Nicholas D. Kristof

Nicholas D. Kristof has lived a little more dangerously than most of his classmates who graduated in 1982.

The New York Times columnist has survived a plane crash in Uganda and an assault by drunken soldiers in Ghana.

Alums recall Kristof as one of the brightest undergraduates on campus—he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in three years and earned a Rhodes Scholarship. But he didn’t strike his peers as the type who would be held up at machine-gunpoint in Beirut and elude rebels chasing him through the jungle in Congo.