The Year at Princeton: Top five alumni newsmakers

Published in the Dec. 12, 2012, Issue

Part two of our year in review looks at some of the year’s top alumni newsmakers, as selected by PAW’s editors. This post fills in for our Tiger of the Week segment, which is taking a brief hiatus and will return in January. Share your picks below in the comments.

Susan Cain ’89 (Photo: Aaron Fedor)

5. (tie) Susan Cain ’89

Cain, a former corporate lawyer, made a splash with her first book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts In a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a best-seller that was featured on several best-of-2012 book lists.

5. (tie) Robert Caro ’57

The release of The Passage of Power, volume four in Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, was accompanied by appreciative profiles of the author in The New York Times Magazine and Esquire, as well as a National Book Award nomination.

4. Laurence Pope *77

A month after Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed in Benghazi, the U.S. State Department announced that Pope, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who had served 31 years and been U.S. Ambassador to Chad, had arrived in Tripoli as chargé d’affaires, the top U.S. diplomat in Libya.

Ted Cruz ’92 (Photo: Wikipedia)

3. Ted Cruz ’92

A former state solicitor general and Tea Party favorite in the race to replace retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Cruz scored an upset victory over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff before winning convincingly in the general election. Media outlets are already speculating that Cruz could be a presidential candidate in 2016.

2. Lloyd Shapley *53

As a young graduate student interested in game theory, Shapley played board games with fellow mathematician John Nash *50. In October, Shapley was selected to receive the Nobel Prize for economics, in recognition of his work on the design of markets and matching theory, and joined Nash on the list of Princeton’s laureates.

Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 (Photo: Denise Applewhite/ Office of Communications)

1. Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80

Slaughter, a former Woodrow Wilson School dean and U.S. State Department official who returned to the Princeton faculty last year, wrote a widely-debated Atlantic feature about balancing career and family life. (She also wrote one of PAW’s most-read stories of 2012, reviewing some of the feedback she’d received from alumni.)