2.19
Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences
Meet the ‘original typical Penn student’
“Rush: Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father,” by creative writing lecturer Stephen Fried, explores the life of Benjamin Rush, who had many ties to the University and is an oft-overlooked figurehead of the American Revolution.
Inventive legal approach decreases gang violence by 18 percent
The drop came after the City of Los Angeles filed nearly 50 civil injunctions against gangs, limiting the activity of their members, according to research from Penn criminologists.
Robert Drake’s super sounds of the ’80s at the ICA
The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, PennDesign, and the Institute of Contemporary Art collaborate to throw the “Paint the Dance Floor” evening party at the ICA.
Widening the lens on language study
Penn Arts and Sciences faculty use language to unravel mysteries of culture, cognition, and communication.
Best seller: author and alum Jennifer Egan to teach spring semester literature course
Best-selling author and journalist Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, will teach a literature course at Penn in the spring as an artist-in-residence.
Behind the scenes of election night projections
John Lapinski, director of elections at NBC and the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Political Science at Penn, discusses projecting elections and what to expect from the midterms.
Getting science right in the fake news era
Over his career as a science journalist, Carl Zimmer has seen legitimate science reporting denied and illegitimate science news taken as fact. In advance of a talk at Penn, Zimmer discusses the problem of misinformation and offers tips for avoiding being fooled by bogus science stories.
Writing with purpose
Students in Lorene Cary’s creative writing course focus on voting, midterm elections, and exploring the big questions of their generation.
A plan to balance growth, quality housing, poverty, and construction for an entire city
PennDesign’s Vincent Reina helped Philadelphia complete its first comprehensive housing plan.
A medieval minute
For their 60-second lecture, English professor Emily Steiner and doctoral student Aylin Malcolm put a dramatic twist on medieval English.
In the News
NextCity.org
Philly applies a ‘light touch’ to get dollars flowing for middle-income homes
Vincent Reina of the School of Design discussed Philadelphia’s new Workforce Housing Credit Enhancement program, which guarantees loans to small and mid-size developers building income-restricted projects. The enhancement “is a nice way of releasing pressure on the housing market,” says Reina.
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Miami Herald
Sex and violence were pumped up to “Americanize” Jane the Virgin, study finds
A new study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that “Jane the Virgin,” like many other English-language adaptations of telenovelas, was augmented to feature more sex and violence than the original version in order to appeal to American audiences. These changes “could in turn adversely affect its adolescent Hispanic audiences,” wrote the report’s co-authors, Darien Perez Ryan and Patrick E. Jamieson.
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Forbes
What the Middle Ages can teach us about Star Wars’ ancient Jedi texts
The Schoenberg Institute was highlighted for its series of weekly videos in which the Libraries’ Dot Porter discusses parallels between fictional texts in the Star Wars universe and medieval manuscripts.
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The New Yorker
Does democracy need truth?: A conversation with the historian Sophia Rosenfeld
The School of Arts and Sciences’ Sophia Rosenfeld was interviewed about her new book, “Democracy and Truth: A Short History.” Addressing the rise of social media, Rosenfeld said, “we don’t have many tools, most of us, for distinguishing between legitimate stories and illegitimate ones, or we don’t care that much. The end result is a world of truth and falsehood all circulating, undifferentiated, globally.”
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The New York Times
Overlooked no more: Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian poet who broke barriers of sex and society
The School of Arts and Sciences’ Fatemeh Shams memorialized the late Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad. “She always had one eye back on tradition, and one eye toward the future,” said Shams.
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