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Ryan Crocker *85, career ambassador with the U.S. Foreign Service, cautioned against a shift towards “neo-isolationism” at the Woodrow Wilson School’s annual colloquium May 4. 

Ryan Crocker *85 (Photo: U.S. Department of State)

“I worry about the increasing mood in the administration of ‘pull back, fix our own problems, and if we’re going to do something, pivot to Asia,’” said Crocker. “If you pivot to Asia, you expose a very important part of your anatomy to the Middle East, which is probably going to bite it very hard.” 

This year’s colloquium, on “Challenges to U.S. Policy in the Middle East,” drew 175 graduate alumni and their guests and featured several prominent speakers, including former Sen. George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace from 2009-11, who delivered Friday’s keynote. Crocker, who spent four decades in the Foreign Service and served as ambassador throughout the Middle East, most recently in Afghanistan, spoke during the Saturday keynote address. 

Crocker said that his experience left him with two lessons: Be careful what you get into, but be just as careful of what you get out of. “Disengagement can have consequences as great and grave as getting in in the first place,” Crocker said. 

The greatest challenge facing the current administration is Pakistan, he argued, with nuclear weapons, instability, and a government willing to support the Taliban “as a hedge against U.S. withdrawal.”  

Miriama Young ’07 and the icon for her Hushabye app. (Photos Courtesy: Miriama Young ’07)

Two Princeton musicians recently have launched apps for children — one to calm them and another to teach them. Miriama Young ’07, a composer and musicologist in Sydney, Australia, has created an app to soothe babies and help them to fall asleep. Inspired by her own newborn that suffered from colic and cried constantly, the Hushabye app provides the kind of sounds that helped her child — white noise, heartbeat, and gentle singing. With Young’s app, the user can create her own mix of real heartbeat, water sounds, and her own lullaby.

Harold Hartshorne 1914 with partner Sandy MacDonald. (Photo: Courtesy The Daily Princetonian Larry DuPraz Digital Archive)

The most famous skater in Princeton’s Class of 1914 was undoubtedly Hobey Baker, the Tiger football and hockey star and World War I aviator whose name adorns college hockey’s version of the Heisman Trophy. But classmate Harold Hartshorne also made a name for himself on the ice, earning national championship medals in pairs ice dancing in the 1930s and ’40s before becoming a respected judge in the sport. 

Hartshorne, a stock broker in his day job, remained active in ice dancing into his late 60s and was traveling with the U.S. figure skating team in 1961 when its flight to the world championships crashed in Brussels, killing Hartshorne, his wife, Louisa, and the other 71 people on board. 

Hartshorne is still remembered in the Jersey shore town of Little Silver, where he built a country home that featured, among other things, a skating pond on the property. The home, designed by Roger Harrington Bullard, earned designation as a Monmouth County Historic Site, and through June 9, it will be on display as a designer show house, presented by the Visiting Nurse Association Health Group. Click here to read more about the Hartshorne family, the house’s history, and the show house program.

Nick Frey '09, left, and Drew Haugen *12. (Photos: Courtesy Drew Haugen)

Aluminum and bamboo might seem like an odd mix of materials for a bike frame. But entrepreneurs Nick Frey ’09, Drew Haugen *12, and James Wolf believe it may be the next big thing in cycling.

Frey, Haugen, and Wolf are cofounders of Aluboo, a startup that builds on earlier work by Frey, a professional cyclist and mechanical engineer, and Wolf, a craftsman and industrial designer. The two created Boo Bicycles, handcrafting frames from tam vong (“iron bamboo”) rods and carbon fiber joints in a workshop in Vietnam. Boo bikes have competed successfully in a number of cycling and cyclocross races, and Frey contends that “you could race the Boo in the Tour de France.”

Bamboo is actually an ideal material for bikes: The plant’s strong, fibrous structure dampens road vibrations and provides for an exceptionally smooth ride, and it is more sustainable than other popular bike materials, such as steel.

The major drawback is the price tag. Each Boo bike is custom-made and priced between $5,000 and $14,000 — not a bike for the weekend warrior. That’s where Haugen comes in.

Ever have that nightmare where you still haven’t finished your thesis? Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson *86 has. 

Returning to campus can counteract that “recurring nightmare,” Jackson said, addressing an audience of students, faculty, and community members in Dodds Auditorium April 9.

“I still have that nightmare that it’s the day before my master’s thesis defense. And I haven’t finished it, but I’m really stressed,” she said, the audience laughing. “But every time I’m here, it reinforces that I got the degree.” 

Jackson, a chemical engineer who served as head of the EPA in the Obama administration from January 2009 until February of this year, recounted her personal story of how she came to define herself as environmentalist. 

Noting that the word “environmentalist” has, in some circles, come to refer to environmental activism for political purposes, Jackson provided her own definition: An environmentalist is someone “who cares deeply about and prioritizes the environment — the environment, not as an outside concept, but more for its impact on our health, its impact on our well-being ... and its impacts on our prosperity,” she said. 

Jackson recalled learning about environmental issues during her undergraduate years at Tulane, when she first heard of the “soup of chemicals” in the Mississippi River causing problems downstream in New Orleans as well as the government’s inability to adequately respond to large-scale, hazardous environmental problems like the infamous Love Canal in upstate New York.

Journalists Landon Jones '66, Griff Witte '00, and Jim Merritt '66 shared their experiences with students from the Class of 2016 at a recent reception in Princeton. (Photo: Courtesy Charles R. Plohn k'66)

“I can’t believe they let me do this and pay me for it.” That’s how Landon Jones ’66 described his career in journalism to a group of 20 Princeton freshmen who gathered at his home April 7. 

Jones, a former managing editor of People (and former editor of PAW), said journalism has allowed him to satisfy his curiosity about virtually any subject. His speech kicked off “An Evening of Journalism and Writing,” organized as part of an ongoing effort to create a special relationship between the Class of 2016 and its “grandparent class,” or the class that will have its 50th reunion when the freshmen graduate.

Previous events have included a Campus Club pizza party and an oyster-eating contest at Blue Point Grill (during which Dominique Ibekwe ’16 ate 65 oysters in two minutes). “Tonight’s event will have a somewhat higher intellectual component … but the same spirit,” Class of ’66 president Charles Plohn Jr. said in his introductory remarks.

The evening’s speakers were generally encouraging about the journalism profession, despite its financial challenges. Washington Post deputy foreign editor Griff Witte ’00, son of Michael Witte ’66, said he appreciated the opportunity to be “constantly discovering” as a foreign correspondent. “Your preconceptions about the world are almost always wrong,” said Witte, who is teaching a course at Princeton this semester.

Tina Fey plays a Princeton admission officer in her new movie. (Photo: Courtesy Focus Features)

Princeton plays a prominent role in the new Tina Fey and Paul Rudd film, Admission, opening nationwide March 22. The stars were in town last summer to shoot a few scenes for the movie, which is based on a 2009 novel by former Office of Admission reader Jean ­Korelitz. 

Admission is the latest in a long line of films that feature the campus or the University — though the two don’t always go hand-in-hand. In Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (2004), for example, the title characters briefly visit Princeton, but the scenes were not filmed on campus; in Scent of a Woman (1992), on the other hand, real Princeton buildings stand in for a New England prep school. 

Princeton’s film debut came nearly a century ago in the 1915 silent film Satan Sanderson, according to a 1999 PAW feature story by film historian Steven G. Kellman. In the early days of talkies, the University was portrayed as a Roaring ’20s party school in Varsity (1928), starring Charles “Buddy” Rogers. The story did not go over well with administrators — or alumni. One letter to PAW called it “an infantile and unusually moronic screen exhibition.”