The UChicagoan

Fall/23

Questions for the legal scholar, philosopher, and public intellectual.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

Actress in a repertory theater.

What would you want to be doing if not teaching?

Writing!! Which, of course, I do already.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

Loud noise in restaurants that makes conversation impossible.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Opera, a great passion; I guess most people are just indifferent, but some do hate it.

What was the last book you finished?

Nora Nickum, Superpod: Saving the Endangered Orcas of the Pacific Northwest.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

Nickum’s book again; also Patrick Mackie, Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces.

What was the last book you put down before you finished it?

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a Town: clearly a wonderful satire, but I don’t know enough Russian history to get most of the jokes. But since a young relative of mine is writing a dissertation on him, I needed to get partway into it in order to talk about his project.

What book—or other work or idea—do you relish teaching?

I love the ideas most, but as exemplified in courses of many kinds and texts of many kinds.

What book changed your life?

There are so many, but perhaps I’ll say the tragedies of Euripides.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

I don’t see why any good writer would do that. They should write about their own lives. Actually, a Japanese philosopher did write mine, an intellectual biography; but I had to make her rewrite it completely because she assumed that as a woman, I must have had a life of unhappiness and struggle. But I am a very happy person. I felt she was talking about her own professional struggle.

What’s your least useful talent?

Answering many emails very rapidly—because it has gotten widely known, so students from dozens of countries write me for advice. It multiplies distractions.

Who was your best teacher, and why?

My high school French teacher, Marthe Melchior, a tiny woman whose passion for literature and philosophy was contagious until the day she died. My best friend and I started a French drama society to act classic plays in French, and she then urged us to write our own plays. Mine was about Robespierre and the French Revolution. The last time I saw her, at a reunion when she was around 90, she said, “Vous voyez, Martha: je suis encore jacobine.”

Tell us the best piece of advice you’ve received—or the worst.

Best: don’t become a professional actress, use your intellectual gifts instead. But I had to find out for myself.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Try out many things and pursue what you love. Don’t worry about jobs. Your four years are groundwork for your entire life, so the humanities should play a large role.

What UChicago classroom moment will you never forget?

A seminar two years ago in which a group of gifted law and philosophy students gave me the most amazing critical comments on a book on animal rights, now published with much thanks to them.

Patrick Jagoda

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:51:32 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

Illustration by Frank Stockton (background network design by Nicholas Cassleman, AB’13)

Summer/23

Questions for the English professor, digital media theorist, and game designer.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

In high school I worked as a knife salesman. Around the same time, even though I’ve never played a round of golf in my life, I also worked as a caddy for a summer. The work was terrible and involved waking up at 4am. The tips were a major draw though.

What would you want to be doing if not teaching?

I’d probably want to design and write for games full time with my favorite collaborators. But alongside teaching, I already get to create games, write books, run arts labs, and travel all around the world. I find the range of this work extremely fulfilling.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

The frustrating answer is soup. I know I’m on the wrong side of this one, but I struggle to overcome my aversion. My cranky answer might be award ceremonies, but I think those have fallen off the cultural precipice since their height in the 1990s, so I don’t actually think everyone loves them anymore.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Moral panics. You know, like the fear of violent video games or the idea that Dungeons and Dragons promoted an interest in sorcery in the 1980s (one might argue the latter was true, though in a good way). Of all the forms of mass fear, moral panics are really the most fun one.

What was the last book you finished?

One of the last books I read for fun was When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It’s a stunning work of fiction about modern science and mathematics that includes figures like Heisenberg and Schrödinger.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

I recommended Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy to both a friend and a student in the last month. All three of the books are special but the second one, The Dark Forest, might be my favorite. I also regularly recommend science fiction books to folks by Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, and China Miéville.

What was the last book you put down before you finished it?

I put down Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which is a nearly 350,000-word novel. In my defense, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out and that open world has been occupying much of my free time since. My thinking is that the Cervantes novel has been around for over 400 years, so what is a couple more weeks?

What book—or other work or idea—do you relish teaching?

I work in game studies, so I often teach video games. I love teaching games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Hair Nah, or Undertale because of how much they open up for students. I also love teaching students about the concepts of “affect” and “game feel.”

What book changed your life?

This is an unanswerable question for me. Books saved my life in so many ways. It would feel like a betrayal to choose just one. I’d be more willing to answer that for video games.

What video game changed your life?

This is an unanswerable question for me … kidding. I retain a special place in my heart for the 1994 roleplaying game Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan). It is a playful and comedic exploration of Americana from a Japanese perspective, which was one of the first RPGs I played that was based in a contemporary setting, instead of the distant past or a fantasy landscape.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

I’m not a fan of biography as a form. If I wanted my life story to be mostly fiction though, which might be preferable, I would go with circa 2023 ChatGPT.

What’s your least useful talent?

Answering interview questions, succinctly.

Who was your best teacher, and why?

I had many extraordinary teachers, including Toni Clark, David Foster Wallace, Priscilla Wald, Fred Moten, Lauren Berlant, and others. One of the best was Daniel Birkholz, a medievalist at Pomona College, who got me fired up about everything from Beowulf to Norse sagas. Given that I work on contemporary media and video games now, it tells you something about his talent as a teacher that I came very close to becoming a medievalist. I steal his teaching tricks to this day.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Try to fail while you can. I don’t want bad failure or precarity for anyone. But college, in particular, is a time when you can learn by taking risks and failing, at least in some areas. I always encourage my students to fail in the most interesting and wildest ways possible. Invent new ways to fail that no one has known before.

Santa Ono, AB’84

rsmith — Tue, 02 May 2023 22:14:07 +0000

rsmith Tue, 05/02/2023 - 17:14

(Illustration by Matthew Cook)

Spring/23

Questions for the immunologist and 15th president of the University of Michigan.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

I really love the power of movies. Bringing together screenwriting, cinematography, and music to tell stories and to evoke both emotions and thought would have been an attractive profession.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

There are quite a few Coldplay haters in the world. I love their music and that Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman, and Will Champion met at University College London. I was also at UCL when their debut album Parachutes was all the rage.

What was the last book you finished?

I've just read The View from the Helm by James Duderstadt, the 11th president of the University of Michigan. It was great preparation for the start of my own term as Michigan's president.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

I often recommend Hanna Holborn Gray's An Academic Life: A Memoir. It tells the story of life in academia and the challenges of leading a major university. Together with Duderstadt's book, her memoir should be required reading for anyone interested in academic administration.

What was the last book you put down before you finished it?

I rushed to buy Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom because it involves interactions between a student and a dying college professor. I had expected pearls of wisdom about the meaning of life, but it was devoid of any such content. I put the book down halfway through.

Tell us the best piece of advice you've received—or the worst.

The best piece of advice I ever received was from UChicago biochemistry professor Herbert C. Friedmann, PhD'58. He said, "Santa, the most important advice I have for you is to pursue your dreams and to be courageous. Don't give a damn if people think you are crazy. Everyone working at the cutting edge is considered to be crazy by those doing incremental research."

What surprising job have you had in the past?

One of my favorite jobs was serving as chief innovation officer for the province of British Columbia. This gave me a platform to bring together fundamental researchers and large corporations from many sectors to leverage cutting-edge digital technologies (artificial intelligence, quantum computing, augmented and virtual reality, and machine learning) to position the province to be globally competitive. Through this work, the province received considerable funding from the federal government to develop a digital technologies supercluster that is having a profound impact on the BC economy.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

People love to get together and play card games such as poker, Uno, or gin rummy. I'd rather watch Emmerdale or Coronation Street.

What UChicago course book left the biggest impression on you?

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the "Philosophical Investigations" left an indelible impression on me because I struggled to understand almost every paragraph. Things made much more sense after reading Philosophical Investigations. I often wonder whether it would've made more sense reading the latter book first.

What book changed your life?

As a University of Chicago first-year student, I was fascinated with the question of the origin of life. I went to the chemistry library in my first quarter to read Stanley Miller's (PhD'54) dissertation. I was very impressed with the originality of the experimental design, and the remarkable result that amino acids were detected at the end of the famous experiment. It inspires me to this very day.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

That's an easy one: Walter Isaacson. His biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein were fantastic.

What's your least useful talent?

If only I had a talent. Being born into a family of remarkably talented people, I'm hopelessly garden variety.

What's your most vivid UChicago memory?

I would not be who I am today were it not for the influences of Hanna Gray; Elliott Kieff, PhD'71; Jonathan Fanton; Herbert Friedmann; and my dorm mates at Burton Judson Courts. But as I said at my Michigan inauguration, my most vivid memory is Dodd-Mead beating Chamberlin House in intramural football (and I didn't even play in the game).

College alumni

Sara Toussaint, AB’00

rsmith — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 17:28:29 +0000

rsmith Thu, 02/16/2023 - 11:28

(Illustration by Nigel Buchanan)

Winter/23

Questions for the sports marketer, co-owner of a National Women’s Soccer League team, and new Alumni Board president.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

My first job on campus was in the athletics department doing everything from screening prospective student-athletes to cleaning out the gym lockers at Henry Crown over the summers. Never once did it cross my mind that I could/would have a career in sports.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

Working on US domestic policies that help this country be more equitable for all people who live here.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

Seinfeld.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

I don’t know if people actually hate them as much as they enjoy bashing them, but I love reading romance novels. Besides the books being fun, the women who write them are brilliant and fierce, so no one should be surprised to discover that there are UChicago alumnae who write for the genre (or protagonists who are UChicago alums!).

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

I was in Florence recently, so Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy—a biographical novel about Michelangelo’s life. Without that book there’s no way I would have appreciated the Duomo or David as they should be admired. I started tearing up when I saw them in person.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

Erik Larson would not only make me sound more interesting but would do a great job talking about key moments in the world. We’re now Twitter friends after I posted my enthusiasm about The Devil in the White City becoming a movie. (Another Keanu Reeves/UChicago connection!)

What’s your least useful talent?

I can usually predict which movie previews will be horror films in the first one to two seconds.

Tell us the best piece of advice you’ve received—or the worst.

Worst piece of advice I’ve received in my career was to put my head down and keep working rather than be vocal when a situation isn’t right. I did the opposite, which actually didn’t change the situation, but helped me build my confidence.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Stay connected to the University because you’ll inevitably find something of interest or value to you. Skim the emails, attend alumni events, read the Magazine, whatever that connection point might be. Through the years I guarantee that you’ll be thankful you were engaged.

What’s your most vivid UChicago memory in two sentences or less?

Dancing Brazilian samba, Colombian cumbia, Bolivian caporales, and Latin hip-hop routines at I-House for our Hispanic RSO’s cultural show with a dozen friends from the College and graduate divisions. A packed hall with family, dormmates, and other school friends cheering us on was the best feeling.

Neil Shubin

rsmith — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:37:05 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/02/2022 - 18:37

(Illustration by Jordi Ferrándiz)

Fall/22

Questions for the paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and host of PBS’s Your Inner Fish.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

I worked in a paper mill stacking and fixing pallets.

What would you want to be doing if not teaching?

Be a fly-fishing guide on western trout streams or Caribbean ocean flats.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

A tie: superheroes and social media.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Fifteen-hour car rides alone in complete silence.

What was the last book you finished?

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

What book, work, concept, or idea do you relish teaching?

The history of life on Earth—how we have come to know it and what it tells us about who we are.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

Carl Sagan, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60.

Who was your best teacher, and why?

Eleventh grade social studies: Stephen McCarter, at Lower Merion High School outside of Philadelphia. He encouraged curiosity and a fearlessness in pursuing ideas.

Tell us the best piece of advice you’ve received—or the worst.

The worst piece of advice I ever received came when I was a postdoc from an eminence who told me to give up paleontology because I’ll never do anything meaningful.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Get your ideas out there and don’t be scared to be wrong. Being wrong is part of the process if you are always learning and self-correcting.

Paleontology

Fossils

D. Maurice Charles, MDiv’90, PhD’13

rsmith — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 02:33:19 +0000

rsmith Thu, 08/11/2022 - 21:33

(Illustration by Charles Chaisson)

Summer/22

Questions for the alumnus and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel dean.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

As a first year at Case Western Reserve University, I was a telemarketer for Time Life Books. I didn’t last very long because I couldn’t sell enough copies of The Gunfighters.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

Holed up in a little townhouse along the Silver Comet Trail near Atlanta where I could ride my bike daily and finish all the books I buy.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

Rock music. It made the difference between living in a dorm and finding my own apartment.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Snakes. Four serpentine companion animals got me through long hours of dissertation writing.

What was the last book you finished?

Just reread Camus’s The Plague, naturally.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

What was the last book you put down before you finished it?

The Sermon on the Mount by Hans Dieter Betz, professor emeritus in the Div School. A single footnote of his rocked my little homiletical world.

What UChicago course book left the biggest impression on you?

The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann.

What book changed your life?

Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day was the earliest of the life changers. Reading it still gives me the freedom to immerse myself in wonder.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

Not sure who I’d want to write it, but I always wished James Earl Jones would play the lead in the B movie. Once the plague arrived, I figured Samuel L. Jackson would be more appropriate.

What’s your least useful talent?

Playing the air organ in my office while [University organist] Tom Weisflog, SM’69, is rehearsing. My fancy footwork makes it look like I really know what I am doing. (I don’t.)

Tell us the best piece of advice you’ve received—or the worst.

Worst piece of advice? “Don’t go to school there; they never let Black people graduate.”

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Head over to Montgomery Place and get to know the seniors. They’re a wealth of knowledge about the University, the city, and a little town called Hyde Park.

What did you learn at UChicago that still benefits you today?

Intellectual humility is the beginning of wisdom. If you don’t possess it when you arrive, you will by the time you leave!

What’s your most vivid UChicago memory in two sentences or less?

Riding along 53rd Street in the back of Sally McCleskey Allocca’s (MDiv’90) red Toyota pickup truck. I offered to provide ballast since the Alabama native didn’t know how to drive it in snow.

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Divinity School

Graduate alumni

Emily Landon

rsmith — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:45:33 +0000

rsmith Tue, 03/01/2022 - 11:45

(Illustration by Lyndon Hayes)

The University of Chicago Medicine

Spring/22

Questions for the infectious disease specialist and public health advocate.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

When I was in high school and college, I used to sing at wedding ceremonies. Iʼm a soprano and would usually perform as a soloist.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

Iʼd probably be doing something in music: either working as a music teacher or singing classical music. I actually went to college as a music major.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

I hate beer. To me, all beer tastes like soap. But that does not mean I donʼt like wine!

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Organic chemistry. I really enjoyed that class when everyone else absolutely hated it.

What was the last book you finished?

I love British crime fiction. The last book I finished was Stolen Ones by Angela Marsons.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

Kristin Lavransdatter, which is a trilogy by Sigrid Undset, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 1920s. Itʼs an amazing story about a Norwegian woman in the 1300s, and it was one of the best books Iʼve ever read. I loved, loved, loved it.

What book—or other work or idea—do you relish teaching?

I work with doctors in training, so my favorite thing to teach about is decision fatigue and how to avoid it. No one knows when theyʼre getting decision fatigued, but medical training can push you toward that point every day. Unfortunately, decision fatigue plays a big role in errors and bad decision-making—especially in medicine.

What book changed your life?

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Whatʼs your least useful talent?

All my talents are useful! I sew, I make soap and candles, I love to garden. I joke that I donʼt have time for hobbies that are useless!

Tell us the best piece of advice youʼve received—or the worst.

Best advice is that your time is your most valuable asset.

The worst advice is the conglomeration of advice people give to women but never seem to give to men. You know: that I should be nicer, or smile more, or be more friendly, or wear lipstick.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Donʼt let the idea that not very many people succeed in a field ever stop you from doing what you want to do. Somebodyʼs going to succeed, and it might as well be you. So do what you love, and just be ready to work really, really hard at it.

Who was your best teacher, and why?

You canʼt be successful without having important teachers and mentors throughout your life, so itʼs hard to put it all on one person. But if I had to pick, Iʼd say it was my elementary school music teacher. Weʼd practice songs and heʼd yell for us to stop and do it again. And while that was so frustrating as a child, he did it in a way that made you feel like you could do it better. And when you did do it better, you realized it was worth it to do it again.

What UChicago moment will you never forget?

I was the resident in the medical intensive care unit one night when a lot of patients got really sick around the same time. The faculty and the fellow had gone home for the night when this very senior faculty member called to see how I was doing (which, by the way, was not well). All I could do was say, “All hellʼs breaking loose,” and then I literally hung up on him. I still canʼt believe I did that. But rather than tell me I was rude, they sent me help that night and again the next morning. It was a great lesson that when you need help, help will be there for you. You donʼt have to worry about hierarchy because weʼre all there to care for our patients.

Science & Medicine

Richard H. Thaler

rsmith — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 01:28:58 +0000

rsmith Fri, 02/04/2022 - 19:28

(Illustration by Graham Smith)

Winter/22

Questions for the Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

In college I had a part-time job delivering “books on vinyl” to housebound unsighted adults. Many lived alone, which I found unimaginable. A VW Beetle made that job possible.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

I was hoping that my cameo in The Big Short would launch a movie career, but somehow that is not happening. Other “jobs” seem to require hard work and following orders. I am not good at either, so I was lucky to fall into teaching and research.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

Even as a young kid, I always hated marshmallows, which most kids adore. The famous marshmallow test would not have worked on me. A version with Oreos as the temptation would have been another story.

What was the last book you finished?

Silverview, John le Carre’s last book. A fitting ending to a wonderful career.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

I am not sure whether to call it a book but Malcolm Gladwell’s new audiobook Miracle and Wonder focused on Paul Simon. Gladwell is experimenting with new genres in the audiobook space. Here, listeners are given the chance to listen to Simon talk about songwriting and get to listen to the music. All books by or about musicians should be done this way.

What was the last book you put down before you finished it?

I would not pick out one in particular. It is the rare nonfiction book that keeps me reading until the end. In my books I tell the readers to quit reading if it is no longer fun. That’s what I do too.

What book changed your life?

Not a book but a series of articles written in the 1970s by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. I read about five of them one afternoon, based on a suggestion from one of their students whom I had met. It was a genuine “aha” moment, and I knew it at the time.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

Maybe John Maynard Keynes. He was a fantastic writer and a behavioral economist before such a thing existed. I’d love to get his take. If you can arrange that, please do.

What’s your least useful talent?

I am moderately good at preferring (in a blind tasting) expensive wines over the cheap stuff.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

You should not pick an occupation based on the subject you liked best in college. Think more about what a job is like day-to-day and whether you could imagine doing that for the rest of your life.

What UChicago classroom moment will you never forget, in three sentences or less?

The day I learned I had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, in a 5 a.m. phone call, I had a class scheduled for 6 p.m. Three hours! Fortunately I was coteaching the class and my partner had arranged champagne and a cake, and she told me to go home after an hour.

Economics & Business

Lisa Lucas, AB’01

rsmith — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 01:08:15 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/10/2021 - 19:08

(Illustration by Arunas Kacinskas)

Fall/21

Questions for the College alumna and publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

I was the telefund manager at Steppenwolf Theatre Company—a gig I managed to get because of my undergrad experience working as the U of C telefund supervisor for three years.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

A radio host, 100 percent. Iʼm hoping I get to have a second act. I blame fellow Maroon Studs Terkel, PhBʼ32, JDʼ34, for this longing.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

Football.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Humidity.

What was the last book you ﬁnished?

The Rage of Innocence by Kristin Henning. Itʼs such a stunning—if infuriating—book that explores how our society criminalizes Black children and does not give them the essential opportunities for play, exploration, risk, and messiness that we allow their White counterparts.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, which is one of my absolute favorite books and, I think, one of the best literary explorations of female rage that exists.

What was the last book you put down before you ﬁnished it?

If I told you, Iʼd have to kill you. I work in books. This is not a safe question.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

Sam Irby. The only way Iʼd ever be interesting is if someone funny wrote the story.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Read everything you are assigned, and deeply. Youʼll be glad you did, and youʼll never have this kind of time again.

What did you learn at UChicago that still beneﬁts you today?

Rigor.

Arts & Humanities

College alumni

Christina Kahrl, AB’90

rsmith — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 23:16:30 +0000

rsmith Thu, 07/29/2021 - 18:16

(Illustration by Peter James Field)

Summer/21

Questions for the San Francisco Chronicle sports editor, Baseball Hall of Fame voter, and transgender activist.

What surprising job have you had in the past?

Hmmm, so many choices—shoveling horse food and mucking stalls for cash as a kid, the summer I spent in a Taco Bell, a couple of years in Local 743 as a teamster with a history degree, writing the homes beat for the Washington Blade. Ultimately it all adds up to my willingness to get paid so that I could do what I wanted to do.

What would you want to be doing if not your current position?

If it were my choice? Teaching. Working with young writers just starting out, as journalists or pursuing other creative choices.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

Canada geese. They’re a waste of protein, feathers, and atoms. OK, nobody loves Canada geese, so how about chardonnay?

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Liver. The restaurant Erwin in Wrigleyville, long since closed, used to make a divine liver dish that involved steeping it overnight in calvados. Just one reason among many I mourn the closure of my favorite spot near Wrigley Field to take baseball foodie friends.

What was the last book you finished?

Rosemary Ashton’s One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858. All three faced significant crises in their lives in that year, self-inflicted to some extent, but Ashton puts the life, skin, and sin into their lived experiences, giving us insight into their interior lives.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

Tim Blanning’s biography of Frederick the Great, because life is too short for most of us to read all of [Thomas] Carlyle, and that Scottish gentleman skipped over more than a few of the interesting bits while moving all the way into hagiographic argle-bargle, and we can do without that any more in history, thank you very much.

What was the last book you put down before you finished it?

Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana, about the smallpox epidemic that coincided with the American Revolution. It’s a great bit of scholarship, but I got the gist of it and moved on.

What UChicago course book left the biggest impression on you?

[Anne Robert Jacques] Turgot’s essay “On Foundations,” because its thesis, that human institutions outlive their original purpose and get adapted (or abused) to suit the needs of the present, struck me then and seems to this day as reliably true, and not merely for the society the Encyclopedists cast a caustic eye upon in the middle of the 18th century.

As an editor I can shamelessly admit that it can be easier to edit something that exists or adapt it to your purpose than it is to conjure up something entirely new. Is that merely an invitation into a career spent in derivative riffing, or is it how we build from what we inherit its own form of art? I think we can all struggle to find answers we like best, and that’s OK. In journalism the mastery of storytelling can explore, but it cannot invent.

What book changed your life?

Baseball Prospectus, which I wrote for, would be the cheap/easy answer, because it set me on my career course in sports journalism. But the book that really started shaping how I thought about baseball? Earl Weaver’s Weaver on Strategy: The Classic Work on the Art of Managing a Baseball Team, which I loved so much that two decades later I acquired the rights to republish it—and interviewed Earl Weaver for the new, updated edition, which wound up being one of my single favorite interviews. I haggled for 90 minutes with his agent, but we wound up spending all day together trading baseball stories.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

Ursula K. Le Guin. Her empathy for the Other was transcendent.

What’s your least useful talent?

My impression of the late Alan Rickman had he ever played a cow. Merrrrr.

Tell us the best piece of advice you’ve received—or the worst.

“But wouldn’t you rather go to Yale?”

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Yes, you’re there to learn, but the most important opportunity you have is to learn about yourself, on your terms, in what you do now that you’re here, and how you choose to go about it. There’s no right answer, save the one that is right for you.

What did you learn at UChicago that still benefits you today?

Follow your curiosity, and never fully satisfy it.

What’s your most vivid UChicago memory in two sentences or fewer?

The day the lightbulb went off reading Tacitus’s Annals and realizing that he was an unreliable narrator, projecting onto the Roman Republic imagined virtues he perhaps believed, but was particularly intent on making you believe.

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