-COVID tourism rebound?

Steves: First of all, we’re not done with COVID. We don’t know what curveballs COVID is going to throw at us in the coming year. Last year, we took 25,000 people to Europe on our Rick Steves bus tours, on 40 different itineraries all over Europe. Four percent of our travelers tested positive for COVID on the road. None of them, as far as I know, went to the hospital.

I can’t say what’s safe for you or some other traveler, but I can say that if you’re comfortable traveling around the United States, you should be comfortable doing the same thing in Europe or overseas. It’s a personal thing, how much risk vis-à-vis COVID you want to take. And it’s an ethical issue for travelers: If you’ve got COVID, do you isolate yourself, or do you put on a mask and keep on traveling? I think the ethical thing to do is not expose other people, hunker down, and self-isolate.

We’re meeting with our guides each month, and we’re making our protocols in an ever-changing COVID world for that coming month. It was workable last year, and I think it’s going to be better this year.

Nyce: You sound pretty optimistic about the recovery of the industry. I wasn’t sure from when I got on the phone with you if you were going to say, “It’s forever scarred. Europe is a different continent.”

Steves: Oh, no. I measure the health of Europe, from a travel point of view, by the energy in the streets. In Madrid, the paseo is still the paseo. You’ll still enjoy the tapas scene, going from bar to bar, eating ugly things on toothpicks, and washing it down with local wine with the local crowd. In Italy, it’s the passeggiata—everybody’s out strolling. People are going to be busy on the piazzas licking their gelato. In Munich, they’re sliding on the benches in the beer halls, and clinking their big glasses and singing, just like before.

People said, “No one is going to be kissing cheeks in Paris, because everybody’s going to be so worried about germs.” They’re kissing cheeks with a vengeance in Paris right now, because they have survived COVID. And I’m really thankful for that.

In the 1950s, The New York Times ran a job advertisement: “Help Wanted—Girls.” “You deserve the best of everything,” it read. “The best job, the best surroundings, the best pay, the best contacts.” It was a promise of financial, emotional, and intellectual success—a guarantee that the working world would pay off. Its implicit message was even more alluring: Women could be fulfilled by their job without having to compromise in other areas of their life. They could have freedom.

The conundrum of that ad wasn’t lost on the author Rona Jaffe. “Today girls are freer to do what they want and be what they want and think what they want, and the trouble is they’re not quite sure what they want,” she said in a 1958 interview shortly after her first novel was published. The Best of Everything—a play on the advertisement copy—was Jaffe’s attempt at capturing the real experiences of women around her and contending with the failure of that promise. “If every nice girl had had a happy ending and had everything that she wanted,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had to write the book.”

Jaffe’s novel, now reissued, chronicles the lives of four young women in the early stages of their careers and romances. While working at a publishing house in her 20s, Jaffe met a Hollywood producer who was looking for “a book about working girls in New York” to turn into a film; when he told her the kind of salacious story line he was imagining, she thought it was ridiculous. “He doesn’t know anything about women. I know about women,” she thought. She quit her job and wrote the novel in five months. She talked with 50 working women about their goals and the pressures they faced from bosses, men, families—what, in short, they thought the “best of everything” looked like, and how it felt to want it so much.

It was an instant best seller. The original manuscript was copied by a group of typists at Simon & Schuster, who would excitedly read the chapters they were assigned and then call her to tell her they couldn’t wait to read the rest. “There’s my audience,” Jaffe thought. Young women everywhere could relate to the experience of juggling all the things they were expected to achieve in order to finally make it and be happy. The book gave voice to their specific desires, even as it tapped into the hardships of moving to a new city, starting a life alone, and grasping, by turns, for connection and independence.

Jaffe’s main characters—Caroline, the sophisticated, ambitious New Yorker; April, the romantic girl from Colorado; Gregg, the glamorous aspiring actress; and Barbara, the struggling single mother—all cross paths during their time at Fabian Publications. Along the way, they date terrible men, manage unwanted advances from senior editors, and find their place in the big city. At no point in the story do they really “make it,” but in the meantime, they get as much from the world around them as they possibly can, trying to wrangle proposals or free steaks or promotions or raises out of the men who hold sway over their life. The intensity of their desire, their desperation, is riveting. “It’s hell to be a woman,” Gregg thinks during a he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not spiral, “to want so much love, to feel like only half a person.”

This yearning drives the book. The women are sweet but unapologetic about their desires: They want to be important, loved, successful, dependable. They take tiny steps. Gregg says “I love you” on her first date with a famous playwright. Caroline, terrified, submits her editorial notes on a manuscript to the publisher, feeling “half thrill, half uneasiness” because she knows she’s contradicting her boss.

Her first lover, an older man in her office, compares Caroline with her female colleagues, who Caroline describes as having “no ambition except to do their work satisfactorily, disappear at five o’clock on the dot, and line up at the bank on payday.” Caroline, in contrast, feels stymied. She doesn’t want to enter “the land of marriage and respectability,” the man observes, and give up her job once she finds an eligible suitor, the way many of her peers do—but she also can’t bring herself to “break with tradition” completely. Caroline realizes that she wants “to get ahead, to make more money, to have more responsibilities and to be recognized,” but she also longs for a steady partner who is both supportive and understanding of her career and compelling in his own right.

[Read: The fight to decouple sex from marriage]

Wanting more than what the world will give you—expecting not just contentment but also joy, not just stability but also success—can become terribly lonely, or guilt-inducing. Gregg mourns the fact that people can’t “realize what a rare and miraculous thing closeness could be,” and spends her years in New York trying desperately to find intimacy with her emotionally unavailable sort-of boyfriend. After her brief relationship with the older man, Caroline spends most of the novel dating a pleasant, considerate man who takes her for nice meals and remembers their anniversary, but has no interest in her work or curiosity about the world. (“Reach me!” she cries out to him silently.)

Jaffe’s novel suggests that holding two realities in your mind is unmooring. Such a state requires being at once patient and demanding, cautious and reckless, devoted and independent, demure and outspoken—an impossible conundrum. April, trying to build the life she wants, realizes—in the middle of an excruciatingly drawn-out conversation during which her boyfriend concentrates on making a cocktail while it dawns on her that he has never had any intention of marrying her, as he had promised—that “perhaps he could not really love.”

And yet, April considers that this, too, might be a compromise she could bring herself to make—that perhaps his wanting to be with her, “if it was all [he] could manage,” was bearable. Her strength, she recognizes, “was more the kind of desperation that comes with weakness, the power that gives a ninety-pound woman drowning in the water the ability to swamp a careless lifeguard.” As beautiful as April makes this steel-magnolia approach to life seem—and no matter how much she truly believes in it—it is tainted by her lack of negotiating power. Still, in her sense of self-preservation, there is generosity and a sometimes-breathtaking openness to people and things as they are.

April compares the slow, painful conversation with her boyfriend to having a tooth drilled: “After a while it hurt so much you didn’t really notice it any more.” Following along with these women today may prompt a similar feeling. Each one of them is mistreated—slut-shamed, ghosted, dumped, forced to have an abortion, threatened to be fired if they object to being molested—and somehow, they continue from the wreckage. As they wait for their efforts to pay off, they keep themselves company, constructing rich inner worlds, talking to themselves out loud, allowing themselves to daydream. Barbara, the single mother, upon falling in love despite her best efforts, accepts that all she can do is “hope for a safe landing.”

[Read: Making peace with Jane Austen’s marriage plots]

This solitary stoicism is perhaps the best the characters are able to manage in a world where they are essentially alone. “Back then, people didn’t talk about not being a virgin,” Jaffe wrote in a 2005 introduction to the book. “They didn’t talk about abortion. They didn’t talk about sexual harassment, which had no name in those days.” The only recourse is their own company, and perhaps one another; the characters have to get by however they can while maintaining their silence. Their bad luck becomes more and more troubling, and the novel takes a sharp, dark turn; by the end, none of them has achieved their so-called best life. Jaffe wrote that she was always surprised when women came up to her to say that the book “changed their lives,” because she considered it “a cautionary tale.” The writer Mary McCarthy felt similarly about her best-selling novel, The Group, published only five years after Jaffe’s novel and likely highly influenced by it. McCarthy’s characters, like Jaffe’s, were mocked by literary critics; they were all, to some degree or another, perceived as tragic cases.

But McCarthy’s characters, like Jaffe’s, were more interested in the world’s promises than in its failures; their characters may have been less inclined even than their authors to see themselves as tragic cases. Most of their readers probably felt the same, if they took the novels more as a gesture of empathy than as a warning; the books offer a camaraderie that the real world largely denied them. And although The Best of Everything doesn’t portray a version of life that guarantees freedom and happiness, its protagonists understand the uncertainty of their future, accepting whatever small joys and high points they can. They might long for a guarantee, but they’ll move on just the same without it. “I wish life could always be like this minute,” Barbara thinks wistfully at one point, in a rare spell of happiness that she knows is unlikely to endure. Barbara does ultimately get surprised by a pleasant ending. But readers may be left thinking that if she has to, if her happy minute does come to a close, she’ll be able to find the next one too.

Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible, but I don’t know what it was. The main subject of discussion—my reporting on the power of online gurus—was not intrinsically offensive. It might have been something about the comedian turned provocateur Russell Brand’s previous heroin addiction, or child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. I know it wasn’t the word Nazi, because we carefully avoided that. Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

“It does start to drive you mad,” says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site’s AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, “you get a green dollar sign when it’s monetizable, and it goes yellow if it’s not.” Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time—and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it’s better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say.

[From the November 2018 issue: Raised by YouTube]

But how? YouTube’s list of content guidelines manages to be both exhaustive and nebulous. “Content that covers topics such as child or sexual abuse as a main topic without detailed descriptions or graphic depictions” is liable to be demonetized, as are “personal accounts or opinion pieces related to abortion as a main topic without graphic depiction.” First-person accounts of domestic violence, eating disorders, and child abuse are definite no-no’s if they include “shocking details.” YouTube operates a three-strike policy for infractions: The first strike is a warning; the second prevents creators from making new posts for a week; and the third (if received within 90 days of the second) gets the channel banned.

For the most popular creators, the site can bring in audiences of millions, and financial rewards to match. But for almost everyone else, content production is a grind, as creators are encouraged to post regularly and repackage content into its TikTok rival, Shorts. Although many types of content may never run afoul of the guidelines—if you’re MrBeast giving out money to strangers, to the delight of your 137 million subscribers, rules against hate speech and misinformation are not going to be an issue—political discussions are subject to the whims of algorithms.

Absent enough human moderators to deal with the estimated 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube uses artificial intelligence to enforce its guidelines. Bots scan auto-generated transcripts and flag individual words and phrases as problematic, hence the problem with saying heroin. Even though “educational” references to drug use are allowed, the word might snag the AI trip wire, forcing a creator to request a time-consuming review.

Andrew Gold requested such a review for his interview with me, and the dollar sign duly turned green—meaning the site did eventually serve ads alongside the content. “It was a risk,” he told me, “because I don’t know how it affects my rating if I get it wrong … And they don’t tell me if it’s Nazis, heroin, or anything. You’re just left wondering what it was.”

Frustrations like Gold’s rarely receive much attention, because the conversation about content moderation online is dominated by big names complaining about outright bans. Perversely, though, the most egregious peddlers of misinformation are better placed than everyday creators to work within the YouTube rules. A research paper last year from Cornell University’s Yiqing Hua and others found that people making fringe content at high risk of being demonetized—such as content for alt-right or “manosphere” channels—were more likely than other creators to use alternative money-making practices, such as affiliate links or pushing viewers to subscribe on other platforms. They didn’t even attempt to monetize their content on YouTube—sidestepping the strike system—and instead used the platform as a shop window. They then became more productive on YouTube because demonetization no longer affected their ability to make a living.

The other platforms such influencers use include Rumble, a site that bills itself as “immune to cancel culture” and has received investment from the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio. In January, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, announced that Rumble was now his “video-sharing service of choice” for press conferences because he had been “silenced” by Google over his YouTube claims about the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, in a true demonstration of horseshoe theory, Russell Brand (a left-wing, crunchy, COVID-skeptical hater of elites) posed with Donald Trump Jr. (a right-wing, nepo-baby, COVID-skeptical hater of elites) at a party hosted by Rumble, where they are two of the most popular creators. Brand maintains a presence on YouTube, where he has 6 million subscribers, but uses it as exactly the kind of shop window identified by the Cornell researchers. He recently told Joe Rogan that he now relies on Rumble as his main platform because he was tired of YouTube’s “wild algebra.”

[Read: Why is Joe Rogan so popular?]

For mega-celebrities—including highly paid podcasters and prospective presidential candidates—railing against Big Tech moderation is a great way to pose as an underdog or a martyr. But talk with everyday creators, and they are more than willing to work inside the rules, which they acknowledge are designed to make YouTube safer and more accurate. They just want to know what those rules are, and to see them applied consistently. As it stands, Gold compared his experience of being impersonally notified of unspecified infractions to working for HAL9000, the computer overlord from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of the most troublesome areas of content is COVID—about which there is both legitimate debate over treatments, vaccines, and lockdown policies and a great river of misinformation and conspiracy theorizing. “The first video I ever posted to YouTube was a video about ivermectin, which explained why there was no evidence supporting its use in COVID,” the creator Susan Oliver, who has a doctorate in nanomedicine, told me. “YouTube removed the video six hours later. I appealed the removal, but they rejected my appeal. I almost didn’t bother making another video after this.”

Since then, Oliver’s channel, Back to the Science, which has about 7,500 subscribers, has run into a consistent problem—one that other debunkers have also faced. If she cites false information in a video in order to challenge it, she faces being reported for misinformation. This happened with a video referencing the popular creator John Campbell’s false claims about COVID vaccines being linked to brain injuries. Her video was taken down (and restored only on appeal) and his video remained up. “The only things in my video likely to have triggered the algorithm were clips from Campbell’s original video,” Oliver told me. Another problem facing YouTube: COVID skepticism is incredibly popular. Oliver’s content criticizing Campbell’s brain-injury rhetoric has just more than 10,000 views. His original video has more than 800,000.

Oliver wondered if Campbell’s fans were mass-reporting her—a practice known as “brigading.”

“It appears that YouTube allows large, profitable channels to use any loophole to spread misinformation whilst coming down hard on smaller channels without even properly checking their content,” she said. But a Google spokesperson, Michael Aciman, told me that wasn’t the case. “The number of flags a piece of content may receive is not a factor we use when evaluating content against our community guidelines,” he said. “Additionally, these flags do not factor into monetization decisions.”

YouTube is not the only social network where creators struggle to navigate opaque moderation systems with limited avenues for appeal. Users of TikTok—where some contributors are paid from a “creator fund” based on their views—have developed an entire vocabulary to navigate automated censorship. No one gets killed on TikTok; they get “unalived.” There are no lesbians, but instead “le dollar beans” (le$beans). People who sell sex are “spicy accountants.” The aim is to preserve these social networks as both family- and advertiser-friendly; both parents and corporations want these spaces to be “safe.” The result is a strange blossoming of euphemisms that wouldn’t fool a 7-year-old.

Not everyone finds YouTube’s restrictions unduly onerous. The podcaster Chris Williamson, whose YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers and releases about six videos a week, told me that he now mutes swearing in the first five minutes of videos after receiving a tip from a fellow creator. Even though his channel “brush[es] the edge of a lot of spicy topics,” he said, the only real trouble has been when he “dropped the C-bomb” 85 minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour video, which was then demonetized. “The policy may be getting tighter in other areas which don’t affect me,” he said, “but as long as I avoid C-bombs, my channel seems to be fine.” (While I was reporting this story, YouTube released an update to the guidelines clarifying the rules on swearing, and promised to review previously demonetized videos.)

[Read: Social media’s silent filter]

As a high-profile creator, Williamson has one great advantage: YouTube assigned him to a partner-manager who can help him understand the site’s guidelines. Smaller channels have to rely on impersonal, largely automated systems. Using them can feel like shouting into a void. Williamson also supplements his AdSense income from YouTube’s adverts with sponsorship and affiliate links, making demonetization less of a concern. “Any creator who is exclusively reliant on AdSense for their income is playing a suboptimal game,” he said.

Aciman, the Google spokesperson, told me that all channels on YouTube have to comply ​​with its community guidelines, which prohibit COVID-19 medical misinformation and hate speech—and that channels receiving ad revenue are held to a higher standard in order to comply with the “advertiser-friendly content guidelines.” “We rely on machine learning to evaluate millions of videos on our platform for monetization status,” Aciman added. “No system is perfect, so we encourage creators to appeal for a human review when they feel we got it wrong. As we’ve shown, we reverse these decisions when appropriate, and every appeal helps our systems get smarter over time.”

YouTube is caught in a difficult position, adjudicating between those who claim that it moderates too heavily and others who complain that it doesn’t do enough. And every demonetization is a direct hit to its own bottom line. I sympathize with the site’s predicament, while also noting that YouTube is owned by one of the richest tech companies in the world, and some of that wealth rests on a business model of light-touch, automated moderation. In the last quarter of 2022, YouTube made nearly $8 billion in advertising revenue. There’s a very good reason journalism is not as profitable as that: Imagine if YouTube edited its content as diligently as a legacy newspaper or television channel—even quite a sloppy one. Its great river of videos would slow to a trickle.