Articles

This year, sitting at the media table in the big white tent on Severance Green, I was especially nostalgic. My classmate Jocelyn Benson ’99, secretary of state of Michigan, delivered the commencement address to the class of 2023—another yellow class, serendipitously.

Ann Velenchik, associate professor of economics and writing, drew on her own experience as a working mother to teach a first-year writing class, Having It All? The Problem of Women and Work. In it, her students grappled with questions about the economic and social roles they will face as they move into the world and decide how, when, or whether to start families of their own.

“When you start to recognize plants, I think you really start to feel like there’s family around,” says Jenn Yang ’12, associate director of the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens and Friends of Botanic Gardens. “You start to feel like a place is home.”

In January, Peggy McIntosh, a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and its former associate director, received an exciting call from Jean Kilbourne ’64. “Welcome to the National Women’s Hall of Fame,” Kilbourne told McIntosh, notifying her that she would be inducted in September.

Tekla Carlén ’24, a medieval and renaissance studies and French major, spent her junior year in France through the College’s Wellesley-in-Aix program. “I chose this program because I wanted a language immersion program and to be able to take classes at a French university alongside French students,” she says.

Perhaps Nina McKee ’16 was fated to be involved with the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs. “Madeleine Albright was always this figure in my life because I was a young redhead who liked negotiating and wanted to be a diplomat,” says McKee, who became the Albright Institute’s program director in December 2022.

Alzheimer’s Fantasy in the Key of G by Kirsten Critz Levy ’74 is no traditional medical memoir. Levy embraces past, present, and future, mixing reality and imagination, to explore the confusing nature of her mother’s illness.

The relationship between Judaism and humor has been analyzed extensively over the years, including by none other than Sigmund Freud. In the years since then, of course, Jewish humor has evolved dramatically. Just imagine what Freud would have made of Seinfeld or Broad City .

What do you find when you cross one calculating entrepreneur, an overworked ceramist, a vengeful ex-wife, and an enterprising young woman in New York City? That would be The Sweet Spot —the eponymous bar where many paths cross in this sweet and funny look at the village it takes not only to raise a child, but also to navigate the pitfalls of success and failure.