Two years after he took over as managing general partner of the Giants, Bill Neukom ’64 stepped off a bus in San Francisco at 4:09 in the morning November 2 holding aloft the spoils of the 2010 World Series: the circle-of-flags trophy. He’d traveled with the team directly from their championship win—the first since 1954—and the start of the celebration a few hours earlier in Texas. “We are going to enjoy this,” Neukom told the Denver Post, which reported he then began a hop-dance number with infielder Pablo Sandoval.

Molly Hunker ’05 used more than 100,000 zip ties of different sizes and colors to create a uniquely beautiful installation for the Revolve Clothing showroom in West Hollywood, California, last September. Hunker created Life Will Kill You with Gregory Corso of the design firm SPORTS, whom she met in the UCLA master of architecture program. “The design is intended to explore the edge between aggression and elegance through material sensibility, overall form and visual effect,” she told ArchDaily.com.

John Harrington ’77, who was profiled in the July/Aug 2010 issue of DAM as he prepared to step down as police chief of St. Paul, Minnesota, now has a new role: state senator. The 54-year-old Democrat, who started his law enforcement career in 1977 as a St. Paul beat cop, won 66 percent of the vote in the November mid-term elections. “We worked really hard,” Harrington told the Pioneer Press in early November. Other Big Green winners on Election Day: incumbent U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano ’73 (D-Mass.), U.S. Rep. John Carney Jr. ’78 (D-Del.), U.S. Rep. Charlie Bass ’74 (R-N.H.), incumbent U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ’88 (D-N.Y.), former-governor-now-senator John Hoeven ’79 (R-N.D.), incumbent State Sen. Matthew Houde ’91 (D-N.H.), Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen ’76, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman ’78 (R-Ohio) and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber ’69, a Democrat who reclaimed the position he held from 1995 to 2003. Those who lost in November: Howie Hawkins ’75 in his Green Party run for the New York governor’s seat, incumbent U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes ’72 (D-N.H.) in his run for U.S. Senate, Ann McLane Kuster ’78 in the Democratic bid for the U.S. House seat won by Bass, and Tay Stevenson ’10 as Democratic contender for Minnesota state senate.

In political news across the border, British Columbia’s three-time premier Gordon Campbell ’70is stepping down after seeing his popularity plummet after he embraced a sales tax that he had opposed while running. “When public debate becomes focused on one person, instead of what is in the best interest of British Columbians, we have lost sight about what is important,” he told The Vancouver Sun. “When that happens, it’s time for a change.”

Photographer Peter McBride ’93 traveled by kayak, raft, small plane and on foot for two years to capture the river that once flowed to the Gulf of California for his book, The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict. A Colorado native who grew up on a cattle ranch fed by the river, McBride was surprised at the toll taken by drought and man-made diversions. During his travels McBride saw the devastation wrought by this overuse. “I spent two weeks walking the most parched, barren earth you can imagine,” he told Smithsonian in its October issue. “It’s sad to see the mighty Colorado River come to a dribble and end some 50 miles north of the sea.”

Mochimochi Land is “a place where knitted toys and people can live together in a spirit of tolerance,” according to creator Anna Hrachovec ’04. The Tulsa, Oklahoma, native created the website mochimochiland.com to showcase her clever knitted world—a land of bright-yarn mountains, tiny tacos, smiling trees and unicorns influenced in part by Hello Kitty and Japanese kawaii design. “A lot of people appreciate that I design toys but they’re not, like, dolls, or anything specific that would just be for children or just for girls,” she told Blast Magazine in October.

As a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona, Emily Schaller ’02 studies methane clouds on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Titan’s weather cycle, lakes, river valleys and channels resemble Earth’s, but the “surface temperature is about -290 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold that methane condenses to liquid form,” the former Dartmouth figure skater explained to Discover magazine last summer. Why does she study Titan’s weather? “A lot of the chemistry there may be analogous to processes that occurred when Earth was young,” she said…

In September Mike Piccioli ’08, DMS’14, pulled a 23-ton fire truck 75 feet in 29 seconds at the New Hampshire Strongest Man and Woman Contest, finishing first in the 175-pound-and-under division. When he’s not hauling heavy equipment, Piccioli is working on his degree at the Medical School. It’s a pastime that puzzles his classmates, he told ABC News in a report last fall on “brawniacs,” highly educated men and women who compete in strength contests. “They have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said. “All of a sudden their eyes get really wide and they say, ‘You mean like those huge guys on ESPN?’ And then their jaws drop.”

Peter Heller ’82 learned how to surf at the age of 47 and wrote about his experience in Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which won the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award in Literature. In the September/October issue of AARP The Magazine, Heller said he embraced the derogatory surfer term, “kook,” which means unskilled outsider. “Being a kook is a way of life at any stage of your life. It’s about being willing to learn something new—to make a fool of yourself and just go for it.”

Joseph Armanini ’40 was featured in a November History Channel special, World War II in HD: The Air War. Armanini was the lead bombardier in the 8th Air Force’s “Bloody 100th,” the squad whose story was the basis for the Gregory Peck film Twelve O’Clock High. The 94-year-old said his squadron sustained tremendous losses partly because their daylight bombing raids were not accompanied by fighter escorts. “The longer the mission, the more dangerous,” he told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. On one mission the Bloody 100th lost nine of 20 planes, and when Armanini’s plane landed in Libya it had 200 bullet holes and was missing an engine. “It was just a matter of luck that you finished,” said Armanini, who was decorated with a Bronze Star and two Flying Crosses and numerous air medals.

Emmy Award-winning producer David Hamlin ’82 spent three years working on Great Migrations, the National Geographic Channel’s new seven-part television film that began airing in November. Among the migrations the senior producer and his team captured was that of the white-eared kob in southern Sudan, an animal whose migration hadn’t been filmed in more than 30 years due to civil war strife. “It’s our obligation to try to make sure we find a way—not to stop human development, because that’s a foolish conversation, that’s not going to happen—but to regain some sense of balance and some sense of our stewardship for the planet,” Hamlin told the NatGeo Newswatch blog.

Jarrett Mathis ’09is on a mission to teach young people the history of the “n-word” in hopes that they will stop using it as a term of endearment. The founder of Empowering Ourselves Now, Mathis conducts workshops nationwide and has also produced and posted to his website a 75-minute educational documentary. “A lot of kids who experience the workshop argue that it’s just a part of the language, it’s just a word,” the former Big Green men’s basketball co-captain said in a CNN segment that aired in mid-October. “But then I argue that the word is so negative and was so wretched and such an intricate part of dehumanizing our people that you can’t make it into a positive.”

Steve Cosson ’90 brings a neighborhood skirmish over land-use rights to the stage with In the Footprint. The musical focuses on the Atlantic Yards project, which will install a basketball stadium and various skyscrapers on 22 acres in Brooklyn—and displace scores of residents and small businesses. The show is based on interviews with about 125 residents conducted by the Civilians, the theater troupe Cosson founded a decade ago. “Being an investigative theater company where we try to engage in important stories, this seemed like the most important local story that we could take on,” Cosson told The New York Times in November. The company has become known for documentary work, including most recently The Great Immensity, a play about the environment created (with evolutionary biologist Stephen Pacala ’78, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute) following years of research on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal and in Manitoba, Canada…

Carley Markovitz ’10 organized a Global Work Party in La Plata, Argentina, as part of a worldwide effort on October 10 to raise awareness about the importance of reducing CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million, according to local daily newspaper, Diario HOY. As an intern with the San Francisco-based Foundation for Sustainable Development, Markovitz works with the Fundacion Biosfera in La Plata to promote environmental advocacy.

After catching 1,938 games in 18 years in the majors, Los Angeles Dodger Brad Ausmus ’91has retired. “In the past I was never really sure if I wanted to retire,” the three-time Gold Glove winner and former All-Star told MLB.com. “Now I’m sure.” “He has the ability to manage, and I think he’ll be interested in doing that,” said Joe Torre, the Dodger’s former manager.

Ten years after playing with an Asian toy during a trip to San Francisco, Molson Hart ’09is now manufacturing the Kikbo. Players kick around the plastic-and-rubber footbag decorated with goose feathers, much like a Hacky Sack. Hart has sold about 300 Kikbos in specialty sporting goods stores in the New York area. He told the Greenwich Time in September he’s hoping to stock them in Toys ’R Us and Modell’s.

Jeremy Teicher ’10 returned to campus in mid-November to screen This Is Us: Video Stories from Senegalese Youth, a documentary he directed with funding from the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding’s Lombard Fellowship. Using 10 pocket video cameras donated by Kodak, Teicher worked with Senegalese students to help them tell their stories. “Coumba, a 16-year-old girl, took her camera into the women’s-only cooking hut in her village [and] filmed her older sisters laughing and dancing with each other as they ground up millet to prepare for dinner,” Teicher said on his blog. “Even if one of the boys in our group had tried to film that image, it would have been impossible: Upon seeing a man in the cooking area the women would have become guarded and quiet.”