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In this article I discuss just why travel takes place. Why does travel occur, especially with the development of new communications technologies? I unpack how corporeal proximity in diverse modes appears to make travel necessary and desirable. I examine how aspects of conversational practice and of `meetings' make travel obligatory for sustaining `physical proximity'. I go on to consider the roles that travel plays in social networks, using Putnam's recent analysis of social capital. The implications of different kinds of travel for the distribution of such social capital are spelled out. I examine what kinds of corporeal travel are necessary and appropriate for a rich and densely networked social life across various social groups. And in the light of these analyses of proximity and social capital, virtual travel will not in a simple sense substitute for corporeal travel, since intermittent co-presence appears obligatory for many forms of social life. However, virtual travel does seem to produce a strange and uncanny life on the screen that is near and far, present and absent, and it may be that this will change the very nature of what is experienced as `co-presence'. I conclude by showing how issues of social inclusion and exclusion cannot be examined without identifying the complex, overlapping and contradictory mobilities necessarily involved in the patterning of an embodied social life.

Policy changes in one subsystem can easily spill over to other subsystems. An approach that addresses these interconnections is the concept of 'policy proximity'. This concept posits that different policy issues share common features that make them more or less likely to change together. However, we unfortunately have no systematic knowledge of the proximity between policy areas. In this article, we address this shortcoming by proposing a novel measurement concept of policy proximity that captures the proximity between different policy issues based on their joint appearance in media reporting. To do so, we conduct a relational content analysis of all media reports aired by the German news broadcast 'Tagesschau' between 2013 and 2021. We show that policy issues substantially differ in their connectivity with other subjects and identify for each subsystem the closest 'neighbors'. We conclude by discussing our results in light of existing policy change theories.

Cultural proximity increases bilateral trade flows through a trade-cost and a bilateral-affinity (preferences) channel. Conventional measures of cultural proximity, such as common language, common religion, etc., do not allow to separately quantify those channels empirically. We argue that quality-adjusted Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) scores can be used as dyadic, time-variant information on European countries' cultural proximity. Assuming that the tradecost related component of cultural proximity is time-invariant, in a gravity model of bilateral trade, the time dimension of the ESC data allows to identify the preferences effect. The validity of our identification strategy can be tested by exploiting the lack of systematic reciprocity in ESC scores. While we find robust evidence for a sizable preferences effect, the impact of cultural proximity on trade runs largely through the cost effect. -- international trade ; gravity equation ; cultural prox imity ; identification