As a student reporter for campus radio station KZSU, PETE WILLIAMS covered the noisy antiwar protests of the early 1970s. Twenty years later, he found himself explaining the military's actions as the Pentagon's chief spokesman during the Gulf War. "I came away with a healthy respect for military folks," Williams, '74, says from his office in Washington, D.C., where he now covers the Supreme Court for NBC. Reviewing Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America, he was reminded of the pressure involved in working for the Pentagon. Before his 1989-93 stint with Defense, Williams was a spokesman for then-Rep. (later secretary of defense) Dick Cheney. And for 10 years before that, he was a television news director in his home state of Wyoming.
JOAN O'C. HAMILTON has spent most of her 16-year career covering the ups and downs of the marketplace for Business Week. Even so, the grim job outlook for today's humanities PhDs struck her as perplexing. "The laws of supply and demand don't seem to apply," she says. Her story explores the reasons for the PhD glut and some of the surprising solutions now on the table. A contributing writer for Stanford, Hamilton, '83, has written in these pages about anti-discrimination crusader Fran Conley and the University's innovative science curriculum. She lives in Menlo Park and continues to write for Business Week as a Silicon Valley columnist.
He may seem like the ultimate straight arrow, but JIM TANKERSLEY, '00, has a troublemaking streak. As an eighth-grader, he wrote an editorial in the school paper arguing that students might as well go naked if they couldn't wear hats and coats to their climate-controlled campus. "It's the one time in my life I've come close to administrative reprimand," he says. "It was really cool." A former Stanford intern, Tankersley writes in this issue about commencement and about making trouble as editor of the Daily.
When he's making portraits of the famous and successful -- Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Lyle Lovett, Sam Donaldson -- photographer ART STREIBER saves the fawning for the last few minutes of the shoot. "I have to suppress my awe," says Streiber, '84, who freelances for magazines like Vanity Fair, In Style and George. So while photographing the coaches and athletes for our cover story, Streiber held off asking for autographs -- but in the end he got each of them to sign Polaroids. Before setting up his own studio in 1993, Streiber spent four years staffing the Milan bureau of W with his wife, writer and editor Glynis Costin, MA '84. The couple lives in Los Angeles with daughter Siena, 3, and their 5-year-old Labrador, Indie.
