By the time you read this magazine, the biggest, best-attended Alumni Weekend in College history will have concluded. If you were one of the more than 2,000 attendees, perhaps you met me or another member of the magazine staff wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “What’s Your Story?” Beneath that slogan was the new magazine [...]
I’m no George Plimpton, but I do enjoy participatory journalism, especially when it involves climbing around on a train. Well, participatory may be stretching it. I wasn’t pulling the throttle on the train engine. I was just along for the ride with Conductor Frank Moscatelli, whose day job is teaching physics at Swarthmore.
Sitting in a [...]
During the last half-century or so, only a few folks have been fortunate enough to serve as the Swarthmore College Bulletin editor. Marilyn Orbison Gillespie ’49, a snappy dresser who is still going strong as an avid volunteer for the Scott Arboretum, led the charge from 1956 to 1992. Jeff Lott held the reins from [...]
It’s been nearly four years since my husband and I were traveling down a congested Interstate 83 to attend his mother’s funeral in Baltimore. Our solemn journey was interrupted by a horrifying jolt and the clamorous sound of twisting metal and shattering glass. I thought a bomb had dropped on our car. No, it was [...]
The first time I heard the term Obamacare I was standing in the Italian-marble-floored kitchen of the expansive home of a Texas surgeon. Mind you, this surgeon was someone I had admired since I’d first met him the summer of the ’76 Olympics. (Yeah, I was a kid, and he was already a long-established scalpel [...]
Yesterday I saw tiny violet flowers cropping up outside my office in Sproul Hall. (According to the adjacent sign, they’re called Scilla bifolia.) It seems everyone I meet talks about the Dean Bond Rose Garden, from which seniors choose their Commencement roses. The heralded beauty of this campus—which I’ve been waiting to glimpse since my [...]
After more than 21 years working on this magazine, I’m handing it over to a new editor, Sherri Kimmel, this month. This is my 85th and final issue of the Swarthmore College Bulletin.
It’s with mixed emotions that I relinquish this job—even though it was my choice to do so. After all these years, there’s [...]
In a few weeks, I’m making a conference presentation called “50 Ways to Love Your Magazine—and Make Your Readers Love It Too.” To prepare for my talk, I spent a couple hours perusing the magazine racks at Barnes & Noble (alas, not Borders, which always had a better selection). I was searching for magazines honored [...]
Following completion of the January 2012 issue, scheduled to go to press in late December, I will leave the editorship of the Bulletin. I will not be leaving Swarthmore College, however; in January, I will begin a part-time position editing and writing a book about the College—part history, part contemporary accounts, and lots of great [...]
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Swarthmore’s Writing Associates (WA) Program, a remarkable peer education system that helps students become better writers. In campus parlance, a WA is a trained student writing coach who works across a wide variety of disciplines with individuals and with entire classes. WAs provide feedback that helps fellow students [...]