Newsmakers

QUOTE/UNQUOTE "Whatever one thinks about the political views of the editors of The Dartmouth Review, one should be grateful for the job they have done in examining what lies in the underside of the granitic liberalism of the Ivy League." —WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., WHO DIED FEBRUARY 27

With snowfall of about 1,000 inches last winter (compared to 300 inches in Vail, Colorado) it's no wonder that skiers are turning their attention to Alaska. One of the most popular ski resorts is Alyeska in Girdwood, which John Byrne III '81 bought in December 2006. The Wall Street Journal reported last January that Byrne has spent more than $10 million to make the challenging terrain more family-friendly and to open a new snowboarding school. Plans call for an additional $30 million in upgrades to the hotel and the mountain, which is situated in the Chugach range. 'Alaska offers that kind of last-frontier opportunity," Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Association, told the Journal...Last December the Worcester Telegram & Gazette highlighted the way Jennifer J. Thomas '03 combined evening and weekend performances in the Boston Dance Company's production of The Nutcracker with a psychology internship at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Thomas, whose research focuses on eating disorders among ballet dancers, danced professionally while earning a Ph.D. in psychology at Yale. She said she strives to be a role model for young dancers. "You can be at a relatively normal weight and also be dancing at a high level, working really hard on technique and still get good parts," Thomas said.... A product created by Kirk Spahn '99 and a fellow student for a Columbia graduate school assignment has turned into a business opportunity. Their sake liqueur, TY KU, was launched last May and is being embraced by celebrities such as actor Jamie Foxx. A blend of sake, soju, tea and fruit extracts, TY KU is also making waves in clubs, due partly to the LED light inside the bottle that makes it glow when poured. Spahn told The Dartmouth last January that his alma mater influenced product design: "I knew that the drink absolutely had to be green."...Spiros Zorbalas 'B5 owns a $5.5 million beachfront estate in Naples, Florida, and more than 700 housing units in Minneapolis.The Minneapolis/St. Paul's CityPages dubbed him "The Slumlord of South Minneapolis." Last January, the newspaper reported he has been sued more than 200 times since the late 1990s by disgruntled tenants seeking such things as building repairs and the return of security deposits. "This guy has lowered the bar for slumlords," said Councilman Gary Schiff. Zorbalas replied that only a small, vocal minority has grievances with him, and that he wasn't fazed by the negative coverage. "There'll be a little hoopla for a week," he said. "Big deal. We're going to keep running our business."...Mindy Kaling '01 serves as one of two female writers on a staff of 14 at NBC's The Office, but she's best-known for her portrayal of ditzy Kelly Kapoor on the show. "I don't think there are a lot of times when Asians on television get to play total idiots, so it's really freeing," the Cambridge, Massachusetts, native deadpanned to Radar magazine last November. "I don't act too much outside of The Office, but sometimes I do get these calls: 'Would you like to be the computer technician in Die Hard 4?' you're like, 'Jesus Christ, of course not. No, no, no, no.' "...In January Chicago magazine featured NBC's SportsAction Team, a spoof of sports journalism that stars AI Samuels '88. The TV show, created by Samuels and his fellow Second City comedy alum Kevin Fleming, airs on more than 40 percent of NBC affiliates nationwide and on HD Net. Among the sports stars who've appeared on the show are Mike Ditka and Danica Patrick. Samuels, an Illinois native, loves filming the show in Chicago. "In the back of my mind I always thought I wanted to be on TV, but I knew I would have to go somewhere else to do it," said Samuels....With their first film, Hamlet2,Eric Eisner '95 and his partner in L+E Productions, Leonid Rozhetskin, produced what TheNewYork Times called the "first unqualified hit" of the Sundance Film Festival last January. After its world-premiere at the Park City, Utah, festival, an all-night bidding war ensued. Focus Features emerged victorious, buying the film for $10 million in what the Hollywood Reporter called one of the biggest sales in the history of Sundance. The comedy stars Elisabeth Shue (sister of Andrew Shue '89) and British comedian Steve Coogan as a high school drama teacher whose class stages a controversial musical sequel to Hamlet—Emilie Schnifman Liebhoff '98, founder and director of Moms as Mentors, works with her former Dartmouth hockey teammate Jennifer LaneLockwood '98, who is director of programs. Liebhoff first studied the impact of sports on adolescent girls' self-esteem while earning her masters at Harvard, and then later while earning her M.B.A. at Cornell, where she launched a pilot program designed to involve mothers in the athletic development of their daughters. Now the Boston-based Moms as Mentors www. momsasmentors.com offers programs designed to teach mothers and daughters sport specific skills, leadership and self-esteem. "I believe that mothers are a critical component to offer mentorship and encouragement," Liebhoff told the Ithaca Journal last May, adding that a Women's Sports Foundation study found that 80 percent of female executives at Fortune 500 companies grew up playing sports. ...Former Olympic medal- ist Scott Macartney '01 struck a pose for Men's Journal, which for its March style story outfitted him in a dapper Gant suit—and a pair of Nordica ski boots, skis and bindings.... ABC's World News Tonight featured school principal Jorge Miranda '01 and his Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) in a special report last October. The 8-year-old Boston school, in which 73 percent of the 220 students live below the poverty line, has earned the top math score in state tests, and 99 percent of its first four graduating classes have been accepted to college. James Gumpper '06 works for MATCH Corps, a group that tutors students daily at the school....Marc Bruni '99, associate director of the Broadway smash Legally Blonde: The Musical, directed an eight-week run of the Edith Whartor comedy, Glimpses of the Moon. Featured in The New York Times when it opened in late January, the musical was performed in the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room, former home of the famed 1920s literary Round Table....Pavol Liska '95 and Kelly Copper '93 closed one play in New York in earlyjanuary only to open another just days later at the Public Theater. As The New YorkTimes noted last January, the pair's Nature Theater of Oklahoma production of No Dice received rave reviews and sold out its run at the SOHO Rep. The play's dialogue was culled from more than 100 hours of phone conversations taped by Liska. The run of NoDice would have been extended except that another play by the pair, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, opened for a 10-day run at the Under the Radar festival in January....David Bathrick '58 is retiring after 20 years at Cornell and moving to Bremen, Germany, where his wife is a government professor. The Cornell Chronicle Online last November called Bathrick, a German studies professor and Cornell's Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Theater, Film and Dance, "a scholarly icon, loved and beloved by those who know him and work with him." Bathrick is working on a book about film and the Holocaust. "I'm just going to keep doing what I've always been doing until my head stops functioning—and that's one of the great privileges of being an academic," said Bathrick....Neotraditional religious practices are on the rise around the country, U.S. News & World Report reported in a December issue, citing full pews for a Tridentine Latin Mass in Washington, D.C., and weekly Communion services at an evangelical Protestant church in Texas. The upsurge comes from young adults turned off by the hyper-individualism of todays world who seek new forms of community, according to Tony Jones '90, national coordinator of the Minnesota-based Christian group Emergent Village and author of The New Christians: Dispatches Fromthe Emergent Frontier. "We are going to live in reconciliation with each other, and traditional practices are what restore us and hold us together," Jones told U.S.News.

Mindy Kaling '01

Al Samuels '88

QUOTE/UNQUOTE "It's like Frost unplugged. We're getting him in discussion. That involves anecdotes, stories, jokes, funny little disses on his contemporaries." —PETER CAMPION '98, WHO IS PUBLISHING A TRANSCRIPT OF A TAPED ROBERT FROST LECTURE RECENTLY DISCOVERED BY JAMES SITAR '01