Darby Ray

In a Q-and-A, Sun Journal reporter Kathryn Skelton asks Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, “If you were a student, what project through the Harward Center makes you think, ‘I’d be all over that’”?

Ray’s answer pointed to a partnership with an elementary school about a mile from campus.

“Last semester one of the education classes at Bates met all semester long at Farwell Elementary School. The students and professor didn’t just visit the school once or twice — they actually held their college course at the elementary school, which enabled an amazing reciprocity of knowledge, insight and energy.

“I love that kind of creative exchange.”

• View story in the May 19, 2013, Sun Journal.

Psychologist Jonathan Adler ’00 talks with Kati Vecsey of the theater department during his lecture at Bates in 2008. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences,” says Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College.

Rodriguez describes how Adler and a colleague investigated the link between mixed emotional experience and psychological welfare in a group of people undergoing 12 sessions of psychotherapy.

Participants who said they felt cheerful and dejected at the same time (for example, by expressing the notion that “I feel sad at times because of everything I’ve been through, but I’m also happy and hopeful because I’m working through my issues”) preceded improvements in their sense of well-being.

“Taking the good and the bad together may detoxify the bad experiences, allowing you to make meaning out of them in a way that supports psychological well-being,” the researchers found.

• View story from Scientific American

So far, it’s worked out well, says reporter Bob Keyes of the Maine Sunday Telegram.

In April, a composer Cyr championed won a Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy.

Composer Vivian Fung won Classical Composition of the Year for her violin concerto, which Cyr recorded with the Metropolis Ensemble and released last fall on the Naxon label imprint Canadian Classics.

Video of the 2011 world premiere of Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Kristin Lee and the Metropolis Ensemble, with Cyr conducting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ambrosino, who has the role of Gabey (Gene Kelly’s part in the 1949 film version of the Broadway play), tells Boston Spirit Magazine blog that while he recalls being “enthralled by the performances”  when he watched the movie as a boy, no one should expect him to channel Kelly.

Chip (Phil Tayler), Ozzie (Zachary Eisenstat) and Gabey (John Ambrosino ’01) in a scene from the Lyric Theater’s production of On the Town. Photograph by Mark S. Howard.

“I’m going to stay away from the movie now and let [director] Spiro [Veloudos] lead us down the road.”

Thus far, media reviews of the play have been positive.

Ambrosino says the Lyric is taking an “awesome artistic risk” by staging the play that was first produced on Broadway in 1944. “It’s so infrequently done because it’s a difficult show to do,” says Ambrosino.

• View post on the Boston Spirit Magazine blog, May 5, 2013.

The profile of President Spencer in the April 2013 issue of Maine magazine carries the headline “Grit and Shared Enterprise.”

In the April issue of Maine magazine, President Clayton Spencer talks about her love affair with Maine and her philosophy of “shared enterprise.”

In a profile titled “Grit and Shared Enterprise,” Spencer tells writer Sarah Braunstein, “I loved what I did at Harvard. But if headhunters called asking if I was interested in a presidency, I would always say: ‘Call me when it’s Maine.’”

“Maine,” she continues, “is a granite state, not a sand state. What I respect most about New England — and Maine — is its substance.”

Substance, she says, is central to the important work that lies ahead for Bates, particularly her emphasis on financial aid.

“It’s critical that we’re on the side of opportunity, not on the side of greater wealth stratification or income inequality.”

As a leader, she tells Braunstein, she prefers the notion of “shared enterprise” over the concept of transparency. The latter, she explains, implies “others on the outside looking in.” She would much rather see the community working together on the issues and challenges facing the college, and viewing the work as a shared experience.

• Read the complete profile from Maine Magazine, April 2013.

A Boston police officer shouts instructions on Boylston Street in Boston on April 15, 2013. Photograph by Bates photographer Mike Bradley, who was at the marathon earlier in the day and returned to cover the aftermath for a New York City media outlet.

Marcus was reporting on the race when the bombs transformed Boylston Street just before 3 p.m. on April 15.

After the bombing, runners weren’t able to collect belongings that had been transported back to Boston from the race start in Hopkinton. By evening on April 15, thousands of yellow plastic bags with runners’ gear had been collected near the finish line, including this pile on Berkeley Street. Photograph by Mike Bradley/Bates College.

A veteran of the Boston Marathon himself, Marcus also reports on the group of nearly 300 runners who gathered in East Cambridge for a group run the next day. He writes:

“In a city still shell-shocked by the Boston Marathon bombings, and with just a few hours’ notice on social media and by word of mouth, some 270 runners answered the call put out by a local running club whose weekly get-togethers at the Courtside, a beloved dive bar, usually attract 30.”

“Boston won’t stop running.”

The group’s route that evening covered both sides of the Charles River and raised $3,000 for victim relief.

One of the organizers, P.J. Aspesi, tells Marcus that “we tried to figure out how we could come together afterward and help, and show everybody that Boston won’t stop running.”

• Read the Esquire story from April 15, 2013.
• Read the Esquire story from April 17, 2013.
• Read the Runner’s World story from April 17, 2013.

Greg Anderson, an assistant in instruction in biology, works with a student doing field work on a Brunswick mudflat of the kind that’s occasionally closed to clam harvesters for conservation reasons. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Historic friction between two marine fisheries groups is playing out once again in Maine, where proposed legislation would give coastal towns the power to prohibit bloodworm digging in areas closed to clam harvesting.

Occasionally, a Maine town will close a flat to allow younger seed clams to mature. Currently, such closures doen’t apply to worm diggers.

The proposed legislation assumes that seeded flats need to be protected from both clam and worm digging, an assumption that riles worm diggers.

“Somebody is always trying to get us kicked out of their town,” said worm dealer Phil Harrington during a recent meeting in Brunswick to discuss the legislation.

Bates marine biologist Will Ambrose tends to side with the worm diggers, telling Bangor Daily News reporter Beth Brogan that the “impact worm digging has on clams has probably been overstated.”

Ambrose tells the BDN that according to his and his students’ research, not a lot of clams are “impacted to the point of death by worm digging.”

He also points to research by colleague and collaborator Brian Beal, a marine ecologist at the University of Maine, that specifically looks at how worm digging affects young clams. Beal concludes that “blood wormers should continue to harvest commercially from areas closed to shellfishing without reprisal or fear that they are causing damage to populations of juvenile soft-shell clams.”

“I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

The hostility between the two digging groups, Ambrose adds, “goes back to at least 1979…because these groups do not mix, for a whole variety of reasons: socioeconomic, geopolitical — they just don’t get along. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

In 2005, environmental studies major Eben Sypitkowski ’05 spent time with worm diggers while doing his honors thesis on bloodworm digging.

He described for Bates Magazine the offbeat culture of the hardy yet disenfranchised worm diggers, and how there’s enviable talent in being able to “keep your butt to the wind and your hoe in the mud when your back is killing you.”

• View story from the Bangor Daily News, April 9, 2013

Professor Emeritus of Political Science Douglas Hodgkin. Photograph courtesy of the Androscoggin Historical Society.

With the Maine Legislature considering various gun control measures this session, the Kennebec Journal turns to Professor Emeritus of Political Science Douglas Hodgkin for insight into how voters treat lawmakers who do or don’t share their views on guns.

Hodgkin tells reporter Tom Bell that Mainers who support gun rights tend to cast their votes for candidates who share their views.

But gun control supporters aren’t as vigilant, says Hodgkin. They won’t punish lawmakers for voting what they consider to be the wrong way on the issue because, as Bell writes, “other issues are more important to them.

• View story from the Kennebec Journal, April 7, 2013.

Postell Pringle ’98 (left, as Othello) and GQ (Iago) face off as Iago’s plot unfolds in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Othello: The Remix.” Photograph by Michael Brosilow.

Rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 is winning rave reviews for his star turn this spring in the title role of Othello: The Remix at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

In March, Time Out Chicago named Pringle its Performer of the Week. In a Time Out Q-and-A , he discussed how working in theater at Bates sharpened his delivery as a rapper:

“My approach to the actual attack of the line and getting punchlines and the arc of the storytelling within the song was all different. I realized that it had to do with the fact that I had just been working on acting, working on playing characters. … I wouldn’t be as good of a rapper if I hadn’t spent all that time working on just acting and just theater.”

Othello: The Remix was adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy by the Q Brothers — aka GQ and JQ, who with Pringle and a fourth member are also members of the rap group the Retar Crew. The entire Crew performs in The Remix.

The Q’s modus operandi, previously exercised on such works as The Bomb-itty of Errors, is to render Shakespeare’s entire text as rhyming couplets suitable for rap delivery. The Remix re-imagines the title character as “a hip-hop mogul whose life falls apart when he makes Iago the opener’s opener on a new tour,” writes Time Out blogger Oliver Sava.

“To cut to the chase: Othello: The Remix — the 90-minute, lightning-fast, hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of jealousy and self-doubt — is absolutely brilliant, and immense fun,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss.

With Bates classmate Erin Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, Pringle returns to campus this spring to lead the longstanding Short Term unit Tour Teach Perform, in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools.

• See the Chicago Time Out story about Pringle from March 21, 2013.
• See the Chicago Sun-Times review.
• See Pringle and Gottwald in their collaborative piece “Last Chance.”

Jesse Laflamme ’00, manager of Pete & Gerry’s Organics, oversees an operation that’s the antithesis of factory farming. Hens live cage-free in open barns, lay their eggs where they wish, and have outdoor access. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

A story posted on MSN’s portal for small businesses and entrepreneurs, Business on Main, includes Pete & Gerry’s Organics, the family egg business managed by Jesse Laflamme ’00.

Under the headline “Businesses find benefits in going green,” writer Joanna Krotz notes that “Pete and Gerry’s, located in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, is a regional powerhouse, distributing ‘certified humane’ organic eggs up and down the East Coast.”

Laflamme says compound annual growth is at 35 percent, “with revenue north of $50 million.” He also works to support family farms by partnering with 40 or so neighbors, some of whom switched to egg production after the success of Pete and Gerry’s.

• View story from MSN’s Business on Main