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sign up today—it's free! On This Day1878 — President Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is the orator for the 46th annual Alpha Delta Phi Convention in Middletown, Conn. StorePurchase Bowdoin merchandise online. |  Madeleine Albright Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivers the keynote address at Baccalaureate 2013, to be held at 4:30 p.m., Friday, May 24, 2013, in Sidney J. Watson Arena. The entire ceremony, also comprising remarks by President Mills, Dean for Student Affairs Tim Foster and student speaker Marissa Daisy Alioto ’13, will be streamed live. Watch it here. Secretary Albright is one of six people receiving honorary degrees at Bowdoin’s 208th Commencement Saturday, May 25. Commencement will also be streamed live here on the BDS.  Dr. Harley A. Rotbart, a professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine/Children’s Hospital Colorado, movingly describes in an essay for the New York Times his father’s reaction to his graduation from medical school in 1979.
Stirred by the memory at his daughter-in-law’s graduation this May, Dr. Rotbart recalls how his father — an uneducated fruit peddler in Colorado (his education had been disrupted by the Nazis) — fell to his knees sobbing after his son received his medical diploma. “On that day, and again in a similar scene at my brother’s journalism school ceremony the next year, Dad was liberated from Auschwitz. He was no longer ’142178,’ a Nazi victim. My father could now stand face to face with doctors, journalists and other accomplished Americans,” Rotbart writes. “At his sons’ graduations, he graduated to freedom.”  Sarah Hirschfeld ’13 With months of free time stretching out before her in advance of her enrollment in the Bowdoin Teacher Scholars Program next January, senior Sarah Hirschfeld decided to take an adventure. She plans to bike across the country from Portland, Maine, to Santa Barbara, Calif. “I could get a [summer] teaching job, but since I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, I figured why not try something crazy and adventurous,” Hirschfeld said recently, taking a break from studying for a microbiology exam. She wants to be a high school biology teacher. But the conscientious biology major doesn’t just want an adventure for its own sake — she wanted to combine the experience with something more meaningful. So Hirschfeld will peddle with Bike & Build, a nonprofit that organizes cross-country trips for young people that combine bicycling with building homes for low-income families. Read the full story here.  Nature reports that more and more studies show that being overweight — despite the condition’s link to diabetes, heart disease and cancer — does not always shorten life, a phenomenon referred to as the “obesity paradox.” In fact, one of the more recent studies, “a meta-analysis” of 2.88 million people by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistic, found that overweight people were 6% less likely to die than were those of normal weight over the same time period.
But this study has prompted backlash. Walter Willett, a leading Harvard nutrition and epidemiology researcher, commented, “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.” Willett is worried that such conclusions could undermine policies to curb obesity rates and be misused by soft-drink and food lobbies to influence policy-makers.  Cindy Cammarn ’14 and Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, Photo courtesy of Jeopardy Productions, Inc. Bowdoin junior Cindy Cammarn first had to make it through rigorous try-outs to qualify as a contestant for Jeopardy!’s College Championships, held this spring. She then went on to win the first round of competition to make it to the semifinals. Even though she didn’t win her semifinal game, Cammarn gushed with enthusiasm recently as she described her experience on the famous game show. “It was 100% positive,” she said. It doesn’t hurt that she walked away with $10,000.
Read the full story here.  Although basements are one of the best places to stay safe during a tornado, fewer than one in 10 Oklahomans have access to cellars. This is because the soil in the state is mostly made of clay, and clay can be fickle as a foundation for buildings, The Atlantic explains. “There is a chance your house, its basement surrounded by glorified mud, will eventually simply topple into itself,” the magazine says.
Compounding the problem is Oklahoma’s bedrock below the clay, which is limestone. Drilling steel reinforcements into the bedrock doesn’t work well because dry limestone becomes flaky. Plus, a steel-reinforced shelter can cost thousands of dollars, much more than most families can afford.  Daisy Alioto ’13 Trying to convince National Public Radio to hire her for an internship this summer, senior Daisy Alioto — who will be the student Baccalaureate speaker Friday evening — eschewed the old-fashioned cover letter typed on heavyweight stationery. Instead, she turned to Storify, an online site that lets users tell narratives by compiling posts from different sources such as Twitter, Facebook, online news sites, blogs and more. (Alioto jokes in her Storify letter that the reason for this was because Grumpy Cat — the sour-faced kitty that has become an Internet sensation — ate her cover letter.)
Read the full story here. 
Fortune magazine reveals the 10 companies that are not only America’s largest corporations but also great employers. Once again, Internet juggernaut Google tops the charts at #1, with notoriously great benefits such as free haircuts, gourmet sushi and fitness centers galore. Indicators for the ranking include work-life balance, training, pay and turnover.  Robert Greenlee In a Bangor Daily News article, Bowdoin Professor of Music (and Oklahoma native) Robert Greenlee tells the hair-raising story of his experience in the devastating tornado. Having waited out the storm in the cellar of his parents’ home, mere blocks from the worst devastation, he described the tornado as sounding like “a thousand freight trains combined with continuous explosions.”  William Head Williams Two years ago, Bill Williams ’69 and his wife learned that their 22-year-old son, William, was addicted to heroin. Shortly before William’s 24th birthday, he accidentally overdosed. When it was clear William would continue in a persistent vegetative state, his family removed him from life support. “In the beginning,” Bill Williams writes in his New York Times op-ed “Ending the Secrecy of a Child’s Addiction,” the family kept their battle secret, both to shield their privacy and also out of a sense of shame. “How could we possibly explain the corrosion in the midst of our well-reared, respectable family?” Williams writes. Williams reflects on how he and his family learned to open up and share their story, which in turn prompted others to speak about their experiences with addiction, all of them “quite separate from a world racing on.” These stories need to be told, Williams insists. “Secrecy and anonymity are part of the disease, for addict and family alike,” he says. | On This Day in Civil War History…Bowdoin Talks: Lectures, Discussions and Events |
