For acclaimed novelist and Pomona professor Jonathan Lethem, curiosity is central to the writing process. Lethem came to Pomona in 2010, succeeding David Foster Wallace as the Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing. Bianca Mirica PO ’29 sat down to interview the writer on the practices that define both his teaching and his work.
Special Projects
Claremont Characters: Zoe Dorado’s cultures of probiotics and poetry
This week on Claremont Characters, Ila Assegaf PO ’28 spotlights Zoe Dorado PO ’27. An English and politics major, her interests include the teen writing industrial complex, the indie man epidemic and bell hooks eating Greek yogurt.
Sixth Street rivalry photo series
TSL captured photos from this year’s Sixth Street matchups in football, women’s soccer and men’s soccer.
Claremont Characters: Micronutritively yours, JaQ Lai
JaQ Lai PO ’26 is the first subject of Claremont Characters, a new column on the interesting and esoteric characters that populate the 5Cs.
MULTIMEDIA: Follow TSL’s first production night of fall 2025
TSL’s senior staff spends every Thursday night in the newsroom, putting together that week’s issue in time for publication the next morning. TSL’s Multimedia team spent time with senior staff members as they readied the first articles of Fall 2025.
Wizards Weekly
Every week cartoonist Sasha Matthews PO ’26 draws a new wizard.
Pluralism, progress, problems: 50 years of interfaith chaplaincy
At the intersection of Scripps College, Pomona College and Claremont McKenna College stands the McAlister Center for Religious Activities (also called the McAlister Center for Spiritual Life), an institution many students pass every day. However, according to former Protestant Chaplain Naima Lett, 75% of the community she encountered during the 2021-2022 school year was unaware of the center’s chaplain services, which provide counseling for all students and faculty of the Claremont colleges regardless of religion. Even less known is the chaplaincy system’s fifty years of complex history, representing both the cutting edge of inclusive college campuses and archaic systems no longer relevant to student needs.
Claremont Mosaic: Monique Saigal-Escudero: How her grandmother’s courageous act saved her from the Nazis
Born in Paris, France in 1938, Monique Saigal-Escudero is an Emerita Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. At just three years old, during the peak of Hitler’s reign in Europe, her grandmother threw her on a train headed for a small city in Southwestern France: an act that ultimately saved her life. Her passion for storytelling would soon bring her back to this history, and once again place her grandmother’s courageousness front and center in her life.
Passing the torch: Alison Saar and evolving Black legacies at The Benton
Alison Saar SC ’78 is one of five artists featured in The Benton’s latest exhibit, “Black Ecologies in Contemporary American Art.” While Saar is just one piece of this show, she stands as a leader of the cultural canon of the Claremont Colleges, continuing the efforts of her family and mentors to uplift Black art at the 5Cs and beyond.
Claremont Mosaic: Blending the personal and political: Professor Sean Diament’s journey from homelessness and addiction to higher education
Politics professor Sean Diament tells his story of his journey to higher education, from overcoming homelessness and drug addiction to finding his passion for teaching.