Wright was controversial for his scandalous love life, and his work was long scorned before being widely embraced as genius. His prickly personality and contrarian streak did little to boost his reputation among contemporaries. He memorably said that he preferred “honest arrogance” to “hypocritical humility.”

And yet, as this magazine put it in a 1949 profile, “in the end he has usually won his point.” Just as visionaries do, no matter how long it takes.

Wright spent his formative years in Madison and lived an hour west in Spring Green for much of his adult life. That proximity forged a lifelong bond between the architect and his home university, one of mutual admiration but shared skepticism. He stayed in regular touch with the UW until his death at 91, in between working on his iconic designs for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

So here are seven tales about Frank Lloyd Wright and the UW, showing what happens when a proud radical collides with a buttoned-up institution.

By the time his Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, the controversial Wright was widely embraced as a genius. Fox Photos/Getty Images

1. Wright falsely claimed that he attended the UW for three and a half years.

Throughout his life, Wright spoke of his university years as a coming-of-age story. In his telling, at the age of 15 — reeling from his parents’ divorce and ready to leave behind family farm work in Spring Green — he enrolled at the UW as a civil engineering student.

“Architecture, at first his mother’s inspiration, then naturally enough his own desire, was the study he wanted,” Wright wrote in an autobiography, referring to himself in third person. “But there was no money to go away to an architectural school.”

Once he arrived at the UW, disappointed by the lack of an architectural curriculum, Wright found “little meaning in the studies.” He claimed that just a few months before he was to receive his degree, he “ran away from school to go to work in some real architect’s office in Chicago.”

But the real story is a bit less inspiring.

After Wright’s death, historians discovered major discrepancies between the former student’s recollections and the university’s official records. Transcripts revealed that Wright enrolled at the UW in January 1886 and stayed for just two terms, that spring and the next fall. He was listed as a “special student,” likely because he didn’t finish high school. Only two courses showed completed grades: “average” in descriptive geometry and drawing.

The UW became aware of the divergent accounts as early as 1955, when it was preparing to award Wright an honorary degree for lifetime achievement.

“Wright’s statement and our record obviously do not jibe,” read an internal memo from mathematics professor Rudolph Langer. He acknowledged that “records are pretty faulty for the years before 1887,” but no evidence has turned up since to suggest an error. And in 2012, UW Archives found a progress report that included a note from Wright’s rhetoric professor that he “failed to appear in class.”

Puzzling biographers even more, Wright also claimed that he was born in 1869. In truth, he was born in 1867, which means that he actually enrolled at the UW around age 18 — just like most of us.

Working on Science Hall is where Wright “really learned most” during his UW student days. UW Archives

2. Wright got his start in architecture as a part-time assistant on Science Hall.

Wright never minced words about his time at the UW, whatever its length.

“The retrospect of university years is mostly dull pain,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Thought of poverty and struggle, pathos of a broken home, unsatisfied longings, humiliations — frustration.”

And if all that weren’t depressing enough: “The inner meaning of nothing came clear.”

To Wright, only mathematics made any sense. And even then, he called his professor, Charles Van Velzer, an “academic little man” who “opened for his pupil the stupendous fact that two plus two equal[s] four.” Ever the idealist, Wright believed the math professor should have approached his teachings as a poet would.

Wright still lived with his mother and sisters while in college, walking two miles to campus each day. Yearbook pages show that he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, the University Choral Club, and the UW Association of Engineers.

With his mother’s help, Wright secured a job with Allan Conover 1874, 1876, a UW professor of civil engineering who operated a private practice. Still a student, Wright was hired as a part-time assistant and draftsman. At the time, Conover was overseeing the construction of the new Science Hall after the original burned down in 1884. The new building was one of the first in the world to be constructed largely of structural steel, and Wright apparently helped to supervise some of the work on the roof trusses.

In his autobiography, Wright shared a story of how the workers, frustrated with the steel clips that were supposed to connect the trusses, deserted the scene and left the materials hanging loosely from the top of the building. He climbed the icy scaffolding in the dead of winter — “nothing between [me] and the ground but that forest of open steel beams” — and retrieved the clips.

It seems that Wright also contributed to the campus’s first boiler house, a central heating plant that later became Radio Hall, as drawings of the trusses matched some of his later work.

“It was with Professor Conover that [I] really learned most,” Wright shared in the rare warm reflection of his time at the UW.

In early 1887, Wright left Madison to start his career in Chicago. He wouldn’t return to the UW campus, at least in a formal capacity, for more than four decades.

3. Later in his career, Wright became a frequent visitor on campus — and a critic of UW architecture.

In the early part of his career, Wright surely felt spurned by the university, which routinely passed him over on commissions. And the university likely feared reputational harm by association, with controversies always swirling around Wright’s romantic and financial affairs.

But by 1930 — his reputation growing first in Europe and Southeast Asia and finally in the U.S. — Frank Lloyd Wright’s name was too big to ignore. His achievements started to appear in seemingly every issue of the UW’s alumni magazine. A glowing profile from 1949 began with the line: “The most noteworthy quality about Frank Lloyd Wright is the deep human warmth that issues from him.”

Wright was first invited to speak on campus in October 1930. More than 1,000 people crowded Music Hall for his pair of lectures, titled “The New Architecture” and “Salvation by Imagination.” Walter Agard, a UW classics professor, introduced Wright as “perhaps the greatest architect in the world.”

“To those who love architecture, ‘radical’ should be a beautiful word,” Wright told the crowd. “It is not enough for architecture to take up where others left off.”

He added: “We are a self-conscious nation, and we are afraid to create.”

Wright returned to the UW for similarly high-minded speeches at least five times between 1932 and 1955, typically in the Memorial Union Theater and coinciding with exhibitions of his work. He preached from his gospel of organic architecture, which sought to bring people and buildings into harmony with their natural surroundings.

A proud provocateur, Wright never shied from the chance to criticize his host. In 1932, he mocked the Memorial Union’s architecture as “speaking Italian, extremely bad Italian.” In 1948, he added that “all the buildings that the university has built are heresy,” calling them “dead forms” and “monarchic hangovers unbecoming to a democracy.”

In another lecture, he decried the shoreline buildings for being designed with their backs to the water. Wright believed that the university wasted a “gift of nature” by failing to marry its campus to Lake Mendota.

4. During Wright’s campus visits, he inspired one famous writer and feuded with another.

Wright’s antiestablishment message resonated with at least one UW student and fellow visionary. Lorraine Hansberry x’52, the future playwright and author of A Raisin in the Sun, wrote that one of Wright’s campus lectures left an indelible mark.

“He attacked almost everything … [including] the nature of education saying that we put in so many fine plums and get out so many fine prunes,” she noted. “Everyone laughed — the faculty nervously I guess; but the students cheered.”

Later, with Wright’s critiques still ringing in her ears, Hansberry left the UW to “pursue an education of another kind” — a writing career in New York City.

In 1934, Wright rubbed shoulders with another famous writer on campus. Gertrude Stein, the rare figure who could match Wright’s eccentricity and ego, visited Memorial Union to deliver a guest lecture in which, according to one reporter, she “modestly offered her work as the foundation of modern English literature.”

Afterward, Stein retreated to a party room and recognized an approaching figure in the hallway — the man who, according to the alumni magazine, “had sat in the front row during her lecture [and] slept like the dead.” Stein ordered an attendant to “slam the door quickly and solidly in the astounded face of Frank Lloyd Wright.”

A week later, Wright fired back with a satirical column in the Wisconsin State Journal, mocking Stein’s “simple view of world literature” and insisting on the last word in the bizarre feud.

Wright designed a Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house before the alumni lost confidence in him. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library Columbia University, New York)

5. Wright designed two university-related buildings, but neither came to fruition.

Wright was commissioned for more than 30 building designs in Madison, the most of any place in the world. But only two of them — a boathouse for the rowing team and a fraternity house for Phi Gamma Delta — had a direct connection to the university.

In 1905, UW rower Cudworth Beye 1906 asked Wright to design a second boathouse for the crew team along Lake Mendota. The architect responded eagerly: “We are always ready when ‘Alma Mater’ calls — we will design any thing for the [UW] from a chicken house to a cathedral, no matter how busy we may be.”

Just over a month later, Wright sent the sketches and predicted a “somewhat more expensive” project than anticipated. The ground floor, flanked on each side by floating piers, was to house the rowing shells, with a locker room on the level above. Wright’s plans were a confident expression of his budding Prairie style: symmetrical, horizontal, low proportioned, always in unity with its surroundings. It was his first design to incorporate a perfectly flat roof and was among the most abstract of his early work.

There was just one obstacle: UW administrators were never really on board with the plan, and they were far more preoccupied with the football program (which the faculty was trying to suspend over safety concerns). Within months, it became clear that funding for the boathouse would not materialize.

Wright was still clearly proud of the work: it was the only unbuilt design featured in his prominent Wasmuth Portfolio five years later. And in 2007, the UW boathouse design was finally constructed — in Buffalo, New York, under the guidance of a former Wright apprentice.

In 1924, alumni of the UW’s Phi Gamma Delta chapter commissioned Wright to build a new fraternity house at 16 Langdon Street. Wright’s plans separated essential functions into a student wing, great hall, and alumni guest house. The Mayan-inspired exterior followed the narrow, sloping lot, hugging the hillside all the way down, complete with rooftop terraces.

The alumni eventually lost confidence in Wright after a series of personal dramas and rising construction estimates. They discharged the architect and turned the project over to the architectural firm Law, Law, and Potter, which preserved Wright’s three-part floor plan but abandoned much else in its more conventional design.

Even after his death in 1959, Wright’s imprint on campus proved almost cruelly elusive. In May 1965, the State Building Commission approved a resolution to name a proposed student union at the UW in honor of the late architect. But the “Wright Union” was never to be — Union South, sans eponym or even mention of Wright, opened in 1971.

At least you can see Wright’s influence in the new Union South, which was rebuilt in 2011 in the architect’s Prairie style.

6. Wright lobbied the UW to sponsor his Taliesin Fellowship.

In 1928, Wright announced that he was planning to convert the old Hillside School in Spring Green into an “academy of allied arts” with an architectural focus. He reached out to the UW in hopes it would fund and sponsor what would later become the Taliesin Fellowship — his famous apprenticeship program.

Wright was likely inspired by the UW’s Experimental College, a two-year alternative program established by educational reformer Alexander Meiklejohn in 1927. It attracted fellow free spirits, and Wright often sung the experiment’s praises.

Wright negotiated with the university for a year, but administrators ultimately rejected a school located so far off campus. The architect lashed out at UW president Glenn Frank, accusing him of letting Wright’s “domestic situation” (filled with multiple marriages, divorces, mistresses, and custody battles) influence the decision.

Wright opened the Taliesin Fellowship on his own in 1932.

The ordeal soured him even more on traditional education. While the university merely conditioned its students, he argued, the Taliesin Fellowship enlightened them.

Wright explained in the UW’s alumni magazine: “No courses, no credits, no examinations, no teaching. … Our textbook is the one book of creation itself.”

Wright receives an honorary degree for his work as a “constructive controversialist.” UW Archives

7. Wright earned an honorary doctorate from the UW in 1955 — and tried to receive another degree.

Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography that he left the UW early because he felt little motivation “just to be one of the countless many who had that certificate.” But that sentiment did not hold true in his later years.

After decades of debate and rejection by the UW’s Committee on Honorary Degrees, Wright was nominated for an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts during an all-faculty meeting in March 1955.

Wright, soon to turn 87, eagerly accepted the recognition in a letter to UW president E. B. Fred. A week later, he wrote to Fred again, adding a request that he receive his undergraduate degree and turning in what he claimed to be a senior thesis.

“So here is the missing thesis — The Eternal Law — to be back-filed, perhaps, with those of my ancient class?” he wrote.

It contained a dozen typed pages (with penciled edits), many personal views, and zero citations. He argued, with familiar grandiosity, that the only certainty in life is change — “that we are all in a state of becoming, that is to say, of growth, or decay: decay being but another form of growth.”

Fred responded diplomatically: “The honor which we contemplate doing you … so far eclipses the deserts of an ordinary student … that I must protest against your feeling that any ‘repair’ needs be made.” He promised to preserve Wright’s paper in the archives.

Wright handled the rebuff with grace, writing back, “Since it has found a resting place, all is well.”

On June 17, 1955, Wright attended the UW’s commencement ceremony at Camp Randall and walked across the stage to receive his honorary degree “with an ailing back (but also a smile),” according to the alumni magazine.

The citation for Wright’s honorary degree referred to him as a “constructive controversialist.” In conferring the degree, Fred told Wright: “You have labored long and well to release the spirits of men from the shackles of outworn convention.”

It’s clear that the recognition from his alma mater touched the old architect deeply. In his response to the UW’s initial invitation, you can practically hear the sigh of relief in his words.

“No honors are sweeter than home-honors. While the lateness of the hour was becoming a matter for invidious speculation — that is now happily ended.” •

Burden is unperturbed, calmly awaiting the new line of inquiry with an attentive gaze. Refocusing on hot political news du jour is his stock-in-trade. The first question is on a court case decided the prior day. Later, a guest asks about a New York Times article in that morning’s paper. Burden responds authoritatively every time. Is it possible to trip this guy up?

Burden is a world-renowned expert in American electoral politics, holds the Lyons Family Chair in Electoral Politics at UW–Madison, and is a frequent media source due to his unimpeachably nonpartisan, factual approach. “He’s tackling the big questions, but he’s doing it from the perspective of a social science researcher, as opposed to an advocate who has a point of view,” says Susan Webb Yackee, director of the UW La Follette School of Public Affairs. “And in our very purple state, Barry’s approach to scholarship is noteworthy.”

Burden is one of the top scholars in campaigns and elections, according to Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor and Burden’s coeditor on The Measure of American Elections. “Anything he writes becomes an instant must-read in the field.”

Burden enjoys the unexpected. In this election year of extreme political upheaval, his wealth of knowledge is more sought after than ever. Whether talking to election observers from Japan or journalists from Argentina, Sweden, or Singapore, he never knows what questions might be asked when he picks up his phone. And he thrives on that.

“Being a political science professor, I think, is different from any other discipline on campus because it is moving constantly,” says Burden. “There might be developments that morning before I’ve had breakfast, or in the hour before I walked into the classroom, that other people are aware of that I am not. So it has a different pace than music or math or astronomy or even related fields like sociology and psychology.”

The Madison Club presentation runs overtime due to the unusually “enthusiastic, engaged audience,” according to Mayers. Among the first to leave the room is an apologetic Burden — a Milwaukee TV station is outside waiting to interview him. Welcome to his life.

Beasts of Burden

Three graduate students casually pull up chairs around an aged wooden table on the second floor of North Hall, just above Burden’s office. Clutching a paper coffee cup, he convenes the biweekly meeting of the Beasts of Burden — a group of his doctoral advisees. The conversation flows from data sets to research scope, and he wraps up, as is customary, by asking, “What media have you been consuming?” Someone mentions an episode of the game show Game Changer where contestants get blamed for messing up despite never being told the rules. Burden jokes: “Is this a metaphor for how professors interact with students?”

There’s a new twist at this particular meeting. The students summarily dismiss their adviser from the room so they can talk about Burden behind his back. “He was the whole reason I came to the UW,” attests Jess Esplin MA’23, PhDx’26. She wanted to study election reform, so she reached out to experts nationwide. Burden responded with a timely email — something she now knows is his standard procedure.

“He makes an effort to make himself available,” she says. “He’s one of the only academics who can keep up on their emails.”

Burden is careful with his word choices, has high expectations, and forces students to also be clear and concise, notes Matthew Kim ’22, PhDx’25. He credits Burden with drawing in students and encouraging participation. “You never feel on the sidelines.”

Jacqueline Qiu PhDx’28 felt comfortable breaking down in tears in his office when struggling with health and academic challenges. Burden handed her a tissue and listened. “He’s really empathetic, considerate, and an excellent teacher with clear expectations — the best I’ve had,” she says. “His classes have always been my favorite, although they’re also the hardest.”

Esplin lifts her phone to show a picture from a class where students dressed up in “standard Barry uniform” — some variety of a blue plaid button-down shirt with jeans. They dub him a nerd, a dad figure, a Star Wars fan, and a lover of the black cat on his phone’s home screen. Several times a year, his grad students are invited to a gathering at his house, where his persona remains the same: Always considerate. Always empathetic. And always the professor.

During the years Levi Bankston MA’18, PhD’23 spent at UW–Madison, Burden was his boss at the Elections Research Center, as well as his adviser and mentor. He jokes that Burden has a robot-like ability to retain facts in spite of his busy schedule.

“If it weren’t for good professors, empathetic professors, like Barry Burden,” Bankston says, “I probably would have quit the program.”

Burden is so serious about his role as a professor, according to his wife, Laura Burden, that he never cancels his classes — even right after she had a baby.

Yet when Burden began college, he viewed politics as a hobby and couldn’t conceive of professor as a job option.

Zero Politics

When Burden, now 53, arrived at Ohio’s Wittenberg University, he didn’t understand what a syllabus or midterms were. He was a first-generation college student and felt at a disadvantage.

Burden grew up in Newark, Ohio, where his mother worked in a civilian support role in the Air Force and his father ran a machine and welding shop. In the Burden home, politics was absent.

“There was zero politics in my school environment, zero politics in my home environment,” recalls Burden. “I don’t know who my parents voted for, or if they even voted, which I think is part of what made it interesting to me. I felt like it was something going on in the world that I was being denied access to. So I was curious.”

He adds: “My career has been made in a place that none of my family knows much about.”

The television was on in his home, however, and there were only a handful of stations, so Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News was a backdrop to family evenings. When he was a senior in high school in 1988, his class did a mock debate where Burden played Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. He demurs when asked if he won the debate: “I think I had done more homework than anyone else in terms of preparing.”

At Wittenberg, he tutored and majored in math, but it lacked the element of surprise that inspires him. So he rushed through a political science major in his junior and senior years, preparing for a career in campaign consulting, polling, or a similar field.

The more Burden saw of politics, the sillier it appeared to him. For example, he recalls President Bill Clinton’s expectation that his administration could reform the U.S. health care system top to bottom in his first six months in office. “You people are bananas,” thought Burden. “You’re trying to upend a huge part of the economy. Good luck with that.”

Several supportive mentors redirected him onto the path of becoming a political science professor, and he earned his doctorate at Ohio State University. Today, Burden is the only professor who sits on the First-Generation Badgers working group, offering support and networking for the 20 percent of UW–Madison students who are the first in their families to attend college. “I think the task force believed that having a faculty member as a member was a nice sign for students that you can go from being a high school graduate like everyone else in the family to being a college professor,” he says. “That path is open to you.”

Burden got his first job as a professor at Louisiana State University, then moved to Harvard University. Harvard had the draw of new experiences, from being on an Ivy League campus to taking the subway to accessing the top politicians and scholars who regularly visited campus.

But after seven years at Harvard, he was looking for a place to settle down with his wife and two children where he could build a lifelong career. UW–Madison had a reputation for its prominent scholars in American government.

“I knew it had a great graduate program,” he says, “and I knew about Madison’s reputation as a place to live.”

That was 2006. Since then, his work in political science has taken him places he never expected.

Lights, Camera, Action

A young Burden would have been shocked to learn that his career would land him in documentaries like Fahrenheit 11/9 and An Unreasonable Man, with his own IMDB entry. Attorneys also seek him out as an expert witness on elections law. He’s selective about the requests he accepts, just as he is with media requests.

“I can be picky about the things I want to do,” he says. “What’s going to be interesting or rewarding? Or where can I have a real impact on the law?”

Burden has testified in battles over voter ID, ballot drop boxes, and election results, which are increasingly waged in the courts.

MIT’s Stewart has been on the same and opposing sides of Burden in court and has found him to be unflappable. “He is very calm, very assured, very easygoing,” says Stewart. “He is an easy witness to listen to.”

Burden says that being an expert witness is different from being a teacher or researcher. “You can’t be equivocal, and you can’t be complicated or ambiguous.”

Burden has to sign his written reports under penalty of perjury, followed by taking the witness stand under oath and being cross-examined by attorneys looking to trip him up with any past tweet or syllabus or quote. He’s testified in a half-dozen states, maintaining his disciplined adherence to statistics and facts in high-stakes situations.

Indeed, Burden isn’t fazed by much of anything, whether aggressive legislators or media. “You might think that would make someone in my role be more cautious about things they say, getting in trouble or offending one side, but I don’t think I’ve been very cautious, and it has not gotten me in trouble,” he says. “If your analysis is based on facts and proper social science standards, it’s pretty difficult for people to argue.”

Too Much News

The 2024 election season offered scholars plenty of riveting material. As President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, Burden took to X to succinctly explain the situation to his nearly 6,000 followers.

“It’s unlike any other presidential election in our lifetimes,” he says. “There are so many elements that are one-off and strange compared to the historical record of how elections usually work.”

The pinned post on Burden’s X profile from 2020 reads: “There is too much news.” Election season has become 24/7, no longer taking a break in off-cycle years or summer or even holidays, notes Burden. And recent events, such as the violence on January 6, 2021, once “seemed out of the realm of possibility.”

Fear is heightened, but Burden offers reassurance that many elements remain consistent.

“I tell my students this: every election is different, but also every election is the same. We know Oklahoma is going to vote for the Republican candidate — doesn’t matter who the nominee is or anything else. So there are those kinds of stable, repeatable things that are known in advance.”

While Burden can confidently answer any reporter’s query about elections, one question does trip him up.

Go, Go, Go

When asked about his hobbies, there is a long pause. “I’m a runner.”

He hesitates, thinks some more.

“Not a lot of other hobbies that I’m super invested in. I play golf a little bit. We’ve had a poker group on and off over the years.”

Burden’s family is also active in the Unitarian church in Madison. That’s another thing, he realizes, that was not a part of his childhood.

“Just as I felt like politics was being withheld from me, religion might be the same way. We were not churchgoers, no talk of that, never inside a church building. I didn’t know what happened in those places. And so it generated a kind of curiosity on my part.”

Laura Burden, a social worker and his wife of more than 30 years, says her “go, go, go” husband needs more hobby time. The family did take a summer vacation, during which he struggled to build a fire.

“By the last night, he realized exactly what he needed to do,” she says. “It’s Barry to his core: he’s gonna approach things very logically, march through, figure it out — and he’s gonna get it right. And then you’re gonna have a fire.” •

Whether she’s in parking lots, airports, stores, or even in the middle of Times Square, she will confidently prop up her leg and apply her award-winning anti-chafe stick, Thigh Rescue. This bold ritual isn’t merely a marketing tactic for her body-positive beauty brand, Megababe; it reflects Sturino’s approach to life.

As an influencer, entrepreneur, and body-acceptance advocate, Sturino has leveraged her social media platform to challenge body-shaming, promote confidence, and build a supportive community. With her personal brand firmly rooted in embracing people of every size, she launched her company to foster shame-free attitudes toward bodies.

For Sturino, authenticity is more than a motto — it’s her guiding principle: “I don’t know how to do anything different than show up as me,” she says.

Sturino Meets World

Sturino’s first foray into social-media success came in 2014, with a viral Instagram post about her rescue dog Toast, an adorable Cavalier King Charles spaniel whose tongue always hung out of her mouth. At the time, Instagram, while still primarily a photo-sharing app, was on the cusp of its influencer revolution.

After studying rhetoric at UW–Madison, Sturino moved to New York to dive into fashion and PR, including founding her own agency, Tinder PR (no, not that Tinder). That experience led her to turn what could’ve been a flash-in-the-pan moment into a career for Toast that included book deals, modeling gigs, and branded @toastmeetsworld merchandise. Though Toast died in 2017, her social media presence lives on through siblings Muppet, Cheese, and Crumb on their account @dogmeetsworld.

Toast’s success showed Sturino the power of social media and led her to begin using it for herself. She launched her personal Instagram page, @katiesturino, and plus-size fashion blog, The 12ish Style, in 2015. Initially focused on shopping advice for women size 12 and above, Sturino’s blog gained recognition for her candid posts about overcoming her lifelong struggles with body image and offering tips for how other women can do the same.

“I find that, anytime I’m going through something, whether it’s an anxiety attack or not being able to find something in a store, I share it, and inevitably, there are people out there who feel better because I did,” she says.

She also introduced content series like “Can I Shop in Store?” #MakeMySize, and #SuperSizetheLook, where she recommends places to shop, tries on clothes from brands lacking size inclusivity, and encourages women to wear what they like at any size by re-creating celebrities’ outfits on a plus-size body.

On her social media accounts, Sturino re-creates celebrity looks in plus sizes, including outfits worn by actresses Meryl Streep (above) and Hilary Duff (below). Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images; Courtesy of Katie Sturino

Sturino’s journey on social media has had its challenges. “It was a difficult transition because I had never had my face out there before,” she says. “But I felt that I had an important message that needed to get out there, so I pushed through my discomfort and awkwardness, and after about a year, I landed on my feet with it.”

Indeed, she did. @katiesturino now has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram.

To the Thigh Rescue

Every spring, Sturino would sit down with her growing community to ask a very serious question: how are we handling thigh chafe? This annual converastion about “chafe season,” as she dubbed it, was just one example of Sturino’s willingness to speak candidly about issues often overlooked by mainstream beauty brands.

“I talk to my people all the time about all the taboo things people don’t talk about, like thigh chafe and boob sweat,” she shares. Through these conversations, Sturino identified a gap in the market for products that addressed these common issues without embarrassing names or toxic ingredients.

Sturino’s antichafing stick is Megababe’s best-selling product.

“I just couldn’t wait anymore for the beauty industry to catch up,” she says. In 2017, drawing from her personal experiences and the feedback of her loyal following, Sturino, alongside her sister Jenny Sturino ’00 and friend Kate McPherson ’03, took a leap and self-funded Megababe. Their mission: to create “nontoxic, solution-oriented products to enhance comfort and confidence in people’s bodies.”

Megababe’s journey began with a focus on tackling the dreaded thigh chafe. Despite initial skepticism from manufacturers unfamiliar with the concept, Sturino persisted.

“I knew from talking to my community that this isn’t just a problem for me,” she explains. “So many people have it because we talked about it all the time.” Undeterred, the trio forged ahead by any means necessary, even running operations from the Sturino family’s garage in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, for the first two years.

In 2017, Megababe launched its first two products — Thigh Rescue and Bust Dust, a talc-free powder for perspiration. Both sold out within weeks, and Thigh Rescue continues to be the brand’s bestselling product, with more than one million units sold.

For Sturino, trusting her instincts and those of her followers proved to be the right decision. “I can’t tell you how many people did not think this was a good idea,” she says. “But there was also just so much positivity that came with the launch of this brand.”

In the seven years since, Megababe has shown no signs of slowing down. The company has grown its product offerings from the original two to more than 30, including Megaman, a line for men. It has secured placement in major retailers like Target, Ulta, and Walmart; expanded internationally into Boots, the UK’s largest pharmacy chain; and this year produced its first ad campaign, Megababe vs. The Chafe, starring plus-size model Hunter McGrady. These achievements not only mark business milestones but also reflect success in Sturino’s larger goal to redefine beauty norms and empower people to embrace their true selves.

“My gut was correct,” says Sturino. “It felt really good then, and it feels really good every day, still.”

Body Talk

In May 2024, Sturino found herself in a dreamlike position — seated next to Oprah Winfrey.

Weeks earlier, Sturino made an Instagram post that included criticism of WeightWatchers for decades of harmful weight loss rhetoric and contributing to a culture that “shamed people for simply existing in larger bodies.”

Her post sparked a flood of responses from women sharing similar experiences with dieting and weight-loss culture. It also captured the attention of Sima Sistani, CEO of WeightWatchers, who reached out with a personal apology and an invitation to appear on Oprah’s special, Making the Shift: A New Way to Think about Weight.

“I didn’t know I needed to hear that apology,” Sturino shared in a follow-up post. “I didn’t know it would mean so much. And based on the hundreds of DMs I got, neither did you.”

On the special, Sturino championed her message of body acceptance, encouraging compassion and rejecting the notion that people won’t be happy until they change their weight. Her commitment to challenging societal norms and fostering self-love is evident through her Instagram page, her podcast Boob Sweat, and her 2021 illustrated workbook, Body Talk: How to Embrace Your Body and Start Living Your Best Life. By addressing issues like size inclusivity, negative self-perception, and medical biases, Sturino resonates with a community of women navigating their own body-image challenges. “Connecting with people has become the fuel for my fire,” she says. “I never thought anyone would be coming to me for anything other than jeans advice. But what made me want to do this work wasn’t just marketing dresses; it was about connecting with people and helping them along their body-acceptance journey.”

This passion permeates every aspect of Sturino’s life, especially her work with Megababe. Despite its success, the company has remained true to its roots. It is still self-funded, with products made in the United States (though no longer shipped from home by Sturino’s parents), and Sturino continues to personally engage with her followers on social media to meet their needs. “When our customers tell us they want something, I listen and look into it,” she explains.

Sturino’s mission extends beyond beauty products; it’s about reshaping attitudes toward body positivity. “For the most part, women of all sizes are dissatisfied with their bodies,” she says. “I am here to try to curb and stop that. The more we can shake it, the better off future generations will be.”

With her unwavering commitment to authenticity and empathy, Sturino is set to challenge beauty standards for years to come. And if that rubs anyone the wrong way, Sturino has just the thing. •

Some health care organizations and news outlets frame overuse this way without unpacking what addiction truly means: an inability to stop doing something despite repeated negative consequences. And the hyperbole does teenagers no favors.

“Social media isn’t going anywhere, and fearing it won’t change that,” says UW associate professor Alvin Thomas. Bryce Richter

“It robs kids of their agency,” says Megan Moreno, a physician, professor, and interim chair of the pediatrics department at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “Sometimes we’re telling teens they’re addicted to social media rather than helping them find healthier ways of using it.”

What constitutes “unhealthy” use is an open question in academia, and social media’s upside — its capacity to foster mental health — has barely been studied. Moreno is one UW researcher seeking answers. Her latest project investigates how the social media content teens create and consume influences their beliefs and behavior. It’s funded by an $8 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

This grant also supports projects by UW pediatrics assistant professor Ellen Selkie MD’08, MPH’09 and Chris Cascio, an associate professor in the UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Other UW researchers are exploring the relationship between social media and teen mental health, as well as learning how adults should guide teens’ online experiences. Their findings have the potential to make the much-maligned social platforms a safer place for kids to hang out.

“Like Learning to Drive”

Moreno leads the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team, whose approach to digital safety research bridges public health, consumer science, and education. Its youth advisory board lets teens voice their perspectives on the studies.

The three studies funded by the Shriver grant share a cohort of 400 Wisconsin residents ages 13 to 15. Data are being gathered over two years, through surveys, interviews, text-messaged health screenings, and functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. The lab examines the teens’ actions and reactions on TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook.

“We observe what they choose to share about their health behaviors on social media, and whether what they share reflects or influences their actual intentions, attitudes, and behaviors,” Moreno says.

Data on how teens discuss healthy behaviors versus risky ones get linked to brain-imaging data from Cascio’s lab. Moreno has found that the teens’ posts are largely authentic, providing helpful clues for caregivers.

“I predict a strong positive association between what teens are posting about their behavior and what they’re actually doing, which has never been shown in this age group,” Moreno says, noting that data analysis is still underway.

As co–medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, Moreno believes that adults, aided by research, can positively affect teens’ use of social media

“We need to think about social media like learning to drive,” she says. “You don’t put a teen in a car and say, ‘Figure it out.’ You ride with them, see how they’re doing, and teach them different parts of the process when they’re ready.”

Pain and Rewards

Cascio’s Communication, Brain, and Behavior Lab explores how persuasion influences adolescent health behaviors — for example, how teens’ real-world choices are shaped by peers’ digital actions. For their Shriver-funded study, the researchers are examining brain pathways associated with both the rewards and the social pain teens experience in the digital realm. They’re curious why some teen brains are more reactive to social inclusion and exclusion and how these differences influence mental health and behaviors such as vaping.

Though feeling a sense of reward with certain actions is part of the addiction process, it also drives many healthy habits. That’s one reason it’s unhelpful to generalize about “social media addiction.”

“It’s like saying alcohol is addictive,” Cascio says. “Addiction affects a subset of its users, but it doesn’t describe how everyone uses it.”

In other words, each teen’s social media experience is unique and has a different set of effects. Many teens report positive effects such as improved emotional health and feeling more supported socially. Despite this, other researchers tend to look for links between social media use and negative health outcomes, according to Cascio and Moreno. For the most part, the resulting advice has been to limit screen time — a generalization that leaves many parents feeling lost, guilty, or both.

Moreno argues that optimal amount of screen time will vary from teen to teen. That’s why she, Cascio, and Selkie are asking different questions about social media: why are some teens more vulnerable to harm, and what are the best ways to help them?

Cascio’s team suspects that the greater a teen’s exposure to certain types of social media experiences, the more sensitive to others’ opinions they’ll be. To test this hypothesis, they are measuring 150 eighth and ninth graders’ neural activity as they view social media posts. The teens see posts they’ve created and posts by others, rate how much they like or dislike each, and note how certain they feel about their like/dislike ratings.

“We’re seeing neural differences at work,” Cascio says. “For instance, experiencing more pain with self-posts is related to increased alcohol use. … It seems to drive health behaviors.”

The way the brain processes peer posts matters, too. Preliminary data analysis showed that teens who feel more reward during positive peer feedback are more likely to have used alcohol recently. Those who feel more pain during negative peer feedback have more intentions to vape. The Communication, Brain, and Behavior Lab is collecting more data to see how these findings play out in different social situations, hoping to gain a clearer understanding of the relationship between reactivity and peer feedback. Armed with these findings, adults could offer support tailored to a teen’s information-processing style. For instance, a counselor might suggest different resources to teens who are easily influenced by peers’ social media behaviors and those who are not.

Social Media Personality Types

Selkie’s Learning More from Adolescents Online group is monitoring teen stress, loneliness, and self-esteem for a Shriver-funded project. The data help test a model in which childhood characteristics predict a trajectory of social media behavior in early adolescence, which then predicts socioemotional well-being indicators in middle adolescence.

The work involves identifying social media “personality types” associated with certain digital behaviors. For example, some types share many more details about their offline lives. Well-being markers get linked to each type.

“We watch how the content of each teen’s social media posts evolves over time, and this is enough to determine their type,” Selkie says. “Outcomes such as loneliness are likely to differ from one type to another.”

Knowing which styles are associated with risk helps mental health professionals develop better interventions.

Selkie’s team is also examining the social media experiences of transgender and nonbinary teens and their parents. The researchers hope to learn how the digital content they consume shapes their families’ health care decisions.

“We’re wondering what teens learn about gender from influencer content and how it affects their parents’ efforts to support their identities,” Selkie says.

Studies like these informed a recent White House roundtable where Moreno shared recommendations for making digital life more kid-safe. Selkie’s research will influence her clinical work as well.

“When you’re in an exam room, you may not see what’s impacting a teen’s mood,” Selkie says. “Research like this provides more context.”

Cyberbullying

Selkie began her research career with cyberbullying studies, extending findings by trailblazers like UW educational psychology professor Amy Bellmore. In addition to examining teens’ Twitter experiences in the platform’s early years, Bellmore pioneered cyberbullying research through a collaboration with UW computer sciences professor Jerry Zhu.

“Jerry Zhu heard about me through a colleague, then asked if I wanted to research cyberbullying with him, which is such a UW–Madison thing to do,” Bellmore says of the cross-disciplinary partnership. “I’d been studying bullying — but not cyberbullying — for 10 years and was ready for a new challenge.”

Bellmore’s team won a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to develop machine-learning models that analyze social media data related to bullying. Between 2014 and 2018, they studied more than 500 teens’ Twitter posts, plus reports on their social media use and school experiences.

This research also deepened Bellmore’s interest in cross-cultural communication. Today, her Peer Relationships, Ethnicity, Schools, and Media Lab examines teens’ social media use through this lens. The lab is currently studying students at four high schools.

“We ask them whose social media posts they pay attention to and whose they interact with. They name these peers in their grade, and we evaluate those networks,” Bellmore says.

First the participants are divided into two groups: those naming more peers who share their own ethnic identity and those naming more peers with a different identity. Then the researchers compare and contrast.

Bellmore expects the data to mirror findings about offline peer interactions.

“Offline, ethnic minority students benefit from having more same-ethnicity peers, whether we’re looking at identity development or friendship quality,” she says. “Cross-ethnic interactions help students see other perspectives and perform better academically.”

If Bellmore’s hypothesis is correct, her research could fuel digital interventions for minority teens who feel marginalized. It could also shape schools’ efforts to boost grades and create a welcoming environment for all.

Preventing Negative Outcomes

Alvin Thomas, an associate professor of human development and family studies in the UW School of Human Ecology, compares social media to a playground: “You know your child could get hurt there, but preventing them from going would stymie their development. Instead, you teach them how to be safe.” Racial discrimination is one injury teens of color can experience online. The likelihood grows as their social media use increases. The Thomas Resilient Youth Lab studies this phenomenon in its efforts to understand how social media shapes mental health.

In the lab’s study of social media use among 356 Black and Latino adolescents, teens who witnessed online racial discrimination reported more depression symptoms, and those who experienced it reported both anxiety and depression symptoms. Discrimination victims also reported more psychological distress, which was associated with feeling unable to act in academic domains. Having higher self-esteem tended to reduce this frozen feeling.

“To me, this means an excellent support system can be protective for a teen who’s been the target of online discrimination,” Thomas says.

Thomas expects to publish three related studies in 2025. Two explore how parents can protect teens from negative mental health outcomes after exposure to online racial discrimination. The other concerns compulsive internet use, whose negative mental health outcomes “aren’t as homogenous as one might assume.”

Finding ways to prevent negative outcomes, or decrease their impact, is the goal.

“Social media isn’t going anywhere, and fearing it won’t change that,” Thomas says. “When something negative happens, parents must recalibrate their teens’ perception of the world. Yes, the world’s dangerous, but it’s also full of beauty.” •

A professor at the University of Kentucky–Lexington, Seales has made it his life’s work to accomplish a seemingly impossible task — to “virtually unwrap” hundreds, possibly thousands, of priceless scrolls that were buried and carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.

Sixty feet of superheated gas and rock smothered the coastal Roman resort town of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples. Author Pliny the Younger fled the cataclysm and described it this way: “A dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”

Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, was likely the original owner of a three-story villa there. Statesmen like Piso often had libraries that contained as many as 40,000 scrolls.

Diggers discovered about 800 of those papyri, now known as the Herculaneum scrolls, in 1752. They look like charred, shrunken, burned pastries. At first scientists tried to unroll the brittle relics, a futile effort that caused many to crumble. “Turn’d to a sort of charcoal, so brittle, that, being touched, it falls readily into ashes,” wrote one early examiner. Scholars hope Piso’s library, the only intact ancient library ever found, may contain lost treasures — plays by Aeschylus and Euripides, poems by Sappho, histories of Rome by Livy, and possibly works that document Christianity’s earliest years.

By all accounts, this find ranks with the Dead Sea Scrolls as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology. And Seales has led the way to tease out its mysteries.

Helpers on the Journey

Homer dubbed Odysseus a “man skilled in all ways of contending,” a description that fits Seales. He, too, has overcome daunting troubles. Technological riddles in the fields of AI and x-ray tomography stymied him. Museums denied him access to materials. In one case, his scholarly collaborators claimed success without mentioning him.

Through his resourcefulness, patience, and collaborative spirit, Seales won powerful allies — among them, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman. It was Friedman’s idea to start the crowd-sourced Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition that awards prizes to teams who succeed in reading the Herculaneum papyri. In early 2024, a winning team revealed five percent of a scroll written by Piso’s resident scholar Philodemus, a follower of philosopher Epicurus.

Seales believes that in a year or two, he and his team will overcome remaining hurdles and enable classicists to read all the scrolls. The ultimate goal? Exhume and decipher thousands of still-buried papyri.

When his odyssey began 30 years ago, no one was working on this. “No one else cared. People thought it was impossible,” he recalls. “I didn’t feel like an underdog. I just felt like a true pioneer. It was real exploration.”

The Road to Wisconsin

Seales speaks from the heart. A balding bear of a man with bushy black eyebrows, he has sparkling eyes, an infectious low-key confidence, and an easy way with words.

He grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, when personal computing was just beginning to take off. Raised in a modest household in the village of Springville in western New York, he caught tech fever at a young age. “For me, computing represented the paramount American experience where you have upward mobility. You could have pioneering exploration. You could have everything the New World is about,” he says.

A lover of math and music, he played violin at his church. The University of Louisiana–Lafayette gave him a double scholarship to study computer science and music. For graduate school, Seales says, “I shot for the moon. I couldn’t imagine anything better than to be at Wisconsin.” Strapped for money when he applied to the university, he prayed it would “just let me work and pay my own way.” Unlike other schools, the UW gave him a four-year guarantee of funding.

At UW–Madison, Charles Dyer, professor emeritus of computer sciences and biostatistics and medical informatics, was Seales’s doctoral thesis adviser. It was an ideal match. Both men were young. Dyer was only 10 years older than Seales. Both craved long-distance ordeals. Dyer ran marathons. Seales thrived in Madison’s cycling culture and pedaled in weekend races.

Even then, artificial intelligence’s potential fascinated Seales. Dyer was one of the first scientists to study computer vision, an AI-related field that gripped Seales’s imagination. Under Dyer, he wrote algorithms that transformed two-dimensional photos into 3-D images, a technique Mars Rovers would use to traverse the Red Planet without commands from Earth.

“I give Brent a huge credit for sticking with his research and making steady progress for years without a lot of big reinforcement,” says Dyer.

Perfecting X-Ray Vision

How does Seales get scrolls that look like flame-broiled croissants to surrender nearly 2,000-year-old secrets?

First, using a technology similar to that used by a computed tomography (CT) scanner, he takes a 3-D scan of a scroll. Its beam slices the scroll into about 15,000 vertical images. Each unimaginably thin slice is like a tree ring. It reveals how heat and pressure distorted the scroll’s overlapping wraps.

Then he virtually flattens the scroll. So far, this has required researchers to trace distorted rings, a process Seales hopes will soon be automated. Correct tracing of rings lets his software create an accurate 3-D image that is flattened to two-dimensions.

Seales used “virtual unwrapping” to read the text from the ancient En-Gedi scroll, revealing it to be the beginning of the Book of Leviticus. It’s one of the oldest Hebrew biblical texts ever found, outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Brent Seales, University of Kentucky

Finally, because the Romans used an ink that scans cannot capture, Seales employs machine learning to detect nearly invisible texture differences in blackened papyrus, thus making letters visible. His saga of discovery has been as convoluted as one of his scrolls. It began in London’s British Museum in 1995 with a digital imaging project to improve readability of the earliest copy of Beowulf. Seales used a NASA technique called MSI, multi-spectral imaging, to make letters pop out against their background. This happens because iron-based ink reflects light, especially ultraviolet light, differently than a background of parchment, vellum, or papyrus.

Based on that work, he wrote a paper about digital restoration. The result? “No one cared,” Seales says. “But I still look at it as one of those turning-point papers for me, because I articulated the principles around digital restoration that were going to be amazing. In that paper, I wrote that the pinnacle of the restoration would be complete virtual unwrapping.”

Seales had a brainstorm. He had seen enough wizened documents to know the forces of time and temperature often caused pages to grow wavy. Sometimes the distortions were so bad they hid letters.

He was working on a ninth-century vellum copy of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Voilà — Seales performed a virtual flattening. His smoothing of the manuscript made letters reveal themselves for the first time in centuries.

The Odyssey Takes a Detour

Seales learned about the Herculaneum scrolls when classicist Richard Janko at the University of Michigan contacted him in 2004. He told Seales about their horrible condition, that others had destroyed some, and asked if he could make them readable.

“I knew instantly — instantly — that if it could be solved, it would be amazing, and the world would think it was amazing,” says Seales. With some difficulty, he got funding to proceed.

To move forward, Seales needed his own CT scanner, one that was portable. He and a partner at Iowa State University tried but failed to build one he could bring to the field to collect his own data. So Seales decided to partner with the Belgian company SkyScan to use this cutting-edge technology.

In 2005 at Oxford, he gave a talk to the Friends of Herculaneum Society. He told them that since the late 1970s, Egyptologists had put mummies in CT scanners. Since scrolls were also wrapped, surely they could be unspooled. All he and his students had to do was write software to interpret the machine’s data in combination with the imaging technology he had started to use 10 years earlier with Beowulf.

To demonstrate his proposal, he made a scroll, lettered it with iron-based ink, and scanned it. The result showed the scroll unrolling with letters visible on its surface.

Next, Seales asked the National Library in Naples, where most of the scrolls are kept, if he could perform similar magic there. “It sent me a response that didn’t say, ‘No.’ It said, ‘Hell, no.’ But it was in Italian, so it sounded better than that,” says Seales.

Undaunted, he successfully approached the Institut de France, which also held scrolls. With a National Science Foundation grant, Seales convinced SkyScan’s founder, the Russian physicist Alexander Sasov, to send his portable CT scanner to the academy in 2009, and he was able to scan two scrolls.

He was coming off a period of “unbridled enthusiasm,” but the results crushed him. The internal complexity of the scrolls “broke” his software. The layers inside the scroll were far from uniform. “They were all tangled and mashed together. My software could not follow them reliably,” he says.

There was another problem. The Romans used carbon-based ink, not ink with an iron base. The letters remained invisible. “I didn’t know what to do. It was a deeply discouraging moment,” he says.

Divine Intervention

In moments of doubt, Seales tried to take comfort from William Wordsworth’s poem SeptemberSeptember, 1819, which reads:

O ye, who patiently explore

The wreck of Herculanean lore,

What rapture! could ye seize

Some Theban fragment, or unroll

One precious, tender-hearted scroll …

“But in fact, the scrolls are not tender-hearted scrolls,” he says. “Wordsworth was wrong. They’re hard-hearted scrolls. Hard-hearted.”

For the next few years, progress was slow. Seales found inspiration — and new collaborators — in Paris in 2011 when he was invited to join forces with the Google Cultural Institute. Since renamed Google Arts and Culture, it creates services to boost digital access to the arts.

“We came along at a time when Brent was at a dead end,” says Steve Crossan, who ran the Google project. He felt sure the Kentucky professor would overcome his obstacles. “He was completely tenacious, and he never gave up. It tends to be the case that if you don’t give up, eventually you succeed.”

Both Crossan and Dyer agree that a key to Seales’s success is his collaborative spirit. “He doesn’t require that he owns the whole of the solution,” says Crossan.

“In the research area,” Dyer says, “people are often very protective of their own work. Not Brent.”

For the next few years, Seales improved the quality of his algorithms so they could conquer the complex convolutions inside scrolls. Then came what some might call divine intervention — Israeli archaeologists asked him to virtually unwrap a carbonized parchment scroll from the ancient town of Ein Gedi. It turned out to be a portion of the Book of Leviticus.

Meanwhile, Seales continued to attack the ink-readability problem. He explored using x-ray phase-contrast tomography, which can reveal minute changes in density in a material. Because of the difficulty of getting permission to use such a machine, he teamed with European scientists who could get the go-ahead.

Disappointment hit again. The scholars he trusted published a paper — without including his name — that claimed they had solved the problem of seeing non-iron-based ink. The media reported the Herculaneum scrolls could now be read. But when Seales studied his ex-colleagues’ data, he realized they were faulty. They had achieved nothing, he says.

Once again, he found himself profoundly discouraged, “because I knew those people. I had worked with them under the assumption we’d all be working together, and they cut me out so they could run forward,” he says.

A Triumphal Moment

Meanwhile, in Israel, Seales’s supercharged algorithms worked. He could virtually unwrap the scroll, and, luckily, scannable metal was in the Biblical ink. The scroll turned out to be one of the oldest copies of the Book of Leviticus and dated from the third or fourth century AD. The subject of the first chapter? Burnt offerings.

With the National Library in Naples continuing to block Seales’s access to its treasure house of scrolls, he won permission from Oxford’s Bodleian Library to scan a Herculaneum fragment known as P. Herc. 118 for signs of ink. This was not a scroll, but bits of a scroll glued to tissue paper. The letter c could be seen with the naked eye against the papyrus background. The problem was getting the computer to recognize it. “We made the letter appear from the tomography after training the method to recognize the evidence of the ink,” he says. “Building the method to make it visible from the tomography alone was the big breakthrough, because we knew that for full scrolls, we would only have the tomography for the inner layers, not actual photographs.” This was the triumphal moment. Now Seales knew that entire scrolls could be read.

By this time, he had realized that AI and machine learning were “the rocket fuel” that would vastly speed reading of invisible ink. “In 2015 when I did experiments with AI, I realized it was going to be a game changer,” he says. “It was the key that unlocked everything.”

The man who helped turn the key was Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, Microsoft’s open-source platform for software developers. During the COVID lockdown in 2020, Friedman had spare time. He became curious about imperial Rome. Soon he was baking Roman-era bread and learning about the Herculaneum scrolls.

“I thought Brent’s project was incredibly cool,” says Friedman. “I wanted to follow along and be a fanboy.”

In 2022 he invited Seales to his hush-hush Frontier Camp, a secretive gathering of techie wizards in the northern California woods. The goal? Win funding for Seales or at least win offers of help.

When the duo struck out, Friedman proposed the Vesuvius Challenge, with first prize going to the scholar who could read four passages of 140 characters. Within months, three college students shared the $700,000 honors. The 2024 prize dramatically ups the challenge — it goes to a competitor who can decipher 90 percent of four scrolls.

Like Seales, Friedman believes all the scrolls will be readable in short order, once the hand-tracing of wraps inside the scrolls is automated.

Hoping for “New Arrivals” in Roman Library

Seales grew up in what he calls “a very strong and devout Christian tradition.” He wants as much ancient knowledge translated as soon as possible, but his deepest hope is to find early Christian writings.

“My passion is more on religious material from the era, because the first century was the cradle of Christianity, a phenomenal point in human history.

“This villa gives absolutely no indication there would be Christian material there, but, you know, you walk into any library, and you pick a book randomly off the shelf. How do you know what you might get?” he asks.

Seales hopes Piso’s library had a new-readings section. “That’s where the Christian stuff might be, because it was the philosophy of the day,” he says. “It would blow people’s minds. It would challenge us.”

Regardless of what is found, classicist Janko, who serves as a Vesuvius Challenge judge, hopes more scrolls are dug up soon.

“Several times since the eruption in AD 79, this particular spot has been covered with molten lava,” he says. “Vesuvius is quiet for now, but experience teaches that it’s never quiet indefinitely.”

Seales believes that if the race against time to recover all the scrolls is successful, the knowledge contained in the entire collection will constitute the largest discovery from the ancient world to date. •

Arguably, it’s not the most important gift that the UW’s Geology Museum has ever received. Certainly, it isn’t the biggest, either by volume or mass or financial value. But the story behind it makes it among the most valued, at least to Slaughter, who’s been the museum’s director since 2004. The bag of change is the only monetary gift he ever felt so strongly about that he decided the museum should preserve it. (1)

“It’s from a kid who, this was their piggy bank, basically,” he says, “and I always wanted to hold on to that. So when it came time to do the end-of-the-month accounting, I put in my own $5.89 so I could preserve this original money. It’s very sweet.”

Stones, we’re told, are axiomatically unfeeling, but the Geology Museum — the UW’s repository for and shrine to stones — is a sentimental place. It was born by decree of the UW Board of Regents on October 7, 1848, and for most of its 175 years, it had only one assigned staff member at a time. That person devoted himself or herself not only to the collection and study of rocks, but also to their interpretation: to discovering and sharing what those rocks mean. Since Slaughter took over the directorship, the museum staff has slowly grown to four full-time employees. Each new person has increased the museum’s collection of treasures — and not just by adding literal gems, but by increasing its store of stories.

Rich Is Rich

When I met with Rich Slaughter in his office, it was March, and Slaughter was trying to solve a problem. The museum wanted to acquire a meteorite, and not just any meteorite: the first ever discovered in Dane County. Called the Vienna meteorite (2), it weighs in at 110 pounds, the largest iron meteorite discovered in the United States since 1981. The museum wanted it — and wanted to have it in time to put it on display at a UW–Madison open house in early April. But the deal was not yet complete.

Slaughter holds up a letter that accompanied a donation from one of the museum’s fans. Slaughter’s office collection includes coins and other objects given by children and visitors.

“Right now, we’re about $30,000 short,” Slaughter told me. That $30,000 is the equivalent of 5,094 piggy banks (3), and with only a few weeks to go, the museum didn’t have time for 5,094 piggy banks. It was taking a lot of special effort to land the meteorite.

“I’m optimistic,” said Slaughter, “though I’m running on fumes at this point. The base work doesn’t go away.”

As director of the Geology Museum and Sherry Lesar Distinguished Chair of Geological Wonder, Slaughter has a wealth of base work. He oversees the staff and the collection, and he meets with donors — whether they’re giving money or objects. He also manages the sales case in the museum’s gift shop, and he examines rocks and stones and putative fossils from people who are curious to know what their objects are. “Every week we identify objects for the general public,” says Slaughter. “In well over 90 percent of the cases, people think they have meteorites. They do not. Or they suspect they have dinosaur eggs. They do not.”

Few of his duties are particularly remunerative, though some add to his collection of treasures.

“This is a secret,” he says. “No one really knows I do it, but there’s a fountain in the courtyard [of Weeks Hall for Geological Sciences]. I wake it up in the spring, and I shut it down in the fall. All of the coins, I have them. I keep track of all the pennies. I keep track of the wishes.”

Slaughter keeps track of a lot more than that. His office is the repository of the mementos that the museum and its staff have amassed. He has a microscope that belonged to former UW president Charles Van Hise 1879, 1880, MS1882, PhD1892. He has cabinets full of index cards and bits of rock and mineral. And on a sheet of white foam, under a dish towel, he had the Vienna meteorite, waiting to become official UW property.

In essence, Slaughter’s office is a museum to the Geology Museum.

The museum’s longest-tenured current employee, Slaughter came to the UW in 2001 to join legendary director Klaus Westphal, who had run the place for 34 years. Geology Museum staff, Slaughter says, “have longer tenures than most.” And he’s well aware of the rich history that lies in his charge.

The Geology Museum was created by order of the UW Regents at the board’s very first meeting (4). In its century and three-quarters, it’s had six homes: North Hall, when that was the UW’s only building; South Hall; University Hall; Old Science Hall, until it burned down in 1884, taking the museum collection with it; the current Science Hall, where it resided from 1888 until 1980; and Weeks Hall, where it has spent the last 44 years.

Last year, the museum topped 60,000 visitors: individuals and families wandering through, college students taking a class (Slaughter estimates that about a tenth of the undergraduates in any given year have a class session in the museum), and about 10,000 Wisconsin grade-schoolers on guided tours.

“They love the dinosaurs, the mastodon, the meteorites, and the glowing rocks,” Slaughter says. “You can rest assured, if you’re dealing with 50 second-graders from Madison, statistically speaking, some of those children have never been in the same room as a dinosaur. We’re in the inspiration business.”

And when May rolled around and this year’s elementary school field trips began arriving, the Vienna meteorite was there to inspire them. Optimism paid off, as did more than half a dozen donors.

Slaughter’s work is rich in labor, rich in variety, and rich in problems. And he wants to keep it all to himself.

“I don’t want to speak too highly of the job because I don’t want the competition,” he says. “I’ve got a great thing going. I don’t want to lose this sweet gig.”

Brooke Makes Marvels

Brooke Norsted MS’03 likes to talk about rocks.

“It’s the stories you can tell,” she says. “That’s what I still love about geology, that you could look at a road cut or at a mountain range, or at an individual rock, and there are clues that are telling us how different that place used to be.”

Norsted is the museum’s associate director, and she specializes in public outreach — in storytelling. She joined the team in 2004, right after she graduated.

“I approached Rich when he was just becoming the director, and I said, ‘Do you know of any science outreach-y jobs in Madison? Any tips?’ ” she says. “And he was like, ‘Well, I’ve got a few months of grant funding. Would you like a job here?’ And that was 20 years ago. We squeezed a lot out of those few months.”

Norsted has spent her life squeezing as much as she can out of opportunities. She grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and attended a high school that offered her two years of geology classes. She earned a bachelor’s at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota, but before she committed to graduate school, she spent a year teaching preschool.

“I love Montessori philosophy, but I learned preschool was not the level at which I wanted to teach. There’s very little geology,” she says. “Though kids love rocks.”

While a grad student, she became a tour guide in the Geology Museum, where she spent her days talking to kids about volcanoes and dinosaurs. “It would fill my cup,” she says, “[and] recharge me to get back into my research.” And it helped point out that she wanted to be in the inspiration business: to marry geology with the chance to tell stories to children.

It also introduced her to a hero: Marvel Ings ’38.

Ings also loved the Geology Museum, just several decades before Norsted came along. From 1939 to 1942, Ings served as director — and she changed the museum’s direction.

Early on, the Geology Museum was the domain of the university’s greatest thinkers: Roland Irving, who helped establish the practice of petrography (writing detailed descriptions of rocks); Gilbert Raasch ’29, PhD’46, who was the state’s preeminent paleontologist; Charles Van Hise, who earned the UW’s first doctorate (5).

But if those scientists brought academic weight, Ings offered pizzazz. She was determined that the museum should be popular, especially with children, in an age when museums were usually oriented toward adults. When she took the director job, her hiring did not receive universal acclaim (6). Very few women ran natural history museums in the early 20th century, and of them, Ings was the only one who didn’t have a degree in the sciences: her bachelor’s was in journalism.

This meant Ings knew how to work the media. “Museum Stones Tell Stories Thanks to Woman Curator,” wrote the Milwaukee Journal. She crafted her own children’s book (7), Ram-for-inkus. And she took the museum’s collections out of their cases.

“She went to storefronts on State Street and asked if she could put exhibits in to help share information about geology with the public,” says Norsted, who found Ings inspirational. Norsted created a museum story time for children, “a tip of the hat to Marvel,” she says. The associate director even dressed as Ings for Halloween, though the costume must have required some explaining (8).

“She was just a classy lady,” says Norsted. “I admire her.”

Norsted teaches museum visitors about concepts such as “deep time,” the span of billions of years that stretch back to Earth’s beginning.

Norsted carries on Ings’s work, training museum guides, engaging with visitors. Her current focus includes finding ways to convey the concept of “deep time” — the very long time spans that geology covers. She’s been working on the best analogies to illustrate how old the world really is. She has kids stand up straight: their feet are the formation of Earth, 4.56 billion years ago; the top of their head is the present.

“I ask people when dinosaurs went extinct, and someone will say 65 million years ago,” she says. “If there’s one number people can pull out of the ether, it’s 65 million years ago.”

Then she asks: where on the bodily timeline did dinosaurs go extinct? People frequently point to their belly button. The right answer is an inch down from the top of their head.

“I get to gently mock people for their math skills,” she says. “But everything that’s a fossil — T. rex and trilobites and mammoths — they’re all on the head. From chin to knee, the earth is a slime world.”

The entire history of the museum itself, at a mere 175 years, wouldn’t penetrate the hair. But then Norsted is pleased to be able to make the vast scope of her science more accessible.

“It’s hard to wrap your head around 4.56 billion years,” she says. “But I feel like that’s something that in the arc of my career, I’m in a place now where I’ve had a lot of time to experiment, and where I get to really share what I’ve learned.”

Dave Digs Dinosaurs

Dave Lovelace PhD’12 wants you to know that he’s not just a dinosaur guy.

“I study a lot of things,” says the museum scientist. “I’d really frame it as, I’m a paleo-ecologist. I’m more of a generalist than I am a specialist, and that’s because I like to blend what I can interpret from the rock record and the fossil record.”

Like Norsted, he enjoys reading rocks: the cataclysms and crises, the rise and fall of different species. “It’s like a novel,” he says. “I am a glorified storyteller.”

Still, Lovelace does study dinosaurs, and right now, he’s eager to share the name of one that he and his students discovered in Wyoming. But he has to practice patience. To name his dinosaur, Lovelace must wait for official publication of a study he led. “Until it’s published, the name isn’t official,” he says. “Remember the example of the Supersaurus.”

The Supersaurus is a sauropod (9) that was prematurely unveiled in 1973 by paleontologists who used that name informally: saurus for dinosaur and super because the dinosaur was really large. But then a journal (10) picked up the story and ran the name, and once it was in print, the name stuck, taxonomists be damned. So Lovelace is discreet, even with On Wisconsin. This won’t be the first extinct creature he’s helped name. Recently, he was part of the crew that uncovered a previously unknown reptile called Beesiiwo cooowuse, announced in April 2023. B. cooowuse is a species of rhynchosaur, its name coming from the Arapahoe language and translating as “big lizard from the Alcova area.” The name was chosen by the members of Wyoming’s Arapahoe community, making B. cooowuse the first taxonomic name in Western science developed by and derived from the people indigenous to that region.

But the new dinosaur is special in a different way.

“For decades and decades,” says Slaughter, “people have thought dinosaurs originated in the Southern Hemisphere. [This discovery shows that] the Northern Hemisphere has dinosaurs that are basically the same age. And so the origin [of dinosaurs] is probably a little bit farther back in time. That’ll be a big splash.”

Lovelace is not splashing — he’s keeping quiet, if excitedly quiet.

One of the reasons Lovelace loves the UW Geology Museum is that it encourages geologists to dream big, especially those who, like him, have traveled nontraditional paths.

“I’ve had a very circuitous career,” he says. “All sorts of adventures.”

Lovelace grew up in Wyoming, a place where geology is less a science and more of an environment.

“The geology slaps you in the face,” he says. “It’s so visible that something has happened — you have layers of rock that are tilted up. There are fossils of different ages all over the state.”

But: circuitous. After graduating from high school, Lovelace became a diesel mechanic working in oil fields. The geologists he worked with convinced him to return to school, and he began earning degrees until he realized he wanted a doctorate. He came to the UW and became more and more interested in Triassic-age fossils, following in the path of another former Geology Museum staffer, Maurice Mehl (11), who led “the last deep research [in Wyoming’s Triassic period],” Lovelace says. “And that’s been the focus of our research since really 2008.”  

As a research scientist, Lovelace’s job is to lead expeditions that will add new material to the museum’s collection, conduct and supervise research on museum specimens, and guide students as they learn to collect and clean and process new fossils, showing them how to use the tools at hand. The UW’s Geology Museum is relatively small, and small museums make the most of what they can scrape together.

“Paleontology is one of the fun sciences in that it can be extremely primitive,” he says. “A lot of tools are recycled and repurposed.”

Some of these are high-tech but borrowed: CAT scans from the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, 3-D-printed fossil replicas from the College of Engineering’s Makerspace.

But a lot of the museum’s tools are items that have been designed for different purposes. “We are using, literally, dental picks that dentists can no longer use and donate to us,” Lovelace says. “We used our family’s toothbrushes, and we recycle those when they’re done with them.”

He also tries to recycle the material that his lab discards — rock that doesn’t contain fossils, stones that had core samples taken, stuff that they decide has no academic value. It all goes into a rock pile behind Weeks Hall, where amateur geology enthusiasts can come and search through it, taking what they want. “They keep it out of the landfill (12),” Lovelace says.

As for what the museum keeps, Lovelace and his students publish articles about it. “Publication adds value,” he says. “It’s not a literal monetary value as much as it becomes a more beneficial asset to the museum and science in general.” Then most of it will go into storage. A small amount of it will end up on display.

And a very small amount of it may, with good fortune, name a new dinosaur.

Carrie Carries the Weight

When most people say they have tons of work to do, they’re being metaphorical. But Carrie Eaton MS’04, the Geology Museum’s curator, does not say tons lightly.

“My job is a little like being a librarian,” she says, “where every book weighs between 40 and 800 pounds.”

Eaton joined the museum staff in 2009, and like Norsted, she was a museum guide when she was a graduate student, before being sucked in by the place’s gravitational pull. She was hired to oversee and care for the museum’s specimens and exhibits.

“There’s a lot of moving rocks,” she says. “And repairing specimens.”

As curator, Eaton manages the collection, which includes more than a quarter of a million rocks, minerals, fossils, and bits of Earth. (13) When new materials come in, she receives and processes them.

“In February of this year, we just signed the dotted line on a new mineral donation,” she says. “And these minerals are of spectacular museum-display quality, so we’ve been secretly working downstairs since everything was finalized.”

The collection — which includes not only minerals, but some rocks and fossils as well — is called the Hudak Collection, named for Thomas Hudak ’67, MA’74, a retired linguistics professor at Arizona State University and lifelong mineral collector.

He gathered specimens that were geologically and aesthetically interesting “and over time just amassed this big collection,” says Eaton. “It’s really great. My students are loving to get to see this. It’s like geology Christmas down there.”

The Hudak Collection may be spectacular in its aesthetic quality, but it’s typical in that it came from someone whose connection to the Geology Museum was weighted with emotion. In the regents’ 1848 call for geological samples, they said, “every neighborhood can do something,” and over time, the UW has acquired a great many significant, beautiful, or remarkable bits from donors like Hudak, adding to the pieces that the staff members have purchased or collected on their own.

“It’s well over 100 tons of material,” says Slaughter.

As curator, Eaton keeps track of the museum’s quarter of a million rocks, minerals, and fossils, most of which are in storage.

It’s Eaton’s job to keep track of all those tons. “I’m the museum’s data manager,” she says. “I migrated all of our digital data into a new collections management system, and I’m constantly cleaning and refining that to try to make all of this more findable, more accessible.”

She’s working on having digital images made of every item, and then on making sure that those images include the correct data.

“A collection that is 175 years old has 175 years’ worth of problems,” she says.

But it also has 175 years’ worth of stories. To celebrate the museum’s anniversary, Eaton and her colleagues decided to present one new exhibit each month between October 2023 and October 2024: the Pine River meteorite last October, a sparkly cluster of grape agate in November, a fossilized starfish in December, evidence of a 1.85 billion-year-old asteroid impact in January, the antlers of an extinct giant stag moose in February, a trio of trilobites in March, and in April, the Vienna meteorite. (14) That last item was discovered by Jim Koch in 2009, when his plow struck it. He and his spouse, Jan Shepel, decided to donate most of it to the museum.

“I love that it was found on a farm by Wisconsin farmers,” says Eaton. “And I think it’s important to maintain that connection with the public and show that anybody out there has the capacity or the ability to contribute something special to the museum.” After the meteorite went on display in April, Eaton and the museum staff celebrated and then turned to thinking about May’s new exhibit, and June’s, and on until October. Eaton and her student employees keep on shipping and receiving new material, polishing and preparing it, and cataloguing its stories.

“I would argue I’m the museum’s biggest fan,” she says. “But I’d probably fight for that status amongst my peers.”

But there are some limits — even here — for safety and function. And it’s those boundaries that inspired this story, an off-path tour of important UW places that most people don’t get to see. It took me and photographer Bryce Richter to every corner of campus as we walked through the Badger football team’s state-of-the-art locker room, observed the magical production of Babcock ice cream, and listened to a ringing rendition of “On, Wisconsin!” at the top of the Carillon Tower.

Join us for a trip behind the UW’s closed doors.

A Sports Sanctuary

Aside from the Camp Randall playing field, there is no space more sacred to Badger football players than the locker room. It’s where they mentally and physically prepare for action and recover afterward. The setting is also something of a social experiment for the 120 young men who cohabit the space and build a brotherhood.

But for our visit, it’s empty. The team is enjoying a short summer recess.

As we enter the locker room, we see a large trophy case. The placement is motivation fuel. The Paul Bunyan Axe and Freedom Trophy are in their rightful places, reflecting last season’s victories over Minnesota and Nebraska, respectively. The Heartland Trophy is in Iowa, leaving an empty display but a powerful message.

Nearby, a four square court is stitched into the carpet. The playground game was a popular bonding activity in the locker room prior to the safety protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it hasn’t made a comeback with recent rosters. (It’s hard to compete with phone scrolling.) The lockers are luxurious, nothing like the soulless row of steel you’d find in a gym. They were installed by the industry-leading Longhorn Lockers in 2019. The low-lit room glows Badger red, and each player’s space is identified with a large, illuminated display with his name and portrait. The locker’s surface is a three-foot-wide red, cushioned seat, which folds open to unveil ventilated storage components.

The lockers are randomly assigned, though veteran players can request the end units for a bit more comfort. Even in an empty locker room, you get a sense of the varied personalities. Some of the locker spaces are spotless to the point of looking unused, while others are littered with Gatorade bottles, granola bars, nail clippers, and rolls of athletic tape. A few lockers display photos from home along with other mementos. A large Hawaiian flag hangs in front of safety Kamo’i Latu x’25’s locker.

The shared spaces feature modern amenities that range from functional to recreational: lounge chairs, TVs, a pool table, four-foot-deep recovery pools, a saltwater float tank, nap pods, a fully equipped barber station, and a nutrition room.

“Several guys will anchor in here for hours post-practice,” says head equipment manager Jeremy Amundson ’02. And it’s easy to see why.

Sugar Central

Nearly all UW–Madison alumni share a taste for Babcock ice cream. Since opening in 1951, the Babcock Dairy Plant has produced the same recipe for its ice cream base, which includes fresh milk, real cane sugar, a gelatin stabilizer, and 12 percent butterfat. We wanted to see how it all comes together to create such an unforgettable first lick.

Visitors can follow along from an enclosed observation deck, but we’re able to view the production up close. We don food-safety coveralls in the entryway. The concrete floor is painted yellow and flooded with soapy water for sanitation purposes, a scene that reminds me of a quarantine zone from the movies. But this place is no dystopia: it’s the home of Union Utopia (vanilla with swirls of peanut butter, caramel, and fudge) and nearly two dozen other delicious flavors of Babcock ice cream. This morning, Babcock is producing two of its bestsellers: vanilla and orange custard chocolate chip. We watch the final step of production as the base mixture, prepared at least 16 hours earlier to allow the ingredients to fully hydrate, is pumped through a specialized freezer and into packaging. The orange custard batch requires a couple of extra steps: adding the orange dye, flavoring, and egg custard base to a mixture tank and dumping chocolate chips into an ingredient feeder.

The plant received its first major renovation in 2023. A new high-flow ice cream maker with touchscreen monitors replaced original equipment, automating key parts of the production process. But we still observe manual labor: technician Joe Chamberlain positions each half-gallon container under the dispensers at a timed interval, and student workers add the lids, box the products, and send them off to the blast freezer to harden at –20 degrees. The next destination: a store or dipping cabinet near you.

I can attest to the process’s results, as I can’t help but request a scoop of orange custard chocolate chip from the nearby Babcock Dairy Store after the tour. The ice cream somehow tastes even better after I’ve seen how it’s made.

Behind the Curtain

Wisconsin Union Theater audiences are no strangers to star power. The UW could fill a hall of fame with the legendary public figures and performing artists who have taken the stage, from Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Eleanor Roosevelt to Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Harry Belafonte.

But few get to see the stars backstage before and after the big show. The green room and dressing room are the private areas where performers can comfortably put on and then shed their public masks. With soprano sensation Renée Fleming on the 2021–22 schedule, the Wisconsin Union spruced up its green room with new carpeting and furniture and a fresh coat of paint. The space is a blend of casual lounge and minimalist kitchen. It’s tidy and comfortable, with wall art tracing a century of classical music performances at the venue.

On the day of a show, the green room is stocked with standard catering as well as special requests. Common items include lemon, honey, and tea to soothe a singer’s vocal cords; berries and nuts to provide a natural energy boost; and wine to wind down the night. Sometimes the contractual requests skew quirky, from wanting an on-call chiropractor to dictating the color of towels or type of ice (for example, chipped and presented in a wine glass).

The theater is home to eight dressing rooms, which allow a whole troupe to receive star treatment — even the band members backing a lead artist. “They’ll see their names on the dressing room and put it on Instagram,” says Kate Schwartz, the artist services manager. But it’s still the students who tend to impress visiting artists the most. Performers will often sit down with members of the Wisconsin Union Directorate and host a studio class for a smaller audience prior to the main show.

“It’s almost like reverse celebrity, where they’re so honored to meet the students who chose them to visit,” Schwartz says. “Renée asked us, ‘How come this isn’t a model for every university?’ ”

The Most Spectacular Storage

The Chazen Museum of Art’s permanent collection holds around 25,000 works. Even if you observe every piece on exhibit, you will have only seen a small fraction of its total treasures. Some 23,500 other artworks remain out of public view, painstakingly preserved in storage areas on- and off-site.

The first storage room we enter looks like an industrial warehouse. We’re greeted by open shelves containing small sculptures that could serve as an exhibition of their own. Rows of floor-to-ceiling racks reveal carefully hung artworks, suggesting the cluttered walls of an old Victorian home. The storage rooms are strictly controlled for both temperature (70 degrees) and humidity (50 percent). When acquiring a piece, the Chazen must consider not only how it will be displayed but also how it will be stored. This often requires a customized solution. While on display, Peter Gourfain’s Roundabout is a monumental sculpture: a wooden wheel 22 feet in diameter, with 12 curving columns that rise from the base and display dozens of carved terracotta panels. But for storage, it’s been deconstructed into dozens of puzzle pieces.

“It’s a constant game of Tetris,” says Kate Wanberg ’10, the Chazen’s exhibition and collections project manager. “We move things around and consolidate to make more space.” Wanberg leads us to another room, this one with unframed works on paper. We can smell the ink as she opens a box with Japanese prints, each covered with protective glassine. Most artworks require the handler to wear gloves, but not these.

“You don’t want to lose the ability to sense the edge of the paper and then cause a crease,” Wanberg says. “We teach a really light touch, because you want to make sure you’re not marking the paper or transferring oils.”

If you feel like you’re missing out, fear not: the Chazen’s website features every piece in its permanent collection. And you can request an appointment to view any artwork that’s off exhibit — so long as it’s not stored in a hundred pieces.

A Keyboard on High

Lyle Anderson ’68, MM’77, the UW’s official carillonneur since 1986, laments that he can no longer give public tours of the Carillon Tower on Observatory Drive. An engineering survey a few years ago deemed that the steep, winding staircases are too risky for visitors. The carillon is played atop the tower to unseen passersby 85 feet below — just Anderson and his 56 bells, ranging in size from 15 to 6,823 pounds.

But today, we’re an exception, allowed to join him for a trek up the tower and an impromptu concert. The tower was built in 1935 with just 25 bells, limiting the musical range to simple melodies. We see the large trapdoors on each floor that allowed new bells to be winched up until the carillon’s completion in 1973.

The carillon is played atop the tower to unseen passersby 85 feet below.

The stairs are as advertised, especially an original section — basically a ladder — between the playing room and the bell chamber. The four-limbed climb is worth it when we see the bells in all their glory. Perfectly aligned rows of smaller bells hang in front of the bronze giants. Lightbulb-shaped clappers rest inside the bells, connected by wires to the keyboard and ready to strike.

Anderson serenades us with “On, Wisconsin!” It’s mesmerizing to see each note mechanically register with the corresponding bell. For “Amazing Grace,” he pushes down wooden batons with the sides of his fists while thrusting his feet at the levers.

“The newer generation plays a lot more with their fingers, almost like a piano,” Anderson says. “My teacher from carillon school 40 years ago would have been absolutely appalled.” Anderson technically retired in 2016, but he still climbs the Carillon Tower every other Sunday for an hourlong concert. Where’s the best place to listen?

“The courtyard out front or across the street,” Anderson says. “If you get too far, buildings will block the sound, and traffic will make a lot of noise coming up the hill. But it’s an outdoor, urban instrument, so that’s just part of the show.”

Where the Cows Come Home

You rarely see — or smell — a dairy farm in the heart of a metropolis. But at the flagship university in America’s Dairyland, college students share the campus with cows. The Dairy Cattle Center on Linden Drive is hard to miss, its pair of silos piercing the city skyline and its farmstead odor detectable for blocks.

The UW’s on-campus herd comprises 84 Holstein milking cows, split into two tie-stall barns. They’re milked twice per day, at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. Local co-op Foremost Farms picks up the milk, occasionally delivering it to the nearby Babcock Dairy Plant for campus production of cheese and ice cream.

The herd’s primary purposes, however, are for instruction and research. The Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences and the School of Veterinary Medicine hold classes at the facility, where students learn how to interact with the cows and provide care. Research projects include animal welfare, food safety, and land stewardship. Built in 1954, the Dairy Cattle Center has been renovated over the past decade to modernize its operations. Keeping the farm functioning requires four full-time staff members and a dozen or so students, including three managers who live on-site and conduct nightly rounds.

After putting on disposable shoe covers, Bryce and I enter the first barn and slowly approach the cows. It’s not hard to sort the friendly ones from the shy ones. Some take a step back or shake their heads, a simple fear response that to us feels like stinging rejection. Others crane their necks toward us for attention, and we eagerly oblige. Stella takes a particular liking to Bryce, gently chomping his hand as if it were hay. When he points his camera for a close-up, she curiously smells the lens, covering it in snot and ending our photoshoot in memorable fashion.

The Inner Sanctum

“The chancellor is ready for you.”

With that, we suddenly know what it feels like to meet with a very important person. And since we’ve fashioned this as a VIP tour, the most appropriate place to end it is at Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin’s office in Bascom Hall, where UW–Madison’s most important decisions are made.

The grand space leaves you with little doubt of its standing. The high, ornamental ceiling sets the room’s consequential tone. Classical moldings frame the arched windows and every wall, with craftsmanship harking back to Bascom Hall’s 1850s construction. A marble fireplace with columned trim anchors the room. The spacious office is split functionally into three sections. As you enter, there’s a conference table for small-group meetings. The middle of the room can host more casual conversations, with a red velvet couch, coffee table, and upholstered chairs. (After laboring to move the chairs for a photo, we can confirm the furniture is made of real wood and is not from IKEA.) Mnookin’s L-shaped workstation is at the far end, flanked by built-in bookshelves with a sizeable collection of law books, including her own works.

In true Badger fashion, Mnookin balances the regal setting with playful touches, including a mini Terrace chair, a foam pink flamingo, and a Bucky piggy bank. She doesn’t hesitate when I ask whether she has a favorite object: “The photos of my family.” Mnookin’s job takes her around the campus, the state, and sometimes the world, so there’s no guarantee that she’ll be at her desk on any given workday. When she is, the usual tasks include “answering emails, reading memos and documents, and thinking through both immediate needs and bigger-picture strategic questions,” she says.

And yes, the chancellor has to hike up Bascom Hill, just like the rest of us.

“As long as it’s not freezing cold,” she says, “I appreciate earning a few steps at work.”

“I would get joy out of sitting at the whites-only lunch counter,” recalls Diamond, the son of a postal worker and president of his senior class. He typically waited until police came before running away. Other times, what he describes as his “very sponta- neous and haphazard” protests included browsing the stacks of the whites-only library. As always, he took off only when officers arrived.

He never told his parents what he was doing. “It wasn’t something I went home and bragged about,” he says.

He also never got arrested. That would soon change.

“I don’t know what motivated me in high school, except I just knew something was wrong,” says Diamond, who transferred to the University of Wisconsin from Howard University in 1963.

Now 83 and living in Washington, DC, Diamond became a Freedom Rider, one of those brave activists, mostly college students, who rode interstate buses in the South, facing angry mobs and imprisonment to challenge segregation. Then, as a voter-registration coordinator for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he risked his life in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Maryland. Police handcuffed him more than 30 times. (“Please check with the FBI for dates and locations!” he says with a chuckle.) The Supreme Court heard two cases resulting from his arrests. He served about a year in prison on different occasions, including two months in solitary. He endured slurs, death threats, and attempts on his life.

“Dangerously fearless and dedicated” and armed with “a quick wit” is how SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael once described his friend. Diamond calls his activism “youthful exuberance.”

“I hold Dion in awe,” says Freedom Rider Henry Thomas. “The number of times they tried to kill him, the number of times he was shot at — I don’t know all that he went through, but I know enough about it to say: how did you maintain your sanity?”

Today, Diamond, a retired human resources consultant, moves more slowly and sports a ready smile. Looking back on his activist days from the comfort of his desk chair in his home office, sunlight streaming in from wrap-around windows, he says, “I regret absolutely nothing that I have done. I have many regrets for what I have not done.”

“YOU WANT TO DIE?”

In 1960, North Carolina college students electrified the nation with sit-ins at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. The news inspired students at Washington, DC’s Howard University, where Diamond, 19, was freshman class president and a physics major. “How can we be doing nothing?” he asked himself.

Soon, he and his classmates founded NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group. On the afternoon of June 9, a small group that included white members (to show broad support for the cause and get more publicity) held sit-ins at the Cherrydale Drug Fair and People’s Drug Store in nearby Arlington, Virginia.

At People’s, the manager closed the counter. When he refused to press charges, Dion and five others went to Drug Fair.

Police, having been tipped off, were waiting in riot gear. So were reporters and film crews. George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, lived in Arlington. Soon he arrived with his followers — young toughs with ducktail haircuts and sideburns who wore brown shirts and swastika armbands.

Standing beside Diamond at the lunch counter, Rockwell asked, “Why do you go where people don’t want you?”

When Diamond made no reply, Rockwell added, “You want to die?”

Again, Diamond said nothing. He kept his hands on the counter. As a crowd of 300 gathered outside, Nazis put lit cigarettes on his seat and in a pocket of his pants. Thugs jabbed him with their elbows and tossed spitballs at him, according to Diamond’s account to a newspaper reporter.

“He was steadfast,” recalls Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, who sat beside him. “He got a cigarette or two put out on him, but he persevered and stayed nonviolent.”

The protesters eventually fled to waiting cars in “a hail of epithets, bricks, and lighted cigarettes that seemed literally to set the night air alive with fire,” according to divinity school student Laurence Henry, who took part in the sit-in.

The next day Diamond returned to Cherrydale — and at one point sat alone — to continue the protest.

Diamond is harassed during a sit-in at the Cherrydale Drug Fair in 1960. Washington area Spark

“My training was strictly on the job,” he recalls.

Less than two weeks later, almost all chain drugstores and department stores in Arlington and Fairfax counties and Alexandria announced they would serve Black customers.

STOP! GLEN ECHO IS SEGREGATED

Flush with victory and perhaps thinking another local success might come swiftly, NAG began daily picketing of the segregated Glen Echo amusement park just outside of DC that summer, sometimes with several hundred Black and white protesters.

“Glen Echo is almost something like a flower, something that blossomed, something that bloomed,” Diamond said in a documentary about the protest, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round.

Counterdemonstrators, some of whom were Nazis, started a competing picket line. Irrepressible, Diamond on at least one occasion walked next to them, a moment a newspaper photographer captured. Smiling, his chin jauntily up, and wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a tie in the summer heat, Diamond holds a placard that reads, “STOP! GLEN ECHO IS SEGREGATED.”

Police arrested protesters, some of whom were on the merry-go-round. Diamond was also taken into custody. It was not his first time in handcuffs. Earlier at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, police charged him with trespassing. The Supreme Court overturned that conviction.

Walking with Diamond that summer was a UW student who told the Daily Cardinal in 1964 that “Dion is sort of an agent, a provocateur.”

He was a prankster, too. To drum up press coverage and highlight the absurdity of segregated facilities that admitted Africans but not African Americans, the picketers rented a black Cadillac limousine. Diamond, who had been in his high school drama club and won best-actor honors in his yearbook, donned a turban and dashiki. He sat in the back seat with a white female student who pretended to be his translator.

When the limo pulled up at the main gate, the elderly guard was “flabbergasted,” according to Diamond. He blocked Diamond’s path, but Dion commanded him in fractured high school French, “Je désire open the park maintenant.” (“I want you to open the park now.”)

“We didn’t get in,” says Diamond with a grin.

But once again NAG got results. In early 1961, Glen Echo announced it would open to everyone.

“It got nasty after that,” Diamond recalls.

“HE SIMPLY WOULD NOT BE COWED”

As with the Greensboro sit-ins, he watched with outrage — and frustration at his own inaction — in 1961 when a mob in Alabama stopped the first bus of Freedom Riders. Someone threw a bomb. The bus roared with fire. Luckily, all on board escaped unharmed.

A call went out for more Freedom Riders. Diamond answered and joined a second group of buses in May 1961. “I thought it might be a long weekend, but it turned out to be two-and-a-half years,” he says.

Diamond was arrested in Jackson while serving as a Freedom Rider. Washington Area Spark

Things quickly got tense. A law enforcement helicopter flew above. Alabama police cars drove in front of and behind the bus. At the state line, Mississippi patrol cars replaced them.

National Guard troops rode the bus to deter mob violence. “We were so stupid we didn’t realize the guard were the same people who wore Ku Klux Klan outfits when they were not on the bus,” Diamond says.

At Jackson, Mississippi, Freedom Riders were arrested and sent from jail to jail until they ended up at Parchman, the notorious state penitentiary. “We had no idea why they kept moving us, but the buses kept coming,” says Diamond, who spent about two months behind bars in Mississippi. “We started something.” That same summer, Diamond faced death at close quarters. While he was picketing a Nashville, Tennessee, grocery store with Carmichael, police deemed both men ringleaders, possibly because of Diamond’s “irrepressible mouth. He simply would not be cowed,” Carmichael wrote in his autobiography.

The men shared a city jail cell. At 2 a.m., an intoxicated white guard approached the bars wielding a pump-action shotgun, which he loaded as they watched. The guard pointed the barrel first at Carmichael and then at Diamond, who told him, “Come on, you cracker so-and-so. Pull the damn trigger. … I’m ready to die.”

Horrified at first, finally Carmichael taunted the guard, too. “Pull the trigger,” he said.

The guard began trembling. He lowered the shotgun and slunk away.

The awestruck Carmichael concludes his story with an apt sobriquet for his cellmate. He dubs him “crazy-assed Dion Diamond.”

“I’ve been in situations where I’ve been frightened but didn’t allow it to show,” says Diamond. “I masked my fear.”

During the next three years, he would learn that, sometimes, even the best mask falls.

DISTURBING THE PEACE

After spending his spring semester behind bars, Diamond dropped out of college and joined SNCC, which sent him to Mississippi to organize voters. While in the town of McComb, he spent the night in a Black neighborhood by the railroad tracks.

While he was sleeping, a shotgun blast tore through the window by his bed, its pellets shredding the wall. When Diamond recounted that event in 2015 for a Library of Congress historian, he patted his belly and said, “If I’d had this girth then, a part of my body would have been shot off. That really made me realize the danger I was in.”

January 1962 found him in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where police had used dogs and tear gas to disperse 2,000 students who walked out of classes at the all-Black Southern University. SNCC sent Diamond there to stage a second boycott.

The police had had enough. They arrested Diamond and charged him with multiple offenses, including disturbing the peace and criminal anarchy. “They said I was attempting to overthrow the State of Louisiana, and that’s true,” Diamond recalls. “If you get enough people to vote, you can change the Constitution.”

A judge raised his bail from $7,000 to $13,000. After four days in the jail’s general population, he was put in solitary confinement for about two months, presumably for his safety.

His cell measured six by eight feet. Lights blazed night and day.

From his “isolated dungeon,” Diamond sent a letter that Howard University’s newspaper ran under the headline “Diamond Was Still Cocky, Undefeated in 44th Day.”

“Just as the little Dutch boy attempted to plug the dike, it seems as if all proponents of the ‘old way of life’ (or death to some) have been called forth to stem the raging tide of freedom,” he wrote. “They realize that these tides are about to inundate the banks of the Southern way of life.”

During Diamond’s civil rights campaigns, police handcuffed him more than 30 times. Washington Area Spark

THE VOICE OF BLACK FOLKS

His NAACP attorneys appealed his conviction on the grounds that Louisiana’s law against disturbing the peace was too vague. As his case wound its way to the Supreme Court, Diamond, now free on bail, continued his get-out-the-vote work in Mississippi.

Hoping to recruit white students from the North to volunteer in 1964 for Freedom Summer, an expansion of SNCC’s efforts, Diamond in August 1963 attended the National Student Association Congress in Columbus, Ohio. His fellow Howard students were starting to graduate, and Diamond envied them.

By chance he found himself standing in a line next to a University of Wisconsin student who asked him about coming to Madison.

Knowing the UW was brimming with student activism, Diamond answered, “Hell, yes.”

Three weeks later, he enrolled at the UW and switched his major from physics to history. “Because of my civil rights exposure, I wanted to find out why it took 100 years from the Emancipation Proclamation for there to be organized protests,” he says.

Diamond remembers life in Madison as “very awkward” and like being in a “foreign country.” It was the first time he socialized with whites. “The only people of color were football or basketball players. Everybody tried to force me to be the voice of Black folks,” he says.

Soon he would remember his Wisconsin days with fondness.

“HIS FIGHT IS THE FIGHT OF ALL OF US”

Diamond lost his Supreme Court appeal. The court declined to hear his case, unanimously ruling that his writ of review had been “improvidently granted.” The New York Times said, “Some observers read into the case a clear warning to racial demonstrators in the South that there is a limit to what they can do within the shelter of the Constitution.”

Now required to return to Baton Rouge to complete his sentence, Diamond became well known on the UW campus. Students raised $254 to pay his fine and travel expenses. A Daily Cardinal editorial called him “part of the vanguard of those fighting for dignity, for a set of rights, for a part of that way of life which we as a people have denied him. … This student is one of a new breed; committed to a society where justice will be color blind. His fight is the fight of all of us.”

At age 22, in March 1964, Diamond again found himself in the general population of Baton Rouge’s city jail. He kept a diary about his two months behind bars that spans the spectrum of human emotion.

“Accused rapists, convicted thieves, and persons of every conceivable crime are my companions,” he wrote. “The drunks and the murderers are my cellmates. The hopeful and the hopeless, the degener- ate and the ‘saved’ are my sources of ‘intellectual’ stimulation.”

Elsewhere in the diary, thinking of his adopted state’s lakes, pastures, and rivers, he writes, “in the final analysis, however, I inevitably travel vicariously, of course, back to Wisconsin.”

The diary concludes with an entry written near the end of his sentence. The bars no longer hold him. In his soul he is free.

“Dear Someone, Anyone, Everyone!” the passage begins. “Within the last five minutes, while perched in a window which had vertical and horizontal bars, I discovered the meaning and the feeling of a breath of spring. … As the wind blew the drops through the open window, I stood there with the greatest most peaceful feeling. … Perhaps my spirits are being lifted.”

A GOOD RIDE

After serving his time, Diamond transferred to Harvard, where he completed his education. For most of his career, he served as a consultant to the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. Married for 52 years, he has a son, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

With other Freedom Riders, he returned to Parchman on the 50th anniversary of his imprisonment and had his photo taken. It shows him defiantly standing in the open door of his cell. He has delivered lectures about his experiences to college students and military officers around the U.S. He recently volunteered with Meals on Wheels.

Diamond wonders if he has done enough. “I have a damn comfortable life,” he says. “I feel like the stuff I was fighting against, I have become.”

When reminded that his long-ago efforts helped a lot of people, he replies, “That was yesterday.”

Then he adds, “When I was a kid and even much later, I never thought I’d reach this age. It’s been a good ride.” •

Now it’s the fall of 2024, and the Big Ten just got bigger. Seattle’s UW has joined Madison’s UW in the conference. So whenever our Badgers face their Huskies, it’ll be a double UW matchup. What does that mean for the future of our favorite initials?

To find out, I launched an investigation into this touchy question: which is the legitimate UW?

Ask the Engineers

Dalton Brockett is a smart guy. Graduated valedictorian from high school. Double majoring in electrical and computer engineering at UW–Seattle. Did an internship with Boeing.

“Dalton,” I ask him, “can the Big Ten handle two UWs?”

“Yes, they can,” he says, quickly identifying key variables. “It’s good for our students because it’ll mean more money, but it won’t be good for athletes because they’ll have to travel farther to compete.”

Nice analysis, Dalton.

“What about the impact on athletic competition?”

“It’ll be confusing at first. How will they handle scoreboards and broadcasting during games? If they meet in the playoffs, it could turn into a real rivalry.”

What’s a Wisconsin engineer’s take? Bruce Case ’77, MS’83 managed UW–Madison’s robotics lab. Not an athlete, but he did hardware development in sports medicine. Bruce is a smart guy, too.

“It’s unfair to expect student-athletes to travel so far to compete,” he replies. “The Big Ten should go to 20 schools with two conferences.”

“What about the issue of two UWs?” I ask.

“Washington should change its name. In a fair fight, a Badger will always beat a Husky.”

Who knew engineers were so feisty?

When a Badger Meets a Husky

The Big Ten is, in practice, the Big 18 now. That’s weird. But each team only plays nine others during the regular season, and there’s no double-UW game at Camp Randall or Husky Stadium this year. So, if you’re itching for a Badger–Husky matchup, maybe swing by a cross-country meet.

Whenever the Badgers and Huskies do cross paths, people already have opinions about the outcome. “Their mascot is a house pet,” says Sarah Schutt, executive director of the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA). “Ours is a ferocious feral animal.”

When it comes to Big Ten Badgers battling Huskies, UW–Madison student Brielle Wallace x’25, a management and human resources major, sees only red. (Washington colors: purple and gold.)

“We became the first-ever Big Ten champions back in 1896 [in football],” Wallace says. “It’s pretty clear that W stands for winners. So the University of Washington better be ready!”

Speaking of Alumni

Schutt, whose parents are Washington natives, was quick to mention that her Washington counterpart, Paul Rucker, is married to a Badger, Noy Saetia-Rucker ’93. Ooh, this should be fun. He’s all Husky. Two degrees from UW–Seattle. Been working there 20 years. And now he’s vice president for alumni engagement. While Rucker looks forward to playing football in the snow at Camp Randall, he argues for the superiority of Husky Stadium, which is on the shores of Union Bay.

“Washington is the greatest setting in college football — the only one with water access,” he said, conveniently forgetting about Madison’s lakes.

So how do we settle this issue of Badger–Husky bragging rights? Let’s ask an athlete: Kyle Luttinen, a 2023 UW–Seattle finance graduate who spent three years on the Husky basketball team.

“It’s simple,” Luttinen says. “Whoever wins the championship in football or basketball any given year gets rights to UW that year.” Okay.

What If We Go by the Numbers?

Maybe we don’t have to wait for this year’s competition to see which is the legitimate UW. We can check some key numbers (Badgers red, Huskies purple):

Definitive? Not really. Especially when you look behind the numbers. Washington has no NCAA hockey teams. But in 1960, its football team beat Wisconsin 44–8 in the Rose Bowl. That hurts. And … this is hard to type … Wisconsin has no NCAA baseball team.

Graciously, UW–Seattle catcher Colton Bower doesn’t mention this fact. “To be fair,” he says, “we are the ones joining the Big Ten.” Thanks, Colton. And I’ll ignore the fact that when I first contacted you, you weren’t sure who the other UW could even be.

When ranking the UWs, Kelcy McKenna, head coach for UW–Madison women’s tennis, has an idea. “Being a Badger from the Pacific Northwest,” she says, “it’s infuriating to me that what comes up first on a UW Google search is always Washington. So if there is any way somebody could drop some dollars to Google to get us to number one, I think that is our first step.”

Can We Be Serious for a Moment?

When the Big Ten announced Washington’s move to the conference, UW–Madison chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin tweeted “a warm Wisconsin welcome to old friends and new colleagues in … Seattle.” When I contact UW–Seattle’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, she reciprocates. “We’re looking forward to visiting the members of our new conference,” she says, “and especially thrilled to welcome them to Seattle.” Both leaders were quick to expand the conversation.

“I look forward to the … Huskies … joining our @BigTenAcademic [Alliance] as well,” Mnookin tweeted. In an email, Cauce said she is “excited to be in a conference with so many academic and research powerhouses, including Wisconsin. … While we will compete hard on the field, we will do a lot more collaborating off the field.”

This broader perspective turned up often during my investigation. WAA’s Schutt cited the level of research being done at both schools. UW–Seattle’s Rucker spoke of the two UWs’ investments in and commitment to the public good. So I asked him what all this ultimately means for the Big Ten.

He paused for just a moment, then flashed a smile. “Here’s what it means,” he said. “The UW always wins!” •

John Malpede ’68, in a red-and-white-striped shirt, sunglasses, and a long white scarf draped around his neck, points across the street. “This building is going to be knocked down and turned into supportive housing,” he tells the crowd assembled in the street. “They’ve got Crushow to make a mural on the building.”

Crushow Herring, a former college basketball star and unhoused resident of Skid Row, still lives in the neighborhood, where his “portraits of freedom” murals have become widespread and well known. He’s also a community organizer who helps people find jobs.

Three other men join Malpede in a quick performance, each speaking in the character of Crushow and telling his story. After a tryout with the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, Crushow sold dope in Skid Row. He quit dealing when his son was born in 2004. A friend recruited him to play in a three-on-three basketball league in Skid Row, where one of the players challenged him to give back to the community. That got Crushow started on his murals. In the process, he found his purpose through art.

The performance provides a synopsis of what Malpede has done with the Los Angeles Poverty Department, which he started in 1985 as the first performance group in the nation composed mainly of homeless and formerly homeless people. For almost 40 years, the performing artist has been giving residents of Skid Row a means to tell their stories through artistic expression — visual, performing, and multimedia.

Rooted in his fundamental belief that all people are multidimensional and creative, he’s given a voice to the voiceless. In doing so, he’s raised awareness about the lives and needs of the unhoused, given their art credibility, created community, and restored dignity and purpose to people often marginalized and adrift.

Birth of an “Artivist”

Homelessness in the United States has reached epic proportions because of a variety of factors, including rising rents, discrimination against subsidized housing applications, untreated mental illness, and persistent addiction. More than 600,000 people around the country are experiencing homelessness — the most since the federal government started tracking the number annually in 2007.

Malpede has situated himself at the heart of the problem. Los Angeles, long known as the “Homeless Capital of the World,” had the nation’s largest unhoused population in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And it’s getting worse. In 2023, homelessness in Los Angeles County rose 9 percent, to an estimated 75,518 people. Within the city limits, it rose by 10 percent, based on a survey by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The majority of the city’s unhoused population lives in Skid Row, a 50-block area downtown with the highest concentration of people experiencing homelessness of any neighborhood in the country.

All of which makes Malpede’s work with LAPD more urgent and poignant.

This isn’t the first time that our nation has seen an uptick in unhoused people. Like many others, Malpede began to notice a surge in the number of people sleeping on the streets around 1983, driven by policies such as deep cuts to federal housing assistance. At the time, Malpede was traveling between New York City, where he worked as a performance artist, and Los Angeles, where he was dating someone. His time at UW–Madison, as a philosophy major in the late ’60s when the campus was charged with political debate and protests, had opened his eyes to community engagement.

“It was really a 24-hour education,” he says. “For the first time in my life, I was paying more attention to and participating in the adult, civic world.”

So, confronted by the wave of unhoused people a little more than a decade later, he felt driven to find a tangible response. He began work on a performance about homelessness commissioned by the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time to stage in New York City. While in Los Angeles writing the script, he attended hearings of the LA County Board of Supervisors. There he met and joined a group of Skid Row residents and advocates who were detailing the squalid conditions in county housing provided for unhoused welfare applicants. Malpede found the work compelling, and ultimately, he ended up in Los Angeles, where his lobbying effort led to a job as an advocate to make sure people were getting the welfare benefits due them under the law. He also continued his work as a performance artist. The possibilities of blending art and activism to improve the community inspired the creation of the Los Angeles Poverty Department and his work as an “artivist.”

Kaleidoscope Community

During his early days in Los Angeles, the better Malpede got to know unhoused people, the greater the kinship he felt with them, and a mutual trust developed. Yet, where he saw a kaleidoscope of experiences and personalities, society at large wanted to flatten homeless people into a single dimension.

“Working in Skid Row, you open up to the infinite capacity of every single human being,” he says. “Every individual has a million stories, and that’s what’s so beautiful.”

Malpede wanted to give those individuals the chance to tell their stories and influence the decisions shaping their neighborhood. In 1985, he secured a grant from the California Arts Council to conduct theater workshops in the area, and LAPD was born. The name was meant to contrast the often negative perception of the police department, what the artists jokingly refer to as “the other LAPD.”

“It’s always been about making artworks and performances that connect the lived experience of people in Skid Row to the larger social policies impinging upon their life experience,” he says.

During a phone interview, Malpede’s thoughts rambled in a raspy baritone, sometimes as disheveled as his wavy gray hair. Yet his passion for his life’s work is never in question. And at 78, he shows no signs of slowing down. As LAPD’s artistic director, he draws a modest salary from the nonprofit, which is funded primarily by grants. He’s supplemented that income over the years with teaching stints and residencies at UCLA, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance, among others. His work has garnered several honors, including the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award and a Bessie award from New York’s Dance Theater Workshop in the Choreographer/Creator category.

While he was teaching in Amsterdam, Malpede met theater and dance artist Henriëtte Brouwers, now LAPD’s associate director. They’ve been married 23 years and have collaborated on a number of projects. When not collaborating on art, they hike in the mountains and bike to the beach. They have a small garden at their home in Mara Vista, and Malpede stays grounded doing tai chi.

The Power of Drama

Over the years, LAPD has staged myriad performances and exhibits throughout the city, hosted community conversations, and lobbied for the interests of Skid Row residents, blending art with activism to preserve and improve the community. That’s rooted in the spirit of ’76, when the neighborhood faced extinction — the city planned to bulldoze it amid a wave of urban renewal. A coalition of advocates, concerned that the low-income housing would never be replaced and Skid Row residents would be permanently displaced, successfully lobbied city officials to renovate existing housing and protect the area.

Since its inception in 1985, LAPD has used art and community engagement to circumvent continued efforts to develop the neighborhood. For example, in 2017, when city planners proposed to open all of Skid Row to market-rate development, Malpede and LAPD installed a nine-hole miniature golf course in its art space, the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, and then invited the entire department of city planning to play the course and attend a performance of The Back 9: Golf and Zoning Policy in Los Angeles.

The performance, written by Malpede and Skid Row performers and directed by Malpede and Brouwers, portrayed backroom development deals made on the golf course, away from public scrutiny. At one point during The Back 9, a developer named Tom Buildmore tells a city council member, “The most important thing is to stop any more housing or social services from coming to downtown” — thrusting a cigar to emphasize his point. Through that performance and community conversations, LAPD succeeded in getting the department’s commissioners to change their plan.

They nixed the open-market development and committed to residents’ requests for more green spaces and stoplight adjustments for people who needed additional time to cross streets. “We got them to come to our events and meet people from Skid Row and find out what people would want in their neighborhood, as opposed to earlier plans designed for someone else,” Malpede says.

In 2013 Malpede spearheaded another LAPD community activism project involving a vacant storefront on Main Street, the western border of Skid Row. A nonprofit developer of housing for the formerly homeless planned to rent the retail space to the Department of Mental Health. But a for-profit developer who was converting vacant commercial spaces into lofts obtained a zoning variance to open a bar and restaurant in the space that would cater to the upscale tenants he hoped to attract. Skid Row residents appealed the variance before the zoning commission, arguing that a mental health clinic would better serve their interests. “Surprisingly, the commissioners were moved, and they agreed with us,” Malpede says.

He converted the transcript from the hearing into What Fuels Development, a performance that LAPD staged in conjunction with an exhibit at the Armory Center for the Arts. “It was an example where the show chronicled the impact we’d already had,” he says.

Recovery is a recurring theme in LAPD works. While many Skid Row residents struggle with addiction, Malpede and others believe the police characterize the neighborhood as a free-for-all drug zone, playing up stereotypes and instilling fear among outsiders. “Even though there are people on the street selling and using drugs, there’s also a highly sophisticated recovery community,” he points out.

In response to a police crackdown in the neighborhood, LAPD staged The Biggest Recovery Community Anywhere, a performance and film series that transformed the police narrative about Skid Row. “Everybody talks about it as a recovery neighborhood now,” Malpede says.

LAPD’s latest project, Welcome to the COVID Hotel, which opened in March, has involved panel discussions on housing as health care, an exhibit, a publication, and a performance chronicling unexpected lessons about health care for the homeless that emerged from the COVID-19 crisis. For many experiencing homelessness during the pandemic, the county’s efforts to house them temporarily in hotels — while seeking more permanent solutions — and provide free medical care marked the first time they’d received health care from caring individuals. The experience engendered trust that saved lives and led to housing solutions for some.

“Nothing Good Would Happen Without Naïveté”

Malpede is much more comfortable collaborating and performing than talking about his good works. Those include providing food, clothes, blankets, and an ear to those in need. “He’s the welcome mat,” says Stephanie Bell, a musical artist who’s performed in 20 to 25 shows with LAPD since 1996. “The man is amazing. He helps you not just in your art but also if you have a problem or a situation. John Malpede is like my second dad.”

Lee Maupin, a James Brown impersonator and Skid Row resident, had been dancing since he was three years old but knew nothing about acting until he met Malpede 12 years ago. Malpede, unconcerned by Maupin’s lack of experience, welcomed him to perform with LAPD. That helped Maupin discover talent he didn’t know he had.

“I never [knew] that I could be an actor, but John helped me to hone my craft,” he says. “He’s a good teacher. It’s got to where a whole lot of people think I’m pretty good at this stuff.”

Malpede had no idea where LAPD would go when he founded it. He has joked, “It’s a harebrained idea that wouldn’t die,” poking fun at his unfounded optimism at the time.

“I don’t want to minimize the virtue of naïveté,” he says. “Nothing good would happen without naïveté.” David Blumenkrantz, a teacher at California State University–Northridge and photographer who’s recently become involved with LAPD, points to Malpede’s unassuming, low-key but efficient manner as an effective means to getting things done — from making unhoused people feel at home and valued to setting up cooling stations where people can take refuge in the heat of summer.

In an Amazon synopsis of his book Acting Like It Matters: John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department, the author James McEnteer writes, “Malpede knows that residents of Skid Row, the most vulnerable among us, are the canaries in the coal-mine of our culture, harbingers of alienation and futility that now threaten middle-class stability and even survival. Malpede long ago recognized homelessness as a symptom of a society in trouble.”

McEnteer makes the case that Malpede has returned theater to the mission envisioned by the ancient Greeks, who thought politics were too important to leave to the politicians and produced plays about topical issues important to the citizens of the day. He contrasts this to the escapism of much modern popular entertainment and quotes noted theater director Peter Sellars, who says that Malpede’s work “will testify on the side of the angels.”

In The Real Deal, a documentary about the theater group, Sellars says, “When they look back in 100 years, the only theater being done now which will matter will be the work John Malpede is doing with the LAPD.”