Robert Eshelman-Håkansson was a journalist who worked for Vice Media and the Nation, and taught at Columbia University in New York City. He began his career in journalism reporting from the Middle East. More recently, his writing has covered science and the environment. He also served in the San Francisco city government as deputy to the president of the Board of Supervisors.

The only child of two factory workers, during his teenage years Eshelman fell in love with the dissonant sounds and iconoclastic aesthetics of punk rock. Through punk rock’s outlaw and DIY sensibility, Eshelman became intensely politicized. First as an anarchist, then as a Marxist, he maintained a life-long commitment to serving the interests of working people and opposing oppression by corporations, the rich, and corrupt governments.

In 1991, at age seventeen, Eshelman graduated from high school in Telford, Bucks County, and with his meager savings from a dishwashing job, departed for Philadelphia. There he lived in a squat in West Philly that had been taken over and rehabbed by young renegades; he worked as a bike messenger and at a political bookstore called Wooden Shoe Books. A compulsive reader, Eshelman would eventually earn two Ivy League degrees, but he did not even start college for another dozen years.