The Wesleyan Connection

At left, Wesleyan President Michael Roth and Matt Weiner ’87 speak at the recent fundraising event in NYC.

On April 25, Matt Weiner ’87, creator and writer of Mad Men, regaled an engaged Wesleyan crowd of 280 with insights into the TV business and comments on connections between the COL syllabus and Don Draper’s reading. The fundraising event, “An Evening with Mad Men” was held at the Director’s Guild of America Theater in New York, N.Y.

During an engaging and unscripted conversation with President Michael Roth, Weiner presented clips from his popular and award-winning AMC series and spoke about Wesleyan experiences that helped to shape his career in the entertainment industry. He talked about being a College of Letters major, and told a story of how a professor’s brutal critique of his senior poetry thesis set him on the path of writing for film and television.

“My Wesleyan education is on the screen,” Weiner said.

In addition to a special anonymous gift of $600,000, the evening brought in almost $37,000 in ticket receipts – all for scholarships.

The “Mad Men” fundraiser was the first in a series of events to kick off the $400 million THIS IS WHY campaign to support the university’s endowment. All proceeds from ticket sales— 100 percent — will go directly to financial aid for Wesleyan students.

More information about the campaign and upcoming events can be found at http://thisiswhy.wesleyan.edu.

View a photo gallery of the “Evening with Mad Men” in this Wesleyan Flickr gallery.

#THISISWHY

Henry Howell ’03

Henry Howell ’03 is bicycling to his 10th Reunion.

He lives in London.

So, a long trip. Luckily the transatlantic portion of the roughly 3,300 mile journey will last only about eight hours, via airplane. Howell, an investment banker who has taken up bicycling in a big way, will finish the trip – about 75 miles – on two wheels, from his family home in Pound Ridge,  N.Y.

“Reunion will be even more memorable heading up to Wes by bike,” Howell said. “I’m already looking forward to it.”

He won’t be the first alumnus to bike to Wes for Reunion. Paul Tractenberg ’60 has been traveling that way since his 35th reunion, when he was reluctant to suspend his training for a planned 200-mile ride.

Since then, Tractenberg, professor of law at Rutgers, has tried out two different routes to Middletown; one from his home in New Jersey and one from his summer place on Long Island, crossing the Sound by ferry. (more…)

Gregory Heller ’04

Gregory Heller ’04 is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press), the first biography of the controversial architect and urban planner.

A book launch will be held on Thursday, May 16 at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (1218 Arch Street) at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Go to http://hellergreg.ticketleap.com/edbacon/ for more information.

In the mid-20th century, Edmund Bacon worked on shaping urban America as many Americans left cities to pursue life in suburbia. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged new approaches to neighborhood development and elevated Philadelphia’s image to the level of great world cities. He oversaw the planning and implementation of dozens of redesigned urban space, including the restored colonial neighborhood of Society Hill, the new office development of Penn Center, and the transit-oriented shopping center of Market East.

Biography by Gregory Heller ’04

Heller traces the career of Bacon’s two-decade tenure as city planning director, which coincided with a transformational period in American planning history. He was a larger-than-life personality, and Heller argues his successes owed as much to his savvy negotiation of city politics and the pragmatic particulars of his vision.

In a recent interview with the Philadelphia Weekly Press, Heller revealed that he became interested in Bacon while completing an internship with the Philadelphia City Planning Commission while he was attending Wesleyan. Heller was able to meet with Bacon, who asked him to write his memoir. Heller took a year off from college to complete it and was then approached by a publisher to write a biography about Bacon. The author wrote his college thesis on Bacon and brought the architect to campus his senior year.

In his introduction, Heller writes: “We study history to understand the past but also to glean lessons for the present and the future. … Despite his shortcomings, Bacon’s ability to bridge the worlds of the visionary and active political actor was rare in 1949 and remains perhaps rarer today.”

Heller is a practitioner in the fields of economic development and urban planning. He is senior advisor at Econsult Solutions, Inc. in Philadelphia. His writing on city planning has appeared in Next American City, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ruth Behar ’77 (Photo: Gabriel Frye-Behar)

Storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar ’77 is the author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys (Duke University Press), in which she recounts her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. Behar shares moving stories about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the kind strangers she meets on her travels. The author refers to herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness and repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba. She asks the question why we leave home to find home.

Kirkus Reviews writes: “A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.”

Memoir by Ruth Behar ’77

Behar is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of many books, including An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba; The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart; and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Behar also is a poet, a fiction writer, and a documentary filmmaker. She wrote, directed, and produced Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love), a film that has been shown at film festivals around the world. She has received many prizes, including a MacArthur “Genius” Award.

Ruth Behar website

Virginia Pye ’82 (Photo by Terry Brown)

Virginia Pye ’82 has published her first novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), which begins on the windswept plains of northwestern China not long after the Boxer Rebellion. Mongol bandits kidnap the young son of an American missionary couple. As the Reverend sets out in search of the child, he quickly loses himself in the rugged, drought-stricken countryside populated by opium dens, nomadic warlords, and traveling circuses. Grace, his young wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, and has visions of her stolen child and lost husband. The foreign couple’s dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again.

Novel by Virginia Pye ’82

This novel was inspired in part by journals of Pye’s grandfather, who was himself an early missionary in China. The author’s father was born and raised in China and became an eminent political scientist and sinologist.

Pye holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. A three-term president of James River Writers, a literary nonprofit in Richmond, Virginia, she writes award-winning short stories that have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The North American Review, Tampa Review and The Baltimore Review. She currently lives in Richmond.

For more information see the Virginia Pye website.

Katherine Krug ’04

Katherine Krug ’04, COO and co-founder of tech startup Everest, was recently featured by Forbes contributor Leslie Bradshaw as part of a running series on the rise of female chief operating officers.

A psychology major as an undergraduate, Krug left the corporate world to become a tech entrepreneur, first founding a startup dedicated to changing the way nonprofits raise funds, before moving on to co-found Everest. Krug looks back on her decision to dive into entrepreneurship as one of the most personally fulfilling she’s ever made. “I now leave work everyday with more energy than when I arrived,” says Krug. “You can’t put a price on that feeling.”

Everest, an app designed to help people live their dreams and reach personal goals, allows users to break goals into small steps, get support and accountability, and beautifully capture their journey. Everest’s mission, says Krug, was inspired by her cofounders’ and her own life experiences. As a child Krug was a highly competitive gymnast with dreams of being in the Olympics. She developed a process for setting big goals and breaking them down into small steps she could take each day. Everest, Krug explains, aims to make that strategy available to the world through digital technology.

As a female COO in a tech industry still largely dominated by men, Krug has a unique perspective on the future of gender equality in business. As Krug notes in her interview with Bradshaw: “Female COOs are an especially great asset in the startup landscape, where the old boys’ club is often replaced by a young boys’ club. I can’t tell you the number of epic ego clashes I’ve witnessed among male executives. It takes much more than competitive drive and confidence to make a startup work.”

A fan of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the bestseller on women in business leadership roles, Krug notes that Sandberg’s book has helped begin important conversations on gender in the workplace which otherwise may never have taken place. Beyond Sandberg’s specific suggestions, Krug says, Lean In has created a context for gender issues that were kept below the surface to be openly discussed.

Dan Matzkin ’06

A litigation associate at Squire Sanders, Dan Matzkin ’06 beat out several hundred other applicants for a clerkship with Judge Adalberto Jordan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Matzkin also has been blind since birth with a condition called Leber congenital amaurosis. It didn’t hold him back, however, from earning an undergraduate degree with honors, double-majoring in Wesleyan’s College of Letters and Classics or graduating from law school at the University of Michigan. While Jordan had reservations about how someone with such a disability could manage the challenges of legal practice, which include reading hundreds of pages to prepare a judge for argument and conducting legal research, Matzkin came to the interview prepared. His laptop is equipped with JAWS screen-reading software, which translates computer text into spoken word but requires training to absorb.

After inquiring about Matzkin, Jordan heard only positive feedback from his colleagues. Matzkin’s boss, Lewis Murphy, said that he immediately connected with Matzkin on a personal level and trusts Matzkin with important research and client work, while Matzkin’s coworkers said they ask him for help on their own cases.

Andy Szegedy-Maszak, Jane A. Seney Professor of Greek and professor of classical studies, worked with Matzkin throughout his four years at Wesleyan. “Dan was my advisee from his first term on,” Szegedy-Maszak said, “and he went on to be a student of mine, a TA for a freshman seminar called Three Great Myths, and my senior thesis advisee.”

Under Szegedy-Maszak’s mentorship, Matzkin wrote his thesis on “Sight and Foresight: Blindness in Classical Antiquity” for the College of Letters. The project won Matzkin the Spinney Prize for the best original essay on Greek or Roman civilization. “I’m pretty demanding as a thesis adviser, and I had (and have) too much respect for Dan to go easy on him,” Szegedy-Maszak said. “He had to submit weekly drafts, do the revisions, and keep going with research and writing. His thesis is truly impressive: thorough, thoughtful, well written, and well argued.”

Says Matzkin, “I can’t help but think that my time at Wesleyan, the liberal arts education, has helped me excel in the law—and I expect it will continue to do so. Many of my classmates in law school came from a single-track undergraduate major, but COL and classics together encompass quite a few disciplines. On a federal clerkship, all sorts of things come your way—contract disputes, criminal cases, immigration. Wesleyan’s holistic approach has prepared me to take on everything that comes my way.”

Matzkin’s strong work ethic ultimately won him the clerkship, although his often self-deprecating sense of humor and strong connection with his colleagues further supplemented his impressive credentials. Despite being one of several thousand blind attorneys practicing in the country, Matzkin achieved a position that is rare and coveted for all lawyers.

“I went into the field because I liked the prospect of being able to advocate for someone who isn’t able to do so himself. Acting as someone’s voice appealed to me.

“Now, it’s an interesting transition from private practice to a federal clerkship. At a law firm, my job is to come up with the best answer for my client; in a federal clerkship, the point is to come up with the right answer. I’ll see a lot of advocacy here, and I hope to learn from both the good and the bad—from whatever is in front of me.”

#THISISWHY

Tim Hetherington in Afghanistan (Photo courtesy of HBO)

Sebastian Junger ’84 has directed a new documentary, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, which premiered on HBO this month.

The film covers Hertherington’s career as a war photographer, from his earliest days covering the civil war in Liberia to his final days in Misrata. He was killed in 2011 at age 40 in the siege of Misrata during Libya’s civil war. Junger pays tribute to Hetherington’s video and still photography and how he engaged himself on a personal level with his subjects.

Junger and Hetherington were co-directors of the acclaimed documentary Restrepo, which focused on an American platoon on a remote but extremely dangerous mountaintop in eastern Afghanistan. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2011.

In a recent interview Junger gave to CBS This Morning, Junger said that when he worked on Restrepo, Hetherington told him that one of the least interesting things about covering war was combat and what Hetherington found more interesting was the emotions out there and the relationships between the men. After he found out about Hetherington’s death, Junger decided within an hour that he would no longer cover war–a topic he had covered since the early ‘90s in Bosnia.

In a review of the HBO documentary in The New York Times, Mike Hale writes: “The new film is a touching tribute … It’s consistently animated, though, by Hetherington himself, seen in excerpts from interviews. He’s larger than life, with leading-man good looks and a seriousness that’s earnest without being annoying. And the real revelation is his still photography… Less interested in chaos and graphic violence than other war photographers, he favored quiet, reflective, classically composed images; among his most celebrated photos was a series of portraits of American soldiers sleeping in their bunks.”

Interview with Junger on NPR

Junger talks to WSJ Live

Mary Roach ’81 (Photo by Chris Hardy)

Best-selling author Mary Roach 81 has just published her latest gift to readers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W. W. Norton), in which she takes a memorable tour inside and outside of the body. Her fascinating book on the process of eating brings readers upclose with the bodily equipment that turns food into the nutrients and sustenance that keeps us ticking.

On her quest for knowledge of the digestive tract, Roach meets with professors and technicians, murderers, mad scientists, Eskimos, exorcists, rabbis and other unique characters. She is fearless in asking taboo and embarrassing questions with relish and humor. Questions such as: Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you?

Book by Mary Roach ’81

In her rave review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin writes: “Never has Ms. Roach’s affinity for the comedic and bizarre been put to better use. … Gulp is a big leap forward for Ms. Roach because it doesn’t require her to do any padding or stunt work. Simply thinking about the body and interviewing the most oddball experts she can find are enough to rivet interest. And the circumstances she describes are sometimes hilarious, sometimes repellent, never dull. She’s at her cheeriest in describing rectal smuggling of items into prison, which is a more creative enterprise than you might imagine.”

Mary Roach talks to The New York Times Dining Journal

Roach interview with NPR

Roach is a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Christopher Kincaid ’83 stands in a lava field in Oregon.

Plate subduction, magmatism, and mantle plumes are the focus of a recent study by Christopher Kincaid ’83, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. A highly contested topic, the three proposed causes of volcanism in the northwestern United States led Kincaid and his team aboard the RV Endeavor to publish an article in the scientific journal Nature.

“I always tell people that I got on this track to being an oceanographer because of my time at Wes,” Kincaid said. “I can trace it back to taking small geology classes alongside master’s level grad students. It made a huge impression on me how devoted they were to the pursuit of science. I always tell people this is something that sets Wes apart from other small NESCAC-y type places.”

Kincaid and his team, including earth and environmental sciences major Justin Rogers ’05—then working on his master’s at URI with Kincaid—set out to determine the cause of volcanism in the area through laboratory models and fieldwork. In the article, Kincaid explained that the Yellowstone mantle plume lies at the heart of the volcanic patterns.

“Here we use experiments with a laboratory model to show that the patterns of volcanism in the northwestern United States can be explained by a plume upwelling through mantle that circulates in the wedge beneath a subduction zone,” he wrote in the article.

Kincaid and his team recover an acoustic current meter aboard the RV Endeavor.

Kincaid and his team tested the plume model in the northwestern region by using a “first of a kind fluid dynamics laboratory” device that they created.

“Results show that when the plate tectonic motions in this area are included, plumes actually get pulled apart and surface in patterns that closely match observations in this region,” Kincaid said. “This will likely set off a flurry of counter-arguments.”

Many scientists reject the idea of a mantle plume, especially in the Yellowstone region. According to Kincaid, critics of the mantle plume cite “odd offsets between” the Columbia River Flood Basalts and Yellowstone hotspot to argue that the patterns cannot be attributed to a plume.

“From my days as an undergrad at Wes, to my very first research grant with Wes’s own Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Peter Patton on the hotly debated causes of pollution in the Housatonic River, I have been taught to not shy away from a debate,” Kincaid said. “There is a very heated debate in the earth sciences community about the very existence of a mode of deep earth convection called mantle plumes.”

The results of Kincaid’s experiments go beyond the mantle plume model and suggest a mechanism for reduced greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, which in turn reveals possible causes for differing developments among planets.

“Our results also seem to point to the existence of one more protective feature[s] of our planet,” Kincaid noted. “In similar fashion to the protective atmosphere, which lets in light but filters harmful rays, we find that certain aspects of plate tectonics on earth actually stall and diffuse much of the massive melt production potential of mantle plumes, dramatically limiting output of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from earth’s interior through geologic time. Without plate tectonics, Venus does not have this protective mechanism, which could account for some of the difference in evolution of the two planetary atmospheres.”

Read more:

http://www.gso.uri.edu/users/kincaid

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/04/08/3730801.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/science/

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/modeling-the-yellowstone-magma-plume-with-a-vat-of-sugar-water/

Jack DiSciacca ’07

Jack DiSciacca ’07 is first author on a paper that appeared in the April issue of Physical Review Letters, a premier journal for physics. Now a Ph.D candidate at Harvard, DiSciacca earned his undergraduate degree with high honors; Foss Professor of Physics Tom Morgan was his advisor. The published paper, “One Particle Measurement of the Anti-Proton Magnetic Moment,” details DiSciacca’s research on the antiproton, which is an antimatter particle.

Morgan explains, “DiSciacca spent the last six months at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research], at the same accelerator facility where physicists recently discovered the Higgs boson to measure the magnetic moment of the antiproton (how much spinning current this anti-matter particle possesses).”

DiSciacca’s work is significant because it offers experimental confirmation of a key theory in physics known as CPT – charge, parity, time invariance. His findings were cited for their importance in Physics Viewpoints, where Eric Hudson and David Salzberg from the University of California in Los Angeles wrote: “Specifically, Jack DiSciacca of Harvard University and his colleagues present the most precise measurement to date of the antiproton magnetic moment … As reported in Physical Review Letters, the results match data on the proton, thus extending CPT’s shatterproof status for the time being.”

Morgan also notes that DiSciacca recently visited his class to give a presentation on his work, which DiSciacca says was “really a discussion, with lots of questions and more of a dialog than a typical presentation.” He was pleased with the engaged quality of the students’ remarks and describes Wesleyan as “a spectacular place to do physics. You won’t find more committed teachers anywhere,” with an atmosphere that is relaxed and friendly, as well as highly academic. The professors, he says, are truly accessible.

As for his current work, DiSciacca says, “The process of making the antiproton measurement was quite interesting and also demanding. We had about six months to move almost everything we used at Harvard to Switzerland, install the experiment and make the measurement using a single antiproton. The goal was to make a measurement before the December 2012 start of an extended upgrade phase at CERN, where there would be no antiprotons for another year and a half. One interesting part of this process is the story of moving the experiment to Switzerland. We went from having an experiment that fits in a room at Harvard, to working in a Home Depot-sized building with many other experiments in close proximity.”

“Our experiment is rather tall, about my height, and it’s quite delicate. So, to secure it safely for the plane ride over, we found that it would exceed the height limit of planes leaving Boston. As a result, we had it trucked to JFK, flown to Paris on a larger plane, and then trucked from Paris to CERN. The fact that it arrived in one piece, without any broken components, continues to amaze me.”

See related links:

http://prl.aps.org/toc/PRL/v110/i13

http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/Physics.6.36

Mark Saba ’81

Mark Saba ’81 recently released Painting A Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books), a collection of poems spanning 30 years. Centering on his Polish and Italian roots in Pittsburgh, the poems focus on the subject of family life and universal themes of what it means to be alive.

Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, writes in the book’s foreword that Saba is a “writer who meditates on the entanglement of his roots and who sounds as if he is tenderly worried that his children not be too bound up with this entanglement while at the same time he is concerned that they do not forget it.” Exploring these complications in such pieces as “Poem of Forgiveness” and “My Mother Straightens Her Babushka,” Saba creates a lyrical autobiography that, at the same time, connects his own experience to the greater American landscape.

Saba is also the author of the novel The Landscapes of Pater, about a boy’s search for a father figure and trip to his ancestors’ birthplace in Sardinia, and the novella Thaddeus Olsen, within the collection Desperate Remedies, which explores issues of identity, privilege, and the state of higher education in the United States. His narrative epic poem “Judith of the Lights” won the Mellon Poetry Award as part of the collection Three Women: Touching the Boundaries of Life. Besides writing poetry and fiction, Saba works as an illustrator and graphic designer at Yale University.

Poetry book by Mark Saba ’81