Ken Fisher, one of the co-founders of Ars Technica, may be just a pen-protector expression of the Condé Nast way. After we discussed our common interest in fourth-century Coptic texts — O.K., he talked, I listened — he said that he had been approached by a number of parties interested in buying the site. After talking to people at Wired.com and Reddit, he and his partners decided that the Condé Nast way left them the best chance of developing what had been a hobby on steroids into a business.When I first read this quote in a NYT piece on Condé Nast's investments in tech publications, I figured that Fisher just meant that he had read one of the translations of the Nag Hammadi Library or the like. But when I found his brief bio at the Ars Technica site, I realized my error:
I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Religion at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I'm now working on my dissertation, and hope to be finished in a few years. I have worked in IT for most of my "career years," performing senior administrative functions at two different universalities, as well as running my own consulting business on the side. I tend now to focus all of my energy on my studies, but I still consult from time to time to pay the bills.He's the real thing. Cool.
UPDATE: Brent Landau, Harvard doctoral candidate in NT and early Christianity, e-mails to say that Ken Fisher "is definitely the real deal" and that he is doing his dissertation on ritual practice in the Gospel of Philip.
