A solar-powered Coachella? That’s a future that alternative rocker Skylar Funk ’10 hopes to see one day. Although there isn’t a solar generator that is big enough to power the Coachella main stage yet—things are moving in that direction, says Funk.

As students in the environmental analysis program, Funk and classmate Merritt Graves ’10 became passionate about environmental issues, and since founding Trapdoor Social together, they have combined their love of music with their sustainability activism. After driving around the country to play shows, Funk became frustrated with all the gas they were burning. So, in 2015, the band acquired a solar trailer that provides them with more than enough power for their concerts. “The real treat is that there is no loud generator which disrupts the whole sonic experience of the festival,” says Funk.

In 2016, Trapdoor Social launched the fully solar-powered Sunstock Solar Festival in Los Angeles, a zero-waste event that also raises money for worthy causes. He adds, “We need a place, we need a positive space to cross-pollinate and to grow our movement and to be a community.”

Previous (Manga)

Next (Women in Mathematics)

Sales of the Japanese graphic novels and comic books known as manga have been falling inside Japan itself since the mid 1990s—a fact that Carl Horn ’91, manga editor for Dark Horse Comics, attributes to the long decline in the nation’s population—especially at the young end of the spectrum. “Even though Japan has the deserved reputation as a country where adults read comics, the top-selling titles are your Dragon Balls, your Narutos, your One Pieces, your Attack on Titans,” Horn says. “In other words, manga that were made for younger readers.”

That means the future of the manga industry is increasingly outside Japan, Horn says. And for American readers, that offers both pluses and minuses.

On the plus side, manga creators are starting to become more accessible to their foreign readers—appearing slightly more often at conventions and responding on social media. On the minus side, however, Horn worries that their stories may lose some of their Japanese flavor.

“The fans don’t necessarily want to see manga becoming ‘more American,’ whatever that means,” he says, adding that for most manga readers, the cultural differences are an important part of the attraction. “However, what they would like to see, I think, are more personal connections with the creators—that is, Japanese creators getting more involved with their English-language readership.”

One thing he doesn’t think will change is the special attraction manga holds for people who feel like outsiders. “Manga is a medium where people who wouldn’t be cast as heroes in traditional American stories, can be,” he says. “You don’t necessarily have to look the part. People considered oddballs, you know, people who dress weird, people with weird hair—in manga they can still be the heroes of an action epic.”

Previous (Movies)

Next (Alt Rock)

She’s smart. She’s funny. She’s a 20-something-year-old Saudi woman growing up on the Moon. That’s Jazz Bashara, the protagonist of Andy Weir’s newest sci-fi book, Artemis, and a soon-to-be-made feature film by producer Aditya Sood ’97.

“She resembles [The Martian’s] Mark Watney in spirit and intellect but is otherwise a completely fresh hero for the 21st century,” explains Sood, president of Genre Films, the production company behind the hit films The Martian, Deadpool and Deadpool 2.

This newest project for Sood is part of the growing change in Hollywood that Sood is excited to be a part of. “The biggest thing happening in entertainment right now is that there’s more and more options for viewers than ever before—the era of one-size-fits-all is going away,” says Sood. “You’re seeing that manifest itself in an increase of representation, in terms of the stories that are being told, the people telling the stories, and the people representing those characters on screen.”

“The superhero world—movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther and the upcoming Captain Marvel—the success of those movies is no surprise. The smartest filmmakers and studios are getting ahead of this.”

Sood adds that there’s still a long way to go but audiences will continue to enjoy more diverse films because they continue to demand stories that reflect themselves.

He wants Pomona readers to heed his words: “I want people who read this, whether they’re students or alumni, who haven’t thought before that [the entertainment industry] speaks to them because of their backgrounds, that we need more writers, executives and producers who come from diverse backgrounds who can tell these stories authentically.”

Previous (Writers)

Next (Manga)

In films, they’re famously known as continuity errors. But these annoying little bloopers also creep into novels. For example, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a griffin first seen tied to a tree later finds itself tied to a fence.

While writing his 900-page tome Sacred Games, novelist Vikram Chandra ’84 found the task of avoiding such errors maddening. Keeping accurate track of his huge cast of characters over the novel’s 60-year span was a constant struggle. “It just feels like doing manual bookkeeping with a goose quill and a double ledger,” he says.

Certain that someone must have designed software to help, he did some research and found to his surprise that no such software existed. So, after finishing his novel, Chandra—who is also a programmer and self-described “geek”—decided to create his own.

“I did a couple of attempts myself,” he says, “and then realized that putting everything into a database or spreadsheet didn’t really solve the problem, because there was no connection to the text. You still had to remember every time you made a change in the text to update your data, and the other way around. So then, my question was, ‘Why not attach knowledge to text? Why can’t we keep the text and information about the text in sync, as it were?’ And that turns out to be a much, much harder problem, for various technical reasons.”

Over the following decade, the seemingly insoluble problem continued to prey on his mind. Then one night, while he was lying in bed, the answer suddenly came to him.

And so, in 2016, he joined forces with an expert programmer, Borislav Iordanov, who took his raw insights and converted them into actual code. Together they founded a company named Granthika—a Sanskrit noun for “narrator.” Their software—also called Granthika—is now patent-pending and in beta testing, and they hope to release a version for fiction writers in early 2019. Future versions may be geared to the needs of other types of writers, from journalists to scientists.

Chandra explains: “The idea is that you’ll write, ‘Jack met Mary at a café,’ and the software, if you want it to, will prompt you, saying, ‘Is Jack a person? Is Mary a person? Is café a location? Does this entire sentence represent an event?’ When you say yes to those questions, you’re creating knowledge, facts that are attached to the text at a very intimate level.”

Since writers may not want to be interrupted while writing, they can also turn that function off and go back to it later, but the final result is the same—a collection of metadata, linked directly to the text itself, to help the writer maintain the illusion of reality.

Recently, as Sacred Games was being transformed into a TV series on Netflix, Chandra wished Granthika had been available when he was writing it. To trace all of the story’s complex, interwoven timelines, the series’ creators had to buy dozens of copies of the book, transfer the info to index cards and arrange them on a wall. With Granthika, he says, “what we’re able to do is have a menu choice that says, ‘Export Ontology,’ and when you hit that, it just takes all the knowledge of the work that you created and puts it in a package so that somebody else could then import it.”

But Chandra’s vision doesn’t end there. Granthika also has him thinking about how the interactive nature of this new software might lead, someday, to the creation of new forms of interactive or multimedia books.

“Since we’re making it so easy to attach metadata to text, our dream is that we’ll be able to make it possible for a writer to say, at the time of writing, ‘When the reader reaches this sentence and goes past it, dissolve into this moving image that will last for three seconds,’ and so, you see a bird walking across the beach, right? So in a sense, what you’re doing is programming a book as much as you’re writing it. And a reader is able to interact with the book—let’s say, adjust reading difficulties, or read the same novel from the point of view of different characters, all that good science-fiction-fantasy stuff we’ve been dreaming about for the last two or three decades.”

Previous (Funerals)

Next (Movies)

From Pokémon to the Marie Kondo decluttering craze, Japanese culture quickly crosses the Pacific. Costly funerals for furry friends could be next.

In Japan, mourners attend services for dogs, cats, even hamsters or birds, sitting solemnly during ceremonies officiated by Buddhist priests. Cremated remains are buried in vast pet cemeteries or stored in mausoleums that look like huge stacks of school cubbyholes, filled with flowers or small offerings of food for the afterlife. Granite markers abound, along with signs with words such as “amour,” “never forget,” and “love hurts” in various languages.

“This is big money. Somebody’s spending thousands,” says Pomona College Sociology Professor Jill Grigsby, who has conducted research on family life and animals in Japan while teaching in the Associated Kyoto Program, a joint effort of Pomona and a group of other colleges.

In the past, Japanese pets might have been buried in a yard, Grigsby says. “Now, many fewer people live in single-family homes.” Another factor might be the Japanese reverence for ceremonies.

Demographics may play a role as well. “Part of my explanation is that when you have very low fertility—and right now in the United States we’re experiencing extremely low fertility, and Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates of any country; so does Korea. People still want to create families; so they think of other ways of putting families together, which means friends, but also pets.”

Pet cemeteries exist in the U.S., but not so much formal funerals. Yet the family as it sees itself is sometimes depicted in stick figures on the back of an SUV: Mom, Dad, two kids and sometimes a dog and cat. “Animals really are members of the family,” Grigsby says.

Previous (Outdoor Recreation)

Next (Writers)

Move over Bear Grylls. Make way Ron Swanson. Take a back seat Naked and Afraid.

Change is coming to the world of outdoor recreation, says Martin Crawford, director of Pomona’s Outdoor Education Center (OEC). There will still be plenty of room for the extreme outdoorsmen like Grylls and the mustachioed hunters like (the fictional Parks and Recreation character) Swanson, but there’s also a growing space being made for women, people of color, queer and trans folk and other groups who in the past, have not felt comfortable or welcomed in the outdoors.

Making the outdoors experience inviting for all Pomona students has been a central part of the OEC’s mission for years now—and Chris Weyant, coordinator at the OEC, says the world of outdoors recreation is finally catching on, at least in higher education. The OEC, which coordinates the Orientation Adventure (OA) experience for all incoming new students and other outdoor education opportunities throughout the year, recruits OA leaders that represent the diversity of the new class, offers a variety of adventures at different levels, and brings in guest speakers from organizations like Latino Outdoors and Outdoor Afro. Last fall, they even added tree climbing (that’s right, tree climbing—not rock climbing) to their Outdoor Leadership class in an effort to draw a wider net of students.

Crawford says it’s important to rethink what the outdoors offers in terms of recreation and that means changing our own perception of how recreational outdoor spaces are used: “If you don’t already feel comfortable in the outdoors, you’re going to think ‘Oh, this is not for me’ and you just keep on driving [away from a state park]. But as we start changing what you do there and how we recreate, it’ll slowly start to change.”

Previous (Thrill Seekers)

Next (Funerals)

When Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974, stunts were kind of an oddity. “Now, that’s every Red Bull commercial,” says Grayson Schaffer ’01, editor at large at Outside Magazine and a co-founder at the production company Talweg Creative. After all, he points out, when the public has seen it all, the only way to grab the limelight is to up the ante, usually with a brand paying the way.

Schaffer, who has covered people doing everything from climbing Everest without oxygen to kayaking down waterfalls, is frequently interviewed by national media about the world of adventure, but he knows he hasn’t seen it all—not yet. As a recent example of death-defying acts that push the limits, he points to climber Alex Honnold’s ascent of the sheer vertical wall of El Capitan without safety gear. “You’re bringing no equipment,” he says, “just your climbing shoes and a chalk bag, and you end up climbing 2,500 feet with no ropes, no way to retreat, no way to bail out—I mean, that’s pretty crazy.”

That’s an extreme case, but among people of means, Schaffer believes, the quest for thrills is becoming the ultimate expression of conspicuous consumption. “You’re seeing the benchmarks of what people view as wealth and success shifting,” he says. “Instead of a fancy car and a big mansion, people are spending huge sums of money to be able to show off an enviable Instagram feed.” Enabling such thrill-seeking, he says, will be the growing ranks of highly skilled professional guides who can provide a measure of safety for people trying their hand at everything from backcountry skiing to summiting Mount Everest.

Previous (Ballroom Dance)

Next (Outdoor Recreation)

A world transfixed by TV shows like “Dancing with the Stars” will soon be captivated by a new look, as more gender-fluid dancers take the floor, says Denise Machin, assistant director of the Smith Campus Center and director of The Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company.

“The future of ballroom dance is one that finds ways to stay relevant to new dancers, expanding conceptions of what a ballroom dancer looks like in body type, gender presentation and ethnicity,” Machin says.

The Claremont Colleges’ dance troupe, which just turned 20 years old, is known for its progressiveness, Machin notes, including actively placing students in dance roles not historically associated with their presenting genders.

While some colleges are actively resisting these new dance moves, and it may take a while for them to reach the small screen or the professional dance floor, Machin says inclusivity of gender expression is a centerpiece of the ballroom dance program at Pomona, adding: “Institutions like Pomona are educating a generation of artists that expect a critical and interdisciplinary approach.”

Previous (Etiquette)

Next (Thrill Seekers)