MONEY MAN 
He may not be John Kerry’s best friend in Pennsylvania, but Mark Alderman’75, chairman of the Philadelphia law firm Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, probably should be. Alderman, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, is “the top money man for Kerry” in the state. Thanks to his fund-raising, he has gotten to know Kerry’s brother, Cameron, who, like Alderman, has a child entering Brown this fall. “It’s as much a friendship as a political proposition at this point,” Alderman told the Inquirer in July. “This is the man who with a lot of hard work and a little luck will be the brother of the president of the United States.”

ISLAND HOPPING 
After finding fame and fortune as a cofounder of Nantucket Nectars, Tom Scott’89, whom the New York Times described in July as “a dreamer whose Trump-size business vision is leavened by John Boy Walton hominess,” has abandoned the Massachusetts island for Long Island’s Hamptons. His new venture, Plum TV, aims to bring upscale community-based cable television to, as the Times put it, “McMansion dwellers like himself.” Scott himself described the venture with less skepticism. “We want to be the Sundance of television,” he told the Times.

SEEDING SCIENCE 
UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering Lisa Pruitt‘93 PhD was one of nine people given a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring this year. She was recognized, she told the Contra Costa Times in June, for “bringing students into a research environment and offering mentorship and research opportunities.

FOOT WORK 
In June, Theodore “Cave Dog” Keizer‘94, a practitioner of the obscure sport of extreme hiking, broke the record for covering the 273-mile length of Vermont’s Long Trail by just over two hours. Although he had to be carried out of the woods thanks to an ankle injury, Keizer succeeded in his second attempt at breaking the four-day, fifteen-hour, nineteen-minute record. “It’s not about a crazy mania,” Keizer told the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press as he started out on the trail. “it’s about pushing the limits. Definitely, it’s an extreme sport.”

SEEING THE HOPE 
When 565 Cleveland high school students gathered in August to receive scholarships from Cleveland Scholarship Program Inc., they heard advice from social worker Cedric Jennings’99, whose journey from a crime-ridden neighborhood in Washington, D.C., to College Hill was famously documented by Ron Suskind in A Hope in the Unseen. “I shouldn’t be here today by virtue of statistics, by virtue of what the statistics tell us about black males in the inner city,” Jennings said, according to a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. About his mother, he said: “Even though she had to take on the role of raising me all by herself, she stuck in there. It was a blessing to me.” Ashley Hudson, one of the students at the talk, said afterward, “It was very inspiring. It just lets you know not to give up.”

GOOD WORK 
Who would want a job that lasts ten months and pays $4,725? Ernest Nino-Murcia’03, for one. Nino-Murcia recently completed a stint with AmeriCorps’s National Civilian Community Corps, during which he logged 1,700 hours on such community-service projects as laying tile at a homeless-shelter kitchen, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, harvesting seeds from a wilderness, and translating for Spanish-speaking parents at a local school. It was such a rewarding experience, he told the Iowa City Press-Citizen in July, that “someday, I hope to persuade my children into doing it.”