The University of Chicago Magazine February 1996
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CHICAGO JOURNAL

Birdwatching

Last December's Chicago Tribune Magazine cover story, "Inside the Nobel Factory," made a convincing argument that Chicago's Nobel Prize-winning economists should be regarded as local heroes on a par with the Big Hurt and Sir Michael. The U of C's success, wrote George Papajohn, "has been created out of elements we all can relate to: the capacity for hard work that resurrected the city after the Great Fire; the propensity for grand, even radical ideas that produced skyscrapers and deep-dish pizza...." And as any economist worth his Nobel will tell you, there's only so much deep-dish pizza to go around.

The University of chicago a leader in "turning torture into fun"? That was the claim made in a recent New York Times article on the trend toward making college-application essay questions less onerous. College Dean of Admissions Ted O'Neill, AM'70, paraphrased "one of our best questions, which we introduced in the 1980s and used again a few years ago....Imagine you're an astronaut stranded on Mars. The only thing you can do is make a blueprint of yourself and send it back to Earth, where it will be reconstituted into you again....Is the reconstituted you the real you?" Somewhere, Rod Serling must be smiling.

Make a list of famous personalities whom you might expect to find in the Chicago Literary Review, a highbrow collection of fiction, poetry, and interviews published at the U of C. Those who included "Hugh Hefner" must have already seen the Winter/95 Review. In an extensive Q and A, Hef revealed not only that he was born at the University of Chicago Hospitals, but that he started Playboy magazine "in my [Hyde Park] apartment at 6052 South Harper." No doubt on a wind-chilled January day.

In this department:

Photographs from campus:

Plus items For the Record.

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