"Must the French always insist on doing it better? And by “it” I mean life. Sure, their popular music is often regrettable and they aren’t exactly killing it in tech, but, they look good not killing it. They also happen to look good long after most of us don’t. Sexy, flirty, confident — Parisians embrace aging with typical élan. The most stylish among them share their secrets.

Read the article for free on Air Mail LOOK, a lively, curious, informed look at beauty with a reporter’s eye, a taste for intrigue, and a sense of humor, from Linda Wells."

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On June 24th, two earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.4 struck northern Venezuela. The damage and loss have been catastrophic, and aid is still reaching out to affected areas. UNICEF estimates 680,000 children are in direct need. If you’re in a position to help, donate at UNICEF.

Colombia just held one of the closest presidential elections in its history. The margin was under one percent. The country went one way; it could have easily gone another.

The winner was Abelardo de la Espriella. You may have seen the name. Whatever your read on his politics, one detail cut through the noise for me: the man holds three passports.

Colombian. Italian. American.

Each one came a different way. He was born into the first. He inherited the second through his maternal grandparents, Italian citizens whose bloodline entitled him, decades later to claim what Italy calls jure sanguinis, the right of blood. The third he applied for. He naturalized as an American citizen in February 2023, went through the process, took the oath, and got the document.

Three passports. Three completely different pathways. And together, they map almost perfectly onto the only three ways any of us can build this kind of optionality.

So let’s use him as a syllabus.

Passport One: The One You Were Born With

Most people reading this have exactly one passport. They were born into it. They’ve never thought much about it because they’ve never had to.

That is fine, until it isn’t.

Less than half of all Americans even have the one passport they were born into. And of the half that do, virtually none have a second one.

(If you don’t have one, stop reading this and make an appointment. International travel is one of the most enriching opportunities life has to offer.)

A birthright passport is the foundation. It’s also, for most Americans, the ceiling. The USA passport is strong (visa-free access to 186 countries), but it is also a single point of failure. One document. One government. One set of policies you didn’t choose and can’t control.

De la Espriella didn’t stop there. Most people do.

Passport Two: The One You Might Already Have

This is the one that you should make you put down whatever you’re doing and call your grandmother.

Jure sanguinis (citizenship by descent) is the idea that blood transmits belonging. If your parents or grandparents were citizens of certain countries, you may already have a legal claim to citizenship there. Not someday. Now. You just haven’t filed the paperwork.

Italy is the most famous example, and it just got significantly more complicated.

For decades, Italy had no generational limit on these claims. If you could trace an unbroken line back to an Italian ancestor alive after 1861, you could apply. Tens of thousands of Americans, many of them with grandparents or great-grandparents who came through Ellis Island, have done exactly this.

Time is of the essence as that door is now closing.

In March 2025, Italy passed a law limiting jure sanguinis claims to two generations. Only those with an Italian parent or grandparent (no longer great-grandparent) now qualify under the standard route. The Italian Constitutional Court confirmed the change in March 2026. It is not being reversed.

If you have an Italian grandparent, you may still qualify. But the window is not getting wider. Start the genealogy research. Locate the birth records. Find an Italian immigration attorney. The paperwork is the easy part once you know you’re eligible, and the document you end up with is one of the strongest in the world.

Another major point: Do it once. Your kids get it automatically. Their kids inherit it from them.

Ireland is a similar story. Irish citizenship by descent is available to those with an Irish parent or grandparent, and the right can be passed down. But there is a generational limit, and the chain must have been maintained at each step. Ireland’s immigration rules have been tightening through 2025 and into 2026. The program isn’t closed, but it isn’t getting more generous either.

Bottom line: Get it while the getting is good.

The pattern is the same everywhere: these windows open slowly and close fast. The people who moved five years ago are sitting on EU passports, which include EU privileges meaning travel, healthcare, and residency rights across 27 countries.

The people who wait another five years may find the question already answered for them.

Passport Three: The One You Earn

De la Espriella’s American passport came through naturalization. He chose it deliberately, went through the process, and in February 2023, two years before he ran for president of Colombia, he became a U.S. citizen.

There’s something worth noting in the timing. He wasn’t American because he had to be. He built that option in before he needed it. His wife reportedly noted, during the campaign, that Italy was always there if things went the other way.

That’s the move.

Naturalization takes time. Colombia, for example, takes five years of legal residency before you can apply. Most countries are somewhat in that range. Some shorter, some longer. It is the slowest of the three pathways, and the most intentional. But it is also the most universally available. Anyone can start a residency clock. You don’t need the right grandparents, just a plan and a threshold of patience.

Colombia, for what it’s worth, is one of the more accessible entry points. The digital nomad visa, the pensioner visa, the investment visa, are some of the multiple legal paths to establishing residency, and the clock starts ticking the moment you do.

The president of Colombia went into the most consequential election of his career holding options most of his voters (and most people anywhere) don’t have. He had a country to run and two exits built in, just in case.

Most people think about a second passport the way they think about a will… something to sort out eventually, when things get serious. But the people who have them built the option before the moment arrived. Windows and laws do not always warn you first.

The question isn’t whether you’ll ever need a second passport, or that you will need it to run for president somewhere. It’s whether you’ll have one when your own particular need for optionality becomes obvious.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka - Quietly launched a Digital Nomad Visa in February at ~$2,000/month income; Colombo runs about $1,100/month all-in, making it one of the best income-to-cost spreads of any nomad program right now.

🇨🇦 Canada - As of January 2026, remote workers can now stay up to a year as visitors with proof of foreign income. Still no dedicated nomad visa, but a quiet rule change that opens the door wider than before.

🇲🇽 Mexico - Income thresholds for residency jumped to $4,200/month (temporary) and $7,000/month (permanent), effectively pricing out Social Security-only retirees who made up a big chunk of the expat community there.

🇨🇾 Cyprus - Flying under the radar: €300k property investment gets you immediate permanent residency, no wealth or inheritance taxes, and zero tax on dividends and interest for up to 17 years for non-domiciled residents.

🇵🇭 Philippines - Digital Nomad Visa exists on paper (executive order signed in 2025) but the application system is reportedly broken and not yet accepting submissions. Watch the Bureau of Immigration for an actual launch date.

🇮🇹 Italy - Retirees moving to southern towns under 20,000 people can access a 7% flat tax on all foreign income for up to ten years. One of the most underrated retirement visa plays in Europe.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

Passports to hell are somewhat beyond the scope of ATN, but I am not against reading novels about it.

I studied Dante at university and consider myself an amateur expert on fictional descents into the underworld: Orpheus, Virgil, Dante himself, and yes, the bureaucratic hell of Beetlejuice, which holds up. Katabasis seeks its place in that lineage. At Cambridge's Magick department in the 1980s, doctoral candidate Alice Law accidentally gets her advisor blown to pieces during an experiment. He ends up in hell. She goes in after him, not out of guilt, but because she needs a letter of recommendation.

Her rival Peter Murdoch, insufferable and talented in equal measure, crashes the trip.

What follows is Dante's Inferno filtered through dark academia: hell as a campus, complete with libraries, dissertations, and the particular cruelty of people who are very smart and very miserable. The novel's sharpest joke might be once again proving people probably are in hell for a reason and oughta be left there.

The premise is somewhat light for the length, but it’s fun enough every once in a while to visit hell, if only to make your day on earth feel a little brighter.

Antoni Porowski, Queer Eye's food guy, now apparently National Geographic's guy everywhere else, takes four cities (Paris, Mexico City, London, New York) and tries to find what actually makes them worth the flight. Not the landmarks. The clockmaker keeping Big Ben running. The 90-year-old woman still dressing Moulin Rouge showgirls. The cheese cave in Paris you've never heard of.

It's a good show. Sleek without being soft, aspirational without being untouchable. Porowski has the rare quality of seeming genuinely curious rather than performing curiosity for camera.

I'll be honest: I watched the whole thing and mostly thought about how this is a job that exists, and someone has it.

If something in here stayed with you, pass it on. The right essay finds the right person. Help it along.

See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

Rio is a hummingbird who's been everywhere and trusts almost nothing he reads online. Ask him about visas, nomad life, or whatever the travel blogs are getting wrong this week.