Quick! What do a glittery singer on the rise, a water-dice-devising artist, an ascending classical-music composer, a feature-film hit maker, and a genre-bending juggler have in common? A Swarthmore degree, of course.
Known as an incubator for free and creative thinkers, the College has long provided a solid foundation for traditional artists and performers as well [...]
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than 20 years since Arlie Russell Hochschild ’62 coined the term “the second shift” in her eponymous book, subtitled Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. She explored women’s paid work on the job, then, the other, unpaid, after-hours labor—baking cupcakes for our daughters’ next-day school party or [...]
One evening last fall, two students made their way along the path from Wharton Hall to Sharples.
“Look, there’s a hawk,” one of them exclaimed, his face upturned, staring into the skeletal branches of the lofty ginkgo that dominates the hill above the fraternity lodges.
Following his friend’s gaze, the second student looked up, located the bird. [...]
Jake Neely ’13 is used to stares from students and new dining-hall employees as he exits Sharples. On his overflowing plate are bunless hamburger patties, mountains of cubed chicken, and spinach—the mainstays of his diet. Proudly, Neely will tell you that diet has taken him to 525 pounds … on the barbell. The Missoula, Mont., [...]
June 9, 2011, was a typical day for Adbusters, the eye-catching Vancouver, British Columbia-based magazine of radical political activism and social commentary. Kalle Lasn, the 70-year-old founder and editor-in-chief, was trading emails with frequent collaborator Micah White ’04, an editor 40 years his junior. The subject was a planned action in Lower Manhattan to protest [...]
Jim MacMillan has spent much of his adult life not necessarily looking down the barrel of a gun but looking through a lens at what those guns had done.
MacMillan was a photojournalist for the Associated Press, the Philadelphia Daily News, and a freelancer in streets as mean as those in Iraq and North Philadelphia. He [...]
A music professor playing the pipettes … A historian running the centrifuge … A dean counting bacteria on a petri dish … You never quite know whom you might run into in Amy Cheng Vollmer’s microbiology lab—and she likes it that way.
Every summer, Vollmer, professor of biology, invites Swarthmore faculty members and administrators to spend [...]
With their 30th reunion on the horizon, four physician members of the Swarthmore Class of ’83—JackGelman, Niloofer “Nee” Dalal, Sue Kost, and David “Paze” Pazer—reunited in Haiti—a region that remains distressed in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. From Jan. 19 to 26, they offered their medical expertise through Project Medishare, [...]
Imagine a rectangular plot of land, let’s say 100 by 75 feet. Four or so small row homes occupy part of the space. There’s also a building for common use, containing a living room where residents might chat, watch TV, peruse newspapers and magazines, or delve into a donated book from the shared library. A [...]
Just before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy hurled herself against the East Coast, frequent Twitterer Christiana Figueres ’79 was out in front with other “top people” (including Michael Bloomburg, Nicholas Kristof, and Al Gore) who use Twitter’s hash tag #Climatechange. “Makes severe weather events more frequent and more intense. What part of that do we [...]