California's Imperial Valley is a long way from Richmond, Va., where TAYLOR ANTRIM, '96, grew up. And before profiling Jim Kuhn, '86, he'd never been near a hay farm. "I was driving east from San Diego into the middle of nowhere, trying to read a map and stay on the road, when I realized I don't even know what alfalfa looks like," says Antrim, '96. The San Francisco-based journalist has covered everything from wineries to books (he's an editor at Wine & Spirits and writes reviews for the San Francisco Bay Guardian), but Kuhn's story may have been his biggest challenge yet. "He was going on about Sudan grass and the difference between Jersey and Holstein cows," says Antrim, "and I felt a little over my head. I kept thinking, 'When do I get to ride the tractor?'"
Bay Area freelancer NINA SCHUYLER, '86, is equally at home penning poetry for literary journals or reporting tech and business stories for PC World, Working Woman, Health and Newsday. But then, she's had an ambidextrous education: economics at Stanford, a law degree at Hastings and, in progress, an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University while she writes her first novel. Schuyler grew up in Washington state and looked back north to situate the book, whose anthropologist heroine probes the mysteries of an obscure British Columbia tribe--and her own marriage. In this issue, Schuyler covers Stanford's ventures in distance education. She has mixed feelings about online learning. "I think if it's used in conjunction with classroom learning, or some form of community, it's a really valuable tool," she says. "It's easy to marvel at technology, get blinded by its brilliance and forget to look at the value of learning alongside another human being."
NIGEL HOLMES has a thing for Eadweard Muybridge. It goes back to his art-student days in 1960s London, when he discovered an unbound copy of The Horse in Motion at a library clearance sale. "I have kept it within 50 feet of me ever since," the illustrator confides, calling the 1882 book "a wonderful artistic reference." Holmes has delivered lectures on Muybridge's photographic work but says it wasn't until he diagrammed the famous racehorse experiment that he fully appreciated the man's technical wizardry. A former graphics director for TIME, Holmes runs a design company in Westport, Conn. He's also the hand behind that shadowy horse running through the pages of our Farm Report--inspired by (whom else?) Eadweard Muybridge.
