Olivia DrakeSinger-songwriter Tess Amodeo-Vickery '07 debuts her first music video "When I Think about You" on YouTube. The video was filmed in Rome, Italy with director Federico Iris Osmo Tinelli. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3RVJ2GnKo&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
David LowJodi Daynard ’79 recently published her first novel, The Midwife’s Revolt (Opossum Press), a work of historical fiction set during the founding days of America. The novel centers on midwife Lizzie Boylston from her grieving days of widowhood after Bunker Hill, to her deepening friendship with Abigail Adams, and finally to her dangerous work as a spy for the Cause. Daynard takes the reader into the real lives of colonial women patriots and explores human connections in a violent time. According to Publishers Weekly, the book is “a charming, unexpected, and decidedly different take on the Revolutionary War.” Daynard also is…
Respected tax scholar Leonard Burman ’75 is the co-writer (with Joel Slemrod) of Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), a clear, concise explanation of how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be improved. This highly accessible book, organized in a question-and-answer format, describes the intricacies of the modern tax system in an easy-to-grasp manner. The book starts with the basic definitions of taxes and then examines more complicated and controversial issues. They address such questions as: How much more tax could the IRS collect with better…
Bill HolderA $3 million gift to support writing programs at Wesleyan was announced March 1 at the Board of Trustees dinner on campus. The gift from John Shapiro ’74 and Shonni Silverberg ’76, a Wesleyan trustee, builds on their 2009 gift establishing the Shapiro Creative Writing Center. Shapiro said he was delighted with the speed with which the center was developed. “We were gratified that the university moved quickly and got this program launched and established,” Shapiro said. “I’ve had good feedback from people both at Wesleyan and elsewhere. It has generated’ a bit of a buzz.” This new gift will…
Gabe Rosenberg '16Five years ago, Terrance “Munch” Williams ’02 began coaching a group of 12-year-old boys, playing basketball in the gym of a New York City recreation center. Now, that same group of boys is ranked first in the country, champions of the 16u Invitational Division at the Las Vegas Fab 48 tournament. The boys are members of Team SCAN, an afterschool program devoted to developing student athletes academically, socially and athletically in the South Bronx and East Harlem areas. Under the management and coaching of Justin Weir ’02, Williams, Andre Charles ’06 and Jason Forde ’01 work with Team SCAN to…
Acclaimed National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita ’71 has just published a new book of photographs Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa (White Star Publishers). His latest photography collection is a rare, intimate look into the Tibet’s changing world—both ancient and modern, sacred and commonplace, the rarefied and the gritty—before the legends and mysteries of the Chamagudao, the Tea Horse Road, disappear into the Tibetan mist. Yamashita captures stunning images of the Tea Horse Road, which winds through dizzying mountain passes, across famed rivers like the Mekong and the Yangtze, and past monasteries and meadows in a circuitous route from Sichuan…
The University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering recently appointed John Keith ’01 as assistant professor and the inaugural R.K. Mellon Faculty Fellow. With funding from a 2012 Richard King Mellon Foundation grant, the university’s Center for Energy brought in Keith as part of a program to build an interdisciplinary foundation toward energy research, focusing on functional materials for energy applications. Keith’s research will focus on developing and applying computational methods to enhance processes that convert CO2 and water into useful chemicals and fuels. By collaborating with experimentalists, Keith aims to contribute to finding economically feasible routes for energy solutions,…
As part of its recent “Legends of Sedimentology” event, The Houston Geological Society named George Devries Klein ’54 alongside three other speakers as having made a substantial contribution to the field of sedimentology.Klein is a sedimentologist, sedimentary geologist, sequence stratigrapher, basin analyst, regional geologist, petroleum geologist, and author of 383 papers, books, reports, abstracts, and reviews. He opened his consulting firm, SED-STRAT Geoscience Consultants, Inc. in Houston, Tex. in 1996, after serving for three years as the executive director of the New Jersey Marine Science Consortium and as New Jersey Sea Grant Director. He is also the author of Rocknocker:…
Attorney Mike MacClary ’93, a partner of Burns & Levinson LLP, has been selected as the 2013 President of the Massachusetts Real Estate Bar Association (REBA). MacClary works in Burns & Levinson’s Franchise and Schools & Colleges practice groups, focusing on commercial real estate conveyancing and leasing. He also counsels charter schools on issues of leasing, property acquisition, financing, and governance. Before joining Burns & Levinson in 2004, MacClary was an associate at Hale and Dorr, LLP, and at Adelson, Golden, Loria & Simons. He also currently serves on the board of directors at the Middlesex Human Services Agency. A…
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University recently announced that Visiting Writer in English Adina Hoffman ’89 is one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes. This new global writer’s award was created with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and is now one of the largest literary prizes in the world. Nine $150,000 prizes were awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama and recognize writers from all stages of their careers. The recipients range in ages from 33 to 87. Writers were considered from around…
Cynthia RockwellEyal Bar-David '09, Wesleyan psychology major and New York University research assistant in the department of psychology’s Phelps Lab, co-authored a paper asking whether “racial bias affects the way the brain represents information about social groups,” published in the journal Psychological Science. With co-authors Tobias Brosch from the department of psychology at the University of Geneva and Elizabeth Phelps, director of the Phelps Lab at New York University, Bar-David noted in the abstract that their "findings suggest that stronger implicit pro-White bias decreases the similarity of neural representations of Black and White faces." The paper headlined the "This Week in Psychological Science" sent…
In his new nonfiction collection Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (University of Chicago Press), acclaimed journalist Carlo Rotella ’86 explores a variety of characters and settings, His writing has been praised for going beneath the surface of the story as he sympathetically dwells in the lives of the people and places he encounters. The two dozen essays in this volume deal with subjects and obsessions that have characterized his previous writing: boxing, music, writers, and cities. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on…