I grew up half city boy and half country boy. During the school year my family lived in New York City, but we spent the other three months at our country home in upstate New York. As I grow older I find myself more drawn to natural environments, but I still feel perfectly at home on a crowded city sidewalk. Each environment is equally rich in its own way. In the forests and fields I’m bombarded by a dozen different bird calls; in the city I’m bombarded by a dozen different languages.

Like many other technically minded people who grew up in the 1960s, I became fascinated early on by computers and realized that I had a rare aptitude for them. I landed my first computer-programming job in 1968, at age 14, this being a time when people with formal education in the field were few and far between.

I didn’t see any point in studying computers in college, since my main interests lay elsewhere. I flirted with majoring in folklore and mythology, then switched to math, and ended up with a degree in English literature. After college I used my copious income to travel around the world and climb mountains. In 1997 bought a small telescope and became obsessed by stargazing.

By amazing good fortune Sky & Telescope magazine offered me a job as assistant editor in 2003, which I accepted eagerly despite the 50% pay cut. After all, how many other jobs could I find that combined my expertise in astronomy, math, computers, writing, folklore, and mythology? In any case I had recently been laid off in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, and taking a job that fell in my lap seemed easier than looking for a different computer job. I continued to work full-time at S&T until 2014, when I changed my status to contributing editor to give myself more time to travel.