ONE: Mickey & Me

Music has always been an important part of my life. I started my college career as a music major and had a number of musical adventures at a young age. Eventually, these experiences led to an increased appreciation for the difference between my serviceable competence and the abilities of those possessed of just mind-boggling natural talent. Along the way, a peak experience was a summer job playing the drums at the original Disneyland in California. This was an education in both music and the world of large corporate machines.

The Disneyland job also provided one of my two lifetime opportunities to wear an iconic animal costume in public. That summer, it was a stint wandering Disneyland's Main Street dressed up as Tigger. Twenty-five years later, as a visiting professor at Oxford, I was given the honor of wearing the front-end of the tradition-laden horse costume in Nuffield College's Holiday Panto.

TWO: The Boston Marathon

Running has been a big thing for me since my undergraduate days. It has been a source of deep friendships, but also a time for solitary reflection. I have always had the good fortune to live where there were interesting places to run, usually on trails. For years, I took a pass on organized races, but in 2011, I decided it was time to tackle a formal marathon. I ran the Richmond Marathon in 2012 and qualified for the 2014 Boston Marathon. The traditions, the crowds, and the assemblage of great runners make running the Boston Marathon an extraordinary experience. 2014 was a particularly meaningful year to be there, after the tragic bombing the previous year.

THREE: Mt. Shasta

My father grew up in Edgewood, California, and we frequently spent time there during my own childhood. Edgewood sits in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, so that mountain loomed large in my life for many years.

I first climbed Mt. Shasta with friends in college and have made the hike several more times since then. During my Stanford years, it became something of a ritual to make the trip with a group of my graduate students. Every time has been a wonder and a source of great memories.

The primary route up Shasta is through "Avalanche Gulch." Despite its ominous name, this is an arduous, but non-technical hike. Shasta is a particularly dramatic climb because it stands alone on its surrounding plateau. This makes for hugely dramatic views all through the climb. At the summit (14,000 ft.), the air is thin and the view is 360 degree awesome.

FOUR: That Oxford Thing

As I was preparing to leave Stanford, I received a nice email from a colleague alerting me that Nuffield College at Oxford University was looking to fill the John Winant Chair in American Foreign Policy. The very same day, the regular mail brought a notice about the Atlantic Fellowships in Public Policy. This fortuitous combination allowed Kathy and me to take up positions at Oxford and move our family to the UK. There, to quote Mark Twain, we "had many a hairbreadth escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any history."

FIVE: The Last-Minute Lancia

The first car Kathy and I owned was a decrepit Audi Fox. Sooner or later, most everything on that car broke. Since the penurious state of grad student life didn't allow for relying on professional mechanics, I learned many things about fixing cars. Several of those lessons were painfully imparted during a brutal Boston winter.

The final lesson was learned after I foolishly repainted the car, but failed to stop the creeping rot that was the fate of so many Boston "beater" cars. On a cross-country drive between our Boston and Princeton years, the floor beneath the driver's seat began to sag ominously and we had to jury-rig clamps and angle iron to hold things together. This salvaged our road trip but required elaborate readjustments every time we wanted to switch drivers.

Arriving in Princeton, we bought a somewhat exotic Lancia sedan that had been marked down to a graduate student price. This was an interesting Italian car--basically a Fiat, but less reliable. It had formerly belonged to the mayor of Princeton and was a level of luxury a couple of notches above that to which we were accustomed.

A while later, I came across another Lancia, an HPE, that was sportier, but wasn't running. It used the same basic mechanics as our Lancia sedan, so I bought it for a couple hundred dollars and then swapped out the engines in the parking lot behind our apartment complex.

When it was time to move back to California, we decided to sell the car, but had trouble finding the right person to appreciate it in all its cobbled-together glory. With Kathy eight months pregnant, we had tickets to fly west, and the departure date was upon us. I was resigned to sending her on ahead and making a solo cross country drive when, on the very last day, I got a call from an Italian car mechanic who paid us more than we were asking for the working Lancia and was delighted to haul away the hulk of the original Lancia and its trunk full of spare parts.

SIX: Two Russian Meetings

In 1990, as a brand-new assistant professor at Stanford, I was invited to attend a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. At that time, Gorbachev was bravely taking the initiatives needed to wind down the Cold War and was a real Rock Star. As he rode from San Francisco to Palo Alto, people lined the freeway overpasses to see the motorcade pass, and Stanford's majestic mile-long Palm Drive was completely packed. Those of us chosen to meet with Gorbachev were locked into the boardroom at the Graduate School of Business a couple of hours before his arrival. They organized us alphabetically and required us to stay in our seats, so I sat between the economist Milton Friedman and the Soviet scholar David Holloway and had one of the most interesting conversations of my life.

The second story involves being mistaken for a representative of the Russian Embassy at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. And I'm going to just leave it at that for now.

SEVEN: Built Things

In addition to music, work in construction and house painting helped defray the costs of my undergraduate education (this, admittedly, was in the olden times when the state of California made a world-class education remarkably inexpensive). So, I got a bit of education in the building arts at the same time that I was learning economics. Building physical things has remained an interest ever since.

I've tackled two full kitchen remodels and numerous other furniture and house projects, including some interesting electrical and plumbing work. I'm not so good at it that there isn't always an element of adventure.

EIGHT: On the Bike

Bike riding has been another source of adventures and misadventures since my high school years. I commuted by bike on occasion from our house in San Francisco to Stanford. In Norfolk, with a much shorter trip, I was a 100% bike commuter, rain or shine.

There have been many long-distance adventures on the bike. The most iconic was the two-hundred miles in two-days trip down the C&O Canal trail in 2016.

NINE: Military Voyeurism

I came of age at the end of the Vietnam War. I turned eighteen in the short window when Selective Service registration was suspended between withdrawal from Vietnam and its resumption in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980.

Since then, there have been significant changes in American attitudes towards the military, and I'll readily admit to an evolution in my own views. At Berkeley, which had its own infamous attitudinal climate, I took a fascinating seminar on Gandhi. This gave me a strong appreciation for the arguments for pacifism and non-violence. But I also began studying international relations at the height of the Berkeley political science department's neo-realist phase. The tension between these two worldviews stayed with me, even as I moved into graduate work that included a significant emphasis on security studies.

My graduate student years introduced me to a large number of military students. Since then, I have had many military students of my own. These students have been consistently excellent and have greatly widened my understanding of international affairs.

In this context, I have had several interesting glimpses directly into the military world. Two military experiences stand out as particularly memorable. The first was a Fletcher School field trip to visit Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. In addition to the experience of lying suspended above the world face-down in a KC-135's aerial refueling station, this included being in the main SAC control room at the moment of the attempted assassination of President Reagan. Needless to say, that visit was cut short.

A second adventure came in my Stanford years when I was invited to spend a couple of days on the USS Nimitz. This provided a fascinating glimpse into the incredible complexity of an aircraft carrier at sea and included the exhilarating experience of a cable-arrested carrier landing and catapult takeoff.

TEN: L'escrime à l'épée

I fenced epee on the varsity fencing squad at UC Berkeley. In 1979 and 1980 I qualified for the USFA national championships. Both times, I came up short in the early rounds, which, alas, was an appropriate reflection of my fencing prowess, even in my peak years. I have continued fencing on and off for most of my life. My peripatetic academic life allowed this to include working out with the excellent teams at MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Oxford.