SEPT–OCT 2011, VOLUME 104, NUMBER 1 AFTER INTERNMENT … LANGUAGE LEARNING … FOLK SINGER … A LIFE IN MATH … AMERICA’S HISTORIAN MATH … AMERICA’S IN … A LIFE SINGER … FOLK LEARNING … LANGUAGE INTERNMENT AFTER

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SPRING 2017, VOLUME 109, NUMBER 3 Seeking Great Leaders

The Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative offers a calendar year of rigorous education and reflection for highly accomplished leaders in business, government, law, medicine, and other sectors who are transitioning from their primary careers to their next years of service. Led by award-winning faculty members from across Harvard, the program aims to deploy a new leadership force tackling the world’s most challenging social and environmental problems.

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170509_AdvancedLeadership_Chicago.indd 1 3/20/17 12:57 PM Features 24 LINGUA FRANCA What if you took a language class and actually learned to speak? Plus: What’s SPRING 2017 a LCTL? By Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93 VOLUME 109, NUMBER 3 30 FREE VERSE Mitsuye Yamada, AM’53, transformed her family’s internment experience into poetry. By Susie Allen, AB’09

38 INFINITE POSSIBILITIES How Ken Ono, AB’89, found life in and outside of math. Plus: A partition function breakthrough. By Helen Gregg, AB’09

46 BODIES OF WORK Photographer Lewis Hine, EX 1904, captured the changing face of American labor. By Susie Allen, AB’09

52 ALL AMERICAN Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), PhB’23, AM’24, PhD’28, was a US historian for the people. By Lydialyle Gibson

58 IN HARMONY How Lucy Kaplansky, LAB’78, made a career of folk music. By Susie Allen, AB’09

Departments 3 EDITOR’S NOTES Transport yourself: Revisiting days gone by in the pages of the Magazine. By Laura Demanski, AM’94

4 LETTERS Readers share their experiences with the Small School Talent Search, encourage mountain climbing, debate free expression, and more.

11 UCHICAGO JOURNAL Ant researcher and enthusiast Benjamin Blanchard; a criminal justice quant takes on mass incarceration; Selwyn O. Rogers Jr.’s plans for adult trauma care; celebrating American writers; Chicago Booth’s Raghuram Rajan returns; and more.

22 COURSE WORK Cinema scholar Jacqueline Stewart, AM’93, PhD’99, explores Chicago’s Mitsuye Yamada’s changing filmgoing scene.By Susie Allen, AB’09 (AM’53) poetry gives 61 PEER REVIEW voice to the sorrow In the alumni essay, Ed Navakas, AB’68, PhD’72, remembers love in the time and rage of Japanese of finals. Plus: Alumni News, Deaths, and Classifieds. internment. See “Free Verse,” page 30. 88 LITE OF THE MIND Illustration by Yuko Maroon multiples: What do you call a group of ... ? Shimizu. By Joy Olivia Miller and Laura Demanski, AM’94

See the print issue of the University of Chicago Magazine, web-exclusive content, and links to our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts at mag.uchicago.edu.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 1 Up, up, and away! On April 24 NASA launched a massive superpressure balloon intended to fly for 100 days at altitudes up to 110,000 feet. The football-stadium-sized behemoth is carrying a telescope designed to detect ultrahigh energy cosmic particles as they enter Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists from UChicago and 76 other institutions worldwide worked together on the telescope, which features an infrared camera built by Leo Allen, AB’17, and Mikhail Rezazadeh, Class of 2017. Angela V. Olinto (left), the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics, is the project’s principal investigator. “The origin of these particles is a great mystery,” Olinto says. “Do they come from massive black holes at the center of galaxies? Tiny, fast-spinning stars? Or somewhere else?” photography by joel wintermantle (top); photo courtesy nasa/bill rodman nasa/bill courtesy photo (top); wintermantle joel by photography EDITORˆS NOTES

Transport yourself Volume 109, Number 3, Spring 2017 BY LAURA DEMANSKI, AM’94

editor Laura Demanski, AM’94 associate editor Susie Allen, AB’09 art director Guido Mendez alumni news editor Helen Gregg, AB’09 senior copy editor Rhonda L. Smith graphic designer Laura Lorenz lite of the mind & interactive content editor Joy Olivia Miller contributing editors John Easton, AM’77; Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93; Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04; Amy Braverman his spring I’ve been going are owed to the Library’s Special Col- Puma; Mary Ruth Yoe to the 1970s in my mind. lections Research Center for valiantly Editorial Office The University of Chicago Edward Levi, LAB’28, digitizing the Magazine archives, along Magazine, 5235 South Harper Court, Suite PhB’32, JD’35, is president with Cap and Gown and the University 500, Chicago, IL 60615. telephone of the University. The Col- Record. All are fully searchable. (As 773.702.2163; fax 773.702.8836; lege has refreshed its cur- always, you can find and search later email [email protected]. The Magazine is sent to all University of riculum. Joseph O’Gara’s volumes at mag.uchicago.edu.) Chicago alumni. The University of Chicago bookstore has taken over the Browsing the Watergate years, I’ve Alumni Association has its offices at space where Woodworth’s been struck by content both curious and 5235 South Harper Court, 7th Floor, Chicago, Books used to do business sublime. The Summer/74 Class News IL 60615. telephone 773.702.2150; fax 773.702.2166. address changes (today it’s a wine shop). And treated readers to side-by-side photos 800.955.0065 or [email protected]. the Watergate hearings are fresh in ev- of alumnus Harry Sholl, EX’41, and web mag.uchicago.edu Teryone’s minds. his look-alike Henry Kissinger. Earlier Law professor Philip Kurland is that year, Norman Maclean, PhD’40, The University of Chicago Magazine (ISSN-0041-9508) is published quarterly about to teach a fall course, Consti- articulated the art of teaching as his (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer) by the tutional Aspects of Watergate. And Presbyterian minister father might have University of Chicago in cooperation “at Jimmy’s, the venerable 55th Street conceived it—as a craft of “conveying with the Alumni Association, 5235 South Harper Court, 7th Floor, Chicago, IL spa,” the September/October 1973 the delight that comes from an act of the 60615. Published continuously since 1907. University of Chicago Magazine re - spirit … without ever giving anyone the Periodicals postage paid at Chicago and ported, “the hearings were sometimes notion that the delight comes easy.” additional mailing offices.postmaster offered on radio while the audio was That hard truth was useful to bear Send address changes to The University of Chicago Magazine, Alumni Records, 5235 turned off for the telecast of the day’s in mind as I absorbed the results of a South Harper Court, Chicago, IL 60615. baseball game, giving an eerie effect.” reader postcard survey the Magazine © 2017 University of Chicago. Newly available online, the Maga- conducted in 1973. A thousand post- zine’s back issues from 1908 to August cards came back. “There were such Ivy League Magazine Network web ivymags.com 1995 are rife with gemlike details like comments,” the editors wrote, “as Heather Wedlake, Director of Operations these. On the other end of the spectrum ‘keeps me informed,’ ‘increases my af- email [email protected] are big-thinking essays by UChicago- finity with the University,’ and ‘makes telephone 617.319.0995 ans like Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar me think’—but also ‘sloppy editing,’ and Katharine Graham, AB’38. Not to ‘looks like Ford Motor Company an- mention news of the classes, campus nual report,’ and ‘fed up with your life, and a nine-decade retrospective revolutionary baloney.’” of print advertising. (An ad in the first We hope your feelings about the archived issue promoted a Chicago Magazine are more in keeping with magic store: “Remember, conjuring is the former remarks than the latter. campaign.uchicago.edu the fashionable pastime of the highest If they are, please help us continue to class of society.”) deliver both the sweeping ideas and The University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual I’ve always been drawn to the bound the sparkling details of UChicago life orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic volumes of back issues in our offices to your mailbox long into the future. origin, age, status as an individual with a like a graduate student to a venerable Make your gift at mag.uchicago.edu disability, protected veteran status, genetic 55th Street spa. Now, at mag.uchicago /give or by calling 888.824.4224 and information, or other protected classes under the law. For additional information, please see .edu/libarchive, you can also turn back declaring the Magazine as your area of photography by laura demanski, am’94 equalopportunity.uchicago.edu. time by turning back the pages. Thanks support. Thank you. ◆

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 3 nals the next week), put me into a cab to O’Hare with a friend to make sure I LETTERS got onto the flight, then contacted my professors. The University bought my ticket home (my first-ever flight) and sent a spray of flowers to the funeral. Bright minds, big city Margaret Perry sent a certified letter I was from a small town, working class, a weaver in cotton mills while still in to my mother of both condolence and high school, got some Korea military time in first. Then I got to UChicago on my assurance that the University would own, met Lawrence Kimpton once, and found many of the same difficulties at the be there for me and her, and the stu- same time as the Small School Talent dents at New Dorms (I had by then Given the chance more Search students in “No Small Talent” established a circle of friends and (Winter/17). But for all its warts as a changed roommates and felt more at would flourish even program, it became a life-changing set home there) took up a collection to as- with little additional of events for many, including me. sure I could afford a train trip back in These stories resonate. And the dif- time for finals. assistance. ficulties of always running into worlds Although it may sound like some- never before experienced in those thing from a hackneyed movie script, small towns is both a great challenge and a growth opportunity. My guess: there my mother put me on the train and told is GRIT out there, everywhere really, and talent galore, and, given the chance, me she had worried about me in the big more would flourish even with little additional assistance. city but would worry no more. I am forever amazed at the wonders still out there to explore. Those years were pivotal and the Monty Brown, AB’59, MBA’60 most formative of my life. I studied un- kansas city, missouri der too many great professors to list, from James Miller, AM’47, PhD’49, to Hans Morgenthau. I gained a circle of friends who introduced me pretty Grass roots talent write an English sentence.” I barely much to all Chicago had to offer, from I very much appreciate Tom Heber- scraped though my math requirement student-rush tickets at the Chicago lein’s (AB’67) “No Small Talent” with only high school algebra and Symphony Orchestra to ball games at about the Small School Talent Search. plane geometry to my credit. I had Wrigley Field. I was recruited to that program an incompatible roommate, the only But most exciting of all was that I through an interview with Margaret person in all my years at Chicago to learned to learn. Perry in Billings, Montana. I was a se- scoff at my origins. I returned from I moved to Reno, Nevada, in 1969 nior at Custer County High School in winter break fully suicidal and ready and began a 33-year career teaching Miles City, Montana. My father was to turn tail. A phone call to a wonder- English, a 20-year career as the Reno- a barber, my mother a bookkeeper. I ful counselor, Wilma Ebbitt, changed Tahoe entertainment critic for Variety learned of my acceptance and schol- that. She understood where I was bet- and Daily Variety, and a 40-year-and- library chicago of university apf7-04073, archive, photographic uchicago arship in April 1963 (the local paper ter than anyone and, with complete going career as an entertainment writ- gave it quite a write-up, calling it the sympathy and a little psychology, con- er for the Sacramento Bee. “Small Talent Search,” which was vinced me to try another quarter. She Mel Shields, AB’67, MAT’69 not entirely inaccurate since I was ill was there with me all the way from reno, nevada prepared for the academic demands I then until the end of my first year. was to face). That May my father died and Mrs. “No Small Talent” enraptured me. That first quarter was agonizing. Ebbitt came to my math class to tell I grew up on my family’s six-gener- My composition instructor wrote on me, took me to the dorm where she ation farm in Iowa, 10 miles south of a my initial paper, “The first thing you had arranged to have my bag packed small 2,000-person community. Even need to do, Mr. Shields, is learn to (inserting the right textbooks for fi- though I graduated nearly 50 years after the Grass Roots Talent Search (GRTS) kids in the article, their sen - timents and experiences still resonate. BLAST FROM THE PAST It is apparent that UChicago has I read with great sadness that Sleepout made great strides in the effort to ac - was being canceled. By bringing back commodate students of varying back- Sleepout, the administration could add to grounds—including regular tutors the social life at the University and reward in Stuart, the UChicago Careers In those students who are willing to sacrifice programs, and frequent adviser check- a night of studying to get the professors ins—yet I still found myself out of my and classes of their choice. depth my first few quarters. I was used —Steven L. Goldstein, AB’90 to a life where everyone knew every-

Aug/93 one, there was one predominant polit- uchicago photographic archive, apf1-06776, university of chicago library

4 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Margaret Perry, in plaid coat, speaks to students ca. 1953–55. To her left is Harold Levy, AB’56, AB’58, JD’59, AM’63, PhD’73; opposite Perry is Peter Vandervoort, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60, now professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago. The group to the left includes Margaret Brown, faced by Norman Cook, EX’57, with Richard Prairie, AB’56, SB’57, PhD’61, on the right. Thanks to James W. Vice, EX’52, AM’54, for the identifications.

ical ideology, and doors were always came less religious. I think they prob- stated that the practice pianos were uchicago photographic archive, apf7-04073, university of chicago library chicago of university apf7-04073, archive, photographic uchicago left unlocked. Moving to campus was ably regretted that I went, although I reserved for music majors. I checked a big wake-up call, and while it was loved it.” Seems like not that much has the sign-up sheets, went to the office, tough and often solitary at the begin- changed after all! and offered to wait until all music ma- ning, I wouldn’t change my decision Thanks to Tom Heberlein for the jors had signed up. My suggestion was to attend the University for the world. fantastic read. Easily my favorite dismissed out of hand, and the person My UChicago experience is price- piece of journalism I’ve come across who was willing to teach could do less to me, full of ideas and thought in the Magazine. nothing. The other pianos I found on processes and friendships I would Lauren M. Riensche, AB’15 campus were in public rooms. likely have never acquired had I re- milwaukee, wisconsin The second anecdote took place mained in my one-mile-by-one-mile at one of those faculty-student meet- town or gone to a college nearby. I Thank you for a fine article. Even ings held in Burton-Judson. A good am confident I can successfully apply though I was not part of the Small friend of mine has a stutter. When he rigorous inquiry and a strong sense of School Talent Search, I would like to introduced himself to a member of the curiosity to my family’s farming busi- share two anecdotes. As the only stu- English department, she said, “It’s al- ness when I return to carry it on to the dent from North Carolina in the four ways nice to meet someone who can’t seventh generation. years I attended, and the only one pronounce his own name.” That line The closing quote, from GRTS stu- who had attended a small boys’ board- might be appropriate in a British sat- dent Loren Nelson, AB’67, SM’68, ing school in Virginia, it is clear I was ire of academic life, but it was hardly PhD’79, prompted a sense of personal admitted for diversity’s sake. conducive to warm faculty-student mutuality and a good laugh: “I think I entered the University of Chi- relationships. The unpleasantness I that this talent search was harder on cago in 1959 and arranged piano experienced at Chicago involved the my folks than it was on me. … I went lessons with someone who taught faculty, not the students. far away and I became corrupted. music students on a part-time basis. Jeffrey T. Gross, AB’63

uchicago photographic archive, apf1-06776,I university of chicagomet library communists in school … I be- A sign posted in the music building memphis, tennessee

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 5 some of them feared pressure to dumb I learned that I was a GRTS student. LETTERS things down; others may have felt an While the program did not recruit me, assault on their own identities. I suspect they were behind the letter With time, my obsession to assimi- I received from College dean Charles late into the cultural milieu abated, Oxnard after I applied, which ad - Thanks to Tom Heberlein for his story. and positive thoughts began to over- dressed the interests I expressed in my I came to the U of C under that endeav- take my negative ones. application essay. And Perry helped or in 1962 from a high school class of 21 I hope that Tom will continue to me get a part-time job working in the in an ingrown German American town research and document this unique admissions office. Adapting to the three and a half hours west of Chicago. experiment. academic rigor was daunting but man- We spoke a peculiar kind of English Jeff Ruprecht, AB’67 (Class of 1966) ageable: life of the mind, meet West called “Dutchy” by outsiders. My first twin falls, idaho Texas Bible Belt work ethic. quarter at the U of C was very hard. My I am forever grateful to the Univer- roommate informed me that it wasn’t The article “No Small Talent” sity for the opportunity to attend and cool to wear white socks with black brought back memories of this pro- scholarships to make it possible. shoes, so I discarded my white socks gram, which I knew as GRTS. As a D. M. Henry, AB’76 (Class of 1977), and began an accent reduction attempt. high school student in 1972, I attended MD’80 After fall quarter grades came out, I a National Science Foundation–spon- schererville, indiana was convinced that I was in an environ- sored program at the University of ment of tough love in its purest expres- Texas, and my mentor encouraged me I much enjoyed Tom Heberlein’s ar- sion. We were assured that a C at the to look seriously at schools I had only ticle. I entered the College from Wa- University of Chicago was equivalent dreamed about. This was a radical and bash, Indiana, in autumn 1951 and to a B or even an A at a state university. empowering suggestion to a farm boy remained at the University until 1975. Still, rural draft boards were notorious for whom UT was considered radical. During those 24 years, I was a general for confusing the U of C with the Uni- While my mentor pushed the Ivy adviser and later dean of freshmen and versity of Illinois at Chicago, so a low League, the U of C appealed to me director of men’s housing. I served on GPA wasn’t good for one’s draft status. because of both a stellar reputation the College Committee on Admis- We were encouraged to address in research (Robert Millikan, En - sions from 1956 until 1971. our teachers as Mr. or Mrs. instead of rico Fermi, George Beadle, and oth- Tom correctly reports that I claim Doctor. I found some of them aloof, ers) and a more democratic spirit sans credit for suggesting the “small school even unfriendly, in spite of that. I legacy students. But it was only after talent search.” What I suggested to wonder to what extent the College arriving and receiving an invitation to Margaret Perry was a straight-out re- faculty bought into the SSTS. Surely a reception from Margaret Perry that cruiting device. Margaret became so uchicago photographic archive, apf5-03333, university of chicago library chicago of university apf5-03333, archive, photographic uchicago

Did you play for the 1968 football team? See Charles Nelson’s letter opposite (“Huddle Up”).

6 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 The less time we spend help players in their lives” (“Game Changer,” Winter/17). What leaves hiking real mountains, me a bit disappointed (not so much in and the more time spent the creators as the customers) is that so much time and energy is given over to focused on screens with video games. A HAUNTING Hunicke receives accolades for the digitized mountains, the creativity of the game she codevel- CHRONICLE OF more alienated from oped: “Journey’s unusual system of WHAT ENDURES collaboration: throughout the game, the natural world we players spontaneously encounter one WHEN THE become. another and can travel toward the WORLD WE KNOW mountain together, communicating only through wordless song.” Hunicke IS SWEPT AWAY was inspired to create this game after identified with the program that it is trekking in Bhutan. not surprising she misremembered a Instead of encouraging people to couple of years later. In autumn 1960, spend more time locked onto a device, the University prepared a press re- I wish people with Hunicke’s talents lease describing the program, featuring would promote actual outdoor expe- LaVonne Johnecheck from Rice Lake riences. Hunicke’s mountaintop ex- High School in Wisconsin, and quot- perience in Bhutan was so moving it ing me for the Admissions Office and inspired her to change her life. As she Mary Alice Newman, AM’49, PhD’54, explained, “I realized that I had been for the College advisers. No Margaret climbing the wrong mountain.” Perry. The press release was picked up The less time we spend hiking real by a number of newspapers, and it and mountains, and the more time spent some clippings are in the archives. focused on screens with digitized Tom discussed the withdrawal mountains, the more alienated from rate. This was a very sensitive topic the natural world we become. Hu- among administrators in the 1950s nicke’s market would be better served and 1960s. I took some heat because to put down their devices and get out- I sometimes thought taking time off side. On the treks I lead in Nepal there or transferring made sense. I thought is “a system of collaboration,” there the registrar’s figures underreported are always “spontaneous encounters,” “Gorgeously graduation by failing to keep track of and we “travel toward the mountain written . . . as deep individuals who took up to nine years together.” Our songs are not, howev- uchicago photographic archive, apf5-03333, university of chicago library chicago of university apf5-03333, archive, photographic uchicago to graduate or who changed names er, wordless, and our scarves are for and necessary (mostly through marriage). My com- warmth, not magic. and haunting as putations showed a graduation rate of Jeff Rasley, AB’75 67.3 percent for the Class of 1966 and indianapolis grief itself.” 73.8 percent for the Class of 1967 in - ——ELIZABETH LESSER, cluding the GRTS students. Write, memory James W. Vice, EX’52, AM’54 In response to the letter from Jim author of Broken Open wabash, indiana Vice, EX’52, AM’54, titled “Eat, Memory” (Letters, Winter/17): Sev- Huddle up eral scenes in my very long novel, now AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE Were you on the 1968 UChicago under consideration by a New York BOOKS ARE SOLD football team, the first after football publisher, are set at Station JBD, Jim- was reinstated as a varsity sport? A my’s, Morton’s on South Shore Drive, player reunion is being planned for Tropical Hut, and Steinway Drugs on DISASTERFALLS.COM Homecoming weekend; call me at 57th Street (maybe 55th?). For the re- 815.382.2210 for more information. cord, if it’s actually published, the title Charles Nelson, AB’73 is “Jesters.” palatine, illinois Roland Schneider, LAB’43, AB’48 CROWN santa monica, california A different game Robin Hunicke, AB’95, deserves con- Talking about free speech gratulations for her success in the vid- The University of Chicago has gar- eo game industry and encouragement nered great respect for its consistent in her efforts to develop games “that public advocacy of speech and inqui-

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 7 the area of political economy where so Good neighbors LETTERS much campus controversy resides? This year we are celebrating the 40th That may be relevant, because anniversary of the Neighborhood President Trump’s recent immigra- Schools Program at UChicago (NSP) tion order is an example of an enor- with a series of events that culminates ry freedoms, when other educational mous campus contention that the at Alumni Weekend 2017. The pro- institutions may have difficulty doing University must accept some effective gram, founded by Duel Richardson, so. It also has attracted admiration for responsibility for: despite objections AB’67, in the Office of Community its “tough love” position regarding Mr. Zimmer recently penned to the Affairs (precursor to today’s Office so-called safe spaces and trigger warn- White House concerning that order, of Civic Engagement), has been serv- ings, by advising students that such the University has generally avoided ing local schools by connecting Uni- concepts are inconsistent with the challenging its deeper causality— versity students to volunteer or work University’s general pedagogic phi- the global war on terror—with the opportunities as tutors, classrooms losophy of intellectual confrontation. same kind of probity that it encour- assistants, tech support, etc., since From President Zimmer’s com- ages among students. The University 1976. This year more than 400 UChi- mentary (“A Crucible for Confront- hosts several educational programs, cago students will partner with local ing Ideas,” On the Agenda, Fall/16), including the Institute of Politics and schools for long-term substantive ex- that philosophy seems fundamental the Chicago Project on Security and periences working with young people to the aspirations and expectations Terrorism, that accept, ipso facto, the in 50 schools and community centers. for the student body. For example, premises of that war. As part of the celebration, we would Mr. Zimmer asks, “What is the value The intellectual culture of the Uni- like to acknowledge and learn from of a university education without en- versity of Chicago—skepticism and the alumni who have participated in countering, reflecting on, and debating investigation—might apply equally, the program over the years! We’re ideas that differ from the ones that stu- and with equal responsibility, to all its collecting and posting reflections dents brought with them to college?” members, if that “crucible” is going to and feedback online, but we could use Indeed. But what about ideas, beliefs, form its highest results. your help identifying alumni from the or assumptions that faculty and admin- Matt Andersson, MBA’96 era before electronic records. If you istration bring with them, especially in oak brook, illinois are (or know) an alum who participat-

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8 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 ed in NSP in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s, let me know at [email protected]. Shaz Rasul, AB’97, SM’08 Director, NSP chicago

For more on NSP see William Rainey Harper’s Index, page 13.—Ed. Debating climate change uchicago SHORT LIST I am all for intellectual debate based on facts. But that debate needs to provide appropriate disclosures. Ken Young, SM’67, PhD’73, states that “Rich- 5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ard Lindzen is a good example of a well-known and respected special- ist in atmospheric dynamics who has 1. What it is questioned the underlying science” Short List is a biweekly e-newsletter, a one-stop shop (Letters, Winter/17). Young fails to of must-reads for alumni, parents, families, and friends. disclose (as one must in all scientific discussions) important conflicts of in- terest for Lindzen. In a 2007 column 2. People, places, and things in Newsweek, Lindzen’s biography claimed his “research has always been It gets you in the know about timely UChicago news and newsmakers. funded exclusively by the US govern- ment. He receives no funding from any energy companies.” In fact, Lindzen received funding 3. Ear to the ground from Peabody Coal for his research. Whether you’re on the job hunt or just curious, Short This funding only came to light in List culls together intriguing career opportunities and Peabody’s bankruptcy filing. His trip advice for your perusal. to testify before a Senate committee in 1991 was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he gave, “Global Warm- 4. Near or far ing: The Origin and Nature of Alleged It gives highlights of upcoming UChicago events, on Scientific Consensus” was underwrit- campus and around the globe. ten by OPEC. So it seems that Lin- dzen’s “findings” are at the very least tainted by his lack of transparency in 5. Lite of the mind research funding. I’m guessing this pseudoscientific Trivia, campus history, photos, videos, and more— letter based on research conducted Short List provides your UChicago moment of zen. with undisclosed conflicts isn’t what President Zimmer had in mind. Victor S. Sloan, AB’80 flemington, new jersey ARE YOU ON OUR Reviving trauma care The news of Selwyn O. Rogers Jr. SHORT LIST? coming to the University of Chicago to lead the development of a level 1 Visit alumni.uchicago.edu/signup adult trauma center (“For the Re - cord,” Winter/17) has brought joy and to sign up or read past issues. happy memories to my life. The city of Chicago has been in- strumental in developing designated trauma care units in US hospitals. When I was in training, I spent time at Cook County Hospital. The chief of general surgery was Robert Freeark, EX’45, and it occurred to him to put all

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 9 LETTERS SOCIAL UCHICAGO

William Rhee @wallysmithjr • Apr 10 something I really appreciate are the awesome people the trauma victims in a special room. who have graduated from this school. Tyehimba Jess When he was asked what the room was AB’91 http://thecore.uchicago.edu/Winter2015 called, he called it a “trauma unit.” It /departments/poem.shtml was one of the first in the United States and certainly the first in Chicago. UChi Phoenix Society @UChiPhoenix • Apr 7 Later Peter Geis, who trained at Get the facts about our furry friend Modo in this unique the University of Chicago, was also interview. #FridayFact http://mag.uchicago.edu concerned about trauma victims and /university-news/modo-rockefeller-chapels-cat-tells-all helped develop a system in the city of Chicago in which trauma victims were UChicago Humanities @UChicagoHum • Apr 5 taken by ambulance to the nearest “I came to a strange and mysterious phrase: ‘Peligro. trauma unit, bypassing small hospitals El Tiburón.’”—Professor Frederick de Armas (RLL) that were not trained properly to take http://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humanities/danger-shark care of trauma patients. The University of Chicago was in- Andrea Nakayama @AndreaNakayama • Mar 30 volved in the trauma system, and it “A happy #microbiome might actually be a real brought a lot of cases to us, but it was thing.”—@gilbertjacka http://mag.uchicago.edu/science not of any benefit financially to the -medicine/microbial-me University. Because of my trauma experience Carrie Golus @carriegolus • Mar 23 and the fact that I am in general sur- “The Kimptons were overcome with gratitude...they gery, several years ago in my rural discovered the students had stolen it from The Tropical practice I was able to save a patient Hut.” http://mag.uchicago.edu/university-news/peek who was shot accidentally with a -inside-presidents-house-1961 shotgun and came to our emergency room in shock. Trauma victims are UChicago Research @UChiResearch • Mar 16 sad cases, but luckily we can take care “I would recommend not picking the team that travels of them many times quite successfully. across the most time zones.” http://mag.uchicago.edu The new level 1 adult trauma center /university-news/how-fill-out-march-madness-bracket at the University of Chicago is indeed a wonderful idea. ‏ @astute_a • Mar 2 Fernando Ugarte, MD’65 Remarkable story: physician-poet and #UChicago marysville, kansas alum @FrederickFoote http://mag.uchicago.edu /law-policy-society/safe-harbor To read more about Selwyn O. Rogers Jr., the founding director of UChicago’s Social UChicago is a sampling of social media mentions of recent stories in level 1 adult trauma center, see “Commu- the print and online editions of the Magazine and other University of Chicago nity Caregiver,” page 13.—Ed. publications. To join the Twitter conversation, follow us @UChicagoMag.

Carbon footprint It was appropriate for the American diffusion column wedged into the Historic Chemical Landmark was placed Chemical Society to mark one of the modest space in the stairwell that ran in Kent Hall for greater visibility. We re- achievements of the chemistry depart- from the basement to the second floor. gret the error.—Ed. ment (For the Record, Fall/16). The All of the labs on Kent’s second floor article attributes Willard Libby’s were largely taken up by undergradu- The University of Chicago Magazine carbon-14 work to Kent Hall. My rec- ate qual and quant chemistry courses, welcomes letters about its contents or about ollection is quite clear that Libby’s and the attic was largely an interesting the life of the University. Letters for pub- laboratories were in Jones, one on the storage/archive place. There are oth- lication must be signed and may be edited second floor opposite Hermann Irving ers who might recall his labs also. for space, clarity, and civility. To provide Schlesinger’s (SB 1903, PhD 1905) lab Martin J. Steindler, LAB’44, PhB’47, a range of views and voices, we encour- where I worked (his main counters SB’48, SM’49, PhD’52 age letter writers to limit themselves to were there) and two in the basement, downers grove, illinois 300 words or fewer. Write: Editor, The where Andy Suttle, PhD’52, was his University of Chicago Magazine , graduate student. The writer is correct that Libby’s lab was 5235 South Harper Court, Suite 500, The only activity in Kent that I re- on the second floor of Jones. The plaque Chicago, IL 60615. Or email: uchicago call was the two-plus story thermal commemorating his work as a National [email protected].

10 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 SPRING 2017 Harper’s Index, 13 ...... Citations, 17 ...... Original Source, 19 ...... For the Record, 20

Growing up, Benjamin Blanchard’s parents got him a book on insects. It was “off to the races from there,” he says.

BIOLOGY tion: ‘What is your favorite thing love of ants with a wider audience. On about ants?’” Twitter he bantered with Carmichael Carmichael posted a screenshot of and others about his insect research— the message on Twitter. “If i don’t get and his hope that other public figures Ant hero back to your email for a few days,” she he’d written to would respond. wrote, “it’s [because] i’m still figur‑ In person Blanchard is as earnest Graduate student Benjamin ing out how to respond to this one.” and knowledgeable about ants as his Blanchard’s enthusiasm about Her tweet went (modestly) viral—as email would suggest. He provides a ants fuels his scientific research. of this writing, it had been retweeted rapid-fire overview of some of the by nearly a thousand people, and liked most interesting ant species: the trap In December journalist and Jeze- more than 4,300 times. jaw ant has “these crazy, really, really bel editor in chief Emma Carmichael Months later Blanchard, a student superpowered jaws—that’s actually scanned her in‑box and discovered in the Committee on Evolutionary Bi‑ the fastest self-directed motion of any the message she would later dub her ology, remains both bemused by and known animal.” His adviser, lecturer “favorite email of 2016.” slightly incredulous at the online re‑ Corrie Moreau, studies the turtle ant, The missive from UChicago gradu‑ sponse Carmichael’s tweet provoked. which has an odd circular head that ate student Benjamin Blanchard ex‑ (He’s also careful not to overstate the can be used to block the entrance to plained that he was “trying to gather scale of the attention. “I don’t know its nest. In human terms, “it’d be like statements on ants from influential if I would go as far to say it was fully if our heads were rectangular and we thinkers of our time. So, could you viral,” he says.) Mostly he’s happy the sat all day with our heads in the door,”

photography by jean lachat please provide an answer to this ques‑ email allowed him to talk about his Blanchard says.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 11 Blanchard has a particular soft spot for the “truly amazing” genus he stud‑ ies, the Polyrhachis (“many-spined”) ants. The 700 species in the group have different kinds and numbers of defensive spines, which, up close, look a little like rose thorns protruding from the thorax. Blanchard wants to understand why such a diverse range of spines evolved and how these spines influence the species’ relationships to their habitats and to other ants. He’s also working to establish an updated phylogeny—an evolutionary tree of life—for the spiny ant group. In the first chapter of his disserta‑ tion, which was recently published in the journal Evolution, Blanchard looked at the development of ant de‑ fense mechanisms. He hypothesized that certain defensive traits would exhibit what’s called an evolutionary trade-off—as Blanchard defines it, “a negative correlation across species between different traits that serve similar functions.” And indeed, using statistical analysis, he found that ant species appear to make a choice, so to speak, between developing a chemi‑ cal sting and other defensive traits, such as spines, large eyes, and large Part of Blanchard’s research involves developing a new tree of life for the 700 colony size. species in the spiny ant genus, including Polyrhachis armata, shown here. The paper also showed that the evolutionary decision to forgo a sting allows for the development of many an evolutionary trajectory toward Those similarities, Blanchard other types of defensive traits, lead‑ longer spines because smaller ones thinks, may explain why humans have ing to an explosion of new ant species. aren’t very useful for defense at all. been studying and writing about ants In evolutionary biology, the question In addition to exposing ants to pred‑ so consistently and for so long. Along‑ of how much evolutionary trade-offs ators, Blanchard’s research involves side his scientific research, he’s been contribute to species diversity is an putting different spiny ant species compiling a database of ant quotes open one, and Blanchard hopes his together with a shared food resource and references that he hopes someday work will inform the conversation. and seeing which colony withstands to turn into a book; the oldest entry is (Many other factors might also con‑ the ecological pressure. “Hopefully from 2500 BC. tribute, such as decreases in predation it’s a somewhat realistic test of what And he’s continued to gather more and the development of very special‑ they do in nature,” he explains. material from the email solicitation he ized ecological niches.) Blanchard traces his interest in ants sent to Carmichael and around 50 oth‑ This summer Blanchard will return to an insect book his parents bought ers. (Carmichael did write back, not‑ to his field site in southern China, for him when he ing that “ants work which is home to a large number of was a child. He was ANTS WORK THEIR BUTTS their butts off at all spiny ant species. He’ll be looking at struck, then as now, times for the greater how different lengths of spines and by the similarities OFF AT ALL TIMES FOR good of their spe ‑

numbers of spines affect ants’ ability between ants and THE GREATER GOOD OF cies.”) Psychologist lachat jean by photography to survive, both against predators and humans. The way THEIR SPECIES. Steven Pinker said in competition with other ant spe ‑ ants tend minute his favorite thing cies. There’s already some evidence sap-sucking insects called aphids is, about ants was their altruism. Writer that longer hooklike spines get caught he says, “indistinguishable” from how Natasha Vargas-Cooper replied at uncomfortably in the mouths of large humans herd cows. And like ours, their length explaining that ants are in a predators such as frogs; shorter spines social behavior runs the gamut from he‑ constant state of revolution. Politician may be more effective against smaller roic self-sacrifice to warfare. “It’s not Dennis Kucinich sent a three-word re‑ predators, like spiders, or allow for just a layperson thing” to see ourselves sponse: “They are organized.” greater agility. It’s also possible there’s in ants. —Susie Allen, AB’09

12 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 at me very resolved,” he remembers, HEALTH CARE and calmly said that she wanted the girl to see her father. A young dad him‑ WILLIAM self, with his own kids in mind, Rog‑ RAINEY HARPER’S Community ers suggested that might not be a good idea. But the mother was insistent; the INDEX patient had just gotten out of prison caregiver and hadn’t yet seen his daughter. “I HEY, TEACH think it’s important,” she told Rogers. Years since the launch of The Magazine sits down with the Rogers acceded, telling the little girl leader of the University’s new the Neighborhood Schools what to expect before bringing her into Program: level I adult trauma center. the room. There, in his re-creation of the scene, she “touches her dad’s hand, Selwyn O. Rogers Jr. is a habitual sto‑ and the mother looks straight forward, ryteller, and a strong one. We spoke in keeps her hand on the girl’s shoulder, his University of Chicago Medicine of‑ and there’s no crying, there’s no weep‑ 40 fice this February, shortly after he ar‑ ing, there’s just calm.” Afterward Rog‑ UChicago students working rived to direct the level 1 adult trauma ers asked the mother, “What’s your in public schools as center that will open on campus next source of strength?” She turned to him classroom aides and tutors: year—the only medical facility on Chi‑ and said, “I had to bury my other son cago’s South Side dedicated to treating with a gunshot wound to the head two life-threatening injuries from violence, years ago.” car crashes, and other accidents. He leans forward to finish the sto‑ “Tell me if I tell too many stories,” ry, voice lowered. “And I thought, no 385 he said partway through our conversa‑ mother should have to go through that Chicago Public Schools tion. But Rogers’s tales are arresting, once. ... No mother should ever have to students benefiting from and every one of them illuminates why go through that twice.’” the program annually: he’s right here, right now. It was early in his career, then, that Like the story from when he was Rogers started thinking hard about a junior faculty member at Brigham the social determinants of health—not and Women’s Hospital in Boston. A only the violence that disproportion‑ man was brought in brain-dead from a ately affects some communities, but 4,000 gunshot wound to the head. With the the disparities in income, education, patient’s mother and young daughter and health care access that heighten Preschoolers served by waiting outside the intensive care the negative impact of diseases such NSP’s literacy program: room, Rogers tried to quickly devise as diabetes and asthma in those neigh‑ how he’d tell them there was nothing borhoods. He brings a holistic view of the doctors could do for the man. community health to his new job, and As he began by asking what their a determination to confront medical 160 faith was, the man’s mother “looked problems at their root. Average number of hours UChicago students spend in schools each year: 35,000 Sites participating in NSP: 55 Miles driven by the NSP van transporting students to and from their sites:

In his work directing the new level I adult trauma center, Rogers aims to ad‑ photography by nancy wong dress the underlying causes of medical inequity. 15,000

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 13 The day we met was just 48 days— starting junior high school early mo‑ CRIMINAL JUSTICE Rogers keeps a running count in his tivated him to throw himself into his head—since his move from the Univer‑ studies. “The things that I liked the sity of Texas Medical Branch, where most were biological sciences,” he he was vice president and chief medi‑ says, and he thought of becoming a sci‑ The prison cal officer, and a little more than a year ence teacher. “That was the first step.” before UChicago’s adult trauma center When it struck him that by being a is slated to open next spring. He’d had doctor, he could both practice science reformer’s to roll up his sleeves (and order cold- and help people, Rogers pulled out a weather clothes and boots) as soon as he volume of his Encyclopaedia Britan- arrived. His office was understandably nica and looked up “medical school.” dilemma a work in progress, with a few items There were “only two medical schools A UChicago alumnus is challenging standing out: photos of his fiancée listed, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. the conventional wisdom on mass and three sons, who live in Galveston, And that’s where I applied for col‑ Texas, and Atlanta, respectively, and a lege.” When his first year at Hopkins incarceration. stack of copies of The South Side: A Por- wasn’t the fit he was hoping for, he trait of Chicago and American Segregation transferred to Harvard, where he fin‑ At the end of 2015, almost 2.2 million (St. Martin’s, 2016). He’d been reading ished college and medical school. people were incarcerated in American up on the neighborhood he’ll be serv‑ At the top of Rogers’s to-do list now prisons and jails, surpassing the popu‑ ing, and giving the book to colleagues. is hiring the team of surgeons who will lation of New Mexico. For Rogers, understanding the trau‑ provide care at UChicago Medicine as The incarceration rate catapulted ma center’s South Side setting is crucial. it adds four trauma bays and expands in the 1970s and continued to swell He believes he can’t succeed without by 188 inpatient beds to accommo‑ over the next 40 years, giving rise the community’s help and trust. In ad‑ date, among other patient groups, an to today’s prison reform movement. dition to serving as the center’s found‑ expected 2,000 trauma patients in the “Mass incarceration makes our coun‑ ing director and as chief of the newly first year of providing adult trauma try worse off, and we need to do some‑ created Section for Trauma and Acute care. He’s eager to form partnerships thing about it,” then-president Barack Care Surgery, he has a third appoint‑ with other hospitals in the city, with Obama said in 2015. ment as executive vice president for residents of the South Side, and with Many of Obama’s efforts focused community health engagement. In that colleagues across UChicago. on nonviolent drug offenders, manda‑ capacity, he oversees UChicago Medi‑ As much as he can weave a great sto‑ tory minimum sentences, and private cine’s Urban Health Initiative, which ry, Rogers prides himself on listening prisons. He’s far from alone in think‑ since 2006 has supported primary attentively and on being aware of what ing those are the best routes for pris ‑ care clinics and education programs to he doesn’t know. When we met, he on reform, says John Pfaff, AB’97, improve the well-being of South Side had already kicked off his “active lis‑ AM’02, JD’03, PhD’05. neighborhoods. Linking that work tening tour”—meeting and listening But the conventional wisdom misses with trauma care will distinguish this to stakeholders within the University the real reasons why the United States trauma center from most others. and, “more fundamentally,” hearing is the world’s biggest jailer, argues Rogers’s focus on community from South Siders. “Without engage‑ Pfaff, a Fordham University law pro ‑ health and its social determinants ment of the communities,” he says, fessor. His paradigm-challenging new will build on long experience. While “we can build eight trauma centers, … book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass an associate professor of surgery at and we will not have changed the core Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Harvard University, Rogers founded reasons for what we see every day.” Reform (Basic Books, 2017), aims to its thriving Center for Surgery and Both the present moment and the dismantle the drug‑war‑focused “stan‑ Public Health, which researches how University, he believes, provide an dard story,” as Pfaff calls it, of why our surgery can be most effective and eq‑ uncommon opportunity to make those prison population is so high. “Why I uitable across populations. During a changes. One thing that drew him to push so hard against this common nar‑ year working as a trauma surgeon at UChicago was his strong impression rative is because actually, in the end, Vanderbilt University Medical Cen‑ that it’s “a university that welcomes it leads us to embrace solutions that ter and Meharry Medical College, big, bold ideas.” And in its breadth of won’t work.” he earned a master’s in public health intellectual expertise he hopes to find Pfaff is an economist and lawyer at Vanderbilt. He has published fre‑ the needed ingredients for such break‑ who describes himself as a “prisons quently on health disparities and the throughs. He foresees working with and criminal justice quant.” He’s spent impact of race and ethnicity on surgi‑ faculty in economics, social service years diving into data from the Feder‑ cal outcomes. administration, public policy, and the al Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau Rogers grew up in the US Virgin Urban Labs’ Crime Lab and Poverty of Justice Statistics, and the National Islands, in a poor family on St. Croix. Lab, to name a few. “I can’t think of a Center on State Courts, seeking to He’s still grateful that an elementary more compelling place or compelling understand the problem and politics school teacher noticed his academic set of circumstances for us to go for of mass incarceration. talent instead of writing him off as the big solution.” The book is jammed with statistics, simply bored. Skipping a grade and —Laura Demanski, AM’94 but a few simple ones help illustrate

14 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 the size of prisons than the for-profit crimes. “For very serious violent of‑ private prisons loathed by reformers. fenders, the sentences are going to be Pfaff says his findings on pros ‑ long and probably need to be long,” ecutors are the most important in the Reddy says. book, as they get far less scrutiny than Pfaff thinks long sentences haven’t police, judges, and prison officials. In worked as a deterrent and aren’t cost ef‑ fact, he could find no data analyzing ficient. He favors shifting money from prosecutors’ choices until he stumbled prisons toward interventions proven to upon an obscure data set from the Na‑ prevent violence in the first place. For tional Center for State Courts. instance, studies show that CeaseFire, It was a eureka moment. He saw a Chicago program working to break that between 1994 and 2008, crime cycles of violence and retaliation, re‑ reports and the number of arrests fell, duced shooting rates. (The program’s yet prosecutors filed more felony cases funding was cut in 2015—right before in state courts. gun violence skyrocketed.) The probability that a felony charge Elsewhere, Pfaff sees an all-too- led to prison time stayed the same common urge in prison reform mea‑ (about one in four) under Pfaff’s sures to balance shorter sentences analysis. Simply by filing more felony for nonviolent offenses with harsh‑ charges, prosecutors brought about a 40 er punishment for violent ones, as percent increase in prison admissions. South Carolina did in a lauded 2010 Pfaff concludes that prosecutors reform bill. need charging guidelines similar to None of this is to say that Pfaff be‑ judges’ sentencing guidelines—scoring lieves ending the drug war is a bad systems that weigh elements in a case so idea. He’s for it, even if he thinks it’s a that similar offend‑ relatively small con‑ ers are treated equal‑ IN THE END, THIS COMMON tributor to the incar‑ ly. Currently they NARRATIVE LEADS US TO ceration rate. have “unfettered He takes heart, discretion” over how EMBRACE SOLUTIONS THAT too, in the recent to handle a case in WON’T WORK. bipartisan trend in which, for example, prison reform that’s a dozen different statutes might apply. coalesced around the standard story. And he’d like to see more prosecu‑ Some in the conservative industrialist tors representing only cities, rather Koch brothers’ orbit have teamed with than counties, so that richer whiter liberal groups like the American Civil suburbs have less sway over criminal Liberties Union to combat mandatory In his Twitter bio, Pfaff jokes that justice in poorer urban areas with larg‑ minimum sentences, earning a shout- “I’m not contrarian—the data is.” er minority populations. out from Obama in that 2015 speech. As for why anyone would want to cut Pfaff thinks the election of tough- time served for a violent crime, that’s on-crime Donald Trump won’t make why Pfaff thinks the standard story the notion Pfaff says people have most much difference to the prison reform falls short. wanted to debate as he’s promoted the movement. If he’s right about what’s For instance, drug crimes account book. His thinking on the question is putting people in prison, trying to for about 16 percent of state prison‑ still evolving. change legislation and executive ac‑ ers, while violent crimes account for He acknowledges lighter sentenc‑ tion at a national level won’t be as more than half. Violent crimes, Pfaff ing is a political third-rail in a coun‑ effective as reaching out to the thou ‑ argues, are the primary driver of the try like the United States. Reducing sands of prosecutors across the coun‑ swollen prison rate and a better place sentences for violent crime is “the one try and convincing them to change. to focus reform efforts. part where left, right, or center, it’s a Pfaff has plenty of ideas he’s willing “We’ve convinced people that we can very hard road … to get people to come to share with reformers of all political do so much just by targeting drugs that along with me.” stripes. He hopes his book will help they don’t feel the need to start wres‑ That’s the case for Vikrant Reddy, them unite around new, more effec‑ tling with, how do we handle violence?” a senior research fellow on criminal tive strategies to reduce the prison Pfaff writes that three things have justice reform at the Charles Koch population—though he acknowledges driven the American prison boom. Institute. Reddy calls the book “one it won’t be simple. “I understand that First, sentencing for violent crimes has of the most important contributions you don’t turn our system around on a grown harsher; second, prosecutors’ an academic has made in the crimi ‑ dime. You have to work your way into power is rarely checked; and third, pris‑ nal justice space in many years,” but this,” he says. “Ironically, drugs is the on guard unions and politicians can have he’s cautious about fundamentally gateway policy issue to reform.”

image courtesy basic books (top); photography byeven chris taggart, courtesy fordham law school stronger incentives to maximize rethinking punishments for violent —Asher Klein, AB’11

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 15 COGNITION ics. Handedness is something you do dates whose names and qualifications rather than something you are. Lefties were displayed in two columns. whose handedness was “corrected” Handedness might even influence in childhood behave consistently like voting behavior. Lefties, Casasanto Left-hand righties in his studies. revealed in a 2015 paper, were 15 Casasanto started by exploring percentage points more likely than whether handedness influences per‑ righties to vote for the candidate they man ceptions of abstract saw on the left side By studying handedness, psy- concepts, like good EVERY GOOD NEUROSCIENTIST of the ballot in a and bad. In one simulated election. chologist Daniel Casasanto hopes study, subjects were KNOWS YOU DON’T TEST Some states pre‑ to understand the relationship presented with a LEFTIES. THEY MESS UP sent opposing candi‑ between body and mind. drawing of a cartoon YOUR DATA. dates’ names in two character, viewed columns—a ballot Left-handers make great baseball from above, with an empty box on either design that may have unwittingly in‑ pitchers, but they’re generally con‑ side. They were told the character loved fluenced election outcomes for years. sidered lousy subjects for studies of pandas but hated zebras (or vice versa) These findings surprised Casasanto, the brain. “Every good neuroscientist and then asked to draw a panda in the given how strongly Americans associ‑ knows you don’t test lefties,” explains box that best represents good things, ate “right” with “good.” This mapping Daniel Casasanto, assistant profes‑ and a zebra in the box that best repre‑ is reinforced in idioms like “my right- sor in psychology. “They mess up sents bad things. He found the subject’s hand man” or “two left feet,” and in your data.” choice of the “good” side was strongly customs like raising your right hand Perhaps it’s justice. After years associated with their handedness. as you swear to tell the truth in court. of being relegated to uncomfortable The same study asked subjects to “This body-based pattern goes against right-handed desks (to say nothing of look at two columns of Fribbles, alien deeply entrenched patterns in our lan‑ scissors or spiral notebooks) lefties cartoon characters with various arm- guage and culture,” he says. exact their revenge in MRIs. Among and trunk-like appendages. Subjects The old myth that lefties are “right- righties, brain lateralization—the were asked to assign positive or nega‑ brained” and therefore creative and control of functions and behaviors tive characteristics such as attractive‑ artistic is just that—a myth, discred ‑ by particular brain hemispheres— ness or sadness to the Fribbles. Again, ited by research. But Casasanto has is fairly consistent. Among lefties, the results varied by handedness, with found that lefties’ and righties’ brains however, it’s messier and much less lefties assigning positive characteris‑ do vary in how they organize a basic predictable, complicating results. tics to the Fribbles on the left side of dimension of emotion—approach and But rather than avoiding south ‑ the page. The outcome was the same avoidance motivation. paws, Casasanto has devoted years to whether subjects responded orally or Emotions are either approach relat‑ studying them, hoping to learn how used their hands to indicate their choic‑ ed, like happiness or anger, or avoid‑ and why their brains diverge from es—and the pattern extends far beyond ance related, like fear. Generally those of right-handers. It’s part of a the realm of the fictional Fribbles. The speaking, we perform approach-relat‑ larger effort to understand the rela‑ study showed identical effects for peo‑ ed activities with our dominant hands tionship between our bodies and our ple picking among consumer products and avoidance-related activities with minds. Does experiencing the world and between hypothetical job candi‑ our nondominant hands. Casasanto in different bodies cause us to develop correspondingly different brains? Casasanto thinks so. Handedness offers especially pow‑ erful insights into the links between cognition and bodily experience. It’s “a model system where human bodies dif‑ fer in clear and measurable ways, and in consequential ways—because our hands are a point of interface between illustration by james steinberg the mind and the world,” he explains. It’s still not known why human handedness varies. While there ap‑ pears to be a strong genetic component, environment plays a role too: identical twins share the same genome but not always the same handedness. Casasanto’s research has shown that, where handedness is concerned, How you judge everything from job candidates to consumer products to pol‑ experience matters more than genet‑ iticians may be influenced by your handedness.

16 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 calls this the “sword and shield” pat‑ cause our brains to develop in predict‑ The marital disagreement—and tern: if you were a knight, you’d hold ably lopsided ways too. Casasanto’s ensuing study—yielded your sword in your dominant hand and Of course, bodies differ in many an interesting discovery: after see‑ your shield in the weaker hand. ways other than handedness, and ing a photo of a celebrity, you’re more Studies dating back as far as 1972 Casasanto thinks those dissimilari‑ likely to remember them as brown- have shown that the left frontal lobe, ties might also influence cognition, eyed if you’re brown-eyed yourself. which controls the right hand, is ac‑ just as being left- or right-handed does. “This is part of a broader tendency tivated for approach-motivated emo‑ For instance, he discovered that your to use our own body as an index of tions. But most of these studies didn’t own eye color influences your percep‑ what is likely to be true about other take lefties into account. In a 2012 tion of the eye color of others. people’s,” he explains. Mostly it’s paper, Casasanto found that approach The research stemmed from an ar‑ “a pretty good heuristic: what’s true motivation is on the right frontal lobe gument between Casasanto and his of my body is likely true of yours in in lefties. (Among the ambidextrous, wife about James Bond’s eye color in a many cases, but of course ... it only approach motivation is “smeared recent film. His blue-eyed wife insisted works on average.” across both hemispheres,” he says.) Bond’s eyes were blue, “and I,” brown- For the record, the most recent The finding bolstered Casasanto’s eyed Casasanto says, “was expressing James Bond, actor Daniel Craig, is hypothesis that the lopsided ways in skepticism about whether you could blue-eyed. And left-handed. which all of us interact with the world have a blue-eyed James Bond.” —Susie Allen, AB’09

CITATIONS

shared by all flu strains. In the that exist deep within planets, paper, published December 15 Dauphas and his colleagues in PLOS Computational Biology, found iron isotopes didn’t break Subramanian and his coauthors and rebond with elements used mathematical modeling found in the mantle or core, to study the effects of universal as the prevailing theory would vaccines at a population level. require. The paper, published According to their model, February 20 in Nature widely administered universal Communications, makes way vaccines could reduce rates for competing theories about of flu transmission more Earth’s anomalous iron. effectively than conventional vaccines and slow the evolution MAKING A MATH WHIZ of new flu strains. However, If you’re hoping to raise a Ow! Shots are no fun, but the universal flu vaccines cur‑ the team still sees utility in computer scientist or engineer, rently under development might be well worth the sting. conventional vaccines, which talk to your kids about math could be used to provide and science early and often. A extra protection to high- study coauthored by Human risk populations. Performance Lab postdoctoral HITTING CLOSE TO HOME distance matters too—when scholar Christopher S. The old adage “out of sight, a country was described as HEAVY METAL Rozek and published in the out of mind” extends even “faraway” in an experimental appeal, donors were less Why does Earth have such January 31 Proceedings of the to charitable donations, different iron composition National Academy of Sciences likely to give than when the suggests recent research from than other bodies in the solar showed that parents could same country was described Ayelet Fishbach, the Jeffrey system? In comparison to rocks boost high schoolers’ math as “nearby.” The researchers Breakenridge Keller Professor from other planetary objects, and science scores on the suggest the study could help of Behavioral Science and Earth’s rocks have more ACT by talking to them about Marketing at Chicago Booth. In charitable organizations heavy iron isotopes than light the importance of science, a study published online March improve their outreach isotopes. The prevailing theory technology, engineering, and 2 in the Journal of Personality to donors. had been that the conditions mathematics (STEM) fields. and Social Psychology, on early Earth pulled light iron For the study, parents in the Fishbach and her coauthor, FIGHTING FLU isotopes to the planet’s core, experimental group were Northwestern’s Maferima Universal flu vaccines may leaving heavy iron isotopes to provided materials designed Touré-Tillery, PhD’13, offer key advantages over accumulate in the mantle. But to help them talk about the found that physical distance conventional flu shots, the new study, whose authors relevance of math and science influences giving behavior. according to a study by include Nicolas Dauphas, with their teenagers. This Using lab experiments and UChicago graduate student Louis Block Professor in led to a 12 percentage point fundraising data from a private Rahul Subramanian. While Geophysical Sciences, and increase in the children’s math university, the researchers conventional vaccines are graduate student Justin Y. Hu, and science ACT scores, as well found that donors are more aimed at the strains of challenges that explanation. as an increase in their STEM likely to donate to causes flu currently circulating, By using a device called a course work in both high physically close to them. They universal vaccines now under diamond anvil cell, which can school and college. cpl. jackeline perez rivera/wikimediashowed commons/public domain that the perception of development target proteins recreate the high pressures —Susie Allen, AB’09

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 17 lives and influences of 100 essential US authors selected by a content com‑ mittee of literary experts. Across the way, scores more writers and works are featured in the interactive Surprise Bookshelf, which reveals unexpected literary facts—about more than just fic‑ tion and poetry. The AWM embraces “a broad idea of literature,” says Kane. “It’s journalists, it’s poetry, it might be songwriters.” And it is—Irving Berlin, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, and Tu‑ pac Shakur are among those celebrated. In other technology-powered ex‑ The newly opened American Writers Museum takes a broad view of US lit‑ hibits museumgoers can tour interac‑ erature, from Louisa May Alcott to Tupac Shakur. tive literary maps of the United States and Chicago, compare their top 10 CULTURE DC, for years, O’Hagan told Irish Amer- books to other visitors’, and shuffle ica magazine in 2012 that he became a the paragraphs of famous works to get passionate reader only after emigrating. a feel for the revision process. The museum’s founding core didn’t The digital technology and design Writ large decide on Chicago as the location right were concocted by Boston -based Five alumni helped launch the away. The nation’s capital was an early Amaze Design. The firm gets a lot of candidate and “we thought for a nano‑ potential clients with ideas for new first museum celebrating Ameri- second about being in New York,” museums, said Amaze’s Andrew can literature. Hammer says. But with its central lo‑ Anway at a winter press conference. cation, abundant tourism, and dynamic “We’re kind of jaded about it, to be When it comes to celebrating our cultural scene with strong community honest, because most of those do not writers, Americans tend to think support, Chicago “was really one of come to fruition.” But with the AWM, local. From the Emily Dickinson the few cities that checked all the box‑ “for the first time of any project we Museum in Massachusetts to Cali‑ es,” he explains. Its own rich literary ever worked on, there was no opposi‑ fornia’s National Steinbeck Center, heritage was another advantage—and tion. Everyone who heard about this sites dedicated to individual authors is celebrated in one of the museum’s project got excited about it.” are generously sprinkled across the permanent exhibits, Chicago Writers: Amid all the high-tech exhibits, the US map. But the landscape didn’t in‑ Visionaries and Troublemakers. museum makes space for old-fashioned clude a museum honoring the nation’s While deliberating over a location, reading too. A children’s literature gal‑ overarching literary legacy until this the founders and their advisers also lery sits off the entryway, with books month, when the American Writers had to figure out how best to repre‑ and comfy spots to nestle with them. Museum opened in Chicago. sent and honor American writing in Squirrels holding beloved children’s Germany, China, Ireland, and other a museum setting. “We really started classics smile down from the gallery’s countries have had such museums for from a tabula rasa,” says Hammer. Dur‑ mural, created by the Caldecott Medal– years. Even to some of those most in‑ ing early planning he got hold of the winning illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky. volved in launching the AWM, the six-volume study the Smithsonian In‑ The spacious Readers Hall can seat absence of a US writers museum came stitution undertook in preparation for a few patrons lost in a book or hold 100 as a surprise. “There were a number of opening its innovative National Muse‑ for events. For Hartfield, the AWM’s people who were like me, who were just um of African American History and best promise is in its public programs illustration courtesy american writers museum astonished” to realize it, says Hill Ham‑ Culture, and pored over it for months. that will reach out to a broad popula‑ mock, MBA’70, who cochairs the mu‑ “You had to really rethink the notion tion of Chicagoans and visitors. She seum’s board of directors. Four other of what a museum could be,” Hartfield once worked for Chicago’s now-closed UChicago alumni sit on the board: Jay adds. A former executive director for Neighborhood Writing Alliance, Hammer, AB’76, the AWM’s treasur‑ museum education at the Art Institute dedicated to “teaching neighborhood er; Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82, of Chicago, she began advising the mu‑ people who were just beginning to its vice chair; Ivan Kane, AB’78, JD’81; seum’s founders in 2011 and later joined think of themselves as writers to really and James Donnelley, MBA’62. the board. Nobody, she says, wanted the take that seriously.” She thinks the The idea for the museum came to its AWM to amount to a library. Instead of museum can do that too, especially by founder, the manufacturer Malcolm collecting and displaying objects like a working with public school teachers. E. O’Hagan, around 2009 and gained traditional museum, this one encour‑ Donnelley also sees potential for the traction as he worked a personal and ages visitors to be hands-on. museum to bolster literacy and help professional network rife with philan‑ Touch screens are the technol ‑ children at risk in Chicago. thropists and book lovers. A native of ogy that makes the museum go. In the Though not the focus, literary ar‑ Ireland who has lived in Washington, American Voices exhibit they unfold the tifacts have a place in the AWM. One

18 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 corner gallery is dedicated to displaying objects lent from the 60-plus writers’ homes and centers affiliated with the ORIGINAL SOURCE AWM. On view through October 27 is the draft of On the Road (1957) that Jack TOOLS OF THE TRADE Kerouac famously typed on a continu‑ ous 120-foot scroll. As the May 16 opening approached, the UChicagoans involved with the AWM sounded almost giddy with anticipation. Hammer, a businessman who studied for a doctorate in English and American literature, enthused about every aspect of the AWM but particularly the wide net it casts. The writers represented are “black and white, they’re women and men, they’re songwriters and speechmak‑ ers, all of whom are considered great American writers.” Kane concurs. “It’s hard to do a mu‑ seum that does justice to the breadth of American writing.” A retired real estate lawyer but still an English ma‑ jor at heart, he collects Mark Twain books and ephemera and is one of the board’s newest members. “I’ll have a lot of fun watching its reception and cheering it on, and if things need ad‑ justing, I’ll have fun being a part of that as well.” Hammock, who is chair of the board of Cook County Health and Hospi‑ After 30 years of teaching, professor the equipment awakens a deep tals System, traces aspects of both of medicine Mindy Schwartz sense of curiosity about the doctors his involvement with the AWM and acknowledges that a medical and patients who came before her. his UChicago attendance to a 1967 education has its highs and lows. Some of the knives and Robert Maynard Hutchins appear‑ Awe-inspiring moments—like amputation tools are surprisingly ance at Georgia Tech, where he was the “transformative” experience similar to what’s used today. But an undergraduate math major. The of dissecting a cadaver for the unlike contemporary instruments, talk influenced Hammock’s decision first time—are interspersed with which are designed for efficiency to come to Chicago for business school mundane lessons on treating and sterility, the 1887 kit boasts and imparted a piece of aphoristic wis‑ routine ailments. craftsmanlike touches: for instance, dom he’s carried through life. So, in search of a spoonful of the bone saw’s mother-of-pearl Hutchins, he remembers, told the sugar to make the medical training handle is scored with small notches Georgia Tech students he was proud go down, Schwartz started reading to provide a better grip. that the University of Chicago had widely on the history of medicine The Special Collections “field trip” made “more mistakes first than any and sprinkling her instruction with is one of the most hotly anticipated other university.” “That stuck with stories from the past. In 2001 she elements of Schwartz’s course. The me as a challenge,” Hammock says. decided to teach an elective course physicians in training inspect the “We have to do new things. We have for Pritzker School of Medicine surgical kit and pore over historical to dive in, we have to see where this students, Invitation to Medical anatomy atlases and old glass slides. goes.” For him and the other board History (“not ‘introduction,’” Schwartz hopes that by studying members, the American Writers Mu‑ Schwartz notes, “because it’s not medical history students will seum is a thrilling new thing. Soon even that grand”). see their experiences as part of a they’ll find out where it goes. In 2006 one of her students told continuum. She views medicine as a You can find out too: beginning Schwartz about the Library’s Special fitful endeavor, full of progress and May 16, visit the American Writ‑ Collections Research Center, where mistakes, and her students as part ers Museum at 180 North Michigan she discovered a surgical kit from of its complex lineage. “You can look Avenue, on the second floor, and at 1887. “When you take those tools to history for lessons on how to cope americanwritersmuseum.org. and you hold them, something and how to understand.” dr. thomas burrows w. surgical kit, 1887, courtesy special collections research center —Laura Demanski, AM’94 happens,” Schwartz says. Handling —Susie Allen, AB’09

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 19 FOR THE RECORD

and has held several leadership MAJOR CHANGES positions at the University, Attention, future Roths and including deputy provost for Bellows: the College will research and education and offer a new creative writing chair of the music department. major beginning next fall. The program will require students to take a mix of creative writing and literature courses and to complete a BA thesis. “The major is designed to enable students to locate their practice politically, socially, and professionally,” John URBAN LEADER John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, Wilkinson, professor and chair Luis M. Bettencourt, a leading has been appointed to a of creative writing, told the researcher in urban science and record-breaking sixth term as Chicago Maroon. complex systems, has been dean of the College. In his 25- appointed the inaugural Pritzker year tenure, Boyer has overseen OUR COMPETITION? Director of the Mansueto the opening of three new Elysa Bryen, Class of 2017; Laurie Zoloth, a leader in the Institute for Urban Innovation residence halls, the expansion Madeline de Figueiredo, Class field of religious studies with at the University of Chicago, of career development and of 2019; and Nick Posegay, effective July 1. Bettencourt, internship programs, and a particular scholarly interest in AB’16, have launched a new who comes to the University dramatic increase in financial bioethics and Jewish studies,

Arabic-language magazine joel; seth by photography marton; matt by photography institute; fe santa courtesy photo left: top from clockwise from the Santa Fe Institute, aid through the Odyssey has been appointed dean of the at UChicago. Majalla, which will also be a professor in the Scholarship Challenge. University of Chicago Divinity means “magazine,” grew out Department of Ecology and School. Her term begins July 1. of the students’ desire to put Evolution and the College. The Zoloth currently serves as the their language skills to the Mansueto Institute launched Charles McCormick Deering test. The first issue, published office news uchicago business; of school graduate stanford courtesy photo lachat; jean by photography last year with a $35 million gift Professor of Teaching in January, includes both from Joe, AB’78, MBA’80, and Excellence at Northwestern academic and personal pieces Rika, AB’91, Mansueto, and University. Zoloth succeeds (one submission described the aims to produce scholarship interim dean Richard A. author’s worst date), all written and programs that address Rosengarten, AM’88, PhD’94, by UChicago students with one urban challenges. associate professor of religion to four years of Arabic study. and literature.

TEACHERS’ HELPER A new UChicago program will offer full-tuition scholarships to Madhav Rajan, the Robert K. children of educators working Jaedicke Professor of Accounting in the Chicago Public Schools. at Stanford’s Graduate School of The scholarship applies to Business, has been named the teachers, counselors, speech next dean of the University of pathologists, and nurses, as Chicago Booth School of well as support personnel such Business. His appointment will as lunchroom workers and begin July 1. Rajan’s primary custodians. The CPS Educators research interest is the Award Scholarship joins DEANS, NEW AND RETURNING economics-based analysis of existing scholarship programs SMART CHOICE Katherine Baicker, a top scholar management accounting issues. for children of Chicago Alison Gass has been appointed in the economic analysis of He served as senior associate firefighters and Chicago and the Dana Feitler Director of the health care policy, has been dean for academic affairs at the UChicago police officers. Smart Museum of Art, effective appointed the next dean of Stanford GSB from 2010 to 2016. May 1. Gass came to UChicago the University of Chicago SETTING GOALS from Stanford, where she was Harris School of Public Policy. Anne Walters Robertson, the The University’s Board of chief curator at the Cantor Baicker is the C. Boyden Gray Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Trustees voted on March 2 to Arts Center. She has organized Professor of Health Economics Service Professor in the increase the financial target major exhibitions at the San at Harvard University. Before Department of Music and the of the University of Chicago Francisco Museum of Modern joining Harvard, she was on College, has been appointed Campaign: Inquiry and Impact Art and the Eli and Edythe the faculties of the University dean of the Division of the to $5 billion. The fundraising Broad Art Museum at Michigan of California, Los Angeles, and Humanities, effective April 1. campaign publicly launched State University, where she also Dartmouth College. Baicker Robertson, an expert in the in 2014 with a goal to raise served as curator and deputy served as a visiting assistant music of the Middle Ages, $4.5 billion. Since that time, director. Gass was featured in professor at Harris in 2003. Her has served as interim dean UChicago has raised $3.68 a 2010 New York Times article appointment as Harris’s dean since July 2016. She joined the billion, affecting virtually every highlighting “the new guard

will begin August 15. Department of Music in 1984 part of the University. of curators.”

20 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 INTERVIEW Return voyage Raghuram Rajan reflects on his In an era of widespread democracy you cannot time at the Reserve Bank of India have a system that works and coming back to academia. only for some, and not for others. The markets After three years steering monetary need political support. policy in India as the country’s top We need to further that central banker, Raghuram Rajan has debate. And UChicago returned home to the University of has always played an Chicago Booth School of Business, important role in that where he is the Katherine Dusak Mill‑ debate. We need a bet‑ er Distinguished Service Professor of ter solution, and that Finance. Rajan, who first joined Chi‑ is part of what I hope cago Booth in 1991, was governor of to think about. the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016. He served as the chief econo‑ Are there particular topics that you the rain pattering on your windshield, mist and director of research at the want to dig into? and the windshield is fogging up. And International Monetary Fund from The global financial crisis essentially you’re on a highway, so you can’t stop, 2003 to 2006. Chicago Booth recent‑ gave us research topics for the next 30 because you could cause a pileup, but ly spoke to Rajan about settling back years. If you look at what happened, you have no idea what’s in front of you. into academic life and his experience there are about 15 to 20 different sto‑ That’s sort of policy making. working as a policy maker. ries now emerging. I would argue And so you always go back. I found —Sandra Jones that one of the biggest factors was a that if I went back to first principles, large amount of liquidity in financial and thought through the problems, What are you most looking forward markets, which tends to breed com‑ and said OK, if this is what is going on, to as you return to academic life? placency. Actually [Chicago Booth here are the things that will affect the One of the difficulties of a job in the professor] Doug Diamond and I have economy. Here’s what I don’t know, “real world” is you don’t really get a paper on that now [National Bureau but here’s what I broadly know. But time to shut yourself off in a room and of Economic Research working paper, you don’t get time to really reflect. think. Now in academia, if you’re not “Pledgeability, Industry Liquidity, too careful, you get really dragged and Financing Cycles,” January 2017]. How did you first become interested into the real world and you don’t have More liquidity means more lever‑ in economics and finance? that time. But if you are careful, you age. More leverage means more finan‑ I was reasonably interested in math, can spend four days in a room, sit cial fragility. That complacency comes and a friend told me about economet‑ looking at a piece of paper and strug‑ back to hit us in down times, and then rics. I had read Isaac Asimov’s Founda‑ gling with a thought that refuses to the down times take a long time to get tion series and you’re trying to predict come out. At the end of those four out of, because we’re still rebuilding how people behave, and I thought well, days, sometimes you say, “Oh my the mechanisms that we shouldn’t have that’s a nice thing. At that time I also God, how did I miss this?”—and it let go of in the good times. This is a fer‑ started reading about John Maynard dawns on you. And that’s as close to tile area for research—the increasing Keynes and the work he had done, and I bliss as you can get. inequality, as well as the sort of lever‑ found it extraordinary. The quick take age we built up in an attempt to deal on Keynes was he took the world out of How did the three years in India in‑ with problems like inequality. depression. Now that’s not quite cor‑ fluence your research interests? rect, but certainly his ideas were very I’m interested in a number of issues What’s the difference between being influential in postwar economics— that I was interested in before I left, a scholar and being a policy maker? both in creating the Bretton Woods but of course you are influenced by the As a policy maker, you’re desperate for system [of monetary management], but real world. And what we see out there more data to guide your policy making. also in the Keynesian approach to deal‑ is a strengthening of populist move‑ You would love to have a ton of research ing with business cycles. It seemed to ments around the world. You see some telling you, “this works, that doesn’t, me that here was a person who through concerns about the market. Is the free thus and such is how you should go.” the strength of his ideas is changing the market really what we want to have But, in practice, you don’t have it. So way we think. That’s extraordinary,

chicago booth chicago as a society? you’re going 60 miles per hour with and I wanted to be like him.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 21 illustration by allan burch

- - ­‑ ------is for ev for is Jaws Go, Man, Go (1954)—that The readings for the course so far far so course the for readings The “Right,” Stewart says. Until the “Local and regional control over the As the discussion of theater de A A male student recalls a preinte “Yeah,” the undergraduate says. Another student ties the push for segregation winds down, Stewart switches gears.“It’s going ques to be about really think to us for important tionsevidence,” of shesays. have used different types of material to support their claims about movie going. instance,For film scholar Ger ald Butters—the author of another of black about readings, assigned today’s film audiences in Chicago—uses inter gration film about the Harlem Globe Harlem the about film gration trotters— Gomerymentions in the chapter. The film was a success in the North to order in South but the in shown hardly avoidprotests publicor controversy. 1960s, Hollywood studios accepted realitythe segregation,of thougheven it hurt their bottom line. They knew some films could not be screened na al be would others that and tionwide tered by local authorities in the South to eliminate positive depictions of African American characters. African Early pioneering the career, her in American star Lena Horne was usu ally given supporting roles that so her scenes could be excised more easily. content of films is a really important part of the story,” Stewart says—and one that seems almost sacrilegious to us today. “Can you imagine if some guy in Nebraska decides ‘I’m going to cut this scene out of this Scorsese film’? But projectionists, exhibitors, had a huge amount of power during this period.” erybody.’” And blockbusters needed broad audiences in order to be finan ciallysuccessful. follows an African American a protago following police the evades he as nist wrongful arrest. The filmofficebox and inspireddid many imitators.well at the Hollywooddollar“saw signs” thesein films. black-themed desegregation to the rise of the block buster: “They’re making these mov ies that weren’t marketed to a specific niche, or a specific demographic, but they were just like, ‘ - - - …” Sweet —which Sweet Sweetback’s , , Shaft Stewartsteps in to supply the full title The discussion leader poses a ques a poses leader The discussion tion to the group: What forces led to the integration of movie theaters? One undergraduate suggests the change came about in part because film producers realized black audi ences were financially valuable.1960s,with Hollywood studios In in the the financialmidsta of crisis, “all sud a of den these blaxploitation films came around— She pauses for a moment, searching for the name. “It’s a really long title.” of the risqué 1971 action film— Sweetback’s Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Local and regional regional and Local content the over control is a really of films important part of the story. for white audiences. door separate a through At other entered they theaters, leading to a segregated balcony. ------Shared Jacqueline , AM’93, PhD’99, Showing up in the right place isn’t a given for this under and graduate mixed greets them with an encour aging smile. “I’m glad you foundthe room,” shesays. graduate course. Stewart’s Chicago Film Cultures Stewart s students file tentatively intoClassics 312,

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Today’s class, however, is in the Stewart turns things over to the class includes sessions in Cobb Hall, the Reva and David Logan Center for the in Grill Movie Studio the Arts, the Chatham neighborhood, and the Stony Island Arts Bank on 68th Street. The reading list is also wide-ranging, with texts about local film societiesvals, amateurand filmmaking,festi and historic hands- a There’s practices. moviegoing on component too: students will curate a night of public film programming at the Stony Island Arts Bank. more traditional sit-around-the-table- Stewart, vein. and-discuss-the-reading professor in cinema and media studies, lays out the agenda: they’ll start with a chapterfromDouglas Gomery’s Pleasures: A History of Moviein Wis the Presentation of United States (University consin Press, 1992) before shifting to a discussion about the kinds of evidence film historians use in theirwork. undergraduate who will lead today’s discussion. The student begins by re capping the Gomery chapter, which traces the history of racial segrega tion in movie theaters. In the South, AfricanAmerican audiences eitherat tendedblack-only theaters the white or in adhered guidelines restrictive to aters. Sometimes African Americans were permitted only on certain days of the week or after the last showing 22

Film forum BY SUSIE ALLEN, AB’09 CULTURAL HISTORY CULTURAL COURSE WORK A Stewart’s class looks at changes in how Chicagoans experienced the movies. Like other movie palaces, Chicago’s Granada Theatre flourished in the ’30s and ’40s but later fell into disrepair. The building was demolished in 1990.

views to tell his story. “He interviews gests the scene is based on Wright’s of the films themselves is superseded my mom for this book, which I totally “own experiences going to the movies by the narrator’s thoughts and imagina- forgot,” Stewart says. “He’s like, himself, on the experiences of other tion. In the darkness of the theater, she ‘Chicago mother Barbara Holt,’ and young black men of his generation. notes, the protagonists of both Maud ... wait, that’s my mother.” And that the mode of fiction allows for Martha and Native Son have license to Stewart describes a struggle with him to get at some of the material and imagine other lives and experiences. evidence she faced while working on emotional and psychological details “Thank you for that,” Stewart says. her 2005 book about African Ameri- of moviegoing that we don’t get from How we experience films and what can moviegoing during the silent film other sources.” happens when we watch them is, she era, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema Stewart continues the exercise, agrees, a foundational question, and and Black Urban Modernity (Univer- handing out a photocopied excerpt one she hopes they’ll continue to pon- sity of California Press). from Gwendolyn Brooks’s novella der. “How do films speak to people, or What Stewart wanted to find, but Maud Martha (1953), in which the Af- what do people find in them?” couldn’t, were firsthand accounts of rican American protagonist goes to But there’s not much more time to dis- what moviegoers were thinking and the movies with her husband. The stu- cuss that or anything else today. In just a feeling while in the theater. So she had dents take turns reading aloud from it. minute, the class will head to the Stony to get creative. Afterward they consider the two pas- Island Arts Bank to begin planning “One of the things that I recog - sages. A graduate student notices some- their end-of-quarter screening. As they nized, being a graduate student here thing curious: how quickly discussion have all quarter, they’ll keep moving. ◆ in the English department,” she says, “was that there are a number of Afri - can American novels that have scenes in which characters go to the movies. SYLLABUS Richard Wright’s Native Son, for ex- For Chicago Film Cultures bridge University Press, students must submit a ample, has a scene—have you read Na- (CMST 21805/31805), 1990), Alison Griffiths’s “research dossier” on a tive Son?” she asks the class. Crickets. Stewart selected a mixture Shivers Down Your Spine: topic of their choosing at “Have any of you read Native Son? It’s of readings she knows Cinema, Museums, and the the end of the quarter, as OK if you haven’t. I’m just curious.” well—very well in the Immersive View (Columbia well as five brief screening Finally a first-year undergrad pipes case of the chapter from University Press, 2008), reports “on films you view up, sounding shy. “I have.” her own book—and oth- and “Disentangling the In- independently, covering Stewart describes the plot of the 1940 ers that are newer to her. ternational Festival Circuit: each of the categories novel, which was “made into a terrible “It was OK with me to be Genre and Iranian Cinema,” covered in class (‘minority’ movie—actually kind of beautifully ter- eclectic,” she says. a chapter from Global Art cinemas/communities; rible. You should watch it sometime.” Students read excerpts Cinema: New Theories and festivals; cinémathèques/ She reads from a Native Son passage from works including Liza- Histories (Oxford University film societies; museums/ in which the protagonist, Bigger, and beth Cohen’s Making a New Press, 2010). schools; microcinemas/ his friend Jack go to the movies. In her Deal: Industrial Workers in In addition to planning multi-venue film pro-

library of congress, prints & photographs division,book, habs ill,16-chig,109--5 (left) and habs ill,16-chig,109--16 Stewart tells the class, she sug - Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cam- the end-of-quarter event, grams).” —S.A.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 23 language LINGUA

FRANWhat if you took a language class and actually learned to speak?A by carr ie golus, ab’91, am’93 illustrations by nearchos ntask as

hat’s the French word for yes? Claude Grangier and Nadine O’Connor Di Vito, cre- Oui, obviously, you might think, ators of UChicago’s first-year French textbook, collected if you took French in high school all the recordings themselves over decades. (They’ve gone or college. Or even if you did not. through six formats in that time, beginning with cassette That’s correct. But it’s not neces- tapes, minitapes, and digital audio tapes. Since 2005 all of sarily what a native speaker would the clips are on video.) say. “People most of the time will Both Grangier, now the French language coordinator, use ouais”—yeah—“instead of oui,” and Di Vito, director of language programs, arrived in explains lecturer Céline Legrand, 1992. Soon afterward they began to develop their book, be- who’s a Parisienne. Roughly, cause “commercial textbooks were so unsatisfactory,” says “way” instead of “we.” Grangier. A short list of flaws: grammar mistakes big and It’s just past nine on the first morning of summer elemen- small, no material on pronunciation, artificial dialogues tary French, which compresses all of first-year French, that no French speaker would ever say. threeW quarters’ worth, into eight manic weeks. The class Their self-published textbook—actually a workbook meets in Cobb Hall for three hours Monday through Thurs- that students fill in during class time, so they discover the day with an additional speaking lab in the afternoons. rules of the language themselves—has been used here for Today’s class begins with the usual basic phrases— bon- more than a decade. In fall 2018 Georgetown University jour, salut, comment allez-vous?—with one essential differ- Press will publish it as Comme on dit (As We Say). A second- ence. The course is structured around recordings of native year textbook, C’est ce qu’on dit (That’s What We Say), writ- speakers. The students learn ouais because that’s what Ju- ten by Grangier, Di Vito, and French lecturer Marie Berg, liette said to Marion in the video. will come out soon afterward.

24 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 LINGUA FRAN A It’s not quite 9:30 and students have picked up another common French word: ben, which sounds like a nasal “bah” YOU’VE DONE THE and “doesn’t really mean anything,” Legrand explains. It’s a filler word, the French equivalent of “um” and its ilk. If you’re searching for vocabulary and need to stall for time, VOCABULARY, YOU’VE ben is a really useful word to know. Ben, ouais. Well, yeah. A few of the students have some background in French, READ, YOU’VE others none. A woman in a black T-shirt asks optimistically if French nouns have the same genders as the equivalent TRANSLATED, YOU’VE words in Latin and Spanish. The answer is no. By 9:45 the students are walking around the classroom, WRITTEN, NOW YOU greeting each other in French. “I didn’t go to class for awk- ward social interactions,” one student mutters. If that’s the case, he should have opted for a dead lan- CAN ACTUALLY SPEAK, guage, or perhaps built a time machine. At UChicago, as at universities across the nation, contemporary pedagogy WITH NO AIDS. IT’S for modern languages is focused on communication, with the plenitude of awkward social interactions that requires. THE HARDEST AND Just an hour into the class, the students’ vowels already sound noticeably more French. (Many French teachers claim beginners cannot learn pronunciation, “which is SCARIEST THING TO DO. wrong,” says Grangier. “Not only can, but must be learned first thing.” It’s much harder to correct mistakes you’ve teacher at the US Army base in Erlangen. Though she had been making for years: “fossilized errors,” as Di Vito calls not begun her German studies until age 23, eventually she them.) To pick up each new chunk of vocabulary or gram- spoke so fluently, “I could go incognito,” she says. “I was mar, the students listen to a recording or watch a video of indistinguishable from a native speaker.” college-educated French people speaking. Then they im- Baumann’s accomplishment is enviable—especially if mediately imitate what they hear. you’ve had the all-too-common experience of earning As What sounds like “schwee,” for example, turns out to be in language classes for years, only to discover, in the coun- je suis, I am, just mashed together. try where the language is spoken, that you can’t even order The students pair up and practice confessing their inner a cup of coffee. The contemporary approach to language state to each other: I’m sorry. I’m disgusted. I’m flattered. teaching, ideally, will prevent that soul-crushing moment. I’m angry. They don’t say je suis like French students. They Today the watchword in language teaching is profi - say “schwee,” like French speakers. ciency. The shift began in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) adapted the US government’s oral atherine Baumann, director of the University exams for Foreign Service employees. “The federal gov- of Chicago Language Center—a resource for lan- ernment has been teaching language for a century, be - guage teachers at UChicago—describes herself as cause they place people in jobs where they need to use C “a product of the history of language instruction in language,” says Baumann. Just because someone has tak- the United States in the 20th century.” In elementary and en two years of Japanese or majored in French, “What high school, she studied Spanish but didn’t learn much and does that mean? Nothing.” didn’t enjoy it: in the terminology of language teaching, the The verbal tests show what you can really do. ACTFL curriculum was “poorly articulated.” recognizes five major levels of proficiency: novice, inter- During college Baumann took French and liked it. She mediate, advanced, superior, and distinguished. Novice, taught seventh grade for a year—“the worst year of my intermediate, and advanced are further subdivided into life”—before returning to the University of Minnesota low, mid, and high. The levels are consistent across lan- to study German. Baumann is of German heritage but had guages. An intermediate-mid in French or Japanese can learned “not a syllable” growing up. do approximately the same things in their respective lan - She studied abroad in Salzburg and northern Bavaria, guages. It just may take longer—if you’re a native English then stayed on for two years as an elementary school speaker—to get to that point in Japanese.

26 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 When you speak, “you’re doing the maximal manifesta- own worksheets. Students can watch the clips anywhere, tion of knowledge,” says Arabic lecturer Noha Forster. “To 24 hours a day, over and over, slowed down if necessary. speak is to have worked so hard. You’ve done the vocabu- There’s an additional challenge with teaching Arabic lary, you’ve read, you’ve translated, you’ve written, now proficiency, Forster says: “the diglossic quality of a written you can actually speak, with no aids. It’s the hardest and versus a spoken language.” The written version, Modern scariest thing to do.” Standard Arabic (MSA), derives from classical Arabic, the Once the new proficiency standard was adopted, class- language of the Koran. It’s the language of literature and room instruction had to change too, says Baumann: “The journalism—but not conversation. “I’m not going to speak goal becomes teaching toward functional ability, instead to my mom in this language,” says Forster, who comes from of teaching toward knowledge about grammar and vocabu- Cairo and would use Egyptian colloquial Arabic. lary.” Put simply, students no longer learn about the lan - So if you want to speak Arabic, you have to choose. There guage—like a linguist might — to understand its structure are four primary dialects: the Arabic spoken in Egypt and and subtleties, or to compare it to other languages. Instead, Sudan, in the Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait), in the students learn to use the language they’re studying. Levant (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories), Textbooks began to change. “A chapter that used to be and in North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria). The first called ‘The Past Tense’ is now called ‘Childhood Memories three are mutually intelligible for the most part, but the and Telling Stories,’” says Baumann, “because that’s what North African dialect, Maghrebi, “can be pretty opaque you do with the past tense.” Then came an emphasis on au- to the rest.” There are also regional variations within each: thentic materials, from magazines to movies to mundane “I can’t tell you how many linguistic studies have been done exchanges between native speakers: “In the real world, on various dialects just in Palestine,” Forster says. that’s what you’re going to be confronted with.” Arabic has been taught continuously at the University since 1893. In the beginning, it was probably taught as a dead language, Forster says, with an emphasis on grammar and s language pedagogy was changing, technology be- translation, and no concerns about dialects. But the profi- gan to undergo its own independent seismic shift. ciency approach “is really what’s in vogue now.” In 1999, when Baumann arrived at UChicago as “It’s been very gradual, the movement from treating it A a German lecturer, students who wanted to hear as a dead language to treating it as we would Spanish, like native speech would go to the language lab. Teachers who a language you’re supposed to become proficient in, walk wanted to show a foreign movie in class would check out a out in the street and speak in.” The proficiency approach, VCR (the tech-savvy University owned VCRs that could “which is entrenched in all of the other commonly taught play European-standard tapes) and roll it to the classroom. languages,” she says, “is forcing its way onto the less com- The internet transformed all that. Now, when For - monly taught languages.” ster wants to show her beginning Arabic class, say, how Turkish coffee is made, she can choose from a selection of YouTube videos in a number of Arabic dialects. All the t’s now week three of intensive French. The students classrooms in Cobb are “smart,” with large flat-screen dis- can tell stories and talk about what happened yester - plays; that upgrade happened a dozen years ago. day—that is, in linguistic terms, they have learned the The video Forster chooses features a woman from the I passé composé, the past tense. Persian Gulf who explains how to prepare coffee with con- They have also lost the hard r’s that mark (or you could densed milk. “Sweetened condensed milk—don’t,” Forster say mar) the pronunciation of the vast majority of Ameri- says. “It’s like putting ketchup on sushi.” The students laugh. can tourists in France. Legrand reads a list of verbs on the Later in the class, she passes out a worksheet of questions. board—dormir, lire, manger, and trickiest of all, regarder—as The 15 students are assigned to walk around the room and the class repeats. No one sounds American; a few sound un- interview three others. “It’s been proven that when people cannily French. walk around, they learn more,” she tells them. Nonetheless denial, or perhaps exhaustion, has set in. Forster and the University’s other Arabic instructors Students seem aggrieved by the inconsistencies of French, rely on a textbook, Alif Baa (Georgetown University Press) outraged by its differences from English: “Now we decide for the beginning class. (Alif and baa are the first two letters to drop the article?” one man complains. of the Arabic alphabet.) But Arabic in Social Context, her At another point in the class, the same student asks ifbrun class for more advanced students, could not exist without (brown) can be used to describe eyes. Legrand explains this the internet. Forster finds clips online and prepares her word is for hair only. Eyes are marron or noisette, hazelnut.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 27 “Pourquoi?” another man asks. Why? nesota, sit in a classroom in Cobb, and attend the class by “I don’t know. Parce que,” Legrand says, smiling: be- videoconference. cause. “When children ask too many questions, you say, This academic year UChicago is sharing its Polish, Ti- ‘Parce que.’” betan, and Catalan courses with other institutions. Catalan, Her cheerful deflection is like a child’s version of the new taught by lecturer Alba Girons Masot, has eight students: four pedagogy: Do or do not. There is no why. in Chicago, four in Minnesota. Girons Masot comes from Sab- adell, Spain, a small city near Barcelona, and has never been to Minnesota. She keeps regular office hours for her Chicago Chicago offers a superabundance of less commonly students and online office hours for the Minnesota ones. taught languages (LCTLs for short, pronounced The class meets in the UChicago Language Center on the LICK-tulls), primarily to graduate students: Ak- second floor of Cobb. The swanky center, which celebrat- U kadian, Bangla (Bengali), Demotic, Ge’ez, Hai- ed its 10th anniversary this year, includes a number of tiny tian Kreyol, Hieratic, Hittite, Luwian, Marathi, Swahili, glass-walled teaching spaces, called pods, which seat just a Syriac, Tamil, Ugaritic, Uzbek, Yucatec Maya, and three few people. Pods are used for LCTLs, many of which have dozen more. But not Icelandic. Until a few years ago, stu- tiny enrollments. There are also two classrooms with vid- dents who wanted to study Icelandic had to take it else- eoconferencing equipment. The larger of the two, where where during the summer—or they were just out of luck. Catalan is taught, seats 10. In 2014 the University joined CourseShare, run by the In 2016 the language center received a $2 million grant Big Ten Academic Alliance. Now a student at UChicago from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to go beyond can enroll in an Icelandic course at the University of Min- ad hoc course sharing. The program, which runs for five years, pairs LCTL instructors from different institutions to develop shared course sequences. The idea is to “let them work together instead of in isolation,” says Baumann, to get better curricula—and therefore better language speakers. The grant also supports professional development conferences aimed at LCTL teachers. The two-day Mellon Winter Workshop, held in February, attracted 60 participants to sessions such as “Grammar by Night, Meaningful Interaction by Day” and “(Cost-) Effective Vocabulary Instruction.” “Bon dia!” Girons Masot calls cheerily to the Minnesota students when they appear on screen. The class, an acceler- ated course for beginners, is in its second quarter and taught almost entirely in Catalan. At one point there’s a technical glitch; Minnesota cuts out. When Nicholas Swinehart, the language center’s multimedia pedagogy specialist, comes in to investigate, Girons Masot accidentally thanks him in Catalan, a language he doesn’t speak. She laughs. He seems to understand anyway. If you know any Romance language, Catalan sounds like a distant radio station: you can follow it, but it keeps fading in and out. Catalan, spoken in parts of Spain, France, and Italy, is not a dialect of Spanish, contrary to the common mis- conception; it’s a language, and closer to Italian or French. It was also banned in Spain from 1939 until after Spanish dicta- tor Francisco Franco died in 1975. “For years, saying ‘ Bon dia’ was a political statement,” Girons Masot says. Children were punished for speaking Catalan at school; adults spoke it privately but not in public. Now it’s the language of instruc- tion in public schools in the Catalonia region of Spain, where Catalan-Spanish bilingualism is the norm.

28 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 WHAT’S A LCTL?

LCTL (less commonly taught language) is “a relative term,” says Catherine Baumann of the University of Chicago Language Center. “At UChicago we call LCTLs any language with less than about 100 annually enrolled students.” So at some universities, Arabic is a LCTL, but here it isn’t.

COMMONLY TAUGHT LANGUAGES AT UCHICAGO, 2016–17 American Sign Language • Arabic • Chinese • French • German • Hebrew • Italian Japanese • Korean • Portuguese • Russian • Spanish • Turkish

LCTLS TAUGHT AT UCHICAGO, 2016–17 Akkadian • Aramaic • Armenian • Assyrian • Babylonian • Bangla (Bengali) • Basque Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian • Catalan • Czech • Demotic • Egyptian (Old) • Egyptian (Middle) Egyptian (Late) • Ge’ez • Greek (Ancient) • Greek (Biblical, Koine) • Greek (Modern) Haitian Kreyol • Hieratic • Hindi • Hittite • Kazakh • Latin • Luwian • Marathi • Norwegian Persian • Polish • Sanskrit • Sumerian • Swahili • Syriac • Tamil • Tibetan • Ugaritic Urdu • Uzbek • Yucatec Maya

Today’s class focuses on food and shopping. Girons Masot she’s studied German, Swedish, and Icelandic. As a lan- passes out words written on slips of paper to the Chicago stu- guage instructor, she says, it’s useful to remind herself dents, by email to the Minnesota ones. The students break what it’s like to be confused in a classroom: “That’s what into pairs: one tries to describe the food, the other to guess my students are experiencing.” it. “Una fruita seca?” one student says doubtfully: a dry fruit? The word turns out to be ametlles, almonds. Immersive games like this don’t just make language t’s August 9, the last day of intensive French. The learning more fun and less like drudgery; they are intend- students are reviewing for the final in pairs, changing ed to make the most of classroom time. As Swinehart ex- partners every few minutes, as they have done innu- plained during the vocabulary session at the Mellon Winter I merable times by now. Workshop, the goal is for students to learn words outside of Lecturer Isabelle Faton, PhD’16, who’s been teaching class and then practice them together during class. Swine- the last four weeks of the course, circulates as the students hart and Baumann demonstrated several ways—high tech practice. She listens in, correcting pronunciation and sup- and low tech—to accomplish this, from online classroom plying vocabulary when necessary. games like Kahoot! that students use their phones to play, to “How do you say ‘wow’ in French?” one man wants to know. childhood favorites like hangman and charades. (Baumann “Wow,” Faton says, “but it’s spelled a little differently.” enjoys asking her beginning German students to mime the She walks to the board and writes ouah. verb sein, to be. “They can handle it,” she says.) The students talk much more slowly than the rapid-fire Like Baumann, Swinehart has a complicated language native speakers they’ve been imitating all quarter. None - learning history. “I learned French at one point, and Ital- theless they form full French sentences, only rarely lapsing ian, and Arabic, but I can’t use any of those,” he says. “I into English. “At the end of 101, I’m still amazed after 20 can use Chinese, the one language I didn’t actually take any years,” says textbook coauthor Grangier. “They can pro - classes in.” He picked it up while teaching English as a sec- nounce. Of course, they don’t all have the r or the on or the ond language in China. “Not to say that classroom learning u. But French people are going to understand them.” is necessarily inferior,” he adds quickly, “but the more you If you close your eyes, it doesn’t sound like a language use a language for meaningful communication, the more class at all. It’s more natural, more conversational: voices you become functional and proficient.” rising and falling, tumbling over each other, punctuated In contrast Girons Masot, who speaks French, Italian, now and again with easy laughter. In fact it sounds a little and English as well as her native Catalan and Spanish, is like a party. an addict for classroom learning. Every other summer, she In eight short weeks, the students have learned to speak travels somewhere new to take intensive language classes; French. Ouah. ◆

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 29 history

FREE VERSE Mitsuye Yamada, AM’53, transformed her family’s internment experience into poetry. by susie allen, ab’09 illustrations by yuko shimizu

30 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 FREE VERSE Evacuation or years, Mitsuye Yamada, AM’53, never spoke of the 18 months she spent interned in the As we boarded the bus Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho during bags on both sides the Second World War. Yamada was 19 when (I had never packed she, her mother, and her three siblings were two bags before forced to leave their Seattle home with no cer- on a vacation tainty about when they might return. lasting forever) They were among the roughly 120,000 West the Seattle Times Coast Japanese Americans ordered by the US photographer said government to remote facilities in Arizona, Ar- Smile! kansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Texas, so obediently I smiled Utah, and Wyoming. Yamada’s father, Jack Yasutake, who had and the caption the next day worked as a translator for the US Immigration and Naturaliza- read: Ftion Service for more than 20 years, was sent to a prisoner of war camp in New Mexico under suspicion of spying for the Japanese. Note smiling faces The Federal Bureau of Investigation never found any evidence to a lesson to Tokyo. support the charge, and in 1944 Yasutake was transferred from the POW camp to an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. “It was just something that we never talked about,” reflects Ya- mada, now 93 and living in Irvine, California. Only in 1962, after her 11-year-old daughter saw a news report about Japanese internment camps, did Ya- mada reveal to her children that she had been held in one. Fourteen years later, Yamada broke her silence on a wider scale in Camp Notes and Other Poems (Shameless Hussy Press, 1976), a book inspired in part by her internment. The collection, hailed as “vivid, pain-filled, weighted with irony” by the Los Angeles Times, launched Yamada’s career as an award-winning writer of poetry and essays. In comments condensed and edited below, Yamada looks back on her childhood, her career as a writer, and the lasting legacy of internment. photo courtesy the yasutake family collection family yasutake the courtesy photo My father was a poet. He wrote a form of 17-syllable Japanese poem called the senryu, which is somewhat like the haiku. But haiku are much more ethereal and much more abstract. Senryu talk about everyday problems. Many of his fellow poets were immigrant men. They would gather in our dining room to write about their daily problems with their wives and their jobs and so forth. Which they had many of. I remember sitting with them in the dining room as a young girl. My mother was making refreshments—sushi and tea and so forth—and I was serving the poets. My Japanese wasn’t fully developed during those days, so I didn’t understand everything they were saying, but I was totally enthralled by the process of writing poems.

32 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 They would take an hour to talk about what had happened At the Minidoka Relocation Center, Yamada worked as a since the last meeting and then go into their corners and nurse’s aide in the emergency clinic alongside Japanese Ameri- write poetry. Then they would come back as a group and can doctors who had been forced to close their practices. Keeping recite their poems to each other. It was a magical moment busy, she wrote later, was “the trick” to enduring internment: for me to sit there and listen to the music of the poetry that “keep the body busy / be a teacher / be a nurse / be a typist / … / they were reciting aloud. But the mind was not fooled.” They would tack a large piece of paper, kind of like butcher paper, to the wall. And a calligrapher would It was one crisis after another in the emergency ward. The write the poem in black ink, very fluid, with beautiful doctors, who worked for 16 dollars a month, were wonder- lines, in Japanese. ful self-sacrificing people. And the head nurse I worked The process was artistic, as well as musical in many under was a wonderful person. I just admired their work senses. And I grew up with that. It was just something that and what they were doing. seemed wonderful to me. But I didn’t actually start writing until high school. I In Camp Notes Yamada relates one of the central dilemmas of wrote mostly prose, I remember. Most of my heroines internment: the “loyalty questionnaire,” which asked interned were blue-eyed blondes. I was totally unaware of my ethnic adults about their hobbies, religion, and languages they spoke— identity at that time. I was trying to blend in with the white questions designed to determine how Americanized they were. majority at my high school. The questionnaire also required them to forswear all allegiance to Japan. Some refused on the grounds that they were American The outbreak of the Second World War brought sudden changes to citizens who had never been loyal to Japan. Others, barred by Yamada’s family. law from becoming American citizens, worried they would be left in stateless limbo if they renounced their Japanese citizenship. My father was arrested by the FBI on December 7, 1941. We didn’t know where he was for a while. He ultimately ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico. The Question of Loyalty This was a real prisoner of war camp, unlike the so-called relocation camps that we were ultimately evacuated to. My I met the deadline mother and brothers and I were so worried about what was for alien registration happening to my dad. We were not quite sure if he was go- once before ing to be forced to return to Japan. was numbered fingerprinted Our situation of going into relocation camp seemed like and ordered not to travel nothing in comparison to what my dad was being accused without permit. of—espionage against a country he had spent 20 years working for. It just seemed so unfair at that time. Whatever But alien still they said I must was happening to us seemed very minor. foreswear allegiance to the emperor. photo courtesy the yasutake family collection family yasutake the courtesy photo For me that was easy I didn’t even know him But my mother who did cried out If I sign this IT WAS A MAGICAL What will I be? I am doubly loyal MOMENT FOR ME TO to my American children also to my own people. SIT THERE AND LISTEN How can double mean nothing? I wish no one to lose this war. TO THE MUSIC OF THE Everyone does. I was poor POETRY THAT THEY at math. I signed WERE RECITING ALOUD. my only ticket out.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 33 poem itself. I remember taking a pen and just crossing out words on the page. I wasn’t really thinking of it as a poem, I HAD BEEN WRITING but as the idea that I was trying to express. I think that ex- ALL ALONG, STICKING plains the starkness of the images in Camp Notes.

BITS OF PAPER INTO To the Lady A SHOEBOX, LIKE A The one in San Francisco who asked Why did the Japanese Americans let the government put them in LOT OF CLOSET WOMEN those camps without protest?

POETS DID. Come to think of it I

should’ve run off to Canada Yamada’s brother Tosh left Camp Minidoka to serve in the US should’ve hijacked a plane to Algeria Army. Yamada was permitted to leave in 1943 and enrolled at should’ve pulled myself up from my the University of Cincinnati a year later. She went on to study bra straps English literature at New York University and at UChicago. and kicked’m in the groin should’ve bombed a bank I had heard from somewhere that a master’s degree from the should’ve tried self-immolation University of Chicago was the equivalent to a PhD, and I should’ve holed myself up in a thought, well, that’s for me. woodframe house and let you watch me In Chicago, Yamada met her husband, Yoshikazu Yamada, then burn up on the six o’clock news a PhD student in chemistry at Purdue University. The couple had should’ve run howling down the street four children; Yamada didn’t tell any of them about her intern- naked and assaulted you at breakfast ment experience until her oldest daughter was 11. by AP wirephoto should’ve screamed bloody murder My daughter said, “Why didn’t you tell us?” She couldn’t like Kitty Genovese believe that I hadn’t ever talked about it. And I remember saying, “Well, nobody asked me.” The subject never came Then up before. You just bury it inside yourself. It’s an experience that one YOU would’ve had to be ashamed of. If it happened to you, it must have been something that you did. I don’t know what the psychology of come to my aid in shining armor that is. It was true that I really did bury it very deeply. laid yourself across the railroad track marched on Washington Even as a mother of four, Yamada found time to write and edit tattooed a Star of David on your arm poetry, though she considered herself a hobbyist,“like a Sunday written six million enraged painter.” One of her projects involved revisiting her journals from letters to Congress Camp Minidoka. But we didn’t draw the line I had been writing all along, sticking bits of paper into anywhere a shoebox, like a lot of closet women poets did. I never law and order Executive Order 9066 thought of my camp poems as really being poems. That was social order moral order internal order why I called them “camp notes,” because they were notes that I kept about my experiences in camp. YOU let’m When I started to edit, I took out many of the excessive I let’m words. I just thought, these words are not central to the All are punished.

34 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Zheng-Tian Lu (second from right in the back row) and colleagues with an ATTA device.

the university of chicago magazine | winter 2017 29 30 the university of chicago magazine | winter 2017 In 1976 Yamada met the radical feminist poet Alta Gerrey, I met Nellie Wong and Merle Woo at a Women Poets of San founder of Shameless Hussy Press. She convinced Yamada to Francisco meeting, and we became very good friends. We publish Camp Notes. connected immediately. And then Nellie and I were featured in a film together, Alta invited me to San Francisco to do a reading. We went Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets (1981). It’s a one- to various coffeehouses and places like that. hour documentary about Chinese American and Japa - The burgeoning feminist movement in the 1970s, that nese American cultures. That film did very well, I think. was quite a revelation to me. And an exciting experience. I [Mitsuye and Nellie was broadcast nationally on PBS and had four kids at home and had never really been outside of featured in several film festivals.] my little comfort zone. Publishing my book really opened up a whole world that I didn’t know existed. Yamada continued to write, producing the collection Desert I met so many wonderful people, including many gay Run: Poems and Stories (Kitchen Table: Women of Color and lesbian poets. The growing consciousness of all of us Press, 1988). She also became active in the human rights group together at the same time was quite strengthening. Amnesty International and served on its board. In recent years Yamada has shifted from poetry toward mem- The influence of Yamada’s new friendships is apparent in her oir and family history. This year she completed a biography of later work, including the poem “Masks of Woman”: “This is her father, who died in 1953, only weeks after finally becoming my daily mask / daughter, sister / wife, mother / poet, teacher an American citizen. / grandmother. / … / Over my mask / is your mask / of me / an Asian woman.” She became particularly interested in collaborat- I remember asking my dad if he felt bitter about his expe- ing with other Asian American writers. riences, about the government suspecting him. He said, “No, not at all, because you have to remember the context in that time. You have to remember that during the first few months of World War II after Pearl Harbor, the American country was actually losing, because we were totally un- THE BURGEONING prepared.” He said it seemed kind of natural to suspect a person like him or the Japanese people in general. FEMINIST MOVEMENT My dad did quite well because of his bilingualism. But I often think about how the people who lost the most from the evacuation experience were the first-generation people IN THE 1970S, like my father’s generation. Most of the Issei [first-generation Japanese immigrants] THAT WAS QUITE A his age—just imagine, you come to this country when you’re in your 20s and spend 25 years working hard REVELATION TO ME. and establishing yourself, buying a house, raising your children, and being quite proud of what you have achieved. And suddenly, there’s a war, and you lose everything. AND AN EXCITING And you go to camp, and you’re in camp for three or four years, and then the government closes the camp and says EXPERIENCE. I OK, now you can go back to where you came from. Well, at that point, most of the Issei had nothing to go back to. HAD FOUR KIDS There was nothing. I do think we’re at risk of forgetting some of those les- AT HOME AND HAD sons. You forget the struggles of the past. Maybe it’s a sur- vival instinct of a sort to forget those kinds of things and to NEVER REALLY BEEN go on with our lives, to look ahead, to keep going. ◆ Poems: Yamada, Mitsuye. Camp Notes and Other Writings. OUTSIDE OF MY LITTLE New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Mitsuye Yamada. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers COMFORT ZONE. University Press.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 37 mathematics INFINITE POSSIBILITIES How Ken Ono, AB’89, found life in and outside of math. by helen gregg, ab’09

38 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017

e had ideas that would transform math- biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity. His on-set enthusiasm ematics, and no one to read them. So in for Ramanujan was contagious, and the film companies 1911, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a two-time partnered with Ono to launch the Spirit of Ramanujan college dropout working as a low-level Math Talent Initiative last year. clerk in southern India, began submit- In Ono’s corner office at Emory, framed awards placard ting his work to local mathematics the walls. But one frame in the middle, directly over Ono’s journals and, when they went largely desk, holds something different. It’s a letter that Ramanu- unnoticed, writing letters to mathema- jan’s widow wrote to Ono’s father in 1984—evidence of the ticians overseas. He enclosed pages of Indian prodigy’s deep influence not only on Ono’s work but his groundbreaking theorems and the on his very identity. patterns he was finding in numbers; no proofs, just bursts of mathematical insight. In 1913 he finally got a response, from Cambridge math- hen Ono was growing up, his parents often told Hematician G. H. Hardy. The renowned English number him how, at just three years old, he had discov- theorist saw the brilliance of Ramanujan’s work and be - ered infinity—when he first reasoned that there came his mentor and champion, bringing Ramanujan to W couldn’t be a largest number since there was Cambridge, and his work to a wider audience. always the possibility of adding one. Math was a part of “I did not invent him—like other great men, he invented Ono’s life as far back as he can remember; some of his fa- himself,” Hardy later said of Ramanujan, “but I was the vorite early memories are of sitting at a child-sized desk in first really competent person who had the chance to see the family’s home office solving problem sets while his fa- some of his work, and … recognise[d] at once what a trea- ther, the mathematician Takashi Ono, worked on his next sure I had found.” breakthrough alongside him. Today mathematician Ken Ono, AB’89, the Asa Griggs Less fond are Ono’s memories of what happened at the Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University kitchen table where, after a less-than-perfect test score or and a renowned number theorist himself, is on a hunt for other perceived failure, he would face a barrage of harsh those with similar undiscovered potential. His Spirit criticism from Takashi and his mother, Sachiko: he was of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative is a global search sloppy, he was unaccomplished, he was bringing shame on that seeks out gifted young mathematicians from modest his family. photography by bryan meltz, courtesy emory university (previous page) (previous university emory courtesy meltz, bryan by photography backgrounds and pairs them with mentors and academic Ono was recognized from an early age as a math prodi- opportunities. gy. He was included in psychologist Julian Stanley’s well- In Ramanujan, “we have a man who could have easily known Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, and been lost to mathematics, and a man who has genuinely his parents decided he would be a mathematician like his transformed the way we do mathematics,” says Ono. With father. All of his time was to be spent studying. Extracur- the talent search, “we want to be the Hardy.” Ono has long felt a connection and kinship with Ramanu- jan. As a specialist in algebraic number theory, Ono, like Ramanujan, seeks new patterns and truths in integers. He drew on the Indian mathematician’s work in his doc- WHEN ONO WAS toral thesis and found his footing as a mathematician in part by confirming some of Ramanujan’s ideas on partition GROWING UP, HIS functions. More recently, Ono, with two collaborators, found what PARENTS OFTEN TOLD he dubbed the “mother lode” of mathematical identities— equations that are true for any value of their variables—us- HIM HOW, AT JUST ing two identities that were among those Ramanujan sent to Hardy in 1913. And his 2014 proof of the umbral moonshine conjecture, which has applications in fields from number THREE YEARS OLD, theory to quantum physics, drew on work that Ramanujan furiously wrote as he was dying of tuberculosis in 1920. HE HAD DISCOVERED Ono even helped bring Ramanujan’s story to life as the

math consultant and an associate producer on the 2015 INFINITY. image courtesy ken ono

40 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 The 1984 letter from Ramanujan’s widow, Janaki Ammal.

kashi’s talent at a math conference in Tokyo and secured him a position at the Institute for Ad- vanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955. And so, during one of their many fights about leaving school, Ono reminded his father that Ramanujan, his idol, had been a two-time col- lege dropout. His parents relented, and Ono became a dropout himself. Soon he was on an Amtrak train to Montreal to live with Santa, then a doctoral student at McGill University. Santa provided a couch to sleep on, a part-time job at a campus laboratory, and much-needed em- pathy. Less than a year later, feeling like he could breathe again, Ono started applying to colleges.

t UChicago, Ono immediately embraced his freedom. He joined Psi Upsilon and spent more time deejaying parties, play- A ing foosball, and eating Harold’s fried chicken than studying. He also started com- petitive cycling again, which is how he met his wife, Erika (Anderson) Ono, AB’90; as a student worker in Pierce dining hall, she began setting aside bananas each Saturday morning, fuel for the kid who came in early with his racing bike. riculars, sports, television, and friends were forbidden. He But at the end of his third year, a visiting math professor doesn’t remember being hugged or hearing “I love you.” who was an acquaintance of Takashi told Ono that his work Ono’s two older brothers were raised the same way: Mo- was subpar and he’d never be a professional mathematician. photography by bryan meltz, courtesy emory university (previous page) (previous university emory courtesy meltz, bryan by photography maro, a gifted musician, and Santa Ono, AB’84. (Santa, Stung and refusing to let his parents be proved right, Ono not identified as a prodigy in childhood like his brothers, attacked mathematics with new vigor. faced the same parental demands but without the expecta- During Ono’s senior year, his work caught the attention tions for success—ironic, says Ono, as he considers Santa, of mathematics professor and “math pirate” Paul Sally Jr., now president of the University of British Columbia, the who was known for mentoring students in Hyde Park and most professionally successful of the three.) beyond. The two began meeting several times a week, to Ono was in high school when the pressure started to talk math or just to talk. They bonded over their untradi - become unbearable. As an outlet, and against his parents’ tional paths—Sally had spent several years driving cabs and wishes, he joined a competitive cycling team, but it wasn’t teaching high school in Boston before deciding he wanted enough. He realized he needed to get out of the house and to pursue math—and Sally helped Ono secure a spot in the began a months-long campaign to convince his parents to mathematics PhD program at the University of California, let him drop out of high school. Los Angeles. His ultimate success hinged on a letter that had arrived At UCLA Ono still heard his parents’ voices telling in the spring of 1984, in a rice-paper envelope from India. him that he wasn’t good enough, that he would fail. He Janaki Ammal, Ramanujan’s elderly widow, had written to almost did fail his first attempt at a qualifying exam in Ono’s father to thank him for contributing to a statue of her his chosen field, abstract algebra, and was drifting until late husband. It was a short letter, but Ono had never seen he took a class with Basil Gordon. Impressed when Ono his stoic father so visibly moved. offered an alternative proof in class, Gordon invited him Standing in his home office, letter in hand, Takashi told to come talk during office hours and soon took Ono on as Ono for the first time about Ramanujan, whose story had his final PhD student. inspired Takashi as a struggling mathematician in postwar For his dissertation, Gordon suggested Ono pursue mod- Japan. Takashi even had his own Hardy—André Weil, a ular forms, a class of functions rooted in Ramanujan’s iden-

image courtesy ken ono University of Chicago mathematician who noticed Ta- tities. It was the first time Ono realized that Ramanujan’s

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 41 work had modern implications. In 1991, while Ono was at work on his doctoral thesis, biographer Robert Kanigel I WAS MESMERIZED published The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Charles Scribner’s Sons). Ono quickly bought the book and read it from cover to cover. BY HIS ABILITY TO Ono and Gordon held long, intense work sessions on Sat- urdays, taking breaks to walk up the beach or talk about MAKE MATHEMATICS literature. Gordon could quote long passages from memo- ry; Ono vividly recalls him reciting the opening of Moby- BEAUTIFUL BY MAKING Dick. “I was mesmerized by his ability to make mathematics beautiful by making analogies with classical art, literature, and music,” Ono wrote after Gordon died in 2012. Gordon ANALOGIES WITH viewed math as an art form, a way of understanding—and embracing—the world around him. From him Ono learned CLASSICAL ART, for the first time to truly, as he says, “do mathematics.” As he was closing in on his doctorate, Ono drove to LITERATURE, AND Erika’s hometown of Missoula, Montana, to present at a math conference. His talk covered Galois representations, MUSIC. a part of modern number theory related to modular forms. But Ono, wanting to impress his audience, made the mis - take of preparing lectures that were too technical. The out hyperbole: “I thank Basil Gordon for saving my life.” audience couldn’t follow, and one professor berated him Ono successfully defended his thesis on Galois repre- afterward for wasting his time. His parents’ recriminations sentations in 1993. He secured positions at the University came rushing back. Ono felt he’d failed in abstract number of Georgia and then the University of Illinois at Urbana- theory, a subfield in which he thought he was making real Champaign and cowrote what he calls a “semi-important progress, in front of mathematicians he deeply admired, paper in representation theory.” Despite these successes, and in a city where word might reach his new wife’s fam- voices of disapproval still rang in his head. He identifies it ily. On the last day of the conference, Ono was driving on now as impostor syndrome—the persistent belief that one’s a rainy Montana highway, devastated and alone except for success has been unearned, that it’s only a matter of time the critical voices filling his head. An oncoming truck came until one is exposed as a fraud. “When I first started, I was into view, and, seeing a way out, he yanked the wheel and grateful that anyone would come hear a lecture that I would steered his car over the center line. give,” he says. At some point, he feared, other mathemati- cians were going to validate his parents’ criticism. Those voices finally started to subside when Ono re - no doesn’t remember how he found the other side ceived an appointment at the Institute for Advanced of the road and brought his car to a stop, only that Study in Princeton, an echo of his father’s achievement he sat shaking, terrified. “I couldn’t believe what I four decades ago. It was the first time Ono had been rec - O had almost done,” he later wrote. “I had never had ognized solely for his own ideas. “These guys had actu- suicidal thoughts before. … It was an impulsive act that I ally heard of me and knew some of my theorems,” he says. will never fully understand.” “That was the first time I actually recognized that nothing For almost 20 years, he didn’t tell anyone what hap - else matters if you work hard and you have faith and have pened on that highway, but the following week he had to some luck.” tell Gordon how the conference had gone. The response Later, a breakthrough in partition functions while he was buoyed him. Gordon told Ono he hadn’t failed and hadn’t an assistant professor at Penn State led to international ac- disappointed him. Math, he reminded Ono, is about taking claim and fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation risks, voyaging into the unknown, and occasionally over- and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (see sidebar, reaching. Delving too deeply into his topic was a symptom “Partition Revelation,” page 45). In 1999 Ono received the of transforming into a mathematician. It was exactly what Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engi- Ono needed to hear. neers from president Bill Clinton. His parents attended the In 1997, at a math conference honoring Gordon’s 65th White House ceremony, and afterward Takashi presented birthday, Ono’s banquet speech started simply, and with - Ono with the fateful letter from Ramanujan’s widow. Now,

42 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 he said, he considered Ono the letter’s rightful owner. He unpack his mental closet.” But Ono also wrote it to help added, “I am so proud of you.” those who might be struggling like he was. Ono’s relationship with his parents has slowly continued Ono likes to tell his undergraduate classes at Emory that to improve. His professional successes, including appoint- he barely got any As in math during his first three years of ments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then at college—drawing laughs when he adds, “But believe me, I Emory, ended their criticism, making room for new ways of am totally able to teach this class.” connecting. His parents now send cards for birthdays and “They need to hear that,” says Ono, especially from holidays, events that weren’t celebrated when Ono was someone as successful as him. He frequently encounters growing up. Ono, for his part, has come to understand bet- students he can tell are under heavy parental pressure to get ter why they applied the pressure they did on their children. top grades and then go into the profession their families fa- In his memoir he reflects on the traditional Japanese ideas vor. “Every class I teach, I will end up having to talk to four about child-rearing that his parents brought with them to or five kids who are not sure about what they are meant to the States, and how the racism the family encountered in do or be,” he says. “And it’s shocking how often it’s related postwar America focused their attention even more in- to, ‘Well, my parents think I should do this.’” tensely on hard work and achievement. Life beyond college is even a part of Ono’s course syllabi. In 2014 Takashi and Sachiko traveled to Atlanta for the For years the last question on every final exam he gives has high school graduation of Ono’s daughter, Aspen. She and been, “What are you going to do to make the world a better her younger brother, Sage, are now both undergraduates place?” He’s so well known for it that many students write at Emory. They’re talented students but Ono talks up As - and print out their answers ahead of time and bring them in pen’s figure skating and Sage’s swimming (he was recently to staple to the test. named UAA Men’s Rookie Swimmer of the Year and an For several years Ono has given an address to freshman NCAA National Champion, Ono says proudly). Ono has parents during Emory’s Family Weekend that includes a raised them to follow their passions and to love themselves bit of his life story. Last fall that talk drew explicitly on his as much as he loves them—including their imperfections. memoir. (Santa has also made use of his life story to help Aspen has close to a perfect 4.0 GPA, says Ono, “so I tell his students; he publicly revealed in 2016 that he battled her, go get a B and learn that it’s okay.” depression as a young man and has continued to talk about his own experiences while president of UBC as a way to destigmatize mental illness on his campus and encourage n 2016 Ono published a memoir, My Search for Ra - students to seek help when needed.) manujan: How I Learned to Count (Springer), detailing Ono currently has seven graduate students, who share a his winding life path and how it kept leading to the workspace down the hall from his office. He’s in there fre- I Indian mathematician. (The book is dedicated to his quently, to check in but also to ask one about her marathon mentors.) It “was good for him,” says his wife, Erika, “to training, or to earnestly tell another that she should really consider Hawaii for her honeymoon. But in front of a chalkboard working through a problem with one of them, he’s quiet and focused, shaping formulas with rapid-fire questions and rapid-fire encouragement. FOR YEARS THE LAST Ono’s devotion to his students’ work and ideas is effec- tive—and remembered. “When you are working on some- QUESTION ON EVERY thing day in and day out, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture and the excitement, and he can give that to you,” FINAL EXAM ONO GIVES his former student Robert Lemke Oliver told Emory maga- zine. “I would not be the mathematician I am today if I’d had almost any other adviser.” HAS BEEN, “WHAT ARE What Ono loves is “watching someone achieve some- thing they don’t think they are ever going to be able to do.” YOU GOING TO DO TO When that happens he delights in saying he told them so. “Nobody likes hearing that, except in this case.” He finds MAKE THE WORLD A working with students both a joy and a duty, and feels he owes it to his own mentors—and to Ramanujan—to be the BETTER PLACE?” best Hardy he can be for the next generation.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 43 THE GOAL IS TO FIND AND SUPPORT YOUNG PEOPLE LIKE RAMANUJAN WHO HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO MAKE SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO MATH BUT HAVE Ono and actor Jeremy Irons, who played G. H. Hardy, on the set of The Man Who Knew Infinity. In October Irons FEW RESOURCES joined Ono at the White House for a screening of the movie and a panel discussion on math education. OR MENTORS.

n 2014 Ono got a surprise email from Matthew Last spring Ono, Pressman Film, and IFC Films Brown, the writer and director of The Man Who launched the Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative. Knew Infinity, based on the 1991 Kanigel biography The project builds on math outreach work that Ono has I of Ramanujan. Brown’s team needed help ensuring done for years, and the goal, he says, is to find and support the accuracy of documents that were going to be repro- “the brilliant outliers”—young people like Ramanujan duced for the biopic. Impressed by Ono’s deep knowl- who have the potential to make significant contributions edge of Ramanujan’s work and life, Brown invited Ono to math but have few resources or mentors. to be the movie’s math consultant. The Spirit of Ramanujan’s mobile-friendly online math On set in England, Ono went to work checking and per- and logic quiz directs high scorers to an application. The fecting all the math that appears on screen. He was present American Mathematical Society, the Templeton Foun- during rehearsals and filming to explain math concepts as dation, and other organizations are also helping promote needed and to help the lead actors, Dev Patel and Jeremy the initiative, and during its inaugural round, more than Irons, develop gestures and use inflections that fit both the 8,000 applications flooded in. The four winners received characters and the math discussed in the movie. financial support and connections with professional math- Ono was even able to help when the movie’s prop co- ematicians in their fields. Tenth-grader Kendall Clark ordinators, looking for a sample of Janaki Ammal’s hand- of Baltimore will study applied mathematics with Johns writing, asked him if he knew of anything, anywhere, Hopkins professors this summer, and 13-year-old Ishwar that might have Ramanujan’s wife signature on it. Karthik works every week with a number theorist at Texas ono ken courtesy photo When he saw that Ramanujan’s story was really strik- A&M’s Qatar campus. ing a chord with Brown and others working on the movie, Ono discovered the most recent winner in December Ono was thrilled. He and the producers began brainstorm- during a trip to Kenya. After Ono finished a lecture on ing ways to help The Man Who Knew Infinity have a lasting his recent work at the University of Nairobi, a young man impact. “We thought, this film isn’t going to beBatman v. stood up in front of 500 audience members to offer a cor- Superman, but for us it’s important,” says Ono. “And so rection based on a Hans Rademacher proof from the 1930s. we decided that we should have the film mean something.” Ono later met with the questioner, Martin Irungu , and dis-

44 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 covered he wasn’t an advanced graduate student, like Ono t was in London, on the set of The Man Who Knew In- had thought, but a recent high school graduate. Unable to finity, that Ono was struck by an insight that turned out afford the University of Nairobi’s tuition, Irungu had been to be a major step forward in proving the umbral moon- spending his free time on campus, poring over math books I shine conjecture. Being outside his office and part of from the library. “He was reading material that a second- or a different kind of creative process made the difference, third-year PhD student at a top school would be reading,” he thinks—and standing face-to-face with Ramanujan (as says Ono. played by Patel) didn’t hurt either. Ever since his walks on In less than 48 hours, Ono managed to secure Irungu a the beach with Gordon, Ono has done some of his best work visa to travel to Emory. He spent a week on campus working outside Emory’s stately white-stone Mathematics and Sci- with Ono’s graduate students and will return for the summer. ence Center, whether on a simple walk or training for a Irungu also met with other mathematicians from around the triathlon (he’s represented Team USA in several recent country who were in town for a conference. “I ended up intro- World Cross Triathlon Championships). ducing him to professors at Harvard and MIT and Berkeley,” He also likes to work at home on his sofa, in a meditative says Ono, “and now they’re competing for him.” state, as he thinks through new patterns or ideas. This can Ono is confident the Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent look a lot like dozing off, says Erika—fortunately Ono has Initiative will continue to identify similarly gifted stu- socks that read, “Don’t wake me, I’m working,” to prevent dents. “They’re out there,” he says, and he’s going to do misinterpretation. The look of contentment is often a give- everything he can to find them. away too. ◆

PARTITION REVELATION

no’s 1999 breakthrough dealt with partition num- work he left behind. In an unpublished notebook, Ramanu- bers, or how many different ways an integer can jan wrote that he wasn’t aware of any other expressions with be represented as the sum of positive integers. “equally simple properties” for partition functions. For example, the partition number of 4, com- Ono discovered that Ramanujan’s enigmatic claim was monly denoted as p(4), is 5, since there are five correct—“simple” expressions like the ones Ramanujan ways of writing 4 as the sum of positive integers: found don’t exist, but more complicated ones do. Drawing O on other recent advances in partition numbers and aided by 4 a number-crunching computer program, Ono proved that, 3+1 for all the prime numbers from 5 to infinity, there exist ex - 2+2 pressions of the form p(an +b) where the resulting partition 2+1+1 numbers are divisible by the prime number represented bya . 1+1+1+1 Ono notes these are often “monstrosities,” like p(48037937n+1122838), which is always divisible by 17. Only Ramanujan discovered patterns in these partition num- for the primes 5, 7, and 11 do the values ofa equal the prime di- photo courtesy ken ono ken courtesy photo bers. For instance, he found that for any value of n, the visor. This is likely what Ramanujan meant by an expression partition number p(5n+4) is always divisible by 5. So when with “simple properties,” says Ono. n=5, the value of p(5x5+4), or p(29), is 4,565, which is divis- Ono has since made other significant advances in parti - ible by 5. The same holds true for any value of n. tion numbers, including devising the first exact formula for Ramanujan also found that the value of p(7n+5) is always calculating the partition number for any value of n. In 2011 divisible by 7, and p(11n+6) is always divisible by 11, no matter he presented this formula and related patterns to a stand - what number is plugged in for n. No other such expressions ing-room-only crowd at a special three-day conference at using another prime number as n’s coefficient appear in the Emory. —H.G.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 45

Nearly two million children ages 10 to 14 were at work in the United States by 1900. Between 1908 and 1911, Lewis Hine photographed hundreds of these young laborers,including Sadie PfeifertheAt (above). time this photo was taken, she had been employed in a months. six for mill cotton courtesy images all indicated, otherwise unless library of congress, prints & photographscollection committee labor child national division, 1904 ex , hine

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Lewis Hine, EX 1904, captured the American changinglabor. of face photography by photography BODIES OF WORK

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 47 ------◆ Boy a.m. Boy from Loray Mill. ‘Been at at ‘Been Mill. Loray from Boy n.c. ” “Gastonia, The publication of his images helped bring about After parting ways with the NCLC over a salary In the 1930s Hine took on small freelance projects but Hine’s notes were brief but evocative: “7 it rightit smart two years.’” gradual changes, lives the including improving on the creation solely of focused the bureau first federal of children and families. In the early 1900s, the premeSu Court narrowly overturned several efforts to banchild labor at the federal level, but public opinion had shifted decisively against the practice—thanks in small no part to Hine. The chair the of NCLC said Hine’s work was “more responsible than all other ef forts” in rousing the public. In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act ended dangerous child labor and of fered new protections for minors. dispute, Hine maintained his interest in labor issues but found a new tone. His images of the construction of the Empire State Buildingraisedwhotheworkers feats of 57,000 celebratedsteeltotonsof the daredevilframe the building. The images... and perhaps, “have a different note givenin my interpretation a new zest Industry,”of Hine wrote. worriedhisimages hadfallenfashion. of out His reputa tion for difficulty, too, scaredoff potential employers. One former boss praised his talent but noted he was a “true artist type” who “requires some ‘waiting upon.’” Hineappliedmultiple FarmSecurity timesa for Admin Great the of impact the documenting project istration Depression, but the head of the project felt he was too uncompromising.WhenHine 1940,diedin destiwashe tuteforeclosure.wasinandhishome Thephotographer who had made a career of capturing the devastation andmajesty Americanof labor couldn’t find work. Ann Rich, he crisscrossed the country, sweet talking talking sweet country, the crisscrossed he Rich, Ann factoryownersintoallowing takehimtopictures. Ifhe was refused entry, Hine would wait for a shift change and photograph the young workers on their way home. (‘Bill,’)carrying milk. Insummertheglassinworks he factory and keeps two cows too.” “Sonny and Pete newsboys. One is six years old. They began at 6:00a.m. - - - He continued to trace the immigrant experience By 1908 Hine had left his teaching position and was through the early 1900s. In 1907 the NCLC commis sioned Hine to photograph home labor in New York City’s teeming tenements, where immigrant chil dren, along with their parents, made clothing and as sembled artificial flowers. working primarily for the NCLC. With his wife, Sarah “I am sure I am right in my choice of work,” Hine wrote of his involvement with the National Child Labor Committee. ------Industrialization brought children who n 1908 photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, Hine, Wickes Lewis photographer 1908 n EX 1904, visited a cotton mill in Whitnel, North Carolina, where he met a little girl employed as a spinner. When don’t “I Hine demurred. girl the asked was, moment, she a old how After him. told she remember,” added,she enoughI“I’m work,tobutold not justsame.”theencounthedoInhis record of ter, Hine noted the girl’s daily(about 13 dollars wage: today). 48 cents From 1908 to 1911 Hine traveled around the coun “If I could tell the story in words,” Hine said of his Hine’sownworking lifebegan18, after at thedeath MillionsEuropeansof were pouring into the Unit previously might have worked on family farms or in domesticservice intofactories andurban sweatshops. Children’s wages helped their families survive and might have accounted for as much as 20 percent of their household’s total income. In 1900 children ages 10to 14 made up 6 percent of the ManyAmerican were recent immigrants.workforce. try, documenting the lives of young workers for the the for workers young of lives the documenting try, recently formed National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). When the imagespamphlets were and publishedin popular magazines, in NCLCthey shocked many Americans and spurred efforts to reform and laws. strengthen labor work,“I wouldn’t have tolug camera.”a hisAlongsidefather. of sup tovariousthe held he jobs port his mother (factory laborer, janitor, bank clerk), Hine took extension courses in art and stenography theat University Wisconsin.of earnedHe teachinga certificate Oshkoshthe at Normal on went School and UniversitythestudytoChicagoat of under education al reformer John Dewey. In 1901 Hine moved to New to York teach at the Ethical Culture School, which offeredfree high-quality education topoor children. ed States in 1903, when Hine bought his firstera. cam oneFor of his early photographic projects, Hine hauledhis bulky equipment Ellisto Island inhopesof chroniclingthe experiences theseof newcomers. photo courtesy george eastman museum I

48 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Hine’s work documented the breadth of child labor, from home work in urban tenements (bottom right) to industrial(topwork right). workingBoys Westin Virginiacoal mines (left) might have spent 10 hours a day underground and earned a daily wage of about 60 cents.

the university of chicago magazine | mar–apr 2015 57 50 Hine knew the images he was capturing might seem unbelievable to some, the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 spring | magazine chicago of university the so he kept careful records of his visits. The authorities, he wrote, “try to get around” the images “by crying ‘fake,’ but therein lies the value of data and a witness.” (Top left: child workers outside a New Jersey glass factory; bottom left: cousins Inez and Lily Johnson, employed at a Mississippi cotton mill; right: a young basket seller in Cincinnati.) “Cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men. ... The more machines we use the more do we need real men to make and direct them,” Hine wrote in Men at Work (1932), the only collection of his photography published in his lifetime. Hine’s later images celebrated the “courage, skill, daring and imagination” of American workers, including those who constructed the Empire State Building (left) and a mechanic at work on a steam pump (below). the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 51 2017 spring | magazine chicago of university the

this page: courtesy george eastman museum profile ALL AMERI AN Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), PhB’23, AM’24, PhD’28, was a US historian for the people. by lydialyle gibson

e was everywhere, all the time. That’s how got there that he was in the wrong Charleston—the college Lisa Commager remembers her father, the he was speaking at was in West Virginia. So he hired an American historian Henry Steele Com- airplane to fly him there that night. “It never occurred to mager, PhB’23, AM’24, PhD’28. All ve- him,” she says, “that he didn’t have to get there on time.”) hemence and irrepressible energy. A poet Commager wrote and edited more than 40 books alto- friend of the family who came to the house gether. At 28 years old, he published the once-ubiquitous for dinner once maybe said it best, she re- textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930, a col- calls. Amid the evening’s clamor, he pro- laboration with historian Samuel Eliot Morison); and later, claimed, “Commager! You’re nine men. another popular volume, A Pocket History of the United States Not the nine muses, not the nine justices (1943, with historian Allan Nevins). More than a few of on the Supreme Court—you’re the nine his books were aimed at young people. Generations of high men on a baseball team!” Every outfielder, the pitcher and school and college students grew up reading Commager. the catcher and the basemen and the shortstop. “Yep,” says At home, “he was like living with a hurricane,” Lisa says: HLisa Commager. “That was him.” bounding up and down the stairs at their house in Rye, New For the wider public, it wasn’t much different. Henry York (where they lived when Commager taught at Colum- Steele Commager was one of the 20th century’s most visible bia), talking, shouting, laughing, banging from room to room and popular scholars. A household name for decades, a pub- and then back to work in his study, while Mozart or Schubert lic intellectual with an encyclopedic memory and a bouncy or Beethoven rang from the little record player in the living dynamism. There he was on television and the radio, inter- room. He was happiest when he was working, and he was al- preting America’s past for reporters and offering up lessons most always working. He typed—at lightning speed—using for the current moment; and in Congress, testifying before only his index fingers; he tapped his foot so hard that it shook the Senate about presidential powers and foreign entangle- the dining table. And he played ping-pong to win. “We had ments; and in the pages of newspapers and magazines, where ping-pong tables wherever we went,” Lisa says. for decades he unleashed a steady torrent of op-eds and es- I never met Commager. I knew him first (and for a while, says and book reviews about the issues of the day. exclusively) as the author of a children’s book, Chestnut For 65 years Commager was a professor, first at New Squirrel (1952), one of several rotating volumes in the bed- York University and Columbia University and then, for time story set list my father read to me and one of many more than three decades, at Amherst College, where he works of fiction that Commager wrote for children. With taught well into his 80s. He had visiting professorships a little-boy squirrel who gets in and out of scrapes for a at Oxford and Cambridge; in Denmark and Sweden; and protagonist, the book originated, Lisa recalls, as a series throughout Western Europe. When he wasn’t in the class- of stories her father invented on long family drives to keep room, he was speaking to audiences in lecture halls across her from getting carsick. the country and abroad, for free to many groups that My father did know Commager, the laughing, banging, couldn’t afford to pay him. (Lisa Commager recalls her fa- roaring one. “Uncle Felix,” he called him, using the nick - ther flying to Charleston, South Carolina, in the mid-1970s, name Commager’s first wife, my dad’s aunt Evan, had given to deliver one of those free lectures, only to realize once he him, from the Latin word for “happy.” Like his aunt, my

4052 the the university university of of chicago chicago magazine magazine | |spring may–jun 2017 2012 amherst college archives and special collections by permission of the trustees of amherst college

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 53 dad grew up in South Carolina, and he remembered tak- wanted “to use his stature as a scholar to advance a set of ing the train all the way north to visit. He celebrated his beliefs to which he was deeply committed.” He felt it was sixth birthday at the Commagers’ house in Vermont and his responsibility. A progressive liberal in the traditional went swimming with his cousins (besides Lisa, there was 20th-century mold and a Jeffersonian defender of individ- a sister, Nell, and a brother, Steele) in a rock quarry down ual liberties, Commager was “a part of all the brawls,” says the road, with the lights of Montpelier shining in the dis - Bernstein. From the New Deal to the McCarthy hearings tance. Years later, at 14, away from home on his own for the to Vietnam and Nixon, “he was right in the middle of it.” first time, he came up to Amherst for Christmas. A Danish More than once, it proved a perilous place to be. professor was also visiting that week, and he and my father spent the holiday making Scandinavian snow lanterns. By the time I was growing up in the 1980s, Commager ommager was born in Pittsburgh in 1902. His par- had largely faded from the scene. Fewer people read him, ents divorced several years later, and when he was or knew of him. He now seemed old fashioned. 9, his mother died. His two brothers went to live But for more than 50 years, he had been an everyday pres- C with aunts and uncles, but Henry, they said, was ence for many Americans (biographer Neil Jumonville re- too energetic. Instead, he was sent to Chicago, to his grand- counts how, even with a bandaged eye from detached-cornea father Adam Dan, a Lutheran minister and church leader surgery, Commager went on television the night of John F. from Denmark, who wrote hymns and taught in Danish, Kennedy’s assassination to talk to viewers about their fallen and whose liberal reform beliefs ingrained in Commager an president). His legacy rests as much on his public engage- interest in politics and culture, an appreciation for democ- ment as on his academic scholarship. He was a public intel- racy, and a lifelong sympathy for moral dissent. lectual at a time when both halves of the term bore equal The family was poor, and Commager was expected to weight, when part of that work was to make challenging work. In the fall of 1918, just before he turned 16, he took subjects accessible to all. “Commager always insisted that a job at the University of Chicago Library. Working 40 or no matter how technical your subject, you must write so a 50 hours a week, he put himself through college and took general reader can understand you,” recalls former Amherst upper-level classes with UChicago historians William student Richard B. Bernstein, now a lecturer in political sci- Dodd and Andrew McLaughlin. They planted in him the ence at the City College of New York. “And if the general idea that historians have a role in public affairs, a respon- reader doesn’t understand you, it’s your fault.” sibility to act and speak out. Dodd wrote essays for the The other part of the job was to fight. His academic Nation and campaigned for Woodrow Wilson and later for peers sometimes groused at the amount of time he spent in Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal ideas. (Dodd’s ensu- front of the camera and on the lecture circuit, but fellow ing ambassadorship to Hitler’s Germany was volatile, and historian Alan Brinkley argued in a New Republic article in 1937, under State Department pressure to attend an an - that Commager wasn’t in it for glory of self-promotion; he nual Nazi Party rally in Nuremburg—at the time the US government was still trying to maintain diplomatic rela- tions with Hitler’s regime—Dodd left the post.) McLaugh- lin, meanwhile, had supported America’s entry into World WHEN HE WROTE FOR War I and in 1918 stumped his way through Britain, giving speeches endorsing the two countries’ alliance. NEWSPAPERS OR Alongside his activism, McLaughlin also believed that an important element of historians’ work lay in decipher- MAGAZINES, FOR HIM ing a nation’s character, its common essence, what he called “its most real self.” Commager, in his own books, would IT WAS JUST ANOTHER take up this aspiration again and again: to trace America’s Americanness and distill it into words. The volumes re- FORM OF TEACHING. garded now as his best work do this—1950’s The American Mind; 1977’s The Empire of Reason; even his 1936 biography JUST A DIFFERENT of Theodore Parker, the 19th century Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and reformist Unitarian minister. AUDIENCE IN A After college Commager went on to graduate school at UChicago, specializing in constitutional history. He wrote DIFFERENT CLASSROOM. his dissertation on the Danish reform movement led by phy-

4054 the the university university of of chicago chicago magazine magazine | | spring may–jun 2017 2012 When the institutions announced Commager would leave Columbia University for Amherst College in 1956, it was New York Times news.

their ramshackle building to his apartment. But Evan lived conveniently on the ground floor, and so it was installed in her tiny apartment. The piano was an excuse to see her of- ten, but Commager truly did love to play, his daughter says. There’d been a piano in the basement of his grandfather’s house, and he taught himself to pick out tunes as a boy—with gloves on, he always said, because it was so cold. “He played by ear,” she says, “and he played horribly, you know. These big huge chords.” He tried to play whole symphonies at once. The Commagers got married in 1928. That same year, he came to the New York Herald Tribune offices with a letter of introduction, offering to write book reviews. His first assignment: Our Revolutionary Forefathers, a translation of letters from 18th-century French politician (and Thomas Jefferson correspondent) François Barbé-Marbois. The Herald Tribune editors liked Commager’s review so much, they gave him 24 more books to review that year. In the Herald Tribune and elsewhere, he reviewed history books

but sometimes literature too, including Gone with the Wind in 1936 and Carl Sandburg’s collected poems in 1950. Over the next decades, he wrote regularly for a dozen or more magazines and newspapers, channeling his politi- cal advocacy into publications like the Atlantic, the Nation, Harper’s, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and the New York Review of Books. From the late 1940s to the mid- 1960s, the New York Times Magazine relied on him con - stantly for its lead essays. For him, all of this was pedagogy. “He really loved to teach,” says Bernstein, who was Com- mager’s student and research assistant as an Amherst un - dergraduate in the 1970s. “When he wrote for newspapers or magazines, for him it was just another form of teaching. Just a different audience in a different kind of classroom.” Commager was known for his richly rhetorical and liter- ary prose style, not surprising for someone who took the general reader as his audience. “History is a story,” he wrote sician and prime minister Johann Friedrich Struensee, who in The Nature and Study of History (1965), a book for fellow in the late 1700s abolished torture and censorship, fought educators. “If history forgets or neglects to tell a story, it will corruption and aristocratic privilege, and banned the slave inevitably forfeit much of its appeal and much of its authority trade in Denmark’s colonies. as well.” In the Iliad and the Odyssey, he continued, storytell- An instructorship at New York University brought ing and history are so “inextricably commingled” that “we Commager east from Chicago in 1926. That’s where he met do not to this day know whether to classify them as literature Evan. She was a shopgirl working the complaints desk at or as history; they are of course both.” Lord & Taylor, a job for which her Southern sweetness was This was a lesson he hammered home to his students. apparently well suited—after talking with her, customers Bernstein had read The Growth of the American Republic routinely left without filing any grievance. She would go and then, at 15, wrote a fan letter to Commager that blos - on to become a well-known author of children’s books and somed into a correspondence. A few years later, Bernstein young adult novels. Evan and Commager lived in the same arrived at Amherst, where, he notes, the professor never building in Greenwich Village, and he sent her wry, punny tried to mold students in his image—there is no “Commager notes. school” of history—but he did insist that they write well. At one point during their courtship, he bought himself a “Henry thought in paragraphs” and loved words, says

herbert h. lehman papers, specialuniversity correspondencelibrary, http://lehman.cul.columbia.edu/ldpd_leh_0178_0001 files, rare book and manuscriptpiano,5,april (accessed 2017) library, columbia perhaps knowing it was too big to get up the stairs of his second wife, Mary Powlesland Commager, whom he

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 55 married in 1979, a decade after Evan’s death from can- “tentatively” experimented with—principles such as religious cer. The two met at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and intellectual freedom, constitutional order, commitment where Commager had come to deliver a lecture and Mary, to reason, progress, humanitarianism—and “wrote them into then a PhD student in Mexican history, was his appointed law, crystallized them into institutions, and put them to work. chauffeur. “He kept a complete set of the Oxford English That, as much as the winning of independence and the creation Dictionary in the dining room,” she says, ready for when of the nation,” he wrote, “was the American Revolution.” after-dinner discussion turned etymological. His books were known less for their precise analysis than for their broad sweep and searching narratives, and for his ut: those brawls. They were numerous. In the sense of optimism about the American project. “People al- 1930s, Commager defended Franklin Roosevelt ways felt more hopeful when they went to hear him,” Mary and the New Deal, and he was an early advocate for Commager says. “Like, ‘OK, things can get better, things B American involvement in the Second World War. are going to get better.’” And in all his works he sought to He supported John F. Kennedy for president in 1960 and uncover the nation’s defining spirit. In the preface toThe Robert Kennedy in 1968. He warned against sending US American Mind, whose subtitle reads, An Interpretation troops to Indochina and called the Vietnam War a moral of American Thought and Character Since the 1880’s, Com- catastrophe. In April 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. mager wrote that he was concerned not with “abbreviated delivered his searing condemnation of the Vietnam War to histories of American philosophy or religion, sociology or an overflow crowd at New York’s Riverside Church, Com- economics, politics or law,” but instead with the “ideas that mager stood beside him on the dais. illuminate the American mind and ways of using ideas that The historian was a profound critic of the Nixon ad- illustrate the American character.” ministration (three days after Nixon resigned, Commager The reviews were mixed: in a New Republic assessment penned an op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Con- headlined “The American Soul and the Brave Historian,” stitution is Alive and Well”) and a detractor of the Central Harvard historian Morton G. White called the book “a dar- Intelligence Agency, whose top-secret “black budget” he ing leap”; philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, noting (mostly ap- believed was unconstitutional. When presidents began as- provingly) in the American Historical Review that it “leaves the suming the war powers that the Constitution had reserved safer ground of documented statements of fact and roams at for Congress, Commager—who had initially supported large over the unfenced ranges of human experience,” praised Truman’s war-powers claim—became alarmed. He fought the way the book forced readers “to see, or to try to see, life that battle into the Reagan years. whole.” But others criticized its conceptualism and general- Commager’s best-remembered combat, and maybe his izations, the roaming at large beyond documented facts. bravest, was against Joseph McCarthy and the anticommu- Later criticism of the book, and of Commager himself, nist witch hunts of the postwar decade. He spoke out long noted what some historians believed to be a lack of urgency before it became safe to do so. Just days after McCarthy in his attention to the plight of African Americans. (A simi- launched himself into the public eye in February 1950, wav- lar criticism arose from the fact that, although he supported ing what he claimed was a list of 205 known Communists in the civil rights movement, he wrote and spoke about it only the State Department, Commager addressed a gathering of peripherally.) Reconsidering The American Mind decades high school students at Columbia University, telling them later, in 1984, historian Robert Dawidoff wrote, “He does that the country had “the jitters” and that loyalty oaths sig- not take very seriously the possibility that American life naled its confusion and insecurity. No nation can flourish for was corrupt, liberty a privilege of class or race. American long, he said, without criticism and originality. A year later, vulgarity, materialism, racism strike him not as conditions his biographer, Jumonville, recounts, before a gathering of but as mistakes and faults, likely to be corrected by a fun- 1,000 Barnard College students and faculty, Commager at- damentally sound political system.” The ideas behind the tacked the oaths as “fat-headed” and “feeble-minded.” nation’s founding, Commager believed, were sound, and so Commager had sensed Americans’ rising anxiety almost surely those ideas would win out. as soon as the war had ended. In 1947 he railed in the Na - The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America tion against “guilt by association with a vengeance,” and he Realized the Enlightenment, Commager’s final full-length published an essay in Harper’s whose title question, “Who book, was the one the New York Times called “his most bril- Is Loyal to America?,” found its answer in rejecting con - liant.” In the opening pages, Commager asserted his thesis: formity as loyalty. This “new loyalty,” he wrote, “takes the that Americans of the late 18th and early 19th centuries took word for the deed, the gesture for the principle. It is content the Enlightenment principles that Europe had envisioned and with the flag salute.” He included theHarper’s essay as one

4056 the the university university of of chicago chicago magazine magazine | | spring may–jun 2017 2012 Commager tells me that the night before we talked, she went WHAT MAKES online to order a used copy of The Great Constitution, Com- mager’s 1961 explainer for young people. Now more than AMERICANS AMERICAN ever, she says, “I need to know everything in it.” Bernstein finds himself returning to Commager’s words IS NOT ETHNICITY OR too, especially to Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent, but also to The Empire of Reason, the book he helped research as Commager’s RELIGION OR RACE OR assistant at Amherst in the mid-1970s. He believes that Com- mager, like him, would be “appalled” at the 2016 presidential LANGUAGE, OR EVEN election and the turn of current politics. But, Bernstein says, Commager counsels “not to despair”—after all, he never CULTURE. IT’S IDEAS. did—and to reconnect with the country’s ideals, the national character he spent half his life trying to define. What makes Americans American, Bernstein says, paraphrasing his old of five in a slim 1954 volume calledFreedom, Loyalty, Dissent. professor, is not ethnicity or religion or race or language, or (The book’s opening paragraph states, “It is a sobering fact even culture. It’s ideas. … that each generation has to vindicate these freedoms”— of inquiry, criticism, and dissent—“anew, and for itself.”) All this public activity made Commager a target. There he Commager book that I’ve spent the most time were lectures canceled and complaints made, and one of with is one that fits less readily into his canon than his publishers sent a note warning that his statements were volumes like The Empire of Reason, or The Ameri- making it difficult to sell his book. Commager was accused T can Mind, or even Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent. But in of being a Communist and attacked in the press. His stri- its own way it seeks—and, I think, finds—the American dency put him at odds with old friends, including fellow character. Some years ago, my father gave me a copy of historians Allan Nevins, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Ar - The Blue and the Gray: The Story of the Civil War as Told by thur Schlesinger Jr. Participants (1950), a massive two-volume anthology of let- In one bizarre incident, National Review editor William ters, memoirs, journal entries, poems, songs, newspaper F. Buckley Jr. wrote to Commager in 1959, inquiring about clippings, and published autobiographies written by foot his middle name and speculating that he had adopted it out of soldiers and their wives, generals, politicians, preachers, admiration for Joseph Stalin—stahl being the Russian word doctors, prisoners. The book took Commager more than for “steel.” Buckley wrote that he had found out “that indeed 10 years to compile. In page after vellum-thin page, he your name was not always Henry Steele Commager.” That gives each document a warm introduction. There’s a letter part was true: he was born Henry Irving Commager, and President Lincoln wrote to General Sherman, urging him somewhere between his master’s thesis and his dissertation, to send his foot soldiers home to Indiana to vote in the 1864 he took the name Steele. But it was not after Stalin; his great- state election (“This is in no sense an order, but …”), and a grandfather, Henry Steel Commagere, had fought with the diary entry from an Illinois minister who traveled to Ten- Union Army during the Civil War. Commager’s reply to nessee to recruit black soldiers for the Union. Buckley, Jumonville reports, was “hostile.” In her journal, Julia LeGrand describes the “wild confu - sion” of New Orleans’s 1862 surrender: “The Women only did not seem afraid. They were all in favor of resistance, no matter alking now to those who knew Commager, today’s how hopeless.” A Virginia boy recounts Confederate prayer politics unavoidably come up. Midway through a meetings in woods that “resound for miles around with the recollection about his exploits against McCarthyism, unscientific but earnest music of the rough veterans of Lee’s T Mary Commager gives a little rueful sigh. She sees an army.” The Blue and the Gray, along with a parallel volume, unhappy parallel between that period in history and the cur- Documents of American History (1934), led one historian to rent one, and thinks Commager would too. If he were still call Commager “the greatest anthologist America ever pro- here, he’d be writing and speaking out furiously, she says. A duced.” I think it goes deeper than that. I dip intoThe Blue and friend of hers recently suggested opening a Twitter account the Gray and find it moving to spend time, as Commager did, in Commager’s name and posting quotes from his work in with the men and women whose words he sifted and gathered. response to current events. Mary Commager considered And with the country that was striving, amid its failings and it, but said no. “I think that would make me too sad.” Lisa chaos and violence, to live up to itself. ◆

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 57 glimpses IN HARMONY by susie allen, ab’09

ucy Kaplansky was just 18 when she moved With support from her husband, filmmaker Richard to New York City, determined to become a Litvin, and her own therapist, Kaplansky made a gradual singer. The city’s changed and so has she. return to singing and writing songs in the early ’90s. Since Over a cup of decaf at a cheerful, bustling then, she’s released seven albums and has performed all Greenwich Village coffee shop, she remembers over the country, both as a solo artist and in the groups the surrounding area as “still pretty dystopian. Cry, Cry, Cry with Richard Shindell and Dar Williams, ... It was slums and heroin and punk,” says Ka- and Red Horse with John Gorka and Eliza Gilkyson. plansky, LAB’78. Kaplansky spoke with the Magazine about her career, her But the city’s music scene was thriving. early performances at Lab, and how independent artists are Gerde’s Folk City, the legendary club where faring in a changing music industry. Her comments have Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel got been condensed and edited. their starts, was undergoing a revival. Like many other young New York musicians, Kaplansky found an artistic Early music Growing up I found a lot of solace in playing Lhome there. In the ’70s and ’80s, folk artists such as Rich- guitar and singing. I loved it. I would sit in my bedroom and ard Thompson, David Massengill, and Lucinda Williams write and sing and listen to Joni Mitchell and pretend I was made appearances at the club, alongside alternative bands performing. including Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth. I started performing at my summer camp and then at my Between waiting tables and tending bar, Kaplansky eighth-grade graduation. I got enough positive feedback earned a reputation at Folk City as a top-notch harmony that I started to develop some confidence. Then I started singer and skilled interpreter of other people’s songs (she performing at my high school. hadn’t yet begun to write her own). She enrolled at Barnard There was a really great vocal teacher at Lab named Gise- College, “but didn’t take it particularly seriously,” and left la Goettling, who was a German opera singer. I took a class after a year. She performed in a duo with Shawn Colvin and with her when I was a junior. lent backing vocals to Suzanne Vega’s “Left of Center,” I put on a show with one of my friends during Lab’s Arts which appeared on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack in 1986. It wasn’t the kind of career Kaplansky’s parents origi- nally envisioned for her, though they did share her love of music. Her father, mathematician Irving Kaplansky, who I DON’T KNOW IF taught at the University from 1945 until his retirement in 1984, played piano and wrote witty math-themed songs THERE’S ANOTHER not unlike those of his onetime student Tom Lehrer. (In retirement, Irving would make occasional appearances at SCENE THAT’S BEEN Lucy’s concerts, accompanying his daughter as she sang one of his originals, “A Song about Pi.”) LIKE IT SINCE, WHERE For a time, music wasn’t the future Kaplansky saw for herself either. In 1983, just as her career was picking up THERE’S ONE CLUB, AND steam, she abruptly put away her guitar and decided to go back to school to become a psychotherapist. It was a sudden EVERYONE GOES THERE decision driven by anxiety and quarter-life confusion, and one she questioned as her friends’ songs climbed the charts. EVERY NIGHT.

58 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 In 1983, two years after the New York Times said “it would be easy to predict stardom” for Kaplansky, she gave up on music—for good, she thought. But she found her way back in the ’90s and has since released seven solo albums.

Week, at the Little Theater. Mrs. Goettling came, and I campus and thinking, “She’s some nerdy folk singer.” thought, “Oh God, she’s going to hate the way I’m singing.” Then somebody put us on a bill together in a Barnard I’m not breathing properly and all that. dorm show—that’s how we met. Then I told her she needed She came up to me afterward and said something along to come down to the Village. the lines of, “You have real talent.” I didn’t know that I did. She could have said anything, and she encouraged me. Walking away I got a gig singing in a country band in Nor- What a gift. way for three months. It was wild, singing like six hours of country music every night. Scenesters Folk City had been the center of a folk scene When I got back from that trip I just decided, I don’t 15 years before and then it kind of petered out—now it was want to do this anymore. I was extremely confused and important again. neurotic, mostly neurotic, and couldn’t let myself pursue Everyone was just hanging around, wanting to get a re- this thing that I wanted and was good at. cord deal. Back then, there were no independent labels. It I had started therapy at that point and decided to go back was Columbia, Warner Brothers, Arista. A few people did to college and become a therapist. Anyone who really knew get signed. The Roches just exploded out of there. Steve me and knew what was going on said, “Wait a minute, why Forbert had just been signed to Columbia when I got to are you leaving this thing you want to do?” New York. I don’t know if there’s another scene that’s been like it Comeback kid I was getting my doctorate, and I was not since, where there’s one club, and everyone goes there ev- happy. Suzanne had this big hit, “Luka,” in 1987, and then ery night. Shawn won a Grammy for her first album. I was happy for them, and they were my friends, but I remember feeling so Friendly rivalry Suzanne Vega was also a student at Bar- bereft, so jealous. nard at the time. They did a big story about me playing Folk While I was in grad school, Shawn said, “Let’s make an al- City in the Columbia Daily Spectator and Suzanne told me bum together. I’ll be the producer, you’ll sing, we’ll do it live later that her reaction was, “Who the hell does she think in the studio.”

photography by jason smith she is?” And I remember seeing her name on posters around So we made this album [The Tide,1994] when I was in grad

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 59

Kaplansky sings Kaplansky My dad first and foremost loved math. That was what he loved from the time he was a little boy. But the story is that, when he was three, the whole family went to some Yiddish musical, and he came home and he played the main song on the piano. So his parents said, “He’s a genius. We’ve got to get him lessons.” He took piano lessons for years and years, and he was good. In grad school, he would play in swing bands, making a little bit of money. When he was at the University of Chicago, he would play at faculty parties and stuff, Irving Kaplansky (right), shown here with administrators and fellow winners and he was the rehearsal pianist for the of the 1961 Quantrell Award, became Lucy’s biggest fan. Hyde Park Gilbert and Sullivan com- pany. But he never wanted to do that over math. My brothers and I learned a lot of school, but it wasn’t until I finished school that I finally figured the songs my dad would play—the Gershwins, Cole Porter, out I really wanted to be a singer. Deciding to go back to music Irving Berlin, a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan. The joke was was the scariest thing I’d ever done, bar none. that my dad didn’t like anything from after 1950. My dad wrote songs for fun—quirky songs. Some of Pen to paper Songwriting feels so unpredictable. It almost them were about math. My brothers and I learned all those feels like luck. I still struggle to write, and I don’t think of songs growing up. myself as a great songwriter, the way I think of Suzanne. I Years later I said to my husband, “I need to come up with library chicago of university apf7-04031, archive, photographic uchicago think I have some talent as a writer, but it’s taken years to something lighthearted and fun to put in my show.” My hus- get to that. band, who has many great ideas, and this was one of them, I still don’t know where these things come from. It said, “Why don’t you do one of your dad’s songs?” Now I doesn’t feel like, “I’m good at math; I can solve this math always do one of my dad’s songs at my shows. People get a problem.” kick out of them, and I think it meant a lot to him. When I became a mother that infiltrated my writing a lot. And when my parents started to fade, that was incredibly im- Navigating the new music industry It’s a very precarious portant to my work. So I started writing about different things. time for people like me. I’ve always recorded albums that But it’s every bit as hard as it ever was. my record label would sell, and I would get royalties. That’s Every time I sit down to write it’s this huge leap of faith, gone. CDs have stopped selling. I left my record label be- like, “Okay, this might totally suck, but if I don’t try, it will cause there was no reason to have a record label anymore. definitely not get written. If I do try, it might get written and So what is the new model going to be for someone like me? maybe even be good.” I will record somehow and put out music somehow. One bit of good luck is that a year and a half ago, Spo- tify took a track of mine, “More Than This,” and put it on a very popular playlist of theirs. It got 11 million streams. SONGWRITING FEELS That was this infusion of hope. I mean, they don’t pay what they should—it’s like a fraction of a cent per stream—but SO UNPREDICTABLE. just the exposure was good. It’s a new world, and people like me better embrace it in IT ALMOST FEELS LIKE some way. I don’t know what the way is. I’m lucky. I have a career, people come to my shows, and I’m grateful for that. LUCK. I’ll see how long I can make it last. ◆

60 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Notes and Releases, 64 ...... Alumni News, 66 ...... Advanced Degrees, 81 ...... Deaths, 84 ...... Classifieds, 87

Students and alumni come together for the annual Interfraternity Sing in 1955. Join in the fun this year during peer review Alumni Weekend, June 1–4. uchicago photographic archive, apf4-01430, university of chicago library

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 61 ALUMNI ESSAY

The lost quartet BY ED NAVAKAS, AB’68, PHD’72

y first year in col- dark trilogy for Hum 1, and had begun reasonable comments all from a group lege was tough. I to dabble tentatively with the Found- of poetry-free American first-years. grew up in south ing Fathers and Alexis de Tocqueville. It all seemed rather pithless to me, Florida in the shad- Though still pretty unsure of myself, I though. Vaguely recalling that por- ow of Cape Canav- had begun to feel that there just might phyry is jet black, or darkish anyhow, eral, and the only be some warm, tiny alcove that I could I offered the anachronistic suggestion thing I could imag- comfortably inhabit within this great that this was a tale of an interracial or ine becoming was limestone monastery. interethnic love affair. Befuddled by an astrophysicist, That hope exploded into certainty the ramifications of my own interpreta- though I don’t think on meeting Chloe. It happened (mira- tion and finding myself attacked on all I knew what that bile dictu!) when we were discussing sides, I mounted a furious defense that meant. But at 17 I was sure about who I Keats in humanities class. We were brooked no evidence to the contrary Mwas and who I would become. When I sitting around an enormous wooden and deserved the oblivion it earned. landed at the University of Chicago on table, some 20 of us desperately look- There must have been something a warm and russet October day, every- ing for something bright, or even just about my exhibition—I like to think of thing seemed right on course. plausible, to say about “The Eve of St. it as akin to a majestic stag beleaguered My optimism began to erode with the Agnes.” The instructor offered pre- by a pack of baying hounds—that caught first snowfall. By late autumn, the roof liminary remarks and there followed the attention of a pale, delicately fea- and the statues of Zoroaster and Plato the usual silence. Someone in the tured young woman with full red lips. on Rockefeller Memorial Chapel were group trenchantly observed that “St. She stared composedly at me through buried in snow, and I found myself go- Agnes Eve must have special signifi- eyes of what seemed—you guessed it— ing from class to class in a paper-thin cance,” a second that “the atmosphere polished porphyry, their irises adorned “winter coat.” But it was more than sure seemed brooding and porten- with flecks of molten gold. the cold that got to me. I wasn’t at all tous,” and a third that “this stuff must The scene went silent and every- ready for the 8:00 a.m. chem lectures have influenced Edgar Allan Poe”— one but her faded into sepia. We were in Kent—nobody’s fault but mine. I alone in that holy space created by was ill prepared, didn’t know how to eye contact. I instantly lost my place study, and could barely make out the We were alone in that in my argument and, hopelessly con - chicken scratching scrawled on the dis- fused, lapsed into sullen silence, star- tant board (I can barely see my nose in holy space created by ing down with furious intensity at the front of my face even with my glasses). eye contact. I instantly tabletop in search of my point. When Soon I was sleeping in. By second I swallowed hard and looked back up, quarter I had bailed out of the science lost my place in my she closed then opened her eyes with curriculum altogether, having passed argument and, hopelessly deliberateness and smiled. That’s out of math and physics on my entrance when I realized literature was for me. exams, and was free to embrace the ag- confused, lapsed into Spring term began as happily as I had teekay credit photo gregated muses of the humanities. sullen silence, staring hoped. Chloe and I laughed together By mid-January, though still cold over pizza in our rooms as we read and most of the time, I was warmed by the down with furious reread “St. Agnes,” the Federalist Pa- fires of Christian Mackauer’s course intensity at the tabletop pers, and more. The weather changed in Greek and Roman history, was hav- too, in the best demonstration of the ing great fun rereading Aeschylus’s in search of my point. pathetic fallacy that this budding liter-

6462 the university university of chicago of chicago magazine magazine |sept–oct | spring 2011 2017 The day had warmed and the librar- ian had cranked open the row of huge mullioned windows that face onto University Avenue. (Who knew that such medieval things could open at all?) There were no screens, and the fragrant air of a northern spring gone wild, steeped in magnolia and crab- apple, flooded the room. The warm breeze, laced with cool currents, ruffled my note papers. With it came a hundred animated voices enjoying the brilliant day on the grassy lawns, all lost in the subtleties of Federalist 10 and the structure of the Haydn. Then, with shocking clarity, I seemed to hear the unadorned melody of the movement’s first few phrases, its simplicity succumbing to luxuri- ant harmonies, at first only between the violins, ultimately embracing a richly toned viola and a sonorous cello, to produce the complicated and unresolved variations at the end of the second section and imply the deeply satisfying denouement of the third. I think of what happened next as “the great fusion reaction” (a vestigial rem- nant of my scientific dreams). Every- thing came together, not just the Haydn, but the urgent luxury of the spring, the sweet logic of the Federalist argument, ary scholar could ever have imagined. One sparkling Saturday morning I my classmates’ eager pursuit of ideas, Soon my brown rag of a winter coat lay was hiding out to study for finals in the and my green-shoot passions for Chloe, crumpled in the corner of my room and wainscoted gothic library of the Ori- all growing without surcease, budding Chloe and I gamboled happily over the ental Institute. It wasn’t a traditional as I watched in astonishment, promis- fast-greening quad. undergrad haunt, and I was almost ing to blossom brilliantly in colors that The best thing that spring was mu- alone in the huge high-vaulted room, I never knew existed. sic class. After about half a quarter its long oak tables arrayed in faultless The quartet encompassed all of that acquainting us with the key musical rows, its bookshelves loaded. Spread and more. Not just for me and for Chloe, vocabulary of the past three centuries, out before me were the Federalist Pa- but for all of us in the Class of ’68. Our the instructor confronted us with a pers and three stacks of notes I had hopes were as alive as the promise of quartet by Joseph Haydn, to be the compiled for each of three essays I’d springtime, with direction and purpose subject of our final examination. We promised to write for a Soc 2 study and the certainty of fruition. When I had five weeks to determine its basic guide. Alas, my summaries were at happened to glance up from my notes in structure, its principal key changes, least as long as the essays themselves— the library, all that I’d felt seemed to dis- how it arrived at its conclusion, and, no help to anyone pressed for time. till from thin air into the purest droplet most mystifying of all, how all its parts Then it hit me. Why not diagram of water, pendant upon a spring-green contributed to “its complex power to the logic of each piece, in as few words shoot, refracting and intensifying the move us.” as possible? By that time I had dimly light of the reawakened sun, redolent We listened in groups and alone, in glimpsed the logical shapes of the es- of the future, incorruptible by time, in common rooms, in our dorms and on says behind the flourishes of their endless reverberation of Haydn’s last the quads, on cassettes secreted into 18th-century prose. Three hours later triumphant chord. ◆ the library. Never before, I submit, had I had six sheets of paper before me, ar- a single work of Haydn’s been heard so rows and boxes arranged into a neat Ed Navakas, AB’68, PhD’72, is a often by so many in so short a time. It tool for efficient study. In the process psychiatrist. Email him at ednav became part of us all, the Class of 1968, I had looked intimately into the minds @comcast.net and read the sequel woven into the fabric of our collective of men, dead for more than 200 years, to this essay at mag.uchicago.edu photo credit teekay ©2017 ken orvidas c/o theispot neural network. who had helped to shape my country. /quartet.

theuniversity university of chicagoof chicago magazine magazine | sept–oct | spring 20172011 6563 NOTES

FEDERAL AND STATE APPOINTMENTS President Donald J. Trump has named Ajit Pai, JD’97, chair of the Federal Communications Commission. An FCC commissioner since 2012, Pai is focusing on reducing regulations within internet and communications markets. Secretary of state Rex Tiller- son has appointed Margaret Peterlin, JD’00, as his chief of staff. A former House Republican aide and US Patent and Trademark Office official, Peter- A NEW INVESTIGATION lin serves as a liaison between the sec- Sarah Koenig’s (AB’90) new podcast production company, Serial Productions, retary and his 75,000 employees. launched its first limited-series project in March. S-Town began as an investiga- tion into an Alabama man’s boasts that he had gotten away with murder, but then SOCIAL HEALTH CARE “someone else ended up dead, and another story began to unfold—about a nasty Raina Merchant, MD’03, has been feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and the mysteries of one man’s life.” All seven epi- named the inaugural director of the sodes of S-Town are currently available for free download. Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health at the University of Pennsyl- vania. Since 2013 Merchant has led MEETING SPECIAL NEEDS after their deaths, one by suicide. In Penn Medicine’s Social Media Labo- Areva Martin, AB’84, has received March, Fog, written and directed ratory, which studies how data from a James Irvine Foundation Leader- by Chelsea Woods, AB’11, was fea- social media platforms can be used ship Award for her work in extending tured in the NewFilmmakers Los to evaluate, predict, and improve autism care to underserved families. Angeles’s InFocus film series. The individual and population health. In Herself the parent of a child with short film tells the story of a success- her new position she will continue autism, Martin founded the Special ful lawyer who navigates a changing this work, with an emphasis on how Needs Network when she realized career and the return of her grown physicians can harness social media how difficult it can be to find and -af daughter while struggling with to better care for their patients. ford the right care for autistic children. mental illness. She will use the $200,000 award to IRISH PRIDE continue to educate low-income fami- WHO RUN THE WORLD? On March 11 Maura Connors, AB’15, lies in the Los Angeles area about the In February Shola Farber, AB’12, reigned over Chicago’s 2017 St. condition and help them navigate the received a 2017 Young Women Patrick’s Day Parade as queen. She health care system and access available of Achievement Award from the competed against more than 50 other state and federal resources, as well as Women’s Information Network, a mike

Chicagoans of Irish ancestry for the advocate for children with autism. professional networking and politi- coppola title and was crowned on January 15. cal organization. Farber worked for Connors is an admissions counselor COLLEGIATE LEADERSHIP the Obama administration’s National / at UChicago. Elizabeth Howe Bradley, MBA’86, Economic Council and for the Hil- getty has been elected the 11th president lary Clinton presidential campaign as

of Vassar College. Bradley was for- a regional director in Michigan, and images merly the Brady-Johnson Professor is focused on increasing political en- ( of Grand Strategy and head of Bran- gagement among millennials. top

ford College at Yale University and ); photo the founder of the Yale Global Health DELIVERED HONOR

Leadership Institute. Her term at The Evanston (IL) Post Office has courtesy Vassar begins July 1. been renamed in honor of late con- gressman, judge, and White House

MOVIES AND MENTAL HEALTH adviser Abner Mikva, JD’51. The Ab- maura Unbroken Glass, a documentary by ner J. Mikva Post Office is “the per-

Dinesh Das Sabu, AB’06, had its fect coming together of three things connors Chicago theater premiere at the Gene my father loved,” Mikva’s daughter Siskel Film Center in February. The Mary told the Chicago Tribune. “Con- , film follows Sabu’s quest to learn gress, the city of Evanston, and get- ab ’15 more about his parents two decades ting letters.” —Helen Gregg, AB’09

64 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 BLAST THE SUGAR OUT! LOWER BLOOD RELEASES SUGAR, LOSE WEIGHT, LIVE BETTER By Ian K. Smith, MD’97; St. Martin’s Press, 2017 The author of the best-selling Shred The Magazine lists a selection of general nutrition series, physician and media interest books, films, and albums by alumni. personality Ian K. Smith offers a new For additional alumni releases, use the link five-week plan for reducing sugar to the Magazine’s Goodreads bookshelf at consumption with the goals of both mag.uchicago.edu/alumni-books. losing weight and improving overall health. Providing simple low-sugar WAKING GODS substitutions, exercise ideas, and By Sylvain Neuvel, PhD’03; Del Rey, more than 45 recipes, Blast the Sugar 2017 Out! aims to help readers eat, and In Sylvain Neuvel’s sequel to Sleep- love, healthy foods. ing Giants (Del Rey, 2016), a team of THE WORKING CLASS REPUBLICAN: RONALD researchers is working to unravel the REAGAN AND THE RETURN OF BLUE-COLLAR LATE IN THE EMPIRE OF MEN mysteries of a towering robot buried CONSERVATISM By Christopher Kempf, AM’16; on Earth thousands of years previ- By Henry Olsen, JD’90; Broadside Four Way Books, 2017 ously, when a second robot appears. Books, 2017 In his debut poetry collection, And a third, and then a whole army. Republican icon Ronald Reagan is the Christopher Kempf uses his own A war breaks out for control of the true heir of Democratic hero Frank- coming of age in Ohio and California planet, and the researchers’ discover- lin Delano Roosevelt, argues Ethics to explore the United States’ larger ies become humanity’s last line of de- and Public Policy Center senior fel- history of westward expansion and fense against a complete takeover. low Henry Olsen—both presidents colonialism. Through imagery and focused on providing working-class reappropriated rhetoric, Kempf ex- Americans the economic security and plores how American culture shapes dignity of a steady job. Conservatives and confines young men. have been making gains over the past three decades by embracing this New Deal populism, posits Olsen, and should continue to promote the vision that Roosevelt and Reagan shared.

FALLOUT By Sara Paretsky, AM’69, MBA’77, PhD’77; William Morrow, 2017 In Sara Paretsky’s latest V. I. War- shawski mystery, a film student goes missing in a Kansas college town. MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE THEIR DAY: Warshawski’s investigation draws GENRE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY her into the racial tensions that have MARKETPLACE long plagued the area, and that may By Jeremy Rosen, AM’04, PhD’11; hold clues to the disappearance. THE SENSATIONAL PAST: HOW THE Columbia University Press, 2016 ENLIGHTENMENT CHANGED THE WAY The trend started in the late 1960s THE GREAT ESCAPE: AMERICAN HEROES, AN WE USE OUR SENSES with works like Wide Sargasso Sea ICONIC SHIP, AND SAVING EUROPE DURING By Carolyn Purnell, AM’07, PhD’13; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern WORLD WAR I W. W. Norton & Company, 2017 Are Dead, and now authors from By Peter Hernon, AM’72; Harper, 2017 Enlightenment thinkers, seeking to Geraldine Brooks (March) to Mar- When the United States entered make sense of their world, employed garet Atwood (The Penelopiad) have World War I in 1917, the US Navy sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell published books that retell classic seized a German luxury ocean liner in ways that seem shocking today— literature from another character’s from New York Harbor, renamed blindfolded children, intentional perspective. University of Utah it the USS Leviathan, and used it to addictions, pianos made of live cats. assistant professor Jeremy Rosen ferry American soldiers to fronts in Historian Carolyn Purnell delves investigates the new genre of “minor France. On the centennial of Amer- into this often-bizarre history of character elaboration” and argues it ica joining the fight, journalistPeter sensation and shows how Enlight- reflects both a neoliberal emphasis on Hernon uses the ship and its array of enment-era sensory experiments individual experience and publishers’ passengers—generals and reporters, continue to shape the way people ex- desire to market new novels to great nurses and a future president—to of- perience life three centuries later. books readers. fer a unique history of the Great War. — Helen Gregg, AB’09

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 65 Bob Stein, AB’55, AB’57, writes: “I have been retired from the Michigan 55 State University Physics and As- tronomy Department for nine years now, but I am still doing research on the magneto- hydrodynamics of the solar surface part ALUMNI time. I call it computer modeling of weath- er on the sun. Some of my results and pub- lications are on my website (steinr.pa.msu .edu/~bob/research.html). My wife and I are still traveling; we went to Cuba for two weeks in February 2016, going from NEWS Havana all the way to the eastern tip. We had lots of fun meeting many local people, hearing lots of good music, and doing some salsa dancing ourselves. We’ll celebrate our 60th wedding anniversary in two years with a big contra and square dance for our dancing friends.” send your news to: The University of Chi- cago Magazine, c/o Alumni News Editor. Email: [email protected]. send your news to: Bernice “Brine” Yutan Firestone, AB’56, SB’56, 56 SM’59, 188 Mary St., Winnetka, IL 60093. Email: [email protected]. John Ketterson, SB’57, SM’58, PhD’62, wrote, “I am still on the 57 active faculty rolls in the physics College classes and astronomy department at North - western University. Having taught solid state physics since 1974, I slowly built up notes and then chapters on the topic that Judith Blake Schaefer, AB’50, she and her husband, Theodore Schae - evolved into a lengthy book, The Phys- AM’57, PhD’62, retired in 1995 fer Jr., AB’50, PhD’57, bought in 1958 ics of Solids, published last fall by Oxford 50 from a research, teaching, and clin- from science fiction writer Fritz Leiber, University Press.” ical career in psychology. In January she PhB’32. sen d you r n ews to: Roland Finston, published her second novel, Horizons (Big Each Day to Me a Joy: Jewish-Themed AB’57, SB’57, 856 Thornwood Dr., Palo Table Publishing Company), “about two and Other Poems and Plays (CreateSpace, Alto, CA 94303. Phone: 650.494.0287. pioneering women—a homesteader in Da- 2017) is a collection of work by Amy Email: [email protected]. kota Territory and her daughter, a writer, (Gevirman) Azen, AB’50, published send your news to: Bob Bloom, feminist, and suffragist who pursues her posthumously by her daughter, Rachel SB’58. Email: bobloom@ameritech interests in Chicago at Hull House, Poetry Dimakis. The book contains 11 plays and 58 .net. magazine, and the University of Chicago more than 200 poems. Some of the poems send your news to: Joette Knapik during the Progressive Era of the early offer a modern take on Judaism and Trofimuk, AB’59, AM’61, Photo- 20th century.” others explore human emotions, writes 59 genesis Gallery, 100 East San Fran- Schaefer has also written more than Dimakis. The plays, which Azen wrote cisco St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Email: ojoette a dozen short stories; a previous novel, “in order to express ideas more directly,” @cybermesa.com.​ Though the Winds Blow (Xlibris Corp, tackle social issues including poverty Congratulations to Nancy E. Al- 2005); and an essay published in the May and racism. bert-Goldberg, AB’64 (Class of 1, 2016, Boston Sunday Globe about a house send your news to: The University of Chi- 60 1960), JD’71, on her recent book, on Ridgewood Court in Hyde Park that cago Magazine, c/o Alumni News Editor. Your Rights When Stopped by Police: Su - Email: [email protected]. preme Court Decisions in Poetry and Prose , George L. River, AB’52, writes, published under her maiden name, Nancy “I retired from Cancer Treatment E. Albert, by LegalEase Press in 2016. It is What’s new? We are always eager to 52 Centers of America in Tulsa, OK, designed to empower the general public by receive your news, care of the Alumni on June 2, 2016, after seven and a half providing a better understanding of one’s News Editor, The University of Chicago years as a medical oncologist, working rights and responsibilities under the law. Magazine­ , 5235 South Harper Court, with great staff and support. My raison With its extensive endnotes and table of Suite 500, Chicago, IL 60615, or by email: d’être was establishing and running a full- cases, it also serves as a primer on consti- uchicago​-magazine@uchicago​.edu. service weekend cancer clinic, the only one tutional criminal law for students. More No engagements, please. Items may be in the country. It was a rare privilege to information is available on Amazon. edited for space. As news is published in spend my ‘retirement years’ (ages 75–84) Judith Victor Grabiner, SB’60, writes, the order in which it arrives, it may not there. My new home is in Monticello, WI, “After 31 years teaching mathematics and appear immediately. We list news from all where I live with my daughter, Heidi, in a history of science at Pitzer College, and former undergraduates (including those barn that’s been converted into a spacious 15 years in the California State University with UChicago graduate degrees) by the three-story home, and loaf—or ride around system before that, I retired last July 1. I year of their undergraduate affiliation. on our ATV.” continue to run Pitzer’s registration and All former students who received only send your news to: The University of Chi- get-out-the-vote campaign, which my col- graduate degrees are listed in the cago Magazine, c/o Alumni News Editor. league, professor emerita of English and advanced degrees section. Email: [email protected]. black studies Agnes Moreland Jackson, and

66 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 I started many years ago. I also continue to be active in support of the Claremont Colleges Interfaith Chaplaincy, and was on the search committee that hired our fourth coequal chaplain, Imam Adeel Zeb, who works together with our Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant chaplains. I also serve on the Claremont Colleges Hillel Council. In addition, several of my research projects in the history of mathematics are still in the pipeline. My U of C education has shaped my teaching and research throughout my career.” Judith can be reached at Judith Victor Grabiner, Flora Sanborn Pitzer Pro- fessor of Mathematics Emerita, Pitzer Col- lege, Claremont, CA 91711. Susan (Sugarman) Guber, AB’60, has been living in California since 2000. She moved from Coral Gables, FL. Retired from the political world, she is now busy playing golf, canasta, and mah-jongg, and having fun. She has three grand-girls; two are at Stanford, and the third is a sopho- more in high school. “We all are beyond excited that Obama’s presidential library will be at the University of Chicago. Can’t wait to visit.” Sorry if there was any confusion, but in the Class of 1960 report in the Fall/16 issue about Michael A. Edidin, SB’60, the impression might have been that Harvey Choldin, AB’60, AM’63, PhD’65, was into horology (working on watches), but it is really Michael who is. se n d you r n ews to: Steven Kailes, AB’60, Apt. 8L, 3430 North Lake Shore Dr., Chicago, IL 60657. Email: [email protected]. Since 1997 David Novak, AB’61, has held the Shiff Chair of Jewish 61 Studies as a professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Toronto. David wrote recently, “I am now busy Commencing: Graduating seniors file into Rockefeller Memorial Chapel for preparing my six Gifford Lectures to be convocation on June 15, 1951. delivered at the University of Aberdeen in April and May. For a philosopher, this is a very great honor. My title is ‘Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature.’ Dear Classmates, My high school and college classmate My interest in this overall topic goes back I was delighted to hear from Charles “Chuck” Lerner, SB’62, emails to the influence of Leo Strauss, a professor 62 some folks, in response to my plea to say, “I have retired from clinical prac- in the department of political science from for news, who had been out of touch for tice and launched a new career. I am now 1949 to 1968, on my thinking ever since my a while as well as some of my “regulars.” consulting with local hospital systems UChicago undergraduate days.” Carol Grossman Schneider, A B’62, on antibiotic stewardship—optimizing Gifford Lecturers from the Univer - AM’67, writes, “I moved to northern the use of antibiotics.” Chuck, too, is sity of Chicago faculty past and present California in 2015 to be nearer my family out of the cold weather as he has been a include John Dewey (1928–29), Martha (as many of us have done at our age). I longtime San Antonio resident. Those of Nussbaum (1992), Jaroslav Pelikan miss my Chicago friends and activities us who live in cold, gray environments (1992–93), David Tracy (1999–2000), but not the weather. I have found garden- sometimes find sunshine can work as well Jean Bethke Elshtain (2005–06), and ing-based and other volunteer opportuni- as antibiotics. Jean-Luc Marion (2014). The lectures ties. First I worked at a county farm/park From Israel, Moshe Erez tells us that his were established by a bequest of Adam doing various garden work; the park has wife, Marlene Lazar Erez, AB’63 (Class Lord Gifford, a senator of the College an active monarch butterfly support pro- of 1962), after starting her teaching career of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of gram and an overwintering colony of the in Chicago and continuing in Israeli high the lectures, ongoing since 1888 at the butterflies. Now I am working at a city schools from 1968 to 2001, “is still teach- Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Victorian house garden. It was built in ing in a teachers’ college at the young age Andrews, and Aberdeen, is “to promote the mid-1800s and includes an arboretum of 76, training Arab, Israeli, and Pales- and diffuse the study of Natural Theol- that the owner started. Some of the trees tinian young women to be English teach- ogy in the widest sense of the term—in are from 1860, including an enormous, ers,” as well as doing “teaching stints in other words, the knowledge of God.” beautiful ginkgo. One of my main activi- Japan and China—and always with so send your news to: Roberta Jacobson, ties is getting rid of my stuff—the chil - much enthusiasm and energy.” He adds, AB’61, 483 Norwick Ln., Carol Stream, IL dren don’t want it. I volunteer at a Cancer “Marlene and I continue to travel and add

uchicago photographic archive, apf1-03338,60188. university of chicago library Email: robertajacobson@​att.net. Thrift Shop and started donating to it.” pins in new places on the big world map.

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 67 There are about 60 of them already.” By I moved to northern send your news to: Judith E. Stein, the time you read this column, Moshe and AB’62, AM’64. Email: jestein5200 Marlene will have added trips to Siena, California in 2015 to be @gmail.com or [email protected]. Italy; the islands of Bali and Flores in Classmates: Indonesia; Sydney, Alice Springs, and nearer my family (as many A traveling retrospective of the Perth in Australia; another visit to the of us have done at our age). 63 photographs and films of Daniel States (though not at reunion time); and Joseph “Danny” Lyon, AB’63, subtitled a trip to Poland with one of their grand- I miss my Chicago friends Message to the Future, was exhibited this children, including the camps at Ausch- past summer at the Whitney Museum of witz-Birkenau. “What else? In August and activities, but not American Art in New York City. The 175 [they] plan a guided tour to Moscow and the weather. prints and a collection of films summed up St. Petersburg, Russia. In September— Danny’s career, spanning more than a half maybe a short India and Japan hop.” For —Carol Grossman Schneider, AB’62, AM’67 century, of postwar American documen- a book recommendation, they offer East tary photography. In its review, the Wall West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” Street Journal noted Danny’s character- and “Crimes against Humanity” (Knopf, ization of himself as “one of the children 2016) by Philippe Sands. The weather was perfect for marching.” of Kerouac,” drawn to the disreputable Moshe sums up: “So you see, our life Judy Goldstein Marks, AB’63 (Class of and outcast. The review comments on continues to be filled with teaching, 1962), AM’69, and her husband, Arthur, Danny’s unusual model of a documentar- family, books (lots of them), concerts, and marched in Sarasota, FL, “over, back, ian who “imprint[s] his unbridled person- trips.” He ends with a quotation, which and over again on the Ringling Bridge ality” on a wide range of subjects, from economist and Nobel laureate Paul Sam- along with 10,000 young and old, chil - black civil rights workers in the South uelson, AB’35, may have said, but if he dren, women, and men, all very peace - to a white motorcycle gang in Chicago, didn’t he certainly should have: “The best ful and exhilarating ... lots of fun with by embedding himself in “lives that are investments are trips; nobody can take everyone so friendly.” Myrna Helmer seldom portrayed in depth—prisoners, away the memories, and they get better Gottlieb, AB’62, sent a photo of her illegal immigrants, prostitutes, homeless with time.” granddaughter participating proudly children, transvestites.” Bill Spady, AB’62, AM’64, PhD’67, in Washington, DC, and Washingto - Some of us did not openly participate completed his second multiweek con - nian David Tillotson, AB’64, sent me a in the social activism of the early ’60s sulting trip to the Philippines in the past photo of his granddaughter with her sign during our time at the University. How- 18 months. On this trip he spoke at two in San Francisco. And, of course, your ever, our awareness and understanding national conferences on outcome-based class correspondent, Judith E. Stein, of those issues were increased by class - education (OBE), his specialty, with com- AB’62, AM’64, was one of the quarter mates like Danny who actively spoke out bined audiences of mainly higher educa- million plus who rallied at the lakefront against injustices and took personal risks tors numbering close to 900. He writes, in Chicago in the brilliant sunshine and to right them. Danny spoke out by cap - “The highlight of this latest trip … was uncharacteristic January warmth, where turing with his camera the lives of “out- an incredible celebration of my work that everyone demonstrated how generous, siders” in difficult circumstances as well was hosted by the University of Makati, helpful, and polite Chicagoans can be. as their struggles against authority. His located near Manila. They had been seri- The consensus from all of the emails I body of work is deserving of recognition ous OBE implementers for the past two received, aside from politics, was the and admiration. years and used the occasion of my visit uniformly friendly, courteous, and gen- Danny blogs at dektol.wordpress.com and presentation to invite officials from erous behavior of the participants and and bleakbeauty.com. In conjunction 105 other universities to attend the event. the high level of creativity in the signs with the retrospective he has published As I stepped out of the car I looked up and people carried. two new books, The Story of Sam and an saw a huge poster with my picture on it, a It is with a heavy heart that I share attack on climate criminals called Burn red carpet to walk on, a small band playing the sad news that I received just a few Zone. Both are available via his Word - in my honor, and mobs of professors and days ago. Our classmate, my friend, press blog. His retrospective traveled to university officials wanting their picture and reunion committee member Avima the De Young Museum in San Francisco, taken with me.” Gotta love it when an aca- Ruder, EX’62, distinguished epidemi- where it was exhibited from November demic gets celebrity treatment! ologist, architecture buff, former Maroon to April, and then continued on to Zurich Although I could write a separate editor, and West House New Dorm and Berlin. [For more on Lyon, see “Periph- column just on classmates’ responses to resident, died in late January following eral Vision,” Summer/16.—Ed.] the Women’s Marches that occurred the two strokes. Although Avima finished On December 12 our classmate Ray - day after the presidential inauguration her academic work at New York Univer- mond Lawrence “Larry” Liss, AB’63, in January, I’ll try to present thumb - sity and the University of Oregon, her MAT’65, passed away. Larry epitomized nails of some of the notes and photos I heart was always maroon. She was a pre- the student-athlete that many of today’s received from the left to right coasts and senter on the very distinguished science (and yesterday’s) institutions of higher places in between. Rachel Oriel Berg, panel at our 50th reunion, and I know education have sadly failed to produce. As LAB’58, AB’62, AM’63, PhD’72, she had hoped to participate in our 55th an undergraduate, Larry was a member and Diana Slaughter Kotzin, AB’62, reunion. Avima had been a member of of one of the best groups of basketball AM’64, PhD’68, both professors emer- every reunion committee since we started players in the history of the University. ita “on the far side of 75,” chose to take on this journey. [For more on Ruder, see His skills as a captain and point guard a bus together to Pershing Square, one Deaths, page 85.—Ed.] contributed to several record-setting of the rallying points for the Los Ange - I hope we will see you at this 2017 seasons, including the Maroons’ appear- les march, where they “saw people with reunion, our final official class gathering. ance in the final eight of the 1961 NCAA wonderful signs and wonderful friendli- There is no more putting it off for future College Division championship. His per- ness.” Rachel adds, “I had never seen years! If you can’t make it, email a note sonal free throw shooting record at the so many helpful, polite people in such with your “excused absence” that I can University held for over 50 years. In 2014 close quarters.” From New York City, include in our next column. It won’t be as Larry’s contributions to athletics were Judy Frost, AB’63 (Class of 1962), says, good as seeing you, but it will at least let recognized when he was inducted into the “I had a great time at our march here. you get a word in. University’s Athletics Hall of Fame.

68 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 As a graduate student in education and they played together. [For more on Liss, see and Peace in the original language, and for years afterward, Larry kept playing Deaths, Winter/17.—Ed.] of becoming the prominent scholar she basketball. He completed his graduate A wicked night wind was blowing is today. Marianna is known for her aca- work in 1965 and then embarked on a and a cold rain was saturating all who demic work on Russia/the Soviet Union career in teaching and administration. were venturing out to the Seminary and its censorship history, but in the pro- In 1973 he became a member of the Palm Co-op Bookstore at 5710 South Wood - cess of doing her scholarly work, she also Beach County school system and served lawn Avenue on January 11. Indeed, it became known and is lauded for her sig- for more than 30 years, retiring in 2003. was a “dark and stormy night.” Inside, nificant contributions to international In 1966 Larry’s abiding belief that edu- however, in the dry and atmospheric set- librarianship. cation in America could be fun as well as ting of tens of thousands of books, sat The evening concluded with a book life changing brought his achievements Marianna Tax Choldin, LAB’59, AB’62, signing and informal chatting. Attendees on the basketball court into the classroom AM’67, PhD’79, prepared to discuss her then headed out into the wind, rain, and when he cofounded the Academic Games memoir, Garden of Broken Statues: Explor- huge puddles. Marianna and her spouse, Leagues of America. The nonprofit orga - ing Censorship in Russia (Academic Stud - Harvey M. Choldin, AB’60, AM’63, nization blends the principles of sports ies Press, 2016). With her was Judith E. PhD’65, were picked up by their daugh - competition with academics. The pro - Stein, AB’62, AM’64, the Class of 1962 ter Mary Tax Choldin, AB’86, for their gram develops and improves students’ correspondent and the evening’s “inter- ride home to prepare for the next book academic and problem-solving skills, locutor”—UChicago-speak for someone reading event (when the driver would be logical thinking abilities, work ethic, and who facilitates a conversation. their other daughter, Mary’s twin Kate lives. And it was fun. Over more than Despite the dismal weather, the turn- Tax Choldin, AB’86). And the two class five decades Larry’s efforts touched out was heartening—extra chairs were correspondents modeled the appropriate more than 100,000 students in grades needed. Attendees were members of decorum and behavior for our nation’s 4–12. He was recognized as “a champion the University community, students, leaders and headed off, as friendly rivals, for education and inspiration for educa- and alumni, some who claim Marianna for a lovely dinner together. tors nationwide.” In 2013 he received the as a classmate. They included Paula S. send your news to: Grazina “Chris” University of Chicago Alumni Public Berger, AB’61 (Class of 1962), AM’76, Keeley, AB’63, MAT’75, MBA’79, 10532 Service Award, not only for developing AM’87, PhD’94; Alan S. Berger, South Bell Ave., Chicago, IL 60643. “thinking kids,” but also for bringing AB’62, AM’63, PhD’68; Judith (Jack- Email: [email protected]. credit to the University. son) Munson, AB’66 (Class of 1963); From the editor: Robert B. Williams, Larry is survived by his wife of 19 and Mike Winter. (The College Classes AB’64, is celebrating his 50th year years, Carolyn; two children, Taryn and of 1962 and 1963 both have a legitimate 64 as a practicing lawyer specializing Blair; a sister, Sue; two brothers, Tom claim to Marianna.) in litigation. Located in Chicago, Wil- and Jim; three grandchildren; three step- Marianna and Judith made a great team. liams’s practice focuses on workers’ com- children; and eight step-grandchildren. They engaged the audience and expanded pensation and Social Security disability On December 16 in North Palm Beach, the conversation as Marianna recounted issues. “He has not lessened his schedule, FL, a memorial service and reception cel- her journey and what she learned. She told has no interest in retiring, and tries cases ebrated Larry’s life “with joy and tears.” her story of growing up as a faculty child throughout the United States.” In attendance were lifelong friends, in the cerebral community of the Univer- send your news to: Barry D. Bayer, classmates, and basketball teammates sity and Hyde Park during the Hutchins AB’64. Email: [email protected]. Larry Costin, AB’66 (Class of 1963), and era, of becoming a student of the Russian In summer 2004 your classmates Mike Winter, LAB’59, AB’64, MBA’65. language when a Soviet scholar prompted Judy Shell Lavinsky, A B’65, Like Larry did, they also cherish the time her to read the unabridged version of War 65 AM’66; Rona Ruben, AB’65, AM’71; Jeanette Sharpe, A B’65, MAT’69; and yours truly [Roberta Ber- nstein, AB’65], along with our respec- tive husbands—Michael Lavinsky, JD’65; Russell Hollander, AM’76, PhD’77; Rob- ert Kreiser, AM’65, PhD’71; and Charles Bernstein, AB’62—met for a mini–U of C reunion in New Mexico. We spent a mar - velous three days together, seeing won- derful sights and talking constantly about memories of our U of C days and updates on our lives since. At one point I mentioned that I was excited about a recent discovery, a box of letters from my father to my mother during World War II while he served in the medical corps (130th General Hos - pital) of the US Army, first in training in North Carolina and then a year in the European theater, primarily in Belgium. I told them that although he had spent his entire career as a writer for the Chicago Daily News and was a great speaker and storyteller, he never once discussed his Army service or mentioned this box or En garde: The UChicago fencing team poses in 1961. Fencing was a varsity sport its contents to my sister or me, and had at the University’s founding, and the Maroons won seven Big Ten championships died (in 1990) long before my discovery. between 1930 and 1941. It hasn’t been a varsity sport for more than 20 years, but a I said that the stories in the letters were uchicago photographic archive, apf5-03196,largely university of chicago library student-run team still competes in regional and national tournaments. not only interesting but primary source

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 69 material, featuring firsthand reports of I have moved to the “Richard Gottlieb, College Class of the events of the war, including the Battle 1965, died in his home in New York City of the Bulge and its aftermath; the life town’s Tree Advisory on January 31 after a long illness. Rich - of an American soldier longing for home Board, which speaks for ard received his MD from the University and family; the deep camaraderie among of Chicago medical school and had a long soldiers in the same unit; and Army the condition of trees on and eminent career as psychoanalyst, bureaucracy, as well as my father’s own town and park district teacher, and scholar. He served as director philosophical musing on Hitler, the Nazis, of faculty at the New York Psychoanalytic the American cause, and war in general. property. Battleboro is Society and Institute (NYPSI) and super - My friends asked me what I planned to excited about partnering vising analyst at the Berkshire Psychoana- do with these letters. I replied that I had lytic Institute, of which he was a founding begun transcribing them into a cohesive with the Vermont Urban member. He was an associate editor for manuscript to share with family members and Community Forestry clinical studies for the Journal of the Ameri- and that maybe someday this material can Psychoanalytic Association and associ - could be produced as a published book. program to get our ate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Jeanette responded immediately that I town arborist. Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New should definitely forge ahead with creat- York City. Richard maintained clinical ing a book for publication, mentioning —Georgia (Marks) Morgan, AB’66, practices in New York City and Sharon, that her father, George Sharpe, had com- AM’69, PhD’71 CT, for over 30 years. He lectured widely, piled his war letters to his wife (which within the United States and abroad, and he had stored away in a box and forgot - published scholarly articles in all of the ten until he discovered them some four major psychiatric and psychoanalytic decades later) into a book about his World and streams on demand from the station’s journals. His work has been recognized War II service in the Pacific in the Army archives for at least two weeks follow - with NYPSI’s Heinz Hartmann Award, Medical Corps (Brothers Beyond Blood: ing broadcast. Convenient links to the the American Psychoanalytic Associa- A Battalion Surgeon in the South Pacific archived shows are on Mark’s website, tion’s Edith Sabshin Teaching Award, [Eakin Press, 1989]) that was success - bluespower.com. Tune in and enjoy! and the Journal Prize of the Journal of the fully received by the reading public. She Unfortunately, we close on a sad note, American Psychoanalytic Association. He sent me a copy, which I devoured, amazed the passing of two of our classmates. In is survived by his wife and collaborator, at the many similarities with my father’s early February we learned that David Josephine Wright; his two sons, David and letters. I later had the pleasure of tell - Schoenwetter, SB’65, died on Decem - Nicholas; and his broad network of friends ing Dr. Sharpe this in person, along with ber 4 (after we had submitted the column dating back to middle school in New York asking him for advice about developing for the February issue, hence the delay and his years at UChicago through his long and publishing such a book. in this report) from complications of career in New York and to his beloved Inspired, I began what became a long cancer. David, a Chicagoan who was second home in Sharon.” [For more on Gott- journey. Due to the demands of my profes- also a high school classmate of Lou Sher- lieb, see Deaths, page 86.—Ed.] sional career and family responsibilities, I man, SB’65, PhD’70; Jay Stone, AB’65, Best wishes for a happy summer with didn’t finish the transcriptions until 2013, MBA’69; and me, majored in chemistry lots of fun-filled adventures to report in giving copies to children, grandchildren, at the U of C, got an MBA from North - this space. and cousins for holiday presents. Their western, and made his career in aero - send your news to: Roberta Lesner feedback encouraged me to edit the mate- space and computer programming in Bernstein, AB’65. Phone: 773.324.6362 rial for a book for publication. And so, Phoenix, AZ, where his memorial ser - or 312.520.6362. Email: bernsteinroberta upon retiring around our 50th reunion vice was held. He was known and loved @gmail.com. in 2015, I got to work. I’m now excited by all for his wit and humor, which he Arthur G. Robins, AB’66, MD’70, to report that as of this writing in Febru- displayed in acting and in writing works moved to Boston when he graduat- ary (the University of Chicago Magazine’s of humor and fiction. To this day, Lou, 66 ed from medical school. An internal editorial schedule demands copy three Jay, and I, along with the rest of our high medicine specialist, he spent a year in a mis- months in advance of an issue’s publica- school class, fondly remember his hilari- sion hospital in Zululand, South Africa. He tion date), the book is finished and I am ous performance as Malvolio in a school was able to travel before returning to the in the process of signing a contract with a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth States and completing some more internal publisher. Hopefully, as you read this, my Night. He is survived by his wife, Bar - medicine training in pulmonary diseases. book is in the process of publication. bara, to whom condolences may be sent He joined the pulmonary staff of the Vet - I tell you this, my own story, in hopes at [email protected]. [For more on erans Affairs medical center in Boston and of inspiring all of you to tell me what Schoenwetter, see Deaths, page 86.—Ed.] spent the rest of his career in the VA system you’re up to and to encourage you to seize Then on March 3, we received this in Boston and Manchester, NH. Arthur opportunities to do something new and email from David Lopez, AB’65: “Rich- retired in 2010 and works one day a week exciting (news of which you’ll of course ard Gottlieb, AB’65, MD’69, died about in the VA system. He is the proud father of share with your classmates here). a month ago. I attended his memorial ser- two children and has three grandchildren, Meanwhile, we heard from pianist/ vice in New York City on February 12. ... with a fourth on the way. He and his wife blues specialist Mark Naftalin, AB’64 There was a smattering of UChicago folk enjoy traveling, which now includes more (Class of 1965), our 50th reunion enter- at the memorial service, some from our frequent trips to New Zealand, Austra- tainer who had been inducted into the class and others from the following two lia, South America, the Galapagos, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame about a month to three years. I urged them all to attend Antarctica. They enjoy bicycling, hik- before the reunion, that his monthly their 50th and support Chicago! I’m ing, photography, and trips to New York radio broadcast, the Mark Naftalin Show, hoping to attend our 55th, even if we are City (more trips are planned). “This is all continues on station WPKN (89.5 all pooled with other ‘emeriti alumni.’” a far cry from 18 hours in Harper Library! FM) in Bridgeport, CT, on the second David, faculty retirement liaison and I am currently reading John W. Boyer’s Wednesday of each month, 4 p.m. to 7 professor emeritus of sociology at the (AM’69, PhD’75) The University of Chi- p.m. Eastern time. The show broadcasts University of California, Los Angeles, cago: A History (University of Chicago to southern Connecticut and northern attached this heartfelt tribute he had Press, 2015). I wish I had some knowledge Long Island, streams live on wpkn.org written to his friend Richard: of that as a Chicago student; like most of

70 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 us I drifted through with no sense of con - text. We knew that Harper was a saint and Hutchins an enfant terrible, but I don’t think we had any appreciation of how the College curriculum had come to be what it was. Better late than never; I am finding the history absolutely fascinating!” Richard R. Ganz, AB’66, is still happily working as a solo medical practitioner in Healdsburg, CA. “The General Stud- ies in the Humanities classes form the basis of my long-term relationship with multiple generations of patients. Hap - pily married for 36 years with children and grandchildren, I do woodworking as a hobby. I went to Togo, West Africa, with the Peace Corps after the U of C and then decided to go into medicine; took premed classes at Columbia and did medi- cal school at Georgetown. I then came to San Francisco for residency and stayed out West. I got very interested in Bowen Family Systems Theory after a lecture by Murray Bowen at Georgetown, which Joel Kleinman, SB’66, MD’73, PhD’74, and Chuck Milgrom, SB’67, enjoy the New has been very helpful personally and pro- Dorms courtyard on a sunny day in 1963. Photography by Joel Brody, SB’66. fessionally. I am extremely grateful to the University of Chicago.” Georgia (Marks) Morgan, A B’66, AM’69, PhD’71, was planning to par - ending up as a field operative in Ger - patient relationship skills in a course ticipate in the Women’s March with her many. His roommate in Henderson, called Doctoring. She is traveling more; daughter and two grandchildren. She con- Richard Dean McFarlane, EX’67, died New York to London on the Queen Mary tinues to set down roots in southeastern in Vietnam. Rich will assume emeritus 2 with classes in theater and history, and Vermont. She was elected to a second term status in 2018 and hopes to have all the on the Mekong via Vietnam and Cam - as town meeting representative (Brattle- work for a geophysics degree completed bodia. She is also to become a first-time boro, VT, is too big for a town meeting). by that time. grandmother! She is still in shock after “Service involves two informational Leslie F. Goldstein, AB’65 (Class of the election and can only hope that meetings and one marathon Saturday 1966), AM’67, is enjoying sunny Flor - “enough of us can follow Meryl Streep’s meeting. After serving for two years on ida in a one-room escape from winter on advice and ‘turn that broken heart into the town’s Citizen Police Communica - Siesta Key, near Sarasota. art’” (or science, social service, or a revo - tions Committee and helping regularize Eric L. Hirschhorn, AB’65 (Class of lution?). “I wish I could find an action the committee’s procedures, I have moved 1966), is leaving his governmental post plan that makes sense.” to the town’s Tree Advisory Board, which as undersecretary for industry and secu- Steven C. Wofsy, SB’66, is embarking speaks for the condition of trees on town rity at the Department of Commerce on his second around-the-world NASA- and park district property. Brattleboro after a seven-year stint in the Obama supported Atmospheric Tomography is excited about partnering with the Ver- administration. He plans on doing Mission. The mission departed in a DC-8 mont Urban and Community Forestry unpaid projects as well as some paying aircraft on January 23 from Palmdale, program to get our town arborist.” She projects, “within his control.” The CA, and will travel to Anchorage, AK; was also appointed to the steering com- former category will include service as Kona, HI; Fiji; Christchurch, New Zea- mittee of the Winter Farmers’ Market. the Washington, DC, bar hearing offi - land; Punta Arenas, Chile; Ascension “And am very happy in both cases working cer on discipline; work with the Ameri- Island; the Azores of Portugal; Thule; with and learning from such knowledge- can Law Institute; and projects with the and then back to Palmdale. Read about able people.” She continues to volunteer National Academy of Public Administra- the first mission at earthobservatory with the activities of an assisted living tion and with several think tanks. The .nasa.gov/blogs/fromthefield/category center (mostly with polymer clay activi- latter paid category will include updating /atom-2016. ties) and to sort and pack clothes for Carry his book on export controls and embar - Margaret Puner Duke, AB’66, spent a Me Home, a local charity providing assis- goes (Oxford University Press willing), lovely holiday with her daughter, son-in- tance to refugees in Greece. working as a monitor for companies law, and seven-year-old granddaughter, William M. Freund, AB’66, is in Africa under judicial or administrative orders Victoria. “This year we eschewed all writing a book and promises to com - proving independent oversight, and pos- things plastic and gave Victoria a profes- municate when it is accepted. The third sibly working as an expert witness in his sional stand mixer as she is very keen to edition of The Making of Contemporary fields of export control and professional bake. Project number one was a choco - Africa: The Development of African Society responsibility. “Finally, I can’t imagine late cake, which turned out delicious. Since 1800 was published in the United that I’ll be refraining from political activ- She also received her own measuring States in September by Lynne Rienner. ity either. Lord knows we’re going to cups and spoons, which are definitely Bill did some traveling to Sicily, Alaska, need it.” His daughter, Anne, is to marry helping her understand fractions. As and Carnegie Hall. His 12th PhD student this fall; Eric and his wife, Leah, are eager as she is to bake, she loves to play was awarded her degree. excited about that. computer games, and in the age of Face- Richard M. Showman, AB’66, is a Katharine Wexler, LAB’63, AB’66, Time we are able to play these with her developmental biologist at the Univer - has been retired for more than a year even when she is home in upstate New sity of South Carolina. Rich served in but feels busier than ever. She is tutor - York.” Maggie is gearing up for her 12th

photo courtesy the university of chicago classthe of 1966 facebook page Army, using his U of C German and ing medical students in improving their Kingston Canadian Film Festival—the

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 71 only standalone festival of Canadian class news at our 50th reunion! See you films in the world. all there. Michael Schlutz, SB’66, retired after send your news to: Deanna Dragu- 39 years as a hematologist-oncologist. He nas Bennett, AB’67, 3962 Arlington has spent much time on deferred house Dr., Palm Harbor, FL 34685. Phone: maintenance items and spent a week in 727.772.6997.Email: the67scribe Berlin on retreat with the Visiting Com- @hotmail​.com. mittee to the Division of the Humani - send your news to: Mike Nem- ties. “This was brilliantly organized and eroff, AB’68, Sidley Austin LLP, led by Martha Roth and her staff.” Mike 68 1501 K St. NW, Washington, DC remains active with the local alumni club 20005. Email: [email protected]. in Newport Beach, CA, and he continues send your news to: Carol Cohen to support the Long Beach Opera and Caswell, SB’69, 1024 West Upsal Pacific Symphony. His U of C daughter, 69 St., Philadelphia, PA 19119. Email: Gretchen Elizabeth Schlutz, AB’98, [email protected]. and U of C son-in-law, David Pierre- From the editor: God and Other Po- Henri Silver, AB’97, are expecting his ems: Final Poems (Big Table Books, third grandchild. On to his 50th wedding 70 2016), featuring work written dur- anniversary in 2018! ing the last weeks of poet Paul Carroll’s sen d you r n ews to: Dick Lyford, (AM’52) life, was edited by Carroll’s AB’66, 1600 Hub Tower, 699 Walnut St., widow and Dan Campion, AB’70. “I was Des Moines, IA 50309. Fax: 515.246.4550. Doubles fun: Students play tennis by Paul’s student in the Program for Writers Email: rlyford@dickinsonlaw​.com. Pick Hall in 1968. at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1975,” writes Dan; the manuscripts are 50TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 held by the University’s Special Collec- tions Research Center. Warren Olson, AB’72 (Class of in their home in Paris. In 2015 she spent s e n d y o u r n e w s t o : Pete Doug - 1967), says, “After nine years, six time with Tom Heberlein, AB’67, and his lass, AB’70, MD’74. Email: edouglass 67 moves, three states, two houses con- wife in Stockholm. This September she @comcast​.net. structed, and one house totally renovated, plans to spend time in Greece with Pat, So, now we know. The never-ending we have moved back to Florida. We are now AB’67, MAT’69, and Manoli, AB’67, election really dead-ended in great living on the ‘space coast’ in Melbourne, Cassimatis. Steffi says, “Nice to have 71 balls of fire! Nevertheless, we keep FL. We are living in a regular neighbor- friends in fun places!” Find out how she on and we’ll do it all over again sooner hood with lots of younger people, includ- does this at [email protected]. than we imagine. As we sink well into ing kids on Big Wheels. A pleasant change Nili Olay, AB’67, spends six months a spring and get ready to sizzle in summer, from gated retirement communities. I am year in Naples, FL. This year on Janu - please try to find time in your busy work looking forward to our 50th class reunion ary 21 she participated in the Women’s and play schedules to send news about you this year, and hopefully the World Cham - March. She says, “I marched because and your achievements, milestones, pub - pion Cubs will be playing at home.” Con- 100 years ago women marched and gave lications, epiphanies, family, colleagues, gratulate Warren on ending his peripatetic me the vote. Women marched some 40 and any other news you would like to share existence by putting down roots in Florida or 50 years ago and now I can open my in our column. at [email protected]. own credit card and own my own house. Dave Forbes, AB’71, sends us news that Daniel Shapiro, AB’67, reports, I am marching so that my great-grandkids he recently coedited a new book, Hand- “This year marks my 49th year of mar - won’t still have to march for women to book of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and library chicago of university apf4-02073, archive, photographic uchicago riage to Sandy Strassberg, EX’69, the have equal rights.” Congratulate her on Social Engagement (Springer, 2016). He first-year girl who sat next to me in my her activism at [email protected]. also wrote a chapter in the book called third-year physics class. I left practice Karen Stone, AB’67, says, “I marched “Critical Integral Contemplative Educa- in 2011 after nearly 40 years as an obste- with pride and passion on behalf of tion.” Dave previously sent us his essay trician-gynecologist and we have been women’s rights in the Women’s March “Occupy Mindfulness” (published online busy traveling (11 countries, 19 states); on Washington the day after the inau - in June 2012 by Beams and Struts) about auditing Princeton University courses; guration. An awesome experience, this complex field of study (please see attending lectures; helping to care for plus I am committed to deepening my our column in the Jan–Feb/13 Magazine). four nearby grandsons; reading; and bicy- engagement with the American Civil Dave’s new work is just as brilliant as cling, hiking, and otherwise keeping fit. Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, that essay, and I must give our readers my We have been in contact with a number Emily’s List, the National Resources same assessment of my own ability to not of classmates, traveling three times with Defense Council, and Earth Justice. quite genuinely understand the concept Marshall Fields, SB’67, and wife, Heidi; Look forward to seeing all of my fellow and agency of mindfulness. As I noted in bicycling with Mike Starrels, AB’67; and classmates for our 50th reunion!” Con - 2013, Dave’s work “definitely requires a visiting Mel Firestone, AB’67, in Ohio gratulate Karen on her dedication at U of C mind to hatch and decipher. … [It] and Eric Brody, AB’67, in Oregon. So [email protected]. is way above my intellectual pay grade, far, life has been good. Looking forward I, Deanna Dragunas Bennett, AB’67, but no doubt many of our U of C class - to our 50th reunion.” Make plans to see have been doing our class news column mates who still flex those fabulous U of C Dan at our reunion at danielwshapiro for 20 years and this is my 125th column. contemplative, analytical, and gymnasti- @verizon.net. I’ve decided to go into semiretirement as cally introspective mind muscles will be Steffi Abeshouse Wallis, AB’67, is class correspondent. This means that I able to understand and thrive” on Dave’s house manager at the Belasco Theater will be happy to continue to compile and writings. I can think well enough about in New York. When the theater is dark, submit class news columns; however, the subject matter, however, to assert for Steffi likes to travel. Last July she went I’m not going to contact classmates and our readers that I think Dave is alerting to Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Amsterdam, solicit news. If you have something to our public at large—intellectuals, phi - and London. She had dinner with Paul share, please send it to me and I’ll make losophers, corporate actors, educators, Lazarow, AB’67, and his wife and son sure it gets printed. Or give me some etc.—about genuine missteps and groggy

72 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 I marched because 100 years ciation for Death Education and Counsel- physical and emotional—dealing with a ing. Dale’s son Evan was admitted to the new culture, racing a bike for the Olym- ago women marched and University of California, Berkeley, joint pics (Rose), setting up a Home Depot– gave me the vote. Women MPP/JD program, and his wife, Debo - like business (David), falling in love, rah Kennedy, published Nature Speaks: and dealing with their mom. Business, marched some 40 or 50 Art and Poetry for the Earth (White Cloud families, Texas. They are emotionally years ago and now I can Press, 2016). unstable and devote serious effort to res- Philip, AB’71, AM’82, PhD’87, and cuing each other from the consequences.” open my own credit card Susan (Donner), AB’71, Lutgendorf, Semon notes that a critic (Tim O’Brien) and own my own house. I both professors at the University of describes his writing style as “curt, lumi- Iowa, sent us updates on life at large. nous and thoughtful.” am marching so that my Susan serves as the president of the Psy- Semon also included news of his essay great-grandkids won’t still choneuroimmunology Research Society. on the “myth of the artist,” a summary of She is also a professor and Starch Fellow the ideal and real persona and lifestyle of have to march for women to in the Department of Psychological and the artist in the viewpoints of our recent have equal rights. Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa. literary history (past 300 years). Philip continues serving as president of It is difficult to provide a decent sum- —Nili Olay, AB’67 the American Institute of Indian Stud - mary of Semon’s essay without including ies. In 2016 Harvard University Press the entirety, so I suggest our classmates published the first two volumes of the email [email protected] for Epic of Ram, Philip’s translation of the further instructions regarding website thinking that can infect the talking and Hindi Ramayana by Tulsidas. Their addresses. practice of mindfulness with old behav- daughter Mira Lutgendorf Debs, AB’99, se n d you r n e ws t o: Elaine Black, iors of materialism, silly self-realization, receives her PhD in sociology from Yale AB’71. Phone: 415.389.9043. Email: consumerism, and more of “the same old this spring. Their other daughter, Claire [email protected]. same old.” I know this is not really clear Lutgendorf McPhee, works as a veteri- and five minutes from now I will probably narian in Bellingham, WA. Susan and 45TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 no longer understand what I have just said Philip “are the proud grandparents of to you. So I will shut up and give our read - three lovely grandchildren—Francesca George Van Cleve, AB’73 (Class of ers a couple of quotes from Dave’s chapter. (8), Gabriel (4), and Henry (2).” 1972), writes that his new book will “Mindfulness education programs can Semon Strobos, AB’71, PhD’84, our 72 be published by the University of be helpful for some individuals: They famous EMS hero, novelist, and essay- Chicago Press in fall 2017. It’s called We tend to alleviate stress, promote skills ist, sends us his “Announcement! Just Have Not a Government: The Articles of Con- useful for self-success, adjust students too late for Xmas but in time for my federation and the Road to the Constitution, and teachers to the pressures and ineq - 68th birthday, my novel, Triage (Cre- and it’s about why the confederation gov- uities of schooling, and help individu - ateSpace, 2016), has been published and ernment, which was fairly popular at the als navigate around high-stakes tests, is available on Amazon.” Triage is “about end of the Revolutionary War, collapsed teacher bashing, and other neoliberal an Ivy League brother and sister, David only four years later and was replaced by detritus strewn on the surface. ... [But] and Rose, who move from Winchester, the dramatically more powerful federal overall many do little to nothing to link NY, to Wimberley, TX, during the government created by the 1787 Constitu- agency with social justice and challenge 1980s and have all kinds of adventures, tion. George and his wife recently went on the moral crises of our day that are based an excellent U of C Alumni Association on self-attachment, greed, and delusion, tour of Japan. “The professorial lecturer, which fuel the sources of stress in the James Ketelaar, AM’82, PhD’87, of the U first place. … Mindfulness programs of C history department, was terrific, and tend to unwittingly reinforce rather than we also had a really nice itinerary and an ex- challenge the neoliberal individualist ceptionally knowledgeable and very, very practices, culture, and social structures personable Japanese guide as the overall that prime the self for marketability. tour director. I strongly recommend Japan What the hell indeed! as a place to visit, and this tour as a way to “We need a comprehensive, critical see it. Will send photos on request.” perspective on contemplative education Richard Gordon, AB’72, general coun- that accounts for the varieties of experi- sel at Seattle’s TOC Holdings Co. (for - ences, worldviews, experimental orders, merly Time Oil Co.) recently returned cultures and systems and that stands for from another trip to the People’s Repub- optimal development of all. … A criti - lic of China, where he lectured on US cal integral approach includes the best of environmental law at both Peking Uni- traditional prophetic and contemplative versity Law School and Beijing Normal values and practices, modernist scientific University Law School. This was Rick’s methods, knowledge and critical think- seventh time lecturing at Peking Uni - ing, and postmodern multiperspectives versity (colloquially referred to in China and inclusivity.” as “Beida”) and fourth time at Beijing Dale Larson, AB’71, sent us all “best Normal University (colloquially, wishes for the new year … let’s hope we “Shida”) since he first started lecturing can survive ‘post-Trump stress disorder’ in China 10 years ago. On this trip Rick and get back to sanity.” Dale enjoyed a gave a lecture called “A Look at Envi - great 2016. He is a professor in the coun- Menfolk: The Chicago Morris Dancers ronmental Liabilities in US Real Estate seling psychology department at Santa were founded in 1969 as an offshoot of Transactions: Problems, Approaches, Clara University and specializes in end- a square dancing group that had too and Solutions.” In addition to lecturing, of-life studies. In 2016 he received the many men. Here they perform during Rick reports that, as is usual on these uchicago photographic archive, apf7-03841-001,Death university of chicago library Education Award from the Asso- the Festival of the Arts in 1970. trips, he and his wife (a Beijing native)

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 73 enjoyed spending time exploring and to be my teacher as I listened to his tapes Judith Ai-Lien (Franklin) Simon, photographing the city, visiting relatives over and over, told them at Farbrengens, AB’78, has remained in the Chicago area, and old friends, and, of course, eating. As and eventually wrote this book. raising a family and practicing various retirement looms on the horizon, Rick “The book is available on Amazon, and artisanal crafts including textile weav- hopes to be able to spend more time in my website is alter-rebbe.com. You can ing and sewing, ceramic sculpture, and China in the future. message me on my Pesach Glaser author graphic arts. Nursing has proven to be a se n d you r n e ws t o: Dorthea Juul, page on Facebook.” family affair, as she earned a combined AB’72, PhD’89, Apt. 302, 1115 South se n d you r n ews to: Julian Brown, master’s and registered nursing degree in Plymouth Ct., Chicago, IL 60605. AB’77, AM’78, 2503 Elmen St., Hous - 2012 and now works in community well- Email: [email protected]. ton, TX 77019. Email: [email protected]. ness and her younger son is now on track From the editor: Were you on the first Our latest news from classmates to become a nurse practitioner. Judith and football team after football “came shows that at both home and work, her now-retired husband also offer their 73 back” to the University of Chica- 78 our peers continue to move beyond full parental love and support to their go? If so, Charles Nelson, AB’73, wants noteworthy milestones on life’s jour - older son, who unfortunately has con - to hear from you—he’s planning a team re- ney. Thanks to them for letting us enjoy tended with mental illness since young union during Homecoming weekend this their additions to our class saga, ideally adulthood. U of C college friends are fall. Give him a call at 815.382.2210. to be savored in full glory via future in- cherished as an always-wonderful part sen d you r n ews to: Carolyn “Lyn” person contacts! of her life. Ragan, AB’72 (Class of 1973). Email: Yvonne Lucero, AB’78, continues to Scott Yaffe, AB’78, has one son, [email protected]. work in research for the Department of Steven Yaffe, Class of 2017, graduating send your news to: Barbra Goer- Veterans Affairs at Hines Hospital near from the College in June, and another, ing, AB’74, JD’77, 65 E. Monroe Chicago while looking forward to retire- David Yaffe, Class of 2021, enrolling to 74 St., Chicago, IL 60603. Email: ment in the next couple of years. When start there in September. So Scott will be [email protected]. not enjoying the time she devotes to her on campus a number of times this year! send your news to: Bruce Gluck- four grandsons, she includes travel, gar- se n d you r n e ws t o: Greg Gocek, man, AB’75, 21 Courtland Pl., dening, needlecraft, and photography AB’78, AM’80, MBA’85. Email:gggman 75 Middletown, NY 10940. Email: on her leisure-time agenda. Thanking @att.net. bgluckman@hvc​.rr.com. the U of C for its role in broadening mind Oscar Wilde wrote, “If there is any- James Fuchs, AB’76, AM’77, and spirit, she extends best wishes to thing more annoying in the world PhD’83, litigated this year at two US all classmates. 79 than having people talk about you, it 76 Army bases, Fort Meade and Fort Bragg. With his uncanny sense of direction, he arrived at Fort Bragg just a bit over one hour late. However, because the opposing attorney had announced a 7 a.m. starting time only 13 hours before, with no other prior notice, he did not feel particularly em- barrassed. He is still waiting for a decision in that case. He won the case in Fort Meade, against one of the best attorneys he has met, and the client was very pleased. send your news to: James Lawrence Fuchs, AB’76, AM’77, PhD’83. Email:

[email protected]. library chicago of university apf4-01160, archive, photographic uchicago

40TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 Pesach Glaser, AB’77, writes, “Af- ter I completed my BA at the U of C 77 and then my MBA at Northwestern, I met Rabbi Meir Chai Benhiyoun at the Chabad House of the Loop and I became a Baal Teshuvah. “Throughout the process of returning to my faith I was fascinated by the stories of the Rebbeim of Chabad. My book Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi: The Alter Rebbe (CreateSpace, 2016) is a biography of the first Lubavitcher Rebbe and is based on a series of tapes by Rabbi Shloma Majeski called the Chabad Heritage Series. Sev- eral years ago I called Rabbi Majeski to ask him on which one of his tapes I could find a certain story. He knew the answer off the top of his head but remarked that he wished someday one of his students would create a written version of his tapes so that such answers would be easier to find and be publicly available. “Although I was never officially his stu- Higher: UChicago track and field team member Becky Clouse, AB’77, practices dent, I always considered Rabbi Majeski running the hurdles in 1974. Photography by Jennie Lightner, EX’65.

74 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 is certainly having no one talk about you.” rific. After the recent election results, Explored the Chicago As the new correspondent for the Class of I couldn’t help but reflect on the pre - 1979, I am here to rectify that and give my scient observation of Robert Maynard Theological Seminary classmates a venue to share the details of Hutchins in January 1946: ‘Increasing bookstore, the Robie House, their achievements, travels, relationships, leisure means that we Americans must and lives. Going forward, I hope this will discover some rational notion of leisure and campus with Matthew provide a pleasant way to reconnect with or degenerate into a nation of ... morons Moran, AB’82; Marisa and rediscover old college friends. and lunatics.’” Naujokas, AB’83; and My entreaties already seem to be send your news to: Bill Sanders, AB’79. paying off. It was great to hear from Email: [email protected]. Laura Naujokas Stern, Carol Studenmund, AB’79, now of send your news to: Pia Lopez, AB’80. Lots of laughs Portland, OR, whose company, LNS AB’86 (Class of 1980). 912 Hamlet Court Reporting, marked its 30th anni- 80 Dr. North, Avon, MN 56310. Email: and wonderful trips down versary this January (which she realized [email protected]. memory lane. when her son, who was born two months We are pleased to report that Jane before the company was founded, cel - Brinley, AB’81, was the recipient —Robert Trombly, AB’82 ebrated his 30th birthday). This anniver- 81 of the 2016 Award for Excellence sary is impressive, given how difficult in Teaching at the Precollegiate Level it is for small businesses to survive, and by the Society for Classical Studies. her company has not only succeeded over Congratulations! Jane has been teaching public high school in Ripon, WI. “I’m the long term but also thrived, expanding Latin in Washington, DC, for the past 20 active on immigration issues and refu - in 1994 to include a new division, LNS years and was instrumental in creating a gee resettlement and am an ally of immi- Captioning. Carol was in Chicago with thriving Latin program at School With- grants and refugees, and I’m also faculty her husband, Jay Hutchins, for a conven- out Borders, a magnet public high school adviser to our high school Gay-Straight tion last August, and celebrated her birth- in the District. Alliance. My son is now in college, my day in true U of C style at Jimmy’s with a s e n d you r n e w s t o: Brian David, daughter graduated from Wellesley in group of friends that included classmates AB’81, MBA’91. Email: bdavid Boston last spring, and life is very good!” Steve Gillenwater, AB’77, AM’85; @chicagobooth.edu. I also heard from Sufia (Khan) Azmat, Donna De La Flor, AB’79; Nancy Alex- AB’82. “After having been in K–12 educa- ander, AB’80; and Bill Horsthemke, 35TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 tion for the past 20 years as a teacher, divi- AB’86. There they took in the dulcet sion head, English department chair, and tones of Curtis Black’s jazz quartet (and Robert Trombly, AB’82, re - then principal, I am currently the exec- perhaps a beer or two). sponded to my email blast as fol- utive director of the Council of Islamic I am also pleased to bring you up to date 82 lows: “Hard to believe it’s been 34 Schools in North America. CISNA is about my dear friend Lauren (Hackett) years. We have a renewed connection! Our working on the accreditation of Islamic Kuby, AB’80 (Class of 1979), who man- youngest son, Peter Trombly, started law schools to raise the quality of Islamic edu- ages community engagement for Arizona school at Chicago. Tanya Winard Trombly, cation in the United States and advocating State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley AB’82, and I took the opportunity to visit for students in the private school world. Global Institute of Sustainability and is a and reconnect with lots of classmates and My son is a JD/PhD student at Harvard first-term council member for the City of friends. We visited Duncan “Duke” Groe- University and my daughter is a high Tempe, elected on a sustainability plat- be, AB’82, my erstwhile Upper Rickert school English teacher.” form. Lauren’s been at the forefront of roommate, and his spouse, Elizabeth Bak- Here is an update from Vince Michael, environmental and animal- and worker- er Groebe, AB’83, at their home in Liber- AB’82, AM’82, executive director of protection issues in her city and in Ari - tyville, IL. Had a great time meeting some the San Antonio Conservation Society. zona. A number of policies she enacted in of their clan. We had pizza and a beautiful He lives in a historic complex on Mission Tempe have been preempted by the Ari- river walk downtown with Larry Pincsak, Reach on the Riverwalk in San Anto - zona state legislature, leading to lawsuits AB’82, and Joanne Zienty, EX’82. Ex- nio, which the society helped create. defending local control and the rights plored the Chicago Theological Seminary He reports that he continues to lecture of charter cities. Notably, her battle for bookstore, the Robie House, and campus widely, with presentations in the last citywide earned sick days led to a suc - with Matthew Moran, AB’82; Marisa year for the National Trust, Ball State, cessful ballot initiative and the adoption Naujokas, AB’83; and Laura Naujokas Goucher College, Notre Dame, the Uni- of statewide policy as well as an increase Stern, AB’80. Lots of laughs and wonder- versity of Texas at San Antonio, and in the minimum wage. ful trips down memory lane. Of late most the Art Institute of Chicago during a For my ( Bill Sanders, AB’79) own of our travel has been in the Washington, Japan study trip last fall. He continues brief news, it was a great pleasure to have DC, area, where our two sons have been. to serve on the board of the Frank Lloyd had lunch with another good friend and Daniel, our oldest, a 2012 Phi Beta Kappa Wright Building Conservancy and main- classmate, Naomi Bayer, AB’80, AM’81, graduate of George Washington Univer- tains a blog (489 entries at press time) at in Ann Arbor, MI, where her daughter, sity’s Elliott School of Foreign Affairs, vincemichael.com. Shira, attends college at the University does national security work in DC. Peter send your news to: Laurie Silvestri, of Michigan. graduated from the University of Virginia AB’82. Email: las​.lawoffices@gmail​.com. See? That was painless! I hope this will in 2016. Tanya and I are owned and trained I’m excited to report that Nora encourage many more of our cohort to by our fourth-generation Rhodesian ridge- Murphy, AB’83, has a memoir take the plunge and send me their news back. We battle the vicissitudes of living in 83 out—White Birch, Red Hawthorn for the next issue of the Magazine. a 165-year-old colonial that’s a musket shot (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), From the editor : Kirkland W. Garey, away from where the militia mustered to which the publisher describes as a “person- AB’79, writes, “I attended the Demo - march to Concord Bridge. To keep dog al investigation into the multigenerational cratic National Convention in July food in the bowl, Tanya and I do IT work cost of immigration and genocide in the as a Hillary Clinton delegate. I had an for competing insurers.” American heartland.” The story centers on opportunity to reconnect with fellow Katherine “Kat” Griffith, A B’82, her dispossessed ancestors’ 160-acre maple Greenwood Hall resident Lawrence reports that she is teaching AP Spanish, grove in Minnesota, the former home of Blumenthal, AB’79, who looked ter - English, reading, and social studies at a three Native tribes, the Dakota, Ojibwa,

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 75 and Ho-Chunk. Murphy is the author of a [Our son] Henry lives the work of many hands, of whom Ben half dozen books. was one among many, but … Ruth O’Brien, AB’83, AM’91, also on south campus, eats And then there’s Carolyn Shapiro, checked in: “I’m keeping up with my Harold’s chicken, won AB’86, AM’93, JD’95, recently quoted junior Labbie; my husband, emeritus in a Slate article about the checks-and-bal - professor Stuart Rice; and friends from his house’s scavenger ances issues stemming from the Trump college—most recently Dayna Lang- hunt, and has so far gotten administration’s banning refugees from fan, AB’83, and her husband, Larry Syria and suspending entrance to resi - Heller, AB’84, MBA’88; Jason, AB’82, off scot-free with a mild dents of seven predominantly Muslim MBA’88, and Deborah, AM’88, Selch; Chicago winter. We are countries in January. She was also one of Lisa Montgomery, AB’86; and David the 140 lawyers (from both sides of the Schaffer, AB’83, among others.” very proud of him despite aisle) who practice in the federal appel- From the editor: David B. Toub, AB’83, late and trial courts and/or clerked for MD’87, has released Ataraxia (Maria de his refusal to properly the Supreme Court or other appellate and Alvear World Edition, 2016), an album refer to the University as district courts who wrote to the acting featuring two of his piano compositions. “U of C” instead of the attorney general to condemn attacks on se n d you r n e ws t o: Gwyn Cready, judges and underscore the importance of AB’83, MBA’86. Email: cready@gmail newfangled “UChicago.” an independent judiciary. .com. Subtheme: Class of ’86ers Are Smart. S. I am sorry to report the Decem- —Dyan Bargfrede Mojica and Abel Mojica, Janelle Montgomery, AB’86, MBA’89, ber death of our classmate Lesa both AB’91 says: “Three years ago I decided to pursue 84 B. Morrison, AB’84, MBA’85, in a master’s in art history, because I love Nairobi, Kenya, where she had been doing to think and talk about art. I’ve dabbled research on the Luo people. It will not be for years as a docent at the Modern Art possible in this short entry to do justice to where it sits in the brook.” So I’m looking Museum of Fort Worth.” Well, guess it our classmate’s amazing life and important forward to hearing from you. paid off, because Janelle just received the work. Lesa served in the Peace Corps for send your news to: Stuart McDermott, Romney Society’s Maclean Eltham Essay three and a half years in Corozal, Hondu- AB’85, MBA’99. Email: smcdermott Prize in Romney Studies for her article ras, where she helped the local Garifuna @hollandcap.com. “Every Picture Tells a Story: A Family women develop their small business, a cas- Ed Baum, AB’86, writes in with Chronicle in George Romney’s Lady Mary sava bread factory. She then worked for the some truly crucial, totally factual, Every.” As she says, “Lest anyone be con- World Bank for a brief time. She earned a 86 although perhaps not 100 percent fused, the Romney in question is the 18th- master’s degree and a doctorate from Duke modest news: He “helped break the curse century British painter, not Mitt’s father. University in political science, specializing that allowed the Cubs to win their first I’ll finish my master’s in May, assuming in African studies and ethnic conflict, and world championship in 108 years. First, I I complete my thesis on David Alfaro continued her research in Kenya. She trav- caught Jake Arrieta’s home run in the di- Siqueiros’s controversial 1932 mural in eled the world—across Africa, to Central vision series in San Francisco, which had Los Angeles, América Tropical. How did and South America, Europe, and parts of lots of media coverage because I was a sole I get from 18th-century United Kingdom Asia. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Cubs fan surrounded by Giants fans in the to 1932 Los Angeles? It’s all about art and Mount Fuji, and Machu Picchu. She was an bleachers. Second, I was present at the epic social change.” avid opera, classical music, and Pittsburgh World Series game 5 win in Chicago and Now, as you know, the class column Steelers fan, and played Spanish-style had the good fortune to have Corey Mertes, policy on news is that if you care about classical guitar. [For more on Morrison, see AB’86, sitting just behind me with his fa- it, we care about it, so please don’t take Deaths, page 86.—Ed.] ther!” Ed adds, “The play of the Cubs them- this iteration to mean that you have to be Jim Jones, AB’13 (Class of 1984), reports selves might have had something to do with quoted in the media or win a prize. No, that he has completed his master’s degree the World Series win, but I was happy to friends and fellow travelers, you just have program in linguistics at Northeastern Illi- play a part.” The many, many Cubs fans in to be alive and kicking and doing some - nois University and is starting a second the class thank you, Ed. When interviewed thing you’d like your former classmates/ master’s program there in January. by the Chicago Tribune later, Ed, a manager roommates/hall mates/drinking mates/ s e n d you r n e ws t o: Karen Erger, for Cisco Systems in San Francisco, said Harold’s-late-night-jaunt mates, etc., to AB’84, JD’90, 662 Old School Rd., Ely, he missed Wrigley Field, where he’d been know about. Don’t delay; write today. IA 52227. Email: [email protected]. a proud bleacher bum, and picked out the send your news to: Martha Schulman, Spring has decidedly sprung (win- great Ernie Banks as his favorite Cub. AB’86, Apt. 17C, 70 West 95th St., New ter never really came in Chicago), The theme this issue turns out to be York, NY 10025. Email: nibbs999@gmail 85 although I did meet the real ol’ media attention: Ben Weinberg, AB’86, .com. man winter this past holiday season (he is was quoted in an article in the Trib when a real person who lives in a makeshift tee- the Oak Park Village Board was con - 30TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 pee in a forest up in Smugglers’ Notch in sidering making the area a sanctuary or Vermont). Unlike Ed Asner, EX’48, and welcoming village. Ben, whose mother send your news to: Stephan Lau, Bernie Sanders, AB’64, ol’ man winter fled Nazi Germany, supported the ordi- AB’87. Email: stephan@racingsquirrel swore he never attended the U of C in any nance and is quoted as saying: “We need 87 .com. capacity, although when I shared the many protection and not collaboration. This is From the editor: Ashraf “Ash” Eldi- heartwarming stories about trips across the challenge of our day. My family has frawi, AB’88, AM’96, is now chief the Midway in minus-30-degree tempera- seen what happens when the government 88 marketing and customer experience tures, all for a usually hot meal at Burton- labels entire groups of people as illegal officer at Redbox. Previously he was chief Judson, he confessed that he did indeed or dangerous or undesirable, and this is commercial officer at Gogo, and before that have a connection with the U of C, even if what has happened.” Like the Cubs’ vic- director of brand advertising at Google. it were not in the physical sense. He told me tory, the board’s unanimous decision a send your news to: Lisa Lucas Tal- many a story, and even urged me to reach few weeks later to enact what advocates bot, AB’89, P.O. Box 112503, Camp- out to our class and request a few updates, are calling one of the strongest ordi - 89 bell, CA, 95011-2503. Email: llucas@ as “every stone tells a story, no matter nances in the United States was doubtless lucasllp.com.

76 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 From the editor: Are you interested in being the Class of 1994’s corre- 94 spondent, compiling classmates’ updates and writing the quarterly alumni news column? If so, email us at uchicago [email protected]. send your news to: The University of Chi- cago Magazine, c/o Alumni News Editor. Email: [email protected]. For the past few years Natalia Uribe Wilson, AB’95, AM’99, 95 has been making rings for knitters and crocheters that allow them to measure their needles and hooks, and knitting pub - lications are starting to take notice. Her knitting needle gauge rings have been fea - tured in Interweave’s Spin + Knit magazine (instagram.com/p/BL_7SY5AMGH) and in Piecework magazine (instagram.com/p /BO0gQbPjOUZ), and they will be in an upcoming issue of Interweave Knits. You can see more of Natalia’s work at malojos.com. Getting into character: Joan Polner, AB’87, leads her fellow cast members in warm- Natalia’s also excited to announce that up exercises before the dress rehearsal for a student-led production of Tango by the fiber arts festival she cofounded and Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek in 1986. The show was directed by Justyna still co-organizes celebrated its 10th anni- Frank, LAB’83, AB’87, AM’87. versary! YarnCon hosted its 10th event on April 1 and 2 at the Chicago Journey- men Plumbers Union Hall, featuring handmade yarn and tools for the hand se n d you r n e ws t o: Michael geance (Silver Leaf Books), the second in stitcher and spinner. You can find out Oberlander, AB’90, 8347 Cornell a four-book horror novel series. more at yarncon.com. 90 Ave., St. Louis, MO 63132. Phone: se n d you r n e ws t o: Martin J. Ber- Natalia explains, “Needless to say, I am 314.608.4614. Email: moberlander32 man-Gorvine, AB’91, 10717 Deborah Dr., not practicing anthropology anymore, @gmail.com. Potomac, MD 20854. Phone: 301.765.9124. but every year I think about the commu- Carol Christine “Chris” Fair, SB’91, Email: [email protected]. AM’97, PhD’04, reports that after 91 being promoted to associate profes- 25TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 sor at Georgetown University’s security Attention Juniors studies program in the Edmund A. Walsh Having spent more than 18 years Enroll Now... School of Foreign Service in the fall of dreaming up innovative products 2015, she was selected as one of the Pro- 92 and services at companies such as vost’s Distinguished Associate Professors Netflix, Intuit, AltSchool, Nextdoor, and in February. She will begin her Reagan- CreativeLive, Lesley Grossblatt, AB’92, Fascell Democracy Fellowship in the was recently named to Fast Company’s 2017 spring. Congratulations to Chris! Most Creative People in Business list. She Dyan Bargfrede Mojica and Abel is currently chief operating officer and vice Mojica, both AB’91, report, “We are president of product at theBoardlist, where enjoying seeing our second-oldest son, she helps connect technology companies Henry Mojica, Class of 2020, experience with qualified female candidates for corpo- Hyde Park as a first-year in the College. rate board opportunities. Congratulations Henry lives on south campus, eats Har- to Lesley! College Application Boot Camp® old’s chicken, won his house’s scavenger s e n d you r n e w s t o: Aaron Gelb, 4-day Intensive Camp hunt, and has so far gotten off scot-free AB’92. Email: agelb​@vedderprice.com. August 2017 in Boston, MA with a mild Chicago winter. We are very William M. Funk, AB’93, of the proud of him despite his refusal to prop- Law Office of William M. Funk, Complete your college applications with erly refer to the University as ‘U of C’ 93 has been selected by his peers as a leading admission pros: instead of the newfangled ‘UChicago.’” 2016 New York Metro Area Super Law- DR. MICHELE HERNANDEZ They have four more sons, Nathan, 21, yer. Fewer than 5 percent of all New York Former Assistant Director of Admissions a junior at Elon University; Conrad, 16; attorneys are selected as Super Lawyers. at Dartmouth; Author of A is for Admission Thomas, 6; and Daniel, 4. Abel is a man- Super Lawyers is a Thomson and aging director at Tortoise Capital, an Reuters rating service of outstanding law- MIMI DOE Parenting guru & author of Busy but Balanced energy-focused asset manager based in yers from more than 70 practice areas who Kansas City, and makes annual visits to have attained a high degree of peer recog- – Last 13 years sold out – campus to recruit for the partnership. nition and professional achievement. The Your class correspondent, Martin Ber- patented selection process includes inde- man-Gorvine, AB’91, has two novels pendent research, peer nominations, and coming out sometime this spring: Mon- peer evaluations, and each candidate is sters of Venus (Wildside Press), a young evaluated on multiple indicators of lawyer adult science fiction tale and sequel to his recognition and accomplishments. ApplicationBootCamp2017.com 781.530.7088 2013 YA novel Seven Against Mars (also s e n d you r n e ws t o: Shinyung Oh, [email protected] photography by j. bradley burgess from Wildside Press), and Day of Ven- AB’93. Email: [email protected].

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 77 AB’98, AM’02; Mark Treskon, AB’99; Abby (Ballou) Brinkman, AB’00; Andrew Chang, AB’96; David Follmer, EX’98; and Namiko Nerio, AB’99. Other U of C– ers who were present (whom I met after moving to Washington, DC) include Su- san Zahran, AM’09, AM’10; David Say- ian, MBA’00; and Erin (Lee) Kim, AB’01. I currently live in Capitol Hill in DC and work for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.” s e n d you r n e w s t o: Julie Leicht- man, AB’99. Email: uchicago99news @gmail.com. From the editor: Employment and labor law practice Littler named 00 Patricia Martin, AB’00, as office managing shareholder, effective January 1. s e n d you r n e w s t o: Mary Tang, AB’00, or Julie Patel, AB’00. Email: chicago2000​@gmail​.com. send your news to: Robert Fung, AB’01. Email: robert.uchicago@gmail 01 .com. 15TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 From the editor: Paul Steinbeck, AB’02, has published Message to 02 Our Folks (University of Chicago Press, 2017). The book chronicles the Art Ensemble of Chicago, “a prominent jazz/ experimental band with ties to the U of C.” se n d you r n ews to: Carolyn Yhun Chong, AB’02, MBA’08. Email: carolyn [email protected]. In November Anthony Ruth, Shooting the moon: A member of the 1995 Snell-Hitchcock Scav Hunt team models AB’03, AM’07, joined One Hope item #213, an authentic space suit. Snell-Hitchcock won that year with 4,534 03 United as senior vice president of points. Photography by Chris Dahlen, AB’95. marketing and communications. The Chi permission. with reprinted - reserved. rights all maroon. chicago the 2017 copyright cago-based human service agency serves nearly 10,000 children and families each year in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and nity we have helped build at YarnCon, 20TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 Florida. Previously Anthony spent 13 years and the greater crafting community in in marketing and communications at UChi- Chicago, and think about what an inter- send your news to: Alpha Lill- cago. In addition, he currently serves on the esting study that would be. Those lessons strom, AB’97, Apt. S718, 800 4th St. board of Chicago’s About Face Theatre. never leave you.” 97 SW, Washington, DC 20024. Email: Jennifer Gogarten, AB’03, checks in Simon Weffer, AB’96 (Class of 1995), [email protected]. with a cause for celebration. “ Stepha- was recently elected to the executive From the editor: Ivan Howard Chan, nie Morris Gogarten, AB’03, and I board of the Illinois chapter of the Amer - AB’98, is happy to report that welcomed our caboose child, Wilfred ican Civil Liberties Union, joining fellow 98 his venture, anywhereworkday George, on July 14. He’s a delightfully classmates Thurston Bailey, AB’93, and .com, is going well. “It recently received an mellow baby, who puts up with the nearly Will Burns, AB’95, AM’98. Simon is an offer of acquisition that the team is consid- constant hugs and attention of his doting associate professor in Northern Illinois ering. The brand and site connect people big siblings, Jolyon, Rupert, and Thom- University’s sociology department. to flexible full-time and part-time oppor - asina. It’s a happy chaos at our house, send your news to: Kathleen Abbott, tunities to work from anywhere, helping especially since I’ve returned to teach - AB’95, Unit 2, 4241 North Damen improve work-life balance and employee ing—I’ve taken over courses in genetic Ave., Chicago, IL 60618-3011. Phone: experience. We’re grateful we’re able to epidemiology and public health genetics 415.661.8554. Email: [email protected]. help people and also be part of the impor- at the University of Washington in recent Cheers and salutations from your tant conversations on work-life and career years.” Congratulations, Jennifer! Class of 1996 cocorrespondents! opportunities of the future.” Nick Kolakowski, AB’03, is anticipat- 96 As people are ensconced in their sen d you r n ews to: Elaine Chang, ing another arrival of sorts: “I have a new daily routines during this spring quarter, AB’98. Email: [email protected]. book coming out in May (May 12, to be please remember to forward not-to-be- From the editor: Melissa Chow, exact) titled A Brutal Bunch of Heartbro- missed news for the autumn quarter issue AB’98 (Class of 1999), writes: “I ken Saps. It’s being published by Down of the University of Chicago Magazine. Our 99 married Carl Ford on November and Out Books. In addition to my nonfic- in-boxes thank you. 12 in Old Town, Alexandria, VA. Several tion and journalism work, I’m entering send your news to: Jeff Hjelt, AB’96. U of C–ers were able to attend, including the arena of crime fiction writing.” Email: jhjelt@uchicago​.edu. Or Jenny a small number of Dewey House (RIP) From the editor : In February Sener Olaya, AB’96. Email: [email protected]. people. In attendance: Max Grinnell, Akturk, AB’03, AM’03, received the

78 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Turkish Academy of Sciences Young I’m focusing primarily on faction, infused with humor and a touch Scientist Outstanding Achievement of snark. If you want to submit a ques - Research Award. The three-year grant family law for Chicago’s tion to her column or learn more, you can helps scientists establish research pro - Filipino community, contact her alter ego at dearbusinesslady grams in Turkey. Akturk is an associ - @gmail.com. In addition to this side gig, ate professor of international relations at inspired by my involvement she is the senior writer for grants and fel- Koç University in Istanbul. with Samahan, the Filipino lowships in the UChicago Division of the s e n d you r n e w s t o: Joe Griffith, Humanities, where she’s worked (in vari- AB’03. Email: [email protected]. student association. ous roles) for nearly a decade. Krishnan Chakravarthy, AB’04, Janice Dantes, AB’05, recently moved will soon be finishing a chronic pain —Janice Dantes, AB’05 her practice to 35 East Wacker Drive, 04 fellowship and joining the faculty at Suite 650, Chicago, IL. She writes, “I’m Harvard Medical School. He will be prac- focusing primarily on family law for Chi- ticing at Massachusetts General Hospital cago’s Filipino community, inspired by and starting as an assistant professor at Samuels-Kalow, SB’04, and Molly my involvement with Samahan, the Fili- HMS. Schranz, AB’04, and Rebekah Rock- pino student association at the University Leighton Smith, AB’04, writes, “Since wood, AB’05, visiting from Chicago. of Chicago.” our last update, my wife, Sarah, and I Alex and I landed in Cambridge in 2010 Thanks, Courtney and Janice, for your welcomed our third child, Caroline. On when I accepted the position of Wornick submissions. If anyone else would like to a recent trip to Southern California we Curator of Contemporary Decorative send an update or a shout out, you know were able to visit Andy Flior, AB’04, Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. how to reach me … Julie Capodagli, AB’03, and their new At the MFA, I’ve been busy opening a XOXO, son, Alex. We also enjoyed a visit from new contemporary art wing in 2011, Gossip Anna Steve Jaditz, AB’04, this fall when he curating exhibitions, writing catalogs, send your news to: Anna VanToai, drove through the Midwest.” and acquiring contemporary craft and AB’05. Email: [email protected]. Joe Slade, AB’04, reports, “As usual, design. We’d love to hear from alums in From the editor : Doug Brown, we’ve been busy. Alison Banger, AB’03, the area, especially other new parents!” AB’06, married Jean Blosser on and I relocated (again!) from Hyde Park Oscar Fernandez’s (SB’04) new book, 06 September 10 in Jean’s hometown to suburban New Jersey, near Man - The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathe- of Columbus, OH. After honeymooning hattan. We’re enjoying being closer to matical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, in Bora Bora, the newlyweds returned to family and currently not missing the Chi - Wealth, and Love (Princeton University their home in Brooklyn, NY. Both are in cago weather. We spent a pleasant eve - Press), came out in April. He was offi - the investment banking industry; Jean is ning in London over the summer with cially awarded tenure at Wellesley Col- a vice president at Barclays and Doug is an Asher Kaboth, AB’06, and are hoping to lege, where he has been a faculty member executive director at J.P. Morgan. reconnect with other alumni in the New in the mathematics department since the Juanjie Joyce Shen, AB’06, MBA’10, York metro area soon!” fall of 2011. He writes, “Earning tenure is completed the Rapha Cycling Club’s Fes- Sara Ortiz, AB’04, has worked steadily a notable accomplishment in and of itself. tive 500 Challenge, riding 500 km between in the field of health-related research since But it’s made all the more notable because December 24 and December 31. She rode in graduation and is currently employed as of my background: a Latino and first- honor of Sponsors for Educational Oppor- project manager for program and data at generation college graduate (son of an tunity and raised more than $1,800 for Scripps Health, one of the biggest health immigrant low-income Cuban family). underserved students in New York City. care systems in California. She spends ... Moreover, given that Wellesley Col- Together with other medical stu - her days managing the operations of the lege is currently ranked the third-best dents at State University of New central clinical research department, liberal arts college in the country (at York Upstate, Eric Zabriskie, AB’06, focusing on fiscal analytics, special proj- least according to US News and World made a video in response to President ects (such as launching a biorepository), Report), the accomplishment is even more Trump’s immigration ban. “It has and the development of novel data models noteworthy. I doubt I would have gotten been viewed more than 170,000 times to predict and manage staffing levels for this far without the rigorous education I between Facebook and YouTube and large clinical research sites. In her spare received at the University of Chicago.” has been praised and mentioned by the time, Sara owns a fashion business, selling Thank you so much to everyone who sub- likes of Don Berwick, head of Medicare clothing to women across the country. mitted news at my recent request! As always, and Medicaid under President Obama, Joachim Steinberg, AB’04, married feel free to drop me updates anytime. and D. J. Patil, Obama’s chief data sci - Emily Ryan Ascolese on November 12. s e n d y o u r n e w s t o : Mercedes There were many UChicagoans in atten- Lyson, AB’04. Email: mercedes_lyson dance: Sarah Devorkin, AB’04; Ari Grey, @alumni.brown.edu. AB’05, JD’12; Miriam Hess, AB’04; Ian Listen up, former South Siders, for IT’S NOT TOO LATE Kemp, AB’05; Viva Max Kaley, AB’03; the latest news roundup. TO BECOME Ashley White-Stern, AB’05; Jeremy 05 Courtney (Wassell) Guerra, Moskowitz, AB’04; Kara Lustig, AB’04; AB’05, AB’05, CER’11, has been har - A DOCTOR Thane Rehn, AB’04; Audrey Truschke, boring a secret identity that’s finally • Intensive, full-time preparation for medical AB’04; Abraham Rondina, A B’04; becoming public. She’s written an school in one year Daniel Sullivan, AB’04, JD’08; Mat- online work advice column under • Early acceptance programs at select medical schools—more than any other postbac program thew Landauer, AB’04; Stephanie Bell, the pseudonym “Businesslady” since AB’08; and Jonathan Ascolese, AB’10. 2014—first on the Toast, now on the • Supportive, individual academic and premedical advising Emily Zilber, AB’04, and Alex Reus- Billfold. That led to a book of all new ing, AB’05, are thrilled to announce the material: Is This Working? The Business- VISIT US AT WWW.BRYNMAWR.EDU/POSTBAC birth of their identical twin daughters, lady’s Guide to Getting What You Want [email protected] Maia June and Juliana Eve, on January from Your Career (2017) was recently 610-526-7350 10. Emily writes, “We’ve already intro- published by the Simon and Schuster duced them to some wonderful Maroons, imprint Adams Media. It’s a primer of BRYN MAWR COLLEGE including Boston-area residents Maggie practical tips for job success and satis -

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 79 entist, among others.” To watch “Sin - Jessica Ferguson, AB’08, tells us: “I left Our cash prize was $5,000 cerely, the Future of Healthcare” and city life and now live entirely off the grid in read the accompanying open letter, remote Montana, where I have restored an in one dollar bills, which visit medium.com/@standtogether2017 1800s structure with my own hands. I am we split up equally among /sincerely-the-future-of-healthcare a designer/maker of handcrafted contem- -e86f559673b#.pqukqppgn. porary furniture (gallery quality).” Visit the team. We awkwardly s e n d you r n e w s t o: Rada Yovo- Jessica’s website at jiferguson.com. stuffed the bills into our vich, AB’06. Email: rada.yovovich Lindsey Thomson-Levin, A B’08, @gmail.com. reports: “I was honored and grateful to pockets and nervously took be in the presence of fellow Maroons the train home, hoping we 10TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 Wendy Gonzalez, AB’08; Helena Lyson, AB’08; and Candace Wang, AB’07, at wouldn’t be some mugger’s With our 10-year reunion on the ho- my wedding on October 1.” (A note from lucky break. rizon, I’ve received some wonder- your correspondent: I was honored and 07 ful updates about the journeys you grateful to be there!) —Bruce Arthur, AB’07 (Class of 2008) have undertaken in the past decade. I hope Anna Lunn, AB’08, and her husband, to get even more to share in these pages as Tim Sweetser, welcomed their daughter, our reunion approaches! Helen Lunn Sweetser, last May. Anna In the 10 years since graduation, Pete reports that Helen is still not sleeping Adoption announcement for my Kalenik, AB’07 (political science), has through the night, but fingers crossed cat Bo: served as a soldier, an AmeriCorps educa- that she is by the time of this publication. 11 My gentleman companion, Jason tor, and a Chicago police officer. In that Congratulations are in order for Isaac James, AM’15, and I adopted our cat, time, he has earned degrees from North- Epstein, AB’08, who was elected to Bo Chapin-James, from PAWS Chicago western University (master’s in educa- the New Hampshire House of Repre - on November 20. He weighed 11 lbs., 4 tion and social policy) and the University sentatives, representing the first ward oz.; is super long and stretchy; has an of Illinois at Chicago (master’s in urban of Dover. His partner, Harriet Fertik, adorable white tummy and paws with a planning and policy) and is currently AB’08, is halfway through her third year gray striped face and back; and is the best enrolled in the joint JD/MPP program at as an assistant professor of classics at the cat of all time except for the times when Loyola University Chicago. Pete invites University of New Hampshire. he is doing weird biting. PAWS is the us to learn more about what he’s been up And proving that it pays to live the life best, and you can catch me volunteering to since graduation by checking out his of the mind, Bruce Arthur, AB’07 (Class there on select Fridays and Saturdays if website: petekalenik.com. of 2008), writes in: “In September you would like me to help you find a cat Samuel Philipson, AB’07, writes with my Washington, DC–based bar trivia slightly less excellent than my own cat. the happy news that he and his wife, Nat - team beat out dozens of others from This is all the news I have received from alie, welcomed their first child, Asher DC, Maryland, and Virginia to win myself or from others for this printing. Matthew Philipson, on May 9, 2016. the prestigious District Trivia Tourna- If you have news, be it a cat adoption, And just a few months later, another ment of Champions. Our cash prize was wedding, birth of a real human child, or alum welcomed a son into the world. $5,000 in one dollar bills, which we split intellectual or social achievement of some Rachel Aubyrn, AB’07, writes that up equally among the team. We awk - other type, please send it to ghchapin@ Wesley Martin Aubyrn was born on wardly stuffed the bills into our pock - gmail.com. Bonus points if you send it October 22. ets and nervously took the train home, alongside a photo of your cat. Carl Streed, SB’07, reports that he is hoping we wouldn’t be some mugger’s P.S. Bo says MEEEEEEER. currently at Harvard’s Brigham and Wom- lucky break.” se n d you r n e ws t o: Grace Chapin, en’s Hospital for a fellowship in general send your news to: Wendy Gonzalez, AB’11. Email: [email protected]. internal medicine research with a focus AB’08. Email: wendyg@uchicago​.edu. on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and se n d you r n ews to: Jane Li, 5TH REUNION June 1–4, 2017 queer (LGBTQ) health. In addition to con- AB’09. Email: janeli6@gmail ducting research on LGBTQ health with 09 .com. Or Sydney Chernish, AB’09. From the editor: Lainie Singerman, a focus on cardiovascular disease in trans- Email: [email protected]. AB’12, has joined Blankingship and gender and gender-nonconforming adults, Kailin Liu, AB’10, married Joel Han, 12 Keith in Fairfax, VA, as an associate Carl is also chairing the American Medi- AB’11, in 2015. Kailin and Joel live in the firm’s personal injury practice. cal Association Advisory Committee on 10 in Chicago now after a nine-month se n d you r n e ws t o: Colin Bohan, LGBTQ Issues. Carl adds that his fiancé, stint in Singapore. Joel is completing his AB’12. Email: [email protected]. Chad Rubalcaba, AB’00, JD’07, continues PhD in economics this spring. Kailin cur- se n d you r n ews to: Parvathy to work for Education First, a consultancy rently works as a North America opera- Murukurthy, AB’13. Email: firm that specializes in education policy. tions manager for Uber. 13 [email protected]. Keep telling your stories right here in Misha Stallworth, AB’10, is the send your news to: Sara Hupp, the Magazine by writing to liz.e.egan youngest person to ever be elected to AB’14. Email: shupp@uchicago @gmail.com! the Detroit Public Schools Community 14 .edu. send your news to: Liz Egan, AB’07. District Board of Education and was send your news to: Nadia Alhadi, Email: [email protected]. recently profiled in the Detroit News. She AB’15. Email: nadalhad@gmail Hello, Class of 2008! Quite a few also started a new job as the director of 15 .com. fun updates this time around. arts and culture for the Luella Hannan 08 Ryan Kaminski, AB’08, is cur- Memorial Foundation. 1ST REUNION June 1–4, 2017 rently senior program manager for human Katharine Bierce, AB’10, teaches at rights and special initiatives at the United a yoga retreat in Hawaii when she isn’t From the editor: Are you interested Nations Foundation. In January the Coun- working in tech in the Bay Area. in being the Class of 2016’s corre- cil on Foreign Relations released a report sen d you r n ews to: Jeannette Daly, 16 spondent, compiling classmates’ he coauthored with Ambassador Mark AB’10. Email: jeannette.daly@gmail updates and writing the quarterly alumni P. Lagon, “Bolstering the UN Human .com. Or Amy Estersohn, AB’09 (Class of news column? If so, email us at uchicago Rights Council’s Effectiveness.” 2010). Email: [email protected]. [email protected].

80 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 GRADUATE LIBRARY SCHOOL Librarian of congress Carla Hayden, AM’77, PhD’87, will receive an honorary degree at William and Mary’s 2017 com- mencement ceremony.

HARRIS PUBLIC POLICY Kimberly Carter, AM’94, is the presi - dent of the Texas Association of Obste- tricians and Gynecologists. Michael Heaney, PhD’04, and Melody (Weinstein) Shemtov, AB’02, have pro- duced and released a documentary film, The Activists: War, Peace, and Politics in the Streets, about the protesters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More information is available at bullfrogfilms.com/catalog /acts.html.

HUMANITIES DIVISION The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts (Long- leaf Press, 2016), by Rob McKean, AM’70, won the Longleaf Press Prize Novel Contest at Methodist Univer - sity. The novel is available on Amazon and through Rob’s website, robmckean .com. An editor of the Chicago Review in his graduate student days, he has pub- Taking care of business class: Norman Bradburn, AB’52, the Tiffany and Margaret lished many short stories. McKean has Blake Distinguished Service Professor, teaches a course at the Graduate School of been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Business. Photography by Linda (Lorincz) Shelton, LAB’72, AB’76, SM’78. received a grant for his writing from the Massachusetts Arts Council. He’s mar- ried and lives in the Boston area. Mia Katrin, AM’70, PhD’75, writes: send your news to: The University of Chi- from around the world,” writes Solovy. “I’m enjoying my secondary (actually ter- cago Magazine, c/o Alumni News Editor. More information is available on his web - tiary!) career. I was a tenured associate Email: [email protected]. site: tobendlight.com. philosophy professor at Millersville Uni - Bioelectronics firm Nativis has versity and then I traveled internation- appointed Sean Kell, MBA’96, to its board ally for years, teaching and spearheading of directors. Kell is the CEO of A Place for organizational activities in nonprofit orga- Mom, a senior living referral service. nizations. In 2013 I formed my high-end David Iannelli, MBA’02, recently jewelry design company, Jewel Couture founded Hudson Pacific, “a data-driven (jeweljewel.com), prompted by my love of consultancy that counsels organizations gems, which I had been collecting directly on public affairs issues, reputation, and from international sources—Brazil, Advanced degrees crisis management.” The company has Colombia, Sri Lanka, India—for years. operations in New York; Austin, TX; My award-winning collections featur- and San Francisco. Previously, Iannelli ing custom-cut gems in my own original CHICAGO BOOTH was executive vice president of global designs are now featured in more than 100 Colin Coulson-Thomas, EX’75, received research at Hill+Knowlton Strategies. top stores nationally and have been chosen a distinguished professorship from Sri Hire an Esquire has added Hi Leva, by celebrities. I write for numerous jew- Sharada Institute of Indian Management- MBA’03, to its board of directors. Leva elry publications, including Southern Jew- Research. An expert in corporate trans- was recently vice president of sales, mar- elry News and Mid-America Jewelry News, formation, Coulson-Thomas has taught keting, business development, and tech- and am frequently invited to speak at jew- at universities around the world and nology at Propel Financial Services. elry trade shows and symposia. In April I has served on private and public sector Matilda Ho, MBA’10, has been named a gave a talk at the American Gem Society boards. For more on his work and publi- TED2017 Fellow. The founder of Chinese Conclave in Hollywood, CA, “Working cations, see policypublications.com. food technology start-up accelerator Bits with Designers—The Inside Scoop!” I reg- Robert D. Peterson, MBA’77, has pub- x Bites, Ho spoke at TED2017 in April. ularly host trunk shows at retail jewelry lished two novels, Deniable Justice and Pedro Saboia, MBA’13, and his wife, stores throughout the country and my col- The Syndicate’s Church (both CreateSpace, Monique, welcomed their second daugh- lections are featured in top jewelry trade 2013), and has a third, not yet titled, book ter, Evelyn Claire Saboia, in November. publications such as the Retail Jeweler, in the works. The novels “feature a con- InStore Magazine, and Rapaport Report.” tinuing cast of ex–government sanctioned DIVINITY SCHOOL Charlotte Digregorio, AM’79, lives in assassins now righting wrongs in the civil- Jesus Followers in the Roman Empire by Paul Chicago and recently had a solo poetry ian world,” writes Peterson. B. Duff, PhD’88, will be published this fall exhibit at Fremont Public Library in Alden Solovy, MBA’90, has published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. The Mundelein, IL. A special reception was This Grateful Heart: Psalms and Prayers book traces the early development of Chris- also held for her at the library. Until July for a New Day (CCAR Press, 2017). tianity and its evolution from a rural Jewish 1 her poetry exhibit will be at North - “Although a uniquely Jewish voice, my movement into a largely urban phenomenon west Community Healthcare’s Wellness

copyright 2017 the chicago maroon. all rightsprayers reserved. reprinted with permission. are used by people of all faiths in the Roman Empire. Center in Arlington Heights, IL. Digre-

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 81 gorio’s poetry is published in interna - cle, “A Gene-Based Association Method Linus Fairfax County chapter, serving the tional journals, and she judges poetry for Mapping Traits Using Reference Northern Virginia suburbs. Project Linus competitions. Most recently, she judged Transcriptome Data,” in the journal volunteers make and collect blankets, an annual competition sponsored by the Nature Genetics. quilts, and afghans and distribute them to North Carolina Poetry Society. sick and traumatized children. She has dis - John Smith, AM’86, has published his SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SERVICE ADMINISTRATION tributed items to homeless shelters, health fourth full-length poetry collection, The Dawn D’Amico, AM’94, has published 101 clinics, facilities for disabled children, and Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Mindful Arts-Based Activities to Get Chil- neonatal intensive care units at local hos- The book “consists of formal poems that dren and Adolescents Talking: Working with pitals. While Annabelle has been proud to go beyond personal experience to address Severe Trauma, Abuse, and Neglect Using serve her country, she is now committed social and political issues. These poems Found and Everyday Objects (Jessica King- to helping the less fortunate children in her range in tone from funny to tragic, and sley Publishers, 2016). The book has been area. Annabelle is waiting for her husband they both comment on our culture (as reviewed by Jeanne C. Marsh, the George to retire this year so that they can tour the in ‘Spinoza at LenscraftersTM’) and Herbert Jones Distinguished Service Pro- United States in their RV and visit their engage with the wider poetic conversa- fessor at SSA; faculty members from Har- children in Denver and Salt Lake City. tion (as in ‘Envy the Dutiful,’ after Dana vard University Medical School and the Runaway and Homeless Youth: New Gioia’s ‘Pity the Beautiful’).” Medical College of Wisconsin; and others. Research and Clinical Perspectives (Springer, In January Donald L. Dyer, AM’82, 2016), by Stephen J. Morewitz, PhD’83, PhD’90, became associate dean for fac- SOCIAL SCIENCES DIVISION “analyzes risk factors for homeless and ulty and academic affairs in the University Vinod Thomas, AM’74, PhD’77, has runaway youth including their social, of Mississippi’s College of Liberal Arts. published Climate Change and Natural health, police, court, and social services From 2005 to 2016 he was chair of UM’s Disasters: Transforming Economies and Pol- outcomes.” Morewitz also coedited Hand- Department of Modern Languages. icies for a Sustainable Future (Transaction book of Missing Persons (Springer, 2016). Robert E. Horwath, AM’97, is now a Publishers, 2017). Thomas is the director This book “is the first interdisciplinary partner at Duane Morris LLP in the law general of independent evaluation at the study of missing persons, focusing on the firm’s Chicago office. Horwath specializes Asian Development Bank. social, biological, and physical sciences of in debt and equity financing transactions, At the 2017 Cybersecurity Excellence missing persons research,” he writes. He mergers and acquisitions, corporate gover- Awards, Charles Brooks, AM’81, was won two San Jose State University faculty nance, and general corporate matters. named the Cybersecurity Marketer of author awards for the books. Rivi Handler-Spitz, AM’01, PhD’09, the Year. The award recognizes excel - Steven J. Sweeney, AM’91, has joined has received tenure at Macalester Col - lence, innovation, and leadership in the law firm of Duane Morris LLP. lege. Handler-Spitz’s research focuses on information security. Sweeney’s practice focuses on mergers comparisons between Chinese and Euro- David Bartlett, AM’84, writes, “I am and acquisitions, bank regulatory mat- pean literature from the 16th century. on the faculty of the Kogod School of ters, loan and credit transactions, corpo- Danila Toscano, AM’10, joined Polsi- Business at American University in Wash- rate finance, corporate governance, and nelli as an associate in the law firm’s Los ington, DC. In that capacity, I serve as general company representation. Angeles office, where she practices com- director of the full-time MBA program, In December Marcia Walker-McWil- mercial litigation. director of global and strategic projects, liams, AM’07, PhD’12, became associate Try Never, a book of poems by Anthony and executive in residence in the Depart- director of programs at the Center for Civic Madrid, PhD’12, was published in March ment of Management. I lead live MBA Leadership at Rice University. Her book, by Canarium Books. consulting projects in collaboration with Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for corporate partners worldwide.” Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (Univer- LAW SCHOOL Annabelle Oczon Hammer, AM’85, sity of Illinois Press, 2016), was based on

Attorneys at Belin McCormick elected retired in June 2016 after a 31-year career her UChicago doctoral work. library chicago of university apf1-00817, archive, photographic uchicago Matt Wallace, JD’12, a shareholder of with the Central Intelligence Agency as the firm, effective January 1. Wallace is a an intelligence analyst in the Washing- send your news to: The University of Chi- member of Belin McCormick’s corporate ton, DC, area. After retirement, she has cago Magazine, c/o Alumni News Editor. practice group. become heavily involved in the Project Email: [email protected].

PHYSICAL SCIENCES DIVISION In February George Smith, SM’56, PhD’59, and three colleagues won the £1 million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engi- neering for the creation of digital imaging sensors. Smith, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009, is retired from Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Juan Enrique Santos, PhD’83, coau- thored Numerical Simulation in Applied Geophysics (Springer, 2016). Santos currently has appointments at Purdue University, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 2016 Eric Gamazon, SM’91, received a PhD, cum laude, from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Amster - dam, where he studied statistical genet- ics and complex-trait genetics. He is the The music man (and family): George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor author of The Genetic Architecture of Neu- in English and College dean Wayne C. Booth, AM’47, PhD’50, plays with his wife, ropsychiatric Traits: Mechanism, Polygeni- Phyllis B. Booth, AM’66; his son, Richard Booth, LAB’68; and his daughters, city, and Genome Function and of an arti - Katherine Booth, LAB’65, on the piano and Alison Booth, LAB’71, on the violin.

82 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 GOAL The gift of a lifetime 1,800 members deserves lifetime membership.

When you plan a gift from your will or living trust, or name UChicago as a beneficiary of your retirement plan or life insurance policy, you become a Phoenix Society member for life.

The Phoenix Society has committed to increasing membership to 1,800 by the close of the University of Chicago Campaign: Inquiry and Impact in 2019. CURRENT PROGRESS Join us in this historic campaign by simply notifying us that 1,690 members you have included a gift to UChicago in your estate plans.

Become a member today. Visit phoenixsociety.uchicago.edu/join Email [email protected] Call 866.241.9802

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 83 Rockefeller, he served in the US Army be- Huston Smith, PhD’45, died December DEATHS fore joining Chase bank, becoming chair 30 in Berkeley, CA. He was 97. A compara- and CEO of Chase Manhattan in 1969. tive religion scholar known for practicing Rockefeller traveled frequently to expand faiths as he studied them, Smith taught FACULTY AND STAFF Chase’s international presence, and in the at several universities, including Wash- 1970s helped bring local businesses and ington University in St. Louis, the Mas- James Charles Bruce, PhD’63, associ- government together to alleviate New sachusetts Institute of Technology, and ate professor emeritus of Germanic stud- York City’s financial troubles. Rockefeller the University of California, Berkeley. ies, died January 26 in Chicago. He was retired in 1981 and continued his family’s He was the author of The Religions of Man 87. Bruce taught at South Carolina State commitment to philanthropy, spurring (1958), later renamed The World’s Religions, College and studied at the University of the development of low-income housing which has sold more than three million cop- Frankfurt am Main on a Fulbright scholar- and supporting museums, public schools, ies. Smith is survived by his wife, Eleanor ship before joining the UChicago faculty and universities, including UChicago. In Kendra Smith, PhB’43; two daughters; in 1963. He retired from the University 1998 his contributions to society were rec- a brother; three grandchildren; and four in 1992 and then spent 11 years teaching ognized with the Presidential Medal of great-grandchildren. English conversation at Soka University Freedom. Rockefeller is survived by four Janet McAuley Rotariu, PhB’46, died Janu- in Japan. Bruce was active in the Midwest daughters; one son; 10 grandchildren; and ary 21 in Salisbury, MD. She was 92. While Modern Language Association and pub - 10 great-grandchildren. raising her family, Rotariu volunteered lished many articles on German literature with her children’s scout troops and parent- as well as a book for Japanese students 1930s teacher associations, as well as at Children’s learning English. He is survived by a son National Medical Center. Later she was a and four grandsons. Philip Joseph Stein, SB’34, SM’35, financial administrator at two churches. Richard Chambers, associate professor MD’37, died February 15 in Evanston, IL. Her husband, George J. Rotariu, SB’39, emeritus of Turkish languages and civili - He was 102. Stein served in the US Army’s SM’40, died in 2010. Rotariu is survived by zations, died August 1. He was 86. A key Medical Corps during World War II be- a daughter, two sons, six grandchildren, and figure in the development of Turkish and fore spending his career practicing obstet- one great-grandchild. Ottoman studies at UChicago, Chambers rics and gynecology. He worked at several George Wilson Hood, MBA’47, PhD’50, joined the faculty in 1962 and helped found Chicago-area hospitals in addition to main- died February 20 in DeLand, FL. He was the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in taining a private practice. His wife, Elaine 95. A US Navy veteran, Hood joined Stet- 1965. He served as the center’s director Krensky Stein, AM’50, died in December son University in 1950 as director of guid- from 1979 to 1985 and helped recruit promi- (see page 85). Stein is survived by a daugh- ance, later serving as dean of men, dean of nent Turkish scholars to the University. He ter, a son, and two granddaughters. students, and professor of counselor educa- was also involved with several national as- Charity Ruth (Hillis) Seay, AM’37, of tion. After retiring from Stetson in 1987, he sociations for Turkish and Middle Eastern Lexington, KY, died February 18. She was founded and directed a counseling center at studies and, with funding from the US De- 102. Seay worked for the University of Ken- his church and remained an active member partment of Education, established the Ad- tucky’s Bureau of School Services before of the USS Drexler Survivors’ Association. vanced Summer Modern Turkish Program serving as a professor of education at three Hood is survived by nieces and nephews. for American students in 1982. He retired Michigan universities. In retirement she Victor Lownes III, AB’47, died January 11 in from UChicago in 1998. enjoyed gardening and breeding swans, po- London. He was 88. Lownes joined Playboy Robert Gomer, professor emeritus of nies, and miniature donkeys. Her husband, as marketing director in 1955 and played chemistry, died December 12. He was 92. Maurice F. Seay, PhD’43, died in 1988. Seay a key role in expanding the magazine’s A chemical physicist, Gomer joined the is survived by nieces and nephews. audience. He oversaw the long-running University in 1950. He directed the James campaign “What Sort of Man Reads Play- Franck Institute from 1977 to 1983 and 1940s boy?” and had the idea for the Playboy Club received a distinguished service profes- nightclubs. Outside of Playboy, Lownes sorship in 1984. Gomer’s research focused Natalie Finder, AB’41, AM’46, of Pitts- produced movies, plays, and music. He is on surface physics and chemistry, and he burgh, PA, died January 12. She was 95. survived by his wife, Marilyn; a daugh- pioneered new techniques for studying the Finder taught English at the College of St. ter; a son; two grandchildren; and two emission, diffusion, and absorption of mol- Rose in Albany, NY. She enjoyed reading, great-grandchildren. ecules and atoms on ultraclean surfaces. cooking, and traveling. Her husband, Mor- Robert S. Rosenzweig, Ph B’47, SB’48, He received many awards for his work, ris Finder, AM’49, PhD’60, died in 2013. SM’49, died February 12 in San Francisco. including Guggenheim and Fulbright fel- She is survived by two daughters, three He was 91. Rosenzweig spent his career lowships. A staunch opponent of nuclear sons, and five grandchildren. as a business systems analyst and a hand weapon proliferation, Gomer cowrote a Gloria (Harnick) Parloff, SB’43, of Tea- bookbinder. He was a longtime member classified report warning against nuclear neck, NJ, died January 20. She was 94. Af- of the Hand Bookbinders of California weapon use during the Vietnam War and ter serving as a cartographer during World and the Trollope Society, and enjoyed chaired the editorial board of the Bulletin of War II, Parloff edited the journal Psychia- his weekly Talmud class. Rosenzweig is Atomic Scientists. After he retired from the try from 1959 to 1991, serving as managing survived by his wife, Regina; two sons, University in 1996 he began hosting inter - editor for the last 25 years of her tenure. Her including David Abraham Rosenzweig, disciplinary lectures in his home, events husband, Morris B. Parloff, AM’42, died in AB’90; and three grandchildren. that became the Robert and Anne Gomer 2011. She is survived by two sons, a brother, Robert Silvers, AB’47, died March 20 in Lecture Series. Gomer is survived by his and a grandson. New York City. He was 87. A US Army wife, Anne; a daughter, Maria Luczkow, Veva (Hopkins) Schreiber, PhB’44, of Lake veteran, Silvers worked at the Paris Review LAB’77; a son, Richard Gomer, LAB’73; Forest, IL, died February 22. She was 91. and Harper’s before cofounding the New and three granddaughters. A nationally accredited flower show judge, York Review of Books in 1963. He edited Schreiber was active in local and national gar- the Review for more than 50 years and was TRUSTEES den clubs and edited Illinois’s Garden Glories known for his pairings of influential writ - magazine. Her husband, G. Richard Schrei- ers with unexpected topics. A fellow of the David Rockefeller, PhD’40, died March ber, EX’44, died in 2007. She is survived by American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 20 in Pocantico Hills, NY. He was 101. The a daughter, a son, a brother, eight grandchil- he received the National Book Critics Cir- grandson of University cofounder John D. dren, and eight great-grandchildren. cle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement

84 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 Award in 2011, among other honors. He is He then joined Argonne National Labora- logic puzzles. Smullyan is survived by a survived by nieces and nephews. tory, where he was on the Lunar Samples stepson, six step-grandchildren, and 16 Analysis Planning Team, receiving the step-great-grandchildren. 1950s NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Nina Byers, SM’53, PhD’56, died June 5, Medal and the NASA Group Achievement 2014, in Santa Monica, CA. She was 84. Wallace M. Rudolph, AB’50, JD’53, died Award. He retired from Argonne in 1990. A theoretical physicist, Byers joined the March 18 in Orlando, FL. He was 86. A Reed is survived by a daughter; two sons, in- faculty of the University of California, US Army veteran, Rudolph was in private cluding Mark D. Morrison-Reed, LAB’67, Los Angeles, in 1961 and made significant legal practice before joining the faculty of AM’77; a brother; four grandchildren; and contributions to fields including particle the University of Nebraska College of Law two great-grandchildren. physics and superconductivity. After retir- in 1962. He was appointed dean of Seattle Nancy Haas Flick, AB’53, died Novem- ing from UCLA in 1993, she established a University College of Law in 1976 and then ber 27 in San Diego. She was 83. Flick website that chronicles and celebrates other became dean of Barry University’s law earned a law degree at the University of women’s contributions to physics. Byers is school in 1997. Rudolph is survived by his San Diego and served on the board of the survived by extended family. wife, Mimi; three daughters, including Sar- Sierra Club. She enjoyed the arts, the Robert P. Blumer, AB’56, SB’58, MBA’58, ah Rudolph Cole, JD’90; a stepdaughter; a beach, unspoiled wilderness, and San Di- of Orland Park, IL, died February 22. He stepson; and four grandchildren. ego. She is survived by her husband, Arnold was 82. Blumer was vice president of media Elaine Krensky Stein, AM’50, died De - Leab Flick, MD’54; three daughters, in- administration at the Leo Burnett adver- cember 15 in Evanston, IL. She was 90. cluding Rachel Flick Wildavsky, AB’80; tising agency, retiring in 1994. He enjoyed Stein taught nursery school and was in- and eight grandchildren. gardening and the Pittsburgh Steelers and volved in various community organizations. Stephen B. Appel, AB’54, MBA’59, died volunteered at the Cancer Support Center. She enjoyed nature and gardening and was a February 5 in Cincinnati, OH. He was 81. Blumer is survived by his wife, Sharon; supporter of local parks and nature centers. Appel served in the US Army before begin- two daughters; a son; a sister, Elizabeth Her husband, Philip Joseph Stein, SB’34, ning a career in retail, retiring as operating (Blumer) Witschard, SB’58; and three SM’35, MD’37, died in February (see page vice president at Federated Department grandchildren. 84). Stein is survived by a daughter, a son, a Stores in 1988. He then began teaching at Robert J. Blattner, PhD’57, died June 13, brother, and two granddaughters. the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for 2015, in Los Angeles. He was 83. Blattner Ruth Curd Dickson, AB’52, died January 17 Learning in Retirement, on subjects rang- was a professor of mathematics at the in Topeka, KS. She was 83. Dickson start- ing from silent movies to the American University of California, Los Angeles. A ed her career in public policy and mental Revolution, and served as the institute’s specialist in theory of representations and health, later working in fundraising at sev- volunteer director for six years. Appel is geometric quantization, he was best known eral universities, including the University survived by his wife, Patty; a daughter, Su- for Blattner’s conjecture, involving repre- of Chicago. She retired in 1997 and enjoyed san D. Appel, AB’90; a son; a brother; and sentations of a semisimple real Lie group. baking, textile art, and traveling. Dickson is four grandchildren. Blattner also served on several boards at survived by two daughters, including Sara Arthur Rosenfeld, PhD’54, died January UCLA and had a passion for music. He is Dickson, AB’82; a son; and eight grand- 27 in Berkeley, CA. He was 90. A US Navy survived by his wife, Susan Montgom- children. veteran, Rosenfeld was working as a nucle- ery, SM’66, PhD’69; three sons; and six Lois (Josephs) Ely, JD’52, died February ar and particle physicist at the University grandchildren. 19 in Morton Grove, IL. She was 89. Ely of California, Berkeley, when the 1973 oil Mildred Dresselhaus, PhD’59, died Feb- practiced law in Chicago before becoming crisis turned his attention to energy con- ruary 20 in Cambridge, MA. She was 86. the first woman assistant county prosecutor servation. He created the Energy Efficient Dresselhaus joined the Massachusetts In- in Bergen County, NJ. She later was legal Buildings Program in 1975 and spent the stitute of Technology in 1960, later becom- counsel at Winthrop College in Charlotte, rest of his career researching and promoting ing the university’s first tenured woman NC, and in retirement provided free legal energy efficiency standards. He was an ad- professor. She was known as the “queen of assistance to the elderly. Ely is survived by viser to the US Department of Energy and carbon science,” and her research into the two daughters and a son. a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award and fundamental properties of carbon paved the Donald L. Fink, LAB’48, AB’52, SB’54, the National Medal of Technology and In- way for advances in materials science. The MD’56, of San Francisco, died January 16. novation. He is survived by two daughters recipient of the National Medal of Science He was 84. A US Navy veteran, Fink direct- and six grandchildren. and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, ed the pediatric clinic at Moffitt Hospital Roger C. Cramton, JD’55, died February 3 Dresselhaus was a dedicated advocate for before helping to found two family medicine in Ithaca, NY. He was 87. Cramton taught more women in science. She is survived by programs at the University of California, at the University of Chicago and Michigan her husband, Gene; a daughter; three sons; San Francisco, in 1971. He held leadership Law School before becoming assistant at- and five grandchildren. positions at UCSF at San Francisco General torney general in the Nixon administration, Hospital and helped to create UCSF’s net- a short-lived position as Cramton advised 1960s work of satellite community clinics. Fink is the president his actions were unlawful survived by his extended family, including following the Watergate scandal. Cramton Walter David Braddock III, MBA’60, died sister Lenore F. Rubin, AB’59. then served as dean of Cornell University’s March 11 in Springfield, IL. He was 80. Robert T. Harms, AB’52, AM’56, PhD’60, law school, from 1973 to 1980, and was later Braddock was a fuel chemist for Standard of Austin, TX, died October 5. He was 84. an emeritus professor of law. He is survived Oil and an economist for the State of Illi- A phonology expert, Harms was on the lin- by his wife, Harriet; a daughter; three nois before becoming a college professor. guistics faculty at the University of Texas sons; two sisters; 11 grandchildren; and 21 He was also an inventor, holding the patent at Austin from 1958 until 20 06, chairing the great-grandchildren. for the first computerized stock exchange. department from 1972 to 1977. In retirement Raymond M. Smullyan, SB’55, died Febru- Braddock is survived by his wife, Zoé; he studied the flora of Texas. Harms is sur- ary 6 in Hudson, NY. He was 97. Smullyan three sons, including Walter D. Braddock, vived by his wife and children. worked as a magician before becoming a AB’84, and Demetrios Thomas Brad- George W. Reed Jr., PhD’52, died August mathematics professor, teaching at Yeshiva dock, AB’88, PhD’94, MD’96; a sister; 31, 2015, in Chicago. He was 94. While a University; Lehman College, City Univer- and seven grandchildren. student, Reed worked on the Manhattan sity of New York; and Indiana University. Avima Ruder, EX’62, of Cincinnati, OH, Project and collaborated with Clair Pat- The author of numerous books of puzzles, died January 26. She was 75. An epidemi- terson, PhD’51, on dating the solar system. he was especially known for his creative ologist, Ruder spent 28 years at the National

the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 85 Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. ron, CT. Gottlieb is survived by his wife, from 1979 until his retirement in 2010. He She published nearly 150 articles and was Josephine, and two sons. enjoyed sailing, traveling, playing back- noted for her work identifying carcinogens. Kathleen (O’Farrell) Rubin, LAB’54, gammon, and spending time with family. Ruder is survived by extended family. AB’65, died February 17 in Camarillo, CA. He is survived by his wife, Barbara; four Peggy Stevens, LAB’57, AB’80 (Class of She was 78. Rubin taught in the Chicago children; three stepchildren; nine grand- 1962), died February 12 in Mishawaka, IN. Public Schools system for a few years and children; and one great-grandchild. She was 77. Stevens taught photography at then in the Westmont, IL, system for more several colleges and community organiza- than 30 years. She enjoyed visiting art muse- 1980s tions in the Chicago area and led courses on ums, knitting, sewing, gardening, and play- wildflowers and ecological sustainability ing bridge. Rubin is survived by a daughter; Tani Marilena Adams, AM’81, of Austin, at DePaul University. She enjoyed geneal- a stepdaughter; a stepson; and a sister, Ellen TX, died February 5 of cancer. She was 62. ogy and composing poetry and song lyrics. (Philip) Leavitt, LAB’60. The founder of the Texas Center for Policy Stevens is survived by her husband, William David M. Schoenwetter, SB’65, of Phoe- Studies, between 1988 and 1994 Adams J. Stevens, AB’62; two sons; a sister, Doro- nix, died December 4. He was 72. Schoen- established and directed five Greenpeace thy Hess Guyot, LAB’53, AB’57, AB’58; a wetter spent his career in the aerospace regional offices in Latin America. In 1996 brother; and a granddaughter. and computer industries and enjoyed writ- she was appointed director of the Center Joseph Nitecki, AM’63, of Philadelphia, ing fiction and humor pieces (including his for Mesoamerican Research in Guatemala, died January 26. He was 94. An academic own witty eulogy). He is survived by his and she later held fellowships at the United librarian, Nitecki worked at colleges and wife, Barbara. States Institute of Peace and the Wood- universities across the country, most re- John T. Beatty Jr., MBA’66, died Febru- row Wilson Center. Adams is survived cently as director of libraries at the State ary 7 in Northfield, IL. He was 80. A US by a daughter, a son, her parents, a sister, University of New York, Albany, where Army veteran, Beatty was an investment and a brother. he also taught school information policy. banker, holding senior positions with Allis Cameron Joseph Campbell, AM’84, died His brother, Matthew H. Nitecki, SM’62, Chalmers and Smith Barney. He also served December 10 in Chicago. He was 70. Camp- PhD’68, died in December (see below). on professional and civic boards, acted as a bell ran the Regenstein Library’s serials in- Nitecki is survived by family, including his supernumerary with the Lyric Opera of dexing department and the Northwestern son, Zbigniew Nitecki, SB’65. Chicago, and volunteered with Habitat for University School of Law’s special projects Deborah Schimmel Butterworth, Humanity. Beatty is survived by his wife, department, retiring from the American AM’64, of Washington, DC, died Febru- Marila; a daughter; two sons; and four Theological Library Association as the di- ary 18. She was 79. Butterworth taught grandchildren. rector of indexing. He enjoyed collecting French at Georgetown Day School and en- Matthew H. Nitecki, SM’62, PhD’68, East Asian art. Campbell is survived by his joyed traveling and playing music with the died December 21 in Chicago. He was 91. husband, Daniel von Brighoff, and a sister. local New Horizons Band. She is survived The last curator of the Walker Museum of Lesa B. Morrison, AB’84, MBA’85, died by her husband, Charles E. Butterworth, Paleontology in Chicago, Nitecki oversaw the first week of December in Nairobi, AM’62, PhD’66; a daughter; a brother; and the transfer of its collection to the Field Mu- Kenya, as the result of a spider bite. She was a granddaughter. seum in 1965. He remained with the Field 53. Morrison spent three and a half years in Jerald C. Walker, DB’64, died December Museum for the rest of his career, retiring the Peace Corps and worked at the World 24 in Tulsa, OK. He was 78. An ordained as curator of invertebrate fossils, while also Bank in Washington, DC, before earning a Methodist minister, Walker was chaplain teaching biology at UChicago. His brother, PhD in African studies. She later moved to of Nebraska Wesleyan University and presi- Joseph Nitecki, AM’63, died in January. Ni- Kenya to study the native Luo people. Mor- dent of John J. Pershing College before be- tecki is survived by his wife, Doris Nitecki, rison enjoyed traveling, classical music, and ing appointed president of Oklahoma City AM’57; and a son. the Pittsburgh Steelers. She is survived by University in 1979. Walker, a member of Patricia (Riley) Johnson, AM’69, died her mother and her sister. the Cherokee Nation, focused on improv- January 14 in Washington, DC. She was ing educational access for Native American 71. Johnson worked for the US Department 1990s and minority students. He retired in 1997 of Health, Education, and Welfare before and was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher becoming the founding president and CEO Timothy Stephen Fuerst, A M’87, Education Hall of Fame in 1999. of Rebuilding Together, a nonprofit that re- PhD’90, of Granger, IN, died February 21 John Richard “Jack” Shaeffer, SM’58, pairs the homes of low-income, elderly, and of stomach cancer. He was 54. Fuerst was PhD’64, died December 21 in Carol Stream, handicapped Americans, in 1988. After re- an economics professor at Bowling Green IL. He was 85. Shaeffer served as a sci- tiring in 2006, she became canon missioner State University and a senior economic ad- ence adviser for the US Army, helping to at Washington National Cathedral, where viser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleve- write the Clean Water Act of 1972, before she led many social justice initiatives. John- land before joining the economics faculty at launching his own engineering firm in 1976. son is survived by her husband, Tom; four the University of Notre Dame in 2012. He Known for creative solutions to wastewa- sons; and nine grandchildren. was active in his church and enjoyed read- ter management issues, he served as chair - ing, exercising, and watching Notre Dame man of the DuPage County Environmental 1970s football. Fuerst is survived by his wife, Commission and his work was recognized Antoinette Medaglia; two daughters; two by the US Environmental Protection Agen- William “Bill” Howard Cowan, JD’71, sons; and seven siblings. cy. Shaeffer is survived by a daughter, three died of cancer on February 2 in Naperville, sons, two stepdaughters, two stepsons, two IL. He was 69. Cowan was a lawyer in the 2010s brothers, and 11 grandchildren. Chicago area, specializing in business and Richard Gottlieb, AB’65, MD’69, died merger and acquisition law. He was also Emily Ariel Bamberger, AB’13, died March January 31 in New York City. He was 73. an amateur photographer, a member of the 6 in Kansas City, MO. She was 26. Bam- Gottlieb was a founding member of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a dedicated berger worked for the American Red Cross Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute and theatergoer. Cowan is survived by three in Chicago as a member of AmeriCorps faculty director at the New York Psycho- daughters, a son, and a grandson. before enrolling in an MD/PhD program analytic Institute. He was also a clinical as- Roy Allen Whiteside Jr., MBA’72, died at the University of Missouri. She enjoyed sociate professor at Mount Sinai’s medical September 19 in Fredericksburg, VA. He reading, traveling, movies, and politics. school and lectured widely while maintain- was 78. A certified public accountant, Bamberger is survived by her parents, her ing private practices in New York and Sha- Whiteside practiced in Fredericksburg sister, and two grandfathers.

86 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017

CHICAGO CLASSIFIEDS

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the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 87 LITE OF THE MIND

What do you call a group of … ?

Collective nouns exist for nearly A weary of A gurgle of every group of animals and gathering grad students gargoyles of people, but what’s the proper nomenclature for Maroon multiples? A daze of A flutter of We took a stab at some potential first-years prospies UChicago aggregation terms. —Joy Olivia Miller and A Milton of A jitterof Laura Demanski, AM’94 free lunches coffee shops

A merger of A persuasion of MBAs law students

A buck of A bleary of milkshakes library naps

An aggression of quad squirrels illustration by laura lorenz laura by illustration

What did we forget? Send your UChicago-themed plural appellations to [email protected]. We’ll post our favorites at mag.uchicago.edu.

88 the university of chicago magazine | spring 2017 SPOTLIGHT ON:

JOIN US JUNE 1–4 FOR ALUMNI WEEKEND Division of the Social Sciences events on Friday, June 2:

The Ambitious Elementary School Economic Causes and Consequences Conception, Design, and Implications for of the Presidential Administration Educational Equality Casey Mulligan, PhD’93, and Roger Myerson Stephen Raudenbush and Lisa Rosen Saieh Hall | 2–3 p.m. Ida Noyes Hall | 11:30 a.m.–noon Economics Student Poster How to Design Communities That Help Session and Reception Us Live Happier, Healthier, Longer Lives Saieh Hall | 3:00–4:30 p.m. Kathleen Cagney, AM’90; Terry N. Clark; and Emily Talen Ida Noyes Hall | 1:30–2:30 p.m. SEPT–OCT 2011, VOLUME 104, NUMBER 1 AFTER INTERNMENT … LANGUAGE LEARNING … FOLK SINGER … A LIFE IN MATH … AMERICA’S HISTORIAN MATH … AMERICA’S IN … A LIFE SINGER … FOLK LEARNING … LANGUAGE INTERNMENT AFTER

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SPRING 2017, VOLUME 109, NUMBER 3