Kalia Brooks is the Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn. She is also an an adjunct professor  at New York University and a Ph.D. candidate in aesthetics and art theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

Can you take me through the process of organizing an exhibition? Which comes first—the artist or you as the curator?

I stay away from having a curatorial idea first, and then finding artists to illustrate that idea. To me, those are the least successful shows. I am surrounded by artists, and I believe it is the curator’s job to always keep up with artists whose work they find compelling, and who are dealing with ideas, topics, and forms that the curator will be able to build a show around. So, for me, exhibition-making always starts with the artist.

Read more HERE.

Jordan Jarrett is a civil engineer with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. That’s a lot of water and power, of course, and it’s due to the hard work of folks like Jordan that the desert city has become an oasis for something like four million people. Below, he gives us a little hint how that’s all possible.

Why doesn’t LA have a private power utility like, say, San Francisco or New York?

How a city comes to be supplied by a municipal utility is a long, complicated issue, and I won’t claim to know all the answers. Individual cities must decide whether they have the knowledge and resources to run such an entity. If they do not presently run one, I imagine the costs and learning curve is too steep to start a new one from scratch. Several Southern Californian cities including Los Angeles, Burbank and Glendale have power supplied by public municipalities, and as the country’s largest municipal utility, LADWP supplies water and power to over four million residents in a service area measuring approximately 465 square miles.

Wow, that’s huge! How does LADWP service a city that essentially won’t stop growing?

To reliably service such a large area, the department is dependent on a diverse array of employees. Engineers, construction workers and field personnel are all vertically integrated into LADWP’s infrastructure.

And what’s your role in that infrastructure?

I am one of a handful of civil engineers working in the Power System. The staff is small, so my responsibilities are pretty diverse. One day I can help select the location of a future facility, while the next I provide recommendations to alleviate erosion for a remote road in central California. Other days I might verify that a station is compliant with the latest environmental regulations, or draft a formal letter asking for permission to proceed with a project. In recent months, I have worked on projects that will help expand LADWP’s capacity to generate solar power. Unlike traditional fuels, solar power cannot be transported; therefore, one of the primary challenges is to identify optimal locations where power can be generated reliably and inexpensively.

How do you make one of the most populated, most sprawled out cities, greener?

Right now I’m working on the Adelanto Solar Power Project. Once constructed, this project, which is adjacent to an existing LADWP facility, will have the capacity to supply the City of Los Angeles with approximately ten megawatts of power. To supply power on this scale, LADWP will need to procure and install thousands of photovoltaic solar panels. This project has required a great deal of coordination between various engineering disciplines.

Speaking of, how did you get your start as an engineer? Did you ever think one day you’d be helping install solar panels for the city of LA?

I wish I could say that working for LADWP was the culmination of a master plan I developed early in my life but I cannot. Instead, it was the logical conclusion to a series of decisions I made while in my early 20s. Due primarily to my proclivity for numbers and Legos, I decided to major in Civil Engineering while at UCLA. When I graduated in 2005, the housing industry was at an all-time high, and I took a job with an engineering firm where I helped design housing complexes throughout Southern California. At the onset of the housing bubble burst in 2008, I decided to seek more stable employment, and there is not a more stable employer of civil engineers than LADWP. I was very fortunate that they was hiring, and that I could arrange an interview. To prepare, I read everything I could about LADWP, created over a hundred flash cards and participated in mock interviews whenever possible. The hard work paid off.

Did growing up in LA inform your work in any way?

I was always aware of LADWP, but now I see LADWP structures as sort of mile markers of my life. I now realize that I grew up adjacent to Receiving Station D, attended college near Distributing Station 145 before ultimately settling near Distributing Station 55.

*Interview by Arden Sherman

Luca Pellicoro is a software engineer at Playdom, a manufacturer of online games. He and his team create automatic testing systems – digital crash test dummies, basically – so that these games function properly at all stages of play. With Luca in charge, computers won’t explode when a high score is topped, which, while taking the pizazz out of things, is probably better for everyone involved.

Do you get paid to play video games all day?

Some people do get paid to “play games” all day, which is actually quite difficult. Imagine playing the same level over and over, then trying to describe in detail to someone what problems you might encounter. What I do is write systems that automatically play games all day. Imagine an army of tireless robots that run through a level and report issues as they encounter them. I also run specific kinds of tests to determine how a game would behave with a large number of simultaneous players. For example, let’s take a game where you can walk around a forest with all your friends. The point of these tests is to see what happens when a lot of friends go into the forest all at once to fight monsters. I almost want to break the game in some fashion.

Have you always been interested in video games and computers?

As a kid, I definitely played my fare share of video games on the console and whatever I could get my hands on for PC. But in adolescence, that phase faded away as other interests sprung up. I was reintroduced to computers in college though. Although I initially opted to study psychology, after taking an introductory computer course, I realized I knew quite a bit already. I switched my major and was more or less hooked after the first programming class. There we learned about the notion of “objects,” which programmers use to describe things in the world. Objects have properties (and can even hold other objects), and actions can be performed on these properties. So for example, a car (object) with doors (properties, but also objects) can move (action). It’s a way to build complex systems by breaking them down into smaller parts with known, testable behavior. I walked out of that specific lesson and the world looked different.

Are you constantly breaking things down into constituent parts?

Well, I wasn’t always an engineer. I’ve worked in a few kitchens and, after enjoying an amazing meal at a restaurant, I have an idea of how much effort was put into it, from the farmer to the delivery crew to the prep cook to the chef to the wait staff to the dishwasher and so on. With any software, like the one we’re using now, there’s a whole lot of years put into them: your operating system, your browser, the operation system of the web server hosting the content, and all the networking pipes in between. But I also think about issues related to usability, not just in software, but a refrigerator door hung the wrong way, for example, or a street sign not placed in the optimal location for pedestrians. I tend to approach the world like a series of small understandable parts tied together in a large complex systems.

Tell me about some of the technical aspects of your job.

My team is really into a programming language called Python. The reason we love it is because it doesn’t get in the way of solving problems like lower level languages can. By lower level, I mean closer to the machine, how a computer is built. It’s a bit like not caring or knowing how a car engine works, but still being a good driver. Python allows us to be good drivers regardless of which car we’re driving. We call that abstraction. One of the best parts about software engineering is the ability to make your own tools and modify what exists. Imagine owning a hammer and not being satisfied with it. An engineer has the skills to fix it by going below the current abstraction level. But once it’s built, you don’t have to think about it anymore. It just works.

*The views and opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily represent or reflect those of The Walt Disney Company.

Maurice Leacock is a senior technical product manager at iRobot, which manufactures (among many other devices) the Roomba, the hands-free vacuum cleaner that bumps around your living room. He’s also a husband and father of two (soon to be three). Between personal and professional obligations, he was kind enough to enlighten us about the mechanics of creating a real robot, the pratfalls of fictional ones, and why a microwave oven isn’t a robot at all.

What does a real robot look like?

We describe robots as devices, platforms or systems that “perform dull, dirty and dangerous jobs that folks are unwilling or unable to do.” That can be applied in quite a few ways. The Lexus that can park itself is technically a robot—it can semi-autonomously do something that usually requires complex human mechanics, brain power and a lot of practice to do accurately and precisely every time.

Read more HERE.

Jeffrey de Picciotto is a butcher at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in New York City. When he’s not breaking animals nose to tail, he writes, edits, and produces the culinary how-to website FudeHouse.com. Warning: This interview may make you hungry.

People want to know more about their food and where it comes from, and consequently the butcher has become a kind of glamor job. But let’s face it: aren’t you covered in blood and guts all day?

Well, there certainly are days I’m covered in blood, although not much guts. Some people are mesmerized and others are grossed out…

Read more HERE.

Jerrold Jackson is a social worker in New York City. He’s also a Ph.D. candidate, consultant, volunteer, and all-around nice guy. Somehow he ties it all together. In our conversation, Jackson explains how to seemingly do it all while remaining both sane and gracious.

Social work is a fairly broad label. What is your particular area of focus, and what does that mean on a day-to-day basis?

For me, no one day is ever the same…

Read the rest HERE.

Willy Muse is an associate menswear designer for J.Crew. Over the course of our conversation, he touched on the importance of Nike Blazers, the irrelevance of special job certifications, and being in the right place at the right time. We wouldn’t have expected anything less from a wildly creative farm boy from Ames, Iowa.

Is it very common for fashion majors at state schools in Iowa to get recruited by the largest and most respected clothing designers in the world?

Every year, Iowa State University has a student-run fashion show, and we always have a guest designer. My junior year it happened to be Todd Snyder, at the time, head of men’s design for J.Crew. One of my odd jobs in college was a tailor at a bad chain store at the local mall. A friend of mine was one of the student producers for the show, and he called me around 8:30 on a Wednesday night while I was drinking a margarita on a friend’s lawn. He asked if I wanted to be the tailor for all of the clothes that Todd was bringing from J.Crew to our show. I of course agreed…

Read the rest HERE.

Meg Paska is an urban beekeeper, backyard farmer, and self-sustainability advocate living in the backwoods of Brooklyn, New York. Her adventures on raising chickens in a small backyard, brewing beer in the basement, and harvesting honey on rooftops will be richly explored in a forthcoming book. In the meantime, she keeps the wonderfully robust blog, Brooklyn Homesteader.

Why bees?

Bees sort of came into my life through a series of experiences in self-sufficiency over the years. I always enjoyed being outside and had an affinity for gardening and, more importantly, eating. I’m rather self-indulgent by nature. I got really into cooking and eating which led to gardening because I thought I’d end up with better food in my belly. I got into home-brewing because I liked being drunk and thought it made more sense financially to just do it myself. At a home-brew meet-up, I met a guy who made mead from his own brand of honey, foraged by his bees. A light bulb went off in my head.

Read the rest HERE.

Jason Sigal is a DJ for Jersey City, New Jersey’s pioneering independent radio station WFMU. He is also managing director of the Free Music Archive, one of the largest collections of open-source music on the web. Great music soundtracks our entire existence, so we jumped at the chance to talk with a like-minded soul, especially one dedicated to bringing the joys of the universal language to the wider world.  

You knew fairly early on that you wanted to be in radio, right?

I got into radio through music. I moved to New Jersey the summer I turned 13, and I didn’t really know anyone, so I had plenty of time to learn guitar and listen to music.

Read more HERE!

Carolyn Vega is a manuscripts cataloger at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. On any given day, she’s combing through some of the most fascinating stuff this side of papyrus and telling the world about it at the library’s blog, Secrets From The Vault. We pulled her out of the stacks to talk about working with really old stuff and how historical odds and ends fill out the big picture.

Is “Cataloger for Historical and Literary Manuscripts” really just an awesome way of saying “Librarian for Really Old Stuff”?

Well, manuscripts means pretty much anything you can think of that hasn’t been run through a printing press: Letters, drafts of novels and poems and essays, commonplace books, diaries, and lots of other odds and ends like Dickens’ cigar case and a lottery ticket signed by George Washington.

Read more HERE.