Brian KattenWhen asked about his strongest football memory from his playing days at Wesleyan, Sandy Herzlich ’81 came up with a 20-7 win at Amherst in 1979. “We beat Amherst up there in just a great game,” Sandy recounted. “Kosty [defensive coordinator Peter Kostacopoulos] put in a wild game plan and we were shuttling personnel in and out, and it worked. I remember that as being a very satisfying win.” Head Coach Bill Macdermott called it “one of the best defensive games I’ve ever seen Wesleyan play.” Mac was in his ninth season at the helm. Sandy’s memory of his first…
Bill Holder“Just Look at What You Did!” is the headline on a Nicholas Kristof column, letting readers know that his request that they commemorate Mother’s Day with donations led to a $135,000 gift to Shining Hope for Communities, a project in the Kibera slum of Kenya led by Kennedy Odede ’12 and Jessica Posner ’09. Kirstof writes: “So while in Kenya recently, I dropped by to see what was being done with your money. In the grim alleys of the Kibera slum in the capital of Nairobi, I found a dazzling girls’ school being built with some of those donations —…
Cynthia RockwellLife During Wartime, an exhibition by New York-based artist Melissa Stern ’80, opens Friday, Sept. 16, with a reception at the Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta, Ga. A collection of new work by Stern, Life During Wartime explores 1940s America as seen from a contemporary vantage point, using collage materials from that era, as well original drawings. The exhibition continues through Oct. 29. In an article for NY Arts, Stern wrote: “Images of the 1940s have long played a subtle but important role in my artwork. My father was a World War II veteran, along with most of the other…
David LowWriter and journalist Alex Kotlowitz ’77, best known for his book There Are No Children Here, has co-produced a powerful new documentary, The Interrupters, directed by Steve James (Hoop Dreams), which was released in select theaters around the country in mid-August. Based on a 2008 New York Times magazine piece by Kotlowitz, the film follows the lives of three members (called “interrupters”) of the Chicago-based anti-violence organization CeaseFire, who risk their lives as the perform violence mediation on the streets of some of Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods. The film follows the three interrupters upclose on the street and in offices,…
A new study by University of California - San Diego Professor of Psychology Nicholas Christenfeld and graduate student Jonathan Leavitt ’92 suggests that people enjoy a story more when they they already know how it ends. Writer Mary Elizabeth Williams, for Salon.com suggests that those on constant alert for “spoilers” in media reviews should chill out: “For their study, Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt provided participants with a variety of 'ironic-twist, mystery and literary' short stories…. Some readers read the stories in their original forms. Some were given a preface with the spoiler. Others had a spoiler rewritten into the…
Howard Shalwitz ’74, artistic director of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., recently directed an acclaimed, re-mounted production of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris at the theater this summer. The play was first staged at Woolly Mammoth in 2010. In April, Shalwitz received two Helen Hayes Awards—Outstanding Director and Outstanding Resident Play—for the production. Norris’s two-act play, a provocative look at race, gentrification and real estate, takes place in a Chicago house, with Act 1 set in the 1950s and Act 2 in the 1990s. The work looks back to Lorraine Hansberry’s theater…
In her illuminating new book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press), Brook Wilensky-Lanford ’99 traces the stories of various men who have sought over time to find the “real” Garden of Eden all over the globe, often in the most unlikely places, despite scientific advances and the advance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This obsessive quest consumed Mesopotamian archaeologists, German Baptist ministers, British irrigation engineers, and the first president of Boston University, among many others. These relentless Eden seekers all started with the same brief Bible verses, but ended up at different spots on the planet,…
Wesleyan soccer alumni Andrew Lacey '89 and Jared Ashe ’07 recently played (May 23) in The Macquarie Football Tournament for financial professionals in London at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea Football (soccer, on this side of the pond) Club's playing ground. “We were representing Lazard Asset Management,” explains Ashe. Lacey, deputy chairman, has been with the firm since 1995; Ashe, who had met Lacey thought their Wesleyan soccer connection, was hired by the firm in 2007. The 14 players on the Lazard team included a dozen players from their London office and two—Lacey and Ashe—based in New York City. The other three…
This year’s Tony Awards ceremony televised on CBS on June 12 ended with a comedic rap number, performed by host Neal Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), which summarized the show’s events in less than three minutes. The rap number was written by Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02 , the Tony Award-winning composer of musical In the Heights, and Thomas Kail ’99, the Tony Award-nominated director of that show. The duo came up with the rhymes while watching the show in the basement of Manhattan’s Beacon Theater, where the ceremony was held. Miranda called the closing number the “Tony speed-through.” To…
Strauss Zelnick ’79, chairman and CEO of video game maker Take-Two Interactive Software, was interviewed this month by the Hollywood Reporter and talked about 3D, his company's digital future, and the rising cost of hiring talent. Take-Two recently released L.A. Noire, a crime drama that uses face-recognition technology, motion capture, and 200 actors. The video game was well-received, which adds another hit to the company’s roster, which includes the successful Grand Theft Auto franchise and Red Dead Redemption. When asked when 3D will become a key contributor in gaming, Zelnick said: “It’s a little complex because you've got the glasses…
In the video below, Joshua Boger '73, P'06, P'09, chairman of the Wesleyan Board of Trustees and founder of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, talks about his lifelong interest in chemistry, entrepreneurship, his Wesleyan Experience, and the toughest challenge of his professional life: developing cures for hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFiJDK1I8xE[/youtube]
Hollywood’s highly successful writing and producing team Alex Kurtzman ’95 and Roberto Orci were recently featured in in an article by Dorothy Pomerantz in Forbes, “Hollywood‘s Secret Weapons.” The duo has worked on a number of films that together have earned $3 billion at the box office in six years, including Transformers I and II, The Proposal, and the 2009 blockbuster Star Trek, and they are able to transform genre pictures into something very special to audiences and studio heads. This summer they are behind big summer movie, Cowboys & Aliens, starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford as 19th-century cowboys…