5 Friendly Reads
Searching for books about friendship, it turns out, is unfriendly business. Looking past the standbys of young adult fiction (think of A Separate Peace), we find ourselves staring out at a stark landscape: the last two centuries of fiction favored exploring the loneliness of individual consciousness, not the pleasures of the BFF. Alas, the genre that yields my personal favorites, American literature, turns a cold shoulder, too: tales of rugged individualism do not accommodate bosom buddies. From Douglass to Thoreau to Hemingway, American fiction broadly asks if one can render selfhood in a...
Read MoreRick Moody
American novelist and short-story writer Rick Moody was this fall’s Bingham Visiting Reader. Best known for his highly acclaimed novels, The Ice Storm and Garden State, Mr. Moody read to students his short story “Boys,” from his 2001 collection, Demonology, and answered questions about his approach to the writing process. “Boys enter the house. Boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible) enter the house.” —opening line from Rick Moody’s “Boys”
Read MoreAmy Louis Wood
Professor Amy Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940, delivered the eighth Henry R. Heyburn Lecture in History in January. With students, she examined visual representations of lynching and the construction of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. She specializes in American cultural history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the history of the U.S. South. Professor Wood teaches at Illinois State University. “This history of lynching and racial violence has had an enormous effect on our criminal justice system today, where we...
Read MoreBen Vereen
Tony Award–winning performer and humanitarian, Mr. Ben Vereen, joined Milton students this fall in class and in performance. He has acted in film, in television and onstage in shows including Roots, Pippin, Wicked, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Muppets and Grey’s Anatomy. For his humanitarian contributions, he has received Israel’s Cultural and Humanitarian Awards, three NAACP Image Awards, and an Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award. “If you define your gravity, you can’t be held down. You are about excellence, and the only person holding you back is you. Stay hungry. Stay...
Read More“From a place of joy and not fear”
by Annie Moyer ’97 I recently married my partner of five years, Renée Coronado Martinez, at a courthouse in Brooklyn, New York. Four months earlier we held a formal ceremony in Renée’s home state of Califor-nia. Our one witness at the courthouse was Emily Brooks, a friend since my freshman year at Milton. It was only fitting that Emily would stand there with us in the courthouse, and that so many of my Milton friends would celebrate with us at the wedding this past summer. I cherish the experience I had at Milton; however, my memories of the school are complex. For me, Milton...
Read MoreInSight, Spring 2012
Elizabeth Stanfield ’12 played the over-achieving Marcy Park in Milton’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
Read MoreErick Tseng ’97 Joins Board of Trustees
Erick Tseng ’97 is head of mobile products for Facebook since May 2010, after having been a lead product manager at Google for four years. His team at Google launched the Android platform and led development of the Nexus One phone. Erick completed a dual bachelor’s and master’s degree program in computer science and electrical engineering at M.I.T., where he was the president of his class. Erick earned his M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.
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