It’s been amusing to see my son Tom Christensen respond to the fact that there is a well-known China expert at Princeton, and until recently at the State Department, whose name is Tom Christensen. We met him at the Asian Studies Association conference and I saw him in New York last week, too, at the National Committee’s members’ meeting, where I told him that for Tom it’s like being a minor college basketball player named Michael Jordan. While I haven’t run into another Karen Christensen, I discovered quite a while ago, thanks to a Library of Congress cataloguer, that there is a Karen Christensen at UC Berkeley whose expertise crosses mine (she is a real academic, of course!), as she is at the College of Environmental Design. And she is also a Sage author.

This train of thought inspired by work on the Encyclopedia of Sustainability. I just noticed that Whole Foods Market has a global produce buyer, who spoke recently at a sustainable food conference, called Karen Christensen. Here’s her bio, which says “From bananas to broccoli rabe, Christensen is a wealth of knowledge of all things grown from the earth.”

Better all round than a friend of mine who had a Canadian porn star as a namesake. I guess in Canada porn stars stick to their birth names – my friend’s name was a perfectly ordinary one.