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“It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

STUDS TERKEL — WORKING XI
ENTER SITE
My Story

What is one thing about your work that most people don't know?

It requires laughter—why I picked this photo. I think that every social norm we've bent or burst in the course of our work needed to first be softened up with a few laughs. Occasionally people think that means we don't regard the social problems we confront with the proper seriousness, but those people don't tend to know very much about how problems are actually solved.

What makes you most proud of the work you do?

I always think of the stuff rather than the activity—a work, the work, the things itching to get out. I had always imagined in life that there would be poems and novels and stories, and there's been some of that. But in my professional life it has been research and programs and institutions, built using the same creative ethos that prompts me to put pen to paper.