Musical Notes

Joshuah Brian Campbell’16 did double duty—nailing his Senior English Address during the Morning Exercises but also, literally, singing for his dinner the night before. At the honorands’ banquet in Annenberg Hall, accompanied by guitarist Alex Graff’17, he sang “Desafinado,” by Brazilian songwriter Antônio Carlos Jobim (a treat for Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in lieu of the usual classical selection). During the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises Tuesday morning, the Radcliffe Choral Society, somewhat surprisingly, sang “We Are…” by Ysaye Barnwell (of Sweet Honey in the Rock); its charming refrain is well suited for graduates with attending elders: “We are our grandmothers’ prayers./We are our grandfathers’ dreamings./We are the breath of our ancestors./We are the spirit of God.” Josh Bean’16 did the fresh arrangement of “Simple Gifts” for the Commencement Choir’s Thursday performance.

Zingers

Commencement-goers may have noticed that the United States is conducting a presidential election. It turns out that academics and their guests are fully capable of delivering political one-liners as punchy as those deployed on the hustings. Some samples: “We cannot will away or wall away the world” (former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, LL.D. ’97, at Harvard Kennedy School’s Class Day). “The ability to know, as former dean Jeremy Knowles used to put it, ‘when someone is talking rot’” (President Drew Faust, Commencement afternoon address, on the role of education in informing discourse). “We are a nation of immigrants, at least for now” (Steven Spielberg, Ar.D. ’16, in his afternoon address—before referring to his attending family member, his 99-year-old father).

Gendered (Club) Jokes

As debate roiled after the College’s decision to pressure members of final clubs, fraternities, and sororities, Dean Rakesh Khurana came in for some ribbing. Tuesday morning, Phi Beta Kappa president Robin Kelsey said, “Unlike some other societies bearing ancient Greek initials, Phi Beta Kappa is not embroiled in any campus controversy—of which I am aware,” giving the dean a significant look. Kelsey went on to note the election of academic achievers to PBK, “whatever your sex, gender, or sexual orientation.” In her Baccalaureate address, President Faust teased about discussing with parents what is known as a “‘final club.’ Without an ‘s.’”

End of an Era

Grace Scheibner
Photograph by Jim Harrison

This year’s festival rites are the last for Grace Scheibner, Harvard’s first formal Commencement director, who retires after 24 such extravaganzas. Scheibner’s successor faces a job that combines logistics mastery with penetrating psychology (tending to visiting heads of state and entertainers) and exquisite diplomacy (weighing last-minute ticket requests). President Drew Faust gave her a richly deserved shout-out after conferring the honorary degrees.

Leading Lecturers

The studious Phi Beta Kappans annually recognize teaching excellence. This year, they honored Kiran Gajwani, lecturer and concentration adviser in economics, who runs the senior-thesis research seminar; Charles S. Hallisey, Numata senior lecturer in Buddhist literatures; and Brigitte A.B. Libby, lecturer on the classics and Allston Burr assistant dean of Pforzheimer House (who had an excellent excuse for being absent: she delivered a daughter on Saturday, May 21). It is a small sample, but all three are lecturers, not ladder faculty members on the tenure track—perhaps a subtle comment on teaching.

Full-Service

Photograph by Jim Harrison

In a big year for ROTC, Ensign Adam Gracia’16 was joined at Wednesday’s commissioning ceremony by his U.S. Navy family: Captains Jorge Gracia and Nancy Gracia, and (right) Lieutenant (j.g.) Alexandra Gracia, his sister. President Drew Faust’s gift to the officers was Leadership,an anthology edited by Elizabeth D. Samet’91, professor of English at the U.S. Military Academy, who came to campus the next day for her twenty-fifth reunion.

Counting Who Counts

Harvard awarded 7,727 degrees and 11 certificates on May 26. Collegians garnered 1,661 degrees. Those entering “the ancient and universal company of scholars” (Ph.D.s) and those who “have surmounted with distinction the first stage of graduate study” (a master’s in arts or sciences) received 988 degrees from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, led by 538 doctorates. Other notable totals: business (934), extension (783), law (769), education (746), Kennedy School (584), and public health (546). The world is also the richer to the tune of 61 Harvard-trained dental specialists.

Ivy Bling

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Eliot Housemates Andrew Fischer’16, of (well-named) Diamond Bar, California, a receiver, sports 2013-2015 football championship rings (next up: a job with Bank of America Merrill Lynch), as William Walker’15, of Hingham, Massachusetts, shows his 2014 lacrosse championship hardware. After summer travel, he joins Fidelity Investments.

Senior Survey

“This is the best time to enter the job market in close to a decade,” FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman informed fortunate graduates in early May. The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey (906 responses) offers confirming evidence, with 21 percent headed to consulting jobs, 18 percent to finance, and 14 percent to technology. (The subsets are amusing: 43 percent of male final-club members reporting are heading to finance positions; a higher proportion of respondents will be in finance and consulting than any class since 2007.) More than half of those entering the workforce expect starting salaries in excess of $70,000. Panelists at Radcliffe’s Friday conversation on “Building an Economy for Prosperity and Equality” lamented the small faction of College graduates (4 percent in 2016) entering public or nonprofit service.

Freshman Ties

First-year roommates Penny S. Pritzker’81 and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall’81 cross paths in Washington, D.C., where the former is secretary of commerce and the latter deputy secretary of energy. They were joined on a reunion panel by none other than Loretta E. Lynch’81, J.D. ’84, whose day job is attorney general.

Somber Speeches

Marcelle de Souza Gonçalves Meira
Photograph by Susan Young/Harvard Business School

Canned oratory about life lessons congeals much graduation rhetoric. But sometimes, the talk becomes painfully real. “I am here today to thank you—for saving my life,” class day speaker Marcelle de Souza Gonçalves Meira, M.B.A ’16, shown here, told her Harvard Business School peers. Her husband and classmate, Pedro Meira, died last September from stomach cancer, and her remarks addressed this ultimate challenge. The College class of 1991 elected as its Chief Marshal Sheryl Sandberg, who shares with Meira an HBS M.B.A. (’95), and the loss of her husband, Dave Goldberg’89, little more than a year ago—the subject of her moving commencement address at the University of California, Berkeley, earlier in May.

Echoes

Honorand Arnold Rampersad, Ph.D. ’73, LL.D. ’16, has written acclaimed books about W.E.B. Du Bois, A.B. 1890, Ph.D. ’95, the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, and Ralph Ellison, Litt.D. ’74, author of Invisible Man, who was that year’s afternoon guest speaker. (In that dreary year, Harvard Magazine reported in its news headlines, “This year’s graduates: More interested in money” and “ROTC on the wane.”)

Signs of the Times

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The Law School, having abandoned its shield, associated with a slave-owning family (see a decorated mortarboard), and absent a successor, hoisted plain banners on Langdell and in Tercentenary Theatre; stay tuned for the new design. In their anniversary years, the Harvard Alumni Association (175^th) and Harvard College Fund (90^th) hailed alumni community and philanthropy on the Yard’s light standards.

Whose Ox Gets Gored?

Radcliffe “Economy and Prosperity” panelist Douglas W. Elmendorf, dean of Harvard Kennedy School, proposed addressing federal deficits by cutting benefits and raising Medicare premiums from those who have done better in society—a suggestion greeted, to his amusement, by applause. “I don’t mean just Bill Gates [’77, LL.D. ’07],” he continued, and suggested extracting resources from the top third to half of the economic order—a suggestion, he joked, that elicited “slightly less applause.”

Extra! Extra!

Photograph by Stu Rosner

In a classic print-era hack, the Lampoon hoisted Harvard Crimson display racks and deployed them at the entry gates for the Morning Exercises—fully stocked with back issues of the humor magazine.

Backstage at the Montalban Theater in Los Angeles, Franklin Leonard ’00 takes his catered sandwich to the green room. It’s his party, in a manner of speaking, and the table’s been set with beer and wine and someone else’s preferred brand of bourbon, and has TV actors of varying fame and uniformly good looks seated around it. They’re all on a dinner break before a live reading of “College Republicans,” a screenplay written by Wes Jones that follows a young Lee Atwater and Karl Rove on their 1973 campaign through the South. Leonard—in a blazer and Converse sneakers, his dreadlocks tied back in an elegant knot—retreats to a cluster of chairs to the side, where his team members balance their plates on their knees. The situation is reminiscent of the divide in high-school theater, between the thespians and the techies. “Joining the kids’ table?” his events manager quips, and he nods.

A self-described micromanager, Leonard goes over a few last details: collecting the cast members’ contact information; choosing the house music as the audience files in (“Southern funk. Allman Brothers,” he decides, firmly); drafting introductory remarks. He especially worries that the auditorium full of Hollywood liberals might boo his guests: Alex Smith, the current sitting (and first woman) national chair of the College Republican National Committee, and two of her friends; they’d taken him up on an invitation he had extended on Twitter. “Honestly,” he says, “kudos to her for coming into the lion’s den.”

Despite apologizing earlier for “running around neurotically,” the supremely unruffled-seeming Leonard sits down long enough for a brief interview. “What are your plans?” he asks. “Do you want to be a screenwriter?” Hesitation prompts him to prod, “Oh, come on, you must have designs on something.”

Leonard is used to writers wanting something. If he can, he will help them get it. Actors get more glamor and directors more credit, but he is passionate about spotlighting screenwriters; he seems to believe in pure story, conceived on the page—not through aesthetic or cinematic observation—as the prime mover of filmmaking.He calls himself the writing community’s hype man: “I’m cool with being the Puff Daddy to their Biggie.” And he became that by creating a Black List that people dream of being on.

 The Black List 1.0: “A Way to Quantify Heat”

Leonard likes to say he founded the Black List by accident. In December 2005, he was a junior executive at a production company, frustrated that he couldn’t seem to find good scripts. He went through his calendar, pulling the contacts for every executive he had met with that year, coming up with a list of 90. From an anonymous address, he polled them about their favorite unproduced screenplays from that year, and, after tallying the results, sent the numbered list back to them as a PDF under the title “The Black List.” Then he went on vacation to Mexico.

“I went to the resort business center to check my e-mail” for his work account, Leonard recalls. “And there were 75 e-mails where the list had been forwarded back to me. People were saying, ‘This list is amazing! Where did it come from?’” He kept quiet about his involvement, but a few months later, an agent calling to promote a client’s script came up with a bald-faced lie that made Leonard realize that he’d started something big: “Listen, don’t tell anyone, but I have it on good authority that this is going to be number one on next year’s Black List.”

“A) I had decided I wasn’t going to do it again because I was afraid of getting fired, and B) even if I was, it’s a survey, so six months out, there’s no legitimate authority on what’s going to be on the list—certainly not number one,” Leonard says. “He was using the possibility of the thing as a tool to sell his client.”

That incident convinced him to continue compiling his survey. People began to pay attention in 2008, when two scripts that had been on the 2005 roster, Lars and the Real Girl and Juno, were nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for best original screenplay. Black List titles have been made into movies as various as The Social Network, Whiplash, Selma, The Hangover, and World War Z. Four of the last six Oscars for best picture, and 10 of the past 14 for adapted or original screenplays, went to films highlighted on the Black List. As the announcement of the Black List became an anticipated annual event, Leonard expanded his survey’s scope. He now polls some 550 to 650 people, with a response rate of roughly 50 percent. “The idea of a PDF has become adorable,” he adds—scripts on the list are now announced, one by one, on Twitter or through YouTube videos.

The scripts for Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Juno (2007) were at the top of the first Black List, in 2005. The List has since included celebrated veterans like Aaron Sorkin (writer of The Social Network) and relative unknowns like Damien Chazelle ’07 (of Whiplash).

Beyond trade publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, media outlets like The Los Angeles Times and Slate took notice, eager to peer into this window on the industry’s conversations: zombies were in, then out again; biopics have consistently done well, as have making-of stories about beloved classics like the Muppets or Jaws. At one point, even Mother Jones joined in the fun of speculating about what titles might one day come to theaters.

Leonard takes care to emphasize that these are not the best unproduced screenplays but the most liked. The distinction emphasizes that the list is not about quality per se—or some external, aesthetic standard—but about the gut: these are the stories that a critical mass found moving, thrilling, or fun. It also suggests the list’s true utility: taking the temperature of Hollywood’s excitement. The first participants may have praised the list less for its new titles than for those they recognized. Aphorisms abound about the industry’s conservatism: executives are said to spend their days saying “No, no, no, and no,” then going to lunch; saying yes will get them fired. Nancy Oliver told Entertainment Weekly in 2008 that her romantic dramedy about a man and a sex doll, Lars and the Real Girl, “had been making the rounds for a few years, but it was still an invisible property. The Black List changed all that. It gave permission for other people to like it.” Leonard’s survey had an observer effect. Measuring—and thus, cementing—consensus, it became a Hollywood fixture.

The awards-season success of Black List films sits next to a more sobering statistic: of the 1,067 screenplays highlighted in the past 11 years, 322 lived to become movies. Even so, some of their authors have parlayed the attention into jobs on massive studio franchises. Brian Duffield, of the Black List class of 2010, earned his first writing credit on the young-adult blockbuster Insurgent; Marvel Studios hired Chris McCoy (named to the Black List three times) for Guardians of the Galaxy, and Stephany Folsom (whose script on Stanley Kubrick made the 2013 list) for their next Thor sequel. Josh Zetumer, a former lawyer’s assistant, found himself writing on-set dialogue for a James Bond movie and, later, the script for a Robocop reboot. No one on the List is pulled from total obscurity; scripts still need to reach the right desks—and enough of them. But the List can bottle the otherwise transient buzz around a writer; it makes the glow last a little longer. As Zetumer told TheBoston Globe in 2012, “The Black List is a way to quantify heat.” Making the case for an unproven talent or a script written on speculation was much harder before it existed. The Black List gave people something to point to.

The Outsiders’ Insider

Leonard has always thought of himself as an outsider—or at least, he concedes, someone who’s gotten access to, but not comfortable with, the inside. This is partly the product of a roving, army-brat childhood: born in Hawaii, he lived in El Paso, Fort Leavenworth, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt before his family settled in Columbus, Georgia. Leonard’s mother was a schoolteacher and his father a colonel and surgeon who, upon retiring to civilian life, specialized in neonatology. They were strict, he says, but “it was also a very loving home. It’s not at all that sort of cliché military upbringing.”

As a child, he had a stutter, which he outgrew, and a love of soccer, which he did not. (On weekends, he plays in a Santa Monica pick-up league called Untitled Football Project, as a defender; in spare moments he reflexively checks on his fantasy league, on his phone.) Adding to his shyness: “I was a giant nerd. I was Steve Urkel [from TV’s Family Matters], basically. People called me that all the time in high school, and I was like, ‘That’s so mean, that’s not true,’ but in retrospect? Not inaccurate.” He joined the Boy Scouts and captained the math team; his senior year, the state senate commended him for, among other achievements, perfect SAT scores.

At Harvard, Leonard got involved with the Institute of Politics—not the Lampoon, the usual hangout of the Hollywood-bound. Still, in hindsight, it’s possible to see the roots of his interest in the behind-the-curtains systems that support creativity. He was publisher of The Harvard Advocate in 1999, and wrote his social-studies thesis on liberal democracy and slam poetry. During summers interning in New York City, he explains, venues like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe were an attractive hangout for a kid under 21.

His path to Los Angeles took a few detours through politics and media: back then, law school seemed basically inevitable; Leonard imagined that he’d then pursue a career at the Southern Poverty Law Center. After graduating from college, he worked on the congressional campaign of John Cranley, J.D. ’ 99, M.T.S. ’00, his mentor and onetime teaching fellow for a history class on the Warren Court. (Leonard says, of that time, “It was great. I mean, it was weird.” They were being taped for the MTV reality show True Life; the episode aired after the election, which they lost.) He then auditioned to be a video deejay, but, failing that, went to Trinidad for seven months, where he observed the aftermath of the country’s contested parliamentary election and wrote for its oldest daily paper. Returning to the States, he took a consulting job at McKinsey & Company. In the months following the September 11 terrorist attacks, though, the firm laid off his entire recruitment class with five months’ severance. Leonard spent much of his time watching rented DVDs before heading west, to Los Angeles, where a friend tipped him off to an open assistantship at the Creative Arts Agency. He was hired the next day.

Leonard was working at Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, Appian Way, when he sent out the first Black List in 2005. After he sent out his second list, the Los Angeles Times published a story identifying him as its creator. Though he considers himself naturally introverted and a homebody at heart, he began being invited to speak at colleges, panels, and festivals as an industry sage.

“It’s still sort of surreal. I think that the thing that gets me invited to speak is that I’m constitutionally unable to bullshit.”

“It’s still sort of surreal. I think that the thing that sort of gets me asked back or gets me invited to speak is that I’m constitutionally unable to bullshit.” Proving that, he continues: “And I think there’s some amount of, like—from a casting perspective—I’m a black guy with dreadlocks, and that person with the Harvard background talking about the economics of the industry. It’s fundamentally interesting.” Though he has grown used to public speaking over the years, he still vomited before giving a speech at Fast Company’s 2010 Most Creative People in Business conference: “Ray Kurzweil was right before me,” he explains. “Just to give you a sense of how out of place I was.”

In a video from a more recent speech in New York, on an assigned theme of “How to Change the World,” Leonard looks faintly green. (He has been described as soft-spoken, which is not quite right; his talk is sometimes boisterous and always fast, a rate accelerated by nerves.) He piles on self-deprecating asides, some planned, others clearly ad-libbed, almost under his breath. Issues more pressing than showbiz weigh on his mind—protests in Baltimore, an earthquake in Nepal—and they foreground his remarks about the Black List’s unlikely successes. This goes some way toward explaining his tone when he tells the audience:

Here’s the thing. I didn’t do anything with those scripts. I didn’t write them, I didn’t direct them, I didn’t produce them, I didn’t finance them, I didn’t act in them, I didn’t run cable or post lights on set. I didn’t even give them from one person to another, who would go and do those things. All I did was change the way people looked at them. But again—and I really cannot stress this enough—I did not do a damn thing to make them.

In that moment, Leonard named the strange truth of his career: that until a few years ago, he was best known for devising an instrument to measure others’ opinions.

Modernizing the Dream Machine

If the Black List’s origin tale starts with serendipity—its founder stumbling across a once-invisible need—its next chapter has a more deliberate arc. In 2009, Leonard met software engineer Dino Simone through a mutual friend, and they struck up a conversation about the difficulty of finding worthy material for film development. (Simone legally changed his surname from Sijamic in 2016.) “Coming from a very different world, where essentially everything that I did was about automating, making things faster or more efficient—when he told me about these problems, that was interesting,” Simone says. “Because they can definitely be solved. It’s just a matter of time, and going about it in the right way.”

Their solution was a website they dubbed “a real-time Black List,” an online hub where members—agents, managers, producers, financiers, directors, and actors—could find promising projects. Writers pay a monthly fee for the Black List to host their scripts, then choose from some 1,000 tags to index it; these describe genre (“alien invasion,” “prehistoric fantasy,” “heist comedy”), theme (“self-discovery,” “guilt/regret”), and other elements (“combat with weapons,” “$1-10mm [budget],” “twist/surprise ending,” and “female protagonist [diversity]”). Writers can then boost their visibility by paying for evaluations from the site’s stable of anonymous professional readers, who give each script a numerical rating and brief comments about its strengths, weaknesses, and commercial viability. Highly rated scripts are featured in the website’s “top lists,” and highlighted in e-mail newsletters.

Simone's tech-world optimism was a natural complement for Leonard’s McKinsey-honed mentality: both were confident that they could modernize the Hollywood dream machine. The Black List embodies a philosophy: that through savvy entrepreneurship, capitalism can encourage not just efficiency, but meritocracy, in show business. That the system could be tinkered with to yield higher-quality entertainment. That, if engineered properly, the marketplace could identify the best material, to the benefit of all—financiers, creatives, and audiences. It’s a theory of industrial art-making that’s powerfully attractive in a business as resource-intensive, risk-averse, and data-hungry as Hollywood.

The website also included a component that catered to this abiding interest in taste by numbers. Leonard had followed the Netflix Prize—a contest to come up with better movie-recommendation software—with interest, and had been impressed by Amazon’s system ever since it suggested the books of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who subsequently became “my favorite writer of all time.” After Simone built their site’s first algorithm, Leonard enlisted the help of his college roommate, Sean Owen ’00, who’d worked at Google and gone on to found his own company, Myrrix, “so we have a recommendations algorithm that is far more powerful than it has any right to be, for a company as small as we are,” Leonard admits. “If I’m being honest, it’s still the most underutilized part of the site.” He suspects that Black List members resist the idea that their preferences can be predicted. “Everyone wants to believe their taste makes them special—like, who could possibly divine what I will like?” (He doesn’t state the irony: that the annual list succeeded, at least in part, because it reassured gatekeepers that their tastes were shared by their peers.)

The co-founders launched the Black List site in October 2012. Now, they employ several full-time staff members who assist in its various projects and day-to-day operations. With no fixed hours or offices, the company allows time and flexibility for other pursuits—everyone, with the probable exceptions of Leonard and Simone, is an aspiring writer. The small, close-knit team meets at cafés, in each other’s kitchens, or at Soho House, the private club in West Hollywood where Leonard is a member. Free to be a remote CEO, he says he seizes the opportunity to travel while he’s still unmarried and doesn’t have kids. In 2015, he was on the road 120 days, attending film festivals, entrepreneurship conferences, and other events from Oaxaca to Toronto to Nairobi; even when he’s home in Los Angeles, he spends much of his time stuck in transit, and while stuck in traffic, conducts phone conferences and listens to podcasts—and, more recently, the cast recording of Hamilton (a musical that happens to be deeply concerned with the power of writing).

Initially, some accused the Black List of piling on in the already-crowded arena of reading services and competitions seeking to make money off luckless hopefuls. From this view, offering the possibility of exposure is akin to selling lottery tickets. The skepticism has faded, though, in part due to Leonard’s readiness to answer pseudonymous critics on online message boards and Reddit question-and-answer sessions, often late at night and for hours at a time.

The site has been popular enough that it recently raised fees to cope with rising demand, promising to give out more coupons for free hosting and evaluation to compensate. More significantly, the founders also added a new mechanism to their marketplace. Scripts receiving high scores from paid readers will earn a few months of free hosting and some free evaluations. The best material could go on a hot streak, entering an endless loop of free reads, racking up enough high ratings to be highlighted. This may keep talented writers from being scared off by the price hike; it also keeps the strongest submissions from languishing simply because their creators couldn’t afford to invest in more attention.

So far, a few scripts have attained sufficient escape velocity to break through to the vaunted annual list: Justin Kremer’s “McCarthy,” about the Red Scare—“When it first came through the site with really good reviews I was convinced someone was playing a practical joke on me. It was just way too on the nose,” says Leonard—and Jason Mark Hellerman’s “Shovel Buddies,” about a group of twenty-somethings fulfilling the last wishes of a friend with cancer. Both were unknowns before joining the site: Kremer was living in Staten Island with his parents; Hellerman had a desk job routing calls for a producer. The writers crowned number one on the 2014 and 2015 lists were also discovered by their reps through the site, Leonard adds. But his favorite success story—“the craziest, and probably the one I’m most proud of”—doesn’t share that straightforward trajectory; it doesn’t involve the annual list at all. In 2012, Ruckus and Lane Skye, a husband-and-wife team based in Georgia, uploaded a thriller that eventually caught the eye of a film executive in Abu Dhabi. The Arabic-language movie that resulted, Zinzana, was reportedly the first genre flick ever made in the United Arab Emirates.

According to Scott Myers, who runs the popular screenwriting blog “Go Into the Story” (which started in 2008, and became the Official Screenwriting Blog of the Black List in 2011), the Black List is the latest shift in a longer historical change in Hollywood: “It used to be a closed-loop system,” he says, one that expanded periodically to recruit writing talent—mostly journalists and novelists; the market for scripts written on speculation boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, but even that was built on personal connections or film-school networks.

These days, says Leonard, people take one of two routes: “You enter the Nicholl Fellowship, which is the Academy’s screenwriting competition, and the biggest screenwriting competition on earth, and if you place in the top 30, somebody will probably call you. Or you move to L.A. and you get a job at Starbucks and you network until somebody pays attention to you.” But, he continues, warming to his subject, “If you’re a married man with a mortgage in Raleigh, North Carolina, you’re a terrible father if you pick up your family and move them to L.A. because you want to figure out how to be a screenwriter. If you’re a single mom on the South Side of Chicago, that’s not an option for you.” For these hypothetical talents, he maintains, his site’s hosting and evaluation fees are a bargain.

The site tends to pitch itself less as real-time analog to the annual list, and more as a place for new writers to be discovered, and for established writers to promote themselves. (Members of various English-language Writers Guilds can list their work for free, and get other services at a discount.)

All can submit their work to various contests: usually, the site’s algorithm determines the strongest scripts for a shortlist, and then those finalists submit personal statements and résumés. So far, the prize opportunities have included deals with studios like Warner Brothers and the Walt Disney Company, fellowships with the National Football League, Google, and the Hasty Pudding, and spots in screenwriting labs.

Kristina Zacharias, working full-time as an administrator at New York University, considered herself a “hobby writer” until recently, when she won a fellowship to attend the Sundance Film Festival under the wing of a prominent producer, and a spot in a workshop at the women-centered Athena Film Festival. Since then, she has been working on a film treatment with a producer she met at Sundance, and taking calls from potential managers. “When I decided to take it seriously, the Black List was the way that I actually could get a little bit of traction,” Zacharias says. And, she adds, Leonard has sent introductory letters on her behalf to agencies and festival labs.

“I have no idea how to thank him—he keeps saying, ‘This is what we do,’” she reports over the phone, sounding elated. “And I’m like, ‘No! No one knows that this is what you do.’ This is like you’re in this select, members-only club, and you have access to all these great resources, and I mean that, to me, is like the real value. Once you’ve sort of proven that you’re serious, the Black List will do anything that it can to help.”

Cinderella stories like hers are tantalizingly rare. But the Black List may have a subtler, more diffuse effect on people working beyond Hollywood, through the happy hours it organizes in some dozen cities, hosted by local volunteers. Shelley Gustavson has found collaborators at the Chicago events, but says the aim is to build camaraderie among screenwriters: “We want to get them away from their laptops, and help them feel supported.” While the Chicago happy hours have been drawing some 150 attendees, the New Orleans happy hour (held at a supposedly haunted converted mansion) draws a crowd a third that size on a good night, according to actor Hunter Burke. “We’re trying to be part of the community that’s trying to bring back a local film movement,” says Burke, who hopes to make his next movie on the cheap, in his city, with Louisiana-based financiers. He thinks the Black List’s name will attract a critical mass. “Really, it was a no-brainer to put them at the forefront of the community-building exercise we should start doing here.”

The range of Black List activities has also grown to reach an audience far broader than its core constituency. These include the “Black List Live!” staged readings of still-unproduced scripts from the annual list. Leonard has also, in effect, become a part-time radio host and producer, putting out a weekly podcast of interviews and full-cast table reads of scripts from the site. “The podcast definitely represents a shift, I’d say, from the Black List brand being a sort of industry-facing thing, or sort of B2B, to us being consumer-facing, so what I’d say is that we’re sort of a B2B2C.” He pauses. “And it’s strange for me, I’m not going to lie. I’m sort of fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of being in the public eye, period. That transition has been an awkward one for me.”

 “We find the best material first, and have access to most of it. It would be cool if we could put money behind the stuff that we identify as being good.”

Within the next year, the company’s ventures are set to expand even further. The site just rolled out a social feature that enables writers to associate personal profiles with their scripts, so industry members can search for people, as well as for material; Leonard hopes this will particularly help women and people of color to promote themselves as diverse talent. He also plans to raise money for a film fund, so the business can start financing projects. To his mind, “We find the best material first, and have access to most of it. It would be cool if we could put money behind the stuff that we identify as being good.”

Asked about their long-term ambitions for the Black List, the co-founders often point to AngelList, a website that matches startups, investors, and job-seekers. But when they’re feeling more expansive, they say they’d like to be the “Google of scripts.” That suggests an ambition to make the Black List not merely one resource among many, but the default. Theirs would be the most comprehensive, specific, and reflexively trusted tool for summoning—instantaneously—whatever screenplay any asker could think to ask for.

“It’s Supposed To Be a Movie”

Wes Jones never considered himself especially political. But like many Americans circa 2008, he got caught up in election excitement—the punditry, polls, and prognostications—such that when it ended in November, he says, “There was a little void.” A documentary about Lee Atwater then airing on PBS offered first a kind of methadone, and then inspiration for his next screenplay. “College Republicans,” imagining the road trip taken by the young Atwater and fellow Young Republican Karl Rove, got Jones an agent and manager. His reps pushed the script onto the desks of various studios and production companies throughout January 2010, and in March flew him out to Los Angeles for meetings. Jones was escorted through what he dubs “the bottle-of-water tour,” a courtship ritual befitting a desert city: the debutant talent leaves each office with a bottle of water in hand, and the hope of work in his heart. By midsummer, he’d snagged several assignments: a deal with Warner Brothers, a book-adaptation project.

For Jones—Indiana-raised, New Jersey-based, and working low-level jobs on the fringes of indie filmmaking for more than a decade—“College Republicans” opened the door to the wider industry; the Black List, in naming his script number one in December 2010, gave his arrival some real fanfare. “I’m saying the same things. I have the same ideas. I am the same guy I have been for years, trying to do this stuff—but all of a sudden, people care,”he says, chuckling and chagrined. “Because, you know, I have backup. I’m on the Black List. It creates a status—and a reputation, in fact—where none was before.” At the time, he didn’t believe it when a Sony executive told him, “You know, you’re going to get work off this for years.” But when his agents put him up for a staff job on the new cable drama Billions,“What did they send, in 2015? ‘College Republicans.’”

Even as that screenplay brought its creator steady success as a writer-for-hire, the project itself stalled. Actors were attached, then detached; money was hard to come by. Jones still remembers one time when the pieces seemed, finally, to fall in place—the production schedule was set; they were hiring crew and renting offices—and how the filmmakers waited at the bank for a wire transfer that never came: “That’s indie financing for you,” he says. “It happens more often than you realize.” Then he adds: “No, it sucked. It sucked. It was a heartbreaker.” To Jones, “The script is just a map. It’s not an art form in and of itself. It’s supposed to be a movie.”

Though the Black List had long pushed for a live reading of his script, Jones and his collaborators had said no until recently, worried that it might complicate an already dicey development process. This time around, with the director and lead actors seeming fully committed, it felt safer; the event might even lend the production some momentum, keeping it on the industry’s radar. It would be many months before Jones’s scenes would play out on-screen, but the performance made his script, briefly, “a live, breathing thing.” Introducing it, Jones told the audience that he had never heard his words spoken aloud before the afternoon’s rehearsal.

“College Republicans” played well in the room. Even in 2016, when Karl Rove has somewhat faded from public consciousness, the recent primaries have lent new weight to the narrative of a political party remaking its identity, and young men with outsized dreams are never out of style. This was what the industry, circa 2010, dreamed of making: a well-balanced script that, for all its scheming and swearing and PG-13 sexual content, seems strangely wholesome in its eagerness to please, its efforts to give a little something to every kind of viewer. The power struggle is intercut with slapstick comedy, romance, and a heist. With its focus on character over ideology, it does indeed work, as Leonard maintains, as a nonpartisan coming-of-age. Everyone laughed at the right moments, and, after his deft introduction of Alex Smith as the CRNC’s first woman leader, they applauded; no one booed.

At the after-party in the theater’s mezzanine lobby, Leonard quietly went about getting everyone settled, offering congratulations or drinks. Finally, lacking anything else to do but enjoy the celebration, he confessed, “I hate this part. I’m really bad at mingling. This is the part that makes me, like, want to lock myself in a closet somewhere.” He meant it, but no sooner had he said it than the trio of Republicans appeared at his elbow, gesturing toward the famously blue-eyed actress standing within earshot. “We’re obsessed with her,” they said, and without missing a beat, he made the introductions and rotated through their smartphones to take their photos. When the moment no longer needed him, he returned to replaying the night mentally. It went well, he thought, but as ever, “There were a couple of things that could have gone better.“ Rather than name them, he shrugged. “I’m already thinking about the next one, for better or worse.”

Megan white Mukuria ’99 is on a mission. The founder of the nonprofit ZanaAfrica Foundation works to promote awareness of an issue still taboo in polite conversation: menstrual health. Zana is the Kiswahili word for “tool,” and Mukuria started the organization in 2007 to give adolescent Kenyan girls tools they need to succeed: answers to their questions about reproductive health and sanitary pads. Today, ZanaAfrica Foundation distributes free pads, underwear, and reproductive health education to more than 10,000 girls a year.

The path to her mission was not obvious. Like many rising seniors, the cognitive-neuroscience concentrator “knew more what I didn’t want to do than what I did.” But that summer, she joined a group of Harvard and MIT students who traveled to Kenya to volunteer, and was placed with Homeless Children International–Kenya (HCI-K) in Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi. While helping girls who had just left the street transition to full-time school, Mukuria says, she realized “how truly some of these girls could be Harvard material, and how I could have ended up in their position if we had been placed in each other’s shoes.” That inspired her to think about how to help “break these girls out of systematic poverty,” on as large a scale as possible. Back at Harvard, she dropped her thesis to take classes in child psychology and Kiswahili. After graduation, she spent two years as a volunteer campus minister, but when she was asked to be HCI-K’s resource mobilization manager in 2001, she bought a one-way ticket to Kenya, and has been there since.

Working again with Kenyan girls, she began to realize that no one was providing them with information about reproductive health. The problem, Mukuria explains, was partly historical: traditional community rites of passage had been superseded by sometimes inadequate health education at school, and “the girls have kind of been lost in between.” The price of pads was an issue, too. As in many countries, and most of the United States, pads are taxed as a luxury item, like lipstick, and in Kenya this made them “the second biggest cost for girls every month after bread.” More than 65 percent of Kenyan girls don’t have access to them. Appalled by the situation, which caused girls to drop out of school at twice the rate of boys, Mukuria decided to do something about it.

ZanaAfrica’s approach reflects her experiences. The girls she worked with had many questions about their periods and reproductive health more broadly, so the foundation started by asking girls what they wanted to know, and built on that data, following UNESCO’s sexuality-education curriculum and consulting with the Kenyan ministry of health. The ZanaAfrica Group, the foundation’s social business partner, was set up to  manufacture pads. The foundation now organizes health workshops during which it distributes pads; it is also at work on a monthly lifestyle magazine—to help girls understand their bodies and rights—as part of a research study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to test the impact of delivering reproductive-health education coupled with sanitary pads.

Because its work remains sensitive, the foundation’s Partnership Program teams with local organizations in Kenya that have a direct relationship with schools in their communities, enabling ZanaAfrica to distribute pads and underwear and facilitate girl-centered reproductive-health lessons to students who need them. Its partner the Samburu Girls Foundation, for example, operates a rescue center for girls who are survivors, or at risk, of female genital cutting and child marriage; it also works to educate parents about the dangers of those practices. Girls’ and women’s reproductive rights remain an issue the world over, Mukuria says, and “part of the mandate of ZanaAfrica is that we feel we’re starting a movement” everyone is welcome to join. “One of the easiest things people can do” is discuss the topic among themselves, she adds: a simple conversation can go a long way toward ending stigmatization.

ZanaAfrica has won a Wharton Africa Business Forum Business Plan competition and three Gates Foundation grants. But for Mukuria, the most inspiring results are the personal ones. “When New Adventure School in Kibera called me and said that for the first time in their 13-year history, 100 percent of their girls had matriculated from seventh to eighth grade, that was incredibly validating—to see girls’ lives change so positively.”

In his recently published memoir, Odd Man Rush, Bill Keenan ’08 describes standing atop a table in a crowded room, garbed in a tutu and pink tights, and performing with aplomb (as a child he’d briefly studied ballet) steps from the opening act of Balanchine’s Nutcracker.

That incident occurred in Annenberg Hall during Keenan’s freshman year, in response to a dare from his coevals on the men’s hockey team, but it’s a sign of the sheer oddity of Keenan’s adventures that it would seem fitting at any point in the memoir. The book, from Skyhorse Publishing, bears on its cover the blocky and aggressively informative subtitle A Harvard Kid’s Hockey Odyssey from Central Park to Somewhere in Sweden—With Stops Along the Way. It briefly limns his days at Harvard, up to the moment he decided, at the end of senior year, to continue playing—in the European minor leagues. Then his three years of professional play—for the Turnhout White Caps of the Dutch Eredivisie, EHC Neuwied of the German Oberliga, and Kramfors-Alliansen of the Swedish Hockeyettan, among other teams—whir by in a stream of comical anecdotes and absurd personalities.

The memoir came about when he returned to the United States and discovered that he was unemployable. “There’s not really a market for someone three years out of school who doesn’t know accounting, who has no real job skills,” he says. “I really had no idea what I wanted to do.”

It was during this jobless interregnum that he began to write. While in Europe, he’d maintained two separate streams of e-mails, one to his parents (“To tell them, ‘I’m alive, don’t worry’”), the second to his friends. In those more candid communiqués, he recounted, among other things, the fact that his newest roommate began each day with a glass of vodka, and he drew primarily from the same source when he started his book. His aim, at least initially, was a form of closure. “There was a kind of therapeutic aspect to writing,” he explains. “When you do something for 20 years and stop cold turkey—well, it was almost a way to figure out, what was it about the experience that I loved?”

From the first, he knew he was writing within a very particular genre—that of the minor-league memoir. He cites as an inspiration the works of baseball player Dirk Hayhurst (author of, among other books, the not-quite-so-prolixly-titled The Bullpen Gospels: A Non-Prospect’s Pursuit of the Major Leagues and the Meaning of Life). “I think more people can relate to [those stories],” Keenan says. “Most of the people who play sports have an experience like I did, where you don’t make it to the top—you make it somewhere, at some point, and then you call it quits. It can happen when you’re 10 years old or 25, but you have to confront the fact that you’re not going to get to where you want to go.”

Keenan graduated from Columbia Business School in May and is now an associate in Deutsche Bank’s investment-banking division, though he’s fairly confident he won’t stop writing. He seems to have gotten the bug. Of his experience creating Odd Man Rush, he says, “I wanted to remember it all in a certain way. And that’s what writing it allowed me to do.”

In the imagination of Justin Cronin ’84, when the world ends, Harvard College is substantially to blame. Not that the novelist has an unkind word to say about his alma mater. He laughs—meaning “no”—when asked if he’s joined the likes of David Halberstam '55 and William F. Buckley, in the tradition of writers warning against the dangers of Ivy League education. 

“My experience at Harvard didn’t lead me to the destruction of humanity,” Cronin clarifies. “I always thought that sometime in my writing life, this institution, its social customs, and how it felt to go there would find its way into what I wrote, but the occasion had never arisen,” he says, “and then it arose.” His chance was The City of Mirrors, published this May, the final novel in the fantasy trilogy that has brought Cronin staggering celebrity.

The Passage Trilogy is a bit of an unlikely epic. Famously so: Cronin’s career arc has become a kind of archetype, a template for the Writer’s Journey in our day. Before The Passage, Cronin, who earned his Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, had published a pair of well-received novels in that vast, shapeless genre called literary fiction. The first of these, Mary and O’Neil, earned him a PEN/Hemingway Award, which is nothing to sniff at. 

But it was his pivot to the supernatural that won Cronin a multi-million-dollar book deal and a commanding spot atop the bestseller lists. Since the 2010 publication of The Passage, Cronin has been spinning readers an apocalyptic vision: quick and hungry creatures called virals—not vampires, exactly, but vampiric—have scoured most of the life from the Western Hemisphere. Thin patches of humanity hang desperately onto the blasted landscape. The novels, monstrously successful, track a shifting cast of survivors in a plot that telescopes across centuries.

The notion of a tension between the two Cronins, a literary past and a genre future, became the master theme of his success, one revisited in profile after profile. Of course, this was always a reductive narrative, old hat even back in 2010. You could forgive Cronin for losing patience with the dialogue.

In that spirit, in a surprising section of The City of Mirrors, Cronin gives readers a novella-length refuge from the grim future of the two previous books. He gives them Cambridge, viewed with keen sentiment through the eyes of his villain: Harvard College class of 1993. For years and hundreds of pages already, readers have known that biochemist Erik Fanning caught a rare virus on an expedition to Bolivia, becoming in the process the first and master viral. Only now do they learn how Fanning liked his college experience, or which final club he was in. Only now can they appreciate the extent to which the invisible root of the Passage Trilogy led back to a campus love triangle.

Like so many alumni, Erik Fanning is haunted by the entanglements he entered into at Harvard. He met a young man named Jonas Lear on the stools at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage—“which I have now used in two different novels!” Cronin emphasizes—and fell deeply for Lear’s girlfriend and future wife, Liz. Years later, she and Fanning plan to run away together, but she dies of a longstanding illness before they can meet. The tragedy strands Fanning waiting for hours, ignorant, at Grand Central. His psyche is pinned to the floor of that concourse; centuries on, nostalgic and nihilistic, he makes the ruined terminal his nest.

After learning of Liz’s death, Fanning joins Lear to search in her honor for a virus with miraculous healing properties. The disease, of course, makes the chemist a viral—but love and its special self-obsession will make Erik Fanning a monster. In what’s left of the world without Liz, he sees little of value; he plans to bring the whole play crashing down. Thus, the events of the entire trilogy are revealed to be Fanning’s reply to that ancient loss, his challenge to whatever universal force might have caused his personal tragedy. “Am I a freak of cold nature,” he asks near the end of his narration, “or heaven’s cruel utensil?”

As Cronin puts it, this origin story “has more in common with Brideshead Revisited than Interview with a Vampire.” The section is knit into The City of Mirrors with stunning fluidity, though for some readers it must have been a rude surprise all the same—as if Alien stood unmasked as a sequel to Love Story. The interlude triggers genre whiplash, a dislocation that will strike some as genius, others as bald self-indulgence. (Both are right, though the first group has its priorities straighter.) Certainly it polarized reviewers: The Washington Post’s Ron Charles called the novel’s visit to Harvard “ludicrous” and boring, while The Houston Chronicle praised it as “one of the most engaging sections of the new book.”

Most of all, the section reads like a declaration of principle. For years now, conspicuously strong writers, the likes of Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel, have been pouring into post-apocalyptic fiction, distending the genre like blood rushing to swollen tissue. Still, many readers insist on maintaining some boundary between the satisfaction of genre—vampires, aliens, detectives—and the satisfactions of literature, whatever that might be. In The City of Mirrors, Cronin bets that he can play hopscotch across that line, without losing hold of his audience. 

“Some readers would find it a bait and switch,” he acknowledges, “which didn’t concern me overly much. And other readers would find themselves hauled into at least a temporary sympathy with the villain.” By the book’s own logic, Fanning—who narrates the Harvard sequence in the first-person—needed to be a gifted storyteller, Cronin explains. “I had a narrator who was a very charismatic guy, extremely smart, very well-read, with a hundred years in which to think about his story and how to tell it.” But in a broader sense, Fanning’s style also has to succeed for the book to succeed. If the choice between genre and literature is truly a fork in the road, The City of Mirrors would fail. Too much of the novel—a load-bearing portion of its structure—is staked on the assumption that readers will happily consume both styles in a single book. Whether it works or not is an exercise left to the individual reader. As Cronin puts it, “Your mileage may vary.”

Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have said, “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” Cronin is more forthcoming—an eager cannibal, in the best sense—and the writers he’s devoured are visible throughout the trilogy. He points out where he’s buried the remains, with enthusiasm. The Fanning sequence is his Brideshead, he says; a brief section of the second novel pays homage to Mrs. Dalloway. 

And readily, like Fanning, Cronin explains that it all started at Harvard. He can point back to individual assignments. Mrs. Dalloway was the subject of a sophomore essay, and the series’ framing device—an academic study of its plot from the view of an even farther future—was inspired by a presentation on the historicity of King Arthur. 

The trilogy is shaped throughout by profuse gratitude, he stresses.  “Everywhere in these books,” Cronin says, “I’m writing thank you notes.” 

The genesis of Education for Sharing, a nonprofit organization that has served hundreds of thousands of children by educating them about global issues through imagination and play, took place on a cruise ship. Dina Buchbinder Auron, M.P.A. ’16, a recently graduated Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Mason Fellow, is the organization’s founder and executive president, and has since guided it from a dream into reality. 

In 2007, when she was 24 years old and newly graduated from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), in Mexico City, Buchbinder was selected to attend the Ship for World Youth—a program run by the Japanese government that brings socially active young people from around the world together aboard a two-month cruise. There, she encountered a young Canadian who told her about an initiative in Canada called Sport in a Box, which seeks to empower youth through sports. “I was very inspired by my Canadian friend,” Buchbinder says, “and I thought, ‘Oh, we need something like this in Mexico.’” 

It took courage to embark on that path, Buchbinder says. The prevailing culture on her college campus was for graduates to head straight for government or the private sector. Her classmates, she says, “almost couldn’t believe that I was going to work with children and with sports. They thought at the moment, that’s not very serious or professional.” Nonetheless, with the help of just one friend, she founded Education for Sharing, inspired by her care for children and passion for sports. “Even though I’m not very good at sports, I love them,” she says. “I believe in the power of what they make you feel, especially as you’re growing up and have so much energy.”

Indigenous children from Norogachi, Mexico, participating in Education for Sharing surround founder Dina Buchbinder.
Photograph courtesy of Dina Buchbinder

The mission Buchbinder set for her organization is simple. “We wanted to form better citizens, from very young ages,” she says. “We achieve this mission by the transformative power of play.”

“She has tremendous commitment to the mission that she’s following,” says Robert Kaplan, Bower professor of leadership development emeritus at Harvard Business School (HBS) and a friend of Buchbinder’s. 

A Vision of “A Different Citizenship”

There is a dire need for better citizenship, Buchbinder argues, not just in Mexico, or even in the developing world, but around the globe. She lists what she calls the greatest “human challenges”—violence, corruption, and apathy—which she believes transcend borders and demographic lines. “We work with all kinds of backgrounds,” Buchbinder says. “You might be a kid in the jungle of the southeast of Mexico, and you might be a very privileged child in a private school in Mexico City, and you’re also part of our vision. The vehicle of play is so human, so special, and it’s an equalizer.” Her organization has now served more than 539,000 people, in all 32 states in Mexico, as well as in other countries in Latin America and in the United States. According to Buchbinder, 94 percent of the schools where Education for Sharing operates in Mexico are in underprivileged communities recently targeted for assistance by the Mexican government.

To choose what challenges to address, Buchbinder has borrowed the issues identified in the United Nations’ list of Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to end poverty, hunger, and inequality. Many other nonprofits, governments, and businesses work on these same issues, she acknowledges. But in her work in particular, she says, “We are really trying to go to the root of the problem. Not just the symptoms, not just the consequences of the problem, but where is the root of these problems coming from?” Her answer: “We believe it’s coming from the lack of a different citizenship.”

Her vision of citizenship is one in which every person “gets to feel useful and valuable, where everyone gets to contribute to their communities, where violence is no longer the norm, and apathy is no longer an option, but where the choice that everyone makes is for the betterment of society.” The goal is for the elementary-school-aged children with whom Buchbinder’s organization works to have a head start on making that contribution. She relates the story of a 10-year-old girl who stood up before her teachers and peers at the end of her Education for Sharing program to tell them, “This is the first time in my life I feel useful.”

Engaging Children through Play 

Buchbinder admits that these goals can sound lofty, but she is just as committed to the methodology her organization has developed to achieve them— engaging children through play. “We go beyond memorization,” she says. “We go beyond the classroom, and we go from the classroom to an open space where the children have fun, where they’re learning in a healthy environment.” 

At the core of Education for Sharing are games. Their content relates to the Sustainable Development Goals—including games that address environmental issues, disease, and gender inequality. The games themselves seek to impart to their participants an appreciation for civic values like teamwork, empathy, and respect. Finally, while the program has expanded beyond just sports to include lessons in art and science, all the activities are meant to be games at heart—so they always include cooperative, active play.

Education for Sharing operates by training teachers to conduct sessions, including both active games and classroom discussion, during normal school hours with their classes. Participants in the session begin by traveling “by imagination, to different countries,” Buchbinder said, “to talk about interesting facts from that country.” Children might begin a session on global health by visualizing themselves transported to Brazil by a mythical animal. The teacher leading the activity might then note the high rate of HIV/AIDS in Brazil. 

Then the play begins: Buchbinder describes a game of dodgeball reimagined as “doctor tag.” Instead of teams, the children are divided into “communities.” When hit by a ball—which might represent HIV, or malaria, or the flu—the “infected” child needs to be seen by the community’s doctor to receive a shot. At some point, she says, “like it happens in real life, doctors run out of medicine, and so children start going out of the community to the clinic.”

After playing, the children and teachers form a “circle of reflection,” where, Buchbinder says, teachers “invite children to come to their own conclusions about what values they practiced, how they made a difference, what they felt, what they thought, and also what they propose in order to address the challenge that we are looking at in that game.” 

At the conclusion of the program, the children are asked to assemble a “treasure box” with handmade gifts, to send to another school as a cultural exchange. Buchbinder says this is meant to raise “cultural appreciation between children, between cultures, between worlds.”

She tells the story of a private international school in Mexico City, with students from as far away as Japan. Asked to create a treasure box to send to underprivileged children living in a rural indigenous shelter, the city-dwellers thought to send them manufactured goods like blankets, or even laptops. Education for Sharing said they had to send handmade objects instead, as a way to level the playing field between the children. 

What surprised them was what they then received in return. The indigenous children sent a wooden ball, which Buchbinder says they had kicked around for miles; letters in their native language, Raramuri; and pictures of the mountains that surround them—a striking landscape compared to Mexico City. All those gifts came wrapped in a blanket. 

“Children in the private school couldn’t believe that children the same age as them made these tremendously beautiful objects,” she says. The urbanites, curiosity piqued, started to marvel: “How cool that they speak another language that I’ve never heard about?” and “I want to get to know them!” 

A Grown-Up Organization

If the magic of Education for Sharing comes from children, it has taken a lot of adult work to get the organization to where it is today. “There is a huge logistical aspect to what we do,” Buchbinder says, noting that she has worked with private and public institutions to secure capital—each year, her organization needs to raise between $1 million and $2 million to fund its operations. In Mexico alone, the organization has worked with the ministry of education, the ministry of energy, and the center for indigenous development. 

Obtaining private funding, on the other hand, can be difficult. “In Mexico the donation culture is not like in the U.S.,” she says, but she hopes to find more sources of cash now that she has graduated from Harvard.

More work for Buchbinder and her team comes from the need to carefully train teachers and then monitor schools’ success. The organization has an “impact evaluation methodology,” which measures the participants’ awareness of civic values before, following, and several years after the program. Buchbinder says results are very encouraging; by her count, 86 percent of teachers report a substantial decrease in violence or bullying after adopting her methodology. Kaplan praises Education for Sharing for being “evidence-based.” In her work, he adds, Buchbinder “was applying ideas that people had shown could work, and using them to help young people [with] how to deal with and manage conflict.”

Buchbinder hopes that teachers will carry out the Education for Sharing mentality even long after receiving their training—that they will discover a new self “that can be playful, that can be actively and intentionally listening to each one of their students, that is unlocking, unleashing the potential of all of their students, and also feeling like they’re learning all the time.” And she hopes children and their parents together can become ambassadors for her organization’s philosophy. She recalls a third-grader who told about seeing his father leaving the faucet running in the kitchen. When the child asked his parent to turn the water off, he replied, “Why would I close it? I pay for this water.” The son had a response ready, having traveled to southern Africa via imagination: “What you don’t know is that there are children in Lesotho that don’t have water to drink.” 

“By involving parents,” Buchbinder says, “we are able to create the support from home, to reinforce the values that children are gaining. So it becomes like a virtuous cycle.”

Expanding Horizons

From its beginnings as a two-person, volunteer outfit nearly a decade ago, Education for Sharing will soon be a six-nation operation, with programs in Guatemala, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, in addition to Mexico, and plans to expand soon to Colombia. Today, there are more than 100 full-time staff members.

Finding a way to shuttle staff back and forth from Mexico City to training sessions in remote, mostly indigenous regions of Mexico, she explains, seemed like a daunting task at first. So as the organization grew, she and her colleagues turned for help to the communities they were serving: Education for Sharing hired college students and recent graduates who lived near the schools where the program would be implemented. “We found the most amazing potential in people that, locally, would understand the context,” Buchbinder says, and for whom “it would be tremendously meaningful to get involved with their community as a first job.”

Buchbinder now hopes that her method can spread even more widely—her dream is “to make it [accessible] to every teacher in the world that wants to implement an education like this,” perhaps via an online model. “The question that we’re always dealing with,” she admits, “is how do we maintain the quality of an experiential training—of the face-to-face training? What you feel when you’re in front of another person and when you play with them and see their reactions—that’s very difficult to replicate.”

Education for Sharing students in the Mesa del Nayar region of Mexico hold up cards representing the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals.
Photograph courtesy of Dina Buchbinder

As she began implementing her methodology in a handful of Washington, D.C., schools, she found that she needed to adapt again. The U.S. operation has worked primarily with specially trained teachers, like coaches and librarians. The bureaucracy is different—Buchbinder says American schools have much more freedom to make their own decisions. And, given the priority U.S. policymakers have placed on enrichment outside of the school day, she has also begun to work on developing an afterschool program.

But, in the ways that matter, Buchbinder says, her work is the same on both sides of the border. “Many people think, ‘Why would you bring an education program to the U.S.?’” she says. “What is also true,” she counters, “is that the problems that we deal with in Mexico are not exclusive to Mexico, or to the other countries that we’re working in. They’re human issues, and the solution that we have to address these issues is a human one, a universal one, so it applies everywhere.” 

“An Endless Well of Wisdom”

When Buchbinder came to HKS for her yearlong stint as a Mason Fellow (a program for mid-career professionals from the developing world), her nonprofit had already come a long way. She had worked full-time for seven years (the minimum experience required for the Mason program) and completed a one-year fellowship in urban planning at MIT. All her experience notwithstanding, Harvard presented a whole new realm of opportunities. “In one way, it was to retool myself,” she explains. “I hadn’t been to school for seven years. I wanted to learn other strategies to work better with governments and with other international organizations. I wanted to learn about better tools for negotiating, better tools for organizing, to tell my narrative.”

There was another, even more powerful motivation to come to Harvard: the “people aspect.” Buchbinder says she was eager to meet other Mason Fellows, who came from more than 60 developing countries. “I wanted to share with them what we’re doing, and I wanted to learn from them about what they’ve done, to understand what challenges they have been through and how they have overcome them,” she says. “It has been just an endless well of wisdom, to be surrounded by these people.” 

Buchbinder’s professors, too, have provided a great deal of support to Education for Sharing during her time at Harvard. Ricardo Haussman, professor of the practice of economic development at HKS, invited Buchbinder to his annual conference to introduce her to fellow social entrepreneurs. Mark Moore, Hauser professor of nonprofit organizations, counseled her on how to assemble an international board for her organization, which currently has separate boards in each country it operates in.

Robert Kaplan, the HBS professor, advised her on strategy as her organization grew. His wife, Ellen, who has also worked on the management of nonprofits, did the same, introducing Buchbinder to new contacts. Since Buchbinder “clearly could not be in every location at the same time,” Ellen Kaplan said, “it was very important to have this strategy outlined for all of her various leaders in these different cities, so that everyone was cognizant of the mission and understood the best way to achieve results.” 

This May, Buchbinder graduated with her master's in public administration. The same week, she gave birth to her first child, Clara Kumi. “One of my plans, for sure, is my baby,” she says. “I’ve always known that I want to be an active professional at the same time as having a family. For me, it’s very important because that’s the example I grew up with—my mom has been a very hardworking woman always.” 

So Buchbinder will become a working mother, continuing to work to build Education for Sharing. Her next goals are to expand her U.S. operations—she envisions starting up somewhere in California, or perhaps in Chicago—and to investigate how her approach might be adapted for younger children. Education for Sharing is also one of 15 finalists for a World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) award, in a competition for education projects sponsored by the government of Qatar. The six awardees will be announced in September.

Buchbinder has also been part of a team seeking to effect change here at Harvard—they want the University to enhance childcare services for students who are also parents—and she says she has met with President Drew Faust to discuss her proposal. She wants Harvard “to serve the needs of students with young children, so they can achieve their fullest potential while being here. I think that’s very important.”

The professors and students she met during her time here, Buchbinder says, “are the reason why we want to form better citizens from young ages: so that they can become like this—professors like this, students like this, change makers.” Buchbinder’s time at Harvard has been “very exciting, not only because of the road, but also because you realize that you’re not alone in this quest for a better world.”

Colson Whitehead’91 has written a zombie-apocalypse novel, a coming-of-age novel set in the world of the black elite, a satiric allegory following a nomenclature consultant, a sprawling epic tracing the legend of the African American folk hero John Henry, a suite of lyrical essays in honor of New York City, and an account of drear and self-loathing in Las Vegas while losing $10,000 at the World Poker Series. That work has won him critical acclaim. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, and has been a finalist for almost every major literary award; he won the Dos Passos Prize in 2012 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. In an era when commercial pressure reinforces the writerly instinct to cultivate a recognizable “voice,” his astonishingly varied output, coupled with highly polished, virtuosic prose, makes Whitehead one of the most ambitious and unpredictable authors working today.

He has gained a reputation as a literary chameleon, deftly blurring the lines between literary and genre fiction, and using his uncanny abilities to inhabit and reinvent conventional frames in order to explore the themes of race, technology, history, and popular culture that continually resurface in his work. In a country where reading habits and reading publics are still more segregated than we often care to admit, his books enjoy a rare crossover appeal. His first novel, The Intuitionist, is a detective story that regularly turns up in college courses; the zombie thriller Zone One drew praise from literary critics and genre fiction fans alike; Sag Harbor, about black privileged kids coming of age in the 1980s, was a surprise bestseller.

Whitehead’s new novel, The UndergroundRailroad, was released in August 

Beyond the books, Whitehead swims effortlessly in the hyper-connected moment: he maintains an active presence on Twitter, where his sly and dyspeptic observations on the curious and the mundane have gained him a devoted following. A sampling includes sagacious tips for the aspiring writer—“Epigraphs are always better than what follows. Pick crappy epigraphs so you don’t look bad”—and riffs on Ezra Pound: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough / Probably hasn’t been gentrified though.” In the pages of The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, he has wryly dissected contemporary mores and the light-speed metamorphoses of language in the age of social media. In a widely shared essay from last year, he parsed the current attachment to the “tautophrase,” as in “you do you” and “it is what it is.” Or Taylor Swift’s popularization of “Haters gonna hate.” Swift makes an easy target, of course, but Whitehead takes aim at the rhetoric of those in power too, and the narcissism in our culture more generally. He’s more gadfly than moralist, but there is a Voltaire-like venom to his sarcasms. “The modern tautophrase empowers the individual,” he observes, “regardless of how shallow that individual is.”

At 46, Whitehead is approaching the mid-point of a successful writing career. He exudes the confidence and ease of a man settled in his craft, and for that reason is also inherently restless, driven to test his limits and keep himself vivid. In recent years, some observers have questioned whether he was taking up subjects rich and deserving enough of his abilities. Dwight Garner in his review of The Noble Hustle (the poker book), vividly praised Whitehead’s talent—“You could point him at anything—a carwash, a bake sale, the cleaning of snot from a toddler’s face—and I’d probably line up to read his account”—while making it very clear he felt it was being wasted. Garner called the book “a throwaway, a bluff, a large bet on a small hand,” and questioned the sincerity of the undertaking: “you can sense that he’s half embarrassed to be writing it.”

As if to answer that criticism, Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, pursues perhaps the most formidable challenge of all: taking readers through “the blood-stained gate,” as Frederick Douglass called it, onto the historical ground of American slavery. The uncompromising result is at once dazzling and disorienting, the work of a writer flexing, firing on all cylinders.

During a recent conversation at an Italian café in the West Village, Whitehead at times seemed slightly distracted. It’s clear he does not enjoy talking about himself. He has always been highly skeptical of confessional modes. When he gives public talks, he likes to tell the audience he was born poor in the South—and then reveal he’s just quoting Steve Martin from The Jerk (in which Martin plays a white man who believes he is born to a family of black sharecroppers). “I never liked Holden Caufield, The Catcher in the Rye,” he declares with a wink in his eye, in a promotional video for his most autobiographical book, Sag Harbor. “I feel like if he’d just been given some Prozac or an Xbox, it would have been a much shorter book, and a much better book.”

In person, this stance becomes a kind of awkward warmth, even nerdiness: the eccentricity of the “blithely gifted,” to borrow John Updike’s 2001 assessment of “the young African-American writer to watch.” In dark blue jeans, his dreadlocks draping over a crisp white shirt, his glance slightly diffident behind neat glasses, Colson Whitehead is unmistakably a New Yorker—from Manhattan. He speaks in the native tongue—a streetwise blend of ironic nonchalance and snappy precision, a jolting rhythm not unlike that of the subway, always with an eye towards the next stop.

The Intuitionist registered as a shot across the bow, as though Whitehead were daring readers to box him in. 

Whitehead was born in New York City and grew up mostly on the Upper West Side. He lives in Brooklyn now, but recalls Manhattan with affection. “I like how Broadway gets really wide up there, how close the Hudson is,” he says. “I’d live up there again if I could afford it.” Asked what it was like growing up, back in the day, he brushes off the perceived roughness of that era: “New York was pretty run-down in the ’70s and ’80s, but if you think that’s what a city looks like because you don’t know anything else, then it seems normal. When I got out of college, I lived in the East Village and on cracked-out blocks in Brooklyn, and that seemed pretty normal, too.”

He paints a picture of a loving and kind of average household. He was always surrounded by readers. “My mother reads a lot, and I had two older sisters, so their hand-me-down libraries were always around. I didn’t need to be pushed.” In a rare autobiographical essay, “A Psychotronic Childhood,” he has described how this period of his life was deeply saturated by television, comics, and the “slasher” and “splatter” flicks, then in vogue, that he watched in New York’s B-movie theaters. A self-described “shut-in,” he “preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies,” where one could acquire “an education on the subjects of sapphic vampires and ill-considered head transplants” while snacking “on Oscar Mayer baloney, which I rolled into cigarette-size payloads of processed meat.” Unsurprisingly, he read “a lot of commercial fiction, Stephen King—the first thick (to me) book I read was in fifth grade, King’s Night Shift. I read that over and over.” His early literary ambitions, he has said, were simple: “Put ‘the black’ in front of [the title of] every Stephen King novel, that’s what I wanted to do.”

After graduating from Trinity School, Whitehead entered Harvard. It was the late 1980s, and the way he tells it makes it sound like he was a poster boy for Gen X slackerdom. (The archetype must feel almost quaint to the hyper-networking Zuckerberg generation.) It’s not that he didn’t enjoy his time at Harvard—he did attend his twenty-fifth reunion, he informed me—but he seems to have been determined not to try too hard to be involved in anything, or to stand out in any way. He read in his room a lot, he says, absorbing a wide range of things. But it was the way he was absorbing these strains that is most revealing: “I think it helped that, for my first exposure to Beckett, I took it to be a form of high realism. A guy is buried up to his neck in sand and can’t move; he has an itch on his leg he can’t scratch. That sounds like Monday morning to me.” (Responding to the suggestion that his novels suggest the influence of Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, Whitehead is noncommittal but open to the idea: “What excited me about writers like Ellison and Pynchon was the way you could use fantasy and still get at social and political themes,” he says. “That was very revealing to me…like here’s this serious book on race, but it has all this wild stuff in it.”)

At Harvard, Whitehead played the role of young aspiring writer the way he imagined it. The results were not necessarily promising. “I considered myself a writer, but I didn’t actually write anything,” he says. “I wore black and smoked cigarettes, but I didn’t actually sit down and write, which apparently is part of the process of writing.” He applied to creative-writing seminars twice—and failed to get in both times.

The most important undergraduate legacy has been his lasting friendship with Kevin Young ’92, an aspiring, charismatic poet from Kansas who was already involved with The Dark Room Collective, a gathering of young black writers that has played a major role in shaping contemporary poetry during the past two decades. Whitehead, never more than peripherally involved, says, “Kevin was always more serious than I was. He already knew where he was going, what he was about….I wasn’t much of team player.”

After graduation, Whitehead gravitated back to New York City. He went to work at TheVillage Voice, writing album reviews and television criticism. He soon mastered the magazine’s signature downtown stir-fry of pop-culture fluency, melding high- and lowbrow, theory and snark, punk and hip-hop: an inevitable rite of passage, given his influences. “I came up in the seventies and eighties reading CREEM [“America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine”], stuff like that, so I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be involved in that scene,” he says. Working in the book section at the Voice, he says, “was where I learned how to be a writer.”

That writer debuted in 1999 to instant acclaim with the disquieting The Intuitionist, set in an unspecified midcentury Gotham, a noir metropolis straight out of Jules Dassin and Fritz Lang. In its conceit, the world of elevator inspectors is divided between rival schools: Empiricists, who work by collecting data and making methodical observations; and Intuitionists, a minority of gifted inspectors who have a second sight that allows them to read elevator mechanics intuitively—an ability scorned and feared by the dominant faction. The novel follows Lila Mae Watson, a member of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, as she tries to solve the case of a suspicious crash, and also untangle the mysterious aphorisms of one James Fulton, whose gnomic text, Theoretical Elevators, may provide clues to a secret about its author and the nature of Intuitionism itself. It’s impossible not to like Lila Mae, a black woman occupying a role stereotypically identified with the square-jawed private eye, who uses her cool and wits to navigate this murky underworld and stay one step ahead of the men trying to frame her. Part of the fun is in the writing itself. Whitehead’s prose oscillates playfully between the pulpy, telegraphic neo-noir à la James Ellroy and the allegorical ruminations of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

This gives the novel a slippery feeling, a cool detachment that makes it easier to admire than to love. It’s as though Whitehead built that book on the principles of stealth technology, every facet rigorously designed to achieve what it is also about: a game of camouflage and detection, the irony of invisibility in plain sight. His interest in unstable visibility suggests the theme of racial passing, a concern with a long history in the African-American novel. As the scholar Michele Elam pointed out, The Intuitionist can be read as “a passing novel in both form and content.” The familiar hard-boiled detective plot turns out to be merely a lure, a skin-thin surface masking a speculative novel of ideas.

As a first novel, The Intuitionist registered as a shot across the bow, as though Whitehead were daring readers to box him in. It was also a first glimpse of what has since become something of an authorial signature: an ironic deployment of genre as a mask for an eccentric but also cutting vision of American culture. It’s an approach that can remind one of Thomas Pynchon in novels like The Crying of Lot 49 (critics have compared its heroine Oedipa Maas to Lila Mae Watson) and Inherent Vice; or to the filmmaking of the Coen brothers, with their affectionate but sinister parodies of Hollywood noir in Barton Fink or Fargo. Like them, Whitehead delights in recasting the iconography of Americana, troubling its conventions and clichés by pressing them to their limits, and releasing that energy in the form of bleak satire and an impassive attitude toward violence.

In 2008, novelist Charles Johnson published an essay in The American Scholar titled “The End of the Black Narrative,” in which he argued that the history of slavery in America had become a crutch for understanding any and all experiences of black life—that at the dawn of the twenty-first century it had “outlived its usefulness as a tool of interpretation,” and should be discarded in favor of “new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present.” It’s an argument that has analogs in academic circles as well, where a movement around “afro-pessimism” has prompted debates in recent years over whether contemporary black life can ever transcend the historical experience of slavery. Whitehead hasn’t read the essay, but he says the argument makes sense to him if it means black writers need to have the freedom to write whatever and however they want. (He resists attempts to theorize his own work, and it’s clear he’s fairly allergic to the scholarly efforts to categorize his literature. He’s an excellent parodist and, whether aiming his wit at the sophistications of academic vernacular or the flummery of marketing lingo, he’s a master at deconstructing jargons. He once opened a talk at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard by delivering a compelling close reading of Flavor Flav’s “Can’t Do Nuttin For Ya Man” at the lectern.)

Yet his work has been viewed along these lines. His 2009 coming-of-age novel, Sag Harbor, follows a group of “bougie” black kids as they try to survive the summer of 1985 in the black enclave their parents have carved out in the Hamptons. A good part of the comedy revolves around the ways the main character, Benji Cooper, and his friends try and fail to act “authentically black”: city boys with toy BB guns awkwardly grasping at gangsta status. Reviewing the novel, journalist and cultural critic Touré, known for popularizing the term “post-blackness,” inducted Whitehead into a constellation of figures opening up the scripts of blackness: “now Kanye, Questlove, Santigold, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead can do blackness their way without fear of being branded pseudo or incognegro,” he declared.

“Post-blackness” should not be confused with the “postracial.” “We’ll be postracial when we’re all dead,” Whitehead quips, alluding to Zone One (2008), in which his hero, an Everyman nicknamed Mark Spitz, is part of a sweeper unit clearing out the undead in post-apocalyptic downtown Manhattan. In fact, no one has more deliciously julienned this particular bit of cant. In a 2009 New York Times essay, “The Year of Living Postracially,” Whitehead offered himself to the Obama administration as a “secretary of postracial affairs,” who like the hero of his 2006 novel Apex Hides the Hurt, will rebrand cultural artifacts to meet new societal standards. “Diff’rent Strokes and What’s Happening!! will now be known as Different Strokes and What Is Happening?” he suggested, and Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing would be recast with “multicultural Brooklyn writers—subletting realists, couch-surfing postmodernists, landlords whose métier is haiku—getting together on a mildly hot summer afternoon, not too humid, to host a block party, the proceeds of which go to a charity for restless leg syndrome…” The essay suggests the influence of Ishmael Reed, whose hallucinatory satires mine the absurdities of racism for comic effect, highlighting how their surreal and grotesque contortions are refracted in language and sublimated in collective phantasmagorias: television shows, music videos, and the movies.

The critic James Wood has complained about a “filmic” quality in Whitehead’s writing. It is undeniable—but younger readers may find that that quality is its own kind of literacy, a clear picture where Wood sees only static. Rightly or not, there is something contemporary and vivid in Whitehead’s direct apprehension of the way lives are overdetermined and bound by chains of mediated images. It’s a gambit that has surfaced as a question for the contemporary novel before: David Foster Wallace famously worried that television had repurposed irony to commercial ends, defanging it as a weapon in fiction. Whitehead has drawn just the opposite lesson, wagering that irony not only sustains the postmodern novel—but that it can even deepen the stain of allegory.

Can this ironic method successfully take on American slavery? It might seem intimidating, perhaps even overwhelming, to write about a subject where the stakes feel so high. In recent years, the history of slavery, never far from the surface of American life, has seeped back into popular consciousness with renewed urgency. On television, Underground, which debuted this spring, follows the fugitive slave trail; and this past spring The History Channel remade Roots, the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries based on Alex Haley’s novel. On film, black directors are also thrusting slavery to the fore, notably Steve McQueen in 12 Years a Slave (2013) and now Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016), about Nat Turner’s rebellion. This year has also brought at least two other novels that will frame the reception of Whitehead’s: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing reconsiders how African identities interlock but also diverge from the “black narrative”; Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines imagines a counterfactual history in which the Civil War never took place, and bounty hunters roam a contemporary United States seeking runaways. And all this still pales before the inevitable comparisons with major writers on the same theme. Whitehead anticipates these questions, and instantly brushes aside comparisons. “You have to do your own thing, right? Morrison”—that’s Toni Morrison, Litt.D. ’89—“already wrote Beloved; you’re not going to compete with that. I have to write the book that makes sense to me, that’s entirely my own vision.”

The Underground Railroad follows Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, as she makes a break for freedom. She becomes a runaway, a “passenger” who must elude capture as she makes her way northward on the famous Underground Railroad—in Whitehead’s conceit, made literal rather than metaphorical. “When I was a kid I always thought it was a real railroad,” he says with a flashing grin. It’s a testament to the power of metaphor, and, like the ghost in Morrison’s Beloved that haunts the former slaves of Sweet Home plantation even as they try to recreate their new lives in freedom, it marks an assertion of the novelist’s supreme freedom: the freedom that allows fiction to breathe and stand on its own, and writers to carve out a personal dimension within material fraught with communal and ideological strictures.

“When I was a kid I always thought it was a real railroad,” he says with a flashing grin. 

If The Underground Railroad seems to give in to the inescapable pull of “the black narrative” which Whitehead had been celebrated for evading, the new novel isn’t as new it may appear. “This project has been on my mind for at least 10 years,” Whitehead says. “I started thinking about it around the time I was doing John Henry Days but I set it aside. I didn’t feel like I was ready yet to tackle it, the way I was writing then…I’m much more into concision now, in my writing, and I think this book needed that.”

For it, Whitehead did a good deal of research—looking to Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom (2015) to depict the cat-and-mouse game between slavecatchers and freemen scouting for runaways along the docks of New York harbor, and reading the Works Progress Administration’s collection of slave narratives for material details of slave life. But above all, Whitehead drew on the rich literary history to which he is adding a new chapter, refashioning famous scenes in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—especially her account of seven years spent hiding in an attic (a passage he singled out as having profoundly marked him when he read it in college). The ominous figure of the slavecatcher Ridgeway suggests more recent antecedents. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, with its vision of bounty hunters chasing scalps on an American frontier steeped in apocalyptic gore, echoes in Whitehead’s chronicling of the orgiastic violence that haunts the hunting grounds of slavery.

The novel explicitly links slavery to the engine of global capitalism. The theme has gained prominence in recent years, notably through works like River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013) by Walter Johnson and Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) by Sven Beckert (both of Harvard’s history department), which have enlarged the context for our understanding of slavery and resuscitated neglected arguments put forth at least a generation earlier by black Marxists like Eric Williams and Cedric Robinson. The idea of a capitalist drive behind slavery always seemed intuitive to Whitehead, he says. “Being from New York,” he suggests, “you can see the drive for exploitation all around you. It just always seemed obvious to me.”

Rather than centering on one site or aspect of slavery, The Underground Railroad presents readers with a kind of composite. The novel proceeds episodically, with each stage of Cora’s voyage presenting a variation on the conditions of enslavement and emancipation. Caesar, a fellow slave on the Randall plantation who encourages Cora to run away with him, compares their predicament to that of Gulliver, whose book of travels his more lenient master has allowed him to read. He foresees a flight “from one troublesome island to the next, never recognizing where he was, until the world ran out.” This sense of variation on a theme—with no exit in sight—creates a sense of blind forward propulsion without “progress”: scenes of medical experimentation that recall the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Studies appear side by side with those of coffles, auction blocks, abolitionist safe houses, as well as the vision of Valentine farm, a haven in Indiana founded by a successful mixed-race free black who believes that hard work and exposure to high culture will secure the acceptance of his white neighbors. “I wanted to get away from the typical, straightforward plantation,” Whitehead says. His novel doesn’t seek to reenact history, but rather to imagine and represent simultaneously the many hydra heads of a system designed to perpetuate the enclosure and domination of human beings.

The genre of fugitive-slave narratives has long been haunted by sentimentality. As the scholar Saidiya Hartman has suggested, the use of the pain of others for readers’ own purification or enlightenment—or at worst, entertainment—is a deep problem for this genre. Many have argued that the truth of slavery can only be understood first-hand. William Wells Brown, who published an account of his own escape to freedom in 1847, famously asserted that “Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.”

To write about slavery is to face head on this risk of representation. The Underground Railroad can feel at times over-represented, almost too explanatory—seeking at every turn to demonstrate how this or that aspect of slavery worked, flagging a character’s motivations by relating them back to that system. There’s precious little room for characters to be something other than what they appear to be, something more than allegorical props. At one point, Cora, staying at a temporary haven in South Carolina, goes up to the rooftop to look out over the town and up at the sky. The scene’s only function seems to be to give the reader a chance to overhear some of her thoughts and hopes, something of who she is when she is not engaged in the business of trying to stay alive. Despite Whitehead’s best efforts, Cora remains sketched rather than known, a specter seen through a glass darkly. She is a Gothic woman in the attic, haunting the national consciousness, a symbol more than a person. It’s a connection Whitehead makes explicit: “Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn’t sure the Declaration described anything real at all,” says his narrator. “America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.”

Yet there is something new and perhaps unprecedented in the way Whitehead has reasserted the agency of black writers to reconstruct “the black narrative” from within. Whitehead interleaves The Underground Railroad with invented runaway-slave advertisements by planters seeking to recover their property. But in the last one, the hand of the author and that of his protagonist are momentarily overlaid, as though we are reading an advertisement Cora has left us, “written by herself,” as the subtitles of slave narratives habitually put it. “Ran Away,” reads the title and declares below: “She was never property.” The device harnesses the power of fiction to assert impossible authorship, to thrust into view the voice that could not have spoken—but speaks nonetheless. Cora becomes, in the last instance, a mirror not only for the drama of slavery, but for the whole problem of writing about slavery: a vector that points away from something unspeakable and toward something unknown—and perhaps unknowable.

Interestingly, ‌John Henry Days, the book by Whitehead that deals most substantially with the history of Black America, is also almost certainly his least-read. Its hero, J. Sutter, is a freelance writer drawn from New York to an assignment in Talcott, West Virginia: the U.S. Postal Service is hosting a festival celebrating a new John Henry commemorative stamp. Whitehead uses the mythical man and J. Sutter’s pursuit of his meaning to transect the sediment layers of black history. His novel starts at the surface of a media-frenzied America circa 1996, simmering with racial unease and tortuous political correctness, then tunnels down to the labor of steel driving gangs in the 1870s. Along the way, it stops to recast figures like Paul Robeson or rewrite the rioting at Altamont Speedway. Suggesting another history, or set of histories, behind the one we think we know, Whitehead poses the thorny problem of how to interpret the stories we inherit.

In The Grey Album, his collection of essays on black aesthetics, Whitehead’s friend Kevin Young has advanced the idea of the “shadow book”—certain texts which, for a variety of reasons, may fail to turn up: because they were never written, because they are only implied within other texts, or simply because they have been lost. One might add to this a category of books that are eclipsed. For John Henry Days, it was Infinite Jest. Bothare postmodern leviathans, ambitiously unwieldy and bursting with insight, indelibly products of the 1990s. Yet Whitehead’s book has never acquired the kind of cult following that David Foster Wallace’s has. Published in 2001, it seems to have been eclipsed at least in part by historical events (though it can’t have helped that Jonathan Franzen wrote a self-absorbed review for The New York Times that ignored any discussion of race, a stupefying lacuna; Whitehead says that Franzen in fact later apologized for it). If John Henry Days is the “shadow book” of the nineties, the other great masterpiece behind the masterpiece everyone knows, it is also a powerful complement to this new novel on slavery. In time it may be recognized that these books are among Whitehead’s defining achievements, capturing the black experience in America with a wide-angle lens, carrying both its mythic and realistic truth, and delivering it over the transom into the maw of our digitally mediated Internet age.

“You have to do your own thing, right? Morrison already wrote Beloved. You’re not going to compete with that.”

In the meantime, with The Underground Railroad gone to press, Whitehead has been catching up on the reading he loves. He’s reading a lot of crime fiction, Kelly Link’s short stories, and he’s well into the latest Marlon James novel. His daughter is an avid reader of comics, so he’s catching up on those as well. Asked what he might work on next, he answers that he’s still focused on promoting the new book, of course—but possibly something about Harlem, something set in the nineteen sixties. After lunch wraps up, he heads down the block, walking smoothly, smoking a cigarette, back into the thrumming heart of the city.

“You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now,” Whitehead writes in the opening pages of The Colossus of New York. A strain of apocalyptic foreboding, tempered by a refusal to sentimentalize trauma, courses through Colson Whitehead’s fiction. It’s present in the books he wrote even before 9/11. But the attacks of that day inevitably cloud the lyrical essays gathered in Colossus, a collection published in 2001, a time of disaster and mourning in the place he has always called home.

Yet unlike so much writing about New York, Whitehead’s deliberately shies away from emphasizing what makes it special and unique. Whitehead writes instead of the invisible cities that everyone knows and carries within memory, not necessarily the ones that still exist in brick and mortar. He writes about the universal qualities of arrival and departure, loneliness and haste. His second-person address to “you” contains within it the gentle pressure of Walt Whitman’s “I too,” from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Whitehead’s answer to the calamity of terrorism is to insist, like Whitman, on the unbreakable power of the city to transform the vulnerability of the huddled crowd into a heightened, even universal empathy.

“Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world,” Whitehead writes on the last page. True, but it is also a way of reflecting the world through one’s own experience of it. It seems not entirely a coincidence that elevators and underground trains, two of New York’s most iconic modes of transportation, are the symbolic vehicles Whitehead has invoked as he grapples with the wider meanings of America. Whether he is writing about the city he knows best, or the lives of characters in almost unimaginable circumstances, Whitehead has demonstrated time and again a remarkable capacity for turning what appear to be evasions into encounters, the historical arc we want to hide from into the narrative arc we can’t avoid. He is a writer who stands squarely in our present dilemmas and confusions, and suggests lines of sight no one else seems to have considered or dared to imagine.  

One of the oldest foundational stories in Chinese mythology recalls the Great Flood: a massive cataclysm in the upper Yellow River valley that persisted for decades. Early historical texts describe “endless”  water washing over hilltops and rising to the heavens. Survivors left their homes to seek shelter in the high mountains. Finally, a legendary hero, Yu the Great, tamed the flood by dredging channels to drain it away. This feat took years, and it earned him the divine mandate to establish the Xia dynasty, the first in Chinese history, marking the beginning of Chinese civilization.

Already ancient by the time it was written down in about 1,000 B.C.E., the story of the Great Flood was accepted as truth for more than 2,500 years. But a century ago, scholars began challenging it, questioning whether any real historical disaster lay behind the legend. Some wondered if the Xia dynasty itself was pure myth too, cooked up to justify the centralized rule and political succession of the country’s emperors. Archaeologists began searching for evidence that the flood—and the dynasty—had really existed.

They may have found it. A team of researchers including Ofer Bar-Yosef, MacCurdy professor emeritus of prehistoric archaeology, and his one-time student David Cohen ’86, Ph.D. ’01, now an archaeologist at National Taiwan University in Taipei, today published a paper in Science offering geological evidence, perhaps, of the Great Flood. Analyzing distinctive sediments deposited along the Yellow River, the researchers pieced together the sequence of events that unfolded almost 4,000 years ago. First, an earthquake in what is now Qinghai Province triggered a landslide that dammed the Yellow River where it flows through the Jishi Gorge, creating a lake that swelled to as deep as 130 meters. Then, six to nine months later, that landslide dam burst (most likely when the water rose too high), sending the flood rushing downstream, destroying everything in its path.

The location of the dam—and the researchers’ excavation—is some 2,500 kilometers from the site where Emperor Yu is supposed to have calmed the flood and established his dynasty, but Cohen, an expert on the history and archaeology of Bronze Age China, told reporters in a telephone press conference Wednesday that the floodwaters could easily have surged all that way, and to devastating effect. “This is the first time a flood of a scale large enough to account for [the Great Flood] has been found,” he said. “The outburst flood could have caused social disruptions downstream for years.”

The date also seems to fit. Using radiocarbon dating from charcoal deposits in the sediment and, with even more accuracy, the skeletons of three children who died when their houses collapsed in the initial earthquake, the researchers, led by Peking University’s Quinglong Wu, placed the flood at about 1920 B.C.E., which is 200 years later than the Xia Dynasty was long thought to have begun. That date, Cohen said, also roughly coincides with a critical turning point in Chinese civilization: the start of the Bronze Age and the appearance of the first state-level urban society, when bronze ritual weapons and other hallmarks of the early Chinese state began to emerge.  According to history and legend, that turning point hinged on the flood. By dredging and guiding the waters back into their channels—an effort that would likely have required a large number of people—Yu “brings order out of chaos,” Cohen said. “He defines the land….He is establishing the political order and the ideologies of leadership.”

Absent any inscriptions or archaeological records from the Xia dynasty—and records from that early era are unlikely to be found, Cohen said—the geological data offer, if not definitive proof, at least “a tantalizing hint” that the dynasty really did exist.

Bar-Yosef, whose archaeological research has taken him to digs in Egypt, Turkey, the Czech Republic, the Republic of Georgia, and his native Israel, has worked in China for almost 20 years, studying the late Paleolithic era and the beginning of agriculture. Calling his own involvement in this flood study “accidental”—he was invited to join by researchers he’d collaborated with before—Bar-Yosef says the tug for archaeologists trying to unravel origin stories like the Great Flood is understandably strong. “It makes sense,” he explains. “We are constantly searching for archaeological evidence for events which are mentioned in our holy scriptures, whether they are Chinese or Jewish or Christian, and so on, and certain things in archaeology that we couldn’t discover in the past, we do discover them today.”

Visitors to Pusey Library this summer have been greeted by a large cardboard cutout of a cow—part of an exhibit celebrating The Harvard Lampoon and the role it has played in Harvard’s comedic history. The exhibition, “Remorseless Irony and Sarcastic Pens: The Story of the Harvard Lampoon,” showcases photographs, drawings and other artifacts collected over the course of the Lampoon’s 140 years.

The cow is an homage to the Lampoon’s custom of unleashing farm animals on campus for comedic effect. William Randolph Hearst, a member of the Lampoon and the class of 1886—although his pranks resulted in his expulsion—is suspected of having sparked the tradition by releasing roosters in Harvard Yard. Lampoon members were also blamed for the appearance of a cow in the Yard sometime in the 1930s, which was “forcibly ejected” from the premises by Harvard police. 

The exhibit contains an array of memorabilia from the magazine’s earliest days, ranging from photographs of the seven students who founded it in 1876 to a copy of its first issue. In its pages, a jester—the first of the Lampoon’s unofficial illustrated mascots—made his debut. Another cartoon derisively imagined a feminist Harvard 100 years in the future. (This suggestion proved prescient: coeducational student housing at Harvard was introduced in 1970, and the Lampoon inducted its first female members in 1972—just a few years shy of the magazine’s centennial.)

Other, more mundane artifacts are also on display: minutes from Lampoon meetings over the years note milestones such as the official incorporation of the organization in 1902 and the purchase of its modern-day home on Bow Street—the “Lampoon Castle”—in 1909. The building, the exhibit notes, bears a resemblance to a human face; a photograph on display depicts it adorned with oversized sunglasses and a faux cigarette to honor Natalie Wood, who came in person to receive her “Worst Actress” award in 1966. 

Prominently featured in the exhibit are examples of some of the Lampoon’s most successful work—its parodies of well-known, national magazines. Copies of a 1925 sendup of The Literary Digest and a successful spoof of Esquire in 1935 are on display: both were suppressed by local authorities for their “obscene content.” Another parody, of Cosmopolitan, from 1972, is also highlighted. That issue, which broke sales records at the time, included a centerfold spread of a seemingly scantily clad Henry Kissinger, along with headlines along the lines of “10 Ways to Decorate Your Uterine Wall.” (That, along with the parody’s generally mocking tone, drew the attention of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, a letter from whom asking the Lampoon to tone down their ridicule is also on view.)

The Lampoon has occasionally even branched out into full-length parodies of novels—a stack of them will be found in one of the display cases—starting with Alice’s Adventures in Cambridge in 1913. Other, more recent editions include 1969’s Bored of the Rings and The Hunger Pains of 2012. 

Along one wall of the gallery are examples of the Lampoon’s forays into politics over the years: after beginning with a cover featuring Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880, the magazine has since published a “Red Scare Issue” and a cover illustration of John F. Kennedy ’40 duking it out with Richard Nixon. The most recent political joke in the exhibition is a photograph of Donald Trump sitting in the chair of the president of The Harvard Crimson. (Stealing the chair is part of a long-standing rivalry between the two student publications; the Crimson seeks, in turn, to abscond with the copper statue of an ibis perched atop the Lampoon Castle.) Members of the Lampoon, having stolen the chair, fraudulently convinced Trump he would receive the Crimson’s endorsement in this year’s presidential election—proof that the 140 years of antics have yet to let up.

“Remorseless Irony and Sarcastic Pens: The Story of the Harvard Lampoon” will be on view through October 2 on the ground floor of Pusey Library.

Judith Brodsky’s entry into the art world began with a hand-drawn circle. Then a young wife and mother just years out of Radcliffe, Brodsky ’54 traced a radius around a map of her home in Princeton, New Jersey, and considered how far away she could go to study art and still be home by the time her children returned from school. Now an accomplished printmaker and Distinguished Professor emerita of the visual arts department at Rutgers, Brodsky recalls that at college, “There were these pulls in different directions”: students were encouraged to be scholars, but TheRadcliffe News was filled with news of engagements and weddings. While pursuing her degree in the history of art, Brodsky herself was married by the end of her junior year.

By the early 1960s, she was itching to stage her first rebellion. The radius of her circle brought her to Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia, where she studied printmaking and began to identify male dominance in fine art. When women’s movements rose to challenge this status quo in the 1970s, Brodsky helped launch FOCUS, a festival celebrating women artists that drew feminist art pioneer Judy Chicago and abstract expressionist Lee Krasner, among others. The program’s success became evident from the pushback: “We got sued,” Brodsky recalls, “by a male artist who said he couldn’t get a show during that period because the galleries were only showing women.”

She kept up this dedication to outsider artists: in 1986, she founded the printmaking center at Rutgers that now bears her name, The Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. The center provides studio space and materials for women artists, artists of color, and gay and lesbian artists, whose work might be too politically charged for museum curators. It has also helped place their art in collections throughout the United States and around the world. The genius was in the medium: “It was easier for an institution to buy a print,” she explains, “than to risk spending a lot of money to buy a painting or sculpture.”

Brodsky has also earned acclaim for her art: provocative print installations, etchings, and collaged images. Her own attraction to printmaking comes from its physicality, she says. The sketching, etching, and transferral involved in the medium constitute a whole-body procedure that “becomes almost meditative” and provides a deep connection to her work: “There’s no part of you that’s not involved in the process.” More than 100 museums and companies now house her pieces in their permanent collections, including the Library of Congress, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Berlin’s Stadtmuseum, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard.

Some of her projects skew more personal, addressing her own memories as they align with historical themes. One major series, Memoir of an Assimilated Family (2003), consists of black-and-white photographs, each enlarged and framed by a black background. She culled these images from her personal archives; the selections show several generations of a Jewish-American family moving through a changing world. Beneath the sometimes somber, sometimes joyful images is stark text that explains what Brodsky knows about the subjects, and the particular memories they evoke.

In other series, Brodsky offers a playful look at relationships between humans and nature. The Meadowlands Strike Back, from 1996, was conceived as a reaction to her workday commute on the New Jersey Turnpike. “As I was driving up and down the Turnpike,” she writes in a statement accompanying an exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design, “the imagery of the refineries, the garbage mountains, and the ports impinged on my consciousness.” One image, “The Animals Run Away,” is a deep red hell-scape of burning pines, with oil derricks rising to the top of the frame while bear-like creatures flee at bottom. “Garbage Mountain” shows a rising pile of fly-covered bags, with interlaid images of dead fish saturating the print’s lower half in Technicolor. “It’s one of my ways of making people aware of what the world is like around them,” she says of her habit of rendering apocalypse in cheery hues. She likens her style to literary satire, forcing commentary by drawing beauty from disarray.

Elsewhere, Brodsky blends popular science with philosophy. Her latest series, The Twenty Most Important Scientific Questions of the 21st Century, is a science fiction-like response to a New York Times list from 2003; it offers her take on what these questions, and their answers, could look like. One work, “Why Do We Sleep?” is an enlarged sepia image of wide-open eyes, surrounded by a neat halo of bulbs as if in an old diagram. The eyes themselves seem distressed by the question, as if it is what keeps them awake. Another, “How Many Body Parts Can Be Replaced? (Male)” centers on a Vitruvian Man-like figure, with skeletal parts and human organs orbiting him; an almost whimsical pattern of eyes and ears frames the piece. This neat menu of parts mocks the question, as if invasive surgery could be ordered from a buffet. By carrying them to their absurd extremes, Brodsky makes the questions themselves a target for her cynicism, and forces this century’s thinkers to consider what they are really asking. “If you replace all the body parts,” she says, “is it really science at the bottom of this? Or is it the desire never to die?”

Balancing her competing commitments as artist, curator, and advocate has not always been easy. During her lengthy career, Brodsky has periodically paused to consider her direction and legacy: “I thought, when I’m on my deathbed, do I want to look back and think about what I’ve done as an administrator, or do I want to have made more artwork?” But since that first, private rebellion, when a younger Brodsky sought to expand her creative horizons, her radius has expanded outward—drawing others, who were previously excluded, into the circle of accepted art.

Nicholas Britell ’03 fell in love with music through the movies. Chariots of Fire made him want to study classical piano, and as a 12-year-old, he took obsessive notes on James Horner’s score for the 1992 hacker film Sneakers. If, like Horner’s shimmer of flutes and choir, his own work as a film composer doesn’t immediately jump out at the average viewer, it’s because Britell considers his role a supportive one, aimed at realizing another artist’s vision.

Understatement can be especially key with documentary scores, he says. Overly explicit music can hinder the narrative: “You have to be very careful, because it can be very easy to veer into melodrama.” Recruited to work on The Seventh Fire, a documentary on Native American gang life by friend and collaborator Jack Riccobono ’03, Britell began composing well before many of the shoots took place, using Neil Young’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s Western, Dead Man, as a reference point. Later, though, he came to feel that “A lot of music that I wrote no longer felt right for the movie. It felt straightforward, almost. It was very clear music. It sounded like a quiet rock song.” After changing tack, “we wound up with these synthesizer tone poems.” Britell’s quiet, amorphous sonic landscape mapped to the unfamiliar topography of the White Earth Reservation, in Minnesota. Instead of handholding the audience through the narrative, the score was an aural extension of the scenery, immersing them in the documentary’s setting. 

Brash and star-studded, The Big Short might seem the polar opposite of an art-house documentary. But however shellacked with Hollywood handsomeness, that movie was also a nonfiction adaptation, Britell points out—and openly didactic. There too, his job was to support the delivery of sophisticated ideas, as the film strove to educate (and enrage) audiences about the financial crisis. For a sequence offering a brief history of banking, Britell supplied exuberant brass; when another scene explained the stupendously elaborate fraud inflating the 2008 mortgage bubble, jittery broken chords rippled beneath the dialogue. “The audience had to feel it,” Britell says. “What was at stake, the complexity.”

Specifications for other projects have varied widely. Commissioning new intro music for their podcast, the hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest gave Britell verbal prompts ranging from “Kierkegaard” to “gamelan,” and made a tongue-in-cheek request for “something that will challenge people, but doesn’t trouble the conscience.” His work composing the on-screen music in 12 Years a Slave had almost the opposite imperative. As National Public Radio critic Ann Powers pointed out, the movie, about a violinist sold into slavery, also examined “how hate and fear gave vibration to music, how music turned those emotions into more without losing their sting”—and he had to write with a dual purpose: “It had to be plausible, but it also had to work dramatically.” Reconstructing period-appropriate fiddle tunes, field songs, and spirituals, he says, was “an almost archaeological process.” (He found that collections of such music published in the 1860s lamented the inadequacy of Western musical notation; the books’ prefaces even called the textual result a mere “shadow” of the real thing.)

With his music, Britell aims to create atmosphere or add texture, and to lend films a sense of intimacy. He tends not to write soaring, hummable melodies in a sweeping orchestral style. His score for the historical epic The Free State of Jones features an 11-note melody for the hero, first heard on a distant-seeming horn, then darkly returning in a crucial scene, on cello; for The Seventh Fire, he composed a motif associated with the central subject’s young daughter. But, he says, “I think more often than not, themes work for relationships, more than for individual characters. It’s less like the sort of Wagner leitmotif” (or, to use a pop reference, the “Imperial March” announcing Darth Vader). “Themes are more about interconnections, sometimes. That’s something I’m continuing to discover in film projects.”

Other recent collaborations include scores for the sophomore films of two up-and-coming indie talents—Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Adam Leon’s Tramps—as well as music for classmate Natalie Portman’s feature directorial debut. For that project, an adaptation of Amos Oz’s novel A Tale of Love and Darkness, Britell was encouraged to compose independent of the footage. He ended up with a “dreamlike sound”: Western classical forms, but with extreme reverbs and bells. What fascinates him about his craft is the unpredictable alchemy between image and sound. “How they interact,” Britell says, “is the biggest mystery.”

Thomas D. Seeley, Ph.D. ’78, studies swarm intelligence, notably in the complex lives of honeybees. Apis mellifera arrived on this continent with European settlers, perhaps in the 1620s. A long line of scientists has engaged with the species, including Seeley, of Cornell, whose Honeybee Democracy was sampled here in 2011. A delightful new book, Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting (Princeton, $22.95), is, as the subtitle suggests, a personal guide to finding wild hives (as opposed to the industry of keeping colonies of bees in hives). With enriching nods to such Harvardian predecessors as Henry David Thoreau and George Harold Edgell (The Bee Hunter, 1949), Seeley’s book is richly informed by both research and the author’s sheer love for “the most intelligent insect in the world.” Here’s what you are in for, if you follow his directions during the autumn goldenrod bloom:

Generally speaking, the best times for bee hunting are when the bees are experiencing a definite honey flow, such as the milkweed flow or the goldenrod flow, for this means that it will not be hard to find bees on flowers. Bee hunting only works well, however, during the start or the end of a honey flow—that is, when nectar is available but is not super plentiful. The peak days of a honey flow are usually useless for a bee hunter because the rate at which a honeybee colony is taking in nectar has a strong effect on the motivation of its nectar foragers to recruit additional bees to their food sources…. This is true regardless of the source, be it a patch of flowers brimming with sweet nectar or a bee hunter’s comb loaded with sugar syrup.

The bees’ disinclination to bring nest mates to a comb filled with sugar syrup during the peak of a honey flow is a serious problem for the bee hunter. After all, once you have found bees on flowers, have caught a dozen or so bees in your bee box, have baited them with a comb filled with sugar syrup, and have released these bees to fly home [suitably marked with dots of paint!], what you desire most keenly to happen next is for some of your bees to reappear quickly at your comb. Even more, you want your baited bees to bring lots of their sisters to your comb, so that you will have plenty of bees to observe flying home from where you are launching your hunt [so the hunter can time their flights and mark their course].

If the honey flow is just starting up or is winding down, then the bees that you’ve trapped in your bee box were probably experiencing only mediocre foraging success before you captured them. If so, then they are likely to be sufficiently impressed with your sugar syrup to want to return for more and to share with their nest mates the news of your wonderful free lunch. Indeed, if the bees are receiving only vanishingly small nectar rewards from the flowers, and the weather is delightful, then you could soon have dozens of bees mobbing your comb.

Progress and Confusion: The State of Macroeconomic Policy, edited by Olivier J. Blanchard, Raghuram G. Rajan, Kenneth S. Rogoff, Cabot professor of public policy, and Lawrence H. Summers, Eliot University Professor (MIT, $31.95). The global financial crisis and Great Recession exposed weaknesses in regulation and policy, and they and the sluggish aftermath have shaken the intellectual underpinnings of macroeconomics. The lingering uncertainties, explored here, are a worry—and a welcome antidote to hubris. From a different perspective, the Law School’s Hal S. Scott, Nomura professor of international financial systems, examines Connections and Contagion (MIT, $38), and argues that regulators need more powers than Congress has been willing to grant to stave off future financial panics.

Nothing like a topsy-turvy election year to bring out a longing for past leaders. Larry Tye, NF ’94, delivers a substantial biography of Bobby Kennedy [’48]: The Making of a Liberal Icon (Random House, $32), while Nick Littlefield ’64 and David Nexon ’66, former members of their subject’s staff, profile the Lion of the Senate (Simon & Schuster, $35): the work of Edward M. Kennedy ’54, LL.D. ’08, in the Newt Gingrich-era, Republican Congress. And While England Slept, by John F. Kennedy ’40, LL.D. ’56 (Praeger, $75), appears in print again with a new foreword by Stephen C. Schlesinger ’64, LL.B. ’68. Spooling back to a previous dynasty, former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld ’58, A.M. ’60, portrays in dramatic depth His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt [A.B. 1904, LL.D. 1929] (Knopf, $30).

Celebrating its collections, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, with Scala Arts Publishers, has released two book-like catalogs: The Rarest of the Rare ($22.95), a narrative cum stunning selection of photographs of interesting specimens, and the new Sea Creatures in Glass ($24.95), on the recently restored and cleaned Blaschka marine animals, the lesser-known cousins to the glass flowers. Nifty mini coffee-table books, with eminent authors (Edward O. Wilson, James Hanken, et al.) to boot.

For the quantitatively inclined, or those who would like to be, Summing It Up: From One Plus One to Modern Number Theory, by Avner Ash ’71, Ph.D. ’75, and Robert Gross (Princeton, $27.95), begins with addition (you need only algebra to follow) and proceeds, with calculus, to probe the results of the initial “enormous intellectual effort to conceive of an abstract theory of addition.” Turning to applications and a more accessible voice, mathbabe.org blogger Cathy O’Neil, Ph.D. ’99, disaffected from Wall Street, writes Weapons of Math Destruction (Crown, $26), examining the data and algorithms used for credit scoring, insurance underwriting, and more—to explain “how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy.”

Copernicus, by Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and of the history of science (Oxford, $11.95 paper), is indeed one in the series of “very short introduction” volumes, by an outstanding scholar and writer (first sentence: “In or around 1510 Nicolaus Copernicus…invented the solar system”). Other eminent thinkers enjoy a fresh vogue in The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, in which Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chalpin, Phillips professor of early American history, reread the author of the Essay on the Principle of Population and cast his ideas in the New World and global context, rather than that of the teeming cities of Europe (Princeton, $49.50); and Lysenko’s Ghost, in which Loren Graham, an MIT historian of science emeritus and associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies, examines the notorious Russian biological theorist in light of current understanding of epigenetics and the living expression of organisms’ genetic code—and renewed enthusiasm for such ideas in some Russian circles (Harvard, $24.95).

China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Arthur R. Kroeber ’84 (Oxford, $16.95 paper). China was an economic nonentity when the author entered college; now it looms so large that everyone does need to know about its output of steel, consumption of soybeans, and much more. Kroeber, an on-the-ground expert for 15 years (and a participant in this magazine’s “Changing, Challenging China” roundtable, March-April 2010), provides clear, level guidance to the needed economic reforms that an official once described as “walking a tightrope over a bottomless pit—and the rope behind you is on fire.”

Vision: How It Works and What Can Go Wrong, by John E. Dowling, Gund research professor of neurosciences, and John L. Dowling Jr. (MIT, $32). An admirably lucid, succinct explication of the scientific understanding of vision, and of disorders of that vital sense, by a leading researcher and an ophthalmologist—a paired approach that one craves for other senses and conditions.

Old genres in a new era: Never Better! by Miriam Udel ’98, Ph.D. ’08 (University of Michigan, $60). The title exactly captures the ironic insouciance mingled with despair of modern Jewish picaresque literature. The author, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at this magazine, is associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Emory. Meanwhile, in The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Harvard, $40), Nikki Skillman, Ph.D. ’12, now professing at Indiana University, explores how feeling, memory, and thought, once the domain of the lyric, now function poetically when informed by neuroscience, too, as in works by Ammons, Ashbery, Graham, and others.

When the Fences Come Down, by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ed.M. ’05 (University of North Carolina, $27.95). In an era of increasing racial and economic segregation across school-district lines, the author, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, examines school-desegregation efforts in four southern metropolitan areas—and develops evidence of clear gains in school and housing desegregation.

Retreat and Its Consequences, by Robert J. Lieber (Cambridge University Press, $24.99). A Georgetown professor argues that a robust American foreign policy is essential to world order, and therefore, the nation’s own interests. An academic argument against the current “pullback,” it concludes that the United States will reengage as a world leader, given a new perception of opportunities—or of perils.

The Curse of Cash, by Kenneth S. Rogoff, Cabot professor of political economy (Princeton, $29.95). In approachable language, a leading economist lays out the case for doing in paper money. He cites abuses of currency (tax evasion, corruption, terrorism, trade in illegal goods like drugs, human trafficking), and the practical problem that physical money sloshing around has made it much harder for central bankers to effect monetary policy in a near-zero interest-rate environment. The poor would need access to subsidized debit cards, among other interesting details.

An 1854 wood-block-print map of land and sea routes through northern Japan, from Cartographic Grounds
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division

From the design perspective: Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America, by Felipe Correa, associate professor of urban design (University of Texas, $40), looks closely at cities shaped less by the migration from the countryside than by the intersection of heavy infrastructure and global demand for oil, minerals, and related goods. To keep track of the growth, one might consult Cartographic Grounds, by Jill Desimini, assistant professor of landscape architecture, and Charles Waldheim, Irving professor of landscape architecture (Princeton Architectural press, $50), a technically advanced book that lay users will find breathtakingly beautiful and mind-expanding, as it sweeps from historical examples to data visualization.

Thomson: The State of Music and Other Writings (Library of America, $50). One need know nothing about music to know that Virgil Thomson ’22, D.Mus. ’82, could write. So it is delightful to have this volume, with its vivid autobiographical passages on Harvard (“In Cambridge, on the first day I took a room; on the second I acquired a piano and a piano teacher”).

“We can’t go on together / With suspicious minds,” Elvis crooned in ’68—though roughly 50 years later, if you feel so inclined, you can graft the title of Joseph Finder’s new thriller Guilty Minds onto the lyrics without seriously neutering the themes of either work. Both guilty minds and suspicious minds hurt people—and even though the mechanics of a thriller are necessarily powered by outsize doses of suspicion, Finder second-guesses this force. He knows that minds trained in suspicion, trained to act on suspicion, will sometimes make dangerous mistakes. In his novels, the suspicious mind is ever on the precipice of becoming guilty.

Finder has been publishing thrillers for the past quarter-century, beginning with 1991’s The Moscow Club, which took as its jumping-off point the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (He earned a master’s in regional studies, focusing on the Soviet Union, in 1984.) The end of the Golden Age of espionage serves as a tonal backdrop to Finder’s fictions; the post-Cold War matriculation of intelligence agents into the private sector served as inspiration for his series character Nick Heller, who first appeared in 2009’s Vanished. Throughout his works, all the leftover postwar suspicion hovers like a vile force.

The plot of Guilty Minds, as you’d expect, is taut, rapid, and tensely recurving. Private spy Heller has been hired by D.C. socialite and political power player Gideon Parnell to debunk a salacious story about one of Parnell’s good friends. The online gossip rag Slander Sheet is threatening to release an exposé linking the publicly milquetoast Chief Justice Jeremiah Claflin (one thinks of the blandish Everyman air of John Roberts ’76, J.D. ’79) to a series of liaisons with a District-based escort pseudonymously named, à la Ian Fleming, Heidi L’Amour. Heller’s charge: disprove the tale, and resettle the status quo.

Crafting one of his thrillers involves extensive, detailed, and peripatetic research, including interviews with specialists of his chosen mise en scène; if it takes him, on average, a year to produce a manuscript, only three to four months are given over to the actual writing. In prepping for Guilty Minds, for instance, he spoke with call girls and private investigators and even visited the offices of the gossip website Gawker, where he studied the company’s business model and spoke to employees about their fear of lawsuits. (“You can see,” he says, “how we haven’t fully negotiated privacy, or the responsibility of journalists.”)

Speaking with Finder, it becomes evident that he knows a lot, yet his conversation is pleasant in the way the conversation of a happily condescending professor is—he is pleased enough to engage with others on the level of their curiosity; it’s the hunger for knowledge, shared between speakers, that matters to him.

Though he’s primarily written stand-alone thrillers, Finder notes that working with the Heller series has yielded special technical benefits. In a one-off literary treatment, “the central character’s world has to be turned upside down—but you can’t have the character’s life be upended in every book.” In exchange for sacrificing that high drama, Finder reaps opportunities for increased topicality and societal commentary, which in turn augment intellectual heft—what he calls his works’ “ballast.” (Guilty Minds, for instance, treats of the dilemma of privacy in the digital age.) Though he raised himself on the thin, snappy novels of Ian Fleming, he also paid his dues with the baroque doorstoppers of writers like Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Tom Clancy. “I actually loved those books,” he says. “There was a time when popular entertainment meant a thick book, but then books began to slim down—I suspect it had a lot to do with the shortening of the American attention span.”

Technology, too, has whittled down the standard-issue thriller’s page-count, he points out: “I was on a panel once a long time ago and someone said, ‘You know, the one thing that’s gonna really screw up detective novels is the cell phone’—because in the old days you could be out of touch, and you couldn’t find a payphone anywhere nearby, and that took up time. But I realized it’s actually going to transform the storylines. Technology is going to make things more difficult in some ways, and more interesting in other ways.”

In Finder’s works, technology doesn’t needlessly complicate the plot. “What I didn’t like about Clancy and his thousand-page books,” he says, “was that they were so drily technical….Reading them was like reading an owner’s manual for a submarine—I don’t actually want to learn how to operate this thing; I’d like to ride in it.” Nor is technology, in his novels, the spectacle-in-itself. “I’ve heard people describe my books as techno­thrillers,” he adds, “and that terrifies me, because to me a technothriller is a thriller that’s completely taken up with the exposition of technology—and…I’m much more interested in people. Technology is simply the texture of the world in which I set the book.”

For all the cell-phone tracking, password hacking, and digital hijinks that stipple Guilty Minds, the narrative remains driven by what Finder refers to as “gumption work”—the classic private-eye footwork of stakeouts, stalking, and visual clue-grubbing. If a complicated technological device springs up at any point, it always leads back to the characters, and the sometimes sordid interconnectedness of their lives.

Finder’s career itself began with an instance of gumption, during his degree-work at Harvard’s Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies). He paid his bills teaching expository writing; he passed his afternoons haunting used bookstores in Harvard Square. “I wanted to be a writer,” he recalls, “but I had no idea how to do it.” One afternoon, browsing at Harvard Bookstore, he picked up a copy of Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan ’45, and discovered, upon reading the author’s note, that the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer lived in Cambridge. “So I went home and I looked in the phonebook and I found his number and I called him up, and I said, ‘You don’t know me, but I want to write, and I don’t know what to do,’ and he invited me over to his house on Francis Avenue, and he told me how it works. He helped me write my first proposal—and he introduced me to his agent.”

As in sleuthing, the old ways will always pay.

While snooping for signs that a suburban salon was illegally shooting up its clients with Botox, Sarah Alcorn ’90 went undercover: “I wore too much makeup and acted like a ditz.” Searching Boston’s homeless shelters for a junkie who’d witnessed an armed robbery, she feigned dishevelment and “dressed in sweats.” Once she donned a brunette wig and sunglasses to tail an alleged adulteress at a hotel. “I like to fit into any canvas,” says the petite faux blond while scrolling through the database of public divorce records at the Middlesex County Probate and Family Court for background information in an assault case. “Changing personas appeals to me.”

A fine-arts concentrator at Harvard, Alcorn worked on props and set design in Hollywood (hence the fondness for hairpieces) before becoming a private criminal investigator 17 years ago. Chameleonic versatility and cleverness aren’t the only traits she exploits to succeed in a field traditionally dominated by tough men—but they have helped. “I spend a lot of time knocking on doors and getting people who don’t want to talk to me to talk to me,” she reports. “Some people respond to the P.I. who’s an ex-cop and might throw his weight around a little. I find the social worker/nice lady vibe often works better for me.”

She has worked on at least a thousand cases, including an ancillary trial connected to the Boston Marathon bombing, and is on the defense team in the high-profile murder of Boston toddler Bella Bond, whose body washed up on Deer Island last year. Some 25 other current cases range from sexual and armed assaults, financial frauds, and robberies to adult murders, drug deals, bar fights, and domestic abuse. She also takes on civil suits and divorces, along with the occasional missing-person search.

A few years ago, on an icy February night, Alcorn was out looking for a mentally ill teenage runaway. Worried that he might freeze to death, she urgently checked police stations, shelters, parks, and hospitals, and questioned homeless people sleeping outside. It turned out “the kid had his parents’ credit card and was staying at a four-star hotel. Living like a lord,” she says. “The lesson there was: Follow the money.”

It also clarifies that detective work is rarely glamorous. Alcorn spends most of her workdays alone, logging hours at the computer trawling social-media sites and proprietary databases for authorized law enforcers and private investigators, like IRBsearch and Locate PLUS, or talking on the phone, trying to reach relatives, friends, and other potential witnesses who can shed light on a crime or a defendant. She gets out of the office to document crime scenes, collect information at courthouses, libraries, and archives (often a tedious process, even without the wheedling), attend hearings or trials, visit inmates, and drive around neighborhoods looking for people.

“People would not enjoy watching real detective work,” says David J. Prum ’80, a former longtime private investigator who was Alcorn’s mentor and then business partner until she opened her solo practice, Greystones Investigation, in 2005. It’s not about building a broad, alluring narrative, but “getting raw information, exactly the words and intention around ‘what A said and B said and C said’ and laying them all down and keeping it all straight in your head while you’re trying to get the story out of the next person,” he adds. “In a complex case, it’s like needlework or dissection: you have to be precise and have extreme patience and tolerance” for pinning down minutiae.

In the larger scheme, Alcorn’s daily doggedness reinforces the integrity of the criminal-justice system, she hopes, and helps keep jury trials “healthy.” Prosecutors rely on police detectives to gather evidence, primarily of guilt, but defense attorneys hire private investigators, like Alcorn, to dig up information that exculpates, or at least raises reasonable doubt among jurors. About half her cases involve indigents with assigned public defenders—“low-paying work, but abundant and interesting,” she says. (More lucrative corporate and security work, or insurance investigations, are “boring.”) Early on, she enthusiastically sought to “Put away the bad guys! They’re a bunch of scumbags!” she recalls—“I am not a bleeding-heart liberal, by the way”—but she soon saw enough to conclude that with the “full weight of the police department, the prosecutor’s office, the Commonwealth against them, the little guy or the little woman needs help,” even if it’s just mitigating the charges against them.

She points to an old Cambridge case, where a police officer reported seeing a drug deal in a park. When she went to the scene, not only was the distance between the deal’s alleged location and the officer’s position too great to see “a little baggie get passed between hands,” she says, but the transaction supposedly happened at night—and the view was “blocked by trees.” “There’s no way anyone could see that. It was absurd,” she declares. “Now, was the alleged drug dealer a questionable character? Probably. However, in this case it doesn’t matter if he dealt drugs 50 times before. They can’t just make up stuff to get a guilty verdict.”

One of the few times she has felt threatened came while investigating a police shooting, and someone—either a fellow private detective or a law-enforcement officer (she believes it was the latter)—used an authorized database to link her to the case. “They published my name and address and my parents’ address and wrote ‘This is the woman,’” she says. Police misconduct occurs, she says, but “I do wonder to what extent a lot of police officers are suffering from a kind of PTSD, and so [they display] this hyper-vigilance. It doesn’t excuse [misconduct] but it maybe explains some of the behavior. I am not anti-police; I think it’s a very tough job.”

Within an often overheated, adversarial system, Alcorn’s duties are surprisingly neutral. She finds out what witnesses saw and think they know to be true (the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, once the bedrock of guilty verdicts, is increasingly being contested by scientists and in the courts), and what they will say on the stand, taking notes that can lead to depositions. She reports “whatever it is: good, bad, or indifferent.” If someone tells her the gun was in her client’s hand, she needs to know that’s what will surface at trial.

The work resembles social anthropology, in its conscious avoidance of moral judgments. “People waste a lot of time trying to understand crime in moral terms,” David Prum notes, “but crime is a completely normal human activity.” There are lawbreakers devoid of a moral compass, he explains, “just like some people are color-blind,” but among the thousands of cases he has worked on, “I’ve only run into a few stone-cold psychos. And it’s obvious when you do. You can’t fake that, nor would anyone want to.”

Instead Prum, who like Alcorn has theater experience, looks at many crimes as “bad performance art. What you see in courts is the result of a lot of young men—because the majority of violent crimes are committed by men between the ages of 16 and 24—who are stuck in a malignant narrative. They are dramatizing themselves, acting out to have an impact on their environment, not to be noticed but to notice themselves, expressing their beings in the face of a reality that ignores them.” He has never carried a gun because “What’s going to happen in a tense situation when a bad guy with a gun knows you’ve got one? He’s likely to use his first. I’ve been in bad situations with armed people and simply walked away. It’s not worth their while to attack if they see you leaving.”

With this in mind, Alcorn favors Mace over a gun. She approaches the job, at least when interviewing potential witnesses, largely as a creative employment of empathy. “The ability to imagine other people’s states of mind,” Prum calls it—to “care about what they are going to share with you.” Often, for witnesses and victims, these are the grittiest details of the most traumatic event of their lives. Alcorn, he says, has an “incredible curiosity about other people—not because she is superficially interested in what she can get out of them, but because she is genuinely interested in the person sitting in front of her.”

Alcorn admits to an abiding “affection for morally ambiguous people.” Where it stems from, she has no idea, but she seems to root for the “Tony Sopranos of the world.” And she finds crime—“why it happens, how it happens, how it’s solved, forensics, the incidental narratives—infinitely fascinating, you know?” She is also nosy. Engaging with thousands of people and visiting their homes, seeing how they live, offers “a view of the range of humanity that most people don’t get to see.” A hoarder’s home where “every single item was pink or purple, even the Christmas decorations. Floor to ceiling, filled with pink and purple clothing, boxes, toys.” The backyard of a house in the country where a murder had taken place, that was strewn with a dozen deer legs sticking out of the frozen ground—“someone had been dressing deer back there”—and a dead cat.

Thirsty from an early age for such extreme sights, Alcorn moved to New York City after graduation to work in theater production, then quickly on to Los Angeles. There, she focused on production design, like creating props for Bottle Rocket, idiosyncratic director Wes Anderson’s first movie (she was also his girlfriend for a year). Her Hollywood career ultimately “tanked,” she says, “mostly because I was bottoming out on partying and bad activities.” In 1997, she returned to Boston, moved in with her parents (her father, Alfred Alcorn ’64, writes academic murder mysteries), and got sober through a 12-step recovery process that she still abides by, finding that “doing the next right thing” serves her well.

Once clear-headed enough, she decided to put her love of research (likely inherited from her father, she adds) and preoccupation with crime to constructive use. She applied to become an FBI agent but, fortuitously, around that time met Prum through mutual friends, and “basically stalked him until he hired me.” (He confirms that.)

Alcorn had already been victimized by then, and responded with stealth. An ex-boyfriend had been stalking her (“to the tune of trying to break down the door of my apartment”) and despite a restraining order, he didn’t stop. Alcorn staked out his house, followed him, and called the police on her cell phone until they served him with a restraining order-violation notice.

After five years as Prum’s apprentice and an interview with the Massachusetts State Police (both requirements for her state license), she officially became a private detective—and, along the way, got married, had a daughter, Juliet, and soon divorced. She loves the jolt, what she calls the “hit,” of moving from “playing Barbies” on the carpet at home to, an hour later, locking up her valuables and “being processed” through the metal detector by guards at a prison in order to interview a murderer.

As a Harvard-educated, artistic single mom, Alcorn knows she’s “a bit of an oddball in this business.” At educational workshops, conferences, and meetings of the Licensed Private Detective Association of Massachusetts, most of her colleagues have been “male, Republican, ex-cops with bellies,” she says—and “total sweethearts, helpful and accepting of me.” More women have entered the field within the last decade, however, and Alcorn, who stays abreast of the latest forensic procedures, legalities, databases, and technology through conferences and seminars, enjoys following the expertise of two of them—“location/background gurus” Cynthia Hetherington and Michèle Stuart. At a recent course on conducting Dark Web searches (for typically illegal content that exists apart from the publicly accessible Internet and search engines), Alcorn says Hetherington warned that, “from a cyber safety perspective, it’s like walking with open cuts into a room full of vampires.”

Humorous—were it not true. Criminal work is steeped in “the darker side of human nature,” Alcorn acknowledges. “It is psychically taxing, if nothing else.” More than 90 percent of her cases result from people doing “something stupid to get money to get drugs, or being on drugs or alcohol,” she reports. Without insight into the addict’s frame of mind, and her own hard-earned recovery, she wouldn’t have lasted in the job “because there is so much hopelessness and death.” Every day she meets people struggling just to get by and build a clean life who are consistently “hobbled by the system.” A witness she recently spoke to is on probation and therefore on call for drug testing, meaning that even at work (and he feels lucky to have a job, she says), for a spot-check, he must leave his post, take a long, round-trip bus ride to the site, and pay $11 for the test. “How is he supposed to do that, and keep his job?” she asks.

Alcorn can’t help identifying with some people, especially women, especially women who drink. “I’ll show up in court sometimes and see some woman whose hair is all messy, her eyes are sunken, she’s got handcuffs on, she looks completely confused, she’s hit someone with her car,” she says. “And I am no different. If I had not chosen the path that I took, I could be that woman, you know?”  

The Harvard Alumni Association (HAA), says new president Martin J. Grasso Jr. ’78, offers “the luxury of staying in the conversations we had as undergraduate and graduate students with the most interesting and intellectually stimulating people we know.” The Boston-based CEO of Pearl Street Capital Group began his one-year term July 1, taking over from Paul L. Choi ’86, J.D. ’89. The HAA includes 330,000 alumni worldwide, and coordinates clubs, SIGs, and class reunions, along with educational trips, online learning, international gatherings, and opportunities for professional and social networking.

The HAA also harnesses the power and talents of scores of alumni volunteers who serve on committees, help put on Commencement, recruit and interview applicants for admission, produce class news and notes, and otherwise keep classmates engaged in University life.

As one such volunteer, Grasso has served on the HAA board’s executive committee since 2013 and is a former co-chair of the College broadening engagement committee charged with cultivating a critical base of support: alumni between their twenty-fifth and fortieth reunion years. The work has kept him close to intellectual life at the University, the vitality of young, bright students, and a cohort of enthusiastic fellow alumni. He says he has also enjoyed “mentoring high-school students in the college application process who are keenly interested in attending Harvard.” He credits his public-school teachers in Revere, Massachusetts, as well as a “young, scrubby-faced, junior admissions officer”—William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, Ed.D. ’71, now dean of admissions and financial aid—with convincing him that “Harvard might actually be within reach, both academically and financially.”

Grasso’s also grateful to his parents’ teachings: the effective and “cheery nature” that his mother, a homemaker, brought to volunteer civic work; the way his father, a postal worker, gas-station manager, and World War II veteran, exemplified “the value of a job well done by somehow dignifying even the most menial of tasks.” Both still influence his approach to life and work.

Pearl Street Capital Group, he explains, “provides debt capital to very rapidly growing technology and life-sciences enterprises that are backed by the elite venture capital syndicates in the U.S.” The job not only stimulates Grasso’s “brain plasticity, virtually every day,” it also contributes to the former ice-hockey player’s lifelong, extensive workout regimen: he monitors scientific advances in sports medicine and fitness training in search of “new methodologies for maintaining physical health and longevity.”

These stimuli helped him set the theme for the HAA board of directors’ upcoming annual meetings. (The February session, for example, features George Church, Winthrop professor of genetics and director of the Personal Genome Project.) Grasso plans to emphasize how “volunteerism in general, and being a part of the HAA in particular, greatly improves the quality of one’s life,” he adds. “My experience at the HAA has made this notion axiomatic for me.”

The Harvard Club of Boston, established in 1908, has elected its first female president. Belmont resident Karen Van Winkle ’80, vice president of business development and marketing for Creative Office Pavilion, has been among those who helped launch and oversee the renovations that have transformed the Commonwealth Avenue club. The improvements include a new rear entrance and elevator, six overnight room makeovers, numerous cosmetic updates, a revamped athletic club, and a new restaurant, called Veritas.

Six alumni are to receive Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) Awards—for outstanding volunteer service to the University through alumni activities—during the HAA board of directors’ fall meeting.

Walter K. Clair

Walter K. Clair’77, M.D. ’81, M.P.H. ’85, of Nashville, is a former member of the Harvard Board of Overseers and of the governing boards’ joint committee for alumni affairs and development. An HAA-elected director from 2002 to 2005, he has also served as an executive committee member of the Harvard Club of Middle Tennessee, and as a member of the admissions committees at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Ann Rand Eldridge

Ann Rand Eldridge’57, M.A.T. ’59, of Cambridge, received the Radcliffe Distinguished Service Award in 2007 for her work with the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association (RCAA) and the Radcliffe Institute. She is currently a Radcliffe Campaign volunteer and, at the HAA, a college director and former co-chair of the committee focused on maintaining connections with alumni. In addition, she chaired the Harvard Club of Eastern New York’s schools and scholarships committee for more than two decades, for which she received the Hiram S. Hunn Award in 2000.

Frederick V. Fortmiller

Frederick V. Fortmiller’51, M.B.A. ’53, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and the Korean War who, after his fifty-fifth reunion, organized and published The Harvard College Class of 1951: In the Nation’s Service, a collection of classmates’ service remembrances. As a class committee member since graduation, he has also been active with the reunion gift and planning committees and co-chaired the sixty-fifth reunion. He is also a stalwart on the HAA board of directors’ Happy Observance of Commencement committee.

Kalle J. Heikkinen

Kalle J. Heikkinen, M.B.A. ’91, of Helsinki, is the founder and former president of the Harvard Club of Finland, which hosted the 2007 HAA European Club Leaders Meeting, and has raised scholarship money for Finnish students to attend Harvard. He has chaired the club’s schools and scholarships committee for nearly 20 years, and joined the HAA’s board of directors in 2009 as a regional director for Europe.

Juanita C. Hernández

Juanita C. Hernández’82, J.D. ’85, of Washington, D.C., is a longtime leader within the Harvard Law School Association, and a founding member and chair of its Latino alumni committee. She has been instrumental in organizing the school’s Celebration of Latino Alumni conferences, is president of the HLSA Club of Washington, D.C., chaired her thirtieth law-school reunion, and served as an HAA elected director from 1994 to 1997.

Carl F. Muller

Carl F. Muller’73, J.D.-M.B.A. ’76, of Greenville, South Carolina, worked with the HAA in various roles for more than a decade, and ended his tenure there as president in 2013. He was a key member of the task force that rewrote the HAA’s constitution and helped align the work of the HAA and the Harvard College Fund. On the local level, he is a former president of the Harvard Club of South Carolina and has been an alumni interviewer since 1973.

July 8 marked the centennial of the founding of the Sieur de Monts National Monument in Maine, which within a few years became the new National Park Service’s first Eastern property. The creation of what is known today as Acadia National Park was spearheaded by a wealthy Bostonian, George Bucknam Dorr, A.B. 1874, who also served as its first superintendent.

Dorr’s Brahmin family lived in bucolic Jamaica Plain until he was seven, and he wrote later, “My earliest recollections are concerned with gardens….” Of his grandfather’s home in rural Canton, he recalled: “There, in real country, with woods and a lake for neighbors, dogs and horses for companions, my brother and I grew up, springs and falls, till college days.” His mother read him works by the Lake Poets, and “Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, Carlyle and Ruskin came to be part of me, grew into my being.” In 1868, the family bought property on Mount Desert Island in Maine, where Harvard president Charles William Eliot was a summer neighbor.

The lifelong impact of Dorr’s youthful stuttering is harder to gauge. Thanks most likely to a supportive family and the insights of an understanding doctor, Edward Warren, A.M. 1826, M.D. 1829 (himself a stutterer), the condition proved no bar to his becoming a sociable and publicly engaged man. Warren’s assertion that a stutterer searching for a career should choose “that pursuit in which his defect shall afford the smallest obstacle to his progress” may have supported Dorr in forging a new kind of profession suited to his passions and abilities—including the very qualities of persistence and tenacity required to manage his stutter.

After college, Dorr largely spent time with his parents in Europe and in Maine. Around 30, though, he began a decades-long engagement with philosophy. An early spark may have been his chance meeting in Boston with Josiah Royce, whom Dorr then introduced to his friend William James. After Royce joined James in Harvard’s philosophy department in the mid 1880s, Dorr read Spinoza with him privately, exploring the unity of God and nature in light of new scientific theories such as evolution. Spinoza’s belief in the existence of enduring order and meaning within the constantly changing material world may have colored Dorr’s growing appreciation of the weather-beaten granite rocks and ceaseless waves of Mount Desert Island, shaping (together with the Transcendental influences of his youth) his later outlook on conservation as “not a question of breathing-spaces and physical well-being only; it goes far beyond that and is deeply concerned with the inner life of men.”

Mount Desert Island, from Baker Island
Photograph courtesy of Friends of Acadia and the National Park Service and NPS/Archive

Dorr’s philosophy connections also led him to serve on (and sometimes chair) the department’s visiting committee for two decades. He led fundraising for a new building, Emerson Hall, to house the department and helped Harvard acquire properties between the Yard and the Charles River. These tasks honed skills of planning, negotiation, and administration on which he drew when he turned to conserving open space on Mount Desert Island.

In the 1890s, living at his family’s home on the island, Dorr developed a real interest and expertise in landscape gardening, founding the Mt. Desert Nurseries, working on other landscaping and conservation projects there (sometimes alongside future landscape architect Beatrix Farrand), and, further afield, advising friends such as the novelist Edith Wharton on her estate in the Berkshires.

In 1891, President Eliot’s son Charles, a landscape architect, and others founded The Trustees of Reservations in Massachusetts “for the purpose of acquiring, holding, arranging, maintaining and opening to the public, under suitable regulations, beautiful and historical places and tracts of land” within the Commonwealth. By the early 1900s, increasing threats to the scenery of Mount Desert Island led to that model of private ownership of conservation land being transferred to Maine: the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations was created, with Charles William Eliot as president and Dorr as vice president and executive officer. After initial land acquisitions and conservation measures, it became clear that negotiating the varied interests involved would require not a private organization but rather public ownership and management, achieved with the transfer of the assembled properties to federal authority as a national monument in 1916.

During his long tenure as superintendent, Dorr committed all his personal, social, and financial resources to the site’s development—solidifying its status through designation as Lafayette National Park in 1919 (renamed Acadia in 1929), expanding its holdings through negotiation with local landowners, and working with John D. Rockefeller and others to create the park’s famous system of carriage roads. In contrast to the first Western parks—claimed as “wilderness” and expropriated wholesale—the gradual development of Acadia respected the legal and cultural precedents of its Eastern (and white) constituency. Yet in shaping a national park in “a peopled region where human associations replace in a measure the appeal of far-reaching wildness made in other parks,” Dorr’s vision of Acadia still offered “one great element of wildness”—“contact with the ocean and the sight from mountainous heights of its great plain of waters stretching boundlessly away till hidden by the curvature of the earth.”

New York attorney Robert M. Pennoyer reports speaking at his class of 1946’s reunion lunch at the Faculty Club, on May 25—billed as its last reunion. In case that is so, some of what he had to say about World War II deserves permanent recording. The class enrolled in September 1942, after Pearl Harbor, he notes. Among the recollections:

At Harvard that September, along with Tommy [Lamont, who died in a submarine in 1945], Norman Walker, Frank Hatch, and countless other friends and classmates, I enlisted in the Navy’s ROTC program. The Navy took control of life at Harvard. Most of us were in uniform. In my last year some of us were “billeted” in Kirkland House, renamed “U.S.S. Kirkland.” Instead of floors, walls, ceilings, rooms, beds, and stairs we had decks, bulkheads, overheads, compartments, bunks, and companionways. When a bugler woke us up at six we put on Navy issue sweatpants and “formed up” in platoons, in the courtyard, then ran in formation to the Charles River for a half-mile run before returning to “the chow line” in the “mess hall.” Before going to class we had to make our “bunks” (learning to make a “Navy corner” came in useful later!)…and make sure our “compartment” was ready for inspection by a warrant officer….

In October 1944, working through two years with no vacations to complete the credits needed for a college degree and our ROTC training, Frank Hatch and I, at age 19, received our college degrees, our ensign’s commissions, and orders to report to the cruiser Pensacola somewhere in the Pacific. It took a month to cross the Pacific to find the Pensacola in the harbor at Saipan, about 1,200 miles from Japan, that had just been taken by the marines. A few hours after we boarded, a voice over the ship’s speaker ordered all officers to the wardroom. When we had assembled, the ship’s executive officer, Commander Behan, uncovered an eight-foot scale model of…Iwo Jima. He explained that the next morning our ship, along with two other cruisers and six destroyers, would sail for Iwo, some 600 miles closer to Japan, where we would bombard targets he pointed out on the model.…

The ship had a crew of 1,000, all volunteer, all young.…The day before the landing at Iwo Jima, the ship was heavily damaged by Japanese shore fire, with almost 150 killed and wounded, when we closed to within one mile of the island to attack guns overlooking the landing beach.…I was in the main battery turret just forward of the bridge. Frank Hatch was two decks below the bridge in CIC, Combat Information Center, which controlled the ship’s radar. Another shell, exploding through the deck in the gap between my turret and the bulkhead leading up to the bridge, blew in the back of my turret and destroyed CIC. When we were out of range and ordered to put out the fires and help the wounded, I ran to the passageway leading to CIC and found Frank sitting on the deck outside the door to CIC, dazed but not seriously wounded. Of the 13 men in CIC he was one of four to come out alive. The night before, when we knew that our ship would be in trouble…before climbing…to stand a four-hour watch at the top of the mast 140 feet above the sea, I had given Frank my lucky piece, a large silver Napoleon coin with the date 1808, telling him, “Here, you may need this.”

…When the war ended in August 1945, I became the first American to land on Hokkaido.…Our ship was ordered to participate in the occupation of northern Japan, and when we dropped anchor in the harbor at Hakodate on the south coast of Hokkaido a few days after the surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay, the captain ordered me, one of the youngest officers on the ship, to “take 20 sailors, with no weapons, and find a way to get ashore to let the Japanese know the Americans have arrived.”

…In May 1946, when Frank and I walked down the gangplank for the last time in San Diego, there was no place to sleep in town, and the Navy bussed us up to the zoo which had been emptied of animals during the war, where we spent the night on cots in the monkey house, with the sign “Baboon” on the cage. From there, there was nowhere to go but up.