Rewind.

I wish I had slept less, taken a few Econ classes, and majored in Secondary Education, Political Science and Sociology. As it is, I averaged a generous six hours of sleep a night, avoided economics out of some narrow-minded notion that economics and my prime areas of interest don’t meet often enough to require more than an occasional hop on Wikipedia, and majored in History and Journalism (though only after bouncing around in the Anthropology, English, German, International Studies and Psychology departments).

Now, I love the idea of journalism, if one can summon the support and resources to do it right, but I couldn’t sell myself to get a job and couldn’t find a wealthy patron to foot my bills while I followed my heart. And I’ve always been the dorky girl with her nose in a 10-ton history book. I think understanding history is essential and I think it’s criminal the way we teach history to junior high and high school kids—all names and terms and dates, stripping out the richness and relevance. But I’ll say now what I never would have said before: history isn’t where it’s at. I love museums, research, microfilche, dense books that marry politics and economics and social developments all in one thoughtful and illuminating narrative, but I live and breathe and work in the present, and it’s the present and future that trouble and consume me. I can’t fill my head with the past when there’s so much history being made today, most of it disastrous for most of the people (and all of the planet) all of the time. I want to be dirty in the trenches of public policy, not closeted in a library or frustrated by spilling my ink for a publication that sells its content to audiences and its audiences to the highest bidders first, and serves the cause of an informed citizenry second if at all.