News Archives

Kumanyika in middle of global food fight

Obesity is now a global health issue. According to the World Health Organization, the top 10 leading risk factors for death in 2000 included four directly connected to obesity—hypertension, cholesterol, high body mass index and physical inactivity. To tackle the problem, the WHO is launching a worldwide campaign against obesity. Its chief tool is a strategy to promote changes in diet and nutrition similar to what the U.S. Department of Agriculture has recommended for many years.

Instant makeover for Reading Viaduct

Look at an aerial photo of Philadelphia and you will see a dark line that starts just north of Girard Avenue and snakes to the southwest, where it veers away from SEPTA’s Ninth Street viaduct and branches into two. One track curves west and heads out (mostly underground) to the Schuylkill River and Fairmount Park, while the other turns south, terminating abruptly at Vine Street. This is the southern end of the Reading Viaduct, a rotting and abandoned four-track right-of-way that last brought trains into Reading Terminal in 1984.

Ask Benny: It’s a grand old flag, and it’s not for sale

Dear Benny,Who makes the University flag? Are they available for purchase?— Wants to Wave the Red and Blue

Gourevitch recounts Rwandan horror

REPORTING/A witness to genocide wrestles with the moral questions it raises “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) has to be one of the strangest, most repellent and at the same time revelatory book titles ever to appear on the nonfiction best-seller list. The subtitle, “Tales from Rwanda,” sets the place, but the question its author, New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, asks has universal application: How do people make choices in the midst of horror?

Editor’s Pick: The return of Ur

Since 1998, the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s celebrated exhibit, “Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur,” has toured 11 sites in 10 American cities. On March 13, it returns for a limited time to its Philadelphia home. The 4,500 year-old Sumerian collection features about 200 objects uncovered in a joint expedition in the late 1920s organized by the Museum and the British Museum. Until September 2004, visitors can marvel at treasures from Mesopotamia—present-day Iraq—such as an elaborate “Ram in the Thicket” statuette and majestic lapis lazuli and carnelian jewelry.

News briefs

One for the books Once again, the Penn’s Way workplace charitable campaign has surpassed its fundraising goal. The final tally for the charity drive, announced by President Judith Rodin at a thank-you lunch for Penn’s Way volunteers Feb. 12, is $466,761, which exceeds the $465,000 goal by $1,761. Representatives of the charitable organizations that benefit from Penn’s Way contributions called the drive a model for combined campaigns and praised the online donation system implemented this year for its ease of use.

At Work with...Lauren Oshana

Scheppele: Serious flaws in Afghan constitution

With nation-building in emerging democracies at the center of today’s international news, much attention has been paid to the important task of creating stable governments. Kim Scheppele, professor of law and sociology, has played an important part in this worldwide process, most recently as an advisor for a United Nations task force charged with helping to construct Afghanistan’s new constitution.

Faculty Feature: A hat pays a visit to its Alaskan home

The Tlingit people of Sitka, Alaska, recently welcomed home a treasured object. Nearly 90 years after it was last worn, the Raven-of-the-Roof hat—a Native American headdress from the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s collection—was flown back to its original home for use in a Coho Salmon clan memorial potlatch, or feast.

50 years after Brown, a time for conversation

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” education as unconstitutional.