Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates that, contrary to common opinion, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates in parts of the South. With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.

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The Kemper and Leila Williams Prize, named for the founders of the Historic New Orleans Collection, is offered annually by HNOC and the LHA. Since its inception in 1974, the prize has recognized excellence in research and writing on Louisiana history. Recipients receive a cash award of $1,500 and a plaque, and are announced at the LHA’s annual meeting each year. The organization held its 67th annual meeting March 13–15, 2025 in Baton Rouge.

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Told in Matteson’s own words, Capturing Kaltenbrunner is a gripping first-person account of wartime espionage, relentless pursuit, and extraordinary courage. From the tense intelligence-gathering operations to the dramatic nighttime mountain raid that led to Kaltenbrunner’s arrest, Matteson recounts in vivid detail the historic events that culminated in the capture of the highest-ranking Nazi official still at large at war’s end. The story continues through Kaltenbrunner’s trial at Nuremberg, where his crimes were finally exposed to the world.

Part military memoir, part historical thriller, and part reckoning with justice, Capturing Kaltenbrunner is a unique window into a nearly hidden chapter of World War II, told by the man who lived it.

According to Sumner Matteson, one of his children, Robert Matteson loved his college life at Carleton. He was president of the Carleton Student Association and a Rhodes Scholar candidate. He wrote of the decision to attend Carleton:

Largely because they were hard-pressed financially [due to the Depression] but partly because my mother admired Dr. Donald J Cowling, the president of Carleton, my father and mother decided to send me to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Dr. Cowling became president at the early age of 29. He had already earned four degrees at Yale University, more than any other man up to that time. He had been born in Cornwall, England, and when his family moved to Pennsylvania he attended Lebanon Valley University. Dr. Cowling’s father was a minister, and this religious background had a profound influence on the son.

Carleton has a beautiful campus. The College is situated above the Cannon River, which is to the west, with the Lyman Memorial Lakes to the north and east… One of the most beautiful areas on the campus was the Arboretum running north along the Cannon River. It was the brainchild of Professor Harvey Stork (1920–1955) and had its beginning in 1927. By 1930, a five-mile nature trail was completed, and by 1931, a seven-mile Bridle Trail. It had over 300 varieties of trees and shrubs and included bogs, islands, rocks, and streams.

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The James Beard Foundation Media Awards took place in Chicago on Saturday, June 14 and honored the nation’s top food authors, broadcast producers, hosts, journalists, podcasters, and social media content creators. The Journalism Awards specifically recognize works in English and cover food- or drink-related content which were published or self-published in 2024 in any medium.

Read the full list of this year’s awardees.

Read the full announcement from the Duluth News Tribune.

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“My Spanish major opened up the world to me, from Morelia, Mexico in 1992 with HH [Humberto Huergo, professor of Spanish] to the Peace Corps in Guinea-Bissau, and then to a Spanish linguistics program in Illinois,” Mancini said. “It has connected me with people from all over — The Basque Country! Colombia! Cuba! Uruguay! — and there’s always something new to learn and a different way to think. Everywhere I go there are good people. What a treasure.”

“My Spanish major has exposed me to literature and films that have expanded my world many times over and introduced me to people who are resisting oppressive systems in an incredible variety of ways,” Snowbeck said. “Spanish has endowed me with a political imagination and challenged me to envision a better world in the tradition of a myriad of scholars and people who have done so before me.”

Learn more from The Minnesota Star Tribune in their piece, “5 Minnesotans nominated for James Beard media awards.”

Fred Ohles ’75 set out to put the name of everyone who started at Carleton in the fall of 1971 into one enormous crossword — though he soon realized that he would have to limit his opus to last names, and he would have to divide his puzzle into a number of separate grids. 

Ohles is an accomplished cruciverbalist (aka maker of crosswords), with puzzles published in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and dozens of newspapers that use the syndicated Universal Crossword, including The Minnesota Star Tribune. His weekly, Nebraska-themed puzzle has appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star since 2021.

Ohles needed to go big — really big — to fit into his puzzle all of the 496 last names that appeared in the 1971 collection of first-year student names, photos, hometowns, and high schools (called the “Zoo Book” because it was how Carls got their first look at the crop of new “animals” arriving on campus every fall).

For his Reunion “Zoo Book” puzzle, Ohles built seven grids, each grid with 47 squares across and 47 squares down. That’s 11 times the size of a daily newspaper crossword, done seven times over. Everything about the puzzle is supersized. Of the seven grids, the one with the smallest number of classmates has a mere 50, while the one with the most has a whopping 90. To those nearly 500 names, Ohles added more than 4,500 words of “fill,” which is what crossword constructors call the “non-theme” portion of a puzzle.

Why not just skip the fill and cross all the names in a much more condensed puzzle? Well, Ohles says, you try to fit into a neat and symmetrical pattern hundreds of names that include Alquist, Basquin, Benziger, Bozivich, Calvo, Charyulu, and the crowning glory of them all, Czyzewski. That’s without even getting past the ABCs. Further down the alphabet, Ohles needed to fit in Elizondo, Jeronimus, Krafft, Laverdure twice (twin brother and sister), Luetzow, Marantz, Okawa, Pizzuto, Saxhaug, Slenz, Suihkonen, Vandertuin, and Zevin (the letter Z was pretty popular that year, actually). Ohles took special delight when he got Czyzewski to cross with Luetzow.

Once all of the names were situated, and Ohles had filled in his grids with those thousands of other words surrounding his classmates, there was the matter of writing 5,156 clues — because that’s how many answers there were, in total, on the seven grids. Ideally, when an answer appeared in more than one grid, it would have a different clue each time.

Three-fifths of the puzzle ended up being three-letter, four-letter, and five-letter words. Only one answer in 100 had 10 or more letters. The longest answers, found on two of the seven grids, had 14 letters each: MAN ON THE STREET, NON-BELLIGERENT, REINCORPORATED, and TERCENTENNIALS. Their clues were: “Ordinary fellow interview,” “Sweden or Switzerland in relation to World War II,” “Took in again,” and “Celebrations such as Harvard’s 1936.”

Ohles points to two distinctive features that solvers can uncover among the puzzle’s 5,156 answers. First, there is a single answer that appears on all seven grids (here’s a hint: it’s a word with a punch). Second, spread across the grid are the names of all 25 books written by one popular American novelist of recent years — there’s even an answer that points to what would have been the 26th book in that series, which never got written. There are enough clues in this much information to solve the mystery of who the novelist was, Ohles says.

Two classmates of Ohles helped out with the puzzle. Mark Jaeger ’75, retired from a high-level computer science career at Oracle and living in Illinois, wrote the clues for one grid; Ohles says his wittiness enhanced the puzzle’s variety and humor. Andy Maverick ’75, a Louisiana State University chemistry professor now retired to Colorado, proofread grids, helping Ohles spot mistakes and improve numerous clues.

After the crossword puzzle was complete, Ohles started arranging for it to be distributed to his classmates. Once every month or two, starting almost a full year before Reunion 2025, everyone in the Class of 1975 received a “Zoo Book” crossword grid in the mail, sent from Carleton’s Milestone Reunions staff. The class responded with enthusiasm.

Bill Hillsman ’75, an advertising executive in Minnesota, called it “super fun!!!!”

Sue Goldmark ’75, who finished her career as a country director at the World Bank, wrote from Florida that it was “absolutely wonderful and clever!”

Dena Southard Berglund ’75, a retired senior officer of the Social Security Administration also now living in Florida, wrote how she “enjoyed working it in bits.” The puzzle had “great clues,” she said, and after completing several grids, Berglund was “amazed at their variety and how it all fits together.”

Mike Hartung ’75, a retired entrepreneur who built medical services companies, wrote from Pennsylvania that it was “a work of maximum inspiration and perspiration!”

Finally, the classmate with that most marvelous last name, Paul Czyzewski ’75, retired software engineer, penned a note from California about how amazed he was at “this huge amount of work for the benefit of the class… I will enjoy seeing them filled in, when I get to Reunion.” Like many other classmates, Czyzewski was counting on other people to put their pencils and erasers to the paper well before June.

When the Class of 1975 arrives at Carleton for their 50th Reunion on June 19, 2025, each of the seven floor lounges in their residence hall will be decked out with a gigantic “Zoo Book” puzzle. There will be Reunion-themed pencils available to fill them out.

Curiously, in the entire puzzle, there ended up being no names or fill words with 13 letters, according to Ohles. Isn’t that lucky?

Erica Helgerud ’20 is the news and social media manager for Carleton College.

Bacon joins Luther after a distinguished career as a professor and administrator at the College of Saint Benedict (CSB) and Saint John’s University (SJU) in Saint Joseph, Minnesota. For the past five years, she has helped lead academic affairs and later the division of student success at CSB and SJU. From 2020 to 2022, she was the dean of faculty before adding the duties of associate provost in 2022.

“Luther’s reputation as a selective liberal arts college that is known for its involved students, committed faculty and staff, and a strong sense of community inspired me to apply, and I am delighted to accept President Chamberlain’s offer,” Bacon said. “Given my experience at a faith-based residential liberal arts college and my own life-changing experiences attending a residential liberal arts college, I am excited to engage with the challenges and opportunities that are ahead for Luther College.”

“Dr. Bacon brings to Luther College a passion for supporting the holistic development that students should experience, inside and outside of the classroom, at residential, liberal arts colleges,” Chamberlain said. “Informed by her academic training as a social psychologist and her progressive experience as an academic administrator, Dr. Bacon’s empathetic, relational and collaborative approach emphasizes engaging stakeholders, considering alternative perspectives, and using data to inform decision-making processes.”

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Brian Fox, the Marvin J. Johnson Professor in Fermentation Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tinkers with the way living things use chemistry to turn their own blueprints, DNA, into the processes that make a healthy organism go.

Over more than three decades, federal agencies including the Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have supported his efforts to study that basic biological chemistry — and to engineer changes to organisms that can benefit humanity.

Fox’s current research focuses on a genetic alteration to poplar trees, equipping them to produce an industrial chemical. It was a surprise discovery that was years in the making and only made possible by long-term investment in his line of research.

“I had no idea we were going to find a gene that would do such a specific and useful thing,” he told UW News in a recent interview. “But here we are, having turned basic research on some gene families into three patents and a process that makes an industrial chemical in a tree.”

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Thurlow is a lecturer at the University of California–Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where she teaches business and public policy. She also leads the technical advisory arm of Carbon Reduction Consulting in San Francisco, helping companies reduce pollution and manage environmental risk.

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Check out the latest NYT Best Sellers.

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Martha Durrett might never have started Cauldron Bagels if she’d liked working in tech.

Durrett’s baking experience began in the Boston area, where she moved after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota. She started a job in the tech field and didn’t love it, so she quit, thinking she’d take a month or two off before finding another job. That was February of 2020. 

As her unemployment stretched on during the pandemic, Durrett got a job at Nashoba Brook Bakery in Concord, Massachusetts, a big wholesale operation where all of the breads were shaped by hand. She had to get to the bakery at 4 a.m.; the shifts were long and demanding. “The work was so physically intense. Like, my first day, I came home and I couldn’t move my arms,” Durrett says. “I kind of liked it.”

After a few months of toiling in that largescale production bakery, she took a job at Bagelsaurus in Cambridge (MA, not MN), a popular bagel shop that specializes in handmade sourdough bagels. “It just clicked in my head … I was kind of a natural at it,” Durrett says. “I learned everything that I know about bagels from Bagelsaurus.” Eventually, she’d become their head baker.

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On May 21, from 1–2 p.m., El-Hai will host a Carleton Connects event on “how to tell stories and make movies.”

To give an idea of the scope and difficulty of Jack El-Hai’s new book: He usually does three or four revisions. This one was more like 10 or 12.

“It was a hard book to write,” said El-Hai of “Face in the Mirror,” which covers nearly 20 years — from 2006, when a Wyoming man named Andy Sandness shot himself in the head and immediately regretted it, to today, when he’s a Minnesota resident and the recipient (in 2016) of the first-ever face transplant at Mayo Clinic.

The difficulty had to do with the many folks who needed to be happy with the book. It’s not just El-Hai and his readers, the people he has aimed to please with previous works such as “The Lobotomist” and “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.” It’s also the clinic, which commissioned the book, medical professionals who were part of the historic operation, Sandness and Dr. Samir Mardini, who led the surgical team and was eager to have his most important work documented.

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Learn more about the 2024 Teachers of the Year.