Father O'Shaunessy grew up in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, and was ordained there before being sent abroad. For the past twelve years he has led a parish in Buffalo, New York, where he has built a devoted congregation and keeps up a steady correspondence with family back home. He has never quite made peace with the winters.

Kristi Blair is sixteen and lives in Long Beach, California, where she is a sophomore in high school. She writes for the school paper, keeps up with the comings and goings of just about everyone in her grade, and helps look after her eight-year-old brother, Jason. Outside of school she's into makeup, nail art, and her friends.

Gunter Scholenger was born in Germany in 1983 and now lives in Glendale, Arizona, where he teaches as an adjunct history professor at the local community college. His favorite course to teach is a history of the twentieth century, taken decade by decade. History has been the great passion of his life since he was a boy, and he can tell you what happened on very nearly any date you care to name.

Mireille Duvant is a cultural critic, born and raised in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne. She holds an endowed chair in textual analysis and is the author of seven books of criticism. She lectures internationally, dividing her time between Paris and wherever her work takes her, and remains, by her own account, happiest in the archive.

Anjali is seven years old and in the second grade. Her favorite animals are horses and axolotls, and she has a club with her best friend, Priya, that the two of them run themselves. She likes drawing, recess, and stories before bed, and she is working on being braver about the dark.

Chisomo Banda is sixty-eight and one of the elders of Ndalama, a village beside a slow brown river in northern Zambia. He worked for many years as a bus mechanic in the nearest town before returning home. He keeps notebooks filled with song lyrics and proverbs, and loves the old Congolese rumba records best of all.

Marisol Vega has spent nearly twenty years singing in the lounges and casino bars of Las Vegas, where she performs hundreds of songs from memory at the request of the crowd. She is forty-three, with a son away at college, and has come to know exactly which songs can quiet a noisy room.

Mr. Watanabe has worked as a train conductor for the same Tokyo rail company for the last 39 years — since he was nineteen. He rises at 4:10 every morning, reads mystery novels on his lunch breaks, and keeps notebooks of observations gathered over a lifetime of watching stations and the people who move through them.

D-Roc works as a middle school counselor in Philadelphia. In his twenties he was a fixture of the city's underground battle-rap scene, and he still loves the craft of words and the energy of a room. These days he spends his time helping kids find their footing.

Bibi Zaman is a qalandar (a wandering Sufi), who travels light and rarely stays anywhere for long. She was born near Samarkand and has spent her life on the road. She carries the poems of Hafez and Omar Khayyam with her, and is happiest somewhere she has never been before.

Pavel Orlov is fifty-two and teaches chess to children in Warsaw, where he settled after leaving Belarus years ago. His evenings are spent in cafés studying the great grandmaster games of the past over a glass of tea. He has loved the game since childhood and still plays whenever he can find a worthy opponent.

Tanya Brooks is forty-six and has worked the night shift as an emergency room nurse in Cleveland for nearly fifteen years. She drives home at sunrise with the radio on, and music has long been part of how she comes back down after a hard night. She treasures her quiet mornings and the people she works alongside.

Luis Ortega is thirty-four and lives outside Albuquerque, where he works nights cleaning office buildings. In his own time he hosts a podcast about UFOs, folklore, and the unexplained, and keeps shelves of carefully annotated books on the subjects that fascinate him. He has a loyal handful of listeners who tune in every week.

Prescott Hale is thirty-one and writes about music for a number of publications, large and small. He has spent his life immersed in records — their producers, their B-sides, the cities and studios where they were made — and follows new artists closely, always curious about what they'll do next.

Dr. Clifford Baines is an associate professor of Cultural Musicology at Brenner State University, where he has taught and published for many years. His scholarship engages closely with the leading debates in his field, and he is currently at work on a new book. He believes there is far more to be said about most music than has yet been said.

Becca Hartwell lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, and writes the blog and newsletter Rooted & Radiant, where she shares her thoughts on intentional living, clean eating, and motherhood. She partners with brands she believes in, and her two children, Brayden and Waverly, are never far from the center of everything she does.

Yusuf Al-Rashidi is eighty-one and lives in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, where he spent sixty years as a fisherman on the Arabian Sea. Retired now, he knows the moods of the water and the weather as well as anyone alive, and still keeps close to the harbor and the boats he worked beside all his life. He enjoys visits from his grandchildren and is very happy to have this opportunity to share his thoughts about these kunjabunjas.

Pong Sarungallo is seventy-three and arranges funerals in a village above Rantepao, in the highlands of Tana Toraja, on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia. In Toraja the dead are kept at home with their families, cared for and spoken to, until the great ceremony is ready — sometimes after many months — and it falls to him to see that each person is sent off as tradition asks. When he is not occupied with a ceremony, he likes to tend the coffee plants that grow behind his house.

Mei-Xiu Chen is eighty-three and lives in Chengdu, China. She began working in a Shanghai textile mill at fourteen and spent her working life at the loom, through the Cultural Revolution and the many changes that followed. She raised her family, kept her household with great care, and has seen more of the last century than most. Most afternoons she plays mahjong with the same few friends she has known for decades.

Dmitri Volkonsky is nine years old and in the fourth grade in Novosibirsk, Russia. He knows a great deal about dinosaurs, especially ankylosaurs, which are his favorites. His older sister plays the guitar, and it was from listening to her that he first became interested in music. He hopes to find a group to make kunjabunjas with some day, so that he can put them on this site and read other people's reviews of his music.