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"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com |
Jorge Cham makes the daily
grind just a bit more tolerable. Cham, MS ’00,
PhD ’03, creates the comic strip Piled Higher
and Deeper. His shtick is graduate student life,
especially the nutritional, sleep and work habits peculiar
to the species. PhD started as a Stanford
Daily strip in 1997; it now appears in newspapers
at MIT, Caltech (where Cham is a mechanical engineering
postdoc), Carnegie Mellon and other universities. Online
readership spans the globe, judging from fan mail. From
an aerospace engineer in India: “Amazing comics,
big fan base in IIT Bombay. Keep it up!” From
a Yale undergrad: “Your comic strip rocks. I’ve
decided not to go to grad school.” Cham claims
900,000 monthly page views and followers in 300 universities.
Like grad school, Cham’s cottage industry goes
on and on. His self-published book compiling five years
of the strip has sold 4,500 copies, and there are PhD
T-shirts, tank tops and mugs. Cham’s characters
may be incurable procrastinators, but his own pace impresses:
a strip a day the first year and three strips a week
since. Profits have gone to orphanages in his native
Panama and to the World Wildlife Fund.
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Cantor Center for Visual Arts |
when the Cantor Arts Center’s
recent show Picasso to Thiebaud closed June 20 (“The
Work of Art,”
January/February), 64 paintings and sculptures went
back home to the alumni and friends who had lent them
for the occasion. But seven will one day return for
good as promised gifts to the museum. They include Picasso’s
Courtesan with Hat (shown), and works by Deborah
Butterfield, Richard Diebenkorn, ’44, Helen Frankenthaler,
Robert Motherwell, ’36, Manuel Neri and David
Park.
To add to the bonanza, the museum recently received
a major oil painting by Sean Scully. The Irish-born
artist says Angel was inspired in “a flash of
insight that took place in a free and unburdened space”—that
is, a flight from Pittsburgh to New York. The work is
a gift from Jill, ’63, and John Freidenrich, ’59,
JD ’63, and the Robert and Ruth Halperin Foundation.
Angel can be seen on the museum’s second floor.
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