Articles

I had the dream again. I’ve been having it for years, about once a week. It goes something like this: I’m about to start my senior year at Wellesley. I’m always incredulous about it, like I woke up on the starting line of an Olympic sprint as the official is raising the pistol. Wait! How did three years go by so quickly? Why didn’t I appreciate them sufficiently? Why did I waste my time?

Historians' obsession with facts can make it difficult to enjoy even the most engaging historical fiction, like the dazzling Broadway show Suffs.

Eighteen years ago, I became a grandmother, opening depths of emotion I had never experienced before. A year later, when I saw the announcement of a 10,000-step-a-day challenge in the Portland [Maine] Press Herald, I decided to apply, writing an essay explaining that I wanted to extend my life so that I could see my grandson grow up.

For a while, I knew where they were. The flags, three of them, that were received when my parents and my older brother became naturalized citizens. I don’t know where they are now. I never had one, because I was born here.

At our 1973 commencement, 426 seniors listened as Shirley Chisholm wove her hard-fought “firsts” into a message for us about activism, laced with bold truths. That day, her powerful words propelled me into our generation’s revolutionary times. How would I live up to her charge?

At 24, it seems like a lot of overt “Picture Ahead!” signs are right behind me. Like a road trip, college has a beginning and a destination. After has a beginning, too. But then it’s a series of vaguely defined experiences that make me feel like a tourist taking a photo I could get a better version of on a postcard.

Super-recognizers are able to identify people, often out of context, even if they haven’t seen them for 10, 20, or even 30 years. Some uber-super-recognizers can recognize a face after having seen it only once, or when seeing only part of a face. Carolyn Kott Washburne ’65 says she’s good, but not that good.

I was cooking pasta in my Portland, Maine, apartment late on the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 25, after a few hours trying to make progress on a dataset for a story on pharmacies. At 8:29...

At her 50th reunion, an alumna remembers what it was like to be part of the largest cohort of Black students ever admitted to Wellesley.