Bones Beneath the Tracks

In the summer of 1832, 57 Irish laborers died suddenly while building the first railroad in Pennsylvania. Alumnus Bill Watson and a host of other Penn people have been trying to find out what really happened. And they’re getting close.

Doing the Time Warp with Wax

The scene, Mangoes restaurant in Allentown; the time, Friday evening, October 29. The occasion was a Beaufest, honoring the late Beau Jones, the bassist for Wax who died this past September.

On Hearths, Ancient and Modern

In which the author takes a break from the rigors of her own ethnographic research in France’s Dordogne region to visit with eminent Penn archaeologist Harold Dibble as he plumbs the mysteries of early human and Neandertal behavior—and plots his next gourmet meal.

More Light

“I think that what is changing about my writing is my willingness to go darker so that I can come out with more light,” says memoirist and fiction writer Beth Kephart C’82. In her new novel, set in Philadelphia during the Centennial, a young woman contemplates suicide following the accidental death of her twin.