News Archives

The inheritance

“Becoming a Catholic was the most Protestant thing I ever did.” So says the title character in Michael West’s one-man play “Foley,” the final production of the 2002-03 Penn Presents season.

At your service

A CURE for cities

The sins committed in the name of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s continue to haunt efforts to redevelop our great cities. Tearing things down was the easy part; deciding what to put in their place is the real challenge.

RESEARCH/From marsh to desert and back—if…

Where exactly was the biblical Garden of Eden? Some scholars think it was in the fertile wetlands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet in southeastern Iraq. For thousands of years, the area was home to people known as the marsh Arabs, who made their living fishing, growing rice and tending water buffalo.

Living for the weekend

Like the enchanted village of Brigadoon, the tents and traditions of Alumni Weekend appear on campus for only a few brief hours then disappear into the mists to return the following year. This year that will be May 16-18. Alumni Weekend is an alternate University. Although the alums may be a bit grayer than the regular inhabitants of planet Penn, their activities are a mirror of actual campus life—going to lectures, asking questions, checking out the new Philly scene, meeting old friends and making new ones. The only thing missing is exams.

AWARDS & HONORS /Cashmore elected to NAS

For shedding new light on plant behavior, Professor of Biology Anthony R. Cashmore has been honored with election to the National Academy of Sciences. Cashmore, director of Penn’s Plant Science Institute, studies the mechanisms by which plants respond to light. His 1990s research that identified cryptochrome, a plant photoreceptor that detects blue and ultraviolet light, has since been extended by others to animals. Cashmore came to Penn from the Rockefeller University in 1986.

TSOP at VP-DLC

“The Sound of Philadelphia: Classical, Jazz and Pop on Records” is the theme of the 37th annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, which takes place in Houston Hall May 28-31. The opening reception will take place amidst an exhibition of 19th-century American sheet music in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center’s Kamin Gallery. Panel discussion participants include Joe Tarsia, owner of the legendary Sigma Sound recording studio, and Cameo/Parkway Records producer-songwriter Dave Appell. Registration $150 for full conference, $60 for one day.

Dante Keyes

Mountains move professor and his students

As you read this, a group of Wharton MBA students are winding up the experience of a lifetime, and Professor of Management Michael Useem is completing one more lesson in leadership using an unorthodox case study. The experience and the case study are one and the same—the annual Wharton Leadership Ventures trek up Mt. Everest. Each spring for the past six years, Useem—an avid mountaineer—has led 15 to 20 MBA and Executive MBA students into the Himalayas to experience what he called “decision-making where it really makes a difference.”

Our short summer

Summer’s coming, so it’s time for the Current to break out the shorts. Our two summer issues will be four-page affairs, published on June 12 and July 17. Deadlines for submitting story ideas are May 7 and June 4; events calendar deadlines are June 4 and July 9. We will take August off completely and resume our regular publication schedule on Sept. 4. You can find our publication schedule online at www.upenn.edu/pennnews/current/2003/schedule.html. Have a great summer!