She has been a world champion. In one year competing for Brown, she rewrote the Ivy record book. Now gymnast Alicia Sacramone ’10 has her eye on a medal at this summer’s Olympics in Beijing.

... and why I'd still send my kids to college there.

Eric Rodriguez ’08 grew up avoiding gangs and drugs in Los Angeles. As a young man, he served in Iraq. How he ended up at Brown is a story of luck, determination, and an unconventional kind of smarts.

A haunting debut novel about perception, memory, and the arc of grief.

Craving a little baby-boomer black humor in the dark days of winter? Check out Laura Linney ’86 in The Savages.

Brown commissions a table handcrafted by a furniture maker whose ancestor cofounded the University.

Can the John Carter Brown library be more than a haven for specialized academics?

A historian appraises the bicycle-helmet generation and their coddling parents.

David M. Gross’s career speeds into control.

Vermont’s bounty inspires fine cooking and reading.

Jumper, a collaboration between Doug Liman ’88 and Simon Kinberg ’95, adopts sci-fi formulas only to turn them on their heads.

Recent highlights from Brown sports

After fifty-eight years at Penn State, Joe Paterno ’50 enters the College Football Hall of Fame.

Looking at women's basketball

After a perfect Ivy season, the men’s soccer team stumbles in the NCAA tournament.

[Replay]

Brown goes international.

Blurred vision and perception

New research about a common strain of the sexually transmitted HPV.

Ethicist Randy Cohen expounds on the difference between artful imitation and outright theft.

Are New Hampshire and Iowa really the best states for picking a president?

Landmine Survivors Network (LSN) executive director Jerry White ’86 recounts how a landmine blew off his lower right leg while he was hiking in Galilee during his junior year at Brown.

How Brown could benefit from the end of early admissions elsewhere.

Mail Room

Is Condoleezza Rice’s staunch support of George W. Bush’s foreign policy a matter of political opportunism or something else?

Thank you for the article on Randy Pausch, as well as for all the other informative and inspirational articles you’ve published over the years. The morning after reading that piece, I watched Randy’s entire lecture online, then ordered two DVDs of it, one to give to the high school where I taught until retiring two years ago.

“The Diva of Cool” (November/December) certainly validates H. L. Mencken’s observation: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

What a treat to read “The Panicked Person’s Holiday Gift Guide” (November/December). As I usually have most of my Christmas shopping done early, I found the guide more a catalog of adventures than of gifts. So many different alumni, from all eras, have pursued their own passions—to fantastic effect.

Reading the “finally” article on Howard Swearer in the November/December issue reminded me of his closing remarks at the June 1990 weeklong seminar at Brown on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You report that Lee Silver, in rebutting Francis Fukuyama’s argument that every evil that bioengineering might be able to eliminate has its good, picked bipolar disorder as a counterexample (“Playing God,” Elms, November/December).

Here & Now

This little Zapatista is a lesson in politics.

Why Big Brother wants to save you from your own gluttony.

You want a scotch and a shoe shine with your trim?

She wants her body to keep the land going.

Using tile, she connects travelers with America’s past.