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Daniel Catán *77 (Courtesy Los Angeles Opera)

 

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Composer and librettist Daniel Catán *77 has created a handful of well-regarded operas, including Florencia en el Amazonas, which premiered in 1996 as the first Spanish-language opera commissioned by a major American company, and Salsipuedes, A Tale of Love, War, and Anchovies, which debuted at the Houston Grand Opera in 2004. But Catán’s newest work may be his most-anticipated: Il Postino, a Spanish-language operatic adaptation of the Academy Award-winning 1994 film (and the 1985 novel Ardiente Paciencia, which inspired the movie), will debut Sept. 23, opening the 25th anniversary season of the Los Angeles Opera.

Superstar tenor Plácido Domingo will sing the lead role of Pablo Neruda in Il Postino, which was commissioned in 2005. Domingo, who also directs the Los Angeles Opera, said in a release that he’d been hoping to collaborate with Catán for several years. “When he told me that he was working on an operatic adaptation of Il Postino, I immediately felt that Pablo Neruda was a role that I very much wanted to bring to life,” Domingo said.

Catán, a native of Mexico, studied philosophy and music in Great Britain as an undergraduate and earned his Ph.D. in music from Princeton, studying under Milton Babbitt *92, Benjamin Boretz *70, and James K. Randall *58. “They were very inclusive in their outlook and they worked at helping their students find their own voices,” Catan told Opera Today in a July 2010 interview. “I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write opera. I always found that having a dramatic text was very inspirational for me. That really got my creative ideas flowing.” 

Conor Madigan '00 (Courtesy Kateeva Inc.)

When Conor Madigan ’00 started studying organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) as a Princeton undergraduate, he saw a potentially brilliant technology for everything from flat screen TVs to mobile phone displays. But the hype surrounding it, he says, was “wildly premature.” 

Fast-forward 12 years. Madigan is now the CEO and co-founder of Kateeva Inc., a leading startup in the OLED field, and he thinks that by 2013, the technology will bring brighter, crisper, and more energy-efficient flat-screen TVs to the marketplace. Kateeva’s job, he says, will be to “address one of the key manufacturing challenges that’s slowing down the adoption curve.”

Kateeva's solution -- a technique that uses inkjet printers and a micro-dryer to deposit the light-emitting organic materials used in OLED screens -- earned the 32-year-old Madigan a spot on Technology Review's 2010 list of the world's top 35 innovators under age 35, released this week.

The posts on Douglas Elmendorf ’83’s blog don’t sound like the typical Web fare - “Estimated Impact of the Stimulus Package on Employment and Economic Output,” “Latest Projections for the TARP,” and “Annual Summer Update of the Budget and Economic Outlook.” But Elmendorf is not the typical blogger. He’s the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Capitol Hill’s nonpartisan analysis service, and when he posts (or speaks, or releases a report), the markets listen. On Aug. 19, for instance, Elmendorf released the CBO’s latest outlook, which included the following:

“According to CBO’s projections, the recovery from the economic downturn will continue at a modest pace during the next few years. Growth in the nation’s output since the middle of calendar year 2009 has been anemic in comparison with that of previous recoveries following deep recessions, and the unemployment rate has remained quite high… .

When disaster strikes, George Rupp ’64 takes action. As CEO and president of the International Rescue Committee for the last eight years, he has raised funds and coordinated responses to help people affected by natural disasters like earthquakes and storms, as well as other humanitarian crises in post-conflict regions. His latest work has been focused on aiding some of the 15 million people displaced by catastrophic flooding in Pakistan.

The floods, from unusually heavy monsoon rains, have caused a relatively low death toll — about 1,500 people, according to The New York Times — but danger persists for millions of people in hard-to-reach areas who have limited access to food, clean water, and medical care. Online donations from individuals have lagged so far, compared with other recent disasters, but Rupp told the Times that a recent United Nations plea for more aid should “get anybody’s attention.”

Rupp, who received the University’s Woodrow Wilson Award in 2005, spent most of his career in higher education, first as a professor and dean at the Harvard Divinity School and later as the president of Rice University and Columbia University. He turned to humanitarian work full-time shortly after retiring from Columbia in 2002.

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.

When Jay Xu *08 took over as director of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum in 2008, the institution was planning an exhibition that would prove to be very personal for him. Shanghai, which runs through Sept. 5, is about his hometown.

The first Chinese-American to serve as a director of an art museum in the United States, Xu grew up during the Cultural Revolution. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that in China he was not allowed to study physics, as he wanted, and instead studied Chinese language and literature. Eventually he became an assistant curator at Shanghai Museum and later enrolled in Princeton’s doctoral program in Chinese art and archaeology.

A scholar of Chinese antiquities, Xu “belies the stereotype of a museum director — he’s chatty and ebullient. And he seems to have a wicked sense of humor,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

The Shanghai exhibition, with more than 130 artworks, is organized into four sections that provide an overview of the major cultural and historical developments in Shanghai since 1850. Xu told the San Francisco Chronicle that even he learned something about his hometown through the exhibition: “Just because you are a native of Shanghai, that doesn’t make you an expert. I’m a specialist in ancient China, so I learned a lot I didn’t know.”

(Photo courtesy Jay Xu *08)

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(Photo by Andrea Cipriani Mecchi)

In creating the protagonists for many of her popular novels, Jennifer Weiner ’91 frequently drew on personal experience. “I’ve written a lot of characters like me,” she told The Wall Street Journal in July. “They went to Princeton, or they’re journalists, or they have gay moms.” But Sylvie Woodruff, the central figure in Weiner’s new page-turner Fly Away Home, is different: She’s a 57-year-old mom with grown kids and she’s just entered the unenviable club of political wives thrust into the spotlight by their husbands’ indiscretions. (Woodruff’s husband, Robert, is a senator who had an affair with a younger woman.)

While Weiner did not have much direct experience to inform her writing, she had plenty of real-life examples, and according to reviewers and readers, she has successfully brought the familiar character to life in her novel. The Associated Press said Fly Away Home is Weiner’s “best offering in years,” and USA Today called it an “unflappably fun read,” partly because Weiner makes Sylvie such a likable and accessible character.

PAW readers who follow the world of modern dance might remember an October 2008 profile of Silas Riener ’06, a young performer who, despite entering college with no formal dance training, had risen to extraordinary heights as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Nearly three years after joining the prestigious company, Riener continues to grow and flourish as one of Princeton's most accomplished young alumni artists. His performance in the July 22 debut of Nox, a collaboration written by the poet Anne Carson and choreographed by Riener's Merce Cunningham Dance Company colleague Rashaun Mitchell, received high praise from New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay, who called the Riener and Mitchell "two of the greatest dancers before the public today." Here's how Macaulay described the male-male duet featuring Riener and Mitchell:

"In looks and movement, Mr. Riener (in electrifying form) and Mr. Mitchell (whose relaxation here seems suffused with darkest meaning, like a form of numbness that drives even his most piercing falls, runs and turns) become negative and positive versions of the same person. ... Even their skin tones and simple black-white costume patterns are reverses of each other. Question and answer, left and right, image and mirror image, the two are convulsed, incapable of repose, two halves now forever sundered."

As a high-school student in Washington, D.C., Riener devoted much of his extracurricular time to soccer and track, and in college, he looked to fill that void with a new physical activity, first joining the Princeton student dance group diSiac and then studying under dance faculty Rebecca Lazier and Ze'eva Cohen. Riener quickly progressed, earning lead roles in campus performances of Vaslav Nijinsky's L'après-midi d'un Faune and Sergei Prokofiev's Le Pas d'Acier. After graduation, he completed his MFA in Dance at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and during that time, he caught the eye of Cunningham, who invited him to join his company in 2007.

(Photo courtesy Merce Cunningham Dance Company)

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Sophie LaMontagne ’00, left, with her sister and business partner, Katherine Kallinis. (Photo courtesy TLC)

Georgetown Cupcake, the bakery launched by Sophie LaMontagne ’00 and her sister, Katherine Kallinis, has achieved remarkable popularity in the two years since it opened on the corner of 33rd and M streets in Washington, D.C. The line of patrons regularly stretches beyond the front door as customers anxiously wait for favorite cupcake flavors like salted caramel and chocolate hazelnut.

But LaMontagne, a molecular biology major who worked in finance before taking the plunge as a cupcake entrepreneur, told USA Today that the shop started with pretty simple ingredients: “In the beginning, it was just the two of us, our life savings, and a lot of sweat equity.”

The sisters’ knack for creating tasty treats allowed them to expand with a second store in nearby Bethesda, Md. And last week, their business received another boost when LaMontagne and Kallinis made their first appearance as stars of the six-part TLC reality series D.C. Cupcakes.

More than a million people tuned in to watch the show’s July 16 debut, with more than half coming from the coveted 18-to-49 age bracket, according to The Washington Post. The show’s success comes just months after the D.C.-based incarnation of MTV’s The Real World flopped, leading Post TV columnist Lisa de Moraes to conclude that “viewers actually like reality shows set in Washington, but with sprinkled jimmies rather than hot-tub splashes.”

VIDEO: Watch LaMontagne create a batch of the bakery’s famous Lava Fudge cupcakes.

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.

Last week, 12 inmates at the Santa Cruz County Jail became algebra students, thanks in large part to Mark Krumholz ’98, an assistant professor in the astronomy and astrophysics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Krumholz worked with corrections officials and administrators at the UC Santa Cruz Extension to create the UC Santa Cruz Project for Inmate Education, which offers college-level courses that allow the prisoners to earn credit while serving time. He’ll be teaching the course, along with a handful of UC Santa Cruz faculty and graduate students.

The UC Santa Cruz project is the third inmate education program that Krumholz has been involved with, and the second that he’s started. As a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton, he created Princeton Project Inside, now known as the Prison Teaching Initiative, which sends Princeton volunteers to two prison facilities to teach courses for credit at local community colleges. (Click here to read PAW’s April 2, 2008, story about the program.)

In Santa Cruz, one of Krumholz’s biggest challenges was location. All of California’s major prisons are at least a two-hour drive from campus, and relatively few of the inmates in the nearby county jail remain there long enough to complete a full semester of coursework. But administrators at the jail were able to identify enough promising candidates to fill this summer’s class.

For more than 250 years, Princeton alumni have earned some of the most distinguished titles in America, so when an alumnus becomes the first Princetonian to hold a given post, it tends to be a remarkable achievement. That was the case June 1 when the Library of Congress revealed that William Stanley Merwin ’48 (better known to readers as W.S.) would be the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States.

Librarian of Congress James Billington ’50, who made the announcement, said that Merwin’s poems “are often profound and, at the same time, accessible to a vast audience. He leads us upstream from the flow of everyday things in life to half-hidden headwaters of wisdom about life itself.”

Merwin has won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice, in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders and in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, and former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia told The Washington Post that Merwin was “an inevitable choice” for poet laureate. (For the record, one other Princeton alumnus, William Meredith ’40, served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978-80, before the “poet laureate” designation was given.)

Though Merwin lives in relative seclusion on a former pineapple plantation in Hawaii, he travels to the mainland at least twice a year for readings and appearances. He read at Princeton in April as part of the creative writing program’s yearlong 70th anniversary celebration.

AUDIO: Listen to Merwin’s July 1 interview with NPR’s Melissa Block

(Photo courtesy Library of Congress)

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.