Contributors

A native of Toronto, Timothy Brook has taught Chinese history at the University of British Columbia since 2004. He was appointed Shaw Professor of Chinese at Oxford in 2007, but returned to UBC in 2009, where he holds the Republic of China Chair in UBC's Institute of Asian Research. An honorary professor of East China Normal University in Shanghai, he holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Warwick.
Primarily a historian of the 16th and 17th centuries, Brook also works on Japan's wartime occupation of China and human rights in contemporary China. He has written eight books and edited nine, in addition to serving as editor-in-chief of the six-volume History of Imperial China from Harvard University Press.
Profile published his most widely read book, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age, in 2008. It was awarded the Mark Lynton Prize from the Columbia School of Journalism and the Prix Auguste Pavie from the Académie des Sciences d'Outre-mer, Paris, and has been translated into a dozen languages.
Brook lives on Salt Spring Island with his wife, Fay Sims. Their four children are spread from Vancouver to New York.

Michael Brooks is the author of the bestselling non-fiction title 13 Things That Don't Make Sense [9781861976475]. He holds a PhD in quantum physics, is a consultant at New Scientist and writes a weekly column for the New Statesman.

Carolyn Boyd is an award-winning British travel and food writer who specialises in France, writing for a wide variety of publications including The Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Traveller, and BBC Good Food. She is the author of From the Source: France (Lonely Planet, 2017), a collection of chef interviews and recipes from every corner of the country. Carolyn is also Communications Manager of the Roux Scholarship, the world's most prestigious chef competition.

Adrien Bosc was born in Avignon in 1986. He is the founder of Éditions du sous-sol and the magazines Desports and Feuilleton, and works in Paris as a publisher. In 2014, he received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie Française for his first novel Constellation.

Record and film producer Joe Boyd was born in Boston in 1942 and graduated from Harvard in 1964. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, REM and many others. He produced the documentary Jimi Hendrix and the film Scandal. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records and ran it for 20 years. Boyd lives in London where he writes for the Guardian and Independent. His next book is about World Music.

Lloyd Bradley is the author of Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King (Penguin, 2000), an account of the glory days of the Jamaican music industry, currently in its 14th UK printing, translated into six different languages and the best-selling book ever written about Jamaican music or culture. He was Associate Producer of the BBC's 2002 series Reggae: The Story Of Jamaican Music and author of its accompanying book. As a regular contributor to Mojo, The Observer, the BBC and The Times, and formerly of Q, the NME, The Guardian and The Independent, Lloyd is one of the UK's most respected writers and broadcasters on the subjects of Caribbean music, culture and its impact on the UK.

Alexander Boxer has a doctorate in physics from MIT, a master's degree in the History of Science from Oxford and a bachelors in Classical Language from Yale. His technical research has appeared in journals such as Nature Physics. He currently works as a senior scientist at a small technology company just outside of Washington, DC. In his spare time, he is an active member of Atlas Obscura as a D.C.-based 'field agent'.

Drew Boyd spent 17 years at Johnson & Johnson, and is now Executive Director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati.

Rashad Bilal, a financial advisor, and Troy Millings, an educator

Camille Bordas is the author of three prize-winning novels. The most recent, How to Behave in a Crowd, was the first she wrote in English. The earlier two, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French. Her short stories regularly appear in the New Yorker. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.