Newsmakers

Alumni making headlines around the world

When Deputy Inspector Brandon del Pozo ’96 was appointed in June as commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s Sixth Precinct, a jurisdiction that includes Greenwich Village, The Villager asked the philosophy major how he applies philosophy to police work. “Everything you do in policing has a moral as well as a legal dimension, whether you’re aware of it or not. It has to be grounded in solid principles,” said Del Pozo, who decided against a legal career because it was “too much mind, not enough hands.”

It was a meeting with Del Pozo that helped convince Sgt. Matthew Delaney ’99 of the 50th Precinct in the Bronx that the NYPD was a good fit for him as well. In his seven years on the force Delaney has worked in the intelligence division (like Del Pozo) and patrolled the Lower East Side, where his high school track skills helped him chase down several of the 300 suspects he arrested. Delaney is also a novelist—his first novel, Jinn, won an International Horror Guild award—and credits learning “copspeak” with becoming a better writer. “When you’re writing a complaint report, it gets condensed to a time and date of occurrence,” he told hometown MetroWest (Massachusetts) Daily News in June. “You’re describing a homicide in short, almost Jack London terms.”

Elsewhere on the police beat: Former Providence (R.I.) police chief Dean Esserman ’79 has resigned in the wake of a controversy over a party at his home celebrating his daughter’s high school graduation at which minors consumed alcohol. Esserman, who was profiled in the cover story of the July/August 2005 issue of DAM, said the controversy had become too much of a distraction to him, the city, the police department and his family. “I’m a father who loves my children,” he told WPRI.com. “Anything about my children is going to stay in my family, and how we deal with family matters is going to stay private. I’m not going to parent in public.”

Jake Winebaum ’81 has started close to a dozen businesses, including Business.com, which he co-founded and sold for $345 million in 2007. In a June Inc. magazine article titled “Becoming a Serial Entrepreneur,” he said the key ingredients needed to create a successful business are a great idea, sufficient capital and perseverance. “[I’m] not the M.B.A.-type, where I start with the market then figure out the idea,” he said. “I experience something, I think there’s a better way to do it, I come up with an idea around the better way to do it and then I see if there’s truly a market for that thing.” His latest venture, Brighter.com, enables patients to shop online for dentists and services. The idea was inspired by a conversation with his father-in-law, a retiree with no dental insurance who needed three crowns. “Fifty percent of Americans don’t have dental insurance and Americans are spending $45 billion a year without price information,” said Winebaum. “This looks like an interesting area.”

Lisa Friel ’79 was featured in Sex Crimes Unit, a documentary that premiered on HBO in late June. Friel, who was on DAM’s cover in July/August 2009, is the unit chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex-crime unit, which has more than 300 cases at any given time. Filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson told The New York Times that in covering the unit’s daily operations, she found Friel and the 40 senior district attorneys “were tenacious and compassionate and laser-focused. Yet they showed me their true humanity in surprising ways: obsessing about TV shows, cajoling cops, having babies, talking baseball. It’s odd that a film about sexual violence can be so full of laughter and joy and the infectious pride of doing good work.”

Injuries have prevented Craig Henderson ’09 from playing competitive soccer since his last game at Dartmouth in 2009, but that doesn’t mean the New Zealander’s career has been at a standstill. The Swedish club Mjallby signed him 18 months ago to a three-year professional contract, and he has been called up twice to the New Zealand national team. The 2008 Beijing Olympian was summoned most recently in June, but was unable to play in games against Mexico and Australia due to a hamstring tweak. “The knee is feeling great now,” the attacking midfielder, who has undergone three operations on his right knee in the past 18 months, told Stuff.co.nz in May. “It’s just a matter of getting the rest of the leg in football shape.”

Jennifer Leigh Warren ’77 earned rave reviews in June for her show, Diamonds are Forever: The Songs of Dame Shirley Bassey, a tribute to the British singer whose songbook includes such popular James Bond themes as “Goldfinger” and the show’s title song. “Looking glamorous and singing with some of the biggest and best pipes around, Warren wows her audience with as sensational a one-woman show as you’re likely to see all year,” gushed a reviewer for StageSceneLA.com.

Averil Spencer ’10 directed a four-week camp this spring for teenage girls ages 12 to 16 in the slums of Hyderabad, India. Camp VOICE enrolled 430 girls and taught them English and basic health skills as well as encouraging them to discuss educational aspirations and career prospects. “Girls from America are not going to be able to empower girls in India, but we can give them some tools to help them,” Spencer told The Wall Street Journal in June.

As Time pointed out in its July 11 issue, there has been an “unprecedented synergy” between Hollywood and toy manufacturers in recent years. Brian Goldner ’85, CEO of Hasbro Inc., has seen his company earn more than $1 billion in toy sales tied to Transformers films, which have taken in $1.5 billion-plus at the box office. Other Hasbro films include this summer’s Battleship; film versions of Ouija, Candy Land and Clue are also in the works. “The part of the toy industry that is supported by movies and other entertainment is growing dramatically faster than traditional toys and games,” said Goldner, who is listed as an executive producer on several Hasbro film and television projects.

In an article headlined “A Gay Rights Power Player Who Wields a Mighty Phone,” The New York Times profiled Brian Ellner ’92, senior strategist for the Human Rights Campaign, following passage of New York’s gay-marriage initiative in June. Described as “unrelentingly persistent” by the Times, Ellner said, “I find connections, and I don’t let go until someone moves their position.” The article also detailed how Ellner enlisted friend and award-winning documentary filmmaker Annie Sundberg ’90 to build popular support for the bill by making a series of videos. Among the actors, athletes, musicians and politicians featured were Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ’88 (D-N.Y.) and attorney Keith Lieberthal ’95 and his wife, actress Julianna Margulies.

With the capture in June of 16-year fugitive James “Whitey” Bulger, speculation was renewed as to whether one of Boston’s most notorious crime bosses could shed light on the unsolved 1990 theft of art masterpieces worth more than $500 million from the city’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Ulrich Boser ’97, author of The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft, isn’t convinced. He told the Los Angeles Times in late June that for Bulger “to organize something like the Gardner heist doesn’t make sense…his MO was to collect criminal taxes, not to organize fresh crimes.” However, the Bulger case does demonstrate the important role publicity can play in solving crimes, Boser said. “When we think about the Gardner case, publicity will make the difference too. Someone somewhere knows what happened to those paintings.”

“My working-class Puerto Rican mother, who raised me as a single mom, gave me two career paths: lawyer or priest,” Juan Cartagena ’78 told the Jersey City Independent in June. “Under those circumstances, how could I not dedicate my work to social justice?” Cartagena, a civil rights attorney who was born and raised in Jersey City, was recently named the president and general counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF (formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund), a civil rights organization that protects the rights of Latino residents through litigation and advocacy and works to increase the cadre of Latino attorneys in the country. “I now have the opportunity to continue a great legacy of representing communities throughout the Eastern seaboard as they struggle to obtain their constitutional rights,” Cartagena said of the organization that first hired him as a civil rights attorney when he graduated from law school 30 years ago.

Rembert Browne ’09 took a break from his urban planning studies at Columbia University in July to fly to Los Angeles for the Black Weblog Awards. The Atlanta native was nominated in six categories, and although he didn’t win, Browne dramatically raised the profile of his blog, 500 Days Asunder, which chronicles the 500 days “until I finish grad school and then no more.”

The Tutor, a new play by Kate Mulley ’05, will be performed at the New York International Fringe Festival in August. The play stars Olivia Gilliatt ’08 as a Yale Law grad turned SAT tutor who leads a secret life online. Mulley is the literary manager of NyLon Fusion Collective and a resident playwright for Odyssey Productions. Her plays have been produced in New York, London and Washington, D.C.

Shonda Rhimes ’91 mingled with royalty in July when Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, visited Los Angeles. The creator and executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice and the upcoming ABC series Scandal attended a British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) gala honoring the royal couple (Prince William is the president of BAFTA). “The best time. They were lovely. The BAFTA committee: You outdid yourself! Got to sit at a cool table: Shonda Rhimes, Dana Delaney, Marc Cherry,” tweeted Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth, according to the United Kingdom’s Sunday Express.”

This spring CBS Sunday Morning producer Mary Lou Teel ’78 returned to campus with correspondent/comedian Mo Rocca to film a segment about Dartmouth students’ reconstruction of the College’s Titcomb Cabin on Gilman Island (the original cabin was destroyed in a 2009 fire). Rocca learned of the project, led by engineering student Greg Sokol ’10, from a March Popular Mechanics article by Jim Collins ’84, as noted in the May/June issue of DAM. “Mo had never built a cabin before and really wanted to learn how to use a chainsaw, so it seemed like a fun piece to include in our design show,” said Teel, who has worked on the television show for more than 25 years.

Producer and writer Kate Novack ’94, a former media reporter for Time, and her husband, director Andrew Rossi, teamed up to produce the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, which opened in theaters nationwide on July 1. Described as “a sprawling vérité group portrait of the Gray Lady’s media desk” by San Francisco Weekly, the documentary focuses on several reporters, including David Carr and Brian Stelter. When Novack and Rossi began filming in mid-2009, the paper was dealing with fallout from the economic meltdown and wrestling with ways to remain profitable in an increasingly online news world. “We wanted to cover, almost as a primary document, The New York Times in what we viewed as a historic moment—not just for the Times but for journalism and the way the culture processes information,” Novack told the Weekly in June.

After working as counselors for two summers at Seeds of Peace, a Maine camp that brings together teenagers from conflict regions in the Middle East, South Asia and the United States, sailing enthusiasts David Nutt ’09 and Monica Balanoff ’11 decided to create an offshoot program called Seas of Peace, which launched this summer. The duo sailed for 12 days on a 140-foot schooner with 15 Israeli, Palestinian and American graduates of Seeds of Peace. Two counselors, including Carrie O’Neil ’04, conducted daily sessions with students on the boat. Nutt told the Valley News in May that a sailboat is an ideal environment because participants “will really have to rely on each other to get to the next port and to be safe.” “While you’re not going to solve the entire [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict by creating dialogue among youth,” added Balanoff, “you are creating the environment where people can begin to empathize with each other, and where maybe a solution can be possible.”

Portfolio

Alumni Books
New titles from Dartmouth writers (November/December 2023)
Fresh Takes
Blogger Ray Padgett ’09 covers the covers.
The Secret Life of the Brain

Michael Gazzaniga ’61 divulges the inner workings of the human mind. 

Gail Koziara Boudreaux ’82
A CEO on the state of the nation’s healthcare

Recent Issues

March - April 2024

March - April 2024

January-February 2024

January-February 2024

November-December 2023

November-December 2023

September-October 2023

September-October 2023

July-August 2023

July-August 2023

May-June 2023

May-June 2023