Brandeis Magazine

Class of 1984, let’s hear from you! Any special news you’d like to share? A new job or a new house or something else exciting in your life? Your classmates would love to know more about it. As for me, I am in my 17th year as the director of research at LiveWire, an online market-research company. Lewis Brooks ’80, P’16, and I celebrated our 26th anniversary last summer. We have two children. Our son, Eddie, is finishing his junior year at Johns Hopkins, and our daughter, Hannah ’16, will be a freshman at Brandeis next fall.

Mary-Ellen Manning, a member of the Governor’s Council in Massachusetts who has often tangled with the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick over judicial nominees, plans to leave that body and seek an open state Senate seat. Mary-Ellen, who has flirted with the notion of abolishing the pre-Colonial era council, says she was attracted to the Senate race by the opportunity to play a greater role in state spending and policy decisions. She is in the midst of her sixth two-year term on the council, an eight-member elected body. “I don’t want to leave the council,” she told the Lowell Sun. “I love my job here, but I think that I can be effective doing other things, and the Governor’s Council really is a limited role. It doesn’t control the budget. You can provide constituency services but not like you can when you’re a state senator.” Robert Barsky’s sixth book, and the third in a trilogy of work about the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Zellig Harris, is called “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism.” At Chomsky’s suggestion, Robert began almost 20 years ago to research Harris (1909–1992) and discovered the story of a major figure in American intellectual life who was part of crucial 20th-century conversations about language, technology, labor, politics and Zionism. The intersecting worlds of Harris’ intellectual and political activities were populated by such figures as Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Franz Boas, Nathan Glazer and Chomsky himself.