Jonathan Gourlay is the author of the e-book Nowhere Slow: Eleven Years in Micronesia. He is an editor at The Bygone Bureau and ESL Director at the University of Saint Joseph in Connecticut.
Before the days of GPS, sailors navigated using the feel of the waves. On a mission to learn the ocean’s secret rhythms, a researcher discovers a coded message in a ship logbook.
Two men, separated by more than 150 years, discover the folly of attempting Western-style capitalism in Micronesia.
A newborn wavers between life and something else. For the father, a walk in the woods elucidates the struggle between nature and nurture.
A childhood ban on toy guns didn’t erase the specter of death from a neighborhood. But it changed how a group of friends interpreted mortality, for years to come.
More than a decade after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—now our longest war—most Americans still know next to nothing about the people who live there, and the liberties denied them. Lessons from a rapid education.
More than two decades later, a return visit to Tiananmen Square finds it scrubbed clean—just as it was immediately following the Incident. Except now there is thick smog, and ghosts. In contemporary Beijing, the past is like Kentucky Fried Chicken: unavoidable.
As Borders liquidates its merchandise, a former employee of store #21 looks back at a glorious workplace—of quirky managers, Borders gypsies, the odyssey to stack more than Hobby/Collectibles—and the moment when salvation seemed at hand to save the chain.