Pilgrimages are one of the most interesting things about the Middle Ages. It was a political and economic movement, not just a spiritual movement. If you overlaid these three maps on top of each other, you would see that the major political sites were also major ecclesiastical sites.”
Christopher Lakey, Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Art
One of the three medieval map reproductions on Lakey’s office wall shows the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), the network of pilgrim routes across Europe that lead to the saint’s tomb in Santiago de Compostela. Lakey, whose work includes the study of monumental sculpture, drove several of the medieval pilgrimage routes while completing his dissertation, and he refers to the maps frequently as a teaching tool and aide-mémoire.
Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson rank among the hardest-boiled cops in American detective fiction, deploying guile, brute force, and a barrage of acidic quips as they battle crime in mid-20th-century Harlem.
Chester Himes created Grave Digger and Coffin Ed in 1956, and he won global acclaim with a series of novels detailing their exploits. But Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History, stakes a claim for Himes past his emergence as a master of detective fiction. In a new biography, Chester B. Himes, Jackson identifies Himes as a key figure in the generation of brilliant, mid-20th-century black writers that includes Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.
The new biography excavates Himes’ unsparing meditations on race, politics, and masculinity, many of which were published in the two decades before his renowned crime fiction appeared. Jackson’s close readings of these texts and access to new archival materials make a compelling case that Himes broke significant new ground in tackling issues that remain at the center of American writing.
Jackson eschews what he dubs “romantic mythicization” in favor of weaving Himes and his peers back into “the crisis of day-to-day life” faced by African-American authors writing in the mid-20th century. It was a crisis manifested in the most basic aspects of life, including, says Jackson, “the inability to get an apartment, to buy a house, to eat at a nearby restaurant, or use libraries and get access to information.”
“I am interested in making an intervention into the mainstream narrative, which excludes systematically, almost as a point of principle, black voices and black people,” says Jackson. “Especially as a biographer of African-American subjects, as an African-American self, I am always interested in providing a corrective.”
Himes felt the quotidian crisis Jackson describes even more acutely than many of his cohorts. As a young man, Himes was arrested for a bungled armed robbery in 1928 and served more than eight years in prison. Himes procured a typewriter while in the Ohio Penitentiary and began his journey as a writer there.
“Prison was a very jarring and deeply uncomfortable experience [for Himes],” says Jackson. “His ability to create a private emotional and intellectual space through writing was a key way for him to survive that experience without becoming insane.”
Himes was already selling his unsparing and candid tales of life behind bars to magazines, including Esquire, when he emerged from prison in 1936. Yet early successes offered no easy path into literary circles. Himes’ fortunes oscillated between stints at prestigious writing colonies such as Yaddo and manual labor jobs taken to make ends meet.
Himes’ growing ambitions as a writer also collided with the racism that deeply permeated America’s publishing and film industries. “As his work grew in some of its richness,” Jackson says, “it was difficult for him to get published.”
Yet Himes persisted. Two classic novels—If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947)—joined an impressive body of stories and reportage, including what Jackson describes as “radical, sharp-edged journalism calling for absolute resistance [to racism] during the Second World War, which was a very unpopular stand.”
Himes eventually moved to Paris in the early 1950s. “I don’t think how Himes personally chafed against the abject racism in the United States at that time can be exaggerated,” says Jackson, “but there was also the sense of [American] cultural philistinism that rankled him as well.”
Himes found Paris more congenial. If He Hollers Let Him Go received a glowing mention in French psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon’s classic work, Black Skin, White Masks (1952). And Himes’ noir detective novels, published first in Paris in French translation, finally won him the wider audience in the late 1950s that he had long sought with his earlier work.
Despite the enduring appeal of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, Jackson’s initial attraction to Himes’ story was the author’s unique stance in the era’s fraught politics. “I was drawn to Himes as a writer with political commitments,” Jackson says, “who figured out an independent path between the Communist left, and the black middle class represented by the NAACP and the Urban League.”
Chester B. Himes will certainly draw new readers to the author’s entire body of work — including early sprawling gems such as Lonely Crusade (1947), which grapples with race, labor, class, and war.
“I think that we can get a lot from Lonely Crusade in our exact political moment,” says Jackson.
Melaku Arega ’17, neuroscience and molecular and cellular biology major, was selected as a Luce Scholar. The program, launched in 1974 by the Henry Luce Foundation, identifies potential future U.S. leaders to promote cross-cultural understanding between the U.S. and Asia.
JHU debaters Kuan Hian Tan ’18 and Harry Zhang ’17 won the 2016 North American Universities Debating Championships in Ottawa. With their victory, Tan and Zhang become the first-ever Johns Hopkins team to win the NAUDC, the official continental title tournament for North America in the British Parliamentary debating format.
Book Arts
Off the Shelf: Modern and Contemporary Artists’ Books, a collaborative project between the Baltimore Museum of Art and JHU, opened March 12 and runs through June 25. Several Hopkins students wrote label texts and helped to determine the checklist and thematic organization of this exhibition of artists’ books from the BMA’s collection.
Rebecca Kelly, associate teaching professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, is a big believer in hands-on learning. As the director of the Global Environmental Change and Sustainability (GECS) program, she encourages students to get their hands dirty (literally!) as they study environmental problems and the challenge of developing a more sustainable society. Kelly practices what she preaches in her personal life, exploring the stream behind her house, using organic foods, and making beehives.
Bishop Douglas Miles ’70 at Baltimore’s Koinonia Baptist Church.
It’s a winding walk through cinderblock hallways, past brightly painted classrooms, and up a stairway to reach the office of Bishop Douglas Miles ’70 at Baltimore’s Koinonia Baptist Church. The voices of children enrolled in the church’s daycare program filter through the building. Twenty-five years after founding this church and 50 years after following his own call to the ministry, Miles reflects on a life dedicated to fighting for social justice in Baltimore. “I’ve tried to live my life not speaking for people, but speaking with people on the issues that matter to them and to me,” he says. It is a heady legacy.
Although Miles admits he always had a “sense that I was destined to preach the gospel,” his path to the ministry was not a direct one. Nor was his path to Johns Hopkins. As a senior at Baltimore’s Dunbar High School, Miles’ plans included college on the West Coast with a career as a doctor or science teacher. His mentors at Dunbar had a different idea, and when they were presented with an opportunity to send a student to Johns Hopkins, they chose Miles—a National Merit Scholarship finalist—who didn’t want to go.
“At that time, Hopkins did not have a great reputation in the African-American community in Baltimore, because it was like an island separated from the rest of the city,” explains Miles, who reluctantly followed his mentors’ advice and enrolled as a pre-med freshman in 1966.
He was one of 14 African-American students—the largest cohort of African-Americans up to that time—but the experience was not an easy one. “There was no support system for African-Americans,” says Miles, whose family moved to the new Lafayette Courts public housing project in East Baltimore around 1955. “To a large extent, African-Americans didn’t really have a place in Hopkins culture.” This included the campus barber shop, where Miles was summarily told by a barber using a racial epithet that he would not cut African-Americans’ hair.
Nevertheless, Miles and his classmates made it their mission to improve the climate for minority students at Hopkins, pressing the administration for more African-American faculty hires, and successfully establishing the campus’ Black Student Union. Miles changed his academic focus when he realized his spiritual call to the ministry, and graduated in 1970 with a major in humanistic studies with concentrations in history and philosophy.
Despite the challenges, Miles finds merit in his Johns Hopkins experience. “[Hopkins] gave me a different perspective of life from growing up in the African-American community in Baltimore, which was still basically segregated; it gave me a larger view of the world, a larger view of the possibility of life; and it even gave me a more rounded perspective of the race issue in Maryland—that not all white people were against black people.”
After graduation, Miles took that newly honed world-view with him and began to blaze trails. He was the first African-American to assist at Baltimore’s St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, eventually winning over white congregants who initially refused to shake his hand. He was among the first African-American trainees with First National Bank, the day job that helped him support his family while he pursued his ministerial calling.
In 1980, Miles was pastoring at Brown’s Memorial Baptist Church when he was approached by a representative of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the nation’s oldest and largest community organizing network, to join a group of pastors who were participating in an action against redlining at a local bank. Miles was reluctant—he had stepped away from social ministry after some rough experiences—but the IAF rep was persistent and persuasive. The event at Provident Bank—which ended with community leaders negotiating real policy changes with the bank president—resurrected Miles’ dedication to social justice work, and he has been active ever since with several national IAF affiliates, including the Baltimore affiliate, BUILD, where he is now co-chair emeritus.
Among BUILD’s many accomplishments, Miles says he is most proud of the creation of the CollegeBound Foundation, which helps prepare Baltimore City public school students for college and provides scholarships; the development of Nehemiah Homes for low- and moderate-income families; the push for afterschool enrichment for public school students as embodied by the Child First Authority; the signing of living wage legislation in 1994; and the re-building of the Oliver community, just north of Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 2015, he was repeatedly called on to speak about the city’s rising rate of violence and the April unrest that erupted in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray. Recently, Miles has worked with Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels in advocating for the creation of entry-level jobs for city residents through the HopkinsLocal program.
Miles urges people who are searching to make a difference in their communities to “organize, organize, organize.”
As he approaches his 50th anniversary in ministry, Miles is committed to his priorities: his family—a wife, two sons, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild—and his church (which he co-pastors with his son, Rev. Dante K. Miles).
“I started preaching when I was 18, and I would take nothing for the journey,” he says. “My only desire is that I could be 20 years younger because I think it’s a great time to be in ministry because of the possibilities for change that exist for those who are committed.”
2001 Earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University
2004 Earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University
Work History
2015-present
Head of Fashion Partnerships
Instagram
2013-15
Editor-in-chief Lucky magazine
2005-12
Beauty and Health Director Teen Vogue
2002-05
Beauty Writer
Contributing Fashion Stylist ELLE
Notable
She’s a first-generation American and grew up in Greenwich Village, New York
Chosen by longtime Vogue editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, to take over Lucky magazine
Originally studied pre-med at Hopkins, but her internship at Harper’s Bazaar led her to change her major to English
Appointed as editor-in-chief of Lucky at age 33, she was the first Asian-American and youngest editor-in-chief in Condé Nast’s history
Known for her frequent Instagram #EvaChenpose, where she posts a signature shot of her shoes, bag, and a piece of fruit in the back of a cab
Currently has more than 700,000 followers on Instagram
In Her Own Words
“My job is about helping people tell their stories in ever more interesting ways. It’s more about creating narratives than directly selling product. Instagram was initially launched as a community for artists and photographers.”
—The Telegraph
“Someone can tweet at me and can get an answer in 24 hours. It takes me 10 seconds to respond. I never had that growing up. The only way you could talk to a magazine was by writing a letter to the editor.”
— The New York Times
Lucio Gama, assistant professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, gives a flash seminar—an intimate, one-hour discussion led by a Hopkins professor outside of conventional classroom or office hours—on “Superstition and Why People Are Reluctant to Tempt Fate,” to a group of Homewood undergraduates.
Caleb Warren ’17, a double major in philosophy and molecular and cellular biology, and his five roommates began organizing the flash seminars in Spring 2015 as a way to prompt discussion among students from different majors who might not necessarily cross paths on campus. Based on a model started at the University of Virginia, invited professors lead a seminar on a topic of their choice (and not always in their professional area of expertise) and assign a 25-minute reading for the 14 attending students to complete beforehand. Topics have ranged from the Cuban missile crisis to poetry to virtual reality. “Everyone who is there wants to be there,” says Warren. “It’s great to see two people who didn’t know each other before the seminar stick around and talk afterwards.”
In no more than three sentences, tell us why you love your major.
The most important lessons I have learned from philosophy are to listen; to take into account other arguments, even if they do not appeal to me; and to not be limited by dogmatic thought.” Ioana Grosu ’17
Philosophy means ‘lover of wisdom,’ but for me, it is characterized by a search for fundamental truths about the universe and oneself. I find philosophy so valuable because it has given me tools to critically view problems from other fields such as psychology
and biology.” Kevin Demario ’17
Philosophy’s allure is not in its ability to reveal esoteric truths to its practitioners, but rather in its capacity to make the banal, forgettable questions one asks oneself in the shower—such as ‘What is the meaning of life?’ and ‘Do we really have knowledge?’—come alive.”
Jared Mayer ’18
Philosophers delve into the most fundamental domains of thought and existence, up through the very practical questions of how one should live, and beyond. Philosophers never run out of interesting questions.” Dan Friedman ’17
In his seven years as the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus ’70 (MS) has not shrunk from a fight for change. With opposition from both inside and outside his military branch, Mabus has pushed for:
Expanded opportunities for women, including allowing them to serve in submarines, increasing maternity leave from 6 weeks to 18 weeks, and letting them assume combat roles in the Navy and Marine Corps;
Reduced reliance on fossil fuels, with aggressive goals for the Navy to use alternative sources such as wind and solar power, biofuels, and nuclear power for its ships and bases;
Attracting a wider group of candidates for naval service by reopening long-dormant ROTC operations at elite schools such as Harvard and Yale, as well as more diverse institutions such as Rutgers and Arizona State.
His efforts are perhaps all the more remarkable in that, by law and tradition in recent decades, service secretaries are less powerful than they were in an earlier era—subject to vetoes by the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Nonetheless, Mabus, 67, has been an active proponent of change, both real and symbolic, getting into dustups with others for such matters as naming naval vessels for labor leader Cesar Chavez, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and, most recently, slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk.
What’s been driving him to push for such changes? Mabus credits his enlightened parents, raising him in Mississippi at a time of seismic shifts in civil rights.
“You could see that segregation was wrong in every possible way,” he says. “It was just so evident.” Years later, as governor of the state, Mabus endeavored to move Mississippi from its perpetual bottom-of-the-barrel ranking in socioeconomic status.
“If you’re the poorest state in the nation, there is no risk in trying new things,” he says. “The risk is in continuing to do what you’re doing.”
He has taken his vision and administrative skills to a variety of positions, including stints as a CEO and as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Though he later earned a JD from Harvard, Mabus credits Johns Hopkins, where he received a degree in political science, with giving him the lifelong career advantage of knowing how to think critically and how to write.
“When I was governor, I would get memos and letters that I couldn’t understand,” he says. “I’d scribble across them, ‘better memo’ or ‘better letter.’”
And while morality and fairness are a large dose of his motivation to seek change, so is simple logic. That push for a more diverse workforce in the Navy? It’s because studies show that gathering the views of many produces better results than relying on a small group of experts. Turning to alternative energy sources wasn’t just to satisfy environmental concerns, it also saved American lives from being lost while trying to protect or access Middle Eastern oil reserves, he notes.
Of course, the fundamental task of the Navy is to provide defensive security across the globe, and when Mabus took the helm it had fewer ships sailing under the American flag than needed for that mission, he says. He’s stepped up the number of ships under contract each year since assuming office to reach that number—308—by 2020.
With his vast experience as a leader, it’s not surprising that he’s a frequent commencement speaker. What does he tell graduating seniors?
“At some point in your life, do something bigger than yourself,” he says. “Do something that will make people’s lives better. There’s nothing wrong with making money, but at the end of your life, you’re probably not going to look back on how much stuff you’ve accumulated.”
Mabus will be retiring with the end of the Obama administration and won’t be in office when the Navy has the full comportment of ships he’s seeking. There’s a related story involving his father he tells concluding his commencement speeches.
His dad had owned a hardware store, then went into the lumber business, dying at 85. “In the last year of his life, he didn’t cut a single tree,” Mabus says. “But he planted thousands, knowing that he would never see them, but that his children and his grandchildren would.”
His final words to the graduates: “Decide what trees you’re going to plant.”
As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, Claudia Kretchmer ’04 (MA) spent six years studying how galaxies morph from infancy into maturity, hoping to one day join the space program at NASA, and maybe even become an astronaut. Her ambitious plan, however, took an unexpected turn just months before she was supposed to receive her PhD.
In 2006, Steven Kretchmer—Claudia’s stepfather, an award-winning jewelry designer— was killed in a motorcycle crash. Six months later her mother lost her battle with breast cancer. The couple left behind an impressive legacy: Steven Kretchmer Designs, their prestigious and thriving jewelry business.
Kretchmer had no formal training in either business or jewelry design, though she had helped her parents with trade shows and other aspects of the business since age 14. After the deaths of her mother and stepfather, however, there was no question she would step up. “I’m the fourth generation,” she says. “Legacy is important to me.”
Still, she says, “I was petrified. A lot of people were watching to see what would happen. They knew me, but as the astrophysicist.”
Kretchmer says she drew on some lessons she learned at Hopkins to help her succeed in her unexpected new career; namely, how to overcome her fear of public speaking and fear of failure. And, she says, “I learned to go for things that you don’t think you can do or achieve.” The transition from science to jewelry design was not easy. “As a scientist, I was used to being very organized,” says Kretchmer. “I would wake up and have a plan for things I wanted to accomplish that day. Then you go into business, which is fluid and dynamic. Things come up all the time; new things, different things. Even though you have a plan, you have to be okay with that plan changing.”
Kretchmer credits Steven with having taught her the aesthetics of jewelry design. From there, she called on her network of contacts in the jewelry industry for advice and support. “I just got up every day and got to work and did the best I could. Trying to think through things and ask a lot of advice,” she says.
Ten years later, Kretchmer is making waves of her own. Last February she won the American Gem Trade Association’s Spectrum Award, one of the highest accolades in the industry, for her design of the piece Rockstar2. In August she was awarded the Women’s Jewelry Association’s Excellence in Design Award for her body of work.
“It’s really special to be part of people’s lives in such a subtle way and make them happy,” says Kretchmer. “I love that part of it.”
At a recent art and antique show in Baltimore, where she was showing some of her designs, Kretchmer said her love of astrophysics and astronomy inspires her work.
“I still have a passion for science. This year I launched a new line that I’m building on, called Stellina Blue, which means ‘little blue star.’” The star in each piece is represented by a small sapphire.
When the request came, Mark G. Meadows ’11 politely declined. After all, he was in Doha, Qatar, pursuing his dream, playing jazz to an international audience. “I’m not really an actor, and I’m also working on a new album,” the pianist, singer, and composer wrote in his email reply to theater director Matthew Gardiner, who was asking him to audition for Jelly’s Last Jam, a musical about the life of legendary jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton.
While declining seemed sensible enough, Meadows didn’t understand what he was passing up. “I didn’t realize how big a role it was,” he says, “nor did I realize how big of a deal Signature Theatre was.” And though he had learned a Jelly Roll Morton song as a student at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Conservatory, Meadows knew little about the life of the man whose story inspired the Broadway musical.
Fortunately, Meadows reconsidered. He returned home and read for the part. Though his only acting experience had come on the high school stage a decade earlier, Meadows discovered that his years of playing jazz had provided the tools to take on the challenge. During the audition, Meadows says Gardiner “seemed impressed with my ability to listen and react and respond, and I told him that’s all I do as a jazz musician. I’m listening. I’m trying to add whatever I can to make it work.”
Clearly, he did make it work. Meadows landed the lead role in the show, which premiered on August 2 at the prestigious Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, and ran through September 11. The novice actor treated each performance as a chance to perfect the part.
“The more I play Jelly Roll Morton,” Meadows said after just a few performances, “the more I learn about him. I might dust off the piano bench, because he used to dust off the piano bench before he sat on it. I might listen to him before the show, and during a solo break when I’m playing piano, I’ll play something more similar to that.” Though reticent at first, the 27-year-old embraced the chance to fully inhabit Jelly Roll’s persona.
The part proved a natural fit for Meadows, who earned a psychology degree from the Krieger School, as well as a jazz piano degree (2011) and a graduate performance degree in jazz piano (2013) from Peabody. A legendary figure in the history of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton was a key innovator during the genre’s earliest years. A gifted pianist from a young age, he forged his style in the libertine atmosphere of the New Orleans brothels where he played during his teens. Like Morton, Meadows studied classical piano as a child, though his development took cues, somewhat more conventionally, from the music he absorbed in church and at the gigs of his jazz-vocalist father.
After leaving Hopkins, Meadows became a fixture on the vibrant D.C. jazz scene, where he was named artist of the year in 2014 by the Washington City Paper. Even as he poured himself into preparing for the run of Jelly’s Last Jam, Meadows remained committed to finishing the album he mentioned back in Qatar. He released To the People last April, a recording that reflects on turbulent events, and was motivated, he says, by “not only police brutality, but just brutality in our world that we keep seeing happen over and over again.” He recorded versions of classic songs of social consciousness, such as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” plus his own compositions, including “What Would You Do,” which he describes as a call to action for his listeners. It’s a song born of frustration, one that echoes feelings Gaye expressed nearly a half-century ago. “I’m still saying the same thing,” Meadows says, “and I’m mad about it now.”
Meadows also draws inspiration from contemporary artists, especially hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar, who has tackled similar themes. And though Meadows references various musical styles, it remains important to him that his work be called jazz, he says, “Because jazz is the music of freedom. Jazz is the music that forces you to listen and forces you to create and forces you to be free.”
Jeffrey Raider ’03 is the co-founder of Warby Parker, an innovative eyewear company offering designer eyewear at competitive prices, and Harry’s, an e-commerce shaving company focused on the design and engineering of its blades.
Education
2003 Bachelor’s degree, international studies, Johns Hopkins University
2004 Master’s degree, European studies, Hopkins’ Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
2010 Master’s degree, business, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Notable
Named in Fortune magazine’s 2015 40 Under 40 list of influential young people in business.
GQ magazine dubbed Warby Parker the “Netflix of eyecare.”
Famous Warby Parker fans include Oprah Winfrey, John Hamm, and Ryan Gosling.
For each pair of glasses sold, Warby Parker will donate a pair to its nonprofit partner, VisionSpring, which trains people in developing countries to give basic eye exams and sell glasses at affordable prices.
For every $1 earned by Harry’s, the company donates 1 percent to City Year, which helps young people with professional and
life skills.
This academic year, Warby Parker will provide free eyeglasses to more than 2,500 Baltimore City public school students.
Warby Parker’s name comes from two characters in unpublished writings of Jack Kerouac: Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker.
Warby Parker converted an old school bus into a pop-up shop in 2012 to showcase its glasses in what the founders called “Warby Parker Class Trip.”
Harry’s opened a small, two-seat barbershop in Manhattan in 2013 to showcase the new brand.
In His Own Words
“Push through the moments when things seem bleak. Surround yourself with talented people. Love the idea of what you’re doing.” from interview on NBC’s Today Show
“At the end of the day, it all starts with trying to understand our customers by putting ourselves in their shoes, talking to them constantly, and then taking steps to make products that we think are right for them.” from LinkedIn Pulse
“We are one of the only companies in the world that makes all of our own products. We make our shaving creams and we make our own razor handles ourselves in our own factory. Our competitors who sell online don’t do that. As a result, we can really control the whole experience from start to finish and take customer feedback and drive it back into the products that we’re making to improve the experience over time. ” to men’s fashion blogger Lance Chung
Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson rank among the hardest-boiled cops in American detective fiction, deploying guile, brute force, and a barrage of acidic quips as they battle crime in mid-20th-century Harlem.
In his seven years as the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus ’70 (MS) has not shrunk from a fight for change. With opposition from both inside and outside his military branch, Mabus has pushed for:
As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, Claudia Kretchmer ’04 (MA) spent six years studying how galaxies morph from infancy into maturity, hoping to one day join the space program at NASA, and maybe even become an astronaut. Her ambitious plan, however, took an unexpected turn just months before she was supposed to receive her PhD.
Fortunately, Meadows reconsidered. He returned home and read for the part. Though his only acting experience had come on the high school stage a decade earlier, Meadows discovered that his years of playing jazz had provided the tools to take on the challenge. During the audition, Meadows says Gardiner “seemed impressed with my ability to listen and react and respond, and I told him that’s all I do as a jazz musician. I’m listening. I’m trying to add whatever I can to make it work.”
Jeffrey Raider ’03 is the co-founder of Warby Parker, an innovative eyewear company offering designer eyewear at competitive prices, and Harry’s, an e-commerce shaving company focused on the design and engineering of its blades.