Alumni in the News: January 8, 2024

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival kicks off in Park City, Utah, on January 18 and includes an array of Columbia filmmakers. Sam Bisbee ’90 is the producer of two films, As We Speak and Daughters; Anna Boden ’02 is co-writer and co-director of Freaky Tales.

Rachael Scarborough King ’06, the widow of Ady Barkan ’06, wrote the January 1 New York Times guest essay “Caregivers Helped Us Be a Family. Everyone Should Have That Option.” King is an associate professor of English at UC Santa Barbara; Barkan, an attorney and activist, died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in November.

Robert A. Gottlieb ’52 was included in the December 22 New York Times Magazine feature “The Things They Cherished.” The late publisher and editor collected Lucite purses from the 1940s. “He found them amusing, such impractical objects, then he kept finding more and more,” says his widow, Maria Tucci. “It was the choosing and acquiring that was important to him. The delight of saving something.” Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, says her father also collected 3-D dog posters, obscure Barbie dolls and macramé owls.

How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, by Professor Chris Wiggins ’93 and Princeton’s Matthew L. Jones, was included on The New Yorker’s December 20 “Best Books of 2023” list.

Emmy Award-winning actress Kate McKinnon ’06 hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time on December 16 (she was a cast member from 2012 to 2022); to celebrate, Vulture shared the list Kate McKinnon’s “20 Best SNL Moments.”

New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ’71 was featured in the December 4 New York magazine article “Trump Has Met His Match in Fellow Queens Native Arthur Engoron.” Engoron is currently presiding over the former President’s civil fraud trial; oral arguments are scheduled for January 11.

Actress and author Hari Nef ’15 wrote the November 24 New York Times book review “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gay Bar,” discussing The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After by Lucas Hilderbrand. “Though The Bars Are Ours offers more ethnography than theory, it sparks when Hilderbrand indulges the latter, as in his exploration of camp,” Nef writes.