A whim, says Adam Platt.

Question: Why did you decide to go into journalism?

Adam Platt: Why did I decide to go in to-- I always wanted to-- I wanted to write and to travel and to experience things and to write about it and I went to Georgetown University. I was in the School of Foreign Service. I graduated from that but I quickly decided that I didn’t want anything to do with working at a large bureaucracy so I’m probably the only restaurant critic in the history of the discipline to have graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Anyway, so I was working- I was a business writer in Hong Kong and I decided that I wanted to A)not do business writing and not do- not even do news writing but to do feature writing and that I also- having lived overseas for- at various- for various stages in my life that I really was tired of it, that I wanted to sort of become an American and have a sort of solid identity and a steady home or at least attempt to do that. So I applied on a whim to Columbia, living in Hong Kong, thinking that I could A)get back to the States and B)try out different kinds of writing. And really what I wanted to do was to be a magazine feature writer. I was a magazine feature writer for a long time and they offered me a steady job and I took it and that was seven, almost eight years ago.

Recorded: 4/22/08