When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Professor Misha Gekhtman was in Kyiv. His life changed forever for better and for worse. Gekhtman, professor of Mathematics at Notre Dame, never expected that Russia would invade Ukraine–or that fleeing for his life would also lead to falling in love, marrying, and gaining a daughter. When he tells the story–part tragedy, part romantic comedy–Misha admits, "If I read this as a screenplay, I would laugh because it's so unbelievable." Lifetime Movie or not, it's his reality...

Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant, a major retrospective of work by the multidisciplinary artist, curator, and critic is now on view at the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) through April 21. A portion of the show comprises work that Walker shot and developed while a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (now SMFA at Tufts) in the early ’80s. During that time, Walker (1953–2003), who was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, often spent nights with a camera dangling from his neck, trawling the Combat Zone, a now-defunct adult entertainment district in Boston’s downtown.

What you might not realize is that back before she made it big as an author, Moreno-Garcia was first a Gull, majoring in communications, working her way through college as a Resident Assistant at Endicott’s very own haunted house, Winthrop Hall, which legend says is stalked by the ghost of the Pink Lady. “There’s a door in the stairwell that goes nowhere, but I can confidently say that while patrolling the halls at night as an RA, I never saw anything other than students trying to trick each other into believing they’d seen a ghost,” said the 2003 graduate from the Vancouver, British-Columbia, townhouse she shares with her family. Is it possible that the idea of the Pink Lady subconsciously came up in her latest book, Silver Nitrate, in which a vision of a main character’s dead, mangled girlfriend visits him in a claustrophobic hallway after midnight? Perhaps, but Moreno-Garcia said bluntly, “I don’t believe in the supernatural—and I especially don’t believe in the supernatural in that dorm.”

Milind Agtey (MBA ’79) learned early on in his career that making the right gut decisions can save lives. As an officer and, later, a captain of a ship in the Indian Merchant Navy, he was stationed aboard cargo ships and oil tankers 24-hours a day, seven days a week, circling the globe three times each year — sometimes through dangerously rough waters. From the instant a sailor falls overboard in freezing water, he explained, you have just 10 seconds to rescue them before hypothermia sets in...

For the last 15 years, when she could have been sleeping, practicing self-care, running marathons, or deep-cleaning her kitchen, Sara Johnson Allen was instead working on her first novel, Down Here We Come Up. “It was a difficult process. I easily went through 100 drafts. Even after my agent sent it out, the book was turned down by at least 30 editors. I cut and rewrote hundreds of pages and submitted it again,” said Allen from her writing desk. “I want to be honest about life, especially with my students..."

At U.S. colleges and universities, men are twice as likely as women to major in economics. But a team of three Wellesley economists has concluded that among students admitted to Wellesley, those who ultimately enrolled at the College were 94% more likely to receive an economics degree than those who chose to study elsewhere. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently released the team’s findings in a working paper: “Women’s Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants.” “At the College we often say that Wellesley encourages women to go into fields that they might not have had access to if they had gone to another school,” said Kristin Butcher, Marshall I. Goldman Professor of Economics and one of the paper’s co-authors. “[We] set out to see if that was really true.”

Blind Fox is the imaginative Boston-based pop artist behind the murals that are bringing color, joy, and edginess to the city’s trendiest restaurants and businesses. “We live in such an Instagram-bubble world that every space needs to have a wow feeling,” says the artist as she lounges in a thrifted chair she’s spray-painted bling gold in the corner of her living room in Quincy. “Blind Fox “is a moniker, a mood, and the work itself...

“A few weeks ago, everything was in pieces, and nothing was complete,” Yu-Wen Wu says from the artist co-op where she lives and works in Boston’s Fort Point Channel neighborhood. Work in progress hung from the ceiling, covered every table, and lay in disarray on the floor. “But now everything has come together.”

Last spring, Associate Professor of History Elizabeth Matelski made national news when she uncovered a disturbing truth hidden in plain sight on the College’s scenic Mingo Beach. She discovered that the beach was named for Robin Mingo, an enslaved man who lived in Beverly in the 1700s...

Ready for a transformation, a pair of empty-nesters set out to create a new home for themselves in Marblehead. The finished product is a 6,500-square-foot, three-bedroom home and guest cottage perched on the harbor with showstopping waterfront views. Even before they’d broken ground for the house’s foundation, the couple turned to Kristine Irving, creative director of Koo de Kir Architectural Interiors in Boston...

Annabelle Estera, Assistant Professor of Education at Endicott College, is increasingly conscious of the fact that the original model for a higher education institution was designed exclusively for white, Christian, land-owning men. “That was the profile of a person both shaping and enrolling in America’s first college,” she says. As a Filipina person, an Asian American, and a woman of color, Estera would have been excluded from that original educational system twice over...

While other parents limited screen time, growing up in Mesa, Arizona Demitrious Matus’ dad took his three boys to the now extinct Blockbuster Video, let them pick out what they wanted, and then binge watch it as a family late into the night. “That was all we did,” he said simply. It wasn’t long before Matus wanted to make his own movies too. A product of the YouTube vlog era he started all his videos from 2013 onwards with the predictable opening, “What’s up guys…” That’s still how he opens many of his films, albeit now ironically and with the alter ego of Meech, the name and persona under which Matus directs and often appears in the vlog-based fake documentaries that have become his genre...

Abigail Clemens’, MFA '23, SMFA studio walls are papered in math equations and mind maps, all scrawled in Sharpie pen. Her writing in permanent marker is a testament to Mrs. Choi, an influential high school art teacher who instructed Clemens to keep notes and to “never to erase a thought” in case it might come in handy later...(Images: Alonso Nichols)

Participating in an intensive three-week lab in Yucatán, Mexico, changed how MIT junior Penelope Herrero-Marques views her role as an engineer. The January trip was the first step in a new partnership between MIT D-Lab and Perkins School for the Blind, a Massachusetts-based national service provider and international nonprofit that strives to make education accessible to all children. As an undergraduate studying mechanical engineering at MIT, Herrero-Marques deeply connected with her studies...

As a young child, historian Maya Jasanoff followed her parents on trips to historic sites around the world. In India, where her mother is from originally, she spotted street signs referencing Shakespeare and imperial British figures and became lastingly curious about how cultures, power, and people cross borders, and the stamp of the British empire on it all. It’s these questions that will form the basis for her conversation with Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed on Tuesday...

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s political career began when her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was jailed after announcing plans to challenge Belarus President Aliaksandr Lukashenko in 2020. The political newcomer ran in her husband’s place, and after Lukashenko was declared the winner in a contest widely viewed as fraudulent, mass protests broke out in Belarus for months...

Novelist Joshua Cohen arrived at Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall on a recent icy night, stomping his feet and shrugging the snow off his black overcoat with a wide, furry lapel. The New Yorker staff writer and book critic James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism, followed. It was exactly the type of night that Cohen describes in his account of Dr. Benzion Netanyahu’s disastrous arrival at the fictionalized Corbin College in 1960. It was hard not to see Cohen’s coat and think of...

A young family dreamed of a backyard with a swing set, garage, and all the benefits of suburban living without giving up the contemporary vibe of their Boston high-rise apartment. After purchasing a classic 2000s Colonial, they tasked Elms Interior Design with bringing the 6,500-square-foot home in line with their style. The one challenge was that they didn’t have time to take on any major construction projects...

Lara Salahi was yawning over the phone. She’d just rolled off the 4 a.m. shift at NBC Boston, where she moonlights as a producer when she’s not teaching broadcast and digital journalism at Endicott College. But at that moment, the Associate Professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism was in multi-tasking mom mode, picking up her two young children from the school carpool line and no doubt punching straws into juice boxes while firing back deeply thoughtful responses to interview questions. Salahi does many things well all at once. Most recently, that included reporting an investigative three-part story with the support of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. “I spent my entire career trying to get away from local news,” she said. “I really didn’t understand the power it holds. But now I know that it’s not enough to just sit high up in a big newsroom.”

Shaye J.D. Cohen works in an office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Volumes in English, Hebrew, and Aramaic are piled on every available and makeshift surface. Most of the texts are bound in leather, with pages as translucent as onion skins. The speckled pattern of the wool sweater Cohen wears is so similar to the stacks that he appears in near-camouflage at his desk. Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern...