Three of Princeton’s most successful teams have a chance to become Ivy League champions on Friday, Oct. 30.

WOMEN’S CROSS COUNTRY kicks off the day’s action at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships, held annually at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, N.Y. The Princeton women have won three straight Heps titles and will be the favorite again this year. Liz Costello ’10 has a chance to be just the second woman to win three individual Ivy titles in cross country. She ran the 5-kilometer course in 16:59.9 last year, a Heps record. In addition to Costello, five returning Tigers placed in the top 10 at Heps last year: Reilly Kiernan ’10, Alexa Glencer ’10, Sarah Cummings ’11, Ashley Higginson ’11, and Liz Deir ’11.

Princeton (1-5, 0-3 Ivy) vs. Cornell (2-4, 1-2 Ivy) Oct. 31, 1 p.m. Princeton Stadium Princeton, N.J.

Princeton has stumbled in its 1-5 start, surrendering more than 30 points per game and scoring fewer than 10. Head coach Roger Hughes said this week that his team needs to find more big plays on offense. Saturday’s game against Cornell could be a good time to look for them: The Big Red defense has allowed 410 yards per contest, second-worst in the Ivy League. (Dartmouth ranks eighth with 428 yards allowed.)

After back-to-back road games at Brown and Harvard — last year’s Ivy co-champions — Princeton’s schedule seems to be getting a bit softer. Three of the Tigers’ next four opponents (Cornell, Yale, and Dartmouth) are 1-2 in Ivy play and .500 or worse overall.

History

In three Ivy games, the Tigers have been on the wrong side of three historic performances. Princeton’s losses to Columbia and Harvard were its worst defeats in each series, and at Brown, Bears receiver Buddy Farnham had 309 all-purpose yards, one of the top 10 single-game totals in Ivy history.

Princeton’s history against Cornell is a little more promising. The Tigers hold a 56-33-2 record in the all-time series and have won three of the last five meetings.

Cyclists from UBikes cross the Brooklyn Bridge on their Oct. 25 ride. (Courtesy UBikes)

A dozen Princeton students, staff members, and friends of the University’s bicycle co-op made an ambitious ride through New York and New Jersey Oct. 25. The group, led by UBikes program manager Sean Gleason ’09 and Ph.D. candidate Jeffrey Domanski, helped to bring a new fleet of bikes to campus for use in a faculty and staff bike-share program.

The group met before dawn, taking the 5:12 a.m. train to Penn Station, and did not arrive back on campus until after dark, starting at the Worksman Cycles factory in Queens, pedaling over the Brooklyn Bridge to a ferry terminal in Manhattan, and continuing on into rural New Jersey before getting a lift from a University van for the last leg of the trip.

Climbing the hills of New Jersey’s eastern highlands on heavy-duty three-speed bikes proved more time-consuming than the group expected, Gleason explained.

“We knew we were trying something absolutely crazy, and crazy’s what we got,” he said. The ride was meant to demonstrate the benefits of sustainable, local choices, like the one UBikes made when it purchased 100 new bikes from Worksman.

Author Jonathan Safran Foer ’99 earned acclaim for the captivating prose in his first two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His newest work, the nonfiction book Eating Animals, is drawing a different sort of attention for its controversial, compelling take on, well, eating meat. Foer’s route to vegetarianism is described in an excerpt published in the food issue of The New York Times Magazine earlier this month. (In it, he briefly mentions wrestling with the morality of eating meat during his time as a philosophy major at Princeton.)

Foer shared some of his views during a recent edition of Larry King Live, and The Huffington Post has launched a series of essays responding to Eating Animals. Aaron Gross, founder of the advocacy group Farm Forward, wrote the introduction, describing the book as “part personal journey, part modern muckraking and a surprisingly candid and empathetic book on food.” Actress Natalie Portman followed with a review in which she said the book changed her “from a 20-year vegetarian to a vegan activist.”

(Photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

The last week has been a busy one for Princeton in Go Cross Campus, the Ivy League’s virtual turf war and strategy game. Old Nassau pushed Brown off its footholds on Long Island, invaded the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine, and prevented Yale from storming the shores of New Jersey. But to win the annual competition, Princeton will need to add more troops, according to Dan Humphrey ’12, the group’s “quartermaster.”

So far, more than 700 Princeton students and alumni are participating in Go Cross Campus (GXC to the initiated), which includes teams from each of the eight Ivy League schools. The object of the game is to seize territory on a map of New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. (Alumni can sign up at ivy.gocrosscampus.com.)

This year’s tournament began Oct. 10 and should run into December (last year’s competition took 61 days). Princeton won the inaugural tournament in 2007 but fell to Penn in 2008.

(Photo © Beverly Schaefer)

Princeton (1-4, 0-2 Ivy) at Harvard (3-2, 2-0 Ivy) Oct. 24, noon Harvard Stadium Cambridge, Mass.

In this year’s Princeton-Harvard matchup, most signs favor the Crimson. They enter the game 2-0 in Ivy League play and feature the league’s top rushing attack. The Tigers, 0-2 against Ivy teams, have struggled on offense and are now without their two most valuable players, senior captains Scott Britton and Jordan Culbreath, who were sidelined for the year by injury and illness.

But Princeton linebacker Steve Cody ’11 has high hopes for the Tigers’ defense. “I think our defense is suited to play against Harvard,” he said. “They like to pound the ball, and I think we respond well to teams that do that, as you saw in the Colgate game. The whole defense is pretty amped up about that challenge.”

Another promising sign for Princeton: Quarterback Tommy Wornham ’12 had the most accurate passing performance of his young career in last week’s loss at Brown, completing 28 of 35 pass attempts. Receivers coach Gary Goff said that Wornham is getting better at throwing to his second or third target when the primary or secondary routes are well-covered.

Culbreath update

Jordan Culbreath ’10 had been diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a rare and serious condition that occurs when the body stops producing enough new blood cells. He is receiving treatment near his hometown in northern Virginia. Princeton football followers who would like to send get-well wishes can sign the guestbook at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jordanculbreath.

History

This year’s game marks the 102nd meeting of Princeton and Harvard. The series began in 1877 and has been contested annually since 1934, with the exception of a brief hiatus during World War II. No team has given the Tigers more trouble in recent years. Under head coach Roger Hughes, Princeton is 2-7 against the Crimson, including six games decided by a touchdown or less (four losses and two wins). Harvard has won or shared the Ivy championship five times in the last 12 seasons.

(Click photo to enlarge)

About 160 alumni and current members of the Princeton Footnotes harmonized on stage at Richardson Auditorium Oct. 10 in celebration of the a cappella group’s 50th anniversary.

The reunion included three-quarters of the original Footnotes and representatives of Princeton classes ranging from 1961 to 2013. After a day of rehearsals, alumni took the stage in ensembles of about 20 members, grouped by class year, and performed for 15 minutes — the traditional length of a set in a multi-group arch sing.

At the end of the concert, all of the singers gathered for a set of Footnotes favorites (video of the finale is included below). Afterward, clusters of alumni performed impromptu concerts in archways around campus, said John Preston ’11, who helped plan the weekend’s events.

Peter Orszag ’91, director of the Office of Management and Budget, ranked No. 5 on GQ’s list of the most powerful people in Washington, D.C., published last week. (Other Princeton alumni on the list include Robert Mueller ’66, No. 19; Richard Holbrooke *70, No. 21; and Edward Yingling ’70, No. 24). The reason for Orszag’s high ranking, according to GQ: “For every must-have on Obama’s domestic agenda — cap and trade, saner immigration policies, educational reform — the pressure’s on Orszag to make sure it can’t be branded as, er, ‘socialism.’ ” The respect Orszag built while head of the Congressional Budget Office, the magazine added, has made him “extremely influential with centrists” in Congress.

This month, Orszag has been trying to wield a different sort of influence around Washington. The avid runner lauched the OMB Pedometer Challenge, an effort to help his co-workers in the federal government burn off extra calories. Federal employees who volunteer to wear pedometers and out-step the OMB director have a chance to win prizes, including free lunches and a “happy healthy hour” for the winning team. “When you measure something and have a competition surrounding it,” Orszag explained in a White House video, “it creates a strong incentive to do more of it.” Better health, he added, may be the “ultimate prize.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

New book: Devil’s Dream, By Madison Smartt Bell ’79 (Knopf Doubleday)

The author: Madison Smartt Bell is the author of 13 previous works of fiction, including Anything Goes and the trilogy of novels about Haiti’s long, bloody struggle for independence led by Toussaint Louverture, including All Souls’ Rising. A creative writing professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, Bell also is a musician, part of the recording duo Bell & Cooper, which released its second album, Postcards Out of the Blue, last year.

The plot: In this historical novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled and celebrated, loathed and legendary of Civil War generals, Bell follows Forrest on and off the battlefield. The novel shuttles between 1845 and 1865 and explores his rise to the top of the ranks despite his abhorrence of Army bureaucracy — and his being a target of General Sherman — as well as his complicated personal life. Forrest, who is addicted to gambling and becomes a slave trader, marries Mary Ann Montgomery, but has a black mistress, with whom he fathers several children.

(Click photo to enlarge)

In advance of this week’s Princeton-Harvard football game — a popular gathering for Boston-area alumni — we present this image from a summer mini-reunion in the city. Friends of Larry Lucchino ’67, CEO and president of the Boston Red Sox, gathered at Fenway Park for an Aug. 11 game between the Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Lucchino is near the middle, wearing a yellow shirt and an orange-and-black Red Sox cap. At front and center is Dick Kazmaier ’52, the 1951 Heisman Trophy winner, who threw the game’s ceremonial first pitch.

(Photos courtesy the Boston Red Sox)

Second charter of the College of New Jersey, 1748 (Courtesy Princeton University Archives)

By Martha Vega-Gonzalez ’09

This is the first article in an occasional series about Princeton history and the University archives at Mudd Library. Vega-Gonzalez, a recent graduate who majored in history, lives and works in New York City as a freelance writer.

Last weekend, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library put the University charter on display for the third and last time this year. The last time the charter was displayed before that was in 1996, and there are no plans to exhibit it again in the foreseeable future -- so if you missed it this time, it may be a very long time before you get another chance to see it. But if you would like a closer look at Old Nassau's founding document, never fear: Photographs of the charter are easily accessible and a full transcript of the charter is available in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's Princeton, 1746-1896.

The most interesting thing about the charter on display is that it's not the University charter, as much as it is a University charter. The charter on display dates to 1748, but as every Tiger knows, the University dates itself to 1746. Indeed, the charter housed in Mudd is the second University charter, which was drawn up after Anglican critics of the Presbyterian institution claimed that John Hamilton, serving as interim governor after the death of Governor Lewis Morris, had overstepped his bounds when he issued the original charter; to resolve all doubts about the University's legality and legitimacy, new Governor Jonathan Belcher issued a second charter in 1748.

(Photo courtesy Flickr.com)

Princeton (1-3, 0-1 Ivy) at Brown (2-2, 0-1 Ivy) Oct. 17, 12:30 p.m. Brown Stadium Providence, R.I. TV: Versus

Both Princeton and Brown faced off against undefeated, nationally ranked teams from the Patriot League last week. The Tigers matched No. 23 Colgate for four quarters but lost in overtime, 21-14. The Bears avoided overtime against No. 19 Holy Cross by kicking a field goal in the closing seconds of a 34-31 victory.

The Colgate loss included some encouraging signs for Princeton, which outgained the Raiders with a season-high 358 yards on offense. Brown has momentum building as well: Last week, junior quarterback Kyle Newhall set an Ivy League record with 46 pass completions.

Number 21

Several Princeton players and coaches wore “21” stickers at the Colgate game to show their support for team captain Jordan Culbreath ’10, who was hospitalized with anemia and is now receiving bone-marrow treatments, according to head coach Roger Hughes, who said the senior’s condition could be life-threatening. Receiver Trey Peacock ’11 said that Culbreath’s health has been prominent in the thoughts of his teammates. “He’s always with us, he’s always in our hearts,” Peacock said. “We’re praying for him.”

History

Brown won last year’s matchup handily, 31-10, but Hughes has a winning record (5-4) against the Bears. The most important historical number may be two — as in, the loser of this game will have two Ivy League losses. The last time that the Ivy football champions had two losses was in 1982, when Dartmouth, Harvard, and Penn split the title, each with a 5-2 league record.

By Brittany Urick ’10

On Oct. 12, a cast featuring Princeton students staged a reading of “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later,” a play that assesses the impact of Matthew Shepard’s murder on the Wyoming community that the crime made famous.

Eleven years ago, Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die by two fellow University of Wyoming students who targeted him because he was gay. The performance provided a lens through which to examine a current issue: the debate in Congress over legislation that would broaden the definition of violent federal hate crimes to include those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The play is a compilation of interviews conducted by members of the Tectonic Theater Project when they revisited Laramie a decade after Shepard’s murder. The work raises questions about memory and what it means to move on from tragedy.

New book: City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, By Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

The author: Called a “master of the erotic confession” by John Irving, Edmund White is a novelist, critic, and Princeton professor of creative writing. A chronicler of New York City intellectual life and the gay world, White has written a previous memoir, My Lives. He also is the author of the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story and a biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud.

The book: After leaving the Midwest, White followed a lover to New York City instead of pursing a Ph.D. at Harvard. In this memoir, he chronicles his life in the city. He arrives broke and unknown, still a “self-hating gay man” who thinks he might be “cured.” City Boy is social history — he witnesses the start of the gay movement — as well as the story of his own gay liberation and his literary emergence. White writes about setbacks and insecurities and describes the literati he met along the way — from Elizabeth Bishop and Susan Sontag to John Ashbery and Robert Mapplethorpe.

In soccer, national-team coaches ultimately are judged by how their teams perform at the World Cup, but just getting into the tournament can be a challenging process. This week, head coach Bob Bradley ’80 and the U.S. men’s national team earned its ticket to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, winning in Honduras Oct. 10 to improve to 6-1-2 in qualifying matches.

For Bradley and his players, the celebration was cut short Oct. 13 when Charlie Davies, a 23-year-old forward on the team, was seriously injured in an early-morning car crash that killed one passenger. “Our thoughts and prayers are with Charlie and his family, as well as the people in the car and the families of the others involved,” Bradley said in a press conference. “As a team, we are relying on each other in a moment that has for sure hit us all hard.”

Bradley, the U.S. coach since December 2006, was a successful player at Princeton and coached the Tigers from 1984 to 1995, leading his team to the NCAA Final Four in 1993. In professional soccer, he coached the Chicago Fire to the Major League Soccer championship in 1998.

(Photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

By Katy Pinke ’10

Molecular biologist and author Sean Carroll delivered the annual Louis Clark Vanuxem Lecture at the Friend Center Oct. 7, introducing some of the subjects covered in his new book, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species. Carroll, a University of Wisconsin professor of molecular biology and genetics and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, explained that in his book, which chronicles the adventures of leading explorers of the natural sciences over the past 200 years, he wanted to celebrate those scientists who “walked where no others had walked, saw what no one else had seen, and thought what no one else had thought.”

Carroll’s talk centered around the life work of three famous figures — Alfred Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and of course, Charles Darwin — and the overlap of their work to “uncover the origin of the species.” He stressed the uncompromising efforts of each, not only when confronting the trials of arduous traveling expeditions to the Galapagos or up the Amazon, but also during a time when discoveries they were making completely diverged from creationist scientific discourses of the day. “Their discoveries really formed the first golden age of evolutionary biology,” Carroll explained.

The bottle designed by Alyce Tzue ’10; message: ” … You are here for a reason. You just have to figure out what that reason is.” (Courtesy The Bottle Project)

By Katy Pinke ’10

On Sept. 16, the night before the first day of classes this fall, Princeton freshmen set out with maps in hand in search of bottles. “The Bottle Project,” a collaboration between the Student Design Agency (SDA) and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), gave alumni the chance to impart words of wisdom to the Class of 2013 through 13 messages in bottles scattered around north campus.

Thirteen volunteers from the SDA each designed a message in a bottle over the summer, inspired by pieces of advice offered by Princeton alumni. On the eve of the bottle search, the designers placed their creations in favorite spots; some bottles hung from trees, others in hard-to-reach places like the center of the Woodrow Wilson School fountain.

The idea arose out of an ODUS initiative to find an effective means by which alumni could inspire and guide incoming freshmen as they start out at Princeton. Hoping to carry out this reach-across idea in a meaningful way, Dean Thomas Dunne came to the SDA before the end of the last school year. At first, Dunne and the student designers discussed the use of posters, a medium employed often by the agency in its work providing numerous student and administrative bodies with design services. But instead, the concept evolved into a more imaginative and interactive experience.

David Goldstein ’84 with daughter Galit ’13

Friday, Oct. 9 will be a big day for David Goldstein ’84, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Goldstein is on the science team of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) spacecraft, which will crash into the moon’s Cabeus crater at about 7:30 a.m. Eastern time, kicking up dust that researchers believe contains ice. A second spacecraft will follow, four minutes after the first.

If water ice is present, Goldstein explains, it could be a valuable resource for astronauts at a lunar station. As NASA’s Web site notes, “It will not be practical to transport to space the amount of water needed for human and exploration needs.” (Interested readers can follow the LCROSS spacecraft’s journey on Twitter.)

Goldstein, an expert in fluid dynamics, has worked to model the gas and dust dynamics of the LCROSS impact plumes. His research group also models comet impacts on the moon.

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Princeton (1-2, 0-1 Ivy) vs. Colgate (5-0, 1-0 Patriot) Oct. 8, 7 p.m. Princeton Stadium Princeton, N.J. TV: ESPNU Radio: Sirius 130, WPRB

Five days after losing 38-0 to Columbia in its Ivy League opener, Princeton will return to the field to take on undefeated Colgate, one of the hottest teams in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The Raiders, ranked No. 23 in one FCS poll, feature formidable running backs Jordan McCord and Nate Eachus, each of whom averages more than 100 rushing yards per game. Colgate’s offense has steamrolled opponents, gaining nearly 450 yards per contest.

Princeton’s offense, on the other hand, is searching for answers. In three games, the Tigers’ attack has scored just two touchdowns (the Princeton defense also scored one against Lehigh). New quarterback Tommy Wornham ’12 has completed 45.4 percent of his passes (44 for 97), and the struggling running game will be without star tailback Jordan Culbreath ’10 for the rest of the season.

Head coach Roger Hughes said that he expects his team will be eager to move past the Columbia game. “While I don’t like to lose with the score the way it was, maybe it’s easier for a team to bounce back from this loss,” he said. “It’s easier to turn the page, say we had a bad game, and go on.”

New book: The Double Life is Twice as Good, By Jonathan Ames ’87 (Scribner)

The author: Called “New York’s gonzo scribe,” Ames has written the novels Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man — which will be released as a feature film in 2010 — as well as the graphic novel The Alcoholic and the essay collection My Less Than Secret Life. An English major at Princeton, he is a former columnist for the New York Press, performs as a storyteller, and has been a frequent guest on The Late Show with David Letterman.

The book: This collection of humorous and erotically charged articles, essays, cartoons, and short stories features the story “Bored to Death,” the basis for the HBO comedy series Ames created by the same name about a 30-something struggling writer in Brooklyn who moonlights as a private detective. Written in the first person, the pieces in this collection range from Ames’ coverage of the U.S. Open and a Goth music festival, to a profile of Marilyn Manson, and his account of attending a class on how to pleasure women.

Steve Cody ’11 (© Beverly Schaefer)

Princeton (1-1, 0-0 Ivy) vs. Columbia (1-1, 0-0 Ivy) Oct. 3, 3 p.m. Princeton Stadium Princeton, N.J.

By Vikram Rao ’11

Princeton opens its 2009 Ivy League season Oct. 3 against Columbia. Both teams come into the game with 1-1 records. The Tigers dropped their first game to The Citadel by a 38-7 score before rebounding with a 17-14 win against Lehigh. Columbia defeated Fordham 40-28 and fell 22-13 to Central Connecticut State.

The Tigers likely will be without senior All-Ivy running back Jordan Culbreath, who sprained his ankle against Lehigh. Culbreath also has been diagnosed with a minor case of anemia. Without Culbreath, the Tigers will rotate juniors Meko McCray and Kenny Gunter and freshman Akil Sharp at running back. Sophomore quarterback Tommy Wornham is making only his third start, and the Tigers will be relying heavily on their senior-laden offensive line.

Defensively, the Tigers will be faced with the difficult task of halting Columbia’s three-headed offensive monster. Quarterback M.A. Olawale is threat to pass or run. (He’s thrown for 316 yards and three touchdowns and rushed for two more scores.) Running back Ray Rangel has rushed for 248 yards on just 36 carries, good for a 6.9 yard per carry. And wideout Austin Knowlin is perhaps the best receiver in the Ivies. Knowlin was named a preseason All-American by The Sports Network and has notched 11 receptions and one receiving touchdown this season.