February 26, 2021
Ato Blankson-Wood and James Cusati-Moyer met the summer before the went to grad school at Yale. "It was Ato's birthday party," Cusati-Moyer remembers. "I was told by a mutual friend that Ato and I were going to be best friends." Blankson-Wood was told the same thing by the same mutual friend. Though both had a bit of natural skepticism, it was "pretty early on," Blankson-Wood recalls, that they realized it was true, "just kindred spirits." "We had this natural gravitational pull," Cusati-Moyer adds, "not just in the classrooms, but as human beings. We have this sense of home within each other."