Occidental College

Steve Coll is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and writer. Coll is currently president and CEO of the New America Foundation. Prior to... assuming that post on September 17, 2007, Coll was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and served as managing editor of The Washington Post from 1998 to 2004. Coll was also an associate editor for The Post from late 2004 to August 2005. Coll used to maintain a blog on The New Yorker website entitled Think Tank, where he wrote primarily on issues of foreign and public policy, and American national security. Born in Washington, DC, Coll graduated from Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland in 1976. He moved to the west coast, attending Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1980 with majors in English and History. He is the writer of numerous books, including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for general non-fiction, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
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Barack Hussein Obama II is the President of the United States and a former junior United States Senator from Illinois. Obama is the first African... American to be elected President of the United States. He is a graduate of Columbia College of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003, won a primary victory in March 2004, was elected to the Senate in November 2004 and to the presidency in November 2008. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.
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'Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt , better known as Ben Affleck, is an American actor, film director, writer, and producer. He became known with his... performances in Kevin Smith's films such as Mallrats and Chasing Amy . Affleck won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the screenplay for Good Will Hunting , which he co-wrote with Matt Damon, and has appeared in lead roles in such popular hits as Armageddon , Pearl Harbor , Changing Lanes , The Sum of All Fears , Daredevil , Hollywoodland and State of Play . Affleck is a critically acclaimed filmmaker. He directed Gone Baby Gone and The Town , playing the lead in the latter. He has worked with his younger brother, actor Casey Affleck, on several projects, including Good Will Hunting and Gone Baby Gone. Affleck has been married to Jennifer Garner since June 2005. They have two daughters, Violet Anne, born December 2005, and Seraphina Rose Elizabeth, born January 2009, and are currently expecting their third child. He dated the actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998.
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Fred Lawrence Whipple was an American astronomer, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory for over 70 years. Amongst his achievements, he... discovered some asteroids and comets, came up with the "dirty snowball" cometary hypothesis, and designed the Whipple shield. Whipple was born on November 5, 1906, in Red Oak, Iowa, as the son of a farmer. An early bout with polio ended his ambition of being a professional tennis player. Whipple studied at Occidental College in Southern California, then majored in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating in 1927. Recollecting his path from mathematics to astronomy, Whipple stated in a 1978 autobiography that his "mathematics major veered [him] through physics and finally focused on astronomy where time, space, mathematics, and physics had a common meeting ground." After taking a class in astronomy, he enlisted at the University of California, Berkeley where he obtained his PhD in Astronomy in 1931. While in graduate school, he helped map the orbit of the newly discovered planet Pluto.
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