Boston College Magazine

12/19/2025

For decades at Boston Children's Hospital, John Costello has practiced his specialty: saving patients’ voices. Thanks to Costello and the clinicians around the world he’s trained in his methods, several thousand people, most of them ALS patients who know they will eventually lose control of the muscles in their mouth and larynx, have been able to preemptively preserve the ability to communicate using the sound of their own voice. He is an international leader in the field of “augmentative communication,” and voice cloning is the latest development.

There are other tools out there that help speechless folks communicate using robotic-sounding voices and generic language. Costello’s efforts, though, are unique. He wants patients to sound like themselves. After all, to lose one’s distinctly individual voice, with all its unique color and character, is to lose a piece of identity. “The voice is an acoustic fingerprint,” Costello said. “There are turns of phrase you use that the people around you appreciate and recognize—and it’s not just the words, it’s also the delivery.” Read more:

ALS robs patients’ voices. John Costello ’83 saves them.

12/03/2025

Scolding other people’s children is largely taboo in America, but in other countries, such as the Netherlands, it can be a key part of a community-oriented approach to raising kids. That’s just one of the surprising insights found in “Please Yell at My Kids” by Marina Lopes ’11, which examines different styles of parenting around the world. Lopes argues that American parents, and their children, could benefit from incorporating ideas and customs found in other cultures.

For her book, Lopes visited ten countries to interview parents about their cultures’ child-rearing norms, such as the Dutch practice of “dropping” blindfolded preteens in the wilderness at night to foster independence.

“When I had kids, I realized that many parenting practices I thought were the only way to do things were actually cultural practices,” said Lopes, who traveled extensively as a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. “That was so freeing, because I realized I could take inspiration from different sources and create something unique to my family.” Read more at the link in the comments:

11/24/2025

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11/12/2025

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11/11/2025

Benjamin Delwiche spends most of his time in two places: the classroom and the kitchen. It’s been that way since his days at Boston College, where Delwiche crunched numbers as a math major when he wasn’t cracking eggs for his part-time job at a nearby bakery. Now, Delwiche lives in Los Angeles and works full-time as a math teacher. At home, however, you’ll find him shooting videos of his science-minded methods to make all kinds of baked goods for his millions of online fans as . His new book, “Desert Course: Lessons in the Whys and Hows of Baking” is the sum total of his lifelong twin passions for math and baking. Read more:

Math teacher and pastry maker Benjamin Delwiche ’14, MEd ’15, has the recipe for success.

11/04/2025

There are moments in comedian Cameron Esposito's latest stand-up special, "Four Pills," that play with your mind. They start more than halfway into the set, as Esposito is firing off jokes about, among other things, mental health and a recent diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Suddenly, mid-sentence, the red curtains that surround Esposito disappear, along with the audience and its laughter. They’re replaced by Esposito sitting in an empty, silent, stark white room, performing to no one. It’s an artistic approach to film editing that Esposito uses to capture the duality of living with bipolar disorder. Read more:

Stand-up comedian Cameron Esposito ’04 shares the healing power of laughter.

10/31/2025

Nicole Wong’s grandparents, like many in their generation of Chinese New Zealanders, were avid mahjong players. They taught the game to their four children, who competed to determine who would do the household chores, and hosted weekly sessions in which family and friends sat around a table strewn with clacking tiles, catching up over conversation. But it wasn’t until the summer after graduating from Boston College in 2009 that Wong finally learned mahjong. Today she is an expert, the author of the recent book "Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora," and a sort of ambassador for the game. Read more:

How Nicole Wong ’09 became an ambassador for mahjong, the Chinese game that’s having a huge moment in America.

10/27/2025

In the nearly four decades since he graduated from BC, Peter Bell ’86, P’20, P’25 has been an entrepreneur, a CEO, a college professor, and a BC trustee. But most consistently, he’s been a venture capitalist, helping entrepreneurs grow their crazy ideas into successful companies. Bell is one of the four BC alumni that lead SSC Venture Partners, a venture capital fund that has invested more than $5 million into 68 companies founded by Eagles. Read more about the startups SSC has helped launch here:

How SSC Ventures—a venture capital fund run by Boston College graduates—is enabling BC students and alumni to get successful startups off the ground.

10/23/2025

Under the leadership of Charlie Jacobs '94, the Boston Bruins have won their first championship since the seventies, rebuilt the team's relationships with its obsessive fans, and celebrated one hundred years in the NHL. But Jacobs believes the best is yet to come. Read more:

Under the leadership of Charlie Jacobs ’94, the Boston Bruins have won their first championship since the seventies, rebuilt the team’s relationship with its obsessive fans, and celebrated one hundred years in the NHL. Jacobs believes the best is yet to come.

10/15/2025

The Fall 2025 issue of Boston College Magazine is here! Our cover story features a wide-ranging interview with the influential Clough School of Theology and Ministry Professor Hosffman Ospino. In it, Ospino explains why a vibrant future for the Church depends on on engaging Latinos, who now account for nearly half of American Catholics. Read more:

https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/sites/bc-magazine/fall-2025-issue/features/the-church-and-latinos.html

08/06/2025

In five short years, Shannon Doherty '06 has turned her social media channels,At Home With Shannon, into an empire, sharing fun and ingeniously simple ideas for decorating, cooking, and entertaining with her 2.2 million followers on TikTok and another 1.5 million across Instagram and Facebook. Read more about her journey to accidental Internet fame here:

Shannon Doherty ’06 is redefining domestic bliss for her millions of social media followers.