Princeton Alumni Weekly: Goin' Backstory Princeton Alumni Weekly

In the final installment of Goin' Backstory, Gregg Lange ’70 and Brett Tomlinson discuss the 2016-17 academic year at Princeton and the news stories that future historians may revisit.

May has us thinking about Reunions, and two of this year’s “major” classes: the 50th reunion class, 1967, and the 75th, 1942. Both left college in a world that was much different than the one they’d known as freshmen. Also in this episode, we talk about Gregg’s new column on free speech at Princeton and Gregory Heyworth *01’s use of imaging science to restore damaged documents.

With two members of the Class of 1939 featured in PAW’s April 12 issue (Lem Billings and Henry Morgenthau III), we decided to take a closer look at the class, which included John F. Kennedy (for one semester), Fred Fox, Bud Wynne, Bob Dicke, Walter Lord, and the elusive Ephraim di Kahble. Also mentioned in this podcast: Morgenthau’s undergraduate days and the infamous Veterans of Future Wars.

With the first Ivy League Tournament complete and the Tiger men set to start play in the NCAA Tournament tomorrow, we look back at two great Princeton teams: the 1966-67 Tigers, featured in a new PAW Online story, a team Gregg has argued (in two columns) may be the best in program history; and Pete Carril’s 1976-77 team, which beat Notre Dame at Jadwin Gym. Also discussed in this episode: revered Princetonian William K. Selden ’34, and the first Ivy women’s basketball tournament, featured on a recent episode of PAW Tracks.

In this month’s look at Princeton history and recent PAW stories, we speak about the Lives Lived and Lost issue, make note of the University Press Club’s remarkable history, highlight the Service of Remembrance, look ahead to Alumni Day, and more.

“Translation is, we’re told, something that’s supposed to be invisible,” Shelley Frisch *81 tells PAW’s Carrie Compton. “I don’t think that that’s so. I think that a translator needs to inject a voice into a text in order to make it live. It shouldn’t read like plain vanilla translation-ese.” Frisch explains her work translating biographies from German to English and the specific case of Reiner Stach’s three-part Franz Kafka biography.
Also, in an abbreviated version of our regular discussion of Princeton history, Brett Tomlinson and Gregg Lange ’70 talk about the 1960s critical languages program and a modern-day analog.