The Official Website of Ryan J Hite
Live Last read · last published · next check
Content warning: This story covers child abuse, the neglect of disabled people, and unethical human experimentation on children. Please proceed with care. If you look at a map of New York City, Staten Island has always been the odd piece. Cut off from Manhattan and Brooklyn by miles of open harbor, reachable for most of the […] The post 375 Acres of Silence: The Institution New York Spent 40 Years…
If you know San Diego, you know this bridge. The big blue curve rising out of the bay, sweeping between downtown and Coronado like it was always meant to be there. It shows up in every skyline photo, every postcard, every establishing shot of the city. It feels permanent, inevitable, obvious. It wasn’t supposed to […] The post The Bridge the Navy Spent Decades Trying to Stop appeared first on Ryan…
There is a city in Europe where the traffic lights are, quite deliberately, programmed to work against you. Buried beneath its streets is a network of roughly 4,500 sensors, feeding a central system that tracks, minute by minute, exactly how full the roads inside the city center have become. When that number creeps toward saturation, […] The post Zürich: The City That Deliberately Sabotages Its…
In February 2014, Russian troops seized the Crimean Peninsula in a swift, almost bloodless operation that Vladimir Putin would spend the next decade celebrating as the defining triumph of his presidency. It was the proof, as far as the Kremlin was concerned, that Russia had returned to the ranks of great powers capable of redrawing […] The post Crimea Is Becoming an Island: How Ukraine’s Drone War…
There is a city in eastern Lebanon where six Roman columns, each seventy-two feet tall, still pierce the sky above a modern town that most of the world has never heard of. Beside them stands a temple in better condition than almost anything left standing in Rome itself. Beneath the ash of an ancient quarry […] The post Baalbek: The Roman Wonder That Became Iran’s Fortress in Lebanon appeared first…
This is London. It is the capital of England, the seat of the British government, and the most recognizable city on Earth outside of maybe New York or Paris. And yet, walk its streets for more than a day and something starts to feel off. It doesn’t behave like the rest of the country it […] The post London: The Capital City Britain Never Actually Built appeared first on Ryan J. Hite .
Look at a map of the United States long enough, and Nebraska starts to feel less like a place and more like a placeholder. It is that impossibly straight rectangle sitting dead-center in the continent, the state most Americans experience only as a smear of brown and green from 35,000 feet in the air, or […] The post Nebraska: The State America Built Just to Skip appeared first on Ryan J. Hite .
What if I told you there’s a stretch of American Interstate barely 50 miles long that packs in more geographic extremity than almost anywhere else you’re legally allowed to drive in the United States? That’s a bold claim in a country that stretches from Arctic Alaska to tropical Florida. But stay with me. This road […] The post The 50 Miles That Break Every Rule: Inside the Kumeyaay Highway’s…
If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, Iran has probably crossed your feed more than once. We’ve spent a fair amount of time on this channel picking apart this country’s regime — the empty government-built towns nobody ever moved into, the notorious walls of Evin Prison, the long list of neighbors who, for […] The post The City That Built a Regime: Inside Qom, Iran’s Hidden Capital…
There are weather events that rewrite the textbooks. And then there are events so far beyond the realm of meteorological possibility that even seasoned scientists struggle to believe their own eyes. June 16th, 2014 was one of those days. Storm chaser Scott Peak was positioned on Highway 275 in northeast Nebraska, filming a violent EF4 […] The post The Day Two Monsters Collided: Nebraska’s…
