Icing the Ivies

Kaiser ’10 helps men's hockey sweep Dartmouth, Harvard

Princeton men's hockey outshot Dartmouth 28-14 in the first two periods at Hobey Baker Rink Jan. 5 and took a commanding 3-0 lead halfway through the third period. But a minute after the third score, the Big Green fired back with a goal of its own. Dartmouth nearly narrowed the gap to one goal when a slapshot popped out of the glove of Princeton goalie Zane Kalemba ’10 and tumbled toward the goal. But center Kevin Kaiser ’10 sprinted to the crease and cleared the puck before it reached the net.
Princeton coach Guy Gadowsky said Kaiser's defensive recovery was "a tremendous hockey play" that helped to determine the game's outcome. Brett Wilson ’09 scored a few minutes later, giving Princeton some room to breathe, and the Tigers went on to win 5-2.

PAW AUDIO: Listen to Gadowsky's description of Kaiser's open-net save against Dartmouth.
The following night against Harvard, Kaiser again skated into the spotlight at a key moment. With the score tied 1-1 late in the third period, Landis Stankievech ’08 slid to block a Harvard shot. The puck deflected toward Kaiser, who rushed to the opposite net on a breakaway and scored the game-winning goal.
With the two wins, Princeton climbed to a tie for first place in the ECAC Hockey standings and improved to 3-0 in Ivy League games. The Tigers also re-established some much-needed confidence on their home ice, where the team had started 1-6.
"We love to play here, [and] we feel badly about our record here," Gadowsky said after the Dartmouth win. "We've played well on the road, but we haven't had the big wins here. So this was an opportunity, getting back in league play and having an Ivy League game, to prove that we love playing at Hobey."

Molecular landscape

The image above, created by graduate student Sieu Ha, is science fiction. Science, because the details were captured by a scanning tunneling microscope, but fiction because the "sky" and "land" are pasted from separate samples (the former is the organic molecule THAP on a gold substrate, exposed to a high background pressure of cobaltocene, while the latter is hexaazatrinaphthylene, also on a gold substrate).
Ha, a fourth-year graduate student in the electrical engineering department who studies the physical and electronic properties of organic materials with Professor Antoine Kahn *78, submitted the image to the Science as Art competition, held in November at the Materials Research Society's fall meeting in Boston. Ha's image earned second-place recognition.
Courtesy Sieu Ha

Faculty in the blogosphere: Presidential politics edition

A Dec. 19 New Republic story by Sean Wilentz that examined political pundits' tendency to build an "emotional attachment to [a] candidate's oratory or image" sparked a debate about experience vs. instinct on the New Republic's Open University blog. ... In a Dec. 19 entry on the Huffington Post, Woodrow Wilson School professor Julian Zelizer aligned the three top Democrats with three of the party's political traditions: populism (John Edwards), anti-politics (Obama), and pragmatic liberalism (Hillary Clinton). ... In a Dec. 20 entry on his blog, Freedom's Power, Woodrow Wilson School professor Paul Starr previewed his article in the January-February American Prospect, "The Democrats' Strategic Challenge," which "set[s] out what the Democrats could accomplish if they win the election and take control of the White House and Congress."

Alumni in the news

Curator Jodi Hauptman ’86 earned acclaim for her Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Georges Seurat: The Drawings," which closed Jan. 7. Critic Patricia Zohn wrote in her Huffington Post blog that the exhibit showed "a quiet brilliance that perfectly echoes one of the artist's defining features: his self-chosen muteness." ... Word of mouth can help underdog candidates keep up with well-funded frontrunners in the presidential primaries, according to a Jan. 6 New York Times op-ed by pollster Mark Mellman ’78 and colleague Michael Bloomfield. Voters tend to trust their neighbors, Mellman said, at least more than they trust what they see in 30-second advertisements. A December poll of Iowa voters found that 69 percent trusted "comments from friends, relatives, and colleagues," compared to 38 percent who trusted information provided by TV ads. ... Colbert Report writer Jay Katsir ’04 discussed life on the writers' guild picket lines with Metro, a free daily newspaper in New York, Jan. 8. Katsir joked that he has turned on the TV for positive reinforcement. "I have been getting a lot of support from people like Dr. Phil. He helped me today to not be 'that girl.'"
The Boston Globe's Dec. 31 roundup of books to watch for in 2008 mentioned three Princeton alumni: Randall Kennedy ’77, a Harvard Law professor whose book about betrayal in the black community, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Disloyalty, is due out this month; Joseph Nye ’58, the former dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who will address international affairs in The Powers to Lead: Soft, Hard, and Smart, which will be published in February; and Louis Masur *85, a professor at Trinity College, who will examine a famous photo from Boston's antibusing demonstrations of 1976 in The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America, slated for an April release.