People & Profiles
Chicago-based puzzle maker Sandy Weisz ’98 turned his hobby into a career when he founded the Mystery League, a puzzle-hunt company, in 2014. He discusses what led him to start making puzzles for a living, including the online daily word game Raddle.
Though they were oceans away from Afghanistan, Iman Sediqe’s family kept their cultural heritage alive in their Midwestern home through traditional recipes and “Afghanified” American dishes. Now, Sediqe ’14 MA, ’19 PhD shares her family’s rich culinary history with thousands on her social media, which she collectively calls Imanistan.
Former Wildcats women’s basketball player Clarissa Flores ’01 opened Level Sporting Club, a sports bar dedicated to women’s sports, in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood.
In her 30s, Jourdann Lubliner ’10 noticed a change in her New York City social scene as friends navigated big life events and social time with other couples became difficult to schedule. So Lubliner created Doubles Social, an app that matches couples with other twosomes for new platonic connections.
Sara Levine ’92 weaves biting humor together with explorations of loneliness in her second novel, The Hitch, released in January. In this quirky family drama, yogurt company owner Rose Cutler is tasked to figure out how to cure her nephew when he insists he’s been possessed by a corgi.
Every spring, nine Northwestern alums gather to talk baseball and reminisce on the good old days with the Vulture League, a fantasy baseball league they started at Northwestern in 1986. Carl Brownell ’86 shares the group’s origins and how they’ve stuck it out for 40 years and counting.
As president of one of the nation’s top public media organizations, Duchesne Drew ’94 MS oversees MPR News and music offerings, which reach more than 800,000 radio listeners combined each week. Minnesota has regularly found itself in the national spotlight in recent years, and Drew says part of his mission at MPR is to help stitch together his beleaguered yet resilient community.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Ian Kerrigan ’00 was meeting with fellow Peace Corps health volunteers in southern Togo in West Africa when a colleague said, “Hey, turn on the radio!” Kerrigan’s outsider perspective on that tragic day’s events help inform his work as senior vice president for exhibitions at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.
Olivia Worley ’20 began penning thrillers when she moved to New York City in 2021. She studied theater at Northwestern but found her passion in writing, publishing five books in three years.
Scott Jenkins ’85 MBA and Lisa Jenkins ’85 MBA rehabilitated a historic, rundown Virginia farmstead into a bustling bed-and-breakfast and hiker hostel just steps away from the Appalachian Trail. The couple, who met as students at the Kellogg School of Management, have been running Mountain Home for more than a decade.
