A quarterly newsletter from the Core
 
 
 
 
 
 
Spring 2018
 
 
 
 
 
 
01 Untouchable like Eliot Ness
02 Nemerteans, hydrozoans, cnidarians ...
03 Who wrote that?
04 Campus fashion: The bunny suit
05 David Broder on Presidents Hutchins and Johnson in 1968
06 Supplementary reading
 
 
 
 
 
 
01
 
 
 
 
 
 
Untouchable like Eliot Ness
 
 
 
   
  One 28-year-old federal agent getting $2800 a year [about $42,000 today] played a prominent part in gathering evidence on Capone. He was threatened, attacked, offered bribes and persistently stalked, yet on he worked, content with his $2800 a year and his conscience. His name is no secret. Gangsters know it. It is Eliot Ness, graduate of the University of Chicago.  
  --The Boston Traveler, June 14, 1931  
 
Prohibition agent Eliot Ness, PhB'25, inspired the book The Untouchables (1957), later adapted into a 1960s television series and a 1987 film. Read more »
 
 
 
 
 
 
02
 
 
 
 
 
 
Nemerteans, hydrozoans, cnidarians, nudibranchs, annelids ...
 
 
The tide was falling at Little Sippewissett salt marsh, a 10-minute drive from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Michael LaBarbera, biology professor emeritus, and a dozen College students would spend the next couple of hours here, collecting live creatures to study and identify before returning them to the ocean in a few days.
 
Several students headed first to the beach. The rest turned inland, toward the heavy-husked marsh grasses and fingers of brackish water winding back into the distant woods. LaBarbera went inland too. He demonstrated how to dig under the sand, scoured clean by the current, to the muckier and darker soil. That's where they'd find the worms and mussels and snails they were looking for. Plus the nemerteans and hydrozoans and cnidarians and nudibranchs and annelids that were on the list LaBarbera had handed out the first day of class.
 
 
Someone found a softshell blue crab. "Oh gosh!" The whole group came splashing over. Crabs often mate when females are molting, LaBarbera explained. Afterward the male will cradle the female in his legs, carrying her for the next 48 hours, while her new exoskeleton hardens. "You can view this as the male protecting his reproductive investment," LaBarbera said, grinning slightly, "or the only moment of romance in a blue crab's life."
 
Look for more about LaBarbera's Marine Invertebrates class and the other intensive College courses offered at the Marine Biological Laboratory in the Summer 2018 Core.
 
 
 
 
 
 
03
 
 
 
 
 
 
Who wrote that?
 
1   "Dear child, relinquish your rich day
With grace be parted from your joys."
 
2   "The Rosetta Stone for Birdcalls
is the Rosetta Stone for Human Suffering. Caw = territorial
outrage. Musical flutings upwards = the days of summer are always
declining. Peep = hunger. Barrage of chips = desperate hunger.
Who? = the nest has been abandoned."
 
3   "freedom is what you can buy with a song. after the song has been soldered into your lungs. after the song has beaten its way inside your dreams."
 
4   "Women don't riot, not sober and earnest,
or high and strung out, not of any color,
any race, not the rich, poor,
or those in between. And mothers of all kinds
especially don't run rampant through the streets."
 
5   "... if this can of beer
deserves our attention
it is as a reminder of what it meant
to speak without hypocrisy,
to live unironically,
to be sincere."
 
See answers below.
 
Follow @UChicagoAlumni this April, National Poetry Month, for more UChicago poetry.
 
 
  Answers
1: Janet Loxley Lewis, PhB'20, "Lines to a Child"
2: Peter O'Leary, AB'90, AM'94, PhD'99,
"The Rosetta Stone for Birdcalls"
3: Tyehimba Jess, AB'91, "freedom"
4: Ana Castillo, AM'79, "Women Don't Riot"
5: Campbell McGrath, AB'84,
"Ode to a Can of Shaefer Beer"
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
04
 
 
 
 
 
 
Campus fashion: The bunny suit
 
Abigail Shearrow, AB'16 (physics and mathematics), works as a quantum engineer in the lab of David Schuster, assistant professor of physics.
 
 
I work in the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility for a physics group that is working toward making a quantum computer. I fabricate circuits. We wear bunny suits to keep anything that's on us inside the suit and not in the clean room.
 
There are two stages to getting gowned up. You have to put booties over your shoes and a hairnet on. You also put on a beard cover, which is like a hairnet for your face. If you get spit on what you're making--if you cough or something--that can ruin it.
 
Then you move into the next room, and you have this white zip-up jumpsuit that you get into. It's really fibrous, like normal clothing but papery. You have a hood that goes over the hairnet. You have a pair of boots that go up to your knees, and then you put gloves on and tuck the ends of your suit into the gloves.
 
Some people write their names on the back of their suits. Eventually, if you're in there a lot, you get to know everyone. It starts to feel like a normal work space. Someone will be like, "How was your weekend?"
 
 
 
 
 
 
05
 
 
 
 
 
 
David Broder on Presidents Hutchins and Johnson in 1968
 
 
   
  This university gave me splendid preparation for covering the Johnson White House. Under Robert Maynard Hutchins, I had a foretaste of President Johnson's concept of press relations.  
   
 
 
"One day in the office of Robert Strozier, dean of students, Hutchins appeared. Strozier said, 'Of course, you know Dave Broder, editor of the Maroon'--which of course, Hutchins certainly did not. He looked me up and down, turned to Strozier and said, 'Can't you get him to use his energy for something useful--like washing windows?'"
 
--David Broder, AB'47, AM'51 (1929-2011), then political correspondent for the Washington Post
 
 
 
 
 
 
06
 
 
 
 
 
 
Supplementary reading
 
 
Regenstein Library's Ray Gadke, AM'66 (1943-2018), known for Hawaiian shirts, religious statues, and microforms. Historian Ada Palmer on censorship and "icky speech." #Fakenews and free speech--in 1967. Sleeping out for art.