friday takeout

When you retire, and assuming you have enough money to do so, what is one cause you would give to because you are passionate about its mission and purpose?

One of my dreams is to be able to fund a higher education scholarship. I’d set it up to be specifically for undergraduate students with financial need who are interested in studying identity formation using art, literature, music, dance and theater among marginalized groups of people. This is an understudied subject in humanities, and we always need new scholars to grow the current work and help us understand how important the humanities are.

Is there a book you’ve read that you love so much you’ve read it twice, or even multiple times?

I am a very active fiction reader - I probably read nearly 100 books a year, and my house is full of books. One of the American 20th century authors whose work I love is Shirley Jackson. You may know her from reading The Lottery in high school. I have read and enjoyed almost all of her work, but my favorite novella, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is a work I’ve read multiple times. It is a masterclass in suspense and insanity in fiction. Other authors I love are Ayn Rand, J K Rowling and my current translated favorite is Haruki Murakami, a fantastic Japanese writer.

Name one country or region in the world you have never visited that you someday want to visit, serve or spend a vacation?

The only place I’ve traveled out of the US is Canada, so there a lots of places I hope to visit in the coming years. Estonia is at the top of my list for no good reason other than I like cold weather and I love the pictures of Talinn.

Give your colleagues a suggestion: what are 1, 2, or 3 of your favorite smart phone apps?

I could not live without Evernote. Everything I should be able to remember, but can’t, is in it: my license plate number, my NICC employee ID, my favorite poems, quotes from artists, all the cars I've owned, all my jobs, all the places I've lived, all that good stuff. I use Maps a lot now that I’ve moved back to Iowa, and my friends and I text rather than call most of the time, so those would be my three favorites.

In one sentence, how would you explain the Internet?

The Internet, in its most pure and accessible form, is a democratic aggregator of all people on the globe that removes time and geographic barriers from sharing knowledge and communication. It is easily as important as the Gutenberg printing press was in its day. One thing I could not live without, say, on a desert island, is the Internet.