24 Hours With A Conde Nast Traveler Editor

Lale Arikoglu is the senior lifestyle editor at Conde Nast Traveler and a co-host of the Women Who Travel podcast. Since 2017, Women Who Travel has become an essential platform for female-identifying adventurers to connect, build community, and see the world together. When Lale isn’t busy developing content for the magazine and hosting live podcast tapings at events like SXSW, she can be found globe-trotting with her husband Chris or leading Women Who Travel trips to Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba. Born and raised in London, England, she currently lives in Brooklyn. Here’s what a day in her life looks like.  

Morning

7 am: I should clarify that I am in no way a morning person (or an exercise person!) but I’ve recently started going to a 7 am yoga class at Dou Yoga a few blocks from my apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Turns out, the rumors are true: it really does make you feel more awake and productive throughout the rest of the day. Who knew!

8:30 am: Naturally, I undo all that good work by picking up a bagel and a large cold brew at Primrose, my neighborhood spot, as soon as I get out of class, and then pop home to get ready for the day before taking the subway into work. (Right now I’m re-reading Little Women on my commute like everyone else.)

9:30 am: I usually aim to get to my desk around 9:30 am, but realistically it ends up being around 9:45 am because either I’m running late, or the New York City subway is. I’ll then spend the next 20 minutes or so before our 10 am team meeting combing through emails and figuring out what I need to write or edit that day. I’ll also check to see who we’re recording the Women Who Travel podcast with the following week. 

11 am: The Women Who Travel team meet once a week to run through updates and brainstorm ideas for upcoming projects. One of the best parts about this platform is that it’s so multifaceted: in addition to our editorial content and podcast, we have a meetup series around the country, group trips to Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba, plus a newsletter and Facebook group. Right now, we’re starting to strategize for International Women’s Day on March 8. Part of the plan is to roll out a new column called “I Deserve This,” which will explore our relationship with spending time and money on ourselves when it comes to travel, and the guilt women often feel in doing so.

Afternoon

12:30 pm: Usually, I’ll just inhale a Sweetgreen salad or a sandwich from the Condé cafeteria at my desk, but today is different! My friends got married at city hall this morning so I ran over to the incredibly grand Beekman Hotel nearby to give them a hug and have a cheeky sip of champagne before getting back to work. A true New York moment! 

2 pm: The next couple of hours requires me to do all the editing I didn’t do when I was in those meetings and gallivanting out on my lunch break. I spent a couple of hours with a beautiful essay about Puerto Rico by the writer Jaquira Díaz, whose book Ordinary Girls came out last year, and then ran up to the cafeteria to grab another iced coffee for a quick pick-me-up.

4 pm: We’ve started to experiment with video content for Women Who Travel, and are using it to engage with podcast listeners (and hopefully pull in some new ones) over Instagram. Our upcoming episode is all about long distance relationships, so we decided to open up our “WWT hotline” and attempt to answer people’s burning questions about how you balance all the travel it requires with the rest of your life. I’m no expert by any means, but I was in a long distance relationship and then I married the guy, so I like to think that I at least half know of what I’m talking about.

Bermudan women's utopia, courtesy of Lale's Instagram. 

Night 

6 pm: Cocktails at Ramona in Greenpoint with a couple of friends. The space is beautiful, the drinks are great, and they recently released a book called A Woman’s Drink. Obsessed.

8 pm: Sometimes, I want to spend my Friday night over a fancy meal at some hot new restaurant. Other times, I want a slice of pizza. Tonight was one of those other times. Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop is a couple of blocks down from Ramona, so we head there and grab a few slices (the “Mootz” and the “Sake Mountain Way” for me) along with some beers.

10 pm: Get home and watch the final episode of Cheer, which destroys me emotionally. 

11 pm: I start to slowly get ready for bed while listening to the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, which always makes me feel homesick for London. My skincare routine right now consists of The Ordinary Daily Set, and I like to slather on one of the various overnight masks I have in my bathroom cabinet, too – tonight it was LaNeige’s water sleeping mask. Once that’s done I make a cup of tea and try to read my book rather than look at my phone, but ultimately end up being sucked down a hole of TikTok videos.

Main image courtesy of Conde Nast Traveler.