I am start­ing a lit­er­ary stu­dio with some very tal­ented folks, which is yet to be announced.

I’ve also focused on the evolv­ing infra­struc­ture of jour­nal­ism. I’ve played a lead role in the Knight News Chal­lenge, a $25 mil­lion ini­tia­tive to sup­port news inno­va­tion, and was a pro­ducer in News Foo camp, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between O’Reilly Media, Google and Knight Foun­da­tion. I’ve also worked to bring jour­nal­ism con­tent to the 2011 SXSW Inter­ac­tive.

I’m also one of the lead orga­niz­ers of Hacks/Hackers, a rapidly expand­ing group that brings tech­nol­o­gists and jour­nal­ists together. It has more than two thou­sand mem­bers in seven coun­tries and rapidly expanding.

I am a trustee of Awe­some Food, part of the Awe­some Foun­da­tion. We give micro­grants to fur­ther food awe­some­ness in the universe.

I am on the boards of The Asian Amer­i­can Writ­ers’ Work­shop, the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integrity, and the Nie­man Foun­da­tion, plus a mem­ber of the New York Pub­lic Library’s Young Lions Committee.

I was a reporter at The New York Times for nine years, where I cov­ered tech­nol­ogy, Wash­ing­ton, crime, poverty and cul­ture. I spent the last two of those years report­ing and exper­i­ment­ing on City Room, the Times’ New York City metro blog.

I wrote a book called The For­tune Cookie Chron­i­cles, on how Chi­nese food is all-American and hit #26 on the New York Times best seller list. As a result, I am on TED.com speak­ing on Gen­eral Tso’s chicken. I also sur­vived an inter­view by Stephen Col­bert, made dumplings on Martha Stew­art and on Today Show dur­ing the 2008 Bei­jing Olympics.

Related to that, I am a pro­ducer on the doc­u­men­tary, The Search for Gen­eral Tso, with Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis of Wicked Del­i­cate films. We have received a devel­op­ment grant from the National Endow­ment of the Humanities.

For fun, we tried to launch Street Pac­man, a geo-enabled ver­sion of the 80s video game with real peo­ple.

NPR called me a “con­cep­tual scoop artist,” in part because of a pop­u­lar story I did on the “man date.” I was user 1324 on Face­book and have my own ver­sion of the red­dit alien (also known as “snoo”). I was listed in the Esquire “Women We Love” issue in 2003.

I received my degree in applied math and eco­nom­ics at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity (where I was vice pres­i­dent of The Har­vard Crim­son) and then went to Bei­jing Uni­ver­sity for a year on fel­low­ship and stud­ied inter­na­tional relations.

As a result of those col­lege com­puter sci­ence classes, I like to tin­ker with python, which is an ele­gant lan­guage. But I have long dis­cov­ered I am not a debugger.

I own a worldy well-traveled pur­ple hippo named Hubba Bubba.