Back to the Future

A visit to Brown in April brought back a flood of memories for Susan Cheever ’65. “It wasn’t really Brown University I was visiting last week,” Cheever wrote in Newsday in April. “It was that younger self who lived there and loved there and studied harder than I had thought possible and wrote my first real pages of prose.”

It’s Not the Tools, Stupid

Fancy equipment is not on the menu for Los Angeles chef and restaurant owner Suzanne Goin ‘88, who relies on a badly dinged chef''s knife in the kitchen. ”My cooks all have these fancy sets of knives,” Goin told the New York Times in May, ”but I pretty much use this one for everything.”

Asking Questions

The chance to work on the John Walker Lindh case was just the kind of high-profile prosecution that drew Jesselyn Brown Radack ’92 to the U.S. Department of Justice. But after she objected to an F.B.I. interrogation of Lindh, Radack was advised to find a new job. “After 9/11 it was like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism,” Radack, who has filed for whistle-blower protection, told the New Yorker in April.

Busting Poverty Online

Matt Meyer ’94 started Ecosandals.com (see “Stepping Up,” The Classes, November/December 2001) to help provide economic opportunity to the residents of a shantytown on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. The sandal-making cooperative grew slowly—until Meyer helped the workers develop a Web site in 2001. “The experience of Ecosandals.com is at the heart of the debate about how—and whether—the Internet can be used to better the lives of the world’s poorest people,” Wired magazine reported in June.

The Millionaire

Most people would be overjoyed to inherit $3 million. Not Karen Pittelman ’97; she felt guilty. So she set up a foundation and signed away control over her money’s distribution. “My everyday work is about trying to undo the donor-as-rock-star thing,” Pittelman, whose day job is teaching others about “radical philanthropy,” told Elle in May.