The Moonshot Evangelist: Claire Johnson ’90 Is Steering Google’s Self-Driving Car
On May 28, at the Code Conference in Palos Verdes, California, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed a surprise. The tech world already knew that Google has been developing self-driving cars that use laser scanners, cameras, and radars to map nearby terrain, track cars and pedestrians, and even identify construction zones. The vehicles avoid swerving cyclists, stop at traffic lights, and move around Google’s Mountain View neighborhood as naturally as a human-driven SUV. The computer-controlled cars have already logged more than 700,000 autonomous miles. Until recently, they’ve also had a...
Read MoreVisual Arts Faculty, Past and Present, Exhibit and Explain
This spring, the Nesto Gallery showcased the considerable and varied talents of visual arts faculty members, spanning five decades. This year has been significant in the program’s history: as longtime teachers retire, new and energized educators have joined the scene, advancing Milton’s tradition of excellence in art education. This coming year also marks the first time in recent history that all visual arts classrooms are housed in one building: the renovated Art and Media Center. Thirteen artist-educators shared a spectrum of media used in contemporary art. The exhibition highlighted...
Read MoreNew Americans Will Power Chicago’s Future, Tonantzin Carmona ’08
In midmorning, the light reflecting off North LaSalle Street’s towering buildings pours into Tonantzin Carmona’s small office in Chicago’s City Hall. Poised and welcoming, Tonantzin clears the Starbucks cup to one side and ignores the steady ping of incoming emails. She looks every bit her age — 24 years. Last April, Mayor Rahm Emanuel named Tonantzin director of his Office of New Americans. While rancorous debate about immigrants surges across the United States, Mayor Emanuel has declared that Chicago “will be the most immigrant-friendly city in the country.” Some view...
Read MoreLanding the Viewer Inside the Story, Llewellyn Smith ’72
“I’m attracted to the consequences of big ideas shaping people’s lives,” says Llew Smith, summing up what drives his filmmaking. His film legacy over nearly 35 years shows a diligent historian, a fearless visual artist, a sensitive and ambitious chronicler of identity and experience in the United States. Llew is alternately, or sometimes simultaneously, a writer, director, producer, series editor and “especially rainmaker, if you know what I mean.” Llew “backed into filmmaking,” by seizing a number of serendipitous opportunities that cropped up in Minnesota, in the late...
Read MoreAt the Console, Nick Makes Productions Sing
At the Console, Nick Makes Productions Sing: Ambitious performances push Milton’s sound guru. Nick Mehlman ’16 folds his long body into a seat behind an analog sound board and puts on a headset. It’s Wednesday night at the dress rehearsal of For Colored Girls. In the black box studio down the hall, a student band is warming up. For the first time in a Milton production, the musicians are not seated in the orchestra pit; in King Theatre, the play’s staging and set extends to the far corners of the room, bisecting the audience. How can live musicians accompany actors several rooms away?...
Read MoreWorth a Thousand Words: Nick Clark ’65 blurs the lines between fine art and your childhood favorites.
Four wide, welcoming murals — eight feet by 16 — warm the airy central hall of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. The textured swaths of red, green, blue, yellow, are stunning tone setters — contemporary collages, you think. But then each painting tugs at a deep-seated visual memory — something familiar, nostalgic — stemming from hundreds of turns with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The murals showcase Eric Carle’s signature tissue-paper technique writ large. Blurring the lines between fine art and illustration art is the goal of The Carle Museum....
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