Blog Articles

Screen Breakers

Screen BreakersHave a meeting to run? When Zoom gets tiresome or you’re trying to build a team online, finding a way to connect the people in the boxes is important.

Four students from the Human-Centered Design course taught last spring at The Claremont Colleges’ Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity—popularly known as the Hive—spent the summer creating icebreakers for the Zoom age

The result is the Screen Breakers website at meltbreakshatter.com, where anyone can search for icebreakers with names like Shakedown, Fail Test and Lemonade. At Pomona, Orientation leaders introduced the activities to new students as a way to begin to create community among people who have never met in person. The site’s creators hoped faculty and people beyond campus will use them as well.

“We realized that Orientation was such a big part of our first-year experience; so our idea was: What if you introduced Orientation to every class?” says Yurie Muramatsu ’22, the project leader on a team with website designer Abdul Ajeigbe ’22, Riley Knowles PZ ’22 and Eda Topuz CMC ’22.

Bookmarks Fall 2019

Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and ObsessionsSavage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsessions

Rachel Monroe ’06, hailed as one of the “queens of nonfiction,” by New York Magazine, pens the stories of four women’s obsession with true crime and explores our collective morbid fascination.


Frost Fair DanceFrost Fair Dance

Dancer and poet Celestine Woo ’89 offers a book of poems that, as one editor praised, “glide across the page” —an apt description as Woo uses modern dance and movement as themes throughout her work.


Best Practices in Educational TherapyBest Practices in Educational Therapy

Ann Parkinson Kaganoff ’58, a board-certified educational therapist and educator for six decades, offers strategies and solutions for novice and veteran educational therapists alike.


Doing Supportive PsychotherapyDoing Supportive Psychotherapy

John Battaglia ’80, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, has written a guide for learners and professionals alike on how to forge meaningful, impactful therapeutic relationships with patients.


One Small SunOne Small Sun

The poetry of Paulann Petersen ’64 takes readers from Oregon to India, taps into memory and tells the tales of an aging woman’s life.


The Road Through San JudasThe Road Through San Judas

The inspiration for this novel by Robert Fraga ’61 came from his time as a volunteer in Northern Mexico, where he learned of the conflict between landless Mexican farmers and a wealthy Juárez family who wanted their land.


Can’t Stop Falling: A Caregiver’s Love StoryCan’t Stop Falling: A Caregiver’s Love Story

In a memoir written to inspire people helping loved ones who are suffering, W C Stephenson ’61 tells the story of his wife’s rare neurological disease and his role as her caregiver.


Forty Years a ForesterForty Years a Forester

Professor of Environmental Analysis Char Miller edited an annotated edition of the memoir of Elers Koch, a key figure in the early days of the U.S. Forest Service with a major role in building relationships and policies that made the bureau the most respected in the federal government.

From the Perspective of a Trilobite

Interim Dean of the College Bob Gaines holds a fossil of elrathia kingii, more commonly known as a trilobite.

Interim Dean of the College Bob Gaines holds a fossil of elrathia kingii, more commonly known as a trilobite.

Interim Dean of the College and Professor of Geology Bob Gaines threw a geological twist into the College’s opening convocation on the first day of the fall 2019 semester by presenting a very small but very old gift to each member of the entering class. The gift—a 504-million-year-old fossil trilobite from the Wheeler Shale in western Utah, was both a memento of the students’ first day of classes at Pomona and a focal point for his welcoming speech, which focused on time, on both the geological scale and the human scale of the four-year college journey upon which each of the new members of the Class of 2023 has now embarked.

“What you hold,” Gaines explained, “is an animal half a billion years old. In Earth terms, this beast is a mere youngster. It appeared after 89 percent of Earth’s history had already elapsed. The last 500-plus million years—which constitute the entire history of complex life on Earth, represent only the most recent 11 percent of Earth’s history and a far, far lesser proportion of the history of our universe.”

After tracing the very long journey each of those tiny fossils had taken through ancient seabeds, rock formations, geological uplifts and ice ages to the present day, he quipped: “So, this is the perspective from which I speak when I remind you that four years is actually a relatively brief expanse of time.”

On the Fringe

On the first day of her Devising Theatre class last spring, when Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance Jessie Mills proposed the idea of developing a student-produced play as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, five of her students leapt at the opportunity. The festival—an open-access celebration of theatre in L.A.—brings hundreds of new plays to professional theatres each summer. And so, for one week in June at the Broadwater Black Box theatre, Ally Center ’21, Roei Cohen ’21, Alex Collado ’20, Noah Plasse ’21 and Abdullah Shahid ’19 brought to life onstage their own serio-comedy, titled How to Adult. Recent graduates Rachel Tils ’19 and Jonathan Wilson ’19 were also involved as directors.

The students not only had to create their own play; they also had to produce it, including negotiating a contract with a venue for dates and times and setting up and breaking down their own sets. “Creating and producing this work is truly at the center of the liberal arts,” says Mills. “These students pulled from a myriad of sources, experiences and materials to collaboratively synthesize their ideas into one cohesive vision.”

Award-Winning Food

fishTry not to drool when you read the menu that won Pomona College chefs Amanda Castillo, John Hames, Marvin Love and Angel Villa a silver medal in a recent national cooking competition.

First course: branzino with kohlrabi slaw, ginger-scented maitake fish broth and tempura snap peas.

Second course: pork belly and shrimp with herb-roasted mashed potatoes, tomato purée and roasted corn.

Third course: vegan almond cake with caramelized peaches, bionda ganache, raspberry sauce and cashew and popcorn brittle.

Buffet course: Korean spiced tri-tip with moong bean pancakes, pickled cauliflower and jasmine rice.

The event was the team competition sponsored by the American Culinary Federation during its 25th Annual Chef Culinary Conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, last June.

Generationally Speaking

Esther Brimmer with her father, Andrew Brimmer, at the 1983 commencement exercises.

Esther Brimmer with her father, Andrew Brimmer, at the 1983 commencement exercises.

Last May, when foreign policy expert and former member of the Obama administration Esther Brimmer ’83 stepped up to the podium in Marston Quad as the featured speaker for the 2019 commencement exercises, she was following in some big footsteps—her father’s. Andrew Brimmer, then governor of the Federal Reserve, was Pomona’s featured commencement speaker in 1983, the year his daughter graduated from Pomona. In her address, Esther Brimmer recalled her father’s advice to her: “Run with the swift. … Whatever you do, you should try to learn from the best.”

 

 

Esther receives an honorary degree at Pomona’s 2019 Commencement

Esther receives an honorary degree at Pomona’s 2019 Commencement

Beyond Writing

Pomona College’s Writing Center isn’t just about writing any more.

Last summer, the center received a $250,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to expand its mission to support oral and visual communication as well. The two-year grant will fund programs in which students can hone not only their writing skills but also their speaking ability and their competency in dealing with visual communications in an increasingly image-driven world.

“Through the new center, we propose a transformative reconceptualization of how we understand literacy and how we teach key forms of communication in the 21st century,” says Kara Wittman, director of college writing and assistant professor of English. “Flexibility, thoughtfulness and deliberateness in all these areas will ensure that all Pomona graduates leave the College able to write and speak effectively, advocate compellingly and have an impact on the real-world issues they care about.”

The new Center for Speaking, Writing and the Image will be a leader among liberal arts colleges in supporting written, oral and visual literacies at a single site.

Fulbright Fellows

Nine Pomona College recipients of Fulbright fellowships boarded airplanes this fall, headed everywhere from Indonesia to Lithuania. Four others declined the award   to pursue other plans. Here’s the list of new Fulbright fellows, with their majors and destinations:

  • Natasha Anis ’19, English major, teaching in Indonesia
  • Ellena Basada ’16, English major. teaching in Germany
  • Sarah Binau ’19, cognitive science major, teaching in Brazil.
  • Tiffany Mi ’19, anthropology and French major, teaching in Spain
  • Andrew Nguy ’19, Asian studies major, studying contemporary tea culture in China
  • Jessica Phan ’19, molecular biology major, studying the chemistry of addiction in Portugal
  • Megan Rohn ’18, international relations major, teaching in Lithuania
  • Ivan Solomon ’19, international relations and Middle Eastern studies major, teaching in Morocco
  • Laura Zhang ’19, cognitive science major, teaching in Taiwan

Smart Summer Reads From 12 Pomona College Professors

These books written and edited by 11 Pomona College faculty members this year aren’t the lightest summer reads… but they could definitely land on the shortlist of the smartest.

Read the Smart Summer Reads From 12 Pomona College Professors story on the Pomona’s website.

Last of the Yellow Journalists

Cartoon sketch of Bill ClintonThere was a time when editorial cartooning was a job a young artist could aspire to. In 1900, there were an estimated 2,000 editorial cartoonists at work in the United States. They still numbered in the hundreds by the late ’70s, when—at the start of my career—I briefly became one of them.

It’s probably just as well that I moved on to other things. Since then, the American editorial cartoonist has become an endangered species, right up there with the pygmy elephant. The total in  the U.S. is reportedly below 25 now, and falling. Just in the last two years, two Pulitzer Prize-winners—Nick Anderson at the Houston Chronicle and Steve Benson at the Arizona Republic—were dumped. In June, following an uproar about a cartoon full of anti-Semitic tropes, the international edition of The New York Times followed the example of its national counterpart and fired its last two cartoonists—neither of whom, by the way, had drawn the offending cartoon.

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: Iran now boasts more editorial cartoonists than the U.S.

I thought for a while that editorial cartooning would be my life’s work. Old-timers like Herblock and Conrad were giving way to subtle, innovative artists like Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly. Strip cartoonists like Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau were blurring the line between the Sunday comics and the editorial page. These young guns were transforming the medium—putting irony and satire, artistic style and sly visual humor ahead of blunt-force commentary. It was an exciting time to be an editorial cartoonist.

And I loved the actual process of creating a cartoon—the immersion in the news, the joyous flash of inspiration, the inner howls of laughter as I did my preliminary sketches, the knowledge of famous faces that allowed me to draw Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton without conscious thought and the feeling of working without a net each time I wielded my ink brush to create the final product.

Over the years, I must have done hundreds of drawings of Clinton, then governor of the state where I lived, including one, shown here, that was completed shortly after he was first elected governor at the tender age of 32. It’s without a doubt the most prescient thing I’ve ever produced.

Part of the fun of it was the pure joy of poking fun at powerful people. I used to joke that we editorial cartoonists were the last of the yellow journalists—the only purveyors of the news who still had license to use caricature and exaggeration to distill complicated situations down to a single, simplistic metaphor. Our work was full of open mockery —an artform that intentionally stretched the limits of polite discourse.

And that was probably a big part of its undoing. In a time of heightened sensitivities and social media mobs, caricature has become a dangerous sport. As Australian cartoonist Mark Knight (whose caricatures are uniformly brutal) learned when tennis player Serena Williams’s husband accused him of a racist depiction of her, there’s a fine line between the kind of harsh visual exaggeration that caricatures depend upon and the perpetuation of cruel stereotypes. Add in the decline of newspapers as a profitable industry, and it’s not surprising, I suppose, that cartoonists have become, at best, expendable and, at worst, potential liabilities.

Given all of that, the number of young American artists who now aspire to become the next great editorial cartoonist is probably on a par with the number who plan to repair steam engines. But while the bell is clearly tolling for American editorial cartooning, I have to admit that I was wrong when I said we were the last of the yellow journalists. Yellow journalism, I’m afraid, is viciously alive and well on social media and talk radio—minus, of course, the redeeming humor.