Ryan Bradley

When I was young, my dad would take me to the hospital, usually on weekends, mostly on Saturdays. He was visiting his patients, the ones he’d operated on earlier that week, when he’d replaced their hip or their knee. I remember these mornings quite well because I knew, even then, that they were not normal.

Life underground, for many of the things that have adapted to it, is like this: The lines between alive and not alive, dead and not, get blurred. Examining these lives raises uncomfortable questions about the very thing we think of as life, and what it means to be living, or at least what it is supposed to look like.

The man appeared suddenly, out of the darkness and around the bend. He was standing to the side of the asphalt, near the edge of the floodlights illuminating a barricade of orange traffic barrels and, beyond, a great pile of dirt disappearing into the night. Half of the mountain road was blocked off—was, in fact, no road at all past the barricade and the pile.

The Circumnavigations of Henk De Velde

When I first wrote the Dutchman, ten years ago, he was sailing around the world alone for the sixth and final time. His plan, he said, was to keep on sailing, continuing this last circumnavigation until the day he died, or until he found some unknown place “behind the horizon.” At the time, Henk De Velde was somewhere in the Atlantic, slightly closer to South America than any other continent, but not very close to anywhere at all.

Due to their increasingly isolated habitats, the native mountain lion population of Los Angeles is under threat of extinction. Ryan Bradley discusses one solution under consideration, as well as the surprising relationship between big cats and one of the most populated cities in the country

He wanted to be on air. So between the church programs, the vitamin programs, the chunks of time bought up in fifteen-minute slots, Art came on to announce what was up next. The station signed off at midnight, but by eleven o’clock no one was buying any air time. That left a whole hour to fill with whatever he wanted.