Author: Milton Academy

“It’s funny to say that a hashtag changed my life. But it’s true. A hashtag really did change my life,” says the Los Angeles-based screenwriter William Yu ’09.

Yu made some waves in the Twitter world in 2016 when he launched an awareness campaign using the hashtag #StarringJohnCho. “It was a time when a lot of fraught conversations were taking place about Asian representation [or the lack thereof] in the entertainment industry,” he says. The practice of “whitewashing” was still quite prevalent. For example, in the soon-to-be-released Ghost in the Shell, Scarlett Johansson was cast in the role of a Japanese character, Major Motoko Kusanagi. In the 2015 film Aloha, Emma Stone played a character supposedly of Hawaiian, Chinese, and Swedish descent, and in Dr. Strange (2016), Tilda Swinton portrayed a character who was originally supposed to be Tibetan. The director Aaron Sorkin reportedly claimed that there were no Asian stars in Hollywood. “That was a problem of perception,” Yu says. “It seemed that no one could picture it.”

But Yu, a Korean American who lived in Hong Kong from the age of five to twelve when his family moved to Massachusetts, could picture it quite clearly, and he wanted others to share his vision. To Yu, the Korean-born actor John Cho—who had already starred in both the Harold and Kumar and Star Trek series, along with many other films—was an entirely plausible leading man. In his initial Twitter thread, using the hashtag #StarringJohnCho—which was a side project Yu created (at a personal cost of $0) while holding a full-time job in advertising—he inserted Cho’s face into posters for Jurassic World and a range of other hit movies at that time. The campaign went viral: It was discussed in the New York Times, and on the BBC and CNN, among other media outlets. Yu became friends with John Cho as a result, and the director Jon M. Chu said that the hashtag inspired him to make the 2018 blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians.

A trip that Tony Dior Gaenslen ’59 took during spring break of his senior year changed the course of his life. Story by Elaine McArdle Photographs by Walter Smith Tony Dior Gaenslen ’59 entered Milton Academy as a self-described “shy” and “nerdy” kid, the Texas-born son of a politically conservative family. He was so enamored of Robert E. Lee that he wrote his senior history paper describing him as the greatest general of the Civil War and a man of unimpeachable character. His father was an oilman, his mother a devout Catholic from Normandy, France, whose first cousin was...

With a career that includes a wide range of experiences, Milton’s new head of school looks forward to the challenges ahead. By Dr. Alixe Callen ’88 I often refer to my career as an educator as one of both/and. I’ve worked in both public schools and independent schools (and, indeed, even spent some time at a charter school). I identify both as a teacher and as an administrator. East Coast, West Coast—both! Even as a student, I attended a public elementary and middle school before enrolling at Milton. The opportunity to learn and work in a diversity of environments...

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