40 Be Ellis Laifer and Tobi Omola, both Class of 2019, turned their college band first into an honors project, and then into a career. Fortuno was unusually successful, and “making it” seemed only a matter of time.
20 Caught
After 9/11, Matt Byrne ’02 served as a firefighter. His classmate Sarah Lovely ’02 and his dad, Ed Byrne ’72, write about the trauma and addiction that cost Matt his life.
22 Right on Earth
Roux Distinguished Scholar Ayana Elizabeth Johnson raises visions of a future rooted in reality and the solutions we need to flourish here on Earth.
28 No Doubt
Is it good to be certain? Writers, doctors, a philosopher, a neuroscientist, and a forensic psychologist tell us what they know—and what they don’t—about certainty.
5 Senior Spontaneity: Ella Riccio ’25 has made the most of just about every moment at Bowdoin.
7 Dine: Ranwei Chang ’06 shares an alcohol-free cocktail from her company, Abstinence Spirits.
8 Bees Do It: Assistant Professor of Biology Patty Jones on the ways bees learn, remember, and forage.
11 As Maine Went: A Bowdoin senior documents changes in Maine’s coast since John McKee’s 1965 photographs shocked people into environmental action.
13 Largest Classroom: The new Finnegan McCoul Woodruff Mountain Center adds a key location for the Outing Club.
48 Getting It Right: President Safa Zaki explains how the biggest gift in Bowdoin’s history will create an initiative that allows the College to meet this critical moment in history.
Charles Wallace ’65, in twenty-seven years as Willamette University’s chaplain, offered laughter with his prayers.
Todd Lynch ’96 is a landscape designer and forest therapy guide who believes connecting with place is key.
SEEING EACH OTHER
Twice a year, students dress up for Student Night at the Museum, an event conceived as a way to bring the museum and its collections to students who had not had a chance to explore them through their classes. It is now one of the student social highlights of the year. April’s celebration brought hundreds of students out on a mild evening to dress up and explore the museum of art with friends. One of the works they saw was Ruby Rumié’s Mujeres en Bodegón de la Candelaria from her series Weaving Streets, which includes photographs, a video, posters, and five volumes of portraits of Cartagena’s women street vendors. The photograph is part of the BCMA exhibition Reimagining Our Américas: Empathy and Activism Beyond Borders.
Photo by Andrew Estey
From Strained to Special
I WAS NOT ABLE to participate in the research for the story about Coach Adam Walsh in the latest issue [Winter 2025], but I enjoyed reading the piece. I did not have a good senior year with Adam; our relationship was a strained one. After the season, he came up to me in Moulton Union and thanked me for the effort I had given the football team for four years. The year after I graduated, I was a volunteer freshman assistant and got to know him better. We corresponded by letters occasionally after that, and he was great to me, encouraging me in my future. When he came back for the special day before a game in his honor, he saw me with the old players lined up on the field’s home side. As he was coming across the field, he yelled, “Hi, Marty Roop!” Always a good memory for me.
Charles “Marty” Roop Jr. ’58
WHAT’S MY BREWPRINT?
As a journalist steeped in caffeine culture, I appreciated the thoughtful blend of neuroscience and biology in the piece “The Joe Gene.” However, it brewed up a question: How do I know which variant of the so-called coffee gene I have? If we could figure out our “brewprint,” maybe we would be better equipped to tailor our intake and decode our coffee compatibility.
Jon Chrisos, Portland, Maine
CORRECTION
In the column in Winter 2025, “Some Vibrant Word,” we misspelled the name of Paul Revere biographer David Hackett Fisher as David Hacket Fisher in the piece. We apologize for the error.
SEND US YOUR NEWS AND IDEAS
We love to hear from you! Please send story ideas, responses to things you’ve read about here, and, of course, news about you. If there isn’t a class news entry for a class year, it’s because we didn’t receive any submissions for that class. We want to hear from you, and so do your classmates and the rest of our readers! Email classnews@bowdoin.edu or fill out a class news form on the website, bowdoin.edu/magazine, or send ideas or letters to the editor to bowdoineditor@bowdoin.edu.
MAGAZINE STAFF
Editor
Alison Bennie
Designer and Art Director
Melissa Wells
Managing Editor
Leanne Dech
Senior Editor
Doug Cook
Design Consultant
2Communiqué
Contributors
Adam Bovie
Jim Caton
John Cross ’76
Cheryl Della Pietra
Rebecca Goldfine
Sophaktra Heng
Scott Hood
Micki Manheimer
Janie Porche
Tom Porter
On the Cover: Photographs by Greta Rybus
BOWDOIN MAGAZINE (ISSN: 0895-2604) is published three times a year by Bowdoin College, 4104 College Station, Brunswick, Maine, 04011. Printed by Penmor Lithographers, Lewiston, Maine. Sent free of charge to all Bowdoin alumni, parents of current and recent undergraduates, members of the senior class, faculty and staff, and members of the Association of Bowdoin Friends.
Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors.
Please send address changes, ideas, or letters to the editor to the address above or by email to bowdoineditor@bowdoin.edu. Send class news to classnews@bowdoin.edu or to the address above.
PHOTO: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES
Coach Adam Walsh at Bowdoin in 1947
ELLA RICCIO ’25
SENIOR SPONTANEITY
I get excited and sign up for everything—playing violin in the orchestra, swing dancing, doing photography for various competitions, and writing poetry for The Quill. When I schedule free time, I bike around and say hi to everyone, play Catan or Apples to Apples Junior edition, catch up with professors, or go for a swim in the ocean.
I could swim before I could walk but wasn’t planning on swimming in college. When I met Brad, my coach, it all made sense. He spends time getting to know every swimmer and has a wicked understated humor. I feel fortunate to not only have my All-American titles and NCAA trophies but also support from such a great team.
I’m from Colorado. Winds come barreling down the mountains; we might have 50 or 60 mph winds, and the weather will say “slightly breezy.” As I started going outside to see how the wind felt, I began to get better and better at knowing the speed, and it somehow became my fun fact.
I’ve been on a journey I call “senior spring spontaneity.” My first act was preparing high English tea, dressing up, and setting out fancy confections in Thorne for my friends. My second was submitting poems to an English department prize despite my fear (I received the Forbes Rickard Poetry Prize!). My third act was signing up to be a violinist for a student’s multimedia publishing company promotion film. I’m not sure what my fourth act will be.
I am obsessed with the Victorian era, sparked by a first-year seminar with Professor Briefel. I get to answer a lot of random Victorian questions for my friends, to which I provide very detailed answers. While I find this extremely fun, they probably wish for abridged versions.
This summer, I’ll get my scientific SCUBA diving certification, with the eventual goal of a PhD in marine ecology, conservation, and communication. I’ve worked with Woods Hole on coral, and I’d love to continue that work. I love being underwater.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
Biology major and champion wind-speed guesser Ella Riccio ’25 has made the most of just about every moment at Bowdoin.
FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND
The recent death of Pope Francis stirred fond memories for Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek Barbara Weiden Boyd.
She knew him as Jorge Bergoglio when they were students together in an intensive Germanlanguage program in Germany almost forty years ago. Boyd remembers a “kind, if reserved” classmate in a group of about ten students, a man who worked hard and enjoyed the small talk between classes.
“Only after a week or two did an Italian classmate, now my dearest friend, discover that Jorge was a priest,” recalls Boyd. “That same classmate met him about a year later in Rome— on a bus!—and he warmly asked about me.” That simple thought, she says, has stayed with her since, as a mark of the spiritual leader’s thoughtfulness and generosity to others. “The man who became Pope Francis was what he aspired to be—a good guy. But he was also a great man, whose deep commitment to the things that matter most—human decency, respect for others no matter their circumstances, the fragile gift of the earth’s environment, as well as the fragility of human life—was humbling but also inspiring,” says Boyd.
Mr. Frog’s Wild Ride
Local amphibians may not get as many big nights as Bowdoin students, but when they do, they overlap.
FOR THE LAST SIX YEARS— at least as far as the group’s most senior members can recall— the Bowdoin Naturalists have taken part in Maine Big Night, a community-driven scientific endeavor to assist amphibians during their yearly springtime migrations. As the Maine landscape thaws out from a frigid winter, meltwater collects in shallow, seasonal basins known as vernal pools—an ideal nighttime breeding ground for posthibernation frogs and salamanders. They have to hit the road to get there, though, and that can mean roadkill.
To help, students don headlamps and reflective vests and, as part of a cadre of project volunteers, spend their nights scouring roads near amphibian hotspots. Their mission is simple, explains Cora Dow ’24: Find frogs or salamanders attempting a crossing, gently pick them up, collect some data on them, and then bring them safely to their destination. What the amphibians make of this unexpected escort is unknown, but Blue Francetti ’28 sums up the student side of the experience: “I’ve never gotten to hold a salamander before. That was really cool.”
Count for the night: eight wood frogs; thirty-four live (sadly, two dead) spring peepers; five spotted salamanders; and one red eft.
Good Guy
Student Life
Blue Francetti ’28 holds a wood frog on Maine Big Night.
DID YOU KNOW?
In L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel set on Prince Edward Island, Anne of Green Gables, Anne serves her best friend, Diana, what she thinks is raspberry cordial, a concentrated drink of raspberries, lemon juice, and sugar, reduced in water. It turns out, though, that a confused young Anne poured Diana three servings of currant wine instead, leading to a rather drunk friend in the story and an official Anne of Green Gables brand of raspberry cordial in real life.
Cape Floral Clover Club
Recipe by Ranwei Chiang ’06
Chiang launched her company, Abstinence Spirits, after finding a lack of low-sugar, nonalcoholic drinking options for adults and deciding the world needed sophisticated, flavorful products for mixing mocktails. This recipe features her Cape Floral—a gin alternative with a slightly bitter herbal profile—and a lemon apertif featuring touches of aloe vera and African wormwood, but readers seeking a boozy version of the Cape Floral Clover Club can substitute regular gin and limoncello as desired! Add all ingredients except the fresh raspberry garnish to a shaker or jar filled with ice. Cover and shake hard for fifteen seconds.
2 ounces Abstinence Cape Floral or other nonalcoholic gin substitute
1 ounce Abstinence Lemon Apertif or other nonalcoholic limoncello substitute
1 ounce raspberry cordial
½ ounce, or 1 tablespoon lemon juice
¼ ounce, or 1 to 2 teaspoons aqua faba
Fresh raspberries, optional, for garnish
Strain the liquid into a glass, discard the ice, and add the liquid back to the jar or shaker.
Cover and shake again to create a smooth, frothy texture.
Strain the mixture into glass, garnish with raspberries as desired, and serve.
Ranwei Chiang ’06 is the CEO of Abstinence Spirits, nonalcoholic spirits featuring botanicals from South Africa that she launched in 2022. She previously worked at e.l.f. Cosmetics and Angie’s BoomChickaPop. Her roots are in food, though, starting with her on-campus job with Bowdoin Dining, and she later hosted her own pop-up dinner series and worked on a boutique lettuce farm. A government and legal studies and sociology double major at Bowdoin, she earned an MBA from Cornell University.
There are more than 20,000 species of bees in the world— just in Maine there are 278, of which 270 species are native. A single blueberry barren might have a hundred different species of bees—like the leafcutting bee or the blue orchard bee—buzzing around, pollinating the blueberries.
Did You Know?
Bees Do It
With a lab full of bumblebees and a whole Canadian island at her disposal, Assistant Professor of Biology Patty Jones works to understand how creatures, especially bees, learn, remember, and forage.
Illustration by Gina Triplett
Bees command our attention with their buzz, their distinctive coloring, and the threat sometimes of their sting. We know when they are around; we are aware and sometimes wary. And they abound in our art and literature and metaphor. There’s classical music’s The Flight of the Bumblebee, paintings by Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Benjamin West, and mentions in Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Chinese character Feng—with symbolism of everything from good luck and prosperity to fertility, hard work, and selflessness. Bees contain multitudes.
Jones knows a ton of cool facts about bees, and she wants to know even more. She is trying to figure out in her lab how bee cognition influences ecological communities. We know bees are essential pollinators, but what do the bees know? How do they learn? What do they see and smell and want?
With a cadre of student researchers, two hundred acres on Kent Island every summer, and a lab in Druckenmiller Hall the rest of the year, she is working on working out all the bees’ secrets.
Honeybees, probably the bee most people think of, are not native to North America. The USDA considers them managed livestock, and they have become critical for agriculture in places where there are not enough native bees. Beekeeping is both a hobby and big business, with colonies shipped across the country to hit crops at peak flowering times.
Bumblebees are quick learners, especially when it comes to associating flower traits with sugar rewards. They can learn colors, scents, patterns, and even the shapes of electric fields around flowers.
There are some feral honeybees in North America, though. As in Winnie the Pooh’s world in their native Europe, in North America they mostly move into hollow trees—but also sometimes inside walls or attics.
Bees play an essential role in growing many of our tastiest crops, like apples, raspberries, and coffee.
Kent Island has no honeybees, but a high pollination of blueberries, thanks to pollinators like Sanderson’s bumblebees and yellowjackets. Honeybees aren’t the best pollinators for blueberries, anyway, because blueberries need to be sonicated—basically, shaken so the pollen falls around—and tidy honeybees don’t do that.
Lots of plants have toxic compounds in their leaves to prevent herbivores from eating them, and these toxins often also occur in low doses in flower nectar and pollen. Some plants that have these compounds— including sunflowers—can act like medicine for bees infected with parasites as well as be host flowers for specialist bees like the mining bee species.
Bees, like other insects, accumulate positive charge on their bodies as they fly. Flowers have negative charges—when a bumblebee lands on a flower the interaction of the charges helps the pollen stick to the bee’s body.
Milkweed produces toxins called cardenolides, but many insects that like milkweed, such as monarch butterflies, have adapted to tolerate them. “All these milkweed insects are gorgeous,” Jones says. “A lot of them are orange because they sequester milkweed toxins into their own tissues for defense against bird predators.”
Athletics
Gift for the Game
Supporters of women’s basketball standout Sydney Jones ’25 say her soaring athletic feats are due both to her on-court talents and her off-court conduct.
Jones will graduate as one of the most decorated women’s basketball players in Bowdoin history, after scoring more than 1,500 points, grabbing 600 rebounds, totaling 300 assists, and racking up 200 steals.
While her skills and stats have been a big part of the team’s winning game after game, it’s Jones’s “leadership that has made us go from good to great,” said Head Coach Megan Phelps ’15.
“I think Sydney is one of the best to ever play at Bowdoin, which is saying something in a program that has been as successful as ours,” Phelps continued. “But it’s also because she’s incredibly good at building relationships with her teammates, coaches, and support staff.”
Jones credits the basketball community at Bowdoin for her record-breaking career. “I’ve learned so much from my coaches and teammates, allowing me to become the leader and person I am now,” she said. “As a female athlete, you don’t expect to have your school, let alone the surrounding community, celebrate your team and sport as much as I’ve experienced here at Bowdoin.”
After graduating, Jones plans to find a job coaching college basketball. Phelps is thrilled. “We need more women in coaching,” she said. “Her basketball IQ will make her a great mentor.”
Who’s Who
CALL ME BY OUR NAME
Making a name for yourself in college can be challenging enough as it is, but when your name isn’t entirely your own, it can be annoying, if at times hilarious. To this, new alumna Margaret Broaddus ’25 and Margaret Broaddus, the senior leadership gifts officer, can attest. “I was invited to a ‘jarty’ at Boody House. Denim dress was encouraged. I bet it was fun,” says Broaddus the staffer, who has received via email an invite to meet the dean, reminders about honors projects and summer applications that are due, and praise for being a fine guitar player. “I can’t thank you enough for dealing with the plethora of emails you have been mistakenly sent,” wrote Maggie, as she was known on campus, to Margaret. “I’m sure you have a better view of my life than most people here!” The two are certain their respective southern roots must cross at some point and agree that a Margaret Broaddus summit over coffee is in order.
In another case on campus, the identity crisis is actually contained within the same household. Sandra Hayes, executive director of health and counseling, liked a man with her name so much, she married him. “I will tell you that before we had children, we researched back five generations and found we had no relatives in common,” says Hayes, who, rather than going through life hyphenated as Hayes-Hayes, chose to take his name. Or did she?
PHOTO: BRIAN BEARD;
Sydney Jones ’25
Alone Together
A pioneering improvisational project creates an intimate, but remote, musical bond.
LIKE MOST OF US, Kate Campbell Strauss was stuck at home during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that unlikely setting, Bowdoin’s director of jazz ensembles and lecturer in music embarked on a groundbreaking recording project, proving that separation is no barrier to musical intimacy.
Saxophonist Campbell Strauss linked up with trumpeter and flugelhornist Emily Mikesell for the album Give Way, released in January on the independent label ears&eyes Records. The album features six multilayered tracks, musical conversations in which the artists, who became friends at grad school in New Orleans, swap sonic ideas and build on each other’s improvisations. The result is a lush mixture of sounds.
“The two of us composed and performed everything you hear on Give Way,” said Campbell Strauss. They also engineered, edited, and mixed the album, which garnered praise from, among others, the revered jazz magazine Downbeat, which lauded the album’s “exquisite sounds” and “gorgeousness.”
As Maine Went
In the summer of 1965, Bowdoin professor John McKee drove up and down Maine’s coast to photograph the unregulated pollution, dumping, and commercialization that was ruining the shoreline.
When he exhibited his black-and-white series in the show As Maine Goes at the Bowdoin art museum, McKee jolted the public and lent visceral imagery to the burgeoning environmental movement.
On the sixtieth anniversary of McKee’s travels, Chris Zhang ’25 and Frank Goodyear, codirector of the Museum of Art, embarked on their own road trips through Maine. Using a large-format camera, the same kind McKee used, Zhang pinpointed the spots where McKee once stood when he captured the alarming conditions on the coast.
In addition, Goodyear and Zhang are organizing a June-to-November show at the Bowdoin Art Museum to share McKee’s As Maine Goes photos and more than thirty of his later images.
This spring, Goodyear and Zhang traveled to Old Orchard Beach, Biddeford, Scarborough, Georgetown, Phippsburg, and Boothbay. They’ve been encouraged by what they’ve seen. “There have been dramatic changes,” Goodyear said, “mostly to the good.”
Zhang and Goodyear aim to publish his images alongside McKee’s in a new volume. Their book will also include photos by Ben Smith ’93, a student of McKee’s who was also inspired to replicate As Maine Goes three decades later for his own art project.
“After stumbling upon Ben Smith’s ‘re-photographs,’ the project began to feel like a cross-generational conversation about the environment: John McKee in 1965, Ben Smith in 1993, and me in 2025,” Zhang said.
While Zhang’s photos show a cleaner version of Maine, he is still capturing threats. His images reveal erosion from more intense storms and new concrete seawalls erected to keep homes from falling into the ocean. “My work is a meditation on what is happening now,” he said.
Give Way album cover
One of the locations revisited by Zhang was Biddeford Pool.
Academics
We’re In
Each semester, Bowdoin faculty offer new classes to lead students into unknown areas and expose them to diverse ideas.
HAMLET UNLIMITED
Associate Professor of English Aaron Kitch
In Hamlet Unlimited, students take “a deep dive into the most famous play ever written.” They look at why the story is popular around the globe, the philosophies that Shakespeare explores in the play, and the ways in which the characters, narrative, and ideas have shaped Western modernity. They also read and watch Hamlet adaptations, including The Lion King and the recent Broadway play Fat Ham. To better understand Hamlet, the class reads works by, among others, Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and contemporary playwright James Ijames.
THE VIKING AGE
Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jake Ransohoff
The Viking Age aims to show that “Northmen”—as their European neighbors called them—were not just savage raiders and colonizers who instilled fear wherever their ships landed. They were also traders, inventors, artisans, and explorers. Their travels shaped cultures from Ireland to Russia—including North America, where they built settlements 500 years before Columbus’s arrival. The Vikings have left us a diverse legacy: medieval sagas and buried treasure, and relics of religious rituals, modern science, and democratic governance—all of which help historians today better understand them.
INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN LITERATURE AND FILM
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Michael Oshindoro
The introductory course immerses students in African storytelling, with an emphasis on literature and films. Using works by African novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers from across the continent, students analyze topics and themes to gain a critical understanding of the most important issues for African artists “across genres and generations.” The course fulfills two Bowdoin requirements: international perspective and visual and performing arts, and it is cross-listed with English and cinema studies, as well as Africana studies.
Sign and Dine
At the peak of the Thorne Dining Hall dinner rush, about a half dozen students made their way to where Elias McEaneney ’27 was holding a table and setting up a reference chart. The hubbub of hundreds of conversations can make dinnertime at Thorne an unconventional choice of venue for a meeting, but the members of the ASL [American Sign Language] Club weren’t deterred—it was an opportunity for practice.
“Tonight we’re doing a sign and dine event, which is meant to just be a really casual way to both talk about ASL as a language and also to learn some basic signs,” McEaneney explained. While the club hosts formal lessons with a local ASL instructor, the dinner gave newcomers a chance to get involved without the nerves that might accompany a classroom environment.
McEaneney noted that offering such a casual, introductory experience was critical, as it encouraged people to learn something important about ASL for themselves: “There’s a lot of history to this, there’s a lot of passion to this, and there’s a very big community attached to that culture.”
PHOTO: ADAM BOVIE
Caption On Campus
Students signing the letter “L” in Thorne.
On Campus
POWER OF POETRY
This year, Hawthorne-Longfellow Library’s annual poetry week—part of National Poetry Month—celebrated student poet Weatherspoon ’25, whose inspirational story is a testament to the power of art and the strength of the human spirit. For Weatherspoon, who grew up largely in foster care and at times experienced homelessness, poetry is more than just a pursuit: “I wouldn’t be alive without it,” they said. “It’s something that has sustained me.”
Weatherspoon was a twelve-year-old child when they discovered their love of writing. “I had just been taken from my mother for the third time. My foster mom took me to a Halloween party,” they recalled, “and I just remember breaking down in the car. I was in the back seat, and I was just crying. I never actually went inside the party. I had an Android phone, but no money to pay the phone bill, so I had no internet. I went on my Notes app, and I just started writing and never stopped.”
Weatherspoon received wide recognition and success as a poet at the age of seventeen with the publication of To, Too Many Children: A Collection of Moments by Weatherspoon (Adolescence & Other Diseases), a reflection on the considerable challenges they faced as a Black teenager from a troubled background. The book went on to become an Amazon bestseller.
Librarian Carmen Greenlee said, “We thought Weatherspoon Week was a nice way to thank them for being such an inspiring and creative presence on campus.”
Maine
Largest Classroom
The new Finnegan McCoul Woodruff Mountain Center adds a key, central location for the Bowdoin Outing Club.
A NEWLY ACQUIRED twenty-one-acre property along the Carrabassett River in Kingfield, Maine, about two hours from campus, will provide myriad opportunities for the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) to expand the ways it teaches leadership and outdoor skills. Dean of Student Affairs
Emeritus Tim Foster and Stephanie Foster, both devoted and now-retired staff members, donated the funds for the purchase and asked that the property be named in honor of Finnegan Woodruff ’21, an environmental studies and music major with a love for the outdoors who died in a kayaking accident in 2021. The BOC has long sought to have a base camp centrally located in its program area of the western Maine mountains. The Carrabassett Valley is at the center of this region, with most BOC trips utilizing natural resources located fifteen minutes to an hour from there. The site itself has 446 feet of river frontage with an adjacent flat area sufficient to support at least forty students in tents. While the property is useful in its present condition, Bowdoin is investigating the design and construction of facilities that would enhance programming and allow multiple groups to use the site in all four seasons.
Looking north on the Carrabassett at the center.
Libraries around the world have exchanged materials with Bowdoin, including the National Library of China and the library at the University of Ibadan, in Nigeria.
By the Numbers
Words on the Wing
Bowdoin’s resource-sharing services operate something like an air traffic controller for the library, directing circulation in and out of Bowdoin from libraries all over the world. Together with CBB, which connects the libraries of Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Colleges, and MaineCat, which does the same for Maine colleges and universities, Bowdoin’s interlibrary loan service (ILL) allows patrons to quickly access research materials from virtually anywhere.
Ben Bockmann ’25, a computer science major who works for the library, has recently improved both the look and functionality of ILL for the College. In addition to substantially reducing staff processing time and ensuring that research materials arrive sooner for Bowdoin users by automating more requests, there’s also a new world map on the log-in page that shows a fun sample of unexpected resources acquired from far-off libraries.
“Bowdoin is a small college in Maine, but through these services, students and faculty are connected to the world,” Director of the Library Peter Bae said.
45
Countries on six continents have exchanged materials with Bowdoin.
72
Faculty publications that used sources acquired through Bowdoin’s resource sharing in 2024.
Student honors theses supported by Bowdoin’s resource sharing in 2024. 30
Percent of books borrowed in 2024 classified as languages and literature.
1930s
Era of a pamphlet on Mexican servitude obtained from El Collegio de Mexico in Mexico City. 1920s
Student workers who assist seven full-time staff to find, send out, and process requested materials. 50
1969
Publication year for a Soviet-era women’s weekly newspaper that was requested from a library in Olomouc, Czechia.
6,653
Books and articles provided to the Bowdoin community by other libraries in 2024.
Year of a treaty digitized and shared with Bowdoin by the Hancock county courthouse in Ellsworth, Maine.
1
Book chapter about the Japanese legal system requested from Myongji University.
Percent of Bowdoin faculty who used the service for research in 2024.
Decade covered by a survey of the Asian sheep industry acquired from Black Mountain Library in Acton, Australia.
He Scores!
How self-care, will, and three weeks of nonstop studying made for a rare feat.
AS HE PREPARED to enter the fiercely competitive arena of law school admissions, John Na ’15 knew he needed an edge. For him, that meant aiming high, so he set his sights on the ultimate goal: a perfect score of 340 on the GRE, the Graduate Record Examination, a standardized test used in graduate school admissions and increasingly as an option to the LSAT for law schools. Earning a 340 on the GRE is exceedingly rare. Of the approximately one million people who sat for that exam between 2020 and 2023, only 8 percent aced the math section and less than 1 percent scored perfectly on verbal reasoning. Na had been down a similar road before—earning a perfect score on the SAT in high school—so he summoned the same determination and cultivated what he calls a “winning mindset” of confidence, preparation, and self-care. He took full-length, timed practice tests, got faster at answering each question, and made sure to get enough sleep and exercise and to eat right. Na has brought his impressive drive and focus to other postgraduate pursuits as well; he earned an MBA at Notre Dame and is currently midway through a master’s in public administration program at Harvard. He says he wants to pursue a legal career in which he could stand up for the underdog. He has submitted his applications and is now waiting to learn if he will score the perfect answer: an acceptance letter.
Alumni
JUICY COUTURE
Luxury footwear designer Ruthie Davis ’84 has long been committed to high fashion and bold silhouettes; she is now stepping into new territory on two fronts that are polar opposites on the spectrum of heel height. Her new collection embraces forwardthinking materials that make for some sweet new designs. The Candy and the Yardley, with sixand four-inch heels, respectively, are part of the new Bio by Ruthie Davis line and are crafted with bio leather made from repurposed apple waste—discarded peels, seeds, and skins—the by-products of the apple juice and jam industries. The final product uses significantly less plastic than traditional synthetic leathers, and with Ruthie’s signature style offers a sleek alternative that aligns with the sensibilities of today’s sustainability-minded fashionista. Davis’s other new project is on brand with an uplifting goal but a decidedly lower profile, at least in
terms of the heel. She has tapped aspiring young designers from the Boys & Girls Club of Southeast Michigan (BGCSM) to create a sneaker inspired by the concept “one people,” to represent a collective community. The program offers paid design apprenticeships to Detroit youth, who get to meet Davis. She has mentored young entrepreneurs for years—including since 2020 Cassidy and Kelsey Tucker of the Detroit-based fashion label DEVIATE, who are also involved in the sneaker collaboration. “This collaboration is special because unlike previous cross-branding projects in which I have participated, this one had a unique educational dimension to it,” said Davis, adding that it has been “an incredibly rewarding experience for all of us…and the diverse set of skills, talents, and viewpoints came together and created a supercool sneaker.” Proceeds from the sale of the shoes benefit BGCSM.
Alumni
John Na ’15
A new line helps Ruthie Davis shoes reach new heights of sustainability.
Calling History
Joe Beninati ’87 was in fine voice when Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin made hockey history.
“THE CHASING DAYS are done! Alex Ovechkin is the greatest goal scorer in the history of the NHL!” shouted longtime Washington Capitals announcer Beninati as Ovechkin surpassed Wayne Gretzky’s thirty-one-year record by scoring his 895th goal—a feat some considered impossible.
Beninati, who started sportscasting as a student at WBOR, stood back from the mic for more than half a minute after the goal, letting the historic goal speak for itself. “I don’t want to be trampling on these moments,” he told The Portland Press Herald. “I want to hit them right on the button.” It was an emotional experience for Beninati, who has called Ovechkin’s NHL career since the player’s rookie season in 2005.
Boost
Not Hitting the Brakes
The Class of 2025 is facing a turbulent job market. To help, Bowdoin’s career office restarted the Accelerator Plus program it first launched during the pandemic. One way the Office of Career Exploration and Development (CXD) supported seniors this spring was by offering mini grants of up to $2,000 to pay for a certification, license, course, or project that could enhance their résumés.
Shayla Pham ’25 said she is applying for a mini grant to modernize her mother’s nail salon in California. She wants to create an online scheduler for customers and attract more reviews on sites like Yelp. “It would develop her business, and I’d learn about small business in general, as well,” she said.
The Accelerator Plus program, which began in 2020 during COVID, is geared toward seniors who have not yet secured postgraduate plans. CXD resurrected it this semester when it began to hear stories of rescinded job offers and graduate school rejections.
“In January and February, things started happening,” said Kristin Brennan, CXD executive director. “There was a federal hiring freeze, and probationary employees were laid off, which particularly affects young people. While this pauses new employment, it also means there are a lot of people with experience out there looking for positions that some of our students would be interested in.”
While the job market faces headwinds, Brennan is reassured by the solidarity of the College community. “I am reminding people we know how to do this,” she said. “Bowdoin broadly supports students when the going gets rough.”
Student Life
FEEL THE BURN
Catherine Uwakwe ’26 brought the heat to an Afro Beat Zumba class she led in collaboration with Students of Caribbean Ancestry and the Intersection Dance Group, which focuses on African, Latino, and Afro-Latin movement. Uwakwe says the class was an opportunity for her to share her pride for her Nigerian heritage and her spicy Afro Zumba playlist, described by those who took her class as “fire!”
1. “Breathe” by Mickey Blue
2. “Tun Fo Meh” by Olatunji
3. “Shekini” by P-Square
4. “Shake Body” by Skales
5. “Johnny” by Yemi Alade
6. “Bounce” by Rema
7. “C’est dosé” by Serge Beynaud
8. “Water” by Tyla (“You’ve got to have some bangers that a lot of people know!” said Uwakwe)
9. “Love Nwantiti” by Ckay
10. “Shake It to the Max (FLY)” by MOLIY, Shenseea, Skillibeng, and Silent Addy
Alumni
Joe Beninati (right) and Alex Ovechkin
On Location
North Star
Student affairs staffer and part-time actress Denise Shannon juggles the demands of her day job while wearing many hats on a small indie film shot along the coast of Maine and on campus.
DESCRIBED AS part Hallmark movie, part science fiction, the indie film 43 Degrees North, now streaming on Amazon Prime, was filmed in various locations around Maine, including on campus at the Chapel and in front of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library. It costars Bowdoin’s own Denise Shannon, director of projects and planning for student affairs. When Shannon’s character dies unexpectedly, her husband, a famous author, retreats to an island cottage, where he grieves in isolation until he encounters an otherworldly being. The film was written and directed by Maine native Eric Norcross and shot during the fall and winter of 2023, during which Shannon and the rest of the small cast pulled double duty as production crew.
“The most challenging part of it all was the balance of learning lines, procuring wardrobe, and the actual filming—all while having a full-time job,” Shannon said, but she says it was worth it on many fronts.
The film is her highest-profile acting project yet, and she became friends with her costars and also with people they met while filming on the islands of Casco Bay, who welcomed them into their homes from their chilly outdoor shoots and gave them food and warm drinks. Fans of Bette Davis may recognize the cottage location from Davis’s 1987 movie, The Whales of August, which also starred Lillian Gish and Vincent Price.
“We were so fortunate that the owner believed in our film and gave us the opportunity to use her house on Cliff Island,” Shannon said.
In Whom I Am Well Pleased
EDWARD T. BYRNE ’72 (En Route Books & Media, 2024)
A child’s suicide feels like the biggest parental failure of all. This memoir tells the story of Byrne’s son, Matt Byrne ’02, and Matt’s subsequent fall as post-traumatic stress from his dream job as an FDNY firefighter spiraled him toward substance abuse and depression.
[See Matt’s story on page 20.]
A Contented Child in 28 Days: A Speedy Guide to Unindulging RICHARD BROMFIELD ’74 (Basil Books, 2025)
Dear Younger Me: What 35 Trailblazing Women Wish They’d Known as Girls ELISA BOXER ’93 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)
Noisy Alien Communicator and the Visible Spectrum MATT BITONTI ’00 et al. (Frankford Publishing, 2022)
The Doomsday Detectives: How Walter and Luis Alvarez Solved the Mystery of Dinosaur Extinction CINDY JENSON-ELLIOTT ’84 (Lee & Low Books, 2025)
PHOTO: ERIC NORCROSS
On the Shelf
Filming a scene at Bennett’s Cove on Chebeague Island.
Strangeness Is Quite Common
A tiny man with ruffled hair and a rumpled jacket stands encased in glass on the second floor of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Measured by the distance his short, plastic legs would have to walk to reach them, he stands far away from the photographic portraits that surround him in the spring show Hello, Stranger: Artist as Subject in Photographic Portraits since 1900.
The exhibition of photos, which includes this 3D miniature man, was curated by Isa Cruz ’27 and BCMA codirector Frank Goodyear. The show features thirty-five highlights from a new collection of about 240 self-portraits and portraits of artists donated by David and Gail Mixer.
The little man, Stephan 1:10, was made in 2000 by German artist Karin Sander (b. 1957) of her friend and fellow artist Michael Stephan. To create her reproduction, she took photos with sixteen digital cameras set up all around Stephan and printed the images using a 3D printer.
“It is a remarkable sculpture of this artist at one-tenth scale,” Goodyear said. He added that Sander “was using new digital imaging technology to create it, which is so common today, but this was done twenty-five years ago! At the time this was very experimental, especially by artists.”
Sander made several other versions of Stephan, including at half-scale and full-scale. In Stephan 1:10, every part of her friend is perfectly reduced—from his ears to his feet. (The museum found out Stephan’s actual height and did the calculations.)
“Isa and I were drawn to images in this collection that represented, as Isa called it, ‘radical propositions for what a portrait might be,’” Goodyear said. “We were looking at uncommon portraits, understanding that identity is fluid, the body is malleable, and strangeness is quite common.”
PHOTO: ANDREW ESTEY
Stephan 1:10 on display in the museum’s Hello, Stranger exhibition.
Talk the Walk
A passion for sharing Maine’s great outdoor walking trails leads to moments in the sun and time on TV.
WHEN REBECCA GOLDFINE first moved to the Brunswick area in 2012, she had a hard time finding trails. “I love to walk outdoors,” said Goldfine, senior writer at the College and a regular contributor to Bowdoin Magazine. “I think most people do, and I thought information about trails should be easier to find.” With website know-how gleaned from her earlier stint as an intern with Bowdoin’s IT department, Goldfine built Maine by Foot, an online guide to trails across the state. Her first post in 2013, about the Spirit Pond trails in Phippsburg, ignited an urge to create a comprehensive resource, one that has grown to amass more than 1,300 posts, nearly all of them written by her. “I literally would head out every weekend to walk, walk, walk, walk, walk,” she said. “And then I began bringing camping gear because I’d be trekking so far from home.” All of that walking and posting caught the media’s attention, including that of
Chronicle, the celebrated newsmagazine program produced by powerhouse Boston station WCVB, whose crew spent six hours with Goldfine on three different trails west of Augusta and near Androscoggin Lake. “One of our three walks was on Monument Hill in Leeds, a beautiful half-mile hike to a clearing with views of Mt. Washington and a Civil War peace monument Oliver Otis Howard erected with his brothers in 1895,” Goldfine said.
A career Army officer, Howard, who was born in Leeds, was a member of the Bowdoin Class of 1850 and awarded the Medal of Honor for valor during the Civil War. He subsequently served as the first commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau and was instrumental in the founding of Howard University and Lincoln Memorial University. Goldfine has also talked trails on Maine Public Radio’s Maine Calling program and in the Portland Press Herald Visit mainebyfoot.com.
“The worst thing you can do to a human being is make them think they don’t count.”
—RANDY NICHOLS AT HIS OVER AND OUT EVENT IN MAY IN CELEBRATION OF HIS RETIREMENT, REVEALING ONE OF THE ENTRIES IN HIS THIRTY PAGES OF INSPIRATION FROM HIS NOTES APP
Athletics
First-Place First-Year
When swimmer Natalie Garre ’28 pulled away from the field in the 1,650-yard freestyle at the NCAA Championships in March, she didn’t just make history at Bowdoin—she also rewrote the Division III record book. Named the 2025 NESCAC Rookie of the Year, Garre became the first Polar Bear in program history to win multiple events at a single NCAA Championship, capturing titles in both the 500- and 1,650-yard freestyle events. She also set a new NCAA Division III record in the 1,650 with a time of 16:17.84, shattering the previous mark by nearly four seconds.
PHOTO: REBECCA GOLDFINE
Staff
Rebecca Goldfine with her dog, Lola, at a beloved local trail in Brunswick.
Caught
After 9/11, Matt Byrne ’02 trained and served as a firefighter with the FDNY. His swimming teammate Sarah Lovely ’02 shares how it felt to read the book Matt’s dad, Ed Byrne ’72, wrote about the trauma and addiction that would cost Matt his life.
RETURNING FROM camp pickup with four ravenous kids on a steamy August afternoon in 2024, I spied an unassuming package on my stoop. Mindlessly, I tore it open. Rather than the back-to-school supplies I’d expected, I discovered a personalized copy of Ed Byrne’s new book, In Whom I Am Well Pleased. Adorning the cover was the all-American senior photo of my dear friend Matt. Cracking it open, I quickly became paralyzed by the first chapter, which revealed, in painstaking detail, the final hours before Matt took his own life in 2014.
Tears flowed as I was transported to a different steamy August afternoon, twenty-six years earlier. That day, I’d left my room in Appleton to fulfill my first rite of passage as a Polar Bear: snapping my ID photo. Entering Smith Union, with a low ponytail that could’ve made the Founding Fathers proud, was Matt Byrne. He looked as though he’d been plucked straight out of central casting for Baywatch. As I learned later, I was not alone in recognizing Matt’s allure—in a nod to Top Gun, his roommates had apparently already dubbed him “Iceman.” Immediately, we struck up an effortless conversation; Matt’s striking looks belied his goofy laugh, making him at once utterly enchanting and disarmingly approachable. We were delighted to learn not only that we were both swimmers, but also that our dads had entered Bowdoin together in 1969. Once we started swimming together, I realized a simple truth: hang around someone long enough clad only in bathing suits, and you will be rewarded with true friendship. Back in my kitchen, I devoured Ed’s book, which oscillated between Matt’s idyllic
upbringing and his gut-wrenching struggles with trauma and addiction. There were times when Ed highlighted qualities of the Iceman I knew, my memory filling in the gaps: self-assured Matt, wearing green corduroys and a yellow sweater vest for our team’s twelve-hour journey to Hawaii because “my mom insists we dress up on planes.” Laid-back Matt, who, a year later, spent two weeks prior to our training trip surfing Hawaii’s North Shore and, legend has it, subsisting entirely on a ten-pound bag of rice. Disciplined Matt, whose life as a distance swimmer made him a confident Jones Beach lifeguard. Whimsical Matt, who led our cult-like team in endless renditions of “Kung Fu Fighting” in Theta’s sticky basement. Faithful Matt, who,
no matter what transpired the previous night, never missed Sunday mass.
As Ed described Matt’s agonies, I reflected on something I had buried: the drift in our relationship during our senior year. As we each confronted our own hurdles, our rock-solid friendship sprouted boundaries, which I attributed to the transition from wide-eyed innocence to adulthood. I realize now that, in oversimplifying things, I failed a rudimentary test of any good English major: I hadn’t investigated Matt’s subtext. Ed’s book provided the missing context: as I wrestled with uncertainty that year, Matt was busy solidifying his life’s purpose.
We were seniors when, on a perfect Tuesday morning, the world crumbled. Whereas the
wake of 9/11 left me devastated, Matt was called to action. That day changed his life’s trajectory, leading him straight into the most selfless—and trauma-inducing—of careers: that of a New York City firefighter.
Reading well into the night, I found my relationship with Matt deepening, as facets of him surfaced that I’d never known: his heroism in battling Manhattan’s deadly Deutsche Bank fire; his heartache as two children died in his arms on the streets of Chinatown. As I read descriptions of his family’s anguished attempts to liberate Matt from the grips of addiction, I recalled the unabashed tenderness with which he regarded his siblings and parents. Seeing Matt through the lens of these inconceivable circumstances, I became convinced that he was a casualty of the very event that defined our senior year. Through his steadfast service to others, he so completely embodied a commitment to the Common Good.
Five months after I finished IWIAWP, many once-inseparable swimmers from our era returned to Greason Pool for an alumni meet. Tears welled as I watched the newest generation of Polar Bears scream cheers that Matt once conducted. Afterward, we gathered in a Brunswick restaurant and remembered our friend. Instead of discussing how Matt died, we traded stories about how charismatically he lived.
In Whom I Am Well Pleased does not attempt to generalize or remedy the complexities of addiction, mental health, or suicide. Instead, Ed invites the reader into his vulnerability and turmoil, offering an antidote to society’s instinct to stigmatize such matters. As I finished reading, I had two revelations. First, courage comes in shapes both obvious and subtle. Second, I know exactly from whom my brave friend inherited his bravery.
This excerpt from chapter twenty-three of Ed’s book—Matt’s story—contains references you might have to read the book to understand. But you can’t miss the important part either way: a cherished son, lost to trauma and gone too soon, leaving a hole in many lives. I think this excerpt will give you an idea.
Sarah Lovely ’02—Matt’s classmate, teammate, and friend—is an admissions and college counselor in Milton, Massachusetts.
AN EXCERPT FROM IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED, CHAPTER XXIII
I have good news and bad news for you, if you ever must go through an ordeal like the death of a child from a socially unacceptable cause, e.g., suicide or overdose.
The bad news is that some people think tragedy and sorrow are contagious, so they shun you and keep their distance for fear of catching it. Some of these people you considered friends, and you thought they would be there for you when you needed them. It’s very disappointing to learn how badly you misjudged some people and gave them credit for compassion they either didn’t have or for some reason were incapable of showing.
The good news is that those fair-weather friends will be replaced, one by one, by people you didn’t realize cared for you. It’s almost like some cosmic balance must be kept, but unexpected people step forward, and you end up with the same number of people you thought might help you get by, although the group is differently comprised.
One unforeseen group came to the rescue immediately after Matt’s funeral, before the letdown following that day’s activities could fully set in. His former supervisors at Jones Beach called and invited us to attend a memorial “Paddle Out” service they would be holding at 8:00 a.m. on Labor Day morning.
Since he was sixteen, Jones Beach had been Matt’s magical place. I remember how happy he would be when he came home for dinner after working a shift at Jones Beach. Tanned and relaxed, he would tell us the latest jokes stolen from the “Bucket and Buoy,” the lifeguard union’s newsletter, and fill us in on the latest misadventures of what I would call the lifeguards’ “groupies.”
Loving the Jones Beach job as much as he did, losing it had to be a crushing blow. I only sensed relief, not regret, when he left the FDNY. In contrast, having to leave Jones Beach because of the incident at Robert Moses had to be like getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden: the biggest screw-up of all time. In hindsight, it really was the beginning of the end for Matt, for I suspect he began keeping score of the things he had lived for that were gone.
Speaking for himself and the others, one of the Jones Beach supervisors started crying when he told me they had known Matt had been having trouble but had no idea how serious it had gotten. Now, he was gone before anyone could do anything to help him.
Matt’s Jones Beach colleagues couldn’t have been nicer to Patti and me at the Paddle Out. They sent a dune buggy up to the parking lot to fetch her and take her down to the ocean’s edge. There we met all the friends he had made over many seasons in this other, happier world, each of them holding a surfboard and a bouquet of flowers. They entered the water soon after so that this ceremony they performed whenever any lifeguard died could be completed before the patrons arrived.
Patti and I stood on the beach, holding hands, unable to see what was going on even though the waves were calm. All we could tell was that the guards were floating on their surfboards, hands joined in a big circle. Then, suddenly, there was a lot of yelling and splashing. Then it was over, and the group paddled back to shore.
A day or two later, we received an even greater gift from the Jones Beach Lifeguard Corps. A young man named Cary Epstein had filmed the Paddle Out, start to finish, and set it to a soundtrack of Israel Kamakaw’iwoole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World.” It’s still on YouTube if you search “Matt Byrne paddle out.” The short film is painful, but it is a priceless memory for us.
Ed Byrne ’72, father of Matt Byrne ’02, is a partner in the Rockville Center, New York, law firm Murtagh Cohen & Byrne and the author of In Whom I Am Well Pleased.
INTERVIEW BY ALISON BENNIE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARSTEN MORAN ’05
A marine biologist and founder of Urban Ocean Lab—a think tank focusing on the future of coastal cities—Roux Distinguished Scholar Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is finishing her second of a three-year tenure at Bowdoin. Her New York Times best-selling book What If We Get It Right? raises possibilities and visions for a future that is rooted in reality but whose doom is not foretold, offering a genuine opportunity to flourish here on Earth. We talked with her about the importance of cities in climate solutions— especially coastal cities—the role of imagination, and what she calls “the open secret that we have the solutions we need.”
Right on Earth
BOWDOIN: In your book, you talk about the climate reality and how we might get it right as both really, really complicated and incredibly simple. Is that fair? Can you elaborate on that?
AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON: That’s a phrase, or a framing, introduced to me by NASA climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel. She’s the first interview in my book, and she describes the climate science in those terms. It’s actually very simple, what happens when we burn fossil fuels and we cut down trees and reduce photosynthesis. We’re throwing our atmosphere and our ecosystems out of balance in this dangerous way. And it’s actually quite simple how to not do that on a very practical level. And then, of course, the question becomes, how do we deal with the entrenched systems that prevent us from doing the obvious, simple things? And pursuing this transition away from an extractive economy into a regenerative one.
And, of course, there are a million details, but the open secret is that we have the solutions we need. It’s just a matter of how quickly and how justly we’re going to deploy them—from clean energy to improved transportation to regenerative agriculture to green buildings, et cetera. We know what to do. We don’t have to wait for a magical technology before we can get started. And I think that’s both reassuring and also a challenge that’s presented to us: that we have no excuse not to act, because it’s actually very clear what needs to happen—even when the headwinds are against us because of politics or money interests.
BOWDOIN: In a recent podcast you were talking with your guest about how cultural change has to precede policy change. What do you see as the path forward to generate the kind of cultural change that would precipitate policy change in this splintered, difficult world?
JOHNSON: I think a lot of it is just a quantity game. We need a lot more storytelling about what the future could look like if we get it right. We need a lot more media about solutions. We need more creative approaches to the news and sharing information. We need to meet people where they are. You can’t just create culture out
of nowhere. It’s a constantly evolving collective thing. And so, I think the opportunity is to say, “Where could we add climate solutions into the conversation, into TV episodes, into film scripts, into social media, into podcasts? How are we showing up where the conversations are happening that are shaping culture and seeing what we can do to inject some forward motion on solutions into those places?”
BOWDOIN: Do you see interest in that from Bowdoin students you meet and talk to here?
JOHNSON: Oh, absolutely. This semester has been an absolute delight working with these students. I was enamored with all of my students last year as well, but, this year, my having restructured the syllabus a bit has given them even more opportunities to do their assignments in these really creative ways. The way they’re doing art projects and writing poetry and film reviews and op-eds and social media posts, all thinking about what are the best ways to engage people in these complex but simple quests for climate solutions and really grappling with what it means for the places where they’re from—there’s such incredible geographic diversity among the students at Bowdoin. I’ve just been absolutely delighted by the assignments they’ve pulled together and truly the creativity that they’ve brought to this. It’s been really quite lovely to get to witness.
BOWDOIN: Something you talk about is loving the earth, loving nature, biophilia. You called it “rekindling the spark of childhood.” What should we do to make sure that people can foster that sort of love of nature and foster that feeling of caring about what the world is beyond our built environment?
JOHNSON: In some ways, there’s a universal answer, and in some ways there’s not. The universal answer is, go outside wherever you can find a bit of nature. Even in cities, there are parks and all of these ways to just remind ourselves that we’re part of ecosystems, not just living on top of them. And the more specific answer is, I think everyone has their own proclivities, their own curiosities about specific aspects of nature, whether it’s shooting stars or
Opening spread:
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on the East River waterfront near the Manhattan Bridge in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, one of the coastal cities she says are key to climate solutions. The Williamsburg Bridge is visible in the distance.
fireflies or owls. There was an owl outside my window the other day! It’s just so exciting still at this very basic level to see the living world up close. It’s very hard not to look. I mean, on a cold, muddy day, fine, but even then, I’m always glad I’ve been outside. This is a little bit of a pep talk to myself, because I spend way too much time in front of the computer.
BOWDOIN: It’s easy to do, that’s for sure. Another thing I felt as a through line in your work was the idea of this as being a long game. What does it take to get people onboard with the long game? You mention that we need to make consumerism uncool. How?
JOHNSON: The long game. I think a lot of consumerism stems from some sort of dissatisfaction with our lives or our perception of our own social status or place in things. I’m never thinking about buying stuff when I’m on a hike—unless it’s like, “Oh my god, these boots are terrible!” [laughter] I think the more we find meaning in the various aspects of our lives, the less we’ll get sucked into that. But it’s very important to me to always say we’re not going to overnight have a different economic system. There are some people who say, “Well, it doesn’t matter what we try to do if we’re still living in capitalism.” And we don’t have time to wait until we have a perfect economic system before we start charging ahead on environmental solutions. We need clean air and clean water regardless of whether we have shareholder capitalism, so we’re going to have to figure that out. And, I don’t know, I feel like part of it is just individual fortitude and determination and tenacity, just not giving up on what we know is right and what we know is needed. And I think there are two sides to that. There’s being tenacious, and then there’s also imagining the future you want to live in, so that you have something to aim for—as opposed to just a bad future you’re trying to avoid. I find that really helpful for myself, that thinking.
The primary motivation for writing this book was feeling that there wasn’t enough literature or anything, more broadly, on what getting it right on climate could look like—the subtitle says, these visions of climate futures—and the
“THERE’S BEING TENACIOUS, AND THEN THERE’S ALSO IMAGINING THE FUTURE YOU WANT TO LIVE IN, SO THAT YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO AIM FOR—AS OPPOSED TO JUST A BAD FUTURE YOU’RE TRYING TO AVOID.”
realization that I didn’t have all the answers, of course. Not by a longshot. So, the book became this collection of twenty interviews with all sorts of experts, from policy to finance to technology to design to Hollywood to agriculture. That helped me personally weave together a sense of the way forward and what getting it right could look like. I feel like our motivation for the long game really does require some vision of what we’re working toward, even if we’re just doing a little part of it.
BOWDOIN: You’ve talked about solutions, some of which you say are underway. What are some good things that are already happening?
JOHNSON: Here in Maine I think we have the most small farms of any state, probably per capita. There’s this very interesting shift in agriculture, this flourishing of small farms and farmers markets, which is really wonderful to see, this local food economy and places
like Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment right down the road from Bowdoin doing wonderful work supporting that transition. We’re seeing more and more new buildings meet energy efficiency standards. There are some on campus, and more and more people generally are realizing that it makes good sense to insulate your buildings and even retrofit your buildings, insulate your attics, et cetera, because it just saves money. So, we’re seeing the economics of these things start to make sense—in terms of solar energy as well, the cheapest new energy we can add to the grid. There are endless examples of this. I think the congestion pricing in New York City, where I’m from, is another interesting one. We’re charging cars for driving into the center of the city so that we can have reduced traffic, reduce air pollution, and increase the amount of money there is to improve public transit. There are endless examples of this, which is really bolstering.
BOWDOIN: Some of them you describe as sort of boring. What’s some of the boring stuff that people wouldn’t necessarily know about because it doesn’t get written about?
JOHNSON: How do we figure out where to build more transmission lines so that we can add more solar and wind energy into the grid is a pretty boring one. I think there’s certainly some stuff about political campaigns and mobilizing voters to support candidates who get it on the environment. Some of that I find boring, but I appreciate how necessary it is. I think there’s also just a lot of project management and spreadsheets and emails and Zoom meetings, and all of those are part of making ideas into reality. But that’s just the stuff of life. And if we can do these things with people we respect and enjoy and with as much creativity as we can muster, then it becomes maybe a little less boring, or maybe it just feels a little bit more worth it.
BOWDOIN: You mentioned Maine, and of course fishermen are trying to deal with this, and it seems like they’re doing many things. I don’t know if you’ve had contact with Maine fishermen at all, but do you think there’s positive change in that industry?
JOHNSON: I haven’t had very much. The group of people I’ve spent a little bit more time with are the oyster farmers and the kelp farmers who are doing regenerative ocean farming, which I find to be really interesting. And my understanding is that more and more fishermen are either turning to farming or doing that just to supplement their wild catch. And I think that’s super exciting, this idea that Maine could become or already is sort of the Napa Valley of oysters. But that, of course, requires that we are very vigilant about our water quality, because oysters are filter feeders, so anything that runs down our rivers and streams to the sea is going to impact the ability of that industry to thrive. But here too there’s a boring part, which is permitting and making sure there’s enough people working in the state government and permitting offices that that paperwork doesn’t take years, so that people can start these
offers multiple paths to learn, find motivation to act, and share solutions, including her What If We Get It Right? podcast of “forward-looking musings on climate and culture.” Recent episodes feature discussions on environmental law, sustainable fashion, city government, and the role of art and humor in the serious work of climate.
Johnson
“THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I WANT PEOPLE TO DO IS TAKE QUITTING OFF THE TABLE AS AN OPTION. THIS IS OUR HOME PLANET. THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE. WE NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET IT RIGHT ON EARTH.”
sustainable businesses that are good for our food system and good for the environment.
BOWDOIN: On the flip side of that, you’ve also said that cities are a place where it makes sense to concentrate efforts. Why is that?
JOHNSON: Especially in this moment, where it seems very hard to get anything through Congress, like new pieces of legislation, I’ve been thinking more and more about local governments and cities in the US. So many people live in cities, and something like 50 million Americans live in a coastal city. So, that’s like one in seven Americans living in a coastal city. If we think about the power of that level of government to implement environmental practices, climate solutions, there’s actually a lot of opportunity there. And local governments are often more responsive to their constituents and often in some ways less polarized and more focused on problem solving, the local stuff. And so, yes,
I would encourage people to get more involved in their town councils or city councils and figure out what’s going on that they can support.
BOWDOIN: You talk about the idea that wildlife tend to create the environment in which they thrive, reindeer for example. So, given that this is something the natural world is geared toward, is there anything you would say to people to help them think of themselves as creatures who can create the environment in which they would thrive?
JOHNSON: That example that you gave was from an interview with Judith Schwartz. One of the themes that kept coming up again and again in the interviews I conducted for this book was the idea that community was the foremost thing we needed to invest in. And that word “community” gets thrown around a lot and can mean any number of different things—it does even in the context of this book. For example,
there’s a community of very wealthy investors who may have been hesitant to invest in climate companies, but when they’re doing it together, it becomes less scary. And of course, it’s the same when we think about a community in the Louisiana Bayou, thinking about how to adapt to a world with more hurricanes and sea level rise. It’s not the kind of thing you can do alone. And so, this theme of community, community among farmers, community of people in cities, of knowing your neighbor as the most important thing to do to prepare for extreme weather events so that we can help each other, becomes ever more fundamental, especially as it becomes less and less certain what role government will play in these tough moments of disaster response, as things like FEMA lose their funding, as we lose weather prediction capacity at NOAA. It becomes more and more important to think about “Okay, how do I take care of my people, my community? What can I contribute on the local level as a professional, as a citizen? How can I just keep showing up?”
I guess I would say the most important thing I want people to do is take quitting off the table as an option. This is our home planet. This is where we live. We need to figure out how to get it right on Earth. We’re not all going to Mars. And if we accept that, then the question becomes, how do we get it as right as possible given all of the parameters and realities and challenges we’re facing? What is my role in making that best possible future become the reality in which we live? Who can I collaborate with? What skills and resources and networks do I have to offer? How can I be more creative? How can I do this in a way that’s more fun so that I’m motivated to keep going? I’m never going to give up on life on Earth, not just for humans but for the millions of other species we share it with. And so, that means that so many doors are open for how to contribute.
Alison Bennie is editor of Bowdoin Magazine
Karsten Moran ’05 is a New York–based photographer who is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has worked for Fortune Magazine, Newsweek, ProPublica, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
Certain. 100 percent sure! Not a single doubt in my mind! What makes us so sure of things? Is certainty a fact or a feeling? Or maybe just a starting point for an argument?
Being certain can be good, of course. If you’re a contestant in a spelling bee, you definitely don’t want to be up on the stage doubting how to spell, say, hagiographer or obnebulate. And we very much want to be sure of some things, even if that surety can sometimes falter or fail us: our partner’s and our parents’ love; our worth as human beings; our trust in institutions and government to keep us safe.
It ought to be obvious that at least half of what we think is certain is suspect, given the limits of human perception. In 2015, the internet went wild with people debating whether that striped dress in England was blue and black or white and gold (don’t bother looking it up; it was blue and black), which was both a fun diversion for a minute and a clear indicator that people don’t see things the same way even when they are all looking at the same exact thing. What’s more, though we humans can see something like ten million colors, the number of colors to see is close to infinite. So, when we say, “I can see it with my own eyes,” well—there’s that.
College is a prime time for questioning one’s beliefs, for forming new ones, and occasionally galvanizing the ones you came with. All that seems good and necessary. But could it be that certainty is part of what’s wrong with us?
To find out, we talked to writers, doctors, a philosopher, a neuroscientist, and a forensic psychologist, to see what they know for sure. Or what they don’t.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHOUT
DOUBT NO
Matt Bitonti ’00—writer, publisher, fantasy football guy, one-time BCN actor— reels out a tale about the one true certainty: love.
The Sure Thing
THE FIRST TIME we met, I went mute. My jaw slacked open, no words.
It was scary. I had never been in this territory. Me without my trusty words. Where did I put my wonderful blankie of sarcasm? My terrible jokes? The Simpsons references? All gone, along with everything else in my suddenly blank mind. Who was I even? Was this ego death?
But it was going to be okay. Because there were sheets of paper in my hand, a script. Clean and new and warm from the printer, chock-full of words. They weren’t my words, but they’d do.
“Just breathe,” I thought, “and read the words on the paper to this beautiful woman.”
My favorite magazine called and asked me to write about certainty. For some reason, I thought of my first rehearsals of The Tower, Season 1, shot in low definition, shown exclusively on the then brand-new Bowdoin Cable Network.
This was the late ’90s. The internet was in its infancy. To have a college cable network was new and exciting, big news on campus. The first show was an absurd soap opera—a telenovela— and people wanted to be a part of it.
Let’s be clear: I wasn’t a grades-based student. More of an experience-based one. And I wasn’t an actor, except when I pretended to be too cool for school. Still, it was undeniably cool to be an actor on the first (maybe the last?) Bowdoin TV show. The producers wrote a part for me. It would be easy, they said. I just had to play myself.
And that’s how I ended up at rehearsal, speechless, struck by the thunderbolt. I’ll remember that moment forever. When Grant Met Ursula. Of that, I can be certain.
We can’t control our feelings. We can’t control what we believe. That’s the only certainty: faith, family, love, and the human heart.
That’s sentimental and heartfelt, and it happened just before winter break. Put in a Christmas tree and call up the good people at the Hallmark Channel. Let AI write the script. I have a bunch of plaid flannel. Onward! We film in Vancouver at daybreak.
But is what I said about certainty really true? After all, there may come a point when I won’t remember the day Grant met Ursula. That’s sad, but many events can and will occur. You must be this tall to ride “life.” Please keep your arms and legs inside the moving vehicle.
We live in uncertain times. But when were times ever certain? Thirty thousand years ago, the cave painter at Lascaux, France, likely gazed at his just-finished auroch (wild cow), dreaming of more certain times, at least foodwise. By some odd coincidence, I was recently going through my statistics notes, preparing for a long shot job interview. (Spoiler alert: They ended up ghosting me. It’s for the best, as the T-shirt proclaims: “I’m an English major; you do the math.”)
But, inside the notes, I found the following statement, which I found quite offensive: If an infinite number of household pets (cats, dogs, monkeys even) gathered in front of an endless number of keyboards, the chances of not only a novel but a great novel emerging was not precisely zero. It was 0.000... well, a lot of zeros... maybe a million zeros... and then a 1.
As a human writer with opposable thumbs and three novels in various states of disrepair, I find even that slight chance to be generous. I can assure the statistics professors of the world that the chances of a great novel emerging from a room full of cuddly fur faces are, in fact, zero. Harrumph.
But that’s not how statistical certainty works. It’s not based on anecdotes, strong opinions, or catchy turns of phrase. Certainty wiggles through the cracks in the concrete, finding purchase on whatever’s possible.
Legend has it that the felines who roam around Key West are descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s cats. They have extra toe beans. Maybe one of
them could pull it off. Quick, get the talent agents down there. Alert the big five publishers.
Life itself is a long shot. Is the Big Bang or any creation scenario more likely than an extra-toed cat writing The Brothers Karamazov? It’s a moot point, as both theories are inherently untestable by the standards of the scientific method.
In a recent collection of short stories, Noisy Alien Communicator, I and other contributors explored intelligent alien life and how it might interact with our world. Everyone assumes aliens are everywhere. There are so many stars. There are so many galaxies; E.T. has to be real, right? Mulder, the truth is out there.
The irony of this project is I wrote a few of these stories and typeset them, poring over the words for hours, days even. Meanwhile, I don’t believe aliens exist, not in any meaningful way where we can interact with them. I’m more of a Fermi’s Paradox, Rare-Earth Theory type of nerd, with a bit of Terrence McKenna thrown in for fun. Sure, mushrooms look weird, and spores can survive in space. But the speed of light is a hard limit. Time only flows in one direction. People want there to be alien overlords. Guys
with big eyes who control everything, so we don’t have to. The horrifying truth might be that we’re all alone, talking into the mirror.
If we look at almost any event relevant to our lives, the chances of it happening or not happening are never zero or 100 percent. Even the sun rising tomorrow isn’t 100 percent. A super volcano could burst, eclipsing the sun from our vision. Some radiation emission like that from a quasar or supernova could blaze through the solar system, knocking us out of orbit. It’s not likely, but it’s feasible.
Therefore, I posit the following: the only absolute certainty exists in matters of faith and affairs of the heart. I don’t have proof, but I suspect only humans are unique enough to bridge that last billionth of a percentage point to certainty. And we do it quickly, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in Blink. You don’t have time to make a pros and cons list with a woolly mammoth advancing. Think long, think wrong. If there’s a moral to my rant, it’s: Be decisive. Step up to the moment. Ask the DM if you can Dash. If you see the rarest Pokémon ever, don’t walk by. Give yourself a chance. Seize the day.
Back to the romantic comedy that is my life. It has been a quarter-century since the day when I was roped into playing a version of myself on closed-circuit television. I was only twenty when we met. The storyline was that she poisoned me with cookies, and we woke up married.
It was ludicrous. And perfect.
Certainty? I couldn’t speak, and someone gave me words. I was lost, and I was found. I saw the crossroads of life unfolding in front of me. We can’t control our feelings. We can’t control what we believe. That’s the only certainty: faith, family, love, and the human heart.
These events took place twenty-five years ago, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve lived more of my life with her than without her. It started with poison cookies, and it might have ended that way. But I make the right decision daily, sharing this existence with Ursula.
Of that, I can be certain.
Matt Bitonti ’00 is a writer in Philadelphia. He is married to a member of the Class of 2002, who isn’t going to be thrilled with this public display of affection.
Neuroscience and psychology professor Erika Nyhus, whose goals include teaching students to think like scientists, tackles uncertainty with curiosity, only to find that uncertainty itself can unleash a drive to explore.
A Boost from Uncertainty
AS A PROFESSOR in neuroscience, I often have students come to my office on their first day of first-year advising saying that they plan to major in neuroscience and go on to medical school. Then they proceed to tell me all the classes they plan to take for their entire four years at Bowdoin. And if they do not get into chemistry their first semester, it will derail their entire plan. Although I welcome their interest in my field and their ambition, I often have to remind them that Bowdoin is a liberal arts college and that the beauty of a liberal arts education is that they can take a class in something outside their comfort zone. Then I tell them the story of how, as a first-year college student, I tried to register for a history course to fulfill a college
requirement, but when I was shut out I was forced to take Introduction to Psychology. I had not even considered taking psychology because my high school did not have a psychology course, and I knew nothing about it. I found Introduction to Psychology so interesting that I ended up majoring in psychology, getting a PhD in psychology and neuroscience, and then teaching at Bowdoin. Sometimes I wonder where I would be today if I had gotten into that history course.
When I was asked to write this essay on certainty, my initial reaction was doubt about what I would have to say, since I am not an expert on certainty. But, just like my doubt about taking psychology, what I found was that
a little uncertainty led me to explore something new and to learn a lot in the process. As luck would have it, I was at the annual conference for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Boston not long after the assignment, and one of the symposia was titled “Uncertainty Resolution Across Learning, Memory, and DecisionMaking.” I thought I should probably go to the symposium to learn about uncertainty in order to write something somewhat coherent. As I sat in the audience, trying to absorb as much new information as I could, I learned about how important uncertainty is for learning and memory. This led me down a rabbit hole of reading papers on the influence of uncertainty on learning and memory.
Although this is still a relatively new area of research, uncertainty seems to be important for boosting learning and memory. When we are uncertain, there is something unexpected in our environment, or there is a gap in our knowledge. This gap in our expectations versus reality is detected by two areas of the brain that are important for learning and memory, the hippocampus and the anterior cingulate cortex. The hippocampus is involved in memory for prior experiences and is active when prior experiences do not match the current experience. The anterior cingulate cortex is involved in detecting conflict and is active when there are information gaps in our knowledge. Once activated, these regions signal the frontal cortex, a region of the brain that is highly developed in humans and is involved in cognitive control, guiding our thoughts and actions. The frontal cortex appraises whether the uncertainty can be resolved. If the uncertainty can be resolved, there is a release of dopamine and motivation to explore the environment to find information to reduce the uncertainty. The release of dopamine in the hippocampus leads to the enhancement of memory. But if the uncertainty cannot be resolved, the amygdala is activated, leading to anxiety and behavioral inhibition, which are detrimental to memory.
Understanding the neural mechanisms of uncertainty and memory brings up many more questions. Why do we have this drive to explore when faced with uncertainty? The neural mechanisms of uncertainty and memory may be related to our innate curiosity, or our motivation to seek information. Curiosity creates an evolutionary advantage, because it compels us to explore new environments and gain new information that may be useful in the future.
Is uncertainty always good for learning and memory? Some research has shown that there is an inverted U shape relationship between uncertainty and memory—some uncertainty is beneficial, whereas high levels of uncertainty are detrimental to learning and memory. The inverted U shape relationship between uncertainty and memory reminds me of the inverted U shape relationship between stress and memory. The high levels of uncertainty
and high levels of stress during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were likely terrible for our memory.
Do all people react the same way when faced with uncertainty? There is evidence that there are individual differences in people’s abilities to cope with uncertainty. If you are able to cope with uncertainty, then you will be more likely to explore and learn, whereas, if you are not able to cope with uncertainty, you will be more likely to have anxiety, behavioral inhibition, and a missed opportunity to learn. I see these individual differences in tolerance of uncertainty in my own kids. My eight-year-old daughter has always enthusiastically faced new physical challenges, whereas my five-year-old son has always been more cautious. At five and a half years old, he has finally started to face uncertainty and explore more, which has led to learning many new physical skills. Recently he has started swimming without a floatie, pumping his legs so he can swing by himself, and riding a bicycle. These new skills have opened up a whole new world of independence and adventure.
I am certainly uncertain about certainty— as someone who is uncomfortable with uncertainty, I often have to remind myself to go out of my comfort zone to explore new things and learn something new, like I did when I took that introductory psychology course in college and when I agreed to write this essay. I hope to convey to my students that, when they encounter a new environment or are faced with a gap in their knowledge, by facing their uncertainty they can improve their learning and memory. You never know where that uncertainty will lead. They—or you! Or I!—may explore something new and interesting that could lead them down the path to a new area of study. And eventually, maybe, a career that they never before considered.
Erika Nyhus is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bowdoin. Her research focuses on human executive function and memory. Specifically, she is interested in how neural oscillations provide a mechanism for interaction among brain regions during memory retrieval and how we can change oscillatory activity to improve memory through noninvasive brain stimulation and mindfulness meditation.
Why do we have this drive to explore when faced with uncertainty? The neural mechanisms of uncertainty and memory may be related to our innate curiosity, or our motivation to seek information.
As a forensic psychologist, Antoinette Kavanaugh ’90 spends her days evaluating people’s grasp on the truth for the court.
True Crime?
I AM a forensic clinical psychologist who provides case evaluations and consultations in juvenile, criminal, civil, and capital court cases. When I think of certainty in my work, I think first of wrongful convictions—more precisely, what we later find to be wrongful convictions. To obtain a conviction, the state was able to prove to the judge or the jury beyond a reasonable level of doubt that this person committed this crime. It is as if they are telling the defendant, “I’m certain that you did this. I’m going to take away your civil liberty.” Years after the conviction, this certainty comes into question when DNA evidence, or some other type of evidence, proves this person did not commit the crime. When this occurs, it is considered a “wrongful conviction,” and the certainty of the judge or jury was wrong. According to the National Registry of Exoneration, this has happened more than 3,500 times since 1989.
The person who has been wrongfully convicted may bring a civil case. In essence, they are saying, “I’m suing the state for their mistake and for their certainty and for the years I spent in prison for something I did not do.” I have evaluated people who, because of a wrongful conviction, spent ten, twenty, or thirty years in prison. When I conduct these evaluations, I explore the psychological damage that this wrongful conviction has caused the person and formulate an opinion about what kinds of things will impact their ability to reintegrate themselves into society. This is sort of a forensic certainty—built upon
a combination of theories and research—that shows that, when this kind of thing happens, here are what we know are the consequences. That certainty is shaky as well, because you have to look at the degree to which the person in question matches people in the sample from the research you’re basing your opinion on. To the degree they don’t, I need to question the certainty of that finding for that case. Sometimes there’s only a very limited body of research. And I can only use what’s available. For instance, when I look at actions that produce trauma or PTSD, those studies may not match the person in front of me. Studies that involve men may be solely about veterans. If the man I’m evaluating has been in prison since he was sixteen, and now he’s forty-six, he didn’t even have the opportunity to become a veteran.
Forensic psychologists look to data, research, and theories to increase the certainty with which we can render an opinion. We know that a body of knowledge will likely not completely overlap and perfectly match. You have to be okay with a level of uncertainty, and you have to be able to verbalize for the court to what degree you’re uncertain and why. You can still feel good about an opinion—“Given what we know, this is what I can tell you.” With some degree of certainty.
I’m also often called upon to help the court understand how a statement can be unreliable, what people think of as a false confession. We are led to believe that every confession is accurate. In psychological and legal terms, it’s not really
You have to be okay with a level of uncertainty, and you have to be able to verbalize for the court to what degree you’re uncertain and why.
a question of accuracy, it’s, “Is it reliable?” The factors that impact the reliability of the confession relate to the person confessing—youth and mental illness can make a person particularly vulnerable—and the circumstances of the interrogation, including the length and manner of questioning.
I was involved in a case where a college student believed he was getting messages from the news telling him he had murdered a woman in the community. She was well-liked, the murder occurred years ago, and the community marked the anniversary of her death. The police did not have a suspect. This young man went to the police and confessed to the crime. The police arrested and detained him. They were unable to locate any evidence against him other than his confession. It was as if they and the prosecutors were certain of his guilt. After spending more than a year in jail awaiting trial, his attorney asked me to evaluate him and the reliability of the confession. Once his attorney gave my report to the prosecutors, they dropped the charges against him.
Many people are certain that they or any rational person would never falsely confess. I think they believe the system is always just, in part because their knowledge of what happens during an interrogation is based on television or other pop culture. Based on my research and my own experience, I am certain the system is not always just, and I know that false confessions occur. Yet, each time I am hired to evaluate a defendant and a confession, in order to be objective, I have to start with the assumption that a confession is reliable. As I conduct my work, I look for indicators that make me less certain.
Antoinette Kavanaugh ’90 is a licensed, boardcertified forensic clinical psychologist. While working on this piece, she was absolutely certain that her new puppy was chewing a rawhide. It was her couch.
Nick ’08 and Mike Larochelle ’08, ER docs both, highlight the tension between patients’ deep need to know what is to come with the stress and cliff-hanger nature of emergency medicine.
Medicine’s Ground State
AMERICAN SURGEON, writer, and public health figure Dr. Atul Gawande wrote in Complications: A Surgeon’s Guide to an Imperfect Science :
“The core predicament of medicine—the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing—is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine’s ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom—for both the patients and doctors—is defined by how one copes with it.”
Medicine is, at its foundation, a science. Medical students and residents embark on their journey by memorizing a vast knowledge base of how bodies and diseases should and shouldn’t work. But experience in clinical practice reveals a world far more complex: while science serves as a guide, medicine is more of an art. We both realized early in our careers that the “atypical is often typical,” and patients rarely follow what is described in the textbook. Nowhere is this more apparent than the emergency room. A patient presenting with a heart attack may exhibit a classic chest pain that began while shoveling snow, or they may simply report fatigue, nausea, or indigestion. Confusion may be the only clue to a serious underlying infection in an elderly
patient. Translating medical education and science to the bedside requires humility, human connection, the desire to continually learn, and the ability to embrace and manage uncertainty. Clinicians often juggle multiple forms of uncertainty simultaneously. At the crux of our field is clinical uncertainty. We gather information from a patient’s history and physical exam and incorporate scientific knowledge, evidence-based medicine, and patient values to guide our workup and treatment plan. Clinicians must account for diagnostic uncertainty (specificity and sensitivity of diagnostic testing), prognostic uncertainty (measuring disease progression and outcome risk), and therapeutic uncertainty (benefits and risks of treatment,
Uncertainty, rather than straining the relationship with our patients, often draws us closer.
In a specialty rife with ambiguity, we find common ground with patients and their families who are coping with unfamiliar stress.
choosing the correct individualized treatment). Risk scoring and stratification based in mathematical modeling guide the decisions we make at the bedside with each patient.
The best clinicians acknowledge that uncertainty is not a failure of medicine but an inherent aspect of providing clinical care. Thoughtful communication is essential to successfully managing the “uncertainty conversation” with patients. The physician-patient relationship today is centered on making a shared decision with patients about the care they receive. It is our job to provide patients with information, counsel them on risks and benefits of testing or treatments, and decide the right path to pursue. Should we perform a CT scan? Is a lumbar puncture warranted? How likely do we think the results will be positive? How will the results change the treatment plan? What are the risks and benefits of certain medications?
Learning to live with uncertainty in emergency medicine is not just a skill; it is imperative. Time is a significant constraint, and emergency physicians rely on continuously evolving evidence-based medicine, risk stratification tools, pattern recognition, and clinical gestalt. We must make rapid decisions with limited information; there is little role for rest-and-digest decision-making or second-guessing. Uncertainty, rather than straining the relationship with our patients, often draws us closer. In a specialty rife with ambiguity, we find common ground with patients and their families who are coping with unfamiliar stress. In an ideal world, allaying our patients’ fears and concerns entails making a clear diagnosis and providing treatment and guidance; sometimes, the optimal outcome is simply ruling out life-threatening emergencies and alleviating symptoms.
In 2020, we entered a pandemic with exceptional uncertainty surrounding infection identification, disease progression, acute and long-term management, and health care systems’ methods of operational response. Most people knew someone who was sick enough to seek care at an emergency department, and many knew someone who experienced severe illness due to COVID-19. Nick recalls the case of a fifty-five-year-old man who had a dangerously low oxygen saturation of 60 percent but was conversing comfortably.
He asked the patient to have his family come to the hospital with concern that he was going to rapidly decompensate. The patient couldn’t believe this and, frankly, Nick couldn’t believe he was saying it either. This was early in the pandemic, and he couldn’t tell the patient if the current treatment pathways would be effective. The patient passed away within six hours despite “best practice” at that stage of the pandemic.
Uncertainty creates stress and anxiety for both patients and providers. Health care workers manage workload demands, cost containment, limited resources, and a more medically complex, aging population. Fatigue, noise, distraction, and the inherent pressure of the emergency department environment contribute as well. Burnout has been connected to poor communication and patient trust as well as poor patient outcomes. A provider’s ability to manage uncertainty in clinical practice can lessen long-term burnout and reduce emotional burden.
Precision medicine, artificial intelligence, improvements in diagnostic modalities, and other advancements in technology will have a significant impact on the practice of medicine in the future. Used properly, these tools may decrease uncertainty, personalize care, and create efficiencies. However, more information doesn’t always yield more certainty. The bedside relationship between the provider and the patient that accounts for human values and the ability to share in a decision-making process will always guide care.
Mastering the science of medicine conditions us as physicians to strive for clarity in diagnoses and treatments. Experience reveals that uncertainty not only prevails but also creates an environment for intellectual stimulation and medical advancement. It will always humanize and reinforce the provider-patient connection. We must embrace and manage it alongside the individuals at the core of the practice of medicine: our patients.
Nick Larochelle ’08 and Mike Larochelle ’08, two of six brothers to have graduated from Bowdoin, both graduated from the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Nick practices clinical emergency medicine in Concord, New Hampshire, and Mike in Park City, Utah.
Scott Sehon, professor of philosophy, takes us back to the academic roots of the logical argument in contemporary terms.
Against Certainty
I AM AGAINST CERTAINTY. We might be better off if we stopped using the word altogether. I have taught philosophy of religion for many years, and more times than I can count I have had students ask, “Where is the proof that God exists?” In my classes, I analyze arguments by putting them in the form of numbered steps: Atheism Is Reasonable (1) It is not certain that God exists. [Premise] (2) Therefore, it is reasonable not to believe that God exists. [1]
(The “[1]” indicates that the claim in (2) is taken to follow from the claim in line (1).)
One sees similar arguments on non-religious topics. For example, faced with the prospect of catastrophic consequences from climate change, the first line of defense is often to insist that the science is not certain.
Raising doubts about science has a long history. Despite separation of church and state, many have proposed teaching creationism or “intelligent design” in high school classrooms. These proposals are usually offered on the basis of a seemingly modest claim: the theory of evolution is just that, a theory, so we should teach students both evolution and creationism and let the students make up their own minds. In other words: we aren’t certain that evolution is true, so it is reasonable to teach the creationist alternative.
All of these are terrible arguments. The conclusion simply does not follow from the premise—in philosophical terms, none of the arguments are valid. To make the conclusion logically follow, we would need an intermediate premise, something like this: For any claim, if
the claim is not known with certainty, then it is reasonable not to believe that claim. Now the argument is valid, meaning that the conclusion does logically follow from the premises.
According to Merriam-Webster, something is certain if it is “known or proved to be true: indisputable.” It is foolish to insist that facts about God or evolution are proven or indisputable in this sense. Instead of answering the rhetorical question with overconfident bluster, the better reply is to reject the intermediate premise. Very little is known with certainty, but that does not mean that it is reasonable to refuse to believe anything that is not proven.
Consider a simple example: Was Ronald Reagan ever president? Of course—many of us are old enough to remember his elections. We can also read historical accounts about his two terms. But can we prove that he was president? Suppose someone were to claim that, after finishing his acting career and serving as governor of California, Reagan died, but a similar-looking person was sent onto the national scene. Of course, the suggestion sounds and is absurd (though I have heard equally absurd claims about Paul McCartney). But can we prove that this didn’t happen? Is it indisputable? No. So we could propose the following argument:
Ronald Reagan Was Never President
(1) It is not known with certainty that Ronald Reagan was president. [Premise]
(2) It is reasonable not to believe anything that is not known with certainty. [Premise]
(3) Therefore, it is reasonable not to believe that Ronald Reagan was president. [1,2]
We could avoid many bad arguments if we simply stopped talking about certainty or proof.
The conclusion is silly. Whatever else you think about Ronald Reagan, you should believe he was president. And yet the conclusion does follow from its premises, and the first premise is true. The lesson is that the intermediate premise is false: just because a claim is not known with certainty does not mean that it is reasonable not to believe that claim. We do not know with absolute certainty that Ronald Reagan was president, but you are being unreasonable if you fail to believe it.
However, it was the same intermediate premise that implicitly did the argumentative work in the arguments about evolution or the existence of God. So those arguments are also equally bad, despite being suggested with great sincerity and fervor by Bowdoin students and even elected representatives.
We could avoid such bad arguments if we simply stopped talking about certainty or proof, at least in contexts like these. It is probably okay to feel certain that your mother loves you, and it is fine to talk about mathematical proofs. It would also be fine if, instead of simply asking what we can know with certainty, we spoke very carefully about degrees of certainty.
Exactly how certain should we be about matters like evolution or God, or climate change? What degree of certainty is required before we can say that withholding belief is not reasonable? Those are hard questions with no simple answers. But loose talk of certainty or proof gives us the illusion that we can replace the hard questions with easy ones. That just leads to bad arguments and, ironically, often leads you to feel certain you are right when you are not.
Scott Sehon is the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of Philosophy. He earned his AB at Harvard and his PhD at Princeton. Much of his scholarship concerns the philosophy of mind and action, especially free will.
Meredith Hall ’93 tells of not being sure of anything as she wrote her novel, Beneficence As she did, characters emerged, and she was filled with sureness, as if having known them always.
On Writing Beneficence
I KNOW exactly what this book is going to be: a man very much like my father will behave selfishly, just like my father. He will betray his wife, and later he will betray his daughter. In his own mind, this man is, somehow, the one harmed. My father carried this certainty. How my father explained his life is a mystery to me. The book will have as its intent an inquiry into his choices. I do not like or respect this man, and I will write him sharply so my readers may dislike and disrespect him, too. I am not certain yet of the story, the events that will structure the book. But whatever is going to happen, this man’s failures to atone for the harms he caused will be at its heart.
I roam for two years looking for the plot. I know it has to be a morally complex story, allowing
my primary character to behave badly and to simultaneously imagine himself a heroic and misunderstood man. But what does he actually do? I do not want to write my own life. This is not memoir. It is a fiction, giving me cover to question a primary grief in my life: my father, newly remarried, exiled me from his life forever when I was nineteen years old. How could a father—my father, the father I loved and who loved me—do such a thing? I will give him his own book, let him speak to us, and I will finally discover the answer I have needed all my life.
One snowy day at my house in Maine, the story arrives with the man who plows my long driveway. We stand by his pick-up with the snow falling silently around us, and he wanders into
a tale about his older brother who played one day after school with a friend on his dairy farm. In a terrible accident, the boy died. The mother “went into herself,” Mark tells me, country talk for sliding into deep depression. The father— well, Mark explained, he found his own comfort, with another woman in a neighboring town. He continued to work his farm each day but lived with this second wife. Here it is, my story. The second I hear it, I recognize this man. I have been looking for him for two years.
His name is Tup Senter. His wife is Doris. His three children are Sonny, Dodie, and Beston. I have never heard these names. I do not name these people. They simply are. It feels as if they have always been waiting for me. They live on a beautiful dairy farm in Maine. I have never lived on a farm. The father-character I have planned never lived on a farm. I feel shaken when they appear, an early presentiment that the book I have intended to write about my father, cloaked in fiction, is already slipping from me.
The next morning, I sit at my desk and type the title, The Senters. I have planned that Tup will tell this story. It is him, after all, I want to hear. The entire intention has been to use this man as a surrogate to speak my father’s understandings and explanations of how he lived his life. But as I start to write the first page, Doris shows up instead. It is as if the stage curtain has risen and there she stands, this stranger, making the bed she shares with her husband. “It is very nice to stand first thing every morning looking out over the land,” she says. “The sun makes sharp shadows of the fence wire, like long, neat stitches binding us to this place. Tup and I have enough sense to know that we are blessed people.” Doris loves this man. Within one paragraph, I understand this is not the book I have carefully planned. I know nothing. I do not know these people. I do not yet know their lives. Someone else is writing this, and I need to listen very closely.
Doris and Dodie and Tup each have their turn to speak to us, in rounds. Sonny does die, in a terrible accident. Doris “goes into herself,” abandoning, in her grief, her two remaining children and her husband. Tup gives himself
Within one paragraph, I understand this is not the book I have carefully planned. I know nothing. I do not know these people. I do not yet know their lives.
over, grimly, to the hard daily work of the farm. Each speaker is a storyteller, sharing with us countless memories from the bountiful and loving life they knew before the accident. I do not recognize these stories, and I cannot name their source. They are not mine. Each morning, I sit at my desk and greet the speaker: What story are you waiting to tell me? And they start. I do not direct them. I no longer have a plan. What they each speak about is their place in this family, the comfort and safety and pleasure they have known. They speak about love, and the fidelity they trust. This is an unknown universe for me.
They also speak to me about the shattering of their life together, their acute failures of each other. Awake through the nights in a separate room, Tup struggles against a god who could allow such sorrow to find him, the loss of his son. We understand that he is a tender man. He longs for the comfort of his wife. He longs to comfort his suffering wife. Doris lives in a world entirely apart from her husband and children. And now, the heart of the story comes: Tup grabs respite from his grief and loneliness with a woman in a town nearby. He returns at dawn each day and silently fulfills his duties to the work of the farm. The terrible complexity.
Here, finally, is what I had wanted! The story I planned with such certainty has finally emerged: A man betrays his wife and children. He does great harm. So why do I love him so much?
Dodie is our truth teller. I know this girl: I was the truth teller in my family, calling out my father for his failures. My father rose up against me in fury. Instead, Dodie’s father appeals to her, and to himself, “But I am a good man!” I believe him. He is a good man struggling to carry his
grieving family, his lost wife. He also does great harm. Tup knows that. He recognizes that.
Tup and Dodie and Doris did not tell the story of my father, the story I knew so well. They came on their own, from a world I had never imagined. In the end, Dodie says, “A wild and powerful river swept us far from shore, and then the current stilled and allowed us to make our way home. We found ourselves again. This happiness requires courage. It requires a willingness to love. A willingness to forgive. A willingness to believe in goodness.”
I have answers now to my questions. These people I never knew existed offered them to me. I loved my father. But he was not a courageous man. He was not a loving man, and he did not believe in goodness. His story would not have been interesting. Unlike my father, Tup understands love and its obligations. He recognizes the harms he has caused and holds himself accountable. He believes in the reciprocal act of forgiveness. Tup tells us in the end, “We are not perfect. We dwell in a complex and uncertain grace.”
Meredith Hall ’93’s memoir, Without a Map, was a New York Times bestseller. A new edition was published in 2024. Her novel, Beneficence, was published by David R. Godine in 2021. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, Five Points, and many other journals. Hall divides her time between Maine and California.
Shout is an award-winning Italian illustrator.
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS RITTER ’21
Ellis Laifer and Tobi Omola, both Class of 2019, turned their band first into an honors project, and then into a career. Fortuno was unusually successful, and not just for a college band. Within months of releasing their first official single, “Be,” their senior year, Fortuno had tens of thousands of listeners, and “making it” seemed nothing more than a matter of time.
a full band is in the works for later, but for now, something lower key feels right: pizza, Modelos, thirty or so friends, and a music setup that would fit right in at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
DRIVING IN LOS ANGELES is “about as fun as you make it,” says Ellis Laifer ’19 as we’re riding through the sprawly center of LA’s Pico-Robertson neighborhood. Tobi Omola ’19 is in the driver’s seat, trying in vain to get into the left-turn lane to get to his and Laifer’s apartment.
“This guy is not letting me in,” Omola mutters, swearing. He gives up, presses the gas, and speeds across the intersection. “Now they made me take the long way home.”
“Hey, bro,” Laifer teases, “long route for the view, it’s all good.” Omola laughs, getting the reference.
“I took the long route for the view” is the opening lyric of “Home,” which, with over four million plays on Spotify, is the biggest song Omola and Laifer have released so far as Fortuno, the indie pop and R&B group the two started as sophomores in college. Fortuno is what led them here to LA, where they moved a month after graduating in the spring of 2019.
The weekend I’m visiting, Omola, Laifer, and Fortuno’s third member, guitarist Eli Koskoff, are hosting a dinner party where they’ll preview new music. A proper release show at a venue with
There’s an air of anticipation around this function despite its low-key vibe. This new music is part of something they’ve never made as Fortuno: an album-length work. The plan is to play stripped-back versions of these songs—a few from the new eleven-song project, a few old favorites—in the office of the production studio where Omola works.
Speaking of work, Omola has to get there soon. It’s Friday morning, the day before the party, and before tonight’s rehearsal, Laifer has music lessons to teach, and Omola has his full-time job. But in the LA traffic, Omola tells of friends who have gotten into minor crashes lately. He insists they’re in no rush.
“I would make a U-turn,” he pauses, eyes locked on the road ahead. “But it would suck to get into an accident with you, Chris.”
The long route it is.
OMOLA AND LAIFER met in an a cappella group. The two auditioned for the Bowdoin Longfellows in the fall of their first year in 2015, neither of them thinking they’d get in. Laifer says he only auditioned because his friend Dante Massapour ’19 did. Omola barely auditioned too, spending most of his first
Opening spread:
Eli Koskoff, Tobi Omola, and Ellis Laifer preview new music at a pop-up event at the production studio, SomeSuch, where Omola works.
From left:
Omola and Laifer near their apartment in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Omola and Laifer in their living room, before work.
A palm tree near Omola and Laifer’s apartment.
semester hanging out with his floormates and playing on the men’s rugby team.
“You played rugby?” Laifer laughs when it comes up, a deep cut of Omola lore. “Are there pictures of you doing that?” Omola says a classic first-year-of-college identity crisis followed his time on the rugby team—“It wasn’t quite the lifestyle I wanted.” Music was there to fill the gap.
Really, music was always pulling at them both. Laifer came to Bowdoin mainly to study environmental issues, but he was urged by his mother to just take one music class, he says. Similarly, Omola had an old mentor from high school who would call him frequently in his first few months at Bowdoin to urge him to pursue music—just go for it, she would say repeatedly.
These urgings weren’t coming out of nowhere. Laifer, raised in Connecticut, followed a well-trodden keyboardist’s path—taking classical lessons as a young kid, quitting them, and returning to play other styles, with brilliant results and a lot more fun. “Once I quit taking lessons, that’s when I actually started to like playing piano,” he says. He went on to play in jazz ensembles in high school and jazz and pop groups at Bowdoin, while also singing with the Longfellows.
Omola played a hodgepodge of instruments growing up—most often trumpet, but also baritone sax and steel pan. Omola says he always
had “a deep musical inclination,” but he didn’t have the confidence to sing until he left home.
“I literally didn’t sing at all,” Omola says. That’s not exactly true; he says later that he sang some at the Nigerian Baptist Church in Brooklyn he grew up attending but was “too shy to really sing.”
“I never got the sort of affirmation I thought I needed.” At Bowdoin he did. There was the intergroup bidding war that ensued when he auditioned for a cappella, for instance. And support from the Longfellows helped, Omola says. “They gave me that reassurance I needed to feel like, all right, I’m the man, I can sing.”
Laifer and Omola stuck around after rehearsals in the basement of Gibson Hall to jam. They played cover songs, then fragments of originals (“little doo-wops,” Laifer calls them), then drafts they would post to SoundCloud.
These voice notes from the Gibson basement are as raw as you would expect. On Omola’s SoundCloud, you can hear a five-minute track from nine years ago titled, “The Rising Sun (very rough draft) ft. Ellis Laifer.” You can hear Omola announce the song’s title into his phone. You can hear the creaks of the wooden piano bench. And then, between Omola’s voice and Laifer’s pensive piano chords, you can hear something working, something fitting itself into place. Something that could form the basis for a life built around music.
OMOLA AND LAIFER have, in fact, built lives around music, but they look a little different from what they thought back at Bowdoin. In their apartment, Omola gathers his things to go to work for SomeSuch, a production studio he’s worked at since 2022. Paying the bills for Laifer is a mix of musical gigs—mostly remote music lessons, scoring music for films, and short video projects.
“I’m teaching guitar for someone online today,” Laifer says.
“Not for me!” Omola blurts.
Laifer has been teaching Omola guitar too, and despite living together, they’ve been struggling to find a lesson time that works. For a minute, they bicker in the way of people who share so much—an apartment, a band, most of their lives for six-plus years.
Laifer turns to me: “This is the nitty-gritty.” The nitty-gritty doesn’t last.
Omola grabs a trumpet out of a case that sits on the couch. “I’ve been trying to bring this back this year.” He starts playing.
“That tone! You hear that?” Omola laughs. He makes it through the head of Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” and halfway through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He holds back a smile while he plays.
“I’d have to get better at it before bringing it to Fortuno,” Omola says before leaving for work. “I would have to know what I want to bring to the song.”
IN FALL of their senior year, Omola and Laifer released their first songs on major streaming platforms. When “Be” took off, it did so quickly. Within months they had an audience of tens of thousands of people, stretching far from Bowdoin’s campus.
No one on campus—at least no one making music—was surprised.
“I have never been surprised,” says Ariana Smith ’21, an a cappella acquaintance turned friend and collaborator. Smith has cowritten with Omola for years now, some of her contributions showing up in Fortuno tracks, and Laifer produced Smith’s 2020 single, “Nostalgia.”
“It’s because their music is good,” Smith says. Smith is right. While the SoundCloud doo-wops and rough drafts showed promise, the first songs Fortuno released to major streaming platforms were a league above. “Be”—and its moody B-side, “Feel”—is a knockout, a slippery and genre-elusive track that has hints of Soulquarians-era R&B, the bedroom soul of early Omar Apollo, and the most hip-hop leaning Kaytranada beats.
The songs impressed their professors, too. “I could definitely see it,” said Professor of Music Vineet Shende of Fortuno’s potential. “Everything that they had—the harmonic sophistication and the thematic development— was married to these studio production techniques that really let them delve deep.” Shende and fellow music professor Frank Maucieri advised Omola and Laifer on their honors project, which included an album’s worth of new Fortuno songs and a year-end concert that packed Studzinski Recital Hall.
The signs that Fortuno would have a life beyond Bowdoin were plenty. “Be” was recorded in LA with Eli Koskoff, a jazz guitarist at USC’s Thornton School of Music and a longtime friend of Laifer’s. Omola and Laifer spent the previous summer in LA as interns, living in student housing with Koskoff and making music together. Koskoff eventually became the band’s third member, “Be” the first song they released together.
Omola and Laifer moved west that summer, permanently this time. In a very LA way, music was all around. At his job as a barista in Culver City, Laifer served coffee to singer Frank Ocean.
Not long after, Omola was playing Fortuno over the speakers at his café job when in walked Phoebe Bridgers, solo star and member of the Grammy-winning group boygenius.
“She was like, ‘You have a beautiful voice,’” Omola says, a flex worthy of sharing into one’s eighties at least.
The song playing on those speakers for Bridgers was “Home,” which they released that fall, just a few months after moving to LA. Cozier and more folk-inspired than anything they had released prior, “Home” earned
Above:
Laifer in his room, where he also teaches music lessons and composes for film and TV, preparing for rehearsal with Omola and Koskoff.
Opposite page: Fortuno’s third and only non-Bowdoin member, USC grad Eli Koskoff, prepares his guitar setup before the preview show at SomeSuch.
They rarely performed live. They didn’t pitch “Be” to playlist curators. They barely posted on Instagram. It still blew up.
Fortuno an audience even wider than “Be” had, becoming its first single to hit a million streams on Spotify.
Omola and Laifer speak of these first months in LA with wistful euphoria. Making it in the music industry in any way is difficult. But Laifer and Omola will tell you that, at that point, they had no doubts.
“Personally,” Laifer tells me, thinking back, “I was like, ‘I’m in a band with literally the most talented people I know. There’s no way this fails.’”
Laifer says that their confidence wasn’t due only to the quality of the songs, but the way they gained traction on streaming platforms. “Be” caught a foothold within Spotify’s Discover Weekly algorithm, showing up on more and more playlists as others saved it to their libraries, snowballing from there. Omola and Laifer rarely performed live. They didn’t pitch “Be” to playlist curators. They barely posted on Instagram. It still blew up. In our current streaming age, it’s a scenario that only happens in the prayers of introverts. For Fortuno, it happened once, and then it happened twice more—in a smaller way for “Do Girl,” and in a much bigger way for “Home.”
“We always liked our own music,” Laifer says. “But it was the fact that all that growth wasn’t due to any marketing or advertising on our part; it was all kind of natural. It gave us confidence.”
LIFE HAPPENS, though, and dreams become moving targets. After 2019, the pandemic hit, forcing Omola, Laifer, and Koskoff back home and back east. They never stopped releasing music—the summer of 2020 brought “Wait,” the group’s third-most-streamed song to date, as well as Damn, We’re Getting Close, a mixtape of old Fortuno recordings released via Bandcamp to raise money for an LA arts school. When they later moved back to LA, they kept going, releasing an EP almost yearly until 2024. The music’s quality never dipped, but no Fortuno release after 2019 reached the quick streaming heights set by “Be” and “Home.”
“It didn’t turn out like we thought it would,” says Laifer.
After Omola goes to work, Laifer and I are in their living room, digging through his laptop.
They haven’t left their younger selves’ aspirations unfulfilled; they let those aspirations morph and grow.
Laifer is a serial archivist—he doesn’t delete texts, so there are drafts of old Fortuno songs in iMessage that he and Omola sent back and forth years ago.
There’s one from 2017: the white box of an audio file from Ellis, a reply of a fire emoji and prayer hands from Omola. They were both studying abroad at the time—Laifer in New Zealand, Omola in Germany—still finding ways to make music. Nearly a decade of texts and .wav files add up, Laifer says. There’s barely any space left on his 2 TB Mac.
Today, other things fill up space there too. Since quitting his barista job, music has been Laifer’s main hustle, but that hustle takes many forms. There are Logic projects for short films he’s scored, commercials he’s composed for (in one, Will Arnett announces a new promotion for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups over music that could be a rough Fortuno demo), and files for morningtime, Laifer’s lo-fi beats solo project. And, of course, there’s Fortuno.
“I think the goal would be to make music and have it support me,” says Laifer. “Originally, that goal was Fortuno and Fortuno only. Over the years, it’s evolved into living a life with music in it: doing different things, Fortuno being one of them, with the goal of supporting myself with music and figuring it out as I go. The path is sort of being forged along the way.”
Omola feels similarly. “In the past, I was like, I’m trying to be a superstar,” he says, the blunter of the two. Nowadays, he says that, while he still has those goals—“I want to play the shows; I want to have music in movies. I want to go on tour. I want to collab with cool artists. I want all of it”—the main goal is to be able to support himself through music alone.
But Omola also says that now his ambitions include directing. He’s been privy to film production through his work at SomeSuch, where he recently helped shoot a music video for Paris Texas, another genre-defying group making noise in the LA scene.
Spending time at their home in LA, you get the sense that, while Omola and Laifer aren’t where they envisioned they’d be with Fortuno, any frustration is fuel for a bigger fire. At twenty-eight, they haven’t left their younger selves’ aspirations unfulfilled; they’ve let those aspirations morph and grow, change, expand, gain attachments. The dreams are still there, just different.
From left: Koskoff, Omola, and Laifer prepare for a TikTok interview with social media marketer Lydia Zenae.
Heading into Omola and Laifer’s apartment in Pico-Robertson, hours before the show.
Fortuno performing at the SomeSuch office.
“Our dreams are looking different now,” is what Omola sings on “Never Too Late,” Fortuno’s first single since Sky Is Everywhere, and the almosttitle track of It Is Never Too Late to Love, the project they are previewing to a roomful of friends.
THE PIZZA HAS ARRIVED. The Modelos have been put on ice. The good wine has been brought over from the shop down the street. An iPhone tripod has been set up by a window for an interview bound for TikTok—something Laifer and Omola say they’re trying to get better at.
I shoot photos and look for the R&B star Omola said might make it, but I don’t find her. What I do find is a community eagerly anticipating what Omola, Laifer, and Koskoff will do next. Laifer and Omola might say they don’t feel quite part of a music scene as Fortuno in LA, but there certainly is a scene here in this room, built from the community they’ve built.
There are Bowdoin faces here, too—filmmaker Kayli Weiss ’18 lives nearby, and photographer Darius Riley ’18 happens to be in town, visiting from the Bay Area. Both swing through.
For many Bowdoin people, Fortuno has, in many ways, already made it. For Smith, it’s always been this way. “They made it the moment that they released their first songs, or even demos,” says Smith, who worked with Omola on the melodies on “Never Too Late.” “They have youth in Chicago listening to ‘getwiddit,’” Smith says.
“There are coffee shops in Brooklyn playing Fortuno. There’s a community surrounding Fortuno that cares about the people and appreciates the art—that’s making it. They are so deserving.”
I agree with her.
The music industry does not move on what artists deserve—if it did, more would get their “moment in the sun” and all of them would get health insurance. For music lovers on Bowdoin’s campus around 2018 and 2019, Fortuno showed the possibility of a future beyond. Beyond their laptops, beyond their dorm rooms, beyond Gibson and Studz. They were also simply a band who made very good music, populating our playlists and decorating the memories of our late teens and twenties just as any other band’s music might; it soundtracked friendships, love, loss, nostalgia, homesickness, uncertainty. They were and continue to be all of it. Any artist who is all of those things deserves it all back.
At the end of the set, the sounds of Fortuno’s DIY setup give way to applause, and then, streaming dance music. Omola dances in a
space between cubicles, and Laifer catches up with friends by the kitchen table. The song playing over the monitors is the TikTok hit of the singer who was maybe going to come. She didn’t. But that’s okay. I stand and wonder how many times a crowd of people I don’t know have danced to a song by people I do know, by these people I do know.
Life is still and always happening. Omola and Koskoff are pulled by the East Coast—Omola by his family in Brooklyn, Koskoff by the idea of settling down with his fiancée—while a relationship anchors Laifer to LA.
But, in this moment, in this office, the only feeling worth feeling is the one Laifer described the day before: these are some of the most talented people you know, and there’s no way they fail. Whatever that means for Fortuno in the years ahead—whatever “making it” looks like—I’m inclined to believe.
Chris Ritter ’21 is a writer, photographer, and musician from Lexington, Virginia. His work has been featured on NPR and in Condé Nast Traveler and more. He records music under the name Nodding Terms
The biggest gift in Bowdoin’s history—$50 million from Netflix founder Reed Hastings ’83— brings with it great excitement and opportunity. President Zaki explains why creating this intiative at not just a liberal arts institution but specifically at Bowdoin is not just right, it’s imperative.
Getting It Right
What has the response been to the announcement of the Hastings gift?
I’ve heard so much excitement—from faculty, from staff, from so many students. I’ve heard from alumni who are excited about the way that Bowdoin is meeting this moment. I’ve been really heartened by the response.
If someone said, “I’m worried that this means that Bowdoin’s going to become a place I don’t recognize,” what would you say?
Nobody has said that. I thought they might. Because change makes people nervous. But I think people understand this as us doubling down on the liberal arts. It’s saying, “The liberal arts are the way to go into the future” and that we want to make sure we have the faculty resources so that people can experiment and iterate with new modes of teaching and understanding and interrogate and maybe even influence the trajectory of AI. I’ve said before, “We have a moral imperative to do this work.” I couldn’t feel more strongly about this. That is the Bowdoin way. We don’t shy away from facing the future and using our tools—the liberal arts, and our guiding principle, the common good—as a way to go into that future. I think that’s what this is about.
How did this gift come about?
I’ve been thinking about AI since I was in college. I was interested in how the mind works. In cognitive science, we often compare the human mind to a computational model of mind—and that gives us insights about the structure of our cognitive architecture. So I have been thinking and teaching about AI for
a very long time. It’s always been part of my courses on cognitive models.
This strong conviction I have about the liberal arts being the way to move forward in this moment predates my appointment as president. Those ideas formed the basis of my inauguration speech. And then I connected with Reed, who has also been thinking deeply about AI for a very long time.
And I think he sees this is a critical moment for the world and for humanity. And he wants Bowdoin to lead in this space. I had a number of really interesting and energizing conversations with him before I asked him to make this gift. He is remarkably decisive and action-oriented. And he’s excited about what we can do here. I was elated that he was willing to make such a historic commitment to tap into that potential.
Something else worth talking about is the incredible fact of this gift’s flexibility. It’s designated for AI but is unrestricted in its implementation. And that represents a remarkable secondary gift—the freedom to adapt our approach as the field evolves and to make strategic decisions based on what’s right for Bowdoin at each step.
What do you want students to get out of this?
This will allow faculty to experiment. It will bring new faculty and create new opportunities for research. It will bring new speakers and new possibility. And that’s for all of us—faculty, staff, and students. Students will inhabit the future in ways that we will not. Right now, we’re teaching students who have just recently encountered ChatGPT, or maybe they encountered it in high school. There will be, to come, generations of students whose first encounters will be much
earlier on and whose trajectories will have been changed by those encounters. What will it mean to teach those students? What will it mean for their cognition? This gift will allow us to be ready.
This is the biggest gift for Bowdoin ever. How does that feel?
It feels really good. I’m deeply grateful to Reed. And I also think, “There is so much more I want to do for Bowdoin.” There’s so much more we can do as a community. It will require the collective energy and vision of our faculty, staff, students, alumni, and in all the ways they drive ideas forward. It’s a wonderful thing. I also feel a sense of responsibility to get this right. Even before the gift, I felt that in this moment. And now it feels evermore pressing, because we have this chance to seize the moment.
It brings such momentum.
Oh, yes. It’s a validation of our vision and approach. I have heard from many people on campus, in our community. But I’ve also heard from many people in higher ed, including old colleagues and old friends and people who are in this field, about how excited they are that there is this good news, that someone is doing this framed this way in the liberal arts. There have been other gifts for AI at other institutions, but I think this one, in this moment—with all of this uncertainty—feels like a ray of sunshine. There are ideas that come to fruition and then feel obvious, and I think this is one of them. This feels so right for Bowdoin.
Safa Zaki is Bowdoin’s sixteenth president, a position she has held since July 1, 2023.
Whispering Pines
In the Blink of an Eye
There are deep historical roots to alumni engagement with Commencement celebrations.
A WEEK AFTER the Class of 2025 entered the ranks of the alumni, members of the classes of 2000 and 1975 gathered to celebrate their twenty-fifth and fiftieth reunions, respectively. It is part of a lifetime rhythm that binds each graduating class to alumni who are on the same five-year Reunion cycle.
The origins of the Commencement-Reunion connection date to the early days of the College. In the nineteenth century, alumni with a bachelor’s degree could pick up a master of arts degree “in course” three years after their graduation, provided they had a good reputation, were present at Commencement, and paid the requisite fee. Individual classes advertised gatherings during Commencement week in newspapers as early as the 1820s. More than a century ago, there were other events that brought alumni to graduation, including meetings of the Athenæan and Peucinian literary societies, the Bowdoin chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the Bowdoin Benevolent Society, the Maine Historical Society, and the Medical Society of Maine. From the beginning, Bowdoin alumni have always
been a part of the Commencement picture, and there was a strong alumni contingent on hand to greet the Class of 2025.
Certain events in the history of the College and the nation brought greater numbers of alumni to graduation. In 1865, Bowdoin honored those who fought to preserve the Union, highlighted by an honorary degree for Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant. In 1875, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s reading of his poem “Morituri Salutamus” at 1825’s fiftieth reunion drew an overflow crowd. Robert Peary’s return from the 1909 North Pole expedition, and the graduation ceremonies following the ends of two world wars also come to mind as examples of collective celebration and commemoration.
Until 1904, Bowdoin had a trimester system, with fall, spring, and summer terms. From 1806 until 1853, Commencement was held in early September. Graduation ceremonies were moved to early August in 1854, to mid-July in 1868, and to June in 1884 for the next ninety years. Since 1974, Commencement exercises have been held in late May.
For many years, Commencement and Reunion occupied the same weekend. By 1986, however, it was apparent that the strain on dining and facilities staff had become too great, and since 1987 the two events have been held on consecutive weekends. Older alumni may remember vats of lobster salad on Commencement luncheon buffet tables set up outside the Hyde Cage indoor track facility (renovated as Smith Union in 1994–1995). Passing from sunlight and fresh air into the Hyde Cage brought cool darkness and smells of damp earth from the running track and old foam rubber from the pole vault and high jump pits. Row upon row of tables were laid out for alumni, who listened to the president talk about the state of the College, heard Chandler’s Band playing on the second-floor wooden track, and caught up with classmates over lunch.
For members of the Class of 1975, it may be a little unnerving to realize that, in the eyes of the graduating seniors, they are the equivalent of the elderly gentlemen from the Class of 1925 who marched at the head of the 1975 Commencement procession, dressed in three-piece suits, carrying pocket watches, and smoking pipes or cigars. In 1975, the self-described “Bowdoin’s Biggest and Best” Class of 1950 celebrated a twenty-fifth reunion (“Biggest” because their ranks were swelled by World War II veterans seeking educational opportunities afforded by the GI Bill of Rights [the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944]).
Time passes in the blink of an eye, and before alumni can say “Rip Van Winkle,” years have flown by. It is also a magical time, to see the campus with new eyes and to forge or renew friendships.
John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.
ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON; PHOTO: RICHARD DARBONNE
Charles Wallace ’65 served for nearly three decades as chaplain at Willamette University, which has just published Praying with Charlie: 27 Years of Meditations, Prayers, and Benedictions or How Monty Python Infiltrated Willamette University
THEM LAUGHING
My mother’s father taught in a seminary, and my father, one of his students, became a local church pastor. After Bowdoin, I pursued a divinity degree at Yale and a PhD in the history of Christianity at Duke.
The academic market was tight, but I found teaching and campus ministry positions in the Maryland-DC area. Teaching religion and connecting to students sometimes seemed like having two jobs, but in interesting ways. Most professors recognize their “pastoral” roles with students, just as college and university chaplains understand themselves as extracurricular teachers. Willamette University (“first University in the West”) was looking for a chaplain and adjunct professor, and I got the job.
I first watched Monty Python in England in 1970 and was hooked! When I stand up to pray, most people think they know what they’re going to get—not very interesting. If I got them laughing, maybe they felt connected to important issues and realities. We’ve all heard the expression “I hope God has a sense of humor.” Humor not only catches people by surprise but also opens up questions and inconsistencies of life and learning.
A preacher’s kid whose frat brothers encouraged him to tend bar (I wouldn’t swig from their bottles), I later developed a taste for good beer. My Episcopalian and Lutheran divinity school buddies introduced me to the habit, and during grad school I spent good times in pubs. Migrating to the Pacific Northwest just as the craft beer movement was starting gave me a chance to sample all sorts of good stuff! And the United Methodist Church finally relented on “total abstinence” as a requirement for ordination, so I could hold my head high.
ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES
CHARLES WALLACE ’65
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1963
James Charles Roy: “All the World at War, People & Places 1914–1918 is finally available here in the States (it was originally published in Great Britain in 2023). It’s been a long wait, I know, but supplies have arrived. You can order it on Amazon or by requesting it from your local bookshop, if you prefer. More information can be found on my website: JamesCharlesRoy.com. Thank you all for your support.”
1965
Reunion
Wally Carson: “Of course the best news is that we are again watching the Bowdoin basketball girls here in Germany on the internet. What a hoot! GO BEARS! Otherwise, I would say that for us geezers, life is treating us well. Good excursions often locally and to the Baltic Sea or Mediterranean. Still have a great dog in the house, we often see grandchildren and children and have many great friends—and the medical care is good. Anybody ever come near Bayreuth? Please come in for a day or two!”
Hugh Hardcastle: “Surrey and I are enjoying living here on Bailey Island and being involved with Bowdoin activities. We are avid fans of the women’s basketball team—currently number one in the nation and hosting the first rounds of the NCAA games. We also connect with students through the common good program. The students we connect with are incredible. I am not sure if I would even be accepted these days! We are friends with many Bowdoin alumni here—many from the Class of ’64 (David Treadwell ’64, John Gibbons ’64, David Kilgour ’64, Rob Jarratt ’64, Roger Tuveson ’64…and the list
goes on). It is wonderful to be part of this very special ‘fraternity.’”
William John Helfrecht: “I finally retired from the practice of law at the end of 2023, returning from the Cayman Islands back to England. My wife, Jenny, and I now divide our time between London, with its theaters, opera, and galleries; the historic town of Lymington on England’s South Coast, with its sailing, boatbuilding, and thirteenth-century Saturday market; and Chatel in the French Alps, where, having finally given up skiing ourselves, we watch—usually from the sunny terrace of a mountain restaurant—our extended family, friends, and especially the grandchildren enjoying the pistes in winter and the hiking trails in summer. Retirement has been busier than I expected and better than I feared. We continue to travel relentlessly; in Europe, by rail where possible, Jenny having become adept at planning these journeys (her most ambitious effort to date being London to Istanbul). Coming up next, we’re training from London to Leipzig, for several days of Wagner at Leipzig’s splendid Opera House. Although I have been compelled to give up gliding (there are no gliding clubs reasonably nearby), I have resisted Jenny’s pleas to hang up my goggles and WWI flying helmet and still take my Morgan three-wheeler on regular outings (admittedly mostly in good weather) and occasionally on long European road trips. The last was with my son, Will, to Freiburg, Germany. The next trip—to Switzerland, via Strasbourg, Tübingen (where I studied classical philology at the university), and the Black Forest—is planned for this summer, although I’m still looking for a co-driver. Since returning to England, I’ve reengaged with the Royal Lymington Yacht Club, where
Jenny and I have been members since the early 1990s. Until last year, Jenny sailed her Lymington River Scow in the club’s scow division. She’s now sold the scow, but I remain active in the division, helming one of the safety boats twice a week during the sailing season. We still keep a boat in the Cayman Islands, which I get to sail whenever we are back visiting my son, who is the exhibitions manager of the Cayman Islands National Gallery. I have fond memories of my Bowdoin days and if, looking back on an eventful life, I have any regrets, one is that my expatriate life has prevented me from seeing more of my American friends and college classmates.”
Charles J. Kahill: “I am keeping busy—practicing law (maybe someday they’ll let me do it for real), running, and cruising the high seas with my wonderful spouse, Suzanne (Winter Weekend Queen 1965). Hope my daughter Erika Kahill ’00 can make it from Alaska for her 25th Reunion.”
Steve Munger: “Linda and I continue to enjoy good health and the comfortable lifestyle of snowbirds living in Maine and Florida. We were blessed with good fortune when the two hurricanes, Helene and Milton, scored almost direct hits on our home in Bradenton on the south side of Tampa Bay. Many other mobile homes in our community were not so fortunate and sustained considerable damage, some catastrophic. Our home, which I helped my grandfather move into in 1960, came through the storms unscathed. We celebrated Thanksgiving Day with some heartfelt gratitude. We look forward to seeing many classmates and Bowdoin friends at the 60th Reunion.”
Roger Saillant: “I continue to serve on several nonprofit boards
(chair of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education and member of the Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for the State of New York). Both of these boards receive private donations as well as some funding from the federal government. The latter funding is under threat, as you all may imagine. I am working on a new book, which is designed to inform players about an approach that reduces losses and helps to produce more winnings under favorable circumstances. The approach introduces some intrigue in the form of a money launderer. It should be completed later this year. It was a good winter for local cross-country skiing, which my wife enjoyed a number of times. It was great to be able to mix in some skiing with our daily routine of walking four or so miles. We are blessed to be that healthy. Looking forward to two golf leagues this spring and summer, as well as gardening.”
Bill Springer: “We’ve acclimated well to Virginia after fifty-plus years in Illinois. It’s great being close to our daughter Allison [Springer] ’97 And we’re thinking, just thinking, of doing a lobster party for the DC alums. Looking forward to Reunion.
I see Steve Munger every summer in Maine. His golf game isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but compared to me, he’s fabulous!”
1966
James Blanford: “Gurney’s Gang (because Charlie Gurney sets up our Zoom chats) got together on January 19. First meeting since our dear friend and roommate Ed Bell passed away last September. We miss Ed a lot and try to take comfort in a host of good memories. Charlie finally retired at his paradisical Vermont home and is surprised that he is busier than ever. At his new
Remember
The following is a list of deaths reported to us since the previous issue. Full obituaries appear online at: obituaries.bowdoin.edu
Alan L. Gammon ’43
February 26, 2025
Galen R. Sayward ’54
March 20, 2025
David A. Stackpole ’54
February 27, 2025
David F. Coe ’55
January 25, 2025
Albert R. Marshall ’56
January 31, 2025
John C. Davis III ’57, G’71
April 7, 2025
Arthur E. Strout ’57
February 13, 2025
Richard C. Hatch ’58
February 24, 2025
Ralph A. Westwig ’58
January 25, 2025
David E. Brace ’59
October 28, 2024
Philip L. Eliason ’59
January 31, 2025
Werner Brandes ’61
January 24, 2025
J. Thomas Chess ’61
March 12, 2025
John J. Saia ’61
February 25, 2025
Charles H. Towle Jr. ’61
January 29, 2025
Frank S. DiGirolamo ’62
February 6, 2025
Frederick B. Jordan ’62
February 24, 2025
Bruce Lutsk ’64
January 22, 2025
Christopher T. Emmet ’65
February 9, 2025
Philip C. McIntire ’65
January 31, 2025
Michael T. Richman ’65
February 12, 2025
William W. Stetson Jr. ’66
January 29, 2025
Robert R. Geddes ’67
February 22, 2025
Neal G. Bornstein ’68
February 28, 2025
Carl B. Cramer ’68
April 10, 2025
Thomas N. Lea ’70
April 6, 2025
Stephen C. Packard ’71
February 21, 2025
Peter L. Chandler ’72
December 18, 2024
Steven R. Sortevik ’72
May 15, 2024
Leo J. Simard ’73
February 16, 2025
Leslie W. Clifford ’74
January 31, 2025
Robert L. Terrell III ’74
January 29, 2025
Charles W. Bass ’76
February 11, 2025
Shaun K. Butler ’77
February 10, 2025
Robert A. Kinn ’77
January 15, 2025
Dana L. Swift ’80
December 23, 2024
GRADUATE
Joseph Andrew G’62
January 17, 2025
James C. Rowe G’63
June 30, 2024
FACULTY/STAFF
Thomas Boudin
April 7, 2025
Beverly G. DeCoster
March 29, 2025
Frederick E. Disch
March 12, 2025
Bonnie J. Pardue
February 24, 2025
Jaime R. Reatiraza
December 18, 2024
Rodney J. Rothlisberger
December 16, 2024
Bowdoin obituaries appear on a dedicated online site, rather than printed in these pages. Updated regularly, the improved obituary format allows additional features that we can’t offer in print, specifically the ability for classmates, families, and friends to post photos and remembrances.
Connect
Sonoma residence, Charles Mills is enjoying some of the world’s great wines and has avoided mudslides and wildfires thus far. On the other coast, a Sanibel Island condo is waiting for Frank Tonge ’67 to pay a visit from his wintry Colorado home as soon as the island is restored after Hurricane Ian’s destructive visit. I hang out near Frank in the summer but still winter in Arizona. Chris Kent (not in the Zoom) makes his way to Brunswick from Connecticut at least once a year to encourage the Bowdoin football team. We wish all our classmates a wonderful and peaceful 2025.”
1969
Bill Gibson:
“Pleased to report that son Jeremy Gibson ’95 was recently named Murray H. Goodman Dean of Athletics at Lehigh University. He had been deputy chief of staff to the president and VP of athletics at Merrimack College, and prior to that was senior associate athletic director at Harvard University. I am also delighted to report that granddaughter Hayley (Colby 2000) just graduated from medical school and has begun her four-year OB/GYN residency. Sadly, I doubt her residency training will be of much help to me! Martha and I remain somewhat functional as aging Maine coastline residents, impressing no one as we very slowly trek along the beach. Be well, everyone!”
1971
Bob Armstrong:
“A small but congenial group gathered at Sharon and Bill Harpin’s clubhouse in Vero Beach, Florida, to meet and share stories from Bowdoin and make new friends. The group feasted on caviar, oysters, and other goodies from Browne Trading in Portland, Maine,
and shared some libations. Everyone had a great time and wanted to stay in touch with the group so a similar event could take place next year.”
1973
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 17, 2025. George A. Khaldun has devoted his considerable skill as an administrator, expertise as an educator, and passion as a reformer to bettering the lives of young people in distressed communities through his quest to break the cycle of poverty in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood and in other urban communities throughout the country. For his efforts, Khaldun has been selected by the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees to receive the 2025 Common Good Award. After graduating from Bowdoin with a major in government, Khaldun embarked on a career in education and community development, through which he helped to develop a transformational model of support for infants, children, teens, and young adults living in poverty. He cofounded the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a paradigm-shifting nonprofit that employs a comprehensive approach to breaking the cycle of poverty by incorporating education, health care, family support, early childhood intervention, leadership training, and violence prevention. In 1990, Khaldun earned a master’s degree in educational policy at Columbia University Teachers College and then went on to complete the Columbia University Business School executive management training program. Following twenty-four years at HCZ, Khaldun left in 2015 to start Khaldun Associates, through which he guided foundations, nongovernmental organizations, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit corporations as they sought to address challenging
Charlie Gurney ’66, Charlie Mills ’66, Frank Tonge ’67, and James Blanford ’66 met via Zoom in January to catch up and reminisce about their friend and roommate Ed Bell, who passed away in September 2024. James said the group “takes comfort in a host of good memories.”
Frank Yule, John Lord, Fred Friedman, Bill Allen, and Dick Forte—all Class of 1966—got together in April. Dick says, “we gathered for a conference on senescence, but none of us could remember where it was being held so we went to dinner instead.”
Mark Winkeller ’68 and Ed Fishman ’68 caught up with each other while attending a wedding in Mexico in February.
social issues in their communities and organizations. In 2017, he founded the Institute for Urban Leadership, an affiliate program of the executive education program at Columbia University Business School; he also served as a member of the advisory council of the New York University leadership initiative, preparing students of color to be influential leaders, as an economic development specialist for the national NAACP, and as an adjunct professor at the College of New Rochelle. He also taught international affairs at Bermuda College. Khaldun was elected to the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees in 2011 and regularly returns to campus to counsel students, speak with classmates and peers at Reunion events, and share insights in forums and on panels such as the Symposium on Race and Justice and the anniversary celebration of the John Brown Russwurm African American Center. Established in 1994 on the occasion of the Bowdoin College bicentennial, the Common Good Award honors those alumni who have demonstrated an extraordinary, profound, and sustained commitment to the common good, in the interest of society, with conspicuous disregard for personal gain in wealth or status.
1978
From an AntiDefamation League online event page, January 2, 2025 Ben Sax was honored at a gala dinner and reception in March to celebrate his twenty-five years with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The program for the organization’s 2025 National Leadership Summit included tributes to and remarks from Sax as he was recognized for his leadership and dedicated service. Sax served in several leadership positions, including vice chair of the
board, national chair of development, and New York regional board chair. He also assisted in a complete revamp of the organization’s governance structure to bolster leadership, accountability, and transparency to sustain the organization’s long-term future. He has also taught financial literacy to young adults at several nonprofit organizations over the years. Sax has a deep appreciation for the arts, is a graduate of Bowdoin College, has two adult children, two grandchildren, and is married to Hollis Rafkin-Sax, a professional photographer. ADL is the leading anti-hate organization in the world. Founded in 1913, its timeless mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” Today, ADL continues to fight all forms of antisemitism and bias, using innovation and partnerships to drive impact. A global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism, and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens, ADL works to protect democracy and ensure a just and inclusive society for all.
1982
From John Morris: “John Morris, Class of 1982, has just published a book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble titled Meet Me on Roatan, with insights and stories, both informative and often humorous, detailing the challenges of being an expat in a foreign country on a Caribbean island. Fun read!”
1983
From a Los Alamos Daily Post report, February 1, 2025. Laura McCarthy has been awarded the 2025 Earth Science Achievement Award for Public Service and Public Policy by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources (NMBGMR)
and
During a visit to the UK in April, Ellen Shuman ’76 met up with Kimi PhillipsLohmann ’99. The two, who had not seen each other in nearly six years, stopped for a selfie in front of Big Ben to commemorate the occasion.
In January, Michael Owens ’73 enjoyed a hiking excursion in Torres de Paine, Patagonia, Chile, saying, “It only took nine and a half hours round-trip with the sensation of 9.5 percent decreased oxygen for four and a half hours and 5 percent for three hours.”
the revelry at a surprise party thrown in honor of Jim’s seventieth birthday. Jim’s wife, Ruthie
the photo.
Jim Small ’77, Mary Fuller, Ted Fuller ’61, Ed Good ’61, Bill Harpin ’71, Sharon Harpin, Ruthie Spire Small ’77, Kathy Balderston ’79, Robert Armstrong ’71, and Jamie Jones ’79 gathered at Vero Beach in Florida to share conversation
some delicacies from Maine. Linda Bournival was also part of the group, representing from behind the camera.
Art Merriman ’80, John Small ’80, Tom Ufer ’77, Laurie Hawkes ’77, Jim Small ’77, Stan Manousas ’77, and Bill Clarke ’76 take a break from
Spire Small ’77, volunteered to take
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at New Mexico Tech. A public servant who has advanced the role of earth science in public policy, McCarthy received the award in February during a ceremony in the rotunda at the New Mexico State Capitol in conjunction with Earth Science/New Mexico Tech Day. As state forester, McCarthy is responsible for forest management on forty-three million acres of state and private lands, including wildfire prevention and response, forest health improvement, reforestation, watershed health, and climate change adaptation. Under her leadership, the State Forestry Division has doubled in size, modernized its business systems, and taken on the challenges of postfire recovery and reforestation of burned areas with the year 2100 climate in mind. She is committed to an ecosystem-based approach to forest health, drawing on her decades of experience as a forester, wildland firefighter, and policy advisor. Before being appointed state forester in 2019, McCarthy worked for more than two decades in advocacy and policy development in New Mexico. As associate state director of The Nature Conservancy’s New Mexico field office, she led the Rio Grande Water Fund, a public-private partnership to restore 600,000 acres of at-risk forests to protect watersheds that supply water for one million New Mexicans. She also advocated for federal fire and forest restoration policies, working closely with Senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici to create the Collaborative Forest Landscape Conservation Program in 2009. As associate director of the Santa Fe–based Forest Stewards Guild, she managed community-based forestry projects, working with diverse stakeholders while making the case for ecology as the foundation
of sustainable forestry. McCarthy began her career at the United States Forest Service as a forestry technician, wildland firefighter, and staff member of the Northern Forest Lands Study, one of the nation’s first cross-boundary ecosystem management policy initiatives.
1985 Reunion
Bob Forsberg: “The Potts Point Eight—me, Wilson Jackson, Panos Stephens, Bob Slayton, Rich Bonomo, Doug Johns, Scott Harrison, and Buzz Burlock originated our senior year, when the eight of us lived together out on Potts Point (the very end of Harpswell, beyond the old Este’s Restaurant). We had two houses across the street from each other, both on the water. We were all Deke fraternity brothers, and various combinations had lived together throughout our four years at Bowdoin. Somewhat by chance, somewhat by design, the eight of us ended up together senior year. The best part is that we have reunited every year since graduation. It started with just us, then grew to include spouses, and then kids. Every other or every third year we do full families. Whoever can join among the kids is welcome. However, the one constant is that the eight of us have gotten together every year. The very cool part is that our kids are all very good friends as well. Our reunion last year was my daughter Abby’s wedding. The reunion this year will be in Brunswick, Maine!”
1998
From a MaineBiz news story, February 6, 2023 Dan Coyne has been named president and CEO of the nonprofit United Way of Southern Maine, based in Portland. Coyne, who joined United Way of
David Potischman ’92, Chris Edwards ’92, and Chad Bonney ’92 met up in South Dakota on the first weekend in April. The group took in the sights at the Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse monuments, as well as the natural rock formations while hiking through the Badlands.
Tracy Ingram ’92, Jeremy Segal ’92, Amy Neher Shultz ’94, Dave Shultz ’92, KC Frary ’92, Rob Kean ’92, and Dave Rodriguez ’94 were all smiles during a mini reunion at Tufts to watch Dave Shultz’s son play soccer.
Wilson Jackson, Panos Stephens, Bob Slayton, Rich Bonomo, Bob Forsberg Jr, Doug Johns, Scott Harrison, and [Walter] Buzz Burlock—the “Potts Point Eight”—reunited for the wedding of Bob’s daughter Abby to Casey Street (center). The group has gotten together every year since their graduation in 1985.
Dayl Ratner Rosenthal ’77 visited the polar bears in the Arctic Passage exhibit at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin, then posed for a photo with a slightly tamer version of the animal.
Southern Maine in 2012, formerly served as the organization’s chief impact and governance officer. His previous experience includes working as legislative director from the Maine Center for Economic Policy and as director of economic development and special projects for former Democratic Congressman Tom Allen ’67. Under Coyne’s leadership, United Way of Southern Maine said it will continue to focus on driving relevant and responsive solutions to address our community’s most pressing challenges, fostering cross-sector collaboration and maximizing impact across southern Maine. The South Portland native is an alumnus of the University of Maine School of Law. He was hired for the United Way leadership role following a national search. From an Oklahoman article, March 18, 2025. Jasmine Obrai Maietta has always had sports in her life. Growing up in Bethel, Oklahoma, she was a star point guard for Bethel High School before going on to play collegiate ball and spending time in Spain as a professional ball player, then coaching high school basketball for several years. She eventually took her love of basketball and sports to new heights with the creation of Round21, a sports lifestyle brand that combines art and sports to create products and experiences. From T-shirts and hats to ping-pong and pickleball paddles and other products, Round21, Maietta said, was created with the sports “fam”— as in family—in mind. “Basketball is a part of my identity,” she said. “I felt the draw to try something new but never wanted to lose that identity of sports or basketball.” Insight gleaned from a career move ultimately led her to take the entrepreneurial leap by starting Round21, where she
serves as founder and chief executive officer. The company is five years old this year, and Maietta said she’s looking forward to creating more products and collaborating with more organizations. One of Round21’s latest collaborations was with the Oklahoma City Thunder and multiple local artists, whom Maietta said “all have different lived experiences. They brought that through the lens of product that fans got access to, and fans associated with the art, the artist, and the team, which is a deeper, richer connection beyond just what’s happening on the court.” She added, “That’s the position we’re playing in sports. We’re playing in this kind of creative side of sports, which I think is an unmet need. It’s a huge opportunity, and we’re still just getting started.”
2000 Reunion
From a Grape & Wine Magazine feature story, December 13, 2024
The Miller Family Wine Company— including fifth-generation growers Marshall Miller, Nicholas Miller ’02, and Shelly Chessie Miller ’03 was named 2025 Grower of the Year by the California Association of Winegrape Growers (CAWG) for their endurance and commitment to strengthening the California winegrape industry. Marshall had advance notice (about a minute). He is on the CAWG board, and when he showed up for the meeting, he learned the award was on the agenda. “I was trying to play it cool,” Marshall said. “The people who vote on it are all growers we respect. It’s one thing to be recognized by the consumer. Being recognized by a group of people who know what they’re talking about is special.” “It does feel good,” Nicholas Miller told Grape & Wine. “You do need to have
FOREST GUIDE
Landscape designer Todd Lynch ’96 is a sculptor, educator, and forest therapy guide who believes slowing down and connecting with place is key to replenishing ourselves.
AS A KID I loved making and gifting art from natural materials to trees and animals. I still do this! Becoming a landscape designer allowed me to integrate my love for creating things outdoors and connecting people with their surroundings.
I GOT EXCITED ABOUT LAND-BASED ART AND DESIGN through ecological art I created as a student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. I think of my career as a process piece, where every installation I create, every STEM arts class I teach, and every forest bathing walk I lead brings me closer to my ultimate questions: How can I give back to this planet and how can I help connect people to the places they call home?
THE WAY I SET UP MY NEW PRACTICE, Counsel of Trees, to integrate landscape design, art installations, and nature immersions might seem unconventional. While these disciplines appear to be tenuously related, they give me avenues to connect folks to their surroundings for an afternoon, a season, or a lifetime. I feel like I design with time as much as with stone or plants. I LOVE BEING IN OUR GARDENS. I make teas from the plants we grow; my go-to tea is tulsi, rose petals, and nettles. I am learning to play claw hammer banjo and sing at the same time. It’s not always melodious! That’s why I often play in the meadow or down by the stream. The deer and frogs don’t seem to mind.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
PHOTO: ERIN LONG
Todd Lynch ’96
Catching Up
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SCIENCE INTO STORIES
Gabi Serrato Marks ’15 is a marine geologist who helps scientists tell their stories at a science communications agency.
I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED SCIENCE and thought I would go into academic research in geoscience. But during my PhD program at MIT, I realized I wanted to spend time with people in addition to rocks. My research focused on past climate change, which I still believe is incredibly important, but I found myself drawn to more future-facing projects with concrete public implications. My role combines client work and back-end business operations, so I love that every day (and even every hour) is different. I spend most of my day solving problems; I just don’t usually know what those problems will be.
THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT OF MY WORK at Stellate Communications is bringing someone’s scientific vision to life. It’s exciting to turn a complex finding into a concrete and engaging story. Bowdoin’s interdisciplinary approach profoundly influenced how I work—I try not to draw firm lines between science and communications or writing. My philosophy around science communications centers on having a conversation rather than standing up with a megaphone.
I DELIBERATELY SEEK OUT NON-SCREEN ACTIVITIES to balance my work. I started watercolor painting last year and love tackling home improvement projects. I don’t love camping—people think that goes hand in hand with geoscience, but I would rather see beautiful scenery on a day trip.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
good news in times like this. When you get a huge affirmation like this, it raises the tide of your whole organization. This is more meaningful than accolades and scores. We believe in CAWG. It’s a pretty big landscape to pick just one grower.” Nicholas and Marshall divide up responsibilities, with Marshall serving as chief operating officer and Nicholas serving as chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer. Their father, Stephen Miller, is chief executive officer. They farm 1,900 acres in Santa Barbara County, 1,500 of which are winegrapes. They also farm avocados and lemons and have since long before their parents planted winegrapes in 1973. In addition to Bien Nacido Vineyard and Solomon Hills Vineyard in Santa Maria Valley, they own the 1,500-acre French Camp Vineyard in Paso Robles Highlands. It’s one of the largest certified organic vineyards in the state.
2001
From Stephen Allison: “Fighting off the flu, nerves, and bursitis in his elbow, Stephen Allison bowled 300 to win the annual Human Fund bowling championship. All winnings were donated back to the fund. Also, he has a son.”
2004
Betsy Gott Follansbee:
“In December I earned my National Board Certification for teaching in the area of literacy for early/ middle childhood [from the State of Maine Educational Association]. The certification process is based on rigorous standards that assess a teacher’s knowledge and skills. It requires teachers to demonstrate their effectiveness in the classroom through a portfolio of their work, assessments, videos of teaching, and reflective writing.”
2010 Reunion
From an SB Nation-Burnt Orange Nation online article, March 18, 2025
Matt Moran, former James Madison Dukes assistant special teams coach, has been hired as the special teams analyst for the Texas Longhorns of the University of Texas in Austin. Moran coached the specialists in his one season at James Madison after serving as a special teams analyst and specialists coach at Boston College, improving the team’s field goal percentage from 57 percent to 83 percent. Prior to Boston College, Moran spent eight seasons at Stanford, starting as a special teams graduate assistant before receiving a promotion to assistant special teams coordinator, coaching future NFL AllPro punter Jake Bailey and LA Rams kicker Joshua Karty, a sixth-round draft pick last season. A graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, Moran was a wide receiver, free safety, return man, and occasional quarterback. His first coaching job was at Albright College in Pennsylvania as running backs coach and special teams coordinator in 2013 and 2014. He then spent a season at Rutgers as a defensive quality control assistant.
2013
David Bernstein: “Via a highly competitive process, I was recently named a David Rockefeller Fellow by the Trilateral Commission. Founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission is a global membership organization that for decades has brought together senior policymakers, business leaders, and representatives of media and academe to discuss and propose solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems. David Rockefeller Fellows are young leaders who participate fully in the commission’s work. My
Gabi Serrato Marks ’15
Catching Up
work will focus on health and health care transformation, and its relationship with national and global security and financial well-being.”
Macy Galvan: “Tom [Benton, University of Southern Maine ’20] and I eloped on February 20, 2024, and celebrated with friends and family on September 14, 2024. Since our elopement, I brought Tom to Armenia to meet my Peace Corps host families and students.”
2014 From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 11, 2025 Jordan Goldberg has secured a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which will get underway this summer. The highly competitive one-year position will give Goldberg the opportunity to be closely involved in the workings of the country’s highest court. Goldberg’s path to a promising legal career began when he was a child, he said. “As a kid, I loved lawyer shows on TV, and then in high school I started to get involved in advocacy-type things, particularly environmental issues.” From the beginning, Goldberg said he has regarded law as a way of trying to fix the problems of the world. He has fond memories of his classes at Bowdoin, enjoying Professor Jean Yarbrough’s class American Political Thought and Religion and Politics with Paul Franco. “It was my sophomore year that really opened my eyes to legal studies, when I took Dick Morgan’s constitutional law classes.” In his junior year, Goldberg went on to take George Isaacson’s comparative constitutional law class, something that solidified his ambition to pursue a legal career. After graduation, Goldberg worked as a paralegal at Isaacson’s law firm in Lewiston, Maine, for two years. His next destination was Yale Law
School, where, among other things, he was managing editor of the Yale Law Journal. In the five years since law school, Goldberg has gained valuable experience as a clerk, first for a federal district court judge in Manhattan and then for a federal court of appeals judge in Bethesda, Maryland. He’s currently an associate at a Washington, DC, law firm, where he is a member of the Supreme Court and appellate practice.
2017 From Sydney Hancock Hillman:
“Drew [Andrew Hillman] and Sydney currently reside in Scarborough, Maine, with their golden retriever, Ziggy! They love being close to Bowdoin and driving up to support the current students in their endeavors, particularly women’s basketball and men’s lacrosse, which they played!”
Jessica Bowen Todesco: “My husband and I have a wonderful birth story to share that has Bowdoin all over it! My name is Jessica Todesco, and my husband, Cody Todesco ’19, and I welcomed our first son, Walker, on December 4, 2024
The doctor who helped to bring our son into this world at Dallas Medical City was Mark J. Godat ’79! To bring this birth story full circle, Mark Godat was also the doctor that delivered my siblings and me in the same hospital over thirty years ago. We couldn’t help but share the news with the Bowdoin community!”
2018
From an Eye on Sun Valley news story, February 13, 2025. Sun Valley Paralympian Jake Adicoff added to his trophy case on February 12, winning the FIS (Federation of International Skiing) 10km interval classic Para Cross-Country World Championship. Adicoff won the race
Wherever You Are
Most people think estate planning is something you do in your later years. But every life journey is different and has many stages. It’s never too early or too late to take stock of your will and beneficiary designations to make sure everything is up to date and reflects any ways that your family, your situation or your wishes have evolved or changed over the years. Every bend in the river creates new choices and opportunities to align your values and resources. We have information to help guide you through it all. For more, visit bowdo.in/jump-in
Director of Gift Planning
Stephanie Ward Ball ’94 can help you become a member of the Bowdoin Pines Society and create your legacy at Bowdoin. 207-725-3172 giftplanning@bowdoin.edu bowdoin.edu/gift-planning
Connect
with guide Reid Goble on a sunny afternoon in Toblach/Dobbiaco, Italy. Sim Valley’s Peter Wolter was also in Italy serving as a guide for Adicoff, in addition to tackling some of his own races. This is Adicoff’s first world championship appearance of 2025. He has been visually impaired since birth, having contracted chicken pox in utero. He is a threetime Paralympian, having competed at the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi, Russia; the 2018 Paralympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea; and the 2022 Paralympic Games in Beijing, China. He has Olympic gold and three silver medals. Prior to this most recent win, he had also won three gold, three silver, and one bronze medal in the World Championships, the most recent before now being gold in the 1km sprint freestyle in 2023. The twentynine-year-old was introduced to cross-country skiing through the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation’s Junior Nordic Development team in second grade. He has spent much of his competitive career racing in an able-bodied field, having competed in two junior national championships and a few Boulder Mountain Tours.
2020 Reunion
Hannah Donovan Billings: “My friend Sophie and I just launched our company, Hummingbird, in the Santa Barbara and northern LA area! We’re looking for a few families (spots are limited!) who want to get on board. Hummingbird is a highly personalized, in-home food and lifestyle service that helps busy families. We offer a private chef experience, reimagined. We don’t just cook—we create delicious, home-cooked meals right in your own kitchen, customized to your family’s tastes with a local, farm-first
approach. From fresh, homemade snacks to all your favorite brands (yes, La Croix included!), we keep your fridge and pantry stocked with everything you need for a smooth, stress-free week. We’re in your home just once a week, giving you all the benefits of a tailored service without the hassle of daily deliveries. Unlike traditional meal delivery, Hummingbird is designed to fit seamlessly into your life, so you can focus on what matters most: sharing quality time and great food with the people you love. We’re looking to the Bowdoin alumni network to help spread the word and find interested clientele in the area.”
From a New York Times press release, February 5, 2025. Maia Coleman has been named The New York Times metro desk’s first associate reporter. Coleman was promoted to the position after serving as a news assistant on the paper’s national desk and an embed with metro last spring. In her embed, she handled all manner of spot news, including a Gotti sentencing, the tale of a scammer who used AI to create “music” that ripped off digital streamers, a prison term for a Chinese intel operation, and even the terrifying crack that brought the Cyclone roller coaster to a halt on Coney Island. As an associate reporter, Coleman will aggressively cover breaking news, with an emphasis on crime, courts, and street reporting. She will work alongside more senior reporters and editors on enterprise as she continues to grow her skillset. 2021
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 11, 2025 Adriana Nazarko has earned a highly prestigious Thomas Pickering Fellowship for US diplomats-in-training. Her strong multilingual skillset
Vincent LaRovere ’18 and his wife, Cassandra [Fibbe, University of Connecticut ’17], welcomed their second child, Sofia Preiss LaRovere, in January of 2025. Sofia joins big brother Gabriel, who is twenty months old.
Hannah Donovan Billings ’20 and her friend Sophie Lovett prep homecooked fare as part of their business partnership, Hummingbird, a highly personalized, in-home food and lifestyle service for busy families in the Santa Barbara and northern Los Angeles area.
In a full-circle moment, Cody Todesco ’19, Mark Godat ’79, and Jessica Bowen Todesco ’17 pose with Jessica and Cody’s son, Walker. Godat performed the delivery over thirty years after also delivering Jessica and her siblings in the same hospital.
and knowledge base helped the government and Asian studies double major secure the award, making her one of two Polar Bears to receive significant foreign service fellowships in the latest round of awards. The other is Khalil Kilani ’25, who has been named a Rangel Fellow. Nazarko, who immigrated to the US from Ukraine as a child, is among forty-five successful college seniors or recent graduates chosen for the Pickering Fellowship this year, from a pool of over 1,000 applicants. The award is named in honor of US Ambassador and longtime diplomat Thomas Pickering ’53, H’84 “The program is grounded in the principle that a broad range of perspectives strengthen diplomatic efforts and foster a comprehensive approach to global challenges,” according to the program website, and fellows are selected “based on demonstrated merit and financial need.” The fellowship includes two years of graduate study in a field relevant to a career in the Foreign Service, internships, professional development, and placement in the Foreign Service upon completing graduate school. Nazarko has applied to both the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and to Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service to pursue a course in security studies with a regional certificate in Asian studies. She is currently based in Japan, where for the past nine months she has been serving as the national chair of the Association for Japan Exchange and Teaching (AJET). She has been living and working in the Asian country since August 2022, when she became an assistant language teacher at the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program, which is administered by AJET.
2023
From a bowdoin.edu/
news story, March 12, 2025. In February, Leif Maynard met via Zoom with the Bowdoin class
Talking to Farmers and Fishermen: Social Science Field Methods for Environmental Policy Research, created by Assistant Professor of Government and Environmental Studies Shana Starobin. Maynard, who joined remotely from Ecuador, was accompanied by Nantu Canelos, a native of the Achuar territory of the Amazon and executive director of Kara Solar, an Ecuador-based organization that is developing sun-powered river boats and solar installations for indigenous people in the Amazon. Maynard began his job as Kara Solar’s communications and development manager in the fall, leaving a position at the US Department of Energy (DOE) to join the innovative startup. For his job, Maynard writes and submits grant applications and manages relationships with long-term funders. Since its founding, Kara Solar has supported the construction of four shuttle boats in the Achuar territory. It has delivered eight additional solar-powered boats to other communities in Ecuador, as well as in Peru, Brazil, Suriname, and the Solomon Islands. In total, the boats support approximately 3,300 people. The foundation is currently working on a project to electrify fifty kilometers of the Kapawi River, bringing solar boats and power to over 1,000 people in Achuar territory. Maynard says that if the model of Kara Solar expands across the Amazon, it could be a transformative way to conserve the biodiversity and ecosystems of the forest, as well as indigenous sovereignty.
1. Jenny Hughes ’16 and Cory Kalin (Bentley University ’15) were married on May 25, 2024, in Westport, Connecticut. Pictured: Keith Chiarello ’16, Tina Davis ’16, Marcela Zegarra-Ballon ’16, Halsey Hughes ’15, Jiffy Page ’84, Matt Liptrot ’16, Taylor Page ’13, Kylie Moore ’16, Karen Fuller ’84, Kate Hughes ’84, Jenny and Cory, Will Kenefake ’16, Steve Hughes ’79, Erin McKissick ’16, Kevin Malone ’79, Lara Adoumie ’16, Eleanor Bright (widow of Nick Bright ’79), and Tim Richards ’79.
2. Julianne Reynolds ’00 and Chris Gottschall (Penn State ’99) were married on November 2, 2024, at the Joseph Ambler Inn in North Wales, Pennsylvania. Pictured: Sandra Pomerantz ’00, Jennifer Sinatra ’00, Carissa Rodrigue ’00, Lisl Hacker ’00, Phil Reynolds ’66, Julianne and Chris, Marianne Lipa ’01, Lauren Markert ’00, Anna Myers ’00, and Robin Seifried ’00.
3. Ryan Malloy ’04 and Christopher Wurster (Columbia University ’02) were married on September 28, 2024, at Locke Falls Farm in Tamworth, New Hampshire. Pictured: Chris Burrage ’08, Kristin Pollock ’04, Kate Phillips ’04, Christopher and Ryan, Ben Peterson ’04, Hillary Fitzpatrick Peterson ’04, and Nora Dowley ’04.
4. Mary Laurita ’21 and Karl Sarier ’19 were married on October 5, 2024, in York, Maine. Pictured: Michael Given ’17, Brad Burnham (head coach, Bowdoin swimming and diving), John Lagasse ’16, Stephen Pastoriza ’19, Monica Xing ’19, Nate Hintze (director, Bowdoin student activities), Kacy Hintze ’98, Justin Yang ’22, Pam Torrey (former assistant coach, Bowdoin swimming and diving), Kate Moynihan ’22, Nadia Eguchi ’21, Dan Williams ’19, Jacob Baltaytis ’21, Mary and Karl, Gabriel Siwady ’19, Will Park ’19, Jules Kiley ’20, Alex Burns ’21, Mitch Ryan ’19, and Thea Kelsey ’20.
Pictured: Laura Hernandez Ibanez ’17, Romeo Ibanez ’15, Davis Unruh ’16, Adrienne and Alex, David Jiménez ’16, Chris Lu ’16, and Matt Liptrot ’16. Celebrate
5. Macy Galvan ’13 and Thomas Benton (University of Southern Maine ’20) eloped on February 20, 2024, and celebrated their marriage with friends and family on September 14, 2024, in Brunswick, Maine. Pictured: Jay Priyadarshan ’14, Zina Kinslow ’13, Emma James ’13, Kristin Rogers ’12, Macy, Toby Nicholson ’14, Oriana Farnham ’15, Taylor McCormick Seabrook ’10, Claudia Marroquin ’06, and Lewis Salas ’13.
6. Sydney Hancock ’17 and Andrew Hillman ’17 were married on October 5, 2024, at the Samoset Resort in Rockland, Maine. Pictured: Molly Kane ’16, Allison Silfen Janel ’17, Abby Kelly ’19, Lydia Caputi ’18, Kimberley Ganong ’17, Marle Curle Van Siclen ’17, Steve Van Siclen ’18, Shannon Brady ’16, Megan Phelps ’15, Sara Binkhorst ’15, Adrienne Shibles (former head coach, Bowdoin women’s basketball), Kate Kerrigan ’18, Siena Mitman ’15, Hannah Graham ’19, Taylor Choate ’19, Bridget Snow ’19, Maddie Hasson ’20, Graham Rutledge ’22, Ryan Nardi ’17, Rachel Norton ’17, Parker Sessions ’18, Matt Cote ’19, Alison Aymar Hancock ’90, Kevin Hancock ’88, Daniel O’Berry ’17, Eric Zelina ’17, Robert Tommy Garry ’17, Chris Brown ’18, Liam Blair-Ford ’17, Brett Kujala ’17, Brandon Lee ’17, Nick Funnell ’17, Alexander Osgood ’17, Mettler Growney Sullivan ’17, Matthew Sullivan ’17, Meredith Sullivan Pirri ’17, Tim Sullivan ’69, Katie Kronick Kokosa ’17, Zak Kokosa ’17, Max Nordeen ’17, and Scott Feldman ’88.
7. Alex Barker ’16 and Adrienne Shih (University of California-Berkeley ’18) were married at Meridian House in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2024.
This is an English translation of the Greek motto of the country’s oldest academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), which Bowdoin joined two hundred years ago in 1825. Alpha of Maine was the sixth PBK chapter to be established since the organization’s founding in 1776. Today, Alpha of Maine is one of a network of chapters at colleges and universities across the nation, all dedicated to the promotion of education in the liberal arts and sciences, fostering intellectual freedom, and recognizing academic excellence. Nomination to Phi Beta Kappa is based on academic achievement, breadth in the liberal arts, and moral character.
Love of Learning Is the Guide of Life
The original Phi Beta Kappa Society, at William and Mary College in Virginia, had an active life of only four years, ending when the approach of the British army under Cornwallis forced the college to close its doors. But the faith of those youthful scholars in the survival and future greatness of their society is shown by their preparation of charters for branches in other colleges. Yale and Harvard were the next to establish their PBK societies in the early 1780s.
The Bowdoin chapter of Phi Beta Kappa received its charter, dated October 25, 1824, from the Yale chapter. The charter was issued to “William Allen [Bowdoin President], Parker Cleaveland, or any other member of the society residing in Brunswick or its vicinity,” and the first meeting got underway on February 22, 1825— what would have been George Washington’s ninety-third birthday. Parker Cleaveland, Bowdoin’s first professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, served as the inaugural president of Alpha of Maine, while the first vice president was Stephen Longfellow (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s father).
All new members of Alpha of Maine sign a membership book housed in the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. This book includes the signatures of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Class of 1825), Alfred Kinsey (Class of 1916), many Bowdoin scholars, two US Supreme Court justices, and a US president. A copy of the “declaration” in the front of that book is given to each new member, along with the chapter colors of green and white to wear on their robes at graduation.
The ballot box used by the College to elect candidates for membership dates from the founding of the chapter. It is housed in the College archives and features black and white balls, with black balls originally used to indicate a candidate had been rejected. (This practice is where the expression “blackballed” comes from.)
Firsts: Herman Samuel Dreer, Class of 1910, became the first African American man to be inducted into Maine’s organization. He was the second Black man to graduate from Bowdoin, eightyfour years after John Brown Russwurm, Class of 1826. In 1973, Donna L. Dionne was the first woman elected to Bowdoin’s society when she graduated with a major in biology. Dionne went on to become a science teacher at nearby Mount Ararat High School.
Unlike most PBK societies, the Alpha of Maine Chapter has been restricted to graduates from the beginning, with students being elected at the end of their senior year and not initiated until graduation weekend. The reason was that the College already had two very well-established and organized philosophical and literary undergraduate societies (which were also intense rivals)— the Athenian Society and the Peucinian Society. In some sense, Phi Beta Kappa sought to bring the bright stars from both groups together in one postgraduate constellation.
From its beginnings nearly 250 years ago in Virginia and New England, Phi Beta Kappa has grown to include more than 290 campus-based chapters like Bowdoin’s. In addition, there are more than fifty active off-campus PBK associations that have been formed to foster the Society’s educational mission. One hundred and fifteen years ago, in 1910, the living membership of Phi Beta Kappa was barely ten thousand. Today it adds that number to its rolls every year and currently boasts a membership of more than half a million.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Phi Beta Kappa key. When he was elected, the “key” was the original larger, cut and engraved silver medallion designed to be worn around one’s neck. The current key awarded by Bowdoin is smaller, gold, and has three stars.
