Back of the Book
I don’t know about you, but there’s this old maxim that readers often flip through magazines from back to front – at least in print. But when digital only? Who knows? But, in any case, as the final (paper) proof of this issue lands on my desk before heading for pixelated immortality, I too pick it up and flip back to front to get a sense of what we’ve written about “this city called York University” during the past few months.
What immediately caught my eye is a short item about three York grads – David Hein, Irene Sankoff and Natalie Bartello – whose musical, Come From Away, opened to rave reviews in Toronto and is currently Broadway bound (we’ll be doing a full-fledged feature on them in The Magazine’s Spring/Summer ’17 issue). Hein and Sankoff were living in New York City at the time 9/11 occurred and changed the way North Americans thought about their safety and security forever. It’s a story that needed to be told and we’re glad that three York grads were part of telling it.
In this issue you’ll also find “Change Makers,” a revelatory feature on how three York grads are redefining what it means to be a millennial while changing our world (for the better) one social program and app at a time. Also, if you don’t have a PhD but always wanted to be a scientist – or at least participate in a bona fide scientific experiment – the good news is it’s not too late! In “Citizen Science,” we tell the tale of how one York professor and a York postdoc are engaging non-academic citizens in scientific studies on our birds and bees.