Oh, I was once so independent, so footlose and fancy-free! I wanted to go on a trip — say, Paris; say, the Galapagos — and if I had no travel companion, that wasn’t going to stop me. On the contrary, the thought of striking it out on my own energized me. I was younger then. [...]

By Jude Polotan Barely seven in the morning, the Victory Liner bus jolts to a stop and the child-sized driver announces in an accent I can barely make out, “Five minutes!” Ken wakes and shifts in his seat. He laughs at the sight of me huddled beneath clothes I retrieved from our bag and have [...]

By Jude Polotan Poor Giordano Bruno. Ten years before Galileo would take the same stance, this former Dominican friar had the temerity to assert that the sun and not the Earth was the center of the universe, earning him a spot front and center in Rome’s Campo di’ Fiore, where he was burned at the [...]