Bradley

he’d work fulltime. Reflecting on his former labor, Bradley says, “I would crank out like 2000 bagels in a couple hours.”

Next year, his culinary aspirations are modest — chicken, rice, eggs, “real guy food,” he says. Though Bradley switched his concentration from Physics to Computer Science — he found quantum mechanics too difficult — his favorite class was Physics 15a, an introductory course on Newtonian mechanics and special relativity. He enjoyed the class demonstrations that Assistant Professor Julia Mundy would lead, and found that Physics 15a allowed him to apply the calculus and algebra he had learned the previous semester in a way that felt grounded in “real-life things rather than little atoms.”

“I’m not not intellectually curious, and I still care about things,” Bradley says. “I still read for fun.” He whips out a copy of “War and Peace” from his backpack. He was never going to sit down and read the thousand-page novel on his own, he says, so he took Slavic 118: “Reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace” instead. So far, he’s loving it. He expected it to be drier, but the romance and family drama is keeping him intrigued. When he’s not reading Tolstoy’s epic, he’s reading a murder science fiction novel, “The Wasp Factory,” which he connects to his interests in horror movies, horror books, and death metal music.

In fact, when we speak, Bradley has just come back from a death metal concert in Boston. He goes to a concert about once a week — before seeing the death metal band, he saw King Princess, an indie pop queer icon. Pleasure is really what draws him to fiction, concerts, and film. Bradley loves mob movies — his favorite is “Goodfellas” — samurai movies from the ’50s and ’60s, and Tarantino movies. (“Obviously, I’m a guy with a mustache, you have to like Tarantino,” he says.)

Beyond concerts, workouts, pizza, and sleep, Bradley’s real priority this year is spending time with his friends. “I won’t go a day without a dose of hanging out with my friends,” he says. “I think that’s important.” Bradley says his friends hold each other accountable. “If you’re actually failing and you’re actually not doing any of your work, we’ll be like, ‘Come on bro, you can’t do this.’ But if you’re really worked up over a pset or really worked up over a paper, we’ll sort of be like, ‘It’s okay, you can send in a quick email, there’s a solution to this.’”

When he graduates, he may not see a lot of these friends more than once or twice a year, he says. So for his group of five or six guys who spend almost every day with each other — oftentimes working together during the day and playing poker or video games at night — Bradley wants to savor their final year together.

By the end of our conversation, I come to a realization: Bradley’s “chillness” is more reflective of his varied interests and admirable priorities than an ambivalent approach to life. By valuing his friends, his health, and his nonacademic interests as well as his intellectual interests and post-grad plans, Bradley is really just a well-rounded dude.

Before we leave Shay’s — Bradley en route to the Fox Club, me foregoing my solo library plan to hang out with my roommates — Bradley imparts some final words of wisdom. “I think everyone can afford to relax a little bit,” he says. “It’s probably better for you.”