Alumni in the News: May 9, 2022

The 2022 Tony Award nominations were announced this morning; Gabby Beans ’14 is nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for The Skin of Our Teeth. The Tonys ceremony will be broadcast on June 12.

On May 4 it was announced that Peter Barba ’19 won the Tournament of Champions in the 2022 Columbia Venture Competition; his company, Lectrium, which provides home installation of electric vehicles chargers, was also the winner of the Venture Competition’s BlocPower Climate Challenge. Rebecca Kwee ’12 tied for third place in the Columbia-CareOne Healthcare All-Stars Challenge; she is the co-founder of BestFit, a digital platform that shares resources for college students.

Confirmation hearings for President Biden’s judicial nominee Nusrat Choudhury ’98 began on April 27; if confirmed by the Senate as a U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of New York, Choudhury would become the first Muslim woman and the first Bangladeshi American to serve as a federal judge.

Eli Grober ’13 wrote the April 26 McSweeney’s humor story “I Like Free Speech So Much I’ve Decided to Buy It,” lampooning Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal with Twitter.

The New York Times reported on April 26 that Dean Baquet, who is stepping down from his role as the Times’s executive editor in June, will lead a new local investigative journalism fellowship program there.

Also in the Times is Tony Kushner ’78, who was featured in T Magazine’s “Letters to an Artist” on April 24 and on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, “Tony Kushner on the Republican ‘Fantasy’ of a Nation Controlled By ‘Straight White Men,’” on April 18.

Rabbi Sharon Brous ’95 wrote the April 14 New York Times guest essay “Imagine a Bible With No Moses, No Story of the Exodus.” Brous is the founding and senior rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community based in Los Angeles.

On April 13, Vulture reported that The National Book Foundation’s 2022 “5 Under 35” includes Crystal Hana Kim ’09, for her 2018 debut novel, If You Leave Me. Kim’s book, told from five separate points of view, describes the Korean refugee experience during the war and afterward.