Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts

Jeff Burt ’66, Jim Hitch ’71, and Peter Pettibone ’61 might know a bit more about Russia than the average Princetonian. All three headed up the Soviet and Russian practices of the international law firms where they were partners: Arnold & Porter, Baker & McKenzie, and Hogan Lovells, respectively. On Sept. 20, the same day that Ukraine President Volodymr Zelensky addressed the United Nations, they discussed their thoughts on the war with fellow alumni at a Tiger Talks ’66 event, and shared an important message: The threat of nuclear war is very real. On the latest PAWcast, the three shared their thoughts on the conflict, Putin’s rationale, the role of NATO, how it could be affected by the recent violence in Israel and Gaza — and just how far this war could go.

Today I am very pleased to tell you: I have good news. Morality is not actually declining in our country or anywhere else. The widespread belief that morality is declining is an illusion. That’s the conclusion Adam Mastroianni ’14 reached in a study recently published in the journal Nature. With Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert *85, Mastroianni found it just isn’t true that people overall are less kind, honest, and respectful than they used to be. So why do we believe it? On the PAWcast, Mastroianni explained the psychological effects behind this phenomenon, and the danger we flirt with when we allow this belief to take hold.

Bob Surace ’90 is heading into his 13th season as Princeton’s head football coach, but his history with the Tigers goes back much further. On the PAWcast, he spoke about his time as an All-Ivy center for Princeton and what experiences like coaching in the NFL taught him about the game and the players. He also gave his thoughts on two hot-button issues in college football today — the transfer portal and players’ newfound ability to sell their name, image, and likeness.

In 1960, the lives of three men born to immigrant families during the Great Depression collided. A doctor helped a prisoner get paroled, and then that prisoner shot and killed a police officer. Many years later, journalist Lisa Belkin, Princeton Class of 1982, heard this story from the doctor, who had recently become her stepfather, and she had a question: How? How did one of these men become the cop, one the killer, and one the doctor? To find out, she traced the families of all three men back through four generations — through births and marriages, wars, historical events and major cultural shifts that shaped the lives of Americans in the 20th century. Then she wrote it all down and titled her new book “Genealogy of a Murder.” In it, she writes, “We have less power over who we are now than we believe, and much more power over the future than we think.”

Princeton University’s valedictorian for the Class of 2023 is Aleksa Milojević, a mathematics major from Belgrade, Serbia, who has focused on combinatorics while at Princeton and has already written three papers. In addition to earning 16 A pluses at Princeton, he has been a recipient of the Freshman First Honor Prize, the Class of 1939 Scholar Prize, and the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence — twice. Milojević spoke with PAW about his Princeton experience, about solving math problems no one has solved before, and about the many friendships he’ll bring with him after graduation, with classmates from around the world.

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.