Full Pursuit

The Jared Cohen résumé is a formidable document. It informs you that the recent Stanford graduate is fluent in Swahili, speaks Congolese, Ugandan, Tanzanian, Kenyan and Spanish, and is bearing down on Arabic, Farsi and Korean; that he is the author of One Hundred Days of Silence, an award-winning examination of the 1994 Rwanda genocide; that he spends summers working at the Department of Defense, with top-secret clearance; that he also worked at the Department of State, where his study of Zimbabwe’s swift collapse drew the ire of President Robert Mugabe; that he otherwise works with the Brookings and Hoover think tanks; that he’s a Rhodes scholar bound for Oxford in October; and that, for good measure, he’s an accomplished wood carver, sculptor and painter. Perhaps out of politeness, the résumé does not get around to mentioning that he was an all-state goalkeeper at Weston High School.