From his New York Times June 24, 2020 obit:
Mark Seiden, an independent computer security consultant who met Mr. Hawley in the early 1980s when they were both working at IRCAM, a music lab in Paris, and eventually hired him at Lucasfilm, compared Mr. Hawley’s exploits to those of George Plimpton, the writer whose participatory kind of journalism had him masquerading as a boxer, a professional football player, a circus performer and a stand-up comedian.
“Plimpton was a famous dilettante,” Mr. Seiden said. “Mike was just as a diverse as Plimpton — except he wasn’t a dilettante.”