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I just received (here in New Delhi, India where I am giving some lectures at the moment) the news that Tom has passed away. I am very, very sorry to hear of this and wish to send my heartfelt sympathy to his wife, Alice, and his family. There is much to say about Tom's intellectual contributions to the fields of economics and public policy, and I will address that more fully in due course. First and foremost, however, and speaking from this state of grief, I have a more personal reaction. I simply want to declare that Thomas C. Schelling was like a surrogate father to me. We were colleagues together at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard from 1982 until 1990. In those years I was a young economist, confused about how to reconcile my interests in pure theory with my commitments to racial equality and social justice. Tom took me by the hand, and persuaded me that there was no contradiction between these whatsoever. During this time, he taught me much about being a scholar and even more about being a man. I will always remember the excitement and the joy of working closely with him at the Kennedy School in the 1980s. And, I shall never be able to repay his kindness during what, due to certain personal challenges that I faced, proved to be some of the darkest days of my life. It pains me greatly to know that he is no longer with us. I can only pray now, at this geographic remove, that Alice and his surviving children will find he strength to carry-on at this difficult time. I wish that I could be there with them now, but I will be constantly them in my thoughts.The Tom Schelling whom I got to know in the 1980s at Harvard had incredibly broad interests; a playful mind; was a master of strategic analysis; was in command of an impressively elegant writing style; and had a gift for imaginatively linking the insights of economic theory with the imperatives of public policy. At his instigation, we created and co-taught a course called “Public Policy in Divided Societies.” There I encountered and read deeply the writings of such scholars as Amartya Sen; Albert Hirschman; Erving Goffman; Leo Strauss; Kenneth Arrow; Robert Merton (Sr.); Howard Raiffa; Mancur Olson; Michael Spence; Harold Isaacs; Jon Elster; Thomas Pettigrew; Michael Walzer; Gunnar Myrdal; Thomas Kuhn; Robert Jervis; and others … (which is to say, even though I had a Phd in economics from M.I.T. I nevertheless got a real education!) And so did our students. With Tom's encouragement and inspiration, they wrote papers investigating such topics as: the Roma in Europe; the indigenous in Central America; untouchabililty in India; slave maroon communities in the Caribbean; skin color caste in the 19th century cities of New Orleans and Charleston; the sign language vs. lip-reading debates among the deaf; the affectation of name and accent changes to disguise ethnic/regional origins; collective punishment; group-based feelings of pride and shame: the public goods problems associated with collective reputation; racial profiling; stigma; explanations for the sexual divisions of labor at home and in the workplace; the inequality-promoting implications of endogamy and assortative mating, and much more … In my conversations with Tom Schelling some 30 years ago -- connected with the course and also more generally (since my office at KSG was just next door to his, intimate communication between us came to be the norm) -- we discussed many conceptual puzzles, and he helped me to understant how a broad-minded economist might provide and account for  the workings of such real-world phenomena as: rumors; seduction; riots; “passing for white”; plausible deniability; signaling; the value of strategic imprecision; the dangers of group think; code words and dog-whistle politics; discursive taboos and naked emperors; knowledge of another’s state of knowledge; image-management and strategic behavior in public; difference between promises, threats and bluffs... In short, I incurred an enormous intellectual debt to Tom in those years, one which I shall never be able adequately to discharge … He forever altered my way of thinking about the intersection between economic theory, social policy  and race – in the United States and throughout the world. I am the scholar that I am today, in large part, because of what I gleaned from these interactions with Tom Schelling. I came to love him dearly, and to rely on his sage advice. And I am now left to wonder what I will do without it. GL