Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, was born and raised in New York City. Today, he says, “I am living the standard, New York, upper bourgeois life in a Brooklyn brownstone with my wife and kids. Everything is basically copacetic.” Below, Rose tells us more about himself.
Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?
A. Watching my kids play soccer. We are a soccer family now. My son recently betrayed the Yankees and his perennial Halloween favorite Alex Rodriguez to go this year as Ronaldo.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. Elvis Costello.
Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?
A. Eating.
Q. What surprises you most about your life right now?
A. How conventional it is.
Q. Who was your childhood hero?
A. Ron Guidry, the great Yankees pitcher.
Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?
A. Say ‘no’ more often.
Q. Who is your favorite fictional character?
A. Julien Sorel from The Red and the Black.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. Cocktails are for wussies. I’m a single malt scotch guy.
Q. When do you feel most creative?
A. Very late at night after a couple of Starbucks Doubleshots.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. Angkor Wat.
Q. What is the last book you read and loved?
A. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Anthony Powell’s endless cycle of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?
A. Talleyrand. He was the French foreign minister in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Henry Kissinger of his day. He was a huge patron of the first celebrity chef, iron chef Carême. So it would be guaranteed to be a fantastic evening.
To read more about Rose’s talk on how to end wars at Zócalo, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.