On Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl, defeating the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20 in their newly constructed home stadium. The stadium’s architectural features were on display all night long from a seating bowl pressed up against the field, to the 360-degree, 80-million-pixel video board that allowed fans to relive Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp’s game-winning touchdown, to the sharp curves of the exterior seen in aerial shots. Behind the design of the most expensive stadium ever built were two Rice Alums, Michelle Stevenson, the Senior Project Architect for the seating bowl, and Neil Prunier, the Senior Project Architect for the exterior.
This past season, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels made waves across the baseball world by winning the American League MVP award as both a pitcher and a batter. Fifteen-hundred miles to the east, the Rice baseball team boasts a two-way player of its own in sophomore Guy Garibay Jr., who serves as both an outfielder and a pitcher.
It is hard to overstate the importance of good coaching in baseball. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “90 percent of the game is half mental,” and while no one quite knows what that means, it comes down to baseball being some combination of preparedness and confidence, not to mention the physical act of going out and performing. A good coach can go a long way toward preparing a team and making it believe in itself, and despite the fact that they have yet to play a game, it feels safe to say that Rice baseball under the command of Jose Cruz Jr. is in a much better position to succeed than it was at any point over the past three seasons.
In 2008, now-Rice baseball head coach Jose Cruz Jr. had already been in the MLB for 11 years. He’d racked up over 200 career home runs and over 1000 career hits, he even won a gold glove in 2003, but he still had one thing left to accomplish.
Following the 2021 season, which saw the Rice baseball team go 23-29-1 and miss out on the conference tournament for the first time since 1993, Athletic Director Joe Karlgaard decided that the program was in need of a change. He relieved then-head coach Matt Bragga of his duties after three seasons, and brought in Jose Cruz Jr. in his place.
Last year, a St. Louis reporter tweeted a promo for a segment on where parents should look for hidden drugs in their child’s room. The tweet started with the sentence: “Looks like a normal teen’s bedroom, right?” — a grave mistake considering that the bedroom looked nothing like a normal teen’s bedroom (for starters, no teen has ever owned a three hold punch). There are two morals of this story. First, the news station needs to fire whoever their teen-bedroom correspondent is. Second, there’s a reason the common refrain is “write what you know.” It’s really hard to accurately portray something or someone you don’t have personal experience with.
Going into “Death on the Nile,” I had extremely high hopes for this murder-mystery film based on the 1937 Agatha Christie novel of the same name. Its predecessor, “Murder on the Orient Express,” was a fantastic film filled with twists and turns and a genuinely surprising but well-earned final reveal. However, “Death on the Nile” is a massive disappointment, failing at all levels of production.
Among the many escape rooms littered throughout Houston is Rice Escape, a student-designed and operated escape room located in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. The Thresher had a chance to visit Rice Escape and found it to be a great and convenient way to spend an afternoon with friends.
It’s been almost four years since Saba’s last release, “CARE FOR ME,” a therapeutic memorial for his late cousin Walter Long, who was murdered in 2017. The album saw him dealing with the loss of a mentor, friend and family member whose death left him empty. Saba’s detailed and personal writing about depression and grief struck a chord with listeners and drummed up anticipation for what Saba would do next.
In 2019, Mitski decided to walk away from music. This decision was personal, not just an effort to create a “farewell tour” that would drum up demand. Fearing a time when she would be writing music just to keep money flowing rather than out of inspiration, she announced her “last show indefinitely” to the dismay of legions of fans.
Late last year, the metastasizing effort by school boards across the country to ban certain books from school curricula, many of which were written by queer and/or BIPOC authors, rose to the forefront of American politics. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s then-conservative gubernatorial candidate and now governor as well as Rice alumnus, supported the effort to excise Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece, “Beloved,” from students’ required reading. In response, Democratic incumbent Terry McAullife’s campaign began handing out free copies of the novel at his rallies. It didn’t win him the election, but it did bolster a burgeoning countermovement to ensure that Morrison’s work retained its legacy as being among the most essential literature ever crafted. And so now we have “Recitatif,” again.
February is Black History Month, and what better way to recognize and celebrate the occasion than to support local, Black-owned businesses? From breakfast spots to vegan-friendly bakeries, here is just a sampling of some of the Black-owned restaurants near Rice or accessible by METRO for readers to consider visiting the next time they venture into Houston for a meal.
Rice’s Visual and Dramatic Arts department and student-run theatre company the Rice Players will stage a musical production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” Described by Christina Keefe, the VADA producer of the production, as an “uplifting, fun, wacky production,” the show features student actors and crew members and the work of both professional and student designers. Performances are Feb. 25, 26 and March 3-5 at 8:00 p.m. in Hamman Hall. Student admission is free, and general admission is $10.
Africayé and Soul Night are some of the largest cultural events on campus, hosted by the Rice African Student Association and the Black Student Association, respectively. They each showcase unique aspects of Black and African culture, and together, they create vibrant spaces to celebrate Rice’s Black and African students. The upcoming events are particularly special for organizers because they mark a return to an in-person audience, and will be the last events held in the Grand Hall before the Rice Memorial Center is torn down. This year, BSA and RASA have collaborated more to execute their respective visions for live audiences.
Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist Sonia Nazario will deliver the 109th commencement speech for the class of 2022, according to Jeff Falk, Rice’s director of national media relations.
Isha Khapre, originally from Kenya and currently a student at Hanszen College, stepped foot on campus for the first time in the fall of 2021. She isn’t a freshman, though, but a sophomore.
The Guinness World Record for the smallest brush belongs to a Rice professor, Pulickel Ajayan from the department of materials science and nanoengineering. Ajayan said both this and the other world record he has held — for creating the darkest material — incorporated his research on nanotubes. He applied for these records to make the research more visible.
