Robert Travis Scott

Age: 57
Occupation: President, Public Affairs Research Council
Hometown: Tega Cay, South Carolina

The heavy guitar case hangs from Robert Scott’s fingers.

Blues man?

No.

Hard rock?

More like Spanish.

Six strings mine their way to the thick muscle that separates one chamber of the human heart from another, puncturing it, bringing diverse people closer.

Classical.

Strings wider apart on the frets than the kind Jimi Hendrix or Robert Johnson strummed. Music on the page that looks more like stars than the canyon chords of American tunes.

“I’m taking lessons,” the president of the Public Affairs Research Council says with a half-grin. He talks over the thwack and unclasping of his leather case.

The guitar has its own stand in the corner of his office, where its rich wood echoes every conversation, every topic parsed and paraded for the pageantry of thought.

Scott is already a pretty keen musician, it turns out.

After high school, he made a decent wage strumming on dueling banjos, Deliverance-style, at North Carolina stage shows.

His people were modern-day vagabonds—he doesn’t have a hometown, though Tega Cay comes closest—and he picked up the traveling itch in his youth.

Baton Rouge settled him after stints in Bologna, Italy, Washington, D.C., and the banks of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.

His soul wanders again, now, as he learns classical melodies. “Folk guitar is fun, and I like to play,” he says. But, “Until you have a teacher, you don’t begin to understand the depth of what you’re doing.”

His mission—at work, too—is to learn and teach.

Through the written word, he deepens understanding. He presses on the tension of sensory, surface reactions.

A lifelong member of No Party, he would rather delve in than riff on specific topics.

“I don’t like ‘he said, she said’ journalism,” explains the former Capital Bureau chief of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

We would all be better knowing instead of opining, he insists.

And so he pours himself into giving common people and high-level politicians the meat they need to lead. The reports he and his staff draft fuel wisdom.

They carve, resting with dissonance, resisting the chord of constant agreement.

“We write for people who give a damn. And more people give a damn than you think.”