Olivia DrakeMay 23, 200918min
Joseph J. Fins ’82, M.D., chair of the Alumni Association, spoke to members of the Wesleyan Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa during Reunion & Commencement Weekend. His speech was titled "Minding Time." Membership for Phi Beta Kappa is conferred for high scholastic achievement. It is a delight to be here with you today to celebrate your induction into Phi Beta Kappa. Let me add my congratulations to those of The Faculty, President Roth and your friends and family. This is a memorable day in your life and it is good that you savour this accomplishment. A former professor of…

Bill HolderMay 19, 20091min
Two Wesleyan alumni performed May 12 for President Obama, his family and others at the White House. The event was titled “An Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word.” Ayelet Waldman '86 and her husband Michael Chabon, both writers, were among the speakers. An NPR story about the event included Waldman discussing the power of the written word: “To harness the power of language you have to be able to put yourself in the position of the person you are speaking to—to imagine what they are thinking, what they’re feeling. That’s hard.” Also at the White House was Lin-Manuel…

David LowMay 19, 20092min
Rebecca N. Hill ’91 is the author of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Duke University Press) in which she compares two seemingly unrelated types of leftist protest campaigns: those intended to defend labor organizers from prosecution and those seeking to memorialize lynching victims and stop the practice of lynching. Her incisive new study suggests that these forms of protest are related and have considerably influenced one another. She recognizes that both campaigns worked to build alliances through appeals to public opinion in the media, by defining the American state as a force…

David LowMay 19, 20092min
Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman ’83 (with David Koepp) co-wrote the screenplay of Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard, which was number one at the box office at $48 million during its first weekend. The film opened nationwide at at 3,527 theaters on Friday, May 15. Based on the novel by Dan Brown, Angels and Demons is a prequel to the best-selling thriller The Da Vinci Code which follows the adventures of Harvard University symbologist and theology sleuth Robert Langdon. The movie version of The Da Vinci Code, which also had a screenplay by Goldsman, was a hugely popular film internationally,…

David LowMay 19, 20092min
Susan Allison ’85 has just published a poetry collection, Down by the Riverside Ways (Antrim Books). Allison returned to Middletown a few years after graduating from Wesleyan and has lived here since. Most of the poems in this collection have been written in Middletown over the last 20 years. Allison comments: "I like the word concatenation, meaning: to link in a chain, to describe some of the poems. Many of the poems are concatenations of ideas based in experience. The book as a whole is a concatenation, and strives to make sense through random strings of devotion. I owe much…

David LowMay 19, 20091min
Recent sculptures by Melissa Stern ’80 will be shown with work by four other artists at the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery Open House in Kent, Conn. from May 23 through July 5. The opening is from 4 to 6 p.m. on May 23. Stern's work reflects both non-Western and outsider art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are characterized by their richly drawn and deeply layered surfaces. She uses a wide range of materials from encaustic to clay, pastel to steel. “All of my pieces share a thematic thread,” Stern says. “Childlike and goofy my figures live in a dream…

Bill HolderApril 29, 20092min
On April 20, Oracle Corp. announced it would acquire Sun Microsystems, whose chief executive officer is Jonathan Schwartz ’87. The deal, valued at $7.4 billion, promises to make Oracle a more potent competitor against I.B.M., Sun’s previous suitor, according to The New York Times. "With Sun, Oracle will more directly compete against I.B.M., H.P. and other giants selling products and services used in corporate data centers by big corporations,”"said the Times. “The move by Oracle is part of the trend of the largest technology companies to assemble more offerings — hardware, software and services — for corporate customers, often through…

David LowApril 29, 20093min
Alex Kurtzman ’95 and Roberto Orci are the screenwriters for a new version of Star Trek, directed by J. J. Abrams, which premieres in the theaters May 8. The eagerly awaited movie has already received a large amount of advance publicity in the media, everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal to sci-fi web sites, and advance word has been positive. The New York Times devoted a feature by Dave Itzkoff on April 26 on the upcoming film. The new version delves into the series’ mythology and takes the viewer to the origins of James Kirk and Spock…

David LowApril 29, 20092min
Tracy Winn ’75 is the author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press), a vibrant new collection of interwoven tales about the inhabitants of Lowell, Mass., a dying mill town. Her affecting and unsentimental stories, set from the 1940s to the present, cover a range of fascinating characters, including mill workers, a doctor, a hairdresser, a bookie, a restless wife, and several insightful children. In his review of the book in the Boston Globe, Steve Almond '88 praises Winn’s book as “a testament to the power of the short form.” He adds that her stories “carefully expose the universal…

David LowApril 13, 20094min
Author Wells Tower ’96 recently garnered rave reviews across the country for his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar Straus Giroux) which was published in March. The book received two fine reviews in the same week in The New York Times and was the cover review for The New York Times Sunday Book Review. For the Sunday Times, acclaimed writer Edmund White wrote: “Every one of the stories .., is polished and distinctive. Though he’s intrigued by the painful experiences of men much older than he is, Tower can write with equal power about young women and…

Bill HolderApril 13, 20092min
“Book-lover Dick Rohfritch didn’t set out to buy 12,000 modern first editions once owned by an eccentric lawyer-collector found murdered in his rural Missouri home. It’s just that he doesn’t like to play golf. And thereby hangs the tale of how The Woodlands got Good Books in the Woods, a new secondhand bookstore full of remarkable finds.” The Houston Chronicle recounts this story about Rohfritch ’66, an English major who works in chemical sales but has always loved reading and enjoys collecting books. The dead man, 70-year-old Rolland Comstock, was an avid bibliophile who acquired signed first editions by 20th-century…

David LowApril 13, 20093min
A recent March article by Nate Chinen in The New York Times focused on Firehouse 12, a New Haven state-of-the-art recording studio and home to a jazz record label of the same name. Firehouse 12 Records is co-owned by cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum ’98 and Nick Lloyd, who owns the recording studio. The Times article pointed out that the Firehouse 12 studio in a renovated 1905 firehouse in New Haven’s Ninth Square Neighborhood has also become a venue for performances by some of today’s most talented young avant-garde jazz artists. At the same time, Firehouse 12 records has already released…