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Yalies of the Week
One band member is named Twist, another is Shout, and they’re nearly as popular as the Beatles—among preschoolers. That’s the Fresh Beat Band, now in its third season on Nickelodeon and, as of February 2, on tour, with tickets selling out in a day. At Yale, keyboardist Shout, aka Thomas Hobson ’04, majored in theater studies and sang in the a cappella group Shades. Now he favors red shirts, giant balloons, and a bright blue plastic car as the band performs such episodes as “Cool Pool Party” and “The Wizard of Song.” When a friend told him about the Nickelodeon audition, Hobson recalls,“I was kind of full of myself and was saying, ‘I went to Yale—I’m not going to do a kids show.’ Then my friend reminded me that I was unemployed.” Pride swallowed, the Yalie went to the audition and the rest, as they say, is history—er, theater studies.
In the 65 years since Benjamin Spock ’25 published his bestseller Baby and Child Care, babies and children probably haven’t changed much. But their care has. And their environment. And their parents. So much that “the new Dr. Spock”—Robert Needlman ’81, ’85MD, the Ohio pediatrician who revised and updated the classic owners’ manual for well-meaning parents—has added sections on ADHD, obesity, nontraditional families, and other contemporary concerns. An English major at Yale who went on to medical school, Needlman never lost his love for books. In Boston, he cofounded a charity that enlists pediatricians to give free books to parents of young children. In an interview with an Akron newspaper, Needlman compares revising Spock to “working on the translation of the Bible.” He once interrupted dinner with Spock’s widow, Mary Morgan—essentially a job interview for revising the book—so he could read a bedtime story to his daughter, Grace, over the phone. That was years ago, during preparations for the eighth edition, published in 2004. This week the 65th anniversary edition was released. The illustrator: Yale art major Grace Needlman ’11.
The phrase “Connecticut schools” might conjure images of blond children, green lacrosse fields, and black Lexuses. Despite Connecticut’s wealth, however, “our performance is getting eclipsed by other states, and we have the largest achievement gap in the country,” new education commissioner Stefan Pryor ’93, ’06JD, told a Wall Street Journal blogger. “It’s shameful.” Governor Dannel Malloy, who appointed Pryor last fall, has proclaimed school reform a top priority this year. A recent Education Week report card gave Connecticut near-failing grades for school accountability, college readiness, and the achievement gap. The state’s education website minces no words: “Nearly 1 in 5 Connecticut students does not complete high school in four years,” one headline declares. Below that: “Mathematics and Reading Results Reveal Many Concerns for Connecticut.” The son of public school teachers, Pryor held his first government position, on the New Haven Board of Aldermen, as a Yale undergraduate. Later he cofounded a New Haven charter school and sat on the board of its parent organization (prompting conflict-of-interest accusations from some critics), then went to work for his law school friend Cory Booker ’97JD, mayor of Newark, New Jersey. This week, Pryor announced a departmental reshuffling. Without spending more money, he will create new positions for chief accountability officer, chief talent officer, and—most ambitiously—chief turnaround officer.
If your image of the Federal Communications Commission still revolves around handing out broadcast licenses and regulating George Carlin’s “seven dirty words,” it’s time for an update. Zachary Katz ’99, ’05JD—newly named as the commission’s chief of staff—is working on such issues as open Internet access and shifting the FCC’s rural-service focus from land lines to broadband. Katz, whose promotion comes just seven months after he was named the FCC’s chief counsel, “has public interest in his DNA,” one public-interest advocate says.
It is one of the peculiarities of New Haven politics that Yale students control an entire ward of the city, and thus a seat on the Board of Aldermen. Since 1981, that seat has almost always been occupied by a Yale student or recent graduate, and the newest incumbent, Sarah Eidelson ’12, was sworn into office on January 1 along with 13 other rookies on the 30-person board. Eidelson, a native of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, was elected in November over sophomore Vinay Nayak. Both ran as independents, but Eidelson had the backing of three Democratic alders from neighboring districts and support from local unions. She says she never expected to hold public office—and especially not before she reached legal drinking age. (She is 20.) “I’ve been more interested in community organizing,” she says, “but the exciting thing about the Board of Aldermen is that it’s so local it’s kind of the same thing.”
Yale students want advice on their sex lives—from university administrators. So says a report on the “campus climate,” co-written by a woman who is about to become responsible for putting it into action. Last spring, Yale president Rick Levin ’74PhD tapped four alumni to report on the campus climate, amidst a federal investigation into whether Yale has a “hostile sexual environment.” On December 20 he named one of the four, Kimberly Goff-Crews ’83, ’86JD, to the new position of vice president for campus life, as well as the existing job of university secretary. The current secretary, Linda Lorimer ’77JD, gains a new title—vice president of the university—and will continue many of her existing responsibilities. The new position elevates students’ concerns to the highest level, Levin suggested in his announcement: “The provost has responsibility for the advancement of the faculty and the vice president for human resources and administration supports our staff, but no one in the officer group represents the students.” Goff-Crews, who will begin at Yale next summer, currently holds a similar position at the University of Chicago, where she has gained a reputation for consultation and consensus, even when it slows down decision-making. In the Yale report, issued last month, Goff-Crews and her coauthors wrote that students struggle to “navigate a confusing social scene that floats on too much alcohol (or other drug use) and casual intimacy, with too little support for (or models of) healthy sexual relationships.” Yalies, they wrote, “are looking for guidance about the values the university’s leaders think should frame healthy … relationships.” The Yale Alumni Magazine is closed for winter recess. The next Yalie of the Week will appear on January 6, 2012.
What they teach journalists: “If your mother says she loves you, get a second source.” What they teach at Yale Law School: “If you can make an argument with a straight face, make it.” Davan Maharaj ’95MSLJ, a career journalist who earned a master’s of studies in law at Yale, will likely draw on both sources of wisdom when he steps into his new job as top editor at the Los Angeles Times. Current editor Russ Stanton abruptly resigned this week after four years, three Pulitzer prizes, and newsroom staff cuts of nearly 40 percent. He gave no reason, prompting rumors that more cutbacks loom. The last three editors quit over… cutbacks. “I am humbled and honored to lead one of the most talented and resilient newsrooms in the nation,” Maharaj said, apparently with a straight face. “Our commitment to delivering high-quality journalism remains unwavering.” The Times’s parent Tribune Company is in bankruptcy. Our advice to Maharaj: if Mother Tribune says she loves you, get a second source.
The long list of official Republican presidential contenders includes zero Yale alumni. But one Yalie—John Bolton ’70, ’74JD—suddenly found his name in the mix this week. Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker who has surged in the polls to challenge front-runner Mitt Romney, said that if elected, he would ask Bolton to be his secretary of state. Under President George W. Bush ’68, Bolton served as ambassador to the United Nations—an organization he had harshly criticized—on a recess appointment, then resigned because he couldn’t win Senate confirmation. Gingrich’s announcement that he would name Bolton to the job now held by Hillary Rodham Clinton ’73JD (a Yale Law School contemporary of Bolton) won praise from conservative activist Gary Bauer and applause from the Republican Jewish Coalition. Bolton, who flirted with a presidential run himself, did not comment.
A year ago, Da’Vine Joy Randolph ’11MFA was a student at the Yale School of Drama. Now she’s singing “I’m Outta Here.” Randolph will belt that song this spring in her Broadway debut as Oda Mae Brown, a “phony storefront psychic,” in Ghost: The Musical. Based on a 1990 movie starring Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, Ghost tells the story of a murdered young man trying to communicate with his grieving wife. It opened this year in London’s West End, and London leads Caissie Levy and Richard Fleeshman will reprise their roles on Broadway—but newcomer Randolph was named this week to play the role based on Whoopi Goldberg’s Oscar-winning film performance. Another drama school grad, Bryce Pinkham ’08MFA, also landed a role as a friend of the dead man. Previews begin March 15, with an April 23 opening.
For the past couple of years, New Yorkers have been abuzz about the High Line, a linear park built on an abandoned elevated railroad track. Now comes James Ramsey ’99 with the Low Line. A Manhattan architect and former NASA engineer who also designs “luxury chicken residences,” Ramsey is working with tech entrepreneur Dan Barasch to turn an abandoned underground trolley terminal into a park. Officially called Delancey Underground, the proposed park would use “fiber-optic technology to channel in natural light,” the New York Times reports—“enough light, in fact, to allow photosynthesis to occur.” “It’s a little perverse, a little like science fiction,” Ramsey says of his “remote skylight” technology. “But we realized that we have the technology to grow grass and trees underground.”
In a week when Yale students staged mock Israeli checkpoints on campus to dramatize their support for Palestinian freedom of movement, Sari Bashi ’97, ’03JD, was continuing her legal battle against the real thing. Bashi used a Yale Law School fellowship in human rights to establish Gisha, an Israeli organization that advocates for freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This week landed her in the news on several fronts: endorsing a protest by Palestinian “Freedom Riders” who were arrested for trying to take a public bus from the West Bank to Jerusalem without a permit; criticizing as too little an Israeli decision to loosen some restrictions on materials coming into Gaza; and noting that a proposal to ban funding of political groups by foreign governments “is narrowly targeted to groups that the [Israeli] government does not support or appreciate.” That would include Gisha. In a speech early this year, Israel’s foreign minister named the rights group among a list of agencies that “help terrorists.”
“Senator for Life” sounds to us like a cushy semi-retirement post. But for Mario Monti ’68Grd—nominated to that position this week by Italy’s president—it’s a potential precursor to a lot of hard work and agita. Monti, a 68-year-old economist and president of Milan’s Bocconi University, is considered the leading candidate to succeed Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. With his nation in financial and political crisis, Berlusconi has promised to step down as soon the Parliament passes austerity measures demanded by the European Union. That’s expected to happen this weekend, and Monti—himself a former EU commissioner—is seen as the probable leader of a technocratic national unity government. “A respected economist considered to be above party politics,” Monti reportedly studied with Nobel Prize winner James Tobin at Yale (although he apparently didn’t complete his graduate degree here). As Europe’s competition commissioner in 2001, he won the nickname “Super Mario” for shooting down a proposed merger between General Electric and Honeywell. But not everyone thinks Monti is ideally suited to bring Italy’s economy back from the brink. As an adviser to Goldman Sachs, one critic says, he is “part of what one can rightly refer to as a ‘financial mafia’ that wrecked the world economy since 2008.”
William Orville DeWitt Jr. ’63 and George Walker Bush ’68 didn’t overlap as Yale students. But the two men have quite a bit in common. Sons of famous fathers (Bill DeWitt Sr. owned the old St. Louis Browns baseball team), they each earned a Harvard MBA. They merged their oil businesses. They co-owned the Texas Rangers. DeWitt raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bush’s presidential campaigns and sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (known as Piffy-Ab, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer). Bush and his father both played baseball at Yale. But DeWitt (whose family name graces the Yale softball field) grew up in the big leagues. And on October 28, he claimed his second World Series ring as chairman and majority owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, who triumphed over those very same Texas Rangers in St. Louis’s Busch (note the letter c) Stadium. Days later, DeWitt and Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak are interviewing candidates to replace skipper Tony La Russa, who announced his retirement after the championship parade. Meanwhile, the dynasty’s next generation—team president William “Billy” DeWitt III, Yale Class of 1990—is scaling back a Cardinals’ downtown real estate venture in hopes it won’t become a House of Cards.
When last we wrote about Sam Fox ’09, he was preparing to launch himself on an excruciating—um, we mean exhilarating—journey: a two-month run from Canada to Mexico along the Pacific Crest Trail. That’s about 40 miles a day, up and down the mountains, through blistering deserts and snow-covered peaks. This week, Fox finished his quest, a feat supposedly accomplished less often than climbing Mount Everest. In the process he raised some $150,000 for research on Parkinson’s disease—with which Sam’s mother, Lucy, was diagnosed a decade ago. Mother and son walked the last stretch to the Mexico border together on October 25, capping a route of 2,396.5 miles, or nearly 100 marathons.
Last December—just ahead of the uprisings roiling the Arab world—Omar Christidis ’04, ’07MBA, traveled the Middle East trying to instigate a different kind of revolution. His ArabNet RoadShow, a three-week bus tour, sought out young digital entrepreneurs and connected them with the investors, lawyers, and experienced business people who can help them succeed. In the words of a Huffington Post columnist: “The next frontier of the digital age is the Middle East and its evangelist is 28-year-old Omar Christidis.” Christidis himself adds: “There’s no reason why the next big thing—Google, Facebook or GroupOn—shouldn’t emerge from Lebanon, Jordan or Saudi Arabia.” After earning his bachelor’s and MBA degrees at Yale—where he cofounded the Yale Arab Alumni Association—Christidis returned to his native Beirut and launched ArabNet, which calls itself “the hub for Arab digital professionals and entrepreneurs to connect and learn.” After the road show, ArabNet sponsored a four-day “festival of digital” in Beirut last March, and this week held a two-day conference in Cairo, with an anticipated 600 attendees. Which just goes to show that in the digital age, people still know how to network in the flesh.
Theo Epstein ’95 “grew up second-guessing Red Sox general managers,” he once told the Yale Alumni Magazine. That was back in 2003, when Epstein—just 29 years old—was beginning his first season as GM of the team that had not won a World Series since Babe Ruth left Boston. It took just two years for Epstein’s BoSox to “reverse the curse,” winning the Series in 2004 and again in 2007. But this September, the team blew a nine-game lead in a collapse that was excruciating even for a non-fan to watch, and Epstein asked permission to talk to other potential employers. On Wednesday, reports surfaced that Epstein has made a deal to be the new general manager of the Chicago Cubs. (Nothing has been confirmed yet; there’s still the matter of buying out the last year of Epstein’s Red Sox contract to be worked out.) How long since the Cubs last won a world championship? Only 103 years.
Lynn Novick ’83 has come a long way since the Civil War. So have we all, you say—but that’s The Civil War, the PBS documentary that made Ken Burns a household name. Burns hired Novick, then 27 and learning her way around the documentary world, to help solve a last-minute crisis in finishing The Civil War. She so wowed him that Novick gained a permanent spot on the Burns filmmaking team, eventually becoming co-everything with Burns on this week’s opus, Prohibition. Burns calls her “the fastest learner I have ever come across.” Before Prohibition, Novick co-directed Burns projects on Frank Lloyd Wright, World War II, and baseball (last year’s The Tenth Inning). And yet they are considered Burns projects. “Ken’s light is very, very bright,” an associate tells the New York Times. “Lynn has equal billing in the film as director, and the sponsors say it’s a ‘Ken Burns film.’” As for Prohibition—which Novick calls “an utterly relevant, cautionary tale about the dangers of believing there can ever be a quick fix for complex social problems”—PBS seems to be trying to break from the slow and somnolent Burns & Novick image. Touting the “sex, violence, unruly women and thugs with tommy guns,” the network has put out a Facebook game. (“Would you be an FBI agent, bootlegger, flapper, teetotaler or mobster? Get your personal Prohibition avatar.”) Still, word has it that the documentary will—like a bottle of bootleg whiskey—help you fall asleep.
So what can you do with a double major in physics and medieval history? If you’re Ashton Carter ’76, and you follow it up with a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate in physics from Oxford, and decades of experience in nuclear arms control, counterterrorism, and military procurement, you could be the second-in-command at the US Department of Defense. Carter was in fact confirmed as Deputy Secretary of State on September 23 by a unanimous vote in the US Senate. Carter has moved between positions in government and academia throughout his career. Since 1984, he has been on the faculty at Harvard, where he is the Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But he took a leave during the Clinton Administration to work in the defense department, where he helped sort out the risky problem of nuclear arms in the former Soviet republics, and the state department, where he worked on North Korea policy. Since 2009, he has been back at the defense department as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics before taking on his new post.
Born and partly raised in Zambia, Namwali Serpell ’01 will travel there to research a novel—with help from a chic Manhattanite. Serpell, who also has a Harvard PhD and teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley, won a $25,000 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award to support work on her novel Breaking. She’ll use the award, presented on September 22, for in-country research on what she calls “an epic set over the course of the last century about three Zambian families—black, white, brown—caught in a cycle of desire and retribution.” Jaffe came to fame with a 1958 debut novel, The Best of Everything, which “told the melodramatic story of four nubile, cashmere-sweatered career girls torn between storybook romance and cutthroat corporate Manhattan,” in the words of the New York Times’s 2005 obituary. Her foundation gives awards each year to “six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.” Or, as one blogger wryly put it: “The Rona Jaffe Foundation: Encouraging women to forsake family responsibilities for wanton careers in letters since 1995.”
It’s a good thing Garth Neustadter ’12MM didn’t try to travel on September 11. The night before, the composer won a Primetime Emmy for a documentary score. On September 12, Neustadter told a reporter from his home state of Wisconsin that he was nervous about carrying the statuette aboard his flight from Los Angeles:
Fortunately, Neustadter, who is rather angelic-looking himself, made it to New Haven “without any problems,” he writes in an e-mail—“although it was evident that many of the TSA personnel enjoyed ‘inspecting’ my carry-on!” Now it’s back to school: the 25-year-old Emmy winner is a composition student at the Yale School of Music. His award-winning score, for the PBS documentary John Muir in the New World, “was recorded at Yale with members of the Yale Philharmonia, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Linden String Quartet,” according to a School of Music press release. Oh, and one more thing about that statuette, Neustadter told a blogger for his alma mater, Lawrence University: it’s heavy.
At 6'2" and 185 pounds, Taylor Ritzel ’10 (left) is one powerful woman. But it is her seat on a boatful of eight powerful women—the USA Women’s Eight, to be precise—that earns our interest this week. With Jamie Redman ’08 (right), Ritzel rowed her way to a spot as Yalie of the Week. Together, the former Yale teammates are one-quarter of the crew that captured a gold medal in the World Rowing Championships in Bled, Slovenia, on September 2. It was the sixth consecutive gold for the USA women, and the second straight in which Ritzel participated. In contrast to last year, when the American rowed to “an emphatic 3.7-second victory over Canada,” this year’s “much anticipated battle” between the US and Canada “featured one of the most competitive fields to date,” Rowing News reports. As for the notion that world champions are born, not made—or at least have to start training before they’re big enough to lift a racket or an oar—Ritzel notes in a e-mail that she and Redman “actually both started rowing at Yale, so a lot of credit is due to Will Porter, the head women’s crew coach there.”
Though Stanley Tigerman ’61MArch has been a constant and provocative presence in architecture for decades—especially in his native Chicago—this autumn is shaping up to be the Season of Stanley for the 81-year-old architect. First up, the Yale School of Architecture opened an exhbition last week centered on Tigerman’s drawings, which he is donating to the Yale University Library’s architecture archive. He also has two books coming out this fall: a collection of his writing on architecture titled Schlepping Through Ambivalence and an autobigography called Designing Bridges to Burn. As the exhibition suggests, Tigerman’s career has encompassed an odd mix of iconoclasm, social consciousness, and consumerism, and fun. He started out as a modernist under the sway of Paul Rudolph at Yale, but he later took a leading role in the post-modern reaction to modernism. (His 1978 photomontage of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall bobbing in Lake Michigan was a touchstone of the post-modern rebellion.) Although he designed high-end tableware and bedsheets in the 1980s and has regularly appeared on Architectural Digest’s list of the top 100 residential architects, he has also designed a Holocaust museum (in Skokie, Illinois) and housing for the homeless. And in 1993, he cofounded Archeworks, an alternative design school in Chicago that emphasizes collaboration and work for nonprofit groups. Four years ago, Tigerman told Architectural Record that he found socialy conscious work more rewarding. “Rich people don’t need me. There’re plenty of architects, good architects, to do villas for princes and princesses. I’m not needed. You see, you want to go where you feel you’re needed. I’ve worked in areas of social causes before and it’s very rewarding because you’re doing something for people who never had access to, say, good design.”
The last time a Yalie appeared in Major League Baseball as a position player (i.e. not a pitcher), the Dodgers were still playing in Brooklyn (we’re talking 1957)—until last Thursday, when Ryan Lavarnway ’09 was called up from Pawtucket to be the designated hitter for the league-leading Boston Red Sox. Tapped to fill in when Kevin Youkilis went on the disabled list, Lavarnway had played seven games for the Sox as of Wednesday night, hitting .304 with 7 hits and 3 RBI. Lavarnway, a 6'4" catcher from Burbank, California, left Yale after his junior year when he was taken in the MLB draft. He has been a standout hitter in the Red Sox farm system, and baseball watchers think he has a future in the majors. The return of designated hitter David “Papi” Ortiz from the disabled list on Wednesday left Lavarnway’s immediate future unclear, though. The Sox could keep him on or send him back to Pawtucket for the rest of August. But with the Oakland A’s coming to Boston’s Fenway Park this weekend, the stage is set for a rare event: Craig Breslow ’02, a relief pitcher for the A’s, is currently the only other Yalie in the majors, so there’s a chance, however remote, of an Eli-on-Eli duel at the plate this weekend. Breslow topped the Sporting News’s list of the “20 smartest athletes in sports” last year. The media have yet to weigh in on philosophy major Lavarnway’s mental prowess, but the blog Babes Love Baseball recently declared him “adorable.”
Surveying the stock market’s recent rollercoaster imitation, David Swensen ’80PhD reaches for a different amusement-park metaphor: “The Mutual Fund Merry-Go-Round.” That’s the headline of an August 14 op-ed that Swensen, Yale’s chief investment officer, wrote in the New York Times. But Swensen is not amused. Mutual-fund managers “face a fundamental conflict between producing profits for their owners and generating superior returns for their investors,” he writes. Through “pointless buying and selling,” they drive up their fees. What’s more, they use a rating system that encourages managers to “sell low and buy high.” Using blunter language, disgraced securities analyst Henry Blodget ’88 sums up Swensen’s position on his site Business Insider: “The Mutual Fund Industry Is A Huge Scam That Costs Investors Billions Of Dollars A Year.” Swensen avoids the word “scam” but calls for “aggressive, intelligent regulation.”
Amor Towles ’87 “arrived in New York in 1989 with diplomas from Yale and Stanford and dreams of becoming a writer,” we learn from the New York Times. “But he quickly noticed that all his friends who were waiting tables and pursuing art on the side looked just as tired as the office drones they were serving. So he joined an investment firm instead.” Surprising, perhaps, that 22 years later such a pragmatist would produce an “unabashedly romantic novel”—his first—that is also an NYT bestseller. Rules of Civility, which tells the story of a savvy, lovable, and upwardly mobile legal secretary in Depression-era New York City, is gathering glowing reviews from publications as varied as the Wall Street Journal, People, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Shelving a previous novel after five years’ toil, Towles—who still works at an investment firm—took a businesslike approach to this book. “I started Rules of Civility on January 1, 2006, and wrapped it up 365 days later,” he told one interviewer. “The book was designed with 26 chapters because over 52 weeks I could allot myself two weeks to draft, revise and bank each chapter. Not coincidentally, the book opens on New Year’s Eve and ends a year later.” But his inner romantic surfaced in talking with the Times: “I would’ve sold it for a penny, just to be able to say ‘O.K., I did it. … I always thought I was a writer on the inside, but after a few years of not writing you can’t make that claim anymore.”
When the space shuttle made its final landing last month, it left a little bit of Edward Cheung ’90PhD behind. That was on purpose: Cheung and the rest of NASA’s Robotic Refueling Mission team sent experimental equipment to the International Space Station in hopes of building the world’s remotest gas station. “Many communications satellite[s],” Cheung explains on his personal website, “have a limited life due to their fuel load at launch. If they could be refueled in space, it would mean a significant extension of their operating life and savings in operating costs”—and, not incidentally, a reduction in the “space junk” that’s cluttering up the cosmos. A robotics specialist, Cheung says his “work education” began at age five in his native Aruba, where he would take apart old electrical devices and then create his own gadgets. Decades later, he cemented the connection between his country and rocket science when he named a critical component of a Hubble Space Telescope Mission the ASCS/NCS Relay Unit Breaker Assembly (ARUBA) box. “The crew would be handling and interfacing with this box during installation,” Cheung recalled. “They would say the word ‘Aruba’ in space—perhaps for the first time.” Last year, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands bestowed upon Cheung the highest civilian order in the Dutch Kingdom: knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. For fun, the rocket scientist collects and restores pinball machines—including one called “Space Shuttle.” And he has automated many of his home electrical gadgets and appliances with a system he can control via “any phone in the world (including those inside the home), any browser over the internet, and”—eat your heart out, Dick Tracy—“from my wrist watch.”
Nancy Pelosi. Former secretary of labor Alexis Herman. Pakistani women’s rights activist Rubina Bhatti. Kamala Lopez ’85 joins their ranks this week as a winner of the National Women’s Political Caucus’s Woman of Courage Awards. Lopez, an actor and filmmaker, directed the 2009 movie A Single Woman, about Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to US Congress. (Not to be confused with A Single Man, or Solitary Man, or the 1970s Jill Clayburgh flick An Unmarried Woman.) Through her company Heroica Films, Lopez has also launched the ERA Education Project to promote the newly revived campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. The ERA project, she tells Fox News, “puts the American woman, her achievements and her earnings over the last century on a solid, irremovable foundation that will be proof against the winds of political changes.”
Wendi Deng Murdoch ’97MBA’s top-ten list of What I Learned at the Yale School of Management probably does not include pie-blocking. Or slapping. But those are the skills that put Murdoch in the global spotlight this week as she tried to defend her husband, Rupert, from a shaving-cream-pie-wielding protester in London. In video clips of the July 19 attack—during a Parliamentary hearing into the phone-hacking scandal that has shuttered one of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids, prompted numerous arrests, and threatens to topple the British government—Wendi Murdoch’s pink jacket and swift right arm stood out amidst the sea of confused men in dark suits. The Guardian called it a “Charlie’s Angel moment.” Katie Couric—seemingly reversing the couple’s 38-year age difference—dubbed her a “tiger mother.” And according to the New York Times, Wendi was “the Murdoch who may have emerged in the best light” from the hearing. On a more SOM-relevant note, the Times also noted that Wendi “acts as counselor to her husband and by all accounts has asserted influence in his global media empire. She has proved to be a particularly important asset as he has sought to develop his business interests in China,” where she was born. Producer of the new movie Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (from Fox Searchlight, part of the Murdoch media empire), Wendi also sits on the School of Management’s Board of Advisors. Maybe she’ll dispense advice on hand-to-pie combat.
She shares a last name and Yale College degree with her father. But politically and professionally, former first daughter Barbara Bush ’04 seems to have more in common with another ex-president: Bill Clinton ’73JD. Bush, who endorsed Obamacare last year and gay marriage this year, is cofounder and CEO of Global Health Corps. The nonprofit agency sends young people with backgrounds in business and tech and HR—but not medicine—to work with “high-impact” health care organizations around the world, as future leaders in “the movement for health equity.” Describing the work of one such fellow last year, she said: “His job is to do for the 1 million people of Zanzibar exactly what he did for The Gap—but instead of getting jeans to The Gap, he is working to get life-saving medicines into the hands of patients and hospitals that need them most.” Bush was at Yale this week as 68 new fellows began their training on campus. She stopped by Mory’s, where she and the fellows met with the Yale Club of New Haven and the Association of Yale Alumni.
By the time Matan Koch ’02 graduated from Yale at age 20, he had “educated this campus and had a significant impact on improving accessibility,” the director of the college’s Office for Students with Disabilities said in a write-up on “Graduating Yale Seniors with Exceptional Stories to Tell.” But Koch, a quadriplegic religious studies major who wrote two senior essays—one on Judaism and disability, the other on the history of people with disabilities at Yale—was just getting started. He picked up his law degree at Harvard, worked at Procter & Gamble and now at the New York law firm Kramer, Levin, Naftalis, & Frankel, and continued his advocacy for people with disabilities. On that last subject Koch, who was born with severe cerebral palsy, has now gained a famous ear: that of President Barack Obama, who announced on July 5 that he will nominate Koch for the National Council on Disability.
If the widow in question were ladylike, however, she wouldn’t be the heroine of an Eloisa James story. James is a bestselling romance novelist whose book covers burst with naked torsos and shapely thighs. But some of the titles—Pleasure for Pleasure, say, or The Taming of the Duke—also hint at James’s not-so-hidden identity as a Renaissance scholar. Under her given name, Mary Bly ’95PhD toils at her day job, teaching English at Fordham University. Outside the confines of the Jesuit-run university, she cranks out bodice-rippers that wink at Shakespeare and allude to Foucault and Eliot. Her 20 novels have sold six million copies, according to the Wall Street Journal, which adds: “Ms. James may be one of the few romance writers whose friends critique the ‘hetero-normacy’ of her plots.” (Bly, however, is no fan of the “bodice-ripper” convention, which robs female characters of their sexual agency: “my heroines,” she writes, “tend to do their own button-scattering.”) This Friday morning, “James” co-leads a workshop at the annual Romance Writers of America conference in New York City. Sadly, the conference is sold out. But if you act quickly, you can get hold of Bly’s scholarly work Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, published by Oxford University Press and available from Amazon for just $237.62. Sounds like it might have more in common with James’s work than you would think.
Stephen J. Kim ’99PhD, an arms expert who worked for the US departments of defense and state, faces up to 15 years in prison under the Espionage Act. His alleged crimes: leaking news to a Fox News reporter and lying about it. Kim, born in South Korea and raised in the Bronx, studied military and diplomatic history at Yale before going to work for the government. An expert on North Korea’s weapons, he briefed officials as high-ranking as Vice President Dick Cheney ’63. In March 2009, the State Department asked Kim “to speak about North Korea to a Fox News reporter, James Rosen,” the New York Times reports. Two months later, Rosen reported on a CIA analysis related to North Korea. Last August, Kim was charged with leaking “Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information” and then lying about his contacts with Rosen. Reporting on the case this week, the Times calls it part of “the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on leaks,” as opposed to spying. Writes a friend and fellow Yalie, UCLA law professor Kirk Stark ’94JD, on Kim’s legal defense website: “Even the government does not allege that Stephen revealed military secrets, operations or anything like Wikileaks.”
So you think Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are the only actors around who can do a South Boston accent? Oh, right—Wahlberg and DiCaprio and Christian Bale and Amy Adams and … Apparently Drama School grad Frances McDormand ’82MFA also has the Southie thing down pretty well. McDormand is perhaps still best known for her “singsongy Norwegian-American accent“ (“Yah? Yah, yah”) in Fargo, the 1996 Coen brothers movie. But this week she snagged a Tony for her performance in Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire’s South Boston drama. The play—about a financially strapped single mother thrown into confrontation with her old high school boyfriend, now a wealthy doctor—“maps the fault lines of social class with a rare acuity of perception while also packing a substantial emotional wallop,” the Boston Globe says. McDormand was “perhaps … channeling the character” at the Tony ceremonies June 12, where she “caused quite a stir by accepting her award wearing a denim jacket, glasses, and no make-up,” a WBUR blog post reports.
John T. Downey ’51 missed his first four Yale reunions for a dreadful and remarkable reason: he was a prisoner in China, shot down in 1952 while on a CIA mission and held for more than 20 years before being released as part of Richard Nixon’s opening to China. At his 60th reunion last weekend, Downey and his classmates watched a newly declassified CIA documentary about his story called Extraordinary Fidelity. The hour-long film, which was posted on YouTube on June 2, uses archival footage, interviews, and re-enactments to tell a story former CIA director George Tenet calls “one of the most remarkable in the 50 years of the Central Intelligence Agency”: how a mission into mainland China by Downey and fellow agent Richard Fecteau went awry, and how they endured harsh interrogation and solitary confinement during their two decades of captivity. The film was produced by the CIA for internal use, but was released this month in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. After Downey was released at age 46, he went to law school at Harvard. He eventually became a juvenile-court judge in New Haven, where the juvenile courthouse was named for him in 2002.
A longtime utility executive who also cofounded a leading environmental organization? A nominee for Secretary of Commerce who wins praise from both the business and eco-lobbies? Sounds too good to be true. If some congressional Republicans have their way, it will be. John Bryson ’69LLB, who helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council soon after graduating from Yale Law School, spent 18 years running a California electric company. Announcing his nomination on Tuesday, President Barack Obama emphasized Bryson’s “decades of business experience across a range of industries—from his role on the boards of major companies like Disney and Boeing to his leadership in the clean energy industry.” The US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable swiftly came out in support. Yet Republican opposition was equally swift, with Rep. Darrell Issa calling Bryson a “green evangelist” and Sen. James Inhofe saying he will work “actively to defeat” the nomination. If confirmed, Bryson will succeed another Yalie, Gary Locke ’72, whom Obama has tapped to become ambassador to China.
“With privilege comes responsibility,” Anthony Marx ’81 told Amherst College’s new grads at commencement this Sunday. Marx was quoting JFK and invoking Amherst’s “explicit commitment to an elite based not on inheritance but on merit.” In his eight years as president of the small Massachusetts college, Marx—who will leave this summer to run the New York Public Library—has walked the walk, making Amherst a leader in the drive to enroll low-income students while remaining highly selective. More than 22 percent of Amherst students receive federal Pell Grants, a jump of nearly 70 percent in the past five years. (Yale’s current figure is about 12 percent.) “We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Marx tells the New York Times’s David Leonhardt ’85. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top [income] quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”
Orphaned at age 12, John B. King Jr. ’07JD says New York City public schools “quite literally saved my life.” As New York State’s brand-new commissioner of education, he will now have the chance to extend that life-saving learning to millions of schoolchildren. Just 36 years old, King earned a bachelors from Harvard, a law degree from Yale, and a doctorate in education from Columbia. He has cofounded and taught at charter schools in Boston and New York. As the state’s deputy commissioner for the past two years, he has been the education department’s “details person,” the New York Times reports—“preferring to sit in a room eating takeout and crunching numbers rather than dipping into Albany politics, which he found frustrating and divisive.” According to the Times, King’s unanimous election this week by the state’s Board of Regents makes him “among the nation’s youngest educational leaders,” as well as New York’s first black and first Puerto Rican education commissioner. Says the regent who formally nominated him: “Hollywood used to make movies about people like John King.”
Last September, when the American Civil Liberties Union called for a federal investigation of alleged police brutality in Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker ’97JD responded angrily to the “unnecessary aspersions” and “distortion of facts.” This week, when Justice Department officials announced they are launching said investigation, Booker stood by their side, calling the probe “free consulting” that will help him clean up the police force. “I’m pretty relieved and enthusiastic about working with the Department of Justice,” the mayor said. Seen as a rising political star, Booker—a Rhodes scholar who voluntarily moved into a public housing project after graduating from Yale Law School—is the only mayor on Time magazine’s 2011 list of the “most influential people in the world.” (Oprah Winfrey wrote his blurb.) This weekend, he takes a break from his political battles to host the Newark Peace Education Summit, at which the Dalai Lama and others will explore “the power of nonviolence.” Perhaps they and the DOJ will help make way for the OMPD.
Tall and handsome, smart and athletic, born to privilege yet successful in his own right, Dr. Richard Raskin ’55 had it all—except for a comfortable sex and gender identity. Those of us who grew up in the ’70s know the second part of Raskin’s story: the transformation into a woman, Renée Richards, and the world-famous fight for the right to play professional women’s tennis. Now a new documentary, Renée, tells the story of what the New York Times calls this “fascinating, melancholy figure, fiercely intelligent and inherently self-dramatizing.” Richards, still a practicing eye doctor at age 76, is as reluctant a movie star as she was a standard-bearer for transgender rights, says filmmaker Eric Drath: “It took a lot to convince her that her story is important. It’s inspirational. She has courage; she’s a pioneer. She broke every boundary.” The film, which debuted last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, makes it clear that Richards hersef harbors doubts about transgender athletes competing professionally against other women. But in an April 30 letter to the Times, she broke a different ideological boundary by endorsing same-sex marriage. Growing up, “my beliefs, mores and opinions were as conservative as those of the rest of my Horace Mann School and Yale College friends,” she wrote. “I never thought about marriage as anything other than between a man and a woman until longer than maybe I should have. And now I will state for the record that … any two people who want to solidify their relationship with a marriage certificate, and gain the civil rights and equality under the law that it ensures, should be allowed to do so.”
New Haven is full of Yalies Who Stayed: came here for college, liked the place, got a job, bought a home, settled down, got involved in local stuff. Michael Morand ’87, ’93MDiv, has taken that pattern to its extreme&mdash except, maybe, for the settling down part. An aficionado of all things Yale and all things New Haven, Morand is constantly on the move, from a planned food co-op to a community theater performance to a city plan commission meeting to a photo op with Paul Giamatti ’89, ’94MFA. (Morand’s Facebook posts this week included plugs for his dry cleaner, an environmentally themed New Haven high school, Easter brunch overlooking the Quinnipiac River, and the Yale Day of Service—twice.) So when Yale handed out its annual Seton Elm Ivy Awards this week—Elm to members of the New Haven community, and Ivy to Yale students, faculty, and staff—it had to give Morand a special Elm and Ivy Award. An associate vice president of the university, he recently shifted from his decade-long stint in the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, where he served as Yale’s public face (and hot pink socks) in New Haven’s City Hall and its neighborhoods. From his student days as a member of the city council, he moved on to serve on (or chair) the boards of the Chamber of Commerce, New Haven Public Library, Arts Council, and a multitude of other local organizations. Morand now divides his work time between Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications and the Association of Yale Alumni. He divides his play time between… everything else.
Lots of kids take a gap year between high school and college. Robert Hess ’15 has taken a chess year. The 19-year-old Grandmaster won last year’s Samford Chess Fellowship, which supported his coaching and travel to tournaments around the world. This week, he’s in St. Louis for the US championship, where his “red hot” play qualified him for the semifinals, which start Saturday. An aspiring finance guru and former hedge fund intern, Hess “strives to play innovative and creative games, a trait that makes him a dangerous competitor,” says his online bio. Lest you think he’s all brains and no brawn, Hess played JV football at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. He’ll never make it in the NFL—at least not on the field—but last year he was invited to play exhibition chess matches outside the home games of his beloved New York Jets. Hess “played 25 simultaneous games against all comers” outside the stadium, Bloomberg reports. “He never lost.”
Joseph “Chip” Skowron III ’98MD, ’00PhD, has a lot of letters after his name. This week, his lawyer says he would like to add a few more: not guilty. The physician and cell biologist, who left the medical field to work as a hedge fund manager, turned himself in to federal authorities April 13 on insider-trading charges. Skowron allegedly gave bundles of cash to a French doctor who provided inside information about a disappointing drug trial. Skowron—then at FrontPoint Partners—sold off stock in the drug’s developer, avoiding $30 million in losses. A criminal complaint accuses Skowron of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. He also faces civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Dr. Skowron intends to plead not guilty,” says his lawyer, James J. Benjamin Jr. of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, in a statement. “We look forward to responding to the allegations more fully in court at the appropriate time.”
“President Nixon was in no way connected” with a break-in at the Watergate Hotel office of the Democratic National Committee. Despite the criminals’ ties to his re-election campaign, Nixon bore no responsibility for the “third-rate burglary attempt” or the ensuing cover-up. The entire scandal stemmed largely from the “zeal” of Bob Woodward ’65 and Carl Bernstein “to create a Watergate story.” Until recently, that was the Watergate story as told by the official Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, which “rivaled nearby Disneyland as a purveyor of fantasy,” in the words of one editorial. But when the National Archives took over the library, historian Timothy Naftali ’83 undertook some serious truth-telling. Naftali’s overhaul of the museum’s Watergate gallery was supposed to open last July. Opposition from Nixon loyalists delayed the launch until last week. As library/museum director and curator of the Watergate exhibit, Naftali sifted through thousands of documents and the notorious White House tapes, as well as conducting more than 100 new video interviews. The product, writes a California historian, “tells the full story of what President Ford called ‘our long national nightmare’”—with an emphasis on those who refused to participate. “Their story is now preserved,” says Naftali, whose previous work includes research on Nazi war crimes. “Students who come here will learn that you can say no when asked to say or do something that’s wrong.”
William Cronon ’90PhD recently compared his governor, Scott Walker, to another famous Wisconsin politician: Senator Joe McCarthy. The key similarity, Cronon wrote, is Walker’s “contempt for those who disagree with him.” Count Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among those who disagree—and as a target of what some commentators call a McCarthy-style attack. In what he terms an an “abuse” of Wisconsin’s open records law, the state Republican party wants to read all of Cronon’s e-mails since January that mention Walker, Republican leaders, or the public-employee unions that are locked in mortal combat with the Republican governor. Cronon believes the GOP was inflamed by a blog post—which the professor labeled a “study guide”—that exposed national conservative influences behind the Wisconsin legislation stripping public employees of their collective-bargaining rights. Himself a public employee, Cronon is prohibited from using his state e-mail account for political activity. At the same time, state law protects confidential communications with and about students, and academic freedom protects faculty from political intimidation. “It is chilling indeed,” Cronon writes, “to think that the Republican party of my state has asked to have access to the e-mails of a lone professor in the hope of finding messages they can use to attack and discredit that professor.” It may be little consolation that he is no longer alone: a Michigan think tank is now demanding similar e-mails from labor professors at that state’s universities.
Back in November, we wrote about grand plans for reorganizing and expanding the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). The unanswered question at the time was where the money would come from for new faculty positions, especially at a time where vacancies are going unfilled in some parts of the university due to budget woes. On March 24 came the answer: a $50 million gift from telecommunications mogul John Malone ’63 that will fund 10 new professorships in a school that currently has 50. Malone, whose Yale degree was in electrical engineering, gave $24 million to build the Daniel Malone Engineering Center at Yale in 2005, which he named for his father. Forbes estimated last year that Malone is worth $2.4 billion; he made his fortune as a pioneer in cable television, building Tele-Communications Inc. into the largest cable company in the nation before it was acquired by AT&T. He is now chairman of Liberty Media, which owns parts of DirecTV, Expedia.com, Sirius XM satellite radio, the Atlanta Braves, and many other media operations. He’s also one of the nation’s largest private landholders.
One of his former students is the accused underwear bomber of Christmas 2009. Another was convicted of training with an Al Qaeda offshoot in Somalia. A third is charged with plotting sniper attacks at an American mall. In fact, “countless” former students of Yasir Qadhi ’09MPhil—though none of those three—“have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad,” the New York Times Magazine reports in a long feature article on Qadhi and his fundamentalist AlMaghrib Institute. His response: American Muslims should wage “jihad of the tongue, a jihad of the pen, a jihad that is not a military jihad.” For Muslims in other countries, “their responsibilities would be different.” The Texas-born, Saudi-raised Qadhi has become “one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam,” the magazine says, “uniquely deft at balancing the edicts of orthodox Islam with the mores of contemporary America.” A penitent ex–Holocaust denier, he is now living in Memphis and writing his doctoral dissertation for Yale, where he was the religious studies department’s first Saudi-educated student. “You admit someone from Saudi Arabia,” Islamic studies professor Frank Griffel told the magazine, “you don’t know how much intolerance you let into an American university.” But, the story goes on, he found Qadhi “profoundly intelligent” and “willing to engage in critical thinking.” These days, Qadhi is preaching ballots, not bullets: “American Muslims are at the forefront in battling Islamic extremism,” he declares, “because they have everything to lose.”
Like a lot of freshmen, Millie Tomlinson ’14 was eager to get home—to Derbyshire, England, in her case—for spring break last Friday. But squash coach Dave Talbott talked her into sticking around for the weekend and doing just one more teensy thing: playing in the college women’s national championship tournament at Dartmouth. Good thing he did: on Sunday, Tomlinson won the national individual title, beating the defending national champion—Harvard sophomore Laura Gemmell—in three straight games. Talbott called Tomlinson’s win “the icing on the cake of a dream season” that also included a national team championship for the Bulldogs. Tomlinson lost her debut match as a Yalie, against Penn back in December. But since then she has not lost a single game, winning 16 straight matches 30. Her individual national championship is the fifth won by a Yale woman, and the fourth since 2004.
During the closing weeks of last fall’s election campaign—often nicknamed the “silly season”—some of US Representative David Wu ’82JD’s staffers felt he was acting too silly, in a serious way. Revelations of a “staff intervention,” in which the Oregon congressman’s employees tried to get him to a psychiatric hospital, have prompted calls for Wu’s resignation. The seven-term Democrat had “the worst week in Washington,” wrote a Washington Post columnist; the weekly Portland Tribune editorialized: “the almost daily revelations about Wu’s behavior are undermining public confidence in his ability to serve Oregon and the nation.” The behavior included late-night e-mails to staff, written in the voice of Wu’s children and sent from his personal congressional account. One e-mail included a photo of Wu in his Halloween costume, a tiger suit. Wu has also admitted accepting prescription painkillers from a campaign donor. Six of his 20 staffers left after he won reelection. Appearing on Good Morning America last week, Wu explained: “Last October was not a good month. It was very stressful,” combining campaigning with his duties as a single father. But “I’m in a good place now,” he insisted: he’s getting the counseling and medication he needs, and has no intention to step down. While the controversy raises serious questions about mental illness, medical privacy, and an elected official’s duty to disclose, it appears Wu may weather the storm if his behavior stabilizes. After all, one supporter writes, “It’s not like he groomed a teenage intern for sex or got caught playing footsy in an airport lavatory. Besides, he’s going to turn these events into a teachable moment for all, urging everyone … to ‘seek help when they need it.’”
Robert Lopez ’97 “sang in church choirs throughout college and always suspected he’d return to sacred music,” says the bio on the website of the new Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. Lopez is the work’s cowriter. Whether or not Lopez really sang in church choirs (we confirmed that he did sing in the a cappella group Spizzwinks(?), he clearly learned some literary tricks at Yale. Irony, for instance: the musical’s scatological satire is about as far from sacred as Salt Lake City is from Uganda. That’s the sub-Saharan setting of the show (tag line: “God’s favorite musical”), in which white Mormon missionaries travel to Africa and, in the words of the New York Times, “blasphemy and cussing” ensue. Exactly what you’d expect from Lopez’s collaborators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park infamy. They may be the bigger names, but Lopez is no slouch: he picked up a 2004 Tony award for Avenue Q, the puppet musical. At Yale, he studied with lit-crit giant Harold Bloom, who taught him to read the Bible as literature—“a story that can change the world,” Lopez tells the Times, “but in the end it’s just a story.” (And the Book of Mormon? He calls it “Bible fan fiction.”) Previews began February 24.
While many of us liberal-arts types were cheering the people power that toppled Egypt’s dictatorship this month, tech geeks were worried. If President Hosni Mubarak had been quicker and more ruthless in cutting off protest organizers’ internet access, he might have stayed in power, Eben Moglen ’85JD, ’93PhD, told the New York Times. “We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now.” Moglen, a Columbia University law professor, is not just worrying; he’s also organizing. Author of “The dotCommunist Manifesto” and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center—which advances such concepts as “copyleft,” as opposed to copyright—Moglen is promoting something he calls the Freedom Box. That’s a charger-sized personal server, with a price he predicts will fall to $29, that will allow individual internet users to decentralize information and power by ending their dependence on Facebook and other mammoth servers. To spread worldwide, the Freedom Box needs free software. Moglen this month launched a foundation to help develop it. “When is Freedom Box?” the foundation’s website asks. The answer: “We don’t know yet. But all around us, we can see that it needs to be soon.”
Your kid’s obsessed with sports statistics? No worries. He can grow up to be a vote-counting guru or Freakonomics-style author. Or—as in the case of Rufus Peabody ’08—a Las Vegas–based professional sports gambler. An econ major at Yale, Peabody wrote his senior thesis on inefficiencies in the baseball betting market. Last fall, with thesis adviser and School of Management professor Cade Massey, he produced a weekly NFL ranking that was published by the Wall Street Journal. But nothing compares to the Super Bowl. Last year, Peabody and his three partners placed $1 million in bets and raked in some $200,000 profit. “Knowing my partners and me have a million dollars riding on it,” he says in a phone interview, “makes watching the Super Bowl a lot less fun.” Especially when this week’s million-dollar investment returned only 3 percent, deriving largely from exotic “proposition” wagers. (Peabody’s favorite: he bet more than $20,000 that Green Bay running back Brandon Jackson would rush for less than 10.5 yards. Jackson didn’t get a single carry.) After “at least” 150 hours of preparatory number-crunching, Peabody’s $7,500 share represents about $50 an hour. Not bad. But the weekend’s big payday had nothing to do with the Steelers or the Packers. “I spent about an hour on a golf tournament,” Peabody says, “and we made $40,000 or $50,000.”
While Connecticut-based Yalies chopped their way through an ice storm this week, a famous fellow alum was fending off a hotter onslaught: attacks by Egyptian crowds defending the reign of embattled dictator Hosni Mubarak. “We’re showing you this not because what happened to us is particularly interesting or particularly important,” CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper ’89 told his audience Wednesday, but because “it shows you just how quickly a crowd can turn and a situation that seems fine can turn deadly.” Given Cooper’s celebrity–news-guy status, we suspect that—disclaimer notwithstanding—CNN was counting on other media outlets to find the assaults interesting, if not particularly important. And they did. “Halle Berry fights for custody; Anderson Cooper attacked in Egypt,” read one headline, while celebrity-gossip blogger Perez Hilton gasped: “OMG! Katie Couric Also Ambushed In Egypt!” Leave it to Jon Stewart, however, to get down to what really matters. “All right, Hosni,” The Daily Show’s host bellowed. “Now you’ve gone too far. Hands off Anderson Cooper! There is not to be a silvery wisp out of place on that man’s glorious head.”
You may have seen Jay Carney ’87 on TV before, analyzing and opining as a Time magazine journalist. But you’ll be seeing a lot more of him now. White House chief of staff Richard Daley announced yesterday that Carney will be President Obama’s new press secretary. For the last two years, Carney has been communications director for Vice President Joe Biden. But before that, he spent 20 years at Time, reporting from Moscow and Miami before moving to Washington to cover the White House and later to run the D.C. bureau. He covered the 2008 presidential campaign for Time. Although Carney, who is married to ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman, is officially an inside hire, Politico’s Josh Gerstein says the appointment of someone who was so recently a working journalist—rather than an Obama campaign veteran—suggests “a break with campaign-style tactics in favor of a more buttoned-down focus on the business of governing, and possibly a détente with the White House press corps.” A D.C. native and product of the Lawrenceville School, Carney was managing editor of the New Journal at Yale.
Lots of female politicians play up their first names. Susan Bysiewicz ’83 has more than the usual reasons. Fortunately for Bysiewicz, who spent 12 years as Connecticut’s secretary of the state, voters recognize her name—even if they can’t spell or pronounce it. (“It’s BICE-uh-witz,” one headline advised.) She hopes to capitalize on that recognition by jumping into the race to succeed US Senator Joe Lieberman ’64, ’67LLB. On January 18, Bysiewicz announced that she’s seeking the Democratic nomination for the seat Lieberman has held since 1988. On January 19, Lieberman announced that he won’t run for reelection next year. Bysiewicz will face stiff competition from fellow Democrats—and, if last year is any guide, from her own gaffes. But as another Yalie proved last year, it’s possible to stumble quite a bit on the way to a Senate victory.
Jared Taylor ’73 calls himself a “racial realist.” Other people call him a white supremacist. But this week, Taylor found himself and his organization accused of anti-Semitism—a charge rejected not only by Taylor, but by one of his toughest critics, the Southern Poverty Law Center—and of a “possible link” to Arizona mass-murder defendant Jared Loughner. The allegation came from Fox News, which reported Sunday on a supposed “law enforcement memo” about the January 8 shootings in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 14 others, including his apparent target, the Jewish congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. “Strong suspicion is being directed at American Renaissance,” Taylor’s organization, Fox said, adding that the document described American Renaissance as “anti government, anti immigration, anti ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti Semitic.” Turns out Taylor, who once told Phil Donahue that Jews “look white to me,” doesn’t truck with anti-Semitism. And as Politico detailed on Tuesday, there’s no apparent basis for linking Loughner and Taylor. “We’re the victim,” Taylor complained. “Here you’ve got some government agency allegedly saying we’re a bunch of anti-government anti-Semites who [pal] around with deranged killers. Do you like that on your official biography?” Officially, Taylor does believe that white intellectual superiority “is about as close to proven as anything ever is in the social sciences.” “Blacks are not stupid,” he writes—by which he means, black people know they are stupid. “They see how so many blacks fail despite the opportunities given them. Racial differences in intelligence are as plausible to them as to anyone else as an explanation for the world as they find it.”
“There’s no greater rush for a critic,” writes Erik Haagensen, “than encountering a blazing new talent.” He speaks of none other than Emily Jenda ’10, whose turn as an upper-class cat burglar in Drat! The Cat! landed her a spot as one of “Haagensen’s Heroes,” part of Backstage magazine’s list of “Memorable NY Performances of 2010.” In case you don’t know the show (we had to look it up ourselves), Drat! The Cat! is a 1965 Ira Levin–Milton Schafer musical that spoofs Victorian melodrama. Far from being overmatched by “Levin’s twinkling wit,” Jenda “showed an astonishing facility with a musical comedy style she’s far too young to know anything about,” Haagensen writes: she “burst with intelligence and sang like a dream.” Leaving us to wonder: did she learn that in The Gay Ivy, or in That’s Why I Chose Yale?
In a week when the headlines were full of Congress’s repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”—led by former Yalie of the Week Joe Lieberman ’64, ’67LLB—the media spotlight also illuminated grimmer military news. “Civilians die in Afghan coalition firefight,” said one report. “Foreign troop deaths in Afghan war top 700 in 2010,” said another. And, in the New York Times, “Life and Death Decisions Weigh on Junior Officers.” That would be Adrian Bonenberger ’02, an Army captain whom the Times initially profiled last summer as the US “surge” in Afghanistan began. Now, in a 4,100-word front-page feature, the newspaper details a mission that Bonenberger planned and led, but that went seriously awry. An English lit major who protested the Bush administration’s build-up to the Iraq war in 2003, Bonenberger joined the Army less than three years later and now commands Alpha Company, First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment. Despite the “For God, for Country and for Yale” banner over his desk, and what one of his soldiers described as “the dark relish of mayhem” in Bonenberger’s eyes, the captain is unsure whether he will stay in the military when his contract is up next year. “I’m getting pretty well tired of seeing dead bodies, that’s for sure.” The Yale Alumni Magazine is closed for winter recess. The next Yalie of the Week will appear on January 7, 2011.
From the Disney town of Celebration to a Barcelona mall; from the Harvard Business School to Yale’s new residential colleges—oh, and with a presidential library thrown in for good measure—the projects of Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch span the globe and a wealth of styles. But all of his work “is rooted in the principles, values, and ideals of classicism and traditional architecture,” the University of Notre Dame says in naming Stern the 2011 recipient of its Driehaus Prize for, you guessed it, classical architecture. Stern “has reopened the discourse between the new and what went before,” the Driehaus citation says, adding that he is a “committed preservationist” (though a few New Haveners disagree). Unlike the classically oriented Notre Dame architecture school, the Yale School of Architecture—of which Stern is not only an alumnus but, since 1998, the dean—turns out architects whose work is even more stylistically diverse that Stern’s. The dean told the New York Times that he will donate the $200,000 prize money to Yale “in support of classical architecture.”
Kathryn Himmelstein ’09 majored in ethics, politics, and economics. All three come together in a study published this week in the journal Pediatrics. The study, Himmelstein told the New York Times, shows that “gay, lesbian, and bisexual kids are being punished by police, courts, and by school officials, and it’s not because they’re misbehaving more.” Now a teaching fellow in New York City, Himmelstein drew on data from a national longitudunal study of 15,000 teenagers for her research, which formed the basis of her prize-winning senior essay. She got the idea while taking time off from Yale and working in the juvenile justice system, where she noticed a disproportionate number of non-hetero teens. Sociology professor Hannah Brückner co-authored the Pediatrics article. One Pediatrics letter-writer argues that Himmelstein and Brückner overstate their statistical conclusions. Nonetheless, the authors write: “Our results suggest an urgent need for all child-serving professionals to reflect on strategies to reduce the criminalization of nonheterosexual youth as they navigate adolescence in an often hostile society.”
Yale sophomore David Carel (right) had a brush with fame in October, when he and fellow protesters heckled President Barack Obama at a Connecticut campaign rally with a chant of “Fund Global AIDS!” This week, the spotlight returned in the form of a New York Times article pegged to World AIDS Day and headlined “Colleges Are Producing New Style of AIDS Activist.” Alongside the 19-year-old Carel—who admits that his parents wished he would be “more respectful”—is 47-year-old Gregg Gonsalves ’11 (left), a student in the Eli Whitney Program, fellow Obama protester, and longtime AIDS activist who is HIV-positive. “I used to wonder where the next generation would come from,” Gonsalves told the Times. “They’re here.”
You could forgive Daniel Skovronsky ’94 if he helped himself to second servings at Thanksgiving this year. The 37-year-old MD/PhD just signed a deal to sell his biotech company to Eli Lilly & Co. for $300 million, plus the possibility of another $500 million down the road if its lead product performs well. Skovronsky is an accidental entrepreneur, according to a profile this week in the Philadelphia Inquirer. After earning his bachelor’s in molecular biochemistry at Yale, he was in grad school at the University of Pennsylvania, researching radioactive dyes that could make Alzheimer’s disease show up on brain scans of living patients. (Currently, only an autopsy can provide a conclusive diagnosis.) With research funding hard to come by, Skovronsky started a company, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, in 2004. He had no business experience. “I didn’t have much of an idea of what I was getting into, which was very helpful,” Skovronsky told the Inquirer. “It would have been much harder if I had any sense of the challenges ahead.” He thinks his technology could help diagnose Parkinson’s and diabetes as well—for which a lot of people would give thanks.
“Everyone at my school was ridiculously driven,” Margo Lang ’10 tells a reporter in her hometown of Manhattan Beach, California. While her Yale College classmates wanted to work on Wall Street or as “high-powered attorneys,” Lang was “stereotyped as the do-good hippie” who taught yoga, co-chaired a cancer fund-raiser, and wrote about the plight of the uninsured. But you don’t get into—or out of—Yale without being a bit driven yourself. Arriving home after graduation with “bazillions” of job applications but no job, Lang dived into more do-gooder work. On November 14, she helped organize LA Gives Love, a yoga-and-vegetarian-food extravaganza that raised money for actress Patricia Arquette’s Haitian relief organization, Give Love. And Lang has landed a paid position—with a start-up company that aims to bring call-center jobs home from overseas, and train disabled vets and battered women to fill them.
You don’t have to look—or listen—very hard to find Phil LaMarr ’88 in television, movies, or video games. LaMarr, who helped found the Purple Crayon improv group as an undergrad, has had a busy career as a screen and voice actor. He was a regular on the sketch comedy show MadTV for five years, he’s done voices on Futurama and Family Guy, and he got shot in the face (click at your own risk) by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. But if you want to see LaMarr live on stage, now’s your chance. This weekend, LaMarr makes his Broadway debut in The Pee-wee Herman Show, a revival of Paul Reubens’s campy 1980 stage show (which itself inspired the cult favorite kids’ TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse). LaMarr plays Cowboy Curtis, a role originated by Laurence Fishburne. Unlike some of his contemporaries, LaMarr says he didn’t catch Pee-wee’s Playhouse in its original TV run. “The Saturday morning television show came on when I was in my latter days of college,” he told TheaterMania. “I wasn’t smoking pot, so I really didn’t watch it!”
It came down to the buzzer. But when the electoral contest finally ended Wednesday night, ex-NBAer Chris Dudley ’87 lost his Republican bid for governor of Oregon. The 6-foot-11-inch Dudley played center for the Portland Trail Blazers, then worked as a financial adviser—two careers that helped him raise a record $9 million for this campaign. “I believe it is a strength and not a weakness that I haven’t spent the last 30 years in politics,” he said in announcing his candidacy last year. But voters chose a career politician, former two-term Democratic governor John Kitzhaber. Noting the margin of less than 1 percent, Dudley observed: “I think the message coming from the voters, the mandate here, is for Republicans and Democrats to work together.”
Long before there was Mark Zuckerberg, there was Mark Gorton ’88. And long before there was Facebook, there was Gorton’s LimeWire. But no more: a federal court order shut down the file-sharing site this week, ending its 10-year run of free, downloadable music. Gorton, an electrical engineer and Harvard MBA, started LimeWire in 2000 after making a pile of money on Wall Street. A proponent of open-source software and open government, he intended the site—where users could upload or download music—to be legal, he told the New York Times, and hoped to work in concert with the recording industry to produce the proverbial win-win. But in May, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America, holding LimeWire liable for copyright infringement. The other shoe dropped on October 26 with a permanent injunction (PDF); more footwear will fall in January, when the court holds a trial to determine damages. The RIAA blames LimeWire for part of a roughly 50 percent drop in US sales of recorded music, from $14.5 billion in 1999 to $7.7 billion last year. While LimeWire traffic ground to a halt, some people fear the LimeWire injunction could exacerbate real-life traffic. Gorton is publisher and financial backer of Streetsblog, a nonprofit site that advocates for sustainable transportation. The court order means that Gorton “is no longer in a position to financially sustain our work,” the blog’s editor noted in a fund-raising pitch this week.
When Archimedes stepped into his bathtub, he figured out how to measure an object’s volume by the amount of water it displaces. When Sara Gilbert ’97 got in the tub, she solved a different problem: how to share her support group for second-time mothers with the rest of the world. “I thought, oh my God, people across the country need this—this kind of support system,” Gilbert said this week in introducing her solution. The Talk, a somewhat younger version of The View, premiered October 18 on CBS. “You know, it was one thing [when] I had this idea in the bathtub, but now I’m sitting in front of millions of people,” Gilbert told her cohosts. “And I’m just like—wait a minute. I am so not a talk show host.” So true. Though Gilbert is now 35 and, with partner Allison Adler, parent of a son and daughter, she looks pretty much the same as she did as Darlene, the younger daughter on Roseanne, in the 1980s and ’90s: a charmingly scruffy adolescent, sardonic and self-deprecating. In The Talk’s opening moments, as her cohosts bubbled about their nervousness and primped, Gilbert’s first words were: “I’m like, is there stuff in my teeth? Is my shirt on right?”
Peter A. Diamond ’60 just won a Nobel prize for his theory of labor markets. Now maybe he can get a job. To tell the truth, the economist has been employed as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more than 40 years. But his nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve board of governors has languished since April. “I don’t believe he is ready to be a member of the Federal Reserve,” Republican senator Richard Shelby of Alabama said last summer. In awarding its economics prize this week to Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides for their work on “search markets,” the Nobel committee asked: “Why are so many people unemployed at the same time that there are a large number of job openings? How can economic policy affect unemployment? This year’s Laureates have developed a theory which can be used to answer these questions.” Retorted Shelby: “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences does not determine who is qualified to serve on the Board of Governors.”
Kanye West has a new BFF: tall, thin, young, blond. No, not Taylor Swift: think taller, younger, and much, much preppier. Bow tie–wearing Andover grad Cassius Marcellus Cornelius Clay ’13—he’s a descendant of the nineteenth-century Yalie abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay—is taking a leave of absence from Yale College to work as stylist to the irrepressible hip-hop star. Word is that West spotted the 6-foot-5-inch, 19-year-old Clay shopping at Barney’s in New York last summer, admired Clay’s shoes (slippers embossed with gold crests), and struck up a friendship that has become a professional relationship. After appearing on Saturday Night Live last week, West named Clay in a Twitter thank-you to his “art and style team.” That mention seems to have fueled the once-and-future sophomore’s elevation from the subject of Ivy League fascination to 15 minutes of international celebrity: a New York Post profile got picked up in outlets from USA Today to the UK’s Telegraph. People who know Clay say that, for such a showstopping personality, he likes to keep a low profile. He declined the Post’s interview request. But that doesn’t mean he has nothing to say on the subject of pop culture and why it matters. “The ivory tower of academia is a comfortable place to barricade oneself against the creep of barbarism and the Billboard Hot 100,” Clay wrote this year in a Yale Daily News paean to Lady Gaga. But “straddling the liminal balance between fiction and authenticity, Gaga has forged a fantasy of everything bizarre and beautiful, and our fascination with her manifests a desperate need to pretend.”
Colleges from all over the country recruited Seo-Hee Moon ’14, but the freshman golfing phenom chose Yale because, she told the Yale Daily News, “if golf didn’t work out for me in the future, I would want a strong educational background.” So far, the golf is looking pretty good. As individual champion, she led the Bulldog women to a first-place finish in the Princeton Invitational two weekends ago. This past weekend, she set a new women’s course record in her first match on the Yale golf course, recording a 67 on the last day of the Yale Women’s Intercollegiate tournament and leading the team to another win. How does she do it? No secrets: just hard work and competitive drive, her coaches say. But she did offer some putting tips on a Seattle talk show last spring.
It sounds like the plot of an Almodovar film: a house painter (in Spain, of course) confesses to his artist client that he has been having an affair with her cleaning lady. In the artist’s house. With the cleaning lady dressing up in the artist’s underwear. What is our heroine to do? Laugh? Cry? Fire them both? Perhaps. But because she is Natasha Zupan ’87, she also made art from this tawdy-but-true story, as told to AOL News. Zupan’s exhibit “Flesh Fold,” a series of collages incorporating panties and bras—some hers, some donated—opens September 24 at the Alexander Salazar Fine Art gallery in San Diego. While Zupan is not our first Yalie of the Week to make underwear-related art, she is almost certainly the first who collected 100 foundation garments from “a very large-breasted woman” and “turned it into a painting called Boobie Trap.” Who could top that?
At the beginning of this week, Chris Coons ’92MAR, ’92JD, was the “who’s that?” Democratic nominee for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat. Now he’s the front-runner—thanks to the upset victory of Tea Party–endorsed Christine O’Donnell in the state’s Republican primary. As the elected executive of New Castle County, Coons represents more than 60 percent of the First State’s tiny population. He’s got not only a Yale law degree but also a master’s from the Divinity School; as county executive during a fiscal crisis, he “cut millions in wasteful spending and restored fiscal responsibility to county government,” his campaign website proclaims. But Republican congressman Mike Castle was expected to win handily in both the primary and general elections. Now, instead of facing one of Delaware’s most popular establishment politicians, Coons finds himself with an opponent who is plagued by charges of financial irregularities and who says that, during her first run for Senate in 2006, she heard “the audible voice of God.” A post-primary Rasmussen poll put Coons ahead, 53 percent to 42 percent, pegging the seat as “solid Democrat.” Glenn Beck branded Coons—formerly an in-house lawyer for the company that makes Gore-Tex—a “Marxist” and “staunch anti-capitalist.” Well, Coons did study in Kenya. …
Most of us would be thrilled to run a 20K in under two hours when we’re octogenarians. Heck, most of us would be thrilled to run a 20K in under two hours at any age. But in the 33rd annual New Haven Road Race on Labor Day, 81-year-old Geoff Etherington ’76MD polished off the 20K trek around the Elm City in an hour and 45 minutes. He easily finished first in his age group—and the one below him as well. Etherington’s time was no fluke. Running Times magazine ranked him last year as the nation’s top runner over 80. In a New Haven Register profile the day after the race, Etherington, who lives in Connecticut and Florida, said he started running at age 50 and still runs about 30 miles a week. His words of inspiration? As he told the Register: “There are always people trying to replace joints and stuff, but you just keep running.”
Flagg Youngblood ’97 lives up to both halves of his name. A former Army captain who attended Yale on an ROTC scholarship, Youngblood directs the Vets for Freedom PAC and served until recently as director of military outreach at the flag-emblazoned Young America’s Foundation (“The Conservative Movement Starts Here”). From that platform, he criticized his alma mater for admitting a former Taliban spokesman and opposed the nomination of Elena Kagan, first as US solicitor general and then to the Supreme Court. “The president and his plotting comrades,” Youngblood argued, “… must be stopped from pushing us over the cliff.” Now the Nashville native will put his miter saw where his moniker is, competing Sunday night for HGTV’s “coveted title of ‘All American Handyman.’” Says his online bio: “Flagg began tinkering with his father’s Craftsman tools at age 4. He soon began taking on home improvement projects for his family and became the handyman-in-residence for his fraternity and friends at Yale.” Youngblood tells the Washington Times that he still uses some of his great-grandfather’s hand tools from the 1920s. But with a $10,000 Sears prize package and an HGTV development deal on the line, we’re guessing this old-fashioned guy will break out the power tools. Maybe he’ll build a bench or a cabinet—and pack it with conservatives.
Author and journalist Fareed Zakaria ’86 has made a career of explaining the world to Americans. Starting next month, he’ll do it from a slightly different platform. Zakaria recently announced he’ll leave Newsweek, where he has edited the international edition for ten years, to become an editor-at-large and columnist for Newsweek’s rival Time. (You could say it’s like leaving Yale for Harvard, something else Zakaria has done—he got his PhD in Cambridge.) For Zakaria, the move means he’ll be able to concentrate more on, in his words, “creating content … doing stories all over the world, rather than figuring out what the business model is for Newsweek on the iPad.” And it’s Zakaria’s content that has made him one of the world’s 100 top public intellectuals, according to Foreign Policy magazine. In the wake of 9/11, he wrote an influential Newsweek essay that sought to explain “Why Do They Hate Us?” And in 2008, he published a bestseller called The Post-American World that sketches a future in which the US is no longer the world’s dominant superpower. If you’re trying to put a label on Zakaria’s politics, good luck. He’s been called a moderate, a conservative, and a liberal. For what it’s worth, as a student at Yale he was a member of the Party of the Right.
Allison Davies ’99MFA is a bit of a mystery woman. A professional photographer with a new book out, she seems to have no website, no Facebook presence, no Amazon page. And the book, Outerland, consists entirely of weird landscapes, a few of them containing Davies herself in a white spacesuit. No identifications, no explanations, no text of any kind. Wired, in a review this week, calls it “a welcome mixture of art and sci-fi” that provides “seeds for the viewers’ fantasies of distant worlds.” Davies began the project as a student at the Yale School of Art in 1998. Her work, “under the tutelage of Gregory Crewdson” ’88MFA, “inspired the title for Another Girl, Another Planet, Crewdson’s seminal 1999 curated exhibition of female photographers working with constructed narratives,” Wired says, adding, “the show launched the careers of her classmates Taryn Simon, Katy Grannan, and others, yet for Davies, what followed was the slow continuation of a solo-planetary mission.” Instead of achieving art-world fame, Davies became “an undercover private investigator for a Manhattan law firm,” shooting the book between assignments. The result, writes photography blogger James Danziger ’75, is “The Little Prince for the 21st century—a wordless visual inquiry into the mysteries of life.” But is there a baobab tree?
Katherine “Katie” Miller was ranked ninth in her West Point class of more than 1,100. She notched better-than-perfect scores the military academy’s physical fitness tests. What “really topped the cake,” she says, was the chance to develop herself “for a cause much bigger than myself.” But when third-year classes begin at the US Military Academy next week, Miller won’t be in them. She’ll be getting ready for her junior year at Yale. Miller publicly resigned from West Point this week, offering herself as what she calls “a concrete example of the consequences of a failed law and social policy”: the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” prohibition on homosexual activity. “I identify unequivocally as a lesbian,” Miller wrote in her resignation letter. In obeying the policy, “I have lied to my classmates and compromised my integrity and my identity by adhering to existing military policy.” Miller, who came out to close friends and family in high school, thought she could “recloset” herself to join the military, she says in a phone interview. “I completely underestimated the personal toll that it would take”—a toll she started to understand at the end of her freshman year, when she had to sit silently during a mandatory student-led discussion of military ethics “as the term ‘fag’ was thrown around, as people made really crude derogatory remarks. I realized that I was going to have to stand up for myself.” Still, President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have called for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Miller might have tried to wait it out if not for an imminent deadline. Third-year cadets must commit to finishing the academy and serving five years’ active duty. Miller found she just couldn’t make that promise. Yale, with its minimal military presence, is “going to be a radical transition,” Miller acknowledges. “I’m going to be pretty torn when it comes to driving away, out the gates of West Point. But Yale is going to offer me an ability to explore who I am and come to terms with myself.” She intends to return to military service as some point. As for when, “I think I need that year at Yale to see.”
James Ponet ’68 is the first Yale graduate to serve as Yale’s Jewish chaplain. He may also be the first rabbi to conduct the wedding of a presidential son or daughter. But Ponet was something of a celebrity at Yale long before he gained national celebrity status for co-officiating, with a Methodist minister, at the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinksy. In a New York Times mini-profile this week, Ponet says he first “glimpsed observant Judaism” as a student at the home of Yale’s then-rabbi, Richard Israel, and was “enchanted.” By the time he graduated from Yale, Ponet had decided to study at the seminary of the Reform movement, where he was ordained in 1973. He returned to campus in 1981 as the university’s Jewish chaplain and, later, director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life. His profile in the 1980s included hosting a radio show on student-run WYBC and hopping on dining hall tables to blow a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashana. More recently, he has co-taught a Yale Law School course on the Book of Job and a college seminar with Dr. Ruth Westheimer on “The Family in the Jewish Tradition.” While mum on the specifics of the Clinton wedding (he would tell the Yale Daily News only that “a number of people” put him in touch with the couple), Ponet did acknowledge that until recent years he declined to perform interfaith weddings—a no-no in traditional Judaism that is also officially discouraged by the more liberal Reform movement. Now—perhaps fittingly for a teacher and intellectual provocateur—his role in this front-page nuptial has stirred a national discussion about intermarriage.
Mark Rosekind ’87PhD takes the Metro every day to his new job in Washington, DC. So it was with both personal and professional interest that he asked National Transportation Safety Board members this week how long it will take to transform the Metro safety culture. The answer: it will take years. Rosekind, newly sworn in as a member of the NTSB, joined a public meeting on the DC Metro collision that killed 9 people and sent 52 others to the hospital last summer. An expert on sleep and fatigue, he was presumably wide awake as the board’s chairwoman reviewed the “anemic safety culture” that put Metro “on a collision course long before” the June 2009 crash. That rear-end crash did not involve fatigue, which is Rosekind’s expertise. A sleep scientist, Rosekind used to direct the NASA Fatigue Countermeasures Program, where he studied the “NASA nap”—a 40-minute cockpit snooze for pilots—and won the space agency’s Exceptional Service Medal. He also cofounded a consulting firm (clients included Air New Zealand, which wanted to persuade Americans to take more vacations) and is a fellow of the World Economic Forum. “Fatigue has been on the NTSB’s Most Wanted List since its inception in 1990,” Rosekind said at his Senate confirmation hearing last fall. [PDF] Twenty years later, that’s still enough to keep passengers awake at night.
What are the best things about being a professional golfer: the fresh air and sunshine, the exercise, the plaid pants? Not for Bob Heintz ’92: “You do your job well, your income potential is limitless,” the former econ major tells the Associated Press. “That’s what I love about this job. I would equate golf to being a salesman. If I play well, I make money. If I don’t, they send me home.” Last weekend Heintz, a 40-year-old journeyman on the PGA Tour, played well—well enough to come in second in the Reno-Tahoe Open and pull down his biggest payday ever, a $324,000 prize. A three-time All-Ivy player, and possibly the only Ivy Leaguer making a full-time living on PGA Tour, Heintz had never finished above fifth place before Reno-Tahoe. Nonetheless, he earned more than $300,000 in each of the last two years. This year, however, his play was “terrible”: he had made less than $20,000 and was “thinking about quitting.” (It doesn’t help that he’s building a house in Florida for himself, his wife, and their four kids. It probably doesn’t hurt that he has a Yale degree, despite his lack of experience in jobs that don’t require spiky shoes.) So instead of getting sent home like a failed salesman, Heintz headed this week to Toronto: his Reno-Tahoe finish earned him a spot in the Canadian Open.
It can’t be fun to testify in court that you were Rod Blagojevich’s yes-man. But it beats being called his co-conspirator. Bob Greenlee ’96 spent only six months as one of Blagojevich’s three deputy governors, but, as Greenlee’s testimony in the former Illinois governor’s corruption trial this week indicates, it was far from uneventful. Greenlee testified that Blagojevich spent just two to eight hours a week in the governor’s office; once hid in a bathroom to avoid talking to his budget director; and was so difficult to track down that Greenlee once had to join a Blagojevich family dinner in a bowling alley to get the governor to review legislation. Most of Greenlee’s testimony centered on recorded conversations in which he and Blagojevich appear to be discussing ways of trading Barack Obama’s US Senate seat for campaign cash, an ambassadorship, or an appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Defense attorneys tried to suggest that by agreeing with Blagojevich’s schemes, Greenlee was giving him advice, but Greenlee insisted that pretending to agree with the governor was a necessary part of his job. “In the event I could see him moving into a position I’d jump in there first and say what he wanted to hear,” he explained. This wasn’t Greenlee’s first encounter with a defense lawyer. Since resigning as deputy governor in the wake of Blagojevich’s 2008 arrest, Greenlee (who was a corporate lawyer before he went into government) has become managing editor of Defense Counsel Journal, published by the Chicago-based International Association of Defense Counsel.
The idea for a company that would sell bottled iced tea with just a little sugar, instead of the usual handful, started brewing at the Yale School of Management during a class discussion of a Coke-vs.-Pepsi case study. After SOM professor Barry Nalebuff and his student, Seth Goldman ’95MPPM, launched Honest Tea in 1998, the beverage maker has itself been cited as a case study of entrepreneurship and business with a social mission. Now Goldman, Honest Tea’s president and “TeaEO,” finds himself on display as a New York Times small business case study in—well, honesty. Honest Tea sells organic iced teas and juices, sweetened lightly or not at all. Two years ago, it sold 40 percent of its stock to Coca-Cola, which purveys—you know, other kinds of drinks. Investor Coke has taken exception to the marketing of Honest Kids, Honest Tea’s line of fruit punch, because it bears the label, “No high fructose corn syrup.” (“Executives at Coke construed the phrase as an implicit rebuke of its products,” says the Times.) “We got a strong request to change the wording,” Goldman told the paper. He didn’t care for Coke’s proposed alternatives, which included “No fake stuff.” It’s not clear that the disagreement has been resolved. The Honest Kids label hasn’t changed, at least according to its website. But next year, Goldman acknowledges, it is “very probable” that Coca-Cola will exercise its option to buy Honest Tea outright. In which case the company with the motto “Be Real. Get Honest” could be swallowed by the beverage formerly known as “The Real Thing.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski joined a half-dozen Republican colleagues in a West Wing huddle with President Barack Obama over climate policy this week. But it was Murkowski’s GOP primary challenger, Joe Miller ’95JD, who was hoping for political bounce. If Murkowski finds common ground with the White House on capping carbon emissions, “it absolutely is going to hurt her,” Miller told the New York Times. (Indeed, he gained the endorsement of the Wasilla-based Conservative Patriots Group in part by agreeing to “reject the argument that man made CO2 emissions are causing significant global warming.”) Climate change is not the only issue on which Miller—according to his campaign website, a West Point graduate who earned a Bronze Star during the first Gulf War—seeks to set himself apart from Murkowski. From Wall Street bailouts to abortion, the Fairbanks-based lawyer portrays himself as “Alaska’s True Conservative Choice,” winning endorsements from Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express [PDF] (which calls him “a constitutional scholar”). A former state and federal magistrate who previously ran for state representative, Miller will face Murkowski in an August 24 primary. Daughter of a former senator and governor, she has the support of Alaska’s Republican establishment. But the race is getting rougher: this week, an Alaska blogger asserted (without support) that Miller was fired from a municipal legal job in Fairbanks. Miller’s campaign (which doesn’t mention the seven-year stint in his bio) calls the claim a “fabrication.”
After picking up her Yale degree in Latin American history, Heidi Miller ’79PhD took a job at Chemical Bank. That doctorate—and three decades of financial experience—have paid off beyond the wildest dreams of most PhDs. As head of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s treasury unit, Miller has more than quintupled its pretax profit in the past six years, Bloomberg notes. And this week, she landed a promotion to a newly created position as president of JPMorgan’s international operations. The move comes in a package of high-level shuffles by CEO and chairman Jamie Dimon, part of his plan to groom an eventual successor. Bloomberg sees Miller—who has worked closely with Dimon since 1992—as a possible heir. The New York Times, which calls Miller “one of the most powerful women on Wall Street,” apparently does not, asserting that the 54-year-old Dimon is “developing a roster of younger managers that could someday succeed him.” (Miller is 56, according to Forbes.) In her new job, Miller is charged with boosting JPMorgan Chase’s business in fast-growing markets such as China, Brazil, India, and Russia—a far cry from asking (as the old joke about humanities PhDs has it) “Would you like fries with that?”
Don’t cry over spilled oil—just prevent spills. That’s the advice Frances Beinecke ’71, ’74MFS, has been giving the country for decades. Now she has a high-level platform for her message: the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling—aka the BP disaster panel. An expert on coastal environmental protection and clean energy, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council has long advocated reducing American dependence on oil and protecting crucial ecosystems from drilling. In early May, Beinecke urged President Barack Obama to order an independent investigation of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In late May, after Obama announced the Deepwater commission, Beinecke wrote that it “must review whether, when, and where offshore drilling should occur.” Beinecke has called the BP spill both “a catastrophe of the largest dimension that we have ever seen” and “an opportunity to really focus all of this country on what our oil addiction is.” Now, with her June 14 appointment, Beinecke and fellow commissioners are charged with “providing recommendations on how we can prevent—and mitigate the impact of—any future spills that result from offshore drilling.”
A year ago, reporters were seeking out Rachel Moran ’81JD for comment about her Yale Law School contemporary Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD. Now it’s Moran’s turn in the spotlight. Granted, her new position is not quite as prominent as a seat on the US Supreme Court. But come October 15, Moran will be “the first Latina dean of a top 20-rated US law school”—the University of California at Los Angeles—according to a UCLA press release. Moran, an expert in race and the law who has also helped develop a theory of “friendship law,” has invested a career teaching in the UC system. She joined the faculty at Boalt Hall, Berkeley’s law school, in 1983. That’s where—invited by Moran to a symposium in 2001—Sotomayor delivered her famous “wise Latina” remark. (“I don’t think anybody thought it was incendiary or inflammatory or anything like that,” Moran told the Wall Street Journal last year.) More recently, Moran took a leave from Berkeley to help establish a law school at UC Irvine. “I find it most exciting,” she said, “to think about how to build a curriculum that will prepare students for being lawyers in the 21st century.” Now the dean will have her chance.
TaiChiMania.com, the website of Terence Pang-Yen Dunn ’76, says he teaches martial arts for “health, longevity, and self-defense.” It’s apparently that last goal prompting Dunn to file suit this week against DreamWorks Animation, claiming the Shrek-meisters stole his idea for Kung Fu Panda. In case you missed it, that was a 2008 Jack Black/Dustin Hoffman/Angelina Jolie vehicle that grossed $632 million and spawned a video game and an upcoming TV series and movie sequel. Dunn alleges that he pitched a movie idea to DreamWorks execs in 2001 and 2002, based on his kung-fu-fighting character Zen-Bear, about a panda who “fulfills his destiny as a martial hero and spiritual avatar… by leading his friends to save the inhabitants of peaceful Plum Flower Village.” DreamWorks said no thanks, then went ahead and made the movie, the suit says. A self-described “pioneer” in the practice of using Chinese martial arts in Western medicine and sports, Dunn holds a bachelor’s in biology from Yale and a Harvard MBA and has studied with numerous masters of classical Chinese martial arts. But if you believe his suit—and a Hollywood.com reporter thinks his “story seems within reason”—he still lacks a black belt in self-promotion.
Last year, Yale saluted the “incredible generosity” of a $1.5 million gift from John Mazzuto ’70. This week, a New York prosecutor said the donation stemmed from Mazzuto’s “wholesale looting” of his former company, charging the former Bulldogs shortstop with grand larceny and other felonies. Mazzuto was arrested at his $2.5 million Florida home, which he also bought with some of the $60 million that he and another man under indictment allegedly stole from Industrial Enterprises of America. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. ’77 contends that Mazzuto, who was the company’s CEO, and his co-defendant issued tens of millions of dollars of a type of stock that is legally reserved for employees, then gave it to family, friends, their alma maters, and themselves. Vance’s press release also says that Mazzuto declared personal bankruptcy in 2002 and didn’t emerge until 2009—several years after his donation to Yale. [PDF] The company, now in bankruptcy itself, has threatened to sue to get its money back. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy says the university cooperated fully with the criminal investigation “and is holding the donation aside.” He declined to explain what that means. (Yale has already built a baseball practice facility bearing Mazzuto’s name. The gift also endowed the head coach’s position.) It’s probably safe to guess that Yale won’t invite Mazzuto to throw out the first pitch again anytime soon.
Being Yalie of the Week, we have to explain from time to time, isn’t necessarily something you want to put on your résumé. It may just mean you’ve had a really bad week. Which brings us to Richard Blumenthal ’73JD. A week ago, the Democrat and longtime Connecticut attorney general had a 13-point lead in the race to succeed US Senator Christopher Dodd. But on Tuesday, the New York Times published an article (and posted video evidence) about how Blumenthal, who served stateside in the US Marine Corps Reserve, said in at least one public address that he “served in Vietnam.” Blumenthal and his defenders say it was a slip of the tongue—he simply said “in” instead of “during”—but there appears to be some damage, at least in the short term: a Rasmussen poll conducted on Tuesday gave him only a three-point lead over leading Republican contender Linda McMahon. Time will tell if it all blows over: in the meantime, the jury’s still out on who gave the media the mistaken impression that Blumenthal was captain of the Harvard swim team.
Don’t be confused by the bill’s title or the co-authorship of Senator Joseph Lieberman ’64, ’67LLB. The American Power Act, introduced by John Kerry ’66 on May 12, is not an authorization to assassinate foreign leaders or torture suspected terrorists. It’s a climate and energy proposal that will “transform our economy, set us on the path toward energy independence and improve the quality of the air we breathe,” Kerry’s website proclaims. “Right now, as one of the worst oil spills in our nation’s history washes onto our shores, no one can doubt how urgently we need a new energy policy in this country,” Kerry told the Senate. And indeed, the New York Times notes, Kerry and Lieberman “rewrote the section on offshore oil drilling in recent days to reflect mounting concern over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.” A summary of the bill [PDF] says it offers “important new protections for coastal states by allowing them to opt-out of drilling up to 75 miles from their shores.” But the president of Friends of the Earth, writing for the Huffington Post, calls the plan a “junk shot” that will “encourage states to ‘drill, baby, drill.’”
Amid all the talk about whether Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is constitutional, law professor Kris Kobach ’95JD has little doubt. Then again, he’s not just any law prof: in addition to his teaching post at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, Kobach is also the legal brains behind S.B. 1070; a consultant hired to train Arizona sheriffs in carrying it out; and a litigator for other local governments enacting strict immigration laws. The Arizona law has spurred nationwide protests and talk of US Justice Department intervention. That “would be highly unusual,” says Kobach, himself a former Justice Department official under Attorney General John Ashcroft ’64. While critics say national law preempts the Arizona statute, the professor responds that the state law merely reinforces identical, longstanding federal provisions—so there’s no reason for Justice Department involvement “unless it was being motivated by political calculations.” Kobach is well-versed in that subject as well: he earned a PhD in political science at Oxford before coming to Yale Law School. Oh, and he’s running for secretary of the state in Kansas. His stints as TV guest of Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck should save his campaign some money on advertising.
This week finds documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney ’77 with three—count ’em—three movies in the Tribeca Film Festival, prompting a Tribeca cofounder to joke that it should be renamed the Alex Gibney Film Festival. One, My Trip to Al Qaeda, is a Vanity Fair pick for the fest. Another is an unfinished take on disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of New York, and the third is a collaboration with five other directors to bring the best-selling book Freakonomics to the screen. Gibney’s run in the spotlight continues next week, when his Casino Jack and the United States of Money opens on May 7. His documentary on the jailed ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff is not to be confused with a feature film opening later this year, directed by George Hickenlooper ’86 and starring Kevin Spacey as Abramoff. (The two Elis squared off last fall over who would get to use the title Casino Jack; Hickenlooper went back to the drawing board.) Gibney’s past subjects include Enron and US military torture, and perhaps it’s not surprising that a theme of social justice runs through his work: he is a stepson of the late antiwar, pro-civil-rights activist and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49, ’56BDiv. But Gibney delves into pop-culture figures as well: still to come from the Gibney factory in 2010 are documentaries about Ken Kesey and Lance Armstrong.
Facing an aggressive fraud suit by the federal government, who ya gonna call? When you’re Goldman Sachs, you call Richard Klapper ’79MA, ’79JD, a “fearsome litigator” with “an impressive record of courtroom victories on behalf of some of biggest financial firms in the world,” Reuters reports. Those include defending the Bank of New York against shareholder accusations of money laundering, and the defeat of Enron shareholders who sued Barclays bank over its advice to the energy giant that become synonymous with corporate corruption. While Klapper keeps a low profile, “It’s certainly fair to say that ‘formidable’ is the right word for him,” says a former colleague at the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Even before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman on April 16, the Wall Street giant known as “Government Sachs” tapped another Yalie—Gregory Craig ’72JD—“to help navigate the halls of power in Washington,” Politico reports. Craig is now practicing at the firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The SEC accuses Goldman of selling mortgage investments that it expected to fail.
In this economy, most brand-new PhDs are grateful for a job—any job. But R. Owen Williams ’07MSL, ’09PhD, isn’t most new grads. Williams, whose December doctorate in history is so fresh that it hasn’t even shown up yet in the Yale alumni directory, snagged an offer to become president of Transylvania University in Kentucky. Before you start with the vampire jokes, pause to consider that Williams, who is 58, spent 22 years as a Wall Street investment banker before returning to academia, and those Goldman Sachs types have taken enough abuse already. Not convinced? Okay, well, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Williams quit his last job rather than lay off “quite professional, quite competent, and quite productive” employees. No doubt Transylvania—a 230-year-old liberal arts college of about 1,100 students, which calls itself “Transy”—is impressed by Williams’s finance background and presumed fund-raising abilities. But he is also a serious historian of post–Civil War race law whose dissertation was advised by David Blight, with a committee that included such scholarly heavyweights as Akhil Amar, Eric Foner, Bob Gordon, and Paul Finkelman. In January, Williams started a two-year Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellowship in the history department. But apparently college president trumps that; Williams begins at Transy on August 1.
Since the days when his Reagan-era undergraduate views graced the opinion pages of the Yale Daily News, David Frum ’82, ’82MA, has stood out as a conservative thinker and writer. Editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the National Review, speechwriter for George W. Bush ’68 (credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil”), Frum declares himself “dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement.” But that modernist bent makes Frum suspect in the eyes of some on the right—including the American Enterprise Institute, which recently canned him as a resident fellow after Frum proclaimed hard-line Republican opposition to health care reform to be the party’s “Waterloo.” Like another fired Yalie of the Week pundit, however, Frum bounced back. On Easter Sunday he was on CNN, criticizing Fox News: “Fox, like Limbaugh, has an interest in pushing the Republicans to the margins, making people angry. When people are angry and alienated, they don’t vote.” Two days later, he told Washington Post readers in an online chat: “Extremism in pursuit of liberty is a serious vice.” Does that mean Frum is fraternizing with the enemy? Fear not. Richard Vigilante ’78—who says he has known Frum “since Yale where we hung out with all the other elitist conservative conspirators who now run the world”—sees no sign “that David even a little bit craves the company or approval of liberals. … All the evidence in our extensive files suggests he doesn’t like them very much.”
“I simply cannot allow partisan politics to stand in the way of the basic functioning of government.” So declared President Barack Obama in announcing that he would name Craig Becker ’78, ’81JD, to the National Labor Relations Board via a recess appointment as Congress headed out for Passover/Easter vacation. The labor board has suffered from “near paralysis” for more than two years, with only two of its five seats filled. For almost a year since Obama nominated Becker—a senior lawyer for the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO—Senate Republicans have blocked a vote, staging a 33-senator filibuster this February. Last Saturday, the president said he would seat Becker and 14 other appointees (out of a total of 217 pending nominees) who have been hanging fire for an average of roughly seven months. “The business community should be on red alert for radical changes,” warned the US Chamber of Commerce, anticipating a reversal of the Bush-era NLRB’s anti-union tilt. Another Obama appointee who has been called “radical”—Dawn Johnsen ’83, ’86JD—did not get a recess appointment and continues to await a Senate confirmation vote, nearly 15 months after being nominated to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
A poor black child, abandoned at birth, is adopted by a civil-rights-loving Irish-American family outside Boston. The youngest of eight, Earl Phalen ’89 is spurred by his parents’ expectations to achieve great things. He graduates from Yale College, goes on to Harvard Law, and decides he wants to give something back. With a classmate, he meets with disadvantaged teens who are considered promising students in nearby Roxbury. “We were sick to our stomachs,” Phalen later told the Boston Herald, to learn that only one can read at a sixth-grade level. So Phalen co-founds a tutoring program that grows to serve 12,000 students a year, picking up a Presidential Service Award along the way. Now Phalen is CEO of another nonprofit, Reach Out and Read, that puts him in the lives of even more impoverished children—some 3.8 million a year. The organization, founded by Boston-area pediatricians, relies on volunteer doctors and nurses to give out some six million books yearly to young pre-readers. The health professionals also dispense advice to parents: read to your kids. And, ROR says [PDF], research proves that participating parents spend more time with their kids, and the children show “significant developmental gains and higher test scores.” Someday, perhaps Phalen’s life and work will become the subject of a storybook. For now, a March 23 profile on ABC World News—and being named Yalie of the Week—will have to do.
Catholic children are sometimes taught that the important part of their church is not the building, but the people. That doesn’t mean the building has to be ugly, though. Ask Duncan Stroik ’87MArch, a Notre Dame professor and church designer whose work is profiled and praised in the March 18 Wall Street Journal. Citing a pair of modern, non-Stroik American cathedrals—“the one a concrete behemoth, the other a glazed, truncated cone”—the Journal wonders: “Is ersatz-traditional schlock the only alternative? The answer is no,” as two recent Stroik churches “powerfully attest.” The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, sitting high on a Wisconsin hillside, is “meant to be a place for the faithful to come on pilgrimage,” writes Stroik, who also founded and edits the journal Sacred Architecture. And at his chapel for Thomas Aquinas College in Southern California, the Journal notes, bells in the Spanish baroque tower “call the college’s 350 students to Mass three times daily.” It seems that urban, East Coast architecture critics aren’t the only ones taking notice of Stroik’s work.
If you haven’t heard of Zoe Kazan ’05 yet, get ready. It’s not just her Hollywood-famous last name (grandpa Elia Kazan directed On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire). Zoe herself appeared in It’s Complicated last year with Meryl Streep ’75MFA and in Revolutionary Road with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. She’s currently starring on Broadway with Christopher Walken and Hurt Locker star Anthony Mackie in Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane. (Plot summary: “Carmichael … has been searching for his missing left hand for almost half a century. Enter two bickering lovebirds … with a hand to sell … and we’re set for a hilarious rollercoaster of love, hate, desperation and hope.” All right then.) And this weekend, the indie film The Exploding Girl opens in theaters with Kazan in the title role. Director Bradley Rust Gray wrote the part for her, about a college student struggling with epilepsy and romance; Kazan named the character Ivy. (We couldn’t confirm reports that Gray rejected her first suggestion, Eli.) If those acting chops aren’t enough for a 26-year-old, Kazan has also written a play, Absalom, which began as a class project during her junior year at Yale, in a course taught by playwright Donald Margulies.
Richard Ravitch ’58LLB ran for public office only once, two decades ago, and came in third. Yet the 76-year-old lawyer/real estate developer/New York City powerbroker stands on the verge of becoming governor of the nation’s third most populous state—if only for a few months. When New York State’s then-governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned amid a sex scandal in 2008, he was succeeded by his lieutenant governor, David Paterson. Paterson in turn appointed Ravitch as lieutenant governor, in a controversial move that was challenged all the way to the state’s highest court. Now Paterson is embroiled in his own scandals over alleged gift-taking, perjury, and intervention on behalf of an aide accused of domestic assault. If Paterson steps down, that would put Ravitch—whom the New York Times recently called “the only adult left in Albany”—in charge of the state’s notoriously dysfunctional government. Ravitch—who, among other accomplishments, bailed out New York City’s subway system in the 1980s—“has practically perfected the role of Mr. Fix-It,” the Times says. Even Paterson supporters are calling on the governor to hand over budget negotiations to Ravitch, who is not beholden to politicos (nor interested in running for governor in November) and is therefore seen as able to break the Albany gridlock. But will Paterson step down? That’s still up in the air. “Asked by reporters if he would still be governor on Friday, he said he would,” the Times reports today. “Asked if he would still be governor next week, he did not respond.”
Wednesday, a group of liberal law professors delivered a letter urging President Barack Obama to move more aggressively in appointing “a new generation of jurists.” That very day, Obama nominated Goodwin Liu ’98JD for a seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At age 39, Liu is indeed part of a new generation. He’s also a liberal law professor and associate dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. A former Rhodes scholar who clerked for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US Supreme Court, Liu is perhaps best known for his criticism of Samuel Alito ’75JD—co-authoring a report that accused Alito [PDF] of “diluting norms of basic fairness” in death penalty cases, and then testifying against Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court. One conservative blog dubbed Liu an “Anti-Alito Left-Winger,” while the L.A. Weekly’s Queer Town blog hailed him as a “Prop 8 Foe” who publicly opposed California’s anti-gay-marriage law. Liu has at least one booster on the right, though: Clint Bolick—who famously tagged an earlier Yale Law grad and federal nominee as a “quota queen”—wrote to Obama last month supporting the expected nomination. “I find Prof. Liu to exhibit fresh, independent thinking and intellectual honesty,” Bolick wrote.
Rashad Hussain ’07JD comes from a family of doctors. Now, President Barack Obama is calling on this young Indian American lawyer to help heal US relations with the Muslim world. Obama announced at the US-Islamic World Forum meeting on February 13 that he is appointing the Texas-raised Hussain as special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference, which represents more than 50 Muslim nations. A deputy associate White House counsel focusing in part on national security, Hussain also has a master’s in Arabic and Islamic studies from Harvard. He’s a practicing Muslim and, according to Obama, “a hafiz of the Quran,” or one who has memorized the Islamic holy book. Indian Muslims see the appointment “as vindication of their plural and moderate ethos by the Obama administration,” the Times of India says, while the D.C.-based Muslim Public Affairs Council calls Hussain “a shining example of what Muslim Americans can do: serve as peacemakers based on President Obama’s goal to seek ‘mutual interest and mutual respect.’”
When the Canadian women’s hockey team takes the ice in Vancouver on Saturday for its Winter Olympics opener, Natalie Babony ’06 will be there with blades on. But not for Canada, where she grew up. The daughter of immigrants, Babony will play for her parents’ native country, Slovakia. (She holds dual citizenship.) “We grew up speaking Slovak at home and continuing many Slovak traditions,” Babony says in an athletics department press release. “It is very much a part of who we are.” So is hockey: father Anton skated for a minor-league team in Slovakia, and sister Andrea joined Natalie on the Slovakian Olympic qualifying team in 2000. At Yale, Natalie led the team in scoring in 2002–03, and the 2004–05 squad set a school record for wins. She’s just the third Yale women’s player ever to make an Olympic hockey team, and she’s apparently the only Yalie competing in this winter’s games. Asked by the Yale Daily News in 2003 what her life included besides school and hockey, Babony replied: “Nothing. It’s studying and hockey.” But now, the pharmaceutical company employee notes, “Once you finish college, it’s much more difficult to find that consistency and availability in ice time, especially as a female hockey player. … I never realized how great it was to be a collegiate athlete until now!”
Standing on a bench in a Manhattan coffee shop Sunday, Reshma Saujani ’02JD declared: “This is a new decade and we need a new direction.” Unsurprising rhetoric from a 34-year-old political novice launching a primary campaign against a veteran New York congresswoman. What is startling is the “new direction” that Saujani touts for the ailing economy in her heavily Democratic district. “I’m running on my Wall Street record, not from it,” the former hedge-fund lawyer told the New York Times. “In Michigan, you’ll never hear a Congressional member speak poorly of the auto industry. This is our bread and butter.” The daughter of immigrants who fled Idi Amin’s Uganda for suburban Chicago, Saujani says she is the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress. She moved to the 14th District—which covers Manhattan’s East Side and part of Queens and is represented by Democrat Carolyn Maloney—just last summer. A research scholar at Yale Law School who raised $1 million from South Asians for John Kerry ’66 in 2004, Saujani has attracted some big-money supporters, including a financier who told the Times he wants a “policy lion” to represent “the most educated district in America.” But she has also antagonized the feminist establishment that backs Maloney. The morning after Saujani’s coffee-shop kickoff, Gloria Steinem and other notables turned out for a Maloney fundraiser that brought in about $100,000—at the Yale Club.
Even before this month’s devastating earthquake, Haiti’s infrastructure was a disaster. But the Solar Electric Light Fund, run by Robert Freling ’82, was doing its part to help. In September, the Washington, DC–based nonprofit brought sun-powered electricity to the rural Boucan Carré health clinic—the first of a series of such projects that SELF is undertaking in the Haitian countryside, almost all of which lacks electricity. After the quake, SELF temporarily diverted some of its solar equipment to power an emergency field hospital set up by the worldwide organization Partners in Health. PIH’s Haitian clinics run on diesel, which is dirty, expensive, and unavailable when rains wash out the mountain roads. A Russian studies major at Yale, Freling has overseen solar projects in more than 15 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In addition to clinics, SELF has brought green energy to homes, schools, agricultural equipment, and even some whole villages. Last year, he received the King Hussein Leadership Prize for sustainable development. “Energy is a human right,” SELF’s website declares—and so too, perhaps, is information: the organization is now working on solar-powered wireless communications systems.
She was an Olympic gold medalist at age 16; the subject of at least four biographies (variously dubbing her a “Golden Girl,” “America’s Sweetheart,” and “Sudden Champion”) before her 18th birthday; and a “Stars on Ice” headliner while still a Yale undergraduate. Now Sarah Hughes ’09 is also a member of the US Figure Skating Hall of Fame. (The International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame beat the skaters to the punch, inducting Hughes in 2005.) An American studies major, Hughes has “dabbled” in skating exhibitions since graduation, and she told People magazine last spring that she plans to “go to law school in three years.” In the meantime, she put her concentration in US politics to use in October, writing an article for CNN defending President Barack Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago as a site for the 2016 Olympics. Some things run in the Hughes family. Sarah’s younger sister Emily is right now competing in the US Figure Skating Championships and hoping for a spot in next month’s Olympics. The big sister—who picked Yale over Harvard—evidently holds less influence when it comes to educational choices, however: Emily goes to Harvard.
He’s represented everyone from George Steinbrenner to Napster, from Michael Moore to disgraced Enron exec Andy Fastow. In his best-known case, Bush v. Gore, he became the face of the Democratic Party, scrapping with GOP lawyer Ted Olson over Florida’s hanging chads. This week, David Boies ’66LLB is in the news alongside his old rival, challenging the California referendum that banned gay marriage. Boies and Olson, a conservative Republican, teamed up to represent the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger—two same-sex couples who contend that Proposition 8 violated their constitutional rights. The trial, which began January 11 in federal court in San Francisco, “will blur the existing partisan divide on the issue between conservatives and liberals,” the Economist predicts. On the trial’s second day, Boies et al. called expert witness George Chauncey ’77, ’89PhD, a Yale historian, to explain the history of discrimination against gays and lesbians in America. Some gay-rights activists last year criticized Boies and Olson for their tactical decision to force the issue now. “How do you decide when the time is right to vindicate one’s constitutional rights?” Boies responds. “Both Ted and I feel we have more than five votes on the Supreme Court, but this issue isn’t going away. Plessy v. Ferguson was not the final word on segregation, nor will a defeat, if that happens, end this battle.”
When a guy who shares a name with his famous father goes to work for a famous boss—nicknamed “The Boss”—it can be hard to get notice in his own right. But Cyrus Vance Jr. ’77 stepped into the spotlight on January 4, when he was sworn in as Manhattan’s district attorney. He is the first new person to hold that office since 1975, and only the fourth ever: the legendary Robert Morgenthau ’48LLB served for 35 years before finally retiring. In his inaugural speech this week, Vance invoked the guidance he gained from Morgenthau as an assistant DA in the 1980s: “His message to the staff was always simple and clear: to prosecute without fear and without favor.” At the same time, Vance spoke of “our dual responsibilities as prosecutors to protect the innocent from wrongful conviction, as much as the victims who have been wronged.” In an interview with the New York Times, Vance also reflected on a lessons learned as the son of a cabinet secretary: after seeing “the all-consuming nature” of his father’s work, Cyrus Jr. waited until his own kids were grown before running for office.
Usually our Yalie of the Week is just one person, and usually that person has at least committed to attending Yale. But sometimes you have to break the mold, and the university’s first-ever admission of quadruplets—early action, no less—is such a time. Carol, Ray, Martina, and Kenny Crouch (clockwise from top left), seniors at Danbury High School in Connecticut, received their “Welcome to the Class of 2014” messages last week and became near-instant celebrities: first in the Danbury News-Times and then in the New York Times. That NYT article (which had a great headline, but seriously, guys—the front page?) prompted hundreds of comments. The siblings, however, are not yet sure whether they’ll accept Yale’s offer. They’re waiting to hear about financial aid. And Kenny, at least, is considering going “somewhere where I’m not ‘one of the quads.’ ” The Yale Alumni Magazine is closed for winter recess. The next Yalie of the Week will appear on January 8, 2010.
Just months after Ahmed Alsoudani ’08MFA picked up his Yale diploma last year, Art + Auction profiled him as an up-and-coming painter whose colorful, chaotic war images had been compared to Picasso’s Guernica. Now the 35-year-old, Baghdad-born artist has commanded the attention of Forbes senior editor Susan Adams ’90MSL, who names Alsoudani to her “Watch List” for art collectors in 2010. In fact, Alsoudani is not just on Adams’ watch list; he is the watch list. The painter “has caught the eye of mega-collectors Francois Pinault and Charles Saatchi at a time when art from the Middle East is getting hot,” Adams writes. “Alsoudani pieces now sell for $24,000 to $65,000. Expect prices to climb much higher.”
Speaking at the School of Management Leaders Forum in September 2007, David Jackson ’93MBA noted that the subprime mortgage crisis was troubling many private equity firms, but “not necessarily” his. “Thanks to all of you, oil goes to $80,” said the SOM grad and CEO of Istithmar World Capital, which is owned by the government of Dubai. “I don’t really worry about where I am going to get the money for my next deal.” Right about now, Jackson is probably worried. Since the SOM speech, Istithmar’s investments ballooned from $4 billion to nearly $20 billion—some $17 billion of it borrowed—according to the Wall Street Journal, which calls the firm “a symbol of Dubai’s once-grand—and now flagging—ambitions.” The Middle Eastern emirate rattled global investors late last month by announcing it wanted a six-month break from payments on an estimated $80 billion in debt. The debt is owed by Dubai World, the government-owned fund of which Istithmar is part. Under Jackson, the private equity arm bought up such name-brand properties as Barneys New York, Cirque du Soleil, and a string of upscale hotels, including the Fontainebleau in Miami and the Mandarin Oriental in Manhattan. Another New York prize, the W Hotel Union Square—for which Jackson paid $285 million—slipped from his grasp this week after Istithmar defaulted on its payments.
Tuesday night, President Barack Obama announced his plan to send another 30,000 American soldiers to Afghanistan. Thursday, the American Anthropological Association released a report [PDF] condemning the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)—a program that embeds social scientists in combat units to do counterinsurgency work in places like Afghanistan. Devised in large part by Montgomery McFate ’94PhD, a barge-raised artist’s daughter who wrote her Yale dissertation on the Irish Republican Army, HTS aims to equip the military with socio-cultural knowledge so that it can “influence the population through non-lethal means,” the Army says. Or, as McFate told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, “If you understand how to frustrate or satisfy the population’s interests to get them to support your side in a counterinsurgency, you don’t need to kill as many of them.” The anthropological association, however, calls the program “fundamentally incompatible” with its code of ethics: “when ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, … and in a potentially coercive environment … it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology,” the report says. Nor a safe exercise: three HTS social scientists have been killed in Afghanistan in the past two years.
It’s kind of a Hollywood story line—minus the adversity. After five years in the film biz, Gabe Polsky ’02 and his brother Alan, running an independent production company, have released their first flick: a little thing called Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, directed by the eminent Werner Herzog and starring Nicolas Cage as a “demented” cop. Well, okay, there was some adversity before the triumph, as Gabe notes in a Forbes interview: “We have a director with a strong following, we have critical praise and a title that is pretty strong. We have drugs and controversial violence. We have all those elements, but we struggled to get picked up” for distribution. Oh, and if you’re wondering what all those elements add up to, the brothers modestly sum it up in Variety’s “10 Producers to Watch” feature—“one word: taste.”
After months of rumors, White House counsel Gregory Craig ’72JD finally quit last week. News accounts cited Craig’s role in persuading President Barack Obama to announce that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison; the administration’s inability to meet its one-year deadline for that closing; and Craig’s insistence that the White House release Bush administration legal memos justifying torture. One media critic dubbed the resignation “firing by leaks”; another deemed it an “assassination” by less liberal White House operatives. But another blogger—while characterizing Craig as an “idealist” who told Obama that releasing the torture memos “is what you were elected to do”—nonetheless concluded that “the counsel’s office was poorly managed” and blamed him for the way key nominations have languished. Obama himself, accepting the counsel’s resignation, credited Craig with shepherding one critical nomination through the confirmation process: that of Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD to the US Supreme Court.
You might have seen Michael Apuzzo ’05 in the New York Times the other day. In his underwear. Apuzzo’s not in a Calvin Klein ad (though he has modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch); he and fellow members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company were performing a new work, Brief Encounters, which premiered in Syracuse on November 6. An econ and theater major from Connecticut—his father, Fred, works at Yale’s West Campus—Apuzzo took up dancing while at Yale, then graduated to a bigger stage. Early this year, he debuted with Taylor’s troupe, where he believes he is the first-ever Yalie dancer. Previously, Apuzzo toured nationally in the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel show Movin’ Out. In case you’re wondering, the Times writer who reviewed the new Taylor piece labeled it “movements of desire and narcissism.” Added reviewer Alistair Macaulay: “I wanted Brief Encounters to last twice as long.” To see pictures of Apuzzo dancing (not to mention pictures of him in his underwear), check out the gallery on his website.
Some people might embark on their first marathon as quietly as possible, just in case they don’t finish. Actor Edward Norton ’91 tackled the New York City Marathon with a team of 30—including three Maasai tribesmen and Alanis Morissette—and a flourish of publicity. His goals: to raise money and attention for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, and to beat the sub-four-hour time that Sarah Palin posted in Anchorage’s Humpy’s Marathon in 2005. Norton managed both, finishing in 3:48:01 and raising, with the team, some $800,000 toward wildlife conservation, education, and health care in east Africa. Norton, who is board president of the US organization that supports the conservation trust’s work, spent the summer training in Kenya with his three Maasai running mates. “They’re used to heat and hills and to maintaining steady pace over long distance,” he told Runner’s World. “They’re used to running carrying 25-pound spears and radios and backpacks. They usually run in sandals made out of off-road tires.” Norton wore running shoes.
First there was Perez Hilton, the celebrity blogger, who tweeted in August about a Michael Jackson tribute video put together by a pair of Yale undergrads. Now comes ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, reporting that “a couple of million folks have been wowed” by the YouTube efforts of Sam Tsui ’11 (left) and Kurt Schneider ’10 (right). Tsui, a member of the Duke’s Men, and Schneider, his video-whiz producer, have been buddies since high school. What makes their MJ medley stand out are the video editing tricks, by dint of which Tsui appears to take the stage at each of six microphones, all at the same time, and sing all six parts. “Making it look effortless—that’s what it’s all about,” Schneider tells ABC News. You don’t have to be a math major like Schneider to see that the video has tallied more than 2 million views. As a result, Tsui told Gibson, “I’m walking down the street and people are like, ‘You’re that—you’re that guy who does the video!’”
When Delia Perez ’97 graduated from high school in rural south Texas, only 30 percent of her classmates went to college. Now, with the help of Perez and like-minded colleagues in the Edcouch-Elsa school district, that figure has risen to 70 percent. This statistic comes courtesy of fellow Texan Jenna Bush Hager (yes, that Jenna Bush), a Today Show contributing correspondent whose interview with Perez aired October 22 with the title “Yale grad inspires young women.” The youngest of seven children of immigrant farmworkers, Perez grew up in an area of the Rio Grande Valley that is 95 percent Latino and a school district that is the state’s third poorest. In high school, she helped establish annual trips to East Coast colleges to expand students’ hopes and horizons. She returned to Edcouch after graduating from Yale and is now associate director of the district’s Llano Grande Center, running an after-school program that Bush calls “an oasis full of opportunity and change.”
She started composing when she was nine years old. Now, at 31, Angel Lam ’10ARTA is traveling the Silk Road. An artist diploma candidate at the Yale School of Music—where she’s working with Martin Bresnick and Aaron Jay Kernis—Lam wrote a piece on the new album by the Silk Road Ensemble, the worldwide musicians’ collective founded by Yo-Yo Ma. Lam’s composition, “Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain,” was inspired by childhood memories of her grandmother’s death. Raised in Hong Kong and California, Lam says her music expresses “East Asian femininity. There are very few East Asian female composers writing feminine music. I go to school at Yale right now and a lot of my colleagues, mostly male, don’t write music like this.” Even for such an accomplished artist, this is a big week. Off the Map, the Silk Road ensemble’s first album without Ma, was digitally released October 13. On October 15, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra premiered another Lam composition, Awakening from a Disappearing Garden—a cello concerto commissioned by Carnegie Hall and showcasing none other than Ma himself.
Last time we wrote about Neal Katyal ’95JD, he had just bested the federal government in a US Supreme Court case. Now Katyal is the federal government—a deputy solicitor general, to be exact—and this week, he appeared before the high court in what the New York Times calls “the most important free speech case this term.” In United States v. Stevens, a Virginia man is challenging a federal law that outlaws the sale of dogfight videos and other “depictions of animal cruelty.” Katyal, defending the law in the face of the justices’ questions about foie gras and an imaginary Human Sacrifice Channel, urged the court to avoid an “endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals.” But when Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD compared the banned videos to a documentary about pit bulls, Katyal had to concede, “The line will sometimes be difficult to draw.”
Health policy guru Jacob Hacker ’00PhD has been dubbed the “father of the public option.” But it’s been an awfully tough labor, and he’s still waiting for that baby to be born. Hacker, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale, has been all over the news media in recent months, pushing his idea—adopted by President Barack Obama in January—to offer government-run health insurance that would compete with private plans. (You could tell he had really made the big time when, like Obama, he got called a liar on the subject.) The House of Hacker suffered a defeat—make that two defeats—this week, when the Senate Finance Committee rejected two public-option amendments to committee chairman Max Baucus’s reform bill. Yet Hacker remains unwavering, telling the Boston Globe that for any proposal (like Baucus’s) that requires individuals to buy health coverage, “the public plan is the linchpin” to making it “both politically and morally acceptable.”
As a New York journalist, Steve Bodow ’89 (arguably) had to work for a living. Then he landed a job writing for the The Daily Show, where, he noted, “I’m paid to sit around in an office with a bunch of other entertaining nerds and make fun of the news.” Since 2006, Bodow has been The Daily Show’s head writer—and since Sunday night, he’s worn the Emmy Awards crown for “Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series.” Bodow shares that honor with Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show’s writing team; they wrested the award, which they had won from 2003 through 2007, back from The Colbert Report, which snatched it last year. When Bodow isn’t getting paid to sit around in an office making fun of the news, he co-directs Elevator Repair Service, an experimental New York theater company whose plays include one about an office worker reading the novel The Great Gatsby out loud—for six and a half hours. And, presumably, getting paid to do it.
Back in January, Colorado governor Bill Ritter appointed Michael Bennet ’93JD to fill a US Senate seat vacated by Cabinet nominee Ken Salazar. Next year, Bennet will face a Democratic primary challenge from another Yalie: Andrew Romanoff ’89, a former state House speaker who is portraying Bennet as too centrist, too unaccountable, and too dependent on out-of-state donors, announced his candidacy on September 16. “This contest ought to be decided not by a tap on the shoulder but by actual voters—especially voters who live in Colorado,” Romanoff declared. One Denver columnist, however, derided Romanoff and Bennet as the “identical cousins” of the Patty Duke Show: “They’re both center-left, white Yalies with law degrees. … They’re both non-native species to Colorado, and their roots here, however shallow, are only in Denver. Neither would look terribly comfortable in a bolo tie.”
He was hired to promote green jobs, but Van Jones ’93JD turned out to have too many red flags for the White House. The environmental activist and author of The Green-Collar Economy—named an Obama administration special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation in March—came under fire in recent weeks from Fox News’s Glenn Beck. Beck raised alarms over Jones’s call to “change the whole system” in America, including overconsumption of energy and mistreatment of Native Americans. (Beck didn’t mention that Jones gave the keynote speech at the Yale Law School’s annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference—a gathering of left-leaning legal activists—in February.) But the piece of Jones’s past that drove him from office was his signature on a 9/11 “Truther” Petition in 2004—especially the petition’s claim that “people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen.” While the political right celebrated Jones’s resignation, many on the left painted him as a victim. But not blogger Arianna Huffington, who rejoiced that Jones is “no longer tied to his desk with a sock in his mouth.” Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds ’85JH had a different take: “Unlike me,” he wrote, “Van Jones has never been Yalie Of The Week. Hence, he’s oppressed and miserable.”
In nearly 35 years as Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau ’48LLB has drawn hundreds of headlines, prosecuted everyone from Bernie Goetz to Boy George to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and served as inspiration for Law & Order’s Adam Schiff. Now he has an award named after him. New York’s District Attorneys Association celebrated its 100th anniversary by creating an award in Morgenthau’s honor, which will be given every year to four assistant DAs around the state. The association’s president pointed out that Morgenthau has served “for more than one third of our existence,” while “The Boss” himself joked that he “was just getting ready for kindergarten” when the group formed. The 90-year-old DA is retiring at the end of this year.
Nearly eight months after Barack Obama nominated her to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen ’83, ’86JD, has gone back to her day job—sort of. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Johnsen’s appointment in March. But Democratic leaders, apparently fearing a Republican filibuster, have yet to schedule a vote in the full Senate. So Johnsen—who reportedly moved her family to D.C. over the summer—will commute back to Indiana to teach a weekly seminar on “Sexuality, Reproduction and the Law.” That’s a hot topic: conservative objections to Johnsen (whom one critic called “aggressively radical”) have focused largely on her pro-choice views and former job as legal director of the abortion-rights group NARAL. The Office of Legal Counsel, you may remember, was the source of that John Yoo ’92JD torture memo—which Johnsen called “shockingly flawed” and demanding of “outrage.” Just in case the Senate gets around to voting, Johnsen has structured the seminar so that classes end before fall break, with students working on research papers for the rest of the term.
A Yale degree in Russian studies—earned while the Cold War still raged—plus a master’s from Harvard would seem like good preparation for the CIA. But Joseph Finder ’80 tried that and decided that writing spy novels was more fun than the real thing. The bestselling author of Paranoia and Killer Instinct has just come out with his latest, Vanished, about Nick Heller, a shadowy corporate fixer (i.e., private spy) in search of his estranged brother, who has lived up to the title. Naturally, Nick makes “shocking discoveries about his brother’s life” and finds himself up against “a powerful and deadly conspiracy that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets”—so we won’t give them away either. Dubbed an auteur of “Dilbert noir,” Finder nonetheless breaks out of his business-thriller niche on occasion—writing, for example, an intriguing though anonymously sourced nonfiction piece on recent CIA travails, and appearing on TV to opine about swine flu. There’s no evidence, however, that this former Whiffenpoof has been called upon to sing. Would that make him a stool pigeon?
If the 1970s were the golden age of quirky television detectives (remember Baretta and his cockatoo?), the past seven years have seen a twitchy revival in Monk. But now Tony Shalhoub ’80MFA, who won three Emmys for his portrayal of obsessive-compulsive San Francisco gumshoe Adrian Monk, is hanging up his handcuffs. The USA Network show has begun its final season—one in which, it is promised, Monk will solve the mystery of his wife’s murder. Playing a character with OCD (no, that’s not the Oldest College Daily) brings out the obsessive fans, Shalhoub told reporters: “They know way too many details about this character, things that I have frankly long forgotten.” For those who can’t get enough, try this trivia quiz about Monk and “a Mensa society’s worth of dysfunctional TV geniuses.”
It took 20 hours, one dinner with the head of state, and one crucial apology to win the reversal of a 12-year sentence for two American journalists in North Korea. That, and the prestige of an ex-US president who just happens to be married to the secretary of state. Laura Ling and Euna Lee returned to Los Angeles in the company of Bill Clinton ’73JD on Wednesday, more than four months after they were arrested and imprisoned in North Korea while researching human trafficking near the Chinese border. North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-Il, invited Clinton to dinner and pardoned the two women after Clinton apologized for their actions. According to the New York Times, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’73JD considered asking other dignitaries to undertake the mission—including Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president and founder of the journalists’ employer, Current TV—but settled on her husband when North Korea sent word that it preferred his presence. Once a rock star …
Julia Usher ’84 put her Yale engineering degree to good use. Honest, she did. Also her Stanford MBA: she worked on nuclear reactors and in management consulting. But the education that’s leaving the sweetest taste in Usher’s mouth these days is her stint at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, where she was valedictorian and winner of the the M. F. K. Fisher Prize for outstanding scholarship in 1996. That training launched Usher’s career as a professional baker and food writer. She ran a boutique bakery, designed wedding cakes, and wrote for publications such as Bon Appetit and Better Homes and Gardens. Now comes Usher’s first book, Cookie Swap: Creative Treats to Share Throughout the Year. Due for release on August 1, it contains recipes and ideas for themed parties, with the aim of turning cookie swaps from a Christmas-only event to a year-round tradition inspired by potluck meals. And for those of us who didn’t know there was such a profession as dessert styling—well, we’ve got a lot to learn. Maybe the chapter titled “Cookies Cum Laude” will help.
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. ’73 has written for the New Yorker, made PBS documentaries, won a MacArthur “genius grant,” and been named one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans.” But last week outside his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was another black man in handcuffs. Gates, professor of African American studies at Harvard, returned to his Harvard Square home at midday on July 16, after a trip to China, and found the front door jammed. With the help of his driver, he shouldered it open and went inside. Then arrived a Cambridge police officer, investigating a passerby’s complaint of a possible break-in. While the police report and Gates’s account differ on some details, both note that Gates eventually showed the officer ID, proving that he lived in the house. Both accounts have Gates angrily repeating something along the lines of: “Is this how you treat a black man in America?” As Gates followed the officer onto the porch, police cuffed the 58-year-old scholar in front of a crowd of onlookers. Charged with disorderly conduct, he spent several hours in jail before being released. When news of the arrest broke early this week, Cambridge dropped the charges. But that did little to quiet the outcry about police treatment of African Americans. “Here we are in the age of Obama, and some things haven’t changed,” Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter told Inside Higher Ed. “Blackness is associated in the public mind with wrongdoing.” As for the aforementioned President Barack Obama, he opined that the police “acted stupidly.” Gates says his next documentary will focus on the criminal justice system.
Before picking up his Yale law degree this spring, Bryan Townsend ’09JD studied economics, philosophy, and disabilities law in China, England, and his native Delaware. What better way, then, to bring together his interests and experiences than … swimming the English Channel? There is a connection, actually, aside from a passion for distance swimming that dates to Townsend’s high school days: he is undertaking the 15-hour Channel crossing as a fund-raiser for Special Olympics Delaware and the Haidian Peizhi Special School in Beijing. Townsend headed to England this week to prepare for the swim, the date of which will depend on the weather and currents. After his one-man assault of the coast of Normandy, the bar exam—which most of his fellow law graduates are taking this month—may seem like a kiddie pool.
Francis Collins ’74PhD came to Yale to study chemistry, drawn to the mathematical precision of molecular interactions. But at Yale he took a biochemistry course that sparked a new appreciation for the sprawling messiness of life, sending Collins in a different direction. He headed to medical school and later became one of the world’s leading geneticists, discovering the genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease, among other devastating illnesses. As director of the National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, Collins also established a reputation as a strong administrator, completing the sequencing of the human genome ahead of schedule and under budget. Collins’s track record made him a front-runner to head the National Institutes of Health—a position cemented on July 8, when President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate the geneticist as director of the $30 billion research agency. While the announcement drew applause from many scientists, some have questioned the cost-effectiveness of the Humane Genome Project as a national priority. Other critics question the ability of Collins, who is an evangelical (though not fundamentalist) Christian, to reconcile science with his religious faith. Collins himself has undertaken this task in his bestselling book, The Language of God, and in frequent interviews and lectures—like this one at Yale last October.
Geoffrey Black ’72MAR has been elected leader of the United Church of Christ—but don’t call him Your Holiness. “The phrase ‘servant leadership’ encapsulates his understanding and practice,” one UCC honcho says of the church’s new president and general minister. “He does not believe that leadership is the exclusive purview of a single person, but the shared responsibility of the many.” That sounds like an excellent trait in the highly decentralized UCC, described by one commenter on the Beliefnet blog as “this crazy wagon of a denomination with hundred[s] of horses pulling it.” The UCC was formed in 1957 from many Protestant denominations, including the Congregationalist tradition, begun by the New England Puritans. It now has 5,320 churches with more than 1.1 million members. Black, who in his nomination speech called the struggle for justice and peace “part of our identity,” is the first African American elected to lead his denomination, which is more than 90 percent white. (The only previous black president completed the term of a general minister who died in office.) Black succeeds another Yalie, John Thomas ’75MDiv.
Since his days at the Yale Daily News, Dan Froomkin ’85 has never been one to duck an argument. He started plenty in the past five years in “White House Watch,” his column for washingtonpost.com. Now Froomkin will have to find a new jousting ground: the Post has axed “White House Watch.” (Click here to read the June 26 column, his last.) The daily feature, originally called “White House Briefing,” was renamed in 2005 amid grumbling by Post political reporters that readers would confuse Froomkin’s “highly opinionated and liberal” work with their own “objective” writing. Froomkin, in turn, criticized the cozy relationship between Post staffers—especially Bob Woodward ’65—and the Bush White House. By the time of his firing last week, a Post spokeswoman dismissed “White House Watch” as “the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com.” The decision, a Post editor said, stemmed not from Froomkin’s politics but from “viewership data, budget constraints and judgments about how well the column was or was not adapting to a new era.” The firing of “the WaPo’s best blogger” inflamed liberal and not-so-liberal commentators, with Salon lamenting the loss of “one of the rarest commodities in the establishment media,” a “long-time Bush critic and Obama watchdog (i.e., a real journalist).” Perhaps prophetically, Froomkin (who has occasionally written for the Yale Alumni Magazine) declared a month ago on a eparate blog that journalists should “be brave enough to call things as we see them. … Playing it safe,” he argued, “is often transparently bogus—and boring, to boot.”
How often except in daydreams does someone get to make a statement like “I am happy the Pope has entrusted to me an area that he considers so important?” That’s what theologian J. Augustine Di Noia ’80PhD told the Catholic News Service when he was appointed on June 16 to head the Vatican office concerned with liturgy. Di Noia, who got his doctorate in religious studies at Yale, is a Dominican priest who has worked since 2002 at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. There he served under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. As secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Di Noia will address issues relating to liturgical practices, including a new English translation of the mass. The job comes with a promotion: Di Noia will be ordained as an archbishop in a ceremony in Washington, DC, on July 11. The New York City native has been named archbishop of Oregon City, Oregon, but he won’t have to make the commute from Rome. Oregon City is a former archdiocese that is no longer active: it’s maintained as one of the church’s “titular sees” for bishops based in the Vatican.
Running for an unprecedented ninth term, New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. has for months been promising radical improvements in the city’s troubled school system. Now the Board of Education has hired a man to put some flesh on the mayor’s skeletal reform plans: Garth Harries ’95, who for six years oversaw the founding of new schools and the closing of failing ones in New York City. He’ll start next month in New Haven in the newly created position of “assistant superintendent for portfolio and performance management.” New Haven’s 20,000-student school system struggles with the gamut of achievement, management, and behavior problems that typically afflict urban districts. But Harries, a former McKinsey consultant, told the Board of Ed that he looks forward to “a great foundation” and “a leadership that’s setting ambitious goals.” And, he said, he intends to stay in New Haven and “live a career here.”
Many people wish for fame. For Brian Deese’s turn in the spotlight, maybe not so much. Deese, a once-and-perhaps-future Yale law student, is the 31-year-old steering the Obama administration through General Motors’ bankruptcy. After his position earned him a profile in the New York Times, his age and lack of business or economics background—and, just possibly, his political affiliation—earned scorn from the likes of a Wall Street Journal editorialist and Fox News’ Glenn Beck. “There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Deese told the Times. “It was a little scary.” Quipped Beck: “More than a little scary for GM, much less the American people.” Scary or not, presumably Deese would like to see the job market for this particular skill set—dismantling failed American companies—dry up soon.
For Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD, it was a Memorial Day to remember. That’s the night when, after weeks of speculation, President Barack Obama called to let the federal appellate judge know she is his choice to replace retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter. Sotomayor’s by-now-famous biography—raised in a Bronx housing project by a single mom after her father died, graduating from Princeton and Yale Law—and her legal chops were enough to win Senate confirmation twice before: when George H. W. Bush ’48 named her to the US District Court bench in 1991, and again when Bill Clinton ’73JD elevated her to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. If confirmed again, Sotomayor will become the first Latina to sit on the nation’s highest court. She’s described as a centrist, which will set her apart from the other two Yalies on the court, Samuel Alito ’75JD and Clarence Thomas ’74JD.
Like a lot of former Clinton administration appointees, Neal Wolin ’83, ’88JD, has found his way back to Washington under President Barack Obama—with some baggage. A Treasury Department lawyer in the 1990s, Wolin made a Bush-era detour into the insurance business. On May 19, the Senate unanimously confirmed his new appointment as deputy Treasury secretary under Tim Geithner. The move “isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring,” one blogger noted, since Wolin oversaw Treasury’s drafting of the 1999 law that repealed the Depression-era firewall between commercial banks and riskier investment banking. Many commentators blame the repeal for some of the reckless lending that fueled the current economic meltdown. Geithner, however, says he’s “thrilled” to have Wolin on his team “at this critical moment in our nation’s history.”
Playwright Tony Kushner previews it as the American arts community’s “best news … since the birth of Walt Whitman.” Other colleagues rave about the “vibrant personality” who is “fabledly impatient.” Broadway impresario (he’s president of Jujamcyn Theaters); former racehorse owner and investment manager; producer of The Producers and Angels in America; the man behind the $480 Broadway ticket: ladies and gentlemen, we bring you Rocco Landesman ’76DFA, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Arts. Landesman’s Yale ties run deeper than his degree; he has taught at the School of Drama and championed the works of playwright August Wilson, many of which premiered at the Yale Rep. Those who know him expect this bold commercial talent to shake up the staid nonprofit world of the NEA: “Rocco is bored,” Yale Rep founding director Robert Brustein ’51DRA told the New York Times, “if things just go routinely.”
Not all is misery on the right these days. Just ask the co-founders of the Federalist Society: they and their organization of conservative law students, profs, and legal practitioners just landed the 2009 Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (The prize is awarded for contributions to the fulfillment of the Bradley Foundation’s conservative mission.) Three of the founders—law professor Steven Calabresi ’80, ’83JD (left), ex-congressman David McIntosh ’80 (middle), and Federalist Society VP Lee Liberman Otis ’79 (right)—met as Yale undergrads. In 1982, after scattering to the four corners—OK, to law school at Yale and the University of Chicago—they celebrated the Reagan era by launching the society, with the help of Spencer Abraham at Harvard Law. By 2000, the Washington Monthly had dubbed the Federalists “The Conservative Cabal That’s Transforming American Law.” And by 2007, the society reported annual income of $7,826,281. The Bradley Prize is worth a comparatively measly $250,000—but with conservatives out of power, every quarter-million helps.
When Arlen Specter ’56LLB jumped parties this week, after 43 years in the GOP and 29 in the US Senate, he set off a flurry of counting: that makes 57 Senate Democrats, plus one more if Al Franken is seated, plus two independents who caucus with the Dems, for a potential 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. President Barack Obama pledged to support Specter for re-election, fueling speculation about whether the White House could now count on his vote on the budget or the controversial nomination of fellow Yale Law School grad Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel. (Answer: no.) US News & World Report delved into the demographics, noting that the Philadelphian’s switch “deprives Republicans of their sole Jewish senator.” Amid all the number-crunching, it might be worth tabulating one more consequence of the newly blue Old Blue: of eight Yale alumni in the Senate, Republicans now account for exactly zero.
She pulled down a MacArthur “genius” prize two years ago, so perhaps it was just a matter of time until playwright Lynn Nottage ’89MFA scored a Pulitzer Prize. That time came this week, when Nottage’s Ruined scooped up the Pulitzer for drama. For her latest work, Nottage traveled to Africa, interviewing Congolese women who had been raped and brutalized by their country’s civil war. Though Ruined is based on Bertolt Brecht’s World War II classic Mother Courage and Her Children, Nottage—a playwriting lecturer at the School of Drama—rejected Brecht’s trademark technique of distancing audience from characters. “I believe in engaging people emotionally,” she told the New York Times.
Whatever else there is to say about Jay Blount ’05—he’s a consultant with the firm of Casey Quirk, he was a founding member of Yale’s chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon, he was one of Rumpus’s 50 Most Beautiful People at Yale for 2002—the reason you might have read about him on Gawker or People.com this week is because of a rumor that he is engaged to marry Barbara Bush ’04, the daughter of former president George W. Bush ’68. The talk began with an item on the blog StyleList on April 14. Before the day was over, someone described as a “Bush family source” had told People that it wasn’t true. The two frequently have been described in the media as a couple, but almost always with the modifier “on-again, off-again.” We’ll keep you posted.
It doesn’t quite match up to the G-20’s promised $1.1 trillion in global stimulus spending. But Yale is quite happy with a $50 million gift from John W. Jackson ’67 and his wife, Susan, for a new international institute. Retired CEO of pharmaceutical maker Celgene Corp., Jackson majored in political science, served in the Marines in Vietnam, earned his MBA in France, and worked overseas for Merck & Co. He hopes the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs will “inspire students to pursue careers in diplomacy and public service and to become globally engaged leaders in all walks of life.” The institute, scheduled to open in the fall of 2010, will expand enrollment in and financial aid for the undergraduate international relations major. In addition, it will offer courses and career placement for all of Yale’s schools. Says Yale president Richard Levin: “I expect that the Jackson Institute will become the most visible of the many thriving activities of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.”
He’s got 14 years on the federal bench in Indiana, a top American Bar Association rating, and the support of home-state senators from both parties—not to mention a Yale law degree. So you might expect David Hamilton ’83JD to breeze through confirmation for a seat on the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. But President Barack Obama’s first judicial nominee ran into some flak at his April 1 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Led by ranking Republican Arlen Specter ’56LLB, some GOP senators boycotted the hearing, complaining that it came too soon after Hamilton’s March 19 nomination. Hoosier senator Richard Lugar, a Republican, stuck by his man, calling Hamilton “superbly qualified.”
Even before the NCAA men’s hockey tournament started, University of Vermont coach Kevin Sneddon paid homage to his first-round opponent. Yale’s Keith Allain ’80 “has my vote for coach of the year,” Sneddon told College Hockey News—an opinion shared by CHN itself. Allain, who played goalie and served as assistant coach under Yale’s revered Tim Taylor, ran up the Bulldogs’ winningest season ever, 24–7–2, capturing the ECAC championship and the conference’s Tim Taylor Award as ECAC Hockey Coach of the Year. Yale, ranked fifth in national polls, and Vermont face off Friday at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport.
Mom’s a successful arts administrator. Dad teaches at the Yale School of Management and co-founded a profitable beverage company. But Rachel Kauder Nalebuff ’13 has found her own route to fame: My Little Red Book, an anthology of first-person accounts of first periods. While the subject is “bound to provoke snickers,” the New York Times Book Review noted this week, “there’s much that is distinctive” about the book. Nalebuff—who is taking a gap year before starting Yale College in the fall—brings a fresh and youthful editor’s perspective. But she gathers stories from women and girls covering a wide range of ages, countries, and socioeconomic circumstances. (One contributor is Nalebuff’s younger sister Zoe, who announced the news to a friend by texting a red dot, with the message: “Only 40 more years.”) And with 92 authors crammed into just 225 pages, My Little Red Book is, like the best of periods, mercifully short.
Medical resident Matt McCarthy ’03 made quite a splash last month with his book Odd Man Out, a tell-all account of his year as a minor-league pitcher with the Provo Angels: an excerpt in Sports Illustrated, an interview in USA Today, and sightings on the New York Times Best Seller List (#21 as of March 8). But when the New York Times published an article on March 3 pointing out that “many portions of the book are incorrect, embellished, or impossible,” McCarthy suddenly found his name in print alongside faux memoirists James Frey and Herman Rosenblat. McCarthy’s errors—many of them pointed out by McCarthy’s former manager and teammates, who were not happy with the way they were portrayed—do not seem to have sunk the book, though; publisher HarperCollins is standing behind the book, and it was still the third-best-selling baseball book on Amazon as of March 12. “I trusted my notes and my memory on some smaller details, and there were obviously a few instances in which I didn’t have things quite right. That’s my fault, and I’ll take the blame,” McCarthy told USA Today on March 9. “But if people are waiting for me to break down and confess that I made everything up, it’s not going to happen.”
Since critical opinions have ranged from “a world-class masterpiece” to “bloatedly inept,” you may have to read the new doorstop of a novel by Jonathan Littell ’89 for yourself. Just be prepared for the incest and genocide. The Kindly Ones, Littell’s fictional memoir of a Nazi SS officer, was released in English on March 3 to great fanfare after collecting a slew of prizes and selling 700,000 copies in the original French. HarperCollins reportedly spent $1 million to acquire the American rights, and the company has launched a major promotional campaign in hope of replicating the book’s European triumph. But even if The Kindly Ones doesn’t succeed here, Littell will always have Paris: although he is an American by birth and lives in Barcelona, he was awarded French citizenship after the book’s publication under a law that makes citizenship available to those whose “meritorious actions contribute to the glory of France.”
“On test scores alone, I probably would not have been admitted to Yale,” Gary Locke ’72 told a roomful of undergrads in a 2001 Chubb Fellowship Lecture. “Yale took a hard look at me and gave me a chance.” He was talking then about affirmative action. But the lesson about long-shot candidates and unexpected opportunities applied equally this week, when Locke became President Barack Obama’s third choice as Secretary of Commerce. (The first, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, withdrew as an investigation into his business dealings heated up; the second, New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, decided his conservative Republicanism wasn’t such a good fit with the Obama administration after all.) A son of immigrants, Locke didn’t learn English until he started school, but he also knows what it’s like to lead the pack: he served as the nation’s first Chinese-American governor, of Washington State, from 1997 to 2005.
First there was the French Fry Mobile, driving around the US on used fast-food grease to demonstrate that biodiesel works. Now comes the India Climate Solutions Road Tour, conceived by Alexis Ringwald ’05, ’06MEM, and Caroline Howe ’07. The two took part in a mostly Indian-led “Climate Caravan,” touring the subcontinent in an Indian-made electric car, retrofitted with a longer-lasting battery and a solar roof that boosted its range to 100 miles per charge. The goal, Howe blogged, was “a wake up call to consumers and policy makers across the world to drive change by reinventing the global auto industry.” If that seems too modest, the sponsoring organization, the India Climate Youth Network, also used the road tour to train and inspire other young environmental activists.
He dropped out of law school to do standup comedy, but Demetri Martin ’95 has not neglected his education. The mop-topped jokester taught himself to sew his own costumes; to play guitar, piano, and harmonica; and even to draw (well, sort of) on an easel pad to enhance his “sketch comedy.” This week, Martin learned what it’s like to headline his own show: Important Things With Demetri Martin made its debut Wednesday night on Comedy Central. Already known to Comedy Central viewers as Jon Stewart’s “youth correspondent,” Martin also stars in the upcoming Ang Lee film Taking Woodstock, based on the memoir of concert promoter and gay-rights activist Elliot Tiber. Important Things punchlines revolve around naked women, self-castration jokes, and supertitles reading “ASSH**E”—not exactly egghead humor. But in a Yale Alumni Magazine interview last year, Martin proved that he has not lost his intellectual edge: Getting laughs, he said, is “probabilistic … like quantum physics. In a sense.”
Ten years ago, surgeon Francisco Cigarroa ’79—embroiled in what he called a “healthy debate” with administrators at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center—got a letter from the UT System. He thought he was fired, he recently told the San Antonio Express-News. Instead, it was an invitation to apply for the health sciences center’s presidency—a move that put Cigarroa on track to become the nation’s first Latino head of a major university system. On February 2, he took office as chancellor of the UT System, presiding over 15 campuses with more than 194,000 students. One of ten children raised in Laredo by a cardiologist father and a mother who, he says, believed firmly in discipline, Cigarroa made his reputation as a pediatric transplant surgeon (acquiring the nickname manos do oro, or “golden hands”) before moving into administration. As head of the health sciences center, he proved himself a talented fund-raiser—more important now than ever in the current economy, unless Cigarroa wants to wield his scalpel on the UT system’s $11.5 billion budget.
After a stint as Bulldogs quarterback, Nick Sanchez ’95 shifted his competitive focus to the courtroom. Now the California litigator is headed back for the huddle, where he’ll be calling plays of a different kind—as sports agent for his kid brother Mark. The younger Sanchez, starting QB for the University of Southern California, recently announced that he’ll forgo his final year of college eligibility and enter the NFL draft in April. He has reportedly tapped Nick to represent him. The choice drew some Monday morning quarterbacking in the blogosphere, on the theory that it’s rarely a good idea to do business with a family member, especially one whose experience is in business litigation rather than representing pro athletes. Then again, Nick Sanchez is no benchwarmer: SuperLawyers magazine ranked him as a Southern California Rising Star in 2008.
The inaugural prayers offered by Rick Warren, Joseph Lowery, and Gene Robinson each kicked up their own mini-controversies. But the Reverend Dr. Sharon E. Watkins ’84MDiv flew under the radar in her sermon at the National Prayer Service held on January 21 at Washington’s National Cathedral. Watkins, the first woman to preach the sermon at an inaugural prayer service, is president of the Disciples of Christ, a 700,000-member mainline Protestant denomination. In front of the Obamas, much of official Washington, and an interfaith Who’s Who of religious leaders, Watkins implored the president to respond to hard times with “generous hospitality” both at home and abroad. She also ad libbed a pastoral critique of his schedule the day before: “Dancing till dawn? What were you thinking?”
Next week, the curtain comes down on the second Bush administration, and with it 20 years of Eli hegemony in the White House. We’ve collected here some thoughts on president George W. Bush ’68 from Yale pundits, his classmates, and other alumni—much of it from our own pages over the last eight years. But don’t just read it—add to the archive by sending your own opinions to yalealumnimag@yale.edu.
Just as one Yale Law School graduate (Hillary Clinton ’73JD) leaves the Senate, another is arriving: On January 3, Michael Bennet ’93JD was appointed by Colorado governor Bill Ritter to fill the Senate vacancy to be created when Senator Ken Salazar becomes Barack Obama’s secretary of the interior. Bennet, a Democrat, has been Denver’s superintendent of schools for three and a half years; before that, he had stints in Denver city government, the Clinton justice department, and corporate law. Bennet is not the only Eli in his family: he is married to Susan Daggett ’91JD, an environmental lawyer, and his brother, James Bennet ’88, is the editor of the Atlantic. As for the Senate, he’ll be one of eight members of the Bulldog caucus.
Liev Schreiber ’92MFA is perhaps not yet a household name, but he’s one of those actors you’re bound to have seen in something by now. The drama school alum has appeared in such diverse fare as the slasher film Scream, the indie favorite Big Night, and the 2000 film of Hamlet. His latest film, Defiance, opened on December 31; in it, Schreiber plays one of the Bielski brothers who led a rebellion against the Nazis in the forests of Belarus. But if that’s not your cup of tea, just wait a while: his turn as the villain in the comic-book adaptation Wolverine premieres on May 1.
When it came time for President George W. Bush ’68 to join 41 other presidents in the National Portrait Gallery, he says he needed “a good and forgiving friend” to paint his portrait. His choice was Robert Anderson ’68, a painter from Darien, Connecticut, who took a Spanish class with the president at Yale. The portrait, along with another artist’s likeness of Laura Bush, was unveiled in Washington on December 19. Anderson had done a formal portrait of Bush for the Yale Club of New York City in 2003, but this time, the two settled on a casual, seated pose. “This is more conversational and intimate,” Anderson told the Stamford Advocate, “the way you would experience the president of you were just sitting down and talking with him.” Anderson, a combat veteran in Vietnam, took painting classes at Yale, but majored in American studies. After his Navy service, he studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He makes his living at privately commissioned portraits, including a few up the road at his alma mater: he has painted former chaplain William Sloane Coffin, and a portrait of president Richard Levin is in the works.
Ever since Robert Frost read “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s swearing-in, Democrats have had a thing for inaugural bards. James Dickey turned up for Jimmy Carter, and Maya Angelou and Miller Williams for Bill Clinton. Barack Obama’s choice? Elizabeth Alexander ’84. It was announced on December 17 that Alexander, author of four books of poetry, will read one of her works at Obama’s inauguration on January 20. Alexander’s most recent volume, American Sublime, was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and she won the Jackson Poetry Prize last year. For her day job, Alexander is a professor and chair of African American studies at Yale. As poets go, she’s also well connected. Her father, Clifford Alexander, was secretary of the army in the Carter administration, and her brother Mark Alexander ’86, ’92JD, was an adviser to the Obama campaign and is working on the transition team.
In a week dominated by the spectacular charges against Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, it takes a lot to get noticed. But Marc Dreier ’72, sole owner of the 250-person New York law firm that bears his name, got his share of attention when he was arrested on federal fraud charges on December 7. Federal prosecutors allege that Dreier forged promissory notes and other documents to steal $380 million from hedge funds and other investors—$100 million from two hedge funds in one instance alone. That’s on top of the odd incident last week in which he was arrested for impersonating another lawyer at a meeting with a pension group in Toronto. At Dreier’s bail hearing on December 11, Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Streeter called him “the Houdini of impersonation and false documents.” But then, Yalies love to excel in their fields.
Sure, Hillary Clinton ’73JD is the Eli who made the biggest splash in the news this week. But she got her turn as Yalie of the Week months ago. Instead, we bring you Dave Arnold ’93, a culinary mad scientist just named by Esquire as one of its “Best and Brightest of 2008.” Known for his manic energy (New York chef Wylie Dufresne, a friend, suggested to Time that “he’s probably a little ADD”), Arnold is a tireless experimenter who has been known to use rotary evaporators, an immersion blender of his own design, and a 1950s centrifuge in his quest for epicurean innovation. As director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute, he’s leading a revolution in cooking science. “There’s no reason you can’t mess with anything and everything,” he told Esquire.
Robert Rubin ’64LLB may have to turn to the sports page this week to find an article that doesn’t mention his name. The former treasury secretary under fellow Yale Law grad Bill Clinton ’73JD, Rubin is in the news as an adviser to President-elect Obama and as a mentor to the top members of Obama’s incoming economic team—including treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, senior White House economics adviser Lawrence Summers, and budget director Peter Orszag. But Rubin is also taking hits because of his role as a director of Citigroup, where he and CEO Charles Prince were reported to have “played pivotal roles in the bank’s current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits.” What’s more, some are pointing fingers at Rubin for his support of deregulation during his term as treasury secretary. No word yet on a possible Rubin connection to the California wildfires.
If Peter Matthiessen ’50 needs a set of bookends, he’s in luck: he now has a second National Book Award to go with the one he won in 1979. On November 19, Matthiessen won the prize for fiction for Shadow Country, a reworking of three of his previous historical novels centered around a 19th-century sugar cane farmer in Florida. His previous award was for the nonfiction book The Snow Leopard, a classic of nature writing that chronicled a trip to the Himalayas. Matthiessen has said that he got into nonfiction writing nearly 50 years ago for “crassly commercial” reasons: he wasn’t making enough money writing fiction. “I’ve had a hard time over the years persuading people that fiction was my natural thing,” Matthiessen said on accepting his award. It seems as though he’s making progress.
He was dean of a law school at 36, provost at Penn at 46. And in March, the 49-year-old Ronald J. Daniels ’88LLM will become president of Johns Hopkins University. The appointment of Daniels, who was a professor and dean at the University of Toronto Law School, has led some arts and sciences people at Hopkins to hope that their day has come at an institution that is heavily weighted toward medicine. Daniels took his undergraduate and law degrees from Toronto; his Yale degree is a one-year Master of Laws for lawyers who want to pursue teaching. Like most university presidents, Daniels will have a faculty appointment at Hopkins. But for the first time in his career, he’ll be on the political science faculty: Hopkins doesn’t have a law school.
Come January, Tom Perriello ’96, ’01JD may be the new kid among 19 Yale alumni in the 111th US Congress. Or maybe not. As of the afternoon of November 6, the Virginia State Board of Elections showed Perriello ahead of Virgil Goode, the Republican incumbent in the state’s fifth congressional district, by 631 votes. But the numbers have been rather fluid, and even after provisional ballots are counted, there will still be a recount given the closeness of the race. The congressional race is Perriello’s first foray into electoral politics: he’s best known for helping to prosecute war crimes in Africa and for starting nonprofit groups focusing on international affairs and religion in politics.
When Anne Wojcicki ’96 and her husband, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, have their first child in November, they’ll have more than a family tree to put in the baby book. The tot will have access to a wealth of information based on DNA samples supplied by Brin and Wojcicki and analyzed by 23andMe, a company founded by Wojcicki and Linda Avey. (Google put up $3.9 million of the company’s estimated $10 million in capital.) 23andMe (named for the number of chromosome pairs humans carry) offers a $399 saliva test that can tell you about your ancestry and about your predisposition to some 90 inheritable conditions ranging from psoriasis to schizophrenia. Time magazine calls the company’s retail test the Invention of the Year for 2008, and the company has been collecting the saliva of the rich and famous at “spit parties,” at the World Economic Forum in Davos and more recently in New York.
Oliver Stone ’68 left Yale after his freshman year, but his time on campus no doubt came in handy when he was creating scenes from George W. Bush’s Yale years in W., a film biography of the president that opened on October 17. Although Stone is known for an over-the-top style and leftish political leanings, he has been credited by some surprised critics with an “evenhanded” and even “sympathetic” portrayal of Bush in the film.
Princeton economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman ’74 is also a prolific blogger. But for most of Monday, October 13, the only item on his blog read simply “A funny thing happened to me this morning.” It linked to the Nobel Prize website, which announced that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. For many of the fans (and foes) of Krugman’s liberal political views, the prize was an introduction to his more scholarly side. Krugman won his Nobel for research he did beginning in the late 1970s that explained international trade patterns and how industries end up being concentrated in specific countries. Krugman will have his hands full in the coming months explaining the economic crisis, but he’ll have a little cushion as far as his own finances are concerned: the Nobel comes with $1.4 million.
The reaction of most left-leaning critics and commentators to the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate has been uniform and predictable. Perhaps just as predictably, Camille Paglia ’74PhD begs to differ. Paglia, best known for her 1990 book Sexual Personae, is a confirmed Obama supporter, but her recent columns about Palin in the online magazine Salon have been the talk of the blogosphere. In her October 8 column, she praised Palin as an “Amazon warrior” and said she admires her “competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal.” Paglia also predicted that “even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment.” Paglia forgot to mention that the record label founded by Madonna in 1992 was called Maverick Records. Coincidence?
Being an expert on presidential debates is occasional work at best—better than census taker but not as frequent as America’s Cup commentator. But Aaron Zelinsky ’06, ’10JD, has carved a nice niche for himself with the Presidential Debate Blog, which offers news and commentary about this year’s presidential and vice presidential debates. A Yale law student who spent four years on the Yale debate team as an undergrad, Zelinsky has, according to the bio on his blog, “watched every debate of the 2007–2008 primary season and read or watched every past presidential debate.” So you don’t have to. Quote-hungry reporters have started turning to Zelinsky for his thoughts. On the eve of the Biden-Palin vice presidential debate, he predicted that Palin “will bring the kitchen sink—a lot of very well-rehearsed zingers that she has to make sound like they’re not,” and advised Biden to “act himself and focus the firepower on McCain.” And before the first presidential debate, his advice to the electorate was candid, although not in the best interest of the punditocracy: “After the debate is over, turn off your television and make up your own decision,” he said in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Don’t wait to be spun by the post-debate commentary. I hope to put guys like me out of business.”
As the object of daydreams, the $500,000 MacArthur Fellowships are even better than the lottery in that you don’t have to buy a ticket—the call from the MacArthur Foundation comes completely out of the blue. For Chimamanda Adichie ’08MA, a Nigerian novelist who got her master’s in African studies at Yale, the call came on her birthday, while she was in the bathtub at her home in Lagos. “I was thrilled and grateful,” she e-mailed the New York Times. “I like to say that America is like my distant uncle who doesn’t remember my name but occasionally gives me pocket money. That phone call filled me with an enormous affection for my uncle!” Born to an academic family in Nigeria, Adichie is best known for her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun, a story centered on the late-1960s war between Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra. The MacArthur Foundation said that the book “has enriched conversation about the war within Nigeria while also offering insight into the circumstances that lead to ethnic conflict.” Adichie was one of three Yale-connected people among this year’s 25 MacArthur winners, which were announced on September 23; the other two were Stephen Houston ’87PhD, an anthropologist at Brown who studies the Mayan civilization, and Jennifer Tipton, a professor of lighting design at the School of Drama. The MacArthur Fellowships, known in the media as “genius grants,” offer $500,000—with no strings attached—to “extraordinarily creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement,” according to foundation president Jonathan Fanton ’65, ’78PhD.
With huge financial institutions falling like dominoes this week, the presidential campaign may finally be turning away from issues like lipstick on domesticated animals and toward a discussion of the economy. Which means we will be likely hearing more from Austan Goolsbee ’91, ’91MA, the 39-year-old economics professor at the University of Chicago who is Barack Obama’s senior economic adviser. Goolsbee, a skilled debater and member of Skull and Bones at Yale, turned up in the media this week talking about the need for government regulation of markets. “The core issue is pretty easy to understand,” he told The Politico. “We’ve just spent the last eight years operating on the premise that the government shouldn’t be in the business of setting the rules of the road.” Goolsbee attracted some unwanted attention to the campaign during the primaries, when it was reported that he had assured Canadian officials that his candidate’s talk about revisiting NAFTA was merely political posturing. He has also heard praise from unlikely quarters: “He seems to be the sort of person—amiable, empirical, and reasonable—you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president,” wrote columnist George Will last year, “if such there must be.”
As the new chief executive of the troubled Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), Herbert M. Allison Jr. ’65 may have to make some unpopular decisions. But that might not be a problem for the man who in 2003, as CEO of TIAA-CREF, eliminated 500 jobs. (Employees called the layoffs “Herbicides.”) Allison also ordered layoffs at Merrill Lynch during his two years as president of the brokerage in the late 1990s. Allison was named to head Fannie Mae on September 7, when the federal government announced it would take over the lender and its cousin Freddie Mac, both of which were at risk of failure from the mortgage crisis. One thing’s for sure: Allison’s not just in it for the money. James Lockhart ’68 (a previous Yalie of the Week), the Bush administration official responsible for oversight of the companies, has already said the new CEOs’ pay will be “significantly lower” than the much-criticized packages of their predecessors.
These are tough times for those Blue boosters who like to bask in the reflected glory of Yale’s dominance in presidential politics. This summer, for the first time since 1968, neither party nominated a Yale graduate for president or vice president, and Eli watchers are left to grasp at whatever alumni stories they can—in this case the odd spectacle of a former Democratic candidate for vice president addressing the Republican Convention. In his speech on September 2, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman ’64, ’67LLB, praised Republican nominees John McCain and Sarah Palin and dismissed Barack Obama as someone who “has not reached across party lines to accomplish anything significant.” But he did have a good word for his old friend Bill Clinton ’73JD, whom he said “got some important things done like welfare reform, free trade agreements, and a balanced budget.”
Barack Obama says he’s here to “tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That can’t be good news for Hunter Biden ’96JD. Ever since his father, Senator Joe Biden, was named Obama’s running mate on August 23, the younger Biden’s work as a lobbyist and Washington insider has been under the media microscope. From 2001 to 2005, for example, while Senator Biden was working to pass a bill making it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy, Hunter Biden was a consultant for MBNA, a credit-card company that stood to benefit from the bill. Obama aides told the New York Times that Hunter Biden had not done lobbying work for MBNA, but the Times also said the campaign acknowledged that his connection to the firm was “one of the most sensitive issues they examined” while vetting Senator Biden.
What is the R-word? No, not “recession.” Tim Shriver ’81, son of long-ago vice presidential candidate Sargent Shriver ’38, ’41LLB and Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy, has been chair of the Special Olympics for 11 years. He’s been making the media rounds recently in the campaign for a boycott of the movie Tropic Thunder. “The degrading use of the word ‘retard’ together with the broader humiliation of people with intellectual disabilities in the film goes way too far,” he wrote in a CNN.com commentary. Shriver and the Special Olympics have been trying to get the word “retard” off the playground and out of kids’ (and adults’) vocabularies for a few years now, but Tropic Thunder has brought the issue into the spotlight. The boycott campaign has drawn decidedly mixed reactions. One blogger who had worked with disabled children wrote, “Oh my, how much I would love to see an end to the use of the ‘R’ word forever from any kind of discourse.” On the other hand, a commenter on an LA Times blog called Shriver a “Commie Pinko Rat” and told him to “go back to Russia.” Uh-huh. That’ll show him.
Sada Jacobson ’06 had one more thing to do before starting law school at the University of Michigan this fall: compete in the Olympic Games in Beijing. Jacobson, a fencer who was a two-time NCAA champion in women’s saber while at Yale, won a bronze medal in the Athens games in 2004. (We profiled her in the magazine that summer.) This time, Jacobson won the silver medal in the individual saber event, going down in the finals to her US teammate Mariel Zagunis. A third member of the US team, Becca Ward, won the bronze for a US sweep. The trio was favored to win the team saber event on August 21, but they had to settled for bronze after being defeated by Ukraine. Jacobson found herself in tears (“sobbing hysterically,” as she put it) after the individual meet and before she joined her teammates for the medal ceremony. But a fellow Yalie was on hand to proffer a handkerchief: former president George H. W. Bush ’48, who had been on hand for the final bout. “It was a very kind gesture,” Jacobson told the Hartford Courant. “I probably should have kept the handkerchief, now that I think about it.”
Is it hard for you to imagine a presidential election without a sixty-something Skull and Bones member on the ticket? Take heart: FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith ’66, a Bones classmate of John Kerry, is being talked about as a potential running mate for John McCain. New York Times columnist William Kristol mentioned Smith as a possibility in his column on August 4, and the Democratic website The Next Cheney now includes Smith as one of seven possible McCain choices. FedEx put out a statement on August 4 saying that “Mr. Smith has no interest in pursuing political office under any circumstance.” But Smith seemed open to the possibility of some kind of government service in May, when he told PBS’s Charlie Rose that “if the president of the United States asks you to do something, you have to pay attention to it. But … I certainly would hope Senator McCain would have better judgment than to hire me.”
Since 2006, James B. Lockhart III ’68 has been director of the little-known Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, charged with regulating Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks. Also since 2006, he has been arguing for more oversight power. Now that the housing debacle has almost brought Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac down, Congress has swung into action. Legislation signed by President Bush on July 30 creates the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which will be empowered to regulate the mortgage companies’ capital requirements and executive pay. (They are already forbidden to buy subprime loans—a regulation that saved them from a much worse disaster than what they face now.) Lockhart, who will be the new agency’s director, was present at the small Oval Office gathering at which Bush signed the bill. But it was hardly his first meeting with the president: the two attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School together.
Last year, Jesse Washington ’92 took a bold stand. As entertainment editor for the Associated Press, he decreed that, as an experiment, there would be no coverage of Paris Hilton for an entire week. (The AP had been averaging about two stories a week about the celebrity heiress.) Washington, a former managing editor of Vibe and founding editor of the hiphop magazine Blaze, will presumably have less need to worry about Ms. Hilton in his new job. On July 18, the AP announced that Washington will be its new national race and ethnicity writer. In the AP memo announcing his appointment, Washington describes himself as “a kid from the projects who went to Yale and married a doctor. I’m a person who fits in everywhere and nowhere.” And, like the man whose candidacy for president has put race at center stage this year, Washington is the son of an interracial marriage.
Meryl Streep ’75MFA didn’t get 14 Oscar nominations for just doing the same-old same-old. This weekend, she turns up singing and dancing in, of all things, a movie musical based on the songs of the 1970s pop group ABBA. Streep has sung before, in films ranging from Postcards From the Edge to A Prairie Home Companion (and in an unforgettable performance on Philadelphia Chickens, an album of songs by Sandra Boynton ’74, ’79Dra), but her performance in Mamma Mia! is by all accounts a tour de force—though critics disagree about just what kind. USA Today said the movie is “worth the ticket price just to see her belt it out, jump up and down on a bed, dance in platform shoes and slide down a banister. … Streep and the rest of the cast appear to be having the time of their lives.” New York Times critic A. O. Scott, on the other hand, says, “It is safe to say that Streep gives the worst performance of her career—safe to say because it is so clearly what she intends, and she is not an actress capable of failure. There is a degree of fascination in watching an Oscar-winning Yale School of Drama graduate mug and squirm, shimmy and shriek and generally fill every moment with antic, purposeless energy, as if she were hogging the spotlight in an eighth-grade musical.”
Michael E. O’Neill ’90JD is only our 24th Yalie of the Week, but he’s the second one who became newsworthy through plagiarism. (Make of that what you will.) O’Neill, whom President Bush nominated in June to be a federal district judge, has acknowledged using passages from other people’s writings in his articles for legal journals. But unlike English professor Kevin Kopelson ’79, O’Neill told the New York Times that his borrowing was inadvertent, the result of a “poor work method.” O’Neill, 46, is a law professor at George Mason University. He voluntarily surrendered his tenure after the plagiarism was disclosed, but he continues to teach there and may reapply for tenure. A former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ’74JD, he served more recently as a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he helped shepherd the confirmations of Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito ’75JD. “I think on the merits, Michael O’Neill ought to be confirmed,” his former boss, Senator Arlen Specter ’56LLB, told the Washington Post. “You have a mistake which ought not negate an extraordinary record of public service.”
When Dr. Benjamin Carson ’73 was an inner-city grade-schooler, his nickname was “Dummy.” On June 19, Carson, a neurosurgeon, philanthropist, author, and motivational speaker, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He credits his mother, Sonya, with turning his life around. When he was in fifth grade, she “put us on this reading program,” Carson recalled in a 2002 interview, “and said we had to read two books apiece from the Detroit Public Library and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn’t read, but we didn’t know that.” Carson went on to Yale, to medical school at the University of Michigan, and to a career in pediatric neurosurgery. He has developed therapies for controlling brain seizures and pioneered surgical methods to separate conjoined twins. His foundation has awarded millions of dollars in scholarships to students from fourth grade on, and he has spoken to countless children and adults about his experiences. And lest you think he doesn’t have a sense of humor, he made his film acting debut in a cameo for the 2003 Farrelly Brothers comedy Stuck on You: he was the surgeon who parted conjoined twins Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear.
Colin Sheehan ’97 knows the Yale golf course pretty well—he’s even played it at night, as he reported in Yankee magazine in a paean to the course’s famed ninth hole: “Once, in my undergraduate days, I tackled this hole at night. I sneaked onto the course, headed up to the tee with Day-Glo balls, then launched drive after drive over the pond. I’d follow their arcs like tracer rockets, then close my eyes, hoping to hear, after what seemed like an eternity, a thud (as they hit the green) rather than a splash.” A former Yale golfer who spent last year as an assistant coach, Sheehan was named head coach of the men’s team on June 26, succeeding veteran coach Dave Paterson. Sheehan is as much a wordsmith as a golfer: he was an editor of The Golfer magazine and wrote a history of the US Amateur championship.
Vanessa Selbst ’05 has always been a competitor. She played tennis and hockey at MIT, then rugby after transferring to Yale. These days, her playing field is the card table: since 2006, she has won $681,115 playing poker. On June 12, she won her first World Series of Poker event, taking home a gold bracelet and $227,965. One poker website said her final table was “as rowdy as any poker duel in recent memory.” (Click here for a live blog account of the event, but only if you have a clue what a “check preflop” is.) Selbst will be even more dangerous in another three years: she’s bringing her winnings back to New Haven in the fall and starting law school.
The Supreme Court’s June 12 decision in the case of Boumediene v. Bush was a victory for foreign detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay and a setback for the Bush administration and Congress. It was also a professional triumph for Seth Waxman ’77JD, the lawyer who argued the detainees’ case before the court. Waxman argued that his clients, six natives of Algeria arrested in Bosnia in 2001 over an alleged terror plot, were not enemy combatants and should have access to US civilian courts. “These men have been held, taken by the United States, thousands of miles away—in the case of my six individuals, plucked from their homes, from their wives and children in Sarajevo,” Waxman said in his December 6 appearance before the court. Waxman, a partner in the Washington, DC, firm Wilmer Hale, was US Solicitor General in the Clinton administration.
Relief pitcher Craig Breslow ’02 is tenacious. In his first stint in the big leagues, in 2005 with the San Diego Padres, he pitched two scoreless innings. But instead of embarking on a dream career, he got sent right back down to the minors. Ever since then, Breslow has been in and out of the majors—Boston and Cleveland, as well as San Diego—pitching 40 innings in 37 games for four teams. This week he made his debut with yet another major-league team, the Minnesota Twins. He struck out three Yankee batters in one and two-thirds innings of work on May 31. “I hope Craig has finally found a home,” says his former Yale coach, John Stuper. Wherever Breslow has played ball, his Yale molecular biophysics and biochemistry degree has been a topic of conversation. “I can’t even pronounce that degree,” Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I just hope I don’t have to get into any real deep conversations with him because I think he’ll be a little over my head.”
It’s one thing to get caught plagiarizing. It’s another to shout about your own plagiarism from the rooftops—or at least in the London Review of Books, as Kevin Kopelson ’79 did recently. In a 4,400-word essay (which we assume he wrote himself), Kopelson, a literary critic and English professor at the University of Iowa, tells of three instances in which he plagiarized academic papers. In fourth grade, he copied an encyclopedia entry on Hernando Cortez; in a music class at Yale, he handed in a paper his brother had written at Harvard; and in graduate school at Brown, he lifted a published paper by gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ’75PhD. Weirdly, when Kopelson later met Sedgwick and she offered to read his work, he sent her the paper he stole from her. Kopelson writes: “As far as I know, Eve’s never read the thing. (But what if she has!) Never seen my name above her work. Never noticed the plagiarism. Well, she will now.”
Expect a record turnout at the tenth reunion of the Class of 2001. Budding film producer Cash Warren ’01 became the envy of millions of men on Monday when he married Jessica Alba, the 27-year-old actress who got her start on the TV series Dark Angel. The couple are expecting a daughter this summer. Warren met Alba when he worked as a director’s assistant on her 2005 film The Fantastic Four. Although he majored in political science at Yale (where he was tapped for the secret society Wolf’s Head), show business is the family business for Warren: his father is actor Michael Warren, who played Officer Bobby Hill on the 1980s series Hill Street Blues.
He rode bulls for the rodeo team in college. He’s worked off and on as a ranch hand in his home state of Nebraska. And he logged 65,000 miles in a pickup truck researching his PhD dissertation on western ranches in the 19th century. So despite his Yale doctorate and his job teaching history at Hastings College, Scott Kleeb ’06PhD comes by those Marlboro-man photos on his campaign website naturally. On Tuesday, Kleeb, who is 32, won the Democratic nomination for an open US Senate seat from Nebraska, winning 69 percent of the vote against businessman Tony Raimondo. In November, he’ll face Republican former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns. In this heavily Republican state, Johanns is the current favorite. But Kleeb (pronounced “klebb”), who ran unsuccessfully for the House in 2006, is heeding the advice of his Yale adviser, history professor John Lewis Gaddis, who told Kleeb in 2004 that Democrats had to become more competitive in red states in order to win national elections. “I had no idea he’d take me seriously,” Gaddis told the Kearney Hub.
It’s hard to find a woman higher on the ladder of success than Yale trustee Indra Nooyi ’80MPPM, chair and CEO of Pepsico since 2006. Fortune magazine calls her the most powerful woman in business. Last year, Forbes ranked her as the fifth most powerful woman in the world. OK, OK, we’re impressed. But we bet this is the one she’s really been waiting for: Nooyi was recently selected as one of the inaugural inductees to the Chief Mommy Officer Hall of Fame. As the mother of two daughters (24 and 15), she is one of ten women being recognized because they have “achieved greatness in their respective careers while simultaneously maintaining their roles as exemplary mothers.” We should add that the hall of fame is pretty much a publicity gimmick for a company that sells “chief mommy officer” and “chief daddy officer” T-shirts online. But, as millions of mothers have been known to say at this time of year, it’s the thought that counts.
W. Bing Gordon ’72 is a 58-year-old executive who sees an empty nest on his horizon and, as he told the San Jose Mercury News, wants to “go do something new and cool.” Fair enough. But what if your job for the last 26 years has been to create, market, and play video games? What’s cooler than the apex of cool? To Gordon, it’s … venture capital. He was one of the founders of Electronic Arts, the video-game behemoth responsible for The Sims, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and lots of other successful games. He shepherded those games to market as the company’s chief creative officer—otherwise known as the “resident genius.” Now he’s leaving to become a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “I’d like to take the thinking behind video game design and help a new generation of entrepreneurs make cool new stuff,” Gordon told the Los Angeles Times.
The Yale Alumni Magazine is emphatically not in the business of endorsing presidential candidates, but for newsworthiness this week, it’s hard to top the victory of Senator Hillary Clinton ’73JD in the Pennsylvania primary. If we were the alumni magazine of about 50 years ago, we’d have to declare that Clinton had “shown the grit and tenacity of the bulldog” in her against-the-odds quest. But this is 2008, so we’ll just note that she’s trying to become the nation’s first female president, and its fourth consecutive Eli president.
We don’t know who gave the Library of Congress the authority to decide who is and who isn’t a “living legend,” but David McCullough ’55 was one of seven people to be honored with that distinction at an event at the library on April 12. True, he has a lot to recommend him. With two Pulitzer Prizes (for his presidential biographies Truman and John Adams), a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and 40 honorary degrees (including one from Yale), he hasn’t got a lot of accolades left to aspire to. The “living legend” award event, by the way, took place during the run of the critically acclaimed HBO mini-series adaptation of John Adams (starring Paul Giamatti ’89, ’94MFA).
Never thought Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Match Girl” and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion were a natural combination? That’s why you didn’t win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music, as David Lang ’83MAM did on Monday for The Little Match Girl Passion. Lang, who studied composition at the School of Music under Martin Bresnick, has made noise in the contemporary-music world for two decades as one of the founders and directors of the collective known as Bang on a Can. His winning work, scored for four voices and percussion instruments (played by the singers), explores the Christian aspects of Andersen’s bleak story of a street urchin’s death by telling it in a structure lifted from Bach’s treatment of the death of Christ. Listen for yourself: Carnegie Hall, which commissioned the piece, has a recording of it available online.
Almost unnoticed in the scandal surrounding Shin Jeong-ah—the South Korean art history professor who falsely claimed to have a Yale PhD (see our story here)—is the fact that her alleged lover and accomplice really does have a Yale degree. Byeon Yang-kyoon ’87MA, who was until recently a top aide to Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, received his master’s as a student in Yale’s International and Development Economics program. On March 31, a South Korean court sentenced Shin to 18 months in jail for faking credentials and embezzling funds. Byeon, 59, who was convicted of improperly using his influence to help Shin gain favor with Dongguk University, was given a one-year suspended sentence and ordered to perform community service. He has resigned his government post. So watch out, Scooter Libby ’72 and Bill Clinton ’73JD. You’ve got competition. As Yale becomes more international in its outlook, even our roster of scandal-ridden alumni is going global.
No one’s going to walk all over Angela Bassett ’80, ’83MFA, the Academy Award-nominated actress best known for portraying Tina Turner in the film What’s Love Got to Do With It. But her name is another matter: Bassett is now officially part of Tinseltown’s terra firma, having been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 20. Bassett’s is the 2,358th star on the storied walk, and by our count the 13th claimed by a Yale alum. (For a list of all 13, click here.)
At 37, the Rev. Otis Moss III ’95MDiv is a rising star: a minister with a degree from Yale Divinity, a noted youth pastor named one of “God’s foot soldiers” by Newsweek, and one of Beliefnet’s “most influential black spiritual leaders.” So after two years as associate pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Moss was ready to step into the shoes of the church’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, on March 9. But thanks to an unusually prominent parishioner—one Barack Obama—and the controversy over Wright’s statements from the pulpit, Moss’s first weeks as pastor have been “a baptism by fire,” as he told All Things Considered on March 19. He feels, Moss said quite cheerfully, like “Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego thrown into the fiery furnace.”
Seth Hawkins ’93 did not actually have to leap tall buildings or jump off cliffs in order to be officially declared a hero. But he does help oversee the EMS team whose territory includes the “deepest gorge east of the Rockies.” He also founded the Appalachian Center for Wilderness Medicine. Hawkins, who practices in Morganton, North Carolina—in the foothills of the Smokies—was honored this week as a Hero of Emergency Medicine by the American College of Emergency Physicians. The college called him a “true pioneer” of the medical specialty of caring for the sick and injured in places no ambulance can reach. Hawkins says it was Yale’s Freshman Outdoor Orientation Trips (FOOT) that helped set him on his career trail.
When Richard Lalli ’80MM, ’86DMA, received the 2007 Yale College prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities, eight of his students came onstage to sing one minute’s worth of Handel’s Messiah—from the “Alleluja” chorus, naturally. Lalli, an adjunct School of Music professor for two decades, has won raves from undergraduates for his course in vocal performance and his leadership of the college Opera Theatre and Baroque Opera Project. On March 5, Lalli became master-elect of Jonathan Edwards College. (His term will begin next January.) His partner, Michael Rigsby ’88MD, medical director of University Health Services, will be associate master.
It’s not easy being the arbiter of sports in a league that’s still hanging on to the idea of the “scholar-athlete.” But as executive director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, Jeff Orleans ’67, ’71JD, has managed to maintain high standards for more than 23 years. Orleans, a former civil rights lawyer known for his trademark bow tie, just announced that he will retire in June 2009. Penn president Amy Gutmann, chair of the presidents’ group, called him “an exceptional leader of an exceptional athletic conference.” Our only complaint is that he seems never to have abused his position in order to help out the Bulldogs.
He’s smart, he’s an Emmy-winning reporter, and he’s a co-anchor on Good Morning America. But the reason Chris Cuomo ’92 is Yalie of the Week is that, on February 19, he jumped off the Taj Mahal. OK, it was the Taj Mahal Casino and Resort in Atlantic City, NJ, and he had been trained by a stuntwoman and was harnessed to a cable. Once safely down, Cuomo, who is afraid of heights, knelt and kissed the pavement.
For designing the first computerized switching system for telephone calls, Bell Labs researcher Erna Schneider Hoover ’52PhD was awarded one of the first patents ever issued for computer software. On Thursday, it was announced that her achievement had earned her a spot in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Like most women who combine career and family, Hoover knows how to juggle. She first sketched out the system while she was in the hospital recovering from the birth of one of her three daughters.
In Congress, she’s the Doyenne of DC and the Voice without a Vote. For 17 years, Georgetown U. law prof Eleanor Holmes Norton ’63MA, ’64LLB, has served as DC delegate to the House. She can’t vote because the District, as she tells everyone, has taxation but no representation. But trust us: she can hold her own. Even on The Colbert Report, where she once asked the host, “Why would you think that I find you attractive at all?”
Yalies? Liberal? So they say. But consider Glenn Reynolds ’85JD, whose blog Instapundit is one of the most influential on the Web. (It’s also one of the oldest—Wired called him The Blogfather.) He’s living proof that some Blues bleed red.
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