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CLASS OF ’81 Uncommon Reader Over the past half-dozen years or so, it’s probably safe to say that Larry Dark C’81 has read more short stories than anyone else on the planet. Until recently, Dark was series editor for the annual O’Henry Prize Stories anthology, each year culling 20 stories from roughly 3,000 published in magazines from The New Yorker to obscure literary journals. Continued...

CLASS OF ’81 Shedding Light—and Shining Lasers—on Cancer Six years ago surgeon Joseph Friedberg EAS’81 had a 47-year-old patient who was diagnosed with lung cancer. It appeared to be a Stage I cancer, the kind that is normally treated with surgery. But when Dr. Friedberg opened up his patient’s chest in the operating room, he found something else, something that hadn’t shown up in any of the preoperative studies: the lining of the chest cavity “was just totally studded with little collections of cancer,” says Friedberg. It was Stage IIIB of what’s known as non-small cell lung cancer, meaning this patient would probably have no more than six to nine months to live. Continued...

CLASS OF ’67 Breaking in the Bard Act 1, Scene 1: A suburban elementary-school classroom 100 miles west of Verona. (Verona, New Jersey, that is.) One by one, the students stand up and hurl insults at their instructor, Diane Antonelli Herr CW’67 GEd’68. Continued...

CLASS OF ’92 Happy Meal, Funny Papers There aren’t many working cartoonists in the Mississippi Delta. Nor are there many Penn alumni who can put McDonald’s on their post-graduate resumÈs. Yet Mark Pett C’92 holds both distinctions. Continued...

CLASS OF ’82 Hooked on Glaciers “I’m really a city boy who would prefer to be sitting in a coffee bar somewhere,” confesses Jack Kohler C’82. Instead, the 43-year-old Philadelphia native finds himself 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle, probing glaciers, analyzing their contents, and pondering the implications for global warming. Continued...

CLASS OF ’65 Humble Athlete, Fierce Competition When the U.S. team for martial arts competes at the Summer 2004 Olympics, George Weiss W’65 will be among those stepping out into the ring. “Probably the most exciting thing for me is to be perceived as a world-class athlete,” says the Penn trustee, money manager, and philanthropist [“The Gift,” December 1997], who just turned 60. Continued...