Kluger ’56 reflects on journalism career, time at the ‘Prince’
Richard Kluger ’56 is a Pulitzer Prize winner, a two-time National Book Award finalist and has previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Forbes Magazine.
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Richard Kluger ’56 is a Pulitzer Prize winner, a two-time National Book Award finalist and has previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Forbes Magazine.
Actor James Franco was in town and later on campus Monday to film scenes for the upcoming film “The Sound and the Fury,” a period drama set in 1910. A portion of Washington Road, between Faculty Road and Route 1, was closed for the movie shooting.
“Do you know about the Waggle dance?” he asked.“No ... ” I said.“Oh. My. God.”On Sunday, I met the BEE Team. I met about a dozen people, each of whom seemed to have an unending knowledge of everything bee-related. For example, the “waggle dance,” as Ben Denzer ’15, former BEE Team president, explained to me, is a complicated — yet simple — way for a bee to let other bees know where a particularly nectar-filled flower is located. According to Denzer, a bee will circle around in a figure eight and waggle its butt, pointing other bees to the flower using the sun as a reference.“If you start looking into bees, it’s just like a never-ending pit of awesomeness,” he said.Last Sunday, the team held a mead-making event in the Brown Co-Op. Essentially honey alcohol, mead is made by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with added raisins or lavender. Although the BEE Team officers now feel as though they are experts in the art of mead-making, they will not actually get to taste the mead they made on Sunday, since it takes up to three years to ferment properly.“The goal is for current freshmen to get to taste the mead that they bottled when they’re seniors. They get to have mead from the bees from that year when they joined the club,” Denzer said.After the event, I sat down with Denzer and Louisa Willis ’16, current copresident, to talk about the history, mission and day-to-day life of the BEE Team.The BEE team was founded in Fall 2009 by Michael Smith ’10 — affectionately called “Panamike” as he was originally from Panama — who, Denzer said, maintained his own hives back home. Upon his arrival at Princeton, Smith wanted to continue beekeeping and founded the club at the start of his senior year to do just that. Originally developed as a means for Smith to complete his senior thesis — which was, of course, about bees — the BEE Team has maintained the hives ever since and continued Panamike’s tradition of studying and loving bees.Neither Denzer nor Willis had done beekeeping before arriving at Princeton, but that didn’t stop them from falling in love with it.Both Denzer and Willis said their favorite part of being on the BEE Team is visiting the hives, which they do twice a month. The hives are located just past the boathouse, a 10-minute walk from Frist Campus Center. The BEE Team usually visits the hives on Saturdays or Sundays twice a month at 2 p.m. The trips last about an hour and a half and often consist of both regular members as well as new students and curious community members.Once they get there, they open up the hives and look for new “baby bees,” a sign that the queen is still alive and the bees are well. Then they might look through the frames and see bees at different life stages, or try to find the queen bee. Sometimes, they have to give the bees medication to prevent them from getting attacked by mites, a problem that has gotten worse over the last 15 years.“Throughout that whole process, [we’re] just telling them cool facts about bees,” Denzer said. “They’re all like little awesome robots that are doing the exact same thing.”“You approach the hive, and you can feel you’re there, because there’s a little vibration in the air because all their wings are flapping, and you can hear it,” Willis said.When they asked me if I would be interested in joining them, I expressed a little bit of concern about visiting a hive — I once got stung by a wasp on my eyelid when I was eight years old, and I still haven’t fully recovered from the experience. But both Denzer and Willis reassured me and said that no one, besides officers, had ever been stung. “It’s like the bees just know who will still love them,” Willis said.“I’ve only been stung twice here, but they were both because I was being stupid,” Willis said.The BEE Team usually uses the honey they collect for events they host — like the mead-making one last Sunday — and packages the rest to sell to community members. With that money, they buy new equipment.“The architecture department really loves our honey,” Denzer, an architecture concentrator, said.Denzer and Willis said that while they’re happy with the progress the BEE Team has made over the past four years, they still have high hopes for the future of the club — perhaps adding more hives, selling more honey or working with other student groups to inform the greater student community about bees.“It would be really awesome if everyone went to the hives once when they’re [at Princeton],” Willis said.
The computer criminal activity case involving a former University employee has been resolved, the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office said Wednesday.
No one has been charged in connection with an incident involving a smashed painting at the Ivy Club last month, according to police records obtained by The Daily Princetonian.
Two arrests were made on campus last week by the Department of Public Safety, according to thedaily crime logspublished by DPS.
Transparency and accountability in financial markets are keys to investor confidence, former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro argued at a Wilson School lecture Wednesday evening. Schapiro spoke in conversation with Wilson School professor Alan Blinder as part of the Wilson School’s Program in Leadership and Governance.
Terrace Club accepted 13 new members during second-round sign-ins, club president Christopher St John '15 wrote in a statement.
Today, I ate a banana. I peeled it back, admired its yellowy goodness and had nearly chomped into my delightful treat, when I was suddenly overcome with a wave of paranoia.
Club Nom, an initiative started by Hannah Rosenthal ’15 to facilitate dialogue between upperclassmen in eating clubs and those in other eating options, held its first event at Cloister Inn on Wednesday.
A painting was allegedly punched and damaged last Friday in Ivy Club, according to a press release by the Princeton Police Department.
A survey sent out to all undergraduate students on Feb. 5 is the first formal step in gathering information for the reevaluation of the grade deflationgrading policy.
In February 2012, a freshman was allegedly asked to withdraw from the University following a suicide attempt, according to a discrimination complaintfiled with the United States Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.The student attempted to fight the administration's decision, the July 2012 complaint read, but ultimately left for two semesters.
The Albion Pleiad, Albion College’s student newspaper, has had its publication rights revoked by administrators due toan articlepublished about the death of a student at a nearby university and concerns of content verification.
A number of thefts and robberies have occurred on Nassau Street and in Palmer Square in the past few weeks, according to press releases from the Princeton Police Department.
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker ’49 criticized the current state of democracy in America in a Wilson School lecture on Friday.
Josh Miller, originally a member of the Class of 2012, has sold the start-up he co-founded, called Branch, along with a sister company called Potluck, to Facebook last month for $15 million. Miller dropped out of Princeton in 2011.
Electrical engineering professor Sanjeev Kulkarni has been appointed the new dean of the Graduate School, the University announced Monday morning.
A Princeton man has entered a plea of not guilty to charges of causing the death of former Executive Director of the Center for Jewish Life Rabbi James Diamond.
A petition organized by Columbia professor Ehsan Yarshater surfaced challenging the University’s current candidate for the position of the Ibrahim Pourdavoud Professorship in Persian Studies.The petition, which has been taken down, argued that having the name of Pourdavoud, a pioneer in the field of pre-Islamic Iranian studies, meant that the professor who occupies the Pourdavoud Chair should continue his work in the field of pre-Islamic studies. But the current candidate suggested by the search committee, according to the petition, was a Greco-Arabic scholar who has not specialized in pre-Islamic culture and who would thus not exemplify the memory of Pourdavoud.The petition was taken down the week of Dec. 22 for unknown reasons. Yarshater did not respond to a further request for comment as to why the petition had been taken down.The petition, which was addressed to University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, copied Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani ’80 and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani ’74, whose $10 million donationto the University in 2012 will help establish a Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. The Mossavar-Rahmanis did not respond to multiple requests for comment.However, the Pourdavoud Chair was not established by the Mossavar-Rahmani family. It was separately established by Dr. Anahita Naficy Lovelace ’75 and her husband Jim Lovelace. Dr. Lovelace said they were aware of the petition and declined to comment until after an appointment has been made.According to Yarshater, the candidate being considered was Kevin van Bladel, a current history professor at Ohio State University. Van Bladel declined to comment for this article and said he had not received any formal offer from Princeton University.“To allow a chair named after Pourdavoud, who spent all his life teaching and writing about Zoroastrianism and the pre-Islamic culture of Iran,” the petition read, “to be held by someone whose formal academic training has been in Arabic, Syriac, and Greek, and who by and large is unknown in the field, is considered a slap in the face of Iranian Studies, the community at large, and the memory of Pourdavoud.”Van Bladel has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Yale University and was previously an assistant professor of classics at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of the Near East in the first millennium CE, focusing on the translation of works between Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Latin, Sanskrit and various Iranian languages such as Middle Persian and Arabic. His teaching also focuses on the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.“In the perspective of my research, the advent of Islam is not the beginning or end of a period; it can be understood only by reference to what came before as much as to what came after,” van Bladel’s OSU biography states.Ibrahim Pourdavoud, for whom the chair is named, was a Persian scholar who studied pre-Islamic Iranian history, focusing particularly on Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrian culture. He is perhaps most well known for translating the Avesta, the primary collection of Zoroastrian sacred texts, into Persian and providing explanatory commentary.Dr. Lovelace said in an email that by naming the chair after Pourdavoud, they intended to “honor him and his life’s work on the occasion of his 125th birthday in 2011, which happened to coincide with [her] mother’s 90th birthday.”In an interview with The Daily Princetonian, Yarshater acknowledged that although van Bladel has many strengths, they do not lie in the same field Pourdavoud spearheaded.“The one scholar that Princeton University was thinking to appoint— although they haven’t appointed yet— was not an expert on any of those things that are Persian history, Persian culture or Iranian language. Even though under other standards he is a very good scholar, he would be more appropriate for chairs in Arabic or Greek,” Yarshater said.Changing the Selection ProcessYarshater also suggested that the selection process be altered so as to better represent the intentions of a chair named for Pourdavoud.“In order to do justice to the chair, to the donors and to the name of Pourdavoud, the selection committee should include several people of expertise in Iranian studies,” Yarshater said. “Ideally they would advertise the chair, a number of people would apply, and they will then decide who is the best choice for the chair … The committee would compose of people specialized in Iranian studies, not people in Arabic or Greek or Syriac.”Dean of Faculty David Dobkin, who was also copied on the petition, said in an email that the selection committee for a chair position is typically made of faculty from the relevant department, or of faculty whose departments overlap with the area of the chair. Often, other faculty with broader interests are also included. Then, the search committee will begin placing ads and sending out requests for nominations to leading scholars in the field.Once the search committee has found a potential candidate, Dobkin said, he or she is proposed to the Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements, which solicits input from leading scholars in the field as to the candidate’s suitability for the position.According to Dobkin, the donor and the University will come to a consensus on a description for a position, and the search committee will begin the selection process from there. Donors are not involved in the identification nor selection of candidates to occupy the chair.Dobkin declined to comment on the search committee organized for the Pourdavoud Chair, citing the need to uphold the integrity and confidentiality of the selection process.Greco-Arabic vs. Pre-IslamicDariush Borbor, Director of the Research Institute and Library of Iranian Studies in Tehran, signed the petition, citing his personal and academic belief that the current candidate does not meet the ideals of a Pourdavoud Chair.“My personal feeling, as many other scholars, most of us agree with what Professor Yarshater has written in his letter that this endowment for the professorship at Princeton was made by two Iranians and they wanted to concentrate on Iranian studies,” Borbor said. “The chair which is named after [Pourdavoud] should be occupied by a person who specialized either in the languages of ancient Iran or the religion or generally the culture of ancient Iran.”Like Yarshater, Borbor acknowledged that van Bladel has many strengths in other fields, but that he may not be suited for this position.“He may be a very good scholar as well, of his own right, but if he is a scholar specialized on Arabic, Syriac and Greek, I don’t think it’s a very suitable choice … Especially the Greek side, because with most of the scholars who were specialized in Greek studies and on the history or culture of Greece, their interpretation of Iranian studies was often very one-sided and sometimes quite wrong,” Borbor said. “I have, myself, written and lectured in many universities about the misconceptions that Greek scholarship has given to Iranian studies.”Hosi Mehta, president of the Zoroastrian Association of Chicago, signed the petition as well, also citing a concern for the potential misrepresentation of Iranian history.“Persian history is really rich, and I was surprised that they could not find somebody who would be into that than finding someone who has the Arabic background,” Mehta said. “I read his qualifications, that he was an Arabic scholar, and the concern was that sometimes things get misrepresented … the winner usually writes the history, so it could be changed in different ways. There are people who say the Holocaust never happened.”