Todd May in Herald Tribune

Killing a bit of time at Cilantro café this evening (the 26th of July branch in Zamalek, for my Cairo readers), and I happened to catch a nice little article on death by TODD MAY, in the International Herald Tribune.

I failed to find a web version of it just now. My search terms were “Todd May Death”. I hope that search doesn’t get reported to him by academia.edu in that format, or he might wonder who’s hunting him down. (The country from which the search was conducted is generally also listed.)

Todd and I did not quite overlap at Penn State. But he had finished just before I arrived, and when you’re 22 and a fresh grad student, the recently finished Ph.D.’s seem like ancient Greek demigods. You tend to remember stories that you hear about them. In fact, few stages of life are more conducive to myths and legends than the first year of graduate school. I still remember hundreds of anecdotes and rumors from that year, even more freshly than more recent ones.

The main story I remember hearing about Todd (apocryphal or not, I don’t know) is that he had been ambushed in one of his first job interviews by someone who handed him a French text by Foucault and forced him to translate it on the fly during the interview. There oughta be a law.