Who We Are
MAX KEILSON
What's your favorite travel story?
In 2016, I went to Spain alone. While there, I spent a few days in San Sebastian. On a stormy Monday night, I sat in a bar for hours, eating tomatoes with olive oil, drinking Rioja, and talking with the regulars. Remembering that time, hanging out with a bunch of older Asturians, reminds me that people are fundamentally all people, regardless of what separates them.
If you had to have a museum dedicated to one subject, what would it be?
Hawaiian shirts. Most people don't know much about the culture that spawned them, and life is better when you're flyin' Hawaiian.
When you're not making tea, what do are you doing?
You can find me riding my bike, cooking, reading, tending to my fire escape garden, pretending I can climb, obsessing about ways to reduce my environmental impact, and shredding the gnar.
JON EPSTEIN
What do you do when not brewing tea?
Run with Dashing Whippets and November Project, play basketball in a summer camp league, and aspire to be a golfer. On the weekend I ruminate on David Brooks, ponder British politics, and spend too much time on prose at the expense of fiction.
Favorite travel story?
Getting my wisdom teeth in, in Johannesburg, South Africa, summer 2013. The dentist I went to had no electricity that day. Folks there, really folks in most parts of the world, are problem solvers. The dentist offered to pull them on the spot with a small battery powered flashlight. I went with Plan C, waiting three weeks to be back in the US, ameliorating the pain with salt-water, but really appreciate the guy's determination to get the job done.
If you could open a museum of one subject, what would it be?
Victorian books. It was the dawn of globalization and the democratization of information. The diversity of Anglo-American reactions are endlessly creative and intriguing and offer a lesson for today. The artwork is equally as impressive as the prose; each picture offers a thousand interpretations.
