Vanderbilt Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On football game days, you can find Don Orr, BE’56, at the same place he was some 50 years ago—overlooking Dudley Field and looking for a Vanderbilt victory. Orr led the Commodores to their first bowl game and first bowl win in the 1955 Gator Bowl with a 25–13 win over Auburn.  “It… Read More

Stitchery by Ethel Wright Mohamed (1906–1992)/Courtesy of Hazel L. Wilson and the Ethel Wright Mohamed Stitchery Museum, Belzoni, Miss. For most of my adult life, I have been fascinated by the old Southern style of shape-note singing—even though for many years I actually knew little about it and certainly never… Read More

Bobby Johnson: “Rather than having just a few talented star players, we’re pretty good at each position now.” The man responsible for leading the Commodore football team to its first postseason win since Sputnik orbited the earth is not necessarily doing the things one might expect after such a feat. He’s not… Read More

Preeg, Blatt. Photo credits: Daniel Dubois Women’s Tennis: Preeg, Blatt Undefeated in Fall Classic The women’s team closed out the fall season with six out of eight singles wins at the SEC Fall Coaches Classic held at the University of Alabama. Freshman Chelsea Preeg and junior Hannah Blatt won their respective brackets… Read More

 www.istockphoto.com Musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and use both the left and right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. Previous studies of creativity… Read More

Why do some bone cells knit together neatly following a fracture or amputation, while others grow wildly into soft tissue that can limit range of motion and cause problems with prosthetics? Dr. Erika Mitchell, assistant professor of orthopaedic trauma, has won a $1.3 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Read More

  © MCT/TIM LEE Each year some 10 million American households borrow money through payday loans. Payday lenders now have more storefronts than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. But a recent study shows that payday-loan applicants who received the quick cash after their first application were significantly more likely to file… Read More

Children born four months before the peak of cold and flu season have a greater risk of developing childhood asthma than those born at other times of year, according to new research from Vanderbilt. In the Tennessee Asthma Bronchiolitis Study, which involved an analysis of the birth and medical… Read More

Earth is protected from the onslaught of solar wind by the magnetosphere, an invisible shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds our planet. The northern and southern polar lights—the aurora borealis and aurora australis, respectively—are the only visible parts of the magnetosphere, but it is a critical… Read More