TIME

Where are the Men?

Synchronized Swimming’s History Explains Why No Men Will Compete in Paris

History News Network

Women Have the Daring to Be Real Life Savers

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.

Literary Hub

On the Time Benjamin Franklin, American Show-Off, Jumped Naked Into the Thames

Vicki Valosik on Our Millennia Long Love-Hate Relationship With Getting in the Water

Smithsonian Magazine

Synchronized Swimming Has a History That Dates Back to Ancient Rome

Most people think of synchronized swimming, which gained Olympic status in 1984, as a newcomer sport that dates back only as far as Esther Williams' midcentury movies. But the aquatic precursors of synchronized swimming are nearly as old as the Olympics themselves.

The Atlantic

Where Did ‘Synchronized Swimming’ Go?

More than 30 years after its Olympic debut, the sport was rebranded as “artistic swimming”—a controversial move that athletes fear could backfire.

Slate Magazine

It’s Long Past Time for Male Synchronized Swimmers to Get Invited to the Olympics

They slice past one another’s bodies, their sequined costumes reflecting sparkles of light in a thousand directions. He catches her foot and swings her, in a curved arc, around his body. There is a passionate pursuit, with grabbing and fleeing, a feigned strike to the face and a fleeting but exultant embrace. Like embattled lovers, their movements harmonize one moment and clash in discordant turbulence the next—and the audience loves it. This is not figure skating, nor is it ballet or even a tan

Huffington Post

Hail, Caesar! and the Rise & Fall of the Aquamusical

The Coen brother's newest film, Hail, Caesar! channels the glamour of the Golden-era "aquamusical," the splashy, pool-centric musical genre made popular by Esther Williams in the 1940s and early 1950s. In one of the film's movie-within-a-movie subplots, Scarlett Johansson plays a sequined Hollywood mermaid starring in an Esther Williams-style aquamusical with daring high dives, spouting water fountains, and aerial shots of synchronized swimmers in shifting, geometric patterns reminiscent of thos

Playing Pasts

The Fair that brought Synchronized Swimming to the Masses

Esther Williams is often mistakenly credited with introducing synchronized swimming to the world through her aquamusicals—aquatic-themed movies produced by MGM in the 1940s and 1950s featuring elaborate pool scenes and water ballets. Though Williams did a lot to popularize synchronized swimming while it was still a developing sport, she did not invent it, nor was she the first to present it to the public on a major scale.

While the question of who “invented” synchronized swimming is up for deba

The Atlantic

Why Isn’t There a U.S. Synchronized Swimming Team in Rio?

Karensa Tjoa didn’t have Olympic ambitions in 2006 when she first joined the Santa Clara Aquamaids, the most elite synchronized-swimming club in the United States. “To be honest I didn’t have much talent at the beginning,” she told me, but the team’s head coach Chris Carver, also a longtime Olympic coach, thought otherwise and took Tjoa under her wing. Tjoa’s ambitions grew, and at the age of 15 she opted to trade high school for a combination of online classes and homeschooling so she could spe

Swimming World Magazine

Artistic Swimming: Ancient Roman Spectacle to Modern Olympic Sport

Initially a form of entertainment, synchronized swimming has evolved as an athletic discipline, and is now branded as Artistic Swimming.

Sport in American History

Review of Katharine Whitney Curtis: Mother of Synchronized Swimming

In 1912, Katharine Curtis (nee Whitney) became the first woman to swim across Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. Under the headline “Madison has a youthful Annette Kellerman,” a local newspaper compared Curtis to the endurance-swimmer-turned-vaudeville-star who had become a household name for her role in revolutionizing women’s swimwear. Little could anyone guess that only a few decades later, in 1958, Kellerman and Curtis would together be inducted into the Helms Foundation Hall of Fame for th

Washingtonian Magazine

Plunging In Head-First

The moderator gives us a nod, and we walk in unison along the edge of the deep end. “Aaaaaand stop!” comes a call from the rear. We pivot to face the pool and bend and stretch into formation, surrounding our seven-person clump with a sunburst of jazz hands. I feel hundreds of eyes watching us as we wait for the music, smiling in our silver-and-pink swimsuits and glittery eyeliner.

The Atlantic

For Same-Sex Couples, Changing Names Takes on Extra Significance

“Before I came out and was still on a path of planning to marry a man,” says Victoria, “I was pretty radical and said I’ll never change my name." But when Victoria Cunningham married Lita Grossman, in Washington D.C. in 2006, three years before same-sex marriage was legally recognized in the District, she was forced to reconsider.

Washington Post

Mine: So much is contained in such small things.

Whenever I stumble upon an old list tucked in the back of a notebook or the bottom of a drawer — a packing list for a trip to meet my in-laws, a guest list for a party we hosted two cities and many goodbyes ago — it’s like discovering a flash-frozen slice of the past.

Medium

If you invite an international student home for Thanksgiving

If you invite an international student home for Thanksgiving, he may ask to come back at Christmas—and you may prepare a basket for the guest room with cookies and hotel shampoos, causing your mom to say, “You really like this boy.”

Philadelphia Inquirer

Hunting the Asylum's Secrets

WESTON, W.Va. - Though I consider myself an uneasy agnostic when it comes to ghosts, it's 9 o'clock in the evening, and soon my husband and I will be locked in a shuttered, 19th-century insane asylum to spend the witching hours of a cold, soggy West Virginia night seeking out their company. As we wait shivering on the steps of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, which predates the Civil War, the darkness is penetrated only by a tungsten sliver of light escaping between the mahogany doors.

International Educator Magazine

Recruiting Farther Upstream

As the growth in numbers of international students enrolling in U.S. universities has slowed, the number of international students in secondary schools more than tripled between 2014 and 2016.

International Educator Magazine

Science: Why Diversity Matters

It might seem counterintuitive: In the laboratory, engineering workshop, and other academic spaces where science gets done, math-based principles rule supreme, and numbers have no language, no cultural inflection, and no gender—why should it matter who the scientists are and where they’re from?

Mobile Bay Monthly

Captain Carol's Sleek Dream Ship

As a child Carol Bramblett
dreamed of a sleek sailing ship,
named "Joshua," built as fleet as the
old schooners that once plied
Mobile Bay. After an uphill struggle
to launch it into reality, she
wonders if the true keel of her
dream wasn’t all the people who
came together in the process.

International Educator Magazine

Learning Arabic Abroad

Study abroad programs to the Middle East and North Africa have seen
tremendous growth over the past decade. While this growth is reflective of a trend in higher
education toward global and experiential learning, it is also telling of an intensifying interest
in the Arab and Muslim worlds among students and educators in the
years since 9/11.

The American Scholar

Water Everywhere

ANTI-ATLAS, Morocco - In a modern update of the ancient practice of collecting dew from stone walls, five villages in southwestern Morocco received drinking water from mountain fog for the first time this spring.

The American Scholar

Above and Beyond

The choicest altitudes for harvesting wind energy are beyond the reach of conventional wind turbines, yet one climate scientist, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, believes these blustery elevations could power the entire world.

The American Scholar

Break With the Cast

Lugging around a heavy plaster cast for days or weeks can seem worse than breaking the bone. But that could all be changing, thanks to (you guessed it) 3-D printing technology.

International Educator Magazine

Supporting LGBT International Students

THE COLLEGE YEARS can be a time of personal exploration and growth for many young
adults, including the exploration of one’s gender and sexuality identities. A 2013 survey from Pew
Research Center showed that the median age lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals “come out” is
20, an age that falls squarely within those college years. More and more colleges are providing
services such as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) resource centers in order to support
these students and help them find community