| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | I loved hiking with my parents and our three dogs in the mountains. My dad would give me “tests,” which were physical challenges, such as hopping along a fallen log on one foot or jumping from one stump to another; I was always asking for more tests! It was nice to feel close with family in a beautiful setting. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I closely identify with my mom, whom I love and admire for her warmth, kindness, empathetic awareness, open-mindedness, and endless curiosity about the world. She has lived a fascinating life—working as a professional jazz dancer, living in New York, switching to being a math tutor—in part because her absence of dogmatism or fear in the face of the unknown makes her atypically open to the strange and exciting things life can offer. She is also extremely caring for other people. I hope that I have absorbed and live up to some of her attributes. When I study philosophy, write books or articles or poems, and teach undergraduate courses in philosophy and literature, I try to channel her open-mindedness and enthusiasm about life and learning. Often, scholarly specialization can sap excitement from the pursuit of knowledge, but my mom always reminds me that pursuing knowledge, even in a rigorous and systematic way, can be simply an extension of a very childlike (in the good sense) excitement. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I admire kindness, ambition, sense of humor, and curiosity. A sense of humor often implies a crucial ability to step back and take a broader view of one’s situation, even in difficult times. I also admire the ability to combine traits not often found in conjunction—for example, to combine flexibility with discipline, or moral seriousness with a forgiving disposition, or toughness with emotional sensitivity, or abstract analytical reasoning with practical skills. The ability to combine or “pivot” between various character traits is itself an extremely valuable trait. For example, one of the professors I most admired during graduate school could speak with extreme clarity during a lecture and to hold students’ comments to a very high bar of precision, but then could listen empathetically to a student who explains after class about an illness they’ve been suffering. Not getting too stuck in one “mode” can often be a key to contributing as much as possible to the world. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | That’s a hard question! I guess this one: skiing with friends, I was leaning back on the tails of my skis gathering slush for snowballs, and (though I didn’t notice) my back pocket ripped off my ski pants and I lost my wallet. Driving home from the ski area, I realized my wallet was missing, called the ski area’s lost and found, and the person who had found the wallet on the slopes met us at a bar at a radio station we’d never known about, to return the wallet. It turned out to be an incredibly fun evening, and we met a bunch of new people at the bar, where they were having a local music event. So, it was a good example of how “things going wrong” can in fact lead to unpredictable good outcomes. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I’d love to see Madagascar, partly because (having been an island for many millions of years) it’s apparently a “biodiversity hotspot.” Most of the plant and animal species there aren’t found anywhere else in the world. I’d also like to visit Ireland and Brazil. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I’d like to pass on genuineness and unpretentiousness. There’s often a huge gap between appearance and reality, and I’d like my children to grow into adults who aim at what’s really true, not merely at what “seems impressive.” I’d also like to pass on a sense of humor and a love of music. |
