I'm a writer and a reader, and I used to be a scientist.

I love travel, languages, the outdoors, music, movies, and distance running. I speak French and Japanese, lived in Paris for a while in college and in Okayama and Kyoto, Japan for three years after college. I've worked as a teacher, translator, psychology researcher, house-painter, and park maintenance tech, and I'm aiming now for a career as an author. I'm a lover of NPR and of magazine journalism like the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's, and my current dream is to write stories for radio, magazines and books about culture, neuroscience, travel, and other interesting things.

Journalism masters program at NYU; Editorial internship at GQ. Next year, into the world as a journalist.

Writing. Reporting. Reading. Exploring. Traveling whenever I can.

conversation.

I'm enthusiastic. I'm too interested in people to act aloof.

Writers: J.D. Salinger, Faulkner, Woolf, John Barth, Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Nabokov, Kundera, Frank O'Hara, Yukio Mishima, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Camus. I also love to read history-- e.g. Japanese-American history by John Dower; American Revolutionary history by Joseph Ellis and David McCullough-- and science writing by folks like Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, and Jonah Lehrer.

Music is a huge part of my life, and many of my best friends are musicians-- indie rock, jazz, & folk. My favorites in recent years have been folk singers Paul Curreri, Dave Van Ronk, and Devon Sproule; jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Coltrane, Mingus, Ellington, and The Bad Plus; and indie rockers The Flaming Lips, Why?, The Magnetic Fields, Bright Eyes, Smog, Modest Mouse, Elliot Smith, and Weezer. I also like some more top-40 music, like Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne, and The Roots, and old country music, like Hank Williams.

Movies: I like dramas, smart comedies, and psychological thrillers. I love auteur filmmakers like Woodie Allen, Francois Truffaut, Wang Kar Wai and Pedro Almodovar, but I also get a kick out of lighter and more mainstream comedies like those of Judd Apatow. I love classic thriller movies like Silence Of The Lambs, and old film noir like the ones I used to see in revival-house cinemas in the Latin Quarter. I love good 1950s movies-- e.g. All About Eve; Sunset Boulevard; The Apartment-- and I have a soft spot for courtroom dramas-- everything from Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" with Jimmy Stuart to "A Few Good Men" with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholas.

I don't watch much TV, but when I do it tends to be cable series like Girls, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Arrested Development, and Six Feet Under; or sometimes documentaries. Oh, and I also love Community & 30 Rock, & Freaks & Geeks is probably my favorite non-cable series ever. I like How I Met Your Mother, too, because I like Jason Segel, and anybody else from that original F&G cast.

1. Outdoor places to run or go hiking.
2. Books
3. Travel
4. Serotonin in the synapse
5. a working hippocampus
6. imagination & ambition

the brain, why we dream, how to write words that move people

out with friends.