Late in the spring term, students trickling into the round room on the second floor of the Forrestal-Bowld Music Center are greeted by the sounds of side one of the Beatles’ Revolver. The iconic album, the group’s seventh full-length release, is the focus of the period’s discussion in MUS202: History of American Popular Music.

Manning the turntable, Instructor in Music Eric Schultz lifts needle from vinyl as the class reaches critical mass. This is the second of two periods devoted to the biggest act in pop music history and, more specifically, the album that cemented the change of the band’s image from boy-next-door pop stars to long-haired psychedelic pioneers.

This senior-level course explores trends in popular music in the United States and how that music reflects the cultural and political landscape in which it was made. Students are graded on “needle-drop quizzes” in which a song from a previously discussed album is played and they must name the artist, title and the year it was released. Schultz says he has been teaching some version of this class for more than two decades. The class syllabus covers a period of nearly 100 years, and he laments being able to give the Beatles only two days of conversation, noting that the University of Liverpool offers a master’s degree program on the so-called Fab Four.

Schultz plays The Ed Sullivan Show performance as heads around the Harkness table begin to bob and feet begin to tap to the beat of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “This is 1964,” he says. “There are no hallucinogens involved in this. This is clean as a whisper.”

“The biggest change happens between these two albums,” Schultz says, motioning between projections of 1965’s Rubber Soul and 1966’s Revolver.

“The song ‘Yellow Submarine’ is on Revolver; you should know that yellow submarine is street slang for a type of illegal drug in London — think of the shape of a pill,” Schultz says to stunned students.

“My kindergarten class sang that song,” one replies.

Schultz goes on to explain that the change in style wasn’t the only massive shift in the band’s output. As the complexity of their sound continued to expand with the 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the group had not played a concert for nearly a year and would play live only once more — in 1969 on the rooftop of their recording studio in London.

“The Beatles spent eight hours recording their first album. They spent 900 hours in the studio for this one,” Schultz says, holding up a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s. “This is them saying: ‘We’re not doing live music anymore. We’re only going to make albums in the studio. And that way, we don’t have to worry about whether or not we can play it live.’”

With the final minutes of class dwindling, Schultz races through the band’s final albums and slow unraveling, again lamenting, “There’s never enough time to talk about the Beatles.”

This story was originally published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

As a youth in the early 1980s, Sarah Varney ’91 spent hours lying on her liv-ing room floor, listening to New Hampshire Public Radio. Radio was the sole entertainment at home and, unlike most contemporary media, it featured women’s voices: Linda Wertheimer, Susan Stamberg and eventually Nina Totenberg, “the founding grandmothers of NPR,” she says.

“It wasn’t just that I was hearing their voices,” she says of NPR’s women. “It was that the stories they were interested in were totally different than the stories men were interested in.

… I didn’t know exactly what a journalist was. But whatever it was they were doing, that’s what I wanted to do.”

After studying public policy and political science at Brown, she covered news and health for public radio, ultimately becoming a special health care correspondent for PBS NewsHour and a contributing health reporter for NPR. Collectively, her reportage covers modern American medical history, including the HIV and opioid epidemics and the Affordable Care Act.

Her pieces put personal narratives within a larger context, taking into account the broader chessboard at play. “We’re taking on these big ideas,” she says, “then rooting them in actual day-to-day stories.”

For one segment, she interviewed a woman who, prevented by Tennessee law from ending her pregnancy, delivered an infant with organs outside the body. It was a profoundly poignant tale. “Even for people opposed to abortion, I think hearing this woman’s story couldn’t not be moving,” Varney says.

At the same time, the story highlighted the intersection of state law and women’s health. “We talk about abortion bans in the abstract,” Varney says. “I’m in the field trying to find real people impacted by these policies.” Because some 2 mil-lion viewers watch NewsHour nightly, including members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, she can “share these stories with people who make really important decisions.”

Varney sees her role as a “collector of stories,” entrusted with people’s experiences at moments of extreme vulnerability. “I think human beings are inherently wired to want to listen,” she says. “Hearing people’s stories and why they make the decisions they make, or believe what they believe, then sharing these stories with [others] is extremely important. It’s how we’re connected as human beings, through storytelling.”

The MakerFest Showcase at the Lamont Gallery this spring featured work by the Academy community made in the Design Lab using precision tools often controlled by computers.

The exhibition, supported in part by the Lynda K. Beck Design Thinking Fund, “seeks to highlight creative problem-solving and methods of making that intertwine research, education and innovation with engineering, design and manufacturing,” Design Lab Coordinator and Instructor in Computer Science Sean Campbell writes in the exhibit’s catalog.

“These creative endeavors, while perhaps not immediately celebrated as modes of art-making or creative expression, reveal themselves to be tools and/or explora-tions of topical themes that identify the potential for innovation and solutions that can spark social impact.”

Laurie Hays ’75 remembers her post at The Exonian.

Exeter was where I first experienced freedom, having been released by my parents from an all-girls private school where I felt suffocated. I’m pretty sure I used that exact word back then. The Academy was also the first place I experienced panic attacks, took up smoking and looked at the possibility of being a total failure as I got to know all of my classmates.

I found my life’s passion, and a good way to hide from academics, at The Exonian. I vividly remember the day that Roy Cohn ’74 said to me, “We have chosen you to be the first woman chairman of The Exonian because it’s about time for a woman to lead the paper.” (He might have said “girl.”) He made sure to clarify that this was not a DEI decision, adding, “We also think you are the best person for the job.” Thank you, Roy!

During my 40-year run as a professional journalist, I always looked back on my time at The Exonian as the best chance that anybody ever gave me to develop a vision and share it with others. I remember looking around the newsroom and feeling for the first time empowered to shape ideas and try to be inspiring. Most people don’t think of their high school newspaper as a big deal, but it was to me!

We were a great team and, as the announcement stressed, we shared duties equally. Bill Bradley was editor in chief; Eric Nordell, managing editor; Mary Gotschall and Edward Eliot, editorial and features editors. And Paul Bentel, the business manager, saved us from bankruptcy as the ad market deteriorated.

Laurie Hays ’75 has worked at Bloomberg News as a senior executive editor and also at The Wall Street Journal for 23 years as a reporter, Moscow correspondent and editor. She worked on a team that won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting on corporate corruption scandals.

This piece was originally published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.