Access to National Public Radio’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is limited these days; tours of the building, located a mile due north of the U.S. Capitol, remain suspended as they have been since the COVID-19 pandemic began. It’s not off limits to employees, of course, but as at so many other workplaces over the past two and a half years, the option to work from home has proven too attractive for many to pass up. So it is that when Rachel Martin ’96, Hon. ’14 offers to show around a guest, the high-tech studios at North Capitol Street NE are not on the itinerary.

In early August, with the summer sun high overhead downtown Tacoma, Chloe Pargmann-Hayes ’24 climbed the steps of Tollefson Plaza with a paint roller in hand to help put the finishing touches on a massive mural. This was the culmination of months of work to create the city’s first piece of public art honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Pargmann-Hayes helped make the project a reality through her role as the project’s communications intern. Now, she was assisting the artists with the final touches.

Growing up in Portland, Ore., Bella Rodriguez ’24 was struck by the absence of Latino stories in the narrative of the city’s history. It wasn’t until she started studying history, environmental policy and decision making, and Latina/o studies at University of Puget Sound that she started to ask questions about the history of Latinos in Portland. That curiosity led her to dig deep into the city’s complicated racial history and uncover the story of the Cuban refugee community which sprang up overnight in the 1960s.

Steam poured out from the grille of the “Loggermobile,” the University of Puget Sound’s team bus.

It was not an elegant vehicle. Built sometime in the ’60s, it wasn’t really even a bus at all—it was a 15-passenger stretch Chevy Suburban, the type of ungainly behemoth typically reserved for use as an airport shuttle or an ambulance. Now, on the way back from playing a match at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the Loggermobile had given up the ghost.

SOME SISTERLY HELP

Joe Biden, presidential candidate, December 2019

Kris Hay, who has worked in Career and Employment Services for more than 20 years, has compiled a collection of recipes from chefs and restaurants in Tacoma—specifically, ones that thrive on local, sustainable ingredients. She wanted her cookbook, called Tacoma Aroma: Savor the Flavor, to benefit the region so 25.3% of proceeds (a wink to the 253 area code) will be donated to nonprofit organizations like Pierce County’s Emergency Food Network. Here, Hay recommends some of her favorite spots close to campus.

Ella Slattery ’25 had only been on campus for a few weeks when she laid eyes on the plasma chamber. As a first-year student at University of Puget Sound, she was on a tour of the physics department and got to chatting with postdoctoral researcher Brett Klaasen Von Oorschot about a project he was working on with some of his students—a small, silver device connected to a mass of wires and sitting on a rolling cart.

“I’d never seen a fusor before. It was utterly fascinating,” Slattery recalls. “I immediately knew I wanted to get involved and learn as much as I could about it.”