On March 19, Ted Van Dyke spoke at the Bulgarian Embassy, along with Bulgarian Fulbright scholar Professor Ivan Hristov, on the life and accomplishments of Reuben Markham. Markham spent much of his career in Bulgaria, going there as a missionary-educator in 1912. He has been described as a Bulgarian figure as much as an American one. (Also, Markham was Ted’s grandfather, but he …
Prolific classmate Richard Seltzer has delivered another important work: Voices of the Owned. It draws on more than 2,000 firsthand accounts of former slaves, collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Most collections like these chase what was typical. Selzer instead focuses on the individual: distinctive lives, unexpected moments, vivid scenes, and unforgettable turns of phrase.
Richard is making the PDF available free to classmates. Just download it here. He encourages you to read it and share it with others.
Click through and see the details of how Richard used AI to winnow the 2 million words of the original transcripts into this book, while keeping his own editorial control, as well as a surprising discovery of his own family connection to one of the former slaves!
This book differs from Djelal Kadir’s earlier academic works, originating instead from his recent personal experiences and insights gained while mourning the loss of his wife of 50 years. Drawing on judgment and skills developed over decades of teaching comparative literature, Djelal explored “the stillness at the heart of the chaos, rather than escaping to the swirling edges.” He examined the historical, scientific, and mythical archives, finding examples of profound solitude.
He spent the next five years researching the lives of figures deeply immersed in, and contemplating, solitude, enabling him to assume their voices through 39 letters attributed to each one.
Following his sci-fi novel Deep Past (2019), author Eugene Linden has picked up where he left off with Resurrecting Bart (2025). The idea for the former book, he told The Hudson Independent, grew out of a ponderance: “If natural selection could produce human scale intelligence in just several hundred thousand years – the blink of an eye on a geological scale – who’s to say other highly intelligent creatures haven’t come and gone over the past millions of years.”
What actions should you consider upon learning that your grandfather was like Reuben Markham—a missionary, educator, journalist, intelligence officer, and a significant American figure who played a vital role in the social and political lives of pre-war Bulgaria? What steps should you take when research reveals a wealth of historically important actions and writings associated with his life?
Well, if you’re like Stuart (“Ted”) Van Dyke, you dust off your PhD in European History, ignite your research skills, and dive into the archives of the US State Department, the Christian Science Monitor, and several Bulgarian and other primary sources. You seek to uncover exactly what your grandfather did and how his contemporaries responded. And with a scholar’s dispassionate eye, you document that for history — maybe for a book, but for now in some academic journals.
Our prolific classmate, Richard Selzer, has done It again – by publishing his newest book, One Family. This one is very different from his other books, many of which have been profiled in these pages. This is not a novel; it’s an exploration, a meditation on the nature of human connectedness.
The book starts with a mind-blowing thought experiment (and proof) that, if you have European ancestry, it’s likely that you are related to every other person with European ancestry on Earth today. We are indeed … ONE FAMILY.
Richard also makes a generous gift at the end of the article — access to a free copy of the book!
Per his 50th Reunion Essay, Marty Cohen retired in 2015 with six goals, two of which were to publish works in process and create new ones.
He’s made good on at least one of those goals by publishing Stone Seeds, which Amazon describes thusly: “Stone Seeds is about paying attention to the connections between people and places, poetry and birds, songs and silence, spirituality and the material world.
Marty has been publishing poetry and essays on literature and the arts in periodicals and anthologies since 1970. Stone Seeds brings together the best of his work since A Traveller’s Alphabet (1979).
In this post, Marty makes a generous offer to classmates and shares some personal news, too – read more.
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
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….
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 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.
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 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.
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 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”
Dr. Daniel Duke, a professor emeritus at UVa, released a new novel, Pursuit of Happiness, in late June. It joins two earlier novels — Man Camp (2022) and River of Dreams (2023). His author profile explains that “his novels address important issues, ranging from what it means to be a man in the 21st century to whether pursuing happiness is worth the effort.” The Amazon “blurb” for The Pursuit of Happiness gives a peek into…
