The University of Chicago Magazine

No matter how you count, the Magazine has reached a milestone.

The Magazine�s first issue began with a letter to the editor�from University President Harry Pratt Judson.

Unlike people, magazines can have more than one birth date, and the University of Chicago Magazine has several. The maroon-bound volumes in our editorial office begin with one containing the spread at left, Vol. 1, No. 1, of the University of Chicago Alumni Magazine. Published by the Alumni Association, that issue appeared in March 1907, and by October 1908 it had morphed into the University of Chicago Magazine (or so the record tells us—Volume 2 has curiously gone missing from our office collection), and the volume count had begun again. Which brings us to this issue: Vol. 100, No. 1. No matter how we do the counting, we’re turning 100, and we’ll be marking the milestone in several ways during the coming year.

One part of celebrating birthdays is looking back, and a look at the first issue reminds us that while the publication’s look has changed over the years, its purposes have stayed close to those articulated in March 1907: “The University of Chicago is not only an institution; it is a movement in itself. It represents not merely a gathering together of equipment and faculties, where one may spend a few years in study and then move on and away to other things. Its mission is the lifelong inspiration to effective service, stimulated by the innumerable associations inseparably connected with the ‘City Gray’—that intangible everything which we call the University. The Magazine will find its largest expression as the organ of this undying movement....

“[T]he Magazine aims to record the daily life of the University, to give some expression to its literary activity and to serve as a medium through which the best thought and enthusiasm of us all may be so directed as to result in the greatest glory of our Alma Mater.”

Staff notes
This summer marked another Magazine anniversary: the tenth year of our summer intern program. This year’s undergrads—Ethan Frenchman, ’08, a history major from Ridgewood, New Jersey, and Seth Mayer, ’08, a philosophy major from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—manned the Web log, UChiBLOGo; wrote for “Chicago Journal,” “Investigations,” and “Arts & Letters”; and generally made themselves indispensable. They also had a good sense of humor.

And in the interest of full disclosure, we’d like to point out a family connection to the story on David Sacks, JD’98, and his new project, a genealogy Web site (“Take 2.0”): Geni’s chief technology officer and cofounder, Alan Braverman, is the brother of managing editor Amy Braverman Puma.