The Art of the Novel

The Great Man, Kate Christensen’s (’86) story about a dead artist and his living ladies, has won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
By Robert Smith ’89

Getting Religion

Are Reed students becoming more “spiritual”?
By L.D. Kirshenbaum ’84

Religion in Days Gone By

Remembrances of religion at Reed culled from the Oral History Project

Many Apply. Few are Chosen.

The admission process used to be simple:
the majority of students who applied got in. Nowadays, just one in three makes the grade. Is a plummeting admission rate good for Reed?
By Romel Hernandez

Winter 2008

Listening to Indians

On a dry and dusty plateau 100 miles east of Portland, anthropologists David (’39) and Kay French schooled a generation of Reed students in the art of listening. The scholars they trained on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation went on to rock the worlds of anthropology, linguistics, and poetry in America.
By Robert E. Moore ’82

Live/Work Space

The lights were never dim in the off-campus study of David and Kay French.
By Stephanie Snyder ’91

When the Beats Came Back

A literary sleuth reveals how a 1956 road trip by Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder helped shape Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and how Reed ended up with the earliest-known recording of the legendary poem.
By John Suiter

What Whalen Saw

While Ginsberg and Snyder were road-tripping to Reed, Philip Whalen ’51 stayed behind in Berkeley. And wrote more poetry. An excerpt from the introduction to The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen.
By Leslie Scalapino ’66

Ways We Speak

Dell Hymes ’50 cut his teeth studying the Wasco language at Warm Springs. He went on to challenge Chomsky and his allies on the relationship between language and culture in his seminal work on sociolinguistics.
By Rebecca Koffman

Autumn 2007

Reed at War

The “Greatest Generation” came to college, then went off to save the world. They came back energized and traumatized, wounded and liberated. When they were done, the college would never be the same.
By Will Swarts '92

Ripped from the Archives:
Reedites Remember the War

Excerpts from Reed’s Oral History Project—from the date which will live in infamy, to the day the troops came home.
Research by Lisa Silverman

It Takes {At Least} a Village

At the edge of a pristine tropical rain forest in Borneo, Dr. Kinari Webb ’95 is pushing a novel approach to conservation. Instead of giving away health care at the rural clinic she has established, the locals pay for treatment by working to restore the forest.
By Oakley Brooks

The Race

Political scientist Paul Gronke parses the 2008 presidential election: a Q&A with Reed editor Mitchell Hartman.