( ) This Education

What happens when you unleash an entrepreneurship evangelist on an education school? Meet Doug Lynch, the vice dean bent on making Penn GSE a hub for social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and next-generation educational reform.

When West Went East

Victor Mair first encountered the Bronze Age mummies of China’s Tarim Basin 23 years ago. He—and others—have been trying to figure out what those people were doing there ever since.

A Shelf Full of Resolutions

Five Penn authors offer challenges and inspiration to readers seeking better self-control, wiser conversations, age-appropriate outfits, meaningful reading, and wholesome eating.

PENN 2.0

The University is now active on all manner of social networks—and students, faculty, and staff members are even inventing new ones of their own.

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.

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.

Paternity Test

Between Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, which Founding Father did the most—by far—to promote and shape the future of public education in America? (Hint: He also published a periodical with the same name as this one.)

A Double Reward

A program at the School of Veterinary Medicine provides free surgery and follow-up care to shelter dogs with mammary tumors and matches them with willing owners, while also collecting data that could advance treatment of human breast cancers.

Art History Lessons

An exhibit at the Arthur Ross Gallery offers a revealing look at some treasures of the University’s art collection—but a walk around campus works, too.

Touching the Virtual Frontier

If you’ve never been stung by imaginary gunfire, sent a texture sample by email, or had a sleeve teach you how to move your arm, Katherine Kuchenbecker’s Haptics Lab is a Pandora’s box of tactile trickery and strange sensations.

Common Bonds

A dinner celebrating the newest class of Penn Athletic Hall of Famers featured laughter, tears, and a demonstration of the true meaning of the word teammate.

Alone Together

Vivian Seltzer has spent decades developing and testing a theory that she believes is “the first roadmap through adolescence.”

The History Buffer

Stephen Fried says we have Fred Harvey to thank for retail chains, Western tourism, and our model of exemplary customer service. He also suggests that his just-published book about the man and the “railroad hospitality empire” he embodied represents a new nonfiction genre: history buffed.

Vendor Defender

Street Vendor Project Director Sean Basinski can tell you all about the mouth-watering offerings available from New York’s food trucks and carts—and even more about the daily struggles faced by the immigrant men and women who operate them.

Degrees of Happiness

In Penn’s intensive one-year master’s program in applied positive psychology, working professionals from more than a dozen countries and a staggering range of fields come to learn how to “add to the tonnage of happiness in the world.”

The (Continuing) Tale of Troy

Ever since Heinrich Schliemann “discovered” Troy in the 1870s, archaeologists have searched for proof that Homer’s Iliad was based on historical fact. Penn Museum Deputy Director C. Brian Rose, who has led excavations at the site for more than two decades, may have found it.