Many Stanford graduates leave the Farm never knowing that there were ROTC students among them, but Josh Davis was aware of the officer-training program early on. One of his drawmates was Army ROTC cadet Dave Kuhn, ’95. Even so, Davis’s reporting for an article about today’s ROTC students caught him off guard. “The cadets called me ‘sir,’ which I found amusing,” says Davis, ’96, who lives in San Francisco. A double major in economics and modern thought and literature, Davis has split his time since graduation writing and filmmaking. He wrote, directed and produced a feature film titled West Coast in 1998, but his most unusual storytelling adventure may be his latest one. In December, he planned to write an article for Maxim magazine about his experience at the World Arm Wrestling Championships in Poland—as a contestant. He was selected for the U.S. team—after he placed fourth (out of four competitors) in his weight class at the U.S. Arm Wrestling Championships in Nevada last summer. “I was pinned in under one second,” he says. “It doesn’t bode well.”
Columbia University journalism student Jocelyn Wiener first became interested in Latin America as a high schooler in Los Altos. “I knew a lot of kids from Mexico and El Salvador,” she explains. “I saw how they were marginalized by U.S. society.” Then, at Stanford, the history and Latin American studies major took a class on street children in El Salvador. “I decided I needed to go see for myself,” says Wiener, ’99. So she went—twice—to conduct research on the different levels of gang violence in two communities. After graduation, Wiener made her third visit to El Salvador, on a Fulbright fellowship. When she came back to the United States, she began working on a series of stories about the street children she grew to know.
Shooting ants in the desert was no picnic for photographer Ed McCain. For starters, there was the blaring sun and the fact that his subjects were fast-moving and uncooperative. But the biggest challenge for McCain—seen here from a bug’s-eye perspective—was avoiding getting stung by the venomous critters. (He succeeded.) A native of Independence, Mo.—“I met Harry Truman when I was a kid”—44-year-old McCain is no stranger to desert conditions, having lived in Tucson for 17 years. He started his own commercial photography business in 1988, serving clients such as Sunset, Sports Illustrated and Forbes, but says he still manages to get out on the back roads to photograph what he enjoys most: “the richly varying scenes of the Southwest—its landscapes and the people who live within them.”
