Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts Princeton Alumni Weekly

For years, Bill Eville ’87 has been writing down his life in bits and pieces, publishing essays about parenthood, childhood memories, and yes, being a Princeton alum. Now he’s gone further and written a book, a memoir called Washed Ashore that’s filled with his thoughts about high school wrestling matches, marrying a minister who fought breast cancer, moving from New York City to Martha’s Vineyard, becoming a stay-at-home dad, and later the editor of the local newspaper. If all of this sounds ordinary, well, maybe it is. But in the hands of this writer a pattern emerges: Life’s unexpected turns can change you in extraordinary ways — if you let them.

Princeton University is positioning itself at the forefront of research that could help to throw the brakes on climate change, from its zero-carbon goals to the way it’s using the campus as a living laboratory. One person with a front row seat to all this is Forrest Meggers, a jointly appointed professor in Princeton’s architecture and engineering schools. He also directs Princeton’s C.H.A.O.S lab, which seeks to maximize the efficiency of heating and cooling systems. This month, as we celebrate Earth Day and PAW devotes its April issue to climate change, PAW asked Meggers for a tour through Princeton’s energy systems and a look at what’s coming next.

Majka Burhardt, Princeton Class of ’98, has always wanted more. More challenges, more achievement. It’s what pushed her to become one of the world’s top professional rock and ice climbers, chasing adventure around the world and eventually beginning to build her own conservation organization at a mountain in Africa. Then in 2015, she discovered she was pregnant with twins. That seismic change led her to question everything — her work, her relationship with her mother, her marriage, and what it meant to be not just a driven woman, but also herself. Through it all, she kept mountains of journals and notes, and now she’s published it all in a raw, confessional memoir, titled, as you might expect, “More.”

While he was a history student at Princeton, and editor of The Daily Princetonian, Jonathan Ort, Class of 2021, began researching the Firestone company. Yes, that Firestone; the one that once dominated the rubber and tire industry and the one that donated the $1 million to build Princeton’s world-class library in 1944. What he found was recently published in the Princeton & Slavery Project, which investigates Princeton’s historical involvement with slavery. This time, the forced labor wasn’t in America but Liberia where Firestone used a racist system of forced labor to run its massive rubber plantation. Ort spoke with PAW about the connections he found between this system of modern day-slavery and the Firestone family’s many donations to Princeton over five decades.

Only one creature, other than humans, substantially engineers the landscape around it: the beaver. Many millions of these furry dam builders once busily trapped water in ponds across North America, keeping the landscape lush and fertile, until colonists in the 1600s discovered the lucrative fur trade. In her new book, titled “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America,” Leila Philip ’86, an English and environmental studies professor at the College of the Holy Cross, who lives near a beaver pond in Connecticut, traces the Native Americans who viewed beavers as sacred, and the colonial capitalists who nearly drove the beaver to extinction. On the latest PAWcast, Philip spoke with PAW about how reintroduction efforts have brought the beaver back, along with hopes that they can help with ecological restoration and climate change.

What happens when a donor kidney becomes available to somebody who needs one? In the U.S., a hundred thousand people are waiting on lists, all with different ages, complications, and circumstances. How do you decide who gets it? In his new book, Voices in the Code, David Robinson ’04, a scholar and co-founder of the equity-focused NGO Upturn, takes a look at the algorithm used to match kidneys and patients, and on the latest PAWcast he discusses how it was developed. Algorithms are increasingly used for all kinds of decisions in public life, he says, making close examination of the ethics and morality within them ever more crucial.