The conference championship starts today at the FitRec competition pool and runs through Sunday.

Both the men’s and women’s teams are coming off seasons that poise them to perform well against their AE rivals. The men’s team finished its regular season with a 6-2-1 record, 3-0 AE; the women have a 6-4 record, 4-0 AE.

Bill Smyth, head coach of both programs, says his two teams are very different, but he has confidence in both. “With the women’s team,” says Smyth, “we definitely haven’t seen everybody’s best yet so far, and I think we’re really going to show some good swims at the conference meet. And with the men, I think that because of our youth, we have a lot to find out about. With 75 percent of our team freshmen or sophomores, there are a few unknowns, but at the same time, we’ve had such a great amount of training at a high level this year, I’m positive they’re going to do very well.”

For the men to take their first AE championship since 1996, they’ll have to get past their biggest rival—the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The UMBC Retrievers are the defending AE champs, and have won three of the past five titles.

Terrier men’s squad captain Daniel Kempf (CAS’12) says he’s out for revenge against the Retrievers in his final year.

“It’s exciting and a little bittersweet to have it be my last AE championship, and I’d love to win,” he says. “For the last two years we’ve been second to UMBC, and as team captain, I’d love to see everyone come out and perform like I know we can. If we do that, we have a great shot at winning.”

Kempf, who’s racing in the 50-meter, 100-meter, 100 butterfly, and relay races this weekend, says that while individual performance is important, there’s a significant team component to this year’s Terriers squad that could give them an edge.

“We’re a tight-knit group of guys now, and we race and swim for each other and it’s fun,” he says. “We’re going to build off each other’s successes, and if we do that, hopefully we’ll win the championship.”

Women’s team captain Kristen Connors (CFA’12) seconds Kempf’s team-first attitude.

“Our main goal is the team points. You want to score points for your team, so no matter what, you’re trying to be conscious of where you’re placing and who’s around you,” she notes. “We’re a really close team this year, from the men to the women and the seniors to the freshmen, so that’s a really nice thing to see.”

Amanda Schmitz (CGS’10, SAR’12) will compete in five races this weekend. Photo by Steve McLaughlin

Connors has another goal for the competition, she says: to break her personal best times in all her races, an ambition shared by Kendra Cheng (SAR’14), who twice this season was AE Swimmer of the Week.

“I’m looking to see if I can get a school record, and just give my all in the pool,” Cheng says. “We’ve been pushed and have been working a lot harder as a team this year, and we’re ready to show what we can do.”

If Cheng does set a personal or school record, she may be the first Terrier to qualify for the NCAA tournament this season.

While a team championship is the first objective, Smyth acknowledges that getting his athletes to qualify for the NCAAs is certainly a secondary goal.

“When I first started here, my primary goal was to have a team championship, and that remains true,” he says. “But I would say having an NCAA qualifier is like having the icing on the cake. You definitely want to eat the frosting all by itself sometimes, but it goes together with the cake.”

This weekend’s AE championship marks BU’s last opportunity to send an athlete to the 2012 NCAA tournament, and Smyth is looking for a personal best from each performer.

“I want to see people do lifetime bests,” he says. “I want to see our relays do extremely well and be the highlight of our meet, and I want people to achieve their individual goals, and have that build into team spirit. I think it starts with people just swimming well, and then everything builds off of that.”

The BU men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams compete in the America East Championship today, Thursday, February 23, through Sunday, February 26, at the BU Fitness and Recreation Center competition pool. Events start at 5 p.m. on Thursday and 10 a.m. all subsequent days. Attendance is free.

Ben Carsley can be reached at bcarsley@bu.edu.

Thursday, February 23

Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Animated

Just in time for the 84th annual Academy Awards on Sunday, the Kendall Square Cinema is screening the five nominees in this year’s Short Film (Animated) category tonight.

A screening of the five Oscar-nominated animated short films is tonight, Thursday, February 23, at the Kendall Square Cinema, One Kendall Square, Cambridge, at 7:10 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here.

Ms. Lauryn Hill

Ms. Lauryn Hill performs favorites from her Grammy award–winning album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill tonight at the House of Blues.

Ms. Lauryn Hill is at the House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston, tonight, Thursday, February 23. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here.

Sharon Van Etten

Critically acclaimed singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten performs at Paradise tonight with folk rockers Shearwater.

Sharon Van Etten is at the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, tonight, Thursday, February 23. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased here.

Friday, February 24

Lots of great bands are performing this weekend, including In Like Lions at the Middle East Upstairs. Photo courtesy of In Like Lions

In Like Lions

Pop-rock band In Like Lions plays a CD release show at the Middle East Upstairs with My Pet Dragon and Soft Pyramids.

In Like Lions performs tomorrow, Friday, February 24, at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 the day of the show, and can be purchased here.

BU Cinematheque: Peggy Ahwesh

Spend the evening with experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, who will show a range of work from her 20 years in film and video, including found footage, video games, and mock horror. The screening is part of the College of Communication’s Cinematheque series, which promotes discussion with innovative filmmakers.

Peggy Ahwesh is screening her work tomorrow, Friday, February 24, in COM 101, 640 Commonwealth Ave., at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Nick’s Comedy Stop

Stand-up comedian Dan Boulger hits the stage tomorrow night at Nick’s Comedy Stop alongside fellow funnymen Mike Bain and Jason Marcus.

Dan Boulger is at Nick’s Comedy Stop, 100 Warrenton St., Boston, tomorrow, Friday, February 24, at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased here.

Saturday, February 25

Don’t miss Boston’s own Vivian Darkbloom this Saturday at Church of Boston. Photo courtesy of Vivian Darkbloom

Best Picture Showcase

Haven’t had a chance to see all of this year’s Academy Award Best Picture nominees? AMC Loews Boston Common has got you covered. Five films up for the coveted Oscar—Hugo, The Help, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Artist, and Midnight in Paris—will be screened as part of the theater’s Best Picture Showcase. Attendees will receive a $5 AMC gift card for concessions and a free theater-sized commemorative poster with artwork from this year’s nine nominees.

The Best Picture Showcase is on Saturday, February 25, at AMC Loews Boston Common, 175 Tremont St., beginning with Hugo at 11 a.m. Tickets are $40 for the day (all five films) and can be purchased here.

Vivian Darkbloom

Boston-based indie rockers Vivian Darkbloom perform at Church of Boston with Stuedabakerbrown, Modern Day Idols, and Upstate Escape.

Vivian Darkbloom is at Church of Boston, 69 Kilmarnock St., Boston, on Saturday, February 25. Doors open at 8 p.m. The show is 21+. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased here.

Sons of Liberty

One of BU’s premier improv comedy groups, Sons of Liberty will perform two hour-long sets that are sure to split your sides.

Sons of Liberty performs on Saturday, February 25, in the Stone Science Building, 675 Commonwealth Ave., Room B50, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. The shows are free and open to the public.

Sunday, February 26

A hit on the Broadway stage, Time Stands Still is a must-see this Sunday. Image courtesy of Lyric Stage Company of Boston

Time Stands Still

Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies and directed by Tony Award winner Daniel Sullivan, Time Stands Still is hailed as one of the best new shows on Broadway. It tells the story of photojournalist Sarah and foreign correspondent James, whose relationship of nearly a decade is tested after they return from Iraq.

Time Stands Still runs through March 17 at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, 140 Clarendon St. The Sunday, February 26, show is at 3 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here.

Improv Asylum

Boston’s Improv Asylum presents Afternoon Delight, a fully improvised, two-act show that promises serious hilarity.

Afternoon Delight plays Saturdays and Sundays through March 18 at the Improv Asylum, 216 Hanover St., Boston. The Sunday, February 26, show is at 4 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased here.

The Twilight Sad

All the way from Scotland, indie rockers the Twilight Sad hit the Brighton Music Hall with Micah P. Hinson and Forest Fire.

The Twilight Sad performs on Sunday, February 26, at the Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $14 and can be purchased here.

Tom Vellner can be reached at tvellner@bu.edu.

The image conjures poet and World War II aviator John Gillespie Magee’s line about having “slipped the surly bonds of earth…and touched the face of God.” Indeed, it was the poetry of scientific breakthroughs that led that seven-year-old to grow up to be an astronomer. Now a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of astronomy and a guest NASA investigator, Opher is among the stargazers waiting breathlessly for the precise moment Voyager crosses the heliopause.

No one is sure when that will be—sometime within the next one to three years, Opher says—but we know Voyager is close because it has detected solar winds at very low speeds, a sign that it’s in the neighborhood of the heliopause. Which is what makes Opher’s research so cutting-edge-of-the-solar-system.

Photo by Melody Komyerov

The daughter of an astrophysicist, Opher, in a fit of youthful rebellion, once flirted with becoming a film director instead of a scientist. She changed course after a college professor “showed me how physics can be poetic, and this hooked me. I realized that physics can be as exciting as movies and opera!”

She and her NASA colleagues made news last summer when they announced that Voyager readings from 10 billion miles away indicate that the region between our solar system and interstellar space is a porous brew of massive magnetic “bubbles.” Contrary to previous belief, cosmic rays may be able to penetrate this boundary, the researchers said. There’s no radiation threat to humans, protected as we are by our planet’s atmosphere, but astronauts on NASA’s hoped-for Mars mission would need to beware of radiation leaking in from outside our solar system, according to the findings, because cosmic rays can damage DNA and immune systems.

The bubble theory needs further corroboration, Opher said at the time, but for now, it provides a plausible explanation as to why the Voyager probes have been experiencing wildly varying readings of the amount of electrons around them. A computer model based on the data suggested that huge magnetic bubbles, 100 million miles long and shaped like sausages, trap particles like electrons. As the probes enter a bubble, electron readings jump, falling again when the probes leave the bubble.

Seeking a simple simile for an interviewer, Opher likened that distant stretch of space to “a really agitated Jacuzzzi.” Chalk up another one for the poetry of science.

Devin Hahn can be reached at dhahn@bu.edu. Joe Chan can be reached at joechan@bu.edu.

The students, traveling in an eight-bus caravan, were on their way back from a trip sponsored by the BU Ski and Board Club that also included students from the University of Massachusetts. Laura Eldred (SAR’12) was cited to appear April 17 in Vermont’s Orleans District Court for ecstasy possession. The students charged with possession of marijuana and cited to appear in court are Kelly Greacen (CAS’14), Aanchal Khaneja (COM’12), and Dylan Turk (CAS’14).

“We hold students accountable for violations, whether on or off campus, and that applies in this case as well,” University spokesman Colin Riley says.

According to a Vermont State Police report, the caravan was stopped on Interstate 91 in Derby Line, Vt., as it attempted to reenter the United States. A search of the buses revealed the alleged alcohol and drug possessions, which led to detention of the caravan for about six hours.

Jason Kashdan (COM’14), who was on the trip, says the BU students were on three buses, with a fourth reserved for University alumni. He says border officials searched the BU buses after finding marijuana and alcohol on a UMass bus that had arrived at the border first. The same trip last year went without incident or extensive search, he says.

Kashdan says that “there was a clear misunderstanding” between the students and the first border official who spoke with them. “From what we understood, it seemed as though students who came forward and admitted what they had would not be processed, and the contraband would simply be disposed of,” he says. “The majority of students were unhappy at the lack of clarity from the border patrol officers and the manner in which they handled the situation.”

A spokesman for the border patrol gives a different account, saying the officer told students that volunteering any contraband would expedite the inspection. When no one admitted having contraband, officers began searching baggage and found the illegal substances, the spokesman says. Officers again asked the remaining students to voluntarily hand over any illicit substances, and some complied, leading to citations from police, according to the spokesman.

The police report included a reminder to students that while the drinking age in Canada is 18, possession of alcohol by anyone under 21 is illegal in Vermont.

That was the case early Friday morning when a woman showering at Warren Towers spotted an iPhone on the floor, apparently recording her. When she tried to squash the device with her foot, she cut it on a jagged tile. As she did, a hand reached into the shower and grabbed the phone. The suspected photographer immediately fled the bathroom.

Friday’s peeping incident marks the third time in the past month that women have reported surreptitious shower photographers to the Boston University Police Department. Two other peepings occurred in women’s showers in Claflin Hall, one on January 22 and the other three days later.

No suspects have been identified, and Scott Paré, deputy director of public safety and BUPD deputy chief, says at this point police have little to go on. “There’s not enough right now to relate them or say it’s the same person,” he says. Officials are continuing to investigate the incidents and encourage anyone with more information to share it with the police at 617-353-2121.

Under Massachusetts law, photographing, videotaping, or electronically surveilling people without their knowledge or consent is punishable by up to two and half years in prison, a $5,000 fine, or both. Distributing such images could slap another five years and $5,000 on the penalty.

On the national front, several states have updated their voyeurism and privacy laws in response to deviant use of new technology. California has one of the toughest privacy statutes, covering high-tech intrusions taken “under and through the clothing” or with “a visual or auditory enhancing device,” such as night-vision goggles.

Overseas, Japanese officials have seen an alarming spike in what’s called “smartphone voyeurism.” More than 1,700 cases were reported last year, a 60 percent increase over 2006, according to its National Police Agency.

Paré advises students to take extra precautions. Roommates and friends could look out for one another in the showers, and dorm residents should always scan hallways and bathrooms for suspicious people.

“A lot of times it’s just that one person that raises the hair on the back of your neck,” Paré says. “Most of the time your intuitions are correct.”

Call the Boston University Police, at 617-353-2121, with information about these or similar incidents, or anonymously text the BUPD at 847411.

Gloriann Moroney, Suffolk County assistant district attorney, said Nicastro has been relocated to an undisclosed address, away from the female student who says he assaulted her early Sunday. Nicastro has been suspended from the hockey team while the case is investigated and no longer lives on campus. Judge Franco Gobourne ordered him to avoid any contact with the alleged victim and impounded the police report in the case to protect her privacy.

The 6-foot-3 Nicastro (CGS’11, MET’13), handcuffed and in a gray suit jacket and a shirt without a tie, held a legal pad in front of his face as he stood in the docket to block news photographers during the 15-minute proceedings. The arraignment of the second BU men’s hockey player to be charged with sexual assault in recent months drew almost a dozen Boston reporters and cameramen to the courthouse.

Curran said Nicastro “has every intention to return to BU” and study this summer in order to graduate on time.

Moroney said that after receiving a call that a female student had been raped, BUPD officers met the tearful alleged victim Sunday morning. She said that Nicastro had raped her. After conducting several interviews, police went to Nicastro’s 10 Buick Street residence and arrested him. The alleged victim was taken to the hospital, where she was treated and released, Moroney said.

She said that while Nicastro has no criminal record, she requested cash bail given “the seriousness of the charges” and his out-of-state ties. Nicastro, whose mother came to Boston for the arraignment, is from Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore (SED’87) says Nicastro is no longer enrolled as a student. “Simultaneous to the court proceedings,” says Elmore, “we are conducting an investigation of this matter.” Elmore says his investigation, which will include talking with Nicastro and the alleged victim, may determine whether Nicastro is enrolled this summer.

Asked if he was concerned that there might be a culture among hockey players or athletes generally contributing to misconduct, Elmore says he wouldn’t use such “a broad brush” until the Nicastro case is resolved: “Before we make that kind of conclusion, we’ve got one situation right now that we’ve got to continue to investigate.”

Gobourne set a probable cause hearing for March 26, which happens to be four days after the next court date for former BU hockey player Corey Trivino, who was arrested in December on charges he kissed and groped a BU student against her will in her dorm room. Trivino has pleaded not guilty to charges of indecent assault and battery and breaking and entering.

The six faculty members reading are Ha Jin (GRS’94), a College of Arts & Sciences professor of creative writing, who will read from his latest novel, Nanjing Requiem (Pantheon, 2011), poet Rosanna Warren, BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, novelist Sigrid Nunez, a CAS visiting lecturer, Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English and former three-time U.S. poet laureate, Leslie Epstein, Creative Writing Program director, and poet and critic Dan Chiasson, a CAS lecturer in creative writing, whose most recent book is Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon: Poems (Knopf, 2011).

The evening will also feature readings from two recent program graduates, playwright Molly Smith Metzler (GRS’02) and poet Chloe Martinez (GRS’07). Metzler, whose play Close Up Space was produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club last year in a production starring Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce, says she plans to read from her new comedy, Elemeno Pea.

Metzler says she loves writing for the stage, primarily because it’s so hard to do. “You get nothing—you get a blank stage and a blank page,” she says. “Yet your job is to create a blueprint for something worthy of enormous collaboration, worthy of a director, and actors, and designers and an audience that is going to willingly sit in a dark room with strangers for 90 minutes. It’s a humbling and terrifying and thrilling and exceptional responsibility.”

Warren, who will read from her poem “Glaucoma,” recently published in the New Yorker, says the poem “came right out of autobiography: medical reality, a friend’s death, the impending loss of a property to which my partner and I have been very attached.” She also plans to read “a zany political poem,” she says.

Epstein will read excerpts from his just published novel Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn (W. W. Norton, 2012). “I have been reading different parts of this novel for the full five years it has taken to write this book,” Epstein notes. “At last I can stop. Farewell, Leib, you sweetheart! You darling! Farewell!”

Photo by Annie Adams

Dan Chiasson (left) has written four books and received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He is an associate professor of English at Wellesley College as well as teaching at BU and is the New Yorker poetry critic. BU Today recently spoke with him about what inspires him to write and the new poem he’ll read tonight.

BU Today: You were in your mid 20s when you started writing poetry seriously. What drew you to poetry?

Chiasson: I was drawn to reading poetry at an early age. I never studied an instrument for very long as a kid; a few flute lessons was as far as I got. But I think I had essentially a musician’s approach to language. Language was my instrument. It’s true that I stopped thinking of myself as a “poet” after high school, but that was mainly because I was so immersed in the poetry of the past, I figured I could never match up. I mean, if you spend your days reading Milton, in one way that’s inspiring, but in lots of other ways it’s pretty humbling.

When you begin writing a poem, how do you approach it?

I write poetry so infrequently. I’m not the kind of person who has a writing desk with piles of drafts on it. I suppose I just work things over in my head until I’m ready to go. I usually write very rapidly once I’m in something. The long poem in my next book, called “Bicentennial,” I wrote in an afternoon, standing up at the counter of an apartment we were renting in Paris. Occasionally an email would come in; I’d answer it and go back to writing the poem. It was, and is, an odd, mixed state of immersion and distraction when I’m writing.

Where do you find inspiration?

I’ve found inspiration in any number of things; I never know ahead of time what will work. The main thing is to develop habits and hobbies that remove the conscious mind from the burden of “must write a poem; must be inspired.” So I write lots of essays, and correct my students’ papers, and play with my kids, or talk with my wife, or fret over money, or watch a baseball game, or look at old YouTube clips of news broadcasts from my childhood—whatever. Something ends up being “inspiring.”

Does your work as New Yorker poetry critic inform your poetry, and vice versa?

I don’t know many poets very well; my wife isn’t a poet; the vast majority of my friends are not poets or writers; my family wasn’t a highly literary family. So writing reviews and teaching (the two are a lot alike) are my way of explaining myself, explaining what matters to me on the inside, to readers whose interest in poetry I can’t take for granted. Writing poetry is very different. It feels more like secrecy than candor, more like privacy than congeniality. When I write a poem, I figure somebody somewhere might be able to explain it. When I write reviews or teach, I’m that somebody.

As a critic, what do you think makes for a good poem?

Honestly I have no idea. I like all kinds of poetry. I can only be very vague: poetry has to surprise without being gimmicky, it has to have an emotional core, and it has to have a playful, insouciant attitude towards language. Robert Frost called poetry “play for mortal stakes.” I agree.

With all your other duties, how difficult is it to find time to write?

Free time is very bad for my writing. So I try to keep as busy as possible, and figure the poems will come. I write more poetry now, with kids and jobs and writing assignments with deadlines, than I did when I had all the time in the world to waste. I am a great waster of free time; there needs to be almost none for me to be happy. Reading is another matter; I often feel I don’t have enough time or mental sharpness to read what I need to read to keep my mind fueled.

What poet influenced you when you began writing poetry?

Too many to name. But Frank Bidart made a real difference to me personally; he has taught me the most of anyone in my life about poetry. Robert Pinsky read at Amherst when I was an undergraduate; I’ve never forgotten it, and I think his “music” is probably the music I’ve learned the most from, found most useful. At Harvard, it was Jamaica Kincaid, my dear friend and our older son’s godmother, who most inspired me to be a writer: her uncompromising idea that writers tell the truth, plain and simple, along with her wild mind and sense of humor. Louise Glück has been an incredible friend and a constant source, in her work, of surprise and invention and just pure human intelligence.

What will you read tonight?

I’m going to read, very rapidly because we don’t have a lot of time, the title poem from my next book, Bicentennial. It’s about my earliest memories of the Bicentennial parade in Battery Park, Burlington, Vt. I was five. I think it’s cool that my earliest memories—there are none earlier—were of that day and celebration. There was a band concert with veterans in uniform. There were hippies. All these names for what I was seeing, of course, came later; all I have is inchoate impressions. The poem is about my childhood and the sensation of getting one little sliver of history that’s yours to glimpse, before it’s other children’s turns to glimpse their little sliver, and on and on. It has a Ferris wheel in it. I think almost constantly about Ferris wheels and other amusement rides these days.

The annual Creative Writing Program Faculty Reading is tonight, February 22, in the Photonics Center Auditorium, 8 St. Mary’s St., at 7 p.m. It is free and open to the public. More information is available at 617-353-2510, by email at crwr@bu.edu, or here.

So this week’s “YouSpeak” asks: “What do you think of BU Memes?”

“YouSpeak” typically appears each Monday.

If you have a suggestion for a question we should ask, post it in the comments section below.

Alex Stout (COM’13) assisted with this video.

The Times-Tribune, in Corbin, Ky., suspected Whitley County Sheriff Lawrence Hodge of running drugs and guns—all seized in arrests—from the back of his barbershop. (The Kentucky county is small, so the sheriff keeps a day job.) As part of its investigation, the paper filed a records request asking the sheriff to verify that the items were secure in an evidence locker—and not hawked out to the highest bidder between flattops and buzz cuts. But the hot items were hot again. Stolen, apparently, just one business day after Hodge should have responded to the inquiry.

The Times-Tribune front page headline that followed was quietly suggestive: “Sheriff’s office broken into after open records request.” Hodge, it seemed, had something to hide.

Editor Samantha Swindler (COM’02) penned that headline—eight words that shot the sheriff. For someone who says she doesn’t even like to write, someone who never dreamed of writing an award-winning investigative series, what the paper exposed is quite an achievement.

Swindler did not come to the College of Communication to be a crusading journalist—“I didn’t want to be poor”—but a high-earning PR guru. After graduation, she wound up back home in Texas, living with her parents and working at a Harley-Davidson store. Then, she says, “a newspaper reporter position opened up, and it was less of a commute, and I thought, I could do that.”

After finding journalism “way more interesting” than PR and rising through the ranks at Texas’ Jacksonville Daily Progress, Swindler took a chance and accepted the editor’s job on the 6,800-circulation Times-Tribune in 2006. “I’d never been to Kentucky before,” she says. “I did not have expectations of specifically rooting out evil; I just wanted to run a newspaper in a small community, be a part of a community, and try to make a positive difference.”

But Whitley County had a little evil that needed rooting out. In late 2008, Swindler’s sportswriter made a throwaway comment: the sheriff’s barbershop doubled as a gun store. Intrigued, and spurred by reported audit irregularities at the sheriff’s office, Swindler put in a raft of open-records requests to verify Hodge’s inventories. Despite the Times-Tribune’s regularly packed police blotter, the evidence logs came back bare—entire months went by without any drugs or guns making it into the county’s evidence locker.

With the help of a part-time local college student, Swindler sifted through thousands of handwritten arrest citations. It was, she says, “tedious and time-consuming,” but they spotted guns listed in citations that weren’t in the sheriff’s evidence logs. They filed another open-records request to track down 18 of them. In a matter of days, the sheriff’s office was “broken into.” The guns—along with drugs and paperwork—were gone.

After an investigation by Swindler’s paper caught the notice of the feds, Sheriff Lawrence Hodge found himself in handcuffs. Photo courtesy of the Times-Tribune

In a series of front-page reports, the Times-Tribune revealed that the goods were gone long before the break-in and uncovered sordid details that would help indict Hodge on 21 felony charges, including abusing the public trust, evidence tampering, and theft of public funds. He would later plead guilty to distributing drugs and extorting and laundering money. Other county notables were dragged down, too—the sheriff’s bookkeeper, a deputy, a businessman, and an attorney all faced charges in cases sparked by the paper’s digging.

For those who’ve never lived in a small town, it might be difficult to grasp what it means to take on the sheriff—or any other regional bigwig. One of the Times-Tribune’s reporters was aware of the consequences and decided not to take the assignment.

“You’re accountable every day; there is no ivory tower,” says Swindler. “I knew people were going to be talking about it and that they were going to be talking to me about it.”

If the community didn’t like the story, she’d soon know about it, whether she was at her desk or grocery shopping. “There’s just not a lot of that kind of reporting that goes on,” she says, “so I didn’t know if people were going to run me out of town.”

There were also practical considerations in taking on an investigative series at a small circulation daily. “This is a 50-hour workweek if all you do is cover bake sales and car accidents,” Swindler says. She doesn’t find it surprising that other rural papers skip in-depth probes; a 2011 federal study found that local media outlets were consistently failing to hold state and municipal leaders accountable. Former Boston Globe reporter Richard Lehr, a COM professor of journalism and an advisor to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at BU, says that it’s not always the fault of limited resources. “There are a lot of community newspaper veterans who don’t see that as their role,” he says. “They’re not necessarily an advocate, partisan paper, but they steer away from controversy.”

Still, Swindler’s sense that the “good-old-boy coverage of local politics” was not deliberately malicious—why file an open-records request when the sheriff is a buddy of 15 years?—was sorely tested in Whitley County.

She’d predicted that after the first headline on Hodge hit the stands, the rival weekly paper, “which had a chummy relationship” with the sheriff, would scoop her on every crime story. But it went further, questioning her motives and editorial judgment. Rumors soon swirled that she was trying to influence an election, was sleeping with the sheriff’s potential rival, and was a Yankee outsider (despite being from Texas) who hated Hodge and the county.

Most of the community supported the investigation, but warned Swindler to watch her back—and with good reason. As the investigation spiraled beyond shoddy paperwork, there was more to worry about than stinging headlines: the drug dealers out in the hollers who benefited from the sheriff’s activities were not people to mess with. With threats flying, Swindler bought herself a gun.

“When you are reporting extensively on these types of people, it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility that you might get shot,” she says. “I kept a gun in my glove box. Realistically, would you have time to draw a gun and shoot somebody if they came up on you? Probably not, but it helped me sleep at night.”

Ultimately, she says, the risks were worth it. Hodge was sentenced to 15 and a half years last September for money laundering, extortion, and drug distribution and is currently at Elkton Federal Prison in Ohio. There’s “a kind of optimism” in Whitley now that wasn’t there before, says Swindler. “Everybody knew there was corruption; they just didn’t know exactly what it was.”

Swindler recently left Kentucky for Oregon to take the position of publisher of the Tillamook Headlight-Herald, but she still wants to work for the same thing: making a small community a better place to live.

“It’s important—it’s like mission work,” she says. “I look at small towns and I say, what are the things about small towns that make people not want to live here? It’s poverty, lack of education or arts and entertainment. Well, let’s work on those things and make this community better.’”

She doesn’t expect to come across the kind of situation that caused fireworks in Whitley County, but says she’s already collecting information and sources for “five little projects.” Tillamook’s notables might be well advised to get their paperwork in good order.

Swindler was a 2011 recipient of a COM Distinguished Alumni Award.

Andrew Thurston can be reached at thurston@bu.edu.

A version of this story originally appeared in the fall-winter 2011 edition of COMtalk.

In his 1996 book Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, the College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history, explored what it was like for people 200 years ago to attend concerts and how they experienced music differently from modern audiences. His newest book, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (University of California Press, 2011), investigates the subject of identity by focusing on the role that masks played in 18th-century Venice.

“As a historian I’m drawn to the inner experience of people who lived centuries ago,” he says. “That’s very elusive to research. You have to generalize from other clues, such as behavior.”

Why focus on mask-wearing as a way to research people’s ideas of self? Johnson, winner of a 1996 Metcalf Award, one of the University’s highest teaching honors, reasoned that uncovering why people disguised themselves in the past might reveal how they thought about identity. As he writes in the preface to Venice Incognito, he was drawn naturally to Venice, where the tradition of masking dates back to the 13th-century. The city’s history of mask-wearing continues today with Carnevale, the annual festival that begins 58 days before Easter and concludes today, Shrove Tuesday, also known as Fat Tuesday, the last day before Lent.

Modern Carnevale revelers don masks largely for celebratory reasons. But as Johnson found through his research, the 18th-century masks themselves, and the reasons people wore them then, bear little resemblance to the feathered, sequined versions you see on partiers parading through the streets of Venice today.

BU Today spoke to Johnson about his research and his book, which recently won the 2011 George Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association.

Venetians, Johnson found, wore masks six months of the year. Spectators buying tickets outside the theater, Carlo Goldoni, Commedie (1788-95), vol. 21. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University

BU Today: What surprised you most in your research?

Johnson: To learn that Venetians wore masks six months out of the year, from when the theater season started in the fall through Carnevale. Also, they were not wearing masks to disguise themselves or for intrigue or corruption, as people visiting Venice at the time thought. It was a custom, a fashion.

What sparked the fashion?

It’s related to this absolutely hierarchal society. The etiquette was that when you came across a noble and you were a commoner, you had to do these formal, involved salutes. If you have masks on, you don’t have to go through that. That didn’t mean that people were disguised and that they didn’t know each other’s rank, but it’s a token anonymity that allows nobles and commoners to mingle in close quarter in theaters, cafes, and in the street without all this rigmarole. Masks encouraged people to talk who normally wouldn’t have because of their difference in rank. It started with nobles wearing masks to the theater so they could intermingle with commoners there.

So it wasn’t a way of changing one’s identity?

I truly believe that most people in this society couldn’t conceive of being a different person, of rising in society. It wasn’t possible. This way of thinking is very different from how we think of identity today, as something changeable. These masks weren’t about expressing alter egos or people passing themselves off as something they weren’t. This was about greasing the social wheels, even during Carnevale.

What was involved in your research?

Venice in the 18th century was not a particularly literate society, compared to Paris, say, where you can find books and pamphlets on anything. So I spent many hours over the course of six or seven summers going through dusty box after dusty box looking at scraps of paper with mostly illegible handwriting in Italian or Venetian. The richest source came from what was called the State Inquisitors. The government was very paternalistic and thought the morals and habits of the citizens had to be watched. So these agents were sent out to watch the populace. They would submit daily reports, which would include descriptions of people wearing masks.

A couple in the Venetian tabàro and baùta, G. Grevembroch. Courtesy of Museo Civico Correr, Venice

What did the masks look like?

I think people now would find the masks then very boring. Women wore a moretta, a simple, round black mask that covered their entire face. A woman held it on by gripping a button attached to the inside of the mask with her mouth. That meant she couldn’t speak while in mask.

Men wore a white mask called a bauta, which stuck out below their nose like a beak, making it possible to easily talk or eat. They were held on by lodging them under their tri-corner hats. They were very hot. I plan to wear one to an upcoming Carnevale gala at the Lotos Club in New York City. I found a Venetian in London who sells bautas.

Will it be the first time you’ve worn a mask?

Yes. It’s long overdue.