Recently in Campus News

On the basketball beat

If you go to a Princeton men’s basketball game, you can expect to see at least two things: a 3-point basket and Jon Solomon. The Tigers have converted at least one 3-pointer in every game since 1986, and Solomon, the founder and editor of princetonbasketball.com and an honorary member of the Class of 1976, has covered Princeton’s last 101 Ivy League games at home and on the road — a streak that dates back to the 2000-01 season.
From the bleachers of out-of-town arenas or his regular seat in the second row of section S4 at Jadwin Gym, Solomon documents the details of each contest on his clipboard and posts stories, audio clips, and photos on his Web site afterward. He has followed the Tigers since childhood, when he faithfully read local newspaper accounts. Back then, Solomon assumed that all writers traveled with the team. Now, on many road trips, he’s the only Princeton reporter waiting outside the locker room. “I like the idea of the old-school beat reporter,” he says. “I take pride in being a constant.” (Away from the gym, Solomon has been a near-constant on the radio, hosting WPRB’s 24-hour Christmas marathon, from Christmas eve to Christmas day, in 19 of the last 20 years.)
For basketball games, Solomon rarely travels alone — his wife, Nicole, and his parents are Princeton fans as well — and he has a few favorite stops in each Ivy League city, from falafel in Providence to Thai food in Ithaca. Watching road games has had its rewards: Solomon says that two of the most memorable games in his Ivy streak took place away from Jadwin. In 2001, Kyle Wente ’03 hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to top Harvard near the beginning of Princeton’s league championship run, and five years later, Scott Greenman ’06 hit two long-range shots in a double-overtime win at Cornell.
Solomon’s 100th consecutive Ivy game was played at Jadwin Feb. 1, and the Tigers did not disappoint, taking a 7-point lead late in the second half against Dartmouth and holding the Big Green at arm’s length in a 57-53 win. The next night, Princeton again played well in the second half, topping Harvard, 68-54. With a 2-0 league record, the Tigers will continue their Ivy schedule against Cornell (4-0) at Newman Arena Feb. 8. Solomon plans to be there.

Ibsen’s
‘female Hamlet’

Irene Lucio ’08, front, and Rob Grant ’08 rehearse scene from Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in preparation for a Feb. 8 debut at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Critics have compared the title character to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Click here for more information about the Princeton production.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Saturday is for science

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory launched its annual Science on Saturday program last month, and this week, Iain Couzin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, will deliver the fifth installment, covering “Collective Motion and Decision-making in Animal Groups.”
The 2-hour lectures start at 9:30 a.m. in the Gottlieb Auditorium on the Forrestal Campus. The program is “geared toward high school students,” according to a University release, but all are invited to attend. This year, selected sessions also will be broadcast live to the “interactive theater” at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.
For more information, including a complete schedule and links to videos of past lectures, visit the Science on Saturday Web site.

Names in the News

Brooke Shields ’87, star of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle, told Newsday that sees parallels between the women in the show and some of her Princeton classmates. “When I look at the people I went to school with — those who graduated when we graduated - they are all CEOs of major, major companies,” she said. “They were pretty hungry, all of them. In their way, they had passions that were very distinct.” … Former Sen. Bill Frist ’74 tried his hand at acting in a Super Bowl commercial for Coca-Cola that featured him side-by-side with Democratic strategist James Carville. The Associated Press declared Coke a winner in the cola ad wars, but USA Today’s ad-meter ranked the Frist-Carville spot 29th out of 55 commercials. … The New York Giants’ Super Bowl win was sweet for Marc Ross ’95, who joined the team as its college scouting director last spring. Before the game, Ross was quoted in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story about his team’s powerful offensive guards. … TV commentator and former NFL lineman Ross Tucker ’01 answered questions about the Giants’ upset victory in a Feb. 4 Washington Post online chat. … The soccer magazine 90:00 will run an extended interview with U.S. national soccer team coach Bob Bradley ’80 in February, written by Giles Morris ’97. When asked about what makes a player great, Bradley said: “The yardstick is always the game. You can try as many tricks as you want and if you win games there [are] no issues. The game doesn’t lie.”

Football, munchies, and megawatts

About 90 million Americans watch the Super Bowl on television each year, and many view the game in groups — at bars, in living rooms, or in the case of Princeton students, in common rooms at dormitories and eating clubs. But does that communal experience change the way power is used? Is there a drop in demand for electricity when the Super Bowl kicks off, as people stop what they’re doing and gather around the TV? Ted Borer, the University’s energy plant manager, was curious. “I’d always heard of this, as an urban legend,” Borer says, “and I thought, ‘I have the tools to confirm this.’”
On Feb. 5, 2006, when the Seattle Seahawks and Pittsburgh Steelers faced off in Super Bowl XL, Borer tracked the power data from the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland grid during the game along with the power demand on Princeton’s campus. The results, seen on the graph below, are striking: Within one minute of the game’s start, power use on campus dropped 6 percent. “We rarely see that dramatic a change,” Borer says.

Courtesy Edward T. Borer. To view a larger version, click here.

Power use spiked during commercial breaks, as people reheated their nachos, opened the refrigerator to grab another drink, or flushed the toilet (triggering utility company pumps). While the pattern is similar for both the campus and the wider grid, Princeton’s power use showed two notable differences from the community at large. Students seemed more interested in the halftime show (in 2006, the Rolling Stones performed), and after the game, when the rest of the region turned off the lights and headed to bed, power use on campus began to climb. Borer suspects that the postgame jump comes from students returning to their rooms and turning on their computers for a little late-night studying.

Names in the news

The human eye is designed for zooming, not scrolling, according to a Feb. 4 Newsweek story, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas ’98 *04 is redesigning the Web browser to cater to the eye’s natural tendencies. Zoom interfaces aim to bring “the full power of your visual system to bear on processing information,” Aguera y Arcas says. … National headlines earlier this week focused on Barack Obama’s endorsement from Sen. Ted Kennedy, but in Princeton, Toni Morrison’s backing of the Illinois senator topped the news. According to the Princeton Packet, the emeritus professor and Nobel prize-winning author wrote that Obama shows “a creative imagination, which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.” … On Jan. 28, the Star-Ledger of Newark profiled geosciences professor Gerta Keller, whose work has challenged the conventional wisdom about how dinosaurs became extinct. …
EBay CEO Meg Whitman ’77’s next move could take her from the boardroom to the campaign trail. The Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 25 that Whitman, a top fundraiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is considering a run for governor in California’s 2010 election. A source close to Whitman “downplayed the seriousness” of the campaign talk, according to the Times. … Fear, history professor Jan Gross’ book about anti-Semitism in Poland at the end of World War II, recently was translated to Polish, and the new version has been “sharply criticized” in Poland, the Associated Press reported Jan. 24. Gross has faced his critics in public debates, including a forum in the town of Kielce, where he explained that he wanted the book “to show people what an incredibly strong toxic poison anti-Semitism is in the general psychology of Poles, because it made us incapable of withstanding temptation.”

Dance festival preview

Princeton students rehearse “Name by Name,” one of five pieces that will be performed at the University’s Spring Dance Festival Feb. 22, 23, and 24 at the Berlind Theatre. MacArthur fellow Susan Marshall is the choreographer. Click here for a complete list of festival pieces and performers.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

History’s headlines

With Princeton students away for intersession and not much activity on campus, The Weekly Blog takes a look back at PAW news from January in years past:

Jan. 28, 1998 | Wins propel Tigers into top 20
“No less an authority than ESPN’s poster boy for logorrhea, Dick Vitale, predicted that if Princeton could get by St. John’s on December 27, ‘these guys could run the table, baby,’ and finish 26-1. … A glance at the national rankings after their 77-48 rout of Manhattan showed them 15th in the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls. No Princeton team since the 1966-67 version, Butch van Breda Kolff ’45’s swan song, has been ranked that high.” By Peter Delacorte ’67

Jan. 30, 1978 | Crime in the stacks
“Although a sign near the entrance to Firestone Library asks guests to identify themselves, no well-behaved person is ever approached to show identification or to justify his presence in any way. Furthermore, most of the library’s holdings are kept in open stacks to encourage browsing. … This halcyon arrangement is now endangered by rising thievery. … The magnitude of the problem was discovered last spring when the library completed its first thorough inventory in recent years. … [T]he inventory revealed that 4.35 percent of the nearly two million volumes in Firestone’s open stacks and almost 10 percent of the materials in branch libraries are missing. In all, some 150,000 volumes with a replacement cost of approximately $3 million have disappeared.” By Virginia Kays Creesy

Jan. 25, 1963 | A $3,500,000 machine
“This has been called the Age of the Computer - the characteristic instrument of our scientific, rationalized civilization - and as of last month, Princeton was right in the center of it. In the 1960s these ‘giant brains,’ unknown twenty years ago, predict Presidential elections, land astronauts, write acceptable TV scripts, compose serious music (‘The Illiac Suite for String Quartet’), play chess, translate scientific Russian, and in what might be called an act of planned parenthood, design other computers. … [The University’s new IBM 7090] has over 50,000 transistors and 1,000,000 magnetic cores, performs 229,000 additions per second, and with its auxiliary equipment cost over $3,500,000.” By John D. Davies ’41

Programming notes: The 14-game tournament

For Princeton men’s basketball, the nonconference season included few bright spots and one long stretch of frustration — a school-record 12-game losing streak. But now the streak is over, thanks to a 60-46 win over Division-II Dominican College Jan. 27, and the Tigers are set to tip off the Ivy League season Feb. 1 against Dartmouth at Jadwin Gym. Princeton also hosts Harvard Feb. 2 in a game that will be broadcast nationally on ESPNU. Princeton fans can listen to all men’s basketball games, home and away, online at WPRB.com.

Princeton and the birth of ultimate Frisbee

The game was created in a parking lot. In 1968, a group of kids from the high school newspaper in Maplewood, N.J., created a team game that used a Frisbee - mixing elements of soccer, football, and hockey - and called it the “ultimate” sport, or ultimate Frisbee.
A few years later, in another parking lot in New Brunswick, N.J., one of those high schoolers from Maplewood, Jonny Hines ’74, joined with friends from Princeton and Rutgers to play the new sport’s first intercollegiate match.
The turnout that day in November 1972 was remarkable, considering that ultimate was still unknown beyond a small network of high school and college students. About 1,000 spectators gathered on the sidelines, along with a reporter from The New York Times and sportscaster Jim Bouton, the former New York Yankee pitcher, who covered the game for New York’s ABC affiliate. Rutgers edged Princeton, 29-27.
“We publicized it well, somewhat as a half-joke, but it was taken seriously,” said Hines, now a Moscow-based partner at an international law firm. “People were surprised to see it was a real sport - a fast-paced, athletic, competitive sport.”
Joel Silver, one of the sport’s co-founders and a Lafayette College student at the time, helped to promote the event. Silver would go on to produce movies, including The Matrix and Die Hard. The third co-founder, Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring ’74, had been a student at Princeton but was killed in a car accident during his freshman year.
In the decades since the game in New Brunswick, ultimate Frisbee has spread and grown at a remarkable rate, particularly on college campuses. Hines said his Frisbee-throwing days dwindled after Princeton, when he devoted his time to law school, his career, and his family, but he still takes some pride in being there at the beginning.
“I’m proud, it was fun, and still fun to think that I had such a part in it,” Hines said in an e-mail. “[But] I’m so absorbed in interesting work as an international lawyer (in New York and now in Russia) - work that’s really fascinating and influential - that I don’t really have time to stop to seek to bask in any such past ‘glories.’”
Read about other Princeton innovations and innovators in the Jan. 23 issue of PAW.
Above, Jonny Hines ’74, left, and Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring ’74 in a photo of the 1970 Columbia High School varsity Frisbee team. Photo by Mark Epstein, courtesy of “Ultimate: The First Four Decades,” www.ultimatehistory.com.

Names in the news

In a Jan. 21 story, The New York Times covered Kevin Gover ’78’s challenging first months as director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. … The Newark Star-Ledger highlighted the musical compositions of the late Edward T. Cone, a longtime Princeton professor whose work was performed by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra Jan. 20. Cone’s musical executor, Jeffrey Farrington *75, is quoted in the story. … Physics World reported Jan. 18 that theoretical physicist Edward Witten *76 will receive the Crafoord Prize, which is given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and recognizes fields not covered by the Nobel prizes. Witten is “widely regarded as the leading figure in the development of string theory,” according to the article.
A New York Times Magazine feature on Ben Bernanke recalled the Fed chairman’s years as a Princeton professor, drawing on interviews with former colleagues Alan Blinder ’67 and Burton Malkiel *64. … In a Jan. 21 opinion piece in Newsday, associate professor of politics and African American studies Melissa Harris-Lacewell argued that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did a disservice to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by “openly disavowing the continuing importance of race in America” at a recent debate in Nevada. “King championed justice by fearlessly engaging racial inequality,” Harris-Lacewell wrote, “not by pretending it did not exist.”

Alumni anagrams, decoded

The Jan. 16 Weekly Blog included the names of six of the 26 people chosen by a PAW panel as Princeton’s “most influential alumni,” disguised in anagrams. The answers are listed below.

Indoor owls, wow! = Woodrow Wilson 1879
Banjo nerd, eh? = John Bardeen *36
Turnover tribe = Robert Venturi ’47 *50
Hippie funeral = Philip Freneau 1771
Landlords fumed = Donald Rumsfeld ’54
Harder plan = Ralph Nader ’55

More at PAW Online

Rally ’Round the Cannon - Gregg Lange ’70 provides a list of 10 Really Important Things that you can’t find on the Princeton Web site.
The salesman - Lud Gutmann ’55 recalls the day a scholarship student and his parents went to Langrock’s to pick out a suit for graduation.
Alumni connections - Four alumni are working together at the headquarters of John Edwards’ presidential campaign.
Working the crowd - Cushney Roberts ’76 gave up an engineering job to perform on the stage; his Motown and R&B tribute group tours the country and on cruise ships.

A look at ‘computing in the cloud’

When services run on a Web browser and store information in the provider’s data center, technology experts refer to the setup as “computing in the cloud” - keeping data on remote servers instead of on the user’s computer. E-mail services such as Hotmail and G-mail are among the most common examples, and other applications are attracting users who want to engage friends on social networks, manage personal finances, or store photos, documents, or spreadsheets. But what does this mean for privacy and security? Who owns the data in the cloud? Who controls how it is used? On Jan. 14 and 15, experts from academia, industry, law, and politics gathered at Princeton to examine some of the open policy questions in “cloud computing” at a workshop organized by the University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and sponsored by Microsoft.
Panelists offered a range of opinions on controversial topics. In a discussion of possession and ownership of data, Tim Lee, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, proposed that sharing personal information is “a prerequisite to any useful online service,” and users make informed tradeoffs. For instance, G-mail users have been willing to accept Google’s practice of scanning e-mails for advertising purposes because they like the product and the extra storage space that comes with it. But Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center questioned whether users truly understand the privacy implications of using G-mail or even accepting cookies on their Web browsers. Much of privacy, he argued, is about transparency, and Web companies are not being transparent about how they are using the information they collect.
Other panels in the two-day workshop covered security, public engagement, and future applications for cloud computing. The audience was filled with open laptops, and some participants blogged about the discussions, including Luis Villa, who commented on wesabe.com’s “data bill of rights”; Khürt Williams of Island in the Net, who posted his notes and comments; and Chris Tengi, an infrastructure operations analyst and manager for Princeton’s computer science department, who reviewed the opening remarks and the first panel discussion.
UPDATE (1/17/08): Video of the introductory remarks by engineering dean H. Vincent Poor *77 and CITP director and computer science professor Ed Felten is available on YouTube, courtesy of UChannel.

Coming soon: Princeton’s most influential alumni

The Jan. 23 issue of PAW will feature a list of the University’s most influential alumni, as chosen by a panel of seven faculty members and an alumnus. The list includes U.S. presidents and Nobel laureates, as well as some notable contributors to medicine, philanthropy, architecture, education, and several other fields. To preview the coming issue, The Weekly Blog has disguised the names of six alumni from the list by creating anagrams, transposing the letters in their names to form other words or phrases. So for instance, James Madison, Class of 1771, could be rearranged to read “Join a mad mess.” Join our mad mess by decoding the anagrams below, and e-mail your responses to The Weekly Blog. One lucky winner will receive a vintage Princeton Alumni Weekly poster. Answers will be posted on Jan. 23.

Indoor owls, wow! (Class of 1879)
Banjo nerd, eh? (Ph.D. 1936)
Turnover tribe (Class of 1947, MFA 1950)
Hippie funeral (Class of 1771)
Landlords fumed (Class of 1954)
Harder plan (Class of 1955)

The beat goes on

Drummer Hannah Valdez ’11 and the Princeton Band rallied the crowd at men’s basketball’s Jan. 9 home game against Lafayette. The Tigers led by as many as 18 points in the first half, but the Leopards fought back to win in overtime, handing Princeton its 12th consecutive loss. The Tigers return to action Jan. 27 against Dominican and open Ivy League play against Dartmouth Feb. 1 at Jadwin Gym.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Kaiser ’10 helps men’s hockey sweep Dartmouth, Harvard

Princeton men’s hockey outshot Dartmouth 28-14 in the first two periods at Hobey Baker Rink Jan. 5 and took a commanding 3-0 lead halfway through the third period. But a minute after the third score, the Big Green fired back with a goal of its own. Dartmouth nearly narrowed the gap to one goal when a slapshot popped out of the glove of Princeton goalie Zane Kalemba ’10 and tumbled toward the goal. But center Kevin Kaiser ’10 sprinted to the crease and cleared the puck before it reached the net.
Princeton coach Guy Gadowsky said Kaiser’s defensive recovery was “a tremendous hockey play” that helped to determine the game’s outcome. Brett Wilson ’09 scored a few minutes later, giving Princeton some room to breathe, and the Tigers went on to win 5-2.

PAW AUDIO: Listen to Gadowsky’s description of Kaiser’s open-net save against Dartmouth.
The following night against Harvard, Kaiser again skated into the spotlight at a key moment. With the score tied 1-1 late in the third period, Landis Stankievech ’08 slid to block a Harvard shot. The puck deflected toward Kaiser, who rushed to the opposite net on a breakaway and scored the game-winning goal.
With the two wins, Princeton climbed to a tie for first place in the ECAC Hockey standings and improved to 3-0 in Ivy League games. The Tigers also re-established some much-needed confidence on their home ice, where the team had started 1-6.
“We love to play here, [and] we feel badly about our record here,” Gadowsky said after the Dartmouth win. “We’ve played well on the road, but we haven’t had the big wins here. So this was an opportunity, getting back in league play and having an Ivy League game, to prove that we love playing at Hobey.”

Molecular landscape

The image above, created by graduate student Sieu Ha, is science fiction. Science, because the details were captured by a scanning tunneling microscope, but fiction because the “sky” and “land” are pasted from separate samples (the former is the organic molecule THAP on a gold substrate, exposed to a high background pressure of cobaltocene, while the latter is hexaazatrinaphthylene, also on a gold substrate).
Ha, a fourth-year graduate student in the electrical engineering department who studies the physical and electronic properties of organic materials with Professor Antoine Kahn *78, submitted the image to the Science as Art competition, held in November at the Materials Research Society’s fall meeting in Boston. Ha’s image earned second-place recognition.
Courtesy Sieu Ha

Faculty in the blogosphere: Presidential politics edition

A Dec. 19 New Republic story by Sean Wilentz that examined political pundits’ tendency to build an “emotional attachment to [a] candidate’s oratory or image” sparked a debate about experience vs. instinct on the New Republic’s Open University blog. … In a Dec. 19 entry on the Huffington Post, Woodrow Wilson School professor Julian Zelizer aligned the three top Democrats with three of the party’s political traditions: populism (John Edwards), anti-politics (Obama), and pragmatic liberalism (Hillary Clinton). … In a Dec. 20 entry on his blog, Freedom’s Power, Woodrow Wilson School professor Paul Starr previewed his article in the January-February American Prospect, “The Democrats’ Strategic Challenge,” which “set[s] out what the Democrats could accomplish if they win the election and take control of the White House and Congress.”

Alumni in the news

Curator Jodi Hauptman ’86 earned acclaim for her Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Georges Seurat: The Drawings,” which closed Jan. 7. Critic Patricia Zohn wrote in her Huffington Post blog that the exhibit showed “a quiet brilliance that perfectly echoes one of the artist’s defining features: his self-chosen muteness.” … Word of mouth can help underdog candidates keep up with well-funded frontrunners in the presidential primaries, according to a Jan. 6 New York Times op-ed by pollster Mark Mellman ’78 and colleague Michael Bloomfield. Voters tend to trust their neighbors, Mellman said, at least more than they trust what they see in 30-second advertisements. A December poll of Iowa voters found that 69 percent trusted “comments from friends, relatives, and colleagues,” compared to 38 percent who trusted information provided by TV ads. … Colbert Report writer Jay Katsir ’04 discussed life on the writers’ guild picket lines with Metro, a free daily newspaper in New York, Jan. 8. Katsir joked that he has turned on the TV for positive reinforcement. “I have been getting a lot of support from people like Dr. Phil. He helped me today to not be ‘that girl.’”
The Boston Globe’s Dec. 31 roundup of books to watch for in 2008 mentioned three Princeton alumni: Randall Kennedy ’77, a Harvard Law professor whose book about betrayal in the black community, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Disloyalty, is due out this month; Joseph Nye ’58, the former dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who will address international affairs in The Powers to Lead: Soft, Hard, and Smart, which will be published in February; and Louis Masur *85, a professor at Trinity College, who will examine a famous photo from Boston’s antibusing demonstrations of 1976 in The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America, slated for an April release.

Exploring the nuances of fear

One aim of the enlightenment was to end the era of fear, according to Gyan Prakash, director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Scholars hoped to use science, rationality, and knowledge to eliminate the anxieties of the Dark Ages. But, Prakash said, “It turned out to be different.”
Fear endured, taking new forms throughout history, and this year, the Davis Center is taking a closer look at the nuances of fear in several periods, from the Incan empire during the Spanish conquest to fascist Italy in the first half of the 20th century. “I thought that it would be interesting to look at other contexts of fear, so that we don’t always see fear in the context of the present,” Prakash said.
Weekly workshops draw 40 to 50 participants to discuss papers about sources of fear in history. The author’s paper is distributed in advance, and a designated commentator opens the discussion with questions about the research.
Prakash said that Davis Center devotees were very enthusiastic about the idea of studying fear. (Other popular seminar themes have included “utopias and dystopias” and “cities: space, society, and history.”) In addition to papers from historians, the center received submissions from psychoanalysts, political scientists, diplomats, and retired military officers.
Prakash, the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, said that the discussions have been building from week to week, despite the seemingly disparate topics. The series resumes its weekly schedule Feb. 7 when Alain Boureau of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales will discuss “Fear as a Passion of the Soul in Scholastic Thought.” A full-day fear workshop is scheduled on April 12. For more information, visit the Davis Center Web site.

Tigers on the ’Tube

If you search for “Princeton” on YouTube, you’re likely to find a range of material not related to the University, from clips of Avenue Q to rock concerts featuring New Jersey teenagers. But the video-sharing site also includes material from Princeton’s student artists, athletes, scientists, engineers, and amateur filmmakers. Here are just a few recent additions spotted by PAW:

Roaring 20 meets Third Eye
A capella singers from the Roaring 20 perform Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” at Richardson Auditorium, with soloist Julian Hertz ’07 front and center.

Let’s hear it for the bio
Molecular biology students learn lab techniques, with inspiration from the movie Footloose.

Goal! Goal! Goal!
CSTV posted highlights from its broadcast of the women’s soccer team’s Oct. 2 win over Rutgers, which gave coach Julie Shackford the program record for wins. Ivy League Player of the Year Diana Matheson ’08 sparkles with two near-perfect assists. Also on YouTube: a maddening moment for Princeton soccer, from a Sept. 17 men’s game against Seton Hall. One of the Pirates scores from near midfield in a clip dubbed the “most incredible soccer goal ever.”

Fine tuning
A team of undergraduate engineers takes a spin through town to make final adjustments to its self-driving truck, which was entered in the DARPA Urban Challenge, a Pentagon-sponsored contest. Reporter Kevin Coughlin of the Newark Star-Ledger captured the action.

Back to school
In their undergraduate days, Nick Confalone ’03, Brandon Tung ’03, and Andrew Wang ’03 experimented with walking, running, and even talking backwards and then reversing the film and soundtrack to create an amusing video.

Programming note: Princeton-Dartmouth at Baker Rink

The Princeton men’s hockey team’s home game against Dartmouth will be broadcast nationally on ESPNU Jan. 4 at 4 p.m. The game will be Princeton’s first ECAC Hockey game since Dec. 1, when it beat Union 4-3 at Baker Rink. The Tigers also face Harvard Jan. 5 at 7 p.m.

2007: The Year at Princeton

A month-by-month look at the headlines, with links to PAW stories

January
Gen. David Petraeus *87 is confirmed as the top commander of U.S. troops in Iraq. Three months later, Time magazine selects the Woodrow Wilson School Ph.D. recipient for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Sen. John McCain writes the brief essay on Petraeus, calling him “bright, studious, morally committed, physically brave, [and] willing to carry a ‘heavy rucksack’ without complaint and with clear-eyed resolve.” Petraeus has appeared in PAW several times - in a 2002 interview, a 2004 feature story, and most recently, in an On the Campus column about student reporter Wesley Morgan ’10, who was embedded with Petraeus and others in Iraq last summer.

February
In women’s squash, undefeated Princeton competes at the Howe Cup, the sport’s national championship, and tops Brown, Yale, and Harvard en route to a perfect season and its first national title since 1999. “It’s quite an honor to be able to put together a group of women to win the national title,” coach Gail Ramsay tells PAW. “[Squash] is very competitive. Small, but very competitive.”

March
Princeton chemistry professor David MacMillan and his colleagues publish a paper in Science March 29 outlining a new way assemble organic molecules without using toxic catalysts. The approach, which could speed the development of new drugs, is a “creative breakthrough,” according to John Schwab, a program director at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which helped fund the research.

April
Moshin Hamid ’93 releases his novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, drawing favorable reviews in the United States and abroad (The New York Times and Amazon.com both selected it as one of the year’s 100 best books). PAW profiled the author and published an excerpt of the book, which features the protagonist Changez, a native of Pakistan who attends Princeton, works in Manhattan, and develops a complicated view of the United States after Sept. 11. “Changez is not meant to be me,” Hamid tells PAW, “but I could imagine being him.”

May
Reunions 2007 draws about 20,000 alumni, family members, and friends to campus, starting on May 31, for receptions, family events, educational programs, and the annual P-rade. On June 5, 1,127 undergraduates and 716 graduate students receive their degrees and join the alumni community.

June
The University announces that Bill Frist ’74, the former Senate majority leader, will join the Woodrow Wilson School faculty in 2007-08 as the Frederick H. Schultz Class of 1951 Visiting Professor of International Economic Policy. A December PAW feature followed Frist and Professor Uwe Reinhardt into the classroom for their course, “The Political Economy of Health Systems.”

July
San Diego Padres right-hander Chris Young ’02 pitches in Major League Baseball’s All-Star game July 10, retiring one batter in the top of the fifth inning before giving up a two-run in-the-park home run to Ichiro Suzuki. Young is one of nearly a dozen alumni in professional baseball, including fellow pitcher Ross Ohlendorf ’05, who made his major-league debut in September with the New York Yankees.

August
On Aug. 2, Middle East studies scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who taught Persian language and literature at Princeton from 1980 to 1994, is released from a prison in Iran where she had been held on charges of espionage and endangering Iran’s national security. Esfandiari strongly denied the charges. She returned to work as director of the Middle East program for the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington Sept. 10.

September
Whitman College, the University’s newest residential college, opens its doors to students. The complex, named for lead donor and eBay CEO Meg Whitman ’77, was built at a cost of $136 million and houses about 500 students. Architect Demetri Porphyrios *80 aimed for a fresh take on collegiate gothic architecture. “The current architectural taste is neo-modern, deconstructive,” he tells PAW. “It’s centered on aggression, where these buildings are centered on beauty.”

October
The University Art Museum and the Italian government resolve ownership of 15 works of art from the museum’s collection at a meeting in Rome Oct. 30, ending nearly three years of inquiries and negotiations. The Italian culture ministry suspected that some of the museum’s artifacts had been acquired illegally. The University returned four works, transferred ownership on four others (but kept them on temporary loan), and secured permanent title to the seven remaining works under review. Museum director Susan Taylor maintained that all of the objects were obtained in good faith.

November
The University formally launches the largest fundraising campaign in its history — $1.75 billion over the next five years — with three days of events for alumni leaders, volunteers, and donors. Priorities in the campaign include Annual Giving; engineering, energy, and the environment; exploration in the arts; neuroscience, genomics, and theoretical physics; national and global citizenship; and the “Princeton experience.” Campaign co-chairman Robert Murley ’72 tells PAW that while Princeton’s goal may not be as lofty as the multi-billion-dollar campaigns at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, “on a per-capita or per-student basis it is a very large campaign. It certainly is large and important for Princeton.”

December
The Dec. 13 announcement of Sachs Scholar Pauline Yeung ’08 concludes a remarkable season of awards for Princeton seniors. Three members of the Class of 2008 were named Rhodes Scholars in late November - Sherif Girgis, Brett Masters, and Landis Stankievech - marking the first time since 1995 that three Princeton undergraduates were selected. Sarah Vander Ploeg ’08 was chosen to be a Marshall Scholar, while Yeung was selected for the Sachs Scholarship, a Princeton honor named for Daniel Sachs ’60. All five students will pursue graduate studies in Great Britain next fall.

A note to our readers
The Weekly Blog will not post on Dec. 26 but will return in the new year with more news and notes.

Better than sliced bread

In early December, Witherspoon Bread Company’s master baker, Denis Granarolo, taught students how to make ciabatta and foccaccia bread, baguettes, and croissants at two bread-making workshops sponsored by a new campus group called Slow Food. Formed this fall, the organization’s goal is to promote sustainable dining and locally grown foods through events like oyster-, cheese-, and bread-tasting workshops. Slow Food also plans on producing a local restaurant review and food guide. Photos by Julia Osellame ’09

Princeton’s top-10 team, 10 years later

In the 1997-98 season, Princeton men’s basketball was a national phenomenon. The Tigers went 26-1 in the regular season (an achievement celebrated on PAW’s March 25, 1998, cover), climbed as high as No. 8 in the Associated Press national rankings, and drew a group of devoted followers. After playing its last three Ivy League games on the road, coaches opened an intra-squad scrimmage to the public to give fans one more chance to see the team play at home. The Tigers went on to beat UNLV in the first round of the NCAA Tournament before falling to Michigan State and star guard Mateen Cleaves in the second round.
On Dec. 16, Princeton will honor members of the 1997-98 team at a reunion during a men’s and women’s basketball doubleheader at Jadwin Gym. The Tiger women (3-7) open the action against Syracuse (7-1) at 2 p.m., and the men (2-6) tip-off against Manhattan (5-4) at 5 p.m.

Princetonians in the Times

Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote about experimental philosophy, a trend of gathering data that is relatively new to the field, in a Dec. 9 New York Times Magazine story. Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center of Human Values at Princeton. … Women’s squash coach Gail Ramsay was quoted in another Dec. 9 Times story about the potential advantage that squash players have in Ivy League admissions. “Not only do the eight Ivy League schools — Columbia will turn varsity in 2011 — have teams, but there are another 21 of the top liberal arts schools that also recruit from this pool of squash players,” Ramsay told the Times in an e-mail. “I actually feel there are not enough players to fill those recruiting spots each year.” … Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 has been blogging for the Times this fall from Shanghai, where she is spending the academic year. Her latest post, filed Dec. 7, addresses climate change and international relations.

Showing their moves

Naacho, the Indian dance troupe made up of Princeton students, performs a routine at “Your Moves,” a cultural dance festival and workshop hosted by Princeton High School Dec. 8. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

More at PAW Online

Rally ’Round the Cannon - In his Princeton history column, Gregg Lange ’70 writes about Harold Helm ’20, the father of the University’s Annual Giving campaign.
On the Campus - Rough road for the Tigers’ self-driving vehicle in California; the University Band enlivens New York’s Village Halloween Parade.
Better late than never - After 27 years, monologist, filmmaker, and talk-show host Josh Kornbluth ’80 finally completed his senior thesis. Read Kornbluth’s story from PAW and watch an excerpt from his thesis/monologue “Citizen Josh.”

Print’s precarious future

“If you’ve got that relentless essential curiosity and you enjoy telling stories, then go into journalism; if you don’t, then go to law school,” joked Evan Thomas, editor-at-large for Newsweek, as he encouraged students at a Nov. 28 lecture about the future of print media.
Jim Kelly ’76, managing editor of Time Inc., joined Thomas as a speaker at the event, sponsored by the University Press Club, where the two journalists addressed the title question, “How Dead is Print?”
“It’s hard to believe that most people, 25 years from now, will be reading the material you find in a book on some kind of screen,” said Kelly, who believes that journalism eventually will be completely electronic.
Thomas, a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, said he hopes that there will always be some form of printed news. He also highlighted the disparity between online and print advertising rates as the biggest economic problem for both newspapers and magazines.
Publications cannot charge the same rates for Internet ads that they charge for print ads, Thomas explained, and easy-access to free Internet news further reduces the revenue that is used to pay for circulating issues.
“It’s increasingly hard to find people to pay for in print what they can get free online,” Kelly added. “Is print dying, then? I guess it’s changing.”
Though both Kelly and Thomas were optimistic about the future of good journalism in general, they did address the changing nature of telling stories.
“Readers don’t just want to use content, but they also want a hand in creating the content,” Kelly said, noting the prevalence of blogs. “This is about reacting and interacting with the people that write and edit.”
Overall, Thomas said he was confident that “what will never go out of business is the basic journalistic value of being relentlessly curious, wanting to get the story, and being able to tell the story in an animated way. We will have that until our dying day.” By Julia Osellame ’09

Brushing off the Big East blues

The Princeton men’s basketball team dropped to 2-5 after losses to Seton Hall and Rutgers Nov. 28 and Dec. 1, but the Tigers stayed close with both Big East foes, giving coach Sydney Johnson ’97 reason for optimism.
“We’ve got something,” Johnson said after the Seton Hall game, a 65-55 loss. “These guys are committed, and I like that. A couple loose balls here, another shot there, and we might turn the corner. So in one way you feel good, but obviously we’re left wanting.”
Seton Hall coach Bobby Gonzalez also saw something in this year’s Princeton team. Last season, the Pirates demolished the Tigers, 79-41, in a game that was decided well before halftime. This year, Princeton trailed most of the way again but stayed close, narrowing the gap to eight points with a minute remaining.
“I think that these kids look like they’re having fun playing for [Johnson],” Gonzalez said. “They’re playing with a little more confidence, a little more excitement, a little more energy. I think he’s going to do a nice job and be a very good coach for Princeton.”
The Tigers play at Evansville (Ind.) Dec. 5 and at Penn State Dec. 12 before returning home to play Manhattan at Jadwin Gym Dec. 16. The Manhattan game is part of a women’s and men’s doubleheader. The Princeton women open the action against Syracuse at 2 p.m., and the men tip off at 5 p.m.

Alumni in the news

On Dec. 3, former Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn ’48 became the first Princetonian (and the fourth commissioner) elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Kuhn was baseball’s youngest commissioner when he took the job in 1969 and presided over the game for 25 years. He died last March at age 80. … Mellody Hobson ’91, president of Ariel Capital Management, is one of 65 “achievers under 40” named to Black Enterprise magazine’s 2007 Hot List Nov. 26. In addition to young standouts in business and medicine, the list includes entertainers and pro sports stars such as Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Will Smith, and Tiger Woods. … Marketplace, the business radio program from American Public Media, interviewed eBay CEO Meg Whitman ’77 about the Web site’s future and its role in holiday shopping as part of the “Conversations from the Corner Office” series Nov. 29. … Cornel West *80 joined Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on stage at a Nov. 29 fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The Associated Press reported that West defended Obama’s civil rights credentials, saying that the Senator’s candidacy “comes at an incredibly powerful moment in the year 2007, and we don’t expect him to be Marcus Garvey … or Martin Luther King.”

Carols for a cause

The Princeton University Chapel Choir has joined seven other local singing ensembles to create a new CD, “A Princeton Christmas: For the Children of Africa.” The project aims to raise funds for the school feeding campaign of the United Nations World Food Program in Africa. The Chapel Choir contributed six tracks to the album, ranging from the classic “The First Noel” to the lesser-known “Mariabaen,” a traditional carol from Iceland. Additional information is available at the Princeton Christmas Web site.

Tigers on the McCarter stage

Two alumni actors are performing in McCarter Theatre’s annual production of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, which opened Dec. 2 and runs through Dec. 23. Karron Graves ’99 plays Scrooge’s sister Fan, and Jed Peterson ’06 is a member of the ensemble. Graves performed in Coram Boy on Broadway and has appeared in several off-Broadway productions and television shows. Peterson started his stage career as a young dancer in the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker and served as the artistic director of Princeton Summer Theater as an undergraduate.

Women’s volleyball jumps into postseason

Princeton women’s volleyball will face Delaware Nov. 30 in the opening round of the NCAA Championships at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y. The Tigers won all 14 of their Ivy League matches and carry a 20-match winning streak into their meeting with the 30-4 Blue Hens.
Princeton (22-3 overall) features three All-Ivy first-team players (Parker Henritze ’09, the league’s player of the year; setter Bailey Robinson ’09, who led the nation in assists per game; and Lindsey Ensign ’09, the team’s top blocker), as well as a veteran coach, Glenn Nelson, who recently set the Princeton record for wins in any sport.
Nelson credits his players for this season’s magical run. “They have such physical talent,” he told PAW contributor Josh Stephens ’97. “I’ve said all along, if you can jump higher and hit harder than the team you’re playing against, you’re probably going to win.”
View the complete bracket for the 64-team NCAA Championships at ncaasports.com.

Faculty in the news

Mideast scholar and emeritus professor Bernard Lewis gave his thoughts about Israel and Palestine in advance of this week’s Annapolis peace conference in The Wall Street Journal Nov. 26 (subscription required). … In presidential politics, history professor Sean Wilentz made his case for Hillary Clinton on the Newsweek blog of Andrew Romano ’04 earlier this month. Meanwhile, colleagues James McPherson and Albert Raboteau signed on to the “historians for Obama” endorsement, released through the History News Network. … Chris Boucek, postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School, spoke about his research on Saudi Arabia’s program to rehabilitate freed terrorism suspects in a Nov. 22 Boston Globe story. … In its December issue, Smithsonian Magazine profiled photographer Emmet Gowin, a professor of visual arts, and his “most enduring subject,” wife Edith.

Autumn ride

Most of the leaves have fallen from the trees, but students like this one in front of Whig Hall were still riding their bikes in sweatshirts earlier this week, thanks to mild late-November weather.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

A history of currency

A new exhibit at Firestone Library examines the early days of coin collecting, when renaissance scholars used coins and texts to decipher the monetary system of ancient Rome and answer other historical questions.
“Numismatics in the Renaissance,” at Firestone’s main gallery, opened with a daylong conference Nov. 9 and will remain on display through July 20, 2008. In addition to displaying ancient coins that bear the images of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, and others, the exhibit explains how 16th-century Europeans systematically studied the “material remains” of classical civilization, giving rise to numismatics, archaeology, and epigraphy (the study of inscriptions).
While the faces on coins were the primary source of fascination, the images on the reverse - of animals, goddesses, and symbols - also provided insight for the study of different time periods. The Firestone exhibit presents several books in which early drawings of coins were published and the actual coins represented in the illustrations.
The exhibit highlights the University’s Numismatic Collection, which contains about 60,000 items, including coins, medals, and paper money.

Up with oomph

Men’s basketball center Zach Finley ’10 muscles through the defense during Princeton’s 66-58 win over Iona Nov. 14. The Tigers won their first two games under new coach Sydney Johnson ’97 (profiled in the Nov. 21 issue of PAW) before falling to Duke 83-61 in the first round of the EA Sports Maui Invitational Nov. 19. Through the first three games, Finley led Princeton in scoring (14.7 points per game) and was tied for first in rebounding (5.3 rebounds per game).
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

New book: Persuasion as art

Do you woo? You should, if you hope to succeed in business, according to Wharton professor G. Richard Shell ’71 and colleague Mario Moussa, the authors of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas (Portfolio). “Woo-ing,” in this case, refers to “winning others over,” a concept coined by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton in their bestseller, Now, Discover Your Strengths. Shell and Moussa dissect the important steps of wooing, from getting people’s attention to closing a deal, using anecdotes about some of history’s “greatest persuaders” and lists of things to keep in mind, including “10 questions for would-be wooers.”
For information about other books by alumni and faculty, visit New Books at PAW online.

More at PAW Online

Roman ambassador — In the wake of the Art Museum’s recent return of Italian artifacts, PAW revisits the post-World War II story of a well-traveled ancient goat head.
On the Campus — On the Street, the mood has swung from carefree to careful; the Office of Religious Life moves to “humanize” the Chapel.
Rally ’Round the Cannon — Gregg Lange ’70 probes the mystery of why the Cannon on the Green is slowly sinking.

Football fails to leash Yale

A year ago, Princeton football’s second-half comeback at Yale helped the Tigers secure a win and a share of the Ivy League championship. While the Tigers slipped out of the Ivy title chase early this year, they tried to pick up where they left off against the undefeated Bulldogs at Princeton Stadium Nov. 10, surging through the defense for 361 yards, compared to 272 for Yale. But a pair of early fumbles kept Princeton out of the end zone, and the Bulldogs eventually broke through with 24 second-half points in a 27-6 victory.
Yale running back Mike McLeod, who averaged more than 180 yards rushing in his first eight games this year, ran for just 107 yards against Princeton. “Our kids just played their tails off,” head coach Roger Hughes said. “I thought our defensive line as a whole did a great job against their offensive line.”
Yale’s defense also was impressive, holding the Tigers to two field goals. Cornerback Casey Gerald said that the Yale coaches made the players watch film of last season’s loss to Princeton during the preseason and a few days before this year’s game. “We’ve had those images of getting beat and giving up plays for about a year,” he said. “[But] it wasn’t a revenge game. It was just us going out and doing what we’re supposed to do.”
Princeton will finish its season at Dartmouth Nov. 17, while Yale will host Harvard in a game that will determine this year’s Ivy champion.
Above: The Princeton Tiger had a grip on Yale mascot Handsome Dan, but on the field, the Bulldogs were harder to contain. Photo by Beverly Schaefer

Princeton’s own ‘de’ Medici’

Peter B. Lewis ’55 was described by President Tilghman as “a modern-day version of Lorenzo de’ Medici” as the University recognized his $101 million donation by renaming the Center for the Arts after him. Lewis, a Princeton trustee and chairman of the board of Progressive Corp., was honored with a series of public and private events Nov. 8 and 9 for his gift in support of the arts.
Lewis received a portfolio of student and faculty art work and signed copies of books by noted faculty authors at a reception Thursday at 185 Nassau St. Thursday evening, and the Lewis family had a private dinner on the stage of Richardson Auditorium with Tilghman, trustees, friends, and faculty. The Lewis Center for the Arts — described by poet Paul Muldoon, the chairman of the center, as “a new iambic tetrameter destined for eternity” — was launched publicly with a celebration of the arts at Princeton Nov. 9 in Richardson. Students and alumni offered a series of music, theater, and dance performances.
“It is a real privilege to be able to do the things I’ve been able to do,” Lewis told the audience. “Princeton makes it a pleasure to give.” By W. Raymond Ollwerther ’71

Alumni in the news, sports edition

Fighting is on the rise in the NHL, and according to an Oct. 30 article in the Winnipeg Free Press, a Princeton alumnus is partly to blame. The Free Press quoted an unnamed NHL executive who said, “Lots of teams saw what the [Anaheim] Ducks went and did last year, getting bigger and fighting a lot and winning the Cup, so they’ve added some size.” Anaheim’s chief enforcer is 6-foot-5-inch, 230-pound defenseman George Parros ’03, “part of the new breed” of hockey tough guys, according to the newspaper. … Former women’s hockey goalie Megan Van Beusekom ’04 helped the U.S. Women’s Select Team to a second-place finish at the Four Nations Cup Nov. 7-11. Van Beusekom made 13 saves and allowed one goal in the Americans’ 2-1 win over Finland Nov. 10. … Men’s track alumnus Chris Banks ’00 placed 89th in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in New York Nov. 3, completing the 26.2-mile Central Park course in 2:30.22. … San Francisco 49ers fullback Zak Keasey ’05 has spent the season moving back and forth between the team’s practice squad and its active roster, where he has become a key special teams player. The San Francisco Chronicle documented Keasey’s journey in two recent stories.

Hoops in Hawaii; cross country championships

Princeton men’s basketball will make its 2007-08 national television debut Nov. 19 against Duke at the EA Sports Maui Invitational. The Tigers, who won their opener against Central Connecticut State Nov. 12, face the 13th-ranked Blue Devils at 9 p.m. on ESPN2. All 12 tournament games will be televised on ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPNU.
Viewers also can watch runners from the Princeton women’s and men’s cross country teams on Nov. 19 as they compete at the NCAA Championships in Terre Haute, Ind. Beginning at noon, CSTV will air the first live broadcast in the event’s history, and the Princeton women, ranked No. 4 nationally, could contend for the title. The women have won every race they’ve entered this season, including an impressive victory at the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional meet, where all seven Tigers finished in the top 25. Three Princeton men qualified for the meet as individuals: 2006 All-American David Nightingale ’08, 2007 Ivy League champion Michael Maag ’09, and talented sophomore Ben Sitler.