It’s 6 a.m. in Tacoma’s North End neighborhood, and everything is quiet except for the whistling of a group of white-crowned sparrows high in a tree at the end of an alley. Down below, Amanda Dougherty ’24 is watching the sparrows through her binoculars. She has an app pulled up on her phone to help identify the birds by their song, and she notes how many birds she sees in her notebook. Once she’s made her notes, it’s off to the next street on her route.

Cookbook author Cynthia Nims’ romance with food had as good a beginning as any: a ham sandwich.

Nims ’86 had just arrived in Paris for a study abroad program when she tasted a classic French baguette sandwich with ham, butter, and Dijon mustard. The simplicity was “mind blowing,” she says. “It was different from any sandwich I’d ever had.”

Browns Point Lighthouse Park is remarkably silent on a Tuesday morning in late July.

The gentle waves of the Puget Sound, tamed further by the embrace of Tacoma’s Commencement Bay, are barely audible. The hum of cars on nearby WA-509 fades as you walk down from the parking lot to the shore. Even the seabirds, hanging low and lazy in the sky, don’t break the peace. Everything at Browns Point is serene, right down to the quaint little art deco lighthouse.

The quiet makes the sudden excited energy from two barefoot college students seem all the more out of place.

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.