Summer 2009

  • Total Immersion

    Total Immersion

    A member of the Vanderbilt women’s swimming team, Austin Langley juggles swim practice and studies in both music and pre- veterinary medicine. Austin Langley is one busy young woman. The rising junior, who calls Burlington, N.C., home, is a musical arts major at the Blair School of Music with a… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Against All Odds

    Against All Odds

    Wirth “Welcome to Germany. Just three weeks until you’ll be in Bosnia,” I was told by my battalion’s personnel sergeant upon my 1993 arrival in Frankfurt. I never imagined then how my longing to experience the adventures of transformational Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would lead me through the dense… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Full House

    Full House

    “How are you holding up?” “What about the loud music?” “Do students knock on your door at midnight?” “Do parents call you?” Reflecting on my first year as a faculty head of house in The Commons for first-year students, these are a reasonably representative sample of the questions I’ve fielded… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Narrative Drive

    Narrative Drive

    I started writing stories because I was lonely. I wish there were more artistic and noble reasons that I put pen to paper, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted people to kiss me and I had the unfounded notion that, if I wrote a good enough… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • From the Editor: Better Off and Better

    From the Editor: Better Off and Better

    Several years ago I had the chance to hear popular Vanderbilt philosophy professor John Lachs deliver a talk titled “The Human Race: Both Better Off and Better” to a small suburban group of perhaps 20 people. Lachs opened his presentation by telling the group that he hoped the evening would… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Letters to the Editor

    Letters to the Editor

    Health Care, Society and Personal Responsibility I very much enjoyed reading “Invisible Nation” by Dr. John Sergent, BA’63, MD’66 [Spring 2009 issue, VJournal]. The doctor argues that “decent health care is a right of citizenship” and compares, as moral equivalents, segregation based on race with denial of… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • 1,000 Words

    1,000 Words

    Wayne Coyne, frontman for The Flaming Lips, works the crowd from inside his signature plastic bubble during the psychedelic rock band’s headliner performance at Rites of Spring. “I did not feel like I was standing on Alumni Lawn sandwiched between Alumni and Tolman halls. Rather, I felt like I was… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Game Face

    Game Face

    Mark Loomis, BA’89 “When I was making my 3,000th copy on the second day of my first job, I realized the one course they didn’t teach at Vanderbilt was how to fix the copier,” says Mark Loomis. That first job, with ABC Sports, saw Loomis running errands, making lots of… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • The Business of Love

    The Business of Love

    Jasbina Ahluwalia, BA’91, MA’92 Making time for personal relationships while juggling the demands of a busy professional life led attorney Jasbina Ahluwalia down a new career path several years ago. The second-generation Indian American is founder of Intersections Matchmaking, which caters to single South Asian professionals nationwide. “Finding time for… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Contributors for the Summer 2009 Issue

    Contributors for the Summer 2009 Issue

    Kevin Wilson Kevin Wilson, BA’00, is author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories (2009, ECCO/Harper Perennial). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere, and twice has been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Vanderbilt Magazine Staff – Summer 2009

    Vanderbilt Magazine Staff – Summer 2009

    Editor GayNelle Doll Art Director and Designer Donna DeVore Pritchett Editorial Associate Editor and Advertising Manager Phillip B. Tucker Arts & Culture Editor Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81 Class Notes and Sports Editor Nelson Bryan, BA’73 Photography and Imaging Assistant Director,… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Conjoined Twins Separated in First-Ever Surgery at Vanderbilt

    Conjoined Twins Separated in First-Ever Surgery at Vanderbilt

    At any moment during the eight-hour surgery, 14 or more personnel were working around the babies. Three-month-old conjoined twins Keylee Ann and Zoey Marie Miller were separated April 7 during a complex eight-hour operation at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The surgery, carried out by… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • University Mourns Loss of Chancellor Heard

    University Mourns Loss of Chancellor Heard

    As Vanderbilt Magazine was going to press, we received word of the death of Vanderbilt’s beloved fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, who led Vanderbilt from 1963 until 1982. Much admired by students and faculty alike, he was adviser to three U.S. presidents and chancellor at Vanderbilt during a time of enormous… Read More

    Aug 5, 2009

  • Virtual Vanderbilt: vuconnect.com

    Virtual Vanderbilt: vuconnect.com

    Aug 5, 2009