About the Editors

James Tadd Adcox, Editor-in-Chief, grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. One of his earliest memories is walking with his mother to an ATM near a local grocery store when he was three years old. He recalls his mother pressing some buttons on the machine, then sliding open the plastic cover of what James Tadd Adcox now realizes would be the slot for deposits. Inside was an ice cream cone, which James Tadd Adcox’s mother removed and gave to her son. Of course, James Tadd Adcox now realizes that this could not have actually happened, and must have been a dream, or a reconstruction of something his three-year-old mind could not make sense of at the time. Nonetheless, to this day the event persists in his mind as a memory, and, whenever he thinks of it—for example, whenever he withdraws money from an ATM—there is a moment between the memory and his rational assessment of the memory, when the event described above seems perfectly natural.

Rebekah Silverman, Managing Editor, grew up in Conway, South Carolina. She understands both implicitly and explicitly the difference between money and ice cream. She is highly aware, for example, of the transaction by which money is turned into ice cream, preferably in a bowl or cup rather than a cone, as she tends to make a mess. This is a sort of alchemy that she is sure very few self-proclaimed alchemists would appreciate, although Johann Friedrich Böttger might have admired it. Böttger was imprisoned by Augustus the Strong of Saxony after he boasted of his ability to create gold, but when his forced trials failed, he was put to the task of finding the formula for porcelain, then known as "China's white gold," on pain of death. He did die, eventually, of dysentery. 

Paul Albano, Web Editor, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  As a child he often helmed cross-country expeditions from Independence, MO to Oregon City, OR.  His habitual traveling companions consisted of Detlef Schrempf, Gambit, that girl from Beetlejuice (whom he now knows as Winona Ryder), and Niels Bohr.  Perhaps a byproduct of draining the party coffers on frontier weaponry for bison huntin’, rather than medicine or fruit, Paul usually failed to survive much past the Rocky Mountains, frequently enduring a fate quite similar to Böttger, namely not alchemizing porcelain and death by dysentery.  Yet, it was through repeatedly bearing witness to his own mortality that Paul came to appreciate the necessity of fiber and to recognize the fallacy in addressing all obstacles simply by consuming more buffalo.