News Archives

Bookquick/“Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956-1961”

For most landscape architects, and designers in general, the name Roberto Burle Marx immediately brings to mind his painterly vision of the landscape and his inspired use of the flora of his native Brazil. Marx’s work began to gain attention in the 1930s, and, teaming up with famed architects such as Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Marx helped create some of the most beautiful vistas ever created. He also would eventually become one of the most influential landscape architects of the century.

Editor's Pick: Personal politics

“Herod’s Law,” Luis Estrada’s story of political corruption—a searing satire of the long-ruling Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)—was a phenomenon when released in 2000. Given that the PRI was still in power at the time of its release, that’s not particularly surprising. And while some critics have charged Estrada’s obvious indignation does more harm than good—the San Francisco Chronicle, for one, contended the filmmaker was “so charged by anger and emotion that storytelling grows clouded”—others have been more forgiving.

SEPTA in need of new ideas, more funding

Vukan Vuchic has spent his career studying transit systems the world over, and in that time has seen the best and the worst in public transportation—from Houston and Tokyo to Munich and New York. One thing he’s never seen, however, is a city the size of Philadelphia cut transit services quite as drastically as SEPTA recently threatened to. For a system that already is obsolete, he says, any more cutbacks would be disastrous—and likely spell doom for transit in the Philadelphia region.

Nobel laureate urges peace

Speaking in a rich, musical voice, Wole Soyinka urged the standing room-only crowd to preserve human rights, especially for those who cannot fight for their own protection. “Impunity always breeds greater impunity. …The gates of hell fly open when the strong overwhelm the weak and innocent,”said Soyinka, a novelist, poet and dramatist, and the first African to win the Nobel Prize in 1986 for Literature.

Ask Benny: Where’s the bodybuilding contest?

Dear Benny, In previous years I attended a Bodybuilding 101 contest here at Penn. Is there one scheduled for this year? If so, where & when? If not, what happened to it? —Pumped Up Dear Muscle Maven, The contest you’re referring to is the Mr. and Ms. Penn bodybuilding competition, a popular campus tradition since 1994.

Rethinking the ‘gospel’

Stay in school and get ahead. Go to college to get a good job. Be sure to learn some practical skills for the “new economy.” All of these are components of what Marvin Lazerson, the Howard P. and Judith R. Berkowitz Professor at the Graduate School of Education, refers to as the “gospel” of education: the theory that education can fix social and economic ills, improve social status and prepare students for the workplace.

“I’d seen the exit-poll numbers … and thought Kerry had won. The subsequent articles trying to explain what had happened made no sense to me." ”

—Steven Freeman, visiting scholar at Penn, on the reason he began researching exit-polling after the presidential election. (Seattle Times, November 25)

At Work With...Robert Chaney

Analyzing Freud

Freud could have used an analyst. That’s according to University of Chicago philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who spoke at Logan Hall Nov. 17 as part of the Penn Humanities Forum on Sleep and Dreams.

Hitting the books

As Board Chairman Emeritus of Pearl S. Buck International and author of the acclaimed book, “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography” (Cambridge, 1996), Interim Provost Peter Conn is the natural person to ask about Buck and her work. Apparently, Oprah Winfrey thinks so, too. Conn, who is also the Andrea Mitchell Term Professor of English, is acting as principal literary consultant to “Oprah’s Book Club”as the TV magnate and her viewers read the Buck classic, “The Good Earth.”