Melissa Myozen Blacker ’76 is co-editor (with James Ishmael Ford) of The Book of MU: Essential Writings on Zen’s Most Important Koan (Wisdom Publications, 2011). The word “mu” is one ancient Zen teacher’s response to the earnest question of whether even a dog has “buddha nature”—and discovering for ourselves the meaning of the master’s response is the urgent work of each of us who yearns to be free and at peace. “Practicing Mu” is synonymous with practicing Zen, and “sitting with Mu” is an apt description for all Zen meditation. It has been said that thousands and thousands of koans…

From 1741 until Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, the Russian empire claimed territory and peoples in North America. In his new book, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804–1867 (Oxford University Press), Ilya Vinkovetsky ’88, an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University, examines how Russia governed its only overseas colony. Russian America was effectively transformed from a remote extension of Russia's Siberian frontier penetrated mainly by Siberianized Russians into an ostensibly modern overseas colony operated by Europeanized Russians. Under the rule of the Russian-American Company, the colony was governed on different…

Amy Baltzell ’87 is the author of Living in the Sweet Spot: Preparing for Performance in Sport and Life (Fitness Information Technology), an inspiring guide to getting ready for life’s big performances. The author integrates the best of the new field of positive psychology with the essentials of sport psychology. Every chapter contains practical, effective reflective exercises that will help readers rise to the challenge of performing at their best when it counts. The book is divided into three parts: The Building Blocks of a Champion Approach, Preparing for Performance and Competition, and The Day of Performance. Readers will learn…

Aram Sinnreich ’94 is the author of Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture (University of Massachusetts Press) in which he chronicles the rise of “configurability,” an emerging musical and cultural moment rooted in today’s global, networked communications infrastructure. For his book, Sinnreich interviewed dozens of prominent DJs, attorneys, and music industry executives and argues that today’s battles over sampling, file sharing, and the marketability of new styles such as “mash-ups” and “techno” foretells social change on a broader scale. For centuries, music has possessed a unique power to evoke emotions, signal identity, and bond or divide…

Chi-Young Kim ’03 has translated the international best-selling Korean novel, Please Look After Mom (Knopf), which recounts the story of a family’s search for their mother, who disappears one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway. The novel is told from the points of view of four of the family members. In a review of the novel in The New York Times, Mythili G. Rao writes: “Shin’s prose, intimate and hauntingly spare in this translation by Chi-Young Kim, moves from first to second and third person, and powerfully conveys grief’s bewildering immediacy.” The Korea Times wrote that Please…