Yale roommates collaborate on a new novel
|

Yale roommates collaborate on a new novel

Calhoun roommates in ’68-’69, Scott Howard and Bob Brush have a lot in common:  They sang together in the 1966-68 Baker’s Dozen and were founding members of the Roll and Pin Society (along with Bob Wheeler, James Hallet, Wayne Henderson, Charlie Peck, Brad Davenport and Bo Riehle).

Recently, they decided to collaborate in the creation of a first novel, with Bob as the author and Scott as the illustrator. 

Bob is an Emmy-award winning writer and executive producer of The Wonder Years and recipient of other awards. Scott is a retired banker now deep into painting, non-profit work, and family. “Read More” to see more about the novel, The Piazza: Stories from Piazza Santa Caterina

Death and Time 29-29
|

Death and Time 29-29

Editor’s Note: This is an essay recently published in Medium.  It has a unique take on The Game in 1968 as a metaphor for how we experience The End.  

When my memory plays tricks on me, often the issue relates to time — the order of events and their duration. My perception of time varies with my emotional involvement in what is happening, as well as with my age. Time drags for a child and races ahead for someone as old as me. The final moments of a sporting event can remind us of the variability of time.

Because of rules that stop the clock, the last two minutes of a football game or a basketball game can go on and on, with reversal after reversal. I particularly remember the Harvard-Yale game of 1968….

Andres Serrano: Beyond The Pale
|

Andres Serrano: Beyond The Pale

Editor’s Note: Our Robert Horvitz interviewed Artist Andres Serrano at an exhibition in Prague, and it was recently published in Trebuchet, the London-based magazine dedicated to contemporary art criticism. See the entire interview online, or reprinted in full here. It is an intelligent, in-depth interview, with high-quality reproductions of artworks from Serrano.

Ted Snow’s new book: The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World
|

Ted Snow’s new book: The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World

Ted Snow announced his new book, published just after our reunion, with customary humor: “There are a few benefits of having a stroke, which I did several years ago – like good parking spaces and getting special treatment at the airport – but I don’t recommend it. However, a few good things came out of it: Time to copy and organize of a lifetime’s worth of photos, and writing a book, The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World.

The following Amazon blurb summarizes the contents and offers a preview of the book. Ted’s other personal update is included below that.

Trial by Zoom – A trial lawyer’s view

Trial by Zoom – A trial lawyer’s view

Editor’s Note:  A trial lawyer in New York City, Bill Beslow has represented many famous, wealthy and powerful people at intensely personal times. In this essay, Bill expounds on how the Zoom Freeze, the Zoom Drop, barking dogs, technical issues and other Zoom Glitchs require radical adjustment of the structure and style of trial practice.

Attorneys in our class will appreciate Bill’s insights; others might enjoy this peek into how attorneys prepare and conduct direct and cross examinations and the extensive, detailed analogies to classical music and dance.

Jim Porter lands NSF grant to continue studying corals

Jim Porter lands NSF grant to continue studying corals

Jim Porter is a retired professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia, and the National Science Foundation just did something highly unusual: It funded a research grant to continue his studies on coral reefs in the Florida Keys.

Jim is unaware of anyone else who has received an “Individual Investigator” grant from NSF in retirement. His best guess about this accomplishment is this:  Because his long-term work is so timely in assessing the future of coral reefs, NSF and its expert panel of external reviewers decided to fund it regardless of the age or retirement status of its investigator.

New novel from Matt Flynn: Hunting Bernie Weber
|

New novel from Matt Flynn: Hunting Bernie Weber

As Amazon explains:  “Our math genius, Bernie Weber, is a high school student in Milwaukee who has the ability to deduce the prime factors of any large number. (FYI: modern cryptology is based on using large prime numbers, which computers cannot extract when they are used in encoded messages).

When Bernie performs as “Pryme Knumber” in a math circus at a Milwaukee college, an intelligence officer in the audience realizes the value of his innate ability and informs the CIA of this potential human resource. They test Bernie to see if his ability is authentic and decide to give him a thumb drive with an encoded message to crack. By mistake, they give him a top-secret message they have intercepted but have not been able to decipher….

Michael and Maureen Folz release several new songs
|

Michael and Maureen Folz release several new songs

Michael and Maureen are using their new editing / mixing equipment to perfect some new songs, which are publishing-ready.  (Watch for it on Spotify!)   Here are two of the latest recordings.  Check ’em out:

See also
More original music from Michael and Maureen”
and
Re-releasing your music using new digital editing tools

The Transformative Experience of Nature

The Transformative Experience of Nature

Editor’s Note: Chris Hoffman recently published the following essay and offers it to classmates for both enjoyment and feedback.

When priest and earth scholar Thomas Berry was about ten years old, he had a transformative experience upon seeing a certain meadow for the very first time. He says: the sight of that meadow in early May, “together with the sounds of the insects – the crickets, the birds – all of this somehow struck me in such a way that ever since then that meadow has become my norm of reality and value…If we don’t have certain outer experiences, we don’t have certain inner experiences or at least we don’t have them in such a profound way. We need the sun, the …

Rainmaker: Superagent Hughes Norton and the Money-Grab Explosion of Golf
|

Rainmaker: Superagent Hughes Norton and the Money-Grab Explosion of Golf

“Now, in Rainmaker, Norton draws back the curtain on his meteoric rise and abrupt fall. With never-before-told stories and exclusive insights, he discusses what it was like being Tiger Wood’s first agent, his time representing the narcissistic Greg Norman, and shining a bright light on his sudden—and controversial—ouster as the head of IMG’s Golf Division—a juggernaut he helped build. This is an engaging and unforgettable memoir that explores golf as never before.”

Eugene Linden Wins Prestigious Book Award
|

Eugene Linden Wins Prestigious Book Award

The Coun­cil of the Amer­i­can Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal So­ci­ety (AMS) has voted to award Eu­gene Lin­den The Louis J. Bat­tan Au­thor’s Award for his 11th book, Fire and Flood: A Peo­ple’s His­tory of Cli­mate Change, from 1979 to the Pre­sent. A pre­vi­ous work on cli­mate change, Winds of Change: Cli­mate, Weather, and the De­struc­tion of Civl­liza­tions, won the Grantham Prize’s Award of Spe­cial Merit.

A for­mer se­nior writer for TIME Mag­a­zine, where he wrote about na­ture, sci­ence, and …

Re-releasing your music using new digital editing tools
|

Re-releasing your music using new digital editing tools

Michael Folz and wife Maureen have been working and re-working some of their songs using some of the newer recording and engineering technology.  And it’s mind-blowing … well, more ear-blowing. Compare, for example “Right Through My Heart” from 2015 vs. the revision of the same song they created a couple months ago,  The 2015 version…