Angus S. King Jr. ’66, who served as governor of Maine from 1995 to 2003, announced in March that he will run as an independent to fill the state’s U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Olympia Snowe. Currently a distinguished lecturer at Bowdoin College, King said his independent status will be a plus in Congress. “Nobody will be able to tell me how to vote except for the people of Maine,’’ he told The Boston Globe. King “goes right to the top of the list, even though he doesn’t have the backing of the major parties and can’t tap party dollars,” University of Maine political science professor Mark Brewer told the Globe.

Gregory Pence ’06 and Victoria Moy ’03 joined forces to help bring artist Song Byeok and his work to the United States, The Korea Times reported in February. A former North Korean propaganda painter who defected to South Korea in 2002, Byeok met Pence in Seoul in 2010, when Pence was studying there as a Fulbright Scholar. Pence enlisted the aid of Moy, co-president of the Dartmouth Asian Pacific American Alumni Association, who helped raise money to bring Song to Atlanta for a gallery exhibition of his works and a series of college speaking engagements. Song’s work depicts scenes from his homeland, as well as satirical pieces, many incorporating the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. “The more eyeballs we can get to see Song Byeok’s works of art, the better,” Pence told The Korea Times.

An Associated Press reporter caught up with Margaret Wheeler ’97, president of the American Mountain Guides Association, last November during the association’s annual conference in New Paltz, New York. Wheeler is a backcountry guide at Pro Guiding Service in North Bend, Washington, and an instructor of avalanche education, but worked an engineering job part-time for more than five years while earning certifications in rock,  alpine and ski mountaineering. In 2006 she became the second woman in the United States to complete her International Mountain Guides Association certification. “You have to take good care of yourself,” Wheeler told AP. “It’s a very physical job...there’s no sick days. It’s a lot about being with people as well. It’s about reading people, about understanding their goals and then taking them sort of out of their comfort zones.”

Looking Through, the second release from the L.A.-based band Warm Weather, has been getting terrific reviews since its January release. The pop trio includes former Dartmouth Aires and The Sing-Off finalists Brendan Lynch-Salamon ’10 and Justin Lerman ’10 and their friend Ryan Pollie. Looking Through “is composed of four heart-warming songs, layered with Beach Boys harmonies and easy comparisons to both Grizzly Bear and the infallible Paul Simon,” MusicDissection.com reported in February. “My desire for a full-length album has, after this, just rocketed!” Listen to their music at warmweather.bandcamp.com.

When Naval Ravikant ’95 first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1996 he helped found startups such as @Home.com and Vast.com, a marketplace for classified ads. But he ultimately realized that he most enjoyed matching investors with entrepreneurs. So in 2009 he started AngelList, a website that helps streamline this process. AngelList has 3,300 participating investors and, as Ravikant told Forbes in February, of the 25,000 startups on the site, he “estimates that hundreds have been funded.”

Rachel King ’81, founder of the biopharmaceutical company GlycoMimetics, was featured in an article about the biotech industry’s “female frontrunners” in the February issue of The Scientist. King, who majored in French at Dartmouth and earned an M.B.A. from Harvard, was first exposed to the industry while working on a biotech project at Bain and Co. Despite her limited background in biology, King says the key to her success has been attending scientific lectures at the companies where she has worked, including Genetic Therapy Inc., and sitting down with the scientists afterward to ask for explanations of various concepts. “I’m not trying to be a scientist, but I can talk about our scientific story,” she told The Scientist.

Honda Classic executive director Ken Kennerly ’87 recalled Tiger Woods’ early years at the PGA tournament he first played in 1993 as a 17-year-old amateur. “I remember the buzz. Here’s a future superstar, but where do they go? You’re never sure,” Kennerly, credited with bringing Woods back to Florida for the March event, told the Orlando Sentinel. Woods brought the buzz again this year, helping boost attendance 45 percent to 160,000 spectators, said Kennerly, who is also the president and CEO of IGP Sports and Entertainment Group in North Palm Beach, Florida.

Biathlete Susan Dunklee ’08—who was featured in the last issue of DAM—scored the highest finish ever by a U.S. female in the World Biathlon Championships in Germany on March 7. Dunklee, who took up biathlon in 2008 and made her debut on the World Cup circuit this season, missed a medal in the individual race by just seven seconds after 9.3 miles of shooting and skiing that lasted almost 44 minutes. “Halfway through my fourth [penultimate] lap I heard an announcer saying that I was in the lead,” Dunklee told the Chicago Tribune. “That was a little terrifying.” Teammate Sara Studebaker ’07 finished 38th.

Dartmouth men’s rugby coach Alex “Mags” Magleby ’00, named head coach of the USA men’s sevens team in February, will guide the team through the remaining four tournaments of the 2011-12 HSBC Sevens World Series, which concludes in mid-May. He will continue to coach in Hanover—though he’ll miss some matches due to national team commitments—where last year he helped the men’s sevens team win the College Rugby Championship Invitational title. “The current squad is extremely proud of Mags and wishes him all the best,” Dartmouth captain Paul Jarvis ’12 told RugbyMag.com. “Playing for Mags and learning from him has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my time at Dartmouth, and it is fantastic to see him reach the pinnacle of his profession.”

With a double major in engineering and studio art from Dartmouth, a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard and four years as an apprentice to renowned architect Richard Meier, who designed the hilltop J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, Eric Fisher ’82 was the perfect choice to design a Pittsburgh couple’s challenging dream home. The resulting Emerald Art Glass House took three years to build and is “a 53-foot-long glass-and-steel wedge cantilevered over [the owners’] factory,” as The New York Times described it in its “Great Homes” section in February. Fisher, a fourth-generation Pittsburgher who is the principal of Fisher Architecture, told the Times that the cantilevered section is three times the length of the one Frank Lloyd Wright built at Fallingwater.

How to Survive a Plague, a documentary film co-written and edited by Woody Richman ’92, was purchased at the Sundance Film Festival in January by Sundance Selects, a division of IFC Films. The documentary about the AIDS epidemic includes footage taken from 700 hours of video and chronicles the activism and medical breakthroughs in the 1990s that helped ensure HIV was no longer a death sentence. In a rave review in January, The Hollywood Reporter called the film “an epic celebration of heroism and tenacity,” adding that the individual stories of gay activists featured in the documentary also help make the film “a rewarding experience and a vital testament to courage and endurance.”

NBC Nightly News in February profiled World War II Remembered, a book of the wartime memories of 56 residents of the Kendal retirement community in Hanover, many of them Dartmouth alumni. Among those featured are John Jenkins ’43, John Weeks ’44 and the late Bill Hotaling ’41, Robert Encherman ’42, Edward Scheu ’46, Malcolm McLane ’46 and Robert L. Allen ’45. Clint Gardner ’44 recounted for NBC Nightly News his experience of the D-Day invasion, when he suffered a severe head wound at Omaha Beach. Later he witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp. “We saw hundreds of bodies piled outside the crematorium. I realized that I had been changed by this experience,” the 89-year-old Gardner said.