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Watching the harrowing images of jetliners exploding into the World Trade Center, Anthony Williams ’02 shook his head and struggled to fathom the unfathomable. “If I saw this in a movie, I wouldn’t be able to take it as fact,” said the kinesiology major from Chicago, “It doesn’t look real. I just don’t know what to do with myself.”

The last time Occidental purchased new hurdles, track and field and cross country coach Rob Bartlett was an exchange student from England. “They came flat-packed to the staff and you had to screw them together,” he recalls. “One hundred hurdles arrived and every person on the team had to come out and spend half an hour over lunchtime putting those hurdles together. 

On a recent overseas assignment for NPR, correspondent Kat Lonsdorf ’09 and her field team traveled to central Beirut amid a ceasefire in Lebanon. The pause in fighting followed the war’s deadliest day, when Israeli airstrikes on what the Israeli military identified as Hezbollah targets killed more than 350 people across Lebanon in 10 minutes. Lonsdorf spent two days with the family of 26-year-old Zahraa Abboud, who went missing when the apartment building where she had been staying was destroyed in the airstrikes.

As the eyes of the soccer community turned to North America for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Seattle took center stage as one of 11 U.S. host cities. Lumen Field hosted six matches, including the United States’ Round of 16 loss to Belgium on July 6 that ended the team’s World Cup run. Just a mile away, Waterfront Park hosted free watch parties for 10 matches, drawing a single-day record of 84,767 visitors on June 19—a festive mix of soccer fans and Juneteenth celebrants.

The screensaver on filmmaker Elliot Tuttle ’22’s phone is a still of Nicole Kidman from a photo call for the 2004 movie Dogville. “She is my hero—I love her,” he says. “I don’t play about her.”

Eighteen months after losing her longtime Altadena home to the Eaton Fire, “Things are a lot better in some ways,” Amy Lyford says. “Sometimes I still can’t believe all the things that happened.”

Several years ago, in the middle of the semester, Tsung Chi’s students in his Chinese Politics course gave him a round of applause. “That’s my favorite class to teach,” he says—one that compares the democracies of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan with China’s one-party state. “For the last 35 years, I’ve taught that class almost every year,” he says.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Alicia González is not a native speaker of Spanish—the language she has taught to thousands of students over the last 25 years at Occidental. She majored in international studies and Spanish at Stanford before pursuing graduate work in linguistics at UCLA.