The Boston Globe describes how Daniel Berman '08, a graduate student at St. Andrews University in Scotland and self-described elections junkie, has "leaped beyond the blogosphere and into the global headlines" with a co-written article that points out "data-driven evidence of widespread election irregularities" around the presidential election in Iran. See also a selection of related links.

Hartford Courant columnist Jeff Jacobs talks to Phil Johnson '06 about his decision to leave the financial world of JP Morgan to join Grassroot Soccer, a nonprofit that uses the international culture of soccer to fight HIV/AIDS, especially among African youth. "No matter how this goes, I can't see it making me less of a person," Johnson says. "The amount of help I can do, hopefully, outweighs everything else. If there's ever something in life that will push you in one direction, this is it."

In an op-ed essay published in The New York Times, Bates politics professor Eric Hooglund asks if "rural Iran, where less than 35 percent of the country’s population lives" could have provided Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "the 63 percent of the vote he claims to have won?" Answering his question, Hooglund says it's quite unlikely. It "would contradict my own research in Iran's villages over the past 30 years."

The Sun Journal describes how faculty member Gene Clough fixed an electrical problem with the carillon in Deering Memorial United Methodist Church in South Paris, Maine. When the original manufacturer couldn't support the 1970s-era system, the church called Bates, and Clough came to the rescue. He created a schematic to understand the equipment, found the defective component and manufactured a new electrical control chassis. A physicist, Clough teaches the first-year seminar "Anatomy of a Few Small Machines," which teaches students view the products of technology as much more than unknowable "black boxes."

The Cape Cod Chronicle profiles Story Fish '67, who owns Chatham Family Charters with daughter Annie Fish. He explained how his career went from salesman (which he hated) to fisherman and then to chartering in the 1990s. In the 1970s, he quit his 3M job after making good money one summer lobstering. "The next year I bought a boat," he explains. "Then of course you go through the cycles of not making enough to make payments, and then making more than you need... One minute you think you're going be a millionaire, and the next minute you say, 'Oh, wait! Oh my God, this is a disaster!' I think that's what makes characters out of some of these fishermen."

In an open letter to the Sun Journal, recent graduate Paul Suitter '09 of Oakfield, Maine, thanks the Lewiston-Auburn community "for being so kind and welcoming to me and my fellow classmates throughout our time at Bates.... The lessons learned inside the classroom at Bates are very valuable, but Bates' location here in Lewiston is one of the things that makes the institution so special."

Raising Maine magazine put Amy Robbins-Winslow '92 of Belfast and her 3-year-old son on the cover of its June issue along with a brief profile. She is the author of Transformational Mothering: A Prayerful Companion for New Mothers and the CD The Divine Hours of Motherhood.

Art major Weston Noyes '00 and wife Amy won a remodel contest for Fine Homebuilding magazine. Referencing their pre-makeover kitchen, the couple say they "vaguely remember when painted white cabinets and avocado appliances were cutting edge in kitchen decor, but mercifully, those days are long gone." For their project, they teamed "sleek Ikea cabinets with vibrant scarlet paint and an exposed adobe-brick exterior wall to transform the look and feel of this kitchen completely."

The Salem Evening News features Carl Harris '55, who returned to Bates to earn his degree 50 years after dropping out to join the Army. Staff writer Tom Dalton says that "Academy Award-winning actress Geena Davis was a graduation speaker and the star attraction at yesterday's commencement at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. But Carl 'Lefty' Harris surely turned a few heads." Also featuring Harris is WCSH-TV in Portland, with Harris telling reporter Brian Yocono about his second campus experience: "I thought it was awesome how much homework they gave you, how much reading and writing."

The WCSH-TV news magazine 207 features Lisa Genova '92, author of Still Alice, the novel about a Harvard professor succumbing to early-onset Alzheimer's that became a surprise best-seller in January 2009. She tells host Rob Caldwell that the response from the Alzheimer's community has been "humbling. It's been an an honor to participate." She explains that the Alzheimer's Association is using the book as a resource for how to live with the disease. "For people who aren't at the end stage, this book gives them a face and a voice." Genova, who lives on Cape Cod, also spoke at Bates on May 20.

The Bangor Daily News reports that Dan O’Connell '09, who guided the John Bapst of Bangor football team to the Class C state championship last fall, was named the 2008 Maine High School Football Coach of the Year by the Maine Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame. O’Connell was honored for leading the Crusaders to an 11-1 record.

The Birmingham News profiles Joyce White Vance '82, a President Obama nominee as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. "She's a little woman," says lawyer and friend Barry Ragsdale, "but her personality and approach to practicing law are all outsized. She is a very effective advocate in the courtroom....I think she will be a voice throughout the nation." The paper describes Vance's Bates experience as a debater and that she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude with high honors in political science.

Maine Sunday Telegram columnist Bill Nemitz writes about a community-building act of philanthropy by Dr. Chuck Radis '75, who provided initial funding for a scholarship in memory of James Angelo, a young Sudanese immigrant shot and killed in the parking lot of the hospital where he worked. Says Nemitz: "We've heard a lot in recent weeks about the wide gulf between mainstream Portland and the city's immigrant Sudanese community. This is the story of a guy determined to build a bridge. His name is Dr. Chuck Radis. He lives on Peaks Island...and could, if he wanted, live in blissful ignorance of the tensions that seem to surface whenever Portland police intersect with the Sudanese. But Radis isn't that kind of guy."

The Boston Globe's annual ranking of the 100 best Massachusetts businesses puts Cubist Pharmaceuticals, headed by Michael Bonney '80, in the No. 1 spot. The story notes how the Cambridge-based firm took a chance on a failed antibiotic called daptomycin originally developed by Eli Lilly & Co. "But Cubist executives thought there still might be hope for the compound," the story says. Renamed Cubicin, the drug is now a powerful weapon in the fight against a particularly stubborn form of bacteria and "has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales and helped transform Cubist into one of the Bay State's best-performing firms."

In the runup to President Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, NPR's Nina Totenberg mentions a few longshots, including Nora Demleitner '90, dean of Hofstra Law School and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

A Maine Sunday Telegram story about the aging population of sports referees, umps, and other officials in Maine focuses on the experience of Jason Buxbaum '08, already a veteran youth soccer offical and baseball ump. The article notes the lack of support for young officials just starting out. "I don't think enough is being done to retain people," Buxbaum says. "There isn't a strong support system in place for those who might get discouraged. I've been discouraged after a game that I don't think I called well, and no one is harder on a bad performance than an official."

The Los Angeles Times discusses the declining presence of the piano in American homes, noting how the acoustic piano "seems to be a relic of another era." The story quotes James Parakilas, the James L. Moody Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts and author of Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life With the Piano. While opportunities to hear and make music seem to be increasing, he notes, most of them are less demanding and expensive than actually playing the piano. Then there's the guitar, which has "displaced the piano in a lot of the music people listen to -- and not just kids," he says.

Restaurateur Deborah Hansen '86, proprietor of Taberna de Haro in Brookline, Mass., can surprise even jaded diners. Take the dessert she prepared for a Boston Globe food writer and his companion, an apparently mundane arrangement of dark chocolate topped with cocoa powder and what looked like granulated sugar. Then came the first surprise: Hansen poured olive oil all over it. Then, as the diners tasted the result, came the second surprise: the white granules were salt, not sugar. "The dark chocolate is bitter, sweet and creamy," wrote Globe writer Ike DeLorenzo. "The cocoa powder is bitter and astringent. The salt is savory and, well, salty. And the olive oil is fruity, fragrant -- and everywhere. The effect is glorious."

A major profile in the The Chronicle of Higher Education portrays Jamie Merisotis '86, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education, as a U.S. higher education policy leader whose "big goal" has caught the attention of the Obama White House. Merisotis wants America to increase the proportion of its population with degrees or credentials to 60 percent by 2025. "We should ask ourselves why other countries are doing a much better job than we are in educating their people," he says, "and why we are satisfied with an attainment level that we reached 40 years ago and that other countries have pushed well beyond."

Wall Street Journal columnist Sue Shellenbarger samples college rejection letters and declares that Bates beats out Stanford for the "toughest" such missive. The Bates letter, she writes, "delivers a more direct, and perhaps more honest, message: 'The deans were obliged to select from among candidates who clearly could do sound work at Bates.'" Dean of Admissions Wylie Mitchell tells Shellenbarger that brevity is the best way to show respect for rejected applicants.

Maine Public Broadcasting reporter Tom Porter interviews Elizabeth Strout '77, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge, who talks about the sense of place in her books, specifically Maine. "When I first moved to New York," Strout says, "I just didn't understand that literature is place...or that place is very important." After moving to New York, she began to realize that her Maine and New Hampshire background is "very strong, so I began to eventually write that and worked my way through three books of it."

Writing in the Lewiston Sun Journal, Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent joins the discussion of a proposed same-sex marriage law in Maine. Noting how Iowa's Supreme Court has ruled that excluding gays from marriage does not "further any important governmental objective," Sargent suggests that Maine legislators might apply "the same test" to their own deliberations. And, observing how opponents sometimes express disgust with the idea of same-sex marriage, Sargent says research has found that opponents of gay marriage generally exhibit greater sensitivity to disgust than do proponents.

Longtime Press Herald sports columnist Steve Solloway tells how Jane Brown Karpoe '49 turned to her local Raymond, Maine, fire department to find some fellow Red Sox fans to accompany her to a recent game at Fenway Park for which she had four excellent tickets. Solloway also interviews Jane's daughter, Kelly Karpoe '78, who recalls how the family spent summers on Moose Pond, nearby in Bridgton. ''We didn't get good television reception,'' Kelly says. "So my dad would turn on his old Navy radio when the Red Sox played and turn up the volume because of all the static."

A letter in the Portland Press Herald by Dr. John Radebaugh '48 of Falmouth, Maine, supports a federal single-payer health reform bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The proposed legislation will "cover all of the 46 million Americans who lack coverage by eliminating deductibles and restoring free choice of physician."

A Los Angeles Times news story about new federal legislation protecting more than 2 million acres in nine states, including more than 700,000 acres in California, quotes Sam Goldman '03, California wilderness coordinator at the Wilderness Society. "We're ecstatic," he says, summing up the response of conservationists.

Inside Higher Ed, an online news and opinion site devoted to college and university issues, published a provocative essay by David Scobey, director of the College's Harward Center for Community Partnerships, who argued that the humanities should embrace calls for assessments of how well students are taught. "There are two overriding reasons: one strategic, the other educational," he wrote.

The Portland Press Herald chronicled the high drama surrounding senior diver Kelsey Lamdin's final performance at the NCAA Division III Swimming and Diving Championships, held at the University of Minnesota in March. During a warmup dive, she struck the board. Head and hands bleeding, she departed for a hospital, where she got stitched up (without anesthesia) and returned to compete. She finished 10th, securing All-America honors. ""I couldn't imagine a more amazing sequence of events," said Bates head coach Peter Casares. "It was a phenomenal display of courage."

The New York Daily News gave staff writer Matt Gagne '04 an assignment he's been training for since his Bates days: Cover the NCAA men's basketball tournament from a sports bar in Manhattan. With a couple of friends, including a chum from Bates, Gagne watched the first-round games from the ESPN Zone in Times Square. "Others came and went, but Mike and Dave were in it for most of the haul," wrote Gagne in his story, peppered with Bates references. "They had dozens of bracket pages spread out all over the table, some neatly stored in a three-ring binder while others were crumpled like old ATM receipts. At times they looked like teachers correcting homework; other times it felt like our restaurant tab was riding on the last horse race at the Meadowlands."

The Icelandic newspaper Fréttablaðið took note of dance band FM Belfast's tour of the U.S., including a stop at Bates College that was sponsored by WRBC-FM. Besides offering a concert, the Icelandic band participated in a discussion about the recession in their homeland. Sponsored by the radio station and the Bates Libertarians, the talk was joined by Associate Professor of Politics Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir, herself a native of Iceland who provided the English translation of the article hyperlinked below. The band talked about the protests in Iceland that began last fall and turned violent in January. "[The students] asked how the collapse really felt," said singer Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir. "We...discussed how the protests helped uncover some phenomenal corruption that we had no idea existed."

The Boston Herald noted the hiring of Buddy Schultz '81 as head coach of the Lobsters, the Boston entry in the professional World TeamTennis league. "I had a partiality to Bud," Lobsters CEO Bahar Uttam told the Herald, "because he's local, he's got the experience, he's been out on the (pro) circuit and appreciates what it takes for people who are on the circuit to get excited about what it means to be on the team." Schultz is a three-time All-American at Bates, a former touring professional, and a member of the Bates Scholar-Athlete Society.

The Hartford Courant published a feature obituary for George Stewart '46, a resident of East Hartford who died Feb. 22. The story noted that Stewart was "an active volunteer in community organizations and president of a local bank [who] seemed to know everyone and over the decades had been involved in nearly every town activity." Tom Heslin, a friend and editor of the Providence Journal, said, ''You can go to the places he made better. He didn't do it for ambition; it was his nature. He was born to make the world a better place."

Bryan McNulty, director of Communications and Media Relations at Bates, was quoted in a Bloomberg.com story about colleges offering new, three-year programs to students looking to save money. Reporter Janet Frankston Lorin wrote that "while Bates College has offered an option for a three-year degree since the 1960s, only one or two students graduate from the program each year." The reason, said spokesman McNulty, is that most students want the four-year experience, including about 70 percent who study abroad for a year or semester. At Bates, the debut of the three-year option in the '60s gave rise to the College's popular spring Short Term.

New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood praises the "extraordinary" Off Broadway directing debut of Arin Arbus '99, who directed the Theater for a New Audience production of Othello. "Shakespeare is the star here," Isherwood writes, "but he is handled with the kind of artistry we always hope for and rarely find. This is among the most sensitively directed, eloquently designed and impeccably acted productions of a Shakespeare tragedy that the city has seen in years." He calls Arbus "a star in the making, or to put it less glibly — and more realistically — a potentially important artist. The associate artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, she makes an extraordinary Off Broadway debut with this production."

Variety noted the return of Michael Pavlic '96 to Sony Pictures Worldwide Marketing and Distribution as senior vice president of creative advertising. From 2003 to 2005, he worked at Sony Pictures as manager of creative advertising and helped produce ad campaigns for Hitch and other films. Pavlic most recently was producer-editor at Big Picture Entertainment.

The annual academic publication Polar Research in Tromsø included an article focusing on Arctic research conducted by Bates biology professor Will Ambrose and his students, including Greg Henkes '08. Written by Michael Carroll, who has co-authored research articles with Ambrose, the piece discusses how bivavles are becoming helpful in deciphering baseline, historical climate conditions in the Arctic. The topic was also featured in Bates Magazine, in its Spring 2008 issue issue.

The recession is forcing job-seeking seniors — and the colleges that are trying to help them — to refine their strategies, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education story. Bill Hiss '66, vice president for external affairs who oversees the College's Office of Career Services, has worked with Bates' traveling fundraisers to ensure that alums in business are asked if their firms have job openings.

Various news outlets, including an Associated Press item in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on the appointment of H. Scott Bierman '77 as president of Beloit College. An economist, Bierman has been the academic dean at Carleton College since 2005. In its story, the Beloit Daily News quoted Jim Sanger, chairman of the Beloit board of trustees: “[Bierman]is an outstanding leader with almost three decades of experience as a member of the faculty and administration of one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation. He is a graduate of another leading liberal arts college and has a passion for what he has called ‘the process of learning how to lead a meaningful life.'”

The Lewiston Sun-Journal reported on Elliot Moskow '10 of Coral Springs, who is chairman and CEO of Pricefalls.com, Fla., a startup that hopes to turn the conventional model of online auctions upside down. Unlike eBay and its ilk, where bidding drives up the price of an item, prices on Moskow's site start high and decrease at regular intervals. What Moskow calls "gravity shopping" is the same idea as a Dutch auction. "I think the idea is very good. It's a tough market to enter," Dmytro Zhosan, an economics instructor who teaches Moskow in the course "Game Theory," told Lewiston Sun Journal reporter Kathryn Skelton. Dutch auctions create a fun buying experience. "Instead of a race to the top price where people with less money get shut out early," reporter Skelton wrote, "it's a race to the bottom price for everyone."

Chris Lynch '84, CEO of Legacy Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, founded his luxury real estate brokerage in Portland, Maine, in October 2005, now considered the best of times for the real estate market. Yet according to Mainebiz magazine, Lynch partially credits the slumping real estate market for his success:a 38-percent increase in gross revenues in 2008 and, in a three-year period, capturing a quarter of the luxury-home market — generally defined as homes worth over $1 million — between York and Waldo counties. "There are tremendous opportunities to grow in a down market,” Lynch says.

In a New Yorker essay about presidential rhetoric, Jill Lepore highlighted the book Rhetorical Presidency by Jeff Tulis '72, who suggests that the founding fathers didn't expect or even want the president to communicate directly with the masses. Wrote Lepore, "Tulis and other scholars who wrote on this subject during the Reagan years generally found the rise of the rhetorical presidency alarming. By appealing to the people, charismatic chief executives were bypassing Congress and ignoring...the founding fathers, who considered popular leaders to be demagogues." According to Tulis, engaging the public directly leads to "a greater mutability of policy, an erosion of the processes of deliberation, and a decay of political discourse." Tulis, associate professor of government at UTexas–Austin, is a Laurence Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at Princeton this year.

In an opinion column in the The Des Moines Register, Scott King '75, director of the Office of International Students and Scholars at the University of Iowa, wrote about his trip to Iraq for an education forum, where he and other higher-education leaders discussed the country's plan to send 10,000 Iraqi college students to the U.S. and other English-speaking nations in each of the next five years. "The forum demonstrated an amazing level of excitement and unity of vision from the government officials, Iraqi university leaders and others involved," King wrote. "Indeed, they seem to see this as a means toward establishing the relationships they need to rebuild their own institutions, isolated for decades, into their rightful positions as world-class schools."

In The Providence Journal, Dan Doyle '72, who turned 60 on Jan. 14, commented about becoming a septugenerian Baby Boomer. Doyle challenged his generation to "rediscover the idealism that defined our youth and that may have yielded...to pragmatism. Our sustenance can come from our selflessness. Our good deeds can benefit our families, youth leagues, charities and churches. These deeds or projects need not be large; rather they can simply create a 'chipping effect' that steadily dissolves a problem or challenge." Doyle is founder and executive director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. He and Deb Doermann Burch '72, authors of The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting, were profiled in the Summer 2008 issue issue of Bates Magazine.

Tom Whalen '86 was part of a CNN panel that discussed President Obama's inauguration speech. Whalen, author of A Higher Purpose: Profiles in Presidential Courage, said the speech "overall [was] not a speech for the ages, but a speech for our times and the concerns people have. In many ways, it reminds me of a coach giving a halftime locker room speech to his team that's behind in the game. What Obama saying is that we have to make improvements or adjustment in order to prevail." Comparing Obama to another president, Whalen suggested that Obama might be aiming for an FDR-like pragmatism, using "both conservative and liberal approaches to solve the Great Depression problems. He's also paintiong himself as a non-idealogue."

Auburn mayor John Jenkins '74 was the subject of a story by longtime Portland Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, who wrote, "Forty years ago last spring, John Jenkins stood on the stage at his high school in Newark, N.J., and proudly shook the hand of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One week after that, King was dead, felled by an assassin's bullet. And Newark, like so many other American cities, was ablaze with anger. Now here Jenkins stood on the National Mall...on the morning of Martin Luther King Day. In a day's time, hundreds of thousands of Americans were going to pack this frozen space to witness the inauguration of...the country's first black president." Jenkins, who is black, told Nemitz that Obama connects with mainstream white America because he speaks about everyday problems using everyday language. The effect is "transformational," Jenkins said. "It really changes people's hearts. It's not that you change them. They change themselves.''