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Colby's plans for reopening campus and COVID-19 testing was included in a June 30 Maine Public story titled "COVID-19 Tests Planned For Thousands Of Students Heading Back To Maine College Campuses In The Fall." President Greene said that in addition to requiring face coverings, social distancing, and other safety measures, Colby will test students and employees before they return to campus and retest three times during the first few weeks of school. "Every week thereafter we will test them at least twice. We’re going to do 85,000 tests in the first semester alone, which is pretty close to what the entire state has done for over 1.3 million people since the beginning of this pandemic, and we’re going to do that our population of only 3,000 over the fall semester,” President Greene told Maine Public.

A Huffington Post story titled "Democrats Are Making Mitch McConnell The Star Of Senate Race Advertising" referenced a poll conducted by Professor of Government Dan Shea.  "A Colby College poll of Maine conducted in February showed that Trump was more popular in the state than McConnell," the Huff Post reported on its story reporting that "Democratic and liberal groups in three states with vulnerable Republican senators are running television and digital ads linking them to Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s increasingly unpopular leader in the Senate." This story was also picked up by Yahoo! News.

The Portland Press Herald featured two startups founded by Colby students in its June 28 article "Waterville-based tech startups mark milestones in their development:" Easy Eats, founded by Christian Krohg '22 and Katharine Dougherty '22, and Sklaza, founded by Josh Kim '22.   Both tech-based businesses competed in the Greenlight Maine Collegiate Challenge pitch competition, "a statewide collaboration of entrepreneurial catalysts and corporate leaders that promotes and mentors the development and growth of business in the state," the Press Herald reported. Easy Eats, an app-based food-delivery service platform that delivers to college dormitory doors, is a finalist in the competition, while Sklaza, an online marketplace devoted to college students that "tackles overconsumption, encourages recycling, and environmental sustainability," was a semi-finalist. “Technology and innovation is a key area of growth for downtown Waterville, and the mid-Maine region, and the success of Easy Eats and Sklaza is both a testament to their founders’ hard work and to the support of incredibly dynamic partners including MTI, Bricks Coworking & Innovation Space, and Colby College,” said Garvan Donegan, director of planning and economic development at Central Maine Growth Council.  

Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, and Kaci Kus '18 have coauthored a paper just published in the Journal of Sedimentary Research that's based on Kus's honors thesis. The paper, "Calcic Vertisols in the upper Daptocephalus Assemblage Zone, Balfour Formation, Karoo Basin, South Africa: Implications for Late Permian Climate," stems from research Kus conducted for a project in South Africa where she detailed the ancient (Permian age) soil profile in one of the classic latest Permian localities in the Eastern Cape Province. With her data, the authors reconstructed the mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation estimates for an interval prior to the end-Permian crisis on land. According to Gastaldo, "previous interpretations of soils with calcium-carbonate soil nodules have been that these features formed under dry and arid conditions. Our geochemical data from stable carbon isotopes shows that these soils developed under regionally cool conditions, with a mean annual temperature of 10 C (68 F), and an estimate of 1100 mm/year (+/- 180 mm). Hence, these soils, often thought to represent dry conditions, formed under a cool and humid climate. These results change our understanding of the paleoclimate of the latest Permian in the Karoo Basin of South Africa."  

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, a member of the editorial board for the Maine Arts Journal, wrote the introduction for the summer issue and contributed two essays: “Teaching in a Time of Confinement,” on her experience teaching remotely, and “Plague Art? An Art Historian’s Musings on Pandemics,” on art during the plague. Plesch reports that Colby interns Sabina Garibovic '22 and Andrew MacDonald '21 were of great help putting together this historical issue on the theme "Art in a Time of Pandemic and Quarantine.”

For the most recent installation in its series "Ask Me," the Portland Press Herald reached out to Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, for her thoughts on the question: When will life get back to normal? Gilkes believes that "Normal, as we once knew it, will never be the same." Because of the coronavirus pandemic and the racial unrest spurred from the George Floyd murder, there's a new level of consciousness. "The new normal, I think, will be a higher level of self-education, and a higher level of consciousness about race and racism, especially among white people in America."

A commentary in Fortune titled "Universities should support their most vulnerable students to champion education equity" mentioned Colby's new initiative, Pay it Northward, as an example of colleges taking care of their students during the COVID-19 pandemic. 'Smaller institutions, too, illustrate how it is possible to make transformative commitments to equity, even with finite resources," the authors wrote. "Colby College, with its Pay It Northward initiative, has deployed its full alumni and professional network to connect each and every graduating senior with a postgraduate opportunity."

Assistant Professor of Government Lindsay Mayka, an expert on Latin American politics, has been named a 2020 Clarence Stone Scholar by the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, a leading professional organization for the study of political science. THE APSA committee selected Mayka based on her significant contributions in the area of local politics in Latin America and her attention to methodology in comparative urban politics, according to a citation from the APSA. The committee was also impressed with Mayka's leadership in the field as well as with her applied work as a consultant in the field of Latin American urban policy. "It is an incredible honor to receive this award recognizing my research on citizen participation, urban planning, and human rights in Latin American cities," Mayka said. "I'm thankful for my Colby colleagues who have supported me, and for my remarkable Colby student research assistants who have provided invaluable help on these projects." Mayka's first book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2019), “examines the idea and implementation of participatory institutions, asking the question about when they actually work, and when they do not work, and why this is the case, especially in Latin America,” New Books Network reported. Additionally, Mayka has won two awards from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) this year: the Best Paper Award from the Subnational Politics and Society section of LASA, and the Best Paper by a Junior Section member by the Defense, Security, and Democracy Section. The Clarence Stone award recognizes up to two young scholars who are impacting the study of urban politics with their scholarship and leadership. Mayka began teaching at Colby in 2013. Previously, she was a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. More than 11,000 professionals from 100 countries belong to the American Political Science Association. Its programs and services unite political scientists from across specialties and regions to further their understanding of politics, democracy, and citizenship everywhere in the world.

Assistant Professor of Biology Chris Moore was tapped to comment on a Portland Press Herald article titled "Widely cited health institute keeps missing the mark on Maine death projections." Models often get a bad rap, Moore said, because they're not perfect and numerically imprecise. "That is just the nature of dealing with complex systems," he told the Press Herald.  "Moore liked one of his student’s comparisons of infectious disease modeling to using a smartphone for driving directions. Your phone’s GPS should be able to predict with some precision when you will arrive in, say, nearby Fairfield from Waterville. But your ETA in Boston from Waterville depends on traffic, accidents and other factors," the article said. “When you are watching your phone and traveling, it is dynamically updating and taking into account all of these variables,” Moore said.

An essay by Professor of Creative Writing Adrian Blevins was recently published by Waxwing magazine. "How I Wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha" showcases the choices Blevins made in write her award-winning book of poetry.  "The Brass Girl Brouhaha is a record of how alive I wanted to be back when I was a not-yet-quite-really-alive sleepwalking baby. It is a record of the oar I had to walk through to become as wrong as possible as a way of staying alive in an oppressive Empire that likes its southern girls all zipped-up and sweet. It’s the story of my unwillingness to quit. It’s a book of loss and sacrifice that I hope does not feel too grave because somewhere along the way I also stumbled across Charles Simic’s idea that 'poetry is best when it finds itself at the heart of human comedy,'" Blevins writes in her essay.