He couldn't bear to see us happy. A child smiling required his assessment. And his assessment was almost always the same: If you're that happy, something wrong is going to happen.

A Brahman bull escaped a slaughter truck in Bogotá, ran forty blocks through traffic, and fought until he couldn't anymore. What happened next — and what it says about ideology versus the animals it claims to protect.

My uncle was a war hero who could have saved us. He never did. I've spent my life trying to understand why.

The one thing in my entire childhood that my father — fearless, dangerous, uncontrollable — couldn't explain or control.

He wore sunglasses everywhere, in every condition. I eventually understood why — and learned to read what he was hiding anyway.

My father checked himself into psychiatric clinics — not to heal, but to disappear until it was safe to come back out.

Why I've never once been late in my adult life — and what it has to do with a train platform when I was seven.

Nine police officers couldn't control my father. They called his eighteen-year-old son instead.

When you're in real trouble — the kind official channels can't reach — you don't pray to the institution. You call La Santa Muerte.

The formation I grew up inside produces a range of outcomes. I am not the worst of them. Here's what kept me from it.

I was eight when our home was robbed. What my father did to the men responsible was something out of a nightmare I still have.

A tribute to my brother, who suffered more than anyone should, and who deserves this even though he'll likely never read it.

The relatives who used him for favors disappeared the moment he stopped being useful. Only the woman he hurt the most stayed until the end.

I looked for years for a book written for the kind of person I am. I never found it. So eventually I wrote one — fourteen of them, actually.

Four armed men at the gate, pricing my animals out loud in front of me. What I was actually thinking while I stayed perfectly calm.

Vampire bats, venomous snakes, a heat stroke alone in the jungle, and the cow I couldn't save. The hardest year of my life, in full.

Why a ringing phone still means something to me that it shouldn't, decades after the calls that taught me to fear it.

A broken ceramic elephant, a loaded gun pointed at a fourteen-year-old, and a soup with a whole bottle of medication in it. A true story.

A stranger sat down across from me, told me things he had no way of knowing, and disappeared into a shadow that had nowhere to hide him.

At ten, my father handed me a rifle and told me to shoot. The bird fell. I've spent my life paying it back.