Transom Talk Special Guests Bios

Paul Tough

Paul Tough

"I grew up in Toronto. When I was a teenager, I was on the radio more than I ever have been subsequently: I was the co-host of a nationally broadcast radio show for kids, called "Anybody Home?" I did the "hard-hitting" interviews. In 1983, the CBC cancelled the show, and I turned to a life of petty crime. Not really. I dropped out of college twice, the first time to go biking through the south, the second time to become an intern at Harper's Magazine.

I stayed in New York for ten years, mostly as an editor at Harper's. In around 1992 I met Dave Isay, at the bar on my corner, and marvelled at the radio he was making; around the same time I met Ira Glass, and again marvelled. I helped out with This American Life, in various ways, beginning back when it was called "Three from the Combination Platter"; the most involved I got was in 1997 and 1998, when I was the show's senior editor. Then I went back to Canada to work as the editor of Saturday Night, a magazine, and then quit that and started Open Letters (www.openletters.net), an online magazine of first-person writing in the form of personal correspondence. And then I quit that, too, in January. I live with my girlfriend, Deirdre, in a house on the beach in Milford, Connecticut.

Highlights from Paul Tough's Topic