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Compassion as an Action Verb

"How do we institutionalize compassion? If we are all products of our systems, how do we make these systems compassionate? Imagine police departments whose main focus is caring for the community, is compassion. What if, from the very beginning, compassion is the anchor for all our social institutions?"

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Weaponized Cells: A Sobering Message About the Virus

Lung researcher Dr. Camille Ehre felt like she was flying a drone over a dense forest, looking for poisonous apples on the ground or in the swaying trees. For more than a month, she piloted her powerful microscope over an area 12 millimeters in diameter populated by cells from the lungs’ airways. Zooming in and out, she hunted between and below their hairlike protrusions for the infectious, spiky orbs of COVID-19.

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Holding Onto Herself

For the first time in the almost two years since she began dating Alex Honnold, the most accomplished free solo climber in the world, she allows herself to think about all the things that could go wrong on El Capitan the next day — when Honnold would attempt to become the first person to climb Yosemite’s monolith with no ropes or safety gear.

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The Art of Perseverance

Students are incredulous when Walters proffers this deal. “You’re going to give me more time and a higher grade? What’s the catch?” But that’s how making and inventing works in the real world, he said. Like pumping gas in a Vermont winter, the first decisions you make often are not your best.

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Setting a Place at the Table for Grief

Only when Lennon Flowers could not lift her own broken body out of bed did she begin to feel the tidal wave of grief.

She had been going full speed at life for more than four years, becoming skilled at placing its disparate realities into their own tidy boxes: her packed Carolina schedule double majoring in international studies and political science in one; and in the other, her mother’s lengthy battle with lung cancer, with its treatments and questions and that word — terminal. The key to surviving it all was never to slow down, never to mix the boxes. Keep going, just keep going.

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Cake and Conversation

As writer Bekah Brunstetter shows throughout her funny and moving play,  The Cake, reconciling traditional roots with progressive values in a polarized world is wrenching work. And while no one should expect to abandon the things that sustain her — be it waffle fries, her faith or the person who has captured her heart — what should be expected, the play shows, is conversation, with a generous dash of understanding and more than a pinch of heart.

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Step Into Those Shoes

They elbow one another for space in his mind: young black teenagers and their worried mothers, old white supremacists and their nervous wives, skeptical lawyers, gravelly voiced journalists and a slave who mailed himself to freedom inside a box.

Mike Wiley not only plays them all on stage — often more than two dozen characters in a single performance, with no costume changes and few props — the documentary theater actor and playwright rehearses himself to sleep at night with their dialogue, their humanity and inhumanity, strumming through his head.

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Look, Mom, No Cavities!

Free candy was everywhere Dr. Sindhura Citineni ’04 looked during her pediatric dental residency in New York, and it was all the good stuff that populates the best Halloween treat bags — the satisfying Snickers, the rich Reese’s Cup, the trusty Twix.