Rachel Maddow, ’94, signed another contract for “several years” as host of The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC’s top-rated TV news and commentary program. She joined MSNBC full time in 2008, following her successful three-year radio slot on Air America.
Bob Norris, chief of emergency medicine at Stanford, has long taught people how to handle medical crises. He’s lectured in India about treating snake bites and mentored physicians in Iraq on handling war casualties. But when a disaster like the Haitian earthquake strikes, logistics are as crucial as medical techniques: It took the Stanford medical team five days to prepare and travel to Port au Prince. Norris’s solution to mobilization delays: SEMPER, the Stanford Emergency Medicine Program for Emergency Response, which is creating a permanent team that can deploy within six hours.
Cory Booker, ’91, MA ’92, started in Newark, N.J., as a community organizer, then won a tough fight running for city council and later for mayor. Now in his second term, he’s had measurable success cleaning up corruption, reducing crime and revitalizing the troubled city’s economy. One unusual indicator: a record-breaking 25-foot matzo, baked to mark completion of new headquarters for Manischewitz, one of several corporations relocating to Newark.
Ten years after 9/11, actress Sigourney Weaver, ’72, reprises her 2001 starring role in the play The Guys—one of the first dramas about the World Trade Center attack—in a Flea Theater production at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage in early September. A 2003 movie version of the play starred Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia.
Bertrand Patenaude, MA ’79, PhD ’87, was an obvious choice to review Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Life (Harvard U. Press) for the American Historical Review, since he’d written his own history, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins). The result might have circulated mostly to readers of the June 2011 AHR, but the online newspaper Inside Higher Ed ran a 3,000-word zinger in July detailing why the review would “earn a place in the annals of the scholarly take-down.” Hoover fellow Patenaude found more than four dozen mistakes in Hoover fellow Service’s book. Inside Higher Ed talked to both authors and blasted Harvard Press for its silence.
