In his third try for Olympic gold in shot put, Adam Nelson ’97 is also throwing his weight behind an awareness campaign for rare diseases. “If Nelson makes the 2012 U.S. team—or, better yet, wins gold at the London Games—it might be the moment that forever changes the way rare diseases in the United States are treated, maybe even cured,” reports 3 Wire Sports. The two-time Olympic silver medal winner has put himself up at charitybets.com, where you can bet whether he makes the team (the U.S. trials are June 24), with all proceeds going to the Global Genes Project, which supports the rare diseases community. Nelson signed up for the cause—and will wear its signature denim ribbon on his uniform—after a 4-year-old family friend was diagnosed with a fatal genetic condition that will force his brain to shrink. “I couldn’t turn him down when my friend says, ‘My son is going to die,’ ” said Nelson. “It’s a question of what can I do to help?”

MF Global’s bankruptcy filing last October was the eighth-largest in U.S. corporate history, with $40 billion in liabilities. The trustee tasked with liquidating the firm and returning more than $1.6 billion in missing customer money to the firm’s 38,000 clients is James W. Giddens ’59, a partner with the New York law firm of Hughes Hubbard. During a congressional hearing in late April, Giddens recommended establishing an insurance fund for commodities customers to safeguard assets in the event of future collapses. “With such a fund in existence, three-quarters of MF Global’s commodities customers would not have been subject to any loss and could have been made whole within days of the bankruptcy filing,” he told members of the Senate Banking Committee, according to The New York Times. Giddens, who has found much of the money, deployed “a team of 60 lawyers and hired 100 consultants from Deloitte and 60 forensic accountants from Ernst & Young to help sift through some $327 billion in wire transfers in and out of MF Global the month before its collapse,” according to the Times. He  has said that returning the money to customers could require legal action.

Maura Kelly ’96 struck a chord with her article, “A Slow-Books Manifesto,” in The Atlantic in March. By early May more than 14,000 Facebook users had recommended the piece, in which Kelly calls for a “Slow Books Movement.” “In our leisure moments, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else,” wrote Kelly, the author of Much Ado About Loving. “They’ll help us unwind better than any electronic device—and they’ll pleasurably sharpen our minds and identities, too.” Find some of her picks at www.theatlantic.com.

The Wall Street Journal columnist Ralph Gardner wrote in April about a chance meeting with Peter Gray ’07, who sells soda. “Not any soda, but Spindrift, a brand I was previously unfamiliar with but that Mr. Gray assured me was a breath of fresh air, and some cane sugar and fruit to boot, in the cluttered sustainable soda pop marketplace,” wrote Gardner. Gray, the director of East Coast sales and business development for Spindrift, told Gardner: “As soon as it hit my lips I thought, ‘This is the perfection of this idea.’ ”

Thanks to Burlington City Arts (BCA), 40 years of works by sculptor David Stromeyer ’68 will be exhibited in three different Vermont locations from June 29 through September 8. Some pieces from this retrospective will be on display in the BCA Center in Burlington, and larger pieces will be outdoors in City Hall Park. Art-lovers may also visit Stromeyer’s farm in Enosburg, north of Burlington. “We’ll have about 45 big pieces on display across a couple hundred acres [on the farm],” Stromeyer told the Austin (Texas) Culture Map. “There are about five or six meadows and sculptures sprinkled out around them.” The artist also lives part of the year in Austin, where he has created a sculpture park in his neighborhood. Search for a slideshow of his art at austin.culturemap.com.

Tyra Olstad ’04 first saw Midwestern prairies as a teenager when she and her father flew over Nebraska. “I fell in love with the space in the West,” the upstate New York native told the Associated Press in March. Now a geography doctoral student at Kansas State University, the former National Park Service ranger is studying landscapes and “how we psychologically interact with places,” and is working to help Kansas attract tourists to these vast, open spaces. “People have to experience the prairie and something has to spark their interest to come,” she told AP. “I couldn’t imagine what the prairie looked like until I was standing in the middle of one.”

Regina Glocker ’88 successfully funded a project using Kickstarter, raising more than $38,000 to produce The Presidential Game. The board game she invented allows two teams—Democrats and Republicans—to vie for Electoral College votes in a presidential race, either choosing to campaign or fundraise during their turns. “There’s a lot of luck in rolling the dice, but there’s also strategy,” Glocker, a self-professed board game fanatic, told The Sag Harbor (New York) Express in March.

Jamie Berk ’11 and Mostafa Heddaya ’11 have been receiving kudos for the online magazine, American Circus, they launched in December. Edited by Berk and Heddaya, the magazine includes fiction, essays, political pieces and longer articles. “Jamie Berk and his staff have a lot of good ideas,” reported One Way Street, a cultural studies blog. “They’ve already executed on one of them: bringing together disparate writing styles and critical points of view into a coherent and engaging format, unlike some other journals that read like a random collection of strangers shouting out opinions.” Recent contributors include Marguerite Imbert ’11, Rahul Malik ’11, Charlie Dameron ’11, Benjamin Riley ’13 and Anise Vance ’11. (Vance, who is working toward a master’s in human geography at Queen’s University in Ireland as a Mitchell Scholar, recently told the BBC that the United States can learn from Northern Ireland’s focus on sharing space. “In the United States it’s almost as if we don’t have that consciousness anymore when it comes to identities. There’s no talk about creating a shared space for communities of race,” he said.)

Comedian Jerry Lewis was inducted into France’s Legion of Honor six years ago; now a documentary about his life, edited by Jim Ruxin ’70, has screened at that country’s premier film festival. Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis was shown at Cannes Classics, a program of the Cannes Film Festival, in May. “You’d have to be a total drip to miss the manic merriment in a two-hour documentary romp through the funniest work of comic actor and director Jerry Lewis,” The Washington Post reported when the film aired on Encore last December.

Methembe Ndlovu ’97, a Grassroot Soccer co-founder and executive director of Grassroot Soccer Zimbabwe, was featured on Zimbabwe’s Bulawayo24 News website in January. In a video interview he explained Grassroot Soccer’s goal of using the universal language of soccer to help educate Zimbabwean youths about HIV/AIDs. As the former captain of the Zimbabwean National Team and the Highlanders Football Club and the current president of the Bantu Rovers team in Bulawayo, Ndlovu knew his celebrity status could help command attention and interest in the health campaign. “This was a good opportunity to do something that would touch a lot of lives in a positive way,” says Ndlovu, who earned a 2010 Martin Luther King Social Justice Award from the College for his work with Grassroot Soccer.

Professional cyclist Evie Stevens ’05 (profiled in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of DAM) moved one step closer to her goal of qualifying for the U.S. Olympic road team when she won the 2012 Women’s Tour of New Zealand in February. Riding for the USA Cycling national development team, Stevens was one of three Americans to finish in the top 20. “Team USA rode like bulls,” she told Sky News Australia. “It was incredible.”

Until Charlie Cogbill ’71 started tracking down and studying old survey maps, including one of New Hampshire’s White Mountain forests dating to 1794, scientists believed that current Northeastern forests didn’t differ much from the forests before European settlers arrived and began clear-cutting. But as Cogbill has found in three decades of historical ecology research, the regenerated forests are dramatically different from the pre-settlement forests. For example, American beech, spruce and hemlock trees were once more common in Vermont than maples, but now one in every three trees in the state is a maple. This “baseline knowledge of historic forests is critical to understanding how today’s forests might respond to modern stresses, including global warming,” Cogbill told VTDigger.org in January. “How a forest functions, how it grows, how it dies, how it recycles or processes, is dependent on that history.”

For an episode of the CBS show Undercover Boss that aired in March, Yankee Candle CEO Harlan Kent ’85 was transformed into a stock boy and assembly-line worker in order to go “undercover” at his company. His curly wig and soul patch proved such a good disguise that Kent’s wife walked right past him. Kent, who has worked for the South Deerfield, Massachusetts-based company since 2001, saw firsthand what it’s like to be on the customer service and production ends of his company, which manufactures and ships 200 million candles a year. “It’s astounding,” Kent told The Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, prior to the show’s airing. “The realization was almost like a frying pan upside the head. This experience reiterated to me just how amazing our employees are.”

At Dartmouth Glenn Randall ’09 was known more for his skiing skills than for his running. Although he qualified for the NCAA cross-country championships in 2008 and finished 61st, that same year he won the NCAA 10K freestyle skiing championship, just a year after he and the Big Green ski team won the NCAA team championship. A familiar name in the skiing world, he gained the attention of the running world when he led the Boston Marathon, by a wide margin, for more than 30 minutes in April. Although 80-degree temperatures and cramping eventually took a toll (he finished 60th), Randall told LetsRun.com that he had no regrets about his race strategy. “During every good race of my life, I’ve been aggressive,” he said. “People thought I was being stupid, but I live by the sword and I die by the sword. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. I’m at peace with this.”

A day before the Boston Marathon, Randall’s former track teammate Ben True ’08 successfully defended his title at the Boston Athletic Association 5K, taking the men’s title in 13:41. Despite being plagued by injuries throughout the winter, he broke the course record he set last year. “It’s reassuring that my fitness is where it needs to be right now,” True told the Boston Globe after the race. “I hope it bodes well coming to the Olympic trials in June.”

If Harmeet Dhillon ’89 wins in November, she will be the first Indian-American elected to California’s state legislature. A founder of the San Francisco law firm Dhillon & Smith and chair of the city’s Republican Party, she was born in Chandigarh, India, and raised in North Carolina. “Our state is very much reliant on income tax from the wealthy to balance the state budget,” Dhillon told IndiaWest.com in March. “The state goes down when the stock market goes down. Everything collapses. This is very bad planning. I don’t run my business or my household this way.”

Another Republican attorney, Wendy Stone Long ’82, is facing two GOP opponents in the June 26 New York State primary for the right to square off in November against Democratic U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ’88. A former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Long left private practice to build the Judicial Confirmation Network (now the Judicial Crisis Network), which backed the successful Senate confirmations of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. “I believe everything is on the line for America in this election year,” Long told the National Review Online. “The year 2012 will go down in history as a time when we chose between two radically different paths. The solvency of the federal government, the future of free enterprise, the security of our people and the very character of our nation are all in the balance this year.”

A Kickstarter project of Walter Jeffries ’86, in which the Vermont farmer raised $25,000 to build an on-farm butcher shop to process his family’s naturally raised pigs, was called “a possible industry game changer” by Forbes in May. Forbes pointed out that Jeffries is building a small-scale facility for $150,000—a much smaller and less expensive option than the $2.5 to $4.5 million the USDA quoted for a processing facility—and is sharing all the details of the project online at sugarmtnfarm.com so that other small farmers can follow suit. “A network of nano-scale facilities will give us all better food security,” said Jeffries, who, along with his oldest son, spent 18 months learning commercial meat cutting.

Who do you call for help if you’re gored by a cape buffalo in Zimbabwe or need to get out of an area that’s under terrorist attack? Global Rescue, which was founded eight years ago by Daniel Richards, Tu’03, and employs his father Stuart Richards ’63 as senior vice president and Tiger Shaw ’85 as senior director of response services. Although his company’s work may involve calling upon the expertise of former Navy Seals to help Fortune 1000 clients, Daniel Richards told the Valley News in April that most of the aid provided is fairly mundane: “It’s for everyday travelers who might find themselves in Buenos Aires or Rome and they’ve slipped and fallen in their hotel room or they’ve eaten something and come down with something and we advise them over the telephone regarding diagnosing and trying to treat their issue.”