Raised on a farm in southwestern Oregon, Zoë Ida Bradbury feels most at home in the countryside. But five years ago, when she got stranded in rural Greece and had to camp in a ditch with a friend and a hanger-on, things turned ugly—providing the inspiration for “This Is the Side of the Road," our winning fiction entry this year. “Not until I wrote the story did I realize how frustrated and angry I was, feeling so vulnerable and alone in the midst of two traveling companions,” says Bradbury, ’01. A former anthropology major with extensive coursework in creative writing, Bradbury has been winning writing contests since junior high school. Today, she lives in San Francisco and is pursuing a career in sustainable agriculture. But she hasn’t given up her writing. “My mom,” she says, “is always hammering at me to do more.”
Considering that Natalie Ascencios’s work is viewed regularly by millions of people, it’s surprising to learn that her biggest paintings have never been seen by anybody. Housed in her New York studio are 16 panels, each 6 feet tall, that she hopes to unveil together in an exhibition . . . someday. “It’s something I’ve been working on quite a while, a completely separate body of work,” says Ascencios, who illustrated “This Is the Side of the Road." A graduate of New School University’s Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design, Ascencios, 30, has been a commercial illustrator since 1994. Name a mainstream magazine and her work has probably appeared in it—clients have included the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly and GQ.
When Alex Soojung-Kim Pang was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, he took a class called Invention and Discovery in the Arts and Sciences, taught by science historian Thomas Hughes. “It was like having never heard of psychiatry and taking a seminar with Freud,” Pang says. “I knew immediately I had found my major.” And his vocation. Pang, who remained at Penn to complete a PhD in the history and sociology of science, has taught at Stanford and UC-Davis, served as deputy editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica and developed digital archives for collections at Stanford’s Green Library. He has written on topics from Victorian solar eclipse expeditions to Buckminster Fuller. One theme runs through his work. “I’m attracted to stories about invisible technologies,” he says, “craft work and skills that usually go undetected or ignored.” A “textbook example”: the Apple mouse, developed by a group of graduates from Stanford’s product design program. A research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, Pang, 37, lives in Menlo Park with his wife, Heather, and children, Elizabeth, almost 3, and Daniel, 2 months.
