Jan. 10: Two Alumni Are Adapting Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ for the Stage

Adam Al-Khayyal ’12, currently director of pro scouting for the Cleveland Browns, is being floated as the potential new general manager of the New England Patriots, replacing Bill Belichick, who holds that role along with head coach. — Musket Fire/Fansided
 
Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06 and director Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06 are working together to develop Prince’s 1984 film Purple Rain for the stage. — Deadline
 
In a long profile pegged on his show Appropriate going to Broadway, The New Yorker said Jacobs-Jenkins “has made an art of dramatizing the Chinese finger trap that is ‘writing about race.’” — The New Yorker
 
Retired Gen. David Petraeus *85 *87 said Russian president Vladimir Putin won’t stop even if he wins the current war in Ukraine: “Moldova will be the next in the crosshairs, or perhaps one of the Baltic states, or some others.” — CNN
 
Former FAA administrator Michael Huerta *80 complimented the cabin crew and the FAA for how they handled the blowout of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 last week, and said it’s important to let the inspectors investigating the incident do their job. — CNBC
 
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader ’55 discussed his grandniece, who died in a 2019 Ethiopia plane crash “due to Boeing’s criminal design of the Boeing 737 MAX.” — Democracy Now
 
Philanthropist and investment banker Edgar Robert Kent Jr. ’63, who started the Kent Family Foundation to support charitable causes in Baltimore, died at age 82. — The Baltimore Sun

“Those are the things that keep me up because you don’t have control over them. And you wonder … where are we in this? Where are our hearts? What is going to happen in this next election? I am terrified about what could possibly happen, because our leaders matter.”

— Former first lady Michelle Obama ’85, speaking on a podcast about her fears for the 2024 presidential election. — Deadline

Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA agent outed by Bush White House leaders in 2003, wrote that Liza Mundy ’82’s new book about women in the CIA touched her in ways she didn’t expect: “I realized that I had mostly repressed the toll inflicted on me and my female colleagues from the many years of working in a man’s world.” — Foreign Policy
 
As the first full-time curator of photography at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Sarah Kennel ’92 said she’s “thinking broadly about photography’s many histories, including so-called vernacular traditions such as the photobooth selfies in the gallery.” — Style Weekly
 
Harvard political scientist Danielle Allen ’93 is among the names being floated online to replace Claudine Gay as president of Harvard. — Daily Mail
 
Johns Hopkins professor emeritus of philosophy Jerry Borges Schneewind *57 has died; he was known for his writings on the history of philosophy and ethics, and he taught at Princeton. — Daily Nous

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