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27 Dec Dani Fankhauser

Startups are synonymous with starting over. We are quick to laud the scrappy hustle to the top as a feat of innovative strength, but what it begins with is accepting that nothing can stay the same and a willingness to wade deep into uncertainty.

Dani Fankhauser, co-founder of ReadThisNext, is well accustomed to this reality. I met Dani after I moved to New York three years ago. I moved there knowing almost no one, thinking that friendship was a numbers game and the city would be a mecca of besties by sheer population alone. I quickly learned that the opposite was true. Loneliness drove me to community at church, and there I found Dani. Dani’s quiet demeanor left an impression. Our early days were marked by me making endless small talk and her nodding politely. When I learned to let the stillness between us linger, she filled it with whip-smart insights. The more we hung out, the more I was able to see a life that was dynamic and guided by serious sincerity. Dani is pragmatic yet deeply spiritual, humorously dry yet quick with kindness, simple in daily practices yet never skimping on big, messy dreams.

21 Dec Liz Medoff

VCS. Those three letters are probably the thing I have to explain the most about myself. “I majored in Visual and Critical Studies,” I’ll say, to which the response is usually, “Oh, cool! …What is that?”

This week’s babe, Liz Medoff, deals with the same struggle on an even greater scale, having followed up her time in the same undergrad program with a master’s. She also now works as an academic advisor at our alma mater. According to our school’s website, VCS can be defined as a department that “serves students seeking rigorous tools to explore cultural phenomena.” Within this very big box, my fellow VCS-ers and I have all developed our own working definitions. The one I find most all-encompassing is that VCS teaches critical thinking and theory and applies those principals to culture. It is a way of looking at the world and yourself with an always curious, compassionate, and analytical mind. It's questioning powerful, pervasive ideas. It’s investigating the world we are given and using that information to pull apart what made it the way it is and to be able to imagine, radically, what could be next.

09 Dec Ryan Oksenberg

Filmmaker Ryan Oksenberg's car waved slightly between the yellow and white lines as the road curled around the steep mountainsides of Topanga Canyon at sunset.

Ryan steered calmly along the twisting roads with a practiced air that made me feel like we were floating rather than driving. While the sun glinted off of the windshield, the red light on my recorder reflected back onto the glass. We were talking about Ryan's latest project, at the time, on our way to a hidden beach near Malibu. He was working on a social outreach docu-series centered around phone booths that he and his friends transformed into temporary havens for Skid Row's homeless. The series, called Life Line Booth, had just sold to the network Pivot and was about to air on TV. That was nearly three years ago. Ryan has since moved on from Life Line, although his interest in telling unique and forgotten stories has carried over to his new projects.