Recently in Tiger of the Week

In a program with as much tradition as Princeton men’s basketball, it’s hard to break new ground. But this week, Sydney Johnson ’97 found a unique spot in Tiger history: He became the first person to lead Princeton to the NCAA Tournament both as a player and a head coach. Johnson’s team, the Ivy League co-champion, earned an NCAA bid with a dramatic 63-62 playoff win over Harvard March 12.

 

Johnson, a captain of two NCAA Tournament teams in his undergraduate days, started coaching in 2004, after playing professionally in Europe. As an assistant to John Thompson III ’88 at Georgetown, he helped the Hoyas reach the Final Four in 2007. Three weeks later, he returned to Princeton as the Tigers’ head coach. Following a subpar first season, his teams have shown steady progress, increasing their win totals and climbing in the Ivy standings. This year, Princeton was 24-6 in the regular season and 12-2 in league play.

 

The Tigers, who play Kentucky March 17, have been the talk of the town since Douglas Davis ’12 hit his game-winning jump shot at the buzzer Saturday night. More than a thousand Princeton fans, including hundreds of students, made the trip to New Haven to see the game. Johnson, who witnessed the same type of excitement as a player, could not be happier for his team. “That’s really all I ever wanted since coming here – for these guys to make their own history,” he said.

 

Two other Princeton alumni will lead teams in the NCAA Tournament this week: Thompson is making his fifth appearance in seven years at Georgetown, and Chris Mooney ’94 returns with Richmond for the second consecutive season.

 

She graduated from Princeton in the mid-1980s, built a successful career, and then found herself in the spotlight for different reasons, as a political spouse. Now, the press critiques her causes, comments on her fashion choices, and speculates about what kind of first lady she will be. Sound familiar?

 

No, it’s not that first lady. Look west, to Denver, home of Helen Thorpe ’87, a journalist and author who also happens to be the new first lady of Colorado (husband John Hickenlooper was inaugurated as governor in January).

 

Thorpe has published articles in The New Yorker and Texas Monthly, and her 2009 book, Just Like Us (Simon and Schuster), followed five years in the lives of four poor, young Mexican women – two U.S. citizens and two undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as youngsters. Shortly after the book’s publication, Thorpe explained to PAW that though the girls were friends, the differences in their legal status had a “divisive, chilling effect” on the friendship. The undocumented girls realized they would face significant roadblocks as they approached college and tried to start careers.

 

According to The Denver Post, Thorpe has updated the book for its paperback release, and she’s advising a stage adaptation of the story, commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company and written by playwright Karen Zacarias. This week, Thorpe is being recognized for her contributions to the immigration conversation by the Denver-based Latin American Education Foundation, which selected her as the recipient of the Sol Trujillo National Lifetime Leadership Award.

 

As first lady, Thorpe has not outlined a specific agenda (she told the Post, “I don’t think I’ll be setting the tone”), but she has expressed interest in a few policy issues, including addressing child poverty in Colorado and supporting education services for children from low-income families.

 

In the view of Wired magazine, the tech community got “no respect” at this year’s Academy Awards. The Social Network and its star, Jesse Eisenberg, were snubbed for Best Picture and Best Actor, and when the science and technology honorees received their brief mention in the Feb. 27 ceremony, co-host James Franco wisecracked,“Congratulations, nerds."

 

But Pixar software engineer David Laur ’84, one of the 19 sci-tech Oscar honorees, had a different take on what awards season could mean for the computer programmers working behind the scenes. “It’s certainly true that nobody grows up to say, ‘I want to be a queuing systems engineer,’” he quipped after accepting his award at a Feb. 13 ceremony. “Now there’ll be action figures.”

 

Laur, a mechanical and aerospace engineering major at Princeton, received a Technical Achievement Award for his role in developing Pixar’s Alfred system –  “the first robust, scalable, widely adopted commercial solution for queue management in the motion picture industry,” according to the Academy’s citation,

 

Translation? Rendering is the process of turning complex 3-D models into two-dimensional movie frames. It can take two to four hours for filmmakers render a single frame, and much of the processing is done off site by computer clusters known as “render farms.” As Laur explained in a recent interview with The Pixar Podcast, the Alfred system “connects the artist to the render farm.”

Laur’s award-winning work has a Princeton connection – one of his classmates, Dana Batali ’84, directs the projects connected to Pixar’s RenderMan software. In his Pixar Podcast interview, Laur credited Batali with making the Alfred platform possible. “He’s really been a friend, mentor, and the driving force behind a lot of this,” Laur said.

In two decades at The New York Times, Clifford J. Levy ’89 has earned a place among the country’s most accomplished journalists. As a local reporter covering campaign finance, he won a George Polk Award in 1998. Five years later, his six-part series exposing the abuse of mentally ill adults in state-regulated homes earned a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. And in 2009, he received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his dispatches from Russia.

 

This week, Levy returned to the Polk Award list, sharing the top honor for international reporting with colleague Ellen Barry for their Times series “Above the Law,” which documents a “culture of impunity” in modern Russia. (Levy introduces the 21-article series in the video above.)

 

According to the Feb. 22 Polk Award release, Levy and Barry “enlightened readers time and time again with hard-hitting reports that spurred candid discussion in Russia about how far the country had strayed from post-Soviet Union promises that no one would remain above the law.” 

 

The award citation also noted that the stories Levy and Barry uncovered were widely cited inside Russia, where investigative reporting can be treacherous for local reporters. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 46 Russian journalists have been killed since 1992.

 

When Paul Wampler ’92 was selected as a contestant for Jeopardy last year, he did his best to refresh his knowledge of topics that frequently appear on the show – American presidents, Greek mythology – and thought back to some of his favorite Princeton courses, including one on Shakespeare and another that covered the Civil War. He also read about Jeopardy strategy in a book written by Ken Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive games on the show.

 

The trivia preparation didn’t help a great deal (“There’s really no way to study,” Wampler says), but Jennings’ advice did. Each time a category was revealed, Wampler began thinking of responses that might fit, even before he saw the clues. Having those words on the tip of his tongue paid off: In five shows that aired last week, Wampler won four times and placed second in his final appearance, pocketing more than $74,000 in prize money. He’s exchanged e-mails with Jennings, thanking him for the tips.

 

February has been a remarkable month for Wampler, a Knoxville, Tenn.-based Web designer who majored in psychology at Princeton. His wife, Christi, gave birth to the couple’s second son a week before Paul’s first episode aired. Wampler plans to put most of the winnings toward his sons’ college savings. A European vacation also is in the works.

 

Wampler wasn’t the first in his household to earn a Jeopardy tryout: Christi was invited to audition twice but had to decline due to scheduling conflicts. She recently took the show’s online test again, in hopes of getting a third chance – and maybe topping Paul’s five-day run. “She says she’s not that competitive,” Wampler laughs, “but I know she is.”

 

Looking to lose weight and get in shape? Timothy Ferriss ’00 has some unorthodox tips for you – taking weekly ice baths, for example, or drinking a glass of grapefruit juice before you binge on unhealthy foods. His ideas may sound far-out, but Ferriss has received endorsements from some influential voices in the health and fitness world, including TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz. And in the New Year’s resolution months of January and February, Ferriss is finding a large audience: Last week, his latest book, The 4-Hour Body, topped the New York Times Bestsellers for hardcover advice books; as of Feb. 8, it also ranked No. 1 overall on Amazon.com. (Another alumni author, Donald Rumsfeld ’54, took over the top spot Feb. 9.)  

 

Ferriss has an unusual résumé that includes majoring in East Asian studies at Princeton, creating a nutritional supplement company after graduation, and, with partner Alicia Monti, setting the world record for consecutive tango spins on live TV as Regis Philbin watched in amazement. Ferriss first made his mark in publishing with The 4-Hour Workweek, a business and management guide released in 2007. The following year, Wired dubbed him “the greatest self-promoter in the world.”

 

The new exercise and diet guide has a hearty dose of self – Ferriss said he’s personally tested the book’s body-sculpting strategies over the course of a decade – but in an interview with The Huffington Post, the author credited expert consultants with guiding his plan. “It was well over a hundred experts in total,” he said, “and the objective was to be the explorer and the guide and the guinea pig, not the source of all knowledge, because that’s ridiculous.”

 

Paul Volcker ’49 had already passed his 81st birthday when he took his most recent job as chairman of then-President-elect Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board in November 2008. In the two years that followed, the former Federal Reserve chairman bolstered an already sizeable reputation in the world of economics. He was a prominent voice in Obama’s inner circle, and as the push for financial reform took hold, his plan to stop banks from making proprietary trades – know as the “Volcker Rule” – became one of the most hotly debated ideas on the table. (In January, the Treasury Department’s Financial Stability Oversight Council issued recommendations for implementing the rule, which was signed into law last July.)

 

Volcker departed from his advisory role in mid-January, though both he and Obama said he’ll continue to advise on occasion. As The Atlantic’s Daniel Indiviglio put it, “rather than ‘so long,’ he's really saying, ‘keep in touch.’” 

 

In the meantime, Volcker told Forbes this week that he’ll spend some of his new-found free time fishing. An avid angler, he does not draw many connections between his hobby and his profession, but columnist Monte Burke has a different take:

 

 

January has been a pretty remarkable month for Anthony D’Amato ’10, a singer, songwriter, and rising star in independent music. He’s rubbed elbows with one of his musical heroes, Bruce Springsteen. He was featured in a New York Times story that explored his relationship with two Princeton mentors, poet Paul Muldoon and composer Paul Lansky *73. He talked with Paste magazine about recording his most recent album, Down Wires, in his Princeton dorm room last year. And one of his songs, “My Father’s Son,” was selected as NPR Music’s song of the day. NPR praised the piece for weaving “a vivid narrative with organic vocals.”

 

D’Amato, whose upcoming gigs include a pair as the opening act for Pete Yorn and Ben Kweller, began seriously thinking about a career in music while he was an undergraduate. He recorded three albums in his time at Princeton, playing nearly all the instruments and enlisting help from a handful of campus musicians. He also refined his lyrics, and the structure behind them, by working closely with Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize winner and part-time rocker who once collaborated with Warren Zevon.

 

Like last week’s Tiger, D’Amato wrote a senior thesis that had an immediate link to his career. Majoring in English, he examined Springsteen’s music and “the literature of American alienation.” Earlier this month, D’Amato found himself on stage with the Boss, at a benefit show in Asbury Park, N.J., singing a group rendition of “Thunder Road.” It was, he told the Times, “a really magical moment.”

 

On the cover date of our special issue dedicated to humor, it’s appropriate that our Tiger of the Week is a television executive who is helping to add laughs to daily cable programming. On Jan. 17, Mitch Semel ’81, a longtime producer and TV consultant, was named general manager of The Onion, the popular satire website and newspaper that is expanding its video offerings with a pair of cable programs – Onion SportsDome, which recently debuted on Comedy Central, and Onion News Network, coming soon to IFC. Variety said that Semel’s hiring is “more proof that the Onion is serious about expanding its TV biz.”

 

Semel, who has worked for a half-dozen broadcast and cable networks, has a history of launching new comedy ventures. In the early 1990s, he was the first programming head at Comedy Central, and he helped the network plunge into topical humor with shows like Politically Incorrect. More recently, he founded and ran Semel Media, a New York-based firm that advises clients on media strategy and content. In a news release, Steve Hannah, president and CEO of The Onion, said that Semel “strikes the rare balance between respecting the creative process and realizing that creativity has to translate into good business.”

 

While Semel may have developed his business skills in the TV world, Princeton can take some credit for providing a launching pad: As a Woodrow Wilson School major, he wrote his senior thesis about “the evolution, programming, and future of cable television networks.”

 

The destruction and loss of life from last year's Jan. 12 earthquake near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, highlighted a range of challenges that Haitians face, both in everyday life and in times of crisis. One item on that list was the ability to provide reliable electricity to remote areas of the country. David Crane '81, president and CEO of Princeton-based NRG Energy, is working to address that problem by supporting a solar energy project in Boucan-Carré, a village in Haiti's central highlands.

 

NRG has pledged $1 million to fund the collaboration with the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), a Washington, D.C., based nongovernmental organization. Solar panels will power irrigation pumps, village schools, street lights, and fish-farming facilities. The project, which is intended to be a model for other areas, earned additional support last week when it received a $500,000 grant from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

 

The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund distributed $3.4 million in new grants, in areas that included cholera prevention, emergency medical care, and lending to small businesses. The grant for the Boucan-Carré project, Crane said in a news release, supports the idea that “solar power can play a pivotal role in helping the Haitian people build a sustainable, healthy, and prosperous society.”

 

Crane, a Woodrow Wilson School major at Princeton, earned a law degree at Harvard and worked in investment banking and the energy sector before taking the helm at NRG in 2003. EnergyBiz magazine selected Crane as its “utility CEO of the year” in March 2010.

 

In 2011, the Federal Reserve will make several important decisions on how to move forward in the midst of a slow economic recovery, and according to The New York Times, Princeton graduate Narayana Kocherlakota ’83 will be one of the key players in that process.

 

Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, recently became one of the 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee. Fed watchers have been following his words to glean opinions on policy issues, and he has taken the sort of explanatory approach one might expect from a longtime professor. For instance, in a Nov. 18 speech he took a detailed look at quantitative easing, a tool the Fed can use to lower long-term interest rates. Kocherlakota concluded that quantitative easing “is a move in the right direction” but added that “there are good reasons to suspect that the ultimate effects … are likely to be relatively modest.”

 

Kocherlakota earned his A.B. in mathematics at age 19 and received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago four years later. His most recent academic research has included important theoretical work on optimal taxation, and when he was appointed to his Fed post in 2009, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas told The Wall Street Journal that Kocherlakota is “probably the most abstract thinker ever to head a Federal Reserve bank,” adding that his approach could be useful at a time when many are questioning the conventional wisdom about financial markets.

 

Ronald George ’61, the chief justice of California's supreme court for the last 14 years, will step down from the bench in early January. He’s been a judge since 1972, when he joined the municipal court in his native Los Angeles, and in his current post, he has presided over a court system that includes more than 1,700 judges. According to the California Bar Journal, George has “transformed California’s legal landscape,” implementing administrative improvements and securing funding to update the courts’ physical infrastructure.

 

George also has drawn the national spotlight on occasion, most recently in 2008, when he wrote the majority ruling in the court’s 4-3 decision that overturned California’s ban on gay marriage on constitutional grounds. That ruling was trumped by Proposition 8, a voter initiative that changed the state constitution and defined marriage as “between a man and a woman.” George later made a speech about “the perils of direct democracy,” in which he examined the 2008 ballot initiatives, including one that regulated the confinement of backyard fowl. “Chickens gained valuable rights in California on the same day that gay men and lesbians lost them,” he wryly observed.

 

According to the San Jose Mercury News, George told news reporters in early December that he hopes to travel more in retirement, but in the short term, his plan is “to have no plans.”