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Personal. I was born in 1986 in northern Minnesota, a cold, isolated, and strange place depicted pretty well in Fargo. I moved states with my mother when I was 14, and for economic reasons attended a public school and state university in Iowa City, a special place I miss; to the right is an amusing picture from high school. As an undergraduate, I acquired the name 'Kurt Ludwig Sylvan', lived in the basement of a bookshop, and worked in several bookshops, the Iowa Law Library, a Procter & Gamble factory, and the Iowa Law, Health Policy, and Disability Center. I moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2008 for graduate school at Rutgers. When I wasn’t working on philosophy, I went to New York City to take bad pictures, imagining at first that it was the New York in which the Velvet Underground flourished, but eventually realizing that it had become the New York of American Psycho, except with knowledge-economy rich kids living in all the places that were still cool and for-the-many in the 1980s. Since 2014 I’ve lived in Southampton, England.
My brilliant and wonderful partner Kate Sylvan is a dual UK/American citizen who was born in the UK (though we met and got married in America). On September 28th 2016, we were thrilled to bring home our first kid, Edward ('Teddy') Felix Sylvan. At present, his favorite things are stories, small animals, rocks, imagining himself performing everyday adult tasks ('I'm going to Sainsbury's to pick up blueberries for baby Bertie'), and asking 'Why?' in odd cases which end up making me sound anti-philosophical. (Example Dialogue. Me: 'That's a chair.' Teddy: 'Why?' Me: 'It has a certain function, namely, [blah blah blah].' Teddy: 'Why?' Me: 'That is its nature.' Teddy: 'Why?' Me: 'It just is its nature!') On May 12th 2019, we had our second kiddie, Albert ('Bertie') Ernest Sylvan. He is now 1. He can crawl, almost walk, and make many kinds of sounds (stay posted). His favorite things to do are what we call 'Bertie crimes' --- i.e., things that little babies shouldn't do, like speed-crawling off to find papers or books to tear, trying to eat flowers, or putting dirt in his hair. He also likes berries and bagels. We also have a cat (Seneca) from the New Jersey street. We are trying our best not to relegate him to the margins of the household, though he has fallen to the bottom of this page. (Updated May 30th, 2020.)
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