AitN: June 17, 2019

Nadia Eke ’15 set a Ghanaian national record (14.33m) in the Triple Jump at the 2019 Racers/Adidas Grand Prix in Jamaica on June 8. With the record, Eke qualified for the 2019 International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships in Qatar and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

Josh Simpson

Josh Simpson ’19

Columbia Athletics/Mike McLaughlin

On June 5, Lions pitcher Josh Simpson ’19 was drafted by the Miami Marlins in the 32nd round of the 2019 Major League Baseball Draft. From Columbia Athletics: “The southpaw earned second team All-Ivy League honors, posting a 4–3 record with a 3.06 ERA and 56 strikeouts in 2019. Simpson became the first Columbia pitcher to toss a complete-game, nine-inning shutout when he did so against Cornell on March 23 and held opponents to a .231 batting average.”

Adrienne Carter ’99 is the 21st recipient of the Nathaniel Nash Award for excellence in business and economics journalism. The award honors Nathaniel Nash, a New York Times business reporter who died in a plane crash while on assignment in Croatia in 1996; traditionally, the award has been given to a Times reporter “who excels in business or economic news, nationally or abroad, just as Nathaniel did.” Carter joined the Times in 2010 and has been deputy business editor since 2017; she was the business department’s international editor for three years prior to that. From the June 3 press release: “Her devotion to the paper’s business coverage, as well as her love of international economic stories, makes her an ideal candidate for this honor. Like Nathaniel, Adrienne is known among her colleagues for being supportive of their hard work. And no editor gets as excited as Adrienne when a reporter lands a challenging story that will open up new worlds to the paper’s readers.”

On June 25, Ethan McSweeny ’93 will open his inaugural season as artistic director of the American Shakespeare Center’s historic Staunton, Va., Blackfriars Playhouse. The season will feature Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra as well as George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. From the press release: “The interconnected stories of our Summer Festival Season expose the inner-workings of McSweeny’s artistic mind. When announcing this Festival Season, he said: ‘For my first summer, I wanted to emphasize the power of repertory theatre to tell stories bigger than just one play…’ This summer, McSweeny will direct Julius Caesar in our beautiful Blackfriars Playhouse, the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre.”