Famine Fighters
It’s high noon on an unforgiving August day, storm clouds blotting out the bright blue sky, the sun a source of malice and spite. Steve Long, British-born and a boyish 71, takes the Illinois...
The Big Picture: Moon Dance
Nov. 18, 2021 was a marvelous night for a moon dance. A partial lunar eclipse of this length and magnitude had not occurred since 1440 and won’t happen again until Feb. 8, 2669. The...
My Alma Mater: Home Among the Murals
There will always be a few places in my life that I will never forget. La Casa Cultural Latina at the University of Illinois is one of them. When I arrived on campus in...
Taboo Buster
Dr. Nicole Williams, ’97 LAS, ’97 LAS, doesn’t get mad—she gets motivated. When a guidance counselor suggested that she consider becoming a nurse instead of a doctor, Williams doubled down on her studies, earned...
UIAA Speaker Series: Russian Invasion of Ukraine
On February 24, President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation,” launching airstrikes across Ukraine and ordering Russian troops to begin a ground invasion. Since then, over 4 million Ukrainians have fled their country,...
Alumni Interview: Karen Layng
The Seventh Circuit Bar Association was founded in 1951. But it had never had a woman president before me, in 2001. If you go up to the ceremonial courtroom in the Dirksen Center, there’s...
Seeds of Success
Armed with a new-fangled device called a laptop that was “the size of a suitcase,” Jeanne Bailey, ’85 ACES, MS ’88 ACES, and her fellow ACES intern, Karen Bender, ’85 LAS, MS ’88 ACES,...
Fleming’s Man
The driving passion of Mike VanBlaricum’s life (one of them, anyway) sparked to life early in 1965 at the Apollo Theater’s Friday-night show in Princeton, Ill., a tiny town surrounded by cornfields about two...
Planet Hopping with Richard Powers
Through each of his 13 novels, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, ’78 LAS, MA ’80 LAS, has used the lenses of science, technology, history and the arts to explore what it means to be...
Kidney Sisters
Rachel Kindred Kesler, ’09 BUS, and Mandy Lockman Leib, MS ’09 MEDIA, played together as toddlers and attended grade school, high school and the U of I together. Now they live a block apart...
