As this project was underway, I found out that Dan was moving back to DC. He’d wrapped up the non-dissertation portion of his PhD at Princeton and was looking for a more conducive environment to finish his treatise on elections in the Middle East. 

And thinking back to our very first interaction when I was forced to reevaluate my own assumptions about how we halfies pick-up language I thought Dan would be a perfect fit. Dan has done quite a bit more meditating on these issues and maybe owing to his many years in academia he’s figured out a way to better organize his thoughts. He has the benefit, maybe, of being forced to question assumptions and his own personal biases. That is the nature of higher education, I suppose. 

Dan brought with him a strong desire to understand context. To fit our experience as Iranian-Americans, White Adjacents, halfies into the greater context of America. And like all the other’s he took some very key feelings I’ve had for a while and actually put words to them.