Indy intern Talya Meyers laughed as she recounted her mother’s warning “to stay away as far as possible” from journalism: “My entire life, she told me newspapers were dead if not on life support.” Happily for us, Meyers finally ignored her mom, a writer with the Los Angeles Times … but not until she’d finished her Stanford dissertation on Muslims in Renaissance literature — think Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata — and began lecturing at UCSB. Meyers recently came home to a journo career writing on such topics as domoic acid poisoning and Santa Barbara’s March for Science. She also teaches a class called “The Postconsumer World,” in which students consider a life other than one built on money and success. Yep, living the dream.