Vanity Fair ... and Radhika?

I will admit it; I hadn't known about the publication Vanity Fair until Christopher Hitchens started writing there.

No, I take that back.  I first heard about it when Tina Brown became the editor of the New Yorker.  Reports said that she was a huge success at Vanity Fair, which made me wonder what the deal was.  Turned out Vanity Fair had quite some back story.

As I read those sentences that I have written, even I am amazed at how far from electrical engineering I have come, and how much I have immersed myself in the literary world.  Maybe this is another piece of evidence for why I continue to think a lot about CP Snow's Two Cultures.

Anyway, back to Vanity Fair.  Just as much as Tina Brown caused a sensation, it is the news about the appointment of a new editor that the literary/journalism world is talking about.  The editor's name is Radhika Jones.

The all-knowing Wikipedia notes:

Radhika was born in New York to an American father (Robert L Jones) and an Indian mother. They had met in Paris in 1970s. Jones grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She has a brother and a sister (Nalini).

Talk about globalization, eh.  An American and an Indian meet in Paris, and the story unfolds!

What are Radhika Jones' credentials?

Ms. Jones graduated from Harvard College and received a doctoral degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. She has lived in Taipei and Moscow, where she got her start in journalism as the arts editor at The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper. (Her Russian, she said, is rusty.)

Harvard undergrad, and then a doctorate from Columbia.  Holy shit; you don't want to mess around with such an academic background.

Interesting that Jones did not then transition into the role of an academic, right?  Good for her.

There are plenty of intellectuals like Jones who crossed over into the world of journalism after earning their PhDs.  Some of my favorites, even when I mostly disagree with them, include Bill Kristol and Andrew Sullivan.

Sometimes, I wonder if the path of academic credentials and then writing for the public is the path that I would have traveled had I known better, or if I had grown up in the US.  The roads we travel, and the forks that we diverge on, is what life is all about, eh!