When everything seems to be so easily found, it almost begins to feel like everything is also easy to understand. We no longer crave answers because we no longer have questions. In a world saturated by mass media it feels like we are what we really aren’t, and when we hear about places we’ve never been, it’s almost as if we’re already there.

The truth, of course, is that what seems to be is often not actually what it is. We do not have all the answers, most of us have actually seen very little of the world and there are lives being lived in conditions we could never understand. For our latest issue, we set out in search of the subterranean: the people, places and ideas that exist beyond our grasp. And because we know there is so much out there that we have never looked for, we wanted to hear back from the people who have gone searching on our behalf. The world may be more connected than it has ever been, but a flat earth is still a complicated one.

Danny Gold has his priorities challenged by visting Phnom Pen’s garbage village.

At the Appelby Horse Fair in northern England David Grocott gets introduced to the epicenter of British Gypsy life.

William Bryk examines the life of the Hon. Mike Walsh, a rabble-rousing militant and foe of corruption who was New York’s most successful radical politician before the Marxists perverted American left-wing politics into a parlor game.

Last Exit co-editor Paul Menchaca talks to Brooklyn-based photographer Joseph Rodriguez, who has spent his career seeking out the world that exists in the shadows of where we feel comfortable.

Lito Elio Porto looks into a mysterious CIA-linked plane crash in the Yucatan jungle last year, and wonders why everyone assumes the drug trade and its vast profits are relegated to the underworld.

Cal Orey describes herself as earthquake sensitive, and claims to have successfully predicted quakes in California and Nevada by studying her seismically intuitive pets and her own physical reactions to underground activity. Nicole Whelan talks to the author of The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes: Jim Berkland, Maverick Geologist.

Rising rents may have forced some music venues in New York City to close, but Philip Henken finds a thriving scene that has gone back underground.

Sandra Koponen discovers the last strip of wilderness left in Manhattan, where a handful of outsiders eke out a primeval living off the radar.

—The Editors