Harvey Rohde ’64 breathed a huge sigh of relief in June when his son David, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, escaped from his Taliban captors after being held in Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than seven months. David was working on a book about America’s longstanding involvement in Afghanistan and was taken prisoner there in November. Harvey told the Times he knew his son wanted “to get both sides of the story, to have his book honestly portray not just the one side but the other as well. I guess that personifies my son.”

Ann McLane Kuster ’78 threw her hat in the ring for New Hampshire’s second congressional district seat in June. “I’ve been very involved in Democratic politics, but I’m not a career politician. I’m a community activist at heart,” the Concord, New Hampshire, lawyer, who was profiled in the May/June 2008 issue of DAM, told the Valley News. Kuster’s maternal grandfather, Lloyd Neidlinger ’23, was an all-American football player and served as dean of the College from 1934 to 1952.

Success magazine detailed in its June issue how Patrick Byrne ’85 took American’s love of outlet shopping, combined it with a memorable TV ad campaign and award-winning customer service, and built a $60 billion Web-based business during the past 10 years. Overstock.com sells almost 700,000 closeout items online, with annual sales nearing $1 billion. “Whether it’s a high-end or a low-end product we have it, and we sell it at the best prices,” said Byrne, an Asian studies and philosophy major who was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

His parents were Colombian immigrants and his father worked at McDonald’s, so Sebastian Restrepo ’07 assumed Ivy League colleges were out of reach. But a private college counselor he met by chance steered him toward Dartmouth and, as Restrepo told the Columbus Dispatch last May, “The only thing she asked from me is to help someone else through the [college] process.” Through his new HighRise program, Restrepo this summer matched 12 low-income Columbus, Ohio, high school seniors with recent college graduates who serve as mentors and will assist with college applications.

As an undergraduate Mara Rudman ’84 took a seminar that examined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As chief of staff of President Obama’s National Security Council the Harvard Law School grad will work to implement the president’s goal of creating a Palestinian state. “Mara manages to be simultaneously incredibly tough-minded and yet optimistic,” Daryl Press, the Dickey Center’s War and Peace Studies coordinator, told the Boston Globe in May. “She feels strongly that the president is making this a real priority and as a result she thinks that there is a real possibility for breaking the logjam.”

During his sophomore year, when Dailan Long ’07 was searching for a research paper topic for his environmental justice class, he found one in his back yard: A power company was planning to build a 1,500-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Burnham, New Mexico, where his mother’s family and Navajo ancestors have lived for generations. Long is now helping to lead the fight against the Desert Rock power project, which he says will pollute the area’s air and water. “I feel that the community has called me to be here and has entrusted me to do this work,” Long, who ultimately plans to go to medical school, told the Associated Press in June.

For 10 days in late May and early June The Daily Show producer Tim Greenberg ’92 and correspondent Jason Jones traveled around Iran to investigate American stereotypes about the nation for a special report, Jason Jones in Iran: Access of Evil. “The trip has been in the works for over a year, from back in the Bush era when he was calling Iran the ‘Axis of Evil,’ ” Greenberg told the New York Daily News in June. “We can’t tell you how many people came up to us, unprompted, and said, ‘The world thinks we’re all terrorists. We’re not.’ ”

Putnam Investments hired CEO Charles E. “Ed” Haldeman Jr. ’70 in 2003 to restore investor confidence after an improper trading investigation. In late June Haldeman, who also serves as chair of the Dartmouth trustees, resigned from Putnam, The Wall Street Journal reported, because he’d been asked to help rescue another troubled company: Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage company that fell into government receivership last summer. “He has a humanistic demeanor that doesn’t diminish from his ability to make hard decisions,” fellow Dartmouth trustee Pamela J. Joyner ’79 told the Boston Globe in July.

This summer the Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction, Vermont, exhibited works by Peter Michael “Mike” Gish ’49 and his son Peter Anthony Gish ’84. The father also has two sets of murals on permanent display at the hotel. He painted them in 1950 at the suggestion of revered Dartmouth philosophy professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. The murals, which depict Vermont scenes and history, can be viewed any time.

Who’s the hottest senator on the Hill? The Huffington Post polled readers last June and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand ’88 was runner-up to Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell. Third place went to Indiana’s Evan Bayh.

Roy Rowan ’41 wrote of his opposition to aging gracefully in the April issue of Smithsonian. “So many of my contemporaries have given up and let themselves disintegrate during what they facetiously call their ‘golden years,’ ” Rowan wrote. “For me it’s a matter of doing the things I’ve always done. More slowly, for sure, but more thoughtfully too.”