TamaraKeith

I tend to agree with him. When you are on TV, you feel some obligation to present yourself in a certain way. And in particular the TV correspondents in the front row sometimes need to ask the same question the person next to them did, simply because they need footage of themselves asking the question.

Growing up people always made fun of me for my name. No one could figure it out, and it was mispronounced more often than people got it right. Substitute teachers always wanted to call my Tammy, which I hated. So I thought I had a really weird name. Then I came to NPR and I don't even make the bracket for unique names.

Just to blow your mind, I am more of a beer person. Have a home brew going right now. I'm not so sure about Peter and Ira.

I was a columnist for my local newspaper in Hanford, CA...but that didn't pay. My first paying gig was as an essayist for Weekend Edition Sunday. I started when I was 15 years old, and then when I was 18 I got an internship at KQED in San Francisco.

I did a series in 2011 where I gave recorders to 6 unemployed people in Saint Louis. They kept audio diaries throughout the year documenting their experience. It was really tough to report, to manage all the tape, etc but it was also incredibly rewarding. It was the one time in my career where I developed real deep relationships with the people I was profiling. And I also just thought it was an important project, to show our listeners the realities of unemployment and re-employment and the slow painful recovery from the recession beyond just a bunch of numbers.