Nigel Holmes is a magician who packs big messages into small spaces. As graphics director for Time magazine from 1978 to 1994, he invented the visual genre known as explanation graphics -- the use of pictures to convey complex subjects in a fun and interesting way. For this issue, he designed a series of graphic "icons" to evoke the Stanford experience. Holmes drew inspiration from his own campus memories; he has lectured each of the last 19 summers at the Stanford Professional Publishing Course. "It was lovely to draw the things I've looked at all this time and make them iconic -- but of course, they are all iconic anyway," he says. The simple, emotionally loaded images are part of the magazine's new look and will reappear in future issues.
Herbert Hoover's failure to wrestle down the Great Depression offers a cautionary message, says David M. Kennedy, '63. "That one of the most competent leaders of his time would prove unable to overcome that economic crisis is a reminder of how events can get out of control," he says. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford, has received the Alumni Association's Richard W. Lyman Award for Faculty Service, and three senior classes have selected him as Class Day speaker. His article is excerpted from Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, to be published in April.
There's something painfully ironic about Lori Gottlieb's account of her accident and recovery. Gottlieb, '89, was an executive at NBC -- where she helped to develop ER and Friends when she was overcome by restlessness. "I had my quarter-life crisis," she says. She wrote a book, sold the screen rights to Martin Scorsese and began pondering a career as a doctor. Then she was nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver. "I probably learned more about medicine in the three weeks I spent as a hospital patient than I will learn in my four years of medical school," says Gottlieb, who starts her training in the fall.
Ellis Cose began his journalism career at age 19 as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. He has worked as a writer at USA Today, press critic for Time and editorial board member of the Detroit Free Press. These days he's a contributing editor at Newsweek, writing primarily about race relations. "Like many black writers, I feel a fundamental ambivalence focusing so much on race," says Cose, who in this issue analyzes a book on affirmative action co-authored by former presidents of Princeton and Harvard (page 62). He finds the book refreshing because "it's not just an emotional screed from one side or the other." Cose has written nonfiction books as well as a novel, The Best Defense.
