Features
Swarthmore Hatches a Big Red Bird
By Jeffrey Lott
It’s a big, red bird. Very big and very red. Note that the wing feathers also look a little like flames. Note the ever-so-slightly aggressive beak—it’s a raptor, and it can be tough. Note the oversize shoes with the garnet S. Then allow yourself a laugh at the highly shakable tail and the overstuffed appearance of the whole silly thing. What more can you say about it—except that it’s Swarthmore’s new mascot, the Phoenix! Features
Independent Streak
By Paul Wachter ’97
One morning in November 1993, David Bradley boarded an airplane at Dulles Airport, bound for Vietnam. He was accompanied by his Swarthmore classmate and close friend Jim Snipes ’75, who had purchased first-class tickets on the occasion of Bradley’s 40th birthday. It was to be one last “boys trip,” Bradley says, and as they prepared for takeoff, Snipes advised his friend to stay awake for the first 13-hour leg to help him adjust to the time difference. Within 20 minutes, however, Snipes himself had nodded off, leaving Bradley alone with his thoughts. Features
Voices that Matter
By Sonia Scherr ’01
One winter morning last year, Hansi Lo Wang ’09 was conducting a phone interview in Lodge 6, just behind Bond Hall, when he heard something on the other end of the line that shocked him: the tattoo of gunfire, frighteningly close. Related Article
Profiles
Head in the Clouds
By Carol Brévart-Demm
When Max Trescott was a boy, the irresistible sound of aircraft flying overhead invariably turned his eyes skyward. The buzz of small planes intrigued him. When he was 10 or 11, he took his first flight, awakening an innate passion that has lasted for 30 years. “Looking down on the world, everything looks so different. I just loved the view from way up there,” Trescott says. “I still do.” Additional Profiles
Faculty Expert
Means and Ends
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici
When E.M. Forster famously wrote his “Only connect … ” epigraph to Howard’s End, he was exhorting his readers to connect the prose and the passion of life, to live life fully with others. Sociologists might also be said to live under the “Only connect…” dictum, but they derive a different meaning from it.
Books + Arts
Blowing the Whistle on the Mob
In the New Jersey suburbs where I grew up, guessing which of your neighbors might be a mafioso was something of a parlor game. But it wasn’t a game to Bob Delaney, whose just-published book Covert, written with Dave Scheiber ’76, recounts his tension-filled years as an undercover cop infiltrating the seedy New Jersey waterfront, where he exposed the Mob’s reach of corruption and coercion.
In My Life
A Writer’s Voice
By Dana Calvo ’92
It took a 100-day strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) to convince me that I was, indeed, a writer. I don’t necessarily mean I’m a good one. Just that I am one. It’s what I do. It’s all I’ve ever really been trained to do.
