Hi, ’98s! To kick things off for 2014 Sara (Tullis) Wester checked in from Florida. Sara, her husband, Forest Wester, and their daughters Drennen and Ellie recently moved to a new house in Key Biscayne. Sara said she and Forest have greatly enjoyed spending time with Kara (Josephberg) Paldino and her husband, Chris, who themselves recently moved into a new condo on Miami Beach. Sara is an oculoplastic surgeon at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Florida and Forest is a partner at Trivest Partners.


A bit further across the girdled earth, Katie Milligan checked in from Geneva, Switzerland, where she has lived for the past eight years. Katie and her husband welcomed their third child, Gabriel, this past October 7, joining big brother George (age 5) and big sister Maya (age 3). Katie is the director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the sister organization of the World Economic Forum. If you are aware of outstanding social enterprises to nominate into the Schwab Foundation network or if you are simply passing through Geneva for personal or professional reasons, Katie invites you to shoot her a note at katherine.milligan@schwabfound.org.


I also recently had the pleasure of trading emails with Christopher Swift, who spends his days practicing international law at Foley & Lardner in Washington, D.C., and his nights teaching national security studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where he is an adjunct professor. Besides the research and his law practice, Chris is also active with the Council on Foreign Relations and has appeared as a guest analyst for Al Jazeera, the BBC, NPR and other major news networks. Chris’s forthcoming book, The Fighting Vanguard: Local Insurgencies in the Global Jihad, draws upon his fieldwork in Afghanistan, Yemen and other “conflict zones” to re-examine the role of local insurgencies in al-Qaeda’s global operations.


Also hailing from the D.C. area is Kristen Hinman, who, along with her husband, Tim Embree, has lived in the nation’s capital since 2011. After two years of editing politics and policy coverage at Bloomberg Businessweek, Kristen left the magazine in November 2013 to become the features editors of the Washingtonian, a well-regarded monthly magazine where she told me she is looking forward to building on the momentum the magazine has recently garnered.


That’s all for this month. Please continue to send me any news or updates. As I have said before, our fellow ’98s are out there doing great things—let’s get the word out! 


—Jeffrey Beyer, 25 Aspen Way, Morristown, NJ 07960; (973) 267-6914; jeffrey.beyer@gmail.com