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Annan to speak
Nobel Prize winner Kofi Annan will speak at Penn’s 249th Commencement ceremony May 16. Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, has found himself at the center of some of the modern world’s most pressing crises—from weapons searches in Iraq to efforts to the promotion of civilian rule in Nigeria to the ongoing Israel-Palestine peace process—and his vast experience makes him an outstanding choice to speak to Penn graduates, Penn President Amy Gutmann said.
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’XPN moves out, Penn Press moves in
FACILITIES/The historic mansion that WXPN vacated last summer will soon be home to Penn Press. It’s musical chairs time on campus. And when the music stops—or rather, when the dust settles—several Penn staffers will be reporting to work at a new address and a stately old mansion on Pine Street will reopen its doors as a luxury condo.
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Ask Benny: Is Eakins' famous painting still on campus?
Dear Benny, Is “The Agnew Clinic” by Thomas Eakins still hanging in one of the School of Medicine buildings? How did we come to have that painting? Is there some connection between Penn and Eakins? —Avid About Art
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A new focus
Q&A/When Becky Young started teaching at Penn, she was the only photography lecturer in the Fine Arts Department. Now photography is thriving at Penn, and for Young, it’s time to move on.
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Corporate scandals, past and present
David Skeel remembers being asked the same two questions, over and over, in the wake of the corporate scandals that unhinged the business world in 2001 and 2002. “I started getting a lot of calls, and people were asking, first, ‘Have we ever seen these kind of scandals before?’ said Skeel, a Penn Law professor and expert in corporate and bankruptcy law. “Then they were asking, ‘And do these scandals have anything in common?’”
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Up Close
When painter and printmaker Chuck Close was a student at Yale in the early 1960s, he was greatly influenced by abstract expressionism. But as the decade wore on, Close became increasingly fascinated with a way of working that more closely resembled photography —something that would come to be known as photorealism. In his unique working process, Close would first photograph his subject and then put a grid over it, breaking the image down into many tiny individual elements.
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Tsunami aid—the long view
EDUCATION/Penn offers educational expertise to tsunami recovery. So many donations have poured into aid agencies helping the victims of the Southeast Asia tsunami that some groups have stopped requesting funds. Others have begun turning them away. But even after the estimated $12 billion needed for reconstruction is collected, plenty of work will remain, and Penn plans to offer help in an area it knows a little something about—education.
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Lights, cameras and action in Philly
As the 14th annual Philadelphia Film Festival prepares to take up residence downtown and in University City from April 7 through 20, Penn students enrolled in the new cinema studies program are getting ready to hit the theaters to catch films they would never normally see. It¹s a way of making connections between what goes on in the classroom and the outside world of film, says Professor of English and Director of the Cinema Studies Program Timothy Corrigan. It tells the students, "What we¹re doing here is not a hothouse activity. Let¹s get out in the streets."
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Out & About: Back to basics
Let's say youíve worked at Penn for a while and know the neighborhood pretty well. You know where to find ginger-pomegranate green tea, sea salt face scrub and gourmet chocolates, and you know where to go for an eco-friendly gift or a new suit. But do you know where to go for the basic necessities most of us need on a daily basis? Do you know where to pick up clear fingernail polish to stop a run in your stocking? Where to fill up your tank before you battle the rush hour traffic home? Where to buy a spontaneous bouquet of flowers for your sweetie?
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Shaping the future of Fresh Kills
Landscape architecture has come of age in recent years, and it’s a transformation James Corner, chair of Penn’s landscape architecture department, is only too happy to see. Yes, he says, practitioners in the field still design parks and gardens and open spaces, but increasingly they’re also being called on to reinvent blast furnace sites, former strip mines and other post-industrial remains that “nobody knows what to do with.”