Between the lines
Chicago alumni are always in the news or writing it-although they are not always identified by their class year and degree. Here are some recent sightings.

47 Concluding her Morning Edition series on cheating, NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg turned on April 30 to former Laboratory Schools kindergarten teacher and MacArthur "genius" award winner Vivian G. Paley, AB'47, who has studied the relationship between childhood development and playing by the rules. For children, Paley told Stamberg, the issue is fairness: "Are you leaving me out of it?" Using musical chairs as an example, Paley said that what the children want out of the game "is that every child always find a chair." That's not how the game is set up, of course, which only proves that "children themselves come in with the highest morality of all: give everyone the same thing; we want to be treated fairly-and it's cheating if you make someone cry." Cheating enters the picture, she said, "along with the other things that start happening once the main rule-be nice-changes," replaced by injunctions to "be smart, be fast, know everything, know more than everyone else." In place of this "highly competitive" model, Paley suggested that we "look upon success as being the extent to which the group helps each other develop and grow," a philosophy that she noted has been around "since Plato and the Republic."

67 The political trajectory of Attorney General John Ashcroft, JD'67, was the subject of an April 15, 2002, New Yorker profile. In "Ashcroft's Ascent," writer Jeffrey Toobin chronicled the conservative Republican's life through the downs and ups of a career that has included the Missouri governorship and a term as a U.S. senator, then asks the what-next question: "How far will the Attorney General go?"

82 The May 5, 2002, Los Angeles Times noted the appointment of University of Southern California professor Lawrence E. Harris, AM'80, PhD'82, as chief economist of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Harris, who succeeds retiring SEC chief economist William J. Atkins this summer, will head the SEC's office of economic analysis. An expert in the economics of securities market microstructure and the uses of transactions data in financial data, Harris wrote his Chicago dissertation on price-volume relations in securities markets.

90 The May 9, 2002, Atlanta Constitution cited Kimberly Ng, AB'90, as "on track to become baseball's first female general manager, if and when there is one." Despite the note of pessimism in that prediction, Ng, a public-policy concentrator at Chicago-where she also was an infielder on the women's fast-pitch softball team-is well on track. With three World Series rings from her 1998-2001 stint as assistant general manager of the New York Yankees, Ng is now assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In that position, she is "second in command for day-to-day player personnel decisions for the team with the second-highest payroll in the National League." Her first job in the majors? A post-College arbitration internship with the Chicago White Sox that, three months later, turned into a full-time post.
-M.R.Y.

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