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EDITORˆS NOTESCHASING GHOSTSVOLUME 112, NUMBER 1, FALL 2019
Laura Demanski, AM’94
Mary Ruth Yoe
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Susie Allen, AB’09
MANAGING EDITOR Rhonda L. Smith
ART DIRECTOR Guido Mendez
ALUMNI NEWS EDITOR Andrew Peart, AM’16, PHD’18
COPY EDITOR Sam Edsill
GRAPHIC DESIGNER Laura Lorenz
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jeanie Chung; John
Easton, AM’77; Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93 ;Lucas McGranahan; Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04
EDITORSENIOR EDITOR

Editorial Office The University of Chicago

Magazine, 5235 South Harper Court,
Chicago, IL 60615
TELEPHONE 773.702.2163 FAX 773.702.8836
EMAIL uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu
The University of Chicago Alumni Association
has its offices at 5235 South Harper Court,
Chicago, IL 60615
TELEPHONE 773.702.2150 FAX 773.702.2166
ADDRESS CHANGES 800.955.0065 or 		
alumniassociation@uchicago.edu
WEB mag.uchicago.edu

The University of Chicago Magazine(ISSN-0041-9508) is published quarterly (Fall,
Winter, Spring, Summer) by the Universityof Chicago in cooperation with the Alumni
Association, 5235 South Harper Court,
Chicago, IL 60615, and sent to all University of
Chicago alumni. Published continuously since1907. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago andadditional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Send
address changes to The University of Chicago
Magazine, Alumni Records, 5235 South
Harper Court, Chicago, IL 60615. © 2019
University of Chicago

Advertising Contact uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu or visit mag.uchicago.edu/
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The University does not discriminate on
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orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic
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information, or other protected classes under
the law. For additional information, please see
equalopportunity.uchicago.edu.

I

BY S U S I E A L L E N , A B ’ 0 9
G U E S T E D I TO R

keep a sticky note on my desk with a quote from the poet Ada
Limón: “We write with all the good ghosts in our corners.” I can’t
think of a better motto for writing, especially writing for an alumni
magazine, where we work to keep a place and an experience in thememories of our readers.
I’ve had ghosts on the brain (though only metaphorically, I hope)while putting together this issue of the Magazine—maybe becauseof how often I look at that sticky note, and maybe because ourdeadline falls just before Halloween and the Day of the Dead, holidays
that celebrate life, death, and remembrance.
Fittingly, in this issue we look back on the lives of three UChicagoans
who are not widely remembered yet left complicated and important
legacies. We also pay tribute to the late John Paul Stevens, LAB’37,
AB’41—thankfully, he is unlikely ever to be forgotten.
Bette Howland, 12GC’53, AB’55, was at the height of her literarycareer, with fans including her friend Saul Bellow, EX’39, and strong
reviews for her first three titles, when she was awarded a MacArthur
Fellowship in 1984. But after receiving that landmark honor, Howland,
who died in 2017, never finished another book. Her work fell out of print,
and her literary contributions were at risk of being lost altogether—
until a chance encounter in a bookstore brought Howland’s writing backinto view.
Harold Goettler, AS 1914, SB 1914, was just 28 when he was killed inaction during World War I. His heroism in trying to aid the so-called Lost
Battalion earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor, the military’s
highest award for valor. In “Flight Test,” David Chrisinger, AM’10, recreates Goettler’s harrowing final hours.
Maurice Hilleman, PhD’44, is arguably the best known of thisgroup—but still less of a household name than you might expect, given
his prolific career as a vaccinologist. Hilleman produced 40 vaccines,
including those for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, pneumonia, and influenza. Yet some of his methods were, toput it mildly, unorthodox, as Maureen Searcy describes. Did the ends
justify his means?
I’ve been grateful for the company of Howland, Goettler, and Hilleman these past few months. Their stories, Howland’s in particular, haveprompted me to think more deeply about who gets remembered andwhy. They are ghosts I am glad to have had in my corner. Whether they
are good or not is, of course, for you to decide.

Be my guest I was excited but daunted when Laura Demanski,
AM’94, asked if I’d like to try guest editing this issue of the Magazine.
Months later, my desk has never been messier, but my appreciation for Laura and the rest of our stalwart, hilarious team has neverbeen greater. For what it’s worth, the second part of that Ada Limón
quote is “I, for one, have never made anything alone.” ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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Vol. 112 / No. 1

FALL 2019
mag.uchicago.edu

Above

Shelf serendipity is a gift to the curious
reader. The story of writer Bette
Howland’s (12GC’53, AB’55) rediscovery
begins when a one-dollar used bookfinds its way into the hands of a literary
editor browsing a crowded New York Citybookstore. See “Howland’s Gift,” page 34.
Illustration by Christopher Buzelli.

At this year’s homecoming game the
Maroons sailed to victory, defeating
Knox College 37–6. The gameanchored a weekend of festivities
including the induction of five alumni
into the UChicago Athletics Hall of
Fame and the Homecoming Block
Party outside Stagg Field.

Photography by John Zich

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On the Cover

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1 Editor’s Notes

4 Letters

Features

24 Market values

By Sharla A. PaulAn economist’s fight to protect capitalism from big business.

32
34

By the dozens By Maureen Searcy
Microbiologist Maurice Hilleman, PhD’44, developed 40 vaccineswith the help of some feathered friends.
Howland’s gift

By Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93
How a Chicago writer made it into the literary canon and then got lost.
Plus: “Power Failure,” a short story by Bette Howland, 12GC’53, AB’55.

46 The prudent jurist

By Laura Demanski, AM’94
Remembering Justice John Paul Stevens, LAB’37, AB’41, 1920–2019.

48 Flight test

By David Chrisinger, AM’10
A soldier’s final mission.

52

Parks and restoration

By Ingrid Gonçalves, AB’08
How a lawyer-turned-scientist-turned-entrepreneur helped establish
Afghanistan’s first national park.

Photography by John Zich

11

55

71

UChicago Journal

InquiryPeer Review

Research andnews in brief

From the PhysicalSciences Division

What alumni arethinking and doing

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LETTERSLETTERSThe University of Chicago Magazine welcomes letters about its contents or about the lifeof the University. Letters for publication must be signed and may be edited for space, clarity, and civility. To provide a range of views and voices, we encourage letter writers to limit
themselves to 300 words or fewer. Write: Editor, The University of Chicago Magazine, 5235
South Harper Court, Chicago, IL 60615. Or email: uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.

Excavating memories

Gallery at the Oriental Institute. The
OI printed a touching memorial to myaunt when she died in 2011.
My aunt and uncle were also closefriends of J. R. Kantor, PhB 1914, PhD
1917, and his daughter Helene Kantor, PhD’45, an archaeologist and art
historian in the Department of Near
Eastern Languages and Civilizations
and the Oriental Institute from the
1960s to the ’80s.
In the summer of 1974, when mycousin Ron and I were visiting our aunt
and uncle, Professor Kantor invited us

While I have many fond memories of
the Oriental Institute from my orientation week in 2003 and the remainderof my time at UChicago, my most recent memory sticks with me.
April 27, 2019: My then fiancé, now
husband, Chad Rubalcaba, AB’00,
JD’07, and I were between setting up
the reception venue and exchanging vows in Bond Chapel. I was
so anxious managing family dynamics and the impending snow (yes, in April) that
we decided to take a break.
Having explored the Coop and taken in the quads,
we found ourselves inBreasted Hall. We shared
our stories of the OI,
how it represented ourlove of exploration andthe significance of thewritten word (theywere reworking partof the early writing exhibit) and our
awe of the Assyrian bulls. It was what
we needed to clear our minds and prepare to be wed.
Carl G. Streed Jr., SB’07
BOS TO N

4Caryl Lee (Rubin) Fisher, AB’82
N E W YO R K CIT Y

In my high school history class, students were required to select a book that
could be used to contribute to class discussions. Somewhat arbitrarily, I chosea volume by James Henry Breasted.
Later that year, I arrived on campus fororientation on a Sunday and proceeded
to take a self-guided tour ofthe campus. Walking down
University Avenue frommy dorm, the subsequently
razed Pierce Tower, I happened upon what seemed
like the Emerald City—
the Oriental Institute.
I was particularly excited to discover thatthe museum was open
on Sunday. I will never forget my overwhelming sense of
awe when I saw thehu ma n-headed
winged bull, thefirst artifact I encountered inside.
The Oriental Institute is now an
obligatory stop whenever I am on campus with a friend.
Lionel E. Deimel, AB’68
I N D IA N A , PE N N SY LVA N IA

I will never forget
my overwhelming
sense of awe when
I saw the humanheaded winged bull,
the first artifact I
encountered inside.

Photography by Guido Mendez

My family has a long history both in
the Hyde Park neighborhood and with
the University of Chicago. The Oriental Institute played an importantrole in the lives of my aunt and uncle,
Cissy Haas and Albert Haas, LAB’33.
Their lifelong interest in the history
and archaeology of the Middle East
culminated in 2005 with the openingof the Haas and Schwartz Megiddo

to accompany her into the basement of
the OI and talked to us about some of
the many artifacts being restored andcataloged there. I have an indelible
memory of her nonchalantly passing
us priceless ancient artifacts that we
gingerly held with trembling hands as
she told us about their history and significance in the archaeological world.
As a UChicago alum, over the years
I visited the Oriental Institute manytimes and was always impressed by
the depth of knowledge and information about each of the artifacts and theongoing work being done there. I wasproud to show my son, Charlie Fisher,
SB’14, around the OI several times
during his years at UChicago as well.

I look forward to hearing about theplans for the next century of work anddiscoveries.

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Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

In the last issue (“The OI at 100,” Summer/19) we asked readers to share theirmemories of the Oriental Institute as
it turns 100. Here are a few of yourresponses.—Ed.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Magazine’s
in-depth articles celebrating the 100th
anniversary of the Oriental Institute.
The OI is indeed a jewel in the UChicago crown, and its exceptionally wide
range of Middle Eastern research
and archaeological and philologicalundertakings is truly, as OI director Christopher Woods put it, “veryUChicago”—something all alumni canrightfully be proud of.
For those who would like to know
more about the OI’s early years, I strongly recommend Jeffrey Abt’s excellent
biography of the institute’s founder,
American Egyptologist: The Life of James
Henry Breasted and the Creation of His
Oriental Institute (University of Chicago Press, 2011). It’s available in a beautifully illustrated paperback.
John S. Willson, MBA’68

Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

B E D FO R D, M A S SACH U S E T T S

As a student in the Divinity School in
the early 1970s, I addressed one area of
my ignorance by electing a course on
Islam. It was taught in the Oriental Institute, a building I had walked by manytimes but never entered. I went looking
for the assigned classroom and was
immediately struck by the magnificent
sculptures and enchanted by the reading room. Someone directed me to theoffice of Fazlur Rahman, the Harold H.
Swift Distinguished Service Professorof Islamic Thought, and I discovered
with some anxiety that there was only ahandful of students in the class (no backrow!). Professor Rahman was both considerate of our naivete and immensely
knowledgeable. He apologized that hewould have to adjust a couple of classes
when out of town. I later discoveredthat he was providing background on
schools of sharia jurisprudence to Pakistani officials trying to develop modern
law codes.
As the term went on, I arrived earlier
and lingered longer in the OI’s exhibits, reflecting on connections between
ancient monuments and contemporary
striving. I came to feel that the ultimate
goal was to not only “furnish a basis forthe history and development of civilization” but also to use that knowledge
to influence future courses of development. Long after that term the OI

remained one of my favorite and mostthought-provoking haunts on campus.
Thomas D. Rainey, EX’73
WA RWI CK , R H O D E I S L A N D

My father, William A. Irwin, was aprofessor at the Oriental Institutefrom 1930 to 1950. As a child, I spent
many hours there, drawing pictures on
the blackboard in his office, talking to
the secretaries, and roaming aroundthe museum. Like most faculty brats,
I attended the Laboratory Schools. It
was a short walk after school to the OI,
where I would hang out until my daddy was ready to walk home with me.

Even as an adult,
I was afraid to put
my hand in one of
the lions’ mouths
on the stairs to thesecond floor.

for same-sex couples. Note, the terms‘gay marriage’ and ‘same-sex marriage’should be avoided, as they can suggest
marriage for same-sex couples is somehow different than other marriages.”
Slate notes that the choice of term
has impact. Elected officials and candidates who support marriage equality
tend to use that term, while those who
oppose marriage equality use “gaymarriage,” reinforcing the idea thatmarriage between two people of thesame sex is somehow abnormal.
In fact, the synopsis of HB5170 neveruses the term “gay marriage” but refers
to same-sex and different-sex couples.
I urge you to adopt “marriage equality” or at least “same-sex marriage” asthe standard for the Magazine.
Victor S. Sloan, AB’80
F LE M I N GTO N , N E W J E R S E Y

We thank the writer for raising this issue. We agree that “marriage equality”
is the more accurate term and will use
it going forward.—Ed.

Even as an adult, I was afraid to put
my hand in one of the lions’ mouths on
the stairs to the second floor.
I loved the museum. Sometimes theguard would let me in after hours. I wasalone with the mummies, the Assyrianbull, the gigantic statue of Nebuchadnezzar and his tiny wife at his feet, toname just a few. I developed a lifelong
love of archaeology and history.
Best wishes for the next 100 years.
Susan Irwin Smith, LAB’49

Architectural digest

TU C SO N , A R I ZO N A

True equality
I had the privilege of meeting Barbara
Flynn Currie, LAB’58, AB’68, AM’73(“Local Interest,” Summer/19), when
she was running for her first term in
the Illinois House. She has had a remarkable career.
But I would humbly suggest that she
didn’t cosponsor a bill legalizing gay
marriage but rather a bill legalizing
marriage equality.
The GLAAD Media Reference Guide
states that “preferred terminology includes marriage equality and marriage

I enjoyed the story about Elizabeth
Gordon, PhB’27, and House Beautiful(“American Style,” Summer/19). While
writing Our Own Devices: The Past andFuture of Body Technology (Knopf,2003), I found that magazine a trove ofimages and ideas, and ran across Gordon’s strange manifesto. Overwrought
as it was, it succeeded admirably in attracting attention as a more restrained
critique would never have done. [Architectural Forum editor Peter] Blake’s
sneering comment shows how needed
it was; men like Tom Wolfe could getaway with even more hyperbole in architecture criticism.

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LETTERS
Gordon had a valid point. The International School, despite its progressive
origins, was in practice an elitist movement that aimed to bring a factory aesthetic into domestic life and even to raze
entire cities, as Le Corbusier planned
to do to Paris. At its extreme it was an
ideological attack on domesticity. There
was a 1990s exhibition at the Museum ofModern Art and a book on this subject,
titled Not at Home: The Suppression ofDomesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 1996).
One of Gordon’s favorite contributors,
Francis de N. Schroeder, was among themost insightful design historians I encountered. Schroeder was also a pioneerof ergonomics and design. His books,
including Anatomy for Interior Designers, and How to Talk to a Client (Whitney Publications, 1948), are thoughtful
as well as beautiful in themselves.
Edward Tenner, AM’67, PhD’72
PL AI N S BO RO, N E W J E R S E Y

Good sports
I read with interest Lester Munson’s(JD’67) piece in the Summer/19 issue(“Brains beside Brawn”)—not only because it was topical and a story welltold, but also because I went to theCollege with his son, Les Munson III,AB’89, and Bruce Montella, AB’86,
MD’90, both of whom are mentioned.
While I agree with Mr. Munson that
the U of C in many ways represents
the true spirit of college athletics, thearticle only addresses the extremes:
athletes such as Montella, who toiled
in relative obscurity, and those in pow-

erhouse Division I programs where thepursuit of knowledge is often eclipsed—
and, it must be said, corrupted—by thealmighty dollar. There are, however,many shades of gray in between.
My daughter just began her sophomore year at a small East Coast college (approximately 3,500 students),
where she’s pursuing both a collegiate
athletic career and a five-year degree.
Perhaps it’s the institution itself—its
principles, mission, and values—or thefact that the program is in just its firstyear of Division I competition, but for
now there seems to be the right balance between sports and classes. She
and her fellow athletes are, in fact,
engaged in “a pursuit of excellence inacademics, teamwork, discipline, perseverance, and leadership,” just as Mr.
Munson described.
I believe the same is true for dozens,
possibly hundreds, of other Division I
schools out there, not all of which aspire to the TV time and revenue numbers that seem to drive the biggest
programs and, sadly, devalue learning.
Go Maroons!
Peter Leeds, AB’88
S TA M FO R D, CO N N EC TI CUTWhat scientists say about
why print magazine ads work
Reading on paper is slower and deeper; paper readers remember more.

higher comprehension
and recall

preferred by majority(even millennials)

stimulates emotions
and desires

more focused attention
less distraction

slower reading
speedsdrives sensory involvement
which contributes to
impact on readers

Advertise in the Ivy League Magazine Network and reach 1,200,000+
alumni from Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford,
University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale with aprint ad in our 9 publications. Visit: ivymags.com to learn more.

Hosea Martin, AB’60
CH I C AG O

6

UChicago Athletics

Source: “What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About Why Print Magazine
Advertising Works?” A White Paper from MPA–The Association of
Magazine Media, Scott McDonald, Ph.D., Nomos Research, October 2015

A teammate remembered
I was saddened by news of the November 2018 passing of Victor I. Carlson,
AB’55, AM’59 (Deaths, Summer/19),
for I have fond memories of competing with him on the University’s
track team in the late 1950s. Ivan (hepreferred being called by his middle
name) was one of the foursome thatwon races at the Drake and Ohio Relays and other meets. I ran the firstleg and could always depend on him
to hold the lead when I passed thebaton to him. His father was an official in the US Foreign Service, andIvan spent some summers with him
on assignments in various countries.
One of Ivan’s favorite stories was ofan early morning run in Pakistan.
The streets were deserted at first but
quickly filled with crowds that lined
the route to cheer for the lone blondCaucasian who strode past for no apparent reason.

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Hyde Park roots
I decided to at last come forward andtell how the tree in front of the former Woodworth’s Bookstore became
the “want-ad tree” (Alumni News,
Summer/19).
I pinned a note on the tree back in1948 (or thereabouts) requesting that
whoever found the earring I lost one
evening in the vicinity of the store
return it to me. I also posted notes onother vertical surfaces that lent themselves to my search.

I suspect the earring
may be buried
somewhere along
57th Street.
Well, the earring was never returned. The pair was handcraftedby a Hyde Park jeweler who specialized in “avant-garde” jewelry—eachwork one of a kind. I suspect the earring may be buried somewhere along
57th Street.

I feel sure I posted the first note on
the tree. I had never seen one there
before. Amazing how it became the“want-ad tree.”June Biber Freeman, PhB’47, SB’49, EX’53
LIT TLE ROCK , A R K A N SA S

For more notes from Freeman, see Alumni News, page 74.—Ed.

Semi-serious
I enjoyed your conversation with Cecelia Watson, AM’05, concerning her
book about the semicolon (“Semiotics,”
Summer/19) but I feel that both you
and she missed an important UChicago connection: Erin McKean, AB’93,
AM’93. Erin is the founder of the online dictionary Wordnik, as well as awriter, lexicographer, and coder. But
all of this may pale in comparison, inthe eyes of some, to her role as the designer and dispenser of merchandisethat showcases the Semicolon Appreciation Society; I urge all to google it.
Orin K. Hargraves, AB’77
N IWOT, CO LO R A DO

A university’s purpose, cont.
I could not help but note Michael J.
Sanders’s letter (Spring/19) essentially disinheriting the University,
apparently for the transgression of
not making sense to conservatives.
His letter extols the virtues of Milton
Friedman, AM’33.
Mr. Sanders might be surprised tolearn that Friedman’s advocacy of anegative income tax as a more productive method of income redistribution
has emerged once more in current discussions of income inequality.
In the mid-1960s, when I was a member of the faculty of the School of Social
Service Administration, my colleague
Edward E. Schwartz, PhD’55, and I
worked closely with Friedman in assembling a collection of scholarly
papers on the GMI (“guaranteed minimum income” as it was sometimes
called) as part of a planned symposium. We received papers from, among
others, Martin Marty, PhD’56, of theDivinity School and Friedman himself.
Unfortunately, the symposium did
not come to fruition. The idea itself,

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LETTERS
given a certain air of respectability
by Friedman, has again come to lightas an income maintenance policy to
be seriously considered. Regardless,I shall never forget the conversations
with Friedman, Schwartz, and others
as the essence of the kind of collaborative spirit inspired by the Universityof Chicago that has been a sustaining
force in my life.
Alan D. Wade, PhD’60
SACR A M E NTO, C A LI FO R N IA

Labor issues

8tively spartan school of the late 1960s.
In the process of change, the University appears to have decided that more
specialization and richer amenities
should take precedence over workers’
rights and benefits.
I have no personal experience fromwhich to speak to the nurses’ situation.
However, as a former teaching assistant at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former resident adviser andteaching assistant at the University of
Iowa when no union option was available, I can say that graduate students
holding such appointments are workers deserving of union representation.
That the University does not recognize, or willfully denies, this reality
seems to me to be an error in judgmentthat the University community needs
to set about correcting.
Dan Campion, AB’70
I OWA CIT Y, I OWA

Have you ever married anyone from the Universityof Wisconsin? I have: just once. If you ever have any
impulse to follow my lead, consult me. I will introduce
you socially to every living graduate of the Universityof Wisconsin since the Class of 1867. The only exception
is Rev. Stephen B. Nearly of the Class of 1902. He
is now a missionary in the Ukraine, and because of
the unsettled conditions there I have not made his
acquaintance yet, but I will. It’s inevitable. Meet one
Wisconsin graduate and you have begun your social
acquaintance with that University’s alumni body.
I was still combing rice and confetti out of myhair when I began the mysteries of initiation which
are open to the Wisconsin-Alumnus-by-Marriage. By
the time a brief wedding trip had ended, I was callingby their first names everyone on pages 1–54 of the
Alumni Directory. …
I am now obliged to recall Chicago, dimly, as an
institution humbled by Wisconsin hosts in football,
baseball, tennis, track, craps, stud, strip, and jackpot,
and in such other contests as have added to the fameof the Badger. …
You’ll have to excuse me now. I have just had aphone call that Rev. Stephen B. Nearly is believed to beon board the ship just coming in, so we’re going down
to the dock to meet him.
Robert Barton, AB 1916
New York City
July 1919

Division of the Humanities

BLAST FROM THE PASTThe September 21 New York Times
contains not one but two articles reporting on anti-union actions takenby the University: an article describing

UChicago Medicine’s hiring of temporary nurses after talks with National
Nurses United broke down, and a separate article recounting the University’s opposition to the unionization ofteaching assistants.
Recruited over 50 years ago to theCollege from Austin High School, located in a working-class neighborhoodon the West Side of Chicago, I am disappointed at the University for taking
so retrograde a stance with regard toworking people.
My Shakespeare teacher doubled
as University registrar. There was
no football team. The Bartlett Gym’s
weight-training equipment consistedof a couple of bars with old tin cansat each end filled with hardened concrete. As a reader of the Magazine
and other University publications,
I’m aware that the University today
bears little resemblance to the rela-

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I shared a music stand (viola) with David Bevington during a Gilbert and Sullivan performance in summer 1991. He
was so kind and generous. He invited
the whole cast to his house after one
performance and not only served foodand beverages but put out chamber music, which people played spontaneously.
He was the only professor who ever invited me to his or her house, and it wasmeaningful to me. Sadly, I never took
one of his courses, but I fondly remember him as an amateur viola player.
Laura (Pinnas) Sagerman, AB’94
TU C SO N , A R I ZO N ADavid Bevington, 1931–2019

Division of the Humanities

A longtime English professor and beloved member of the UChicago community,
David Bevington died August 2 in Chicago. Below is a selection of the personal
remembrances we received. For more on Bevington’s life and career, see Deaths,
page 92.—Ed.
I was very sorry to learn of the loss ofDavid Bevington. I think I may havewritten the first PhD dissertation hedirected at the University of Chicago.
I came to Chicago in 1966; he arrived
in 1967. I had two seminars with Bevington and liked him very much. He
was an excellent teacher, nurturing
and supportive. So I approached him
with a proposal to do a dissertation
on Christopher Marlowe. He agreed
to direct it, and medievalist Arthur
Heiserman, AB’48, AM’51, PhD’59,
served as my second reader. I could
not have had a better team.
They were ideal dissertation directors, rigorous but encouraging.
The title of the dissertation was“Christopher Marlowe and the Politics of Power,” influenced by Bevington’s From “Mankind” to Marlowe:
Growth of Structure in the Popular
Drama of Tudor England (Harvard
University Press, 1962) but less interested in topicality than politics
more broadly.

When it was published, an Oxford
professor with an outsized reputation
reviewed it. She complained that I was
more interested in homosexuality thanin Marlowe. She intended the snidecomment to be dismissive, but she unintentionally put her finger on what madethe dissertation original and valuable.
It offered the fullest exploration ofhomosexuality in Marlowe’s plays yet
attempted. Preceding the gay studies
movement, it was also the first study ofMarlowe that treated the homosexuality of his plays sympathetically rather
than censoriously. That no doubt waswhat the reviewer found distasteful.
However, David and Arthur were fully
supportive of my work. I was very fortunate to have studied with them.
Although Arthur died at a tragically
young age soon after my dissertation
was finished, David remained a generous and supportive mentor throughout
my career.

Mr. Bevington was a genial classroom
instructor, but I got to know him better after he agreed to oversee an independent study for which I wrote
a three-act play in 1993. To note thatpatience and humor were two of his
prominent qualities is to recognize
how immature I was in those days.
Among his many other talents, he had
a gift for redirecting raw enthusiasm,
which was about the only thing I had
going for myself, into viable dramatic
forms. I don’t know why he took my juvenile ideas seriously, but I’m gratefulthat he did. I try to keep these traits inmind in dealing with my own students.

To note thatpatience and humor
were two of his
prominent qualities
is to recognize how
immature I was inthose days.
He rode that bike like a demon. Once
I saw him catch about 16 inches of air
on the sidewalk outside Pick Hall. And
he loved Doc Films. He’d turn up for themost obscure screenings. It could be asnowy Wednesday night in February,
with a movie only the U of C film bratswould love, and there would be Mr.
Bevington, Renaissance man, sitting
down front along the left, ready to roll.

Claude J. Summers, AM’67, PhD’70

Robert A. Jackson, AB’93

N E W O R LE A N S

TU L SA , O K L A H O M A

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Food allergies
Sleep
Screen time
Language acquisition
Social life
Math anxiety
Summer camp
Tough conversations

Parental Guidance is UChicago’s brand-new monthly e-newsletter for parents.
Because when it comes to raising kids, no one has all of the answers. But the
University of Chicago’s evidence-based research will help you feel like you do.
Subscribe today.

alumni.uchicago.edu/parental-guidance
Credit10

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UCHICAGO JOURNALRESEARCH AND NEWS IN BRIEF

BRIGHT SKIES AHEAD
A light rainstorm greeted the Class
of 2023 and their cheerers-on as
they made their way to opening
convocation September 22. The
dampness didn’t seem to put adamper on things, though—andwith family goodbyes on the day’sschedule, there wouldn’t havebeen a dry eye in sight anyway.

Photography by John Zich

12

When Westernculture flooded
the USSR

16

A cat shelter
looks beyond
feline welfare

20

Why are there
more species inthe tropics?

23

Sports, an
Americanreligion?

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Rita Rait-Kovaleva, whose Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye became a best seller, also brought the works of Kurt
Vonnegut, AM’71, to Soviet readers.

HISTORY

To Russia,
with love
How Soviet citizens madeWestern culture their own.
BY SUSIE ALLE N , AB’09

12“an inseparable part of Soviet life,”
Gilburd says, both Soviet and nonSoviet at the same time. By examining
how Western culture was seamlessly
incorporated into everyday life, Gilburd, AB’98, now an assistant professor of history at UChicago, hoped tounderstand how the thaw’s distinctive
culture came to be.
The book interweaves the experiencesof three groups: the bureaucrats, whobrought Western cultural material
into the country; the mediators, suchas literary translators, dub actors, andcritics, who helped make that material
accessible; and the public. In different
ways, all three took part in the workof translation, which Gilburd sees as“a mechanism of transfer, a process ofdomestication, and a metaphor for theway cultures interact.”
Literary translators sought to capture “not the text itself, so much, butwhat they called the reality behind

SPUTNIK/Alamy Stock Photo

In 1960, seven years after the deathof Joseph Stalin, readers in the Soviet
Union met Holden Caulfield for the firsttime. They were electrified. In Holden’sstory, Soviet citizens found language
for their experiences. As one fan put
it, “Which one of us, Russian readers,
did not think of school as ‘duratskaia,’
of classmates as ‘kretiny,’ of lessons as‘pokazukha’?”—stupid, bastards, phony.
The Russian translation of J. D. Salin-

ger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye
became a Soviet literary sensation,
prompting multiple reprintings.
The Catcher in the Rye arrived in the
USSR among thousands of Westerncultural works during the “thaw,” aperiod of relative openness following
Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power.
This wave of officially sanctioned
imports, more diverse in style andsubject matter than what had comebefore, made its way to the far reachesof the country. Why and how Westerncultural objects arrived, and what theycame to mean to ordinary Soviets,is the subject of UChicago historian
Eleonory Gilburd’s book To See Paris andDie: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture(Harvard University Press, 2018).
To many Soviet citizens, who encountered American and European
books, films, and TV shows all thetime, these materials didn’t feel entirely foreign. Western imports were

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the text,” Gilburd says—how it madereaders in its country of origin feel.
This resulted in translations that seeminterventionist by contemporary standards. In The Catcher in the Rye, forinstance, American Holden repeats
words like “terrific” and “goddam”;
Russian Holden employs a raft of synonyms. That subtle difference changes
how the character comes across, making him, in Gilburd’s view, appear
more sensitive and vulnerable. Whenit came to cinema, dubbers added
voice-over narration and even inserted Russian billboards and signs into
Western films. It’s not surprising thatviewers sometimes didn’t know what
was foreign and what was domestic.
One outcome of the domesticationof Western materials, Gilburd argues,
was that they took on unexpected
new meanings in the Soviet context.
Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom theBell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War
and idealism pushed too far, was readas alluding to the violent, repressive
Soviet Union of the 1930s. The Catcher
in the Rye became enmeshed in Soviet
literary debates about whether slang
and other forms of youth language belonged in print.
There is no single explanation for
why certain Western imports flopped
and others became classics. (A translation of The Grapes of Wrath failed tocapture much interest, perhaps understandably—after decades of Soviet
realism, who wanted to read another

QUICK STUDYImage courtesy Harvard University Press

TECHNOLOGY

Just a(mega)bit
betternovel about workers’ struggles?) But
one notable area of audience interest,
Gilburd writes, was fiction centeredon emotion—something that hadlargely been left out of Soviet culturein the 1930s and ’40s, when straightforward depictions of proletarian triumph proliferated.
By the 1950s, Soviet artists andcritics had begun to worry about the
bloodless quality of domestic art. After all, they reasoned, even in a societyof perfect economic equality, heartbreak and other forms of personal
pain would still exist.
Western art helped fill the gap,
providing lang uage and images
for what had gone unspoken andunseen. One enthusiastic reader ofErich Maria Remarque credited theGerman novelist with “[telling] us,
young Soviet men and women, about
these feelings” of “eternal, singular,
and unique” love. Western films
offered franker depictions of sexual
behavior than Soviet viewers had everseen before—an offensive experiencefor some, who felt the country’s
censors were not doing their jobs, butrevolutionary for others.
Gilburd’s book concludes with asomber chapter on Soviet emigrés andtheir lives in the countries they had
only known from movies and books.
The reality, inevitably, was more painful and complicated. She goes on tocompare the emigré experience to life
in post-Soviet Russia, when the coun-

The “thaw” was, until recently, an
understudied moment in Soviet history,says Eleonory Gilburd, AB’98.

try, as a whole, “essentially emigrated
to the West.”
In the tumultuous 1990s, former
teachers, doctors, and engineers, theirsavings wiped out and lives upended,sold their possessions on the street.
They peddled World War II medals
to tourists but found no takers fortheir idiosyncratic translations of
Hemingway, Remarque, and Salinger.
With the end of government control
over information, new and unmediateddepictions of Western life flooded into
the country, rendering what was once
beloved suddenly pointless. ◆When it comes to watching video, is faster internet service worth the pricetag? Amid projections that video streaming will account for 82 percent
of internet traffic by 2022, the Wall Street Journal set out to investigate.
Getting help from a team led by computer science professor Nick Feamster,
the newspaper gave its answer in August: no. Using a new method,
published August 14 on arXiv, that improves the ability to infer the quality ofvideo streaming from encrypted traffic, the researchers compared start-up
delays, picture resolution, and other quality measures on Amazon, YouTube,
Netflix, and Twitch on 66 home networks with a range of service plans over
16 months. Most consumers paying a premium for speeds of 100 megabits
per second or more enjoyed only marginal improvements in performance,even when streaming up to seven videos simultaneously.—L. D. ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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14

Are men better suited for politics than women?
Agree

DisagreeNot sure

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%
1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

YEAR

How happy would you say you are?
Very happy

Pretty happy

Not too happy

Don’t know

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%
1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

YEAR

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

Graphics by Laura Lorenz. Data accessed from the GSS Data Explorer website at gssdataexplorer.norc.org.

What do Americans think about religion,
government spending, and sexuality? For
answers to those questions and more,
researchers and reporters turn to the GeneralSocial Survey, or GSS. The modestly named
poll reveals Americans’ views on nearly everysocial issue—including hot-button concerns.
Established in 1972 by late UChicago
sociologist James A. Davis, the GSS began
at a time when attitudinal research often
had commercial, not scientific, aims. It soon
gained the attention of social scientists,
media outlets, and policy makers.
As the GSS’s following grew, so did its listof questions. The 1972 survey collected dataon nearly 200 variables; today, it’s more than
1,000. Figuring out what to add and delete inany given year is one of the trickiest parts of
the job, says René Bautista, a senior researchscientist with NORC at the University of
Chicago, which administers the GSS. It takes
a team of scholars from different fields andinstitutions to arrive at the final list. A key
factor is whether they expect views on the
proposed topic to change over time.
The latest GSS, conducted in 2018,
included for the first time questions about
respondents’ relationships with theirpets—an acknowledgment of changing
definitions of companionship, Bautista says.
Others have fallen off the national opinion
survey; one question about attitudes towardmarried women working outside the home
disappeared after 1998.
Conducting opinion polls isn’t glamorous
work, GSS founder Davis admitted in 1964.
“There is a lot of misery in surveys,” hewrote. But from the painstaking process
emerge new insights. For his part, Bautista
always looks forward to seeing the resultsof questions about government spending
priorities. “It’s fascinating how we canobserve these changes seen in our society
through the GSS.”—S. A.

PERCENT OF POPULATION

Survey says

Over the past five decades, the GSS has asked
Americans to share their views on social, economic,
and personal issues. Here are a few notable trends.

PERCENT OF POPULATIONPUBLIC OPINION

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Almost always
Often
Sometimes
Never
Don’t know/no answer
Not applicable

New question in 2018

How often do you turn toyour pet for comfort?
Should a communist teacher be fired?
Not firedDo you believe in life after death?

Don’t know

Yes

No

100%

100%

80%

80%

PERCENT OF POPULATIONPERCENT OF POPULATION

Fired

60%

40%

20%

Not sure

60%

40%

20%

0%
1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

0%

2020

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

YEAR

Do you favor or oppose permits to buy a gun?
Oppose

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

2005

2010

2015

2020

Should marijuana be made legal?

Don’t know

Legal

100%

100%

80%

80%

PERCENT OF POPULATIONPERCENT OF POPULATION

Favor

1995

YEAR

60%

40%

20%

Not legal

Don’t know

60%

40%

20%

0%
1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

YEAR

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

0%
1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

YEAR

FALL
LL 201
20199
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ANIMAL S

Top cat
A University alumna connects
human and feline communities
in Chicago.
BY RHON DA L . SM ITH

16

At Tree House’s eco-friendly shelter, it’s all about the cats. While waiting for theirforever homes, cats live in colonies designed for their comfort, including lots ofperches and heated floors.

eye-opening; the more she learned,
the more she realized that animal welfare is a complex issue that goes wellbeyond pet adoptions. When she saw
the Tree House position, it seemed
like a great opportunity to merge her
nonprofit management skills with her
newfound passion.
Running a cat shelter, she’s found,
isn’t just about the cats—it’s also about
the community. “As I’ve been in thisseat for a year, I’ve seen a lot of intersections between animal welfare andpoverty, animal welfare and mental
health. So it’s been kind of interesting to apply some of what I’ve learnedin the social impact space to Tree
House,” Allaire says.
Under her direction, Tree House
has expanded its outreach, forging
more collaborations with otherorganizations, such as senior centers,
and opening a cat café to bring
Chicagoans into the shelter. (For moreon the café, visit mag.uchicago.edu/treehouse.) It has also emphasized
its Community Cats and Cats at
Work Prog rams, which include
a trap-neuter-return strateg y tomaintain neighborhood colonies andto place colonies with businesses andresidential areas for rodent control.
Work is also proceeding on a lowincome cat and dog clinic, which Tree
House hopes to open in 2021.
Some of this work may end up on the
big screen. Shortly after Allaire arrived
at Tree House, she was contacted by
the Scrappers Film Group, run by
Brian Ashby, AB’06; Ben Kolak , AB’06;
and David Schalliol , AM’04, PhD’15.
They want to make a documentarythat examines urban issues in Chicago
through the lens of the city’s outdoor
cats. It’s still in the earliest stages,
but the aim, Kolak says, is to “follow
some of the cat colonies longitudinallyfor a few years to really get a sense ofneighborhood change.” The fragilityof the cats that live on the streets ofChicago “has a real tie-in and is packed
with other social issues” reflected in
the city’s human populations.
Some may contend the cats won’t
appreciate the staff’s hard work, but
Allaire disagrees: “I think they get abad rap sometimes.” In spite of theirreputation for aloofness, she’s seen the
joy and comfort they can bring. Theirdetractors, she believes, just haven’t
had enough experience with cats orhaven’t met the right one. ◆Photo courtesy Tree House Humane Society

Dogs may be man’s best friend, butwhen it comes to companion animals,
cats win the popularity contest: morethan 94 million feline friends can befound in US homes (second only to
freshwater fish).
For ailurophiles looking for a companion or two, Tree House Humane
Society has been a destination foralmost 50 years. Founded in 1971 in
Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, theshelter is run today by Raissa Allaire,
AB’97, AM’02, its executive director
since May 2018.
Prior to Allaire’s arrival, Tree House
experienced a few years of turmoil,
including leadership changes and disagreements over the shelter’s mission
and values—while also raising $7 million to construct a new eco-friendly
shelter, which opened in 2017 in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood. During her first few months, Allaire went
on a listening tour and shadowed staff
members so that she could learn how
the organization functioned. “I talked
to everyone. I talked to staff, I talked
to board members, former board
members, supporters of Tree House,
people who were not happy with Tree
House.” That gave her a better picture of what the organization meant
to the community and what it should
do better.
Allaire joined Tree House after almost 12 years at the Center for Economic Progress, a move prompted inno small part by her family’s adoptionof two cats from the Oak Park Animal
Care League in 2016. About a year after bringing Sulley and Sal home, shelearned about a feral cat colony undera neighbor’s care. The discovery was

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THE COLLEGEQUICK STUDYON THE ROAD

MEDICINE

Photography by Eloise Hyman, AB’17/UChicago Office of College Admissions

Pollutionon themind

Where in the world is Phil the Phoenix? This year, UChicago College
Admissions counselors began taking their mascot along as they visited
schools around the world. So far, Phil has collected passport stamps fromcountries including Cambodia, Costa Rica, India, Italy, Mexico, Singapore, and theUnited Kingdom. Like any good tourist, the intrepid bird took lots of photos along theway. Here, he poses at a United World College campus in Karuizawa, Japan. The signs
above show the distance to the 17 other UWC locations globally. (Alumni of theseinternational high schools can receive scholarships to attend UChicago through theDavis UWC Scholars Program.) With admissions travel season winding down, Phil has
temporarily shelved his Ziploc of three-ounce toiletries. But we have no doubt he’ll
be struck by wanderlust before too long—and when he is, you can follow along on
Instagram at @uchicagoadmissions.—S.A. ◆Living in places withpoor air quality
increases the risk ofa host of psychiatricdisorders, an August
20 paper in PLOS
Biology found.
Professor of medicine
and human genetics
Andrey Rzhetsky
and computational
biologist Atif Khan
were among ateam that analyzed
inpatient andoutpatient claims
from a US healthinsurance database of
151 million individuals
against levels of 87
air pollutants acrossthe nation. The mostpolluted counties
had 27 percent morebipolar disorderand 6 percent more
major depression. To
validate the findings,
the researchers
turned to national
treatment registersof 1.4 million people
born in Denmark.
They found 29
percent more bipolar
disorder in the mostpolluted counties
there, and an evenstronger correlation
than in the UnitedStates between earlychildhood pollution
exposure andmajor depression,schizophrenia,
and personality
disorders.—L. D. ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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“The power of social media is that it gives you depth, vulnerability and multiple perspectives,” Desmond Patton, PhD’12, has said.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

Tech support
How Desmond Patton,
PhD’12, unites social workand social media.
BY L AU RE N L ARSON , AB’ 12

In April 2014 a Chicago teenager named
Gakirah Barnes took to Twitter—not,as she sometimes did, to post photos ofherself posing with guns or to threaten

18

Brightlights,safer cityless at 2:41 a.m. on a Thursday morning,
sharing her sorrow with the world.
What would have happened, Patton
wondered, if someone in a position to
help had seen the suffering in her tweets?
It wasn’t the first time Patton had
thought about how social media wasshaping young lives. As a graduate
student at the School of Social Service
Administration, he wrote his dissertation about how high schoolers on Chicago’s West Side navigated violence intheir community; Twitter, they told
Patton, was an important platform,
because it helped them spot and avoid
brewing conflicts.

Shining a light on high-crime areas of New York City makes those spots safer,found a May 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by ateam that included the UChicago Crime Lab’s Jason Lerner and Lucie Parker.
The researchers identified 80 public housing projects with high rates of themost serious crimes—murder, robbery, and felony assault, for example—
and worked with the city to install temporary light towers in half. The 40
communities and the towers’ locations within them were randomly selected.
Nighttime crimes near the towers fell by 60 percent, and the larger complexes
saw a 36 percent drop. Knowing from previous studies that violent crime tends
to be geographically concentrated and that criminals focus on short-term
factors when deciding to commit a crime, the researchers argue that smallchanges like the towers have the power to make a significant impact.—L. D. ◆Photography by John Pinderhughes

QUICK STUDYURBAN STUDIES

rival gangs—but to grieve. Her friend
Raason “Lil B” Shaw had been fatally
shot by a police officer. The pain, Barnes
wrote, was “unbearable.”
Eight days later, Barnes, 17, was deadtoo, shot nine times in the chest, neck,and jaw. She was memorialized in the
media as “Chicago’s Gun-Toting GangGirl” and “Lil Snoop,” a reference tothe cold-blooded killer on The Wire.
Social worker Desmond Upton Patton,
PhD’12, saw the coverage, which led him
to Barnes’s Twitter account. Reading
her tweets, he recognized the hardened
figure described in news reports but also
saw a young woman, apparently sleep-

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Patton is still grappling with the
influence and power of social media.
Now the founding director of Columbia University’s SAFElab, he’s developing software that analyzes patterns of
online behavior among at-risk youth.
He hopes the tool will help social workers and outreach organizations intervene in positive ways.
One of SAFElab’s most significant
findings, published in npj Digital
Medicine last year, is that aggressive
social media posts often follow posts
about grief. Young people turn tosocial media to express reactions topersonal trauma and loss, but thena broad network of people engage
with those reactions, in ways bothwell-intentioned and hostile. That’s
precisely what happened to Barnes,
whose grief-filled tweets prompted
taunts from a rival gang member.
“That is a very common practice,because being tough on- and offline is
an important way in which you staysafe,” Patton explains. “If we don’t likeeach other, one of the ways in which
we show how bad we are is, ‘I’m going
to follow you and every time you say
something, I’m going to say somethingback to you.’” When a rival responds toan expression of grief—even just by replying with an emoji—the interaction
can spiral into online and sometimes
offline aggression.
The software is in its early stages,
and part of the work ahead for Pattonand his collaborators is determining
how it can best be used. When thetechnology is ready, they plan topartner with communit y-basedorganizations and figure out when,
where, and how to put it into action.
But he’s certain of one thing: the tool
isn’t able or intended to predict crime.
“This isn’t Minority Report,” he says.
For the time being, Patton is focusedon making the tool fairer and moreaccurate. Social media language isever changing and extremely local.
Law enforcement can monitor social
media for threats, but that data isuseless without the ability to parseout meaning on a local level. It’s
taken Patton and 25 fellows, research

assistants, and collaborators several
years to reach 72 percent accuracy
with their algorithm—meaning that 72
percent of the time, it correctly labels
content related to grief, substanceabuse, and aggression.
Now Patton has “an army” ofcommunity members who help him
interpret the patterns he sees. He
relies heavily on their help in decoding
linguistic quirks from place to place. In
New York City, for instance, the purple
grinning devil emoji has a sexual
connotation, but in Chicago that same
emoji, when paired with an implicit
threat, might signal an imminent
violent act.
Still, the complexity of online
language hasn’t stopped police andattorneys from deploying social
media during legal proceedings. Allover the country, posts from blackand Latino young people have beenused as proof of gang involvement.
But too often, critics of this practiceargue, courts ignore a crucial fact:
teenagers posture. Without context,
it’s impossible to separate criminality
from swagger. That’s why Patton istaking his time developing the tool andis wary of similar software already inuse by police departments.
There’s good reason to be cautious.
Patton and his colleagues have alreadyfound biases in their own system.
“Our algorithm kept identifying stop
words—like ‘duh,’ ‘uh,’ and ‘uhn’—asbeing related to aggression,” Pattonsays. “When we dug a little deeper,
we saw that some of those patterns ofspeech are also intrinsically connected
to African American Vernacular English.” The team fixed the problem, but
the discovery shook them.
Patton wants a tool that helps rather than harms, one that allows social
workers, the courts, and the public tobetter understand the lives of young
people who get written off as dangerous. For every tweeted threat, there
is another post—about friendship, orloss, or fear—that tells a different story.
“Most people are using these platforms
for support,” Patton says. “They’relooking for help.” ◆W. R.
HARPER’SINDEXSTOCKHOLM
STATS
Nobel and Nobel
Memorial prizes
awarded to date597

Laureates affiliated with
UChicago as faculty,
students, or researchers92

Age of the youngest recipientat the time of the award

17

Age of the oldest, 2019
chemistry laureate John
Goodenough, SM’50, PhD’52

97

Laureates who are
UChicago alumni

34

Laureates currently
on the faculty

5

Alumni laureates on
the faculty2Nobel medals in UChicago
Library collections

7

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A Spondylus americanus (left) from the Florida Keys, a tropical mollusk species withlong spines, and Arctica islandica, found only in cold waters like the Gulf of Maine.

EVOLUTION

A little latitude
Why does biodiversity wax
near the equator and wane
approaching Earth’s poles?
BY LOU ISE LE RN E R , AB’09

20

Photo courtesy Katie Collins

Among all of the world’s natural kingdoms, one rule reigns supreme: there
are lots of different species at the tropics, but the numbers drop off sharply
as you move toward the poles. “Thisholds true across virtually all kinds oflife and in all kinds of environments,
but the reasons why are still hotly
contested,” says David Jablonski, theWilliam R. Kenan Jr. DistinguishedService Professor of Geophysical Sciences, whose research on mollusks hashelped shape the study of evolution,
extinction, and biodiversity. “This is afundamental question that goes backbefore Darwin,” he says. The stakes ofunderstanding the geography of biodi-

versity are big. For one thing, it could
help scientists project how species will
adapt to climate change.
Scientists have traditionally researched one aspect of biodiversity
at a time: the number of species in aregion, the species’ form (the shapeof an organism’s body), or their ecological function (the way they “makea living”). For example, a clam’s shell
can be spiny or smooth, and it can survive by eating sunken logs off a coastor by filtering plankton in tidal flats.
All three ways of looking at the animal tell you something different about
evolution, niches, and patterns of biodiversity. But each is so complex on its
own that any two are rarely studied inunison, let alone all three.
Jablonski believes integrating theseapproaches could yield important
insights. Two recent publications
from his lab combine the expertiseof different kinds of specialists to investigate the biodiversity shift fromtropics to poles.
In one study, Jablonski’s teamworked with UChicago bird biologist
Trevor Price and his research group,

including Matthew Schumm , AB’18,
to compare their mollusk data with
Price’s understanding of how the traitsof bird species vary with geographicalenvironments. In tropical birds, someways to make a living are common to
many species while others support
just a few. Many species eat insects ontree branches, for example, but only
a few semiaquatic birds eat lizards.
This pattern persists midway into thelatitudes, but at a distinct tipping point
the number of ways to make a living
declines, and the distribution of species among them evens out.
The same is true for mollusks, andthat result “knocked our collective
socks off,” says Jablonski. “For animals, you don’t get much different
than a bird and a bivalve, but you see
this strikingly similar pattern,” adds
Stewart Edie, PhD’18, a postdoctoral
researcher in Jablonski’s lab and, with
Schumm, the joint first author of thestudy. “That usually suggests we’relooking at a higher-order control that’s
operating on a large scale around theplanet, both on land and sea.”
The theory is that in the tropics,
there’s more room for fine-scale specialization among species—not justbirds that eat seeds, but birds that eat
one kind of seed, in one part of the environment (branches high in the forest canopy, for example). But at higher
latitudes, the climate is more seasonaland more difficult to survive in, making it less viable to be a specialist. “A lotof the ways of life are still present; youjust have to be able to eat every kind of
seed, or live anywhere in the canopy,”
Jablonski says.
That would be a new insight about
how biodiversity works, with implications for how functional diversity will
respond to climate change. For example, the food supply could face newrisks from parasites that attack “crops
or plants we care about—species will
arrive that can focus on specific hosts
as it gets warmer.”
A second study, led by Edie andpostdoctoral researcher Katie Collins,
turned to technology to analyze how
the forms of mollusks change from

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Photo courtesy University of Chicago Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy

QUICK STUDY
tropics to poles. The team used a mi- smooth, plain, and often small. At firstcro-CT scanner to examine museum- blush this seems to indicate a massive
held samples of 95 percent of all the directional shift in the forms species
species found in the Florida Keys and take at different latitudes. Particuthe Gulf of Maine, yielding a trove of lar species may have more elaborateshells near the equator as an adap3-D images.
Most studies work with shell length tation to better protect themselvesand height only, but “of course that’s not from the wider variety of predators,
the whole picture,” Collins says. With for instance.
That’s not the only phenomenon
this data they were able to add shellornamentation, shell thickness, and that scientists found at work, though.
“It turns out there
many other paramare plain shells eveters. “Now we canerywhere,” Collins
put hard numbers Species are moresays. In the tropics
on shell form where likely to drop out
you find “a mix of
we just had generalplain and fancy speimpressions before,” than to adapt to thecies; the fancy shells
says coauthor Rüdi- tougher conditions.
just drop out of theger Bieler, curator ofmix as you go north.”
invertebrate zoology
at Chicago’s Field Museum and a mem- While some species transform to adapt
ber of UChicago’s Committee on Evolu- to varied conditions, other species disappear at higher latitudes. “It looks
tionary Biology.
Beaches in the Florida Keys are like the high-latitude climate narrows
littered with large, brightly colored down the range of viable shell forms,
shells with spines, ridges, and knobs. and some lineages are just frozen out,
But north of Cape Cod, the shells are so to speak,” says Jablonski.
This too has implications for humans as they continue to alter the
climate and environment. “What thissuggests is that species are more likely
to drop out than to adapt to the tougher conditions at high latitudes,” Collins says. “This could affect humans in
a very real way. Bivalves serve a hugerole in fisheries, and we don’t know if
the ones we like to eat most, like oysters or scallops or mussels, are goingto disappear or move out of their accessible fishing grounds as the climatechanges around them.”
This study was done on modern
species; the next step is to add fossils.
(Scientists love mollusks because theirshells are easily fossilized.) That, Collins says, will shed light on whether“the fancy lineages are more extinction prone or if they’re stable.”
Taken together, says Jablonski, thestudies show that the diversity of animals’ forms and the diversity of theirfunctions “don’t all change together
on a global scale, and the mismatches
David Jablonski got interested intell us something new about the forces
mollusks because their easily fossilizedshaping life on Earth.” ◆remains have left a vast historical record.

PSYCHOLOGY

City
pickers
It’s well documented
in environmental
psychology that
adults strongly
prefer natural tourban environments,
but it’s not wellunderstood why.
New research led bypsychology doctoral
student Kimberly L.
Meidenbauer, AM’16,
examined young
children’s wilderness
love or lack thereof
and whether the
adult preference isinnate. Meidenbauer
and her colleagues,
who published theirresults in the Journalof Environmental
Psychology, spoke to
4- to 11-year-olds andtheir parents living inrural and developed
settings. Both wereasked to rank picturesof natural and built
places, and the adults
were questioned
about their children’s
home and school
environments.
Children, they found,have a “robust
preference” forurban settings that
decreases withage. And the datasuggested they reap
the psychologicalbenefits of green
places regardless ofpreference, including
better mood, lower
stress, and reduced
attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder
symptoms.—L. D. ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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For the record
ARTISTIC DIRECTIONS

Two UChicago arts programs began
the 2019–20 academic year with newleadership. Jacqueline Stewart, AM’93,
PhD’99, professor of cinema and media
studies, was named director of Arts +Public Life, which works to advance therelationships between the University andthe civic, cultural, and artistic communities
of Chicago’s South Side. Previously directorof the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for
Arts and Inquiry, Stewart is succeeded inthat position by Seth Brodsky, associate
professor of music. The Gray Center
supports collaborations between artists andscholars at UChicago.

RUSTANDY JOINSBOARDNEW FUNDING MODEL FOR
GRADUATE EDUCATION

A new framework for doctoral education in
the Divinity School, Humanities Division,
Social Sciences Division, and School ofSocial Service Administration will be phasedin over two academic years beginningin fall 2020. Under the new approach,announced by Provost Daniel Diermeier in
October, all enrolled PhD students will befunded for the duration of their programs
at the guaranteed stipend level (currently$31,000) plus full tuition and healthinsurance premium coverage. Teaching by
PhD students will be structured as mentored

22

REACHING OUT

In August the College Admissions
Office expanded support for rural
students and high school counselors
through the UChicago Emerging Rural Leaders Program. Part of the UChicago Empower Initiative, the program wasmade possible by University trustee Byron
D. Trott, AB’81, MBA’82, and his wife,
Tina, longtime UChicago supporters
and advocates of increasing college
access for rural students. Empower
expands financial support, oncampus programming, and online resources for first-generation students,
rural students, and underrepresented
students, beginning with the Class of 2023,
who arrived on campus in September.

BEYOND THE
MILKY WAY

After a decade building
the instrument, a teamled by astronomy
and astrophysics
associate professor
Jacob Bean installed
MAROON-X in Hawaii’s
Gemini Observatory to searchother solar systems for exoplanetsthat could potentially host life. From its
perch atop the observatory’s Gemini
North telescope, the instrument detects
the infinitesimal gravitational pullthat exoplanets exert on the stars they
orbit, enabling scientists to identify the
exoplanets and measure their masses.
MAROON-X took its first readings on
September 23.

MISSION DRIVEN

Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, anationally recognized independent bookseller
and a fixture of the Hyde Park community
since 1961, announced its new status as thecountry’s first not-for-profit bookstore

whose mission is bookselling itself. In making
the change, said director Jeff Deutsch in an
October email to members and friends of thestores, “we more accurately place the workof the Seminary Co-op in the realm of thecultural institution while still recognizing ourprimary mission as booksellers.”

LANDMARKSCIENTIST

Albert A. Michelson,
recipient of the 1907
Nobel Prize in Physics
and the first US
scientist to becomea Nobelist, now hasa campus namesake.
In August the Physics
Research Center became theMichelson Center for Physics—a workplacefor 150 scientists exploring the nature ofdark matter and dark energy, cosmic rays,
black holes, and other questions about theuniverse. The building, which opened in
1965, underwent a wholesale renovation in2017, including the addition of two floors. For
more about Michelson, who is best known fortaking the first accurate measurement of the
speed of light, see “The Angle of Reflection,”
page 68.

RITE OF PASSAGE

For more than 55 years, incoming College
students have gathered in Rockefeller
Memorial Chapel during Orientation Week
to hear a senior faculty member reflect
on the purpose and nature of education in
the Aims of Education Address. This year’s
address was given by School of Social
Service Administration
dean Deborah
Gorman-Smith, amember of theUChicago faculty
since 2012 who
studies youth
development andthe preventionof violence. Her
September 26 lecture
stressed the importanceof challenging conventional wisdom and“learning by engaging outside the walls of
the University.” It was followed by facultyled colloquia in the residential houses wherestudents had an opportunity to discuss theaddress and share their views.

Clockwise from top left: Photography by Heidi Zeiger; photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center;photography by Lloyd Degrane; photo courtesy Jacob Bean

Tandean Rustandy,
MBA’07, founderand chief executiveof PT Arwana
Citramulia Tbk,
has been electedto the Universityof Chicago Board ofTrustees. His five-year
term began in May. Rustandy
is a member of the Chicago Booth Council
and a past member of the Booth
Global Advisory Board Asia cabinet.
His belief in a socially beneficial
approach to business was thedriving force behind his decision
to support expanded research andprogramming in social innovationand entrepreneurship through the
Rustandy Center for Social Sector
Innovation, one of many areas of the
University he has supported.

teaching experiences and separated fromfunding. And the total number of PhD
students across a school or division will be
fixed. Alongside this new funding model,
the University will offer new career support
for students, expand existing postgraduateteaching fellows programs, develop
programs to help faculty become better
mentors, and launch several initiatives torecruit and retain a diverse graduate
student body.

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studies?” No, but we do give an award
each year to a student paper or projectusing the materials of the institute.

How is sports like a religion?

INTERVIEW

The field of his dreams
A Divinity School grad turns an academic double play.

Clockwise from top left: Photography by Heidi Zeiger; photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center;

Illustration by John Jay Cabuay

BY J E AN IE CH U NG

The son and grandson of Baptist ministers, Joseph Price, AM’79, PhD’82, grew
up in Mississippi as a New York Yankees fan—partly because of the team’s
success in the 1950s and early 1960s,
partly because of pitcher Don Larsen’s
perfect game in the 1956 World Series.
“I thought, here in a religious household, perfection is the goal,” he says.
The intersection of sports andreligion has fascinated Price throughout
his career. At the Divinity School, thecritical methods used in theologicalstudies and comparative religions gave
him a conceptual framework to apply tosports rituals and fandom. He explores
sports as a form of “civil religion” inbooks, including Rounding the Bases:
Baseball and Religion in America(Mercer University Press, 2006).
In 2014 Price and two colleagues at
Whittier College, where he is professor
emeritus of religious studies, founded
the Institute for Baseball Studies, ahumanities-based research center.
During a 2011 sabbatical Price, whosang in the Rockefeller Chapel Choir
at UChicago, went on a cross-country
quest to sing the national anthem in
as many minor league ballparks as
possible. He covered 28,712 miles

in a rented RV with his wife, sang at
104 games, and chronicled the trip in
Perfect Pitch: The National Anthem for
the National Pastime (Mercer, 2018).
The 2019 Divinity School Alumnusof the Year, Price talked with the Magazine in an interview that has been edited and condensed.

Is the anthem hard to sing?
If it’s sung joyfully, it’s really quite aneasy song to sing. It’s lilting. I sing it
in a low key, which makes it more fan
friendly. It’s enjoyable to see fans singing along; it’s sort of a choral work, andbest when conceived in that way.

What has been your colleagues’
response to the Institute for
Baseball Studies?
Envy. “This looks like it’s fun.” “Youradministration buys this?”
The institute has supported fourcourses dealing with the significanceof baseball for American culture.
We’ve taken students and alumni to
Puerto Rico and to Cuba on study trips.
We frequently get asked, “Do you
have a major or minor in baseball

One way is the building of a community—the following that is engenderedby becoming a fan. It’s possible to be asports atheist. There is also something
fundamentally human about trying tosecure a victory, as passing as it might
be. Theologian Michael Novak pointed
out that the experience of defeat in a
sport is a way to rehearse how one
will deal with death. Issues of life anddeath are dramatized in a timeframeof sports competition that reflects
questions of ultimacy. And that’s fundamentally a religious question.
There are also, of course, the myths
that shape lives and teams. The historiesof the players, the relics. The foul balltouched by Steve Bartman during a
Cubs playoff game in 2003 became arelic that needed to be destroyed.

What is your take on former
NFL player Colin Kaepernickand protests during the anthem?
His kneeling was actually a muchgreater sign of respect than the fans
who continued to sit on blankets andtalk while I was on the tour. He also
was able to raise consciousness about
issues of racial oppression.

What’s your next project?
It’s on the closing rituals of baseballparks, especially the significance ofremoving home plate. What happens
when home plate is removed from theballpark? Usually it’s transported indramatic ways to the new site, muchin the way the cornerstone of an oldchurch sanctuary building would
be transported for perpetuity to a
new site.
I’m also cowriting a book with mylongtime friend Don Musser [PhD’81].
He and I have a 40-year-friendshipthat began in the Divinity School.
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ECONOMICSMARKET VALUES
An economist’s fight to protect capitalism
from big business.
BY S H A R L A A . PAU L

24

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Illustration by Keith Negley/Theispot (left); photo courtesy Chicago BoothIn his 2019 convocation speech,
Luigi Zingales told graduates,“To fight monopolies, yourpower as workers, consumers,
and investors is not sufficient.
Your participation in the politicalprocess is critical.”O

ne of the busiest corners of the
globe at the opening of the year
1872 was a strip of Northwestern Pennsylvania, not over fifty
miles long,” journalist Ida Tarbell wrote in 1902. In the spanof just 12 years, those once quiet
Pennsylvania hills were overrun with hardy young entrepreneurs seeking to make their fortunes from a
new product: petroleum. But the days of bustlingcompetition did not last.
“At the very heyday of this confidence,” Tarbell
went on, “a big hand reached out from nobody
knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle
their future.”
The throttling hand was that of John D. Rockefeller. By 1880 his Standard Oil Company controlled about 90 percent of the oil produced in
the United States, including its transport, refining, and marketing. Rockefeller pioneered
market domination by undercutting prices
across all areas of the oil business and buying
up his competitors.

For a cohort of eight journalists on campus at
the University of Chicago Booth School of Business this past spring, Tarbell’s two-year 19-article exposé on Standard Oil—widely considered tobe the birth of investigative journalism—served
as both inspiration and how-to guide.
Credited with exposing the deleterious effects
of monopolies on society, as well as inspiring
government efforts to counter them, Tarbell’s
muckraking series “created the political demandfor intervention,” Chicago Booth economist
Luigi Zingales explained in a recent episode of his
podcast Capitalisn’t. In 1911 the Supreme Court
ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil into 34 individual companies. (Rockefeller, who referred toTarbell as “Miss Tar Barrel,” became the nation’s
first billionaire and spent the later years of his life
giving away much of his fortune, including funds
to found the University of Chicago.)
Journalists and business school professors may
seem like strange bedfellows, but not to Zingales,
the faculty director of the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. In
2017 he launched the Stigler Center Journalists in
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Residence program. For the reporters who participate, it’s a taste of the business school experienceand a crash course in economic theory: they audit
classes, meet scholars, and attend special events.
Why invest in the next generation of muckraking? Because, in Zingales’s view, capitalism depends on it. He believes investigative journalism
is a major reason why American capitalism hashistorically been so successful compared to the“crony capitalist” systems that prevail elsewhere.
Take his native Italy, where, he has argued, personal connections—not merit or competition—
determine who wins in the marketplace.
The guiding idea behind the residency is thatjournalists in the trenches—filing pieces on thedaily and weekly happenings of the businessworld and exposing special interests that aim tosubvert markets for their own gain—help createa demand to keep markets free.
“Inquisitive, daring and influential media
outlets willing to take a strong stand against
economic power are essential in a competitive
capitalist society,” Zingales wrote in the Financial
Times in 2015. “They are our defense against crony
capitalism. When the media outlets in any country
fail to challenge power, not only are they not partof the solution, they become part of the problem.”T

he problem, as Tarbell’s oil capitalists experienced and as the Stigler Center recognizes, is that capitalism itself is so fragile.

26

Illustration by Keith Negley.

Economist George J. Stigler, PhD’38,
revolutionized his field by arguing that
regulation may have the unforeseen
consequence of hindering competition.
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Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the free-market laissez-faire approach so famously espousedby Chicago economists can easily be shackled
by special interests (see page 31). These include
price-cutting monopolies like Rockefeller’sStandard Oil; competitionshy incumbents aiming
to deter new market entrants; and rent-seeking
corporations that look to
the government for an advantage in the marketplace
via subsidies or regulatory
capture—that is, when laws
increase the market advantage for the very firms
meant to be regulated.
It was UChicago Nobel
Prize–winning economist
George J. Stigler, PhD’38, theeponymous founder of theCenter for the Study of the
Economy and the State, who
first questioned the impactof regulation on competition
and who in 1971 put forward
the idea that industry “acquires” regulation for its benefit. His two-part hypothesis:
one, industries will wield whatever political power
they have to prevent new competitors from entering the market, and two, regulations will be written
to slow those new entrants’ growth.
Before Stigler, regulation had been studied entirely from a content perspective—in other words,
how the rules were written to prevent market
failure and protect consumers from unfairly highprices. Not questioned was the assumption that
regulation itself, particularly of natural monopolies such as public utilities, was necessary. So
Stigler and his coauthor Claire Friedland, AM’55,
took up the study of electricity regulation, aiming
to understand the actual outcomes of such controls, as opposed to the intentions. Did regulation
keep prices for consumers down? By comparing
areas with varying degrees of electricity oversight from the early 1900s to 1960, Stigler foundthat the price difference was negligible, casting
doubt on the need for regulation at all.

The finding shocked economists. “I can’t tell
you how important it was,” says Sam Peltzman ,PhD’65, a graduate student of Stigler’s who took
over directing the center after Stigler’s deathin 1991. “What happened next was a period ofgreat ferment.”
Over the subsequent decades, economists followed
Stigler’s lead in examining the real-world effects
of regulation and stopped
taking for granted that
regulation accomplishes
what it intends. Stigler’s
1982 Nobel citation statesthat his work “resulted infundamental testing of theforces, purposes and effects” of legislation.
For his part, Peltzman,
the Ralph and Dorothy
Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
of Economics, carried on
Stigler’s work by digging
into the more nuanced outcomes of regulation. He
put forward a model for
analyzing the trade-offs
and unintended consequences of such rules.
Peltzman argued that even the most beneficial of regulations still have trade-offs, because
people tend to change their behavior in waysthat counteract the regulation’s aim. The most
famous example of what is sometimes called thePeltzman effect is car safety regulations. In a 1975
paper he argued that, although safety features
including seat belts saved lives, a portion of thebenefit was offset by increases in reckless driving
and nondriver deaths.
Later, in a 1983 paper, Nobelist Gary Becker,
AM’53, PhD’55, offered his model of regulation,in which he noted that interest groups are not amonolithic bloc but consist of competing interests.
As he explained in the Wall Street Journal in 2010,“Once you’ve got a piece of legislation in place, interest groups grow up around it.”Overall, Stigler set in motion an understanding for which Chicago economics has become

Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library

ECONOMISTSFOLLOWEDSTIGLER’S LEAD
IN EXAMINING
THE REALWORLD EFFECTS
OF REGULATION
AND STOPPEDTAKING FOR
GRANTED THATREGULATIONACCOMPLISHESWHAT ITINTENDS.

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In July executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple testified in a congressional hearing on antitrust issues—a sign ofmounting public concern that technology titans are curbing competition and innovation.

tion of the 1970s, which, “as a result, in part, of
the triumph of the ideas of the Chicago school,”
Zingales says, was followed by a reduction in regulation and an era of innovation and economic
expansion, lasting until the 2008–09 meltdownof the financial sector.
Now the Stigler Center has cast its gaze on
Silicon Valley and its digital titans, Amazon,Apple, Facebook, and Google. This fall, wrapping up a large-scale effort to examine the current shape of economic concentration and its
effects in the United States, the center issued its
assessment: there islittle evidence themarket will, or can,rein in these companies’ increasingly
unchecked power.
The finding drewfrom the work of 30
experts from acrossthe country; representing the fieldsof business, economics, law, and political science, they spent a year researching and debating
whether monopoly has reached a worrisome level.
The ultimate question was what to do about, to use
Tarbell’s phrase, the “big hand” of tech giants inthe marketplace.

MY CLAIM IS THATPART OF THE CHANGE
IN ATTITUDE IS DUETO A CHANGE IN
SURROUNDINGS.

28

Photography by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

known: that the outcomes of regulation andgovernment intervention, such as antitrust litigation, are complicated, to say the least—and,at worst, can end up hurting competition andhampering free markets.
This brings us back to the Stigler Center today,
where its current director, Zingales, is in the surprising position of arguing that the pendulum
against antitrust and government regulation has
swung too far.
“My claim is that part of the change in attitude
is due to a change in surroundings,” he says in
his office the day
before convocation,
when he will speak
to 2019 graduates
about their politicalpower as consumers.
“The world today iscompletely different
from the world in
the 1970s.”
A little more thana century after Progressive Era figures like
Tarbell and Senator John Sherman intervened
against Rockefeller, the economy has cycled
through the Great Depression, the increasing
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One surprising and much-debated conclusion was to create a digital authority to regulate the industry. In May Yale economist Fiona
Scott Morton, who led the Stigler Center groupthat analyzed the market structure of thedigital platforms, quietly delivered the recommendation to the US Senate as part of hearings on digital advertisingand competition policy.
Zingales spent the summer
getting traction on the ideaof a digital authority. In
July Fortune magazine ran
a feature on the center’s
proposal to tailor regulations to limit big tech’s
power, and in September
the New York Times business section trumpeted,“Chicago School Professor
Fights ‘Chicago School’ Beliefs that Abet Big Tech.”Peltzman, however, isn’t
convinced that a new regulatory authority will work.
“It’s just not the right tool
to address the nonexistentproblems,” he says. “I’m skeptical. Having said
that, it’s certainly relevant to have a discussion. I
hope we have a discussion instead of a crusade.”
In an episode of the podcast Capitalisn’t,
Zingales faced similar criticism from George
Mason University economist Tyler Cowen,
a panelist at the center’s conference on digital platforms and the author of Big Business:
A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (St.
Martin’s, 2019).
“I would stress the negative secondary consequences of regulation,” Cowen warns on the
podcast. Setting up a regulatory agency, he argues, “is a very dangerous step. It’s an entry barrier. It’s an opportunity for rent seeking. It will
limit innovation.”As the economists, law scholars, and political scientists debate, one thing is certain: theStigler Center’s journalists have been all ears.
The purpose of the residency program, after all,is to educate the journalists. How they use what
they learn is up to them.

All spring Adam Creighton was on firewith the ideas he was encountering at
UChicago. The economics editor for theAustralian and a 2019 Stigler Center journalist in
residence, Creighton filed stories and columns
that bore the fingerprints of the classes he wastaking and scholars he’d met during his 12 weeks
in Hyde Park. In one piece
he argued that patents create “artificial monopolies”;
in another, a critique of Australia’s retirement savings
system, he cited UChicago’s
own Eugene Fama, MBA’63,
PhD’69, and Richard Thaler.
Meanwhile, in Bengaluru,
the Silicon Valley of India,
the Economic Times’s Megha
Mandavia, a 2018 Stigler resident journalist, was helping her readers make senseof unfolding efforts to tax
Facebook and Google. The
move would help the Indian
government reap some of thevast profits the companies
generate from citizens via
advertising and data monetization.
In the United States, from the Election 2020
desk at the Wall Street Journal, another 2018 Stigler resident journalist, the Pulitzer prize–winning reporter Jacob Schlesinger, published threepieces in June on the many challenges presented
to policy makers by Amazon, Apple, Facebook,and Google. The influence and effect of theseplatforms on markets, he wrote, are particularly
challenging to grasp because they don’t fit oldmodels of monopoly that would signal harm toconsumers and trigger antitrust action: the combination of higher prices and less choice.
“Free services are good for consumers,”
Schlesinger wrote. “Monopolies tend to be badfor them. The big tech platforms have elements ofboth—a combination that is vexing policy makers
around the world as they struggle to figure out how
best to police American technology behemoths
and their unusual business models.” The outcome, he and colleagues reported in a subsequent
piece, is a “mounting backlash” against technology

THE INFLUENCEAND EFFECTOF THESE
PLATFORMS ON
MARKETS ... ARE
PARTICULARLYCHALLENGING TO
GRASP BECAUSE
THEY DON’T FIT
OLD MODELS OF
MONOPOLY.

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An ongoing conversation: Chicago school luminaries Stigler(right) and Milton Friedman, AM’33.

giants “that threatens to raze the four-decadelong Washington consensus to defer to markets
in setting boundaries for corporate competition.”
On campus, at the last Friday noontime seminarof the spring 2019 quarter, this year’s journalists
gathered for a pizza lunch with Chicago Booth’s
Austan Goolsbee, who chaired President Barack
Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and is
the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics. After Goolsbee gave ashort overview of his
research, the questions began. XinningLiu of the Financial
Times asked about
the US-China tradewar, trying to understand the real-timeand potential longterm implications ofPresident Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs.
Other journalists peppered Goolsbee withequally timely questions about the outcomes ofa recent Federal Reserve conference, whether arecession is on the horizon, the student debt bubble, the viability of the wealth tax, his thoughts
on universal basic income, and his favorite in the2020 presidential race. Asked what he thought of
the idea of a digital authority, Goolsbee wonderedaloud how it would work in practice.
After the session, the Australian’s Creighton
gave his own take on the proposed digital authority: “It’s not very Stiglerian.”

The comment doesn’t faze Zingales, whose work
as he carries on the legacy of Stigler requires him to
grapple with what makes an idea “Stiglerian.”“I think, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, that thecontribution of Stigler is great, but mostly to learn
what we should not do,” he says later, back in his
office. Stigler’s work shouldn’t be used as a justification for sitting back and doing nothing, Zingales
argues. “I think that the absence of regulation canbe as bad as, and sometimes worse than, bad regulations. … I’m very happy to come to a conclusion,
if you convince me, that maybe the intervention
is not worth the effort. But starting with the presumption that nothing can be done? That’s the kindof ideological block that I would like to avoid.”
So what does Zingales believe is Stiglerian? It
depends—and that was true even for Stigler, hesays. He notes that Stigler’s views also evolved to
fit the times, citing the economist’s 1952 Fortune
magazine article “The Case Against Big Business.” In it Stigler argued for breaking up large
corporations when necessary, writing, “This, I
would emphasize, is the minimum program, and
it is essentially a conservative program.”
Zingales lets the effect of Stigler’s statement
sink in.
“Wait a minute,” hesays, “what is so conservative about that?”
In 1952 Stigler saw
no economies of scalein big business andargued that it was
better to break up
than to regulate large
firms. But those ideas
evolved under the influence of another UChicago
economist, the late Harold Demsetz, who established that big business tends to be more efficient.
Zingales’s point: what’s conservative depends onthe evidence and the context—and maybe what’s
Stiglerian does too.
“If the world around you changes, you shouldchange your prescriptions,” Zingales says. “If you
don’t, it’s called ideology. … I don’t say, whatever
Stigler said in 1970, it cannot be changed. That’s
religion, not research.” ◆THE CONTRIBUTION
OF STIGLER IS GREAT,
BUT MOSTLY TO LEARN
WHAT WE SHOULDNOT DO.

Photo courtesy ProMarket

30

Sharla A. Paul is a writer and editor in Hyde Park.

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PRO-MARKET OR PRO-BUSINESS?
A primer on subversive special interests.

Adam Smith Business School (CC BY-SA 4.0)

I

n The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith
posited that competition is the essential
ingredient that makes a market economy
work and that a competitive market system ends up benefiting everyone. Two hundred years later, George J. Stigler, PhD’38,
outlined how governmental regulationinterferes with the healthy functioning ofthat system. Now, Stigler Center director Luigi
Zingales and others are keeping a watchful eye on
how new forms of special interest in business andgovernment can intrude too. Here, according toZingales and the other editors of the Stigler Center’s blog, ProMarket, are several key ways special
interests can subvert capitalism and undermine
the public good.
ANTITRUST Pro-business versus pro-market.
“Businessmen like free markets until they get intoa market; once they are in it they want to block entry to others,” Zingales explained in 2012. “Promarketeers want free markets at all times.”
According to the ProMarket editors, a good
way of telling where someone lands on the probusiness–pro-market continuum is their stanceon antitrust policy. “Pro-business usually favors
incumbents”—established firms—“while promarket calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement
to facilitate competition,” they write.
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE “The system of formal and informal rules by which a company isgoverned,” according to the ProMarket editors.
“Corporate governance therefore affects and isaffected by the degree of cronyism and rent seeking in society.”
CRONYISM When who you are or who you know
determines who gets a job or a contract, or whena monopoly so dominates a marketplace that efficiency and innovation no longer matter, that’s cronyism at work. Italy practically invented cronyism

and nepotism, Zingales claims, beginning when
the natural children of Pope Alexander VI werecalled “nephews” and given plum positions in the
Catholic Church. The result is a vicious cycle, with“incompetent nephews and stupid cronies” tending to hire subordinates of equal or lower quality,
eroding human capital, causing firms to resort
to lobbying when threatened, and systematicallyharming even successful economies.
MONEY IN POLITICS “The ones who are the bestat business these days are the ones who are bestat lobbying, not at making gadgets or new ideas,”says Zingales. He has proposed taxing lobbying (“the best way to discourage a behavior is totax it,” he quips), as well as the powerful tool of“naming and shaming” firms that engage in excessive lobbying.
REGULATORY CAPTURE In his 2019 convocation
speech, Zingales recalled: “George Stigler ... hastaught us that regulation tends to be shaped—
what we economists refer to as ‘captured’—by
the very companies it is supposed to discipline.
It increases their power rather than reducing it.”
In his landmark 1971 paper, Stigler outlined the“supply” and “demand” for regulation, proposing that industry “acquires” regulation, and that
regulation is “designed and operated” primarily
for the benefit of industry. Zingales often gives
the example of the Dodd-Frank Act, meant to police the financial services industry following the2008 crisis, and its Volcker Rule. The regulation
is so complicated that it’s nearly impossible to enforce—which, he argues, is why banks wanted it.
RENT SEEKING Rent seeking is “when one grouptries to obtain privileges from the government
to secure profits beyond those available underwell-functioning markets,” according to ProMarket. Examples include tariffs, subsidies, andthe 2007–09 bailouts for “too big to fail” banks. ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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LEGACYBY THE DOZENSMicrobiologist Maurice Hilleman, PhD’44, developed 40 vaccineswith the help of some feathered friends.
BY M AU R E E N S E A R C Y

M32After isolating the so-called Asian flu virus, Hilleman
tested it against the blood of hundreds of servicepeople andcivilians. None had antibodies to the virus. He sent samples
to public health organizations, which tested it globally. Only
elderly survivors of an 1889 pandemic were immune. That
virus was back—and could sweep across the world.
But the US Public Health Service and the military-based
Influenza Commission dismissed Hilleman’s worries. They
called him crazy, Hilleman told Offit, so he contacted six manufacturers directly, bypassing the principal American vaccine regulatory agency. When Asian flu arrived in the UnitedStates during the first week of September, as Hilleman had
predicted almost to the day, vaccinations had already begun. By late fall, 40 million doses had been distributed.
The 1957–58 flu pandemic killed as many as two million
people worldwide, about 70,000 in the United States. Someestimated a million Americans would have died without
Hilleman’s vaccination campaign. The speedy response
would have been impossible had he not advised: don’t kill
the roosters.
From his coop-tending youth, Hilleman knew that farmers typically killed their roosters late in the hatching season.
But making millions of doses of influenza vaccine requires
millions of fertilized eggs to incubate the virus. Hilleman
warned the manufacturers to notify their egg suppliers thatthe nation’s roosters would need to work overtime.
Virologists and chicken farmers have had a long partnership, forged in the 1930s when pathologist Ernest Goodpasture grew fowl pox, a smallpox-like virus, in fertilized eggs,
which are cheap and internally sterile. The virus grew exceptionally well in the chick embryo membrane.

Photography by Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

aurice Hilleman, PhD’44, was born in 1919
near Miles City, Montana, during the deadliest influenza pandemic in history. When thenext global influenza pandemic arrived, Hilleman was in the position to save thousandsof lives, thanks in part to his Montana roots.
Before Hilleman, who died in April 2005,
became the world’s most prolific vaccinologist, with a portfolio including vaccines for measles, hepatitis, meningitis, and more, he was a farm boy. His family
sold fruit, poultry, and eggs to make ends meet through theGreat Depression. He briefly worked at J. C. Penney, but his
brother convinced him to apply for a scholarship to college.
After graduating first in his class at Montana State University and earning a doctorate in microbiology at the University of Chicago, he joined pharmaceutical company E.
R. Squibb—much to his mentors’ chagrin. Chicago graduates were expected to become academics, he explained
during an interview for Paul Offit’s 2007 biography Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (Smithsonian Books). But Hilleman had had enoughof the academy. “I came off a farm,” he said. “I wanted tomake things!”
By 1944 Squibb had already developed a typhus vaccine
for US soldiers. During his four years there, Hilleman helped
develop and mass produce an influenza vaccine—an experience he drew on later, in 1957, when a flu epidemic broke out
in Asia. Hilleman, by that time chief of the Department ofRespiratory Diseases at the Walter Reed Army Institute of
Research, recognized that the outbreak could grow into apandemic. He knew he could help.
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Maurice Hilleman, PhD’44, and his flu research teamat the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in1957. Then (as now) scientists incubated influenza
and other viruses inside eggs to produce vaccines.

Flu vaccines have been made this way for more than 70
years, using eggs to replicate the virus before killing it.
Hepatitis A, polio, and rabies vaccines are all inactivatedviruses. Other vaccines are made from live, attenuated(weakened) viruses, which provide longer-lasting immunity. When grown in a series of nonhuman cell samples (often chick embryos), sometimes up to 200 times in a process
called “passaging,” the strain mutates to thrive in thosehost cells while becoming less able to replicate in humancells—if at all. The weakened viruses are recognized by our
immune system but can’t infect us. Measles, mumps, andrubella vaccines are made this way.
The first measles vaccine was developed by John Endersof Boston Children’s Hospital, who published on its effectiveness in 1961. Several pharmaceutical representatives
immediately requested the Enders strain in order to mass
produce a vaccine. Hilleman, who by the end of 1957 hadjoined Merck Research Laboratories, was one of them.
When Hilleman received Enders’s vaccine, he found thesample was loaded with a chicken leukemia virus. It had been
contaminated by chick embryos used to weaken the measles
virus. In the early 1960s, about 20 percent of the US chicken
stock carried the cancer-causing avian leukosis virus (ALV).
When Enders was developing his strain, there was no way to
distinguish healthy from infected embryos.
Later studies found no connection between ALV andcancer in humans, but in 1961 Hilleman didn’t know that.
Fortunately, the test he used to detect the virus—developedthat year—also offered a way to breed ALV-free chicks.
Because he had chicken-raising experience, Hilleman attempted—and failed—to breed a clean flock at Merck. Thena fellow virologist told him about Kimber Farms in California, which had about 300 ALV-freechickens. Kimber’s director of poultry
research, hesitant to hand over the
farm’s research birds, sold the whole
flock when he learned Hilleman was,like him, from Montana. The resulting measles vaccine, Rubeovax, was licensed to the US government in 1963. Merck still produces
vaccines using eggs from that flock’s descendants.
With the contamination issue resolved, Hilleman turned
his focus to Rubeovax’s side effects. The vaccine made many
children ill, producing a rash and high fevers that sometimes caused seizures. It was “toxic as hell,” said Hilleman(a gentle expletive for someone famously profane). He alleviated some symptoms by administering gamma globulin,a fraction of blood from measles survivors containing antibodies, along with the vaccine—one shot in each arm. But
giving two injections was a burden on doctors and children.

To reduce the side effects, Hilleman needed to weaken
the Enders strain even further. He did so by passing it
through clean chick embryos an extra 40 times. He named
the weaker virus “Moraten,” for “more attenuated Enders.”(One reason Hilleman isn’t a history-book staple like Jonas
Salk may have been his humility. His sole personal touch
was naming his mumps vaccine the Jeryl Lynn strain, after
his daughter, from whom he sourced the original sample.)
Licensed as Attenuvax in 1968, Moraten has been the only
measles vaccine used in the United States ever since. In 1969
Hilleman created a rubella vaccine and combined it with his
mumps and measles vaccine, licensing the MMR shot in 1971.
How did one person produce so many vaccines? It may
have been his personality and management style, both ofwhich tended to ruffle feathers. At a January 2005 symposium in his honor, Hilleman admitted that the best description of him had come from a former Merck colleague, “whosaid that on the outside I appeared to be a bastard but that if
you looked deeper, inside, you still saw a bastard.”
Hilleman’s standards were high and his tolerance for
mistakes was low. When he discovered Merck’s manufacturing division had tweaked his chemical inactivation process for the hepatitis B vaccine, creating the possibility of
infecting children, he summoned the team for a legendary
meeting, castigating them all as “goddamn meatheads.”
Employees unwilling to match Hilleman’s seven-day
workweek were fired. A few had their likenesses made into
shrunken head trophies for his office (carved from apples byhis daughter Kirsten). Those who survived were fiercely devoted. But his demands could go further. In the late ’70s, Hilleman was developing his hepatitis B vaccine—the first andlast derived from human blood. (It’s now grown in yeast.) Because of the inherent dangers, the FDA
was reluctant to grant permission totest it. So he distributed consent forms
to his staff requesting volunteers to try
it out. When no one stepped forward,
he said the forms didn’t have a “no” option. Joan Staub, an employee who took
the vaccine, told Offit, “If Hilleman told you to do something,
you did it.” Nine Merck employees conceded and later tested
clean before the vaccine was cleared for broader trials.
While his professional behavior ranged from indelicate to
likely actionable by today’s standards, he was supportive andloving at home according to Kirsten. And there’s no arguingthat his work has saved millions of lives—and counting. Nine of
the 14 routinely recommended pediatric vaccines are his, andsome of the worst childhood diseases have been thwarted. Before retiring from full-time work at Merck in 1984, the foulmouthed farmer defeated yet one more of them: chicken pox. ◆How did one person
produce somany vaccines?

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LITERATURE

BY C A R R I E G O L U S , A B ’ 9 1 , A M ’ 93It was the cover that drew
Brigid Hughes in.
The book, which she
picked out of the bargain
bin at Manhattan’s Housing
Works Books in 2015, had“this fabulous 1970s cover”
with neon green lettering.
On the back, a blurb from Saul
Bellow, EX’39.
Hughes had never heard of theauthor, and it is her business to know
authors. She was the second editor of
the Paris Review, after George Plimpton; then she founded the literary magazine A Public Space.

34“I’m sure you’ve had those moments,”
she says. “You open a page at random andthere’s a sentence or a paragraph that
resonates very powerfully.” The book’s
price: one dollar. Hughes bought it.
W-3 (Viking, 1974), the first book by
Bette Howland, 12GC’53, AB’55, is alightly fictionalized memoir of her stayin the University of Chicago hospital’s
psychiatric ward, recovering from asuicide attempt. Hughes read the bookquickly, though she found it harrowing: “There are a number of sentenceswhere you want to pause and takethem in and walk around thinking
about them.”

She wanted to know more about
Howland. An internet search brought
up nothing at first. More digging
yielded an obituary for Howland’s
mother, which mentioned a grandson, Jacob, a philosophy professor at
the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
Bette Howland was his mother, Jacob
confirmed, and she was still alive. But
she was suffering from multiple sclerosis and dementia.
Later in 2015, with Jacob’s help, A
Public Space published a portfolio of
Howland’s work. It included two shortstories (one, discovered in a Tulsa safe
deposit box, published for the first

Bellow, Saul. Papers, Box 32, Folder 8, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

How a Chicago writer made it into theliterary canon and then got lost.

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W-3 cover courtesy Viking; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage cover courtesy A Public Space; Blue in

HOWLAND’S GIFT

W-3 cover courtesy Viking; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage cover courtesy A Public Space; Blue inChicago cover courtesy Harper & Row; Things to Come and Go cover courtesy Knopftime), an essay on heroines in American literature, and excerpts from postcards and letters sent by Bellow (alsofrom the safe deposit box). Jacob told
his mother all about it; she was “mildly
pleased,” he says.
In October 2017, two months before
Howland’s death, Hughes launched an
imprint, A Public Space Books. Its firstpublication, Calm Sea and Prosperous
Voyage (2019), includes a novella of thesame title and 10 other short stories byHowland. Now articles and reviews
are everywhere: the Paris Review, the
New York Times, Harper’s, Lithub, theWall Street Journal.
But Howland’s reviews were always
good. A Commentary review of W-3
points out that, unlike other memoirists of mental illness, “she writes as
if she were a participant-observer, anovelist-anthropologist in a strange,
often perplexing new place.” Whenher second book, Blue in Chicago(Harper & Row, 1978) was published,
Studs Terkel, PhB’32, JD’34, invited
her on his WFMT radio show. “Bette
Howland is one of the most perceptive observers of a city, Chicago,” hesaid, introducing his guest. “Her picture of the city is a haunting one, apoignant one.” The New York Times
described her third and final book,Things to Come and Go (Knopf, 1983),
as “a quirky collection of three longstories by a writer of unusual talent,
power and intelligence,” just like “thebrilliantly executed Blue in Chicago.”
How did a well-reviewed writerwith such a prestigious pedigree—an
MFA from the University of Iowa in
1967, a Guggenheim Fellowship in
1978, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1984—come to be so
thoroughly forgotten?

Author and critic Bill Savage,
who teaches Chicago literature at Northwestern Uni-

After discovering Bette
Howland’s (12GC’53,
AB’55) memoir W-3 in2015, editor Brigid Hughes
became fascinated withthe writer’s story. Hughes’s
imprint published a newedition of Howland’s work,
Calm Sea and Prosperous
Voyage, earlier this year.

versity, wrote his dissertation on
how Nelson Algren was precanonical, canonical, and then decanonized.
(Twenty years later, he’s being canonized again.)
When Savage teaches canon formation, he starts by explaining thecompeting definitions. “There’s theright-wing, conservative, Allan Bloom[PhB’49, AM’53, PhD’55], Saul Bellow
definition,” he says. “The canon isthose timeless works that everyone
agrees speak universal human truth.
... It is the canon, singular.” But thisnotion is not historically accurate,
he says: “Things move in and out ofcanonicity. Shakespeare was theequivalent of television. Twain was
the equivalent of Game of Thrones—
pop fiction.”
The “left-wing idea,” in contrast,
claims “the canon is just a politicalprocess by which people in power
make other people read things. That
has truth to it too, but it’s not 100 per-cent.” (His own preferred definition:
the canon is that list of books and/or
writers that educated people “either
have read, feel guilty about not having
read, or can fake having read.”)When editors like Hughes seek tobroaden the canon, they often lookfor “scenes,” as Savage puts it: “who’s
sleeping with who, who’s publishingeach other’s work, who’s blurbing eachother.” Howland’s relationship with
Bellow encompassed all three.
Among Bellow’s papers in the UChicago Library’s Special Collections
Research Center is a decades-longcorrespondence between the two.
Howland sent Bellow numerous shortstories, including at least one that tomy knowledge has not been publishedanywhere. I immediately emailed Jacob to let him know.
“See, you are demonstrating how
the canon process works,” Savage says.
“You’re part of that process too, withthe alumni magazine.”

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For a long time it had seemed
to me that life was about tobegin—real life. But there wasalways some obstacle in theway. … At last it had dawned
on me that these obstacles
were my life.
—W-3

B

36

Howland around 1940 in front of her childhood home in West Lawndale. In later years, Howland’s relationship with her parents grewstrained—but she never stopped writing about them.

In August Howland sent Bellow a
submission to his literary magazine.
“I’ve no great hopes that Noble Savage
will take this, in spite of its commendable qualities and my fine connections,”
she wrote. The story is not with the letter in Bellow’s papers, but presumably it
was “Aronesti,” published in Noble Savage in 1962, along with work by Nelson
Algren and Arthur Miller.

When Howland was visiting herparents in Chicago that winter, Bellow
phoned; he was spending a quarter as“Celebrity in Residence”—so namedby the University’s public relations office—in the English department. (Bellow had just married Susan Glassman,
AM’73, wife number three of five, but
she remained in New York.) “It was
his alma mater; mine too; and one of

Photo courtesy Jacob Howland

ette Sotonoff was born in 1937—
in January, of course, the bitterest month of the bitter Chicago
winter—and grew up in Lawndale on
the West Side. Her father was a factory
worker, her mother a social worker. At 15
she enrolled at the University, earning a
12th-grade certificate in 1953 and taking
the blandly named Core courses of thetime: humanities, history, and so on.
For her final quarter, autumn 1955,
her transcript lists five law classes:
Elements of the Law, Contracts, Civil
Procedure, Torts, and a tutorial. But
rather than completing a law degree,
she withdrew her registration in January 1956 and married Howard Howland,AB’52, who became a prominent neurobiologist. She was 19.
The couple had two sons, Frank(born in 1958) and Jacob (born in1959). Around the same time, Bette
Howland’s first published stories began to appear: “Sam Katz” in the literary magazine Epoch, “Julia” in the
Quarterly Review of Literature.
In July 1961 she attended a twoweek literary conference at Wagner
College on Staten Island, where Edward Albee taught drama, Robert
Lowell poetry, and Saul Bellow fiction. Howland, then 24, and Bellow,
46, were immediately taken with eachother. “Bette was easily the most accomplished of the young people who
had signed up,” Bellow wrote in a recommendation for her more than 30
years later. “Even then, before she had
fully organized her talents, she wasquite obviously the real thing.”

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the few places you really can go backto—maybe, in Chicago, the only place,”
Howland recalled in an unpublishedscrap of memoir titled “Herzog’s Bellow.” He invited her to a small gathering with Algren and a group of visiting
Russian writers. As glamorous as thatsounds, the evening, in Howland’s retelling, was awkward and tiresome.
By 1963 Howland was a divorcée—“that lurid word,” she called it in W-3,
“that benighted condition”—and hadenrolled in the University of Iowa’s
Writers’ Workshop, partly thanks
to Bellow’s recommendation. Howland completed her MFA in 1967. Her
thesis, “The Iron Year,” includes earlyversions of some of the stories published a decade later in Blue in Chicago.
In letters to Bellow from Iowa, sheinsisted that she was happy there, but
an incident at the very end marred it.
Her thesis had a minor error in formatting. A secretary refused to accept it,
and she was not allowed to graduate
with her class. Howland never forgot;
she refused to let the school ever use
her name.
By 1968 Howland was living in thesame decrepit Uptown building as her
grandmother, working part time at
the branch library and editing manuscripts for the University of Chicago

puddle of blood in their building: “Weneeded the money.”
Around this time, Howland was
hospitalized. The unnamed narratorof W-3 (the name of the psychiatricward) does not die, despite the bottleof sleeping pills she swallowed, because she immediately thinks better of
it and calls the doctor, who alerts thepolice. In real life, Howland took thepills in Bellow’s apartment. According to Bellow’s biographer Zachary
Leader, Bellow discovered her andprobably hushed everything up.
But Howland rarely hushed anything. W-3 is an unsparing look at life ina psychiatric ward: the humiliations ofinstitutional life, the peculiar behavior of the patients, the haplessness ofthe doctors and nurses, whose speechis usually rendered in all caps. “NOWYOU’RE MUCH TOO YOUNG, TOO
PRETTY A GIRL, TO HAVE TRIED A
THING LIKE THAT,” she is told soonafter she’s admitted. “NOW THATWON’T DO AT ALL.” Her young sonsare not allowed to visit. In one heartbreaking scene, her mother brings themby so she can wave to them from thewindow; they can hear their mother’svoice calling but can’t find her. “It was aterrible thing I had done to them,” Howland writes. “And I felt like a ghost.”

SHE WRITES AS IF SHE WERE
A PARTICIPANT-OBSERVER,A NOVELIST-ANTHROPOLOGISTIN A STRANGE, OFTENPERPLEXING NEW PLACE.
Press. It was not much to raise a family
on. Jacob, whose darkly funny observations mirror his mother’s, recalled
in an essay that the three of them oncecollected six dollars in change from a

W-3 ends on an optimistic note:her sons return from her parents’home in Florida, she moves to a newapartment, she paints the walls late
at night as the boys sleep. In reality

Howland still wasn’t well. Her sonsbegged their father to let them livewith him and his new wife, who waspregnant with their first child; Frankand Jacob visited their mother during
the summers.
She made every effort to make up forher absence, both sons recall, taking
them to concerts, museums, and plays,
and on trips abroad. “She loved us very
much,” says Jacob. “But having said
that, her writing always came first.”
It seems to me that there issomething immoral—because
inattentive—about readingwhen your body is in transit.
And maybe I felt even thenthat I should be paying
attention instead. But paying
attention to what?
—“Blue in Chicago,”Blue in ChicagoI

n 1971, at Bellow’s suggestion,
Howland enrolled as a graduate
student in the Committee on Social Thought, where he had recently
become chair. During this period
she published several short pieces
in Commentary.
“Public Facilities—A Memoir” is
set in the Borglum Branch (actually
Bezazian) of the Chicago Public
Library in Uptown, where she had
worked part time. Howland writes
mercilessly about its oddball librarians
and shabby regulars: the elderly, thepoor, the nobodies with nowhere elseto go. (The story is “hilarious,” says
Bill Savage. “It should be samizdatxeroxed and sent to every library
bra nch in CPL .”) Commentar y
published a long, furious letter fromBezazian’s reference librarian: “Partsof her article were highly exaggerated
and other parts were downrightfictitious and malicious.”

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38

Writing from life was what Bellow
was known for too, and in his novel More
Die of Heartbreak (Morrow, 1987) it was
Howland’s turn. The character Dita
Schwartz, based on Howland, is selfconscious about her acne scars, so shetries a new technique, dermabrasion, tosmooth them. Bellow writes about hercoarse skin and her gruesome recovery
from the procedure in cruel detail.

In 1993 Howland accepted a threeyear position teaching literature in theCommittee on Social Thought. The CV
she submitted includes two books described as “in progress”: “The Landlady(Knopf, 1992)” and “Grisha Lapidus: My
Life (Knopf, under contract).” Thosebooks were never published either. (HerCV also lists her 10 years in the Chicago
Public Schools while omitting her MFA

SHE SEEMED DOUBTFUL OF THE
WORTH OF WHAT SHE HAD DONE
AND OF WHAT SHE WAS DOING.
How must Howland have felt? Her
letter to Bellow offers few clues. “I’mlonging to talk with you,” she wrote.
“Your book held me strangely; I
dreamed of it every night. It was likeseeing you or talking to you—& yet stillin a kind of disguise.” Their correspondence, and friendship, continued.
There is nothing here I would
ever choose—and nothing
I can ever part with.
—“The Life You Gave Me,”Things to Come and Go

I

n 1983 Howland published her
third book, Things to Come and
Go: Three Stories (Knopf ). The
following year she won a MacArthur
Fellowship, thanks to the strong support of Bellow, who served as an evaluator. Yet in the last three decades ofher life, with her children grown andfinancial pressures removed, she published no more books. It’s not clear why.
Her biography on the MacArthur
Foundation site states “she is at workon a monograph, Jacob: A Life, and ashort novel, A Time for Kennedys.” Neither of those works ever appeared.

from Iowa, although a terminal degreefrom a respected program would havemade her hiring easier.)
Seeing his friend’s career stalling,
Bellow, as always, tried to help, submitting her work to his new agent
and to the New Yorker: “You are not
likely to have heard of her, although
she is the author of several books ofthe highest quality, each of them asuccès d’estime.”
Howland continued to write andto publish literary criticism. Jacob
suspects winning the MacArthur
sapped her confidence; too much was
expected from a certified genius. In
1999 she published her final pieceof creative work, the novella “CalmSea and Prosperous Voyage,” in theliterary magazine TriQuarterly. The
editor had to cajole her into it, he told
the New York Times: “She seemed
doubtful of the worth of what she haddone and of what she was doing, andshe was reluctant to be published.”
Howland’s older son, Frank, blames
her perfectionism. “She spent a lot oftime trying to write things that didn’t
come out,” he says, such as Grisha
Lapidus. “She never completed that toher satisfaction.”

sadfGwg

In 1974, the final year Howland wasenrolled in the committee, W-3 cameout. Her thesis, never completed, wason Henry James.
Howland’s second book, Blue inChicago, collected six short pieces,four previously published in Commentary. Readers, even professional
ones, weren’t sure what to make ofBlue in Chicago: Was it a short story
collection or not? Some publications
reviewed it as fiction, others as nonfiction. “I certainly don’t want it
reviewed as fiction,” Howland complained to Bellow. “For one thing, I
went to a hell of a lot of trouble—no
one will ever know how much—to
work with the facts.”
Throughout Blue in Chicago—asin her work in general—Howland’s
powers of observation are like military-grade weapons, deployed mostoften against her family. Her mother“seemed to talk only when her mouth
was full and her cheek was bulging likea fist. As if she were chewing a quid of
tobacco, and about to squirt.” Uncle
Rudy “had to be trundled through highschool in a wheelbarrow.” The house
he shares with Aunt Roxy: “Unmade
beds, unwashed cups, cigarette butts,
dishes in the sink; it’s like a frat house.”
There’s more.
“I recognized everybody, and shejust nails them,” says son Jacob. What
did her relatives think of these sharply drawn portraits? “Roxanne—that’s
my Aunt Jane. She loved it. She justwas so thrilled. ... Her husband, notso much.” What his grandparents
thought, Jacob never knew. Although
Howland wrote of her parents again
and again, her relationship with themwas strained to the point of breaking.
She didn’t speak to her father for years,“until she couldn’t speak to him anymore, because he was in a coma, on his
deathbed,” says Jacob. “She expressed
the love in her writing.”

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Photo courtesy Jacob Howland (top); photo courtesy Frank Howland

The novel was based on an unpublished memoir by her grandfather’s
cousin. Born in Europe, he lived inPalestine, got caught up in the Russian
Revolution and the Mexican Revolution—then moved to New York and led
an entirely ordinary life. Frank has a
200-page typescript, plus a large sketch
pad—14 by 17 inches—with 80 pages,
front and back, written in pencil. “Thisis clearly something she hoped to publish after the MacArthur award.”
By 2005 “cognitive decline begins to
set in,” says Frank. She had learned touse a computer but would get confusedand lose her revisions. Howland wasdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis in
2010, and in 2014, while walking homefrom the grocery store, she was hit bya pickup truck, which worsened her
dementia. As Jacob wrote at the time,“Her words scatter like vegetables
bouncing on asphalt.”
A year after the accident, the neongreen cover art of W-3 caught Brigid
Hughes’s eye.
Illness, old age, funerals, and death
were constant themes in Howland’s
writing. An observer to the core, sheseemed aware of her diminished capacities, Jacob says. One writer, A. N. Devers,
insisted on trying to interview her; Jacob
agreed to let her. “What does it feel liketo be Bette Howland?” Devers asked.
“Bette Howland died a long timeago,” she replied.
What would she have made of the
furor over her rediscovered work? Jacob suspects she would be irritated by
the focus on gender, a perpetual theme
in reviews and articles. “I can hear her
voice saying, ‘I’m not just a woman writer, I’m a writer,’” he says. “She thought ofherself as an American writer, and more
specifically as a Chicago writer,” working in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser,
James T. Farrell, Richard Wright.
And yet she was a woman writer,
writing from her own distinct perspec-

Top: Howland with her son Frank (left), novelist Henry Roth (far right), and Roth’s
wife, Muriel, around 1980. Bottom: Howland with her extended family—the frequent
subjects of her stories—in her parents’ West Rogers Park apartment around the time ofher hospitalization. Younger son Jacob stands with Howland at right; Frank is at left.

tive—as a daughter, as a mother—andthat fact shifts the Chicago literaturecanon, which is still “a boys’ club, a sausage fest,” as Savage puts it. Its beginning is often traced to Carl Sandburg’s
poem “Chicago,” Savage says, “where
he actually personified the city as aworking-class man.” (Interestingly, thefew women writers added to the canonin the more recent decades—Lorraine
Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra
Cisneros—are all women of color.)
One mark of canonicity, of course, isthe price of first editions. Wanting tobuy Blue in Chicago, Savage searched
online, but all the copies he found costhundreds of dollars. Until this year,
Howland’s work had never been available in paperback.
Brigid Hughes keeps that bargain-bin copy of W-3 on her desk at
A Public Space. The bright orange“$1.00” sticker is on the back, a few
inches below Bellow’s blurb: “I wasmuch moved by W-3. ... No poses are
struck and no vain gestures made inthis brave and honorable book. Bette
Howland is a real writer.” ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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40
40 TH
THEEUUNNIVEIVERS
RSITITYYOOFFCH
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AGOOMMAGAAGAZIZINNEE| |FALL
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EXCERPT

POWER FAILURE
A story from Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.
BY B E T T E H OW L A N D, 1 2 G C ’ 5 3 , A B ’ 5 5

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Bette Howland’s story “Power Failure” was first publishedin the literary journal the American Voice in 1985. Howland’s
work is characterized by its sharp observations of others,
especially her parents and extended family. In this story,
atypically, she turns ref lective, self-critical, nostalgic, anddreamy, imagining that her grown sons are “small again.
We have it all to do over.”—Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

42

saws, doodads and all—getting pickedclean by vandals. They would havewalked off with the cannon that squatson the front lawn by now, only it’s up to
its cast iron neck in concrete.
The old man seems to have all thison his mind.
He comes by just about every day. I
hear a car door slam, I look up, there
he is, larger than life—green plaid
lumber jacket and waxy yellow workboots—squeezing out of a low-slung
hatchback. A Japanese make, which
I mention because there seem to be
so many in this neck of the woods.
The local dealer must be one helluva
salesman. The little cars go clattering
up and down the patriotic landscape,almost a part of it; like the red brickand bow windows, the bumpy blue
pyramids of the mountains, the whitebirches. (You think other trees arewhite, too, until you see birches again.)

So here he comes. Collar up, earflaps
down, hands shoving into pockets over
his stomach; pipe extending the angle,
the purpose, of his stubborn Yankee
jaw. His eyes have a nippy glitter inside his glasses; his breath in the iced
air stiffens and staggers before him.
“How’s the typewriter?” That’s what
he always asks, only he says “haaoww”
and “typewrituh.” It’s his joke; hemeans me and my machine both. He’s
the one who delivered it, got downon all fours under my desk to plug it
in. “Well, yuh’ve gawt noh excuse
naoww,” he said, scraping and grating
his sandpaper hands together. “Gawttuh get daowwn tuh wuhk naoww.”
From his baggy pants dangle wires,
pliers, clippers, black electrical tape.
He’s been busy rigging up traps andalarms, meaning to give the vandals
a surprise: “Next time they get the
shawk of their life.”

Previous pages: Erin Paul Donovan/agefotostock/NewscomI

was sleeping on the couch
under a pile of blankets andcoats and the fire scratchedin the grate.
The power wa s out ;one of those freak springstorms that bump off trees
and knock down lines. The
world was a snow-swamp,
the Everglades turned white. Kneedeep drifts, floating branches, limbs
bent low, broken and bearded withsnow. Everything bowed with age
and silence.
The only other soul I’d seen all day
was the caretaker who looks afterthat place across the way—the onethat used to belong to Colonel Somebody-or-Other. The heirs are in court,squabbling about who gets what andwhich was promised when; and in themeantime the house just sits there—abig pink elephant, gingerbread, jig-

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I think he’ll be sorry if there is nonext time.
Today the house was safe; buried under a ton or two of savage bright stuff.
You couldn’t look at the snow for thepressure of sun on it. A blue jay flashedin branches, the colors of the wintry
day. Black white blue. Trees snow sky.
Spreading its wings it became a miniature landscape, something painted
on a fan.
I read by the fire in earmuffs and mittens. (Have you noticed? How hard it is
to turn pages with mittens on?) When it
got dark—whenever that was, the clock
had stopped—I cooked supper over theflames. The hamburger dripped, smoking raw. The potato burned black; ashes
blew into the coffee. I was getting goodand mad at myself: too lazy to take thetrouble to do things right. Just because
the situation was temporary. Some excuse. What isn’t temporary? If you wantto get technical? As if that’s any way
to live. (And how long since I’ve been
meaning to buy a kerosene lamp, in caseof emergency, and replace the dead batteries in my portable radio.)
By the time I went to bed, I had fed
the fire just about every scrap of paperin the house; and if there’s one thing
there’s plenty of around here, it’s scrap
paper. All the same, the last thing I
saw—turning my back to the fire, hitching up covers—the last I saw, in the redflickering glow, was the one scrap overlooked. A letter from my mother, stuck
to the bottom of the wastebasket. The
envelope raggedly ripped.
Even in my sleep I knew that thismust be the reason for my dream.
Now please. Don’t get me wrong. I
don’t mean to embarrass anybody. I
get discouraged myself, when people
start talking about dreams. Especiallyin stories. Because what’s to keep us
from telling lies? Making it all up? Are
there rules? And besides, everyone
knows that dreams aren’t just dreams.

Someone is trying to tell you Something—with a capital S. I don’t know
about you, but that makes me nervous.
All right. I apologize. But what can
I do? I’m not trying to put one overon you. (I told you to begin with I
was sleeping—remember?) This isn’t
really a story—and I was dreaming.
And I’d just like to see if I can get
things straight.

In the dreams my sons are justlearning to walk; bold staggering
steps and shy shining faces. One
light head, one dark head, at the samelevel. My daughter is older (thoughthat can’t be right, can it?). Her shortskirts lift and stick out in front andshow her bare narrow legs, the puckered trim of her bloomers. What’s

Everyone knowsthat dreams
aren’t justdreams. Someone
is trying to tellyou Something—with a capital S.
odd is her hair; smooth heavy hair,straight-hanging, as if water weighted, and so long it surrounds her. She ismantled in hair; a dark shining cloak.
Some children are born that way;right from the beginning; come into
the world wrapped in the mysteries of
their own personalities. You can see
my daughter is one of these.
My heart glares with gladness; asdazzling, as hard to bear, as the sunburning snow. Because I know what’s
going on—I recognize this dream. I’ve
had it so many times before—thoughnever in my sleep. It’s here, this is it.

I’m getting my wish. My children aresmall again. We have it all to do over.

I

can’t tell you if I had read mymother’s letter or not; ripped open
doesn’t mean anything. I might
have been looking to see what was inside. Lately, she has sent a few checks.
“Go buy yourself something.” “How’s
the money holding out?” This is something new; I’m not sure what to do.
Maybe I cash them, maybe I tear themup. It all depends. No rhyme nor reason.
I see I have just confessed—and put
it in writing—that I am the sort of person who opens a mother’s letters in casethere might be money in them. Good.
Glad that’s over. So now you know. Here
we have a stock situation, the old antagonism. Mother and daughters. You’ve
heard this story before.
But I’m not the only one, it’s not justme. This condition must be very widespread. (There’s safety in numbers. But
is there truth?) Many friends tell methey can’t read letters they get fromtheir mothers, either. And who canblame them? Why open up a letter andread it when you know darn well, beforehand, what it’s going to say? What
has been written, predestined, foreordained, from time immemorial. A little
reproach, a little punishment, a little
guilt. My friends must feel the same way
I do when I see my mother’s handwriting on an envelope. The postmark. The
wavy lines, the canceled stamp. About
the way it feels to see my name on a bill:
Remit immediately or action will
be taken.
And after all she is presenting the bill.
It’s that time. Payment is due, she means
to collect. Only—only—it has been established by now that I am never going
to come up with her currency. And she
won’t accept mine. So how can I pay up?
What will I use for wherewithal?
Like they say: The letter killeth.

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You know how it is when you try
to recover a dream.
A tug on the line; a quiver,a gleam. You grab hold, you hang on;
it struggles and squirms. Maybe you
catch something, bring it to light. Maybe it sinks into the depths.
Splash! Gone for good.
That’s how it is in my dream, only
the other way around. In my dream
I’m trying to recall real life, waking
life. My own life. I have it, it’s hooked,
I’m reeling it in. Then the same thing
happens. A wriggle, a flash, it slips
from my grasp.
I reach for the past—and it isn’t there.
I might have known. This dreamwas too good to last. My sons I canpicture as infants; that means the pastis there—somewhere. I could lay hands
on it (couldn’t I?). What’s wrong is mydaughter; she’s the one. Looking closer,
I see that she’s not really a child at all.
She is only reduced in size, in scale: aminiature. Except for her hair. It can’t
be any longer and straighter now. And
that’s another thing. I don’t recall girls
having hair like that, when I was herage. So lustrous, so lithe, a kind of raiment: an animal’s coat.
Her eyes have the same liquid gloss.
Something tells me I am seeing mydaughter in my dream just exactly as
she has always been. A grave little image, a stand-in for her grown-up self.
But who got her ready for school,then? Who brushed her hair, who
tied her shoelaces, who buttoned her
blouses down the back? If I didn’t?
Who painted orange stuff on her cutsand stuck the thermometer under her
tongue? (Don’t tell me she never ran afever, fell down and scraped and hurt
herself?) Who kissed her good night?
Who checked the covers? Who told
her things a mother tells a daughter?
Someone must have.
Who else could it have been? If it
wasn’t me?

44

The brightness fades; a bare whitelight seeps through me. No fair. No
fair. This isn’t my wish! Not what I
bargained for, not what I meant. I said
I wanted to live the past over again. I
never said I wanted to lose it.

W

hat made me say handwriting?
My mother prints, scrawled
block letters. This is likewisesomething new. Maybe it’s too hard forher to write? She has a touch of arthritis in her wrist, it could be acting up. (Iought to know, I have it too. I’m feelingit right now.) Maybe she thinks it’s too
hard for me to read? Her letters could
be scribbled to a child:
TELLING YOU THIS FOR YOUROWN GOOD
And she expresses herself, more andmore, in a telegraphic style.
P.S. EVER GET THAT CHECK I
SENT? BYE NOW. LOVE, MOM
Wait a minute. Just a minute. Whoa—
hold on. So she calls herself Mom?
Since when? How long has this been
going on? Who calls her Mom! I callher Mother. And get introduced to her
acquaintances—as all my life long—as
my daw-ter.
No name, just the generic.
“Mother,” I say. “Is that manners? Is
that nice? Are your friends supposed tocall me Daw-ter?”

I might have
known. This
dream was toogood to last.
She arches up her two little pinchedeyebrows plucked, picked, singed like
pinfeathers—the style of movie vampsof her youth. In that mode also, her thinwine-colored lips. You smell the per-fume of her lipstick as she compresses
them: “And what makes you think they’dcare what your name is? If I told them?”
Otherwise her features are large,
dark, and dignified; the profile of acoin. The head on a buffalo nickel.
So she thinks of herself as Mom.
She wants to be Mom. That’s news tome. What do you make of it? What’s
in a Mom?
And while I’m at it—that reminds me.
Just where does she write these letters,
anyhow? (The ones I don’t read.) Since
there’s no place in the whole darn house
where a person can sit down, in a comfortable chair, under a decent lamp, toread or write. Naturally not; she’d be
a social outcast. This is a retirement
village in south Florida—where theskies are as blue as the ocean, and theclouds are as white as its wakes.
Correction. That’s at high noon. At
sunrise the clouds are bashful pink,
blushing, puffed-up flamingo feathers.
At sunset they are gossamer—gilded—
edged in radiance: translucent as an
old lady’s hair.
She must write her letters at the
kitchen table. Stamps and stationery
she keeps in the cupboard, hiding
the bottle of sweet purple wine. (Thegrapes on the label sweat glassy beads
of dew.) My mother doesn’t drink herself, except for a drop in hot tea when
she has a cold, but she does like to keepa little something on hand; just to show
how broad minded she can be. And it’sno use telling her I don’t drink; even
if strictly true, she’d never believe me.
She knows better. I’m divorced.
HOPING YOU HAVE LEARNEDYOUR LESSON
What is her currency? A life she canapprove of, what else? What does any
mother want? Why can’t I be like her
friends’ children, acquiring things,
habits, for a lifetime?
Go explain to your mother that there
has been a breakdown in “personal rela-

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tions”—as if she didn’t know—and whenthat happens, when circuits short, fuses
blow, lines come down, connections
fail—you’re on your own. You need a lotof luck, or a lot of character.
And I only said that, about the character.
Just ask my mother. How would I know?

T

he caretaker told me they were
fixing to get the paowwuh backon during the night, and I figured
I’d be the first to know. This cottage has
oil heat, but an electric switch kicks it
on—and I do mean kicks. The first time,
I thought a deer had taken a runningjump into the side of the house. I was
afraid to go out and see. Do deer look
before they leap? They give a whistle, I
know; and their little white tails standup and stiffen and it’s the last glimpse
you get. There were deer here aplenty inthe colonel’s day, when this cottage waspart of the colonel’s grounds. Now no
more deer, but it’s still the colonel thisand the colonel that. (The license plates
say Live Free or Die, but oh how New
Englanders go crazy for titles.)Anyway, the furnace gives me astart. Even in my sleep I’m listening for a thud. The night is booming:
snow plopping and thumping from all
those pitched roofs and pointy firs,
dumping down clods and clumps,
blow by blow, like wet concrete. The
fire is low; flames scavenge the logs,
gnawing and sharpening red rodent
teeth. That is what’s real. And I want
to wake up, throw off the weight ofsleep and dreams and too many covers and snow loading down the backsof the trees. The burden will snap the
young spring branches, with theirclawing buds.
I know this is a dream. Only a dream.
Winter dusk. A pearly slush packs the
skylight. Galoshes lean outside doors.
Climbing stairs, I smell dinners getting cooked. Fat spits and spats in frying

My daughter andI have no history;
only the historyof mother anddaughters.
pans. This run-down building seems
familiar. Have I been here before? People pack their bags, they move on, theyleave no forwarding address. Window
shades fly up with a clatter, clack liketongues. Frozen snow glazes the glass.
I’m looking for the person who
raised my daughter.
The children were small, money was
scarce, I got sick. That must be when
my daughter was sent to strangers.
That’s how come the missing years, themissing memories. It wasn’t me. It wassomeone else all along.
But who? Where? No one answers
my knock. Streets, stairs, doors keepchanging. Room after room is empty,
and not just empty—deserted. No one
lives here. The building is condemned.
The doors are lined up like rows of fences.
I have found the past. I am in it.
This is it—all that’s left of it. Not evena memory. My daughter and I have nohistory; only the history of mother anddaughters. I know just how she is going to feel toward me. I have forfeited
my one and only chance.

Ididn’t tell you what it felt like when
I saw that torn envelope. A jolt, ashock; it buzzed right throughme. I thought the furnace had kicked,
they’d got the juice going, thrown theswitch. The force was so strong, I didn’tknow what to call it. And what difference does it make. Call it anything
you want. It’s all the same power, it allcomes from the same place. So that’s
the way we’re wired up.

I didn’t know there was that muchleft in our connection.
But what about all those years, when
my children were growing up, when
we were alone?
WASH MY HANDS YOU MADE
YOUR BED NOW LIE AS FAR AS
I’M CONCERNED NO DAUGHTER
OF MINE
Mother Mother, why can’t you be
one way or the other? So I could feel
one way or the other? Why have wewasted our time like this? Why couldn’t
we have called it something else? What
good are checks and letters now?
Now she sits at a plastic-topped table,
ballpoint pen in hand, gazing as if for
inspiration at a row of newly planted
palms. All lined up and wired, pliant
grass-skirted utility poles. Flamingos
shift on coat-hanger limbs. Her face iscarved teak from the Florida sun, herlipstick glows in the dark; her eyesswim like goldfish in the cloudy depthsof her glasses. You know those fishbowl
lenses old people wear.
Old? Did someone say old? My mother?
The frames are mother-of-pearl, as
white and luminous as her hair.

I’m numb; frozen stiff. The room iscold, the clock is stopped, the fireis out—powder and ashes. The
windows are streaked in leaky graylight; cold sweat clings, a sheet wrung
from the wash. It takes a minute or
two for me to understand. I’m awake.
It’s all right. It was a dream; only a
dream. No one is going to feel thatway toward me. Still, it’s not exactly
a relief. Because who was she? Who isshe? And what do I do now? I never
had a daughter. ◆Excerpted from Calm Sea and Prosperous
Voyage. Copyright ©2019 by the estate of
Bette Howland. Reprinted with permissionof A Public Space Books.

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IN MEMORIAM

THE PRUDENTJURIST
Remembering Justice John Paul Stevens, LAB’37, AB’41.
1 92 0 –2 01 9
BY L AU R A D E M A N S K I , A M ’ 9 4

J

ohn Paul Stevens was a Hyde
Parker born and raised.
He grew up on 58th Street,
graduating from the Laboratory Schools and the College, and he remained close
to the neighborhood and the
University all his life. But thedecisions—and the dissents—that hewrote during his 35 years of service, thethird-longest tenure of any Supreme
Court justice, leave a legacy that is mostessentially American.
Respected by citizens of every political leaning, Stevens, LAB’37, AB’41,
earned a reputation for being staunchly independent in his thinking, loath toapply rote principle. As much as he influenced US law, the thousands of cases he studied and ruled on influenced
him, notably his views on capital punishment and affirmative action, whichchanged over his career.
His open-minded but rigorous judicial
temperament, which compelled Stevens
to consider each case on its own terms
without preconception or prejudice,shares much with the aims and modus
operandi of a UChicago education. He
belonged above all to the country, yes.
But also unmistakably to this place.
Stevens’s death on July 16 (see Deaths,
page 92) sparked the outpouring of
remembrances one would expect forsomeone in such an influential and public

46

role for so long. Less common was thewarmth of those words—from his fellow
justices, former clerks, journalists, andcourt watchers—as demonstrated by theindividual reflections shared here.
Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West, JD’98,
Slate

At times he was a maverick, a frequentlone dissenter, unafraid to standalone in his convictions. Once, in aninterview, Justice Antonin Scalia was
asked which justice was his favorite
sparring partner, and he named
Stevens. “I think you should give thedissenter the respect to respond to
the points that he makes. And so did
John Stevens,” Scalia explained. “So
he and I used to go back and forth
almost endlessly.” Stevens, however,
was also a unifying leader who will
be remembered for his unusuallyeffective ability to unite the four more
liberal-leaning justices against theconservative majority.
Stevens was known for being theonly justice to write his own firstdrafts, which he would pass along to
his clerks with instructions along thegeneral lines of “don’t let me look likean idiot.” For decades he was also the
only justice to rely entirely on his own
clerks’ recommendations about whichcases the court should hear, rather
than pooling his clerks with thoseof the other justices to review only ashare of the petitions as all the otherjustices did. He reveled in debatingwith his young clerks, enthusiasticallyengaging their arguments and humbly
treating them as intellectual peers.
David Cole, The Nation

Stevens’s commitment was not to aparticular worldview but to the act of
judging, which requires fierce independence, an open mind, and the willingness to do the right thing regardlessof whether it is popular. He was skeptical of rigid doctrinal tests; he criticized
the Court’s equal protection doctrine,for example, which applies different
levels of review to laws discriminatingon the basis of race, sex, and other classifications, respectively. In his view,
there was only one Equal Protection
Clause, and he didn’t think that differing tests were very helpful in deciding
cases. He trusted his own ability torender judgment over a rigid rule.
Travis Crum, Lecturer and Bigelow
Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Law School

I had the tremendous honor to clerk
for Justice John Paul Stevens while
he was a retired justice. During myclerkship, Justice Stevens wrote his
memoir and often reminisced about
growing up in Hyde Park. His stories
about Chicago were like something out
of a movie. As a child, he watched Babe
Ruth hit his famous “called shot” at the1932 World Series at Wrigley Field,
worked at the 1933 Chicago World’s
Fair, and attended several important
events at his family-run Stevens Hotel (now the Chicago Hilton). Justice
Stevens also spoke fondly of attending
both the University of Chicago and theLaboratory Schools.
Despite living one of the most extraordinary lives of the past century,
Justice Stevens was one of the most

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views while his relationships with hiscolleagues remained as warm as ever.
Noah Feldman, Bloomberg

Today’s justices come so vetted to
avoid deviation from ideological andpartisan pressures. Stevens, the justicefrom the greatest generation, reminds
us that it wasn’t always so—and that
great justices develop and change, becoming greater as they go.
Gregory Garre, SCOTUSblog

humble people that I’ve ever met. And
on top of that, he was a brilliant andvisionary jurist. His passing is a hugeloss for the court and the country.

Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg

Ian Gershengorn, SCOTUSblog

The spate of 8–1 decisions with thejustice’s occupying the role of lonedissenter earned him a reputation of
being an iconoclast. In the term when
I clerked, articles were written calling the justice and his jurisprudence“quirky.” He didn’t like that description, he told us, because as far as hewas concerned, he was just doing his

job. His reaction captured somethingimportant about the justice and his
approach to the law. He was committed to getting it right in every case. No
issue was too small, and no case tooroutine, to demand anything less thanhis full attention and consideration. If
his review of the law and the facts led
him off on what others thought a tangent, so be it, as he believed that theparties and the court deserved no less.
And because of the way he approached
his task—with respect for the majority
and a calm conviction in his own position—his lone dissents conveyed his[Justice Stevens’s] disarming mannerof asking questions masked the factthat he often asked the most difficult
questions, zeroing in on the key legal
principle or fact at the crux of the case,and asking an advocate in the kindest
way if they would just agree with him
on a point, leaving them to realize only
later that they had often sunk theircase by doing so. It always reminded
me of the detective show Columbo, another link to the past. Just when thelead suspect would think they had gotten away with it, Columbo (played byPeter Falk) would return to the sceneof the crime, raise his finger, pause fora moment, and say, “There’s just one
more thing.” And that would be thequestion that did the suspect in.
Waiting for Justice Stevens to askthat question as time was winding
down was one of the scariest momentsof oral argument.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In a capital city with no shortage ofself-promoters, Justice Stevens set
a different tone. Quick as his brightmind was, Justice Stevens remained agenuinely gentle and modest man. No
jurist with whom I have served wasmore dedicated to the judicial craft,
more open to what he called “learningon the job,” more sensitive to the wellbeing of the community law exists (orshould exist) to serve. ◆TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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HISTORY.

FLIGHT
TEST
A soldier’s final mission.
BY DAV I D C H R I S I N G E R , A M ’ 1 0

48

The plan was simple: fly their De Havilland
4, or DH-4, low and slow over the Charlevaux
Ravine to tempt the Germans into firing, thus
revealing their dug-in positions. The two fliers
believed that if they could mark the enemy’s
positions this way, they’d be able to deduce, byprocess of elimination, precisely where Whittlesey and his men were. As Goettler and Bleckley
readied for takeoff, their commanding officer
warned them to be careful. Shouting over therevving engine, Bleckley replied, “Don’t worry,lieutenant. We’ll find ’em, or we won’t come back!”
On November 25, 1922, four years after
Goettler and Bleckley’s fateful flight, the War
Department’s Adjutant General’s Office notified
Goettler’s mother, Gertrude, that her son would
be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
The medal, the highest for valor in combat that an

Photo courtesy National Museum of the United States Air ForceNo one would have blamed him
if he had decided not to fly
again that day. During his firstattempt to locate and resupply
the men of the “Lost Battalion,” on October 6, 1918, Harold
Goettler and his single-engine
biplane had been nearly ripped
to shreds by German machinegunners dug into the cliffs of a ravine deep inFrance’s Argonne Forest. But 1st Lt. Goettler, AS
1914, SB 1914, and his observer-gunner, 2nd Lt.
Erwin R. Bleckley, believed they had seen throughthe fog signs of what was left of the nearly 700
men under Maj. Charles W. Whittlesey’s command. So Goettler decided, with permission fromhis commanding officer, to borrow another crew’s
plane and try again.
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When he joined the 50th Aero Squadron during
World War I, Harold Goettler, AS 1914, SB 1914, wasassigned to fly the De Havilland 4. Because of its
explosion-prone gas tank, the plane earned thegrisly nickname “the flaming coffin.”

American military service member can receive,should have immortalized Goettler as a heroof one of the most famous battles in American
military history. Instead, his story of service andsacrifice has largely been lost to history, buried
beneath the suffocating layers of rumor, myth,and legend that emerged soon after the surviving members of the Lost Battalion marched outof the Charlevaux Ravine.
In the fall of 1910, Harold Ernest Goettler
arrived at the University of Chicago planning tostudy German. He pledged Delta Kappa Epsilonand played right tackle for the 1913 championshipfootball team. A picture taken of him in his uniform shows a tall, thick-legged young man with his
hands at his sides, serious and unsmiling.
Soon after graduating, Goettler landed a job
with the Chicago real estate management company McKey & Poague. Later that year, he senta short note to the newsletter of the Owl and
Serpent, a senior society
at the University, informing fellow members that hewas still single and hadn’t
yet made his fortune. He
added, “If any of the brothers are thinking of getting
married, tell them to comeand see me about renting anice little flat.”
When America declared
war on Germany in 1917,
Goettler signed up to servein the Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps, the aerial warfare service of the UnitedStates. By April 1918, he
had been commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant andordered to report to the 50th Aero Squadron in
France, where he would fly missions over enemy
territory to spot their artillery batteries.
Goettler’s first mission took place on September 12—the start of the St. Mihiel Offensive.
The goal of this US-led campaign was to breakthrough the stalemate between French andGerman forces and threaten German war production and the rail network around the Briey
Iron Basin. American military leaders also believed the offensive, if victorious, would show theAllies that the Americans were equal partners in
the fight against Germany. “The big push opened
last night at 1:00 a.m.,” Goettler wrote in his diary, “and it was some noise. The clouds were low
but from our positions we saw the barrage veryclearly.” After sleeping for a few hours, Goettler
woke and prepared to take off with Bleckley justafter daybreak. As part of an enormous armada
of 1,481 Allied planes, Goettler and Bleckley wereordered to observe the movements of frontline
troops and artillery pieces to gauge the effect theoffensive was having on the German army. But
thick cloud cover obscured their view, and thetwo fliers returned to the airdrome at 7:15 a.m.
The next week was quiet for Goettler and Bleckley. In his diary, Goettler wrote that he was glad,
because his “ship was in no shape to fly.” He passed
the time reading through letters from home, playing some baseball and a little poker, and lunchingat the Hotel Metz. Nearly a week later, on September 26, Goettler and Bleckley
went up to surveil German
artillery positions. “No Bosh[sic] bothered us,” Goettler
wrote of the Germans, “andour trip was uneventful.”That was the last day hewrote anything in his diary.
On October 2, Whittlesey, a lanky New Englander
who had trained as a lawyer
before the war, was ordered
to attack a heavily fortified
and nearly impregnable ravine in the dense Argonne
Forest with nine companiesof men as part of the MeuseArgonne offensive. It was the largest operation
American soldiers would engage in during theFirst World War—and the deadliest campaign in
American history. Before it ended with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, theoffensive would claim the lives of more than
26,000 Americans, with another 120,000 wounded. Whittlesey was to hold his position regardlessof the losses once he reached his objective.
Plunging headlong into the growth and underbrush with his men, Whittlesey succeededin reaching the ravine. But by the next day, theTHE MEDAL ...
SHOULD HAVEIMMORTALIZEDGOETTLER AS
A HERO OF ONE
OF THE MOSTFAMOUS BATTLESIN AMERICANMILITARYHISTORY.

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50

As a University of Chicago undergrad, Goettler played footballand basketball and ran track. He joined the military soon after
the United States entered World War I.

UChicago Photographic Archive, apf5-00826, University of Chicago Library

Germans had surrounded the Americans, cutting them off from reinforcements. For the next
100 hours, as Whittlesey’s men were slashed toribbons by ghostlike German machine gunners,
artillerymen, and snipers, the survivors quickly
ran out of supplies. Instead of food and cigarettes, the men munched on twigs and smoked
dried leaves wrapped in yellow message paper.
Blood-crusted bandages had to be taken from thedead and applied to those freshly injured. “Thewounded would crawl across the frozen groundto the dead,” a veteran of the battle later recalled.
“They would drag themselves to the corpses, andransack the pockets and packs for a scrap of foodor tobacco. Or search for even a drop of water inthe canteens.”
By October 5, the men under Whittlesey’scommand were on the verge of collapse. The
Germans, in contrast, were well supplied andcontinued to pour fire into the American lines
from the north and south, leaving the hillside littered with dead bodies the survivors were too exhausted to bury. Stationed safely behind the front
lines, Goettler wrote to his mother that same day:“Just a note to let you know I am OK and getting
along alright.”
The next day, Goettler’s squadron was ordered
to fly over the Charlevaux Ravine and try tolocate the Lost Battalion, which, in reality, wasneither lost nor a battalion (a newspapermancoined the phrase). They were to drop muchneeded food and medical supplies. Because
combat aircraft during World War I were notequipped with radios, ground forces had to communicate with them using signal panels—whitebedsheets that ground troops would lay out incertain configurations to represent encoded messages. Fearing that these panels would be visible
to the Germans manning the cliffs above theirposition, the Americans kept them from view.
Mist and smoke covered the ground in theearly morning of October 6, making it nearly
impossible from 1,000 feet up to identify anyone in the heavily wooded hillside, let alone todistinguish friend from foe. So Goettler dropped
to 500 feet to try to get a better look. Then 300
feet. When Goettler and Bleckley reached 200
feet, the Germans hiding in the cliffs began firingfrom above. The slow-flying DH-4, nicknamed
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the “flaming coffin” because its pressurized gas
tank had a tendency to explode, was an irresistible target as it lumbered just above the treetops.
Before long, the plane was riddled with bullet
holes and gashed by shrapnel, and Goettler wasforced to return.
Goettler landed at the airdrome, and soon after he and Bleckley headed back up into the air
with another crew’s DH-4. As they approachedthe location Bleckley had pinpointed on his map
before taking off, Goettler pushed the control
stick forward and plunged into the ravine once
more. They quickly passed above the area Bleckley suspected would light up with heavy enemy
fire, dropping almost to the ground in an open
stretch of land, rising to clear the trees, before
pivoting on one wing to come back around.
To the Germans hidden among the vegetationon the floor of the ravine, a second opportunity
to take down an enemy aircraft was not
to be missed. Opening up with rif lesand machine guns,
the Germans did justwhat the fliers had
intended: they gaveaway their positions.
With each burstof f ire, Bleckleymarked its origin on
his map. But soon
hundreds of bullets were chewing
through the wing’s wood struts, leaving static wires
hanging loose like broken guitar strings. From theground, an American Field Service ambulancedriver watched the daring fliers. He recalled after
the war how erratic the biplane’s flight path became before it turned back out of the ravine.
Goettler was dead. A German bullet had blown
away most of his skull. Without a lead pilot tocontrol the biplane, Bleckley must have grabbed
the rear cockpit control stick, pulling it up andover to turn the DH-4 away from the ravine toward Allied lines. Following this turn, Goettler’s
lifeless body likely slumped forward in the front
cockpit, pushing the control stick forward as
well. With its control cables shot away, the bat-

tered craft heeled over and nosedived into theground. The impact threw Bleckley from the biplane, causing devastating internal injuries. He
took his last breath on the way to a field hospitalat Villers-Daucourt.
The day after Goettler and Bleckley were
killed, the German troops who had pinned down
Whittlesey and his men in the Charlevaux Ravine abruptly withdrew under intense fire fromadvancing American troops. Of the 694 officers and enlisted men who began the offensive,
only 194 sunken-cheeked survivors were strong
enough to stagger out of the Argonne Forest.
Goettler’s commanding officer, Lt. D. B. MorseJr., wrote a heartfelt letter to the young officer’s
grieving mother. He did not mention the fact that
her son’s mission had been unsuccessful in thesense that the men of the Lost Battalion neverreceived the supplies they badly needed. Morseclearly believed thatwas beside the point.
Goettler and Bleckley didn’t have to goout on that second
flight. They had done
their duty the firsttime around. Butthat wasn’t enoughfor them. Instead,they took off a second
time likely knowing they weren’t going to make it back.
Their mission, Morsewrote, was “a most perilous one,” and Goettler hadtaken it on “with the wonderful spirit he has always shown while in the squadron.” Describing
her son’s death as “most heroic,” Morse assured
Goettler’s mother that her son would be recommended for a medal for his selflessness and valor.
“Your son’s death,” he concluded, “has not been
in vain.” ◆GOETTLER ANDBLECKLEY DIDN’T HAVETO GO OUT ON THATSECOND FLIGHT. THEY
HAD DONE THEIR DUTY
THE FIRST TIME AROUND.
BUT THAT WASN’T
ENOUGH FOR THEM.

David Chrisinger, AM’10, is the director of the Harris Public Policy Writing Program at the Universityof Chicago and a contributing writer to the New YorkTimes’s At War column. He is currently writing a bookabout famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, due out
in 2021.
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GLIMPSESPARKS ANDRESTORATION
How a lawyer-turned-scientist-turned-entrepreneur
helped establish Afghanistan’s first national park.
BY I N G R I D G O N Ç A LV E S , A B ’ 0 8

52

National Park, and laid the groundwork for asecond, Wakhan National Park. Together thesenature reserves protect over 70 percent of thecountry’s snow leopard population.
Band-e-Amir attracted around 25,000 visitors
the first year after it opened in 2009, andcontinues to provide an animal sanctuary and a place where Afghans
can enjoy outdoor activities. “Thesheer number of Afghans that
actually went ... is really themost powerful thing,” Dehgan
says, “because it means we created something Afghans actually wanted.”
Dehgan chronicles his efforts
in The Snow Leopard Project: And
Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation (PublicAffairs, 2019). Now the CEO
and cofounder of Conservation X Labs, Dehgan
has shifted his focus to the private sector, developing open-market technologies to tackle the

Photo courtesy Duke University (left); photo courtesy USAID Afghanistan (top)Leopards, tigers, and bears were justthe beginning. In 2006 conservationist
Alex Dehgan, SM’03, PhD’03, ventured
by horse, donkey, and yak to someof Afghanistan’s most remote landscapes in search of elusive war
zone wildlife. Dehgan andhis team tracked ecologically crucial keystone species
through grasslands, valleys, andmountains rarely glimpsed in
American media coverage ofthe former Soviet-controlledcountry, the scene of nearly
nonstop conf lict since 1978.
Their goal was to figure out how
to protect the surviving fauna.
From 2006 to 2007, in the midst of
Operation Enduring Freedom, Dehgan led
the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Afghanistan program. Through WCS, he helped create
Afghanistan’s first protected area, Band-e-Amir

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Some 25,000 Afghans visited Band-e-Amir National
Park in its first year—a sign, says conservationist
Alex Dehgan, SM’03, PhD’03, of locals’ pride in anddesire to protect their country’s natural beauty.

underlying drivers of extinction. This interview has beenedited and condensed.

You call Afghanistan a biological Silk Road. What
did you learn about the health of Afghanistan’s
wildlife, and how did you go about it?
Afghanistan has been this amazing mixing ground andmeeting place of wildlife where three major biomes cometogether in a single country. You have brown bears from Europe, tigers from Indo-Malaysia, hyenas from Africa. You
have species specific to the region, like snow leopards andthe markhor, a goat that looks like a unicorn except with
two spiral horns instead of one. Great north–south bird migrations from Africa into the Arctic pass through Afghanistan, channeled by the Himalayas and the Wakhan Valley.
So it serves as an important transition point.
The international WCS team, which was just under 90
percent Afghan, included about 50 staff and 25 affiliated scientists and conservationists. We wanted to find out what
was left after 30 years of war and how to direct our conservation efforts. What effect did
conflict have on biodiversity?
What areas do we still need toprotect? What baselines would
we be starting from?
We used things like sensoractivated cameras. We looked atscats, literally the feces of carnivores, and hair samples for evidence of species’ presence andperhaps a degree of insight into
their population genetics andpopulation size. We were essentially verifying the existenceof species that hadn’t been seen for 50 or more years.
We found many more species than we had expected. In
the case of snow leopards, we thought there were only 70 to
100 of them left in Afghanistan. The evidence suggests that
there are over 200 in just one region. There may be more.
So there’s an even greater imperative for their protection
than we ever thought.

of its 100th anniversary. They so inspired me that I decided
to return to my passion for understanding the drivers andbehaviors of extinction—work I’m still doing today.
UChicago had the best program in the country forstudying the behavior of extinction, the focus of my PhD. I
wanted to go to a school that created theory, not just appliedit, so I could understand the assumptions behind models
that were being made. I also appreciated the intensive life of
the mind the University was known for.
It wasn’t easy to go back to graduate school after working
on significant national and international cases, including
multiple cases that went to the Supreme Court.

What was it like to work as a scientist in a
conflict area?
The biggest challenge was obviously the security situation. Land mines were an enormous problem. Afghanistan
was the third most heavily land-mined country in the entire world. I probably walked into a minefield chasing aftersome birds I was trying to document. People we knew were
kidnapped. Being in the wrong
place at the wrong time was areal issue—if you were near a
car carrying an improvised explosive device, or if there was an
attack. There were explosions
going off in the city, in government buildings, in the places
where we worked all the time.
It sounds surprising, but Afghanistan was the easiest place
I’d ever done conservation.
People intuitively and inherently understand the link between their own security and the environment. This wholegeneration grew up as refugees—Afghans in Iran, Afghans
in Dubai, Afghans in Pakistan—and those individuals wererebuilding an identity they already had in association with
the incredible wildlife in Afghanistan. It was a point of pride
that they had this environment and these species that were
worthy of global consideration, attention, and protection.
The Afghan people had been visiting the Band-e-Amir
National Park location for hundreds of years. It’s near otherimportant cultural sites, like the Buddhas of Bamiyan, andlies near one of the Silk Road routes. The second most important Shia shrine in the country also sits on the edges ofthe park’s most important lakes. Local communities had anumber of reasons for wanting to protect the site, from geological and biological to historical, cultural, and religious.

Being in the wrong place at
the wrong time was a realissue—if you were near a
car carrying an improvised
explosive device, or if there
was an attack.

Why did you choose to study evolutionary
biology at the University of Chicago, especiallyafter earning a law degree?
While I was in New York clerking for the chief judge of the
US Court of International Trade, the WCS held a lecture
series with the world’s best conservation biologists in honor

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After decades under threat from conflict and poaching, Afghanistan’s snow leopards are thriving again thanks to the Wildlife
Conservation Society’s efforts.

With so many development priorities after decadesof war in Afghanistan, why a national park?

54

Now that you’ve started your own company,
how do you see the roles of the public and private
sectors in environmental conservation?
While government is a very powerful entity for addressing the challenges we face, the political climate prioritizes
shorter-term interests over the long-term nature of environmental conservation. Because of the fickle nature ofgovernment, you can have a rapid shift in policy throughexecutive order.
One example is the Paris Agreement on climate change,
which the Trump administration has pulled out of. If you
look at the data, the most effective thing we can do forclimate change is address cooling technology, which isbased on vapor compression—super old, not very efficient.
We have billions of people moving into the middle class,in places that are only getting hotter, who will demand
refrigeration and air-conditioning. So Conservation X
Labs—along with the Rocky Mountain Institute and theIndian government—is running an international competition to reinvent the underlying air-conditioning technology, aiming at a four- or five-fold increase in efficiency
as a way of directly meeting the needs outlined in the
Paris Agreement.
How do you make things sustainable in an unreliable
environment? How do you find new solutions? How do we
use the power of innovation? Government plays a huge role,
through the funding of science, through laws and policies.
But at the moment, in the absence of government action, weare stepping up. ◆Photo courtesy USAID Afghanistan

Conservation is fundamentally tied to the outcomes we expect
to see in development. When the environment fails, so does
everything else. So does food security. When grasslands fail,
we lose pollinators necessary to grow the food. The soil becomes less rich with microbial diversity. The very things thatsustain domestic populations also sustain wild populations.
Wakhan National Park, in the Himalayas, was important because environmental management is critical to thesurvival of the nomadic Kyrgyz tribes and the Wakhi, who
inhabit the landscape. The same overgrazing that threatened their livestock was also undermining the survival of
the spectacular Marco Polo sheep.
The environment itself can provide a tool to build governance and democracy as well as diplomacy between
countries. We had elections for a community conservation
council that involved all of the villages along the rivers surrounding Band-e-Amir National Park. The national, provincial, and local governments all participated. Many jobs werecreated for the protection of this wildlife.
We didn’t want it to be a Western park in Afghanistan.
We wanted it to be a park for Afghanistan. National parks
in the United States have always had some type of local governance, but land tenure is much better established here.
Land ownership was an important part of our constitution.
In many other countries, there are informal systems of land
tenure that haven’t been codified into laws or registeredthrough an administrative agency. Many past conservation
efforts have been almost neocolonial, running roughshodover traditional interests in land.
By building the governance structures that helped improve how Afghans manage natural resources in the park,

we then could actually help establish that ownership, help
set the direction, and help build the leadership for the future of conservation in the country.

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INQUIRY
NEWS FROM THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES DIVISION 2019

Photo courtesy Maureen Coleman

A wake forms behind
the research vesselBlue Heron, which
carried microbiologist
Maureen Coleman
from Milwaukee to
Duluth to sample themicrobiomes of Lakes
Michigan and Superior.

56

Lake health

58

Squishy cells

60

Pulse of light62

Muscular music

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Congratulations to John B. Goodenough, SM’50,

D E A N ’ S N OT E

PhD’52, who shares the 2019 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry for his pioneering work developing

Organic
growthlithium-ion batteries. His research helps lay thefoundation for a wireless, fossil fuel-free society(see Notes, page 72).
JOHN B. GOODENOUGH

56

technologies. Science is afeedback loop, with discoveries framing brand-newquestions and catalyzing
work in other fields.
Seeing where projects
intersect or how breakthroughs might seed new
subfields often happens
serendipitously. This is why
PSD spaces are designedwith exchange and dynamics in mind. Chemists andbiophysicists commingle in
the Gordon Center for Integrative Science. Astrophysicists and molecular engineers brush shoulders in the
Eckhardt Research Center—
perhaps sharing a cup ofcoffee in the Quantum Café.
And any scientist visiting
the John Crerar Library can’t
help but notice the Center
for Data and Computing,an incubator for multidisciplinary data science andartificial intelligence inquiry
that fuses fundamental andapplied research.
Perhaps an incubatoris an apt descriptor for
UChicago’s science sphere:a safe environment at theideal temperature with
abundant resources to nurture growth.
All the best,

Angela V. Olinto
Dean of the PhysicalSciences Division

MICROBIOME

Small bugs inlarge ponds
Coleman’s lab samples the teeming
microbiome of the Great Lakes.
BY L U C A S M CG R A N A H A N

There’s a lot of interest lately in the human microbiome,” says Maureen Coleman, an assistantprofessor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences. “But lakes also have a microbiome.”
If you swallow a drop of water from Lake Michigan, she explains, it will contain roughly a million
bacterial cells and 10 million bacteriophages—tiny
viruses that infect bacteria and may outnumber
every other organism (micro and macro) on Earth.
Coleman’s lab studies how such communities of
microbes adapt, interact, and coevolve.
UChicago researchers are fortunate to have an
excellent model system for studying bacteria andtheir hangers-on right in their backyard. This sys-

Photography by John Zich (left); photo
courtesy the University of Texas at Austin

At the University of Chicago,interdisciplinary research
between physical, biological, and medical sciences isleading to life-changing
scientific and technologicalbreakthroughs. In the Physical Sciences Division we
have a physicist “squishing”
cells to study force (“Living Matter,” page 58). We
have a geophysical scientist
taking to the seas and lakes
to plumb microbial diversity
and evolution (“Small Bugs
in Large Ponds,” right). And
we have a computer scientist
using electrical muscle stimulation—the kind employedfor physiotherapy—to build
musical skills and empathy(“Instrumental,” page 62).
Scientists, physicians,
and engineers at the University are working together
to improve the way we live,
approaching research fromall directions. Many peopleview scientific fields as partof a pipeline leading fromfundamental research topractical application: mathto physics, physics to chemistry, chemistry to biology,
biology to medicine. But
science isn’t so linear.
For the physical andmathematical sciences, adding life to the equation isn’t
simply the next step. It cancreate new “building blocks
that don’t exist in physics,” according to Margaret
Gardel (page 58), inspiringnovel scientific fields andI N Q U I RY I N TH E U N IVE RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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The Great Lakes “each have their own unique character—tem is not just Lake Michigan but the Great Lakes as a whole.
“It was shocking to me when I arrived here in 2012 that no Lake Erie is really, really different from Lake Superior—and
one had yet systematically characterized the microbiome of yet at the same time, they’re connected,” Coleman says. While
this makes them a theoreticallythe Great Lakes,” Coleman says.
interesting system, the lakes are
Her lab is now doing just that, inalso inherently valuable, supcollaboration with the Environplying a staggering 20 percent
mental Protection Agency. (Theof the world’s liquid fresh water.
EPA has tracked water quality
Keeping this precious, soughtand some multicellular organafter resource in good shape is,isms in the lakes since 1983, but
in large part, a matter of followits research had not included
ing the microbial signals.
the systematic sampling of bacReal-world challenges such as
teria, archaea, and viruses.) A
forthcoming paper in the journal Environmental Microbiol- these are what motivate Coleman, whose PhD from MIT is inogy details some results of the lab’s work completing the first civil and environmental engineering. “I am in no way qualified
to build a bridge or anything,” she says,
microbial time series—a comparison oflaughing. “But I do still carry with me
populations in water samples drawnthat desire to solve problems, as opposedfrom the same sites over time—that
to just studying basic science for the pure
covers all five Great Lakes. They comlove of theory and fundamentals.”
pleted their spring 2019 sampling in
Coleman describes fieldwork and lab
May and summer sampling in June—work as complementary: discoveries intheir eighth year on the water.
the wild can inspire hypotheses that
Why dip your toes into such an amyou test back home. In the lab, Colebitious research program? Because
man’s team uses a technique calledmicrobes perform a number of vitaltransposon sequencing to knock out
ecological functions. For one, Colemangenes from microbes and observe thesays, they process all of the runoff fromresulting functional differences. “Withland, including “all of the fertilizer, allthis approach you can do global-scaleof the pesticides, all of the pollution
gene deletions and then test the funcfrom Chicago—although not our sewtions of all of these genes essentially inage because we send that down theparallel.” Such experiments are in deriver.” They are also fundamental to themand: scientists have gotten so good atfood web. “If you’re interested in fisherdiscovering microbial genes that thouies, for instance, you need to care about
sands more have been identified thanwhat’s happening at the very bottom of
are well understood.
the food web as well.”
The scope of the unknown in microMoreover, microbes serve as “senbiology is a familiar and humbling facttinels for change” by indicating shifts
to Coleman. Her PhD research was onin environmental conditions. Colethe photosynthetic cyanobacterium
man cites a 2014 incident in which
Prochlorococcus—an organism that,drinking water in Toledo, Ohio, wasdespite being among the most abundant
tainted by a toxin produced by abacteria on Earth, was not discovered
bloom of cyanobacteria in Lake Erie.
until 1986, by a team including ColeDetecting shifts like these and underman’s adviser Sallie “Penny” W. Chstanding how they occur can help sci- Maureen Coleman and her team sailed on
entists predict and mitigate some of the research vessel Blue Heron in June 2019 isholm. Today’s sequencing technology,
the harmful effects of climate change to collect water samples from different lake Coleman says, “gives us a new tool tofigure out how much we don’t know.” ◆or changes in land use.
depths for microbial DNA analysis.

Photography by John Zich (left); photo

Photo courtesy Maureen Coleman

DISCOVERIES IN THE
WILD CAN INSPIREHYPOTHESES THAT YOU
TEST BACK HOME.

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BIOPHYSICS

Living matter
How Margaret Gardel accidentally
became a biophysicist.
BY J E A N I E C H U N G

Margaret Gardel, the Horace B. Horton Profes-

58

Through a chance exchange with a collaborator, Gardel
attended the physiology course at the Marine Biological
Laboratory after she finished her PhD. There she met cellbiologists willing to teach a physicist about the inner workings of cells. She also met Clare Waterman, who convinced
her to leave her postdoc position and move across the country to join her cell biology lab at the Scripps Research Institute, where she learned how to image the polymer networks
inside cells while they are crawling and building adhesions
with the external matrix and each other.
Since Gardel had taken only one biology course as an undergraduate, her time with Waterman proved critical. She wasused to thinking of material building blocks as passive structural elements. But proteins and other building blocks usedby living organisms are mechanochemical enzymes—that is,they can convert chemical energy to do local mechanical work.
Likewise, local mechanical forces also impact their chemical
reactivity. Thus, living materials provide building blocks that
don’t exist in physics, inspiring new types of research.

Image courtesy Patrick Oakes

sor in the Department of Physics and theCollege, found her area of study through aseries of serendipitous events. Her graduate
research at Harvard focused on filamentous actin, a polymer found within cells in
multicellular organisms.
In living cells actin drives cell motion and is essential inbuilding multicellular tissue. Gardel was interested in theways actin (as part of a polymer network inside cells) deforms
in response to external mechanical stress, but in a physics lab
the approaches used to study those types of properties had
been developed for traditional polymeric materials—thinkof Jell-O or Silly Putty. Those materials don’t spontaneously
move or build complex multicellular organisms.
Near the end of graduate school, Gardel was increasingly
bothered by this gap. How can we make measurements tounderstand the materials that living cells use to support
their physiology?
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Left: In cells, the F-actin cytoskeleton is responsible
for much of the force generated and transmitted
across individual cells. These biophysical behaviors
play an important role in cell adhesion, migration,and division. Right: Margaret Gardel and her lab are
pictured in 2019.

Photo courtesy the Gardel Lab

For example, Hooke’s law of elasticity, which addresses
force on objects, doesn’t always work the same way on living
materials—which move spontaneously, change shape, react,and change their chemistry. “There’s lots of more-intricate
properties happening,” Gardel says.
Gardel’s lab—its URL is squishycell.uchicago.edu—seeks
to understand how physical forces such as pressure and deformation act on individual cells. The lab’s two main areasof inquiry complement each other: One seeks to understandthe physics of how living cells adhere and move. The other,she says, seeks to build cell-like material “from scratch.”
To address these challenges, Gardel collaborates with labs
across the division, as well as in the Biological Sciences
Division. For example, UChicago cell biologist Michael
Glotzer developed a genetically encoded tool to control
the localization of proteins within living cells using light.
With this tool, Gardel’s lab has studied how cells respondto local changes in force either internally or at points where
they connect with other cells. In the second research area,
Gardel is working with UChicago biochemist David Kovar
on a project building active materials: gels and fluids that
contract the way muscles do.
If scientists can understand how biological materials adapt,they’ll learn new types of design principles. There are undoubtedly dozens of applications for those design principles in medicine alone, but Gardel is most interested in figuring out how
things work. Scientists have wanted to understand cells since

LIVING MATERIALSPROVIDE BUILDINGBLOCKS THAT DON’T
EXIST IN PHYSICS,
INSPIRING NEW
TYPES OF RESEARCH.
first seeing them under a microscope, and unlocking the biochemistry and genetics of cells has answered a lot of questions.
“What 20th-century biology has given us is knowledge ofwhat’s under the hood,” she says. However, she adds: “Westill don’t know how each of the components work together
to facilitate the complex cell physiology.” ◆FORCE AMPLIFIERBY J E A N I E C H U N GAs Margaret Gardel leads the scientists
in her lab toward discoveries in “living
matter,” she hopes they learn from eachother as well as from her. She recalls her graduate adviser at Harvard, David Weitz, saying,“If I’m the only person you’ve learned from in
graduate school, you’ve wasted your time.”
She gives her lab members the same advice.
Fostering a collaborative environment is an
important part of scientific research today, shesays. So is acknowledging—and then trying to
reduce or eliminate—unspoken or unconscious
biases. Gardel considers herself one of many
women in science of her generation who “really felt like gender was not an issue—until we
got to the higher stages and realized it is.”Gardel says she has always felt well supported at UChicago. However, as she’s progressedin academia, serving on grant review committees, participating in speaker selection for
conferences, and interacting with journal editors, she has become “more aware of all theseinteractions that occur that are not necessarily
based on the quality of the science.”
She now feels more strongly about callingout these biases—even just talking about themin stories like this one—and being a “more vocal advocate for people who aren’t in a position to advocate for themselves.” ◆I N Q U I RY I N TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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INNOVATION

Light
heartedChemist Bozhi Tian illuminates
pacemaker technology.
BY M AU R E E N S E A R C Y

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An optical microscopy image of the silicon
nanowire mesh shows high-density random
nanowires supported over a polymer framework.
(The density increases contact area between
the wires and the heart muscle cells; the random
configuration is easier to manufacture.)

Illustration by Chris Gash (left); photo courtesy Bozhi TianS

ometimes the heart needs a hand, like when
it beats too quickly, too slowly, or out of sync.
Our hearts have an innate electrical system that
controls their rhythm, and when that system malfunctions, physicians may opt for a pacemaker.
This matchbox-sized device consists of a battery,
a computerized generator, and electrodes that attach to theheart. When the pacemaker detects an abnormality, it sends
a little burst of electricity to get the heartbeat back on track.
Traditional pacemakers, first used in humans in 1958,
come with inherent risks. They’re “not freestanding,” explains associate professor of chemistry Bozhi Tian. The needfor a battery pack increases the device’s size, “making implantation a more invasive procedure.”
The size also causes irritation, which can lead to an inflammatory response. The device can get coated with immune
cells and fibrous material from the extracellular matrix—thenetwork of proteins and carbohydrates found in the space
between cells. This type of biofouling, Tian says, “reduces thepacemaker’s electrical signal transduction efficiency becausesignals will get lost.”
His team has developed a potential solution: a wirelesspacemaker powered by light. The device is based on existing
solar cell technology, but shrunk down to the nanoscale—amesh of silicon nanowires embedded in polymer for support.
Silicon, a semiconductor that serves as a building blockfor computer chips, is an ideal material because it has “a lotof electronic and optical functions you can play with,” says
Tian. “You can convert light energy into electricity.”
Working with both cultured cells in a dish and isolated
rat hearts, Tian’s team attached the mesh to heart muscle
tissue and then scanned the mesh-coated area with a laser, delivering pulses of light. The mesh in turn produced
electricity, activating the heart cells to beat at the same
frequency as the flashes. Scanning, rather than the direct
application of light, is more efficient and safer for the cells,
which can be damaged by too much energy.
While traditional pacemaker surgery is considered minimally invasive, with the device implanted through a small

incision in the chest, Tian’s mesh could be delivered evenless invasively, via needle injection. The surgeon would
even target areas of the heart with pacemaker cells, mostly
found in the sinoatrial node close to the right atrium wall.
These cells naturally generate electrical impulses, and thatenergy flows throughout the heart, causing it to pump.
Light could be delivered in a few different ways, including
through an optical fiber. After injecting the mesh, a fiber
about the diameter of a human hair could be plugged into
the same hole, with one end touching the mesh and theother exposed to the outside world, able to guide light tothe pacemaker.
Traditional pacemakers can be permanent or temporary.
If an irregular heartbeat is caused by something acute andreversible, such as drug toxicity or infection, a pacemaker
may be needed only until the underlying problem is solved,
and this is the type Tian’s light-powered mesh is aimed
at replacing.
Nanostructure silicon can dissolve inside a human bodywithin a few weeks, making it optimal for transient applications. (Silicon degrades into silicic acid, which can be filtered by the kidneys, so in small enough doses, it’s safe forhumans. The polymer support for the silicon can be biodegradable as well.) “You would inject one dosage, apply thelight pulses, and then treat the patient for a short window,
perhaps a few days,” says Tian. “Then there’s no need for
additional surgery” to remove the device.
Much of the work in Tian’s lab has the potential to directly
improve medical care. This project builds on technology originally developed to stimulate neurons, a concept pioneered by
Ramya Parameswaran, PhD’18, an MD/PhD student who completed her biophysics degree in Tian’s lab and is now finishingher medical training at the Pritzker School of Medicine.
“At this stage we certainly hope to work with medical
doctors because that’s how we make real impact,” says Tian,“but we must first optimize the technology,” improving thedevice’s optical pacing, efficiency, and power demands.
Tian predicts they might be ready to approach clinicians ina couple of years—if they keep up this pace. ◆I N Q U I RY I N TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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TECHNOLOGY

Instrumental

Computer scientist Pedro Lopes integrates technology
with anatomy to reimagine the roleof “human” in human-computer interaction.
BY M AU R E E N S E A R C Y

Illustration by Christian GralingenT

he sparse room is almost
blindingly bright: whitefloors, white walls, white
exposed ductwork, and a
primary-yellow door. Articulated fume extraction
pipes (think robot arms with suction
cup hands) extend from the ceiling,
and a Styrofoam human head sits on
the bench. Above the white noise offans and beeping electronics plays theotherworldly whine/hum/squeal of atheremin—the classic B-movie UFO
sound effect. If Stanley Kubrick and Ed
Wood had teamed up to imagine theyear 2019, it might have looked something like Pedro Lopes’s lab in the recently renovated John Crerar Library.
In the center of this futuristic spacestands Marco Kaisth, Class of 2021, himself a study in retro styling in a Western yoke shirt, plaid cropped pants,
and mod boots. Kaisth waves his arm
through the air, his fingers fluttering
as if playing invisible strings—and themusic fluctuates. That’s how you playa theremin, moving your body throughthe instrument’s electromagnetic field
to produce sound. But it’s what you

can’t see that’s most interesting: thetheremin, in a sense, is playing Marco.
He can feel the music. His fingers are
moving involuntarily.
The details of this work aren’t yet
published and must remain underwraps for now, but the crux of the
project represents a theme in Lopes’s
research—reversing the flow of control within human-computer interaction and reimagining the natureof the relationship between humans
and technology. In Lopes’s office one

BUT IT’S WHATYOU CAN’T SEE
THAT’S MOSTINTERESTING.
floor up, relocated from the lab to givehis students “acoustic space,” Lopes
writes H-C-I vertically on a scrap of
paper, like a ladder with the H on top.
“In HCI, a human controls the com-puter.” What if you put the computer
on top? And how would that affect oursense of control? (Some may dread a
Matrix-like future, but Lopes qualifies that the computer must still be
programmed by a human. Whether
that’s better than being controlled byartificial intelligence is debatable.)
The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) is difficult to define, evenby experts, except in the most redundant way: it’s how humans interact
with computers. Before Lopes joined
the computer science department as
an assistant professor in January,
UChicago had no dedicated professors in HCI, though Neubauer Family
Assistant Professor Blase Ur and Neubauer Professors Ben Zhao and Heather
Zheng all count HCI projects among
their work.
Ur, who takes a human-centered approach to studying computer security
and privacy, says the field looks at how
to design computer systems to better
meet users’ needs and habits. Researchers adopt techniques from sociology
and psychology to understand how
people use computers and other tech-

PEDRO LOPES is an assistant professor of computer science, leading the Human Computer Integration Lab. Lopes’s team engineersinteractive systems that intertwine computing with anatomical functionality to supersede mobile and wearable technology. Several of
their systems use electrical muscle stimulation to provoke movement, raising questions of control and agency. To read about how Lopes’s
interactive wearable systems increase realism in virtual reality, with the potential to build empathy, visit mag.uchicago.edu/similitude.
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nology in practice, which is often distinct from what the designers intended.
Zhao and Zheng, a married team who
operate a joint lab, study human behavior as illuminated by data. Zhao conducts empirical research with a slant
toward security, trying to model andpredict human behavior, while Zheng
focuses on mobile computing and sensor data, gathering information fromwearables to better understand the behavior of, for instance, patients and caregivers, which could help make healthcare more efficient and predictable.
In this vein, some of Lopes’s work
follows the conventional HCI ventureof developing technology to record,facilitate, or enhance human action.
Wearable tech—a booming subset of
HCI research—features prominently
in Lopes’s lab, including stretchy electronics, ideal for biometric sensors of
the type Zheng might use to gather
hospital data.
Take, for example, visiting PhD student Steven Nagels, who brought his
work on stretchable circuitry when
he joined the Lopes Lab in January.
The material combines comfort andIn a lab filled with computers andelectronics components, Nagels pulls
out a floppy square of silicone with anembedded circuit. He alligator-clips thecircuit to a power source, and a green
LED lights up inside the patch. He thentwists, folds, and stretches the square,
and it returns to its original shape, still
illuminated. A normal circuit board has
rigid electrical connections; such treatment would break the wires. Nagels
solved this problem by creating chambers within the silicone and pouring in
metal that remains liquid at room temperature. A constant liquid state makes
for flexible conductivity.
“Such resilience means engineers
could put electronics in places normal
circuit boards can’t go,” says Nagels,and makes the technology extremely
promising for wearables, particularly
those meant for skin contact. Stretchy
electronics could sit on the body forextended periods without hindering
your movement. They could be incorporated into any kind of material,even a sweatshirt that can be easily removed. (Laundry involves water, heat,and mechanical force—all enemies of

SUCH RESILIENCE MEANS
ENGINEERS COULD PUT
ELECTRONICS IN PLACES NORMAL
CIRCUIT BOARDS CAN’T GO.
flexibility for a variety of wearable applications. (Nagels, one of several lab
members whose expertise lies outsideof computer science, specializes inelectrical engineering and materials
science. Lopes intentionally devised
his team to include diverse specialties
to best suit the many facets of HCI.)
64

electronics—but Lopes and Nagels,
now back at his home institution, Hasselt University in Belgium, seem confident that this material will eventually
be washable.)
Wearable tech is a broad field: it includes the ubiquitous fitness tracker,
as well as experimental equipmentthat scrambles surveillance, like themicrophone-jamming bracelet that
Lopes, Zheng, and Zhao are developing. But what if the technology—skinadhered electrodes, for instance—wasused to deliver information instead ofgather it, to control the human rather
than the human’s environment? Thisis how some of Lopes’s work differsfrom that of his HCI colleagues.
Beginning this line of inquiry as a
graduate student at the University of
Potsdam in Germany, Lopes looked at
the ways technology interfaces with
anatomy. For biosensors, the humanbody is the input, transmitting information to a computer. Perhaps hecould make the body the output, reacting to computer processing.
In the realm of movement, which isof particular interest to Lopes, there
are a couple of ways to flip the flow:
devices based on mechanical actuationand those that use electrical muscle
stimulation (EMS). Mechanical actuation for wearable technology involves
motorized equipment, like robotic exoskeletons—your body is simply along forthe ride. In contrast, EMS sends signals
to your muscles, making your body acomputer peripheral device. You, thehuman, are the printer, the monitor, thespeaker, receiving information and acting on it. This is the technology Kaisth’s
theremin project relies on.
Electrical muscle stimulation uses
a pair of electrodes stuck to the skin
to deliver small jolts of electricity tomuscles, making them involuntarily
contract. (The concept traces back to
1791, when Luigi Galvani discoveredthat electric current made an inanimate frog leg twitch, partially inspiring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.)“When a burst of electricity entersthe first electrode, it wants to comeout of the second,” Lopes explains.
“As it travels through the medium

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Photography by Anne Ryan

Pedro Lopes (top) stands outside one of his labs
in the John Crerar Library. The group’s name,
Human Computer Integration Lab, emphasizes
the expanded scope beyond simple interaction
between humans and technology. Steven Nagels(bottom) demonstrates a stretchable circuit.

that is your body, it crosses your skin,and most people say it tingles because
it’s a form of vibration.” The electricalimpulses then encounter nerve cells
connected to muscles, or the muscles
themselves. When the muscles feelcurrent, “they do what they always do,which is to contract.”
Lopes first started experimenting
with EMS at the University of Potsdam’s Hasso Plattner Institute, exploring eyes-free interaction for wearables.
He focused on proprioception—theability to sense the orientation andmovement of your body within its environment. (Close your eyes, stretch
out your arms, and then touch yourindex finger to your nose. That ability
comes from proprioception.)
One of his applications dealt withgesture recognition: Lopes wondered

if your smartphone, connected to you
by electrodes, could deliver information by moving your body. Perhaps
the phone compels a person’s finger tomove in the shape of a “5,” as an alert
for five unread messages, or in a heart
shape to indicate a message from a closefriend, he explains on his website.
Lopes also realized that EMS could
be used for more than notification;
it could be used to train or teach themuscles directly, similar to its use inphysical therapy for rehabilitatingmuscle function. For instance, a wholly unfamiliar object could itself teacha person how to use it.
To demonstrate the concept, Lopes
developed a prototype that uses an EMSwired device worn on the hand and forearm and a multicamera setup to track
the user’s hand proximity to an object.

A video shows people wearing the contraption trying to pick up a white cube.
When one woman nearly grasps the
cube, her fingers jerk away. “It doesn’twant to be grabbed,” she laughs. The
instrument had been programmed to“tell” the user of its unwillingness to beheld by stimulating the muscles to backoff. Other participants try to spray painta design on cardboard, but the spray can“instructs” them to shake it first.
The participants are then given a
specialty tool, a magnetic nail sweeper,
whose function is not intuitive. The
wearable device instructs them how
to grasp the tool and gather scatterednails and then how to pull a releasebar to drop them into a bin. “In awild future, you could wire up andlearn by doing rather than reading an
instruction manual,” says Lopes. He
notes that the same could be achieved
with an exoskeleton, but “I wanted tosee if we could do it without being so
instrumented,” with a more seamlesshuman-technology interface.
The learning could skip the brain entirely and go straight to muscle memory, but whether your body actuallyretains the lesson remains to be seen.
Lopes is collaborating with Shinya
Fujii, a neuroscientist at Japan’s Keio
University, to investigate whether EMS
could build drumming skills. (Fujii is adrummer while Lopes is a turntablist,
playing turntables as if they were fullfledged instruments.) After training
beginner drummers through “passive
action,” or electrical stimulation of thearm muscles, they found that the drummers did improve, but not much morethan had they spent time practicing.
What was notable was the striking improvement in the nondominant
hand and the speeds the drummers
were able to reach while wired up.
“We’re making people drum as fast
as the world’s fastest drummer,” says

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Pedro Lopes’s collaborative, interactive art installation Ad Infinitum invites visitors to insert an arm into a box. The participant
is then captured when electrified cuffs close down on her forearm and deliver mild muscle stimulation, causing her wrist to
involuntarily pivot to turn a crank. The machine, deemed a “parasite” by its creators, harvests human kinetic energy to power itself.
To be released, the restrained human must convince another participant to take her place at the other end of the table.

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technology. “We’re trying to see if we
can do that with more human capabilities, human skills, human senses.”

WE’RE MAKINGPEOPLE DRUM
AS FAST AS
THE WORLD’SFASTESTDRUMMER.

T

he reversed directionality of
Lopes’s work raises questions ofagency—both physical and philosophical. First the easier scenario: what
it feels like to resist EMS impulses. If
you insist on grabbing the “unwilling”
white cube, “it feels literally like you’re
resisting a force,” explains Lopes. “Inother projects, we’ve used that as atrick to create the feeling of weight” invirtual reality.

The system is designed to recognize
when the user is resisting the stimulation and disconnect. And because
EMS-instructed action can only be as
strong as the human’s own muscles, it
can also be overcome by the strengthof the human’s own muscles, unlike amechanized exoskeleton. When asked
if someone could hack such a device
to compel you to act against your will,
Lopes stresses that any technology canbe vulnerable to infiltration, but thestrength limitation offers protection.
Willingness poses a different set ofissues. If technology inspires action(or aids function through nerve-integrated prostheses, for instance), it can“feel like this alien force,” says Lopes—
you think and something else acts.
This is particularly troublesome withexoskeletons because of the external nature of the hardware. For suchtechnology to feel natural, it needs to“synchronize or harmonize with yourintention,” actuating at a speed fasterthan possible without the device (inthe scientists’ terms, achieving “preemption”) but slowly enough that theperson feels they initiated the action.

Photography by Arthur Silber

Lopes. Maybe such conditioning willlead to unfair competition advantages—electrical doping of sorts. “Shinyasaid that if this changes the rules, he’ll
be happy. And I agree.”Lopes emphasizes that he and his
collaborators use medically compliant devices in their research that are
carefully calibrated for human use
and have fail-safes to prevent injury.
Still, a small amount of current can be
dangerous. “You can kill yourself witha 9-volt battery,” he says, so any projects that involve human subjects go
through an institutional review board.
Lopes also believes in the value of open
source; in 2015 he and a colleague in
Hannover, Max Pfeiffer, designed adevice that safely leverages standard
EMS generators and made the sourcecode and schematics public to help researchers begin exploring EMS.
In a UChicago lab that is relatively
new, Lopes and his team still experiment with EMS, the work that was his
baby for so long, which he “could talkabout till dinner.” But he wants the lab
to grow from that technique to explore
other ways humans can bond withI N Q U I RY I N TH E U N IVE RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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Lopes and Jun Nishida, a postdoc in
his lab, collaborated with Shunichi
Kasahara, an associate researcher atSony, to explore how fast they could
accelerate human reaction withoutcompromising people’s sense of agency.
With their ring fingers wired to receive
EMS, subjects were asked to tap a touch
screen when a target appears. The researchers programmed stimuli to bedelivered at different speeds, measured
reaction time, and asked the subjects torecord their sense of agency.
The paper, presented in May at the2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, showedthat stimulating the subjects 160 milliseconds after the target appears sped
up reaction time by 80 milliseconds
while preserving the strongest senseof agency. That is an incredibly shortwindow, where the subject feels justa shadow of external impulse, barely
distinguishable from their own intention. This finding might help optimize
wearable technology for the most natural experience.
While research based on self-reported sense of agency involves metaphysical elements, the experimental design
can be quantified. Time frames can bemeasured; data patterns can be analyzed; conclusions can be formed. But
not all of Lopes’s work revolves aroundan answer. Sometimes the question iswhat matters, and “art seems to be agood way to not just ask the question
but also inject it into people’s minds.
It’s like an Inception thing.”

In 2015 four musicians—one on bass,
one on guitar, one on vibraphone,and Lopes on turntable percussion—played in front of 80 people in the
now-shuttered media space Spektrum
Berlin. In a video posted on Lopes’s
website, the music is a din of discor-dant sounds, and the players jerk andlurch like marionettes, which in a way
they are. The audience is full of puppeteers controlling the quartet througha web app. They can make a musician
play or stop playing by tapping the performer’s name on their smartphone
screen, which sends a stream of electrical muscle stimulation.
(The instruments, even the guitar
and bass, are treated mostly as percussion tools. EMS isn’t yet precise
enough for sophisticated, targeted
movement because of the layered nature of muscles. Using EMS to teachwriting or violin is quite a ways off.
Dancing is probably not as distant because it requires coarser motion, says
Lopes—a welcome prediction for thepathologically unrhythmic.)
At the end of the roughly 12-minuteperformance, the audience members’
screens appear to glitch and they see
a closing message posing the question:
Were the audience members in control
or were they being “played”?
The “conductive ensemble,” as Lopes
calls it, was an art piece designed to
provoke thought about the notion ofcontrol in relation to social networks
and their pervasiveness.
Between 2016 and 2018, one of
Lopes’s art installations, called Ad
Infinitum, was staged at five exhibition spaces around the world, including Austria’s Ars Electronica. The
piece, created with Patrick Baudisch(Lopes’s PhD adviser at the time)and several fellow graduate students,
comprises a box into which visitors
insert their arms. Cuffs close down on
their forearms and deliver mild electric shocks that cause their wrists to
involuntarily pivot, forcing them toturn a crank; the device is harvesting
kinetic energy to power itself. The
only way to be released is to convinceanother participant to take your placeat the other end. The installation likely hosted 200,000 arms over its exhibition life.
The creators call the installation aparasite that lives off human energy. It“reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies:
the parasite shifts humans from ‘users’to ‘used.’” As described on its website,
Ad Infinitum is a “critical take on the
canonical HCI configuration, in which
a human is always in control.”Lopes’s art doesn’t always provide
an answer to the question; that’s not
the point, after all. But he “started
valuing art as a mechanism to do research.” Sometimes art works better
than empirical methodology to explore an idea, so he takes “that routerather than the hypothesis-testing approach.” When his team brainstorms,
often there’s an outlier that they realize would make a great art project.
(Several lab members are also artists.)“It’s such an interesting space to probe
people’s imaginations.”
Questions of flow and directionality and control only matter so long as
there’s a disconnect—no matter how
minuscule—between humans andcomputers, but Lopes’s grand overarching goal is to achieve complete
fluidity between technology and us.
In fact, his research group is called
the Human Computer Integration Lab,emphasizing the expanded scope beyond simple interaction.
“A good interface matches your expectations,” says Lopes. It feels naturaland does exactly “what it afforded you todo.” By moving certain interfaces to thebody itself, he’s removing instrumentation, making for a more organic experience. You shouldn’t know where you end
and the tech begins.
“Good HCI has no I—it just happens,”
says Lopes. “So my secret objective forthe field is to destroy it.” ◆I N Q U I RY I N TH E U N IV E RS IT Y O F CH I C AG O M AGA ZI N E | FA LL 201 9

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Y

EXCERPT

The angle ofreflection
From the University of Chicago Magazine print archive:
Gamesmanship and America’s first Nobel Prize scientist,
Albert Abraham Michelson.
BY N O R M A N F. M AC L E A N , P H D ’4 0 | S U M M E R / 75

Norman F. Maclean, PhD’40, was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the Universityof Chicago, teaching from 1930 to 1972. The year before his semiautobiographical collection A River
Runs Through It and Other Stories was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1976, Maclean
wrote an essay for the University of Chicago Magazine about his time spent in the Quadrangle Clubbilliards room with Albert A. Michelson, founder of UChicago’s physics department.

» Michelson

approached his personal pursuits—games, music, painting—in much the same way as his physics:
with attention to both precision and beauty. His universe was governed by “esthetics, mechanics,» In recognition of the Physics

on Michelson’s scientific endeavors. To read the full essay—including Maclean’s speculation as towhy Michelson was terrible at bridge but brilliant at billiards—visit mag.uchicago.edu/billiards.

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Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitungand gamesmanship,” says Maclean, “all shades of one another.”

Research Center’s new name, the Michelson Center for Physics, we here excerpt Maclean’s reflections

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“I always think of Michelson as the artist in Science. His greatest joy seemed
to come from the beauty of the experiment itself, and the elegance of themethod employed.”—Einstein, in a telegram to a fellow physicist on the 100th
anniversary of Michelson’s birth. Mount Wilson Observatory director Walter
S. Adams (left) met with Albert A. Michelson, Albert Einstein, and Robert A.
Millikan in 1920 at the Technological Institute in Pasadena.

W

hen I came here in 1928, now morethan half the history of the University ago, the University of Chicago was the one institution ofhigher learning that was thought
to exist west of the Appalachiansby the populace east of the Appalachians. Thiswidespread recognition was based largely on thenames of Leopold and Loeb, Clarence Darrow(who in the eastern mind was also connectedwith the University of Chicago), A. A. Stagg, andAlbert Abraham Michelson, who in 1907 hadbeen the first American to win the Nobel Prizein science. Before arriving on campus, I may also
have heard of Arthur Holly Compton, because
only the year before he had been awarded theNobel Prize, but I have the feeling I did not knowof him until I saw Mrs. Compton showing him off
at intermissions in Mandel Hall.
Michelson and Einstein, however, were thebest known scientists of the time—in some ways
for almost opposite reasons, although both were
physicists. Einstein was the wonder of the world
because he had encased the whole universe ina simple formula, E=mc2, which we were told,
equally wonderful to us, would be very upsetting if we could understand it. Especially to us
who could not understand, he was the theorist
beyond theorists.
Michelson’s wonder was what his head did withhis hands, and a few boxes and rotating mirrors.
He measured things, especially things that wereregarded as unmeasurable, ineffable, and precious
as life itself. Among other things, he had measured
light and a star. I watched him play billiards nearly
every noon for several months before he retired
from the University, and, in introducing myself,
I could further say with equal truth, “Shake thehand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan.” If
I get the right opening, though, I prefer saying,“When young, I watched Michelson play billiards.”
Michelson’s hands were to make many things
that brought light to our universe, but nothing somarked him in the popular mind as his measurement of the speed of light itself. Throughout mostof history, light had been thought of as instantaneous and present wherever there was nothing
to cast a shadow, and probably throughout all

history light will be thought of by poets and therest of us as the source of body and soul, without
which there would be no photosynthesis or foodor love or moonlight in which to make love. Without light for a metaphor there would have been
little poetry written and no candlelight to write
it by. Christ said, “I am the light of the world,” andCardinal Newman’s hymn to Him begins, “Lead,kindly light.”
Michelson was to measure the speed of lightmany times (his most accurate figure being
186,285 ± 2½ miles per second) and modern electronic equipment has changed that figure to only
186,282.3960. When in 1878 as an ensign in Annapolis he made his first measurement he spent$10 of his own money to assemble his equipment(for $10 light measured 186,508 miles per second).

Michelson was the best billiards player I haveever seen at the University, and I think I
have seen all the really good ones, including the barbers at the Reynolds Club. At first I wassomewhat embarrassed to see how good he was,because I did not expect to find any academic type
as good at a “manly sport” as the best we had inwestern Montana. But the more I thought about
it and the more I learned about Michelson, theless surprised I became. Before long, I comforted
myself with the question, “Why not? He’s the besthead-and-hands man in the world.”
So it wasn’t just billiards I watched when I arrived early every noon to watch Michelson playbilliards. I came to watch his hands. The year
1928 was still in an age which counted men who
made machines among its marvels and took for
granted that the rest of men could use tools andthat women could embroider beautifully. Edison
still performed his wonders, but the wonders of
Bell and Edison were more or less household utilities. Michelson’s head-and-hands made machines
almost godlike in properties, designed to tell us
how it was with the universe. His favorite creation
was his interferometer, with which, among otherthings, he (and later a collaborator, Edward Morley) had performed an experiment that shook theold universe and gave Einstein a big push toward
creating a new one with his theory of relativity.
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INQUIRY
70

Former faculty
member and founding physics department chair Albert A.
Michelson, the first
American to win a
Nobel Prize in thesciences, was anavid billiards player.

seen by our most powerful microscope. A fancy,
wide-angle billiard would also take my mind off
the game, because I knew just from the natureof the experiment that the machine had to turnninety degrees without vibration (in mercury,
I later found) so that any change in the patternof the light waves could be observed. Perhaps
the most American, air-conditioned question I
kept asking was, “How the hell in the 1880s did
he ever keep the machine in a temperature thatprobably couldn’t vary a tenth of a degree?”You don’t have to have a diagram of the interferometer to realize why it was Michelson’s favorite creation or why Michelson must have felt
about his interferometer something of the way
Galileo felt about his telescope:“O telescope, instrument of much knowledge,
more precious than any sceptre! Is not he whoholds thee in his hand made king and lord of theworks of God?”
But even this poetical outpouring isn’t as moving a tribute to a machine as the factual statement about the interferometer made by Arthur
Stanley Eddington, the English astronomer; it isa machine, he said, that can detect “a lag of onetenthousand-billionth of a second in the arrivalof a light wave.” ◆United Press International/University of Chicago Magazine archives, Summer/75

Before the Michelson-Morley experiment,
the common scientific assumption was that theuniverse consisted of bodies of matter moving
through and permeated by a substance that, although invisible, had somehow itself to be material. This substance at first was spelled “aether.”Since Michelson tended to believe that the major
theories of the universe were already in and that
accordingly the chief jobs left to do were to measure what was sailing around in ether, his headand hands produced his interferometer which
split a light wave, sending one half with the orbit of the earth and back again where it met theother half wave length that had been sent on areturn trip at right angles to the orbit of the earth.
If there were ether out there (unless it were being carried along by the earth as if it were an
envelope of the earth), the expectation was thatwhen the two halves of the light wave rejoined
they would be “out of phase,” since one had helda course parallel to “the ether drift” and the otherhad crossed it at right angles and returned. The
difference between the two half-light waves
would indeed be small, but Michelson was sure
he could measure it—and measure it he did, again
and again—only to conclude reluctantly that
there was no difference and that therefore there
was no stationary ether “out there” and that lighttraveled at equal velocity in all directions.
In 1928 we only crudely knew how these negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment
opened the universe to Einstein’s theories of relativity and we had even vaguer notions of the kindof machine that left Newtonian physics lying ina heap feebly struggling to get out from under its
own ruins.
I had heard, however, something about theinterferometer, and, having worked ten or eleven summers in the Forest Service and logging
camps, I had enough feeling for tools to makeit hard for me to keep my mind solely on billiards. After Michelson would run ten or twelve
billiards with a touch so delicate that the threeballs could always be covered by a hat, I foundmyself wondering instead how he had ever madea machine so delicate its finding would be invalid
if it vibrated half a wave length of light, a whole
wave length of light being so small that it can’t be

The Division of the Physical Sciences

Email Inquiry at: psd-inquiry@uchicago.edu

William Eckhardt Research Center

Editor: Maureen Searcy

5640 South Ellis Avenue, Suite 319

Contributing Editor: Laura Demanski, AM’94

Chicago, IL 60637

Design: Guido Mendez

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PEER REVIEWWHAT ALUMNI ARE THINKING AND DOING

Photography by Stephen Deutch, UChicago Photographic Archive, apf4-01530, University of Chicago Library

ART SCENE

Betsy Hess-Behrens, PhB’44, looks
at Hale Woodruff’s Sharecropper Boy(1938), part of the 1944 RenaissanceSociety exhibition New Names in
American Art: Recent Contributions to
Painting and Sculpture by Negro Artists.
In the exhibition brochure, Harlem
Renaissance doyen Alain Locke wrotethat the artists’ blending of modernism
and social realism was “a development
to be watched for its great future
promise” to American art.

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Notes andReleases

74

Alumni News90

Advanced
Degrees

92

Deaths

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NOTESA SELECTION OF ALUMNI WHOSE NAMES ARE IN THE NEWSGOODENOUGH GETS NOBELIn October John B. Goodenough,SM’50, PhD’52, received a Nobel Prizein Chemistry for his role in developing
the lithium-ion battery, the “foundationof a wireless, fossil fuel–free society,”said the Nobel Foundation. The Universityof Texas at Austin engineering professor shares the prize with Binghamton
University’s Stanley Whittingham andMeijo University’s Akira Yoshino. Eachcontributed to the technology’s evolution. For his part, Goodenough createda new cathode for the battery that increased its power and safety, eventuallyleading to a commercially viable product.
He is the 92nd UChicago-affiliatedNobelist and, at 97, the oldest person toreceive the honor.
SOCIAL WORK PIONEER
School of Social Service Administration
founder Sophonisba Breckinridge, PhM
1897, PhD 1901, JD 1904, is the subjectof a new biography by University ofMontana historian Anya Jabour.
Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing
Women’s Activism in Modern America(University of Illinois Press, 2019)
describes the social work pioneer’s contributions to Progressive Era reforms,
New Deal policy, and the formation of
the United Nations. The book discusses
Breckinridge’s personal and professional
partnership with Edith Abbott, SSA’s
first dean—“one example of the longstanding contributions of LGBTQ people
to American politics,” Jabour wrote on
the media website the Conversation.

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Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human
Development. Formerly the founding
director of the African Jesuit AIDS
Network, he will now serve as a papal
adviser, envoy, and elector.
JUDGES’ MOTIONSIn July Rebecca R. Pallmeyer, JD’79,
was named chief judge of the US District
Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Pallmeyer is the first woman to lead thecountry’s third-largest federal court
district, where she has served for nearly
three decades. A former magistrate
judge, she began her lifetime appointment as a district judge in 1998. Perhaps
best known for presiding over former
Illinois governor George Ryan’s corruption
trial, Pallmeyer has also helped preserve
Illinois legal history as chair of the district
court’s historical association.
New posts on Chicago’s federal court
also began in July for Mary M. Rowland,
JD’88, and Martha Pacold, JD’02. For
Rowland, the appointment follows
nearly seven years on the court as amagistrate judge. Pacold, most recently
the Treasury Department’s deputy
general counsel, is the court’s firstfemale Asian American district judge.
GRAIN GAINS
Agilis Partners, a Uganda-based agricultural company cofounded by BenjaminPrinz, AB’14, received a 2019 US
Secretary of State Award for Corporate
Excellence in Sustainable Operations.
Started when Prinz was a UChicago
student, Agilis runs its own grain andoilseed farms while partnering as awholesaler with smallholder farmers,
connecting them to markets and training them in sustainable, high-yieldpractices. The company aims “to transform rural communities and catalyze amore food-secure Africa,” Prinz said ina statement. Citing its work to improve
farmers’ livelihoods, the US ambassador to Uganda has stated that thecompany “exemplifies the best of
American entrepreneurship.”—Andrew Peart, AM’16, PhD’18

Photo courtesy Turner Classic Movies

ELEVATED TO CARDINAL
Michael Czerny, PhD’78, a Czech-born
Canadian Jesuit priest, was appointed
to the Catholic Church’s College of
Cardinals by Pope Francis in October.
He received the pope’s nomination letter in Brazil during talks with landlessworkers ahead of the Amazon synod,
for which he was a special secretary.
Long engaged in the church’s social
justice mission, Czerny has been at the
Vatican for nearly a decade and since2016 has helped lead the migrants andrefugees section of the newly establishedA VOICE FOR THE SILENT SCREEN
Jacqueline Stewart, AM’93, PhD’99, debuted in September as host of Turner Classic
Movies’ Silent Sunday Nights, the television network’s weekly midnight silent film
series. The New York Times described as historic Stewart’s appointment as TCM’s
first black host; Stewart noted that she’s also proud to be the first academic in thatrole on the network. In 2016 the UChicago professor of cinema and media studies
cohosted two special TCM broadcasts based on Pioneers of African-American Cinema(Kino Lorber, 2016), a box set she cocurated. She reprises one of those films, independent black Chicago filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), on
Silent Sunday Nights on December 8.

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RELEASES
ALUMNI BOOKS, FILMS, AND RECORDINGSDEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
By Julie E. Justicz, JD’88; Fomite, 2019
Civil rights attorney Julie Justicz’s
debut novel is the story of an Atlanta
family overwhelmed by caring for son
and brother Ben, a teenager with a severe disability who has trouble staying
welcome at care facilities. Each family
member finds a way to cope; Ben’s
mother, a Shakespeare scholar, escapes
into research and starts self-medicating.
Though older brother Hugo seems
uniquely capable of reaching Ben, heends up making a decision that could
destroy the family.

BLACK BASEBALL, 1858–1900: A
COMPREHENSIVE RECORD OF THE
TEAMS, PLAYERS, MANAGERS,OWNERS, AND UMPIRESBy James E. Brunson III, AM’95,
PhD’06; McFarland, 2019
A project more than 30 years in the making, baseball researcher and Northern
Illinois University art historian James E.
Brunson III’s three-volume sourcebook
documents the beginnings of organizedblack baseball and its role in late 19thcentury black cultural life. Teams like the
Utica Fearless, the Chicago Uniques, andthe Mobile Saucy Boys had their origins
in clubs formed by barbers, hotel waiters, and other workers. The game they
played became more than a professional
sport, Brunson suggests. It formed an
integral part of America’s nascent entertainment industry, with ties to popular
music, theater, and visual culture.

GAME DAY
Written, directed, and coproduced byJohn Susman, AB’81, AM’82, MBA’94;
Movie Night Media, 2019
Playwright and screenwriter John
Susman’s first feature film is a dramatic
comedy about a woman in the techindustry who realizes that being greatat her job will only get her so far—breaking through requires joining thecompany’s all-male basketball team.
She meets a teenager, played by rapper Romeo Miller, who teaches her thegame. What they learn from each otheralters their lives. Filmed in Hyde Parkand elsewhere in Chicago, Game Day hit
theaters nationwide in October.
JUDGE THY NEIGHBOR: DENUNCIATIONS IN THE SPANISH INQUISITION,
ROMANOV RUSSIA, AND NAZI GERMANY
By Patrick Bergemann, AB’04; Columbia
University Press, 2019
Denunciation is as old as Judas Iscariot
and as modern as the US Departmentof Homeland Security’s “If you see
something, say something” campaign,argues Patrick Bergemann, an assistantprofessor of organizations and strategy
at Chicago Booth. Bergemann, who has
degrees in economics and sociology,
sets out to understand the behavior of
denouncing, known variously, he notes,
as “ratting, tattling, squealing, whistleblowing, snitching.” Denunciation
benefits authorities by giving them information about acts they want to punish
or deter. But driving any denunciation,
Bergemann finds, is what reporting another person will do for the denouncer.
SNAGGLETOOTH
Written and directed by Colin Bishopp,
AM’04; End Timey Pictures, 2018
Before her mother will agree to get
her the puppy she wants, Mary-Alicehas to visit the dentist. His office is in agothic-looking Victorian mansion, andtheir appointment is at midnight. MaryAlice’s “snaggletooth” is not the only
thing that’s irregular here. Filmed in

San Francisco’s legendary, purportedly
haunted William Westerfield House,
and featuring a dentist’s assistant
who shares a name with the German
director of the silent classic Nosferatu,
moviemaker and clean-energy advocate Colin Bishopp’s short film knows
its antecedents and how to tell a story
through atmosphere. It drew praisefrom critics after its screening at thisyear’s Tribeca Film Festival.

A LIVING TRADITION: SELECTIONSFROM FOLK-LEGACY RECORDS
Original recordings coproduced by
Caroline Paton, AB’56; Smithsonian
Folkways Recordings, 2019
Late singer and song collector Caroline
Paton cofounded Folk-Legacy Records
in 1961 with her husband, Sandy, anda friend from Chicago, Lee Haggerty.
Amid the folk revival, they avoided pop
adaptations of folk songs and went tothe sources themselves. Folk-Legacy’s
earliest releases were field recordings of traditional performers from theUnited States and the British Isles; later
albums spotlighted artists who, likethe Patons themselves, were learned
interpreters of the old songs. This compilation from the Folk-Legacy catalog,
acquired by the Smithsonian Institution
shortly before Caroline died in March(see Deaths, Summer/19), features bothkinds of material, including the Appalachian music of Frank Proffitt and a cut
by Sandy and Caroline.
—Andrew Peart, AM’16, PhD’18

For additional alumni releases, use the link to the Magazine’s Goodreads bookshelf at mag.uchicago.edu/alumni-books.
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ALUMNI NEWSFROM THE CLASSES, SCHOOLS, AND DIVISIONSTo protect the privacy of our alumni, we have removed the class notes from this section. If you are an alumnus of
the University and would like class notes from our archives, please email uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.

From classroom discussions led by UChicago professors
to paleontological digs in the field, from hands-on work inbiology labs to firsthand insights from leading economists,
students can choose from over 70 courses offeredduring Summer Session.

LEARN MORE AND APPLY AT:

SUMMER.UCHICAGO.EDU

What’s new? We are always eager to receive your news, care of the Alumni News Editor, The University of Chicago Maga­zine, 5235
South Harper Court, Chicago, IL 60615, or by email: uchicago​-magazine@uchicago​.edu. No engagements, please. Items may beedited for space. As news is published in the order in which it arrives, it may not appear immediately. We list news from all former
undergraduates (including those with UChicago graduate degrees) by the year of their undergraduate affiliation. All former students
who received only graduate degrees are listed in the advanced degrees section.
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UChicago Photographic Archive, apf4-02776, University of Chicago Library

When the student-faculty ratio was three to one: Behind the cue ball in the BurtonJudson Courts basement rec room is resident head Thomas S. Hall, an assistantprofessor of biological sciences at the time of this 1944 photograph and the future deanof the college at Washington University in St. Louis. With him are (left to right) Burton S.
Rosner, PhB’45, PhD’50, who later taught psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
and the University of Oxford; John Holsen, AB’48, AM’52, now a retired World Bankeconomist; and Lee Wilcox, PhB’49, SM’54, who spent most of his career as a physics
professor at Stony Brook University.

Photo courtesy Judy Molnar, SM’80

Claus/Nixon: Judy Molnar, SM’80, sent this photograph of a December 1977 holiday
party in Broadview Hall, then a graduate student residence. “In the photo,” she writes,“Dick Kroeger [SM’79, PhD’85] and I own the hands about to spill drinks on Tom
Lane’s [AM’78] (Nixon Santa’s) head. Have no recall of whether we actually did pourthe drinks or why he used the Nixon mask.” The party was one of many Broadview
festivities, which included Star Trek viewing parties in the lounge.
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Photo courtesy Alan Thomas and Kyle Wagner, AM’08

Jazz requiem: Doug Mitchell, AB’65 (left), died in September (see Deaths, page 92).
When the UChicago Press executive acquisitions editor retired last December, hecontinued playing drums with his jazz band on Sunday nights at Jimmy’s Woodlawn
Tap. Mitchell’s roots in the Chicago jazz scene ran deep. He was a member of theJoseph Jarman Quartet, shown here prior to a pair of midnight concerts the groupperformed with avant-garde composer John Cage at Hyde Park’s Harper Theater in
November 1965. “I was an aspiring Beat, or a hipster,” Mitchell wrote to his UChicago
Press colleague Alan Thomas 40 years later. “A touch of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, morethan a touch of the young Frank O’Hara, and what one veteran of the era told me wasas pure a ‘Camus pout’ as he’s ever seen.” Mitchell identified his bandmates (left toright): the late saxophonist and Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
founding member Jarman; bassist Bob Hodge, AB’66, AM’68; and trumpeter Ellis
Bishop. The program they performed with Cage was called Imperfections in a Given
Space; the composer’s main rehearsal instruction to the band was to “do as you feel.”

UChicago Photographic Archive, apf5-03401, University of Chicago Library

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Charting a new course: The varsity golf team went co-ed in 1974 with the additionof Sandra Kostyk, LAB’71, AB’75, PhD’85, MD’85, and Susan Missner, AB’75, MBA’83(front row, left and right, respectively). Coached by Walter Hass (back row, left), theteam also included (back row, left to right) Richard Enger, AB’75; Robert Wharen Jr.,
AB’75; Stephen Daniloff, AB’75; and Bruce Edward Bursten, SB’74; along with Warren
Nagumo, AB’75, MBA’77 (front row, center).
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DEATHSFACULTY AND STAFF
Mary Jean Mulvaney, former director ofathletics and professor emerita of physicaleducation, of Lincoln, NE, died September
20. She was 92. Over 24 years of service,
Mulvaney transformed athletics at UChicago and was a powerful national influence
in collegiate sports, emphasizing academicathletic balance. She arrived on campus in1966 to chair the women’s physical education
division. When the University consolidated
men’s and women’s athletics in 1976, she became one of the first women to head a US university coeducational athletic department.
Under her leadership, UChicago expanded
women’s sports offerings from two to nineand became a competitive force in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division III. The namesake of UChicago’s Mary
Jean Mulvaney Scholar-Athlete Award anda member of the UChicago Athletics Hallof Fame, she received the Founders Medalof the University Athletics Association, theUniversity’s intercollegiate conference,
which she helped establish in 1986. She issurvived by a sister.
Vivian Gussin Paley, PhB’47, retired Laboratory Schools teacher and an early childhood
education researcher, died July 27 in Crozet,
VA. She was 90. Paley was on Lab’s facultyfrom 1971 until her retirement in 1995, teaching kindergarten, mentoring educators, andholding workshops and lectures on pedagogy. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowshipin 1989, she was known for experimental
teaching methods emphasizing the roles offantasy, storytelling, and play in children’s
learning. Her ideas, incorporated into aschool-district curriculum for the first timein Boston, influenced early-childhood education reform nationwide. Paley’s numerous
books on education include You Can’t Say
You Can’t Play (1993) and A Child’s Work:
The Importance of Fantasy Play (2004). She issurvived by her husband, Irving Paley, AB’47;
a son, David A. Paley, AB’73; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
of English and Comparative Literature, died
August 2 in Chicago. He was 88. A scholar of
the English Renaissance and a leading Shakespeare expert, Bevington began teaching at
UChicago in 1967 and remained a devoted
classroom instructor through retirement,teaching at the University’s Graham Schoolof Continuing Liberal and Professional
Studies as recently as 2018. He received the
Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and was twice a Guggenheim Fellow. Known for his studies ofboth the history and the staging of drama, hewrote From “Mankind” to Marlowe: Growthof Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor
England (1962), analyzing the medieval
legacy in Tudor morality plays, and Action
92

Is Eloquence (1984), about gesture and thevisual aspects of Shakespearean drama.
Editor of the popular Bantam Classics andLongman editions of Shakespeare’s complete
works, he also coedited The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). A frequent Court Theatre collaborator, Bevington
helped found the College’s theater and performance studies major. He is survived by his
wife, Peggy; two daughters, Kate Bevington,
LAB’82, and Sarah A. Bevington, LAB’88; ason, Stephen R. Bevington, LAB’80; and five
grandchildren. (For remembrances of Bevington, see Letters, page 9.)
Douglas Mitchell, AB’65, retired executive
acquisitions editor at the University of Chicago Press, died September 1 in Chicago.
He was 76. Mitchell began his publishingcareer at the Scott Foresman college division, acquiring textbooks in American andEuropean history. Joining the UChicago
Press in 1977, he made important acquisitions of books by the Annales school historians and works in sociology, rhetoric, andsexuality studies, including John Boswell’s
National Book Award–winning Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay
People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the FourteenthCentury (1980). Mitchell’s list in sexuality
studies helped shape the field, earning him
a Lambda Literary Award in 1998. At the2018 meeting of the American Sociological
Association, he was honored for contributing to the advancement of US sociology, work
for which he also received the Society for
the Study of Symbolic Interaction’s George
Herbert Mead Award. Building the press’s
jazz studies list, Mitchell was himself a jazz
drummer (see Alumni News, page 78). Survivors include his wife, Christine; a daughter;a brother; and two granddaughters.
William Meadow, professor emeritus ofpediatrics at UChicago Medicine, died
September 14 in Chicago. He was 70. A neonatologist and a medical ethicist, Meadow
joined the faculty in 1981, codirected theneonatology section for nearly a decade, andwas a clinician in the neonatal intensive careunit. He also served on the faculty of UChicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical
Ethics. The coauthor of Neonatal Bioethics:
The Moral Challenges of Medical Innovation (2006), he helped shape the decisionmaking framework of physicians caring for
infants with critical illnesses and congenitalconditions. Meadow received the American
Academy of Pediatrics’ 2016 William Bartholome Award for Ethical Excellence. He issurvived by his wife, Susan Goldin-Meadow,
the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service
Professor of Psychology, of Comparative
Human Development, and in the College;
a daughter, Jacqueline G. Meadow, LAB’07,
MD’16; two sons, Alexander Meadow,
LAB’99, and Nathaniel Meadow, LAB’03; asister; and two grandchildren.

1940s
John Paul Stevens, LAB’37, AB’41, died July
16 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He was 99. The
third-longest-serving Supreme Court justice, Stevens was nominated for the postin 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford at thesuggestion of former UChicago president
and then attorney general Edward H. Levi,
LAB’28, PhB’32, JD’35. Stevens served in
the US Navy during World War II as a signals intelligence officer; his work breaking
Japanese codes earned him the Bronze Star.
After attending Northwestern’s law schoolon the GI Bill, he clerked for Supreme Court
justice Wiley B. Rutledge. Joining the court
as a moderate Republican, Stevens would
come to lead its liberal wing. He wrote influential opinions on decisions regarding thecriminalization of same-sex sexual activity,
the interpretation of federal statutes by the
judiciary, the desecration of the US flag,and the execution of intellectually disabledprisoners. His outspoken dissent in Bush v.
Gore rued what he saw as the case’s damage
to perceptions of the court’s political impartiality; he lodged another major dissent
in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Stevens received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 2012. He is survived
by two daughters, nine grandchildren, and
13 great-grandchildren. (For more, see “The
Prudent Jurist,” page 46.)
Lois Davis Atwood, AB’44, died March
31 in Providence, RI. She was 95. Born inProvidence and raised in Georgia, Atwood
headed the Charleston (SC) Navy Yard’s
publications unit after World War II. Returning to Providence, she studied fiction
writing and worked at Brown University
Press, in the university’s religious studies
and human resource departments, and as an
original committee member of the master ofarts in teaching program. A longtime bookreviewer for the Providence Journal, sheedited the Rhode Island Jewish Herald. She issurvived by her husband, Preston; two sons;and three grandchildren.
Mary (Oxley) McEachron, SB’44, died March
19 in Louisville, KY. She was 96. With abachelor’s in dietary science, McEachroninterned at Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital and then worked as assistant head dietitian at Evanston Hospital. After settlingin Wilmette, IL, to raise her family, she wasactive in the local philanthropic educationalorganization and the Trinity United Methodist Church. She is survived by a daughter,three sons, eight grandchildren, and seven
great-grandchildren.
Peter Selz, AM’49, PhD’54, died June 21 inAlbany, CA. He was 100. Selz was chair of
the art department at Pomona College when
he turned his UChicago dissertation into thebook German Expressionist Painting (1957),
praised for situating artworks in their social and political contexts. A year later he

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became the Museum of Modern Art’s curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions,organizing the provocative show New Imagesof Man (1959). As founding director of the
University Art Museum and professor ofart history at the University of California,
Berkeley, Selz helped start the Pacific Film
Archive and curated such exhibitions as
Funk (1967), showcasing the San Francisco
Bay Area’s Beat-inspired artists. He is survived by his wife, Carole Schemmerling; twodaughters; two stepdaughters; four grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

1950s
Sherman Shapiro, AM’51, PhD’62, of Lafayette, CA, died June 22. He was 94. An economist and banking expert, Shapiro taught at
the University of Texas at Austin and Notre
Dame University before becoming professorof economics at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, where he chaired the department.
Formerly on staff at the US Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of theCurrency, Shapiro later served as a senioreconomist at the Federal Reserve Bank ofChicago and did consulting for Chicago
banks and savings and loan associations. He
is survived by his wife, Ellen; two sons; andtwo grandchildren.
Eunice M. (Berg) Rosen, SB’54, of Highland
Park, IL, died June 5. She was 88. Rosen
majored in mathematics at UChicago andworked as an editor at the Bulletin of theAtomic Scientists. A national champion
bridge player, she twice won the American
Contract Bridge League’s Freeman Mixed
Board-a-Match competition with her husband, William A. Rosen, EX’58, and later took
the Whitehead Trophy in the women’s pairs
contest. Her husband died on April 7 (see thispage). She is survived by a daughter; threesons; two sisters, including Donna (Berg)
Gilboa, AB’62; and eight grandchildren.
Virginia W. Beauchamp, PhD’55, died February 10 in Harwood, MD. She was 98. A literary scholar and early champion of women’sstudies, Beauchamp helped found what is
now the American International School ofLagos before she joined the English facultyat the University of Maryland. In 1973 shebecame the first coordinator of the school’s
new women’s studies program. The editorof the 1987 collection A Private War: Lettersand Diaries of Madge Preston, 1862–1867, she
received the Maryland Governor’s Awardfor her scholarship and work promoting
gender equity in academia. She is survived
by a daughter, two sons, five grandchildren,and two great-grandchildren.
Stanton T. Friedman, SB’55, SM’56, died May
13 in Toronto. He was 84. After working as anuclear physicist for General Electric, Westinghouse, and McDonnell Douglas, Friedman
dedicated his career to researching unidentified flying objects, having discovered
records from a US federal investigation
called Project Blue Book. A leading ufologist,
he brought widespread attention to whatbecame known as the Roswell incident,

lectured and made media appearances about
UFOs and purported government secrecy,
and wrote or cowrote numerous books. Survivors include his wife, Marilyn; two daughters; a grandchild; and a great-grandchild.
Dale Miller Jr., PhD’55, died May 21 in Raymore, MO. He was 96. An educator, minister, and political activist, Miller was the first
pastor of Disciples Church in Huntsville,
AL, and was active in the civil rights movement. With a doctorate in church history
from the Divinity School, he taught at Drake
University for nearly four decades. His publications include The Adult Son: A Study of
the Gospel of Mark (1974). He is survived by
his wife, Betty; three daughters, including
Cristanne C. Miller, AB’74, AM’76, PhD’80,
and Patricia Jayne Miller, EX’72; three sons;and many grandchildren.
Don R. Yungclas, DB’55, died April 15 inGrinnell, IA. He was 92. A minister in the
United Church of Christ (UCC), Yungclas
served as pastor for congregations in Washington, Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois before
moving to Wichita, KS, where he led the
UCC’s Kansas-Oklahoma Conference formore than a decade. In 1979 he foundeda church in Port Orange, FL, and later led
UCC conferences in Michigan, the Dakotas,
Ohio, and elsewhere. After concluding his
conference ministry, he became an interim
minister at his hometown church in Webster City, IA. He is survived by his wife, Pat;
four daughters; a son; a sister; a brother; 10
grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren.
Sydel Finfer Silverman, AM’57, died March
25 in New York City. She was 85. An anthropologist and ethnographer, Silvermantaught at the City University of New York’s
Queens College before serving as executive
officer of the CUNY Graduate Center’s anthropology PhD program. Known for her
fieldwork in Monte Castello di Vibio, Silverman wrote Three Bells of Civilization: The
Life of an Italian Hill Town (1975). Her dozen years as president of the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Researchinspired her book The Beast on the Table:
Conferencing with Anthropologists (2002).
She is survived by two daughters, a stepson,two sisters, a brother, five grandchildren,and two great-grandchildren.
William A. Rosen, EX’58, of Highland Park,IL, died April 7. He was 90. Rosen served asa US Army medic during the Korean War,studied at the Law School, then became afloor trader at the Chicago Board Options
Exchange. A Bermuda Bowl–winningbridge player when he was 25, at the time
the game’s youngest world champion, helater won several national championships
and was inducted into the American Contract Bridge League Hall of Fame. His wife,
Eunice M. (Berg) Rosen, SB’54, died on June
5 (see this page). He is survived by a daughter, three sons, and eight grandchildren.
Mitchel J. Sweig, SB’59, SM’60, PhD’67, died
August 1 in Evanston, IL. He was 79. Sweig
spent most of his career at Northeastern Illinois University, where he was professor ofphysics. A skilled chess player, he competed

in international tournaments and appearedon television as a commentator for the famous Fischer-Spassky World Chess Championship in 1972. He is survived by his wife,
Linda; two daughters; a stepdaughter; andfive grandchildren.

1960s
Lula M. White, AB’60, AM’63, died September 10 in Hamden, CT. She was 80. A Freedom Rider, White was held for 40 days in
Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1961, an
experience she recounted to the Library ofCongress’s Civil Rights History Project. Returning to New Haven, CT, her hometown,
she taught history at a local high school fornearly 30 years and was jailed for her rolein a 1975 teachers’ strike. Her activism andservice earned her Quinnipiac University
School of Law’s Thurgood Marshall Award,
the Greater New Haven NAACP’s Living Legend Award, and other honors. She is survived
by a sister and three brothers.
Milan J. Packovich, MD’61, died April 19 in
New Philadelphia, OH. He was 83. After
serving in the US Navy during the Vietnam
War, Packovich established a private practiceas an internal medicine physician in Weirton,
WV. Later moving to Dennison, OH, he continued in private practice while serving on
the Tuscarawas County Board of Health. He
is survived by his wife, Lois, and two sons.
Andrew Naylor, AM’63, PhD’66, of Nashville, TN, died July 1. He was 79. Naylor was
professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana
University South Bend, where he chaired
the department at its inception and again
for a dozen years before his retirement. An
expert in epistemology, he published papers
on memory and personal identity. He is survived by his wife, Marilyn, and two sons.
Joel M. Stern, MBA’64, of East Hampton,NY, died May 21. He was 77. After running
Chase Financial Policy, Chase Bank’s global
consulting operation, Stern founded and led
the advisory firm Stern Value Management.
He developed the concept of economic value
added, a measure of financial performance
implemented by the US Postal Service, Singapore’s sovereign fund, and many privatecompanies. A columnist and commentator
who wrote or cowrote numerous books onfinancial economics, he taught at Chicago
Booth and other business schools. He also led
the private equity firm Stern Solutions Capital Partners and founded Stern Learning Systems, which adapted his graduate businesslectures into a digital education resource. He
is survived by a son, Erik D. Stern, MBA’97;
two sisters; and three grandchildren.
Judith Klotz Morhar, AB’65, of Napa, CA,died June 8. She was 75. Dedicated to social service, Morhar spent three years in
the Peace Corps in Venezuela, where shelearned Spanish and helped farmers start
credit unions. After moving to the Napa Valley, she became a counselor with the Napa
Council on Alcohol Problems; then, working with the state’s Employment Development Department for the next 25 years,

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she helped clients secure benefits and find
new jobs. In retirement she volunteered
as a driver, transporting senior citizens to
medical appointments. She is survived byher husband, Lee; a daughter; and a brother.
Charles L. Gellert, AB’66, of Laytonsville,MD, died December 31, 2018. He was 72.
With a master’s in history, Gellert worked
at the National Archives and Records Administration, eventually heading the Motion Picture Branch’s reference service. For
his research, he received a credit in Woody
Allen’s film Zelig (1983). He also publisheda guide to the National Archives’ motion
pictures on Jewish history. He later becamea systems analyst in Fannie Mae’s technology department. He is survived by his wife,
Susan; two children; and a brother.
Kathryn “Kay” T. Caskey, AM’67, died May
5 in Kalamazoo, MI. She was 76. A social
worker in mental health and educationalsettings, Caskey helped create Cass County
Hospice in southwest Michigan. With herpartner, Laurie Young, she founded thecompany Laughter Works, using humor andplay, especially juggling, to promote wellness. Caskey taught in Western Michigan
University’s integrative holistic health andwellness program and received a lifetime
achievement award from the Association
for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. She issurvived by her partner, a stepdaughter, twosons, a brother, and three grandchildren.
Michael Lieber, AB’67, died December 23,
2018, in Jackson Heights, NY. He was 73.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Lieber
taught at Wellesley College and Boston University before his work on Balinese ritual
performance deepened his interest in documentary and led him into the film business,where he worked for New Century Productions and developed projects at Disney,
Paramount, TriStar, and other studios. He
produced feature films including Joe Gould’s
Secret (2000) and Flash of Genius (2008).
Survivors include his wife, Tiffanie Morrow.
Mark C. Steinhoff, AB’69, MD’73, of Boston,died July 12, 2018. He was 70. A pediatricinfectious disease specialist, Steinhoff conducted vaccine studies at Christian Medical
College, Vellore, in his native India. Returning to the States, he worked at the University of Michigan Medical School and thenat Johns Hopkins University’s schools of
public health and medicine. He later directed the Global Health Center at Cincinnati
Children’s Hospital. In 2008 Steinhoff published the first randomized controlled study
to demonstrate that an inactivated influenza
vaccine during pregnancy protects womenand infants. He is survived by his wife,
Elizabeth Senft; three sons, including Eirik
S. Steinhoff, AM’99, PhD’12, and Kristoffer S.
Steinhoff, AB’01; two stepchildren; a sister; abrother; and six grandchildren.

1970sMark C. Patronsky, AB’70, of Sun Prairie,
WI, died May 21. He was 70. During his US
Army service in Germany, Patronsky photo94

graphed military life and later donated his
image collection to the Wisconsin Veterans
Museum. After earning a JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School, he joined
the Wisconsin Legislative Council staff,
specializing in natural resource mattersuntil retiring in 2009. An all-seasons bicycle
commuter, he once made local front-page
news in Madison, WI, for cycling downtown
in a blizzard. He is survived by his wife,
Kathryn Ambler, and two brothers, including
Ross T. Patronsky, AB’73.
Charles Cheung-Wan Leung, SM’71, PhD’77,
of Fremont, CA, died March 22. He was 72.
Born in Hong Kong, where he earned his
undergraduate degree, Leung studied physics at UChicago and pursued a career in thetechnology industry, serving as presidentof the semiconductor company Bipolarics.
A member of the Institute of Electrical andElectronics Engineers, he patented a wafer planarization technology, developed ahigh-speed silicon transistor, and invented
a silicon microwave monolithic integrated
circuit used in communications. He is survived by two daughters, a son, two sisters,
and two brothers.
Carol Perkerson Foster, AM’74, died July 3 in
Sidney, British Columbia. She was 69. Foster
worked as a cooking instructor in the PacificNorthwest and published three cookbooks,
including 365 Main-Course Salads (1997),
part of a popular HarperCollins series. Sheis survived by a stepson, a sister, and two
step-granddaughters.
Charles J. LaGrutta, AM’77, died August 2 in
Chicago. He was 73. LaGrutta earned his
first master’s degree, in English, and worked
as a teacher before enlisting in the US Navyand serving in Guam, where he trained in
Chinese linguistics. Then, with a master’s inlibrary science from UChicago, he became
a librarian and training manager, first withthe real estate firm Urban Investment andDevelopment Corporation and later at the
Chicago Board Options Exchange. In retirement he again took up studying Chinese
language and culture. He is survived by his
husband, Stuart Miller, MAT’72, AM’76.
Timothy J. Nevitt, AB’78, of Red Wing, MN,
died suddenly August 24. He was 64. Nevitt
received his doctorate in meteorology from
Penn State University in 1987 and worked asa staff scientist at 3M in the transportationand electronics business group, coauthoring
more than 50 patents and receiving the Circle of Technical Excellence award. Activein the Red Wing community, he coachedsoccer and hockey, taught in an extracurricular math program, and taught religious
education at a local Catholic school. He issurvived by his wife, Susan; two sons; asister; and two brothers, including Michael
Nevitt, AB’73, AM’78.
Kamyar Jabbari, MBA’79, died of a heart attack April 8 in Northbrook, IL. He was 64.
Working at First National Bank of Chicago,
Jabbari served as agent, underwriter, arranger, and financial adviser for large-scaleutility, oil and gas, and infrastructure projects around the world. He then launched an

academic career as a clinical professor of
finance at Illinois Institute of Technology’s
Stuart School of Business, pursuing his JD
at IIT’s Chicago-Kent College of Law. Most
recently he was a financial representative at
the Guardian Life Insurance Company ofAmerica. He is survived by a daughter.

1980s
Jeffrey F. Osanka, AB’82, of Alexandria,

VA, died on December 26, 2018. He was 58.
With degrees in public policy and communications, Osanka taught at the University ofOregon and Lane Community College. After working for the Oregon state legislatureand serving on the board of a major public
utility, he was appointed to the Department
of Health and Human Services during the
George W. Bush administration. Later a
consultant with the Federal Labor Relations
Authority, he also taught at Georgetown andGeorge Washington Universities. He is survived by his mother; two sisters, including
Wendy L. Jones, AB’86; and two brothers.
Andrew K. Miller, AB’83, of Budd Lake, NJ,
died of a heart attack July 17. He was 58.
With an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua
School of Business, Miller was president of
the management consulting firm Milluk.
Active in community service, he belonged to
the Knights of Columbus and volunteered asa UChicago alumni interviewer for local highschoolers. He is survived by his wife, Mei
Hong Yan; two daughters, Elizabeth R. Miller,
AB’16, and Olivia A. Miller, Class of 2022; twosons; his mother; and three brothers.

1990s
Stefan Johannes Krieger, AM’92, PhD’99, of

Oakton, VA, died of stomach cancer July 8.
He was 52. A theoretical macroeconomist,
Krieger taught at Yale University before becoming a hedge fund portfolio manager. He
worked most recently at Freddie Mac, developing a house price index that was critical to the corporation’s risk modeling after
the 2008 housing crisis. He is survived by
his wife, Eliza Morss; three daughters; his
parents; a sister; and a brother.
Paul M. Gaziano, AM’97, of Minneapolis,
died June 23. He was 47. As a Duke University doctoral student, Gaziano studied Italian
Renaissance history in Florence and Rome.
Pursuing a career outside the academy, he did
work for websites, most recently as a research
assistant and partner at the medical education company obimages.net. He is survived
by his parents and a brother, Emanuel P.
Gaziano Jr., AB’92, AM’93.

2000s
Jason A. Yost, AM’02, PhD’11, died of brain
cancer June 28 in Kalamazoo, MI. He was
42. A visiting assistant professor of English
at Kalamazoo College, Yost taught classes in
Renaissance literature and in writing. He issurvived by his wife, Paramita Babli Sinha,
AM’02, PhD’06; a son; and his parents.

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CL ASSIFIEDSSERVICES
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During a dry spell between dot-com
booms, I was an assistant to a private
investigator. I’ve also been a security
guard and done phone polling for Gallup.

What would you want to be
doing if not your current
profession?
If we’re in the realm of fantasy, where
my alternate profession is also guaranteed to be successful: interior design.

What do you love that everyone
else hates?
Mass-market chain-store pizza: Domino’s, Pizza Hut, etc. It’s comfort foodfrom a childhood spent in college towns.

What person, alive or dead,would you want to write yourlife story?
Curtis Sittenfeld.

What’s your least useful talent?
Extraordinarily good handwriting.

What did you learn at UChicago
that still benefits you today?

THE UCHICAGOAN

Ana Marie Cox
AB’94

What’s your most vivid
UChicago memory?
Sitting in Harper Library on electionnight in 1992, studying American Civ
while also listening (very quietly) to my
Walkman (!) when Carol Moseley Braun[JD’72] became the first black womanelected to the Senate. I had this quiet
sense of the whole flow of history andfelt exhilarated by the possibilities.
TO READ THE FULL Q&A , VISIT MAG.UCHICAGO.EDU/UCHICAGOAN.

96

Illustration by Arthur E. Giron

Questions for the politicalcommentator, podcaster, and 2014
Institute of Politics fellow.

It may be a cliché, but UChicago taught
me how to think and drilled into me
the value of understanding why things
are the way they are over knowing specific bits of data. As a journalist, knowing how to find information is a much
more important skill than mastering
any particular field, and I learned thatat UChicago.

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Let’s get real
Do you own a property that has appreciated significantly?
Is your property a burden to manage or no longer in use?
Do you wish to make a significant gift to the University?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions,

The Office of Gift Planning welcomesconsider the benefits of gifting all or a portion

the opportunity to discuss personalizedof your property to the University of Chicago.

and tax-advantageous options for yourpotential gift.

A gift of real estate can be an advantageous
way for you to leverage an illiquid asset, reduce
the size and complexity of your estate, andenjoy a charitable deduction based on thecurrent fair market value of your property.

Learn more today.
Visit giftplanning.uchicago.edu/realestate
Email giftplan@uchicago.edu
Call 866.241.9802

A gift of real estate can also be used to funda trust that provides you income.

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