11/15
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Memoirist Maynard gets real
Literary bad girl Joyce Maynard, who has been publicly spanked by her numerous critics during the year since she published her memoir “At Home in the World,” spoke at Kelly Writers House on November 2. Her memoir deals with growing up in an alcoholic family, the expectations put on her by her brilliant parents and the affair she had, as an 18-year-old, with famed writer J.D. Salinger. It was her writing about this last item that drew vociferous criticism; many believed that the private life of Salinger, a known recluse, should not have been revealed.
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Take better aim with anti-crime dollars
Excerpts from testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Juidiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives Oct. 28
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Civil rights was on the air
World War II was a two-front battle of a different sort for African Americans. Like the rest of the country, they fought Nazism and fascism abroad, but at home, they also fought for the basic privileges of citizenship that were still denied them decades after emancipation.
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An audience with the King
The “King of the Blues,” B.B. King, still rules the roost after five decades of recording, and today on “The World Cafe,” he drops by to give host David Dye — and you, if you tune in — a sampling of the songs on his most recent album. Other special guests these next three weeks include composer Jonathan Elias and alt-rockers Ben Folds Five. Thursday, Nov. 11 B.B. King talks with Dye and performs, featuring music from his latest album, “Let the Good Times Roll”
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Claudia Gould
The new director turned the inside outside in her first event at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Claudia Gould draped the side of the building that faces Sansom Common with a plain white tarp to show passersby the videos being screened indoors by curators, video artists and whoever else was attracted by the event. Alas, the lights of Sansom Common made the videos hard to see, but the sound effects were loud and clear. And so was Gould’s message — that the ICA was of the people, by the people and for the people.
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The world turned upside down
It took a little effort, but Harcum College freshman Chrisnie Grobler (center) did find her homeland of South Africa on this map of the world. And if the people around her — (left to right) third-year School of Medicine student Kareem Zaghlool, University of Scranton junior Anthony Zamcho and Engineering doctoral student Kai Hynna — look bemused, that’s understandable: The map shows the world as someone from Sydney might view it.
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Math turns 100
Depending on how you want to count it, the mathematics department last month celebrated its 100th year or 250 years of math at Penn. Back in 1749, when 24 trustees were constituted as governors of the institution that would eventually become Penn, the School of Mathematics didn’t yet have a distinct personality. It included disciplines we now recognize as physics, astronomy and philosophy. In 1899, as both the discipline and the University evolved, a separate mathematics department emerged at Penn and the first chairman was named.
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A peek into an emerging science
The game of chess can be described using fewer than a dozen rules. Yet we’ve been playing it for centuries and have yet to exhaust all the possible sequences of moves those few rules permit. That, in a nutshell, describes what psychologist and computer scientist John Holland is now studying — how a few relatively simple building blocks can combine to produce systems of enormous complexity.
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“Most reduce drinking by age 30 or so, but some continue on and become alcoholics.”
Charles O’Brien, professor of psychiatry, on studies that show college students drink more heavily than others their age and the population at large (Philadelphia Daily News, Nov. 2)
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“There’s a value, of course, in the traditional ways of building things, but you don’t want this to turn into Colonial Williamsburg.”
Dennis Pierattini (C’80) said he went to Penn “back when there were dinosaurs roaming.” But the supervisor of the shop in the Blauhaus, where Graduate School of Fine Arts students create architectural models and artwork, is no dinosaur himself. He’s planning for a future in which many of the shop tools are run by computers.