Hamilton Magazine - Winter-Spring 2023

HAMILTON Magazine

Steve Wulf ’72 A Writer Returns to His Roots

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Winter-Spring 2023

THINGS YOU’LL LEARN Eels are Everywhere Medievalist John Greenlee ’00, a.k.a. Surprised Eel Historian, says you can learn a lot from the slippery fish. Check out his work and that of other alumni in the Because Hamiltonians section. PAGE 4

Math Happens on Capitol Hill Courtney Gibbons’ interest in public policy began when she was in the first grade. Fast forward 34 years and the associate professor of mathematics is applying her STEM training as a Science and Technology Policy Legislative Branch Fellow in Washington, D.C. PAGE 14

Writing is a Journey Becoming a strong writer means trusting the process — planning, sharpening thinking skills, collaborating, making mistakes. See how today’s Hamilton professors and staff are developing tomorrow’s accomplished writers. PAGE 30

There’s Something for Everyone Meet a few of the editors — and the visions — behind some of Hamilton’s newest student publications. PAGE 38

Books Transform Lives We asked nine Hamilton professors to share a nonfiction book that not only inspired or influenced their thinking, but altered the way they regard their teaching, research, lifestyle, or view of the world. PAGE 44

On the cover

Steve Wulf ’72 pounds out a draft on a manual typewriter just like he did 50 years ago at his first sports writing gig with the Norwich Evening Sun, about 42 miles from his alma mater. The journalist retraces his journey from there to the pages of Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine. PAGE 50 PHOTO BY KEVIN M. WALDRON

THIS PAGE: Royal typewriter, circa 1945, courtesy of Evelyn K. Mullin.

PHOTO BY KEVIN M. WALDRON

COMMENTS

HAMILTON MAGAZINE WINTER-SPRING 2023 VOLUME 88, NO. 1 EDITOR Stacey J. Himmelberger P’15,’22 (shimmelb@hamilton.edu) SENIOR WRITER Megan B. Keniston ART DIRECTOR & DESIGNER Mark M. Mullin DESIGNER Bradley J. Lewthwaite PRODUCTION MANAGER Mona M. Dunn PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Phyllis L. Jackson CONTRIBUTING WRITER Jorge L. Hernández ’72 STUDENT WRITER Claire S. Williams ’25 STUDENT ILLUSTRATORS Sawyer Kron ’25 Eliza Pendergast ‘24 PHOTOGRAPHERS Josh McKee Zack Stanek Kevin M. Waldron

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

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OU MAY RECALL that a printing glitch in the Fall 2022 edition of Hamilton magazine resulted in a cover that rendered darker than we

originally intended. After the issue hit mailboxes, we followed up with an email to readers pointing out that, although the cover story featured Hamilton’s cemetery, the image was not meant to be maudlin or gloomy — in fact, the stories we told of the cemetery’s inhabitants were intended to celebrate some rather fascinating lives.

We received many notes from readers in response to our email, including a surprising number who liked the dark cover. We’re just happy you are all reading!

MIGHT BE A MINORITY opinion, but I thought the dark quality of the photo was an inspired match for the headline

and the article title, and I was immediately impressed by the way the magazine was breaking free of the mold. I thought to myself, more or less verbatim, “This is great work from the same minds who just won an award for the issue last year. It is so awesome how they are pushing the envelope on what an alumni magazine might look like.”

Archives-directed corrections notwithstanding, I think you should put the cover (and/or the issue as a whole) up for whatever awards there are for such things.

Benjamin Widiss, associate professor of literature and creative writing

WEB COORDINATOR Esena J. Jackson SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Tim O’Keeffe

VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING Melissa Farmer Richards

CONTACT Email: editor@hamilton.edu Phone: 866-729-0313 © 2023, Trustees of Hamilton College

Hamilton’s All-American goalie Don Spencer ’59 was Gene Long’s model for hockey’s first form-fitting fiberglass facemask. On April 28, 1959, Spencer wrote to Jacques Plante, goalie for the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens, to tell him about the invention, pictured here.

The following is not a letter to Hamilton magazine, but a sentiment with which may alumni will agree. On Nov. 25, 2022, hockey historian Stan Fischler wrote in his weekly column for The Hockey News …

ABOUT HAMILTON COLLEGE AND GOALIE MASKS Several years ago, I was honored to attend Clinton, N.Y.’s nomination as Hockeytown USA. While there, I visited the legendary Hamilton College on the hill and learned something I never knew before.

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COMMENTS THE TRUSTEES David M. Solomon ’84, P’16, Chair Robert V. Delaney ’79, Vice Chair Linda E. Johnson ’80, Vice Chair

That is, although Jacques Plante was the first NHL goalie to regularly wear a full mask — Nov. 1, 1959, versus the Rangers — the creator of the first mask was Hamilton’s athletic director, Gene Long.

Long’s mask, developed in 1955, was more practical than Plante’s and looked less grotesque.

That was a good 63 years ago. I bring it up now to commemorate the passing of Long and suggest that his mask innovation qualifies him for the USA Hockey Hall of Fame.

Gene Long, who served as professor of physical education, coach, trainer, and athletics director at Hamilton from 1953 to 1991, died on Nov. 18, 2022, at the age of 93. Readers can find his memorial biography at hamilton.edu/genelong.

Send your letters, story ideas, and feedback to editor@hamilton.edu or Hamilton magazine, 198 College Hill Road, Clinton, NY 13323.

We welcome comments on topics discussed in the magazine or on any subject of possible interest to the College community. Please include your name and class year, and whether you intend for your letter to be published. We reserve the right to judge whether a letter is appropriate for publication and to edit for accuracy and length.

OVERHEARD ONLINE

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N HONOR OF Professor of Geosciences Todd Rayne’s impending retirement in June, here’s a post featured recently on the College’s Facebook page.

CHARTER TRUSTEES Aron J. Ain ’79, P’09,’11 Mason P. Ashe ’85 Manal Ataya ’01 Richard Bernstein ’80 Peter B. Coffin ’81, P’14 Julia K. Cowles ’84 Daniel C. Fielding ’07 Carol T. Friscia K’77 Amy Owens Goodfriend ’82 Philip L. Hawkins ’78 David P. Hess ’77 Gregory T. Hoogkamp ’82, P’25 Lea Haber Kuck ’87, P’24 Sharon D. Madison ’84 Christopher P. Marshall ’90 Robert S. Morris ’76, P’16,’17 Daniel T.H. Nye ’88, P’24 Montgomery G. Pooley ’84, P’16,’19 Ronald R. Pressman ’80 Imad I. Qasim ’79 R. Christopher Regan ’77, P’08 Nancy Roob ’87 Alexander C. Sacerdote ’94 Jack R. Selby ’96 David Wippman ALUMNI TRUSTEES Betsy G. Bacot ’84 Aditya Bhasin ’94 Phyllis A. Breland ’80 Kathleen Corsi ’82, P’23 Mark T. Fedorcik ’95 Eric F. Grossman ’88 John Hadity ’83 Monique L. Holloway ’87, P’14,’18 Marc B. Randolph ’81 Daniel I. Rifkin ’88, P’23 Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo ’97 Sharon S. Walker ’90 LIFE TRUSTEES Henry W. Bedford II ’76 David W. Blood ’81 Harold W. Bogle ’75, P’14 Brian T. Bristol P’11 Christina E. Carroll P’90 Gerald V. Dirvin ’59, P’84, GP’17 Sean K. Fitzpatrick ’63, P’87 Lee C. Garcia ’67 Eugenie A. Havemeyer GP’00 Joel W. Johnson ’65, P’93 Kevin W. Kennedy ’70 † A.G. Lafley ’69 † George F. Little II ’71, P’04 Arthur J. Massolo ’64, P’93 Donald R. Osborn P’86, GP’16 Mary Burke Partridge P’94 John G. Rice ’78 Stephen I. Sadove ’73, P’07,’10,’13 † Howard J. Schneider ’60, P’85,’87,’89, GP’21 Thomas J. Schwarz ’66, P’01 A. Barrett Seaman ’67 Nancy Ferguson Seeley GP’17 Chester A. Siuda ’70, P’06, GP’25 Susan E. Skerritt K’77, P’11 Charles O. Svenson ’61, P’00 Thomas J. Tull ’92, P’13 Susan Valentine K’73 Jack Withiam, Jr. ’71, P’16,’20 Jaime E. Yordán ’71 Srilata Zaheer † Chairmen Emeriti PRESIDENT OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION John J. Christopher ’83, P’14

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FIGHT HIV

Sherene Brown Cora ’97 PUBLIC HEALTH WORK has taken Sherene Brown Cora ’97 across the globe to Africa. In August she moved from a job in Rwanda with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the HIV field to pursue a similar post in Lesotho.

“I entered Hamilton intending to major in science to attend medical school,” Cora says. “After taking a philosophy course, I fell in love and ended up a philosophy major with a minor in Africana studies.”

As a grad student pursuing a master’s in public health at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, Cora found her niche in the HIV field. “I conducted in-depth interviews with drug-using and nondrug-using women to explore multigenerational drug use and HIV risk perception, and was a program assistant for a CDC-funded STD outreach project for adolescents,” she says.

Cora’s first job after Rollins was with the CDC as a contractor in the Division of HIV and AIDS Prevention where she developed comprehensive prevention programs for HIV-positive individuals. In 2012, she relocated to Africa and began providing technical leadership on HIV program implementation to various ministries in Botswana. She later served as deputy country director for CDC Rwanda overseeing the office’s administrative and financial operations.

Now in Lesotho, Cora is providing operational oversight for a team of 11 public health professionals. “I see myself continuing to work in management and operations in another country,” she says. “I love what I do and love working overseas in Africa.” n

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INCREASE ACCESS Judi Alperin King ’83

AIM FOR THE MOON Kevin Conole ’04

THE SKY CERTAINLY ISN’T THE LIMIT for Kevin Conole ’04 when it comes to promoting NASA’s global outreach. As a senior program specialist at the space agency’s Office of International and Interagency Relations in Washington, D.C., he manages relationships with civilian partners and leads the agency’s United Nations-related activities.

“NASA has accomplished so much in the last year,” he says, noting the recent launch of Artemis I, the uncrewed test mission that will enable the U.S. to land the first woman and a person of color on the Moon. “Soon we will have humans living and conducting critical research on the lunar surface. It’s also rewarding to work with our Applied Sciences Program, using data from satellites to help deliver solutions to international development challenges in global health, such as climate change and food security.”

A government and philosophy major, Conole credits Hamilton with honing critical thinking and writing skills and his four years playing football with learning the value of teamwork. After Hamilton, he worked for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., before taking a job with the space agency.

Along the way he earned a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College and a graduate certificate in legislative studies from Georgetown University. For now, the Syracuse, N.Y., native says he remains focused on expanding his portfolio at NASA and possibly returning to the private sector in the future. n

STUDIES SHOW THAT college-aged students without a family support system or personal safety net are among the least likely to earn a four-year degree. Judi Alperin King ’83 is committed to changing that.

Following a 32-year career with Wediko Children Services, King connected her passion for working with youth navigating complex family situations with her love of vibrant college campuses by launching the Wily Network in 2015. A first-of-its-kind nonprofit, the Wily Network ensures students “have the tools and networks necessary to thrive in four-year residential colleges and transition successfully into post-college life.”

Similar programs exist on individual college campuses, but King saw a opportunity to launch a community-based access program spanning Boston, which has nearly three dozen colleges, almost 100 within a 50-mile radius. Wily has supported more than 100 talented students — Wily Scholars — mostly through partnerships with area colleges and universities.

The network provides Scholars with a clinically trained coach who meets with them weekly on the Scholar’s campus, financial support, and community-building events with nearby Scholars. Wily is there for its Scholars 24/7 to assist with managing obstacles and to cheer as they celebrate achievements.

“We’re talking about a group of students who haven’t had agency in their lives. They’ve stood very still in a tornado of chaos,” King says. “No one told them at 4 years old that college would be their ticket out, and no one told them that they’d do everything in their power to get them through college. They did this all on their own. They are trailblazers.”

A cohort of Hamiltonians, including alumni, staff, and faculty, have been involved with Wily, including current employees Mike Holliday ’17 (major gifts manager) and Nathalia Mahabir ’17 (clinical scholar coach). King describes the organization and those involved with it as “present and future focused,” all working toward the goal of making college more equitable and accessible.

“The students we work with add so much value to every college campus,” King says.

“This is who colleges want on their campuses, so let’s find ways to take care of them.” n

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FEEL FOR EELS John Greenlee ’00

MEDIEVALIST AND CARTOGRAPHIC historian John Greenlee ’00 was working on a project involving 17th-century London when he noticed something odd. On several maps, there were two ships anchored in the Thames.

These ships had been marked as civic landmarks and labeled “Eel Ships.” Interest piqued, he began researching the history behind these vessels and the history of eels in England in general.

Little did Greenlee know that this chance observation would evolve into the dissertation topic for his Ph.D. in medieval studies at Cornell University and an ongoing fascination with the slippery, snake-like fish.

“I kept finding myself surprised by the roles that [eels] play in premodern English

INSPIRE CREATIVITY Susie Szeto Price ’92

SUSIE SZETO PRICE ’92 can trace her foray into photography and the arts to a cinema class she took with Professor Scott MacDonald at Hamilton.

“Reading films critically really spoke to me. I wanted to be involved in film, or media studies, as a career because of it,” she says.

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history,” said Greenlee, who is now a lecturer in medieval studies at Cornell. “Once you start looking for eels in English history, they’re basically everywhere.”

It’s true. Eels were no ordinary fish in historical England. They were a common form of currency in 1200 CE and remained an important aspect of English diet and identity in the 17th century. Finding increasing fascination with the history of eels in England, Greenlee began to share these facts with the world. He started with sporadic Tweets, under the name Surprised Eel Historian, mostly for his own amusement. Now, he Tweets each weekday, usually with a meme and a joke or pun, for his 21,400+ followers. His work was featured in a 2020 Time article.

As a medieval historian, Greenlee hopes his Tweets will encourage people to learn more about the period. But during his time as a history major at Hamilton, he also learned

about the importance of interdisciplinarity.

He weaves this into his Tweets in the hopes that people will recognize eels, a critically endangered species, as one that is worth saving.

“Eels have long been an extremely important part of freshwater riparian habitats, but they’re neither majestic nor cuddly, and they are not a fish that most people have personal experience with,” Greenlee says. “To get people on board with saving them, I try to make eels interesting by telling engaging stories. Twitter is a great medium for helping people appreciate the humor, and history, of eels.” n

After graduation, Price earned her master’s degree at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts before becoming an assistant for Richard Greenberg and Bruce Schluter, two prominent creative directors who designed titles and marketing graphics for movie trailers. As a production and visual effects coordinator, she honed her skills in storytelling, dynamic shot compositions, and CGI effects.

“Interestingly, what I learned on the job was compatible with the theoretical film concepts I first learned from Scott,” she says. In fact, she found that even her family snapshots reflected those same professional and academic standards.

Eventually Price took a hiatus from fulltime office work to raise her family. Her husband, a photographer and CG animation artist, suggested that she submit her photos to Getty Images, where she still works as a freelance photographer creating stock

imagery “telling everyday stories of family, children, and multiracial diversity in America.”

Price had found the perfect balance of spending time with her children, dabbling in real estate, and pursuing creative interests until 2015, when her husband died of multiple myeloma at age 47.

“It was one of the most devastating moments of my life. It was also the ultimate wake-up call to confront what I wanted my life to be about,” she says. “Unsurprisingly, my art and creativity went through the roof. I took chances. This creative energy was a way for me to communicate my love for my late husband.”

Price also uses that creative energy to inspire others through her work on the Hamilton Career Network’s Arts & Entertainment Committee. “I love sharing the possibilities of working in visual effects, animation, and other artistic fields through a liberal arts education. I’m a living example, and I have no regrets.” n

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

IMPLEMENT CHANGE Michael Nelson ’16

SOCIAL IMPACT IS THE LIFE WORK for Michael Nelson ’16, who is fresh from a summer working in the Biden-Harris Administration to implement the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. “It’s unfair how accurately your childhood ZIP code predicts your future education, income, and health, and how factors like race and gender further separate opportunity,” Nelson says. “I was glad to support the White House to develop guidance that expands equitable access to funding for marginalized communities, as well as to increase transparency and efficiency for the thousands of BIL projects.”

Day-to-day, this meant collaborating with the U.S. Chief Financial Officers Council and

other government leaders to resolve challenges they faced in implementing the BIL. Nelson’s social consciousness stems from his education at Hamilton, where the economics major explored a variety of innovation and experiential learning opportunities. “Outside of class, you could either find me in the Levitt Center studying or the Glen House planning Adirondack trips. The Levitt Center’s programs on entrepreneurship and policy helped me realize I could merge my interest in economics with social impact projects,” he says.

After Hamilton, Nelson moved to Washington, D.C., where he spent four years as a government innovation consultant at Deloitte. “My team helped agencies adopt cutting-edge technologies like AI, blockchain, and robotics to better serve the country,” he says. “We covered a variety of issues from preventing financial fraud to battling the opioid epidemic and COVID-19.”

Nelson is currently wrapping up graduate school, pursuing a dual MBA/MPA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Harvard University with a focus on economic mobility and youth empowerment.

He continues to support equity and opportunity projects on the side by partnering with changemakers to improve their programming and expand their organizations.

Balancing graduate school and professional projects has meant bouncing between Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and DC — a fun adventure for the Centennial, Colo., native.

“I plan to continue working with government agencies and nonprofits. I look forward to using the skills and insights I acquired in school to better support communities in need,” he says. n

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BUILD COMMUNITY Tommy Thompson ’73

TOMMY THOMPSON ’73’s Facebook page states that he’s “A guy who lives in eternal terror of becoming bored and has too many hobbies as a result.” One of those too many hobbies is building, well, buildings.

“My father worked in construction as a high schooler,” Thompson says. “He was an enthusiastic do-it-yourselfer, and his skills rubbed off on my brother [Rick ’83] and me.”

Those skills came in handy in 2020 during the pandemic.

KUPR-LP is a low-power (100-watt) FM, nonprofit radio station broadcasting and streaming (at kupr.org) a variety of music and cultural programming to three towns and two Indian pueblos around Placitas, N.M., near Thompson’s home. It had operated from a 12-by-12-foot room since its founding in 2015.

LABOR FOR EQUITY Natasha Jenkins ’07

NATASHA JENKINS ’07 has shown her commitment to promoting principles of equity in the legal field throughout her career.

Formerly an advocate for worker’s rights as general counsel of Teamsters Local 700, she now leads a chapter of the oldest association of African American lawyers and judges in the country.

Jenkins is the president of Illinois’ Cook County Bar Association (CCBA). “I sit as the youngest Black woman

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In late 2019, a local family donated a retired Los Alamos National Laboratories test site office trailer to the station. It sagged at both ends, with dry-rotted plywood siding outside and tired, 1970s wood paneling inside. The 12-by-56-foot structure offered a solid roof and four times as much space as the station’s prior home, but little else.

A hired contractor installed a new subfloor and reframed the interior for two broadcast studios, an office space, and a bathroom. In March 2020, station volunteers took over to finish the job.

“I was already a volunteer announcer on the station, building on my four years of WHCL-FM experience at Hamilton,” Thompson says. “It turned out I was one of just a couple station volunteers who had the skills and free time to work on it.”

Thompson and a rotating cast of volunteers replaced rotten substructure, installed new windows, insulation, and drywall, and

laid new flooring throughout. New steel siding panels covered the dry-rotted plywood.

Slowly, the crew transformed the worn, vintage trailer into a comfortable, modern space. KUPR-LP began broadcasting and streaming its signal from its new home in September 2020.

“The project accomplished two things,” Thompson says. “First, it kept me sane during the lockdown stage of the pandemic. Second, it provided a spacious home for KUPR to improve its service to the local community.” n

known to hold the position in the organization’s 108-year history,” she says.

In that capacity her goal is enhancing CCBA’s strategic programs, educational initiatives, and community outreach to prepare attorneys to not only excel as practitioners in their fields, but also to combat racism, advocate for justice, and promote equity in the legal field and in the judiciary. Her dual career roles also include working as an associate at Littler Mendelson P.C. in Chicago, where she practices labor and employment law.

Jenkins majored in history at Hamilton.

Her thesis centered on housing discrimination in the United States and its relationship to the development of the Chicago Housing Authority in her hometown. After graduation from the University of Illinois School of Law, she was hired as an assistant attorney general at the Office of the Illinois Attorney General, practicing civil litigation and criminal law.

She later pivoted to labor and employment law with a focus on the transportation field after stints with the Chicago Transit Authority, Teamsters Local 700, and United Airlines.

“I served as lead labor counsel for United in grievance proceedings, mediations, and arbitrations to ensure collective bargaining and disciplinary procedures were consistently enforced,” Jenkins says.

In the next few years, she hopes to strengthen her practice as an expert in labor and employment and to continue to advance the agenda of the CCBA. “For the first time in U.S. history, there is a Black woman serving as vice president of the United States and a Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, but there is more work that needs to be done to eradicate injustice and increase diversity, inclusion, and equity in the legal profession and in the world,” Jenkins says. n

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LEAD DIPLOMACY

What positions did you hold leading up to your postings in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Michael Murphy ’87

AS THE CURRENT U.S. AMBASSADOR to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Michael Murphy ’87 reflects on his second tour there, his 31 years in foreign service, and how Hamilton prepared him.

What do you do on a daily basis?

I live and work in Sarajevo. My day typically starts with a press briefing followed by a meeting with senior staff. Both can drive the embassy’s work, but our work is always tied to the United States’ strategic foreign policy objective here: support for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and multiethnic character, as well as its integration into the European Union and NATO. In addition to managing approximately 600 employees, I meet with political, business, and civil society members to advocate on behalf of the United States and American businesses.

I engage in public diplomacy activities from press statements and interviews to policy speeches. I also travel throughout the country.

You cannot be an effective ambassador if you spend all your time in the capital.

What’s different now from your previous work in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

I served in Sarajevo from 2006 to 2009 as the embassy’s political counselor. In some ways the country has changed a lot and in others less than I would have hoped. Sarajevo is more prosperous, and the country’s tourist infrastructure is much improved. In 2006, you could still see a lot of damage from the 199295 war, and there is much less now. On the other hand, the problems of nationalism and corruption are worse than they were in 2006.

That is disappointing to me personally, but it also poses a challenge to U.S. foreign policy.

“Hamilton provided me with exactly what it promised” How did Hamilton prepare you for your career?

I made the decision to major in international affairs after taking a course with Professor Deborah Gerner. She was an electric lecturer and inspired me to pursue a junior year abroad at the London School of Economics.

After that, I was hooked on the idea of combining my interests in current affairs, history, and travel in a career with the Department of State. Hamilton provided me with exactly what it promised: a classical liberal arts education that left me with a lifelong desire to learn. Both have served me well in a profession that requires you to learn new politics, histories, cultures, and societies every few years. I also cannot stress enough Hamilton’s emphasis on writing.

I spent 18 years serving at embassies in Nigeria, Cameroon, the United Kingdom, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Botswana. My tour lengths varied from two to four years. Every foreign service officer has a designated specialty, and I am a political officer. Most of my work overseas involved contact work, diplomatic and public advocacy of U.S. policy, reporting, and analysis. I spent 13 years in Washington in different assignments, most recently as a deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. These duties encompassed managing European and Arctic security policy, including relations with NATO, as well as managing bilateral relations with 10 northern European and Baltic countries.

What is next for you professionally?

I have not given a lot of thought to what I might do after my time as ambassador concludes. I am in the fortunate position where I can continue working with the Department of State or retire if I decide it is time to move on to the next phase of my life. n

What did you do after graduation?

I had planned to attend Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, but the Department of State offered me a job. I worked on Capitol Hill for three years before joining the Foreign Service, serving as a foreign affairs and defense legislative assistant for Tennessee Congresswoman Marilyn Lloyd.

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THE BIG PICTURE

Summer Work in Burke THE FIRST FLOOR of the Daniel Burke Library will soon undergo a major renovation to include a new classroom, areas that highlight the College’s physical collections, shared service points for assistance, virtual reality spaces, soundproof rooms for podcast production, and more, different types of study spaces for individual and group work.

PHOTO BY BOB HANDELMAN

RECENT NEWS HIGHLIGHTS from across the Hamilverse 1 KENNEDY CENTER FOR THEATRE AND

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Students in the digital arts course TV Club explored how live video broadcasting can be a method for collectives to bond with one another. Professor Anna Huff says, “In TV CLUB, students not only gain skills in putting on a show regularly, using applications such as OBS [for video recording and live streaming], and thinking critically about the history of media collectives, but they also gain a community.”

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2 KIRNER-JOHNSON BUILDING

Through the Levitt Center Justice Lab, 14 students spent the fall exploring public policy issues affecting community wellness in Utica.

They took four classes together and pursued internships focused on public safety, care of vulnerable populations, and access to quality medical services. This spring’s Justice Lab focuses on immigration and asylum.

3 FILLIUS EVENTS BARN

It’s never too early to start mastering your knowledge of Hamilton trivia. This year’s 45 “Jans” (a.k.a. first-year students who matriculate in January) got well versed in College facts, legends, and lore at a special Jan Trivia Night during their orientation.

4 TOLLES PAVILION

The fall CAB concert featured the Canadian indie pop band Peach Pit, complete with front man Neil Smith crowd surfing into the audience.

WANT MORE HAMILTON NEWS? Visit hamilton.edu/news. And if you’re not receiving our monthly Hamilton Headlines in your inbox, send a note to editor@hamilton.edu, and we’ll add you to the list.

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5 SAGE RINK

A jam-packed crowd at the annual Citrus Bowl was juiced on Dec. 13 when the Continentals men’s hockey team posted a 3-1 win over rival Middlebury.

6 CHAPEL

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Novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki presented the Tolles Lecture last fall, sharing insights into writing and the creative process. “Framing the world around us as an abundance of voices, both audible and out of reach, Ozeki reaffirmed the potential delights of the mundane, prompting everyone to look around at least once and train an ear to the potential whispers of shoes, pews, or backpacks,” noted Evan Robinson ’23.

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7 TAYLOR SCIENCE CENTER

The Hamilton College Arboretum’s Saturday Speaker Series welcomed Ernest Cavallo ’71, who shared his knowledge and love of Galanthophilia, otherwise known as the snowdrop. He discussed experimenting with cultivars, identifying best practices to encourage blooming and multiplication, and propagating and selling rare specimens.

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Students taking the course Maps in Global Environmental History curated an exhibition of maps that prompted such questions as how have mapmakers depicted nature, projected power, and imagined new environmental futures, and what can maps teach us about colonialism, energy, climate change, environmental degradation, and recovery?

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM WOOLLEY

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LARRY CANNER

FIELD WORK

A Mathematician Goes to Washington

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OURTNEY GIBBONS’ INTEREST in public policy began with the 1988 presidential election and a passionate defense of a vegetable. It’s an unexpected start to a story about a math professor — until you learn she is spending the academic year working on Capitol Hill.

At age 6, Gibbons turned the hallways of her elementary school into a campaign trail

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by frequently wearing a Michael Dukakis for President button. Her parents weren’t political but had friends who were, and “stumping for Dukakis and being pretty excited about him” set the stage for her interest in political figures and policy.

Then came the moment President George H.W. Bush publicly shared that he didn’t like broccoli.

A young Gibbons, taken aback by the “irresponsible” comment, took matters into her own hands by writing him a letter that included sage advice on how he might make the green plant taste better: “Just put some cheese on it.”

Gibbons, now an associate professor of

mathematics at Hamilton, remains the kind of person who sees opportunity in every challenge and doesn’t shy away from working through the issue at hand. In fact, she often runs toward problems at full speed. That’s what happened in seventh grade when she failed the subject she teaches now.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m pissed and I’m going to finish math!’ And here I am, still working on that,” she quips. “I’ve learned that, for me, being good at math means being good at being stuck. I hate feeling stuck, but I’ve become comfortable with it. I like puzzles. I like trying to figure things out. I’m patient with feeling stuck and working through the process in front of me.”

FIELD WORK “JUST PUT SOME CHEESE ON IT.” Since that first bit of advice she shared with President George H.W. Bush over 30 years ago, Associate Professor of Mathematics Courtney Gibbons’ passion for problemsolving has only grown. This year she’s on Capitol Hill as a Science and Technology Policy Legislative Branch Fellow.

That lifelong lesson is helping in her latest endeavor: Gibbons is part of the 50th class of Science and Technology Policy Legislative Branch Fellows selected to serve on Capitol Hill for 2022-23, and is one of two fellows sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), selected out of a pool of 150 applicants. Each year, the AAAS places fellows in the federal government’s executive, judicial, and legislative branches where they apply their STEM training to work on policy development and implementation. She first learned of the fellowship while attending graduate school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“I was studying a theoretical area of math that didn’t have a ton of immediately obvious applications, and there was a part of me that thought, ‘I want to do something to make this country and world better,’” she says. “When I learned about the fellowship, it was fun to think about working on Capitol Hill at some point in my career.”

In 2021, as she began planning for her second sabbatical, one of Gibbons’ mentors reminded her about the fellowship and urged her to apply. Since September, she’s been working with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and in the office of its chairman, U.S. Senator Gary Peters from Michigan.

“As I researched the various offices, I noticed that this one is responsible for a lot of bipartisan legislation, which was attractive to me,” Gibbons says. “I thought that in order to be effective, I wanted to learn how to do more bipartisan work. And this is a great office to do that in.” Her fellowship mentor, Matthew Cornelius, is a senior professional staff member who sponsored her place among the staff because he shares her excitement

about all things data.

“Matthew has taught me a lot — not just how the Senate works, but how to really be part of the team.”

Gibbons’ workload varies depending on whether or not Congress is in session. Each day is different and comes with new research questions and problems to tackle on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to equity in grant funding. Gibbons enjoys chipping away at them to get the information she and her colleagues need.

In addition to the vast technical expertise she brings, Gibbons meets with constituents and people with specific expertise, interests, or passion projects that intersect with her portfolio of work. She also researches topics with help from the Congressional Research Service (“academic librarian superheroes,” as she calls them), and she writes — a lot: memos, emails, invitations, summaries, and “really good questions that make someone actually return your email or call.” Each part of the fellowship has helped her understand how valuable her passion for process and mathematical training is to her host office’s work.

“I didn’t think my math was that meaningful to the government, but as I meet people, I realize we do need a lot of math in the government because there are a lot of problems that require modeling,” explains Gibbons, whose research area is commutative algebra.

“Government offices need to figure out how we will use things like blockchain, and they need to understand algorithms, runtime, and the size of the dataset they’re using.”

At times, Gibbons’ work in Washington, D.C., has included topics she had infused into her classes back on College Hill. In one previous course, Math and Social Context, her students discussed why there aren’t crashtest dummies shaped like women. Through the fellowship, Gibbons worked with an

office that sponsored a bill in the last Congress about the issue and has gotten to help “figure out how we make cars safer for women without making them an afterthought.” Seeing up close how essential math is to policy has given her ideas for future course topics and a new perspective on how her students can make an impact.

“I’ll come back to Hamilton with a stronger sense of how math and STEM students can find a way to take their skills and move into policy,” Gibbons says. “We need champions for math and science in the government because we don’t know the benefits of every project or initiative until we do the math and see the application sometimes. Our students and graduates who love math can make a big difference in public policy. It all comes down to the people in the room working on the issue. We know how smart Hamilton students are. Wouldn’t it be great to have more of them in that room?”

As her time on Capitol Hill draws to a close, Gibbons is glad to have had the experience of working in Washington — and other challenges that life brings. She became a mom just as the fellowship program’s orientation was underway in September. Ben, who was born 10 weeks early, is “doing great” (and constantly wears his Hamilton gear), while Gibbons and her partner have been adjusting to their new lives as parents while she simultaneously works to make the world just a little better. True to form, she’s gaining confidence that she can work through this new process.

As for Ben? He’s already teaching Mom new things about what it really means to be stuck.

“This poor little human can’t do anything for himself right now. He’s in a state of perpetual stuck-ness,” Gibbons says. “While I’m frustrated because I’ve got these work things to understand, he is trying to figure out what his hands are. It puts it all in perspective.” n — Meg Keniston

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FIELD WORK

Why I Love Books

BY MARIANNE JANACK, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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NEW YORKER CARTOON about people who love vinyl records shows two middle-aged men standing in front of a big stereo system with large speakers, a turntable, a receiver, and a large cabinet, its shelves full of vinyl records. The caption says: “The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.”

Though I’m not a vinyl afficionado, I am a fan of books — old-fashioned things made of paper and wood pulp that have to be shelved or stored in a physical space. Bookshelves are ideal, but tables and floors will do, too.

As my students, colleagues, and our department custodian, Kevin, will tell you, my office is a mess. I have a huge desk that I got from the salvage barn (it used to live in the library); I have a round table; I have a metal file cabinet; I have three chairs. All of those surfaces are covered with books and papers.

I just got about 10 more feet of book shelving in my office, but this won’t accommodate all the books that are sitting in boxes on my floor or piled on my desk and tables. I must make hard decisions. Which books to keep? Which to give away?

Some of my students love ebooks for this reason — that and because they’re sometimes cheaper than the paper version. Ebooks don’t take up physical space, and you can read them anywhere you can get an internet connection. No need to lug heavy volumes around; no need to remember to bring the right books to class. Sometimes I envy this generation of students, remembering the semester in

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H A M I LTO N

The unread books sitting on my shelves remind me of what I don’t know, of what I haven’t done yet, of what might still await me, of my own life as a physical thing that ages and changes.”

my sophomore year of college when I had to haul a huge volume of Shakespeare and an equally huge collection of writings by British philosophers to my classes and to the library, like Sisyphus and his rock.

And so, you might ask (justifiably): what’s to love about physical books? Why not do a Marie Condo and get rid of all that clutter? Like vinyl records, books made of paper — material items that can only be in one place at a time — are inconvenient and expensive. And if you add to this the environmental concerns about paper, the problem becomes even larger. The arguments against materialistic collection seem compelling.

As I was reading in bed last night — a book by a friend of mine — I decided that after I’m finished, I will give the book to one of my

students. It’s about a strained motherdaughter relationship, and I know she has had a similar experience; maybe I’ll have the author sign it first. I’ll also write a note in it when I give it to her.

On one of the bookshelves in my office is the volume of the British philosophers that I read in my Modern Philosophy class in 1984. On another is the Norton Anthology of American Literature and The Riverside Shakespeare I read that same semester. They include my notes, written in the margins, and when I look at that handwriting, I am taken back to that time. I still consult them for classes or when I need to be reminded of a line from a poem. I can envision them even now as I think about where they are on my shelves; I can also summon the classrooms in which I sat as a college sophomore listening to a professor talk about what we read. I can see the coffee cup rings and the comments I wrote in the margins (some of them quite stupid, I must admit).

On another bookshelf I have books that came from my bedroom at my parents’ house: Never Tease a Weasel (the first book I read myself); two volumes of Alice in Wonderland (in which I have added my own artistic interpretations); a copy of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature from the early ’80s and another from 30 years later, with a nicer cover; a copy of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that I read in my Wittgenstein seminar in my senior year of college and again in graduate school.

Ebooks might give us the same information as their paper counterparts, but they don’t give us the same reading experience — an experience framed by what’s available, by the heft of the book, by the history of our development as readers and thinkers represented by those material objects that connect us to the past. The unread books sitting on my shelves remind me of what I don’t know, of what I haven’t done yet, of what might still await me, of my own life as a physical thing that ages and changes. n

FIELD WORK

The Demise of Long Island Bay Scallops

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NJOYING A DISH of pan-seared bay scallops over fresh pasta could become more of a rarity. A new study led by Stephen Tomasetti, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies, and colleagues at Stony Brook University confirms that warming ocean waters have all but eliminated production of scallops in Long Island’s Peconic Estuary.

According to an article published by Innovate Long Island, scallop production in the region is down 99 percent, which prompted

the U.S. Department of Commerce to declare a federal fishery disaster in 2021.

The researchers’ findings, published on Jan. 10 in the scientific journal Global Change Biology, warn that the collapse of the New York fishery is only the beginning. Using satellite-based temperature readings and long-term environmental records, along with data that included measurements of scallop heartbeats, the team concluded that an eight-day heatwave and repeated episodes of low oxygen in the water caused a 2020 die-off at a specific Peconic Bay site.

Although coastal Massachusetts waters remain within safe temperature ranges, the researchers posit that as warmer coastal

Buchman, the Carolyn C. and David A World Premiere Heather M. Ellis ’38 Distinguished Professor of Music and director of the Hamilton College Orches72 Years in tra, learned about it at an International Conductors’ Guild conference. The Women’s the Making Philharmonic Advocacy, which champions

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N 1950, COMPOSER MARION BAUER completed her Symphony No. 1. The piece was to premiere the following November at the Symposium of American Orchestral Music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., but three copyists tasked with creating the orchestral parts from Bauer’s score did what the composer called an abysmal job.

There were “literally hundreds of errors — notes misread, ties omitted, dynamics forgotten, even wrong instruments copied in the parts,” according to what Bauer wrote in the critical notes of the piece.

After the errors forced the symphony from missing its scheduled debut, the work became all but forgotten. That is until 2020 when

the performance of women composers, had facilitated editing Symphony No. 1 into a performance edition.

“It caught my eye because it had a note attached — ‘has never been performed,’” Buchman says. “Marion Bauer was a significant presence in American classical music in

waters spread north, the same combination of high temperatures and impaired water quality may soon threaten the nation’s entire northern bay scallop industry.

And this phenomenon isn’t new. Tomasetti cites the collapse of the Long Island Sound lobster industry and the loss of blue mussel populations in coastal bays south of Delaware as well.

“Commercial shellfisheries are a vital part of our blue economy, and shellfish habitats are changing rapidly,” Tomasetti told Innovate Long Island. “Mitigating further warming by transitioning to clean energy is critical.

But while these global efforts are underway, committing to practices that will improve our local water quality — like reducing nutrient pollution — is also important.” n

the first half of the 20th century; she taught at both NYU and at Juilliard, so the fact that her symphony was never performed seemed an egregious neglect of someone who should be celebrated.”

Through Buchman’s other role — guest conductor for Symphoria, Syracuse’s professional orchestra — she worked with colleagues to develop Unheard No More, a concert centered around the Bauer work. At long last, Buchman conducted the world premiere of Symphony No. 1 on Oct. 15, 2022.

“It felt momentous to have the honor of making this piece come alive for the first time and to share that with the other musicians and audience in the room,” Buchman says. “Marion Bauer’s compositional voice was unfortunately kept out of the conversation with her contemporaries. The least we can do is to bring it into a new conversation and add her to a more complete and inclusive picture of mid-20th century American symphonic music.” n

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SHOW AND TELL

WOMEN’S SQUASH

MEN’S GOLF MEN’S TENNIS

WOMEN’S LACROSSE WOMEN’S ICE HOCKEY

WOMEN’S ROWING FOOTBALL

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SHOW AND TELL

VOLLEYBALL MEN’S AND WOMEN’S INDOOR TRACK AND FIELD

WOMEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVING

MEN’S ICE HOCKEY

HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT. At the start of each season, Hamilton’s varsity athletes gather for publicity photos at what is known as Media Day. And while photographer Josh McKee captures stunning images that reflect fierce, dedicated, competitors, these photo sessions inevitably evolve into the opportunity for student-athletes to show their camaraderie, pride, and just plain goofiness. Here are just a few selections representing all 29 Continentals teams.

MEN’S AND WOMEN’S INDOOR TRACK AND FIELD WOMEN’S GOLF

MEN’S SOCCER

WINTER 2023

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SHOW AND TELL

WOMEN’S SOCCER

MEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVING

MEN’S CROSS COUNTRY

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

MEN’S LACROSSE

BASEBALL

MEN’S ROWING

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WOMEN’S TENNIS

SHOW AND TELL

WOMEN’S CROSS COUNTRY

SOFTBALL

MEN’S BASKETBALL

MEN’S SQUASH

FIELD HOCKEY

WINTER 2023

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Tricky Name?

Tougher Job Prospects

NANCY L. FORD

CONNECTIONS

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T’S SAID A ROSE by any other name would smell as sweet, but that’s not necessarily so according to two Hamilton affiliates whose research suggests that a person’s success in the job market may depend on how easy it is to pronounce their name.

Stephen Wu, the Irma M. and Robert D. Morris Professor of Economics at Hamilton, recently teamed with former student Qi Ge ’06, assistant professor of economics at Vassar College, on the study “How Do You Say Your Name? Difficult-to-Pronounce Names and Labor Market Outcomes.”

The pair met in 2002 when Ge came to Hamilton as an international student. “Steve was actually the first American I met and spoke to in person,” Ge says. “He came to pick me up at Syracuse Airport when I first landed in the U.S. from China, a day I vividly remember.”

Wu recalls that day too. “Qi took several of my courses, and I also served as a supervisor for his summer research project through the Levitt Center for Public Affairs,” he adds.

It was no surprise that their connection grew to one of academic collaborators. “Over the years, we discussed the idea of how names might affect people’s job prospects, so we decided to work on a project using data collected from economics Ph.D. students on the job market,” Wu says.

Ge affirmed how he often has his name mispronounced and sometimes relies on a fictitious name in public to avoid confusion.

For example, he often relies on a “go-to name” in sandwich shops. Wu adds, “My Chinese name is Zhouxun, so Qi and I can relate to the ideas behind our names research question, and it seemed appropriate to ask him to collaborate.”

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Steve Wu

Qi Ge ’06

The researchers analyzed 1,500 economics Ph.D. job candidates and found that those with difficult-to-pronounce names — from the perspective of native English speakers — had a 10% lower chance of landing an academic or tenure-track position and were also placed at less prestigious institutions. Wu and Ge also found discrimination due to name fluency using experimental data from two prior studies that included Black candidates and Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese candidates. Even within particular racial and ethnic groups, people with difficult-to-pronounce names received fewer callbacks.

Their study has gained national recognition with articles in The Wall Street Journal

and Inside Higher Ed as well as a radio spot on NPR. In one article, Wu noted that removing names on résumés to ensure candidates are evaluated based only on their qualifications is a potential solution.

“Knowing [the bias] exists might help limit it,” he said in the interview.

Wu graduated from Brown University in 1995, majoring in applied mathematics and economics. He earned his master’s degree and doctorate at Princeton and came to Hamilton in 2000. Ge, an economics and mathematics double major at Hamilton, earned his doctorate in economics at Princeton in 2016. He taught at Skidmore College before moving to Vassar in 2019.

The two colleagues had previously co-published a paper titled “Sharing common roots: Student‐graduate committee matching and job market outcomes” in the Southern Economic Journal in 2021. Their current paper is an offshoot of this prior project and is currently under review for publication in a professional journal.

“It is very gratifying as an educator to be able to see the progression of a student from their early days as a first-year undergraduate all the way to a colleague who is now a faculty member at a peer institution,” Wu says.

“My career trajectory has been heavily influenced by Steve. I am still learning a lot from him in our collaboration, including his extensive knowledge and vision about the field, open-mindedness to new ideas and approaches, extreme attention to detail, and second-to-none work ethic,” Ge says.

Next for the collaborators and friends is a possible extension of their current project.

“Steve and I share some common academic interests,” Ge says. “He is the best person to work with on these projects because of his expertise on related topics.” n — Jorge L. Hernández ’72

CONNECTIONS

Because Hamilton Connects

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ACH YEAR STUDENTS gain insight into possible career paths thanks to more than 100 alumni who volunteer with the Career Center’s Connect Team. Focusing on eight key industry areas, the Connect Team plans in-person and virtual workshops, events, and panel discussions to showcase alumni in corresponding fields and positions.

Here’s just a small sampling of topics and alumni who connected with students this year:

WOMEN IN GOVERNMENT: Sarah Krieger ’11 (policy analyst, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), Kelsey Mellette ’11 (senior policy advisor, U.S. Senate), Amy Soenksen ’13 (chief of staff, U.S. House of Representatives)

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BIOPHYSICS: Richard Pastor ’73 (senior investigator, Membrane Biophysics, NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)

n

FINANCE: Jenn Fleming ’22 and Quin Crowley ’22 (investment banking analysts, Deutsche Bank); Adam Wijaya ’22 and Jason Kauppila ’22 (investment analysts, Goldman Sachs)

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EDUCATION: Erin Bishop ’08 (manager, graduate financial aid/engineering, Harvard University), Alana Christopher ’14 (director, program operations, EXPLO), Larry Allen ’09 (teacher, Ming Dao High School), Fluffy Aguilar ’19 (assistant director, educational outreach, Pomona College)

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SPORTS MEDICINE: Hannah Lyons ’14 (physical therapist, U.S. Air Force), Stephen Pribut ’73 (podiatrist), Kyle Adams ’97 (orthopedic physical therapy coordinator, Cayuga Medical Center), Danielle Mortorano ’12 (physical therapist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center)

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INVESTMENT BANKING/TECHNOLOGY: Brian Truesdale ’92 (chairman, global technology banking, Citigroup)

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MUSEUM CURATION AND VISUAL ARTS: Jessica Dalrymple ’94 (artist), Catherine Prescott ’12 (chief curator, Keeler Tavern Museum & History Center), Ianna Recco ’16 (scholarly programs and publications specialist, Smithsonian Institution), Kyla Sullivan ’06 (collections manager, D&D Management Group)

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP: John O’Keeffe ’01 (co-founder, Champ and Warren Ventures), Sam Morgan ’07 (co-founder, Astra), Cyrus Boga ’90 (founder, Novamaya)

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CREATIVE WRITING AND LITERATURE: Stuart Kestenbaum ’73 (poet), Whitney Martin Collins ’95 (author), Lydia Kiesling ’05 (author)

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INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN STEM: Sandra Saldana ’19 (research and data associate, ParentChild+), Anthony Ruberto ’13 (Ph.D. candidate, Institut de Biologie Valrose, Côte d’Azur University), Jiong Chen ’10 (senior data scientist, LinkedIn)

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FILM AND ENTERTAINMENT: Céline Geiger ’04 (writer/supervising producer, Nancy Drew), Bridget Braley ’18 (freelance producer/production manager), Marcos Sotelo ’15 (coordinator, Universal Musical Group)

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CAREERS IN CONGRESS: Catherine Berry ’19 (government affairs specialist, Pathloom), Philip Gow ’22 (constituent services liaison, U.S. House of Representatives), Nadav Konforty ’20 (staff sssistant, U.S. House of Representatives), Anna McCloskey ’18 (legislative assistant, U.S. Senate), Jonathan Older ’21 (scheduler, U.S. House of Representatives)

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Thank You For Being a HamPal

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OUNG GIRLS in the Clinton Youth Hockey program have some pretty impressive mentors to keep them excited and engaged with the sport.

Through the HamPals program, members of the women’s hockey team — who advanced to the Frozen Four in the NCAA championships this year — volunteer with the young players running drills and practice games, and even hanging out in the locker room.

PHOTOS BY JOSH MCKEE

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CELEBRATIONS

THE WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART is marking a decade of serving as an interdisciplinary hub on campus. It’s a place where the arts foster creative inquiry, inspire experimentation, and spark dialogues across disciplines, introducing new ideas and perspectives to classroom discussions.

THE

H A M I LTO N

TURNS

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ZACH WELLER ’23

10

WELLIN MUSEUM

The Wellin represents a synthesis of honored traditions and new ideas. In addition to its more than 7,000 objects representing a range of cultures, historical periods, artistic practices, and movements, the museum also champions diverse artists, and its exhibitions and programs spark thoughtful and complex conversations.

CELEBRATIONS Since opening in 2012, the museum has Hosted

97,982

Mounted

36

Acquired

2,631

visitors

exhibitions

works of art, artifacts

11

institutional partnerships Forged (organizations ranging from the Honolulu Museum of Art, to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.)

Hosted

34

visiting artists and curators

246

public programs Sponsored (exhibition tours and receptions, gallery and artist talks, Wellin Kids events, programming for art educators, art yoga, etc.)

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and student/campus programs (Black History Month art walks, Red Weather magazine launches, docent talks, Earth Day art scavenger hunts, etc.)

Hired

159

Hamilton student docents

639

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Met with Hamilton classes in disciplines ranging from Arabic to Geosciences, from Government to Music

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Engaged with school districts through the Wellin’s K-12 educational outreach program

67

media outlets from Received coverage in ARTnews to Forbes, from The New York Times to The Times of India Statistics as of 3/25/23

Clockwise from top: “Margarita Cabrera: Space in Between,” February 2018/Heather Ainsworth; The Wellin’s Archive Hall/John Bentham; “Elias Sime: Tightrope,” September 2019/Heather Ainsworth; Wellin Kids event/Megan P. Haman; Animation class meeting at the Wellin/Tatiana Bradley ’19

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CELEBRATIONS

Wellin Museum Highlights SO MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN 10 YEARS! Through collaborations with artists, curators, students, faculty, scholars, the community, and the broader contemporary art world, the Wellin Museum of Art has established itself as a new model for a teaching museum. This timeline (found in full at hamilton.edu/wellin/timeline) offers a glimpse at just some of the museum’s achievements.

START HERE

’07 JANUARY 2007

A $10 million gift from Wendy and Keith Wellin ’50 sparks planning for the museum, to be named in honor of Keith’s parents, Ruth and Elmer Wellin.

’12

FEBRUARY 2016

“Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe” is the artist’s largest solo exhibition in the U.S., featuring new scrolls, sculptures, and drawings.

’15 OCTOBER 2015

“Karen Hampton: The Journey North” features new work alongside a career survey by the artist. A second exhibition, “Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman” is co-organized with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, S.C., and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta.

’14 OCTOBER 2014

“Alyson Shotz: Force of Nature” debuts the Wellin’s first sculptural commission, a large aluminum artwork suspended from the ceiling, now installed in Christian A. Johnson Hall. The exhibition also includes a 49-foot, site-specific work created with students.

OCTOBER 2013

JULY 2012

Tracy Adler is named founding director. She comes from New York City where she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Hunter College Art Galleries, and acted as principal of the art consultancy Adler Arts.

OCT. 5, 2012

The Wellin officially opens with the inaugural exhibition, “Affinity Atlas.” The exhibition brings together new and iconic works of art in various media, as well as scientific and ethnographic objects, some on loan and others from the College’s collection, to suggest ways that visual art can connect and expand on ideas across disciplines.

’13 MAY 2013

“Danielle Tegeder: Painting in the Extended Field,” the artist’s first solo museum show, features a large-scale mobile commissioned by the Wellin, now on view in the Taylor Science Center.

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’16

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The Wellin’s Student Docent Program launches. Hamilton students lead exhibition and collection tours, and develop educational programming for their peers and the community.

Advanced research opportunities are also available for students who have a specific academic focus.

The Wellin hosts its first Wellin Kids event, a free, drop-in, art-making program for area children and families.

SEPTEMBER 2013

“Frohawk Two Feathers — You Can Fall: The War of the Mourning Arrows” travels to the Wellin from the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.

Addressing localism in a global context, the exhibition “A Sense of Place” features work by a diverse group of international artists.

CELEBRATIONS

SEPTEMBER 2022

’17 FEBRUARY 2017

“Julia Jacquette: Unrequited and Acts of Play” includes two murals created in collaboration with students.

WellinWorks, an interactive educational space informed by themes in the exhibition, debuts. Visitors engage with a variety of modular forms inspired by the show, constructing their own rules through the process of play. WellinWorks is presented each spring inspired by ideas in the concurrent exhibition.

SEPTEMBER 2017

To celebrate the Wellin’s fifth anniversary, “Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions” assembles 140 artworks from the collection, including ancient works that have been on campus for over 150 years and new acquisitions by contemporary artists.

“Dialogues Across Disciplines” celebrates the Wellin’s 10-year anniversary. Featuring a selection of artworks acquired through gifts and purchases over the last decade, the exhibition highlights the museum’s ongoing commitment to building a globally representative collection that is reflective of the academic and cultural richness of Hamilton College.

MAY 2022

Collection, a magazine written and designed by student docents who support the museum’s communications efforts, debuts.

’22 FEBRUARY 2022

“Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR,” the artist’s first solo show, features all new work including a mixedmedia collage measuring over 38-feet-long inspired

by Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals (1932–33).

Klos works with students to create an original mural for the show, When the Parts Untangle.

’18 FEBRUARY 2018

“Margarita Cabrera: Space in Between” is a social practice project addressing the often-harrowing experiences of those immigrating to the U.S. through a series of soft, plant-like sculptures onto which participant collaborators stitched their personal stories. Simultaneously, the photography exhibition “This Place” marks a collaboration among Colgate, Hamilton, Skidmore, and the University of Albany.

SEPTEMBER 2018

“Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day” debuts a body of work including large-scale sculptural garments and elaborately adorned helmets.

The Wellin commissions its first video, I Was Here, to premiere in the show.

H Scan to watch the video.

’19 SEPTEMBER 2019

“Elias Sime: Tightrope” features new and recent work, including an artist/student collaborative sculpture, Flowers & Roots.

’21 SEPTEMBER 2021

The exhibition “Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine” allows visitors to touch, move, and interact with the sculptural works created to debut at the Wellin. A dance class choreographs a performance using the artworks, and a music class composes a score for visitors to experience as they interact with the works.

DECEMBER 2020

In response to COVID-19, student docents begin creating short interpretive videos about artworks in the Wellin’s collection and online learning resources. Developing digital resources remains a component of the Wellin Student Docent Program.

’20 OCTOBER 2020

Due to the pandemic, “Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud” opens in phases. The show “reappeared” Room H from the Northwest Palace of Nimrud using food packaging from products imported from the Middle East as its medium. Filling the gallery, the work represents the largest commission by the Wellin and is made possible by a grant from the Daniel W. Dietrich ’64 Fund for Innovation in the Arts.

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VOICES

VIEW FROM COLLEGE HILL

Helping Psychologists Write Right CO URT ESY OF TH E N ESB ITT-JOH N STON WR ITIN G C EN TER

W

HEN WAS THE LAST TIME you wrote a paper applying style outlined by the American Psychological Association?

If your answer is “Huh?” you may be in the minority.

“How to Write an APA Research Paper” was the fifth most-viewed page on Hamilton’s website by off-campus visitors in 2022. It generated a whopping 140,965 pageviews, with 86 percent of viewers finding the page via a Google search.

Hamilton’s handy guide describes the different types of information to include in each section of an APA-style paper, along with the following tips for crafting a strong introduction. Most make good sense for all kinds of writing. Here’s an excerpt: A GOOD INTRODUCTION will summarize, integrate, and critically evaluate the empirical knowledge in the relevant area(s) in a way that sets the stage for your study and why you conducted it. The introduction starts out broad (but not too broad!) and gets more focused toward the end. Here are some guidelines: •

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on’t put your readers to sleep by D beginning your paper with the time-worn sentence, “Past research has shown (blah blah blah).” They’ll be snoring within a paragraph! Try to draw your reader in by saying something interesting or thoughtprovoking right off the bat. Take a look at articles you’ve read. Which ones captured your attention right away? How did the authors accomplish this task? Which ones didn’t? Why not? See if you can use articles

H A M I LTO N

you liked as a model. One way to begin (but not the only way) is to provide an example or anecdote illustrative of your topic area.

•

lthough you won’t go into the details of A your study and hypotheses until the end of the intro, you should foreshadow your study a bit at the end of the first paragraph by stating your purpose briefly, to give your reader a schema for all the information you will present next.

•

Your intro should be a logical flow of ideas that leads up to your hypothesis. Try to organize it in terms of the ideas rather than who did what when. In other words, your intro shouldn’t read like a story of “Schmirdley did such-and-such in 1991.

Then Gurglehoff did something-or-other in 1993. Then ... (etc.).” First, brainstorm all of the ideas you think are necessary to include in your paper. Next, decide which ideas make sense to present first, second, third, and so forth, and think about how you want to transition between ideas.

When an idea is complex, don’t be afraid to use a real-life example to clarify it for your reader. The introduction will end with a brief overview of your study and, finally, your specific hypotheses. The hypotheses should flow logically out of everything that’s been presented, so that the reader has the sense of, “Of course. This hypothesis makes complete sense, given all the other research that was presented.”

• When incorporating references into your

intro, you do not necessarily need to describe every single study in complete detail, particularly if different studies use similar methodologies. Certainly you want to summarize briefly key articles, though, and point out differences in methods or findings of relevant studies when necessary. Don’t make one mistake typical of a novice APA-paper writer by stating overtly why you’re including a particular article (e.g., “This article is relevant to my study because…”). It should be obvious to the reader why you’re including a reference without your explicitly saying so. DO NOT quote from the articles, instead paraphrase by putting the information in your own words.

•

e careful about citing your sources (see B APA manual). Make sure there is a one-toone correspondence between the articles you’ve cited in your intro and the articles listed in your reference section.

•

emember that your audience is the R broader scientific community, not the other students in your class or your professor. Therefore, you should assume they have a basic understanding of psychology, but you need to provide them with the complete information necessary to understand the research you are presenting. n

For the complete text of “How to Write an APA Research Paper,” please visit hamiton.edu/APApaper.

QUOTABLES

No Neil Young??

Terry Connors ’87, reacting to a December post on Hamilton’s Instagram page that featured a poll asking students what music they are currently listening to.

Still workers are getting wage increases that are below inflation so that could be fueling some desire to look for better circumstances.

Professor of Economics Ann Owen in the Nov. 1 Marketplace article ”US job openings increased in September.”

Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who discussed the war in Ukraine on Oct. 25 as part of Hamilton’s Common Ground series.

I cannot imagine a more pure distillation of good versus evil.

Their calls include the hoot, the wail, the tremolo, the yodel, the chick distress call, and the chick begging call ...

Catherine Fengler ’24 and Caroline Boyd ’23 in their project Adirondack Loons: The Spirit of Wilderness, prepared as part of the course Forever Wild: The Natural and Cultural Histories of the Adirondack Park.

Always teaching, always listening, helping us become better athletes, better students, and better men.

Thomas Jasinski ’81 in a tribute on LinkedIn to Gene Long, longtime coach and athletics director, who died last November at age 93.

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KEVIN M. WALDRON

Writing Center Director Jennifer Ambrose on her approach to teaching writing: “I think it’s really important that we develop students’ abilities to use their own voices to speak clearly and to advocate for things in which they believe.”

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By Maureen A. Nolan

a

t first, it felt awkward, maybe even unreasonable, like being asked to wear shoes on the wrong feet or eat yogurt with a butter knife. Why do it that way?

During the spring semester, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Studies Adil Mawani assigned students in his Asian Film and Religion course a weekly, in-class, 10-minute writing assignment — without use of a laptop or tablet. Out came paper, pencils, and pens from the recesses of backpacks.

As students bent to Mawani’s open-ended prompt, the classroom grew so still that the motion-activated lights shut off.

In his own writing, Mawani sometimes turns off the computer to jot things on paper.

“I found it organizes my thoughts, but I think it also can generate original ideas or original

solutions,” he says. He’s not certain students view writing in that way, and he devised the technology-free exercise to spark an understanding. Initially, students were resistant, but after a few weeks, they reported that they’d grown more comfortable writing without a screen.

Dechen Cohen ’26 found it refreshing to set technology temporarily aside. Without the distraction of laptops or tablets, it was easier for her to focus on the task. She says timed writing was a good way to get students back into the course material for a long class (three hours) that meets only once a week.

“I would say that the structure of his writing exercises actually produces not just better points, but more writing, lengthwise. I feel like I get a lot more done in those 10 minutes than maybe I would in 30 on my laptop,” Cohen says.

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t Initially, students were resistant, but after a few weeks, they reported that they’d grown more comfortable writing without a screen.

ABOVE: Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Studies Adil Mawani, who assigns students weekly technology-free writing assignments designed to spark their creativity in a new way.

RIGHT: Associate Professor of History Celeste Day Moore on the joy she feels when a student’s ideas, research, and revisions result in a solid paper.

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he quill atop the Chapel is no idle boast. From its beginnings, Hamilton has revered its commitment to writing, and Mawani is among its professors, across disciplines, who continually seeks ways to help students develop into accomplished communicators. Professors share ideas with one another, evaluate and reevaluate their own success, and, increasingly, seek advice from Writing Center Director Jennifer Ambrose. “We often have alums come back and tell us that the thing that essentially got them their job was people knowing Hamilton’s writing program and from that extrapolating that the students are communicators,” she says.

According to Ambrose, 95% of students use the Writing Center at some point during their time at Hamilton, and tutors conduct well over 3,000 conferences a year, which she finds an amazing number given the College’s overall student enrollment of about 2,000.

“I’ve never seen another institution where the Writing Center is so well integrated into how writing is practiced, and one of the things that I find significant about Hamilton is that the majority of our conferences are voluntary,” Ambrose says. “While we support about 50 required conferences each semester, more students are choosing to come in on their own.”

The no-tech writing assignment is just one of Mawani’s strategies. He turned to Ambrose for her expertise about how best to teach writing in classes made up of students with divergent academic interests, from Asian studies to biology. Ambrose has visited his classroom to lead sessions about writing. “When she taught the workshop the first time, it didn’t feel like she was doing a long lecture; she was basically drawing the ideas from the students,” he says. Ambrose offered great practical insights as well. For instance, Mawani and Ambrose presented students

with essay structures and had them evaluate their effectiveness and decide how to make improvements.

Ambrose came to Hamilton in 2016. It was a time when many veteran faculty members were retiring, and many of the newer professors began to seek her guidance about teaching writing. Her approach is to encourage students to examine their rhetorical situation: What is the purpose of their writing? What are they trying to convey or argue?

Who are they writing for? How do those things dictate the style, organization, and other elements of their writing? Students, guided by professors, need to consider all these things.

“I think it’s really important that we develop students’ abilities to use their own voices to speak clearly and to advocate for things in which they believe. And so teaching writing by saying, ‘Here’s how you do this,’ and ‘There’s only one way to do that,’ doesn’t represent the plurality of students and voices,” Ambrose explains.

t

o keep her writing advice in context for students, Associate Professor of History Celeste Day Moore tells them that she’s just one step in their writing journey. For students in her 100-level, writing-intensive courses, the journey includes a one-on-one discussion about their first paper.

That meeting takes place before she gives the paper a final grade, and she tells the student the grade she would assign to the draft.

“One of the first questions I ask them in those meetings is, ‘Tell me about what people have said to you about your writing, what you’ve been told, and how you feel about it.

What do you like about how you write?’”

Day Moore says. She finds that it’s helpful to get that on the table before they figure out the next steps, and she makes sure students understand their next steps before they leave her office.

Having taken five courses with Day Moore, Cam Blair ’21 met with her more times than he can remember, and they talked about writing in a way he hadn’t experienced before. Day Moore was “idea-focused,” he says, encouraging him to examine precisely what ideas he was trying to get across. He learned that before investing time in firming up his topic sentences and paragraphs, he needed a solid concept.

“That’s when I really started planning so much before I started writing. Because before these types of meetings, I had a tendency to write and develop my ideas in the course of writing,” he says.

A history major, Blair finished up his writing-intensive requirements by the end of his first year. That’s also when he took a job

as a Writing Center peer tutor, a position he kept throughout his time at Hamilton. Day Moore was with him for the duration, too, including for his senior thesis.

At Hamilton the words “senior thesis” have weight, even for first-year students who’ve heard what lies ahead. The thesis, an academic capstone that can both intimidate and inspire, typically is the longest paper a student has undertaken. The project requires extensive research and data gathering, the creation of a literature review, and, of course, the final argument.

“When I turned in the first draft,” recalls Blair, “I thought it was really good. And then, when I turned in the final draft, I thought my first draft was awful. And that process was so rewarding when it was done. But, of course, when you’re doing it, it’s so awful.”

Day Moore shares the thrill when a student’s thesis labor pays off — the research, revisions, and testing of multiple arguments it takes to address a complex historical problem. Success, she says, is an answer that’s clear but not overly simplified.

“That’s the challenge. They try different strategies, and they’re kind of working around it. And there is some sort of magic that frequently happens, probably in the eleventh hour, late at night. All of that work and revision crystallizes,” she says. “It really is amazing. I love that moment, in a thesis, or in another paper. It’s really joyful to be reading something and be able to say to someone in the comments, or in person, ‘You did it.

You nailed it. You found what you were trying to say.’”

“That’s the challenge.

They try different strategies, and they’re kind of working around it. And there is some sort of magic that frequently happens, probably in the eleventh hour, late at night.”

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KEVIN M. WALDRON

We often hear stories about how the writing skills alumni developed on College Hill set them apart in graduate school or in their professions.

Here’s one such story that has gone down in Hamilton lore …

But there’s more …

As the story was passed down over the past 25+ years, the name of the student somehow didn’t pass with it. But thanks to some recent sleuthing courtesy of the College’s Information Services staff, we tracked down the Hamilton/ Georgetown Law writer extraordinaire. It is none other than Sarah Kanwit Morehead ’95, now the career law clerk to a federal judge in the Western District of Washington, where she conducts legal research and analysis, draft orders, and assists the judge in courtroom proceedings.

“The job requires extensive writing every day,” she says. “I am grateful to Hamilton for its strong writing curriculum that definitely helped me hone my communications skills. Strong, clear writing is important in so many professions.” n

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H A M HI LATMO INL T O N

NANCY L. FORD

T

HE SETTING IS A LARGE HALL at Georgetown University Law Center. A second-year student, and Hamilton alumna, sits among a class of law students nervously awaiting the return of their first paper of the semester. The professor is Samuel Dash, former special counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee during the Nixon era.

Dash stands at the front of the room, randomly calling numbers assigned to each student. “Number 27?” Student 27 raises his hand, the professor hands over the paper asking, “Where did you go to college?” The student replies, and Dash moves on. This continues with each student receiving a paper and answering, “Harvard, Penn, Princeton …”

Finally, when all but one paper is distributed, Dash calls out, “Number 18?” The Hamilton alumna raises her hand.

“Where did you go to college?” “Hamilton,” she replies.

“Okay, the rest of you,” Dash announces, “you should have gone to Hamilton. You would have learned to write.”

t

he scope of the project compounds the student anxiety about their thesis, says Professor of Sociology Stephen Ellingson. For several years, he’s asked Ambrose to do workshops with his thesis students to re-enforce his work with them. “So much of writing is actually thinking. And I think one of the great things that Jennifer does is help them realize that. You’ve got to be able to get your ideas clear in your mind in order to get them clear on the piece of paper,” Ellingson says.

Ambrose is excellent at helping students think through the strategies they need for long writing, Ellingson says, and students tune in. After her initial classroom workshop and after students pick a thesis topic, Ambrose returns to discuss the literature review. Further along in the process, students may meet with her to go over their drafts.

Pavitra Sundar, associate professor of literature and director of cinema and media studies, helps students develop thesis muscles in her 300-level literature “methods” courses. In the courses, she says, students learn to craft a long argument. Working with Ambrose, Sundar designed “scaffolded” assignments, which are linked assignments that break writing into smaller bites.

“That has been really helpful. They turn in a prospectus. They meet with me about it, they get to revise that prospectus. Then they do an annotated bibliography,” she says. Sundar talks to students about doing research that goes beyond Wikipedia or Google Scholar. Sometimes, she has students present on their arguments, which helps them crystallize what they want to say.

Most importantly, Sundar wants students to understand that writing is a process, rather than a skill to master.

“I think of writing as a way — one way, perhaps not the only way, but one way — to sharpen their thinking,” she says. “I do a lot of discussion work in my classes, and I invite students to be really free-flowing in how they participate in class. So there, I want students

to just try out ideas. But when it comes to their writing, at least with the papers they turn in, I want them to have used those initial ideas as a starting point, but then really refine their arguments. It’s not just about making an argument; it’s about figuring out what your argument is and making a better argument through writing.”​

w

hile the Writing Center has always supported students and faculty at the 100- and 200-level courses, Ambrose sees room for growth in working with senior thesis writers and other writing at the upper-class levels.

She works with some math and science professors, and wants to do more of that.

“One of the things that’s great about Hamilton is we do truly have a writing-across-the-curriculum program. And we do have a number of hard-science classes that are writing intensive. We have math classes that are WIs, and I’ve worked with those faculty before to actually require writing conferences for things like proof writing, and linear algebra, which is fun,” she says. “I came to Hamilton from an engineering college and in a technical and scientific writing center at an engineering college. One of my administrative goals for the center is to continue our outreach especially to hard sciences faculty, because that’s my own area of expertise and also my love in terms of writing.”

Her longer-term vision is to work with professors on their own projects, which she says would trickle down to how they teach their students. “I’ve done that on an ad hoc basis over the years, and I’ve also been involved in some faculty writing groups and helping to support some faculty writing groups, and I think there’s a lot of potential growth there,” Ambrose says. n Maureen Nolan is formerly the senior writer of Hamilton magazine.

“It’s not just about making an argument; it’s about figuring out what your argument is and making a better argument through writing.”

ABOVE: Pavitra Sundar, associate professor of literature and director of cinema and media studies, helps students prepare for writing their thesis in her 300-level “methods” courses.

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LEFT: Writing Center tutor Kelvin Nuñez ’24.

KEVIN M. WALDRON

RIGHT: Tutor Alex Kropaneva ’25 discusses a draft with Ian Trefry '26.

WRITIN G C E N TE R T UTO R I NG:

It’s About Building Rapport and Trusting the Process

by Kelvin Nuñez ’24

A

FTER MY FINAL CONFERENCE on a frosty February evening, I slid my classic W.B. Mason notepad back into the cabinet and grooved my way to the back table. As I sat down, fellow Writing Center tutor Max Gersch ’23 turned to me with a raised eyebrow and a smile.

“You always seem to have so much fun during your sessions. What do you guys talk about?” he asked.

Initially, my thoughts stalled as in, “Well, the usual … it’s writing.” But then I realized it was more than that. The icebreakers, jokes, and rapport with my peers are built on something genuine and go beyond just helping them improve their writing. Max’s observation made me reflect on how my time as a writing tutor changed me and my perceptions of the effort we put into communicating with each other.

I came into my junior year at Hamilton a bit nervous and feeling alone. My social networks were limited, so I set a goal of meeting more people. I see myself as goofy and caring, but I often default to shyness and hesitation when presented with new interactions on campus.

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The Writing Center allows me to connect with other students and get to know them while also leaving an impact. The opportunity to make a difference at this one-on-one, highly personal level reminds me that my efforts to share writing knowledge contribute to a larger purpose beyond myself. Yet, at the same time, I have taken steps to improve my own technical writing and interpersonal skills. The Writing Center has made me a much stronger communicator and listener.

The first in-person conference I participated in was as a shadow tutor in training.

As I sat in one of Sophie Rubenfeld’s ’23 first meetings of the fall semester, I could not help but be impressed by how she navigated, communicated, and taught throughout the session. The first-year student was receptive to her enthusiasm and appreciated her guidance. I appreciated watching how she empowered the student to drive the conference.

Sophie stoked the sparks of his intellect and encouraged him to trust his intuition. This conference broke down the tutoring process for me in a nutshell — a student-driven process where the exchange of

ideas is honest and balanced. Ideas turned into body paragraphs, body paragraphs into topic sentences (the Answer-Cite-Explain paragraph structuring method Sophie introduced blew my mind!), and all that work helped the student refine his thesis for the direction the paper would become.

As tutors, we are privileged to help writers on the sentence-level with general advice on how to structure, analyze, and incorporate key ideas in their writing process. Ultimately we work to develop students’ confidence in their ability to communicate effectively. When students come in bashing their own writing, it does not communicate weakness to me but a desire to improve. Writers need to trust themselves to be in a mindset that embraces mistakes. The first attempt, the first draft, rarely resembles the best version of their thoughts. From the beginning of the conference, I strive to set a positive and helpful space. I smile and often find myself sharpening my wit and jokes, or so I hope.

Some of my favorite ice breakers come from the topics of the papers that pile in.

Since we have required conferences for specific courses, I have absorbed so much knowledge about Plato’s Republic and Russian history that I cannot help but smile when I meet another person tackling those topics.

My experience as a writing tutor has dramatically shifted my perspective on the writing process. I no longer think of writing as an isolating activity but as one requiring an engaged, positive mindset of communication. As a tutor, I sharpen and learn new skills as a writer and connector as I try to improve everyone’s experience with the writing process.

The Writing Center has taught me to truly love the effort we put into communicating with one another, and I hope we can all be a little kinder to ourselves and feel free to laugh throughout the writing process. n

KEVIN M. WALDRON

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A

of

STUDENT MEDIA

w

RITING IS HARD; writing well is even harder. And like most

skills, it takes practice to get better.

Students at Hamilton have been perfecting their writing skills outside of the classroom as far back as the early 1830s with the debut of a literary magazine known as The Talisman.

That tradition has continued for generations through such long-standing publications as The Spectator, Hamiltonian, and Red Weather. Over the years other campus publications come and go as student interests change. Here are just a few of the most recent ones to hit campus newsstands.

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SIGNATURE STYLE Surya Gowda ’23 and Anna Sakamoto ’23

co-editors

Tell us about your magazine.

Signature Style’s mission is to showcase fashion, beauty, and self-expression at Hamilton through student voices, as well as those of faculty and staff. We create an outlet for campus expression and give a sense of community to people passionate about design and style.

We publish one issue per semester; the spring issue will be 48 pages of themed articles with accompanying photographs, trend features, and editorials.

Describe a story from your publication that you are particularly proud of.

Last semester, we published our favorite issue yet. [It] captured the intersections of fashion, beauty, self-expression, and art. We always push ourselves to develop new article ideas, photoshoot locations, and concepts, and we did so last semester. One of our favorites was the “Body Mods” spread, which highlighted gorgeous student models’ tattoos, piercings, and style. The photoshoot itself was filled with creative energy, beauty, and music.

Who’s on your staff?

There are nine members of our executive board and over 50 general board members — contributors, including writers, photographers, stylists, layout designers, makeup artists, and models.

What does your publication provide that readers can’t get elsewhere?

Signature Style provides an opportunity for students interested in photography, digital media design, writing, and social media to combine that with a passion for fashion, makeup, and hair styling. Our main focus is fashion, which distinguishes us from other campus publications. We strive to be unpredictable, so we want our readers to turn each page with excitement and curiosity.

Ultimately, we hope our readers come away inspired and in awe of Hamilton students’ talents and creativity.

Share a little about why you became co-editors.

Anna: I am an environmental studies major and a Japanese minor. I have been a contributor since my first semester on campus.

I have always loved fashion and design, and as I worked my way up to co-editor-in-chief, I realized my passion and drive. I learned that a hobby could also become a career path. The publication has inspired me creatively at Hamilton and pushed me to work collaboratively.

Surya: I am a government and art double major. I have also been on the magazine since my first year, and it has been a key outlet of creativity for me. The ability to express myself and meet other students who share the same passion for design and detail has been a highlight of my time on Signature Style. As co-editor-in-chief, I feel like I have been able to completely have our vision seen and work with the awesome team to make it a reality. n

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CULTURE MAGAZINE Leslie De La Rosa ’25 editor

What is your magazine’s mission?

Our mission is to highlight the vital components of the Black, Brown, and Asian communities across campus. These components are defined by the culturally embedded perspective of our shared historical experiences and include a distinct artistic expression, nuanced academic pursuits, and culturally guided intellectual engagements.

As an outlet for news, knowledge, art, and entertainment, Culture seeks to empower these communities by supplying a reminder of the core cultural narratives that distinguish us as unique and powerful.

Describe your production process.

Culture Magazine is the only publication at Hamilton created by students of color for students of color. Our executive board collaborates with other clubs on campus to produce our issues. We decide on a specific theme or vision, and our photoshoots, sub-

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mitted work, and aesthetic vision are all based on that particular theme. To reach our minority student community, we send campus-wide emails encouraging them to take part. A magazine requires extensive planning that begins months in advance.

Because of the community we’ve established and how effective our team’s communication has been, that journey has turned out really nicely.

What do you hope readers come away with?

We provide an atmosphere where students of color can submit their work or apply to join our general board. We provide a setting where both outgoing and introverted students can feel comfortable. Culture is a space without judgment for existing and incoming students of color — where thoughts are valued and regularly exchanged. Being a student of color, going to a school with a demanding curriculum, maybe having three or more

jobs, and having no voice are all realities that one must deal with on this campus. Culture provides a sense of safety and community, which fosters leadership and self-assurance so that people may walk around campus with pride while appreciating their uniqueness and cultural heritage.

What have you learned from working with Culture?

I am a theatre major. In order to become a professor and pass on what I learn, it is my ambition to travel the world and study theatre. I knew I wanted someplace to feel included, and, after learning what Culture was, I also wanted other students of color on campus to feel that way. Through theatre classes, I have come to understand that it is crucial to have a supportive community, team, and family. I have performed on campus numerous times for mainstage musical performances and Culture events, and every time, the community’s support remained constant. Being a part of Culture has taught me that nothing is simple. Although the battle is quite difficult, the victory is well worth it. n

THE WATTAGE

Describe an especially interesting content idea you generated.

A few years ago, there was a piece in The Wattage called “What I Would Play if an Opus Barista Gave Me an Aux.” Little did we know at the time this would start a trend of describing personal playlists that has been a really fun recurring segment.

Lena Schneck ’23 editor

Tell us about The Wattage.

The Wattage is Hamilton’s first and foremost music publication and is proudly supported

by WHCL. We publish music reviews, commentary, upcoming albums, and games, and field questions from the Hamilton community. The format and frequency of The Wattage varies, but this year we will publish two mega-wattage issues, which are multipage booklets. In between, we publish miniwattages that are one sheet front and back and consist of DJ spotlights, upcoming music releases, and music events on campus.

THE TOPICAL Annie Kennedy ’24 co-editor

What’s the goal of your publication?

Our mission is to brighten up students’ news cycles. We hope readers walk away from The Topical in a little brighter mood. We feature did-you-know, wacky words, and this-day-inhistory sections, [but] people are often most amused with the overheard section where they can find something they or their friends have said.

Tell us about your production process.

We publish on a single piece of tan paper that people can find at Commons and McEwen [dining halls]. Co-editor Amanda Clifford ’24 and I have 12 staff members.

Who’s on your staff?

We have three editors and 63 members on our email list who volunteer and contribute.

What does The Wattage add to campus dialogue?

WHCL is such a unique opportunity that really creates a sense of community on campus. I know so many people who have had the same show for all four years that they have been on campus, and it has provided a lot of purpose and joy for them. The Wattage extends this community and the meaning of music on campus to a broader audience.

Why did you get involved as an editor?

I am a literature major and a psych minor.

I have had a radio show since my first semester at Hamilton, and WHCL has been a significant part of my College experience.

WHCL has meant a lot to me, and being an editor has allowed for me to give back to the program. I also think that the voices and opinions of Hamilton students are so valuable, and it is really impactful to hear what they have to say regarding music and musical artists both on and off campus. n

Describe a story from your publication that you are particularly proud of.

My favorite piece that I have written informs readers of a continuing robbery. Two years ago, a stray dog would wait until consumers entered a store and then proceed to take a dragon stuffed animal from the store’s shelf.

After this crime occurred many times over a day, the stray dog, along with his dragon companion, were eventually adopted. I really enjoyed writing this piece because it is a cute story. As difficult and complex as the news can be, it is nice to focus on feel-good stories.

What have you learned from serving as co-editor?

I enjoy being a part of The Topical because it is a nice change from coursework in chemistry and economics. My position as co-editor allows me to build connections and develop interpersonal skills. I also like the process of storytelling and collaboration. n

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GREEN APPLE Abigail Moone ’23 co-editor

Tell us about your publication.

Green Apple is a poetic and creative publication that provokes thought and sparks discussion. We are dedicated to high quality work, honest self-expression without censure, and the exploration of self through all creative means. Though we produce a publication, our real goal is to create a feminist creative collective, developing community through the arts.

Describe your production process.

We have two editors-in-chief, Katie “KT” Jenkinson ’23 and me, and eight to 15 consistent members and several floating contributors who come and go. Our publication has evolved over the years. We began as a print publication, tried blogging briefly in 2012, and have returned to print. After a short hiatus between 2020 and 2022, we now publish one edition per semester and function as a feminist creative collective. We host workshops two to four times a month, providing art supplies and encouraging various types of creative expression. All of the work produced in these workshops is compiled and published anonymously in a zine format, following in a strong feminist tradition.

What sets Green Apple apart from other student publications?

Green Apple is an explicitly feminist publication, intended to uphold the legacy of Kirkland College. While I believe this distinction

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is important, what I think more importantly distinguishes Green Apple is the generative community component. As opposed to looking for refined, polished, ready-to-publish work, we create that work together, regardless of experience level. Other student publications at Hamilton are submission-based and do not host spaces to create, workshop, or develop publishable content in a creative community.

Describe a story or piece of content that you are particularly proud of.

Our spring issue is just about ready to go to press, and we are receiving such a wonderful variety of pieces from students across disciplines and class years. KT and I are basing the layout and design off of our Levitt project from the summer, a zine titled Homegrown: A narrative exploration of creativity and environment.

What have you learned from your experience with Green Apple?

I am a double major in women’s & gender studies and French & Francophone studies.

I joined Green Apple my freshman year.

Sharing creative space in a community of poets was foundational to my college transition, and I was disappointed that the publication was not revived after we got sent home during the pandemic. I was motivated to restart Green Apple because I feel connected to Kirkland’s legacy and believe in the power of creative community. This approach is deeply informed by women’s and gender studies, and I have been learning how to balance facilitating a community I love deeply and am ideologically invested in with the logistical upkeep and bureaucracy of a college environment. n

a lot by reading the work of their peers and that access to eloquent critical scholarship is essential to one’s development as a reader, scholar, and informed citizen.

Describe something in your publication that you are particularly proud of.

SUTURE

Lillian Norton-Brainerd ’23 and Bella Moses ’23 co-editors

Tell us about Suture.

Lillian: Suture’s mission is to publish insightful academic essays to spark discussion across campus. It also provides students with opportunities to publish their critical essays in the humanities, arts, and social sciences through a peer-editing process. We publish once per semester, and a typical issue contains three-six academic essays. This semester, there are 11 students on staff.

What do you hope readers come away with?

Bella: We are the only interdisciplinary journal on campus not associated with any particular academic department. We hope to provide a place where students can share their academic work with other students and the broader Hamilton community (something they do not usually get the chance to do in classes). We also have a robust peer-editing process that allows writers to collaborate with other students to strengthen the content of their work. Peer-editing is a pillar of academic publishing, and writers have the opportunity to experience this process in a safe and friendly environment in order to prepare to publish academic work in the future if this is something they wish to pursue. We also feel that students can learn

Bella: I am proud of our most recent edition published last fall. All of the essays are fresh, exciting, and beautifully written, and our editorial team worked hard to make sure the issue was the best that it could be. I am also particularly proud of the cover, which Lillian and I designed and hand-printed in the Dunham Letterpress Studio.

OTHER MEDIA OVERSEEN

BY HAMILTON’S STUDENT MEDIA BOARD:

Hamiltonian — The College yearbook, first published in 1858.

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The Spectator — The weekly student newspaper debuted in 1947. It evolved from The Campus (1866-70), which was followed by Hamilton Life in 1899 and Hamiltonews in 1942.

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W HCL-FM — Begun in 1941 as WHC, an AM radio station broadcasting exclusively on campus, WHCL-FM (available locally at 88.7 or globally via live stream) features more than 100 student shows each year.

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What have you learned from your work with Suture?

Lillian: I am a women’s & gender studies major and environmental studies minor.

After being exposed to interdisciplinary scholarship and theory, I realized that my interest in writing was focused on academic essays. Through working on Suture, I am now potentially interested in publishing as a career. I have learned how to give constructive feedback and work with others to make decisions. I’ve also loved the opportunity to see the variety of insightful essays students produce!

Bella: I am a creative writing and women’s & gender studies double major. I joined Suture in my sophomore year because I enjoyed reading the journal. I also edit for Red Weather and have written for a number of campus publications. I have learned a great deal working on Suture, not only about writing and editing, but about the amount of work and coordination it takes to lead a team of editors and collaborate with people across campus who are involved in taking each issue from the submission stage to a printed publication. I plan to go into publishing and am considering academic publishing as a possible career path. n

Red Weather — A literary magazine, containing poetry, prose, and art, founded at Kirkland College in 1976.

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he Daily Bull — Introduced in 1978, T this broadside is today described as “a neo-Dada absurdist publication that aims to bring campus issues to light in a satirical manner.”

The Duel Observer — A weekly satire publication, begun in 2002, “striving to make the campus a better and more humorous place. place.”

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The Continental — A magazine first published in 2006 “to provide accurate, intriguing, thought-provoking student interest stories in a more casual journalistic setting. setting.”

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The Monitor — Hamilton’s political and social justice op-ed publication will return to the lineup of student publications this semester.

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Power Book

the

of a

A

T ITS MOST FUNDAMENTAL level, a book — especially a nonfiction book — is a medium for the transfer of knowledge or

ideas. But beyond that, certain books go beyond providing information; they spark inspiration and have the power to change our perspectives and mindsets.

We asked nine Hamilton professors to share a nonfiction book, published within the last few decades, that not only inspired or influenced their thinking, but also altered the way they regard their teaching, research, lifestyle, or view of the world.

Mackenzie Cooley ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

W

HAT IS HISTORY? Is it the study of the past? All of it? Or only after humans had mastered the art of writing? As a historian of the premodern world — the era before the French Revolution and the rise of industrialization — I study how people who lived in earlier eras had, by and large, the same potential for sophisticated thought, political machinations, love, and warfare as we do today. As historians seek to write more inclusive histories that do not only center the insights of cultures that wrote in a way that is intelligible to us, we have sought new windows into the past beyond texts alone.

David Reich, a Harvard-based geneticist whose research focuses on population genetics in ancient humans, has directed us to one such portal. While scientists with leading labs often focus only on writing for their field, Reich’s work relies on archaeological, historical, and linguistic research, while also reaching out to scholars beyond experts in ancient DNA. His book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018) offers both an introduction to the history of population genetics as a field and a history of the deep past. He follows human populations who migrated across the globe, making the peoples of Africa, Europe, India, Native America, and East Asia, all the while mixing with different groups, including Neanderthals. The result is a history of

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science that tells a history — filled with love, cunning, and destruction — of humans who wrote down little or nothing.

A new generation of historical scholarship now seeks to combine the study of biological evidence with texts. Medievalists are leading the charge. Monica Green has combined written records with genetic science to the spread of plague and leprosy; Patrick Geary has interwoven ancient DNA analysis to understand barbarian migrations of the fourth and sixth centuries in Europe; scholars at Harvard have promoted these cross-disciplinary methods through the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

Doing this work requires deep knowledge of both history and the challenges of working with scientific evidence. n

Rhea Datta

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY

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N THE SUMMER OF 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of COVID, I searched for a book that would help me navigate my way through. At the time I needed to read something that would transform my approach to teaching and inform how I would show up in my classrooms when, and if, we were allowed to teach in person again.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) by bell hooks was that book. hooks begins with a critical analysis of the education system, outlines the need for an inclusive

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and transformative learning environment, and proposes a model of teaching that challenges traditional hierarchies of power. The book reimagines the classroom as a space to encourage students to engage actively in their own learning and invites us to imagine education as a tool for liberation (as perhaps it was always intended to be). hooks rethinks the use of space and movement in the classroom as a way to break barriers between students and professors. It is this kind of transgressive teaching that is essential toward undoing and unlearning the structural inequities that persistently and systematically exclude entire groups of students. hooks gently, firmly, tells us that authority for authority’s sake can create chasms between the learner and the material, particularly if the learner is already part of an excluded group.

I read the book as I usually read books that I know are going to transform my life — read a chapter, put it down, reflect, take a walk, re-read, and then move to the next chapter. (It was the summer of 2020 — there was a lot of time to be spent with my thoughts and worries! How was I going to incorporate this kind of transgressive teaching into STEM classrooms and into the laboratory? Is it possible to truly visualize science education as a tool for social transformation?)

I continue to draw inspiration from the book, but perhaps the major takeaway for me was that all education should foster a sense of personal and collective responsibility to effect change. bell hooks was a writer, activist, and educator, and her joy for teaching and her hope for the future were exactly what I needed that summer. n

Erica De Bruin ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT

T

IMUR KURAN’S BOOK Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995) introduced me to the idea of “preference falsification,” when people misrepresent their own thoughts and desires due to perceived social pressure.

Preference falsification happens in mundane ways in our everyday lives. I might feel pressure not to admit that I’d rather stay in than go out with friends because I don’t want to disappoint them or worry that they’ll judge me. In other contexts, the consequences can be more serious. In authoritarian regimes, people may privately dislike the dictator, but continue to publicly express support for him, show up to rallies, etc., out of fear of punishment. Indeed, dictatorships often depend on this type of preference falsification to remain in power.

Kuran’s book helped me understand the astounding speed at which change can happen. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or how quickly Arab Spring protests brought down seemingly entrenched dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, or, more recently, the speed with which the #MeToo movement seemed to shift norms about sexual harassment. Once some people stop falsifying their preferences in public, it becomes easier for others to follow suit. And seeing others protesting, or sharing their experiences publicly, can also change the

minds of those who had been content with the way things were — creating a cascade of public support for change.

Kuran’s book also helped me come to terms with the limits of even experts to predict political and social change. Because we can’t observe when private grievances are piling up until they reach a critical threshold, it can be quite difficult to anticipate major political transformations in advance. Kuran calls this the “predictability of unpredictability.”

At the same time, the book made me more optimistic about the possibilities of such change in my own lifetime. It can be frustrating to see long periods of time pass without significant progress on issues that may be important to you. But, as Kuran shows, this does not mean that change is impossible — or that when it starts, that it will go slowly. n

Anna Huff

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DIGITAL ARTS

T

HE ATLAS OF ANOMALOUS AI (2020), edited by K Allado-McDowell, founder of Google’s Art and AI initiative, and Ben Vickers, a writer, curator, and technologist, had a recent impact on my teaching and thinking. The book is a collection of essays on AI, situated around humanistic, poetic, artistic, and ethical issues.

As described by publisher Ignota Books, the collection provides a framework where “texts on modeling, prediction, and automation are brought together with stories of science

fiction, dreams, and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal imagery.”

Essays range from transcripts of conversations from AI conferences in 2017, far before ChatGPT was on the public radar, to writing by theorists, sci-fi authors, artists, and indigenous technologists. With the recent release of ChatGPT4 and its incorporation into Microsoft’s search engine BING, many of the prescient issues proposed in this collection provide a framework for conversations that are just now reaching more public mainstream consciousness — What does it mean when we anthropomorphize AI? How do we address bias in AI? What does it mean for authorship if we turn to AI as a collaborator?

At Hamilton I teach courses at the intersections of technology, media art production, and performance, including one focused specifically on potential uses of AI in devised performance. Many of the above questions come up frequently, and assigning essays in this collection — sometimes simultaneously to different groups — has helped my students engage in their own creative technological output with a critical lens. For example, in an essay by software engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas titled “Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence,” AI is compared to the camera and early photographic processes, which at the time encountered a lot of resistance. The author asks “what new kinds of art become possible when we begin to play with technology analogous not only to the eye but also to the brain?”

In the essay “Making Kin with the Machines,” a group of indigenous co-authors, including Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic Suzanne Kite, applies indigenous epistemologies to thinking about virtual space, network culture, and AI. What does it mean if we treat AI as a kind of Kin, adhering to some indigenous philosophies that aim to decentralize humanity as the only acting agent that matters?

Finally, in a 2017 conference transcript of a conversation between computer engineer

and philosopher Yuk Hui and cultural theorist on machine intelligence Ramon Amaro, issues around bias in AI are discussed, drawing from Black cultural theorists Fred Moten, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant, offering helpful frameworks for my students to think more critically about issues of power, visibility, and marginalization, while working with AI and algorithms. n

Jim Lister

HEAD ROWING COACH & ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION

A

S A FORMER ASSISTANT rowing coach, one of my jobs was to load the trailer with all the items necessary for a race.

It was our first race of the season and upon arrival, I had forgotten to pack one very essential item, the boat slings. The only way to rig the boats is to lay them in the slings to prepare them for racing. I sheepishly went to the next trailer over and asked to borrow some slings to prepare our boats.

Rookie mistake? Not after 20+ years in the sport. Just an oversight on our first away race. Later that season, my mentor and head coach gave me a book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2011) by Atul Gawande. In summary it’s about the application of a checklist in certain industries to minimize mistakes, with particular examples in the medical field and piloting planes.

Certainly, these mistakes have much greater

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consequences than forgetting to pack slings; however, the simplicity of the mechanism can be applied to many different industries.

Soon after reading the book, I had a laminated packing list with pictures to assist the hundreds of items to load the trailer.

Soon, my curiosity with systemizing influenced other areas of my profession including recruiting, training plans, travel, safety, and inventory. Now, my new checklists have helped me be better prepared for the hundreds of details that go with my profession.

I have become very familiar with Google Sheets to assist in the organization of information. And now the checklist can be shared with staff and rowers.

This process of systemizing information has also informed me about the different ways in which we handle copious pieces of material. I recognize that I am a visual learner and prefer to see information categorized on a spreadsheet or drawn on a white board.

It is the sharing of information and systems that can help an organization function more effectively and efficiently. So the next time you forget to pack the camping stove, consider making a list. Yes, that did happen. I am now the owner of two camping stoves. n

Tobin Ost ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF THEATRE, DESIGN

I

N DOCUMENTING THE Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit of the same name, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011) by Andrew Bolton brings into focus the intersection of fashion, performance art, theatre, and storytelling as defined by the uncompromisingly unique fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen. I was astounded by

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the 2011 retrospective at the Met itself, but it has been this book — a catalog of the exhibition and a study in photography — that has been a crucial source of inspiration since its publication.

As presented in both the exhibit and the book, McQueen sought to evoke strong, visceral reactions to his work, and he approached his collections as complete, self-contained stories told not just through clothes, but also though his runway shows. He did this by curating complete environments, inclusive of scenic elements, lighting, scoring, and the models themselves.

Frequently provocative but never gratuitous, the themes and subjects he drew upon were intensely personal and meticulously studied; high drama was a byproduct of a truly romantic thought process that pushed significant boundaries in a field typically driven by economics rather than emotion.

Repeatedly, this book has helped me question what actually constitutes a theatrical event by blurring the lines of fashion and costume, commerce and art, and display and performance. More importantly, the narrative running through McQueen’s collections was devised by a designer rather than a designated playwright or composer, and motivated by a person who would typically take his cues from collaboration with a director. This demonstration of agency helped me to reconsider my own ability to generate complete stories apart from the infrastructure of an existing piece or production.

Underlying the topical spectacle of McQueen’s collections was his impeccable attention to detail and a mastery of working with the human form. He pioneered revolutionary tailoring techniques originating from foundational apprenticeships on Savile Row, and the resulting ability to accentuate

the body in surprising, unorthodox ways has encouraged me to reevaluate my own costuming for the stage.

Savage Beauty is a book to get lost in and a masterclass in a designer’s process that celebrates the collision of unlikely ideas, materials, and forms through fashion, art, and theatre. n

Alexandra Plakias ’02 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY

B

ARRY SCHWARTZ’S The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2004) came into my life when I was questioning a lot of my own choices and helped me see that it wasn’t necessarily the choices I’d made that were the problem, but the way I was thinking of them.

We “maximizers” (as opposed to “satisficers” — Schwartz has a handy quiz you can use to self-diagnose) tend to assume there’s a best choice and, ironically, often make ourselves miserable pursuing it. Schwartz’s book helped me realize that being a maximizer wasn’t helping me make better choices, it was just making me less happy with the choices I did make.

The book is now close to 20 years old, pre-dating Yelp and Google reviews; Amazon Prime with its endless and seemingly identical options; Netflix’s streaming with the endless scroll of television and movies. But it seems more relevant than ever. I often find myself recommending it to students or anyone who is struggling to understand why having so much choice can feel like a burden. n

Zhuoyi Wang

PROFESSOR OF EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

W

HEN I WAS PURSUING a Ph.D. in literature and film studies over 20 years ago, I initially hoped to become a scholar of European and Taiwanese arthouse cinema.

But this career path later changed significantly. One important reason was that I read a book titled The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (1997), written by Professor Ban Wang (now teaching at Stanford).

The book changed much of my understanding of the interplay between the aesthetic and the political in modern China. I was particularly inspired by its analysis of Chinese films made during the Mao era (1949-78). At the time, the prevailing assumption about Mao-era films was that they are puritanical propaganda often representative of a suppression of sexuality. The book, however, proposes to understand these films “not in terms of politics versus sexuality, but in terms of sexuality in the guise of politics:” “Despite its puritanical surface, Communist culture is sexually charged in its own way. High-handed as it is, Communist culture does not — it cannot, in fact — erase sexuality out of existence. Rather, it meets sexuality halfway, caters to it, and assimilates it into its structure” (p. 134).

Such analysis opened my eyes to fascinating historical, political, and aesthetic nuances. I wrote a term paper on the book and then became dedicated to the research of Mao-era films. Years later, the term paper developed into my dissertation and eventually my first book monograph, titled Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979.

My book does not simply praise Professor Ban Wang’s work, but responds to it from my own perspective and with my own findings. As I write in the acknowledgments: “Readers will find differences between [Professor Ban Wang’s] perspective and mine, but those differences should not obscure my gratitude toward him” (p. xii). In fact, those differences are precisely what makes The Sublime Figure of History a true inspirational book for me: it not only taught me new knowledge, but also stimulated me to find my own voice in the same research field. n

failures occur because multiple actors become accustomed to them. Rather than isolating misconduct to particular individuals, we should critically examine what it is about the system itself that permits routine injustices to occur.

In her book, Bach argues that what’s largely absent is scrutiny — from both legal professionals and everyday citizens. This was part of the inspiration behind instituting a court observation assignment in my Psychological Bias in the Justice System course. I want my students to see mundane proceedings, not only to educate themselves but also to serve as witnesses to a process that is largely unexamined by well-informed laypeople.

Reading Ordinary Injustice helped me see that systemic change in criminal courts is only likely when ordinary citizens engage with such regular, everyday occurrences. n

Keelah Williams, J.D. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY

W

HEN EGREGIOUS INJUSTICES come to the attention of the public, our tendency is to blame single actors. Perhaps it’s the police who violated a suspect’s constitutional rights, or the prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence, or the defense attorney who fell asleep during trial, or the judge who gave too light a sentence.

Before reading Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court (2010) by Amy Bach, my own view of the legal system’s shortcomings was similarly focused on the piecemeal failings of individual participants. Ordinary Injustice broadened my scope to instead see the legal system as a collective, where basic

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(ABOVE) Former executive editor at ESPN The Magazine, Steve Wulf ’72 stopped by the Wild Owl Bistro during a return trip to Norwich, N.Y., the town where he got his start as a journalist 50 years ago.

(RIGHT) The writer’s headshot as it appeared with his original column in The Evening Sun.

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NANCY L. FORD

A Writer Returns to His Roots

I

t’s a winter Friday morning in Norwich, N.Y., and the Deja Brew coffee shop near the northwest corner of Broad and Main is hopping. A dapper older gentleman in an LL Bean jacket walks through the front door carrying a shopping bag. Before he gets to my table, he pulls out a loaf of bread and hands it to a customer, and then another to another, and another to another. When he gets to my table, he sits down across from me and hands me a loaf.

“Hi, Steve.”

“Hello, Your Honor.”

My honor, actually. The label on the bread reads BAKED ESPECIALLY FOR YOU, and underneath a drawing of a loaf continues BY HOWIE SULLIVAN and then, next to a gavel, JUDGE FOR YOURSELF. The Honorable W. Howard Sullivan served Norwich and Chenango County as a judge for over 37 years right around the corner, beneath the golden Lady Justice atop the courthouse. He retired in 2012 but still fills in once in a while when the courts in Binghamton, 35 miles southeast of Norwich, need a hand on a gavel.

Sullivan grew up in North Norwich, went to Le Moyne College, received his law degree from Temple, and settled in Norwich, where he raised four children, who gave him six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

I came to know Howie from noontime pickup basketball games at the old Norwich YMCA when I first arrived in 1972 to write sports

By Steve Wulf ’72

for The Evening Sun, right after I graduated from Hamilton.

He started baking bread about 40 years ago out of curiosity, borrowing a commercial bread slicer from a friend. “My one machine became two and at times I had three. I hand them out randomly and supply them to nonprofit bake sales.”

“How many loaves have you given out over the years?”

“In a few days, I will pass 53,000 loaves.

Now you know the real reason why the bailiff would say, ‘All Rise,’ when I walked into the courtroom.”

The judge has done more for the people of the county than bake bread. He was a founding member of its Big Brothers Big Sisters program, served on the school board, and coached baseball. He’s especially proud of his role in building the new YMCA, which provides the community with all kinds of recreational and educational opportunities for reasonable fees based on need.

I express to the judge my amazement at how much he has done for Norwich over the years. He says, “The one thing I’ve learned in life is that no matter how much you give, it’s never equal to how much you receive.”

I

n the 50 years since I worked in Norwich, the county has lost the sheen of prosperity as most of its industries left or folded. The bread, then, is literally a godsend. Still, the can-do spirit of the town

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NANCY L. FORD

(LEFT) Steve Wulf strolling past Norwich’s Colonia Theater, which was showing The Graduate when he arrived in town in August 1972. (RIGHT) In the stands as the Norwich High Purple Tornado took on Owego Apalachin on Jan. 20 were a trio of Evening Sun reporters: (from left) former sports editor Tom Rowe, former sportswriter Steve Wulf, and current sportswriter Morgan Golliver.

is very much alive, like the marquee of the restored Colonia theater on South Broad, which is now showing Plane and M3GAN. When I pulled into town in August of ’72, the Colonia was showing The Graduate.

Like Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman, I too was in search of myself. That’s why I drove around New England and Upstate New York in a powder blue ’68 Chevelle Malibu, dropping off my résumé and writing samples at various newspapers. One day, I left the packet at The Evening Sun offices, which were housed in a matching powder blue cinder block building on the corner of Hale and Birdsall streets.

Shortly thereafter, I got a call from Tom McMahon, the publisher of The Evening Sun, asking me to return for an interview. The mostly one-sided conversation with McMahon, who bore a resemblance to Clark Kent, went something like this: “I need a sportswriter. I can only pay you $95 a week, but you’ll get a raise after a few months. You’ll work your butt off here for a year or so, and then you’ll leave and take a job in Florida because that’s where the jobs are. You’ll be there long enough for somebody to notice you, and within five years, you’ll be working at Sports Illustrated.”

Sounded like a good deal to me. And so, on Aug. 3, 1972, my professional journalism career began with an assignment to interview John and Mary Maxian, a

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father-and-daughter rifle team who were about to compete in the Smallbore Prone Championships in Camp Perry, Ohio.

The next day, I got to my desk at 4 a.m. to write the first draft of my story longhand, just as I did for my papers at Hamilton. An hour later, my editor, a wonderful guy named Barry Abisch, walked in and asked me what I was doing. Before I could finish explaining, he rolled my chair over to the manual Royal typewriter behind me and said, without raising his voice, “This is where you will be writing from now on.”

Four hours later, I watched as McMahon pasted up my first story: “Norwich Father-Daughter Duo Seeks National Shooting Title.”

I’ve been typing ever since, for The Fort Lauderdale News, Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, and ESPN.com, and now, in the sunset of my career, the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I pretty much followed the same path McMahon laid out for me, helped along by Abisch’s directive.

I evolved along with the keyboard — IBM Selectric, Portabubble, RadioShack, several generations of Macs. There was also something I kept in mind from that first story — a quote from Mary Maxian, the teenage marksman: “Preparation keeps my heart from jumping around.”

Back then, Norwich was a thriving town of 8,800, located on Route 12 roughly halfway

between Utica and Binghamton. The Evening Sun had a circulation of 5,000 and a staff of six editors and writers, not counting McMahon, who helped paste up the pages. My job was to cover the many teams of the dozen high schools in the Chenango County area, as well as individual achievers like the Maxians, and the local softball, bowling, and golf leagues.

There were the glorious fall afternoons covering 8-man football in South New Berlin, the winter nights when I tapped out 12 different basketball stories, and the summer evenings when I played second base for Rowe’s O’s in the People’s Softball League and then wrote about the game, occasionally quoting myself.

I spent 15 months there, living in an area of nearby Oxford that was so isolated that its five houses shared a party line. I also learned a ton from Abisch, McMahon, editor-inchief Joe Quinn, and Tom Schwan, a chemist at Norwich Pharmacal who covered the big games for us. When I headed south to find a job in Florida, the Chevelle had 50,000 more miles on it, and I had a tankful of gratitude.

Now, half a century later, Judge Sullivan and I are reminiscing about the old days and pondering the future of Norwich in a café near where the Blue Bird Diner used to be.

“You know what’s very cool?” he says. “The sportswriter for The Evening Sun now is my granddaughter, Morgan Golliver.”

He then excused himself to go to Mass.

I rise.

S

o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

If you haven’t already recognized those words, that is the ending to The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’ve read it countless times. But I didn’t fully understand it until 2022, when that current felt like a tsunami.

Hamilton was partly to blame. It was the year of our 50th reunion, and Jon Hysell, J.K. Hage, and I had been chosen to write the half-century annalist letter for the Class of ’72. It was a labor of love that put us in touch with our classmates, sent us back into the stacks of the library, and awakened hundreds of memories of our years on the Hill.

Going through the old Spectators, I came across the baseball preview from the spring of my senior year that mentions the new coach, Tom Murphy, and a sophomore infielder named Steve Wolf. I used to joke that my mistaken identity was a signal to give up baseball and take up journalism. In actuality, I knew I wasn’t that good at baseball, and I had no idea if I’d be any good at writing. Just like baseball, though, I liked it, and I needed to make a living.

”

The Evening Sun was the perfect place for me to start. McMahon and Quinn were indulgent enough to let me cover Richard Nixon’s second inaugural with my close Hamilton friend, Rob Ziegler ’72, an extraordinary photographer. The paper even ran our Rolling Stone-like two-part feature on the front page. I also wrote a weekly column called “Just For Starters,” in which I pontificated on anything to do with sports, including the 1973 Associated Press Major League All-Star Team. I took particular umbrage at the selection of Giants shortstop Chris Speier, naming 10 other shortstops I liked better.

Perhaps my finest piece, though, was a news story about the theft of a 14-pound ham from Taranto’s Market. It ended with, “Police are now on the lookout for a large purchase of mustard.”

Before 1974 rolled around, I got back in the Chevelle and drove to Florida, as McMahon had suggested. I was running out of highway when Bernie Lincicome, the sports editor and superb columnist for The Fort Lauderdale News, decided to hire me to cover horse racing and work the desk.

When I headed south to find a job in Florida, the Chevelle had 50,000 more miles on it, and I had a tankful of gratitude.

NANCY L. FORD

Last June, I was watching Chris Evert report from Wimbledon for ESPN, and I flashed back to another June morning in 1974. The phone on the sports desk rang, I picked it up, and Jimmy Evert, Chris’ father, was on the line. He ran the tennis program at Holiday Park, so he couldn’t get away to see his daughter play at Wimbledon, and because the matches weren’t yet televised, he wanted to know how she was doing in her second-round match. I went over to the AP teletype machine, phone in hand, and told him that she had just beaten Lesley Hunt, 11-9, in the third set. (Evert would go on to win her first Wimbledon title and 55 consecutive matches.)

I can’t remember where I put my reading glasses, but memories like that hit me all the time. While Fort Lauderdale wasn’t a big city, it was a hub for the famous. I used to cover boxing, too, so every time I see a video clip of Muhammad Ali, I remember that he would howl my name whenever he saw me at the local boxing gym. Hank Aaron was on the brink of breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record when I went up to him at the Braves’ spring training site in West Palm

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“Hank,” I said, “Have you ever given any thought to the significance of you being both the first player alphabetically in the history of baseball and the greatest player, too?”

Beach to ask him a question that had been nagging at me.

“Hank,” I said, “Have you ever given any thought to the significance of you being both the first player alphabetically in the history of baseball and the greatest player, too?”

He looked at this long-haired kid in bell-bottoms with a notebook and said, “Shiiiit.” Then he turned and walked away.

The other day, I was playing with my 2-year-old granddaughter Jane and some toy horses she had. The stable they were in looked just like the stables along the backstretches of the race tracks I frequented in my early 20s, and suddenly, I was at Gulfstream Park walking alongside a huge horse named Forego with his tiny jockey, Heliodoro Gustines.

Working on the annalist’s letter, I thought back to my old classmate Tom Creamer ’72, who had once introduced me to his father, Robert Creamer, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated and author of the seminal

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biography of Babe Ruth, Babe. When I felt it was time to leave Fort Lauderdale, I wrote Creamer a letter, with some clippings, asking if there might be any openings at SI. He later told me that he had tossed the package on the desk of Merv Hyman, who was the chief of reporters, and said, “You should hire him.” Which Hyman did.

Back then, SI hired prospective writers as fact-checkers to make necessary corrections to stories, learn the ropes, and aid the actual writers. Our offices were on the 20th floor of the Time & Life Building, on the northwest corner of 50th St. and Avenue of the Americas, and we reporters were given desks in what was called The Bullpen. Most of the stories came in on Sunday morning, and we would spend the day “checking them” before repairing to the Ho-Ho, a Chinese restaurant downstairs, to nurse beers and try to catch the eye of a senior editor who might assign us a story.

I got my first such assignment from a senior editor named Peter Carry. It was for the upcoming 1978 college basketball issue, and he needed a preview of the best Division III teams in the country. As it happened, Carry was from North Norwich, N.Y., and went to grade school with Howie Sullivan. One of the teams he wanted me to write about was Hamilton College, whose coach was Tom Murphy, my baseball coach for about a week. I wrote about how Murph had transformed the basketball program, which went 1-15 his first year, into a D-III powerhouse that wasn’t allowed to play in the NCAA tournament because NESCAC prohibited its teams from postseason play.

Much as the coach wanted the Continentals and their star Cedric Oliver ’79 to prove themselves on a bigger stage, he freely admitted, “If the administration stressed athletics, it wouldn’t be Hamilton.”

Thanks to assignments from editors like Creamer and Carry, I began to be noticed and was made a staff writer. McMahon was right, after all.

L

ast summer, shortly after our 50th reunion, the Philadelphia Phillies honored the 1980 World Champion team. I covered that World Series with the Kansas City Royals as one of SI’s baseball writers. All sorts of scenes from that Series still spin around my head like a kaleidoscope.

One of them was from the victory parade down Broad Street. Accompanying me to pick up color for my story was a reporter who had just been promoted from the news bureau, Jane Bachman, fondly known as Bambi. We both took notes as float after float passed by. When the float carrying Tug McGraw, the relief pitcher who had saved two games and won another in the Series, came abreast of us, he spotted me in the crowd, waved, and yelled, “Hey, Wulfie!”

Bachman was suitably impressed.

I don’t think that was the reason, but almost exactly four years later, we were married. As both of our careers took off, we settled in New York City and became parents — first to Bo, then John, and then twins Elizabeth and Eve. By the time we moved out of the city to Larchmont, Bambi was chief of reporters and I was a senior writer.

I wrote a lot, so as I beat on against the current, I often encounter the flotsam and jetsam of my career. Last April I attended the memorial service for the father of Neil Fine, a dear colleague of mine from ESPN. Alan Fine was a primary care physician in Watchung, N.J., who grew up in Brooklyn.

When I walked into the chapel, the first person I encountered was Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of both the Chicago Bulls and White Sox. Turns out he and Alan were childhood friends from Flatbush. I’d known Reinsdorf since I did a story on the White Sox, which he had just bought, in 1981. But the first thing he said when he saw me last April was, “Bag It, Michael.” We both laughed.

In the spring of ’94, Michael Jordan had decided to try his hand at baseball, and I was assigned to describe the circus. He clearly had a lot of work to do, and I had a little fun

(LEFT) Cover of the March 14, 1994, Sports Illustrated featuring Steve Wulf’s piece “Bag It, Michael!” (BELOW) Among the players on the 1985 Ukrainian national baseball team was pitcher Igor Lenets (standing at the left, fourth from the end), who is now a coach with the team from Kyiv who came to play in the U.S. last year.

My son John ’12, who works in player development for the Washington Nationals, came up to watch the Friday night game against the NYPD. New York’s Finest were clearly the finer team, but the Ukrainians might have been able to beat the Continentals John played for. He especially liked the catcher, a cancer survivor named Viacheslav Babii.

All four of the children Bambi and I raised have careers in sports — go figure.

Besides Eve and John, our eldest, Bo, covers the Philadelphia Eagles for The Athletic.

Elizabeth is the assistant woman’s hockey coach for UConn, and one of their early season games was at Northeastern. Before the game in Boston, I made a lunch date with an old acquaintance who’s the coordinator for basketball advancement there. Tom Murphy.

The same Tom Murphy who was briefly my baseball coach, who figured in my first SI byline, and ended up winning 602 games in his 34 years as the men’s Hamilton basketball coach. He is now in his 14th season coaching for Bill Coen ’83, one of his former Continental players and coaches.

Even at the age of 84, Tom hasn’t lost a step. He remembers every one of his Hamilton players, including one from Norwich, Mark Griffin ’81, now an attorney in Washington, D.C. I asked him how he was able to build

PETER READ MILLER

with his awkward swing, but I did note that he was putting in the hours and behaving like an ideal teammate. However, the managing editor, Mark Mulvoy, took offense at Jordan’s quixotic quest. The cover billing for the March 14, 1994, issue read “Bag It, Michael!: Jordan and The White Sox Are Embarrassing Baseball.”

Jordan was so mad that he cut off all contact with SI, even after he returned to basketball. I subsequently wrote pieces praising his stint with the Double-A Birmingham Barons, trying to walk that original story back, but the cover haunted me right up to the 2020 ESPN documentary The Last Dance. Ironically, my daughter Eve, then at ESPN Films, actually worked on the film and has an Emmy as proof. But by the time I ran into Reinsdorf last April, we were both able to laugh about it.

When I made a few trips to Clinton last year to work on the annalist’s letter, I always made sure to stop off at Cooperstown.

Because of my work for the Hall of Fame, I like to avail myself of its down-the-rabbit-hole library and visit with its kind and gracious staff members. My visits are never complete without a slow walk around the plaques in the Hall of Fame gallery. I’ll silently ask Hank Aaron the same question I asked him in ’74, even though he is no longer first alphabetically — Damn you, Dave Aardsma. I’ll thank all the Hall of Famers who did give me time over the years, men like Johnny Bench, Craig Biggio, Bert Blyleven, Cal Ripken, Dennis Eckersley … you get the idea.

Last October, I got a surprise callback out of the blue. A man named Dmitry Sagalchik, a native of Belarus who is active in international baseball, contacted me because the Ukrainian national baseball team was coming to New York to play teams from the NYPD and the FDNY at Brooklyn Cyclones Park on Coney Island. He thought I would be interested because once upon a time, in July of 1985, I wrote a story for SI on a baseball tournament in Moscow between teams from the Soviet Union (“The Russians Are Humming”). In the final, a team from Ukraine had upset the host team by a score of 8-7.

Prior to their games on Coney Island, I met the team at an indoor facility called New York Empire Baseball on the west side of Manhattan. I brought along a copy of the 1985 article, along with a team photograph sent to me by SI photographer Peter Read Miller that hadn’t run in the story. Because it was taken 37 years ago, I didn’t expect any of the current players to recognize anybody in the photograph. But then I heard someone shout something in Ukrainian, followed by a quick translation to English: “That’s me!”

It was Igor Lenets, a coach with the team from Kyiv. He was a pitcher on that ’85 team.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” he said through a translator. “We had beaten Mother Russia, and we came home like heroes.”

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such a successful program from a team that finished 1-15 his first year.

“Honestly, a lot of it was luck,” he says. “In 1975, I recruited a Utica kid, Cedric Oliver, who was too small for D-I schools. He was not just a great scorer but a great person. I found guys to play around him, and when they were seniors, they showed the freshmen how to play hard, and those freshmen became seniors who set an example for a new set of freshmen. It’s easy to recruit when you have a winning record at a great school.”

S

hortly after my Michael Jordan story ran in ’94, I decided to bag SI. Time magazine managing editor Jim Gaines had asked me if I wanted to become the unofficial sportswriter there, and I gladly accepted, excited that I would now have the whole world of sports before me.

I loved the job, and not just because I got to cover Jordan’s return to the NBA in ’95 and Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak. I was working with some of the best minds in journalism, people like Gaines, Jim Kelly, Rick Stengel, Nancy Gibbs, and Walter Isaacson. And because Time had something called “Saturday Duty,” a rotation in which a writer had to show up on closing day just in case something happened, I sometimes got a chance to stretch myself beyond sports.

On one fall Saturday afternoon — Nov. 4, 1995 — I got a call from Gaines asking if I could come in. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had just been assassinated, and they needed me to write the story. “Why me?” I asked. “In all honesty,” he said, “you’re the fastest writer we have. Don’t worry. You’ll be writing from files.”

God bless Barry Abisch and those dozen basketball stories for the next day’s Evening Sun. I was fed compelling dispatches from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Washington, knitted them together in a few hours, and handed a first draft over to Gaines, who made it much better. The result was “Death of a

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VICKERS & BEECHLER

The Wulf family on College Hill for John’s graduation in 2012: (from left) Elizabeth, Bo, Bambi, John, Eve, and Steve.

Peacemaker,” a story that was awarded Best News Story of the Year 1995 by the Overseas Press Club. Now, whenever trouble flairs in the Middle East, I’m borne back to that night.

I would have happily stayed at Time, but in 1997, ESPN announced that it would be publishing a biweekly called ESPN The Magazine. One of my best friends from SI, John Papanek, was chosen to be editorin-chief, and he asked me if I would like to be an executive editor. The opportunity to start a new magazine was almost too good to pass up, but we — my wife and I — had a little problem. By then, Bambi was assistant managing editor of SI and was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I went to ESPN she would no longer hold that position. This was a woman who had hired such SI talents as Armen Keteyian, Steve Rushin, Jon Wertheim, and Grant Wahl, and who could work magic with a mockup.

Bless her heart, she saw the potential for The Magazine and the blatant sexism of the threat. With her encouragement, I took the job and she was parked at SI For Kids, which made a certain amount of sense because our own four kids were now ages 3-11. A year later, she too found a better place — Time, where she became assistant managing editor.

U

nder the leadership of Papanek and publisher John Skipper, ESPN The Magazine became an instant and enduring success. Larger and more irreverent than SI, we brought on talents like Dan Le Batard, Tim Kurkjian, Gene Wojciechowski, Tim Keown, and Wright

Thompson and nurtured others — Seth Wickersham, Eric Adelson, Ryan Hockensmith, Jeff Bradley.

Becoming an editor gave me a better work/life balance. Because I was no longer on the road all the time, I could spend more time with our children, coach their teams, and drive them hither and yon. But I did miss the writing. When the great author Roger Angell died last year at the age of 101, I was reminded of a November 2003 piece he wrote in which our family made an appearance precisely because I was no longer covering baseball: “At two-thirty-seven in the morning, Steve Wulf, a Red Sox fan who is also the executive editor of ESPN: The Magazine, was alone in the living room of his house in Larchmont watching on television the first game of the Sox-Athletics American League divisional playoff from Oakland. The A’s had loaded the bases in the bottom of the twelfth inning when catcher Ramon Hernandez dropped down a killer bunt, to bring home the winning run. ‘Fuck,’ Wulf said to himself, turning off the set — and heard the same summarizing blurt softly repeated from above by his wife, Bambi, who had long since gone to bed, and, still more faintly, by their seventeen-year-old son, Bo, on the top floor.”

I was — still am — tremendously proud to be in Angell’s story, in part because it was the first time “Fuck” ever appeared in The New Yorker.

When our children were no longer kids, I went back to writing for both The Magazine and ESPN.com. Among my first assignments,

in late summer of 2007, was to profile the Virginia Tech marching band in the wake of the tragic shooting of 32 people there on April 16. Photographer David Burnett and I went down to Blacksburg for the first week of band training camp, but it wasn’t our story — it was theirs. Titled “330 Strong,” the piece was about the task facing these amazing student musicians and their band director, David McKee. They had to help heal a community and pay tribute to Ryan Stack, a beloved band member who was one of the victims.

I had spent most of my career in the “toy department,” but with the Marching Virginians story, and over the next few years, I came to realize that sports had a higher purpose. I was asked to write about both the Sandy Hook horror in December of 2012 and the Parkland shooting on Valentine’s Day, 2018. So when the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, unfolded on May 24 of last year, the pain reverberated.

Nothing, though, can prepare you for the death of a loved one. On June 10, 2017, Bambi passed away of pancreatic cancer. It was first detected after Bo’s wedding to Rachel Davis-Johnson, and she lived long enough to see John marry his Hamilton sweetheart, Abigail Seadler ’11.

Though my wife and parents are gone, I am truly blessed with the love of my children and my sister Karen. Bo and Rachel now have two children, Casey and Jane, and in between visits to Philadelphia, I took pleasure and pride in Bo’s stories and podcasts about the Eagles as they came up just short in Super Bowl LVII. John, who has a World Series ring from the Nationals’ 2018 championship, is giving his best so that they can get better. Eve is making sports films for Meadowlark Media and my old boss, John Skipper. And Elizabeth just completed her second year with the UConn women’s hockey team.

As for me, I retired from ESPN in September of 2019, shortly before the pandemic.

As I was cleaning out my papers, I came across a letter that the great relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry, a good friend, had written to Bambi and me in 1996, a few years after he had retired. He told us that he had taken to writing poetry and attached a poem titled “Ode To My Children.” The first stanza reads: can I teach you? to say goodbye to laugh and to cry to live with the light and the dark And it ends with: I love you forever I pray night and day In my heart I’m glad you’ll make your own way Sigh. Dan passed away of brain cancer at the age of 45 on Sept. 30, 1998, the bottom of the ninth month.

When I’m not living vicariously through my children and grandchildren, I write stories for the publications of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. One of them was on baseball players who were accomplished musicians, including Bud Fowler, a 19th-century Black player. Fowler was a songwriter, and the Hall of Fame has the original sheet music for a song of his about a famous Negro League team, the Royal Giants. There was no recording, so out of curiosity I took a copy of the music to the Larchmont Music Academy to see if I could find anyone to play it. After explaining my mission to the receptionist, Bianca Barragan, she replied, “Oh, I’m a singer. I’ll see if I can have something for you by next week.”

True to her word, she did just that. Upon hearing her beautiful, light operatic voice for the first time, and the skillful ragtime piano, I expressed Scan to hear Fowler’s song. my gratitude and

H

Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had just been assassinated, and they needed me to write the story.

“Why me?” I asked. “In all honesty,” he said, “you’re the fastest writer we have. ...”

amazement and asked who was on the piano.

She replied that it was Douglas Kostner, the organist for the Larchmont Avenue Church.

Another sigh. He had played the organ at my wife’s memorial service.

A

s 2022 rolled over into 2023, I decided the time was right to turn the boat around and row back to the shore, i.e. Norwich. After all, it was the evening sun of my career.

And so, I touched base with Tom Rowe, my old friend and softball manager. Back when I worked in Norwich, Rowe sold clothing at Winan’s Men’s Shop, but in 1980, he became sports editor for The Evening Sun and served there with passion and distinction until 1994. Now he oversees the Norwich High School Sports Hall of Fame. I asked him if there might be a good upcoming spot on the athletic schedule.

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NANCY L. FORD

What goes around … Steve Wulf (left) reunites with Mickey James (right), a former Norwich coach, whose grandson, Steve Dowdall (center), is a current point guard for the Purple Tornado.

“Too bad you didn’t go to the NorwichBinghamton basketball game the other night,” he told me.

“They won?” I asked.

“No, they lost, 91-21.”

“What?!”

“Yeah, Norwich was playing over its head to begin with, and some kids were out sick, and then their best player got hurt just before the game.”

Still, what kind of coach would allow a team to run up the score like that? And could this really happen in Norwich, a town with a proud history of sports excellence? After all Ed Ackley, Norwich High Class of ’54, nearly beat out Jimmy Brown for a starting spot in the Syracuse backfield. Indeed, back in 1992, Peter Carry sent me back to Norwich for a feature (“My Kind of Town”) because the Purple Tornado was in between winning the state basketball championship and playing for the state football championship. Back then, 20 years seemed like a long time. Now it was 50.

The man credited with forging the extraordinary collection of athletes in ’92 was Mickey James, a telephone installer for GTE when he wasn’t coaching his son and his friends in youth sports. In that story, I quoted Judge Sullivan as saying, “Mickey instilled in those kids not just a work ethic, but a sportsmanship ethic.” As it happens, James’ grandson, Steven Dowdall, is the best player on the current basketball team. Under his photo in the Norwich High basketball

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program, he answered the prompt “Your Hero & Why” like this: “My grandpa because he is always pushing me to be my best.”

The next home game on the schedule was Jan. 20, a Friday night, against Owego Apalachin. Two days beforehand, I took the scenic route back in time. Not all roads lead to Norwich, but a surprising number of them do, and one of the pleasures of returning is to feel the familiar curves and see the beautiful farmland nestled in the hills again. Because of my fondness for his late father, I made it a point to put Tim McGraw’s “Everywhere,” a song about the town he left behind, on my playlist — “... you’re on every highway, just beyond the high-beams ...”

One thing that is new to Chenango County is Chobani Yogurt. Founded by Kurdish businessman Hamdi Ulukaya in 2011, Chobani has its corporate headquarters in Norwich and a huge plant on the eastern edge of the county in New Berlin. Chobani literally means “shepherd” in Kurdish, and Ulukaya has been just that for the area, providing much-needed jobs and giving the workforce a stake in his success.

I chose to drive into Norwich going south from Utica on Route 8, past the plant in New Berlin, marveling at the towers that produce the yogurt that fills our supermarket cases from the cows

in the surrounding fields. After that brief stop, I continued down Route 8 and hung a right on Route 23 in South New Berlin. As I approached the heart of Norwich, another new addition on Rexford St. caught my eye: The Northeast Classic Car Museum.

This automotive wonderland was unveiled in 1997, seeded by the amazing collection of George Staley, a native of Lincklaen, a small town northwest of Norwich.

It now houses over 170 vehicles from 1899 through the 1980s in five adjoining buildings.

Naturally, I had to see if one of them might be a 1968 Chevelle Malibu. Alas, it was not there, but the array of cars was spellbinding.

And right across the street was a hobby shop with all kinds of miniature cars. One of the Hot Wheels was a replica of the vehicle that had first taken me to Norwich. Naturally, I bought it. In fact, I took it for a spin around the desk just before I asked myself this question, “How old am I again?”

As for the newspaper building on Hale Street of the same blue hue, it is now brown and called the Hale Street Medical Arts Building, which is heartening because the building now has a higher purpose than journalism. Besides, The Evening Sun still has a place in the community — 29 Lackawanna Ave., not far from the car museum and the new YMCA. The publisher of the paper is Richard Snyder, who bought the operation in 1991 and moved it to its current location in 2001.

“The area has changed dramatically since I first came here in 1973,” he says. “I can’t sugarcoat it — we lost a lot when the big corporations moved out. But we still have a lot to be proud of. It’s a beautiful part of the state and a great place to raise kids — we had five. There’s the car museum, the Blues Festival every

summer, Cooperstown to the east, wine country to the west. And I have to say, we’ve had a good run with The Evening Sun and the advertising circulars we print.”

The newspaper staff is down to three: managing editor Tyler Murphy, staff writer Zachary Meseck, and sports reporter Morgan Golliver. A graduate of Norwich High and Utica University, Golliver joined the staff last spring and clearly takes after her bread-baking grandfather — in 10 months she has 626 bylines. That’s a lot of typing and a lot of driving, and she does it while raising her 2-year-old son, Jacob, whom she named after her favorite Mets player, Jacob deGrom.

“I’ve loved the job,” she says. “It could be girls’ volleyball in Sherburne one night, wrestling in Oxford the next, bowling in Norwich the next. I never get tired of it. I was a cheerleader in high school, and I sort of see myself serving that role for all the athletes in the county. They work hard, and they deserve to get some recognition.”

Morgan didn’t write about Norwich’s 91-21 loss to Binghamton because she wasn’t there, and besides, she surmised that nobody wanted to read about it. She’s probably right. Had it happened on my brief, bell-bottomed watch, I would have been ripping the Binghamton coach (David Springer) for not taking his foot off the gas pedal simply by passing the ball around on each possession.

Rowe, for his part, appreciated the historic aspect of the loss. He pointed out that it broke the Norwich High School all-time record for largest margin of defeat in a basketball game set in 1905 in a 72-7 loss to Cazenovia.

While first-year coach Phil Curley, who has lived in Norwich for 28 years, took no pride in the record, he didn’t take umbrage at the Binghamton coach. “It wasn’t Coach Springer’s fault,” Curley says. “We were in over our heads to begin with, some of our players were sick, and then Steven went down with a sprained ankle. We’ve been

Now, in the evening sun of my own life, I can look back with a smile, a tear in my eye, and a profound sense of gratitude.

playing better since then, so maybe that long, painful bus ride back to Norwich did us some good.”

The night before the Owego game, I had drinks at the Norwich VFW with Rowe and Rich Turnbull, a social studies teacher at Norwich High and the school’s athletic coordinator. “I grew up in Edmeston, a small town about 30 minutes from here,” Turnbull would tell me later. “I came here 21 years ago, right out of college, and I’ve never regretted it. It’s a little like Cheers, where everybody knows your name, but it’s more than that.

It’s the bustle of the YMCA, and the school district giving us a half day off to attend the services of a longtime faculty member, and the local assemblyman plowing out my driveway after a major snowstorm.

“Yes, we have our problems, but don’t we a shared community. Norwich is smaller all? At the end of the day, we all know each than it was 50 years ago, but its spirit hasn’t other and care for one another.”

The gym was packed for the Owego game. diminished. Howie Sullivan once told me, “Norwich has a way of holding on to you.”

Golliver and Rowe, my successors, were I may not be that same long-haired kid there, and so was Mickey James. He walks getting pushed over to a typewriter, but I will with a limp from a work-related accident forever ask myself: What if I hadn’t gone to and he’s hard of hearing, but he loved talking Hamilton? What if I hadn’t started in Norabout his grandson. “He’s only a sophomore, wich and learned from Barry Abisch? What you know,” he says. “He already has a nice if I hadn’t caught the eye of Bernie Lincicome game. Just wait until he’s a senior.” or won the heart of Bambi Bachman? What if Owego, clearly the better team, jumped I hadn’t learned the hard way about the value out to a 17-2 lead, but before visions of of sports? another record loss could take hold, Norwich Now, in the evening sun of my own life, fought back thanks to some key shots by I can look back with a smile, a tear in my Dowdall. Still, the Indians — who will have eye, and a profound sense of gratitude. Judge to change their name at the end of the school Sullivan is right — what you give is never year — held a 50-25 lead over the Purple equal to what you receive.

Tornado at the half.

His bread is delicious, by the way. n Very few fans left, however, and they saw Norwich draw to within 18 and keep that margin. Final score: Owego 74, Norwich 58.

Dowdall led the Purple in scoring with 15. At one point, Rowe looked down at my steno notebook and laughed. “That’s exactly the way I kept score,” he said.

As the crowd dispersed, I couldn’t help but notice the smiles that come from

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Bookshelf Michelle Facos K’76

Kamila Shamsie ’94

(Pouthier Press, 2022).

(New York: Riverhead Books, 2022).

An American in Pandemic Paris: A Coming-of-Retirement-Age Memoir

I

magine you’re in Paris for a brief respite when the pandemic strikes. Do you leave for home — “a polarized and chaotic U.S. or a let’s-pretend-everything’s-normal-even-though-it-isn’t Sweden” — or stay in the City of Lights tourist-free? The book’s title may give away the answer but not the adventures that ensue for Facos, who finds herself on a 16-month journey of self-discovery, pathrealignment, romantic adventure, and more.

Join the author, an art historian, as she “explores the jasminescented streets of Paris, navigates the fascinating world of senior dating, returns to her original career path, spends weekends with aristocrats, winters on the Côte d’Azur, and holds long conversations with her favorite works of art. And meet the new people in her world — Puzzle Man of Montparnasse, Amazing Accordionist, Jim the Expat, and Caroline the Professor — who made her (first) pandemic year one of metamorphosis and joy.” n

WALLY BRESSLER ’90. Tragic Hero (Lake Mary, Fla.: Impact Publishing, 2022).

CHIP BRISTOL ’82. Burning Faith (self-published,

2022).

MACKENZIE COOLEY, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY.

The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).

NANCY AVERY DAFOE K’74. Socrates is Dead Again

LYNN H. BUTLER K’75. Flames Against the Dark:

(Washington, D.C.: Pen Women Press, 2022).

JUSTIN CLARK, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY.

NANCY DAFOE K’74. The House Was Quiet, But the Mind Was Anxious (Georgetown, Ky.: Finishing Line Press, 2022).

Saving America’s Sacred Sites (Colfax, Wis.: Hayriver Press, 2022).

Plato’s Dialogues of Definition: Causal and Conceptual Investigations (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

ROBERT COLLEY ’66 and MAURA COLLEY ’19. Truro and

the Outer Cape (Fabius, N.Y.: Standing Stone Books, 2022).

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DAVE DUNN ’90. Love, Crowd Out, Forgive, Accept: A Guide to Supporting a Loved One with Anorexia (self-published, 2022).

CHARLES DUNST ’18. Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2023).

Best of Friends “

T

he problem with childhood friendship was that you could sometimes fail to see the adult in front of you because you had such a fixed idea of the teenager she once was, and other times you were unable to see the teenager still alive and kicking within the adult.”

Shamsie challenges readers with this question: Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend? Her novel tells the story of two women and the forces that bring their lifelong friendship to the breaking point.

The publisher notes, “Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though — or maybe because — they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future. Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences — and find out whether their friendship can survive.”

The author has written several previous novels including Home Fire, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. n

Stephen G. Rabe ’70

The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

R

abe recounts the untold and unexpected stories of collaboration between American paratroopers and residents of Graignes, Normandy, during World War II’s D-Day invasion. The author is not only a noted historian who has written or edited 12 previous books, but also the son of one of the paratroopers who landed in the small French village that day.

When planes dropped more than 150 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions off-target on the outskirts of Graignes, the villagers — many of them women — sacrificed their own safety to offer help. They cooked for the soldiers, gathered intelligence, and salvaged their equipment from marshy waters.

Five days after the landings, German forces of the Waffen-SS Panzergrenadier division advanced into the village, forcing most of the paratroopers to withdraw. The remaining U.S. soldiers, including a doctor and a dozen wounded men, were massacred, along with more than 30 townspeople.

According to Publishers Weekly, “Rabe contends that the German Waffen-SS, who wore ‘death skull’ insignia and reported to Heinrich Himmler, ‘made a habit of violating customary laws of war.’ He also sketches the history of American airborne warfare and its development as a highly motivated, elite unit operating under charismatic generals. Based on extensive conversations with village families and surviving paratroopers, including Rabe’s own father, this history combines heroism and tragedy in equal measure. WWII buffs will be engrossed.” n

JAMES GIBSON ’74. Just A Long Walk: Healing & Discovery on the John Muir Trail (San Diego: Halcyon Press, 2022).

PRIYANKA R. KHANNA ’04. All the Right People:

KENNETH GROSS ’76. Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).

ALEXANDRA ALEVIZATOS KIRTLEY ’93. American Furniture, 1650-1840: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021).

BARBARA ISMAIL K’74. Western Chant (Melton

Mowbray, United Kingdom: Monsoon Books, 2022).

CAROLINDA GOODMAN (KAUFMAN) K’74. Pirate Ships and Shooting Stars (Little Cottage Press, 2022).

A Novel (Haryana, India: Ebury Press/Penguin Random House, 2022).

LAUREN MAGAZINER ’12. Case Closed #4: Danger on the Dig (New York: Katherine Tegen Books/ HarperCollins, 2022).

LAUREN MAGAZINER ’12. The Mythics #1: Marina

and the Kraken (New York: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2022).

JAMES G. MEADE ’66. End Anxiety!: Proven Benefits of the Transcendental Meditation® Program (New York: SelectBooks, 2022).

JOSEPH E. MWANTUALI, PROFESSOR OF FRENCH. L’impair de la nation (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2022).

JOHN NICHOLS ’62. I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer (Albuquerque, N.M.: High Road Books/University of New Mexico Press, 2022).

TIM NORBECK ’60. No Time for Mercy (Chicago: Why Not Books, 2022).

PREETA SAMARASAN ’98. Tale of the Dreamer’s Son (New York: World Editions, 2022).

LOWEY BUNDY SICHOL ’96. Idea Makers: 15 Fearless Female Entrepreneurs (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2022).

CONSTANCE STELLAS K’72. Aquarius: A Guided Journal* (Avon, Mass.: Adams Media/Simon & Schuster, 2022). *There are 12 books in this series, one for each sign of the zodiac.

CHARLIE WARZEL ’10 and Anne Helen Petersen. Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home (New York: Knopf/ Penguin Random House, 2021).

GORDON WILKINS ’13 (co-author). Rosamond

Purcell: Nature Stands Aside (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2022).

For descriptions of the books listed, and links to where you might purchase them, visit hamilton.edu/alumni/books.

WINTER-SPRING 2023

61

LET’S FINISH WHAT WE STARTED...

ON JUNE 30, 2023, the books will

close on the Because Hamilton campaign, the College’s most ambitious fundraising effort to date, launched in 2018 with a goal of $400 million.

The goal is well within reach thanks to the tens of thousands of trustees, alumni, parents, employees, friends, corporations, and foundations who believe in Hamilton’s mission. Their individual generosity and collective impact are already transforming the lives of students, who will use their Hamilton education to effect positive change in the world — just as those before them have done.

[FINISHES STRONG] $395,000,000

$0

62

$400,000,000

H A M I LTO N

CAMPAIGN PRIORITIES

The Because Hamilton campaign is focused on six strategic investments in Hamilton’s future that both strengthen and differentiate the College while increasing access to talented and deserving students, regardless of their financial circumstances. Here, community members share how the campaign already is shaping their lives and work on the Hill.

H For information about campaign priorities and how you can help Because Hamilton finish strong, visit

hamilton.edu/becausehamilton.

FINANCIAL AID:

CAREER EXPLORATION:

“

“

I’ve been impressed with how committed Hamilton is to its students and their success. [The College] not only provides financial support for its students, but advising and wellness support as well. When it comes to financial aid, Hamilton doesn’t just say it, it executes on it too.”

The generous funding that I was granted allowed me to execute my marine biology research project in southern California, the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii last summer. Having the ability to visit and work in these places was a particularly formative experience for me personally and academically.”

– JANICE SCHEUTZOW, new executive director of financial aid

– JULIAN JACOBS ’24

DIGITAL HAMILTON:

HUMANITIES:

“

“

It’s incredible to be at an institution where there are all these technological specialists … hired through [the Digital Humanities Initiative], who are just so excited to dive into new technology.”

There is a great deal of value in getting an education in the humanities. It both fulfilled my desire to learn about the world through the lenses of different disciplines and also shaped me to be a strong thinker, writer, and orator.”

– ANNA HUFF, assistant professor of digital arts

– J.R. HANE ’22

LEARNING AND LIVING:

THE HAMILTON FUND:

“

“

As a student, I was in Opportunity Programs, did a Levitt research internship, and worked with COOP, but they weren’t connected. Having all of Hamilton’s resources as part of one network through ALEX makes accessing them much more seamless. Now students have a person dedicated to their experience.”

I interact with alumni nearly every day as an intern for the Hamilton Fund, and I’m grateful for all of the ways they’ve supported me, and students like me, throughout my time on the Hill.”

– CLAIRE KAPLAN ’23

– KEVIN ALEXANDER ’13, ALEX advisor

WINTER-SPRING 2023

63

5

Thine Arms Are Ever Warm

THINGS YOU’LL LEARN

EVEN WITH SNOW BLANKETING CAMPUS, the Chapel cupola faithfully reaches out from the trees as if to extend a warm welcome.

PHOTO BY KEVIN M. WALDRON

HAMILTON

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage PAID

198 College Hill Road Clinton, NY 13323

Hamilton College

I

got my first such assignment from a senior editor named Peter Carry. It was for the upcoming 1978 college basketball issue, and he needed a preview of the best Division III teams in the country. ... One

of the teams he wanted me to write about was Hamilton College, whose coach was Tom Murphy, my baseball coach for about a week. I wrote about how Murph had transformed the basketball program, which went 1-15 his first year, into a D-III powerhouse that wasn’t allowed to play in the NCAA tournament because NESCAC prohibited its teams from postseason play.

Much as the coach wanted the Continentals and their star Cedric Oliver ’79 to prove themselves on a bigger stage, he freely admitted, “If the administration stressed athletics, it wouldn’t be Hamilton.”

– Steve Wulf ’72, recalling his first writing assignment with Sports Illustrated See “A Writer Returns to his Roots,” pages 50‑59

Hamilton men’s basketball coach Tom Murphy, who led the Continentals to a record of 602-262 from 1970 to 2004.