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In 2009 we tried some new things on our blog UChiBLOGo and kept things interesting in the pages of the Magazine. Some ideas played out more successfully than others. Here are some of 2009's highlights, by the numbers:

Five most popular magazine stories, online

  1. "Chicago Schooled"
    Michael Fitzgerald, AB’86, writes about how the visible hand of the recession has revitalized critics of the Chicago School of Economics.

  2. "Life under wraps" and "Meresamun: A life in layers"
    On display for nine decades, the coffin of a 2,800-year-old Egyptian mummy Meresamun has never been opened. But CT imagery peeled away paint, plaster, and linen to reveal the woman inside.

  3. "The Founders connect online"
    Leila Sales, AB'06, imagines how John D. Rockefeller and William Rainey Harper's relationship during the development of the University would have blossomed over Facebook.

  4. "Make no little quads"
    Jay Pridmore's look at how Chicago’s Hyde Park campus is undergoing its biggest building boom in a century was almost as popular as its complementary Flickr set of additional photos and images.

  5. "The fighter still remains"
    Cocaine and crack once consumed Mark Allen, AB’01, but now he battles his demons in the ring.

Five most popular blog entries

  1. "Unspeakably hilarious"
    Like us, even the editors over at Newsweek—who linked to this entry from their front page—couldn't get enough of linguistics expert Arika Okrent's (PhD'04) amusing list of made-up words.

  2. "Who is Dan Pawson?"
    Magazine copyeditor Elizabeth Chan's interview with Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Pawson, JD'06, includes plenty of charm—and zingers aimed at Law School faculty.

  3. "A presidential drugstore"
    Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93, takes a trip to Hyde Park's Walgreens to look at its transformation into Barack Obama Headquarters.

  4. "2B or not 2B? That's the question. 2B is the answer."
    After publishing a poem in the New Yorker, English PhD student Michael Robbins, AM'04, chatted with UChiBLOGo's editors about his poetic influences, following his sister to Chicago, and his current project intersecting Wu-Tang Clan and the twin towers.

  5. "Chicago gothic"
    Although it started as a last minute replacement blog entry, this behind-the-scenes look at the installation of artist J. Seward Johnson Jr.'s God Bless America (2005) outside the Magazine's office building downtown near Chicago Booth's Gleacher Center held its own among planned entries.

December 30, 2009