Background
He was born in Chicago and has lived in New York City, Paris and San Francisco.
director philosopher author poet
He was born in Chicago and has lived in New York City, Paris and San Francisco.
Mandel was educated at the University of Chicago, where he studied with philosophers Richard McKeon and Hannah Arendt, novelist Saul Bellow, classicist and translator David Grene, and art critic Harold Rosenberg, among others, and in Chicago"s jazz and blues clubs (eg Theresa"s, The Burning Spear and especially The Sutherland Lounge where he was a regular from his early teenage years).
Tom Mandel"s name at birth was Thomas Oskar Poeller. He was the child of Jewish immigrants who fled Vienna (after the Anschluss) and then Vichy France (after France"s defeat by Germany). A first marriage in Chicago produced two daughters, Jessica and Sarah.
He has also lived in New York City, Paris, San Francisco and Lewes, Delaware.
In his twenties, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois and was also an editor at the Macmillan Company and a consultant to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Becoming interested in collaborative technologies and social computing in the early years of the Internet, he went on to found and/or help found several technology companies.