11-0-2!!

Vaunted volleyball, scoring soccer, tireless track, unflagging football! The marvelous Maroons this season are…could it be?…undefeated!

UChicago PhoenixAutumn unofficially begins this week, and it brings with it quite the surprise: fall athletes have not yet experienced the winter-bleak misery of defeat, the attitude most often (and a little unfairly) associated with the Maroons. It may be early in the season—and I mean only two games in so far—but it's still a remarkable moment, as the school is collectively 11-0-2 (the victories-defeats-ties math explained below). As they say down in summery, all-conquering New Orleans: Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say they gonna beat dem Saints Maroons?

Let's begin our sports round-up with volleyball, a sport that always reminds me of summer. Third-place in the UAA division last season, volleyball has won each of its six matches so far this year, and it's sitting atop the division, though tied with 6-0 NCAA champs Wash U. There are upwards of 30 matches in a season, but it's a sunny way to start, especially since it's propelled the program into the top 25 Div III teams in the nation for the first time.

Moving on to the world's game—association football: the Maroons have taken to kicking butt like a summer blockbuster. After a tie in its season opener, the third-ranked Maroons women's soccer team put its season on-target with a 6-0 dusting of DePauw University, including a new team record for goals scored in one match: 4, by senior Sarah Loh. Fifth-ranked men's soccer fared even better, winning its first two games in overtime thrillers, 2-1, then 3-2. They are a combined 3-0-1.

Cross-country is doing just as well, running faster than the guy screaming "Shark! Shaaaark!" down at the beach. The men cruised to a second place finish at last week's 17-team, season-opening meet at Elmhurst, while the women dominated, coming first of 14. Let's conservatively call their combined record 1-0-1, since winners come in first and losers last. Tough cookies, second place. That's going to have to count as a draw.

Finally, football is also undefeated, winning its first game 28-25 at Beloit Saturday night, in what sounds like a thriller. The Maroons left it late, scoring the winning touchdown in the last minute, a six-yard pass from quarterback Marshall Oium, '11, to wide receiver Clay Wolff, '11, culminating a 64-yard, two-minute drive. But the Beloit Buccaneers almost brought it back, hustling the ball to the Maroon 30-yard line in the last 40 seconds, before having a hail-Mary pass intercepted in the end zone, preserving Chicago's victory and the Maroon's unbeaten, late summer run.

Keep your ears to the ground for today's matches: men's soccer against Dominican (4:00) and two volleyball matches against Edgewood (5:30) and Ripon (7:30). Unless this post has jinxed it all, the boys and girls of autumn might keep summer here to stay.

Asher Klein, '11

September 8, 2010 at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)

Service detour

Nathan Richardson, JD'09, was on track to work at a major law firm, but the recession changed his plans: now he works for a nonprofit environmental group in Washington.

In the world of law, it sometimes feels as if there aren't quite enough Atticus Finches around, fighting the good fight against injustice. Taking posts at multimillion- (and, in some cases, multibillion) dollar law firms is clearly the more lucrative route. But, perhaps in the footsteps of our Community-Organizer-in-Chief, more law students are taking the public-interest path.

A New York Times article last Thursday chronicled the trend of law firms that, because of the recession, deferred prospective hires, such as Chicago grad Nathan Richardson, JD'09, for as long as a year. With the extra time, and a stipend of $60,000-$75,000, many young lawyers decided to work in the public interest—in Richardson's case with Resources for the Future, a nonprofit policy group in Washington. Doing legal research on climate change and the Gulf oil spill, Richardson experienced a compelling alternative to his prospective work with Latham & Watkins. Many of his peers felt more at home with public defenders and nonprofits than with high-stakes megafirms. So when the time came for the lawyers in the Class of '09 to take their offers, recent graduates like Richardson decided to stay with public service in spite of the significantly lower pay.

“I’m working with a lot of really smart people and getting published," Richardson told the Times. "I’m not sure if there’s anywhere else I could do this, at least at this point in my career.”

Burke Frank, '11

September 2, 2010 at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)

Glass and steel, revisited

Seattle's glittering Central Library prompts comparisons to UChicago's own crystal book-palace-in-the-making.

On vacation in the Pacific Northwest last month, it was exhilarating to get out of Chicago and take a couple weeks of much-needed R&R. After all, a reporter can get pretty worn out covering the fast-paced world of rare books, precious manuscripts, andautomated storage-and-retrieval systems.

Call it a buswoman’s holiday, but just after landing in Seattle I couldn’t resist dragging my family to see the sparkling downtown Central Library. It was worth the visit. The minute we entered, we felt the thrum and hum of activity. We oohed and aahed at the views of the city and Elliott Bay through the building’s soaring glass-and-steel façade. My teenage nephew brought his longboard into the slick chartreuse elevator, which was packed with patrons who had come to use the public computers, collections arranged in a winding, six-floor “book spiral,” and vast, visually quirky reading rooms.

Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Ramus, the Central Library has attracted both kudos and criticism. This month, a panel of architects placed it near the top of Vanity Fair’s list of modern marvels and when the library opened in 2004, critic Herbert Muschamp extolled it as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review.” But six years into its young—and busy—life, the library has drawn fire for its functional shortcomings. Bottom line: the glittering glass box is a fabulous, flashy jewel in Seattle’s architectural crown, but maybe not such a great place to find and read a book.

Returning to my job at UChicago, I felt a bit of déjà-vu when I learned that the glass panels were being installed at our own Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. What’s more, the German company Seele—which created the Seattle Central Library’s dazzling grid and many other steel-and-glass constructions around the world—is also doing the work on our own crystal book palace.

It was tempting to compare the Mansueto Library’s sweeping elliptical dome, designed by starchitect Helmut Jahn, with the Seattle library’s radiant glass skin. From there, I easily jumped to worrying that in our own new building, form could trump function. But maybe not: the Mansueto is modest in comparison to the 11-story urban wonder in Seattle, and the dome is just a spectacular cap to what is mainly a gargantuan underground book-storage facility.

What’s more, UChicago has a long tradition of collections-based scholarship, and planning for the new library has benefited from the intensive involvement of researchers, librarians, archivists, and conservators. There’s every reason to hope that it won’t only be a cool building, but also a beating heart for research, a wonderful place to read, and a glimmering bridge between the past and future. In spring 2011 we can test that hypothesis.

Elizabeth Station

September 2, 2010 at 4:56 PM | Comments (0)

Seal of approval

Vincent Yu, '14, designs a new look for the University of Chicago’s old logo, just for kicks.

revised-phoenix.jpgVincent Yu, ‘14, hasn’t even started classes yet, but why would that prevent the incoming first-year from getting a head start on the kind of critical thinking he’s excited to partake in at the U of C? A self-taught graphic designer, Yu decided at the beginning of August to update the look of the University seal for a more modern audience, posting his slick new design on his blog, idionsyncratic reminiscences. The San Jose native took a minute for a phone interview with UChiBLOGo to discuss the what brought the beaming bird about.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat made you want to come to the University of Chicago?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe overwhelming intellectualism of the University, and also the art and culture of the city—an authentic, original American city.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat made you want to redesign the University seal?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI wanted UChicago apparel, but when I was looking through sweatshirts I didn’t like what I saw. Most people would get the normal logo and get it on a custom sweater…. It’s a pretty awesome logo in itself—it’s a pretty complex logo for a University seal—but as I was looking at it, it was more complex and, not retro, more classic than would probably be necessary for a sweatshirt in the contemporary world of design…. I wanted to design a seal that didn’t have as Byzantine a look, as complex a look as the original logo has.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat were you going for?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI guess you can say it was a hybrid of the Twitter logo and what I thought was UChicago, the original seal. I wanted something that was sort of a phoenix and had the remnants of the original logo, but was as accessible as the Twitter logo.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo what’s going on in the new seal?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt does have sort of the feather designs. You can see the patterns going on in the bird’s wing, but the shape looks a lot more symmetrical than the original logo was, in terms of the bird’s wings.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIts eyes look kind of vacant. Why’s that?
QandA_ADrop.jpg[The Twitter logo] is just a white oval, so I guess it was just pirated from that. I guess the biggest reason was I wanted it to be contrasted from the original Chicago seal—you can tell it was hand-ink done, or stencil done. I was using the computer, which makes it much more difficult to create intricate designs…. [The design] also makes it more accessible, in terms of making it a modern, cartoonish image.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd it looks like the font’s been updated too.
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe font is just Avant Garde; I guess the style is condensed too. The business school loves to use Helvetica condensed…. I wanted to adapt that, but I didn’t want to be as bold as the Chicago Booth type face…it’s great for a school like Booth—it’s a brand name that’s recognizable—but here I wanted the focus to be on the image.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow’d you get to be so artistic?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy parents originally tried to enroll me in art classes when I was in second grade, like, paint-the-vase kind of classes…the traditional approach to art. I really didn’t like it, I really didn’t like the idea of art for the majority of my life, from like 4 to 14. And then entering high school, I was very interested in journalism but I didn’t want to do newspapers…there was no permanence in terms of writing; what I wrote wouldn’t really matter in the next month or the next week.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy did journalism appeal to you?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI wanted to do something more concrete, and I know yearbook doesn’t sound like journalism, but I made it my goal to make it more journalistic…I got to doing that. Obviously I didn’t lose my love towards journalism, I still love to report on the interesting stuff…. I sort of just transitioned from layout to actual illustrations, and I guess that’s how I sort of got into it.

Asher Klein, '11

August 30, 2010 at 4:55 PM | Comments (0)