Amherst College

The first meals served at Ford Student Center. 🍽️

Today, a group of Dining Services staff members offered the inaugural meals to a hungry—and grateful—crowd of about 150 employees of Shawmut Design and Construction and other subcontractors.

Director of Dining Services Cynthia Nardulli and her team wanted to test out the kitchen and facility in general before its grand opening in a few weeks, but, because it is still an active construction site, they couldn’t invite the broader campus community, she explained.

Her idea? Feed the crews working to put the finishing touches on the building. “They’ve been so appreciative,” Nardulli said. “I think it’s been great for them to see their hard work come to life.”

National Best Friends Day. 💜

“The [Ford Student Center] will be the crossroads of campus life at Amherst,” said Bill Ford '83.

“It is designed to bring students together in the ways that matter most—spontaneously, across differences, in the conversations that no algorithm can replicate. I am proud that our family can play a part in creating that space.”

Read the full announcement: https://bit.ly/4egJd7d

For The Atlantic, President Michael A. Elliott writes about the value of parsing through ambiguity and finding pleasure in the work of deep thinking. https://bit.ly/432dHEB

"What we need now, and will need even more as machine thinking works its way deeper and deeper into the workplace, is the capacity for human judgment—judgment that is human not only because a person made it but also because they have learned to think together with other humans about challenges that have no clear answer or solution," Elliott writes.