I am a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. I grew up in Southern California, lived and worked in Chicago and New York (and, briefly, New Delhi) and have been writing professionally for more than two decades. I’ve been nominated for a National Magazine Award, won a SoCal Journalism Press Club Award, and had my writing featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Essays collections. I’ve written and worked for a whole lot of different magazines, newspapers, websites, and blogs. And, recently, I worked for The RAND Corporation. My work tends to follow my interests, which are capacious.
My email is: rfbradley@gmail.com
Recent Work
The L.A. Fire Where Something Went Right
The New York Times Magazine
When the Flames Come for You
The Atlantic
Ti West is Turning Hollywood into a Horror Show
The New York Times Magazine
Chain’s Gone Glam
Eater
How Khruangbin’s Sound Became the New Mood Music
The New York Times Magazine
The Greatest Trees of Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Times
A Chatbot is Secretly Doing My Job
The Atlantic
The Great LA Dumpling Drama
Eater
The New York Times Magazine
L’Rain Makes a Way Out of No Way
Who Are These Kids, and What Are They Doing to Jazz
The $60 Gadget That’s Changing Electronic Music
The Accent Whisperers of Hollywood
The Scarily Profitable Hits of Jason Blum
Letter of Recommendation: Bushnell Trophy Cam
Why Am I Obsessed With a Cellphone Game About Collecting Cats?
The Atlantic
The Shakespeare of Status Anxiety
The Mystery of the Vanishing Bees
The Sewanee Review
The Virginia Quarterly Review
The New Yorker
An Encounter with a Giant Kangaroo Rat
Consider the 'For Your Consideration' Billboard
Waze and the Traffic Panopticon
LitHub
The Guardian
How I rented a piece of a river in a never-ending western drought
Eater ↗
Popular Science ↗
Why Marine Biologists Fell in Love with a Kitchen Scrubber
Inside the Gold Mine where Scientists are Searching for Dark Matter
What We Learn from Noisy Signals from Deep Space
Why Bigger Planes Mean Cramped Quarters
Bill Nye Fights Back
The Verge ↗
All Queens Must Die
Conner goes to Hollywood
WSJ Magazine
The Life and Death of Grimes
How the “Godmother” of VR is Changing the Mediascape
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