In my class today, we talked about the top of feature stories — the anecdotes and the nut. Here are the nut graphs I talked about.
Boston Phoenix: “Children of the Revolution,” Dec. 9, 1999
…”People used to laugh,” he says. “Now they know what you’re talking about. It’s gotten to the point where more people know about us than not.”
“Us” is the Student Underground collective, a group of about 15 BU students who last year turned a photocopied handout into a kicky little newspaper devoted to left-wing activism and pop culture. Like the rest of the staff, Feder is smart and passionate. He’s also tired. The Underground is put out between classes, jobs, term papers, meetings, parties, and protest rallies. Reporting on issues from Kenmore Square to Kosovo, the staff pull all-nighters in a windowless church basement across the river. They never know how they’re going to pay for their next issue.
“MIT physicist empowers young Cambodian women by building them a dormitory“
The new three-story Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women is named for a town in Maine. But it’s on an unpaved street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, populated with fried fish vendors, motorbike taxis, and roaming chickens.
The name is a nod to the building’s founder and chief supporter, Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist and celebrated author. Lightman, a soft-spoken, deep-thinking Southerner who summers on a quiet island near Harpswell, said he now spends about a third of his time running the dorm for rural women he built in Cambodia. While working on another aid project there in 2003, Lightman learned that a lack of secure housing prevents many village women from going to college. All the schools are in the gritty capital, and few offer dormitories. Lightman saw a clear solution. He raised money, bought a piece of land, hired contractors, and built a dorm.
Now, he is “Dad” to more than 30 women. Until the dorm opened about a year ago, they faced lives as rice farmers, tour guides, or possibly brides in arranged marriages. Now they want to work for the government, earn PhDs, and study overseas.
“As unexpected as it was to find myself on the other side of the planet in the culture I knew nothing about, I felt like I could make a difference,” Lightman said. “It wasn’t a lost cause. This is something that was not beyond my reach.”