Why, yes, that was Robert Wilson ringing the doorbell chez Paul Milgrom, MS ’78, PhD ’79, in the wee hours of October 12, to share the news that the pair had won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and that the Royal Swedish Academy was trying to call Milgrom. The prize, awarded for the professors’ work on auction theory, capped off a week in which poet Louise Glück, a visiting professor in creative writing, won the Nobel Prize in literature and associate professors Forrest Stuart (sociology) and Monika Schleier-Smith (physics) received MacArthur “genius” grants.
Everyone’s either talking about The Social Dilemma, a Netflix film directed by Jeff Orlowski, ’06, or in it—the Ticker spotted Tristan Harris, ’06, Jeff Seibert, ’08, Bailey Richardson, ’09, Alex Roetter, ’00, MS ’05, Tim Kendall, ’99, MBA ’06, Justin Rosenstein, ’05, Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, MD ’95, Mary Fetter, ’23, and Stanford Internet Observatory research manager Renée DiResta.
Dawn Davis, ’87, who founded the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink to give voice to marginalized storytellers, has been named editor-in-chief at Bon Appétit. She takes over the magazine in the wake of public criticism of the work environment by several Black former staff members, including Ryan Walker-Hartshorn, ’17.
Before Danny Scher, ’73, MBA ’75, became a top concert promoter, he was a student at the Graduate School of Business who programmed Frost Amphitheater. And before that, he was a Palo Alto High School student who invited Thelonious Monk to perform in the Paly auditorium. That 47-minute concert has now been released as an album, Palo Alto.
