The Conjurer of Compost

Spring 2016

Rebecca Louie ’99 pauses outside the door of a quiet cubicaled room and whispers, sotto voce, “This is where the magic happens.” She’s joking, but there’s something to the notion. Inside the cavernous shared writers’ space, Louie undergoes a magical transformation into the green goddess of blogging, The Compostess, and author of 2015’s Compost City: Practical Composting Know-How for Small-Space Living. Beyond, there is more wizardry.

Our Moment Is Now

Spring 2016

Melissa Tier ’14, Swarthmore’s sustainability coordinator, keeps a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on her shelf.

“The history of life on Earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the Earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight,” Carson wrote in words first published in 1962. 

The Fates of our Fathoms

Spring 2016

Heather Ylitalo-Ward ’06 was 17 years old when she had her first close encounter with an octopus. 

“I was sitting in a tide pool, looking out at the ocean, when a wave came in and a small octopus swam right up next to me,” says Ylitalo-Ward, who was living with her family in Costa Rica at the time. The creature circled her legs for a while, like a cheerful Disney sidekick, before swimming away. 

VideoAbsolute Value

Spring 2016

It is a truth universally acknowledged that math class can be boring. 

But it doesn’t have to be, according to Dan Finkel ’02. An elementary-school math whiz who went on to exhaust his district’s math resources halfway through high school, Finkel eventually majored in mathematics at Swarthmore before earning a Ph.D. in the subject at the University of Washington. 

GallerySayed Dreams of Birds

Spring 2016

Avian and otherwise, rare birds abound at Swarthmore. 

Among the many roosting in the College’s Peace Collection is Horace Gundry Alexander, a world-famous
pacifist, Quaker, and adviser to Mahatma Gandhi.

Nowhere in the 14 boxes of papers by the Englishman who eventually moved to Swarthmore is there more passion than in the slim folder, “Writings re: birds.”