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Dan Haybron is a professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University. He was recently awarded a $5.1 million grant for a three-year interdisciplinary project on happiness and well-being from the John Templeton Foundation and Saint Louis University. In this interview, he talks about spending summers in, and falling in love with, North Carolina, developing an aversion to snobbery, and a taste for blowing things up (figuratively and literally), getting into Wesleyan and deferring upon the realization that he hated school, selling insurance, working in retail and then deciding to go back to school, the illuminating but somewhat Victorian political atmosphere at Wesleyan at the time, getting into his philosophy of science and philosophy of religion classes and eventually developing an interest in metaphilosophy, interviewing Philip Glass, moving to the Bay Area and doing tech support, going back to grad school, bodysurfing, working with Steve Stich and Wayne Sumner (one of the only philosophers working on happiness and well-being at the time), scorpions, the job market, landing a tenure track job at Saint Louis University, the protests in Ferguson, the totalitarian response, the concept of privilege, and our diversity problem, the Templeton grant, the dangers of the soap box, his favorite movie, and his last meal...
Hey man, thanks for doing this! I understand you're a bit reluctant…
I'm not sure how to talk about this stuff, since I can't imagine many people are interested in the details of my life. But I'm not sure it's worth saying anything if I don't fill things in enough to paint a real picture, especially since a lot of my approach to philosophy is rooted in my personal history. Also, a lot of people come to academia from non-typical backgrounds, and maybe it's useful to hear the stories of others. So I guess I'll go long…
Well, I'm interested. So, where did you grow up?
I grew up between two very different worlds, spending most of the year in a small town near Cleveland, and a few months each summer on a small island in North Carolina. As far as I was concerned, the island was my spiritual home, but I was very much a child of both places—and in some ways a child of neither—and that mix has had a huge impact on my thinking. Northern and Southern, urban and rural, affluent and not, with a good dose of piratey island culture thrown in. (Some of the islanders are descended from pirates, and there's a long seafaring tradition that took many around the world—a very free-thinking, independent-minded bunch.)
What did your folks do?
My mother was an artist and my father a physics professor and writer, so we had a lively combination of creative/analytic thinking in our household. Both were real characters, with a lot of weird, amazing friends. My father's background, growing up poor in Southern Ohio, also was a major influence, as he always took pride in those roots. I internalized much of his aversion to rank and snobbery—he was at the physics department at Princeton for maybe three days before deciding to hell with those people, and his favorite job might have been straightening railroad track with a crew of ex-cons and the like. I think it meant more to him that I could handle myself around roughnecks than that I could impress academics. My mother also didn't have a snobbish bone in her body, and was as happy chatting with a homeless guy as with a fellow artist, maybe happier. Once she locked herself out of her car in a rough area and sought out the toughest-looking kids to help her get in, which they managed handily. Of course they were complete gentlemen with her. She paid them the compliment of treating them as trustworthy, and they responded accordingly.
Did your folks have an influence on your philosophy, you think?
Both parents had an enormous influence on my philosophical thinking. My mother stoked a lot of my intellectual curiosity trying to get me to read the Bible and talk about the issues; the religion never stuck, but the love of ideas did. I'm not sure most of my philosophical work doesn't amount mainly to ideas I picked up from, or with, my father. I still hope to publish a collaboration of sorts we'd talked about. Neither was really capable of caring enough about money to make much of it, but they put every spare penny into getting us onto the island each summer. So my Ohio friends always had nicer stuff, but I got to spend part of the year in what I considered paradise. Which seemed like a pretty good tradeoff.
What was this collaborative project with your father?
He had a manuscript for a book based on the journals he kept during our years on the island. Aside from a shorter version for a literary journal, it never got published—a neat regional house picked it up but went out of business before it could see print. In general, he didn't have great commercial instincts as a writer, so he left a lot of good material behind. Anyway, we talked about me writing a sort of philosophical postscript, making some of his ideas more explicit, roughly along the lines of Leopold's Sand County Almanac. I'd still like to do that, as he says a lot of the stuff I've been thinking about much more eloquently and poetically than I could.
As a kid, what were you into?
Blowing stuff up, setting stuff on fire, going out in the woods and shooting stuff—you know, the usual young philosopher things. (At some point I acquired the nickname "Torch" around the neighborhood.) From a fairly early age—7 or 8—I pretty much was free to do whatever I wanted once I walked out the door. If I got into fights, which was not infrequent, that was my problem. As long as I wasn't too much nuisance to the neighbors, what I did was my business, and my parents almost never got involved. When I was sixteen, I went down to the island and got a room, busing tables to pay the rent and keep myself in peanut butter and jelly. So I had a lot of freedom, which I really treasured.
What I most loved was anything to do with the ocean—bodyboarding, fishing, sailing, catching critters for my aquarium, or not doing a damn thing. As long I was near the sea, I was happy. Wherever I was, I had lots of books, and spent a lot of time reading. And a lot of thinking—many of the ideas I work on now have their roots in stuff I was thinking about when I was ten or eleven. By that time it was already pretty obvious to me that our way of life is nuts.
I wasn't very athletic, but played a fair amount of front yard baseball and football etc., because my friends in the neighborhood would keep banging on the window until I put the book down and came out to play. Besides books—most of them about animals or war—I wasn't into many of the things one might expect an academic to have been into. Chess, puzzles, debate club—that sort of stuff didn't do much for me. Idle intellectual exercises were incomprehensible to me. I pretty much hated school and avoided it as much as I could, sometimes not showing up for the first week or two; more worth learning on the island, I thought, or from my books. Sometimes my mother would tell school I was sick and we'd be off to the zoo or something.
Some of this makes it sound like I was a delinquent; I was usually pretty mild-mannered, unless I thought someone was being a jerk. Well, I could be a pain in the ass, but generally avoided getting in trouble for it. In seventh grade they started making us do the pledge of allegiance, and my teacher didn't care for it much when I did a Sieg Heil during the proceedings.
Whoa! That's intense.
I figured, if you're going to dishonor the flag by lining kids up to do forced loyalty oaths, you might as well do it right. People mean well, but I felt that a lot of flag-waving stuff ends up demeaning the flag more than anything. And I've never been comfortable with public displays of piety or virtue, especially when it takes zero virtue to indulge in them. To my mind, the young black men who hung the flag upside-down near my office last year were honoring the flag more than many of the flag-wavers do. They were taking seriously the symbol, and the ideals it is supposed to stand for, not sticking it on their underpants, or forcing kids into Orwellian ceremonies.
Anyway, in high school I thought it would be fun to start a Dadaist-cum-educational-reform political party for student council with some friends—the PIGs, I believe we called ourselves. It was pretty obnoxious, but nothing punishable.
Those sorts of things were about as overt as it got for me. I was relatively well-behaved for someone in my family. My father only graduated high school because he was too smart to expel; basically his school handed him a diploma just to get him to go away. The principal literally suggested he spend the latter part of senior year in a pool hall, so he wouldn't cause any more headaches. None of us were ever joiners or "group" people, and we never entirely fit in with any particular crowd. I suspect it's part of what's made us good at what we do. We chalk that sort of thing up to our Scotsman lineage, but really who knows. Actually, my mother hardly encountered a rule she didn't want to break, and not a drop of Scottish blood that I know of.
When you hit high school, did you start thinking about what you were going to do for a living?
At some level I think I always suspected I'd end up in academia, probably the sciences, or as a writer. But my teen years were all over the map. Early on I thought I'd be a Navy pilot, then maybe a video game designer, then an anthropologist or political scientist. I assumed I'd go to college and applied a few places, and decided I'd go to Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, as it seemed small enough but also diverse, as such schools go. Then it occurred to me that it was really expensive and I hated school, and a lot of the people I respected most never went to college. So why bother? I was already better read than a lot of college grads, so I didn't see the point. I was persuaded to defer enrollment for a year rather than burn that bridge, which was a good move.
What did you do instead of school?
I started out as an insurance salesman, selling cancer insurance. For some reason I thought this would be a great career, and started collecting brochures for the snazzy car I'd get when I had the dough—Mustangs, Camaros, Audis…. I did think about college again, but this time to go to Penn and major in insurance, which is amazingly a real undergraduate major. Anyway, I got off to a promising start, but then when I went to pitch my first big sale, my mentor—a dissolute English gentleman, maybe 50, who looked like Terence Stamp—failed to show up and it fell through. I wonder if he knew he was doing me a favor. Somehow that killed my mojo, and before long it was clear I'd actually not make any money in that job, perhaps in large part because I realized it wasn't a very good product and ended up agreeing with a lot of my customers that they'd probably be better off without it. And that was the end of my insurance career.
Then I took various jobs in retail, and lit off for Tennessee to live with a friend for the next six months or so. Seeing the jobs I could get without a college degree, I decided a little more school wouldn't hurt. Plus there'd be a lot of girls.
Did your attitude towards college change once you started?
I had mixed feelings about college. Even while there I toyed with the idea of becoming a mechanic, like my grandfather and two uncles, one of whose transmission shop I spent some time in, working on a homely old VW bus, which remains my favorite car to this day. I liked the work and the company, but not the idea of getting up so early or dealing with employees showing up drunk or stealing things from people's cars, so that didn't go very far. In school I continued to be a semi-indifferent student but got a great education out of it, including getting turned on to philosophy. I also learned a lot from the other students, who were a smart and very intellectually stimulating bunch.
At the same time, it was the height of a sort of neo-Victorian era of political correctness—the film PCU was made by a couple of classmates based on our time there—and there were a lot of hipsterish kids and Life-of-Brian-People's-Front-of-Judea types who liked to argue about things like whether the correct term is "wimmin" or "wymyn," and might hiss at you if you got it wrong. That and a not-uncommon air of superiority, and contempt for the little people at whom their benevolence was supposedly directed, made the experience not so much fun at times. So the idea of swilling Red White and Blues with the boys at the garage while stinking of transmission fluid had its allures. But on balance, the college route was almost certainly a good choice. There were a lot of nice kids there and I got a lot out of it—best of all, my wife. A job doing philosophy ain't bad either.
How did you meet your wife?
Elizabeth was friends with my junior year roommate, so we met through him. She was a biology major and since then has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, mostly in marketing, business development and strategy. We married in 1995, twenty years ago.
How did you get turned on to philosophy?
There was a "Freshman Integrated Program" the first year where you took history, English, and philosophy courses with the same small group for both semesters. I thought that sounded great except for the philosophy part, so I pleaded with the registrar to let me do it without the philosophy classes. I just assumed philosophy was exactly the sort of pointless pondering I couldn't stand. They said nothing doing, so I relented and signed up anyway. At some point in the first semester we were covering Plato and I hadn't done the reading, nor was I paying attention. The professor asked me a question about the Plato text and I made something up. Whatever I concocted, he said it was really insightful. I believe that's when I first started to think philosophy might be a pretty good gig. The professors were great, especially Brian Fay, and I realized that a lot of what I'd been thinking about over the years were basically philosophical problems.
What were your favorite philosophy classes?
Philosophy of science comes to mind, and something where we read MacIntyre. Actually, my favorite philosophy classes were probably religious studies courses for the most part, which is a little odd since I'm an atheist (agnostic, technically, but people get the idea you're indecisive if you say that). I guess religious traditions struck me as doing a better job of speaking to some pretty deep human concerns than most of the philosophical literature I encountered. Wesleyan had a great department, and I especially liked courses on East Asian thought, and anything taught by Jim Stone, who was a really eccentric Zen Buddhist guy who'd bark "Hi!" (Japanese for "yes," I believe) when you entered his office. He was fascinating and a terrific mentor, the embodiment of what a college professor should be. I had to get a policy exception to graduate, because I'd taken too many religious studies courses instead of philosophy courses to satisfy the major.
What were your least favorite classes?
Probably my least favorite courses were logic and ethics, though logic eventually grew on me. Maybe it was just how it was taught, but the standard ethics course stuff left me cold. Part of it that it was all very narrowly focused on moral theory, and it seemed to me that, while there was plenty wrong with our priorities as a society, it wasn't mainly a matter of failing to know right from wrong. Metaethics interested me more, because people on campus were always yelling at each other, with a soupçon of shooting and firebombing, and I wanted to know how to deal with the problem of clashing values. But the stuff I'd read in metaethics seemed either obviously false or gibberish. So I ended up doing my senior thesis in metaphilosophy—in particular, what makes claims in metaphysics true or false—as a way of setting myself up to deal with the metaethical problems I was mainly concerned with.
What did you do for fun?
It wasn't a great party school. I made sure there would at least be a campus bar, but it burned down just before I got there. But we managed decently anyway, and students organized some interesting events one probably wouldn't find at most colleges. One of the cool things about Wesleyan was all the cultural events they had—a great world music program, dance, and other things—and how normal it was for students to attend them, and also just to hang out and talk about intellectual stuff. I tried doing stuff for the school paper and the radio station, and had fun interviewing Fishbone, which was the only way I could get into the club. I also interviewed Philip Glass, but I didn't know much about him and just asked stupid questions, and then they wouldn't let me see the performance.
When did you decide you were going to go to grad school?
I applied to grad school straight out of college, but only got in one place, which Elizabeth wasn't about to move to, so after graduation I followed her to the Bay Area—she's from Palo Alto-- where we lived for two years.
Nice area. Where wouldn't your wife move to?
Columbus, Ohio—I'd gotten an acceptance from Ohio State but there weren't any jobs for her there. On balance, it made more sense to head out to the Bay Area, where she'd grown up, and we got good jobs and got to live in San Francisco, which is hard to beat—especially then, before everyone got so crazed by money. Also, it was clear I'd botched my applications, so I could try again later if I wanted to.
What did you do for a living in the Bay Area?
I worked at Intuit and Oracle, doing tech support and then technical writing. I liked the software industry—the business world can be more rewarding than a lot of academics realize, if you pick the right sort of work. But I decided academia would still be more satisfying over the long haul, so I applied to grad school again.
Where did you end up going to grad school?
This time I got letters from philosophers instead of religious studies professors, and canned the Heideggerian writing sample in favor of what I thought was the most boring part of my senior thesis, a chapter about linguistic presuppositions. That went over much better, and I ended up at Rutgers. Which is funny because you could hardly pick a place with a more different philosophical style from Wesleyan—especially religious studies there—than mid-90's Rutgers. Prior to that I think the only semi-contemporary analytic philosophy I'd read was Quine and Davidson. I think someone at Rutgers went out on a limb and got me a place there—whoever it was, I'm very grateful.
So I dragged Elizabeth from San Francisco to New Jersey, which she wasn't thrilled about, but it was a very good place for her line of work. Of course, not following a philosopher around the country would have been even better for her career, but she's been extremely good-humored about it all.
Given the fact that you had taken so many religion courses, did you feel prepared for grad school?
At first, I think so. Analytic philosophy is pretty clear and mostly not too difficult to understand, which is something I still like about it. I think I actually did very well in the beginning, speaking a lot in classes, as I hadn't yet learned to be afraid. But my lack of background in the literature, the occasional incident of saying something stupid, and generally the realization—or at least the perception—that we were under constant scrutiny, being sorted into the "smart" and "not smart," etc… all that gradually wore me down and I ended up being a lot more quiet and anxious.
Another important thing is that I had always led a relatively solitary intellectual life, with my parents being my main interlocutors, along with those friends who enjoyed talking about ideas, but not in any serious way. In college I had zero interest in hanging out with other philosophy majors, and in fact I think I could only name two other people who did philosophy then. If talking to someone could help me work out my thoughts and learn something, then great. But that didn't happen a lot outside of a small circle, all of whom shared my distaste for verbal jousting, so I never had a habit of debating philosophy the way you're supposed to in academia. If I said something and someone raised an objection, then unless I personally found the point interesting or troubling, my inclination was "good point, thanks for sharing." And move on. It sort of still is. But in academic philosophy that can seem overly conciliatory. It can also be kind of rude—someone has taken the time to engage with your ideas, and (to a point) you owe it to them to take it seriously and try to respond as best you can. Yet for the most part, that's a real effort for me, and I don't always do it well—partly because I'm not a high-speed thinker/talker by nature, and partly because my heart usually isn't in it. In general, I don't care very much about winning arguments. Anyway, you can imagine how I might not have felt entirely at home in grad school.
Was Rutgers a friendly place?
I don't know that it was any less friendly than most top philosophy departments, and think it was friendlier than some. Rutgers was good to me, and I'm grateful to have had the chance to study there. But my time in grad school wasn't perfect, and it's probably worth saying a bit about the downsides of my experience, as I think they speak to broader tendencies in the profession. So, I didn't find it a terribly warm and fuzzy environment, and some of my favorite classmates dropped out early on. At the same time, when I think of the individuals there, I honestly can't think of anyone I disliked. I got a lot of support from the faculty, some of whom put a ton of effort into their students, and a lot of them were really terrific people. I also liked nearly all the other grad students. In general I thought people were pretty nice. But there was something about the whole package that added up to an environment that I didn't want to spend a lot of time in, and by the end of it all I'd changed from a very laid-back guy to, well, not. Part of it, no doubt, was inherent to academic training in a tough job market. And part of it has to do with the climate issues that generally plague the profession. Generally, I don't think we do a very good job of providing a supportive environment for young philosophers. It should be possible for most students to get their degree without raiding the pharmacists' armamentarium like starved Vikings. Then add the East Coast status games, and you're not having much fun.
I remember a girlfriend in college who complained that I never talked about myself (she was from Manhattan). By the time I had a PhD, there was little risk of that ever happening again. Now I give extremely long-winded interviews.
haha…that's the idea! Who did you end up working with at Rutgers?
I started out working mainly with Steve Stich, who continues to be a friend and mentor. He had a huge impact on my thinking, as he has on many others of my generation. But when my interests turned to happiness, which took me more deeply into ethics, I started working with Doug Husak. Doug was a terrific interlocutor, supporter, and mentor, and I'm very grateful he took me on. He really gave me freedom to pursue my crazy interest in happiness—which was widely, and more or less correctly, regarded as a form of career suicide—and helped keep me on track. This was at a time when basically only one philosopher, Wayne Sumner, was working seriously on happiness (as a psychological matter). Luckily Wayne agreed to be on my committee.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy happiness and well-being were so out of fashion, philosophically. Big fan of Stich over here. Speaking of Stich, were you still interested in metaphilosophy?
When I started out at Rutgers, I was interested in metaphilosophy, and for a while I planned a dissertation on the evidential value of intuitions, which of course went on to be a hot topic. But I felt that the epistemological questions got most of their interest from the underlying metaphysical and semantic questions: what exactly are philosophical claims about? What sort of metaphysics and semantics might make sense of philosophical practice? The problem was, pursuing those issues would mean becoming a metaphysician or specializing in philosophy of language, and I didn't really want to do either of those things. I wasn't that interested in other areas of metaphysics, and I didn't think we were even close to having the necessary semantics to answer my questions. So I was kind of stuck about how to proceed.
Sometimes I think I'm more interested in metaphilosophy than anything else. Do your metaphilosophical views shape your philosophical views?
Definitely. I grew up looking at the world partly through a scientific lens, so my perspective is strongly naturalistic, and also very pragmatic. I have no idea how to make sense of ethics, for instance, except as a part of the natural world, a product of human psychology, and hence dependent on our sensibilities. In a sense, then, normative ethical theory is basically empirical: the best theory will depend on our best understanding of what human valuing is like. I don't really know how else it could go; all other paths seem to lead to Plato. At the same time, I don't think that means we should collapse ethics into science; to a great extent, the best way to understand human valuing is to engage in philosophical reflection about values and see where it leads us. What values are able to sustain reflection?
To me we approach those questions both from the inside, via old-fashioned philosophical reflection, and from the outside, via the scientific method. In thinking about well-being, for instance, I'd like to arrive at a theory that both makes sense on reflection and fits well with empirical evidence about the way people think about well-being. If it's going to apply broadly and not just to people like us, then I think it should also be consonant with a plausible story about the roles concepts like well-being play in human life such that it might be reasonable to expect that people in a wide range of cultures should come, on reflection, to find that sort of conception of well-being plausible. I think we have to leave open the possibility, however, that no such convergence is forthcoming, and that the best account of well-being will somehow be population-relative. I suspect that's actually the case to some degree, but I'm also fairly optimistic about the universality of certain values. Consider how easy it is to make friends just about anywhere.
As well, I'm not that interested in unmotivated conceptual analysis, where you just try to account for intuitions without really thinking about the point of the concepts in question. Then you spend a lot of energy playing "counterexample whack-a-mole" where you keep refining the analysis to deal with various counterintuitive results. I think it's a lot more helpful to ask why we care about the concepts in question, which are probably fairly messy and undisciplined to start with. Concepts like those of happiness, reasons, knowledge might be good examples of that. Then perhaps we need to reconstruct the concepts, making revisions and distinctions as needed to arrive at some understanding of the subject matter that fosters clear thinking about it. I call the approach "reconstructive analysis," but I think lots of people do it in various forms.
You sound like a student of Stich! How exactly did you get into the happiness and well-being stuff?
I got turned on to the subject in my first year at Rutgers, in a seminar with Steve, where we read some fascinating work on subjective well-being research as well as irrationality. I ended up setting that aside for some reason, though, and turned to the stuff about intuitions. Maybe around 1995 or so, I was feeling a bit stuck on that topic, and then had a short trip to the beach that vividly reminded me of my earlier experiences on the island. I got a refresher on that mindset, and was struck by how clueless I'd been about how, well, not-happy I'd been. Basically, I think bodysurfing convinced me to work on happiness. (Well, my wife reminds me that she told me that if I was going to be a professor and drag her to who-knows-where, I had to work on something I liked.)
Awesome. Were you discouraged from working on happiness and well-being?
I was advised not to do it, as hardly anyone was working on it then—one person, really—and it didn't exactly sound like a "macho" topic. I remember going to a conference shortly after where a prominent psychologist sounded like she was going out on a limb suggesting that cognitive science begin to take seriously the "warm and fuzzy" side of human psychology, namely emotions. This surprised me, as a lot of people already worked on that, but clearly it was regarded as marginal in some important circles. And happiness was beyond marginal. I thought, well, here we are in the dark ages. Let's see if we can change that a little.
What did you do for fun?
I liked hanging out with my wife's colleagues a lot. They were a fun bunch. As much as I like most of my colleagues, who are nice people and can be fun too, it really helps to have friends outside academia. Grad school in philosophy has a non-trivial element of being broken on the wheel, at least for an awful lot of students, so I'm not sure fun is the operative notion. More like coping. I don't mean that as a gibe against the field, by the way, though I think we could do much better in this department. But the training really needs to alter your thinking and habits in very deep ways, for instance building habits of self-correction and self-criticism, and I don't know that there's a very fun way to do that. The rewards are mostly down the line, I think, as is the fun.
Right. How did it feel to get your first publication?
The first thing I ever sent out for publication was a paper on evil character, which I mailed to APQ as a grad student. About two weeks later, I got a call from the editor wanting to publish it right away. This was very pleasing but, needless to say, not representative of the academic publishing experience. Especially as I started focusing more on happiness, which is a pain in the ass to get published. Then again, at least I was getting publications in decent places, which was really reassuring when I couldn't get a job. Academia generally is very conservative, but less so in publishing than in hiring.
When you started teaching, did you feel prepared? Was it scary? Fun?
I started teaching around halfway through grad school, after doing a bit of TA work for one of the professors. I don't think it was all that scary, except that I definitely over-prepared for class the first few years, with copious lecture notes to make sure no possible question or objection would go unanswered. That was a complete waste of time, and actually counterproductive.
I like teaching, and often it's great fun, but it's also a lot of work, and probably the hardest part of the job. I tend to optimize, and you can't do that as a teacher because there are so many variables, and so many ways to go about it, so it's really about managing a bunch of balancing acts. What works for some kids doesn't work for others, and what serves some educational purposes doesn't help with others; and then you have to consider your own personality and strengths and weaknesses. So it's an exercise in practical wisdom, with no "best" solution. I've gotten pretty comfortable with my style in the classroom, but you never stop learning, or trying new things, which is kind of a neat thing about the job; you can always keep it interesting. It's incredible that anyone thinks it makes sense to impose "accountability" on teachers through quantitative metrics, any more than you can measure good parenting.
What was the job market like when you finished the dissertation? Were you confident you would get a job?
When I went out, I was told I'd have no trouble landing a good job, and sure enough I was the first one of my cohort to hear back about a position; I got an email from a department at a Very Fancy UK university saying I was on the shortlist and asking whether I would accept an offer if they made one. I think I spent about a week debating that question before replying to the email—not one of my smarter moves. Never heard back, and I believe I only had one interview that year. It consisted almost entirely of me trying ineptly to answer a reasonable question, "tell us about you and ethics." A great opening for a joke, which I completely missed. I didn't get that job either, and only managed a one-year the following year, though it was at a great place, Arizona.
How did it feel to land the first gig? How did you and your family cope with the move?
While I would have preferred a tenure-track job, especially with a family, Arizona was pretty great for a one-year. Even better, we rented an amazing home near the top of the Tucson Mountains from one of the faculty who was on leave. It was like living in a resort, and my wife nearly dropped the baby when she walked in the door. I worked like a dog that year and didn't see them much—first semester I had three courses including a grad seminar in political philosophy, which wasn't an AOS of mine, but was certainly a specialty of that department, hence a bit nervous-making. But it was a pretty neat place to work like a dog. The wildlife was incredible—it was like Wild Kingdom, and for a while I wondered if we'd wake up to a shark in the pool, there was so much weird and dangerous stuff there. About the only thing Elizabeth really didn't care for were the bark scorpions. We usually found one or two of them in the house every day, and she always wore shoes; I took my chances. Our next-door neighbor woke up with a scorpion on her face, and one day I caught the baby waving one around in her fist. (She was fine; the scorpion and myself, not so much.)
That's what it feels like to wake up when you are on the philosophy job market! How was your job search coming along?
It seemed like I was getting shortlisted everywhere, but for various reasons, nothing beyond that. I knew I had some weaknesses like a long time to degree and having not really trained in my AOS, and specializing in an area that hardly anyone else was working in, which isn't a great strategy if you want to play with the popular kids. But I thought it was still obvious enough I was doing good work on something worthwhile, so someone would hire me. By year three, I was fed up with the market and pretty much stopped caring, which seemed to help. I got two offers, one of which was for my current job at SLU.
I imagine you were excited to finally get the tenure track job!
I was thrilled to get the job at SLU, not least because it was a job. I'd almost not applied because it's a Catholic university and I'm not religious, but my father told me Jesuit schools are really cool, so I put in. He was right, at least about this one; I immediately had a great feeling about the place, and really liked the people there, especially Fr. Ted Vitali, the chair. He met me for breakfast my first day visiting, and swore up a really good blue streak; I pretty much knew I wanted the job at that point. And this has been a great gig—it's very collegial, no pretentiousness or posturing, and it's a very supportive environment, where I can do whatever weird stuff I want and no one will complain. Well, maybe it's not so weird anymore, but I like having the option.
How do you balance research and teaching?
I balance research and teaching mostly by first making sure I've done what I need to for my students, and then using the remaining portion of my time for research, with something carved off for family time and downtime. It's really easy to let work eat up all your time in academia, so I think it's important to figure out some things that are important to you—kids, exercise, whatever—and carve out time for them, no matter what. If something doesn't get done, it doesn't get done; you have to have a life. Sort of like saving for retirement—you can always use the money now, but that way poverty lies, so you just need to commit. But then, some things really do need to get done, like a conference talk, so it's hard not to make exceptions now and then. But those exceptions can really creep up on you, and end up being the norm. The trick is keeping them to a minimum. I can't say I've really mastered that trick.
How would you describe St. Louis or Missouri to somebody who has never been there?
It's a very pleasant mid-sized Midwestern city—friendly, unpretentious, lots of stuff to do and not too expensive, not a lot of traffic. If you're going to raise your kids in the Matrix—which is pretty much the only option if you're going to do what I do for a living—it's a pretty good place to do that. It's similar in a lot of ways to Cleveland, though Cleveland got more of the East coast/European culture—the Cleveland Orchestra is no coincidence—whereas St. Louis has more signs of its old frontier status, and is a little less sophisticated. My main gripe is that it's about as far from the ocean as you can get.
What do you make of the whole Ferguson situation?
The general issues of racial injustice in this country that Ferguson put in the spotlight weren't new to me—it's stuff we talked a ton about at Wesleyan, and one of the things that spurred me to become a philosopher. And I knew St. Louis was not one of the better cities on that front. But I'd had no idea just how bad it was here, in particular the strongly predatory form of government that exists in so many towns in this county. You'd notice that it was impossible to keep track of all the tiny towns around here—Ferguson is just 10 minutes away from here, but heaven knows how many municipalities you could cross getting there. And they're too small to survive on tax revenues, so they prey on poor people and people of color to raise money on nonsense charges, like having a date spend the night (not on the occupancy permit). That's appalling, and it seems clear that the state or federal government needs to take over and dismantle a lot of these towns, folding them into larger entities that can actually survive honestly.
(I don't like to call this stuff "white privilege," incidentally, because I think privilege is more of a class thing, and I've spent too much time with poor white folks to feel comfortable insulting them by calling them "privileged." Not being oppressed in some respect doesn't mean you're privileged. And it diminishes the problems of racial oppression, which are a lot worse than just not giving people extra perks. Having to worry about getting shot by the police is not like having to fly coach instead of getting bumped up to first class. Anyway, it's polarizing in ways I don't think are helpful.)
For me the worst of it was the militarized police response to the protests, which included some of my friends. The one time I ever switched on the television during that time, it was live footage of the police tear-gassing an Al-Jazeera crew on a lawn, clearly no threat to anyone. Had this stuff been done to white folks in Idaho or Oklahoma, there would have been a serious shooting war—however bad Waco etc. was, this was a lot worse. That was a glimpse of totalitarian government, and it's really sad there wasn't a bigger national outcry.
It's embarrassing when you travel to other countries and see how they look at it. I was in Jamaica last summer and asked a young man who'd also lived in Brooklyn how this stuff was perceived. He said people don't really follow international news there, but when it's really big they do, and Ferguson was one of those cases. They found it baffling because they just don't get racism—they think racism is funny, he said, I guess because it would be even more ridiculous in an almost all-black country like Jamaica than it is here. But basically, he said, it was just "disappointing" to see that stuff happening here. They knew we had problems but expected better from us.
In philosophy, how do we deal with our diversity problem?
I think it's a really complex problem with a lot of interacting parts, and it needs to be addressed on a lot of fronts—affirmative action in admissions and hiring, being more attentive to implicit bias, including more women and people of color in course syllabi, and so on…basically, just being serious as a discipline about many of the remedies philosophers are already talking about. To my mind gender issues are the most pressing, but we need to do better on race, disability, and other issues of inclusiveness. It's kind of depressing we're having this conversation now—I mean, a lot of philosophers seem to have less of a clue about these issues than the average Wesleyan undergrad had 25 years ago. I don't mean to say that there aren't a great many philosophers dealing with these problems in a really discerning and sensible way, and I'm really encouraged by a lot of recent developments. Just that it's disappointing we didn't get to this a long time ago.
I don't have much original to say about it, I guess, though I do think we need to focus a lot on both class and intellectual and ideological (including political) diversity. Philosophers very much tend to hail from the urban ruling class—if you find it normal to get on an airplane for vacation, or you belong to the same breeding cohort as people who do, you're probably in the ruling class, as I was raised to think about it—and those who do come from rural, poor and working class backgrounds often distance themselves from their "primitive" past. There are already so many barriers to people from those backgrounds going into philosophy, and I'd like to see greater attentiveness to making the field more welcoming to them.
Do you think philosophy is unfriendly, generally?
I don't think so; sometimes I get frustrated, but at least as often I think "what a great bunch of people." But we could still do a lot better, and one thing that I think would help with inclusiveness on many fronts, including gender balance, is if people were more consistently nice to each other, more supportive, and if the field were characterized more by cooperative or constructive dialogue, and less by competitive discussion. And generally, if we related to each other more along the lines of "parity-seeking" rather than status or dominance-seeking—that is, trying to maintain a sense of equality or parity with our conversational partners rather than trying boost or assert our status over them. Less "dick-waving," for instance. Put it this way: in the top 10-20 graduate programs in philosophy, how many of the students would characterize the environment as "warm, friendly and supportive"? I could be wrong, but I suspect not many.
Academics have always tended to have fragile egos, as we earn a living by getting the approval of our peers, which both means that we tend to be fairly conservative and conformist, intellectually speaking, and that it's hard not to be concerned with status. (All the more reason we need to be nice to each other.) So academic culture naturally has strong pressures toward status-seeking behavior, and is only tolerable to the extent that we have norms, practices, institutions in place to counter those tendencies. Philosophy has those, but I think we could do better—and the need may be stronger because philosophers tend to prize raw intellectual power more, and philosophical ability is judged in a wider range of contexts than ability is judged in other fields (it seems to me). Dave Chalmers recently posted a really nice document on some ways we could improve, but it's hard to know how to address these kinds of subtleties. Philosophy strikes me as a relatively unsupportive field, yet for the most part philosophers are nice people and don't do overtly obnoxious things. It's more a sense you have of being comfortable in some environments and crowds, and uncomfortable, anxious, on edge in others, for reasons you can't really articulate. Maybe you just feel more like you're being judged in some environments. I suspect we mostly need to find ways to change the basic attitude we take up when dealing with each other—the professional gestalt, as it were.
Anyway, I think our diversity problems may owe a lot to the fact that we're often not a very fun or welcoming crowd to be around. If, on top of the bullshit I dealt with early in my career, I also faced the disadvantages of being a woman, or disabled, or a country boy, or African American, I'd likely have dropped out. If graduate study is just barely worth enduring even for many of the most advantaged members of the profession, then why should members of disadvantaged groups put up with it?
I'm a little uneasy making remarks like these, as I do like the great majority of my colleagues, who are really nice people. And as much as I didn't enjoy graduate school, I benefited a great deal from the hard work of the faculty there and was treated well. Now I'm a tenured faculty member and mentoring grad students myself, and it isn't always obvious how to do things better, though I'm sure I could. These kinds of problems mostly emerge at the collective level and don't require villains. But little things can really work together and build up into a big problem. And it's important for us to talk about them.
Low point of your career?
Probably midpoint in grad school, taking an area test (a comprehensive exam) in philosophy of language, which I chose because I'd not really studied it before. Unfortunately that's a really hard area to teach yourself, especially back when there weren't a lot of handbooks and such. I thought I'd bombed it and wanted to crawl into a hole. It turned out I actually did pretty well, or so I was told.
If you could go back in time and give yourself advice then, what would it be?
I guess I wish I'd realized how much of my feeling like I didn't get something wasn't me being stupid. It was really liberating once I realized that it usually wasn't me when something seemed impenetrable or confusing—the problem, at least as often as not, is that the text itself is confused. Also, in general, don't take the status game and posturing and stuff too seriously—if you interact with people enough, then generally they'll figure out your abilities and any one thing you say probably won't convince them you're an idiot. You're not the only person who's insecure or anxious, especially in graduate school. There's always someone who seems really cocky and sure of themselves, and seem to love the whole game, and I've never been quite sure if it's an act or they just don't have any sense. Maybe some of them really are brilliant, but in general, there's just a lot of anxiety going around in graduate school, and it's best not to worry too much about your inadequacies. Remember the things that got you there, and the good moments, and remind yourself that you're not a moron.
High point of your career?
Probably publishing The Pursuit of Unhappiness. It pretty much came out the way I wanted it, and I felt like, well, if anyone doesn't like what I'm doing, fuck 'em. Because I knew it was good, and made a real contribution. That felt really good, and I stopped worrying about my abilities at that point. (Tenure helped too, which was around the same time.) Part of what I had in mind writing it was that you have to reach students with that sort of thing because the famous people were hardly working on these issues at all. I wasn't about to get them to change career directions, so really all you can do in that situation is aim for the next generation. So I tried to write something that I'd have liked as a graduate student, and I felt like it worked on that level.
Any exciting projects coming up?
I'm chomping at the bit to get on two books that have been gelling for the last several years, each following up on a different thread of the first book. One of them is about the nature of good lives, in the broadest sense of the term. Part of that will involve an attempt at a complete account of well-being, as I only sketched part of my view in previous work; presently I'm calling it a "Millian hybrid" theory, as it combines eudaimonistic and hedonistic elements in a way that loosely resembles Mill's body of thinking about well-being. Another major element, though, is to try to get clearer on the very idea of a good life, and develop the account of a good life I sketched in Happiness: A Very Short Introduction. Oddly, there doesn't seem to have been any sustained debate about this notion, at least where it isn't just assumed at the outset that well-being is the sole measure of a good life, as in the ancient literature. And if you think, as most moderns do, that good lives involve both well-being and, distinctly, morality—and perhaps other values as well—then you have a really tough problem figuring out how to bring it all together. Put another way: how is the eulogist supposed to figure out whether the dearly departed had a good life—not just morally or prudentially, but period? Basically, this book aims to sketch, as best I can, the basic outline of a good life.
The other book centers on a defense of well-being policy. It starts with the question: suppose you have a just society. Can we say that you have a good society? If not, what else is needed? My thought is that, while justice does have a kind of priority over other moral demands, it is not really a sovereign virtue; it's a virtue in roughly the sense that not being a criminal is a virtue—a pretty minimal aspiration. So a society could be just yet be a terrible society, both morally and in terms of quality of life. I think this is important for multiple reasons—e.g., the left's obsession with social justice has arguably been politically self-defeating, alienating a lot of potential allies—but the immediate motivation is to make room for the promotion of well-being, including happiness among other things, as a major policy imperative. A lot of political philosophers seem hostile to this idea, I think because well-being was long ago ruled out as a "currency" of social justice: the state doesn't owe us happiness. I agree, but I also think that, in practice and in fact, justice plays much smaller role in political morality than a lot of people have assumed. Who cares if the state owes us happiness? Most policymaking is not in the first instance about giving people what they're owed, but about things like trying to make this or that situation better. And it's still pretty important whether policies are favorable to people's happiness, or undermine it. Urban planning and agricultural policy in the U.S. have been disastrous for our quality of life, in my view, but you can admit that, and grant that it's a huge moral failing, without thinking it unjust. Anyway, that's what I want to say. So I want to explore the moral basis for well-being policy, and also issues about how to implement it—measuring well-being, paternalism, etc.—in this book. Because it's so hard to say anything interesting about the importance of well-being in policy without relating it to the importance of other policy concerns, like people's capabilities, or environmental degradation, I'm hoping to be able to sketch—no doubt crudely—the chief elements of a good society.
So these are both really big-picture books, and I've no doubt important things will get left out, and others gotten wrong. But big-picture stuff is one of my stronger suits—I'm certainly not the fastest or cleverest philosopher—and it's a useful exercise just to put something out there. We'll see; a lot of the elements of both are already in place, but these will probably take a while, like the first book did. I intend both to be more provocative and less cautious than the first book, so there's be lots to disagree with.
Could you describe this Templeton thing you are working on a bit?
The basic idea is to do what we can to help build up well-being research as an interdisciplinary field. A lot of people work on well-being, but there's not so much collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, especially between the humanities and sciences. For my own part, I'm especially concerned to see the philosophy side of things build up; it's definitely improving, but the ranks of empirically-engaged well-being philosophers, let alone philosophers working on happiness, are still pretty thin. There should probably be at least as many people working on well-being as on moral theory, in my view, so we've got a long way to go.
The bulk of the funding for this project is going toward sub-grants, and most of that money will fund empirical research that involves collaborators from philosophy, theology and religious studies. We're also hosting a number of workshops and conferences. The idea is basically to lock humanities and science folks in a room and make them do something together. I'm hopeful that people will find the exercise rewarding, and carry on doing this sort of thing in the future. Or at least pay more attention to what's going on in other departments.
I think this stuff is really important, most of all because we're essentially taking a blowtorch to the planet in the name of hare-brained ideas about the good life. We won't survive as a species, or at best we'll leave a biologically impoverished planet for several million years, unless we find better ways of securing a decent quality of life. Anyway, an awful lot of folks are pretty miserable, despite being awash in material abundance. And you still have a lot of people who think policy should ignore that sort of information. So we have a good deal to learn.
Is there anything you believe now that a younger version of yourself would be surprised you believe? Like, how has your academic study of well-being changed your world view?
Probably, but I think my basic outlook hasn't changed a whole lot. I had more than my share of stupid ideas as a kid, and probably do now, but the stuff I write now is pretty much continuous with stuff I was thinking back when I was ten or eleven. Which is probably not a good sign. I have the mind of a ten-year-old.
haha…do you talk to your kids about philosophy? Would you encourage them to pursue a career in philosophy?
I don't know how much we talk about academic philosophy, though sometimes I throw something at them to get the gears turning. But we do talk about "big ideas," like I did with my mother. Mostly I think they overhear my wife and me talking about things. I try to be careful not to impose my political or (lack of) religious views on them, so certain things we don't talk about so much, or I don't let them know what I think. But that can be tricky—it's important to take an interest in politics, and talking about it at home can foster that, but again, I want them to form their own views. If they want to be conservatives, libertarians, communists, whatever, that's their business. There are certain things I don't think it matters what political persuasion you are—neither climate change nor Ferguson are ok. You can deal with the problem in different ways, but you're just missing something if you don't think there's a problem. Ferguson was the first time I ever thought about joining a protest, and also thought about taking the kids, because it involved basic matters of a minimally civilized, free society. I was afraid we'd get our heads knocked in by the police, but now I regret not doing it. I'm not a "fist in the air" kind of guy, but that was some serious stuff.
How do you see the future of philosophy? Do you find any trends disconcerting? Exciting?
I feel like the field is really improving in important ways—we're starting to take inclusiveness and diversity more seriously, and also making life more tolerable for younger members of the profession. I expect things will genuinely improve as a result. We're also becoming a lot more engaged with real-world problems and matters of public concern, and it's wonderful to see more good philosophers writing for general audiences. I think it used to be a badge of honor not to care about making a difference in the world as a philosopher, and that seems less the case now. Mind you, I'd hate to see all philosophers doing "relevant" philosophy—there should always be people pursuing useless ideas, just because they are fascinating or beautiful. A civilization is diminished when it doesn't leave room for people to create useless beauty. But it's also good if, as a profession, we aren't fiddling while Rome burns.
On that note, I hope environmental ethics becomes a more prominent part of the field, with specialists training grad students in all the top departments. I'm not sure why it remains relatively marginal—or so it seems to me—as there are a lot of interesting, very fundamental theoretical issues at stake even if the field is also "applied." Maybe it's just too hard.
I have some concern about what seems to be increasing shrillness and self-righteous intolerance among philosophers, and perhaps academics generally. Actually, I suspect it's just symptomatic of the same trend in the culture at large—people everywhere seem to be becoming more politicized and polarized. But I hope it's just a swing of the pendulum, and will correct itself in due time, as happened with the psychotic political correctness that gripped Wesleyan in the 80's. A great deal of it is online, too, and generally people aren't as likeable online as in person. I'm not sure that will change, just because that's the nature of the medium. It encourages people to get on a soapbox and cultivate their inner Bill O'Reilly or Kanye West. Sort of like an interview.
What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher: roasted! Favorite movie?
Apocalypse Now, or maybe Life of Brian.
Favorite curse word?
All of them.
Last meal?


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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Wesley Korir
Wesley Korir
|Member of the Kenyan Parliament
|In office
28 March 2013 – 31 August 2017
|Personal information
|Kenya Canada
|[1]15 November 1982
Kitale, Trans-Nzoia District, Kenya[1]
|Kenya, United States, Canada
|1500 m, 5000 m, 10000 m, Marathon
|College team
|Murray State University, University of Louisville
|Achievements and titles
|Personal best(s)
|Half marathon: 1:01:19
Chicago Marathon: 2:06:13
Wesley Korir (born 15 November 1982, in Kitale, Trans-Nzoia District) is a former Kenyan elected Member of Parliament for Cherangany Constituency [2] (4 March 2013- 31 August 2017) and a long distance runner who specializes in road running competitions. On 16 April 2012, he won the Boston Marathon with a time of 2 hours 12 minutes 40 seconds.[3][4] He had previously won the Los Angeles Marathon in 2009 and 2010, the first back-to-back winner there in eight years.[5][6] He took second place in the 2011 Chicago Marathon in a personal-record time of 2 hours 6 minutes 15 seconds,[7] and improved that personal record by 2 seconds in the 2012 Chicago Marathon. In March 2013, Korir was elected to a seat in the Kenyan National Assembly.[8]
When Korir was young, he would run 5 miles (8 km) each way to school, often running back for lunch or to do errands for his mother.[5][9] However, he never ran competitively until after high school. Fellow Kenyan Paul Ereng, a 1988 Olympic gold medalist from the same hometown as Korir, used his contacts among college coaches in the United States to find Korir a spot at Murray State University in Kentucky.[6] He recalled in 2013 that when he first left for the U.S., he never expected to return to his homeland:[10]
I remember telling God, Hallelujah. I've left the poverty land. I'm going to the land of riches. In my heart and head, I never thought I would go back.
He would win both the 5000 m and 10000 m at the Ohio Valley Conference championships in 2004,[1] but was forced to find a new school when Murray State dropped its men's track and cross country programs.[10][11] Ereng put him in touch with University of Louisville track coach Ron Mann, and Korir transferred there.[11] Korir would go on to set school records there in the outdoor 1500 m and 5000 m and the indoor mile, 3000 m and 5000 m.[1] He would also earn All-American honors multiple times. He finished 3rd at the 2007 NCAA National Outdoor Track and Field Champions in the 5000 meter race and finished 12th in the fall of 2007 at the NCAA National Cross-Country Championships.
In 2007, he returned to Kenya for a visit, only to be caught up in the violence that followed the country's elections that year. For a short time, he was conscripted into a roving gang; he soon escaped across the Uganda border, spending two weeks as a refugee before he was able to return to Louisville.[10] Korir recalled,[10]
As I was going across the border, I looked at my cousin, who had to go back, and told him, bye bye. I won't see you again. I'm going to America and I'm going to be in America forever. That's what my heart was saying. But let me tell you, God had a different idea. When I said that, I believe God in heaven was laughing.
Korir moved on to the marathon only after his college career had ended. He entered the Chicago Marathon in October 2008, but with no previous marathon experience, he had to enter the open race starting five minutes behind the professional field. He would win the open division and post the fourth fastest time overall, 2:13:53.[7][12] He would go on to win his next marathon, the May 2009 Los Angeles Marathon, in a time of 2:08:24 which at the time was the fastest marathon ever run in the state of California.[12] He would repeat as champion in Los Angeles in March 2010, while continuing to post strong results in Chicago each October 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, including a second-place finish in 2011 in 2:06:15 and a fifth-place finish in 2012 in 2:06:13, his current personal best time.
Korir had his most significant victory to date at the 2012 Boston Marathon, where he ran a strong tactical race under extreme heat which claimed many of the pre-race favorites, including his countryman Geoffrey Mutai who had run the fastest marathon ever during the 2011 Boston event.[3] He was considered one of the favorites for the 2012 Chicago Marathon but he faded away from leaders in the second half of the race and came fifth, although his time of 2:06:13 hours was a new personal record.[13]
Personal life[edit]
Korir is the son of Nehemiah Kip Korir Koros.[1] He attended Murray State University before transferring to the University of Louisville, where he graduated in December 2008 with a bachelor's degree in biology. He is a Kenyan citizen, and a US Permanent resident.
Korir is married to Canadian runner Tarah McKay, his former teammate on the Louisville track and field team, in March 2010, and they have a daughter named McKayla.[5][9][14] He and his wife founded the Kenyan Kids Foundation to improve education and healthcare in his homeland, and they are assisting with the construction of a new hospital in Korir's hometown of Kitale. Before his election to the Kenya National Assembly, the family divided its time between Louisville, Canada, and Kenya;[11] they are living full-time in Kenya during his five-year term in office.[15]
Since becoming an MP, Korir has taken up the cause of clean water in his constituency and throughout Kenya:[10]
Water is medicine. If you can get water, you get rid of 80 percent of our diseases. That's why water is the song I am going to sing for the next five years. I'll get money from the government. And I'll put as much money as possible in water projects. But it won't be enough. That's why I will partner with people. Every dollar people give us in our area, I'm going to match it.
To that end, he briefly returned to Louisville in August 2013 to establish partnerships with individuals, businesses, and nonprofits in that area to assist him in this effort, and to get training in repairing water pumps. According to Korir, a Swedish group had installed pumps in villages throughout his region in the early 1990s, but most of them soon broke down and had not been supplying water for more than 15 years.[10]
Korir is noted for buying two Subway tuna sandwiches before each race, one of which he eats pre-race and the other intended to eat post-race, but which he often gives to a homeless person instead.[5][7][9]
|Representing Kenya
|Chicago Marathon
|Chicago, IL
|Los Angeles Marathon
|Los Angeles, CA
|Chicago Marathon
|Chicago, IL
|Los Angeles Marathon
|Los Angeles, CA
|2010 Chicago Marathon
|Chicago, IL
|Los Angeles Marathon
|Los Angeles, CA
|2011 Chicago Marathon
|Chicago, IL
|2012 Boston Marathon
|Boston, MA
|2012 Chicago Marathon
|Chicago, IL
|2013 Boston Marathon
|Boston, MA
|2015 Boston Marathon
|Boston, MA
|2016 Boston Marathon
|Boston, MA
In 2013, Korir was elected a member of Kenya's Parliament. He is working with dairy farmers of Cherangany to improve and strengthen their yield. He also worked with Semex on Dairy Genetics. Korir's story from elite runner to politician was turned into a documentary: Transcend (2014).[16]
- ^ a b c d e "Player Bio: Wesley Korir - University of Louisville Official Athletic Site". Retrieved 16 April 2012.
- ^ "Wesley Korir Wins Seat in Kenyan Parliament". Retrieved 2 May 2018.
- ^ a b Powers, John (17 April 2012). "Wesley Korir heads up Kenyan sweep". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 17 April 2012.
- ^ Golen, Jimmy (16 April 2012). "Kenya's Wesley Korir, Cherop win Boston Marathon". Boston.com. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
- ^ a b c d Markazi, Arash (22 March 2010). "A personal victory for Korir: Los Angeles Marathon winner overcame violence in his homeland". ESPN.com. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
- ^ a b Connolly, John (15 April 2012). "Wesley Korir takes long road from Kenya to Hub". Boston Herald. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
- ^ a b c Latter, Phil (February–March 2012). "Fast-Rising Wesley Korir". Running Times Magazine. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
- ^ "Kenya election: Behind the headlines". BBC Africa. 7 March 2013. Retrieved 7 March 2013.
- ^ a b c Cook, Josh (March 2011). "Louisville's Wesley Korir, is the running man". LouisvilleMagazine. Retrieved 17 April 2012.
- ^ a b c d e f Crawford, Eric (18 August 2013). "Korir, still running, takes up the cause of Kenya". Louisville, Kentucky: WDRB. Retrieved 23 August 2013.
- ^ a b c Schenk, Ruth (2 January 2013). "Boston Marathon winner Wesley Korir sets sights on bigger race". The Southeast Outlook. Middletown, Kentucky: Southeast Christian Church. Retrieved 4 January 2013.
- ^ a b "Wesley Korir | World Marathon Majors". Retrieved 17 April 2012.
- ^ Gugala, Jon (2012-10-07). Course record for Kebede, Baysa dethrones Shobukhova - Chicago Marathon report. IAAF. Retrieved on 2013-02-02.
- ^ "Two Pro Runners, A Baby & The Kenyan Kids Foundation : Tarah & Wesley Korir". RunnersFeed.com. 7 June 2011. Retrieved 17 April 2012.
- ^ Schenk, Ruth (24 April 2013). "Another close call strengthens Wesley Korir's resolve to serve". The Southeast Outlook. Middletown, Kentucky: Southeast Christian Church. Retrieved 27 April 2013.
- ^ Monte, Michael Del; Munnings, Tad (10 October 2014), Transcend, Wesley Korir, retrieved 2 May 2018


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E-Marketing Outsourcing
As a company you have several task and processes which are expensive and time intensive task, you can cut this cost by breaking down the process and can outsource some part of the process to us, we can work with your team in Thailand or can carry the work offshore, it could be anything from Data processing to Engineering design or accounting task.
We also understand some task of your work is difficult to be outsource, in such cases we can offer Hybrid Business model where some people can also work at your facility and rest can be offshore, depending on the cost and level of work we can discuss custom cost reduction solutions.
Well Said
"Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation."
- Peter Drucker
"To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business."
- J. Paul Getty
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds can not change anything."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Every successful man I have heard of has done the best he could with conditions as he found them, and not waited til next year."
- Edgar Howe,
as quoted by Lee Richardson.
"All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them."
- Walt Disney
"Paying attention to simple little things that most men neglect makes a few men rich."
- Henry Ford
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
- Steve Jobs
Search Engine Optimization.
Today ranking on the internet is very important, imagine if you have a website where there are no visitors to know and read about your product and services, what would you do ?. Website is no good, it's purely symbolic in nature, you need to reach out to potential buyers and tell them what you have to sell. Search Engine Optimization can help your website to reach targeted audience and make your website found on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing for the keywords what people are searching the internet related to your business. We do Organic SEO as well as Pay per click (PPC), We can do an analysis of your website and suggest you with SEO tips which can be implemented to achieve greater ranking.
Website Design and Development.
Websites are made to connect customers with your product and service, Our philosophy is to first understand customer needs, his target audience and based on that create an design layout which has all elements which would answer customers question, a proper aesthetics to appropriate content and language, and we don't forget to implement SEO guidelines so your website is friendly to search engine spiders. We use several technologies depending on your need and budget, from static HTML sites to PHP based dynamic content management sites, can also develop unique additional features like e-commerce, online inventory management, invoice processing, etc...
Custom Software development.
If you are into manufacturing or hotel business you always need task specific custom developed tools to bridge your needs, we can make customize software from inventory management, accounting, as well as back end support tools for marketing professionals. We can create such tools to be used online or installed in your local server using PHP, Java, .NET, ASP or any other open source program.
Outsource your Online Work to us and You can focus to expand Business:-
SEO & Digital Marketing.
Custom Website Design.
Social Media Engagement.
Video Optimization and Vlog enhancement.
Email Marketing Campaigns.
Analyzing and Reporting.
"Think out of Box, Do things beyond line to get outstanding results." - Mr. Ravi Kumar (Rav)


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2013 is going to be the sh-t. I don't know that for sure, but I'm trying to do what life coaches tell you to and speak my will into existence.
It's started off well-enough, anyway. On that rooftop in Johannesburg, we get wind of a house party allegedly close by. Johannesburg is like LA in the since that "close" actually means a 30 minute drive.
We—me, Stephie, and Thuli, park in front of a gated home somewhere around 1:30 AM. The house is dark and there's no music or sound at all. We fear we've missed the party on the long ride over. Weird, because Johannesburg, like New York, parties into the wee hours.
Finally someone comes to unlock the gate and I ask in all my American naivety, "Have we missed the party?" I over enunciate "missed" making sure to add the "d" on the end. Americans tend to speak lazy English and despite the influx of American entertainment, it can make us difficult to understand. That, and we sound straight up ignorant to English speakers elsewhere.
"No," the host informs. "You can't hear the music from the main house."
Don't ever let anyone tell you South Africans don't have money. I'm from the 'burbs, a so-called affluent one at that. And the Black wealth in this city is unlike anything I've ever seen.
We walk down a pathway on the estate to the backyard, which is the size of a half a football field. The pool, to me, looks Olympic sized. There's a full-fledged braai going on. Everyone is what we would call in the States "white boy wasted." Here's the thing about Johannanesburg though. What we call wasted is what they call getting started. I can drink. I can hold light liquor, including shots, with the best of 'em. No stumbles, no slurs, definitely no falls. I can't hang in Joburg.
Everyone's just real extra, celebrating the new year. Some guy—someone's husband—is running around with a bottle of Goldschlager convincing everyone to take bottle shots, which plenty of people consent to. He seems put off when I decline, and insists I drink something. It's just uncivilized not to have a drink in my hand, so I accept a barely red glass of Goose and cranberry.
There's another girl, who I have to assume is drunk because she's so obnoxious, but she ain't wobbled or slurred once. She's a close talker, treating everyone she meets like they're her best friend and declaring, "you're my new best friend!" to Thuli. I rescue her by asking her to grab something to eat with me from the table.
Noshing on carbs is when I discover that Thuli is Zulu, and that's when I make the connection between South African Zulu and New Orleans Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. I went to my first Mardi Gras last year, and hence my first Zulu ball—30k black people in tuxes (with tails) and gowns packed into the convention center. I've never seen anything like it. Somehow in my stupor I recall that my great-aunt, born and raised in New Orleans, calls her mother "Go-Go" allegedly because she's always on the move, and realize it's the Zulu word for "granny". I wonder if this is coincidence or some cross-cultural-continental connection. But I don't say that. I just ask Thuli if she's ever heard of New Orleans Zulu balls.
"I'm sorry what?" she says. She's never heard of such a thing.
I try to explain to her, in my very limited understanding of New Orleans culture, what the Zulu ball is and the parade, which is a wondorous and fascinating experience if ever there was one. I do well enough to convince her to come to the States for 2014 Mardi Gras to see it for herself.
The party was winding down when we arrived, and quickly does further while we're there. After an hour, it's cleared out and we're down to the actual friends of the hosts, not just the people who showed up for the revelry. We've retired to I guess what would be called the basement. It's got a bar the size of any TGI Friday's and stocked just as well. It's "only" 3 AM and everyone's trying to figure out where to go next.
"There's a party going on at Leroy's," Nandi, another friend, suggests. And just like that it's decided. Off to Leroy's we go.
So here's the thing. You tell me we're going to a party at "Leroy's", I'm thinking "Oh, Black guy." I'm expecting a Brooklyn-type houseparty—sweaty black bodies., full of smoke, all of us packed in someone's basement. I'm so down.
But that ain't what we walked—better, drove into. We pull up to the house and there's no cars. Party done?
Not quite. Leroy lives on estate, too, a bigger one. We pull up to the gate and someone opens it for us to pull in to park inside. The lawn is littered with BMWs and Audis.
Leroy's house isn't a house, it's palacial. And "Leroy" isn't Black. He's a well-perserved Italian guy in his late 40s or early 50s. This is a private party. Maybe 14 people. The DJs white, his lady is white, and Leroy is white. Everybody else is Black. I don't get it. Harpo, why this middle-aged white man got all these Black "friends?"
Leroy couldn't be happier to see me, Stephie, and Nandi. He beams when we walk into his kitchen, takes Stephie by the shoulders and turns her sideways. Grabs me next and positions me beside her, and then places Nandi beside me. "That's how I want you!" he declares. "My Dreamgirls!"
It's funny. Harmless enough. But I have the sneaking suspicion something ain't right.
Leroy is beyond a gracious host. There's empty bottles of Moet littering the counter. On the island, there's gobs of food, and while I'm fixing a plate of veggies, Leroy pulls a fresh roasted chicken from the oven and starts dispensing meat on to everyone's plate like it's Thanksgiving turkey.
Leroy wants to know what I'm drinking. I scan the remaining bottles—all hard—and decline. I've been drinking since 10. I can't drink like a South African or I will throw up.
"Champagne? You want champagne?" Leroy asks. He opens the fridge and it's stocked with champers like a new money rapper on MTV Cribs. So yeah, I take him up on the offer.
Nothing really eventful happens between the hours of 3AM and 6AM. The DJ is spinning in the living room, people are chilling and dancing and chain smoking on the patio. I don't really dance anymore, but when Leroy approaches me at 5AM in the middle of a Biggie set, I give him a two-step out of obligation to the host. I can't just drink up the man's top shelf liquor and not give him a wiggle. Shortly after that he disappears—to bed?—and the party keeps going.
Around 6, when the sun is coming up the DJ complains that they party is going a little long. He's from Atlanta and used to a late night ending at 4AM, not whenever this is ending, which even now shows no signs of stopping. He needs a break.
Everyone seems to be having a good time, and me being the American guest, I think of all of them as my hosts. I decide to relieve the DJ. Mind you, I've never spun a day in my life.
I get in the DJ "booth", the actual DJ shows me the basics, supervises me as I cue up my first song and transition to the second, then plops in a chair nearby to for a catnap. Just like that, I'm DJ Belle Belle.
I actually do all right. I start with —surprise—a Kanye set, and people, scattered all over the hosue by now, come back to the living room to dance. After the first four songs, I gain a new respect for DJs. I actually like this, but it's singlehandedly the most aggravating thing I have ever tried to do. The pressure of reading the "crowd", queing up the next song, searching thru a song list, and al on a short timeline is intense. When a song gets down to the last 30 seconds, my screen flashes an annoying red light. Pressure. Pressure. I've been to enough parties to know that whatever I do, I can't let the music stop. Picking a bad song or a song that has no similar beat to the previous one is better than silence.
Some guy comes by and announces everyone's getting in the pool now. He wants me to join them and let the DJ do his job. Uhhh…
It's not that I don't have a swimsuit. Undies and someone's t-shirt would suffice. It's also 7AM, ie, bright light, not a midnight swim. It is because these are strange, although very nice men. There's no explaining this one to CBW who I've just BBMd to wish a Happy New Year on East Coast time.
"Nah," I decline.
He insists. "Why not?"
I look at my ring and back at him. "Hubs ain't going for that."
I'd have said "fiance" but "hubs" carries more weight in these situations.
"Oh, is he here?" the guy asks.
"He's in New York."
"You gonna tell him?"
I laugh because the game doesn't change, even on other continents.
And no, I don't get in the pool.


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A Perfect Day
Cynthia's favorite part of the Africa trip was the orphanage visit.
Whew! 2012 is flying by! I can't believe that we are already in February. I have been so busy with my classes at The Bailey Agency and The Cynthia Bailey Model Search tours that I fell behind with my blog. Apologies! Apologies! I'm back, so let's go!
Where should I start? Since (in the show) we are still in South Africa, let's start there. Africa was amazing! Even though I spent time there years ago as a model, nothing could prepare me for my return to the motherland with the girls. From the moment we arrived at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, I had a small suspicion that this journey we were about to embark on would be like none other. Just a feeling!
The Wives are in Africa!
Even though many things happened on our adventure, the only day that touched my soul was the day we went to visit the orphanage. As a mother myself with a 12-year old child, the day at the orphanage was by far the most fulfilling. It was truly the most genuine time that I have ever shared with the girls! Everyone's love, generosity, and compassion was overwhelming. It was the first time that I experienced firsthand how "enormous" each of these women are in their own special way. There were no Smalls that day, everyone was a Tall. I say this because the generosity that each of us displayed at the orphanage was big, elevated, soaring, towering, sky-scraping, and giant. Yes, we were giants, all of us. That day, those beautiful children gave each of us more than we could ever give them. Even buying out the whole store! You can't put a price tag on doing the right thing. It was a perfect day.
Visiting an Orphanage
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Sarat Sreepathi is a Computer Scientist interested in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of High Performance Computing and domain sciences. He is a member of the Future Technologies Group and Computational Earth Sciences (matrixed) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. His dissertation work was awarded Gold medal in the ACM Graduate Student Research Competition at Supercomputing conference.
His current projects include Energy Exascale Earth System Model (Deputy Lead, Performance) and Exascale Computing Project application development (E3SM-MMF). His research interests include High Performance Computing, Computational Climate Science, Performance Analytics, Exascale Co-design, Optimization Algorithms, Computational Intelligence, Parallel I/O, Performance Analysis and Optimization. He serves on the OLCF User Group Executive Board.
Computer Scientist
Future Technologies Group
Computational Earth Sciences Group (matrixed)
Computer Science and Mathematics Division
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Ph.D. Computer Science
North Carolina State University
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarats
Office: Bldg 5100, Room 239
One Bethel Valley Road
Bldg 5100, MS-6173
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6173
PGP KeyID: D5F78015


text: emilyrberg 0 Posted February 7, 2013 Hi! This is my first time posting in here. I read all your posts but I finally got engaged so now I have an excuse to actually write in here myself! I booked my wedding at Manchebo Beach Resort & Spa in Aruba for January 24, 2014. I've only found a few posts/threads on here detailing it. Have any of you been to the resort/gotten married here? I go to Aruba a lot but have never actually seen this particular hotel. The price was right and the pictures looked pretty good online so I just took a chance and went with it. Any help you can provide this newbie would be great! Already I'm wishing I just went to the courthouse to get married. Haha. Emily Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites


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Personal Banking
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For the quickest answer, search previously asked questions below. Chances are, others have asked a similar question and there's already an answer waiting for you. If you can't find a match, ask a new question and our team members will answer.
tirza, Elad
January 16, 2015 01:25:40 PM
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3 Responses
In reply to tirza, Elad
It's great to hear from you, Tirza!
As a Customer, you are able to purchase Official Bank Checks with cash, or via withdrawal from your account. At this time, Official Checks can be completed at any of our Stores in either the lobby or drive-thru. Please see http://bit.ly/TDStores to find your closest TD Bank Store.
If you'd like to purchase an official check, please keep in mind that these cannot be made payable to "Cash." We'd recommend reviewing your Payee's requirements prior to your visit to the Store to ensure you're aware of the correct name that should be written on the check. Fees may also apply for this service depending on your account type, and please review our current Fee Schedule at http://bit.ly/1cTejgt for further information.
Thanks again for asking, Tirza and we look forward to seeing you soon!
Kristen P, Mount Laurel
January 16, 2015 01:28:26 PM
In reply to Kristen, Mount Laurel
I just relocated to Chicago and am in need for a cashier check, but there is not any TD Bank location in Illinois. Is there any way that I can ask TD Bank to send me a cashier check? I am have a premier checking account at TD Bank and would like to keep it.
Desmond, Chicago
October 23, 2016 10:56:57 AM
In reply to Desmond, Chicago
Thank you for submitting your question to us on TD Helps, Desmond.
At this time, in order to receive a Cashier's Check, you must visit a TD Bank Store location. However, we understand that this may not always be convenient for you. To help out, we have online options that may fit your needs.
If you are attempting to give money to another person, we now have the Person-To-Person Payment feature. When using the Person-to-Person transfer feature, whether you're transferring to a different TD account, or an account at another financial institution within the United States, you will have two delivery options available. There is the three business day option and the next business day delivery. The next day delivery option is not available for savings accounts and to qualify for this option, you must wait 90 days from your first successful 3-day transfer and must not have had any transactions that overdrew your account in the past 90 days. For the Transfers Terms and Conditions please see: http://go.td.com/1pADlWD.
Additionally, Online Bill Pay is a great way to schedule bills and keep track of your monthly expenses and we are happy to say, as a TD Bank Customer, you will have free Online access which includes, Online Banking, Bill Pay, and Mobile Banking! This option will also allow draft checks to be made to small companies or individuals.
Before using this feature, you must first be enrolled for Online Banking. If you have not enrolled for Online Banking, you can do so by clicking here: http://go.td.com/1lU2qfY. Keep in mind that you will need to have your account number, TD VISA/ATM Card number, Social Security number and email address to complete the enrollment process. Once you are logged in, you will need to enroll for Bill Pay. To enroll, please select the "Bill Pay' tab, you will then be asked to accept the Bill Pay user agreement. Once accepted, you can then immediately begin scheduling your bills!
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us 24/7 at 800-493-7562 or stop by any of the TD Store locations in your area. To find out TD Store locations near you, please visit: http://go.td.comTDStores.
We are always here to help, Desmond. Please feel free to reach out to us with any other questions.
Kris M, Mt. Laurel
October 23, 2016 10:57:24 AM


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If you are a local you are familiar with the joy of Seattle streets and if you are visiting and plan on renting a car, let's just say you were warned. It can be overwhelming to try and navigate our crazy shaped neighborhoods, but it is also something that gives Seattle some of its charm.
A while back we were doing some research and found out the steepest street in Seattle is E. Roy St. in Capitol Hill Between 25th and 26th Ave. E. We obviously had to go check it out seeing as this is something right up our alley, a quirky, little-known spot in the city. With a 26% slope it becomes pretty hilarious/terrifying to visit. Once you arrive it is so fun to look at all the houses built on this massive hill and imagine how awesome these residents' calf muscles must be.
If you want some other things to do when you go check it out we also recommend the Haunted Coke Machine (written about on the blog here) or grabbing a bite to eat at Cafe Flora or for a sweet snack Hello Robin (Mackles'more and Birthday Cake are our favs).


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End of year Hand Ins
It may be the final push for our fourth years before the degree show build, but that doesn't make this a less important time for our students in their lower years.
This is the final year hand in and assessment time, there are no exams here. Students submit a portfolio of their work from the past year accompanied by all the supporting research and development material they have produced.
The quality of some of this work can be exceptionally high, with students progressing and producing work of increasingly higher standards as they move through the years.
Here is a perfect example, a group of 3D Design Students who are just completing their second year with us. The work is of an incredible standard for students who are only half way through their Gray's journey, just think what they will have when they get to their own degree shows.


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Being the non partial* observer to the Super Bowl (and by non partial I mean there is ONLY one team who deserves to win) here is my prediction for the winner:
Since we are still snowed in, we will be watching the Indy Colts take down the Saints from our living room tonight. I will be sporting my #18 Manning jersey.
*I am from Indiana, did you ever expect me to cheer for the Saints? So Brees went to Purdue and Lafayette is my hometown, but, Peyton is my QB.


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Thank you for using the BioSig-ID automated, self-serve help desk system. We have created a knowledge base of the most frequently asked questions to help you quickly resolve any issues you may be experiencing.
If you are unable to find answers in this searchable database, you can submit a help desk ticket and we will respond to you as soon as possible. If you are having problems with other software related issues outside of BSI's technology, please contact your company or institutions system administrator.


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Reunification Palace
March 26, 2007Reunification Palace formerly known as Independence Palace or Norodom Palace is a historic landmark in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It was the workplace of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and the site of the official handover of power during the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.
The front yard of the Palace is a grass carpet in oval shape with a diameter of 102m. Running along the whole width of the great hall is a half moon shaped pond.
Admission is VND 15,000 including with a descriptive brochure available in several languages and a guided tour of the palace. The guide explained about the architecture, decoration and historical contents. He showed us where the important meetings held during the war, as well as some of the private quarters of the president and his family. There is a lot of Vietnamese arts and also nicely decorated reception where International visitors received.
The Palace consists of 95 rooms, each decorated according to its function. It features two exhibition rooms, a 33-room guesthouse, bomb shelter, Catholic chapel, helipad, tanks and numerous entertainment facilities.
Luckily, I got a snapshot with our tour guide wearing a traditional dress called "Ao Dai", literally means, a "long dress". Pronounced "ao yai" in the south, but "ao zai" in the north, the color is indicative of the wearer's age and status.
Young girls wear pure white, fully lined outfits symbolizing their purity. It is also the uniform for female students in many Vietnamese high schools and universities (They looked cute with their long hair clipped back and riding their bicycles and motorcycles). As they grow older but are still unmarried they move into soft pastel shades. Only married women wear gowns in strong rich colors, usually over white or black pants. The Ao Dai is the traditional dress of Vietnamese women, consisting of a long flowing tunic that is slit on the sides and worn over loose trousers.
This was the first thing I noticed when I was in Vietnam. You can almost see everywhere women wearing ao dais. I would really love to wear this elegant, demure yet sexy traditional dress. It gives a certain dignified look to women. :)
Oops! Ok, let's get back to the most interesting section of the Reunification Palace, which is the basement. It has network of tunnels and rooms, including a War Room and a telecommunications room.
Now, the Palace is both an ideal tourist sight seeing point and a place to hold meetings, seminars, receive guests from local and foreign agencies and businesses. It has a restaurant serving entertainments, birthdays and weddings.
Ticket selling time is 7:30 to 11:00 am and 1:00 to 4:00 pm. Open everyday including Saturdays, Sundays and Tet Holidays.
Reunification Palace
106 Nguyen Du St.,
District 1, Ho Chi Minh City


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Basic Principles of Telekinesis
The ability to move objects and influence circumstances by just willing it is called psychokinesis or telekinesis. Some people believe that psychokinesis is an ability born to all but only a few really do get to exhibit and make use of it. However, for those who want to tap into their inner psychokinetic powers, here … [Read more…]


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Thursday, October 3rd, 2019 02:00pm
This taping features Marcia Cross!
Hosted and produced by The View's Meredith Vieira, 25 Words or Less is the amazing white-knuckle game show where every word counts!
Each episode pits two teams of contestants and celebrities against each other in a fast, frantic scramble to guess the right answers with the fewest number of clues. Join the action from the studio audience and see who will go home with the top prize of $10,000!
Celebrity guests are subject to change.
Shows will be posted up to 60 days in advance.
Sunset Las Palmas Studios
1040 North Las Palmas
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Minimum Age:18+


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MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - June 15, 2015) - KP Tissue Inc. ("KPT") (TSX:KPT) will hold its Annual Meeting of Shareholders in Toronto, Ontario, Wednesday, June 17, 2015. The meeting will take place in the Gallery Room of the TMX Broadcast center, 130 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario, at 2:00 p.m. All interested individuals are cordially invited to participate in this event.
For shareholders, media and other interested parties who are unable to attend the meeting the presentation material will also be available on the web site www.kptissueinc.com.
About KP Tissue Inc.
KPT was created to acquire, and its business is limited to holding, a limited partnership interest in KPLP. For more information visit www.kptissueinc.com.
About Kruger Products L.P.
KPLP is Canada's leading manufacturer of quality tissue products for household, industrial and commercial use. KPLP serves the Canadian consumer market with such well-known brands as Cashmere®, Purex®, SpongeTowels®, Scotties®' and White Swan®. In the U.S., KPLP manufactures the White Cloud® brand, as well as many private label products. The Away-From-Home division manufactures and distributes high-quality, cost-effective product solutions to a wide range of commercial and public entities. KPLP has approximately 2,500 employees across North America and operates five FSC® CoC- certified mills (FSC® C104904), four of which are located in Canada and one in the US. For more information visit www.krugerproducts.ca.
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