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Cynthia RockwellJanuary 24, 20183min
  For two hours every Saturday—and any early morning or late night shift available—Middletown resident Franco Liseo fills the airwaves of WESU 88.1 FM, with Italian music. His specialty is the sounds from the ’60s and ’70s; "Love songs," he says. "When I left Italy, I left with the music”—and he's been doing this for 30 years. The Saturday show is special; he broadcasts with a co-host, Lucilla Caminito, the daughter of a childhood friend, who Skypes in from Melilli. These shows feature contemporary music that Caminito chooses and sends to Liseo (whose DJ name is "Francaccio") via the internet, YouTube,…

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Cynthia RockwellJanuary 23, 20188min
"Pattern recognition was a constant in my explorations at Wesleyan—and what I focused on afterwards," says Benjamin Fels ’06, explaining the unity behind a seeming diversity of interests. The Bill and Melinda Gates Organization is interested, also, in what Fels finds intriguing. The company Fels co-founded, macro-eyes, is one of 20 that the foundation selected to be a Grand Challenges Explorations winner. The project that macro-eyes proposed seeks to use their own breed of statistical machine learning, trained on supply chain and immunization data at health facilities in Tanzania. The goal is to maximize the number of children who get vaccinated and minimize vaccine…

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Cynthia RockwellJanuary 22, 20185min
"The title character is, of course, a Wesleyan graduate," says author Heidi Mastrogiovanni ’79, of her debut comic novel, Lala Pettibone's Act Two (Amberjack Publishing, 2017). The novelist herself is also a comic actor, an animal welfare advocate and a screenwriter—and her second novel, sequel Lala Pettibone: Standing Room Only, will be available in August. To celebrate, she and a fellow Amberjack author—with similarly titled books, both with a reference to a second act—visited bookstores and venues across the country to talk about the writer's life and the ways in which a book written by a female is perceived, welcomed and marketed. In…

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Cynthia RockwellDecember 11, 20171min
The Broadway cast recording of the Tony Award–winning musical Dear Evan Hansen earned a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theater Album on Nov. 28. Produced with Atlantic Record’s President of A&R (artists and repertoire) Pete Ganbarg ’88, along with music supervisor and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, creators Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and Broadway producer Stacey Mindich, the album had debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 when it came out last February. (more…)

Cynthia RockwellDecember 11, 20172min
On Dec. 4, This Podcast Has Fleas, a partnership between WNYC Studios and kids’ television veterans Adam Peltzman ’96 and Koyalee Chanda ’96, joined that studio’s roster of innovative audio programming and signaled its foray into children’s podcasting. This Podcast Has Fleas is six-episode scripted comedy series about a dog, Waffles (Emily Lynne), and a cat, Jones (Jay Pharoah), who live in the same house, each hosting their own competing podcasts. Additional household pets are a goldfish played by Alec Baldwin and a gerbil played by Eugene Mirman. Chanda and Peltzman, whose television credits include Blue’s Clues, Wallykazam! and the…

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Cynthia RockwellDecember 11, 20172min
This year the list of Grammy nominations includes work by Gail Marowitz ’81. Founder of The Visual Strategist, a company devoted to designing for music, Marowitz is not a first-timer on the coveted list. Her work has garnered her three nominations in the Best Recording Package category, with a win in 2006. Now in the running is Marowitz’s work on Jonathan Coulton’s Solid State. Marowitz, who claims “a misspent youth, looking at albums in record stores” and sends e-mails under the name “childorock,” says that her fascination with album covers began when she was 6 and her older brother brought…

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Cynthia RockwellNovember 28, 20174min
Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02, the Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Genius, and Tony Award winner for Hamilton and In the Heights was honored with the Latin Recording Academy President’s Merit Award at the 18th annual Latin Grammy Awards on Nov. 16. This is a special award, not given annually, and it was presented to the well known composer, lyricist, and performer by Latin Recording Academy President/CEO Gabriel Abaro to honor Miranda's many outstanding contributions to the Latin community. Abaroa told  Billboard, “Lin-Manuel’s urban and social poetry have provided strength and encouragement to every Latino motivated to get ahead. He has brought pride to…

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Editorial StaffNovember 13, 20172min
(By K Alshanetsky '17) Since graduating just last May, Jenny Fran Davis ’17 has become a published author with the fall release of her debut novel, Everything Must Go. The story revolves around Flora Goldwasser, a teenager from New York City who has just transferred to a rural, Quaker boarding school in her junior year. Through a collection of journal entries, e-mails and other archived materials, Flora pieces together her experience and lets readers into her tumultuous period of adjustment. Davis wrote the book in her freshman year of college and spent the next few years editing, before landing a contract…

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Cynthia RockwellNovember 7, 20172min
She Makes Comics, a documentary directed by Marisa Stotter '13, and produced by Patrick Meaney '07 and Stotter, won Best Documentary at the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con International Film Festival, and was released on Netflix on Oct. 15.  Also available on iTunes and Amazon Prime, the film tells the story of the women—artists, writers, executives, as well as ardent fans—in the comic book industry. The documentary has played at film festivals around the world since its release in December 2014. Both a thoroughly researched history—featuring luminaries such as Karen Green, the comic librarian at Columbia University, as well as women…

Cynthia RockwellOctober 30, 20174min
Brimstone and Glory is the feature-length documentary produced by Benh Zeitlin ’04, Dan Janvey ’06, Kellen Quinn ’05 and others, on the annual festival in Tultepec, Mexico, where pyrotechnics are the major industry. The weeklong celebration honors San Juan de Dios, patron saint of firework makers, and celebrates the artisans who dedicate themselves to pyrotechnics. Directed by Viktor Jakovleski, and edited by Affonso Gonçalves, the film is scored by Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer, the two who collaborated on the Beasts of the Southern Wild score. Dubbed “Best Documentary Feature” at the San Francisco Film Festival, Brimstone and Glory opens in…

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Cynthia RockwellOctober 26, 20176min
Laura R. Walker ’79, P’21, president and CEO of New York Public Radio (NYPR), has an agenda: She wants at least half of the podcasts produced to be hosted or co-hosted by women. "We're making progress," she reported at Werk It 2017, an annual festival she helped to create in 2015 to give women the tools they need to become creative forces in podcasting. Walker came up with the idea after she’d read a report on this new medium and discovered that of the top 100 podcasts on iTunes, only 20 percent were hosted or co-hosted by a woman. "Podcasting…

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Editorial StaffOctober 26, 20172min
(By K Alshanetsky '17) Author Daniel Handler ’92 enjoys a prolific career as a celebrated novelist, best known for using the pseudonym Lemony Snicket to publish A Series of Unfortunate Events. This 13-book series about three orphaned children and their increasingly tumultuous lives—which has been adapted for film, video games and, most recently, a Netflix series—established Handler as an appealingly sinister storyteller, a writer with a penchant for narratives without happy endings. The first episode of Articulate on PBS delves into some of Handler's inspirations and how he came to develop his dark approach to children's writing. In the clip,…