oliver_roeder

I reject the premise.

Thank you! I was doing a postdoc at a center housed at NYU, working on some econometric stuff around incarceration and crime. I pitched a story about that research to an editor there at the time, Andrew Flowers. He said, "Well, we're not interested in THAT right now, but I see on Facebook you play competitive Scrabble" (which I did at the time). So I wrote a piece about the world's best Scrabble player, which sort of blew up (thanks, Reddit!). They commissioned a few more pieces, then Nate Silver and the managing editor took me to lunch and gave me a job.

In the absence of that stroke of luck, I may still be banging my head against the walls of academia.

Yes, but very badly. I once played Magnus Carlsen. It did not go well. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/i-faced-off-against-the-worlds-best-chess-player-you-will-totally-believe-what-happened-next/

That's Philip IV of Spain, as painted by Velazquez! A friend of mine pointed him and our similarities out to me a few years back and another friend Photoshopped the backwards hat, which I favor in real life. He looks exactly like me

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/14.40.639/

And I enjoy visiting him in The Met—it's like visiting family. Although the paintings of him later in life don't augur that well for how I will age :-/

Wonderful. This is the only job I've ever had in journalism, and everything I've learned about the field I've learned from folks that work or have worked here—Nate, Mike Wilson, my editor Chad Matlin, our amazing copy desk, our viz team, and so forth. They are, to a man and to a woman, sharp and generous and brilliant. I am biased but it's also true.