Fall Splash Brings Back Ithacan Alumni

From left: Rich Morris ’81, Jeff Selingo
 ’95, Mike Nagel ’04 and Alyssa Gardina ’08.

From left: Jill Kirtland Hughes ’03,
 Kelli Grant ’04 and Rob Engelsman ’10

Fall Splash brought quite a few Ithacan alumni back to campus to participate in activities and hang out with friends. Among the weekend’s events were two panel discussions sponsored by the Park School on Oct. 14. Former Ithacan Editor in Chief Jeff Selingo ’95, now vice president and editorial director of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and former News Editor Kelli Grant ’04, senior consumer reporter at SmartMoney.com, participated in “Using Social Media to Your Professional and Personal Advantage” at 2 p.m. Then former staff writer Cole Louison ’00, now at GQ magazine and the author of the recently published “The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Fantastic History of Skateboarding,” currently the #1-selling book on skateboarding at Amazon.com, participated in “The Future of Communications: How Do We Reinvent Our Media Industries and Audiences” at 4 p.m. (Photos by Jacob Lifschultz)

Buy This Book! Cole Louison Chronicles the History and Culture of Skateboarding

Cole Louison ’00 has just published a new book. The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Fantastic History of Skateboarding, was released today by Lyons Press. You can read an excerpt from it in GQ.
Here’s what he had to say about the concept behind the book:
“The original idea was to write two long stories and put them together a la Franny and Zooey [by JD Salinger], where readers follow two people whose stories eventually overlap. Ryan Sheckler was the young wild prodigy, and Rodney was the older wise mentor. But Rodney Mullen is about Tony Hawk's age, and like Tony he's been around for so long, and his influence is so great, that his story really is the story of skateboarding. Rodney was born in 1966, the year skateboarding first officially "died" That's how the Fantastic History of Skateboarding came into play.”
Cole’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker book blog and GQ, where he is on staff. He is also the author of the U.S. Army Zombie Combat Skills field manual.