About the Author

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen is a New York-based staff writer at Time. She writes about workplace, business and society trends for the magazine and Time.com. Of late these trends included snooping bosses, teen interns and cubicles of the future.

Cullen joined the magazine in 2001 as a Tokyo correspondent. Born and raised in Kobe—a harbor city known for beer-fed beef and one heck of an earthquake—she returned to her home country to write about women who fetishize black U.S. servicemen in Okinawa, Asia's plastic surgery phenomenon, and Japan's pop-star machinery. She was interviewing the buxom Kano sisters at their favorite restaurant when the planes hit the World Trade Center. The next morning, the animation director Hayao Miyazaki refused to postpone a long-begged-for interview, and then stormed out when he found her questions insufficiently stimulating (he later returned, apparently mollified after a smoke).

Back in the U.S., Cullen wrote an article for Time in 2003 about the trend toward personalized and often wacky funerals and burials among baby boomers. That assignment led inexplicably to her first book, "Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death" (HarperCollins, August 2006). For the book, Cullen traveled around the country with her new baby in tow, crashing a tango funeral in Washington, D.C., biodegradable burials in Westminster, S.C., and a festival for a frozen dead guy in Nederland, Colo. The result is a travelogue of death, life and all-American kookiness (a chapter on caskets is excerpted in Time).

Cullen feels she's excellently suited to write about jobs, seeing as she's held so many. She was previously a staff writer at Money magazine, and has been an editor or reporter for Financial Planning, Adweek and Ladies' Home Journal. She learned at 23 that she made for an autocratic, workaholic and generally lousy boss when she became editor-in-chief of a ragtag group of free newspapers. She's contributed travel writing and essays to The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Bon Appetit (that essay was selected for the anthology Best American Food Writing 2000). As an International Reporting Project (then Pew) fellow in 2000, she vaguely studied the changing role of women in Japan. Cullen graduated from Canadian Academy International School in Kobe, Rutgers College in New Jersey, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She lives in New Jersey with her husband Christopher Cullen, a clarinet player, their toddler Mika and a basset hound named Hoover.