News Archives

The protesters’ media guru

Matt Ruben was a little blasé about being interviewed. This was understandable. After all, the Ph.D. student in English and urban studies had just come down off a stint as media guru that pushed him in front of TV cameras a dozen times in two weeks. “When I did my first press conference, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m in a press conference,’” laughed Ruben. “By the second week, I was like, ‘God, not another one!’”

“An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean”

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy 392 pages, 41 black-and-white illustrations, $22.50 paper

Issues emerge from Shadow Convention

  The Republican shindig at the First Union Center wasn’t the only game in town this summer. While the herd of elephants staged their extravaganza in South Philly, a smaller but more interesting convention took place on the Penn campus — the Shadow Convention, a gathering called by an assemblage of activists and a syndicated columnist to raise issues the organizers claim the major parties are ignoring.

Colleges take stock

This summer, Penn played host to the Campus Compact Presidents’ Leadership Colloquium, where higher education administrators discussed making their institutions “vital agents and architects of a flourishing democracy.”

Robokids

Kidney protection

Fuad Ziyadeh and kidneys were meant for each other. “In my first year of medical school, the minute we started studying renal physiology, I was completely sold on nephrology as my specialty,” says the professor of medicine, his eyes flashing with excitement. “I knew I wanted to study it and I didn’t change my mind.” This summer, Ziyadeh’s passion and years of research paid off when he made a key discovery about how diabetic kidney failure happens and how it might be prevented.

Share your love of nature with others

Like trees and plants? Better yet, like talking about them? The Morris Arboretum wants you. The Arboretum is looking for volunteer tour guides and is willing to train. The guides are integral to the Arboretum’s operations, explaining its history and collections to visitors. The four-session training course, held on successive Thursday evenings beginning Sept. 7 or successive Saturday mornings beginning Sept. 9, introduces guides to all they need to know about the Arboretum and its history.

Time to start thinking about college

High-school juniors and seniors — and their parents — face a bewildering array of choices and requirements as they negotiate the path to the college of their choice. What are the must-take courses? How important are extracurricular activities, test scores, essays, recommendations and interviews? The folks who know the answers are willing to share them with you, no matter what college your children want to attend.

Anthony Santomero

When Britain’s Monty Python comedy troupe wrote, “Everyone must hanker for the butchness of a banker/ It’s accountancy that makes the world go ’round,” they probably could not have envisioned a time when millions of dollars of assets vanish in a day just because Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made some off-hand remark. But that time has come. And with it, the Federal Reserve System — the nation’s central bank, and an institution that most people once paid little attention to — has become a major player in the national economy.

Government to the rescue. Not.

Two former mayors staged a bipartisan lovefest at Irvine Auditorium July 31, but a prominent critic of one of them managed to get in a few zingers. At a panel discussion on “The Future of the City,” Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, now general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Indianapolis’ Stephen Goldsmith, now George W. Bush’s chief domestic policy advisor, both noted that cities have come to rely more on their own resources in staging their revivals.