Africa was viewed as a vehicle for escapism for Roosevelt and other writers, including the many inspired by him who would follow suit. Travel writing was, for a time, one of the main ways people learned about distant cultures.

“Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them,” Joan Didion wrote, in her own essay about Hawaii, published in The White Album in 1979. “Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner...” Coming from a writer’s writer, like Didion, who is herself a dedicated Hemingway fan, this seems to be meant as a compliment. But it is her use of the word “belongs” that hangs on the page.

Travel writing is traditionally concerned with the writer’s sense of belonging, or lack thereof—the spectacle of being somewhere new, the sense of displacement one feels. Focus on your own sense of self in a place where questions of belonging are at the heart of local politics and culture, however, and you risk misunderstanding the place entirely. Escaping is not a form of understanding, anyway.

“It’s worth noting,” writes David M. Wrobel in his book Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression, “that Roosevelt overtly insisted that politics, whether domestic or foreign, not intrude in his African experience.”

Which brings us back to “The Hawaii Cure,” billed as “a first trip to the island, in a desperate bid to escape the news,” but with no hint at the short distance between escapism and exploitation in the history of Hawaii, or in the history of travel writing for that matter.

“Can it be true?” the author asks, “The aloha spirit is real? Paradise on earth? An Eden of happy Americans moated from our national ravages of malevolence, contempt, uncertainty and fear?”

There are deep and complicated tensions in these questions. Hawaii is beautiful, yes, but it is not simply an “Eden of happy Americans.” Though many people in Hawaii are proud of its nearly 58 years of statehood, others don’t consider themselves to be American at all. The state’s economy is hugely dependent on both tourism and federal jobs, both of which can be viewed as complicit in a form of settler colonialism that shapes the way people perceive and experience life in Hawaii. This is heavy stuff, and worthy of consideration by all Americans, especially those who visit Hawaii.

The Times story doesn’t go there. Instead, it begins with a stereotype, a reference to Polynesians overeating. Its first scene takes place at a commercial luau. And though the author, Wells Tower, hints that he’s somehow in on the joke—it’s not totally clear what he’s lambasting. (In response to my interview requests for Tower and his editor, The New York Times told me they had “no comment.”) There are moments of self-deprecation in the essay, but the prevailing tone is one that supports the idea that Hawaii is, as Tower puts it, “a magical land where the laws of physics bend toward human satisfaction.”