The McGill Sisters – Fashion Photography Pioneers

By Ellen Gilbert

"A flock of girls just arrived at arrived at our house,” Frank McLaughlin told friends on September 22, 1919. While not exactly “a flock,” the new arrivals were a multiple: identical twin girls named Frances and Kathryn. They grew up to be known as Kathryn Abbe and Frances McLaughlin-Gill, and became remarkably successful photographers who published pictures of high fashion models and celebrities like the young Jacqueline Bouvier in the late 1940s and 1950s. They passed away within months of each other in 2014. The McGill sisters were born in Brooklyn as a result of their having arrived two months early and “were snugly wrapped and placed near a warm oven,” according to a later account by Frances. She couldn’t have remembered, of course, and the affluent Connecticut upbringing that immediately followed suggests that the humble modesty of that description may not exactly have been accurate. Photographs of the twins as beautifully outfitted babies, young bathing beauties, visitors to 1939 World’s Fair, and later, as on-location professional photographers, show them to be as glamorous as any of the subjects they depicted over the years." more

Art by Design With David M. Sullivan

By Anne Levin

Portraits by Tom Grimes

It seems incongruous that a young designer juggling several high-end projects in Manhattan and other parts of the world is thriving without a website, computer, television, or access to social media. But David M. Sullivan, named “One to Watch” by Architectural Digest in 2013, is as enamored of an old world aesthetic as he is of contemporary ideas. Originally trained as a sculptor, Sullivan, who is tall and striking, runs a design/build architecture firm on Soho’s Crosby Street. It was the Architectural Digest article that caught the eye of one of his clients, for whom he is renovating a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park South. But nearly all of the work that has come Sullivan’s way has been by word of mouth. more

Digitizing Einstein

By Ellen Gilbert

Taking note of an important new resource: Einstein papers go digital

The December 2014 announcement of the launch of the Digital Einstein Papers (einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu) was greeted with huzzas from scientific circles as well as the popular media. “They have been called the Dead Sea Scrolls of physics,” began one article about the project by New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye. They will, he said, enable readers to “dance among Einstein’s love letters, his divorce file, his high school transcript, the notebook in which he worked out his general theory of relativity and letters to his lifelong best friend, Michele Besso, among many other possibilities.” more

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies Arrives on Broadway

By Taylor Smith

Photographs Courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company

Writer Hilary Mantel has claimed the Man Booker, Olivier, Tony, and BAFTA Awards for her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Working with dramatist Michael Poulton and director Jeremy Herrin, Mantel brings the story of Henry VIII and his lascivious Tudor Court to the New York Stage.

The play has already experienced several sold out runs in London’s West End and opened on April 9, 2015 on Broadway. A BBC TV version is also currently being filmed. The play is broken into two parts to reflect Mantel’s two separate novels; Wolf Hall serves as Part I and Bring Up the Bodies as Part II. more

Q&A With Alyson Eastman

Interview by Anne Levin

When 27-year-old Alyson Eastman launched her first collection last year at Soho’s Dune Studios, she won praise for her unique mix of Paris-inspired Romanticism and fresh Modernism. An oversized, champagne-colored sweater paired with a white, button-down blouse and long pleated skirt; and a matching, maroon-hued set of high-waisted, draped trousers and a cropped, short-sleeve blouse were among the popular pieces in the collection. Clean, strong silhouettes are the backbone of Eastman’s aesthetic. Her newest collection is for spring/summer 2015. Until recently she worked at the NoLiTa boutique Warm, but she is now solely focused on own design work. more

Talk of the Town and Gown

By Ellen Gilbert

"I have two words: John McPhee." The New Yorker editor David Remnick's ('81) explanation of what Princeton meant to him. 

"Your parents will remember your graduation almost as acutely, and with the same sense of wonder, as they remember the day you entered this world,” observed New Yorker editor David Remnick (’81) in his 2013 Class Day speech at Princeton University. “It’s an incredibly moving thing to see your child go into the word as a whole healthy person,” added the father of three. more

It’s Not Just The Disease – Oliver Sacks Wants Details

By Ellen Gilbert

"The hunger for narrative has been very strong for me, but also is a necessity for me,” observed Oliver Sacks speaking to an audience at the University of Warwick, where he was Visiting Professor in 2013.

The title of his talk, appropriately enough, was “Narrative and Medicine: The Importance of the Case History,” and Sacks, who has been referred to as “the poet laureate of medicine,” was making the case for the “complete integration of science and story telling.” more

Brooke Shields – On Motherhood and Her Latest Book

Interview by Kam Williams

Actress and author Brooke Shields is a familiar face within the entertainment industry. Starting her career at just 11 months, Shields went on to star in Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981). She also caused a sensation with her advertising campaign for Calvin Klein. Shields attended Princeton University in 1983, graduating in 1988. Following college, Shields played the title role in Suddenly Susan and appeared on Seinfeld. She has just published her latest memoir There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, written after the death of her mother, Teri Shields, in 2012. In it, Shields honestly examines her remarkable and often difficult relationship with her mother. Her previous memoir, Down Came the Rain, was a New York Times Bestseller. more

Isabel and Ruben Toledo: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

By Ellen Gilbert 

Photos Courtesy of The Toledo Archives

"I have never seen two other people with so close a symbiotic relationship." - Valerie Steele

They’ve been described as “fashion’s two-for-one couple;”  “creative alter-egos” who enjoy a “poetic partnership.”   What’s love got to do with it?  Everything. Now in their early 50s, Isabel and Ruben Toledo have been in the fashion/art/design business for nearly 30 years, and their work just gets more intriguing: beautifully executed, completely original, and, as a rule, quite unexpected. Their lives—how they look and dress, and the atelier where they live above their studio—seem to intersect seamlessly with their work. more

A Writer’s Faith

By Stuart Mitchner 

Joyce Carol Oates had been living in Princeton for 25 years when she published The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (Ecco 2003), one of two works she named when asked to mention books that were “close to her heart.” The author, who will be teaching her last class at Princeton University in the spring semester of 2015, also cited High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories 1966-2006 (Ecco 2006), which contains “my favorite stories of my own up to that time.”

New work published this month includes Lovely, Dark, Deep (Ecco), a collection of short fiction, and Prison Noir (Akashic), the second book she’s edited, after New Jersey Noir, for Akashic’s Noir Series. The Sacrifice, a novel due early in 2015, is set in a “racially troubled” New Jersey city in the late 1980s; she is also working on a memoir to be published in fall 2015. more

Q&A With Joyce Carol Oates

Interview by Stuart Mitchner

Recently asked to name his favorite living novelist by the New York Times Book Review, Larry McMurtry replied, “Joyce Carol Oates...a natural-born writer.” As John Updike once said of her, “If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed,” she would be “the person most entitled to it.” The National Book Award-winner, who has been teaching at Princeton University since 1978, will continue to make Princeton her home after her official retirement next summer.

UA: What are your plans after you teach your last class? Will you stay in the area? How would you describe the changes you’ve seen in the college community since you moved to Princeton? more

The Paris Review And The Pilgrim Souls Who Shaped It – Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton

By Linda Arntzenius

It’s been said that individuals only come of age with the demise of their parents. The same might be said of institutions. With the recent death of literary lion Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) and that of legendary journalist George Plimpton (1927-2003), the institution that is The Paris Review has surely come of age.

Founded in 1952 by Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes along with Donald Hall and Thomas Guinzburg, The Paris Review’s first issue appeared in the spring of 1953, with Plimpton replacing Humes as editor. TIME Magazine has called it “the biggest ‘little magazine’ in history” and who could disagree. more

Paul Krugman

Interview by Lynn Adams Smith

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman will be retiring from Princeton University in 2015 to join the faculty of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, as professor in the Ph.D. Program in Economics, where he will become a Distinguished Scholar at the Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center (LIS). He will continue writing his column and blog for The New York Times. more

A Look Inside of Jennifer’s Way

The Rising On East 10th Street

By Jamie Saxon

Photography by David Kelly Crow

Jennifer Esposito has fallen in love with jelly doughnuts -- twice.

Growing up in an Italian-American family in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, actor/entrepreneur Esposito was immersed in a childhood defined by food—and her ravenous hunger for it. She ate everything in sight—bagels, cake, spaghetti, zeppolis at the Italian street fair, jam dot cookies she baked with her sister at Christmas. “Food is very tied to emotion and remembering events,” she says. more

Kwame Anthony Appiah

By Ellen Gilbert

Scholar/Critic Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah recently left Princeton University, where he was a member of both the Department of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, to assume a position as Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University.  He received both a B.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Clare College, Cambridge University.   more

Bloomberg Philanthropies: Giving Away Mike’s Vast Fortune At Home and Abroad

By Ingrid W. Reed

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg concluded his unprecedented 12 years of governing New York City, his record was assessed in the local and national media, and by organizations that agreed and disagreed with his performance in office as well as in the political campaigns of his would-be successors. In spite of epithets like “Nanny-in-Chief,” the ultimate consensus was that he instituted modern management, safeguarded the health of the City’s inhabitants, initiated long-range plans to protect its environment, upgraded performance of schools, reformed transportation policies to include pedestrians and bicyclists, and invested in the arts for the public good. more

Raymond Kelly: Former Commissioner of the New York City Police Department and Lifelong New Yorker

Interview by Lynn Adams Smith

As Police Commissioner, you spearheaded the modernization of the New York City Police Department and created a counter-terrorism operation. How many planned terrorist attacks did your team avert, and are other urban cities adopting your model for a counter-terrorism operation?

In 2002, we created a counter terrorism bureau, the first and only one of its kind at the municipal level. To better assess threats coming from overseas, we established an overseas intelligence liaison program, in which we stationed NYPD detectives in eleven foreign cities, such as London, Tel Aviv, Toronto, and Amman. But unlike federal intelligence offices overseas, the NYPD’s detectives are embedded with each country’s police forces, which affords them access and ability to respond quickly.  more

Brainstorm Digital: Crafting Magic In The Digital Editing Room

By Ilene Dube

The world we see on the silver screen begins in the minds of directors, writers and producers. Creating that world so the rest of us can see it is no easy task. It requires complicated visual effects that, if effective, are “invisible.” We, the viewer, aren’t supposed to think about any of this, we just believe in the magic. Digital effects incorporate still photography, matte painting and computer-generated imagery to create environments that look realistic but would be dangerous, costly, or simply impossible to capture on film. more

It’s All About Attitude With Fashion-Forward Swimwear Designer Malia Mills

By Taylor Smith

Hawaii-born, Brooklyn-based swimsuit designer Malia Mills has a message for all women this summer – stop worrying! With a fit that has been likened to the best lingerie brands, Malia’s separate swimwear tops and bottoms will flatter every woman’s unique body shape and size. In fact, her swimwear is so well-fitting, that you may be tempted to use the beach as your own personal runway. more

Standing Up For Mothers Everywhere: Christy Turlington Burns and “Every Mother Counts”

By Lynn Adams Smith

Images Courtesy of Every Mother Counts

Fashion model Christy Turlington Burns has represented some of the biggest names in fashion such as Calvin Klein and Versace. Most recently, she has devoted much of her time, energy, and passion towards the organization she founded, Every Mother Counts, a campaign to end preventable deaths caused by pregnancy and childbirth around the world.  more

Simon Doonan, the Classy Iconoclast New York Needs

By Jessica Gross

Call Simon Doonan's style unconventional, punky, iconoclastic, irreverent, humorous, startling - but don't call it campy.

I love camp, but try to avoid anything that is ‘campy,’” says Doonan. “It might sound like splitting hairs, but there is a huge difference between real camp—a la Susan Sontag—and ‘campy,’ which tends to mean predictably tacky. High camp—like Liberace, Carmen Miranda and La Lupe and Oscar Wilde—is the lie that tells the truth. It’s a beautiful thing.” more

Richard Gere and Carey Lowell Share Their Love of Yoga at the Bedford Post Inn

By Anne Levin

You don’t have to be an avid practitioner of yoga to visit the Bedford Post Inn. But it seems a shame, somehow, to stop at this bucolic setting and not take advantage of the Yoga Loft, a light-filled former barn that overlooks a zen garden. And for those who spend a night in one of the inn’s eight rooms, a free yoga class is part of the deal.

Opened in 2007 by husband-and-wife actors Richard Gere and Carey Lowell and partner Russell Hernandez, the inn is known as much for its restaurants and related comforts as it is for its unique yoga program. Only a few years after opening, the Bedford Post Inn was named a member of the prestigious Relais & Chateaux organization of boutique hotels. more