July|August 2015
Volume 113, No. 6
FEATURES
The Link
As the nation’s first medical school celebrates its 250th anniversary, a look back at how generations of students, faculty, and alumni have served their country, delivered the finest patient care, and advanced medical research and education here in Philadelphia and around the world. By Dave Zeitlin
Bankoff’s Time
Is Vox Media CEO James Bankoff WG’96 a Henry Luce for the Digital Age? By Alyson Krueger
“One of Those Prodigious Victorian Polymaths”
Horace Howard Furness was a hopeful ghost-hunter, a Penn leader with a gift for stimulating donors’ “pocketbook nerve”—and the founder of modern Shakespeare scholarship. By Dennis Drabelle
Alumni Weekend 2015
Our annual photo essay. By Addison Geary
Pure to Applied
Unconventional mathematician Robert Ghrist rejects his field’s “hippie aesthetic” in favor of suits and ties, loves medieval literature, reversed the usual way of teaching calculus in his popular MOOC, and is using one of mathematics’ most abstract disciplines—algebraic topology—to solve real-world problems in robotics and sensor networks. By Kevin Hartnett
DEPARTMENTS
First Person: Essays
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGRAD Close quarters
ALUMNI VOICES A walker in the city
ELSEWHERE “First came the earthquake”
EXPERT OPINION Today’s playgrounds are no fun
Gazetteer: News & Sports
Powers to Class of 2015: “[T]o save the world, start by acting ‘as if’”
Student speaker at Wharton Commencement is fighting for his life
PREP aims to help ex-inmates become entrepreneurs
ICA gets $10 million gift for curatorial program
Risk factor: health-related websites track and share search data
In Young Quakers program, Penn athletes mentor middle-schoolers
Heard on Campus: “Are we living inside a pre-traumatic syndrome?”
Arts
THEATER Hal Prince C’48 Hon’71 gets Penn Alumni Creative Spirit Award
BOOKS A poet’s memoir of life after death. The Light of the World
FILM Penn Masala gets a Hollywood moment in Pitch Perfect 2
Alumni: Profiles
Peter O’Malley W’60 built a bridge to Japan with baseball
Andrew Weinreich C’90’s latest startup is a boot camp for entrepreneurs
Chhavi Ghuliani G’09 WG’09 helps women workers with HERfinance
: Events
: Notes