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A Chicagoan in Paris

Magazine intern Phoebe Maltz, ‘05, shares some moments from studying abroad.

I just returned from the College’s Autumn Paris Civilization Program. My classes—European history with an emphasis on France, supplemented by a French grammar and writing class—at the University’s Paris Center, opened September 2003, were taught in French by Chicago professors.

My dorm room at the Fondation des Etats-Unis came complete with a sink, a broken chair, and stern warnings that using a hairdryer would blow a fuse. The dorm is part of an international student community, the Cité Universitaire, located at the city's southern tip, two Metro rides away from the Paris Center. More than 20 Chicago students from two different study-abroad programs lived there this fall.

Parisian markets sell delicacies from shiny vegetables and delicious but stinky Camembert to dead rabbits, still furry, hanging upside down by their feet. Chicago students, accustomed to such fine dining establishments as Pierce, Hutch, and Medici, frequented the markets, such as this one on the boulevard Raspail. Early on I broke my general rule of not eating unwashed fruit, polishing off a huge quantity of strawberries too tasty to save for home.

I’d park myself in Paris cafés, often elegant and rarely cheap, to stay caffeinated while grappling with my more difficult civilization assignments or on days when reading in French seemed especially daunting. Au Vieux Colombier, right outside the St. Sulpice Metro stop, had industrial-strength espresso, chic patrons, and a prime location in one of many designer shoe districts. When espresso lost its kick, I turned to pastries, eventually setting a three-per-day limit, at least one of which always included a flan—custard in a pastry shell.

Phoebe Maltz

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Ramming Harold

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When Chris Love, the Alumni Association’s executive director, tells Chicago alumni where the new Alumni House is located, she often explains that it’s the old McCormick Theological Seminary building at 56th and Woodlawn—the one that used to have Harold the ram out front. “Oh, where is Harold?” they ask. Apparently many alumni remember John Kearney’s ram sculpture made from chrome car bumpers.

Harold has moved to University Ave. just north of 55th St, perched atop the steps to the seminary’s own new home. Though his venue has changed, his appeal to pranksters has not. “I don’t know if they’re trying to steal him, to dress him, to tip him like a cow, or what,” says Natasha Gaines, administrative assistant to McCormick’s vice president of finance and operations. “But people seem to play pranks on him about every two weeks”—currently one of his horns is missing, and the McCormick work crew, Gaines notes, “just bolted him down yesterday once again.”

Even Harold’s arrival in Hyde Park was a prank. As the story goes, when McCormick moved from Lincoln Park to the South Side in 1975, many outdoor sculptures adorning the seminary’s original block-long quarters were left behind. Some students, missing Harold (nicknamed after the seminary’s student newsletter, the Herald, and so spelled by some admirers), liberated him late at night, hoisting him into a rented U-Haul and planting him at the 5555 S. Woodlawn address. Administrators demanded that the guilty parties step forward, but no one ever did.

The sculpture quickly became steeped in shenanigans, decorated or stolen by U of C fraternity members during pledge week and ornamented by McCormick students on festive occasions. Today Harold is McCormick’s official logo, embroidered on hats and shirts. And he’s still greeting Hyde Parkers, one horn short of a set.

AMB

Artistic Advocacy

The art contrasts with its austere surroundings. Two gray dolphins arc toward a yellow star. A green cactus stands beneath a Magritte-esque sky. A retro convertible floats across a turquoise background.

Six panels from the global AIDS Memorial Quilt will hang in Rockefeller Chapel until March 15, each scene commemorating a person who died from the disease. Chicago is one of several stops for the traveling memorial, which continues to grow and educate visitors about AIDS, which has killed an estimated 22 million in the past 23 years. In October the quilt boasted 45,000 3x6-foot panels—some 51 miles of fabric, enough to blanket 47 football fields. Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, it’s the world’s largest community-art project.

The patchwork has raised more than $3,250,000 for direct services for AIDS patients since its 1987 founding in San Francisco. Contributors have used materials such as condoms, photographs, and wedding rings to represent friends and relatives. The Rockefeller staff knew three of the people honored in the displayed panels. For more information, including instructions on adding to the quilt, see www.aidsquilt.org.

M.L.

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A lesson in carrying on

Although scheduled keynote speaker Michael Eric Dyson, the Avalon professor in the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, canceled his address after catching the flu, the University’s noontime Martin Luther King Jr. Day tribute continued today at a crowded Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

Bao Phi, a free-form Vietnamese poet raised in South Minneapolis, said King, who had opposed the Vietnam War, had greatly influenced him, a war refugee from a military family. He performed For Us, his poem highlighting the paradoxes of the Asian American experience. “This is for you, Asian America, only loved when you can be used, only told you are beautiful after they’ve beaten out your beauty with their ugliness.”

The Safer Foundation choir, made up of formerly incarcerated young men, sang “A Sinner’s Prayer”—recovering nicely after the background-music CD skipped—and “No Weapon”—with lyrics “No weapons formed against man shall prosper; it won’t work.”

Kids from the Little Village Dance Company and the University of Hip Hop wowed the crowd with break-dance moves on the Napolean gray marble Rockefeller floor.

The University’s undergraduate Soul Umoja choir, who performed a solemn rendition of “Go Down, Moses” during the opening processional, sang “What if God Is Unhappy with Our Praise” during the ceremony.

Political-science professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, scheduled to introduce Dyson, gave an address in his stead. Click to enlargeWith upcoming Valentine’s Day in mind, she spoke on the theme of love, noting that King’s love was not sentimental or weak but universal and strong. “A true patriot,” she said, King “loved his country enough to be unsatisfied with it”—protesting war and injustice. If King were alive today, she predicted, he “would have spoken out against the war in Iraq.”

A.M.B.

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Unbobbled mind packs ’em in

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Monday afternoon throngs of science enthusiasts and U of C celebrity-seekers packed two BSLC lecture halls, spilling into the aisles and lobby. They were there to see James Watson, PhB’46, SB’47, famous for his 1953 discovery, with Francis Crick, of DNA’s double-helix structure. Only half of the audience actually did see him; the rest watched a live video projection from the next room. Watson’s leisurely lecture touched on his Chicago education and his general life experience, rather than his Nobel-winning discovery. In fact, he quipped, the original paper on which The Double Helix was based was very short, and “the reason it was short was that there wasn’t very much to say.”

During his lecture Watson projected photographs and early writings featured in Crerar Library’s exhibition “Honest Jim: James D. Watson, the Writer,” which runs through May 28. He recalled his childhood in Hyde Park, his early interest in ornithology, and his introduction to scientific skepticism in Erwin Schrodinger’s What Is Life? No one at the University, he joked, believed he would ever make anything of himself, whereas at graduate school at Indiana University everyone thought he was smart. Chicago, Watson said, “has made a pretty serious person out of me.”

He closed with advice to students: “In your 20s you should be totally devoted to yourself and no one else. Don’t worry about the poor, don’t worry about the environment, don’t worry who the president is.” A swelled head, he suggested, might not be such a bad thing for young people. “If a young person isn’t arrogant, something’s wrong.” In the lobby after his lecture, alongside his newest book, DNA: The Secret of Life (Knopf, 2003, $39.95), patrons could buy bobble-head James Watson dolls with large, smiling heads ($20.95).

Joseph Liss, ’04

Photo: Photo by Elliott Brennan (top).

Let them drink Cakebread

“Full bodied and luscious in the mouth,” the 2000 Chardonnay Reserve was favored for its “creaminess” and “toasty vanilla” scent. While the crowd agreed that the white wine was as rich as Cakebread Cellars’s lavish catalog description, the tasters greeted each of the five wines offered at Tuesday’s GSB Wine Club meeting with thoughtful murmurs and appreciatively pursed lips.

The Wine Club, which meets about five times a quarter and boasts 350 members (more than any other GSB student group), gathered at the tony Gleacher Center to hear Jack Cakebread, of Napa Valley’s Cakebread Cellars, discuss his experiences in the business and, of course, his wine (most of which retails for $35 and up). Though he encouraged the future MBAs to explore winemaking as a career option, Cakebread reminded oenophiles perhaps too eager to invest that “the best way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large one.”

A.L.M.

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No cold feet

Marking the last day of Kuviasungnerk, the University’s winter festival, about 100 students in various states of undress braved Friday afternoon’s 23-degree temperatures and falling snow to participate in the annual polar-bear run from Harper Library to Hull Gate. Longtime spectators noted that this year’s runners seemed extra daring, exposing more skin to Chicago’s frigid air than in sprints past.

A.M.B.

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Photography by Dan Dry.

Bear in mind the benefits

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In the Law School’s packed lecture-room II Tuesday evening, Law Professor Douglas Lichtman pondered drug patents, Dunkin Donuts, a Gone with the Wind parody, and pet bears. He was presenting the 18th annual Coase Lecture, a public series established in honor of Nobel Prize winner and Clifton R. Musser professor emeritus of economics Ronald Coase, using such examples to illustrate that courts, when dictating litigants’ behavior before or during trial, should consider not only potential unjust and irreparable costs but also possible undeserved, irrevocable benefits. In the case of the bear, for example, Lichtman argued that if a court examined nonmonetary harms, such as a neighbor forced to live in fear of mauling, it should also take into account goods, such as the owner’s quality time with his or her ursine companion. As far as Lichtman is concerned, however, “the bear goes.”

A.L.M.

Photo: Douglas Lichtman gives the Law School’s annual Coase Lecture (top). Afterward Lichtman chats with Ronald Coase, the lecture series’ namesake (bottom).

Baby, it's cold outside

For many Chicago folk winter means discovering how to get from Cobb Hall to Social Sciences without ever going outdoors—a complicated route that requires passing through five or so buildings. Some, however, choose to embrace the cold. Wednesday evening a few hardy skaters braved 10 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures (windchill –5) to glide around the Midway Plaisance ice rink. Located between Harper Memorial Library and the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle, the rink is open weekends and Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.

Just to the north, nestled between Woodlawn and Ellis Avenues, the new Winter Garden, a Midway Master Plan project, shows off Chicago’s latest snowfall, inviting hustling pedestrians to take a more circuitous route through the chill.

Also taking advantage of the perpetually freezing weather—highs in the teens and 20s are predicted through next week—Chicago-area ice carvers created sculptures for the University’s annual Kuviasungnerk winter festival. The artworks ring Hutch fountain, bundled in jaunty red scarves.

Phoebe Maltz, ‘05

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Photos (from left to right): Photo by Phoebe Maltz, ‘04. Photo by Amber Mason, AB’03. Photo by Amber Mason, AB’03. Photo by Amber Mason, AB’03.

Fractured fairy tales

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“We’ll begin far, far away and long, long ago,” intoned Barbara Schubert, conductor of Saturday’s University Symphony Orchestra performance, Fairy Tales, which featured Scheherazade, opus 35 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Jack and the Beanstalk, Jon Deak’s Concerto for Contrabass and Orchestra. Starting with Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 adaptation of Arabian Nights, the musicians sounded the story of a sultan who beheads his young brides one after another until his last wife, Scheherazade, tells him nightly stories so fascinating that he stays her execution 1,001 times, eventually renouncing his murderous habits.

For the second piece soloist Andy Cowan, a biology graduate student, took center stage with his contrabass, playing Jack in Deak’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated work. A whimsical and unconventional piece, including a kazoo, a barking percussionist, and intermittent subtitles, Jack and the Beanstalk personified the instruments—the bean-selling oboe, the cruel-giant low brass—and used eclectic sound effects—slide whistle, doorbell—to undercut the characters’ musical dialogue.

A.L.M.

Bright lights, small exhibit

The Smart Museum of Art’s current show, Illuminations: Sculpting with Light, running through April 4, presents a handful of works that take artificial light as an essential ingredient.

Visitors first see Charles Biederman’s #9, New York, 1940, a recent addition to the museum’s collection, incorporating blue, red, and yellow fluorescent tubes into a modernist relief sculpture.

Next they encounter three pieces by Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell that use light itself as sculpture. Flavin’s Untitled, 1964, for example, showcases pink and blue fluorescent tubes, hung on a gallery wall, blanketing their surroundings in a soft, pinkish glow. Finally visitors walk through rising star Stephen Hendee’s Dead Collider, 2004, an installation commissioned for the exhibit. Lit from behind by colored fluorescent and incandescent lights, a steel structure—decorated with geometric shapes—envelops them in a mod scene.

Exiting where they entered, they complete the museum’s circle of light.

M.L.

Wine and swine

Wednesday evening the University’s new Alumni House welcomed more than 65 local alumni to an open house and wine tasting. The event attracted guests from the Class of ’03 through Alumni Emeriti, from the College to the Law School, frequent attendees to new faces. Tasting wine and cheese, mixing, mingling—it was just the sort of event to warm an alumni officer’s heart.

One upshot of all this intergenerational mingling was the handing down of campus lore. At the tasting (as with every other event held in the new House) alumni seemed magnetically drawn to the bookshelves containing those ubiquitous volumes of memory, the College class “portrait directories.” Recent graduates knew them as “pic books,” which they assumed to be a spontaneous abbreviation of the official name. More seasoned alumni, however, were quick to point out that when they were on campus in the ’60s and ’70s, the publications were fondly known as “pig books.”

Kyle Gorden, AB’00, Assistant Director, Class and Campus Programs, University of Chicago Alumni House

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Do-it-yourself folk

Although the 44th Annual University of Chicago Folk Festival offered its usual trio of evening concerts this weekend, the hands-on fans turned out Saturday and Sunday for workshops that filled Ida Noyes with dueling banjos, fiddles, tin whistles, and guitars.

Sunday afternoon festival-goers crowded the lobby, fingering through folk CDs and manuals (Beginning Fiddle, How to Play the Pocket Harmonica, Instant 5-String Banjo). Irish fiddlers strummed on the first-floor landing; a bluegrass group jammed in the cloakroom. In the Cloisters couples—wearing jeans or shorts, or dancing slippers and gored skirts designed for twirling—waltzed, two-stepped, and jitterbugged to Cajun tunes. Across the way participants in a harmonica workshop learned the tricks of instrument care, including a caveat on reed replacement: “They’re little, tiny things. If you lose one in a shag carpet, it’s gone.”

Next up were fiddler Liz Carroll, a South Side native who won the Senior All-Ireland Championship at 18, and guitarist John Doyle. The duo, who also performed at Saturday and Sunday’s concerts, alternated reels with insights into Irish music (“It’s like sweet and sour sauce—happy, but with undercurrents of melancholy”). They ended with an impromptu ceilidh, as the instrumentalists in the audience joined in for a set of reels—but no waltzes. “For the Irish,” Carroll said, “a waltz means the evening’s over.”

M.R.Y.

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Photos (from left to right): Fiddler Liz Carroll and guitarist John Doyle (center) lead 16 musicians through St. Anne’s Reel. Cajun dancing in the Cloisters. A gentle reminder to musicians: curb your enthusiasm.

Book lovers

Friday afternoon Special Collections hosted “Love in the Stacks,” a study break featuring Valentine’s Day treats and rare books about love, including a 1914–15 scrapbook by Helena Jameson Stevens and three drafts of Love Story (1916) by William Carlos Williams. The oldest item displayed was Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le Rommant de la Rose printed in 1515.

Not to overlook Friday the 13th, the Library showed off Antonio Scarpa’s Tabulae Nerulogicae (1794)—morbid sketches that balanced the fluff.

A.M.B.

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Fish fest

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Complete with Yiddish rap, the first-ever “Gefiltefest”—a Jewish cultural extravaganza organized by College students Miriam Gedwiser and Beth Malinowski—took place Sunday evening in Ida Noyes’s packed third-floor theater, decorated for the occasion with white and blue streamers. After a buffet dinner including, but not limited to, gefilte fish, the attendees took in a variety show featuring a monologue, skits, and a guitar performance. The evening concluded with an energetic set by the University of Chicago Klezmer Band, playing traditional Eastern European tunes with a number of instruments: bass, percussion, guitar, saxophone, clarinet, piano, cello, and violin.

Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Uplifting art

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“I decided to paint my daughter several hours after her C-section,” says Jean Bundy, MFA’02, of her 2003–4 acrylic-on-canvas painting Post-Partum. “It felt unnatural not to help her while watching her sink into the sterility of the hospital and the agony of childbirth. … Painting her was my counter-depressant.”

Part of the Center for Gender Studies exhibit “Counter/Depression,” Post-Partum is on display at 5733 S. University, Thursday through March 20, along with other artworks addressing depression’s medicalization and privatization, its prevalence among students, and the relation between economic and psychological depression. What role, the exhibit asks, can art play in times of crisis?

Keeping with the same theme, a March 12–13 campus conference called Depression: What Is it Good For? will feature academic papers as well as creative works.

A.M.B.

Photo: Jean Bundy
Post-Partum, 2003-4
3' x 4'
Acrylic on canvas

Heartfelt thanks

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Usually party guests eat before they express their thanks. But at Thanksgiving in February, things went differently. The Office of Donor Relations hosted its annual letter-writing luncheon for College scholarship recipients February 18, when about 160 students acknowledged donors’ generosity by drafting personal thank-you notes.

As in past years, the event was held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Reynolds Club South Lounge. Keeping with the Thanksgiving theme, the study room was spruced up with pumpkin-scented candles, tea lights, music, and a warm fire. The menu likewise offered mini turkey and cranberry sandwiches, veggie wrap bites, acorn squash soup, and dips, as well as lemon bars, pumpkin squares, and other desserts.

Laurent Lebec, Assistant Director of Donor Relations, Office of Development and Alumni Relations

Photography by Dan Dry.

Wheel world experience

Potter Meghan Taylor Holtan—a graduating third-year in Latin American Studies—considers herself lucky to show her work in Regenstein Library’s Special Collections Outer Gallery, a space typically booked five years in advance. On exhibit last Wednesday through today, “Craftworks” features pottery Holtan created last summer outside Homer, Alaska. Thanks to a summer grant from the U of C Arts Council, she spent the season firing the kilns and mixing glazes under the watchful eye of the Anchorage native’s mentor, artisan Paul Dungan.

“You would think that ceramics don’t have a place at the University of Chicago,” Holtan writes in her exhibition description. “Craft of the hand doesn’t work so well with the life of the mind. However, UChicago, for all its theoretical foundations, was quite supportive of my binge on the three-dimensional realm.”

Part of her display, in fact, pays homage to functional pottery and sculpture at the University over the past 100 years. While three glass cases contain Holtan’s earthy, glazed mugs and bowls with muted organic designs, mounted on the wall behind are news clippings from pottery-related University archives, pulled together with help from Jay Satterfield and Rosa Williams.

It may be a while before Holtan’s next exhibit. “I am trying to graduate right now, so I am not doing any pottery,” she says. “I expect if I get back into pottery it will be in several years. Plus, I have plans after graduation to start a circus with some pals of mine.”

Joy Olivia Miller

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Multimedia martyrdom

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George Bernard Shaw termed St. Joan of Arc “one of the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” Burned at the stake in 1431 for heresy, 19-year-old Joan, driven by the voices of St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and St. Michael the archangel, spent most of her teens dressed as a man leading French troops in their fight to expel the English. After many victories she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and prosecuted in Rouen by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, which kept meticulous records of the proceedings.


Those records inspired Carl Dreyer’s recently rediscovered silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which depicts Joan’s excommunication, trial, and execution. The film in turn moved composer Richard Einhorn to create Voices of Light (1993), an oratorio designed to be performed in concert with The Passion—as the Department of Music did Saturday night in Rockefeller Chapel. The film screened to a 1,200-plus crowd, as Randi Von Ellefson conducted the University Chorus and University Symphony Orchestra members in Rockefeller’s chancel, hidden behind the movie screen and black curtains. Together the score and film dramatically recreated the trial, which Joan of Arc scholar Pierre Champion deemed “second in importance only to the trial of Christ.”

A.L.M.

Sound of Music

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About 20 local elders and backpack-toting students filter into Graham Taylor Hall. They turn their wooden seats away from the chancel and toward the back door. Most chat in hushed tones with their neighbors. Suddenly, a voice from above booms, “Good afternoon.” All heads tilt heavenward. A goateed man wearing jeans greets the crowd and then disappears. The music begins.

Welcome to organist Thomas Wikman’s weekly recital, sponsored by the Chicago Theological Seminary. Throughout his 30-minute performance listeners stay quiet. Many close their eyes. There is little movement, aside from one young man turning book pages and an older fellow wiping his brow with a handkerchief.

Wikman pauses part way through this afternoon’s four Bach selections to
serve up some extemporaneous program notes, although, he concedes after the free concert, he has “a very knowledgeable crowd.”

The Reverend David Neff of Chicago’s Morgan Park Presbyterian Church is a longtime fan. “The organ was beautiful,” Neff says. “‘St. Anne’ fugue in E flat—oh my, it takes you through so many movements.”

Wikman enjoys playing the seminary’s baroque organ, hand-built in 1983, doing so on-and-off for the past two decades, with stints in Europe in between. This season’s final concert is March 12.


M.L.

No bells and whistles, just Guys and Dolls

With a minimalist set, moody lighting, and a bare-bones cast, Court Theatre’s production of Guys and Dolls hardly evokes the 1950s-era Broadway premiere of the now-classic tale of gamblers and showgirls. According to the program notes, director Charles Newell chose to strip away the “bells and whistles often associated with Broadway musicals” to find the “emotional truth in the central relationships.” The result of this “eccentric revival,” writes Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips, is “a very interesting mixed bag.”

During a Thursday night showing the audience bopped along to Frank Loesser’s familiar tunes and the onstage, five-man jazz combo. One audience member remarked, however, that the singing was a bit weak, though he admitted that he’d only experienced larger productions.

Guys and Dolls, based on Damon Runyon’s short stories about early 1900s New York gangsters and Broadway types, will run at Court Theatre through March 28.

A.L.M.

Photo: Photos courtesy Court Theater.

Civil-rights memory jog

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Fifty years after overturning “separate-but-equal” laws and spawning the modern civil-rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education has lost its impact, Vernon Jordan, Washington lawyer and former Clinton adviser, told a Law School audience Monday afternoon. The Black Law Students Association’s Black History Month keynote speaker, Jordan—whose wife, Ann Dibble Jordan, AM’61, is a University trustee and former assistant professor in the SSA—recalled his career in Brown’s early days, defending blacks in the segregated South.

In 1960 he defended a black Georgia man accused of murder. During the trial some of the town’s black residents, “dressed in Sunday best,” laid out a festive lunch for Jordan’s legal team. In a pre-meal prayer the host said words Jordan has always remembered: “Lord, down here in Tattnall County we can’t join the NAACP, but thanks to your plentiful bounty, we can feed the NAACP lawyers.” Such “average, working-class, humble black people,” living in overwhelming fear, Jordan said, were the real force that “brought down the system that oppressed them.”

Continuing to recognize Brown, he contended, is crucial because schools are still segregated—at levels similar to 1961. The integration debate has been muddied with nuances, as politicians no longer argue outright for segregation, but “America’s color line still exists.”

A.M.B.

The student body doth protest

Today’s howling wind (gusting up to 54 mph) stirred up more than winter grit and long-dead leaves; student activists were moved to make some noise, accusing the University of Chicago Police Department of using excessive force in a January campus incident. At a noontime rally, some 100 students and community members demonstrated to support Clemmie Carthans, a black SSA student who allegedly was assaulted by two UCPD officers. ABC and NBC cameramen taped the rally, and Steve Klass, vice president and dean of students, was on hand. Once the protesters marched off toward the UCPD building, Klass explained to reporters that the case was being reviewed by an independent committee, and in the meantime the students had been granted the space to protest.

The rally culminated a flurry of student activism—several smaller demonstrations and flyer distributions took place recently decrying the rising cost of graduate-student health care, weapons of mass destruction, U of C Hospitals firings, budget cuts for Chicago-area educational institutions, laws against gay marriage, and the U.S. Patriot Act.

A.L.M.

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Photos (from left to right): An orange outside Cobb decries the Patriot Act. Students protest Hospitals firings on February 25. Today's police-brutality protest.

Saturday with sensei

Late-arrivals kneel at the edge of a Henry Crown Field House wrestling mat until Wendy Whited Sensei invites them to join the dozen other students—most in white robes, some in draping dark pants—practicing aikido falls. The newcomers pair up and imitate their peers, one sending a soft punch, the other gracefully batting down the aggressor’s hand, throwing him off balance and to the floor. They all repeat the drill until Whited, a 6th-degree black belt who’s studied aikido for 30 years, calls them back into line to demonstrate the next practice move—but not before exhibiting the proper Japanese woman’s bow (while kneeling, place the left hand on the ground, then the right, forming a triangle with the fingers.)

At the Saturday session, one of a series of special classes to celebrate the Aikido Club’s 30th anniversary, undergraduates and graduate students learn the basics from Whited, who founded the Inaka Dojo in Beecher, Illinois, in 1992; spent two years studying in Japan; and taught U of C Aikido Club classes until the 1980s, when sociology professor Donald Levine, AB’50, AM’54, PhD’57, took over.

A.M.B.

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Photos (from left to right): Aikido Club acting president Qin Zhen, a graduate student in Chemistry, stretches before practicing her moves. Bruce Schmoetzer, who trains with Whited and has come to help teach the U of C session, takes a kick from the sensei. Wendy Whited Sensei demonstrates the proper Japanese woman's bow.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Rock of ages

U of C founder John D. Rockefeller gave the University $1.5 million to build a chapel, which he envisioned in a December 13, 1910, letter as “the central and dominant feature of the University group,” evoking “the spirit of religion.” By all accounts, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel—named for its benefactor in 1937—still fits the bill in both form and function.

Rockefeller’s letter of bequest is one of about 110 archival documents and photographs in a 75-year anniversary exhibit, Life of the Spirit, Life of the Mind, at Regenstein Library’s Special Collections Research Center through June 18.

Sketches and photographs of the chapel’s windows and 72-bell carillon, both among the world’s largest, testify to its grandeur of design. Meanwhile, flyers and programs from concerts, lectures, and protests—most recently against the Iraq war—reveal Rockefeller’s diverse role in campus life.

M.L.

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Chilly scenes of winter

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When the Magazine decided to jump on the blog wagon, the goal was “to have more room to cover more events more quickly,” as editor Mary Ruth Yoe put it in February’s issue. But along with providing fresh campus news and views, we thought opening a more literal “window” on the quads would keep readers connected with University life’s more elemental aspects. With an every-other-daily photograph, we reasoned, far-flung alumni could get a peek at today’s campus denizens, experience the gothic ambiance, or, if they’re blessed with warmer climes, view a bitter day with a shiver of schadenfreude. And the best part was, after we’d collected a critical mass, we could make our own “flipbook.” Click Winter 2004 slideshow.

In an attempt to imitate time-lapse construction features, we snapped “Northern Exposure” in the same spot at (more or less) the same time. While some passersby, who by the dictates of their class schedule witnessed almost every shoot, stopped to tease our photographer with stalking accusations and credential demands, most whisked past nonchalantly, unaware of their momentary “stardom.” In either case, we now have a preponderance of photos, and though the wind chill has dipped back into the single digits, from our perspective Chicago is slowly taking on the appearance of spring.

A.L.M.

Photo: The Magazine staff makes a Northern Exposure appearance.

Home is where the art is

In “Hardly More Than Ever: Photographs, 1997-2004”—running at the Renaissance Society through Monday, April 19—Laura Letinsky sees art in the leftovers of domestic creations: the aftermath of meals, parties, and homely festivities.

Letinsky, associate professor in the Committee on Visual Arts and the College who was featured in the October 2002 Magazine, explained to the University Chronicle that her work looks at how daily life is composed, manipulating “photographic space to comment on the made-up-ness of home.” That sense of construction—and impending destruction—can be seen as tabletops edge into blackness and images flatten, forcing the viewer to confront the scenes’ precariousness.

Still the sense of celebration remains, including an April 7 student reception at the Renaissance exhibition. Refreshments (cupcakes donated by Chicago bakery Sweet Mandy B’s!) will be served—and Letinsky will photograph the aftermath.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (from left to right): Photo by Mairead Ernst. Photo by Mairead Ernst. "Untitled #85," 2003 Courtesy Laura Letinsky

Beyond the ides of March

Maybe somewhere March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, but in Chicago the phrase is meaningless. St. Patrick’s Day snow? Please. Bring on the April ice storms.

We Chicagoans watch the flakes fall, admiring their downward dance, vaunting our ability to handle such long winters (“Of course I haven’t put away my hat and scarf!”), but meanwhile pining after relatives on spring break in Mexico or friends living in northern California, where it’s hit 85 degrees.

Lucky for the Magazine, photographer Dan Dry has an instinctively visual response. This morning’s snow drew him to the quads, where he turned the city’s notorious weather into art. Add one more notch to the pro-snow column.

A.M.B.

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Photography by Dan Dry.

The envelopes, please

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At 11 a.m. on Thursday only one sound was heard in a packed-to-the-walls U of C Hospitals auditorium: the rustle of 101 white envelopes being torn open. Seconds before, the 101 members of the Pritzker School of Medicine Class of 2004, many accompanied by friends and family, cheered loudly as Nathan Teismann received the last Match Day envelope—containing his hospital residency placement.

Along with learning where he’d be doing his emergency-medicine training (California’s Alameda Medical Center), Teismann received the traditional last-name-called prize: a kitty jumpstarted with $100 in school funds, to which classmates added their own contributions.

Teismann wasn’t the only fourth-year who got good news. Everyone got a match, with the largest number—24—staying put for all or part of their training at the U of C. As a whole, the class’s top specialties were internal medicine (17) and pediatrics (15).

Last month fourth-year students across the nation submitted a list of their residency preferences to the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). The hospitals also ranked the applicants, and the NRMP matched students with the highest-ranking hospital accepting them. For med students, Match Day is a rite of spring that outranks even graduation. Assured of a full turnout the Pritzker staff used the occasion to hand out June convocation to-do lists.

M.R.Y.

Spring break in full swing

Last fall visitors to the quads’ northwestern nook may have noticed an unusual new fixture outside Hitchcock Hall. The freestanding swing, crowned with the house motto, deformis sed utiles (“deformed but useful”), was built with funds from Hitchcock’s endowment to commemorate the dorm’s centennial, celebrated in 2001. Designed by Charles Friedlander and Fred Sickler to incorporate details from the building’s architecture, the bench is flanked by two armadillos, Hitchcock’s beloved mascot.

Recently the Magazine staff noticed that the armadillo bench has disappeared (our sleuth reporting, unfortunately undertaken during spring break, when even resident heads ditch campus, didn’t uncover why). A humbler quads bench currently occupies the seat of honor, but a simpler swing has sprung up in Hitchcock’s front yard just in time for spring.

A.L.M.

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Photos (from left to right): The armadillo bench, installed last fall. Photo by Dan Dry. The armadillo is gone, replaced by a regular quads bench. Photo by Amber Mason. A new tire swing hangs outside Hitchcock Hall. Photo by Amber Mason.

Hey, Mr. Postman, is there a letter for me?

Today’s the day: after three months of reading essays, the Admissions Office is taking about 6,000 letters—2,500 yeas—to the Post Office. The skinny envelopes already have been metered; the admit packets were too fat to fit through the machine, so staffers are sealing them by hand.

Chicago doesn’t send admissions notifications by e-mail, like many other schools, and applicants won’t learn their status on a Web site. College admissions dean Ted O’Neill, AM’70, believes “it’s really important to have a hand-signed signature—no stamp, no scan,” says associate admissions director Zach White, AB’01. (The University does send e-mails to international applicants put on the waiting list or denied admission, says director of international admissions Ali Segal, because of the longer time it takes snail mail to arrive overseas.)

Adhering to the personal touch also means that Chicago can avoid mass e-mail snafus—such as a mix-up at the University of California–Davis, which accidentally told 6,000 admitted students that they had received a prestigious scholarship. “The biggest threat we have,” says Chicago assistant admissions director Jenny Connell, AB’01, “is putting the wrong letter into the wrong envelope”—an error she and the rest of the staff have narrowly escaped once or twice today.

A.M.B.

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Photos (from left to right): College admissions dean Ted O'Neill signs a last-minute admissions letter. Admissions project assistant Rolanda Travis reaches for application files, making sure the admit letters go into the correct folders. Assistant admissions director Lauren Droz, AB'02, international admissions director Ali Segal, and associate admissions director Zach White, AB'01, seal admit packets. About 6,000 envelopes are heading to the Post Office.

Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map

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Tucked in a corner of the Smart Museum, a spare collection of scrolls, prints, and sepia-toned photographs comprise Mapping the Sacred: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Shinto Prints. Gathered principally by Edmund Burke, a Chicago comparative-religion professor, during his 1890s travels, the images portray both a change in the way artists rendered three-dimensional spaces flat (introducing Western-style perspective, photography, and printing advances) and the influences of increased tourism.

Displayed through Sunday in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery, the exhibit was curated by Kris Ercums, an art history Ph.D. candidate.

A.L.M.

Photo: "The Daidai Kagura Shinto Dance at Ise Shrine," 1890, lithograph mounted as hanging scroll.

Now that’s a bargain

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On the prowl for U of C memorabilia? A quick troll through E-bay’s collection last Friday turned up 36 items matching “University of Chicago,” including several vintage postcards, a 1929 football schedule, and a brass pennant-shaped pin circa 1890–1915.

At $24.99, the most expensive item was an 11”x14” photograph of a Chicago gargoyle, while a 1916 baseball team photo ($1) and a used U of C Spanish–English Dictionary ($0.99) ran the lowest. A reproduction of a 1904 panoramic campus photo, measuring 16.5” x 6.5”, began at $9.95.

A.M.B.

Photo: Caption (top). Caption (bottom).

Form follows function

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The art of Renaissance Italy was not made to hang in galleries, as it does though August 22 in the Smart Museum’s The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy. Rather, according to the exhibit’s notes, it was made to be experienced in everyday life. Taking care to place each object in the context of its practical intent, curator Elizabeth Rodini emphasizes the early modern culture of materialism. Items not to miss are two statuettes, one a satyr candleholder, the other a playful sculpture of Venus with her son Cupid.

A.L.M.

Photo: Workshop of Orazio Fontana, “Birth Bowl,” c. 1575, polychrome tin-glazed earthenware (top). “Footed Bowl,” c. 1500, Enameled and gilded blown green glass (bottom).

Weintraub's legacy

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“Western civilization won’t end with the passing of Karl Joachim Weintraub, but you could be hard-pressed to prove that to a legion of his former students,” the Chicago Tribune wrote last week. Weintraub, AB’49, AM’52, PhD’57, died of a brain tumor March 25 at the University’s Bernard Mitchell Hospital. At age 79, the Thomas E. Donnelley distinguished service professor emeritus in History had spent nearly 60 years as a Chicago student, professor, and mentor. His Western Civilization course was so popular that College students famously camped on the quads the night before registration to secure a place. Known as compassionate and approachable, Weintraub, who also taught in the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on the History of Culture, and the Humanities Division, earned two Quantrell Awards for excellence in teaching, among other honors. He is survived by his wife, Katy O’Brien Weintraub, AB’75, AM’76, PhD’87, and a sister. A University memorial service is being planned.

For more on Weintraub’s life and accomplishments, see the University Chronicle or Associated Press articles.

A.M.B.

Lead poet's society

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“What is a poet?” the 78-year-old man asked. Then, providing his own answer, Robert Creeley recited a few lines of verse.

Billed as “the greatest living American poet,” Creeley—visiting campus last week as part of the University’s Poem Present lecture series—used poetry, sometimes his, sometimes others’, to help answer questions about the art form posed by students and professors. During his one-hour talk, he touched on big-picture themes including life and death, careers, and friendship.

“Poetry is an extraordinarily useful companion,” said Creeley, professor emeritus at the State University of New York, Buffalo, seated at a small table before an audience of about 50 in Classics 10.

For Creeley—founder of the Black Mountain Review and friend to such luminaries as Allan Ginsburg, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams—peer collaboration is vital to the craft. “Poetry is a team sport; you can’t play it all by yourself,” he said. “It’s like gypsies. You know each other in the world.”

M.L.

The writing on the walks

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Deciphering the hieroglyphics chalked along heavily traveled quad thruways can stump even the most dedicated pedestrian reader. Today the most enigmatic messages were the scattered Qs skirting Cobb Hall’s main entry, which revealed their significance only by association with another stark sidewalk missive: “www.ChicagoQuill.com.” The Chicago Quill, an online student-run journal, launched last Friday (and edited by Magazine intern Phoebe Maltz, ’05), takes as its totem a gothic Q and promises an environment where, much like campus paths, “any and all voices will be heard.” But the Quill presents a more legible format, offering politics, arts, and culture along with the Inkblots section—a “rapid response center” for reader views “too long or formal to be a comment, but not long enough to be an article.” With student-penned stories ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to tongue-in-cheek diet advice, the Quill strives, as its mission statement commands, “to further the great conversation.”

Response so far has been encouraging. According to executive director Zachary LeVasseur, who perched outside Cobb this morning trading Jolly Ranchers for e-mail addresses, the Quill received inquiries from 30 potential contributors and 40,000 hits in its first 72 hours online—attributable to both its chalk campaign and a College list-host message.

Also hitting the streets later this month is the Chicago Scholarly Review (not available online), which will publish undergraduate research papers in the humanities and social sciences. Founded by fourth-years Margaret Ryznar and Natalie Brown, the CSR garnered 70 submissions for its first seven-article issue.

A.L.M.

Brooding over the bourgeoisie

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After a year in Germany working on forthcoming books about Hegel, Nietzsche, and modernist aesthetics, Robert Pippin on Thursday delivered the 2004 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture. An eager crowd of professors, alumni, and students squeezed into Max Palevsky Cinema to hear his talk: “Bourgeois Philosophy? On the Problem of Leading a Free Life.”

Why are intellectuals and philosophers continually dissatisfied with modern society? Pippin, the distinguished service professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Philosophy, and the College, responded to his rhetorical question by chronicling the history of the bourgeoisie, people originally despised as philistines and poseurs: bourgeois (literally burg-dweller) referred to merchants and skilled craftsmen who held no noble status but lived within the manor township walls. Their growing affluence “gave them access to high culture but absolutely no idea what to do with it,” Pippin said, explaining that many philosophers from Rousseau onward assumed an aristocratic disdain for bourgeois mediocrity and phony fashionableness—effectively adopting a bourgeois self-hatred.

While this self-hatred swept French thought, Pippin said, the German Romantic philosophers (Kant, Hegel, and later Nietzsche and Heidegger) grappled with the issue of freedom. The meaning of freedom in a consumerist society, he argued, must be more than the ability to do and get what you want; the German Romantics insisted that real freedom is liberty from the things we want, a triumph over low habits and inclinations.

Joseph Liss, ’04

Faith and eggs

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Traditional signs of Easter abounded as boys in miniature navy suits, girls in butter- and mint-colored sundresses, and ladies in magenta bonnets with flower-clad brims arrived at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Sunday morning. The building also was gussied up, thanks to white lilies in lavender pots, soft-hued banners draped from the ceiling, and pastel hard-boiled eggs hidden among pews.

While similar scenes played out around the country, Rockefeller’s service seemed unique to the place as Dean Alison Boden preached on the struggle between intellectualism and faith, touching on both the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

Such age-old issues gave way to lighter fare as kids gathered in the basement post-service, attaining a simpler state of enlightenment by finding those eggs.

(top) Churchgoers file out of Rockefeller after Sunday's Easter service. Photo by Todd Stoessell. (bottom) Children gather in Rockefeller's basement before the Easter egg hunt. Photo by Todd Stoessell.

Talk to me

Campus lecture titles, advertised online and on tacked-up flyers, reflect a scholarly smorgasbord. A few invoke popular culture, others are matter-of-fact, but all testify to the wide-ranging research and thought at the University. Some recent and upcoming offerings:

* Legalized Abortion, Unwantedness, and the Decline in Crime, by Chicago economist Steven Levitt
* Working in the Shadow of the Step Pyramid: Insights into Burial Practices in Middle Kingdom Saqqara, by University of Pennsylvania Museum Egyptologist David P. Silverman, PhD’75
* Studies of Human Islet-Derived Endocrine Pancreas Precursor Cells, by National Institutes of Health scientist Marvin Gershengorn
* The Homintern: Critical Anxieties about Homosexual Influence on the Arts in Cold War America, by Northwestern University historian Michael Sherry
* Uncovering Deep Throat: Media in the Political Realm, by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Gaines
* Watching the Photocycle of Photoactive Yellow Protein—One at a Time, by chemistry graduate student Jason Ming Zhao
* The Dynamics of Authority in Islam: Imams, Ikhtilaf, and Isnad, by visiting assistant professor Scott C. Lucas, AM’98, PhD’02
* Molecular Decision-making Networks: Deoxyribozyme-based Circuits and Automata, by Columbia University professor Milan Stojanovic
* The Baseball Culture of Superstition, by Whittier College religion professor Joseph Price, AM’79, PhD’82

And our favorite…

* Queering Brad Pitt: The Struggle Between Gay Fans and the Hollywood Machine to Control Star Discourse and Image on the Web (date has been changed to May 14), by Committee on Cinema & Media Studies lecturer Ronald Gregg

A.M.B.

Playing defense

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Click on thumbnails for full view. When a top U.S. Defense official visited campus Wednesday, U of Cers arrived in droves to hear him speak. Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for policy, drew a crowd that nearly filled Palevsky Theater. Feith, a chief architect of U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, ranks third in the Department of Defense under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, PhD’72.

President Bush, argued Feith, departed “radically and boldly” from previous policy when he decided to rely on armed forces, not only the FBI, in the war on terror. For Bush September 11 “meant that we’re at war.” The enemy—“a far-flung network of terrorist organizations and their state and nonstate supporters”—is a nontraditional one that, Feith said, the country is fighting in three principal ways: disrupting and attacking terrorist networks, protecting the homeland, and engaging in a “battle of ideas” to prevent terrorist ideologies from spreading. Aiming to “defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life as a free and open society,” he said, the United States acknowledges that, realistically, it will never fully eliminate terror worldwide.

After Feith’s talk, organized by the University of Chicago Political Union and funded by the College Republicans, some audience members—noticeably all male despite the coed crowd, and mostly critical of the Bush administration—lined up to ask questions. They grilled him on weapons of mass destruction; the link, or lack thereof, between Iraq and Al Qaeda; and the Iraq war’s death toll. Feith refuted charges that the administration lied when claiming Iraq had WMDs, calling the assertion “at worst a failure, not a lie.”

Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Guys line up to grill Feith. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith addresses the Max Palevsky crowd.

Top o’ the building to you

One o’clock on a June-hot April afternoon is not the best time to uncork the Chianti. But at the Friday topping-out ceremony for the new Interdivisional Research Building (IRB), University officials and researchers took a few ceremonial sips, emulating Enrico Fermi’s team’s toast after the first controlled nuclear-chain reaction. They were also celebrating a milestone at Chicago: with 425,000 square feet of research space, the $200 million IRB will bring researchers from the Biological and Physical Sciences together under one roof.

The ceremonial raising of the IRB’s final girder mingled medieval tradition with 21st-century goals. Before a massive crane lifted it into place, construction workers, researchers, students, and administrators lined up to autograph the steel expanse. A timeline of medical and scientific milestones—from 1904, when Alexis Carrel developed early organ-transplant methods, to 2004, when NASA’s Mars rovers carried an instrument using Chicago-invented techniques—looked toward the future as researchers added questions they hope IRB scientists will answer. Here’s one: “Can we watch a biomolecule functioning in the cell in real time?”

Then the beam rose, carrying American and POW-MIA flags—and a potted fir. The last was a remnant from medieval Europe, when carpenters placed a tree atop a new wooden building to seek the forest god’s blessing on the structure and its inhabitants.

After the beam was eased into place, workers and guests adjourned for a hard-hat picnic in the shade of the work-in-progress building. Meanwhile, flags and tree stood tall above 57th Street. Eventually a layer of fireproof flocking will cover the timeline, signatures, and questions. But science will march on.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right):Faculty and grad students add graffiti that ask science's big questions. After placing the IRB's final beam, workers release it from the crane's cable. Five floors below the beam, the topping-out crowd enjoys a picnic in the shade.

Photography by Dan Dry.

The dating game

Conventional wisdom says of U of C dating, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” The adage bore fruit in two recent campus events, timed in confluence with Chicago’s budding spring, which is driving the quirky student body outdoors and, perhaps, into one another’s arms.

One celebration of Chicago-style mating debuted last Wednesday in Max Palevsky Theater. A collaboration between Fire Escape Films and the Order of the C, the student-produced film Eliminate Your Date spoofed popular reality-dating show Elimidate, featuring undergraduate encounters staged at local hangouts, where contestants chose one lucky suitor after whittling down a field of four or five. While the raucous audience settled in, some eliciting giggles by shouting “penis” and others bemoaning the scene as “high school revisited,” the box office declared the show—executive produced by Clair Baldwin, ’04—sold out, even as the line snaked its way out Ida Noyes’s west entrance. Once the film rolled, the crowd watched four vignettes of self-conscious students flirting and fawning for the camera, inducing roars of laughter and the occasional “boo.” But while the unlucky inevitably were “elimidated,” all seemed to have a good time, some jokingly pursuing show host William Connors, ’04. Looking on as Connors attempted to disengage his fans, one contestant declared, arms wrapped around his own chosen lady, “I guess everybody’s a winner.”

Upping the odds of success two days later, about 80 graduate and College students took advantage of Speed Dating, which promised 20 five-minute “dates” along with pizza and beverages in Ida Noyes’s Cloister Club. Organized by Remedy Cuba, a medical-school group raising funds to distribute pharmaceuticals in Cuba, the event drew students who described the standard U of C social scene as “introverted” and “desolate.” As Nelly’s Hot in Herre thrummed through the awkward pre-event mingling, one student worried that he “might be losing the ability to chase ladies; I study too hard.” But when the round robin began, chitchat swelled and few participants had trouble filling five minutes, no matter how odd their partner.

A.L.M

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Photos (from left to right): Speed dating students get five minutes to chat. The right look can go a long way in five minutes. Helpful students point out empty seats at the sold-out Eliminate Your Date showing.

Spinmeisters

A miniature wheel of fortune lent some color to a gray Thursday afternoon in Hutchinson Courtyard. The Student Steering Committee of The Chicago Initiative, the University’s $2 billion capital campaign, tempted passersby with free ice cream and a chance to spin the wheel for prizes, including Chicago Initiative–emblazoned mugs, pencils, and mouse pads. To educate students about the campaign, which recently hit its $1 billion halfway point—the official announcement was today—staffers also handed out novelty $1 billion bills containing background information about the campaign.

While most participants played along, some skeptics noted that they would graduate long before the University would see the billions' benefits. Steering Committee members were quick to remind the pessimists that though they wouldn’t be here to enjoy the fruits of the campaign directly, the value of their Chicago degree depends upon the University’s future reputation, which is what the Initiative hopes to ensure.

Joseph Liss, ’04







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Photos by Dan Dry

Chicago convenes—and continues

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Seconds after Edgar Jannotta, chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, announced that the $2 billion Chicago Initiative had passed the halfway point, maroon and white balloons showered the leadership supporters, alumni, and friends who had gathered Friday afternoon in the International House Assembly Hall to mark the accomplishment. At $1,017,097, 261 the two-year-old campaign has received gifts from 77,000 donors, including 43 percent of the University’s alumni body.

After the balloons, participants were showered with faculty-led panels, tours of new campus facilities, classes in the undergraduate College, and a reception at the Oriental Institute. Then came the grand finale: dinner for 500 in a transformed Rockefeller Chapel, where a floor built over the pews created a venue as magical as Harry Potter’s Hogwarts dining hall.

After 107 guests were inducted into the Harper Society Founders Circle, recognizing cumulative gifts of $1 million or more to the University, President Don Randel conferred the University of Chicago Medal on Life Trustee Marion Musser Lloyd, honoring her five decades of leadership and service.

By 9 o’clock Saturday morning, Rockefeller Chapel was taking off its party clothes. Balloons gone, the I-House Assembly Hall had a full house for the keynote address of a student-organized conference, Consolidating Democracy in Mexico. With simultaneous translation available and television cameras rolling, Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior Santiago Creel Miranda discussed election reform and then fielded insistent questions from migrant workers seeking the right to vote in Mexico’s elections from abroad.

It was business as usual at Chicago.

M.R.Y.

Photography by Dan Dry.

First to dig, first to return

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Seventy-one years after the Oriental Institute made Chicago the first U.S. university to mount an archaeological dig in Iran—at Persepolis, the ancient Persian Empire’s capital—OI researchers are setting another precedent. Led by OI Director Gil Stein, a delegation will travel to Tehran in early May with 300 cuneiform tablets—the first return of loaned antiquities since Iran’s 1979 revolution.

At a press conference held today in Stein’s office, media types jockeyed for views of tiny clay tablets similar to those stored in the conservator’s office, already carefully packed and sealed for customs. Giving back the tablets, part of a huge, almost uncountable cache estimated at 15,000 to 30,000 pieces, loaned to the OI for study and publication in 1937, also signals the probable renewal of joint Chicago-Iranian projects; at the invitation of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, the OI has drafted a five-year research agreement. This fall the OI became the first U.S. institution allowed back in Iran when senior research associate Abbas Alizadeh’s team began digging in Khuzestan.

And what makes the tablets so special? Oriental Institute Librarian Charles Jones admitted that when they were first discovered, the hope was that they would be “the royal archives of the great kings of Persia.” They turned out to be much more “pedestrian”: record after record documenting rations distributed to workers and travelers. But, as OI professor Matthew Stolper pointed out, when researchers began the arduous task of translating the Elamite texts, they learned much about the administrative systems that allowed the empire to flourish.

The OI returned two groups of tablets and fragments to Iran around 1950, and more shipments will follow. Asked how many pieces await analysis, Stolper hesitated, then hazarded a guess of 10,000 to 15,000.

M.R.Y.

Photo: OI professor Matthew Stolper (left) and librarian Charles Jones show the Iranian tablets (top). Stolper, Jones, and OI director Gil Stein talk to reporters (bottom).

Sushi seminar

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Thursday evening Chicago students washed their hands, got their fingers wet, and arranged rice on seaweed. Undergraduates Chuk Moran, ’05, and Luba Kontorovich, ’06, led the sushi-rolling seminar in an overflowing Bartlett Lounge, while event leader Annie Sheng, ’06, explained the ingredients, purchased both in Chinatown and at the Hyde Park Co-op. Participants and onlookers packed around a large table to observe the demonstration and then to have a go at preparing (and consuming) such sushi basics as cucumber and California rolls. The finished products, though not quite the sleek cylinders of sushi bars, still delighted their creators. The lounge was so crowded, however, that at least one sushi lover, unable to muscle her way to the sushi-making table, climbed the stairs to the Bartlett dining hall for a pizza slice.

The lesson, organized by the Culinary Club, was part of PanAsia 2004, an annual ten-day Asian- and Asian-American festival. Aside from “Sushi Rolling with Chuk and Luba,” this year’s PanAsia included lectures, films, and other events exploring relevant issues.

Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Photo: Chuk Moran, ’05, demonstrates sushi-rolling motions while Luba Kontorovich, ’06, chops ingredients (top). The ingredients were bought in Chinatown and the Hyde Park Co-op (bottom).

Every one Else

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In Court Theatre’s adaptation of Fraulein Else, the title character, played by Whitney Sneed, renders aloud her obsessive, incessant, adolescent interior monologue, essentially holding a conversation with herself—running parallel to the plot and dialogue—for the length of the hour-and-a-half production. The audience experiences every moment of doubt and distraction as Else, a 19-year-old Viennese woman on holiday with rich relatives, struggles with her insolvent family’s demands and quickly loses touch, spiraling toward disaster.

“Both the novella [by Arthur Schnitzler] and [Francesca] Faridany’s adaptation exert an elegantly queasy pull,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips. “It’s a claustrophobic tale but a compelling one. Directed by Lucy Smith Conroy, the Court production has a sure sense of psychological compression.”

Fraulein Else runs through May 16.

A.L.M.

Reader’s choice

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Bookworms sitting, standing, paging through musty old tomes and yellowed, disintegrating paperbacks: it's not Powell's Books; today it's Regenstein Library’s annual book sale. Every spring the Library combs its stacks for duplicate and dispensable books to sell over the course of a week. On Monday hardcovers are $20, paperbacks $10; Tuesday prices are cut in half; and by Saturday all unsold books are free.

Students and faculty line up outside the Reg before the sale. Few items are too recondite or in poor condition: a couple minutes of second-day browsing yield attractive works by Philip Roth, Derek Walcott, and Henry James, as well as out-of-print gems like William Hazlitt's essays or Frank Budgen's James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses.

"It's an ingenious waiting game," says fourth-year undergraduate Ian
Kizu-Blair, pondering a new-looking hardcover of Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. "Do I buy this today for $10 or wait to get it for $5 tomorrow and risk losing it to someone else today? What do you think?"

Paralyzed with indecision, he distracts himself by laughing at old paperback cover designs of a few great novels—a trashy illustration for Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and a kitchy cover for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

Joseph Liss, ‘04

Season ender

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It’s the bottom of the first; a weak sun retreats behind a gray skim of clouds, and a fresh breeze flaps though the sparse crowd’s Chicago windbreakers. The scene on the field is just as bleak: In the opening moments of last Wednesday’s baseball game, visiting Elmhurst College (24-11) has already scored once against the Maroons (22-12) and will three more times before the third inning is out, racking up six hits to Chicago’s one.

But the sun returns during a short fourth inning, warming the now larger crowd of straggling students and parents quick to lend encouragement (“Let’s go, buddy. Let’s go.”) With an out at second and a double play, the top of the fifth flies by. When the Maroons step to the plate Elmhurst snags a pop-fly, but then the pitcher unravels, hitting a batter (and the umpire) and walking the next before his coach yanks him. Chicago rallies against the new pitcher, as a single to left field turns into a run (interference by the third baseman) and another hit loads the bases. The crowd, munching on hot dogs grilled and served behind the bleachers, gets riled up, badgering the ump when he calls a questionable strike (“No way, blue. No way.”) The next hit bounces over the first basemen, bringing two runners home but catching the batter at third, upsetting Coach Brian Baldea, who, after some shouting and pointing, gets ejected.

With Baldea lurking beyond the left-field fence and the fifth inning closed by a strikeout, the crowd’s cheerleading can do little against Elmhurst’s superior hitting, which adds five runs in the sixth and three more in the eighth to end the Maroons’ last home game 12-3.

A.L.M.

Photo: Maroon seniors take a bow at their last home game (top).

Face time

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Launched by Harvard students February 4 and spreading to more than 30 other schools, Thefacebook, “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges,” has finally reached Chicago, turning otherwise industrious undergraduates into social (or, at least, virtually social) beings. Since the system’s programmers added Chicago to its directory April 30, students have hovered over computer screens from Harper to the Reg, fascinated to no end by the new phenomenon. Thefacebook, a virtual directory of classmates’ sexual orientations, hobbies, and schedules, has replaced sticker books or pogs from current undergrads’ younger years.

Anyone with a uchicago.edu e-mail account can sign up for the free service, which links U of C participants both to one another and to friends at other schools. Students can create a list of real-life friends and also make new ones, either by searching for classmates or by scanning clubs, jobs, summer plans, political views, and other categories. Thefacebook also functions as a dating site, where users can announce whether they are seeking men, women, or both, and for what sort of relationship. Once registered, they may upload photos, theoretically but not always of themselves, and attach them to their profiles. Unlike services such as Friendster or Match.com, which, the New York Times reported, students consider “strictly for the older generation,” Thefacebook and another college-geared site, WesMatch, are used “somewhere between procrastination tool and flirtation stimulant.”

“In its first week at the University of Chicago,” the Maroon reported, “thefacebook.com has achieved rapid, widespread popularity among students, with some 1,500 students registering in the first 75 hours. After one week, there are 2,380 students registered at the University, with 118,560 students registered throughout the United States.”

Phoebe Maltz ‘05

Photo: Phoebe scans other Facebook profiles at the Reg (top). Phoebe's own profile (bottom). Photos by Molly Schranz ’05.

Grill season

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Flip-flops clack around campus. Couples canoodle on the quads. In yet another sign that spring has arrived, the Hutchinson Courtyard grill has reignited its lunchtime flame, to the delight of both staff and students. “There’s nothing like grilled food,” says Deborah Lewis, an administrative assistant in the University’s legal department. “The burgers are wonderful.”

Many customers share that sentiment, making the $2.49 sandwich and its cheesy counterpart the grill’s most popular grub, with more than 200 burgers sold per day, according to Brian Oakley, the food service employee manning the barbecue on Wednesday. In addition, Oakley typically cooks up 24 brats, 14 veggie burgers, 12 hot dogs, and six portabella mushrooms. A slew of 99-cent sides—from potato salad to potato chips—round out the plastic plates.

Food aside, the grill’s al fresco station wins points with fans. “I like that they actually have it outside,” says graduate student Wenyi Wang, a second-year in computer science. Oakley agrees that “enjoying the weather” is a perk of the job, along with playing the radio, set to a hip-hop station.

The grill is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. That is, as another employee notes, “as long as it doesn’t rain.”

M.L.

The greatest show on campus

A search for the student-organized Le Vorris & Vox circus Friday night turned up an Ida Noyes salsa party, a Mandel Hall performance of the GSB Follies, and Off-Off Campus’s Pants Pants Revolution! at the Blue Gargoyle. A dedicated enthusiast might have braved the spitting rain and gloomy clouds to find a dozen seagulls and three geese meandering on the circus’s announced site, a soggy swath of Midway with a lonely trapeze frame: the show was canceled.

Fortunately for performers and fans alike, Saturday proved sunny, if a bit chilly, and The World’s Fair Regained went on as planned. Ringmaster Forest Gregg, ’04 (who founded the circus three years ago along with Roberto Kutcher, ’04, and Shawn Lavoie, ’04, after their independent study on the history of the circus fizzled), set the scene as the last day of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. To the delight of some 350 students and neighborhood families, tumblers tumbled, dancers danced, and unicyclists whizzed by.

Other highlights included knife juggling, trapeze work, poi (the New Zealand art of swinging things), clowning, and music by P1xel, the University’s own glam-rock band led by Gabe McElwain, AB’03, who “wrote what I thought the circus might sound like.”

A.L.M.

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Photos (from left to right): Captions.

Photos by Amber Mason.

Calling Sarah

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“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Alan Ladd said in Shane, and this week second-year Sean Coleman took those words to heart, laying it all on the line—make that pavement. To track down Sarah, a student he met at a Scav Hunt party last weekend, 19-year-old Coleman chalked four well trafficked spots on campus with his digits and a plea: “You gave me your number. I, like a fool, have lost it. Call me?”

Coleman had tried more conventional approaches to locating his mystery woman, including asking friends if they knew her last name, but to no avail. “This was kind of a last-ditch effort,” he said of the Monday chalking. “At some point, I’m going to have to throw my hands up.” As of Tuesday Sarah had yet to respond, but Coleman remained hopeful. “We met, suddenly clicked, we danced, we talked, had a good time,” he said. “I’d really like to get to know her.”

M.L.

Helen of Vegas

The summer movie Troy may focus on Achilles (played by Brad Pitt), but installation artist Joan Jonas is much more interested in Helen. Her Renaissance Society exhibit Lines in the Sand explores Helen as poet H.D. (Helen Doolittle, 1884–1961) portrayed her in the epic poem Helen in Egypt. Rather than the figure who incited a lust that caused the Tojan War, as H.D.’s Helen tells Achilles her version of the events, she was never even in Troy, and, she regrets to inform him, “they fought for an illusion.”

Jonas imagines a liberated Helen in modern America—specifically, as a showgirl at Las Vegas’s Luxor hotel, a suggestion “perfectly in keeping with myth’s ability to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction,” the Renaissance Society’s exhibit notes say. More poignantly, Lines in the Sand also refers to the first Gulf War and the more recent Middle East conflict. In one video Jonas describes the Trojan War as a trade war whose victors stood to control access to the Black Sea and surrounding resources.

Lines in the Sand and an accompanying exhibit, The Shape, the Scent, and the Feel of Things (a work in progress), will be at the Renaissance Society through June 13.

A.M.B.

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Summer Breeze blows through

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Though the weather proved more breezy than summery—it rained intermittently throughout the day—many students nevertheless came to the main quads Saturday for a round of Jell-O wrestling, inflatable bull riding, and rock climbing. The Council on University Programming Carnival—part of the annual Summer Breeze festival organized by the Major Activities Board—also included cotton candy and caricature stands. The Summer Breeze concert , held in Mandel Hall rather than Hutch Commons because of evening downpours, featured Jurassic 5, Medeski Martin and Wood, and Guided by Voices.

Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Photo: Inflatable bull riding (top). Alex Fishman, '05, poses for a caricature artist (bottom).

A Chicagoist at heart

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A newly launched Web site, Chicagoist, coedited by fourth-year Margaret Lyons, takes on the city in its entirety: “Chicagoist is a website about Chicago and everything that happens in it,” says the “about” page. According to parent site Gothamist, the “website about New York City and everything that happens in it,” the Windy City version has “posts on all the good food (especially BBQ) in the area and any incidents of tigers in apartments, if they happen to come up; there's [also] been posts about the problems with recruiting cheerleaders in Winnetka, the upcoming Chicago Book Fair; how CTA rail operators shouldn't read the paper or use their cellphones while on the job; the annoying weather; and a baby gorilla at the Lincoln [Park] Zoo!”

Lyons’s bio says the religious-studies major “left the familiar comforts of suburban New York for the Windy City and has made her home in Hyde Park for the last four years. She loves Chicago so much she pretends to understand lake effect and finally stopped calling the El ‘the subway.’” Her latest entry on Chicagoist calls knitting “the new smoking.”

Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Comic relief

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The first thing Art Spiegelman did when he took the stage was light up a cigarette. “Think of this as performance art,” he said. “That’s the only way they’d let me smoke.” So began the multimedia lecture by the creative writing program’s Kestnbaum writer in residence. Spiegelman achieved national fame in 1992 when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel of Holocaust remembrance, Maus. Thursday afternoon in Court Theatre he addressed a newer trauma, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which he witnessed firsthand. He was mentally paralyzed for months, he said, after rushing to take his daughter out of Stuyvesant High School that morning and witnessing the Twin Towers collapse just a few blocks away as they ran home.


“Everything I know I learned from comics.” Projecting pages of his newest comic, In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman’s attempt to resolve his memory of the catastrophe with the United States’ subsequent militaristic response, he proceeded to a history of comics—which began accidentally, when a new color printing press at Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper failed to reproduce great works of art, forcing the paper to invent the funny pages as a backup plan. When it comes to graphic novels, Spiegelman is interested not so much in superhero fare but rather in underground comics.


Defending his medium as a unique art form with distinct visual semantics, Spiegelman advocated comics’ use to change the frantic, terrorism-obsessed state of American culture. “We have to stick to our convoluted ironies and use them toward an end other than nihilism,” he says. “We need a neosincerity.”

Joseph Liss, '04

Photo: Art Spiegelman depicts "the new normal" after September 11,
2001.

The art of flirtation

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Second-year COVA major Karlynn Holland didn’t know where the electric blue slug seat came from, but last Thursday she used the comfy chair on the quads to study. Her lounging drew the attention of physics graduate student Jason Wyman, who walked over and said hello.

Turns out the seat was the creation of third-year Chuk Moran (of sushi-seminar fame), whose artwork was part of this year’s Festival of the Arts.

Phoebe Maltz, ’05

No place like home

Alumni Weekend 2004 kicked off with a grand opening: a June 3 reception at the new Alumni House. By 5 p.m. a crowd had gathered to watch as former Alumni Board of Governors presidents Linda Thoren Neal, AB’64, JD’67, and Katharine L. Bensen, AB’80—both driving forces behind the building—snipped through a ceremonial red ribbon. It was official: the Gothic structure at 5555 South Woodlawn Avenue was open for business—and a party.

Inside, guests toured the new digs, picked up nametags for the weekend’s events, snacked on hors d’oeuvres, and caught up with former classmates. Alumni who’d missed the ribbon cutting were in time for another house-warming rite, as University President Don M. Randel offered a toast: “It’s high time that the alumni of this great University have a great home. I hope you will always think of it as a home to stop by when you return to campus—and that those stops will be frequent.”

Sunlight streaming through the mullioned windows, the guests smiled and partied on.

M.R.Y.

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Photos: going in: Former Alumni Board of Governors presidents Linda Thoren Neal, AB’64, JD’67, and Katharine L. Bensen, AB’80, officially open Alumni House (left); grand day for a grand opening: guests arrive at Chicago’s Alumni House (middle); Alumni Association Executive Director Christine C. Love—who is leaving Chicago to move east with her family—received a surprise from the Alumni Board of Governors: the house’s entrance foyer has been named in her honor (right).

Photos by Dan Dry.

Reuning

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For at least 54 of the 2,500 alumni, family members, and friends who flocked back to the alma mater’s open arms this weekend to reunite with former classmates and relive the old days, the memories hadn’t yet had much time to gather dust. The bulk of the class of 2003’s attendees—not yet a year out of school—spent Friday night at their alumni dinner, enjoying appetizers and an open bar at a North Side eatery, and unceremoniously skipped the weekend’s all-alumni events.

But a few recent grads did make their way to campus: Replacing an absent flag-bearer for Saturday morning’s procession, a single backup took the 2003 banner, joined at Rockefeller’s steps by three tardy classmates. After the ceremony, at least six members came to Ratner (five of whom either work for the University or were on the reunion committee) to enjoy the afternoon’s barbeque. And at Saturday night’s soiree, though one 2003 table was empty, the other, brimming with borrowed chairs, overflowed with newly minted alums.

A.L.M.

Photos: the Class of 2003 at Saturday's barbeque (top); alumni procession in Rockefeller (bottom).

Jazz in translation

An entryway display to the Smart Museum’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery reveals the focus of its latest exhibition: “moga,” or modern young women, the Japanese equivalent of Roaring ‘20s flappers. Composed of muted grays, taupe, green, salmon, and a splash of teal, the portrait shows a Japanese girl holding a traditional fan while wearing a contemporary pleated dress with sheer black stockings and funky jewelry.

Taishô Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, and Deco spotlights the social role of Japanese women during the reign of Emperor Taishô (1915–26) through the mid-1930s, when traditional Japanese art and conservative values were integrated with popular Western styles. Organized by the Honolulu Academy of Arts, this collection includes more than 60 items such as woodblock prints, folding screens, figurines, household goods, kimonos, and other decorative artifacts.

Taishô Chic will be at the Smart Museum through June 20.

Joy Olivia Miller

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Photos (from left to right): Woman's Kimono, Second quarter of the 20th century, Silk, plain weave, stencil-printed warp and weft kasuri. Courtesy of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Gift of the Christensen Fund, 1998; Round Fan Advertising Jintan, with Photos of Irie Takako and Hamaguchi Fujiko, c. early 1930s, Paper and wood. Courtesy of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Gift of Mauree D'Honau, 1997; Yamakawa Shûhô, Three Sisters (Sannin no Shimai), 1936, Screen. Courtesy of the Honolulu Academy of Arts; Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, Tipsy, 1930, Color woodblock print. Courtesy of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Gift of the Philip H. Roach, Jr. Collection, 2001.

Bagpipes, robes, cameras, and foreign policy

This morning the Millar Brass Ensemble welcomed soon-to-be-graduates’ families and friends into Harper Quad. Once the processional from Hull Gate began shortly after 9 a.m., all eyes turned to the University of Chicago Pipe Band and then, of course, to the black- or maroon-robed degree candidates. Family members, wearing flower-print dresses or khakis, lined each side of the parade, waving, smiling, and clicking their cameras when the student they’d been waiting for finally passed. “There’s my brother,” one graduate said to the woman behind her, smiling and waving to said relative.

Though cloudy skies and sticky air appeared to threaten this morning’s convocation session for Law School, Harris School, and SSA graduates, the ceremony concluded without a drop. The Rev. Alison Boden, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, offered an invocation, noting that despite this national day of mourning “our spirits can’t help but be elated” by such a celebratory event. Then political-science professor John J. Mearsheimer gave the convocation address, telling the graduates that with a Chicago education they are prepared—and indeed obligated—to publicly question U.S. foreign policy. “The elites who make foreign policy don’t like to have their ideas challenged,” he said. “As graduates of this institution you are well informed to engage in those debates and help avoid future foreign-policy debacles.”

At 3:30 this afternoon graduate students in the biological sciences, the medical school, the humanities, the physical sciences, the social sciences, the divinity school, and the Graham School of General Studies will receive degrees. Saturday morning is the undergraduate ceremony, and Sunday morning the business school. Mearsheimer will address all but the GSB convocation, when Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, will speak on “Business Schools within Universities: the Right Mix.”

A.M.B.

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Far left and far right photos by Amy Braverman. Middle photos by Dan Dry.

Thrown into art

In the high-ceilinged, airy space at Gallery 312, early guests to the opening reception nosh on Asian appetizers, waiting for the artists and their families to show up. The Humanities Division convocation ceremony has just ended, and it takes some time to drive north in Friday-afternoon rush hour.

Two guests—cousins of Mary Burns, MFA’04—eye a series of cement and graphite sculptures, a piece by Stacy Karzen, MFA’04, called Lunch. A small group laughs before Jung Eun Lee’s (MFA’04) untitled mixed-media installation—when they enter the space behind the curtain, a camera unexpectedly takes their photograph, and now they’re giggling at the results: photo-booth–style strips of pictures. Around the corner visitors step onto faux-grass and read about Lynn Retson’s (MFA’04) “expeditions” to discover and recreate borrow pits, where dirt is dug to use as fill elsewhere. (A sign explains, “Exhibit temporarily on loan to the mobile site of the Midwest Museum of the Borrow Pit located in the U-Haul van near the front entrance loading dock.”) One guy stares at Paula Henderson’s (MFA’04) Chicago: the Remix, an acrylic and charcoal map of the city in which she reconfigured neighborhoods in alphabetical order, coming up with a surprisingly even distribution of race and class.

The exhibition, called Pitch and curated by the Smart Museum’s Uchenna Itam, features some 25 pieces by eight graduating visual-arts students, including photography, paint, video, installation, and sculpture. The title Pitch, Itam says, connotes the artists’sense of being “thrown out into the gallery world” and also plays nicely on Retson’s borrow pit project. Their work shown here through June 26, the graduates have a welcoming entrée into an artist’s life.

A.M.B.

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Holding out for a hero

The lunchtime audience in the Chicago Cultural Center theater (legal occupancy: 249) was small (18 attendees plus five panelists), but the question was big: “Is Cyrano a Hero?”

Thomas Pavel, chair of Romance languages & literature at Chicago, hosted the discussion, held in conjunction with the Redmoon Theatre/Court Theatre production at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where it has received rave reviews—the Chicago Tribune called it a “richly provocative interpretation of a classic” with “a visual environment resembling a 19th-century puppet show gone mad.”

Responding to the intimacy of the group, Pavel and his panelists—Court artistic director Charles Newell, dramaturg Sarah Gubbins, translator Mickle Maher, and Allen Gilmore, who portrays Cyrano—abandoned table, chairs, and microphones to perch on the edge of the stage as they dissected the heroic mettle of Cyrano de Bergerac, French dramatist Edmond Rostand’s larger-than-life protagonist with larger-than-life proboscis.

Although everyone agreed with Pavel that “Cyrano is a hero with a flaw,” they found the flaw harder to pin down. “In these self-activated times,” Newell said, Cyrano can come across as “a coward, an idiot,” unable to accept Roxane’s love. Dramaturg Gubbins and translator Maher emphasized the idealistic nature of Cyrano’s personality and passion. “He can’t be with Roxane,” said Maher, “because if he were, he wouldn’t be Cyrano.” And Gilmore saw him as a wise man made a fool by love: “He does things around her he just can’t help.”

The third and final session of the We’re Talkin’ Classics symposium series, “The Language of Words: Conceiving and Creating CYRANO,” takes place on the day of the play’s last performance, Sunday, June 27, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

M.R.Y.

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Photos: just another love story? Cyrano looks on as Roxane looks away(left); a larger-than-life protagonist with a larger-than-life proboscis (middle); Christian speaks Cyrano’s words of love for Roxane (right).

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Going my way?

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Despite soaring gas prices and the summer construction season, University denizens are still packing up and hitting the pavement—with a little help from the Ride Board. Online and in the Reynold’s Club basement, the Ride Board hooks up students, staff, and faculty who are ready for a road trip but need wheels or want company.

Drivers or passengers who don’t want to go it alone can register (with a valid U of C e-mail address) to post or view available rides online, or they can do it the old fashioned way, pinning scraps of paper below a Rand McNally U.S. map. Posted offers include journeys to Cleveland and New York, both offered by Gregory, who has a stick shift and no particular music preference; a roundtrip ticket to the Minneapolis Magnetic Fields Show; regular visits to St. Louis; and an expired call for a one-way jaunt to “Anywhere Anytime, USA” by classic-rock fan Bernadette.

Though the online site stipulates that the University “accepts no responsibility for the outcome of any rider or offer you accept,” a letter featured in the June 1998 University of Chicago Magazine tells the triumphant tale of a Ride Board–facilitated trip to Northhampton, Mass. Upon completing their journey, the two pilgrims, a political philosophy student and a doctoral candidate in physical chemistry, “promised to get together for a Cubs game before the summer was out. We never did make it to Wrigley Field,” explains the philosopher, “but nine years and a beautiful daughter later, we’re still together.”

A.L.M.

Summer School

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For William Rainey Harper, Chicago’s first president, learning was a yearlong enterprise. Developing the quarter system and organizing summer schools, Harper had an academic appetite that never seemed to need a vacation. Today the tradition continues, as about 290 undergraduates and 3,200 graduate students returned to campus for the summer session, one week after spring quarter’s end.

“It’s early,” said Lea Schweitz, a Divinity School doctoral student, “but it’s a good way to get a lot of Latin in a short amount of time.” Introduction to Latin meets Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 2:50 p.m. During break Schweitz headed to lunch with Div School graduate student Erika Tritle and Jennifer Voss, a visiting undergraduate who happens to attend Luther College, Tritle and Schweitz’s alma mater. A little socializing can’t hurt those summer studies.

A.M.B.

Photos: Samantha Kuhn, AM'03, reads up before sitting in on a Reading French course this afternoon (top); Intro to Latin breaks for lunch (bottom).

Shaking all over

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Michael Allen, associate professor of classical languages and literatures, received an urgent phone call from his wife this morning. “She said, ‘Stop! Where are you?’” Allen recounts. Having just finished teaching a class, he was on campus. Her instructions were clear: “Stop and get shakes.”

For a buck on Wednesdays, the C-shop churns out 12-14 oz. frozen treats in such basic flavors as vanilla, chocolate, mint chocolate chip, and strawberry. Word of Shake Day travels fast, and Allen wasn’t the only customer to take advantage of the decades-old tradition. Third-year Karen McClendon-Sikic, who’s participating in a University research program this summer, made a beeline for the C-shop around 11 a.m. “I always come,” she says. “I like the fact that it’s filling and only a dollar.”

Shake Day is so popular, in fact, that University officials negotiated for nearly two years with Einstein Brothers Bagels to continue the deal when the chain moved into the shop last year, according to Christy Cook, food service director, who also notes, “It’s in our top five movers every week.”

M.L.

Groundhog Doc

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Running Wednesdays through Saturdays until August 28, this summer’s Doc Film series offers 40 film classics—from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent to Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician—for a $14 quarter-long pass (or $4 per show).

Yes, you can rent or buy the same films on video or DVD, but Doc offers the joys of the big screen, air-conditioning (though July and August will have to be warmer than June has been to make this a plus), and the fun of watching with a knowledgeable audience—many of whom may have seen the same films at previous Doc screenings.

In fact, Doc’s Web site provides a list of all films screened in its Max Palevsky home between March 29, 1999, and March 15, 2003. For example, Akira Kurosaw’s Seven Samurai—showing at 8 p.m. July 29—was screened October 25, 2000, and Ben Stiller’s Zoolander—at 7 and 9 p.m. July 7—played Max on January 11, 2002.

What about the mother of all déjà vu movies? Groundhog Day—which didn’t make a Doc appearance between Spring Quarter 1999 and Winter Quarter 2003—will be shown twice on July 17, at 7 and 9:15 p.m.


M.R.Y.

Chicago summer sees twice the ambition

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Forgoing the joys of a summer vacation, 12 scholars (ten straight from college, one Pritzker student, and one developmental-biology graduate student) have thrown themselves into the University’s medical science training program (MSTP). Now in its second week of classes, the eight-year-long program, headed by Jose Quintans, associate dean and master of the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, is tailored to students seeking a doctorate along with a medical degree. MSTP courses (which later will focus on fields such as neuroscience and immunology) began in late June with human morphology so participants could get acclimated before the other M.D. candidates arrive in the fall. At today’s histology class, taught by associate pathology professor Tony Montag, the students examined epiglottal cells, which, according to MSTP first-year Brian Theyel, look like “purple and pink globs.”

A.L.M.

Local swimmin' hole

Two slouching lifeguards—Hyde Park teens Jennie and Emily Msall—perked up in their elevated seats as a new group of swimmers trickled into the bright, humid Myers-McLoraine pool room last Friday around noon. One by one professors, staff, students, and other members of the Ratner Athletics Center unwittingly followed the same pre-swim routine—sliding off their squishy flip-flops before dipping their feet into the water to test the temperature (kept at approximately 80°), then splashing into an open lane of the 50-meter-by-25-yard pool for some lunchtime laps.

“Everyone who comes to swim is assured of adequate workout space,” George Villarreal, the men’s swimming coach and aquatics director, writes via e-mail. “In comparison to the former offerings, Ida Noyes Pool and, before that, Bartlett Pool, which have been described variously as dungeons and pits, this pool”—which opened last September –“is an airy place to swim that keeps drawing patrons.”

No matter what the season, the pool’s year-round popularity—it’s busiest weekdays at 6:30 a.m., noon, and 8 p.m. and weekends at 9:30 a.m. and 3–6 p.m.—isn’t taken for granted. “The pool is kept clean and running well by our skilled building engineers,” Villarreal says, “who clearly take a sense of ownership in running it well. A clean pool is its best advertisement.”

Joy Olivia Miller

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Photos by Joy Olivia Miller.

Men at work

It’s been said there are two seasons in Chicago—winter and construction. Even without construction projects such as the new business school, Comer Children’s Hospital, and the Interdivisional Research Building, the dictum holds true on campus. Men (we’ve witnessed no women among the workers) in hard hats are ubiquitous this summer, replacing the U of C Bookstore roof, maintaining the Hospitals and Cummings Life Sciences buildings’ facades, and trimming main-quads trees. Consider it a campus makeover.

A.M.B.

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Photos: (first row) workers replace the slate and metal portions of the bookstore’s roof (left); the Hospitals’ facade work requires safety signs (middle); Cummings gets a facelift (right). (Second row) Jimmy Monson is “the safety guy,” ensuring trucks can get through as workers install air-conditioning pipes in the IRB (left); the main quads’ trees get a summer trim (right).

In our back yard

As students lounge, chat, and bury themselves in books, enjoying Chicago’s summer on the main quads, they probably don’t think about how the grassy plane came to be. Now nestled in the center of the 211-acre campus, the main quads, once a swampy spread 1/8th the size, was the sum total of University land when the school was granted its charter in 1890. Donated in part by Chicago merchant Marshall Field, the plot stretches between 57th and 59th streets and Ellis and University avenues, a contiguous patch thanks to a Chicago City Council edict eliminating pre-existing streets and alleys. This blank slate allowed University planners, in particular architect Henry Ives Cobb, to adopt a quadrangle scheme: a center space flanked by six smaller quads, three to the north and three to the south, enclosed by bordering buildings. Each square reflected the activities in the structures around it—for example, the Classics Quadrangle, according to the campus master plan, is more “quiet and contemplative” than Hutchinson Courtyard, where student social life was focused.

Designed to resemble England’s Oxford University, the University’s original campus was meant to provide a haven in the bustling city, suggest tradition and continuity, and emphasize the importance of wisdom and learning. Today the wide, grassy area is also a designated botanical garden, which, according to the 1999 campus master plan, is intended to grow, display, and document plants “of both ornamental and scientific interest.” And the quads keep evolving: other master plan recommendations include a pedestrian portal through the Administration Building lobby and a center circle fountain to “add appropriate emphasis to the heart of the symmetrical space.”

A.L.M.

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Art makes you smart

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“The college museum experience is absolutely seminal,” the Smart Museum’s departing Dana Feitler Director, Kimberly Rorschach, told a jam-packed lecture hall Wednesday. Addressing “Why Do Universities Have Museums?” Rorschach explored the history and purpose of university art museums, choosing, she said, to focus on “why we collect rather than what we collect.” University museums’ “unique resources,” she said—like having access to world-renowned intellectuals—allow them to meet their “distinctive mission” of providing thought-provoking art and interdisciplinary educational programs.

Indeed, the Smart’s summer exhibition, Smart Collecting: A Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration, demonstrates the collection’s variety, ranging from modern American to 18th-century Asian works. The exhibition “highlights outstanding additions to the Smart’s collection,” says a brochure, including sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing.

In August Rorschach will leave her ten-year position to become the first director of Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. Under interim director Jacqueline Terrassa, MFA’94, and beyond, Rorschach says, she is confident that the Smart will continue to help lead Chicago arts scene by showing “intellectually risk-taking exhibitions.”

Smart Collecting: A Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration will be on display through September 5.

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Summer score

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Even with Maroon student-athletes on summer break, Ratner Athletic Center and the adjacent fields behind it remain packed with ballplayers, swimmers, and goalies gunning for glory. Yet there are no 300-pound linemen here. These superstars dominate the fields and courts with an average height of less than four feet.

The University’s Super Summer Sports Camp is back in session, welcoming students aged 4–16 for fun and games under the instruction of varsity coaches and student-athletes. The program has grown from 41 participants in 1995 to 225 this year, a popularity that camp director and head football coach Dick Maloney attributes to the University of Chicago name and the seven-to-one camper/staff ratio. The camp attracts participants from as far south as 95th Street and as far north as the Loop.

The 2004 session offers morning recreational and afternoon sport-specific activities, including dodgeball, soccer, football, softball, and swimming. “I like a lot of the sports we get to play, and I really like to tear it up on the football field,” says Ryan Williams, 14, a six-year camper. “I get to have fun, make friends, and play.” In fact, 75 percent of this year’s kids have attended sessions in previous years.

First-time campers are also impressed. “It’s been fun to do sports that I like and learn some new ones before we go cool off in the pool,” says Maya Glover, 10.

Today begins the second of the camp’s two three-week sessions, when a new crop of kids gets to resume the home-run hitting and goal scoring.

Sean I. Ahmed, ‘06

There's such a lot of film to see

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“We’re just praying that the weather will hold out,” said Mariah Ford, ’06, ORCSA’s Summer in the City events coordinator, as she scanned the sky for approaching thunderclouds. It was a humid Tuesday night and a few dozen people, mostly students, lounged on the main quads, waiting for the free outdoor screening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s to begin. There have been past summers, Ford said, when every screening got rained out, “just due to bad luck.”

Fortunately, despite foreboding flashes of lightning, Tuesday’s weather remained calm, and the audience settled into their picnic blankets and beach chairs to watch Audrey Hepburn in what is considered one of her most memorable roles. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the second of four movies that ORCSA will present this summer, including Big Fish on July 27 and Starsky & Hutch on August 10. The first screening, Kill Bill, “got a pretty big turnout,” Ford said, even though the audience complained that there were too many bugs and that the men setting up the video projection equipment were listening to Elton John.

ORCSA’s film selections reflect both a student survey conducted at the end of the school year and the need to show some family-friendly movies. Other Summer in the City events include a lunchtime concert series, free ice cream days, and trips to Second City and Six Flags Great America. As Hepburn would say in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it’s all “simply marvelous.”

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Courtyard noise

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For those nodding to the beat the whole hour or sneaking an extended glance on their way to and from lunch, Hutch Commons at noon on Thursdays has become the prime place to rock out to Hyde Park’s best student bands. ORCSA’s Noontime Noise series has introduced the University’s oft-hidden side to students and staff on campus this summer.

“The idea behind ORCSA's summer programming is to provide a variety of events for students and faculty during the summer,” says Mariah Ford, ’06, the Noontime Noise program scheduler. “We try to encourage students or other people affiliated with the University to perform.”

Yesterday’s show was split between two of the school’s best rock groups. Spooning with Nora, which includes “a jazz-trained drummer, a poet, a conductor, and a composer,” according to the band’s Web site, played a five-song set that took the audience on a light-hearted, summery tour through the band’s discography. Healthy Booty, a temporary side project for the U of C band Health and Beauty, followed with another half hour that ranged from the scathing noise-rock of “Guns v Butter” to the slow and pensive “Children Are A Gift From God.”

About 50 people watched the bands perform, which took place on the set-in-progress for University Theater’s A Winter’s Tale, while passersby stopped to listen for a song or two. The free show by the bands, which have played in such Chicago venues as the Metro, Lyon’s Den, Fireside Bowl, and Bottom Lounge, delighted the crowd.

A still-unannounced DJ will headline next week’s Noontime Noise, which includes free ice cream for the audience.

Sean I. Ahmed ‘06

Photos: Healthy Booty (top); Spooning with Nora (bottom).

Ring out, wild bells

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Wylie Crawford, MAT’70, the University of Chicago’s carillonneur, flutters his hand up and down as he hums through a few bars of Pachelbel’s Canon, one of ten pieces he will play during his free hour-long recital August 15. As melodic as his humming is, he promises that the song sounds better on the carillon. “You can get amazing musical effects,” Crawford says, gesturing up toward Rockefeller Chapel’s lofty tower, where the instrument resides.

Rockefeller’s annual summer concert series, dubbed Carillonathon, presents an opportunity for Crawford to invite musicians from all over the world to campus. This year guest carilloneurs come from as far away as the Netherlands and as nearby as Naperville, Illinois. The performers choose their own programs, sometimes arranging the pieces themselves, so the recitals represent “whatever people are interested in working on at this particular moment.”

Every carillon is different, but playing the University’s is a special experience, Crawford says, because it’s “a real monster.” Weighing more than 100 tons (approximately the size of the new giant “bean” sculpture in the city’s Millennium Park), Chicago’s carillon is the second largest in the world.

This past Sunday a small crowd listened to Linda Dzuris, from Clemson, South Carolina, perform folk songs from Spain, America, and the British Isles. While a few people chose to climb the bell tower and sit with Dzuris as she played, most of the audience, including Crawford, sat scattered across Rockefeller’s lawn, reading, picnicking, and enjoying the tolling of this rare instrument.

Carillonathon continues at 6 p.m. every Sunday through August 22.

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Photos: listeners lounge on Rockefeller's lawn (top); university carillonneur Wylie Crawford, MAT'70 (bottom).

New café on the block

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Students and professors whose work keeps them on the quads often ignore campus south of the Midway. Yet the University of Chicago Press building’s new Midway Gardens Café at 60th and Dorchester offers an enticing breakfast, lunch, and coffee option that might make them change their routine. Customers can lounge in couches and modern, padded-metal chairs in a spacious main area lit by four arched windows. Taking a page from the building it serves, the café’s shelves are stocked with Press books such as A Poet’s Guide to Poetry and Truth and Reality.

Operated by Plum Café, a catering service founded by Richard Mott, MBA’81, the coffee shop features drinks, baked goods, and made-to-order sandwiches. Midway Gardens Café is the tenth campus shop run by Mott’s company, joining the Classics, Biological Sciences Learning Center, and Law School shops.

Though the shop is already open, decorations are a work in progress. Once done, patrons will enjoy a taste of the Midway’s history along with their food and drinks. The café, named after Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1914–24 concert gardens at 60th and Cottage Grove, plans to add a 73” x 60” recreation of a John Warner Norton cubist and futurist mural that adorned the old gardens.

Sean I. Ahmed, ’06

On tour

Third-year Marya Spont hates it when people ask whether she has fun at the University. But answering such a question comes with the territory for a summer tour guide. Thursday morning Spont, dressed in a purple halter top and a low-rise, flowered skirt, does her part to put Chicago’s reputation for dreariness—which she considers undeserved—to rest. Five minutes into an hour-long campus walk, she slips off her flip-flops and scores a laugh from the crowd of about ten high schoolers and parents, visiting from as near as St. Louis and as far as New Delhi. Her crash course covers academics, housing, student life, and Hyde Park, stopping at such high-traffic spots as the Reynolds Club, Joseph Regenstein Library, and Max Palevsky Residential Commons. Along the way she recommends Shake Day and warns against stepping on the University Seal.

The Office of College Admissions keeps its daily tours—departing from Harper Library at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. March through November (the afternoon tour is dropped December through February)—small to allow for discussion. Parents do most of the probing—“Can you request a single room?” “Are all the dorms this nice?”—although father Greg Tuleja concedes, “In the end, our opinion is not going to be important.” Indeed, independence awaits.

M.L.

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Botany Pond to blossom

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After last summer’s massive quad tear-up to install water lines, the current Botany Pond renovation, featuring a couple workers digging holes, seems like a minor affair. Yet the effort to create a “lush garden” that harkens “back to when it was used as an outdoor classroom and laboratory,” says University Planner Richard Bumstead, could dramatically change the aesthetics of a main campus walkway.

Inspired by 1910 photos, the two-year, $180,000 project aims to recreate that century-ago pond. Back then John Coulter, the University Botany Department’s first chair, planted the area’s flora, mixing specimens from his field trips with the University’s greenhouse holdings. The new garden, Bumstead says, will reconstruct the original garden’s “marsh-like feel” with “lush and more colorful broad panels.”

The digging began July 1, accommodating the pond ducks’ annual departure. Landscapers plan to complete hardscape construction by fall and continue other time-sensitive work through spring. The ducks, turtles, and goldfish, meanwhile, await their redesigned home.

Sean I. Ahmed ’06

Alumnus examines drug trade

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While the film’s star shuffled nervously beside him, occasionally acknowledging compliments after a Monday evening advance screening, writer and director Joshua Marston, AM’94, answered questions and regaled the crowded Old Town, Chicago, theater with tales of creating his first feature-length film, Maria Full of Grace. The movie follows a 17-year-old Colombian girl (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) who becomes a drug mule to escape her small-town life.

Marston, who studied political science at Chicago (he spotted an old professor in Monday’s audience), researched the film by hanging out at airport customs offices, where police arrested mules as young as 12 and as old as 84. He also spent time in New York’s Little Colombia neighborhood and in Colombia itself. Though filming had to shift to Ecuador when political violence prevented the crew from securing production insurance, Marston told Monday’s gathering that what scared him most was having the “audacity” as an American to try his hand at a Colombian film.

But he’s already attracted authentic praise—Colombia’s first lady invited him to screen it twice for assembled dignitaries, and the country purchased a print for educational purposes. In June a 17-year-old Columbian boy called Marston to say he had been scheduled to travel as a mule but the movie changed his mind. International critics have also hailed the film, which won awards at the Seattle, Berlin, and Sundance film festivals.

A.L.M.

Photo: writer and director Joshua Marston, AM'94, and actress Catalina Sandino Moreno on the set of Maria Full of Grace (bottom).

Women on board

The Women’s Board members chat eagerly as Chris Love, executive director of the Alumni Association, leads them around the Alumni House, old fraternity quarters that the association moved into nine months ago. “We wanted it to be comfortable,” Love says, showing off the conference room and lounge. “We wanted a homey atmosphere.”

The crowd murmurs its appreciation. “It’s just so marvelous,” says one white-haired, bespectacled board member. “This is what you call giving back.”

In the lounge the two dozen women settle in for University Architect Curt Heuring’s presentation on the Master Plan. The 1999 plan, calling for the development of nine new campus buildings, is nearly complete. Now, he says, the University is looking ahead to future projects that will “create a density and vitality south of the Midway that hasn’t been there before.”

To get a closer look at the new buildings, the group boards a bus for a campus tour, guided by Robert Feitler, X’50, chair of the Master Plan Executive Committee. He points out buildings in progress such as the Interdivisional Research Building and the Chicago GSB Hyde Park Center, the plan’s remaining projects. Along the way the women meet up with Bill Michel, AB’92, assistant vice president for student life, who takes them around the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center and Max Palevsky Residential Commons.

The board members swap opinions on each building. When driving past the new GSB, one woman sniffs, “Well, it certainly doesn’t fit with the neighborhood.” And while Ratner seems to be a crowd-pleaser, the Palevsky dorm engenders more conflict. “I fell in love with the new dorms eventually,” says a young alumna, “but it took a while.” An older board member disagrees. “I love it,” she enthuses, heading out of Palevsky and back to the bus. “I love it.”

Leila S. Sales, ’06

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Which dorm will it be?

The incoming class of 2008 sits on pins and needles, waiting to see what luck their housing assignments will bring. Will they be placed with roommates who are tidy, quiet, and unfazed by late-night parties and study sessions? Or will they spend ten months stuck with monsters?

On the class’s password-protected online discussion forum, incoming students share roommate horror stories, handed down from older friends and siblings. One girl claims to know a Boston University student who roomed with a murderer. Another has heard of roommates who bring home different strangers every night.

Then there are newcomers such as Hilary Lee, who fears she will be denied a roommate entirely. Lee doesn’t want to be placed in Broadview, she admits. She would rather be placed with a socialite or a murderer, she says, than live alone.

Soon the class will wonder no more. The Office of Undergraduate Student Housing mailed out room assignments Friday, and the luckier students have already received theirs. Incoming first-year Caitrin Nicol is thrilled: although she doesn’t know her roommate, she did get placed in her first-choice dorm—the Shoreland's Dudley House. Dave Franklin, meanwhile, is slightly more apprehensive: he preferred Palevsky East but will live in the dorm’s west wing.

Although students’ satisfaction with their housing assignments may vary, there’s one point on which they agree: they’re glad the wait is over.

Leila S. Sales, ’06

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Meaty movie

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Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, cowritten by Hayden Schlossberg, AB’00, has more meat than a standard stoner flick. Chronicling two pothead roommates’ Friday night quest to curb their Castle cravings in New Jersey, the film hits on such social ills as racism and workplace stereotypes about Asian Americans. Confronted by career anxiety, bigoted bullies, and pushy parents, Harold and Kumar—an investment banker and a med-school applicant—end up finding themselves (as well as those small, square sliders).

Schlossberg penned the script while in the College with high-school bud and University of Pennsylvania grad Jon Hurwitz, basing the main characters on friends. “There’s a huge population of college kids who get high, who are on track in life,” Schlossberg told the Washington Post. “Or who are working at jobs…not really sure they are into it. They come home from work, they get high and think, ‘What are we going to eat for dinner?’ That’s people’s daily lives. We take that and blow it out to epic proportions.”

M.L.

Fun as an art form

A sunny, deserted island spotted with tall palm trees; flowered meadows illuminated by the moon; schools of fish darting through ocean currents. These scenes aren’t typical of the Chicago landscape, particularly this past week’s rainy days. Rather, they come in the imaginations of the kids visiting the Smart Museum on Wednesday afternoons, capturing their own conceptions of beauty through art.

The Smart’s Art Afternoons offer workshops each week to community children and adults. Starting with six attendees per week in 2001, the program has grown to a peak of about 140 participants in a given week. College students assist the workshops, as groups practice techniques such as clay sculptures, fish-tank gravel mosaics, and paper weaving. In a museum scavenger hunt, the children look for different shapes and styles in the art collection.

But it’s the hands-on component that often inspires the most excitement. Many participants hailed a past session, where they made sponges out of paper, expanded them with water, and then painted with them, as the coolest workshop yet. “I loved making the sponges,” said Nzaari Kaepra, 8, while weaving multicolored patterns out of construction paper with her home-schooled classmates. “It was really interesting to learn that paper can make sponges. We made different shapes, and I painted flowers in the nighttime.”

The College assistants also enjoy the workshops. “Art Afternoons are my favorite parts of the week,” said third-year Kristin Love, who works at the Smart as part of the College’s Summer Links community-service program. “There are always a lot of familiar faces, and the adults enjoy it too.”

Sean I. Ahmed ’06

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All the courtyard's a stage

“I think of The Winter’s Tale as a fairy tale,” wrote Susanna Gellert, AB’99, in her director’s notes for University Theater’s (UT) Summer Shakespeare in the Court. “In this world nothing—however terrible or delightful—is a dream.”

Gellert and her design team created such whimsy through Ásta Hostetter’s (AB’04) costumes—oversized skirts, colorful fabrics, wing-like sleeves, and enormous sparkling-twine crowns—Scott Zielinski’s dramatic lighting cues, and Mark Winston’s (AB’04) melodic score, performed by a student string quartet. Last night the spectacle drew a few dozen audience members to this epic story of love, loss, and renewal.

The actors too—students, recent alumni, and children who attended the University’s Summer Drama Workshop—helped transport the audience to Shakespeare’s fanciful world. After the performance Gellert, who participated in UT as a student and now attends Yale University’s School of Drama, marveled at the actors’ enthusiasm for embedding themselves in the text and characters. And working with the young campers, she said, “put into context what the show is really about”—creating theater the entire Hyde Park community can enjoy.

Each year’s Summer Shakespeare play is the only UT mainstage production performed in Hutchinson Courtyard. Meredith Ries’s (’05) stage design made use of what Gellert called the “ambient world of the courtyard”: the actors took over the area, playing to audience risers on three sides of the elevated stage—impermanent structures funded by the Arts Planning Council and the Women’s Board—and periodically splashing through the courtyard’s fountain.

Summer Shakespeare, like the season itself, is fleeting: The Winter’s Tale continues its run this Wednesday through Saturday before disappearing as quickly as a Shakespearian tragedy’s entire family lineage.

Leila S. Sales, ’06

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Before you vote for George or John . . .

If the political bug hasn’t bitten you yet, perhaps the right reading materials will inspire your passion for the democratic process. The University of Chicago Press has compiled its “latest and best books for the election season”—required reading for critical thinkers including The Almanac of American Politics 2004, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, The Votes that Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election, and neocon figurehead Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. The Press’s Web site also links to election-related book excerpts and interviews, plus candidate, party, and news home pages.

By A.L.M.

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Bright lights, big station

The big switch came May 30. The next morning you could see it in the commuters’ faces. As they stepped off trains that just the day before had made their official Hyde Park transfer stop at the 59th Street station, the Metra Electric and South Shore commuters—a usually somber lot—were pleasantly surprised by the bright 57th Street station.

In contrast to the dingy, graffiti-marred, and sometimes malodorous 59th Street location, the new station meets with approval from the 500-plus weekday rail riders who board Metra Electric and South Shore lines in Hyde Park. “It’s so clean,” says Renette Davis, a Metra rider and the head of Regenstein Library’s serials & digital resources cataloging. “And it’s quicker to get to work too.” The more centrally located station also features amenities such as elevators for handicapped passengers.

Input from a series of community meetings helped drive the transfer point’s switch to the 57th Street station. Funded by Metra, the Federal Transit Administration, and the Illinois Department of Transportation, the stop has only some minor work—punch-list items—yet to be completed, according to Metra spokesman Dan Schnolis.

Not only passengers appreciate the upgrade in surroundings. “I love it. It’s such a change,” says ticket agent Launie Rae Scognamiglio, a 31-year Metra employee who transferred from the 59th Street station. “I actually get sunlight now. My plants are thriving.”

J.O.M.

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Photos by Joy Olivia Miller.

Wonders of the ancient world

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Only three people show up for the third and last installment of “Lunchtime in Another Time,” the Oriental Institute’s free Friday gallery tour series. But docent Joseph Diamond, AM’56, seems unfazed by the turnout, noting with a shrug that other tours this summer have attracted dozens of people. He says that the topics may drive attendance—while this week’s focus is the Persian gallery, past tours of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian rooms proved more popular.

Taking advantage of the low tourist to docent ratio, the audience members engage directly with Diamond, answering his questions, asking their own, and admiring aloud the pottery and ornaments. Diamond—and ancient Persian culture—has their full attention. They lean in to get a closer look when he pulls a stamp and clay lump from his pocket, demonstrating the ancient use of seals.

Diamond claims he can’t remember when he began working at this Near Eastern museum. He thinks it’s been four or five years but points out, “Time takes on a different meaning here.” With an Assyrian dictionary that has been in process for 80 years and artifacts that date to 3500 BC and earlier, Diamond says that the Oriental Institute makes a couple years here or there seem insignificant.

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Get to the point

On any given warm and sunny day, scores of Hyde Parkers grab beach towels and make their way on bike, rollerblade, stroller, or flip flops east to the Promontory Point. Though the Point, a broad swath of grass and trees whose revetments jut into Lake Michigan between 55th and 54th streets, remains open to pleasure seekers, a battle between neighborhood activists and the city is smoldering. In 2001 city planners, as part of a larger effort to renovate Chicago’s lakefront, proposed replacing the blocky shore and its eroding supports with concrete steps. Many community members objected to the plan, citing aesthetics and water access as main concerns, and negotiations have been ongoing ever since. The latest news, posted online by the Promontory Point Community Task Force (the organization behind the white-on-blue “Save the Point” stickers dotting Hyde Park bumpers), is a report from former mediator Jamie Kalven arguing in favor of preservation-minded restoration.

With construction delayed until at least 2005, this summer the Point continues to operate as Hyde Park’s swimming hole, sports field, jogging track, bike path, beach, and backyard.

A.L.M.

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Drinking in knowledge

What book made headlines in California in 1989 for condoning alcohol use? What is the name of the pickled ginger served with sushi? What car company originated the electric starter?*

If you know the answers to those questions and are looking for a little extra pocket change check out the Pub’s Trivia Tuesdays. Organizers and Pub employees Gerra Bosco, Amy Herrick, AM’01, and Vanessa Davies, AM’03, the self-titled “Trivia Goddesses,” were looking for a way to lure in more customers. This being the University of Chicago, they thought, how about a trivia contest?

Here’s how it goes: Working in teams of two to six people, participants answer four rounds of ten questions with each correct answer worth one point. The bonus fifth round questions feature Chicago- or alcohol related answers worth two points. The $3 entrance fees are placed into a kitty and split 70/30 between the first- and second-place teams. This week’s winners, the “Vultures,” took home $101, with second place “Thundercats” nabbing $43.

Alas, the authors, with the help of two friendly Pub-goers, Marcia and Zohar, and $1 Huber beers, answered none of the above questions correctly. Marcia, a Brazilian who works at Survey Lab, and Zohar, a sociology grad student from Israel, have played several times. They both admitted to having a less-than-deep reservoir of knowledge on American pop culture—though let's just say the "The Golden Girls" theme song was familiar to all.

Registration for the weekly games is at 7:45 p.m., games begin at 8. For more information sign up for the Pub’s listserv.

*Respectively: Little Red Riding Hood, gari, Cadillac.

Johanna and Jeff Jay, AM’98

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Back to sports

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It may not be Athens, but Stagg Field and Ratner are getting their own piece of the action this week. Almost 200 students moved into Max Palevsky Central on Sunday—though autumn quarter doesn’t start until September 27—to prepare for the fall athletic season.

Practices began today for the soccer, cross-country, football, and volleyball teams, whose first competitions come early next month. Hopes are high especially for the Maroon women’s soccer team, which lost last year’s NCAA Division III championship game in overtime. While football and soccer took breaks between their morning and late afternoon sessions, the volleyball players lifted weights at Ratner.

Sean I. Ahmed, ’06

Photo: the Maroon volleyball team works out in the Ratner weight room.

Photo by Anthony Decanini.

Reading, writing, and regulation

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Though nearly all industries are government regulated, “colleges are among the most extremely regulated institutions in the nation,” said University vice president for administration and chief financial officer Donald Reaves. “I cannot think of any part of this institution that is not already regulated heavily.” He made these comments at a “town hall meeting” lecture series designed, according to associate vice president for human resources Chris Keeley, “to incorporate staff as a more knowledgeable and active participant in the life of the University.”

To demonstrate the costs of regulation, Reaves gave a modern-day adaptation of the Noah’s Ark tale, drawing laughs from the U of C–employee audience as he described a world in which zoning, waste management, and workers’ rights regulations prevent Noah from completing his ark on time.

But regulation burdens are not always laughing matters. Reaves bemoaned the strained relationships that can develop between administrators, who must enforce the rules, and faculty members, who find the medical, ethical, and environmental restrictions intrusive. And the monetary cost of compliance, while impossible to calculate exactly, approximates $20 million, Reaves said, or about 5.5 percent of every tuition dollar.

Still, he doesn’t doubt regulation’s necessity. “We do know that risks exist, and they must be managed,” he summed up. “We understand that the stakes are so high that regulations and lawyers will surely be with us forever.”

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Head of the class

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University undergrads may claim “where fun comes to die” as their unofficial social-life slogan, but their academic experience is thriving, according to new college ratings.

Princeton Review has named Chicago numero uno for academic experience in its latest survey—one of those highly publicized lists that have become synonymous with the college-application process.

Among national universities the U of C also tied Cornell and Johns Hopkins for 14th in U.S. News and World Report’s top-schools category in its 2005 rankings. Harvard and Princeton came in first.

To rate colleges and universities, U.S. News groups schools with their academic peers and gathers data in areas including graduation and retention rate, faculty resources, and alumni giving. Based on those indicators, schools are given a weighted composite score.

While earning high marks is a plus for recruitment efforts, many administrators discredit the rankings, arguing that a school’s quality is beyond measurement.

But such scorings have a strong foothold in the American marketplace, and U.S. News’s annual ratings, which debuted in 1983, now share the limelight with other lists including Princeton Review’s.

Needless to say, Chicago didn’t sweep every category. It was, for example, absent from U.S. News’s list of schools with the most athletic scholarships. Maybe next year.

This item corrects the 8/27 original posting--8/31/04.

M.L.

Summer ceremonies

Since its 1893 founding the University of Chicago has celebrated 478 convocations, most of them following formats similar to Friday’s: the Student Marshals and graduates processed through Rockefeller Chapel; Dean Alison Boden offered a prayer; Angela Olinto, chair of astronomy and astrophysics, delivered a short address; the student choir sang an anthem; President Don Randel awarded degrees; and everyone who knew the lyrics sang along to the Alma Mater. The most noticeable difference between Summer Convocation and the graduation exercises held earlier this year wasn’t the ceremonial proceedings; it was the 90-degree temperature in Rockefeller.

Well-dressed audience members fanned themselves with Convocation programs. The musicians quietly asked their director for permission to perform from the chapel’s ground level rather than in the elevated, overheated choir loft. The graduates wiped their brows, finding no respite from the heat in their floor-length black and maroon gowns.

But when President Randel called forward the graduating students and decreed, “By virtue of the authority delegated to me, I confer to you the degree of Bachelor of Liberal Arts, and I welcome you to this ancient and honorable company of scholars,” the years of education and the half-hour of suffering through the weather suddenly seemed, to the graduates and their guests, time well-spent.

Leila S. Sales, ’06

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One for the books

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After adding 2.5 million books to Chicago’s stacks over 24 years, Martin Runkle, AM’73, steps down as library director October 1. Photographs, articles, and a timeline highlight his tenure in the Special Collections Research Center exhibit Catalyst for Change: On the Occasion of Martin Runkle’s Retirement as Library Director. The exhibit, which opened Monday in Regenstein Library, focuses on themes such as donors and friends, evolution of technology, staff development, library outreach, Regenstein reconfiguration, and the construction of Crerar.

A believer in “digitization as a means of preservation,” Runkle oversaw the Library’s user-interface overhaul. Personal computing terminals—beginning with the green-text-on-black-screen systems and progressing to today’s Windows, Mac, and Linux machines—replaced the old card catalog in 1989. More recently Special Collections began digitizing its photo files, a continuing project.

Even as computers made the need for a massive card catalog obsolete, the expanding science collection led to the 1984 addition of a new library, Crerar, which in part replaced the old Chemistry Library. The Library system’s continued growth forced a massive reorganization in 1990, including more compact, motorized stacks on the B level.

The exhibit will outlast Runkle’s time at the University by a week, running through October 7.

Sean I. Ahmed, ’06

Life at the pond

“Excuse me, are you the architect?” inquires James Cronin, professor emeritus in physics and astronomy & astrophysics, approaching the Botany Pond walkway from the main quad road. When David Gianneschi replies that yes, he is a landscape designer for architect Douglas Hoerr, Cronin continues: “I’m delighted to see you’re putting in some grass. I walk by here every day. It’s one of the few calm, beautiful places” on campus, and grass near the pond’s edge, he says, is important for frolicking children.

Cronin isn’t the only one who’s noticed the quickened pace of the pond’s renovation, begun July 1. As Gianneschi points out, this week landscapers planted most of the new greenery, intended to give the area a more lush feel, as it had circa 1910. Besides the sod, the flora includes two azalea varieties, a Japanese maple, lily of the valley, pickerelweed, and iris.

Still to come are a couple crab-apple trees and four bald cypress—two of which will go in the pond itself to give it “more height and diversity,” Gianneschi says. Planted in concrete culverts just below water level, the trees will be at least six feet away from the pond’s edge, Giannesci says, to prevent children and duck-hunting cats from jumping to them. The water lilies, meanwhile, will stay, though two-thirds of the smaller, floating lilies will be removed to make the surface more visible.

At the pond’s south end, circular stepping-stones lead to the Class of 1988 concrete bench, while two north-end stones offer pond access for people and other fauna. Three new lampposts provide nighttime lighting.

The pond should reopen, Gianneschi says, by mid- to late September.

A.M.B.

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Photos by Dan Dry.

Fall cheer

A squint-inducing setting sun and half-filled campus didn’t stop about 100 students and parents from cheering on Division III’s new top-ranked women’s soccer team Tuesday afternoon. In many ways the game was a typical, nonthreatening affair for the Maroons (2–0–0), who didn’t allow a Lake Forest (1–1–0) shot and made two of their own in the victory. The crowd roared its approval from beginning to end for 15th- and 83rd-minute goals and taunted the opposition: “That goalie’s going to be real good after this game.” The squad played hard with the fan encouragement; scrappy starting forward Bridget Hogan, ’07, had to walk on crutches post-game after a late leg-to-leg collision, and others regularly got banged up. That type of play helped women’s soccer earn their top poll ranking, vaulting ahead of State University of New York at Oneonta, to whom they lost in last year’s national championship game.

Other Maroon teams also dominated the competition last weekend, as the men’s soccer, volleyball, and men’s and women’s cross-country teams each had successful opening performances. Men’s soccer (2–0–0) impressed the home crowd, earning shutout wins in Friday and Sunday games. Volleyball (3–1), guided by Chicago’s new career-digs leader Tracie Kenyon, ’06, earned three wins in two days after having only seven all last year. Men’s cross country swept the four-team field at the University of Illinois at Chicago Invite. Women’s cross country followed with a 3–1 mark.

With four winning teams and football starting Saturday, returning students may be surprised to see how Chicago’s fall teams have become some of Division III’s best, despite the Princeton Review’s ranking of Maroon sports as the 18th-most “unpopular or nonexistent.”

Sean I. Ahmed ’06

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Awaiting O-Week

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Although first-years won’t start Orientation Week for another eight days, housing staff is busy preparing for their arrival. Many Resident Heads—the adult couples living in each of the 38 houses—moved in weeks ago, and the last of the third- and fourth-year Resident Assistants arrived Tuesday. Now the bunch faces intense training and planning for the thousands of students who will soon crowd campus. “Once the O-Aides come,” says Johanna Gray, ’05, Vincent House’s RA, “it all happens really fast.”

This is Gray’s second year in Vincent House, but for 27 RAs and 17 RH couples, housing work is a new experience. “I’m really less freaked out than I was last year,” laughs Gray, while first-time RH Sacari Thomas-Mohamed admits her excitement is tinged with worry that her residents will dislike her. Katie Callow-Wright, director of the University housing system, says she focuses on training new RHs for O-Week, which she describes as “a critical time to get to know first-years individually.”

The schedule for new and old housing staff alike reads like alphabet soup: presenters come from relevant campus offices including SCC (Student Care Center), UCPD (University of Chicago Police Department), SCRS (Student Counseling and Resource Service), CPO (College Programming Office), RSVP (Resources for Sexual Violence Prevention), and OMSA (Office of Minority Student Affairs). But Callow-Wright is the first to point out that the training isn’t intended to be comprehensive. Rather, it aims to acquaint staff with resources that will help them build communities, develop relationships, deal with emergencies, and handle administrative responsibilities.

Tonight the housing staff will hold a banquet, a welcome respite from days of 9 to 5 training. Activities such as the banquet, ice-breakers, and snack times, Callow-Wright says, are ways for the RAs and RHs to foster a community of colleagues “who are in the same boat.” “It’s the last chance to focus on ourselves as a group,” Gray says from her empty dorm, “before we turn to our houses.”

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Photos: resident heads and assistants take a snack break from training week (top); the group settles in for a two-hour training session on planning house activities (bottom).

Early returns

Anticipating the September 23 autumn quarter start, construction workers continue to place finishing touches on the GSB’s new Hyde Park Center. Today contractors installed doors on the building’s western, or Rockefeller Chapel, side, while electricians wired the lobby receptionists’ computers. Though the grand opening is not until next week, already the six-story glass atrium, dubbed the winter garden, illuminates the entire building, giving the interior a lighter-than-air quality. Lounge chairs are scattered everywhere to give business students a collaborative and relaxing atmosphere, one of architect Rafael Viñoly’s main priorities, along with creating an exterior that reflects the neighborhood. While the jury is still out on whether Hyde Park’s latest addition does in fact resemble both Robie House and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the some 1,500 projected full-time users are excited by its prospects.

Sean I. Ahmed, ’06

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First two photos by Sean I. Ahmed. Far-right photo by Dan Dry.

Video renaissance

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Tucked under the eaves on the fourth floor of Cobb Hall, the Renaissance Society is a leader in showcasing contemporary art. But for the current exhibition the small gallery looks—at first glance—totally unprepossessing, divided into five enclosed screening rooms whose blank outer walls give no clue to the artwork that awaits inside.

This is the fifth time in the past two years that the Renaissance Society has used isolated screening rooms to exhibit video art. So by now, says educational director Hamza Walker, the gallery knows how to deal with the art’s peculiar needs: lighting and sound demands, screen sizes, and adequate space for each work. “As a medium,” Walker says, “[film] has definitely come into its own.”

The filmmaker on exhibit this time is Yang Fudong, whose work has been shown at museums worldwide, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and who was recently nominated for a Hugo Boss Prize. The new show, open through October 14, features five of Fudong’s black-and-white films, including one—part II of “Seven Chinese Intellectuals”—produced by the Renaissance Society.

Producing artwork is a growing part of the Renaissance Society’s mission, says Walker. “It isn’t simply showing recent art that’s already existing, but going one step further.” The gallery, he stresses, remains “completely beholden” to the artists’ requests, exerting no creative control. Fudong’s films, he continues, comprise “a really beautiful and very generous body of work” that, taken as a whole, explores critical questions about modern-day China. “The show is very, very rich.”

Leila S. Sales, ’06

Photos: still from "An Estranged Paradise" (top); still from "Seven Chinese Intellectuals" (bottom).

Celebrity swim

Though already Olympic-sized, the Myers-McLoraine Pool seemed even bigger this week when eight-time Athens medalist Michael Phelps dove in for a workout. Phelps, who is touring with U.S. teammates Ian Crocker and Lenny Krayzelburg for Disney’s “Swim With The Stars” show, called the University early Wednesday morning to request some practice time between stops. At 11 a.m. the 6-4, 195-pound 19-year-old arrived at the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center and swam for an hour. His 200-meter backstroke, one of the only events that didn’t garner him an Athens medal, was timed at 1:48, seven seconds faster than the pool record.

Nearly everybody who caught wind of America’s hottest sports celebrity was excited to bask in swimming greatness. Phelps accommodated the attention gracefully, staying around after his practice to answer questions and pose for pictures. “Once everyone realized that there was an Olympian swimming in our pool, people started coming out of the woodwork with their cameras,” fourth-year swimmer Dennis Connolly said. “Most everybody was in awe of him—especially the girls. For a 19-year-old, he handles all the attention given him incredibly.” With Phelps’s large signature now scrawled on the men’s swim team’s locker room door, Ratner has its own piece of the 2004 Olympics.

Sean I. Ahmed, ’06

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Photos by Dennis Connolly, '06.

So many children, she didn't know what to do

Hyde Park resident Mae Wilson sits at Kimbark Avenue, hugging a stuffed goose as she welcomes families to the 57th Street Children’s Book Fair. Her first year playing Mother Goose, the opening parade’s grand marshal, the grandmotherly volunteer kicks off the day by leading Peter Rabbit, Lyle Lyle Crocodile, and other book characters in a procession around the fairgrounds.

Throughout Sunday afternoon fairgoers approach her and recite lines from Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes. “I always say, ‘Oh, I am so honored and humbled that you remember that!’” Two girls run up to pet Wilson’s goose, while their mother comments, “We just had to say hello.” As the three leave the fair, Wilson laughs, “That’s a pleasant notoriety.”

Lab Schools parent and four-time volunteer Sophie Worobec notes that her friend Rebecca Janowitz, LAB’70, started the fair 18 years ago as a back-to-school celebration. Then, distracted from recounting the event’s history by a booth advertising $5 paperbacks, Worobec pauses. “Oh,” she reminds herself, turning away from the books, “I better concentrate.”

The book fair, Janowitz says, has blossomed into a Hyde Park tradition featuring singers, dancers, storytellers, puppeteers, author signings, and dozens of book vendors. And not only young children enjoy the festivities. Mixed in with face-painted toddlers are University students and faculty. Dana Kroop, ’07, shows off her glittered construction-paper crown, while Rebecca Knapp and Laura Mazer, both ’06, read a Babar picture book aloud to each other. Knapp asks, “Can we live here forever?”

Leila S. Sales, ’06

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Oh, what a week

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One first-year, stressed about his placement tests and problems registering for certain classes, mutters sarcastically, “Well, this is just amusing,” as he walks out of his adviser’s office. Meanwhile, 20 ambitious new students take a librarian-led tour of the Reg, asking nervous questions about everything from making copies to interlibrary loans. Perhaps most indicative of the early college-student traumas are the handful of first-years locked out of Bartlett Dining Commons, left hungry because they neglected to learn the dining hall’s hours.

Still, O-Week has brought a lot of excitement for the Class of 2008, with the College Programming Office attempting to make the acclimation to college life as easy as possible. Smiling O-Aides helped with Saturday move-in before students filtered to “O-Fest”—a midday fair offering games, prizes, and food—and later Opening Convocation. After the bagpipe procession, which passed through the main Quad and ended at the newly redesigned Botany Pond, students said goodbye to their parents one last time before officially becoming phoenix-loving first-years.

With 52 percent of the new class varsity high-school athletes, 60 percent musicians, 40 percent involved in publications, and 25 percent student-government leaders, this year’s 1,220 enrolled students have résumés on par with recent classes. They’ll continue meeting each other in activities this week, including tonight’s Reynolds Club dance party; tomorrow’s Aims of Education Address, given by President Don M. Randel, and subsequent discussion; and Saturday’s “Explore Chicago Day,” which culminates in a downtown reception at the John Hancock Observatory. Now if only first-years could get that lunch schedule down, they’d be in the clear—at least until midterms.

Sean I. Ahmed, ’06

Photos: new students tour the Reg (top); first-years fill out registration forms in the College advising office (bottom).

An onion by any other name

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Judging from the wealth of nicknames boasted by the Windy City (others include the Wild Onion, the City of Big Shoulders, and the City in a Garden), describing the Big Chi is a big challenge—one answered this fall by the University of Chicago Press with a very big book. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, edited by U of C history lecturer James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, AM’79, PhD’84, and UCLA professor Janice L. Reiff, offers 21 critical essays, 56 original maps, and 1,400 entries from abolitionism to Zoroastrians.

The 1,000-plus page volume also covers a few of the city’s choicest monikers. “Chicago,” for example, comes from an American Indian word meaning “striped skunk,” a term that also refers to the pungent wild onions that grew along the eponymous Chicago River. “Windy City,” on the other hand, was coined by Midwesterners in the late 1800s to deride the famously long-winded local politicians and other vocal boosters who touted the charms of the soon-to-be Second City (another insult, this from A. J. Liebling New Yorker articles). Both Windy City and Second City, the encyclopedia notes, have since been adopted with pride.

A.L.M.

Jensen wins "America's Nobel"

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Following in four Chicago faculty members’ footsteps, Elwood Jensen, PhD’44, the Charles B. Huggins distinguished service professor emeritus in the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research, today received this year’s Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.

Jensen shares the honor with Pierre Chambon, of the Institute for Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Ronald Evans, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The trio’s discoveries, the award citation says, “revolutionized the fields of endocrinology and metabolism.”

Jensen was singled out for his research on how estrogen and other steroid hormones work, transforming “the treatment of breast cancer patients” and saving or prolonging “more than 100,000 lives annually.” On campus this afternoon, Jensen will address the “Discovery of Estrogen Receptor” at the Biological Sciences Learning Center.

Called “America’s Nobel,” the Lasker often is a precursor to the prestigious Swiss prize, as was the case for Chicago professors George Wells Beadle, Charles Huggins, and Roger Sperry, PhD’41. Double-helix codiscoverer James Watson, PhB’46, SB’47, also made the Lasker-to-Nobel leap. (Professor Janet Rowley, PhB’45, SB’46, MD’48, has won a Lasker but no Nobel.)

Meanwhile, bioterrorism expert Matthew Meselson, PhB’51, who earned an honorary Chicago doctorate in 1975, earned the Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science “for a lifetime career that combines penetrating discovery in molecular biology with creative leadership in the public policy of chemical and biological weapons.”

The Albert & Mary Lasker Foundation administers the awards, first presented in 1946. Recipients will receive an honorarium, a citation, and an inscribed statuette October 1 in New York.

M.L.

Arresting images

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“Omigod!” gasped the young woman in the U of C sweatshirt as she caught sight of Feng Feng’s Shin Brace (1999–2000). The Gulliver-sized bodyscape—a metal apparatus drilled into the leg of a Chinese workman, who wore it for 18 months—fills an entire wall of the Smart Museum, where Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China had its opening reception Thursday night.

Feng Feng’s photograph is not the only larger-than-life aspect of the new exhibition, presented jointly at the Smart and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). Curators Wu Hung, the Harrie H. Vanderstappen distinguished service professor of art history, and Christopher Phillips, curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, have divided the 130 works by 60 artists into four themes: “History and Memory” and “Reimagining the Body” at the Smart, and “People and Place” and “Performing the Self” at the MCA. The October 2–January 16 exhibition includes a range of special events, kicking off a two-day scholarly symposium this weekend.

Many of the photographs and videos have never been seen in the U.S.—and rarely in mainland China. Indeed, as he led reception-goers, who’d earlier munched veggie wraps, cashews, and Moroccan-style chicken, on a tour of the 13 artists represented in “Reimagining the Body,” Wu Hung, dapper in shades of browns and black, confessed, “I sometimes feel a bit uneasy to see these works in this environment because I first saw them in a Shanghai warehouse,” exhibited in unofficial shows, “underground.”

M.R.Y.

Photo: Sheng Qi’s “Memories Me” (2000) is a photograph of the artist’s hand—minus the finger he cut off and buried when he left his homeland.

Soul sisters

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A photo of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, embracing in their toddler Full House days, decorates a U of C sorority-recruitment handout. “Friendships last forever when sisters come together,” the flyer says. And though the sorority women working the Reynolds Club booth have left toddlerhood far behind, they echo the sentiments in their own words. “Your sisters are there for you,” says Joelle Shabet, ’06, who tells of a sister who stayed at the Reg all night with her, and next morning woke her up in time to turn in a paper.

Joining the handouts at the booth are colorful, tissue-lined cups filled with candy—the sororities’ giveaway to women who pay $15 to sign up for formal recruitment. Since last Thursday, when the two-week registration began, 17 potential sisters have enrolled to attend information sessions and then the main event October 14–17, when the three National Panhellenic Conference sororities on campus hold formal parties. “It’s a mutual selection process,” Shabet says—the recruits pick their top choices, and if their favorite sorority picks them too, they’re in. Each of the three sororities—Alpha Omicron Pi, Delta Gamma, and Kappa Alpha Theta—should have 55 total members when recruitment’s done. Despite the old stereotypes, “it’s not a superficial thing,” says Shabet, who studies modern Hebrew. “You take a pledge to commit yourself to these women.” And at Chicago, where “there are no stupid people,” she notes, “it’s an incredible way to meet smart, vibrant, articulate women.”

A.M.B.

Photos: third-years Kim Alvarez, Joelle Shabet, and Sarajohn Kerins work the sorority-recruitment booth in the Reynolds Club (top); a potential sister signs up (bottom).

Racism's still strong, theologian argues

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“There is no place one can go to escape racism in America,” argued James Cone, Union Theological Seminary professor and self-proclaimed “theologian activist,” addressing a packed Mandel Hall Tuesday night. The inaugural speaker in the University’s Workshop on Race and Religion: Thought, Meaning, and Practice, Cone attacked America’s persistent—and sometimes, he said, hidden—“white supremacy” and the notion that the ’60s civil-rights movement had erased inequalities.

In a deliberate, scathing tone, he challenged the audience to “speak openly and often” and to “listen to one another,” advising them to be guided by empathy, or “living in someone else’s skin.” Although his ideals are based on Christian values, he said, “One does not have to be a Christian as I am to see the grave threat that white supremacy poses.”

The lack of communication and understanding in the United States—including both whites refusing to learn black spiritual and existential history and blacks not grasping their own—troubles Cone, who garnered crowd applause and responses of “amen” and “don’t hold back; tell us.” Blacks should not blame today’s whites for current segregation, he argued, but they should take whites to task for not challenging a government that refuses to consider the problem.

Despite the University’s recent progressive efforts, Cone criticized its history as a “university that benefited from injustices in this society,” suggesting it should have “put back what it unfairly took” (but without citing specifics.) Building off his critique, political-science professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell closed the event by urging community members to call the University in times of need and to speak up when it encroaches on them.

After his talk Cone stayed to sign his books and discuss his arguments. The workshop series continues Tuesday, October 19, with University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Ines Talamentez discussing Native American religions.

S.I.A.

Religion makes economic sense

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As bowls of salad and balsamic dressing get passed around the cafeteria-style tables in Swift Common Room, the lunchtime group members, mostly Divinity School professors and students, make introductions, joking and guessing each other’s denominations.

It sounds like typical banter at the Div School’s Wednesday lunch series. Less commonplace within these walls, however, is the talk’s topic: economics. Which is why speaker Luigi Zingales, abandoning his $4 vegetarian meal to discuss religion’s impact on economic attitudes, concedes up front: Religion “is not our area of expertise. We should give up.”

The admission earns laughs before Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack professor of entrepreneurship and finance, continues, explaining his team’s approach: “Mostly we can draw correlations.” Using data from the World Values Survey, a collection of questionnaires on values and beliefs, the researchers examined attitudes toward equality and incentives, private and government ownership, and competition. They even found some links between religiosity and support of the free-market system.

Religion, he argues, is good for economic development, meaning churchgoers are generally more promarket. Among religions, he says, Muslims are more pro-state and antimarket; Christians and Buddhists are less pro-state and more promarket.

While Zingales calls the level of interest in the study “overwhelming,” he has moved on to new projects, including a look at cultural biases in economic exchange. Further analysis of the religion findings will have to wait. “Actually,” he says to the crowd of 50, “this is more for you guys to do.”

M.L.

Domesticated poet

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Forrest Gander did not stand like a poet lauded many times over. Winner of a Whiting Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative North American Writing, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for Arts, the Brown University English professor took to the podium hunched beneath his jacket, as if he were simply stopping by to have a drink with the 70 or so audience members before slipping out the door.

But he soon put on his poetry-reading cap, beginning with works by Jaime Saenz, which Gander translated with Kent Johnson. He highlighted the evening, the first of the University’s 2004–05 Poem Present series, with three poems from his 2001 book Torn Awake.

That he teaches a Brown course on phenomenology is appropriate for Gander, whose evocative diction engaged the Classics 10 listeners with everyday images from “air vibrant with mosquitoes” to a girl whose shyness “sits at the edge of her plate like a fly.” He told the audience, “I am not given a subject, but I am given to a subject; I am in it.”

Economical with his commentary, he let his work speak for him. Only once did he look up from his verse to warn, “I seem to be increasingly becoming a poet of domesticity”—hinging on themes of love in its playful, erotic, and paternal forms—an evolution he attributed to his teenage son.

Meredith Meyer, ’07

Maroons come home

On a sunny, 70-degree homecoming Saturday a couple hundred alumni returned to Hyde Park to tailgate, play catch, and watch the Maroons football team take on conference foe Washington University (St. Louis). The event started with a pregame picnic, where graduates chatted about their personal and professional lives and the University's rapidly changing campus—reflected in the picnic’s location on the year-old Ratner Athletics Center front lawn.

Some alumni skipped the food to watch the now-13th-ranked women’s soccer team take on Carnegie Mellon at 11 a.m. Two key Maroons—third-years Diana Connett and Jacqui DeLeon—returned from injuries, DeLeon playing with a cast on her broken arm. Despite their on-field presence, Chicago (7–1–2) struggled in the scoreless, double-overtime match. The now-14th-ranked men’s soccer team duplicated the 0–0 score immediately afterward.

Fans moved from picnic and soccer game to the day’s main attraction, football’s clash against perennially strong Washington University. Though it was a sloppy, 11-turnover affair, the Maroons (1–4) made the game interesting in the fourth quarter. Trailing 24–3, second-year quarterback Marc Zera hit first-year wide receiver Mike Albian on two touchdown passes, raising the score to 24–16. The crowd roared when Chicago recovered a fumble at the Washington 6-yard line with 2:58 left. But one play and four seconds later, Zera’s pass was intercepted in the end zone, and Washington won 24–16.

Though Chicago’s three games were thrillingly close, the weekend’s focus was taking a look back at past student-athlete contributors. Friday night’s second annual Hall of Fame Dinner, held at the Quadrangle Club, honored the six 2004 inductees: Patricia R. Kirby, William A. Lester Jr., SB’58, SM’59, James D. Lightbody, PhB’12, John J. Schommer, SB’09, Courtney D. Shanken, AB’42, and Helen Elizabeth Straus, Lab’80, AB’84, MD’90. Like last year's inaugural class, those recognized spanned men’s and women’s athletics, Big Ten and Division III eras, and included both administrators and students.

S.I.A.

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Photos by Kristine Khouri.

Suspension accord

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In the School of Social Service Administration lobby, the window walls behind him revealing the Midway’s yellowing trees, Martin Marty, PhD’56, took the podium. His Wednesday afternoon talk, “America: Still Gadget-filled, No Longer Paradise: Providing Human Services Today,” spanned the 1890s origins of modern social work, 1967 predictions about American religiosity in the year 2000, America’s post-9/11 insecurity, and current debates over displaying the Ten Commandments, funding faith-based initiatives, and repealing the federal estate tax. The winding discourse concluded with his argument that religious institutions and social services are poised for unprecedented partnerships.

Sporting a red plaid bowtie, Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone distinguished service professor emeritus in the Divinity School, noted that in 1980, the last time he lectured at the SSA, there was “a necessary difference between the social-work way of doing things and the clergy’s way of doing things.” Indeed, each entity often perceived the other as imposing on its turf. But now, especially after September 11, 2001, that view has changed.

Taking his lecture’s title from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Cold War–era comment that America was “a gadget-filled paradise suspended in a hell of global insecurity,” Marty contended that after 9/11 “the suspension cord was broken, and we joined the rest of the human race,” no longer feeling sheltered by two oceans and friendly neighbors. The resulting trend toward intense religiosity, though threatening in its militant forms, also can have positive effects, he said: “In a world of insecurity, there is more friendliness between the secular and the religious,” creating “a larger amplitude of resources on which to draw.” Secular and religious social-service providers share a common vocation, he argued. And in such a world, where the Divinity School and the SSA have joined forces, “we will be much better off than when it was just turf battles.”

A.M.B.

Photo: Martin Marty, PhD'56, sits with SSA senior lecturer William Borden, AM'83, PhD'88, before Borden introduces Marty's lecture (top).

Sweet home falafel

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“A dazzling extravaganza of great, free food and even better music,” according to Council on University Programming (COUP) posters, Blues n’ Ribs hit 59th and Woodlawn last Friday from 9 p.m.–1 a.m.—the organization’s first major party of the year. In Ida Noyes Hall’s third-floor lounge a DJ spun contemporary tunes, in a first-floor room singer-keyboardist Charlie Love played soul-filled music, and on the first-floor Cloister Club’s temporary stage students danced to Willie Kent and the Gents’ upbeat offerings. The estimated 1,500 participants also devoured the snacks—1,000 ribs cooked behind Ida Noyes, 1,000 samosas, 2,000 chicken pieces, four trays of hummus, eight trays of falafel, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for those of legal drinking age—by the event’s midway point.

COUP—which also organizes Dance Marathon, winter celebration Kuviasungnerk Kangeiko, and Summer Breeze—will host Fall Formal November 5 at Soldier Field.

S.I.A.

Funny pages

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Favoring floppy hair, Converse, and ironical T-shirts, a 100-plus hipster crowd gathered in the International House Monday night to take a peek inside the Onion, an irreverent newspaper spoof popular with the 18- to 35-year-old set. Firmly in the youth bracket themselves, Onion editor-in-chief Carol Kolb and associate editor Amie Barrodale spoke about the paper, joking and clicking rapidly through some of their favorite front-page stories (“Women: Why Don’t They Lose Some Weight?”, “Jesus Demands Creative Control Over His Next Movie”, and “Irrelevant Pop Stars Unite Against Bush”).

After launching into a phony history—in 1756 a man named Zweibel traded a sack of yams for a printing press—Kolb revealed that, in fact, the Onion was born in 1988 at UW–Madison and has clung to its Midwestern roots despite a recent move to New York City. To write for the paper, she joked, you have to have lived in Wisconsin in 1995—that and wait for one of the current staff (a Midwestern group of 10) to die.

Though the Onion creates fake news in the line of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, sometimes, the editors admitted, it gets taken pretty seriously. Papers from Michigan to Beijing have picked up stories and spread them (including “Report: Al-Qaeda Allegedly Engaging in Telemarketing”). They also got a flood of e-mail thanking them for revealing that Harry Potter books do indeed incite Satanism in children.

And, while their fake news makes great fun of the powers that be (“Cheney Vows to Attack U.S. if Kerry Elected” headlines a recent edition), Kolb and Barrodale claimed that the paper is “not too lefty or too righty.” Their job, they argued, is to “point out stupidity wherever it happens,” a charge they fulfill even with the paper’s brief motto: You are dumb.

A.L.M.

Leaves of grass

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When perfect autumn days arrive like Thursday’s 57-degree sunscape, Chicagoans fall in love with their city all over again. Coats and scarves—only recently dug out of closets—get spurned in favor of shades. In the quads students lounged on the grass one last time, red, yellow, brown, green leaves peppering their views of the blue sky. Some loungers even braved flip-flops and short sleeves.

Lucky for the Magazine, photographer Dan Dry captured the all too fleeting moment on campus. When winter blows in and breaks our hearts, his photos can serve as love letters from a happier season.

M.L.

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Families bring kisses, clean clothes

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Showering students with hugs and food, parents and siblings arrived in droves last weekend for the College Programming Office’s (CPO) Family Weekend 2004. Participants flocked to the food (“They sure know how to feed us well,” remarked one father wearing an “I’m a proud U of C parent” button at the Sunday dean’s brunch), neighborhood and campus museum tours, and mock classes spanning the undergraduate divisions.

Saturday morning presented a little confusion as two other major events crowded Hyde Park: the Second Annual Comer Kids’ Classic 5K Run, Walk, and Kids Dash and the Humanities Open House. While parking spots were at a premium, some families chose those alternatives over the CPO’s offerings.

For those who stuck to the schedule, their daytime hours were filled. In the evenings students—now in prime midterm mode—got decent meals outside the dining halls. And for the luckiest young scholars, eager parents washed their laundry and cleaned their rooms. Now that’s a study break.

S.I.A.

Global Chicago

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In International House’s flag-lined Assembly Hall, four authors of the new book Global Chicago (University of Illinois Press) spoke Monday about the city’s evolution from a swamp to a worldly metropolis.

Richard C. Longworth, executive director of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Chicago Center, discussed Chicago under the 1950s–70s reign of former Mayor Richard J. Daley. It was a time, he said, when mobsters carried machine guns in violin cases and the Democratic Machine was a paternalistic force, providing new immigrants jobs in return for votes.

Chicago’s global character, continued Chicago Tribune urban correspondent Ron Grossman, is much older than Daley’s time. Considered the Wild West even after the Industrial Revolution, the city was advertised throughout poor parts of Europe as a place where anyone willing to work could make a living, Grossman said: “Chicago imported human beings like some countries imported raw materials.”

William Testa, vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, attributed the region’s worldwide influence to the railroads, constructed in 1848. And immigration’s rise the last 20 years, he said, is evidence of Chicago’s continuing international legacy. The 2000 census reported that in 51 percent of Chicago’s non–African American households, English is the second language. An Italian restaurateur, Grossman recalled, said recently, “These days you can’t run an Italian restaurant without Mexicans in the kitchen cooking.”

Far from the days of political machines, the current Mayor Richard M. Daley’s biggest brag, Longworth noted, is that “he’s planted more trees than any other mayor.” Daley’s beautification efforts, demonstrated in projects like Millennium Park and flower baskets lining Lake Shore Drive, are not frivolous, Testa added. They represent Daley’s continued efforts to maintain international acclaim. Chicago, he argued, must be attractive to intellectuals and entrepreneurs to remain competitive in the global economy.

Many corporate headquarters have left Chicago in the past decade, Chicago sociology professor Saskia Sassen reminded the audience. The global role, she said, is one Chicago cannot take for granted.

The panel, part of the Center for International Studies’ World Beyond the Headlines program, was the second such event this quarter.

Meredith Meyer, ’07

A bioethical upstart just in time for election

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“There were already protests at Princeton when I arrived,” reminisced Peter Singer, known for triggering the modern animal-rights movement and supporting human euthanasia and abortion, about his 1999 appointment to Princeton’s Center for Human Values. Selected to give the Law School’s 2004 Dewey lecture, the bioethics professor drew a mélange of students, professors, and academics there Thursday afternoon to speak on “America’s Responsibilities as a Global Citizen.”

“Right now American ethical pursuits are concentrated within national self-interest,” said Singer, whose recent books include One World: The Ethics of Globalization (Yale University Press, 2nd ed. 2004). “Instead, America’s responsibility as a global citizen should be to help international law gain substantial ground.” America’s role under the Bush administration, he argued, has hindered global solidarity and welfare rather than improve it. Bush’s reluctance to sign the Kyoto Protocol hinged on his belief that overstated environmental dangers would disturb the American economy and way of life. “Bush argues that the U.S. cannot carry the burden of cleaning up the world, especially when China and India are not asked to sign the Kyoto Protocol,” Singer said. “But the polluter must pay.” Industrialized nations should be the first to assume responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, he contended. “America cannot claim to be a good global citizen by conferring the costs of the global environmental welfare to other nations who are less equipped to deal with them.”

Further, Singer said, America’s violation of the Geneva Conventions, its exemption from the International Criminal Court, and its efforts to challenge the ICC’s legitimacy threaten to undermine the rule of law. Urging America to sincerely support the United Nations, he said, “If we allow preemptive strikes to become international law, we allow war to occur more easily. We must work with the UN to advance global cooperation.”

Bianca Sepulveda, AB’04

Many a magic being

A menagerie of witches, black cats, angels (and their devilish counterparts), pirates, and princesses were among the 900 guests who filed past the flapper and the American Indian to take their Mandel Hall seats Saturday night. An annual tradition, the music department’s Halloween concert brought out a costumed crowd for this year’s Ring of Destiny, featuring selections from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Götterdämmerung, and Die Walküre and Johann de Meij and Howard Shore’s music from The Lord of the Rings performed by the University Symphony Orchestra. Not to be out-spectacled by the audience, the musicians also were disguised—as elves, clowns, vampires, and what might have been a strawberry. Conductor Barbara Schubert appeared as a Viking, making a grand entrance on a wheeled longboat.

Reading from her golden shield, Schubert told the audience to expect “to meet many a magic being” in the selections, and she prefaced each piece with a rhymed synopsis describing the music’s fairytale narrative. Refusing to be distracted by false ears, lab goggles, and a young audience prone to unprompted claps and screams, the orchestra thundered through the pieces, accompanied during “Ride of the Valkyries” by the Hyde Park School of Ballet professional track dancers performing in the aisles. After the show—the first of two—the crowd gathered up its cowboy hats and prosthetic tails, streamed through a waiting throng of ghosts and goblins, and ventured out into the Halloween night.

By A.L.M.

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The price of the election

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Two days before Senator John Kerry conceded the 2004 presidential race to President George W. Bush, the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a debate on the two candidates' likely economic impacts.

The event, held at the Graduate School of Business' new Hyde Park Center, pitted GSB professor Austan Goolsbee—an economic adviser to the Kerry campaign—against Randall Kroszner—a 2001–03 member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. They argued to a capacity crowd of polo shirt- and khakis-wearing grad students grabbing lunch in between classes and job interviews.

An animated Goolsbee criticized Bush's fiscal responsibility during the past four years: “It would be like the week before your kid goes to college, you max out all of your credit cards.” Bush's “stimulus” policies, he said, are supposed to take effect within the next six years, but the government has signed itself up for a decade of debt. “What does it take for a president to be voted out of office?

Kroszner rejected the deficit's importance, primarily arguing that there has been little evidence that the long-term interest rate will increase. Because the country's debt-to-GDP ratio is relatively low—particularly when compared to the Reagan years—lenders know that the country won't have a problem paying deficits back, he said.

The two speakers also debated the growing Social Security crisis. With the baby-boom generation pressing the system's resources, Bush's policy would create tax-relieved personal retirement accounts that create a long-term fix, said Kroszner: “It has to be now or later, and we're willing to pay more now to save later.”

But Goolsbee argued that the 2001 stock market recession reminded people why they don't invest privately and that Bush's projections of investment returns have not been risk-adjusted. He expected Kerry to restore the 1993 Clinton tax code and use surpluses to save Social Security—a plan that Bush “hacked to pieces with bad fiscal policy.”

Two days later, with Republicans expanding control of all three government branches, Bush's fiscal policy will almost certainly be able to test the waters again.

By S.I.A.

Photo: (from left to right) Randall Kroszner (Bush), Saul Levmore (moderator), and Austan Goolsbee (Kerry).

A lesson in jumping to bird-brained conclusions

For some time tales have circulated around campus that a peregrine falcon, until recently an endangered species, had taken up residence among the Gothic towers of the main quads—the urban equivalent of cliffs and ledges. So when Mandy Collins, a Hospitals housekeeper, came to my office looking for a guy with a camera to photograph the “giant killer bird in the courtyard,” I assumed that was what she had found.

We ran down to a big plate-glass window about 10 feet away from a crow-sized, brown and white bird, perched in a tree in the courtyard next to Chicago Lying-in Hospital. Below it were a pigeon’s bloody remains. In hospitals death is supposed to occur behind closed doors, so we had taken only a few pictures before a two-man clean-up crew arrived: one to gather and prepare the prey’s feathers and bones for burial and one to protect his colleague from the predator—who promptly flew away.

Pointing a camera out the window in a busy narrow hallway drew a crowd. “This is a peregrine falcon,” I told the onlookers, “the world's fastest animal. They swoop down on other birds and knock them out of the air.”

A quick Google Images search confirmed my impression—the bird must be a peregrine falcon. But within an hour Mandy came back to tell me our bird was a Cooper’s hawk. A neurologist had pointed it out in a book. I scoffed.

We looked at the prints of our bird, the Web’s peregrine falcons, and the book. It was a Cooper’s hawk–also until recently endangered, also fond of pigeons, also a cliff dweller and pretty darn speedy—but not the world’s fastest.

Later that day, to see if the bird returned, I passed by the window. It was the same spot where I had my only previous memorable bird-watching experience, again punctuated with snap judgments. George Block, a feared, renowned, foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping, ex-Marine surgeon, swooped down on me in the hall, grabbed my arm, and dragged me to that window. I expected complaints about litter, or worse, but he pointed out the window to a big red bud tree in full bloom. Smack in the middle sat a bright red cardinal. “Look at that,” he said. “Isn’t that the most beautiful goddam thing you ever saw?”

By John Easton, AM’77, U of C Hospitals public affairs

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Photos by John Easton.

All the world's a poem

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“Who will be the first man to forget a continent?” the poet read. “The great forgetters were hard at work.” Drawing the audience into a reflective trance Thursday afternoon, Mark Strand, the Andrew MacLeish distinguished service professor in the Committee on Social Thought, gave the Divinity School’s 2004 John Nuveen Lecture.

Creating a mood sometimes grave, sometimes humorous, he led his listeners into a realm of lyrical imagery, addressing themes of transience, apathy, consciousness, desire, and death. “I am not thinking of death but death is thinking of me,” he recited from his unpublished work 2002, due out in 2006. Besides new poetry, Strand, the 1990–91 U.S. poet laureate, also analyzed passages from his Pulitzer Prize–winning Blizzard of One (Knopf, 1999) and The Continuous Life (Knopf, 1990).

A painter turned poet, Strand often crafts his verses as pictures, he said. “The idea of shaping something poetically is like painting; my intent is to first establish order.” He initially drew inspiration from artists and writers he encountered as a young man. “This has been a very rich century for American poetry,” he said, citing Donald Justice, Wallace Stevens (whose namesake award Strand won last month), Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. “Having read these poems early on in my teenage years,” he recalled, “initiated me into the realm of imagination where I could get away from the world around me.”

By Bianca Sepulveda, AB’04

Cleaning the stacks

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On the Regenstein Library’s first floor, about 20 browsers juggle winter jackets as they leaf through dusty books. Choreographing his steps through the unforgiving, narrow aisles, one man struggles to pass a younger guy, who is engaged in an old edition of a medical text, Sudden Coronary Death. The next aisle over a girl smirks as she lifts Men of Ancient Iowa from a shelf marked “history.” Meanwhile, in a roomier corner, an older woman huddles over The Meaning of Meaning.

This is no ordinary day in the stacks. On Monday the Reg kicked off its biannual, weeklong book sale. More than 10,000 old and duplicate books create an impressive labyrinth, tucked away in Room 120.

The Monday shoppers take no chances. These early birds get first pick at the widest variety of books. And variety there is; subjects range from computer science to Judaica. As the sale’s inventory diminishes over the week, so will prices. A hardback that goes for $20 on Monday will command only $5 dollars on Wednesday. If it hasn’t been sold by Saturday, the sale’s last day, the book is free.

Proceeds benefit the library.

By Meredith Meyer, ’07

Hittite parade

“Everybody knows about Egypt. Everybody knows about Mesopotamia,” grumbled Theo van den Hout, professor of Hittite and Anatolian languages. “But we always have to explain what Anatolia is.” The occasion of van den Hout’s lament, Thursday night’s Oriental Institute broadcast of The Hittites: The Empire that Changed the World, was also an occasion for hope: “With this movie, I don’t think we ever have to explain it again.”

After a brief introduction by director and Turkish filmmaker Tolga Ornek and a warning—“You’re going to get two hours of Hittites with no breaks”—the capacity audience learned that Anatolia (which encompassed modern-day Turkey) witnessed the rise and fall of the Hittites, who reigned from 1650 to 1180 B.C. During its zenith the Hittite empire rivaled the glory of neighboring Egypt, but now it’s “an obscure footnote on the pages of history.” As a remedy, the film reanimates the Hittites’ past, exploring their rituals, economy, laws, cities, and extensive pantheon of gods, both their own and those of conquered populations. Indeed, the documentary explains, one of the Hittites’ greatest accomplishments was to absorb and perpetuate the cultures of their Near Eastern neighbors. Even after their ultimate decline, the Hittites’ legacy included religious, military, and diplomatic innovations preserved throughout the region and the world.

The film, too, had an impact. As the lights came up one audience member mused to another, “That made me want to go study more history.”

A.L.M.

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Photos: scenes from The Hittites: The Empire that Changed the World.

Group hangs antiviolence message

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“Don’t lament, get consent,” directs a laminated, orange-construction-paper sign, pinned to a clothesline. “Only yes means yes,” reads a red sheet. The two clotheslines, strung on the main quads by Resources for Sexual Violence Prevention to mark Sexual Assault Awareness Week, each hold more than a dozen such messages. The outdoor signs draw attention to more displays that will hang in the Reynolds Club later this week, as Chicago participates in the national Clothesline Project, in which sexually abused women hang T-shirts with antiviolence messages.

Related events this week include a Center for Gender Studies discussion titled Kobe and Beyond: A Look at Sexual Assault, Race, and the Media; two Ratner self-defense classes; a talk called The Political Process and Efforts to Address Violence Against Women; and a Friday creative forum for assault survivors to create their own clothesline T-shirts.

By A.M.B.

Burning discussion

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Sometimes war movies have the unfortunate trait of applying to present-day situations, as students, faculty, and other adults pointed out Tuesday night at Doc Films after watching the Italian film Burn! (Queimada), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.

Screened as part of the Human Rights Program’s ten-part “Occupation, Colonialism, Human Rights” series, Burn! is a 1970 sequel of sorts to The Battle of Algiers (1966), but unlike the latter film’s historical, docudrama setting, Burn! tells the story of a fictional, 19th-century, Portuguese-occupied island. It chronicles ambivalent, drunken Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando), a British agent sent to Queimada to start a native rebellion against the Portuguese sugar monopoly. Ten years later he is forced to return to the island and kill the leader, José Dalores, he had mentored. The movie’s themes were provocative enough to Spaniards that, in order to prevent the film from being censored, Pontecorvo changed the island’s occupier to Portugal from Spain and dubbed Spanish-speaking natives accordingly.

The hour-long discussion afterward, led by associate history professor Dain Borges, revolved largely around the film’s historical basis. Borges argued that the movie’s plot most resembles the Cuban and Haitian revolutions of the mid-19th century, but that it also makes deliberate commentary on the Vietnamese and African decolonization movements happening around the film’s release. Students added comparisons to present-day Iraq, noting in particular the guerilla tactics.

When one student pressed Borges on why the audience needed to ground the film historically, he admitted that the movie might be best characterized as a more universal “opera of human emotions” with its powerful, if obtrusive, music and focus on facial expressions. He criticized the film’s concession to story-telling conventions, such as the natives’ dependency on a foreign white man to start a movement. “The same way it irks me that people say Indians couldn’t build the pyramids without Chinese or Egyptian influence,” Borges said, “it irks me that these slaves couldn’t start a revolution without an Englishman parachuting in.”

By S.I.A.

Keeps rainin' all the time

About 50 guests left behind gray skies and misty air for a lighter take on stormy weather inside Fulton Recital Hall Thursday. Three petite, white-haired women rode the Goodspeed elevator to the fourth-floor auditorium, humming old showtunes. The trio joined other early birds in the lobby, dishing on a recent AARP Magazine article. But once the doors opened, they abandoned talk of cancer, blood pressure, and strokes for an afternoon escape.

At the Music Department’s free noontime concert, “Stormy Weather: Songs from 1933,” the mood was more mirth than melancholy. On a stage set with greenery and a bowl of floating candles, soprano Jess Cullinan and pianist Richard Plotkin bowed and then launched into the Ted Koehler (lyrics) and Harold Arlen (music) classic. A project assistant and computer tech in music, Cullinan may not have known “why there’s no sun in the sky,” but she did explain her selections: “I chose the year 1933 for Billie Holiday”—the year of the crooner’s first recording—“and for the music,” all Top 40 hits from movies or Broadway. With that explanation out of the way, Cullinan and music graduate student Plotkin carried on, working through 13 more numbers, including “The Song is You” and “Love is the Sweetest Thing.”

Finished 45 minutes later, the duo bowed again and exited stage left. Back in the lobby the crowd lingered, avoiding what awaited them outside, weather- or otherwise.

By M.L.

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Photos: 20th Century Fox 1943.

Genocide: not a word to take lightly

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With PowerPoint presentations, statistics, and photos, panelists from around the globe lectured on what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis—the unfolding genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. Packed beyond capacity with students, faculty, and community members, the panel discussion took place Thursday evening at Ida Noyes Library.

Government forces and Janjaweed militia have already killed at least 50,000 non-Arab Darfurians and driven more than 1 million villagers from the country. During Sudan’s 21-year civil war, said Suliman Giddo, director of the Darfur Peace and Development Fund, the Khartoum government has tried to crush Darfurian rebels while the nomadic Janjaweed militia has worked to expel the non-Arab population from the land. As a consequence, Giddo noted, “There is no infrastructure for opposition in Sudan.”

The crisis originally stemmed from political tensions associated with the “Islamization” of the community or “the civilization project.” “The [Islamic] government wanted to force the [Darfurian] community to change its fundamental structure,” he explained.

Monitoring the humanitarian effort’s status, John Heffernan, an investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, showed images from his two-week visit to refugee camps along the Sudan-Chad border, where 200,000 refugees remain in exile. “Darfur is the size of Texas and is virtually inaccessible by outsiders,” Heffernan explained. “These people have no access to water, medicine, or adequate shelter. Unless there is outside assistance to people, they will have a difficult time surviving.”

The final panelist, Ami Henson, an officer on the Sudan Task Force at USAID, discussed the inherent tension between performing humanitarian aid and assisting human-rights investigations. “Humanitarian workers do not want to get [thrown out] of the country and lose their access to the population,” she said,” so we don’t ask certain questions that human-rights workers would.”

Above all, the panelists agreed, an accord between the government in the north and the Darfurians in the south must forge a fundamental change in ruling structure and involve more substantial action by other nations. “There has been no intervention because this is a sovereign country even though it has been recognized that there is a genocide going on,” Heffernan argued. “How much does a country have to do before it must forfeit sovereignty?”

Sponsored by the Giving Tree, the Human Rights Program, Amnesty International’s U of C chapter, the Center for International Studies, and U of C UNICEF, the discussion headlined this year’s Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week.

By Bianca Sepulveda, AB’04

Photo: divinity School doctoral candidate Noah Salomon, AM'01, moderates Thursday's "Crisis in Sudan" panel discussion.

Photo by Bianca Sepulveda, AB’04.

Food for debate

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Last night in a very crowded Mandel Hall, a panel of academic-gowned U of C professors solemnly weighed the pros and cons of two popular Jewish holiday foods. The ritual debate, presented by Hillel and sponsored by the Neubauer Family Foundation of Philadelphia, opened with a brief set by the University of Chicago Klezmer Band. Then Hillel’s Rabbi David M. Rosenberg welcomed all to the 58th annual debate, offering newcomers a helpful translation: the Yiddish word for “hamentashen” is “hamentashen.”

Following Rosenberg was longtime moderator and philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB’62, who, for numerous and numerological reasons, announced, “Welcome to the 60th Latke-Hamentash Debate.” Cohen introduced the first panelist, Modern Hebrew Literature professor Menachem Brinker, who suggested using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a model for solving the far more controversial battle over the respective merits of the Chanukah potato pancake and the traditional Purim cookie.

Eschewing the political for the material, physics professor Robert Geroch showed a slide of what he claimed was the first page of Albert Einstein’s “On the fundamental significance of the speed of latke,” which, as with the first page of any scientific paper, came complete with abstract and introduction. He then demonstrated, using a giant pendulum made of a suspended bowling ball, how the hamentash defies the laws of physics.

Latkes and hamentashen were also used as symbols of the traditional rift between German and Eastern European Jews in America—SSA associate professor Harold Pollack asserted that the former prefer hamentashen and the latter latkes, laying out his points in the form of a thorough parody of Philip Roth’s [AM’55] Goodbye, Columbus. And finally, music professor Philip Gossett revealed that Italian operas were all written by a tailor named Moishe with a penchant for pseudonyms.

After the debate, audience members cast ballots in favor of latkes or hamentashen and proceeded to Hutchinson Commons to make a less intellectual and more direct comparison.

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Photo: debate moderator Ted Cohen, AB'62, feigns ballot box stuffing in favor of his choice, the latke (bottom).

Two for the Rhodes

Two College alumni have joined the ranks of Bill Clinton, Naomi Wolf, and Wesley Clark. Announced November 20, Rhodes Scholarship winners Ian Desai, AB’04, and Andrew Kim, AB’04, along with 30 other Americans, will receive tuition and a living stipend for two years of study at Oxford University. Desai, an ancient-studies major, plans to explore the links between South Asia and Greece, both modern and ancient. Kim, a political-science major, will use his scholarship to study refugee issues and human rights. Desai and Kim bring Chicago’s Rhodes total to 39.

Beyond the University of Chicago Chronicle, Desai and Kim have made headlines in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, and an Associated Press article ran in many papers, including the New York Times.

By A.L.M.

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Photos: Andrew Kim, AB'04 (left); Ian Desai, AB'04 (right).

Frolicking farce

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In his revival of The Importance of Being Earnest, at Court Theatre through December 26, director Charles Newell punctuates Oscar Wilde’s verbal acrobatics with aerobic choreography. Actors pose, prance, and leap about the sets—a miniature London cityscape that doubles as Algernon “Algy” Moncrieff’s morning-room, a manor house garden with Astroturf hedges, and the same house’s library, hedges transformed with purple velour and gold braiding into bookcases and hassocks. If that’s not enough, an onstage pianist tickles the ivories on a white baby grand at the rear of the stage, underscoring key phrases to comic effect.

Subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” the play about love among English society’s leisure class delivers more than its share of one-liners, from Algy’s assessment of his own piano playing—“I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression”—to Jack (née Earnest) Worthing’s rueful realization that “it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” Although the theatergoers have heard many of Wilde’s bon mots before, the actors garner fresh laughs.

At times it seems as if Court’s cavorting cast will take a tumble over the gymnastic set, but Earnest concludes as Fiction (at least according to the play’s requisite governess) is meant to: the good end happily.

By M.R.Y.

Photos: Lance Stuart Baker as Algernon Moncrieff and Sean Allan Krill as Jack Worthing (top); Lance Stuart Baker as Algernon Moncrieff and Cristen Paige as Cecily Cardew (bottom).

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

U of Cers predict financial future

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The first of the suits to arrive, Joel Stern, MBA’64, joked with reporters gathered at the Chicago Marriott Downtown Wednesday for the Graduate School of Business’s 43rd annual financial forecast. “I’ll try to be controversial, try to make it valuable,” laughed Stern, managing partner and chief executive officer of Stern Stewart & Company.

But neither he nor economics professor Randall Kroszner’s predictions for the upcoming year would rock the business world that morning, or at an afternoon luncheon with some 900 alumni and executives. With guesstimates including that the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) would grow about 3.8 or 3.9 percent and consumer spending 2.9 or 3.1 percent, they painted a rosy picture.

“The economic statistics are very strong,” said Kroszner, who served on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003. Dismissing negative media reports, he argued, “I think we should show the economy a little bit of respect.”

Stern agreed. Criticizing the Kerry-Edwards campaign’s claim of a sluggish economy, he noted that as of September 30 the 2004 GDP had increased about 4.5 percent. “It turns out we were very lucky this year,” despite such obstacles as soaring oil costs, which he sees dropping in 2005.

Tempering Kroszner and Stern’s good news, Marvin Zonis, professor emeritus of business administration, offered a political perspective on the financial climate. “U.S. economic competitiveness has been declining,” Zonis noted. With the country off track in Iraq and facing conflicts over nuclear proliferation in Iran and elsewhere, he argued, an even lower dollar value and slower growth seem likely.

By M.L.

Photo (top): Kroszner, Stern, Zonis (from left).

Photos by Dan Dry.

Defending NAFTA

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In the middle of a packed Mandel Hall a College third-year held up a sign that read “Salinas+NAFTA=Criminal.” Several rows ahead of him, about 20 Mexican American graduate students watched the stage. All eyes were fixed on the compact, neatly dressed man at the podium—former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Salinas, a driving force behind the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), offered an unflinching defense of the 1994 law. His Friday visit was his first to the University since 1991, when he came to promote the pending agreement, and the first in a lecture series on NAFTA sponsored by the Katz Center for Mexican Studies.

Salinas commended the Katz Center and the city of Chicago’s Mexican community, the second largest in the United States. Betraying a fierce nationalism, he lamented that Mexico has continued in the past decade to suffer high numbers of emigrations at the U.S. border (According to the U.S. embassy in Mexico, the estimated unauthorized resident population from Mexico increased from about 2 million in 1990 to 4.8 million in January 2000.) “It is a fatality of geography and a destiny of history that we happened to be neighbors.”

Still, he rejected assertions that NAFTA was responsible for the emigrations, attributing them instead to the three-year-old U.S. recession, which has resulted in a stagnant Mexican economy.

By Meredith Meyer, ’07

Broadcasting trust

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Poised to reinvent themselves, public-television leaders gathered last Thursday and Friday at a conference organized by the University’s Cultural Policy Center and held at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “The new world of media waits for no one,” Carroll Joynes, the center’s executive director, said in his opening remarks to a 200-member audience. Pat Mitchell, president of PBS, concurred: “Technology is rewriting and reinventing the way we do everything.” Public television, she said, must ensure its place in the new-media landscape.

That place should be a “true alternative,” Ken Auletta, media critic for the New Yorker magazine, emphasized in his presentation, challenging PBS to keep in mind its biggest asset: trust. Many panelists raised concerns about political bias, the representation of minority voices, and growing commercialization.

In nearly all of the conference discussions, money emerged as a central problem. Public broadcasting, multiple speakers noted, is grossly underfunded. As one remedy, Mitchell announced the Enhanced Funding Initiative, an expert panel formed to find new ways to put PBS on secure financial footing.

The most promising way to achieve that goal, suggested Jerold M. Starr, executive director of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting, is to form a coalition with universities, public-interest groups, and art institutions. Joining up with a museum, it seems, may be the way to keep public television out of one.

By Sibylle Salewski

Photos: Pat Mitchell, PBS president (top); the conference was held at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (bottom).

Photos by Lloyd DeGrane.

Much-kneaded break

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It’s close to 1 a.m. on Sunday night; the recorded sounds of indie-rock music pulsate from a pair of large speakers. A line of students snakes through the building, spilling outside onto the rain-soaked sidewalk. They are all waiting to be served.

A scene from one of Chicago’s newest clubs? Not even close. These patrons are clutching book bags, not beers. At the University of Chicago this time of year, both sleeping and hanging out are pretty much unheard of. Tonight, or rather this morning, is different. Though finals will begin in only a few hours, hundreds of students have jammed into the Reynolds Club for the annual Midnight Breakfast, an event sponsored by the Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities (ORCSA) featuring pancakes, eggs, and sausage—and a much-needed break from studying.

This year, with grant money from the U.S. Department of Education’s drug-free schools program, the Student Care Center also offers free chair massages, given by two members of Chicago Massage Professionals. About 30 students take advantage of the seven-minute treatments, a part of the event used as a model for other colleges across the country.

As things start to wind down and the conversation switches from holiday presents back to Plato, the students seem eager to head back to the books.

By Dan Dry

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Photos: (clockwise from top-right) Martyna Dubensky of Chicago Massage Professionals gives 4th-year Matt Graham a chair massage around 11:30 pm; Christin Davis, a first-year MAPSS graduate student, works away on a take-home exam near midnight, apparently oblivious to the mass of students lined up for the Midnight Breakfast; the line stretches out the Reynolds Club door into the rain on 57th Street; while some students chow down, hundreds wait to be served; students and food-service employees serve the free Midnight Breakfast.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Apostolic art

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Suspended between wooden pews and soaring stained glass, 13 abstract portraits of the apostles flank Rockefeller Chapel's stone walls. Painted in reds, blues, yellows, and grays by Swedish artist Michel Östlund, each 4-by-6-foot figure reinterprets an apostle and explores characteristics including longing, love, betrayal, doubt, and wisdom. Part of a world tour, Apostles will be shown through March 30. On February 25 Rockefeller will celebrate the exhibit with a musical program, “In the Glorious Company of the Apostles.”

By A.L.M.

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Photo (upper-right): Artist Michel Ostland at the show's opening. (photo by Dan Dry).

Bottom row photos by Amber Lee Mason.

If you direct it, they will come

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Academy Award–winning director Mike Nichols, X’53, returned to the Windy City last week to begin technical rehearsals for a medieval musical comedy.

Best known for the The Graduate, Nichols has new projects on both the big screen and the big stage—one heavy, the other light. His film Closer, a look at adultery based on Patrick Marbers’s play, has earned five Golden Globe nominations, including best director and best motion picture–drama. Back in Chicago, the musical Monty Python’s Spamalot, which begins pre-Broadway previews December 21 at the Shubert, has his attention.

Nichols got his start in local theater. In a December 10 Chicago Sun-Times article he recalled attending a production of The Matchmaker while at the University. “I saw that show three times, and by the third time—about 20 minutes into the first act—I thought: Now I know what style is. It’s starting something in such a manner that what needs to happen later in the show can come straight out of that beginning. And you can’t fake it; it must all really unfold in front of the audience.”

The Nichols style—an ironic sensibility, as one film writer put it—has won a loyal following. Commanding such big-name actors as Jude Law and Julia Roberts (Closer), David Hyde Pierce and Hank Azaria (Spamalot) doesn’t hurt with the audience either.

By M.L.

Photo: Broadway in Chicago.

Red, white, and blah

The Renaissance Society’s latest exhibition, A Perfect Union…More or Less, portrays a decidedly disillusioned view of current government affairs. Mary Ellen Carroll’s 24-photo series (Federal, 2004) depicts a day in the life of Los Angeles’s bland federal building. Dominic McGill’s black-and-white mural (Project for a New American Century, 2004) locates war-on-terror imagery and language in a haunted forest. In one of Joeff Davis’s photographs a woman with a blank stare carries a “people of compassion” sign at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Rob Conger’s woven yarn-on-canvas mesh Greenspan Praying (2001) shows the Federal Reserve chairman in a meditative pose, hands pressed together. As a whole the exhibit reflects a confused American political identity, particularly in light of the November election, on display through December 19.

By A.M.B.

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Photos (from left to right): Joeff Davis, "People of Compassion," floor of the Republican National Convention, New York, New York, 2004; Mary Ellen Carroll, "Federal," 2004, 24 C-prints, ed. 5; Van McElwee, "Flag and its Shadow," 2003, DVD projection with sound; Dominic McGill, "Project for a New American Century," 2004, graphite on paper.

Marty Center aims to provoke e-comment

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Perhaps timing is everything—on the Martin Marty Center’s Religion and Culture Web Forum, anyway. So far Bruce Lincoln’s essay “The Theology of George W. Bush,” posted a month before the election, has received the most online response. The 29 related comments—by far eclipsing the typical two, three, or four in other months—include an exchange between Lincoln, the Caroline E. Haskell professor in the Divinity School; Hugh Urban, AM’92, PhD’98, who teaches at Ohio State; and other readers. This month Divinity School professor and Martin Marty Center director Wendy Doniger writes on “The Mythology of Self-Imitation in Passing: Race, Gender, and Politics”. That essay has elicited two responses.

By A.M.B.

Photo: Bruce Lincoln.

If you need us, we'll be by the fire

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With 8 degrees on the thermometer and the holidays approaching, UChiBLOGo is taking a break until January 3. In the meantime, here are some fun indoor activities. If, like in Chicago, it’s too cold in your town to go outside and make a snowman, stay inside and prepare a mummy for burial. The Oriental Institute shows you how. Or try to play “Jingle Bells” on the OI’s Artifact Timeline buttons. If art, rather than artifacts, suits you, play around on the Smart Museum’s kids page.

Happy holidays from UChiBLOGo.

By A.M.B.

Happy birthday to us

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The Magazine began this blog almost a year ago, one week into Winter Quarter 2004, with a dispatch from former intern Phoebe Maltz, ’05, who was studying abroad in Paris. In 2005 UChiBLOGo has come full circle. Maltz rejoins the staff as an intern in her last College year. And Northern Exposure, the thrice-weekly photograph of Hull and Cobb gates, now has a year’s worth of entries, which can be seen individually or in a new yearlong slideshow.

The slideshow marks Northern Exposure’s conclusion. This quarter the blog has a different feature in its upper-left corner: Postcards from the Quads, a staff-chosen daily image. It won’t have the same-time, same-place quality of Northern Exposure but instead will take viewers around campus, depending on where the interesting scenes are. Today’s photo, courtesy Alumni News Editor Amber Lee Mason, AB’03, shows the rain dripping off a leafless tree in Harper Quad’s southeast corner.

Coming spring quarter: UChiBLOGo gets a Web cam.

A.M.B.

Cast away

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Would-be actors streamed into Cobb Hall last night for University Theater’s winter-quarter auditions. Looking nervous, they stood in the hallway waiting to be called, reading scripts aloud either alone or with partners. Current UT members sat at tables marked with different play titles, trying to lure students into their audition rooms. Among others, directors sought casts for The Crucible, which will show 10th week; Poe, showing 8th; and Muffet’s Leap, 8th and 9th week, produced by the University’s new student-run production company, Naked Theater, based in Burton-Judson’s basement. Also being cast were the Winter Workshops, plays with shorter rehearsal times and no tech staffs.

UT audition liaison Pete Sloane, ’06, was impressed with the turnout. “The directors are happy with the amount of people showing up,” he said. The auditions, open to the public, attract mainly undergraduates. Grad students, said UT assistant production manager Sarah Nerboso, ’05, tend to be wary of the plays’ time commitments, but they “are very welcome.” Women candidates generally outnumber men, said Sloane, though female and male parts are roughly equal in number, leaving more disappointed Juliets than Romeos.

Interested in seeing your name, well, not quite in lights, but on a UT program? You haven’t missed your chance. Auditions will be held again tonight in Cobb, 7–10 p.m.

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Poetry is cool at school

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Poetry draws a young crowd these days—at least when longtime Lab Schools teacher John O’Connor, AB’86, MAT’87, has the stage. About 50 fans, many former students, packed 57th Street Books last night to hear him discuss his new book, Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing, and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom.

“I found school profoundly dull and artificial,” he began. “The sort of mission I feel I’m on is to make school as exciting as the rest of the world.”

Now at New Trier Township High School, O’Connor won praise at Lab for his inventive teaching style, particularly when it came to poetry, an oft-dreaded subject. He demystified verse by having students write about their own life experiences—and making it fun.

“I didn’t feel pressure for it to be really profound or good or anything,” recalled 16-year-old Alice Grossman, who took O’Connor’s class as a freshman and in summer school.

Like a proud parent, he believes his protégés are good, featuring their work in his book and calling on some to read. The poems accompany instructional tools, including more than 25 activities.

Rather than end with a lesson, O’Connor, looking more student than teacher in cargo pants and hiking boots, played his guitar. “Don’t you want to come back to Hyde Park?” one parent called out.

“Yes,” he said, “let’s do this every January 6.”

By M.L.

MLK events span disciplines

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A keynote address by Kweisi Mfume, the recently retired NAACP president, tops a list of weeklong, campuswide Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration highlights, the University’s most ambitious celebration of the civil-rights icon to date. Mfume will speak on “living the legacy,” the week’s theme, next Monday, January 17, at noon in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

The activities, said President Don Randel and Provost Richard Saller in a December 30 e-mail, are meant to “examine and celebrate Dr. King’s message from a number of disciplines and perspectives.” The academic events include tonight’s screening of Brother Outsider: The Life of Baynard Rustin and a subsequent discussion led by associate professor Jacqueline Stewart, AM’93, PhD’99. On Tuesday longtime Hyde Park resident Roderick Pugh, PhD’49, discusses what the neighborhood was like during the Civil Rights movement. Friday explores multicultural arts with “Roots and Rhymes: Spoken Word/Open Mic” at Uncle Joe’s Coffee Shop. Saturday’s focus is community service, Sunday features Gospel Fest, and on Monday—in addition to Mfume’s talk—the SSA presents a celebration featuring Camille Quinn, AM’98.

By A.M.B.

Photo: Kweisi Mfume.

Talking and eating in the library

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On a typical Tuesday evening Broadview Hall’s library contains some students hunched over laptops, a few seated around a table working on a problem set. But last night at 8 o’clock it was jam-packed with residents, there to meet with the University’s president, who just happened to be stopping by. “An Evening of Conversation about Music and Other Topics with President Don Randel” was presented by the Broadview RH and RA staff, house staff, kitchen managers, and program coordinators. Though music was the promised discussion topic, Randel assured, “I’m happy to talk about anything. Well, more or less anything.” Over coffee, tea, cookies, and fruit, he and dorm residents discussed matters from the history of musicology to Chicago’s “Uncommon Application.”

Answering students’ questions, he explained why both music and the University of Chicago play vital roles in the world. “Music has never been seen to be essential to the national defense,” said Randel, lamenting the lack of government arts, education, and research funding. Recent budget cuts in those areas, he said, would “undermine our future.” And his favorite art has such practical applications: the one necessary question to determine roommate compatibility, he said, is, “What kind of music do you like?” He added, “From that [information] you invent an entire personality.”

Randel believes Chicago’s personality is different from other elite universities. When peer-institution alumni discuss what they got out of college, he noted, they mention close friendships and spouses. Chicago alumni, on the other hand, often say the University “taught me how to think.” (They do not say, he pointed out, that they were taught “what to think.”) “We are not interested in trying to look like every other institution in America,” he said. “For the right person, [Chicago] is the only place.”

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Classroom wizardry

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Despite the presence of two dozen grad students gathered for the Divinity School’s Thursday afternoon Pedagogy and Professionalization Workshop, Swift 106, with its paneled walls and mullioned windows, looked like a classroom where the young Harry Potter would feel at home. The day’s guest—Jonathan Z. Smith, the Robert O. Anderson distinguished service professor in the Humanities in the College—even had the flowing hair and beard of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

Indeed Smith, who coordinates the Religion and Humanities program, approached his topic, “Approaching the Undergraduate Classroom,” with Dumbledore’s wry sagacity. And, like Dumbledore, he told the truth: even after decades of teaching, he still visits the classroom the day before a course begins (“I know what I didn’t know at the beginning, to check to make sure there’s chalk”). And he still spends a sleepless pre-class night rewriting the first day’s lesson plan and perusing the reading one more time. The process “does not get any easier, and it shouldn’t. It’s an awesome responsibility.”

To meet that responsibility, Smith suggested practical strategies: Keep a journal for each course, recording successes, surprises, readings that might work. Keep office hours religiously (and be predictably available at other times in a place where students can join you, “but never be distressed if no one comes”). Remember “the very first rule of teaching: assume nothing; make everything explicit,” because although professors design courses “answering our questions,” students “are listening for answers to their questions.”

For Smith, the challenge of the undergraduate classroom is also its magic: “I want to be with people who shout, ‘Eureka!’ all the time.”

By M.R.Y.

Something to crow about

Featuring dances, skits, fight scenes, and a rainbow of costumes and characters, the Chinese Undergraduate Student Association’s (CUSA) Saturday night New Year extravaganza, Big Swords, Big Guns, followed dual narratives of ancient sword masters bent on revenge and turn-of-the-century Shanghai gangs chafing at colonial British dominance. The occasionally slapstick action was interspersed with choreographed musical numbers, ranging from the traditional handkerchief dance to Plum Blossoms (Remix), a modern take on 1920s dance-hall culture.

A crowd of about 700 students, sponsors, and family members offered up hearty applause, hoots, whistles, and a few roaring laughs for the Mandel Hall spectacle, celebrating the Year of the Rooster, and received in return the good-luck blessing of a well-performed lion dance.

By A.L.M.

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An argument against nationalism

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Distinguished and erudite, British journalist and historian Anatol Lieven unabashedly proffered, “America may be spreading progress in other countries, but not democracy.” Continuing the Center for International Studies’ World Beyond the Headlines lecture series Tuesday night at International House, Lieven, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former correspondent for the London Times and the Financial Times, discussed his newest book, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2004).

According to Lieven, America’s patriotic character embodies two contradictory elements: thesis—a civic nationalism espousing liberty, democracy, and the rule of law, which he calls the American creed—and antithesis, a Jacksonian nationalism rooted “in the aggrieved, embittered, and defensive White America, centered in the American South.” One reason he wrote the book, he said, “was to remind Americans of the great many critiques of America’s culture and past. Dividing American nationalism between a thesis and antithesis would qualify some belief in American exceptionalism.”

While the American creed is ultimately optimistic and universalist, Lieven continued, “the danger of the American antithesis displays the liberal imperialist sense that nothing but total victory will do, leading to unrealistic and frustrated goals.” He concluded, “America keeps a fine house, but in its cellar there lives a demon, whose name is nationalism.”

By Bianca Sepulveda, AB’04

Photo: Anatol Lieven.

Classical piano meets art rock

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Christopher O’Riley opened his sold-out show at Mandel Hall with the first song from Radiohead’s album Pablo Honey , because, he said, it is “the only pop song [he knows] in 28:3 time signature.” A classically trained pianist and host of a classical-music radio show, O’Riley’s concert did not feature the Mozart or Shostakovich pieces for which he is well-known. Instead it showcased Radiohead songs O’Riley had personally transcribed (and recorded).

Neither definitively rock nor classical, the concert drew from both genres. Dressed in all black at a grand Steinway, between songs the self-effacing host maintained a casual conversation with the Radiohead fans in the crowd about his obsession with the band. He also held a continuous dialogue with the sheet music: the audience watched his face as he mouthed lyrics and, as each song ended, closed his eyes and threw himself back.

The show was the seventh annual Regents Park Discovery Concert put on by Chicago Presents. O’Riley returns to Mandel Hall tonight to play with the Miró Quartet.

By Meredith Meyer ’06

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Road movie with a twist

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The Adventures of Felix (Drôle de Félix, 2000), the second film by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau—on campus last week for a two-day Center for Gender Studies film conference—employs the familiar road-trip genre, following a young man on a quest for a father he has never met. Felix is a young Frenchman of Arab descent, gay, and HIV positive. During his journey across France he encounters characters including a racist thug and an elderly woman who not only takes him in but who also shares his love of a morning soap opera and his need for a large pill organizer. Though Felix never finds his father, he learns some lessons about paternity from a little boy, who matter-of-factly explains that his own biological father, those of his half-siblings, and even his mother’s current boyfriend are all “dad.”

After the screening, held last Saturday in Cobb Hall’s Film Studies Center, the filmmakers discussed the movie with the audience.image: uchiblogo “The film wasn’t marketed as a gay film in France,” Ducastel said, but rather as mainstream fare. Martineau added that not everyone who saw Felix in France even understood that its main character—who is seen taking medications but whose condition is never stated explicitly—is HIV positive. Another challenge, Martineau noted, had nothing to do with identity issues: France is “a small country,” so to “make France look wide” and remain consistent with the typically American road-trip flick, the filmmakers had Felix hitchhike rather than drive or take the train.

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Broomball bombast

Ask anyone to describe modern intramural broomball and you will probably hear some combination of the words “overpaid,” “selfish,” and “immature.” The intellectual variant of ice hockey, broomball has lost its former status as the bourgeois winter sport of choice, thanks to large contracts and enormous product endorsement deals.

Broomball owes its origin to a midcentury obsession with ice sports. After hockey and skating took center stage with the Winter Olympiad, intellectuals—mainly youth at America’s top undergraduate institutions—desired an ice sport of their own, but one unencumbered by the technical and physical demands of skating. These students found their place in broomball. Unable to secure funding for equipment from athletic departments—at the time promoting only “real” sports—these students employed brooms to propel a small ball toward an opposing goal. As the sport ascended from leisure activity to organized athletic event, technologically enhanced broomball sticks came to replace the actual brooms (although historical broomball societies continue to host occasional “olde tyme” matches with brooms).

Amateur play is only the tip of the iceberg: the 15-year-old National American Continental Broomball League (NACBL) now has 20 teams in 16 metro areas (New York has four teams). Since its inception the league has seen the average player salary rise from $32,000 to $10.5 million per year, aided by a veritable explosion in attendance and viewership. Experts attribute the slow death of the National Hockey League (NHL) to broomball’s growth.

Despite the market gains, the NACBL has been rocked in recent years by steroid scandals and increasing violence on and off the ice. Fans feel disillusioned with a sport that once encapsulated sportsmanship and friendly competition. This year some 12 Chicago students are offering their own counter-narrative to this dark tale. Calling themselves the Frozen Tsunamis, this ragtag group of undergrads—one of 24 University IM broomball teams—is attempting to take back the sport’s ethical and intellectual genesis.

“Most teams are sponsored and supplied by ‘houses,’ giant multiquad entities that require their players to eat, sleep, and study together,” says Tsunami captain Sam Gill. “Most of these kids don’t even know anyone outside of their houses, which are spookily named after the corporate barons who funded the dormitories in which these broomball automatons live.”

Gill’s goal is to unite students outside the house system. Most call him idealistic, but he believes that his team’s independence might be its biggest advantage. “How did broomball start? A bunch of philosophy students with big glasses and academic scholarships decided they had the same right to ice sports as any huge, juiced-up athlete.”

Their task may seem impossible, but that’s why they call themselves the Frozen Tsunamis. They believe they can stop a tidal wave and, journalistic integrity be damned, this reporter thinks they can do it.

The Tsunamis now stand 1–1, ending Woodward House’s four-year undefeated streak Tuesday night. Their next game, against Wallace House on February 1, will determine if they make the playoffs.

By Sam Gill, ’05

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Photos: Frozen Tsunami captain Sam Gill gives a half-time pep talk (top right); Tsunami Rebecca Searl, '05, adjusts her helmet (bottom left); Woodward team members watch the game (bottom right).

Parchment mystery

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On Saturday the Oriental Institute reopens its east wing, which closed in 1996 for renovations. The new gallery, Empires of the Fertile Crescent: Ancient Assyria, Anatolia, and Israel, explores ancient civilizations including the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Neo-Hittites, the Canaanites, and the early Israelites. Though most of the displayed artifacts were excavated by OI archaeologists in the 1920s and ’30s, one item was purchased by the OI in Jordan in 1956: a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which dates to 50 BC–50 AD. The parchment texts, wrapped in linen and stored in pottery jars, were hidden in the first century AD and recovered between 1947 and 1956. Many of the scrolls contain the earliest known Hebrew copies of Old Testament texts. The OI piece, translated by Norman Golb, the Ludwig Rosenberger professor of Jewish history and civilization, first praises the virtues of Torah study and humility, then decries contrary vices:

1. ..your soul .
2. ..your [hear]t, and in the teach[ing]
3. . you will [re]joice upon it and .
4. . [with] humble heart beseech Him .
5. . and haughtiness of eyes, uncircumcised heart .
6. . haughtiness of heart and anger, anger .

Recent excavations at Khirbet Qumran, where the scrolls were found, show that a controversial theory Golb has long advanced may be true. He has argued that the scrolls were not written exclusively, or even largely, by the poor Essene Jewish sect, as commonly thought, but by a variety of scribes. Ten years of digs turned up artifacts suggesting prosperous inhabitants, not the Essene, had in fact lived there.

By A.M.B.

Photos: the OI case containing the Dead Sea Scrolls fragment also contains a pottery jug similar to the ones in which the scrolls were found (bottom).

Photos by Dan Dry.

Kids' hospital opens amid fanfare

In a well-appointed tent accented by clowns and posters of young patients, the ceremonial ribbon cutting for the Comer Children’s Hospital (opening this month) featured an all-star program of local and national officials, University higher ups, big donors, and 8-year-old former cancer patient Jimmy Mohan.

Senator Barack Obama joined University President Don Randel, Illinois First Lady Patricia Blagojevich, and Congressman Bobby Rush, among others, in thanking Gary and Francie Comer, who donated $21 million toward the 155-bed, 242,000-sqare-foot building, designed to offer a warm, family-friendly atmosphere along with expanded research and treatment facilities. Gary Comer, who considers the South Side his hometown, also thanked those who would advance pediatric care. “Jimmy,” he said, “you’re what it’s all about.”

By A.L.M.

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Photos: Jimmy Mohan (left); Gary Comer (middle).

Mob scene

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It was SRO in the Quadrangle Club dining room for the opening (and penultimate) night of Revels ’05, “A Mob Musical.” As with any professorial opus, there was a Latinate subtitle involved—in this case, “An Encomium to Clout and Clichés”—but this year’s incarnation of the annual faculty-produced revue was light on pomp, heavy on puns and sight gags as it took on two Chicago traditions: life in the mob and the life of the mind.

Those lifestyles meet when the son of Chicago mobster Rocco eschews the family business to enroll in the Committee on Social Thought. Turning lemons into lemonade Rocco decides to move into a new ’hood and open a riverboat casino on the Midway. First he needs to flood it—and he needs the University’s cooperation.

So Rocco and his boys make a little visit to President Randel—played with lifelike precision by President Randel himself. Rocco wastes no time in explaining to his good friend Don Michael what could go wrong if the University doesn’t do business with him, singing merrily and meaningfully: “I ask you to surmise ten years without a prize—not a single Nobel—what a dreadful tale to tell.”

Not even in economics?” Randel deadpans back.

But enough about the plot. It was only an excuse for witty lyrics set to music composed by GSB professor emeritus Bob Ashenhurst, philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB’62, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, and others. Among the biggest crowd pleasers was Hyde Parker and novelist Sara Paretsky, AM’69, MBA’77, PhD’77. As Detective Warshawski, testifying against Rocco in federal court, Paretsky did a diva turn in “The Queen of the Right’s Aria.” Too bad Rocco’s defense attorney was, as described in the program, “a brilliant Law School prof.”

By M.R.Y.

Photos: VP for University Relations Michael Behnke as Rocco and President Don Randel as himself (top); novelist Sara Paretsky as Detective Warshawski (bottom).

Mind over body

In the Renaissance Society’s current exhibition, The Here and Now, three sculptures by three artists address “the notion of presence—literally, metaphorically, and spiritually,” says the gallery’s educational director, Hamza Walker, AB’88, in the museum notes. Javier Tellez’s helium-balloon “base of the world,” Katrin Sigurdardottir’s high-plain mountain landscape, and Sanford Biggers’s Buddhist bowls each are “an invitation to critically reflect upon one’s relationship to the artwork as it in turn relates to its location.” Exhibited together, they create a more cohesive result, making “concrete the imagination’s bid for transcendence, giving form to the very metaphors that would then allow the imagination to go beyond the material and spatial forms of the gallery, and indeed the artworks themselves. In other words, presence of body is activated only to yield to presence of mind.”

The Here And Now runs through February 20.

By A.M.B.

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Photos (from left to right): Javier Tellez, Socle du Monde (Base of the World), 2005 helium filled vinyl balloon, 60" x 60" x 50"; Sanford Biggers, Hip Hop Ni Sasa Gu (In Fond Memory), 2005, tatami mats, pillows, inscribed Buddhist singing bowls; Katrin Sigurdardottir, High Plane 3, 2005, wood, foam, dimensions variable.

Let's talk about sex

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U of Cers can go beyond the life of the mind, thanks to the second release of student-run sex magazine Vita Excolatur. Exploring the human body, the 25-page, glossy black-and-white publication features a photo essay on the University’s men’s Frisbee team, with full frontal nudity. Another section includes interviews with and pictures of Chicago’s sexiest male teaching assistants, as voted by readers: biology and math students Palak Desai and Semere Baraki.

The current issue is more provocative than the first, which came out in January, editor in chief Sida Xiong observed. The initial response to the magazine, she says, “was really positive overall, with criticism here and there.” Steve Klass, vice president and dean of students in the University, called Vita Excolatur “reasonably good” in a January 11 Maroon article, suggesting that writers should delve into health and other related topics. “I think that’s something we are going to touch on,” fourth-year Xiong said in a recent interview.

Vita Excolatur’s editors obtained Registered Student Organization status and backing from the Student Government Finance Committee. Readers can subscribe or find copies at the Reynolds Club or Cobb. The next issue is due in March.

By M.L.

Not yet the end of history

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Social Sciences room 122 teemed with enough listeners to create condensation on the windows, crowded aisles, and a slew of camera flashes. They were there Tuesday afternoon to hear Francis Fukuyama, the Bernard L. Schwartz professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University, give a talk called The End of History Fifteen Years Later. In his address Fukuyama amended claims in his groundbreaking book, The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, 1992), and discussed his newest work, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Cornell University Press, 2004).

“I think The End of History needs to be rewritten,” the scholar-prognosticator admitted. “The modernity of the liberal West is difficult to achieve for many societies around the world.” Islamic radicalism, the United States and Europe’s ideological split over the Iraq war, and the notion of politics as an autonomous machine have all clashed with Fukuyama’s original thesis that human history as a struggle between warring ideologies was at a close, with the world settled on liberal democracy.

“My thesis ended as a question,” he noted. “The theory is about modernization and the coherent processes of economic, political, and social development and interconnectedness.” Nevertheless, Fukuyama defended his ideas about modernization’s universality and liberal democracy as correlative. “Modernization is like the scientific revolution—both can break out of their cultural homeland,” he said. “However, to maintain a liberal political order, there must be a fundamental separation between religion and state formation.”

The talk was part of the 2005 John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy Winter lecture series.

By Bianca Sepulveda, AB’04

Poetic calm

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Joanna Klink seemed perfectly at ease Thursday afternoon in Classics 10, where she quieted the buzzing audience of about 50 students and faculty members with her image-laden poetry. Her poise in the crowded room reflected the calm of her verse, introduced by English language & literature assistant professor Oren Izenberg as providing a “foundation for the chaos of the world to be understood.”

Klink pronounced each word with doting attention, pausing after particularly poignant images so that the audience might fully appreciate the beauty of “air filled with moths as light as pencil outlines.” The natural environment surrounding Klink at the University of Montana, where she teaches, figures prominently in her work and informs what she called her “poetry of the North.” Antelope, flickers, and barn swallows were the unsuspecting subjects of her poems, which came from an unpublished manuscript she was “testing out” on the Classics audience.

Klink also gave a 1 p.m. lecture today in Gates-Blake 321. Thursday’s reading marked the first Poem Present event of 2005. The series continues through the spring, welcoming five more poets to campus.

By Meredith Meyer, ’06

Dangerous Liaisons

In the Court Theatre production of Heiner Müller’s Quartet, which runs through February 27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the game of scheming and seduction first told in Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses gets whittled down to the two main players: the Marquise de Merteuil and her former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont.

Directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, AB’60—back for her sixth Court project—Quartet takes place not in a pre-revolutionary French court but in a “timeless, unspecified place,” interpreted by set and costume designer Kaye Voyce as a bland, double-bedded hotel room. Because Merteuil (Karen Kandel) and Valmont (Steven Rishard) play all the parts (including each other), the play involves, as Akalaitis told a Chicago Tribune reporter, “a lot of creative confusing gender-switching. They’re constantly switching from seducer to seduced as if to prove how much they deserve each other.”

An hour-long tour of the pair’s self-described “museum of love,” Quartet is about seduction as words and performance, language and theatricality, amusement and fear.

By M.R.Y.

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Photos (from left to right): role reversals: Merteuil (Karen Kandel) plays Valmont as seducer while Valmont (Steven Rishard) is the seduced Madame de Tourvel; after the fall: Karen Kandel as Merteuil and Steven Rishard as Valmont; Valmont (Steven Rishard) seduces a "virgin" (Karen Kandel).

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Life of the student

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Steve Klass didn’t expect so many students to join the mostly faculty and staff audience in a BSLC lecture room Tuesday afternoon at the town-hall meeting he led on “supporting student life in 2005.” So Klass, vice president and dean of students in the University, said he’d keep his talk general, not delving too far into the bureaucratic depths of administrative officialdom. Between jokes (a cold had rendered him “a walking Walgreens”), he compared the University today with five years ago, pointing out how student life has improved—and which areas still need help.

Not so long ago, Klass said, it “wasn’t uncommon for College alums to say they had a transformative experience here, but they would never send their kids or anyone they liked here.” So, he asked, what changed? In 1994–96 a faculty, staff, student, and trustee task force recommended the University focus more on students’ well-being. An outgrowth of that report, Klass’s office was created in 2001, he said, touching on “everything outside the classroom”—student services such as the bursar and registrar, lifestyle aspects such as residence halls and student activities, and “lots of affairs”—international affairs and minority affairs, for example.

After discussing racial, gender, and “spiritual” diversity (“We still have a long way to go to meet our aspirations in this area, but we have made some progress”); planned projects such as a new dorm; the rise in athletics and student organizations; improved career services; and recent computer-system upgrades, he took questions. They ranged in topic from kosher-food offerings to graduate-student health care to the dearth of campus dating. To the last he replied with a smile and a shrug, “I’m personally not dating any students,” before turning the topic over to other administrators in the crowd, who discussed sexual-harassment policies and programs. For those questions Klass couldn’t get to, he stuck around to talk one-on-one with a short line, mostly students.

By A.M.B.

Man on a mission

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Dan Strandjord, Lab’69, has become a familiar fixture on 58th and Ellis. On a mission to prevent the Hospitals from performing circumcisions, he’s been standing near the institution’s Ellis Avenue entrance, next to the University bookstore, for about two hours most weekdays since mid-June. “Circumcision is not at the forefront of medicine,” he says, referencing the motto of the Hospitals, where he says his father, the late Nels Strandjord, MD’46, had worked.

Bearing a large, conspicuous placard with a photograph of two infants, he speaks enthusiastically and candidly to interested passers-by, and hands out cards explaining his anti-circumcision platform. “Circumcising a child is a violation of human rights,” Strandjord says. Confident that listeners are getting his message, he says, “About 90 percent of the people who talk to me agree with me.”

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Java jive

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Combating Sunday’s dreary weather, the Central Javanese Gamelan & Friends of the Gamelan performed a vibrant selection of Southeast Asian court music in Rockefeller Chapel. With more than 50 ornately scrolled instruments, a collection called Sri Sedånå after the rice goddess, some two dozen musicians produced hypnotic, ringing rhythms for the small crowd and representatives of Chicago’s Consulate General of Indonesia.

A mix of traditional and contemporary pieces, the music flowed from the soran (loud) style in the opening Gangsaran Bima Kurda, named for an ill-tempered giant, to the sparse …and so she died, the pale faced girl. The penultimate composition offered a masked dance in the masculine gagah style: King Klånå frets over his love for Prince Panji’s promised bride.

Presented by the Department of Music, the concert collected more than $400 for the Indonesian Disaster Relief Fund.

By A.L.M.

Food for thought

It was hard to narrow down the materials for the Crerar Library exhibit, You Are What You Eat: Nutrition and Health, to four glass cases, says Reed Lowrie, AM’87, a science reference librarian who helped write the exhibit notes. Yet in that small space Lowrie, science library director Kathleen Zar, and reference librarian Barbara Kern fit in a feast of old cookbooks and guides, contemporary magazines and diet fads—the history of U.S. food practices from colonial America to the modern day.

The first case includes the first cookbook written and published in the United States, and it’s a mouthful: Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery; or, the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards, and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to the Plain Cake, Adopted to This Country, and All Grades of Life. (Crerar has a 1963 special limited edition.) The case also offers a taste of 19th-century nutrition reformers Sylvester Graham, the Kellogg brothers, and C. W. Post—who all believed a scientific diet rich in grains and nuts would promote health and even cure physical and mental ailments—and Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catherine Esther Beecher, who wrote The House-keepers Manual in 1874.

The exhibit next highlights storing and shipping advances—the ice box, canning, railroads—which accompanied some food-production shortcomings, creating the unsavory conditions detailed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and eventually new laws. Then it’s on to nutrition today, including diet books contributed by library staff members. While the Kellogg brothers were the first to exploit Americans’ desire for healthy living, the notes say, fads such as the Atkins diet and the Coconut diet, published in January, continue to be big business. Finally the exhibit offers a practical discussion on body image and portion size, with help from BSD nutrition teacher Mindy Schwartz. Six dice, for example, equal one portion of cheese, and a deck of playing cards measures three ounces of meat.

The exhibit ends June 11.

By A.M.B.

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Gonzo neoconservatism

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Nearly an hour before Christopher Hitchens was scheduled to speak Wednesday afternoon, the Social Sciences lobby was already filling up. The crowd, largely male and including several members of Chicago’s parliamentary-debate team, finally poured into room 122, where political-science professor Nathan Tarcov introduced the British speaker, who’s worked as a columnist for the Nation, Washington editor for Harper’s, and book critic for Newsday, and who recently wrote Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship and Love, Poverty, and War (both Nation Books, 2004). Hitchens, addressing the question “Can one be a neoconservative?” as part of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy’s 2004–05 lecture series, began by apologizing for his “Hezbollah appearance”—the international journalist’s way of noting his well-traveled air.

He chronicled his changing view of neoconservatism, starting with a “yuck” feeling. In 1989 he considered such thinkers “anti-democratic” for what he saw as their “degraded, cynical realpolitik.” (The notoriously hard-drinking writer then interrupted his discussion on Eastern Europe’s turn from communism, pouring another glass from a pitcher and saying, “This is the most water I’ve ever drunk.”) He explained his own political turn-around: petitions to stop the early 1990s ethnic cleansing in the Balkans were signed by some of his neocon enemies. When Slobodon Milosevic finally was imprisoned and the situation improved, said Hitchens, “I had to notice that, without the so-called neoconservatives, this wouldn’t have happened.”
So, can one be a neoconservative, in Hitchens’s opinion? Wrapping up, he explained the Hegelian view that a political movement only becomes genuine after it has experienced a split. Hitchens sees such a split forming between Norman Podhoretz and Henry Kissinger on the one side (which Hitchens still detests) and Paul Wolfowitz, PhD’72, on the other, more admirable one.

Following the talk he answered questions, including one from an elderly pacifist that sparked a hearty debate. Finally the cigarette Hitchens had long been waving began calling, so the evening drew to a close as he offered to take more questions—outside.

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

Photo:

Christopher Hitchens.

The butts stop here

When silence fell, the scramble erupted. Lucky players in Saturday’s large-scale game of musical chairs swiftly plopped into empty seats while the desperate leftovers scurried and scuffled for remaining spots. The atmosphere at the student-organized event, which sold raffle entries and more than 150 $5-tickets to raise $1,800 for tsunami victims, was giddy—with a healthy dollop of competition—as the Henry Crown crowd relived grade-school days to the funky beat of Zapp & Roger, Al Green, and the Incredible Bongo Band, among others. The winner walked with a $400 plane ticket to anywhere, the rest with booby prizes and sore bums.

A.L.M.

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Photos:

Folding chairs stretched around two basketball courts in Henry Crown (top left); contestants shuffle to the beat in an early round (top middle); a volunteer referee mediates a dispute (top right); players lunge for open seats (bottom left); in later rounds contestants were required to pat their heads and rub their stomachs, hop on one leg, and crab-walk (bottom middle); the final round (bottom right).

Paintings of a different color

William Bailey and Giorgio Morandi both painted still lifes of vases and other common household items. Mark Rothko and Josef Albers both painted square or rectangular blocks of solid color. But overlapping subject matter does not equal overlapping content, argued poet Mark Strand, the Andrew MacLeish distinguished service professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Tuesday afternoon in Foster Hall.

Showing slides first of Bailey’s and Morandi’s work, then of Rothko’s and Albers’s, Strand attempted to demonstrate that sometimes “differences outweigh the similarities” between “ostensibly similar” works. A Bailey still life resembles “a royal family portrait,” static and conclusive, while a comparable Morandi painting produces what Strand called “the odd feeling that the objects are together and holding still for a pleasing instant.”

If the difference between the still-life painters manifests itself in the viewer’s reaction, the contrast between Rothko and Albers lies in how they approached their art. Rothko called one painting Orange and Yellow but insisted color wasn’t important, urging viewers to “disregard color.” (“If Orange and Yellow is not about orange and yellow, what is it about?” Strand asked.) Albers, on the other hand, freely experimented with and appreciated color. And unlike Rothko, “there was no admission on Albers’s part that he ever wept when he painted.”

During the question and answer period Strand was accused of favoring Morandi over the other artists he discussed. But, he assured, “I like them all equally.”

By Phoebe Maltz, ’05

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Photos:

From left: Giorgio Morandi, Still Life (The Blue Vase), 1920. William Bailey, Table with Ochre Wall, 1972. Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956. Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: With Rays, 1959.

Economics unzipped

03-04-05_image-1.jpg“You put naked in the title and they show up,” joked Charles Wheelan, PhD’98, author of Naked Economics. And show up they did. A line of students formed outside Stuart 103 an hour before Wheelan, a Harris School lecturer, and economics professor Allen Sanderson were slated to discuss “College Undressed: the ‘Naked Economics’ of Student Life,” sponsored by the student-run Chicago Society. As the crowd squeezed into the lecture hall, it became clear that the room would not accommodate everyone, and a number of fans were turned away with the promise of a rain check.

Sanderson, armed with 200 index cards on which students could write their names to enter a door-prize lottery, was pleasantly amazed that he might not have enough cards. “I can’t imagine that at any other University 200 students would show up on a Thursday night in the penultimate week of the quarter to talk about economics.”

He and Wheelan gave the audience some bare-bones commandments for living economically: Don’t take a job during the academic year that pays less than $10 per hour. Don’t get married in December, but do plan children in that month, for tax purposes. And never tell a potential employer the starting salary you want, even if the employer insists. For particularly unscrupulous planners, Sanderson suggested to “go and visit your grandma on December 30, 2010,” and if she is near the end of her life “stand on a hose or something” to expedite her passing before the relaxed estate-tax legislation runs out.

By Meredith Meyer, ’07

Photo:

Charles Wheelan, author of Naked Economics.

One-woman show

03-07-05_image-1_thumb 1.jpgWith wild curly hair and sleek black slacks, playwright, actress, and NYU professor Anna Deveare Smith told personal stories about race and gave acting tips to about 40 students in the Reynolds Club’s cozy third-floor theater. On campus as the first Presidential Fellow in the Arts, Smith—known for playing National Security Adviser Nancy McNally on the West Wing but who’s also been nominated for a Pulitzer, won Obie awards, and received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship—held the afternoon conversation before a Mandel Hall evening performance last Tuesday.

During the talk Smith told about having a “pleasant” conversation with a cabdriver in her hometown New York when he suddenly yelled “Nigger!” at a truck driver blocking his way. Smith, who is African American, said, “You shouldn’t talk like that.” First of all, she said, “you could get killed.” Second, “I don’t think you have any idea what my people have suffered and done for this country so people from all over”—including the driver, whose nationality she couldn’t pinpoint—“can come to this country.” The driver apologized profusely. But for Smith the incident demonstrated that U.S. race relations are far from fixed, especially when she told her Romanian doorman the story and his well-meaning response was, “And where is he (the cabdriver) from?”

Smith performs monologues based on the thousands of people she’s interviewed, from Anita Hill to a Korean shopkeeper whose store was destroyed in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, using the person’s exact words and mimicking his or her voice and mannerisms (her Studs Terkel is dead-on). When she first started performing in the 1980s, she said, “I was very uptight about all of this.” Unlike many black artists, she didn’t write about “my kitchen” from her Baltimore childhood or growing up in segregation. Instead she wrote sympathetic Jewish and black characters in Fires in the Mirror, a play about the violence that erupted in Crown Heights, New York, after a Hasidic driver hit and killed a 7-year-old black boy. Because her work hasn’t followed the traditional black artist’s path, she said, black audiences and media have been ambivalent toward her. But she believes African American intellectuals, rather than drifting to area studies or “the black table,” should “make it hard for people to find you.”

By A.M.B.

Photo:

Anna Deveare Smith (left) and discussion moderator Jacqueline Stewart, associate professor of English language & literature, take questions in the Reynolds Club third-floor theater.

Photo by Dan Dry

Dawn of a dorm

A handful of students gathered Monday afternoon in the dimly lit Judson Lounge as Steve Klass, vice president and dean of students in the University, announced the architects selected to design an undergraduate dormitory in the lot behind Burton-Judson. The Boston-based firm, Goody Clancy, was chosen for its experience in urban planning and historic preservation, and for its “philosophic and intellectual” approach to design, said Elaine Lockwood Bean, associate vice president of facilities services. Goody Clancy has designed buildings for institutions including Harvard, Georgetown, Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton.

The façade of the new dorm and dining hall will draw on the “exceptionally varied palette” of building materials in surrounding structures, including the eclectic neighborhood architecture, the Gothic Burton-Judson dormitory, and the Mies van der Rohe–designed Social Service Administration building, according to Lockwood Bean. The University expects a schematic by July and has projected a tentative $104 million budget for the project.

Student input has played a prominent role in the programming phase, underway since November 2003. Two focus groups, consisting of undergraduates with differing housing experiences, and surveys distributed to second-, third-, and fourth-years have helped guide the initial planning stages. Privacy ranked as students’ principal concern, which didn’t surprise Cheryl Gutman, deputy dean of students for housing and dining services. “We have more single rooms on campus—now about 50 percent—than any other campus I can think of,” Gutman said. Students also prized quiet for sleep and study, the surveys showed, and relative proximity to laundry facilities and campus.

By Meredith Meyer, ’07

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Prints for the people

03-11-05_image-1_thumb.jpgThere’s Peter Paul Rubens’s Supper at Emmaus and Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Last Judgment. Not the originals, mind you, but prints of the iconic works. Don’t be disappointed. Prints have their own artistic value, argues the current Smart Museum exhibition, Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–1800.

Including prints by Pieter van Sompel after Rubens and Giulio di Antonio Bonasone after Buonarroti, the exhibit of about 100 paper images explores the role reproductive art played in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Imitating works by others, the prints not only helped to promote those artists but also gave the public access to paintings, sculptures, and other pieces once available only to wealthy travelers or collectors. The copies, suggest curators Rebecca Zorach, AM’94, PhD’99, assistant professor of art history, Johns Hopkins’s Elizabeth Rodini, PhD’95, and the Smart’s Anne Leonard, constitute art in their own right.

The exhibition runs through May 15 and then travels to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, where it opens in September.

By M.L.

Photo:

Left: Pieter van Sompel after Peter Paul Rubens, Supper at Emmaus, 1643, Etching. Right: Willem van Swanenburg after Peter Paul Rubens, Supper at Emmaus, 1611, Engraving. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchases, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions.

The play's the thing

Putting together the classics—Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, for example—or creating a one-of-a-kind comedy—like Off Off Campus’s Mild Mild West—takes more than a stage and some players. Photographer Lloyd DeGrane scouted out some University Theater types, who presented the aforementioned shows along with seven other productions last quarter, breaking a sweat, if not a leg or two. This week the house has gone dark as cast and crew members study up for their recurrent student roles; but after finals has its run, the show must go on. Look for Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Sophocles’s Electra, and new student pieces this spring.

By A.L.M.

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Photos:

Third-year Peter Sloane designs lighting for UT's production of Poe, written and directed by third-year Caitlin Doughty (left); Cobb 103 rehearsals for The Crucible(middle); writer/director Caitlin Doughty (black shirt) leads Poe's cast in a chant for focus (right).

Argonne gets new director

03-16-05_image-1_thumb.jpgAfter a six-month national search, University of Chicago astrophysicist Robert Rosner has been named Argonne National Laboratory’s new director, effective April 18. Succeeding Hermann Grunder, director since 2000, Rosner has served as Argonne’s associate lab director for physical, biological, and computing sciences and as its chief scientist since 2002. He is also the William Wrather distinguished service professor in astronomy & astrophysics.

Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman has approved the appointment. For more information, see the News Office’s full report.

By A.M.B.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane

Not so fast out of Dodge

That last final, both dreaded and eagerly awaited. While most students finished their exams earlier this week, those who had to stick it out until Friday were still trickling in and out of classrooms this morning, cramming until the last hour or trying to find Zen.

The 40-degree weather allowed Samantha LaPeter, a second-year Divinity School master’s student, to study for her Greek final at a picnic table outside Cobb. Oliver Roeder, a second-year College student, sat alone in Cobb 214 a half hour before his 10:30 a.m. linear-algebra test, eyes on his textbook. With three finals and a paper, plus his parents in town from Des Moines this week, he hadn’t yet had time to prepare for this one. And Nicholas Boterf, a fourth-year classics major, was early to his Antigone final because “the TA e-mailed that it was at 10,” but apparently it wasn’t. “I probably should be studying,” he said, “but at this point I almost need to detox.” And while Roeder takes off for Tallahassee to visit his girlfriend after his test, Boterf will hit the books again. “I’ll probably take a nap, hit Chipotle with my friends, and then tomorrow it’s B.A. paper crunch time.”

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Photos:

Divinity student Samantha LaPeter studies for her Greek final (left); classics major Nicholas Boterf detoxes before his Greek final (right).

Sign of the times

03-21-05_image-1_thumb.jpgBesides the greening grass, the chirping robins, and the tulip shoots poking up with increasing assurance, the quads have been graced with yet another sign of spring: our ducks have roosted. Arriving at Duck Island just a few days ago, in time to inaugurate the season, the pair of mallards enjoyed a Monday morning swim in a recently thawed Botany Pond, as passersby alternately cooed and quacked.

We’re hoping that the chummy couple will produce another brood of fuzzy ducklings, marking, as last year, the progression of summer, and, with the young ducks’ departure, the advent of fall.

By A.L.M.

Odes to the peasantry

03-23-05_image-1_thumb.jpgFor centuries the French had considered rustic life part of their national identity. As the Industrial Revolution forced peasants to flee the countryside for market-friendlier cities, artists and folklorists feared—correctly—that a central piece of the country’s character was fading. They invaded the rural lands to document the dying way of life, whether accurately or pastorally romanticized; several artists, for example, omitted the machines that eased workloads, and the fact that so many peasants had deserted the country for more lucrative urban centers.

The Smart Museum exhibition Shepherds and Plowhands: Work and Leisure in the Nineteenth Century, on display through April 24, assembles etchings, lithographs, and an Impressionist oil painting in an account of the era. Ironically, the exhibit notes observe, the works often were collected into expensive books cherished in middle-class and aristocratic homes.

By A.M.B.

Photo:

Leon Augustin LHermitte (1844-1925), Boy and Girl in Spring Landscape, date unknown, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Myron E. Rubnitz. 2002.49.

The dean remembers

03-25-05_image-1_thumb.jpgWhen Wayne C. Booth, AM’47, PhD’50, was named dean of the College in December 1964, he had a grand ambition: to recreate the Hutchins College. But things didn’t turn out the way he’d planned.

In a lecture videotaped at Chicago’s Alumni House this week—to be added to the Alumni Association’s Mind Online Web page later this spring—Booth, the George C. Pullman distinguished service professor emeritus in English language & literature and the College, explained that his academic vision failed to win campus approval because he forgot the importance of “precinct” politics in institutional affairs. Before he could try again, the changing tide of national politics hit the quadrangles.

As sit-in followed sit-in, Booth found himself torn between support for the protestors’ anti-war stance and his institutional duties. In his journal entries he recorded his feelings of hypocrisy, failure, and the occasional moment of accomplishment. When black students occupied the Administration Building, he managed to convince the Chicago policemen who’d been sent to the scene that they were not needed. When he sat back down on the hallway floor, for the first time since he’d arrived, a student spoke to him: “Mr. Booth, would you like an apple?”

By M.R.Y.

Rockin' the chapel

03-28-05_image-1_thumb.jpgA cultural performance, staged poetry, and an ethics conference highlight Rockefeller Memorial Chapel’s ecumenical range of upcoming events. Monday night the award-winning Turkoman Folk Music Ensemble dances to and plays music of the Caucasus region, while a daytime exhibit shows off Turkoman silver, instruments, and costumes. Friday night the Chicago group Schola Antiqua presents Murder in the Cathedral: Music for St. Thomas à Becket, an all-vocal concert written to honor the English archbishop, killed in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Next Tuesday, April 5, the Becket-athon continues as Second City cofounder Bernie Sahlins, AB’43, directs a staged reading of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. And right in time for tax deadlines, the April 13–14 Global Ethics Conference: The Search for Common Ground brings together Temple University professor Leonard Swidler and other leading scholars to address “the question of the existence of a shared, global ethic.”

A.M.B.

Magazine spring break

Though not really on spring break, we are in lovely San Diego for the CASE Editor’s Forum through Friday. While we’re gone, here are some other U of C blogs to check out:

Economist Gary Becker and Law School lecturer Richard Posner have created the Becker-Posner blog, exploring economics, law, and policy.

Political scientist Daniel Drezner discusses national and international affairs on his blog.

Magazine intern Phoebe Maltz, ’05, publishes “the best Francophilic Zionism in the blogosphere” on What Would Phoebe Do?

We know we’re missing some, so please write and let us know your favorite University-related Web log. Then return here Monday at 3 p.m. for your regularly scheduled UChiBLOGo posting.

Caution: words at play

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One look at the playbill for director Charles Newell’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties—running at Court Theatre through April 24—and you know you’re in for an evening of poetry, pastiche, and puns. The notes feature jokey typefaces, snippets of quotations, and free-association references to the play at hand.

The action takes place in the wandering mind of Henry Carr, a real-life figure although he didn’t have quite the life that Stoppard has given him, a minor official in the British consulate at Zurich shortly after World War I. The play opens as Carr, now in his dotage, recalls the famous men he has known or thinks he has known: Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, and modernist author James Joyce.

The real-life Carr did know Joyce, suing him after a Zurich performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Carr played “not Earnest—the other one,” Algernon Moncrieff. Stoppard uses that tidbit to structure his play, borrowing and revamping key scenes and plot devices from Earnest.

Which brings us to Court’s “other one,” its fall 2004 production of Earnest. Not only do key members from that cast appear in corresponding roles in Travesties (Lance Stuart Baker, who plays Carr, was Algernon, while Sean Allan Krill, who plays Tzara, was Earnest), but a similar frolicking choreography adds to the circus-like and circular movement of Stoppard’s own “Trivial Comedy for Serious People.”

M.R.Y.

Photos:

Hey kids, let’s put on a show: Jay Whittaker as James Joyce, Lance Stuart Baker as Henry Carr and Heidi Kettenring as Gwendolen in Court Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties (top); Algernon and Earnest by any other names: Lance Stuart Baker as Henry Carr and Sean Allan Krill as Tristan Tzara in Court Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties (bottom).

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Gestalt grammar

04-06-05_image-1_thumb 1.jpgJon Trowbridge, AB’91, SM’92, has been a fugitive alumnus. “It took years but somehow I’ve eluded the Alumni Association,” he says. “They no longer ask me for money, but I never get the Magazine either.” Now Trowbridge has stepped out of obscurity and back onto the University’s radar to introduce Gnoetry—with a hard “g”—to the campus community. With cocreator Eric Elshtain, a PhD student in the Committee on the History of Culture, he presented their four-year-old invention Monday to a Franke Institute for the Humanities audience of about 20 poetic-minded students and faculty.

Gnoetry, born of a conversation between the two friends “one morning over bad coffee and French toast,” creates a space where “humanities and math overlap,” Elshtain says. A computer program analyzes the language of out-of-copyright texts, including Heart of Darkness, Huckleberry Finn, and Notes From Underground. Software written by Trowbridge then reconfigures the analyzed language into a prescribed poetic form, including blank verse, Renga, or Tanka.

Because Gnoetry uses complete texts rather than random lists of words, it maintains the essence of the original work, Elshtain says. So when Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class gets Gnoetry-ed, the result, he supposes, “is as if we said, ‘Hey Veblen, could you write us some T-shirts?’” For proof he referred to Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country, which produced the line their glances met in a mist of bargaining and hyperbole—a phrase that struck Elshtain (and the audience) as a “pretty accurate distillation of Wharton’s writing.”

Meredith Meyer, ’07

Photo:

Eric Elshtain (left) and Jon Trowbridge.

In with the new new

04-08-05_image-1_thumb 1.jpgOn Tuesday a panel of writers parsed the “new new journalism” in a packed room at International House. As part of I-House’s Global Voices lecture series, Robert Boynton, Leon Dash, and Alex Kotlowitz came together to promote Boynton’s book, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (Vintage, 2005).

Pulling from personal experience, the trio illuminated new new journalism, which builds on the tradition of narrative nonfiction associated with Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer while maintaining strict journalistic standards. For example, Dash talked about reporting a Pulitzer Prize–winning series on adolescent childbearing for the Washington Post (which formed the basis for Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America [Plume Books, 1997]). The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign journalism professor explained that he tried to build a relationship with subjects that would allow him to get beyond their “public face.”

To help others get there, Boynton, director of NYU’s graduate magazine-journalism program, offers tips in his book including how practitioners like Dash and Wall Street Journal veteran Kotlowitz write, report, and organize their notes.

David King, AM’04

Photo:

Alex Kotlowitz, Robert Boynton, and Leon Dash at International House.

More space, more Gothic grandeur

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Kicking back on a sunny Friday afternoon, the College Admissions invited a few campus friends over to luxuriate in their new space. Recently installed in Rosenwald Hall—the GSB’s former digs—after vacating an outgrown Harper Memorial Library suite, Admissions occupies the smartly appointed, and generously large, first floor and lobby, pushing the Department of Economics to the building’s second and third floor.

The move provided for airy interior spaces that still have that new-office smell. A grand, green-walled reception area, where NYSE’s Trading Post No. 12 used to be, is not quite complete: campus-networked computers are still to be installed for prospies looking up classes. Though Admissions head Ted O’Neill will miss the magnolias that used to burst into bloom across his Harper windows, he’s happy to be in the thick of things in his southwest corner office, with a view of kids “hanging out” on the quads.

A.L.M.

Photos:

An ornately carved doorway leads from Rosenwald's lobby to Admissions's interior offices (top); admissions head Ted O'Neill in his new southwest corner office (bottom).

On the road again

04-13-05_image-1_thumb.jpgA behemoth invaded campus Monday. The conspicuous, neon-green and blue RV spent the afternoon on the main quads as part of a cross-country tour promoting Road Trip Nation, a project that sends college students seeking post-graduation guidance to interview inspirational people nationwide. The goal is to give the students—and later viewers—a glimpse of life’s professional possibilities.

Monday evening Road Trip Nation organizers gave a Doc Films advance screening of a PBS documentary about last summer’s travels. The nine students in the film included U of Cers Erica Cerulo, Diana Dravis, and Candace Elliott. During their five-week trek across the southern part of the country the students, now College fourth-years, interviewed, among others, Hugh Hefner.

Though the application for summer 2005 excursions has passed, through July students can apply for grants financing their own small-scale road trips.

David King, AM’04

Photo:

Road Trip Nation organizers and the U of C students who
participated last year promote the program Monday on the quads.

The tax man commenteth

04-15-05_image-1_thumb.jpgThink the economists in the house filed their tax returns months ago, or at least requested extensions? One tax expert, GSB professor Austan Goolsbee, filed April 12. He used Turbotax and got a “big refund,” he says. “I should have filed earlier.” Here are some observations by Goolsbee, the author of Investment, Overhang and Tax Policy and other tax-related papers.

* What are some common mistakes people make when filing taxes?
Hiding their income. Actually, the two most common mistakes are putting the federal check into the state envelope (and vice versa).

* Any advice for non-economics types on filing?
If you have any schedule C income, check out a solo 401(k) that allows you to make potentially large contributions to a retirement account tax-free.

* Any interesting new rules or allowances this year?
The phasing out of deductions is really irritating.

* Best tip(s) you’ve learned?
Start earlier next year.

A.M.B.

Photo:

Goolsbee giving the 2000 GSB commencement address.

Desert-island dreams

04-18-05_image-1_thumb.jpgIf Charles Lipson, professor of political science, were marooned on a deserted island, he would want Mozart, Robert Johnson, and the Rolling Stones along with him—or at least their music. He also would want all the history books he’s long been meaning to read and reread, and a lot of Snickers bars and cans of diet Dr. Pepper.

Armed with a soda in one hand and a pair of reading glasses in the other, Lipson spoke to about 20 students and faculty in the Reynolds Club about what is important to him, as part of the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel–sponsored brown bag forum “What Matters to Me and Why.” Even more important than candy bars were learning, humor, and free discourse.

“The first thing I treated myself to when I got my PhD was a good reading chair,” Lipson said. “It’s not like a chair at the Boston opera that says, ‘Sit up!’ It says, ‘Relaaax,’” he cooed in his Mississippi accent. At home, he said, he surrounds himself with books, his shelves heavy with history and political-science texts. “Soon [my bookshelves] will say, ‘Enough.’”

Despite his scholarly profession, Lipson maintains that his tastes are “anything but highbrow.” He is a sucker for American pop culture, especially if it can make him laugh. “If I had to do without the Daily Show or the New York Times, it would be a close call. If it were the Simpsons or the New York Times, it would not even be close.”

Meredith Meyer, ’07

Mr. Sandman

04-20-05_image-1_thumb.jpgNeil Gaiman, creator of the cult comic series Sandman, noted last night that a Web site measuring celebrity has labeled him “niche famous.” But judging by the sold-out audience that filled the Court Theatre to watch his interview with Gretchen Helfrich, host of Chicago Public Radio’s Odyssey program, the niche has grown quite large.

Gaiman, visiting the University as part of the Presidential Fellows in the Arts series, has experimented with many media, including graphic and traditional novels, television, and film. “I have long held the theory that the next thing I do should be completely different from the last. But then I look back and [my projects] are all lined up like soldiers, leading to the same thing.” It’s not quite clear to the author what that thing is, but his fans clearly enjoy it. When Gaiman read a passage from his new novel, Anansi Boys, in which the character Fat Charlie woke up hungover one morning, feeling like “his eyes were too tight in his head,” and “not only were they too tight in his head, but they must have rolled off in the night and reattached with roofing nails,” the college-age audience nearly heaved with laughter.

Although Gaiman specializes in creating fantastic stories in ordinary settings, he does not consider himself an escape artist. “Fantasy is not to create a different world, but it is a route back in to this one,” he said. “It is that wonderful feeling of coming home after being away awhile.”

Meredith Meyer, ’07

Earth day(s)

04-22-05_image-1.jpgThe University brought Earth appreciation up a notch this year, expanding what’s usually a day of activities into a week’s worth. Chicago’s annual celebration of environmentalism kicked off April 15 with a panel discussion on climate change, featuring Divinity School Professor William Schweiker, PhD’85, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s David Doniger, and University of Wisconsin’s David Bromley. A talk on environmental-science careers and a screening of the documentary The End of Suburbia followed on Monday and Tuesday. The festivities concluded Friday. A planting excursion was planned but, throwing her weight around, Mother Earth made that difficult. Besides the rainy weather, the ground won’t be ready until May.

M.L.

Jack flash

04-25-05_image-1_thumb.jpgThe Graduate School of Business’s 53rd annual management conference was a winner: the April 22 event attracted 1,000 alumni and other businesspeople, many of them drawn by a lunchtime conversation with Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric and author (with wife Suzy Welch) of the current bestseller Winning.

As attendees lunched in the Fairmont Hotel’s Imperial Ballroom, GSB Dean Edward A. Snyder, AM’78, PhD’84, pressed Welch for highlights: “Jack, your book has four parts and 20 chapters. We’ve got some people here who don’t have much time—what should they read?”

“It depends on what you need,” Jack shot back. For readers in crisis mode he recommended the chapter on crisis management: “Get out of the denial phase fast.” Readers in a merger situation should check out the mergers and acquisitions chapter—and remember that “[A]fter a merger, the brilliant resisters are dead.” He drew laughter with another recommendation: “And there’s a great chapter about how to work for a lousy boss.”

Lousy bosses, in Welch’s view, are those who “lack candor,” who “think it’s unkind to tell employees what they’re doing wrong,” and who pay more attention to budgets than dreams. In his straight-from-the-gut style, Welch dissed both corporate loyalty (“I do not find loyalty to be a great corporate virtue—only winning companies count”) and CFOs (“Why people want to hang around with finance grunts is beyond my imagination”).

Conversation finished, guests headed to the Gleacher Center for an afternoon of panel sessions, from GSB professor Marvin Zonis discussing “Déjà Vu All Over Again: Foreign Policy Challenges in the Second Bush Term” to “Where is Consumer-Driven Health Care Going?”—a panel sponsored by the Chicago GSB Public Policy Roundtable Alumni Group.

M.R.Y.

Photo:

GSB Dean Ted Snyder interviews former GE CEO Jack Welch.
Photo by Dan Dry.

Fever pitch

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Blazing along the base paths and firing heat past opposing hitters, the women’s softball team is the hottest thing to hit the South Side since the Great Chicago Fire. The nation’s 12th-ranked squad got off to a fast start en route to a 20–7 record. This past Sunday the Maroons rebounded from a tough 1–6 stretch by cruising past the overmatched Lawrence Vikings in an afternoon doubleheader.

In the first game Chicago phenom Hannah “Hannibal” Roberts dazzled her adversaries with an encyclopedic array of pitches. A four-hit, ten-strikeout masterpiece vaulted the College third-year to the top of the team’s all-time shutout list. The second game saw second-year Petra “Petrol” Wade exact no less mercy on the Vikings, surrendering only one unearned run as she torched fastball after fastball at the hapless Lawrence batters.

Even when the visitors managed to put the bat on the ball, they frequently found Maroon defenders swarming over the diamond. Junior third-baseman Kayti “Web-Gem” Fuhr lit up the highlight reels, making a spectacular catch in foul territory in the first game and picking a hotshot out of the dirt in the second contest. At the opposite corner, junior first baseman Rachel “Stretch” Cohen consistently scooped out low throws.

But don’t think these women of spring are all defense. The team pounded out 19 hits over the two games, outscoring Lawrence 7–1. In the balanced line-up, nine different players hit safely. Standout Dominique “Dominator” Marshall, a first-year, showed her versatility in the second game by adding a textbook bunt to two singles.

With three road contests remaining, including two against top-ranked Washington University in St. Louis, the team is looking for a strong finish to a season already drenched in Maroon blood, sweat, and tears.

Sam Gill '05

Photos:

Hannah Roberts prepares to fire strike three at the Lawrence hitter (top); the teams congratulate each other after a Maroon sweep (bottom).

Reading material

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What does it mean to use a book, rather than read it? Exploring this question through a wide collection of old and unusual texts, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700, a Special Collections Research Center exhibit on display through June 15, focuses on the book as a material object and practical tool. Prominent among the displays are eye-popping anatomies, intricate sky maps, and other illustrated works, including the anachronistic Greatest of All Time: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali (Taschen, 2004), a book so large it’s “almost unmovable.” Nestled among these are smaller treasures, such as an intricately embroidered Bible and a tiny Latin medical guide, only a few inches square.

A.L.M.

Photo:

William Cowper (1666-1709). The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, with Figures Drawn After the Life by Some of the Best Masters in Europe. Oxford: for Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1698. Rare Book Collection, From the Collection of Mortimer Frank.

Observing Yerkes

Amid news reports of the University possibly selling Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, the 1897 building still brimmed with activity this past Friday.

At 1 p.m. a local junior-high-school group stands outside the ornate, brick and terra cotta structure, awaiting a tour and a build-your-own-telescope class with public-affairs officer Richard Dreiser. Meanwhile observatory manager Jim Gee, MBA’81, leads another visitor down a tile-floored, marble-walled hallway and up two flights to the west end, where a 90-foot-diameter dome holds what remains the world’s largest refractory telescope. Astronomy & astrophysics professor Kyle Cudworth, Yerkes’s director, still conducts research with the telescope, whose mammoth blue base, 60-foot-long tube, and history—it was first displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—inspire awe. It’s cold inside the brick-faced dome. “The temperature must be the same as outside,” Gee explains, or the heat would scatter the light waves and cause optical illusions.

Through dusty library stacks and several doorways, Dreiser has taken the school kids to a darkened room, where they sit on an old solar optical bench. “If you cover the moon with your finger,” he says, as he and the studens hold up their thumbs toward a poster of the moon, “and you know the size of your finger” and the angle, you can figure out the moon’s size.

On the ground floor engineers work on the NASA project SOFIA/HAWC—short for stratospheric observatory for infrared astronomy/high-resolution airborne wideband camera. When it’s done, Gee says, the camera will mount on the end of a telescope, which scientists will bring aboard a 747 and, from 40,000 feet, study celestial objects at infrared wavelengths. It’s likely the last engineering project at Yerkes, whose mission has moved away from research and toward education and outreach, which is why the University may sell it—or, as Gee prefers to say, “change stewardship.” After working at Yerkes for 15 years, he’s found the place “has a way of endearing itself to people.”

A.M.B.

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Photos:

The Great Dome holds the world's largest refractor telescope (left); public affairs officer Richard Dreiser teaches about the moon (middle); the outside is brick and terra cotta (right).

Eye of the storm

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One could say that Darcy Frey, the University’s Robert Vare visiting writer in residence, puts himself in stressful situations. But that would be an understatement. For a New York Times Magazine story, which he read from yesterday at the Franke Institute, Frey spent a month observing the newborn intensive care unit at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

While reporting the 1995 piece—“Does Anyone Here Think This Baby Can Live?”—he daily witnessed doctors deciding the fate of babies so small they could be “held like a bunch of grapes in a nurse’s hand.” The doctors, he told the audience of about 15 students and staff, tended to premature babies, “lying froglike and immobile,” with the “precision of a man building a ship in a bottle.”

Laughing, Frey recalled how the New York Times sent him to the air-traffic-control center that governs Newark, La Guardia, and Kennedy airports—“for a lighter piece.” The staff he encountered there wore a “savage, bug-eyed look,” so they appeared “like men on the verge of drowning,” constantly asking themselves if this would “be the day of the their unmaking.”

Poised at a podium, he gave the impression he’d be good to have around in a chaotic situation. Frey, who’d watched 30 high-risk births in 30 days and air traffic controllers “curse and twitch like a bunch of Tourettes sufferers,” maintained a calm presence as he made his characters and imagery come alive.

Meredith Meyer, ’07

Salon de Scav Hunt

Thursday afternoon, 12-plus hours into Scav Hunt 2005, competitors carried out No. 108 on the 15-page list of items to get and deeds to do, posted online at midnight:

“Le Salon en Plein Air, aux Quads, Jeudi et Vendredi, 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. Mes cheries, your locks are in terrible shape! Et mon Dieu! Who let you out of the house with that outré mascara? Coral and taupe are très 2004. And toes without a manicure francaise are simply dégoutante. Un bouffant charmant, s’il vous plaît. Aussi, those pauvre étudiants deserve une masseuse to rub away the stress of their day. Voilà, la haute école de beauté!”

The Snell-Hitchcock contenders responded by blaring the Amelie soundtrack and, along with other teams, offering free manicures and pedicures, haircuts and styling, and massages to passersby.

The hunt continues Saturday with the ScavOlympics and ends Sunday with the final judging.

C’est bon!

A.M.B.

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$1.25 billion and counting

This past Friday the institution that offers, as President Don Randel often proclaims, tongue only partly in cheek, “the best education in this or any neighboring galaxy,” thanked some of its stellar supporters—with programs across the disciplines, dinner in Rockefeller Chapel, and a progress report on the $2 billion Chicago Initiative.

University Trustee Edgar D. Jannotta welcomed the guests with an up-to-the-minute fund-raising total. At the three-year mark, the campaign has reached $1,250,495,216.33. “The 33 cents is a joke,” the Initiative’s chair confessed, “but we are counting every penny.” Having already made its mark on the campus landscape, the campaign now must meet its human-capital goals, Jannotta said, announcing a new, $17 million Trustee Scholarship Challenge: a group of trustees will contribute $1 for every $2 in contributions to undergraduate scholarship endowment.

The 74-year-old Jannotta also announced that on July 1 he will step down as chair, to be succeeded by fellow trustee Andrew M. Alper, AB’80, MBA’81. Board of Trustees vice chair and cochair of the GSB campaign, Alper, noted Jannotta, “is the right man for the job.”

Then it was on to a celebration of human capital. Lectures, seminars, and tours gave everyone something to talk about during a pre-dinner reception in the GSB’s Rothman Winter Garden. At dinner in Rockefeller Chapel, 49 new members were inducted into the Harper Society Founders Circle, recognizing cumulative gifts of $1 million or more, and President Randel conferred the University of Chicago Medal on Gerald Ratner, AB’35, JD'37. In addition to his support for the 2003 Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, Ratner was honored for 70 years of advocacy for the College, the Law School, and campus athletics.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (from left to right): The pre-dinner reception in the GSB’s Rothman Winter Garden; Ratner accepting his award; Rockefeller in its evening best.

Photos by Dan Dry.

God on whose side?

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When pundits talk about the role that faith-and-values voters played in the Republican presidential victory last November, they’re really talking about white voters, noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell in a panel discussion Friday. Author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (2004), Harris-Lacewell looked at black faith-and-values voters and found a different story.

Blacks are among the most religious Americans, said Harris-Lacewell, yet only 11 percent of African Americans voted Republican—up from 7 percent in 2000 but down from 12 percent in 1996. If their religious beliefs have made it hard for blacks to vote Republican, those same values, she predicted, may make it hard for them to keep voting Democratic. If it comes to a choice “between Jesus and the Democratic Party,” she said, “they will stay home.” Whatever they do, “they’re sure not going to vote against Jesus.”

Harris-Lacewell also factored black Americans into the red-state/blue-state paradigm, arguing that “[t]here are no blue states, there are only blue cities.” This fact presents a pressing problem for the blue team, she said: “The only people left in the Democratic Party are black people, brown people, and the white people who live around them.”

Harris-Lacewell was one of four Chicago faculty—two political scientists, two Divinity School professors—who spoke on “God in American Politics: The Making of the President 2004,” as part of Chicago Convenes.

M.R.Y.

Photo: Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

Common knowledge

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Want to find out where in Chicago to get a $1 milkshake, free museum passes, and discounted movies tickets? Check out Factoids, a Web site run by fourth-year Jeremy Guttman and the Student Government Campus Services Committee, where students share campus and regional secrets. The site presents the inside scoop in six categories: arts & culture, food, good deals, history, tech & Web mail, and miscellaneous. Among other tidbits, visitors learn that there’s a large computer lab in Harper Library, that a U of C baseball cap costs less at the Gerald Ratner Athletic Center than at the University bookstore, and that Jackson Park has “an awesome Japanese garden.” Those already in the know can submit their own helpful hints. Let knowledge grow!

M.L.

Photo: Maroon caps are cheaper at Ratner.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

Changing of the quads

University staffers swarmed the main-quads tulip beds this morning, holding open plastic bags for groundskeepers to toss in the bulbs that would otherwise be tossed out. “I get them every year,” said Martha Sykes, office manager for the Office of Graduate Affairs. Bulbs in hand, Angela Stoddart, a hematology/oncology PhD in the Department of Medicine, asked Sykes for planting advice. “I plant them now, just like this,” Sykes said. “Really? Not in the fall?” Stoddart asked. “They die down a little bit,” Sykes admitted, but then they come back.

Gardeners from Clarence Davis plant the tulips every fall, and in spring they dig in the summer greenery. This year the quads will bloom with blue salvia, Cape Town blue daisies, dove wings lantana, and marguerite sweet potato vine.

A.M.B.

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Comics Stripped

Clicking through some old and recent work on Cobb 301’s large screen—coaxed to life after 15 minutes of fiddling—cartoonist artist Ivan Brunetti, AB’89, ran through his biography and philosophy in a Tuesday evening talk. Comics, he variously explained, are like calligraphy, Buddhist doctrine, music, life, math, and B-movie making.

“We’re working with the least dignified thing there is,” he said, comparing comic artists to 1940s horror-film producer Val Lewton—the subject of an upcoming strip— “and we’re just trying to give it some dignity.” Brunetti, who is teaching Writing the Graphic Novel this quarter, has also tackled strip bios of Kierkegaard, P. Mondrian, and Erik Satie, finding confluence between the artists’ often hermetic lives and his own. In fact, much of his work is autobiography. “My comics are about me,” he said. “Or people that I think are like me. Or animals that are basically me.”

Such autobiographical examples—published in his weekly Chicago Reader strip—include “Cartooning Will Destroy You” and “The Horror of Simply Being Alive,” exploring writer’s block and the dissolution of his marriage. His work, much of it dark humor, is about “putting people into my head and hoping they’ll understand it.”

A.L.M.

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Design and Dionysus

Last Friday the Festival of the Arts (FOTA) kicked off its 2005 season at the Smart Museum, where an assortment of French wines and grape leaves greeted several hundred buzzing students, primed for the evening’s fashion show. Promptly at 10:05, with the Smart lobby packed, second-year fashion designer Andrea Fjeld’s student models got the party started, introduced by one of several well-built, shirtless men wielding billboards.

Leading off with yesterday’s news—a dress made of old Maroons—Fjeld featured everyday products in her designs, including playing cards, electrical tape, and garbage bags. She wrapped up with her most crowd-pleasing numbers: a slender dress made entirely of neckties and a revealing ensemble featuring a white fluffy skirt and a Saran Wrap top.

Next up, first-year Elizabeth Shaeffer favored bold colors, including an aqua-green corset that one fan termed “gorgeous.” Then second-year Lila McDowell offered a short, dark assortment, set to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” Part of an eccentric, hula-hoop heavy collection, Asta Hostetter’s (AB’04) most popular piece was a bright pink ruffled dress, though the enthusiastic response likely owed more to the model’s decision to expose her knickers than anything else.

With her name scrawled across the final hunk’s chest, second-year Alta Buden presented the show’s last set, an eclectic compilation featuring the classic T “Where Fun Goes to Die,” an 80s-style ripped yellow top with blue knee-highs, and a man in a sarong. For the grand finale, two of Alta’s models staged a mock fight.

When the spectale ended, the models took a bow, sending the crowd outside to finish off the last of the grape leaves, and, of course, wine.

John Fitzgerald

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Photos (from left to right): Andrea Fjeld's playing-card number; Asta Hostetter's ballerina; the models take a curtain call.

Photos by Lila McDowell

Spring's palette

As campus fluffed its May plumage, unusual blossoms sprouted in unexpected places: collaged birdhouses stood sentinel along walkways, framed photos drooped from Botany Pond branches, and pinwheels paraded outside the Reg. FOTA 2005, the latest iteration of the annual Festival of the Arts, transformed the quads into a gallery of student art, blooming with a May 13 fashion show and closing Saturday with the all-day carnival and concert Summer Breeze.

A.L.M.

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Photos (from left to right, top to bottom): Alta Buden's Spirit Houses; Emma Bernstein's site specific fashion photography; penguines (artist unspecified); Monica Herrera's Pinwheel Timeout; David Pickett's Lego Play Area.

Utopia in the park with Claire

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“I think this is casual enough,” Claire Pentecost says as she negotiates herself into a chair at the Franke Institute, forgoing the podium prepared for her. Pentecost, associate professor and chair of the photography department at the Art Institute of Chicago, takes off her denim peacoat, adjusts her beaded bracelets, slips off her loafers, and sits cross-legged in front of 30 or so students.

Beginning her lecture, Insert Utopia Here, part of the Big Problems series, she declares, “I used to be allergic to the idea of utopia—it made me think of Brave New World or something.” The term seemed to connote “a predictable and coercive kind of situation,” filling her with the “horror that the idea of perfection gives.”

Yet Pentecost offered a more palatable kind of utopia—the city park—where “the ideals of the social contract are given a theater.” Parks, for her, are true utopias because they are “creative and political” spaces that reflect “the people, the history, and the desires” of a community. She showed a slide of her own “idea of paradise,” a Paris public garden where the plants are marked with their common and Latin names, making it “like a library.”

Other visions of utopia find their expression in parks. Pentecost displayed slides of a Paris park in an unused railroad depot, a Barcelona one surrounding a former leper’s hospital, and a Hamburg park in a once abandoned area—where local teenagers have proposed that a room be built for community members “to exhibit their hidden talents.” It struck Pentecost as “a gorgeous idea.”

Meredith Meyer, ’07

Photo: Claire Pentecost.

An affair of honors

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“All University of Chicago students are above average,” President Don M. Randel proclaimed at the 49th Annual College Honors Awards Assembly, held Wednesday afternoon in the Ida Noyes Cloister Club. “That means that you,” he told the crowd of undergraduate honorees, “are the above average of the above average—which makes you above average to the nth degree, where n is some very large number.”

As part of a tag team with College Dean John W. Boyer, Dean of Students in the College Susan Art, and University Marshal Lorna P. Straus, President Randel handed out an eclectic array of awards, from the J. Kyle Anderson Award, “presented to the senior baseball player who best exemplifies character, leadership, integrity, and dedication to the team, while distinguishing himself with accomplishments on the field,” to the latest class of Student Marshals, “who assist the Marshal of the University with the dignified conduct of official ceremonies,” and who “are appointed by the President in recognition of their excellent scholarship and leadership in the University community.”

The formal ceremony ended with an invitation to walk over to the President’s House for refreshments—and then an especially spirited rendition of the “Alma Mater,” inspired in part by President Randel’s observation that “singing in full voice and knowing all the words” just might be a prerequisite for receiving another above-average honor: a U of C diploma.

M.R.Y.

Photo: Magazine intern Sam Gill, '05, receives his certificate for Student Worker of the Year.

Divine day

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Four dollars bought grilled hot dogs, eggplant, potato salad, ice cream sundaes, beer, and live bluegrass music at the Divinity School’s last Wednesday community luncheon of the year. Usually a vegetarian meal including an academic speaker in Swift Common Room, today’s cookout in the Swift Hall courtyard was less brainy, more tasty. While the Whisky Hollow Bluegrass Band played Johnny Cash tunes and other standards, Div School students manned the grills and sold self-made cookbooks to raise money for new kitchen equipment. Blessed with a sunny, 70-degree day, guests at five picnic tables conversed, applauded each song, and didn’t hesitate to grab seconds before hitting the sundae bar.

A.M.B.

Photos: The barbeque's on (top), and the band is playing (bottom).

Trolley along

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Looping around campus since 8:30 a.m. Friday, trolley driver Emanuel has memorized the route well before lunchtime. “I don’t even have to think about it,” he says. Transporting U of C reunion attendees from Alumni House to various event locations, he brakes for maroon and white balloons and “trolley stop” signs. Eighty-year-old Ruth Beiersdorf, AM’65, boards on her way back to Alumni House from the SSA, where she earned her degree. “I was here in ’45,” says Beiersdorf, who flew in from Colorado. “Then I got married and came back to finish in ’65.” When she gets off, Jeff, AB’55, and Beverly Steinberg climb on. They think the trolley is a formal tour, but when they learn it’s more for transportation than information they stay put, watching the campus as they browse their brochures and make their pick for Saturday’s Uncommon Core lecture—Developing Fundamental Scientific Concepts: Illustrations from Thermodynamics by Stuart Rice.

After lunch traffic picks up. Five graduates and spouses from the late 40s and early 50s marvel at the new GSB and the Ratner Athletics Center. “The pool’s in there?” one man exclaims. A couple with two kids, ages 5 and 7, ride to the BSLC to board another trolley, where Hank Webber, University VP of community and government affairs, will guide a Hyde Park tour of recent growth and other neighborhood changes. Then they’ll return for a dinosaur talk by Paul Sereno.

Soon the trolley is full. Veronica Drake, AB’85, talks with another member of her class whom she didn’t know during school. Woodward Court is gone, she says, but it was probably time for something new. True, the man agrees. Jimmy’s is still here, they note. The Ida Noyes painting was stolen. Remember Kuviasungnerk. On they talk as Emanuel drives around campus, evoking 20-year-old memories with each turn.

A.M.B.

Photos: Emanuel's trolley (top); Reunion riders (bottom).

Brave hearts

To the skirl of bagpipes and the whirl of cottonwood seeds, Chicago alumni paraded into Rockefeller Chapel Saturday morning, behind maroon and white banners that heralded their College class year or divisional affiliation. Bringing up the rear were the day’s special guests: winners of the Alumni Association’s 2005 Alumni Awards.

Part of Alumni Weekend activities that brought more than 2,500 alums and guests back to campus, the convocation featured an address by Alumni Medalist David Broder, AB’47, AM’51, national political correspondent for the Washington Post.

Invoking Robert Maynard Hutchins and his belief in freedom as essential to the human spirit, Broder—who, like his wife, Ann C. Broder, AB’48, AM’51, is a Hutchins College grad—told his Rockefeller audience, “The liberal mind is an open mind—not devoid of values, but one that is never too sure of how those values can be achieved in a particular age.” Staying open to other approaches and views, he said, is the only way to win “the battle against closed minds,” a battle in which “cynics disarm themselves.” It is “far better,” he ended in Hutchins-echoing exhortation, “to cling to your faith in freedom.”

M.R.Y.

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Photos (from left to right): Alumni Medalist David Broder, AB’48, AM’51; Stuart Rice, the Frank P. Hixon distinguished service professor emeritus in chemistry, and University Marshal Lorna Straus, SM’60, PhD’62, former Dean of Students in the College, received Norman Maclean Faculty Award for their contributions to the student experience on campus; Saturday was a banner day for winners of the 2005 Alumni Awards.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Fair weather

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Throngs of fairgoers descended on Hyde Park last weekend for the 58th annual 57th Street Art Fair. While on Saturday a mid-afternoon storm derailed activities for a spell, temperatures in the high 80s kept the crowds coming. Artists new to the fair set up shop on William H. Ray School grounds, and rows of identical white tents lined 57th Street, Kimbark Avenue, and 56th Street, housing more than 250 craftsmen and their wares: jewelry, wooden utensils, watercolors, stained glass, and photographs of mannequins and ballparks. A life-sized sculpture of a jester attracted many children in attendance.

Neighbors soaked up the sights and sounds from porches and stoops, and lines snaked from the Medici bakery and restaurant. Drawing even more interest were the food tents located on the east side of the William H. Ray School grounds, enticing passersby with ribs, Polish sausages, pad thai, and egg rolls. Lemonade and ice cream offered a respite from the June heat.

John Fitzgerald

King for a day

When a king comes to town, even VIPs pay attention. So it was Thursday when Jordan's King Abdullah II arrived to inaugurate a Harris School lecture series in his name. (Click here for Abdullah's remarks.) University President Don M. Randel, Harris School Dean Susan E. Mayer, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley were all in attendance.

For security, the Oriental Institute shut down at 11 a.m. for the king's 11:30 address in the near-capacity auditorium. Guests were wanded as they entered—and became a captive audience until the event was over. What struck photographer Dan Dry, who had all-access clearance, was seeing "the Secret Service, the Jordanian police, the Chicago PD, and the U of C Police all working together."

A.M.B.

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Photos (from left to right): King Abdullah II addresses the OI crowd; "I was educated in Boston," Abdullah tells Mayor Daley and President Randel; Board of Trustees Chair James Crown presents Abdullah with a proclamation; Secret Service keep the area secure.

Photos by Dan Dry.

How many MBAs does it take to fill a quad?

Convocation weekend concluded Sunday as the Graduate School of Business dispensed degrees to some 650 students. In my role as journalist, I arrived at Harper Quadrangle early, armed with tape recorder and notepad. But this was not to be an objective report. One MBA had this editor’s extra attention: my fiancé. And so I found myself jockeying unashamedly for the perfect picture—of him—as the procession drew near.

The only class to spend time at both the old and new Hyde Park quarters, the festivities made the most of the diverse locations. First against Harper’s Gothic backdrop, Harry Davis, the Roger L. & Rachel M. Goetz distinguished service professor of creative management, spoke on “Being Silly, Seriously,” and Credit Suisse First Boston Chief Executive Officer Brady Dougan, AB’81, MBA’82, on corporate leadership. Then, after each graduate’s name had its due, family and friends strolled over to the GSB’s Woodlawn Avenue digs for a swanky reception complete with champagne and appetizers in martini glasses.

I toasted my fiancé—and the University where I have worked since November 2003. We leave Chicago July 1 for Washington, D.C., with memories and MBA in tow.

M.L.

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Photos (from left to right): Almost-MBAs listen to the convocation speakers; Dean Ted Snyder, AM'78, PhD'84, shakes The Fiance's hand; the swanky post-ceremony reception.

Photos by Dan Dry.

On the midway, in medias res

For the final production of its 50th anniversary year, Court Theatre chose a play that’s approaching its own half-century mark: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame premiered in 1957 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, performed in French as Fin de partie.

Set in a drab, half-underground room that shelters four characters—blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm; his servant Clove; and Hamm’s ancient father and mother, Nagg and Nell, who live, per Beckett’s directions, in garbage cans—Endgame has become synonymous with existential, Cold War despair. The current production, directed by Christopher Bayes, captures the disillusion while living up to its Court billing as “A Carnival of Laughter and Despair.”

Videotaped roller-coasters, a Ferris wheel’s circling lights, and tent-like canvas hangings set the midway mood. And, as Bayes plays up Beckett’s music-hall influences, Hamm (Allen Gilmore) performs as a vaudeville ham, Clove (Joe Faust) is his slapstick sidekick, and Nagg (Maury Cooper) and Nell (Roslyn Alexander) do burlesque bits.

After all, as Nell tells Nag, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” But Nell’s next line rings even truer as the play moves toward its certain, uncertain conclusion: “Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.”

At the end of Court’s Endgame, which runs through June 26, neither is the audience laughing any more.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (from left to right): Joe Foust as Clov and Allen Gilmore as Hamm; Roslyn Alexander as Nell and Joe Foust as Clov; Maury Cooper as Nagg and Roslyn Alexander as Nell.

Photos by Michael Brosilow

Bloomsday, yes

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On Michigan Avenue near Adams yesterday afternoon, soaking up the ample sunlight, a stroller could bask unaware that this was a red-letter day for fans of modernist literature and friends of Ireland alike. Take an elevator up 22 floors to the Cliff Dwellers club, however, and there was no mistaking the festiveness and importance of June 16th. It was Bloomsday, of course—the day of both James Joyce’s first date with his future wife Nora Barnacle and the day his landmark novel Ulysses takes place, both in 1904. At Cliff Dwellers, as in cities the world over, dedicated Joyceans gathered “to read from and rejoice in this comic masterpiece,” in the words of emcee Steve Diedrich, whose popular Newberry Library course on the novel had several appreciative alumni in the audience.

Besides Diedrich, last night’s readers included Irish Consul General Charles Sheehan, the explosively funny actor and two-time Jeff Award winner Lawrence McCauley, and three University faculty and staff members. Before reading the novel’s first scene, Sheehan spoke about Joyce’s connections to the United States and Chicago. Though he never visited the U.S., Sheehan noted, Joyce deeply appreciated his supporters here, especially Judge John M. Woolsey, who lifted the ban on the book in 1933. Sheehan read from Woolsey’s decision, and when he finished with “Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States,” the room erupted in cheers.

The three readers with University ties are Chicago Bloomsday veterans. Claudia Traudt, AM'81, who teaches Ulysses in the Graham School’s Basic Program, set the crowd by turns guffawing and blushing with her ripe, ribald performance of the young seductress Gerty MacDowell. Cardiology professor Rory Childers, grandson of an Irish martyr and son of an Irish president, was the very voice of authenticity reading from the novel's “Ithaca” section. And development staff member Mary Nell Murphy brought the event to a poignant close with a strikingly musical, delicate Molly Bloom. Murphy emphasized the sweetness of the novel’s famous, breathless last pages, while not missing the humor: “…and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Laura Demanski

Photos: Development staff member Mary Nell Murphy and writer/actor Kevin Grandfield; Graham School Ulysses teacher Claudia Traudt.

As the deans turn

The University will have some familiar faces in its top academic ranks for the foreseeable future.

The Divinity School’s Richard Rosengarten, AM’88, PhD’94, and Graduate School of Business’s Edward Snyder, AM’78, PhD'84, have both been appointed to second five-year terms, effective July 1. Rosengarten is working on three books. During his previous tenure, the Div School created the Chicago Forum on Pedagogy and the Study of Religion, a three-year forum of plenary talks, panel discussions, and graduate-student workshops. Snyder, the George Pratt Shultz professor of economics, also has kept busy, overseeing the GSB’s move to its new Hyde Park quarters. In addition to teaching and coediting the Journal of Law & Economics, he is a member of the energy and industrial group’s advisory board at Accenture and chairman of Huron Consulting Group’s academic council.

Across the Midway, Jeanne Marsh returns as dean of the School of Social Service Administration—she held the position from 1988 to 1998 and served as acting dean this past year. Marsh, the George Herbert Jones professor in the SSA, is a leading expert on developing and evaluating social services for children and families.

ML

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Photos (from left to right): Rosengarten, Snyder, and Marsh.

Feats of clay

Standing before a glass case of rough, beige-colored bowls circa 7000 BC, Oriental Institute museum director Geoff Emberling begins his talk. “Early ceramic vessels were used for cooking grains.” Their introduction, he tells about 20 visitors on a tour of Chicago-area ceramics, correlates with agriculture’s growth and created “a human health disaster.” When people began eating “starchy, sugary grains,” he says, their teeth rotted. Over time, with less use, human teeth became smaller.

Emberling, over six feet tall with dark curly hair, talks and laughs with the group, mostly older women, as he ushers them to the next case—Mesopotamian pottery from 7000–3000 BC. The bowls and sherds here display painted patterns; artisans had begun employing a slow potter’s wheel, creating smoother, thinner vessels and decorating them with concentric circles. Next up: bevel-rimmed bowls, marked by knuckle and thumbprints that, Emberling says, “give you an instant connection to the past.” Found by the thousands, these 3500–2900 BC dishes “were used basically as paper plates” to feed the king’s many workers.

Traveling from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast, the group views finds from Anatolia, or ancient Turkey. It’s “a very different kind of pottery,” Emberling notes, “handmade, red-burnished pottery.” Produced from 3000–1000 BC, the vessels feature spouts, handles, and “really beautiful forms.” Around 1000 BC, he says, pointing to pieces more brown than red, the color and shapes changed. A new people had come to the region—the Phrygians, known for King Midas, had migrated from the Balkans.

In the Persian gallery Emberling emphasizes the Iranian tradition. Dating to around 4000 BC, the thin, hand-made bowls and jugs are elaborately painted with abstract images of mountain goats or dancing figures. People had constructed kilns capable of firing at extremely hot temperatures. “The introduction of metallurgy just before this,” Emberling notes, “led to massive deforestation” as humans collected firewood. The land had been filled with trees but “soon got as barren as it is today.”

The OI tour finished, the group sets off to see the Smart Museum’s “Centers and Edges” exhibit, the Geophysical Sciences building’s Ruth Duckworth mural, and the Chicago Cultural Center’s Duckworth exhibit. “I learned so much,” gushes one woman, smiling at Emberling. “Art on the Move” director Joan Arenberg says, “Geoff has set the bar very high for today.”

A.M.B.

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Photos (from left to right): Early glazed Mesopotamian pottery; Emberling shows off Iranian pottery; Emberling talks with visitors after the tour.

The Pearl was their oyster

The Little Black Pearl, sitting on an innocuous 47th Street corner, is an oasis of silence and cool air on a hot June day. The small, open gallery’s high ceilings and bright, echoey spaces complement Research and Development, a busy collection of pieces from this year’s crop of ten graduating MFA students.

Lined up to greet visitors are Michael Dinges’s engravings: everyday objects including a bucket and a PVC pipe, scratched over with political messages and precise drawings of iconic animals. Just beyond hovers Julia Oldham’s video installation, three televisions broadcasting time-lapse loops of the artist dancing and flapping to imitate a bee. Around the corner, Caroline Mak’s webs of unstrung crochet poke through sheetrock and wind around a garden hose, while across the way John Preus’s Narrative Generation System 1: Homezwarethartiz uses a desk fan to animate a hair ball and toy tractor. A discreet video camera projects passing images on a television, bringing the observer into the artwork.

Contributors also include Kate Baird, Ben King, Merry-Beth Noble, Tara Strickstein, Lindsey Walton, and David Wolf, AB’00. The exhibit closes Saturday with a 2:30 artists’ gallery talk.

A.L.M.

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Photos (from left to right): Untitled by Caroline Mak; Rotations by Julia Oldham; Untitled, part of the Trench Art collection, by Michael Dinges.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Obama on call

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Five television cameras and half a dozen reporters lined up in the Comer Children's Hospital lobby this morning to hear Illinois' junior senator, Barack Obama, promote federal legislation aimed at improving health information technology. Obama joined GOP Senator Bill Frist and Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton in introducing the bill June 16.

"Too much health care is still provided by pen and paper," said Obama, a former Law School lecturer, contributing to medical errors that kill up to 98,000 Americans each year. The proposed legislation would provide grants for local health-care providers to computerize medical records, and it would establish a national coordinator of health information technology to develop standards and make sure records are secure.

Obama listened while U of C officials touted the Hospitals' own technology plans. Hospitals CIO Eric Yablonka said Chicago already has begun a $70 million technology update. Next assistant professor of medicine Alex Lickerman, AB'88, MD'92, praised the legislation, noting that electronic medical records help "patient care keep up with scientific advancement," allow physicians to see what patients' other doctors have prescribed or diagnosed, and improve clinical research by keeping information in a database.

After Obama noted, for full disclosure's sake, that his wife works at the Hospitals (she's vice president for community affairs) and his two daughters were born there, he opened it up for questions. How, one reporter asked, would the legislation protect patient privacy? Does it provide enough money, another wondered, to do the job? Then, because they had the senator's attention, the journalists quizzed him on other news of the day: a potential new Supreme Court nominee, the Ten Commandments decision handed down this morning, the war in Iraq, and a state video-interrogation law.

A.M.B.

Photos: Obama drew several local media outlets (top); Obama stands by as assistant professor of medicine Alex Lickerman hails electronic medical records (bottom).

Low-top culture

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Got to get your hands on a copy of Kappa Alpha Theta’s 1999 sorority portrait, “including approximately 30 girls?” A trip to uchi.marketplace, where students buy and sell a slew of stuff, is in order. Perhaps you’ve got two Jimmy Buffett concert tickets you’d like to be rid of. Voila! Adrian on Marketplace is “willing to pay a lot” to catch “Cheeseburger in Paradise” at Wrigley Field in September.

Marketplace, “the product of insomnia,” was first introduced to the University by an undergraduate night owl in August 1999. In 2001 Marketplace became a joint venture between Student Government and Devon Ryan, AB’02, according to the site, which permits anyone with a University e-mail address to post wares.

Over the past six years Marketplace has grown to include hundreds of listings. Its users also have matured. One current seller has posted several pairs of low-top Converse All-Stars “from back when [he] was a hipster.” He’ll only relinquish his black, orange, red, aquamarine, brown, and pink low-tops, however, to a “worthy owner.”

Meredith Meyer, '06

Photo: This new Dunlop squash racquet has been for sale on Marketplace since June 26. The posting has been viewed 53 times by potential buyers.

They all scream...

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As temperatures rose above 90 degrees Wednesday, summertime undergrads flocked to the ice-cream truck dispensing free Good Humor bars at the edge of Hutch Courtyard just before noon. Under the shade of trees, and fanned by an occasional light breeze, the clump of students waiting for ice cream moved along briskly. After grabbing a chocolate éclair, strawberry shortcake, candy center crunch, toasted almond, or sundae bar, several students clustered in small groups, chatting.

By 12:25 supplies ran out. As Pars Ice Cream employee Roxanne started up the truck, someone called, “Are you coming back?” “In two weeks!” she replied, already on the move.

The free treats came courtesy of the Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities (ORCSA), CAPS, and the Alumni Association, whose Noontime Noise programs, featuring live music and free ice cream, are a part of Summer in the City, a series of events for students on campus this summer. Wednesday’s DJ, according to Katy Bologna, a rising second-year and ORCSA’s summer assistant programmer, left his records at home. By the time he returned to the DJ booth at 12:45, the event was over.

“Next time, I promise, there will be music right at 12,” Bologna said. “The DJ messing up is a one-time thing.” Most of the spectators seemed satisfied enough with the ice cream. As Maria Patterson, a rising third-year staying on campus to work in a physics lab, said, “I give it two thumbs up because I like free ice cream.”

Hana Yoo, '07

Happy birthday, improv

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The Reynolds Club’s third-floor Frances X. Kinahan Theater was packed to its 137-person capacity at last night’s celebration of improvisational theater. Fifty years ago to the day, the Compass, a theater troupe cofounded by David Shepherd and Paul Sills, AB’51, staged the world’s first improv-theater performance in a bar, no longer in existence, at 1152 East 55th Street. Last night’s heat, oppressive despite the open windows, did little to dampen the audience’s laughing and clapping. Besides improv, the show included remarks by emcee Patrick Brennan of Chicago’s WNEP Theater, associate dean of the College Bill Michel, AB’92, University archivist Dan Meyer, AM’75, PhD’94, and Jonathan Pitts, the show’s producer and the Chicago Improv Festival’s executive director.

Meyer—quipping that if any evidence was needed that the event was a historical one, he was it—announced that Shepherd had donated his professional papers to the University archives in the Reg’s Special Collections. “Now we’ve got the goods,” he said. Pitts said he hoped to track down all the living original Compass Players for a reunion performance in November. Although 50 years is a long time for a human being, he said, “[improv] is still a very young art form. It’s still changing, it’s still growing.”

Undergrad improv group Off Off Campus, accompanied by guitarist Ben Lorch, AB’93, AM’04, recreated the Compass’s first performance. In the first act the players spoofed the present day’s news, including song and dance, and acted out a scene centering on a dysfunctional family. After a ten-minute intermission, Off Off returned with two-person scenes based on audience suggestions. Shepherd led a brief Q&A, followed by a reception in the Reynolds Club South Lounge featuring Glaceau vitamin water and a two-layer chocolate and vanilla cake.

Hana Yoo, '07

Photos: David Shepherd watches Off Off Campus rehearse for last night's show (top); The players enact the day's news (bottom).

Photos by Dan Dry

Sound buffet

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Tucked away in the corner of Goodspeed Hall’s fourth floor, near practice rooms that echo scales and missed notes, sits a musty, church-like concert hall. Wooden beams trace the ceiling’s dramatic arch, black binders packed with scores line the walls, and 20 rows of red-upholstered stacking chairs sit before the stage. A quilted blanket is draped over a grand piano, occupying stage right. Positioned beside the piano, four music stands and black chairs are empty.

Empty, that is, until the four women of the Ardnamara String Quartet file in—a vision in black. As they tote their violins, viola, and cello across the stage to their seats, their high heels click against the wooden floor. Once situated, perched on the edge of their chairs, light streaming in from the window behind them, the quartet begins its performance, part of the Music Department’s noontime concert series. About 20 people enjoy the musical nourishment, including works by Haydn, Shostakovich, and Schubert. One auditor needs more tangible sustenance and eats his lunch during the show—a homemade sandwich housed in Tupperware.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Louise Higgins, violin; Rebekah Cope, violin; Karen Schulz-Harmon, cello; and Susan Tanner, viola.

Artists ad astra

When Barbara Kern, Crerar’s science reference librarian, heard that John David Mooney—creator of the aluminum-and-crystal, 1984 Crystara sculpture suspended from the skylight of Crerar’s three-story atrium—would be in Chicago for Inspiration of Astronomical Phenoma, a late-June conference on astronomy and the arts, she and her colleagues quickly planned an exhibit exploring the same theme. One of four glass cases encompassing “They Saw Stars: Art and Astronomy” is devoted to Crystara, featuring a Chicago Tribune article praising the installation, photos of the artistic process, and other works by Mooney.

The three other cases in the exhibit, on display through September 1, feature works from 1066 to the present, such as Thomas Wright’s An original theory or new hypothesis of the universe, published in 1750; H.G. Wells’s 1906 science-fiction work In The Days of the Comet; and a 2004 handmade artist’s box including a telescope, paper depictions of several phases of the moon, and a working lunar clock, made by the Regenstein’s Digital Library Development Center codirector, Elisabeth Long.

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Images from the exhibit "They Saw Stars," courtesy the Crerar Library.

Swing kids

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About 15 minutes into last night’s beginning swing class, the second in the Chicago Swing Dance Society’s six-week summer session, Adeoye M. Mabogunje, AB’04, told the seven females and three males circled around him in pairs, raising their arms as if embracing giant balls and clasping each other’s hands, to hug their partners. Flashing a wide smile, he explained that in swing, you have to touch your partner and feel comfortable with it. Throughout the lesson he and co-instructor Debra Raich, a “Chicago dancer at large,” emphasized the important connection between the lead and the follower. The follower, they said, should be constantly aware of the dance’s natural momentum, never moving without a signal from her lead—the gentle pressure of his hand between her shoulder blades, for instance, or the direction in which he propels his body. By the end of the lessons, a student should be able to swing dance with anyone.

As the novice dancers shimmied around the third-floor theater of Ida Noyes, both without music and to jazzy tunes from big-band CDs Swing America and Compact Jazz: Count Basie, rotating partners with each pause in the dance, Mabogunje clapped the rhythm, shouting out counts and names of moves. He and Raich gave tips such as how to hold one’s arms—like holding a grapefruit or pushing a shopping cart. Around 9 p.m., 45 minutes after the lesson was scheduled to end, the class disbanded, still bubbling with enthusiasm. The instructors encouraged the students to practice—and show off—their new moves at Friday’s Java Jive, a weekly three-hour swing fest preceded by a free one-hour lesson.

Hana Yoo, '07

Photo: Instructors Adeoye M. Mabogunje, AB’04, and Debra Raich.

One love evening

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Under a generous splash of July evening sun, a colorful seven-man band sent its mellow melodies along the Midway, filling the now-dry ice rink with reggae sound. Attracted by the beat, dog walkers and soccer players wandered over to join the families, summer students, and neighborhood folks dotting the surrounding grass and filling the rickety bleachers across center ice from the stage. A score of kids pranced and wiggled along the rink’s edges, clutching popsicles provided gratis by the Chicago Park District, which cosponsors Reggae on the Midway, along with the University.

“We want to get all different types of music out here,” said Rick Shaheen, Park District supervisor, looking forward to future summer concerts of jazz, blues, and salsa. Wednesday’s show featured Chicago-based Toki Aks, which had the 250-plus crowd swaying to the rhythm. “I hope ya like ja music,” sang the band leader. “Reggae music. Ja music is the cure.”

A.L.M.

Photos: Toki Aks jams on the Midway (top); A toddler feels the beat (bottom).

Importing history

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Among the West Loop’s neglected warehouses and sidewalks, crunchy with broken beer bottles, grows a Japanese garden. Standing at 400 N. Morgan, it belongs to the Douglas Dawson Gallery, relocated last November from the more gentrified River North neighborhood, which was “losing its edge,” according to Wally Bowling, the gallery’s architect.

Inside, amidst a lacquered Burmese Buddha, a Peruvian urn from the Chancay tribe, and a Japanese armoire dating to 1875, the Smart Museum hosted its final event for this year’s Smart Set, a membership program intended to bring together gallery owners and Chicago alumni “who don’t know much about art but are curious and interested in collecting it,” said Katie Malmquist, manager of membership and annual giving at the Smart.

Owner Douglas Dawson put his audience at ease, explaining that he got into the business largely because he was “very uninterested in Western civilization and trying to avoid a real job.” Dawson encouraged the 45 alumni to ask him “anything you’ve always wanted to ask but have been too embarrassed to.” In response to one woman’s query about whether a slender statue was once part of a fertility ritual, Dawson replied, “The two main concerns of ancient art are fertility and ancestor worship. These cover 90 percent of the pieces.” But “this piece,” Dawson assured, “is not a vagina.”

Meredith Meyer, ’06

What women want

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The idea came by chance to Agraja Sharma, a rising College fourth-year. While filing ledgers for her job at ORCSA, her eye fell upon an account that “wasn’t very active”: A Woman’s Guide to the University of Chicago, a compilation of resources for female students. Flipping through the publication, last released in 2000, Sharma decided to resuscitate the guide.

“I e-mailed all the girls I knew,” said Sharma, including Facebook friends and women who belonged to female-oriented Registered Student Organizations (RSO), like Sex Education Activists and Women and Youth Supporting Each Other. At spring quarter’s end, she assigned volunteers to the 17 chapters from the old guide, which covered issues such as substance abuse, nutrition and exercise, and sexual harassment. Sharma also added new chapters on minority women and women in academics. The group wants to “personalize [the guide] to the University of Chicago,” said Sharma, who found the old guide too general. Another goal, said Raedy Ping, a graduate student in psychology and one of the group’s five administrators, is to make the guide “more applicable to older students” than Chicago Life. They plan to update the Web site (wguide.uchicago.edu), which, Sharma said, will be revised frequently in the future, whereas a paper version of the guide—the first is due out this fall—will come out every two years.

Sharma hopes the revived guide will “build a platform for women’s issues,” providing both information and the opportunity to network with other women and related RSOs. The group is planning to become an RSO, throw a launch party in the fall featuring other female-oriented organizations, hold monthly brown-bag lunches with both students and faculty on women’s issues, and advertise both the guide and the Web site. For now, however, Sharma is excited that the woman’s guide has prompted other campus resources, like the Student Care Center, which had outdated links on its Web site, to update their information. “I can’t believe,” Sharma said, “we’re already making a difference on campus.”

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: Psychology grad student Raedy Ping and College fourth-years Agraja Sharma (with 2000 Women's Guide) and Jessica Lent.

Renaissance relationships

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Scholars often leave out the East when they write about the Italian Renaissance and too “narrowly divide” Christian and Islamic countries, argued Daniel Goffman in Pick Hall Tuesday. Goffman, AM‘77, PhD’85, who chairs the history department at DePaul University, claimed that the Ottomans and the Italians were much cozier than historians have suggested. In fact, Goffman contended, the “need for the Italian state to be flexible to the Ottoman Empire” was the “chief stimulant” of Renaissance-born diplomacy.

Scanning the crowd of graduate students and faculty, which nearly filled Lecture Hall 016, Goffman noted that he recognized “all but one or two” of the spectators, from the University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and from a talk he gave earlier in the day. This afternoon event, he warned, would be “utterly formal” in contrast to his morning discussion. Goffman planned to read directly from his recent paper, “The Ottoman World in the Construction of the Early Modern State,” because, he joked, “I’m still not sure what I’m trying to say.” Despite that disclaimer, the attendees gripped their pens and, with the ferocity of September freshman, scrawled in their notebooks historical details about the Ottomans’ intimate relationship with Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Meredith Meyer, '06

Photo: Daniel Goffman.

Take me out to the ballgame

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Two yellow buses parked outside the Reynolds Club Saturday lurched forward shortly after 5 p.m., carrying a full cargo of College students to the 6:05 p.m. White SoxRed Sox game at U.S. Cellular Field. The Office of the Reynolds Club & Student Activities (ORCSA) organized the trip as part of its Summer in the City event series. Once the buses ground to a halt and rising second-year Katy Bologna, ORCSA’s summer assistant programmer, warned that they would leave at 10 p.m. regardless of when the game ended, the students scattered to find their seats, dotted throughout the stadium. Some paused to purchase cheese nachos, a 34-inch Rollin’ Red Super Rope, or funnel cake dusted with powdered sugar.

Although a surprisingly large Red Sox contingent attended the match, rising third-year Ben Zimmerman, on campus this summer for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program in physics, said he favored neither team—“I’m a baseball fan,” he said. (Not such a fan that he stayed to watch the game’s outcome; in the fifth inning he ducked out for bubble tea at Joy Yee’s in Chinatown, accompanied by his girlfriend and two friends, arranging his own transportation back to Hyde Park.) In the end the Red Sox, who hold first place in the American League East, beat the AL-Central-leading White Sox 3–0.

Hana Yoo, '07

Read me

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“It’s four o’clock,” said Xenia Ruiz, glancing at her watch with a frown. Ruiz, a Chicagoan whose first novel, Choose Me (Walk Worthy Press), came out last month, was scheduled to do a reading and book signing at 4 p.m. this past Friday, but she waited half an hour for friends and family who were “stuck in traffic” to fill the little corner of the Ellis Avenue Barnes & Noble, where four brown couches and six folding chairs were set up. About a dozen audience members eventually trickled in, one bearing a bouquet of yellow roses and a bunch of balloons. Explaining that she had a sore throat and a cough, Ruiz read the prologue of her book in a soft, throaty voice.

During the question-and-answer period, Ruiz said, “I wanted to write an interracial love story.” Her novel follows Eva, a Latina who falls in love with Adam, an African American. In some ways, the book reflects her own life—Ruiz married an African American at 19 and had two college-age children by her 30s. Ruiz also drew inspiration for characters from people she knows. “I took tiny details,” she insisted. “The whole story was fiction.”

Ruiz’s second novel, In the Picture I Have Of You, which she completed years ago but was rejected by publishers, is due out next year as part of the two-book deal she received from Walk Worthy.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Copy cat

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A child’s car seat balances atop empty cardboard boxes in a corner of Beecher 310. A cubicle divider barely conceals a computer on the opposite side of the room. The musty-smelling space has no vials or brain charts posted on the walls. Yet it is in rooms like this that Bennett Bertenthal’s cognitive-psychology research team has spent the past three years testing how environment affects the way humans think and behave.

To begin each experiment, graduate student Matthew Longo, AM’04, asks his subject to fill out a survey judging her own capacity for empathy. Then the subject sits before a monitor and watches a computer-generated image of a hand press its index or middle finger down, alternating left and right hands, for about 30 minutes. Longo instructs the subject to press the “1” key with her index finger or the “3” key with her middle finger to indicate whether the computer’s depressed finger is on the left or the right side of the monitor. Later Longo will evaluate if the subject has accurately recorded right or left, or if she merely mimicked the simulated hand’s action. He and other researchers hope to quantify people’s propensity to “unconsciously imitate the behavior they observe” and possibly relate this data to the subject's self-reported ability to empathize with others.

At least 250 people have been tested so far, Longo estimates, using “at least 20 different variants” of the experiment. Last week the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance accepted an article on the tests, which demonstrated that people mimic behavior they observe. The team’s inquiries are not over; they will continue researching the topic “as long as it’s interesting,“ Longo says, and as long as it helps scientists “understand the way people think.”

Meredith Meyer, '06

Photo: Matthew Longo sits at the psych-experiment computer.

Poster girl

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She stands in front of the Ellis Avenue Barnes & Noble each weekday morning, flanked by three friends and wearing a poster that covers much of her small frame. Her sign, in colored markers, reads, “God, Creator Of Heaven & Earth, Made You Breath-Takingly Beautiful. You Are His BELOVED.” From 8:30 to 9:30 she displays her sign; when the hour is up, she packs it into a large blue plastic bag and leaves. Rebecca Wei has to be on time for class.

For the past four weeks Wei, 16, a Naperville Central High School rising junior, has been commuting to campus for the Young Scholars Program, a free, intensive, four-week math workshop for Chicago-area seventh through twelfth graders. In the hour before classes start and from 2:30 to 4 p.m., Wei shoulders the poster. She got the idea from “the circumcision guy” who stations himself in front of the bookstore each afternoon. “I thought, well, if he can stand on a corner for something he believes in, so can I.” A member of a nondenominational church, Wei said that the poster idea “isn’t my church.” She and her friends “just thought it up.” In the afternoon she finds other campus spots because, she said, “I don’t care either way about circumcision. I don’t want to be associated with it.” Last week, for instance, she stood in the Regenstein Library lobby (she couldn’t enter without a University ID) for about half an hour before she was “kicked out.” She’s often parked at the bus stop in front of the Cancer Research Center.

“Some people are really encouraging and some people will, like, lower their eyes,” said David Chang, a Naperville Central rising sophomore who stands with Wei each morning. One person pulled a book out of his bag for “ten seconds” as he passed, avoiding eye contact. On the other hand, “We got a taxicab driver who wanted to shake our hands.” Although the poster’s purpose is evangelism, Wei said, one person thought it had to do with birth control.

Wei, who also attended the Young Scholars Program last year, will likely return next summer. If so, she said, “I will definitely do the poster thing.”

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: Poster-clad Rebecca Wei, fellow Naperville Central High School students David Chang and Emily Sheu, and seventh-grader Vincent Chang take a break in Cobb's coffeeshop.

Math buzz

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“What’s purple and commutes?” Nathan Czuba, AB’05, asks his four boothmates, at Ida Noyes Pub. Joe Ochiltree, ’06, suddenly straightens up in his seat—he knows the answer but allows Czuba to release the punch line, “An abelian grape!” Interrupted by occasional trips to the bar for another pint, Czuba and Ochiltree keep their booth entertained with a series dueling math jokes.

It is the last Pub Night of the summer, and by 6:30 Arthur Lundberg, AB’04, the ORCSA coordinator of the event, runs out of tickets for free beer and pizza. Scanning the room, dimly lit by Miller Lite Tiffany-style lamps, Lundberg estimates that 150—200 people had already taken advantage of the give-aways. Students huddle in booths and crowd around the foosball, pool, and shuffleboard tables, devouring baskets of 20-piece buffalo wings and onion rings.

Around 6:45, back in the math booth, Czuba rounds off the math wit marathon with, “What is the contour integral around Western Europe?” He waits for a response, but no one has a guess. “Zero because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe,”Czuba declares. He reassures his table, “Its okay. I’m Polish.”

—Meredith Meyer, ’06

Under the Miller neon, ORSCA coordinator Arthur Lundberg surveys the scene; Joe Ochiltree awaits a punchline.

Movie circuit

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A sign reading “Shhhh! Filming in progress” hangs on the entrance to the Max Palevsky Cinema lobby. Beyond the heavy wooden doors, Andy DeJohn, AM’03, talks through the staging of the next scene with his six-man crew. “I don’t think we need any more light in that area.” This is the first day of filming for his 25-minute Fire Escape film, La Chevelure, based on the 19th-century short story by Guy de Maupassant.

Five extras sit on the floor—knitting, reading Life magazine, and munching on challah bread; they wait their turn in front of the camera or their turn to go home. “Do you know what time it is?” an extra asks her friend. “Three hours left,” he responds, fishing a sweet from a Dunkin Donuts container. DeJohn, pacing up and down the lobby with a white terry-cloth towel in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, wipes the sweat from his brow and shouts, “Can I have the principal cast!” Three actors jump up and take their places. A half hour later, with the cameras, lights, audio, and actors adjusted, DeJohn calls, “Extras, pleeaaase!” The extras form a line in the lobby behind the principal actors. There is more adjustment. The actors and extras grow listless as the minutes tick away. Readjustment. Thirty minutes later filming begins, lasting five or so takes before the crew blows a fuse. The monitor and cameras go dark.

DeJohn takes the setback in stride. If things are “a little hectic” he isn’t worried, he says, because “they usually are on film sets.” He expects to continue shooting and editing through the summer and early fall and have “a finished product around beginning to mid-October.”

Meredith Meyer, ’06


Waiting for the shoot (top). Lights, camera, action (bottom).

Hiroshima remembered

Before Hiroshima Day 2005, a two-hour program in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombings, began this past Saturday, audience members promoted their own causes. As Chicagoland folk artist and activist Dave Martin strummed a tune from the chancel, another man roved the aisles, instructing people to make a phone call and five copies of a flyer claiming the United States is dumping uranium on Iraq. “Imagine having a child born without an eye because the United States dropped bombs on your country,” he said. A man wearing a gray “Free Tibet” T-shirt and toting a National Resources Defense Council Member carryall showed Addicted To War to those seated around him, explaining, “It’s designed like a comic book, but the historical content is deadly serious.”

During the ceremony, Chicago singer Maggie Brown regaled the crowd with Vaughn Monroe’s “When The Lights Go On Again,” the title song from the 1944 film, before a series of speakers took the stage. “We gather here today in remembrance,” said Reverend Laura Hollinger, Rockefeller’s associate dean. “We gather here today in repentance. We gather here today in sorrow. And we gather here in hope.” The speakers, drawing parallels between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the ongoing Iraq war, emphasized the dangers of nuclear proliferation and warfare. David Cortright, president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and a fellow at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, called nuclear weapons “instruments of terrorism,” warning that more than 40 nations have the full capacity to build them. “We’re here to renew our commitment to a world where Hiroshima and Nagasaki can happen never again,” said Illinois State Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, AB’68, AM’73. “The threat today is just as real as it was.”

The commemoration, organized by Illinois Peace Action, concluded with a march to Nuclear Energy, the Henry Moore sculpture marking the campus site of the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. “You have come here to light a flame of hope and extinguish the flame of death,” said the Reverend Calvin Morris. Attendees dropped candles into a bucket of water, symbolically putting out the atomic flame.

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Folk singer Dave Martin; beginning the march to the Henry Moore sculpture; extinguishing the atomic flame.

Photos by Hana Yoo, ’07.

Tables of tapas

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After the Spanish soft rock music stopped pouring through the speakers at Emilio’s Tapas, Alumni Association Executive Director Christine O’Neill Singer, X’72, reminded the dozens of students at the mixer, sponsored by the Alumni Association and the Office of Minority and Student Affairs (OMSA), about the “alumni community, waiting to welcome you with open arms.”

Scanning the room, where undergraduates coagulated in cliques around food tables, Ten Chu, a part-time student at the Graduate School of Business, was struck by the generation gap. “These guys are all kids to me.” Richard Tung agreed with his friend that the event had a different flavor than GSB functions. Juggling an Ambar beer in one hand and a chicken kabob in the other, Tung said, “At GSB events, parents are there with kids in strollers sometimes.” Chu noted another difference: “There are a greater number of professions here too.”

Career paths were on the minds of the event organizers and the 130 students and alumni who attended. Interspersed between tapas-stained napkins, brochures advertising the “14,000 alumni strong” Alumni Careers Network littered tables in the private dining room. Ana Vazquez, the OMSA director and deputy dean of students in the University, also reminded the group of the Chicago Multicultural Connection, a new alumni mentoring program for minority students.

Tung was not overly concerned with flexing his mentoring or networking muscles Thursday evening. “Have you tried this potato thing?” he asked. “It’s so good—I’ve been eating it all night.” He had more on his plate to think about.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Night vision

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A video of Faith Hill in concert lit up the movie screen outside Rosenwald Hall Tuesday night as Dashboard Confessional’s song “So Long Sweet Summer” filtered through the sound system. For students attending the quads premiere of The Incredibles, the summer quarter does not officially end until August 27, and for three boys waiting for the movie, time is measured not in seasons but in yards.

“It’s football time!” yelled a young boy in a blue Wizards jersey as he tossed the pigskin to his friend in a red jersey. “I’m the wide receiver. I’m the all-time best wide receiver,” he declared before establishing the boundaries of the field. “This tree to that post is ten yards.” Throwing his hands up in exasperation, the third boy—bespectacled with a mop of red hair—protested, “No, that’s too far!” Pointing to a sapling near University Avenue, the redhead adjusted the proposed yard line. "OK, OK! The movie is going to start soon. Let’s play football,” the Wizard acquiesced. Without further ado, he yelled a throaty “hike!” and tossed the ball in the air.

By 8:45 students began to gather benches from around the quads, making a semicircle facing the screen. The football players, fumbling by the dim light of lampposts, called it a night and hustled up to the corral of benches, blankets, and tiki torches, where 50 or so students had situated themselves. As the Rockefeller bells announced the arrival of the nine o’clock hour, Mr. Incredible appeared on the screen and a few last bikers rolled onto the quad staring straight ahead at the bright animation, like moths attracted to the light.

Students will have their sixth and final chance to catch an ORCSA-sponsored movie on the quad August 24, with a showing of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Think it's easy to take a photograph of a night screening (top) of The Incredibles (bottom)? Think again.

A little lawn music

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Alumni Association project coordinator Lisa Ballard stood at the western edge of Millenium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion, holding a maroon “University of Chicago Alumni” banner and waiting for early arrivals. One hundred and one alumni had registered for the free, “family-friendly” event, Ballard said, including an 11-person group from Kankakee. Attendees swarmed the lawn for the Grant Park Orchestra’s 6:30 “American Romantics” concert, featuring music by Gershwin, Hailstork, Barber, and Hanson. Among them was Julie Burros, AB’86, Chicago’s director of cultural planning, who spearheaded the Wednesday evening get-together. “It was kind of natural for me to help organize this,” she said. Burros offered optional nametags to alumni trickling in: a family, carrying Subway sandwiches and sodas, who kicked off their shoes before sprawling on a green throw; a gray-haired couple who settled into their lawn chairs, one reading the paper while the other tackled a crossword; and another couple who lay down mid-concert on a yellow blanket, sharing a makeshift briefcase “pillow” and cradling cell phones.

After the last strains of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue faded away, David McNutt, MBA’04, president of Chicago-based db Integrated Systems, explained the pavilion’s sound systems—which he helped perfect—to the alumni encircling him, his words somewhat obscured by departing concert attendees. The speakers had been wired, McNutt said, so that wherever an audience member sat—from the front row of seats to the back of the lawn—the sound was the same, and so there was a real sound difference “outside” the open-air venue—say, on the concrete—and “inside.” The sun’s last rays struck the Frank Gehry–designed silver trellis as alumni gathered their belongings and left the pavilion.

Hana Yoo, ’07


Photo: Julie Burros and Alumni Association staffer Kimberly Masius hold the U of C sign (top); GSB alumni share a suitcase pillow (bottom).

Midwestern chic

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Tucked into a booth below a flat-screen television featuring the Chicago Bandits against the New England Riptide, a flimsy paper sign with “U of C Alumni” scrawled across it designated the nerve center of the fourth young-alumni happy hour in as many months. Marc DeMoss, AB’03, and Erin Onsager, AB’03, manned a table watching for anyone who “looked U of C,” Onsager said. By 7:30 a group of alumni gathered upstairs at the downtown Rockit Bar, where exposed brick, exposed pipes, and exposed limbs provided the decor. “We don’t have the official U of C nametags because Erin left them at home,” DeMoss explained to David King, AM’04, one of the ten or so alumni who stopped by. DeMoss had gone to Kinko’s and bought tags with maroon borders before the event, and he asked each new arrival to sign in on a clipboard, which by the end of the night boasted Jacques Chirac as an attendee.

As alumni drifted to a nearby pool table, DeMoss took a break from meeting and greeting and sipped his $10 mojito. Frowning and looking down at his glass, he remarked, “It’s not very strong for how expensive it was.” Onsager shot back, “Well, this is no Jimmy’s.”

By popular request, the next alumni happy hour is slated for September 8 in Hyde Park—at Jimmy’s.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: DeMoss, Onsager, and their expensive drinks.

UT fever

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Fanning herself with her hands under the bright ceiling lights in the Reynolds Club’s third-floor Frances X. Kinahan Theater, Hannah Kushnick, ’07, director of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, notes that the play’s cast and crew have become very attached to the fan. Not an electric fan, but the giant Chinese fan suspended above the stage. Below it, an assortment of items—tennis rackets; a velvety couch; a wooden table; a gold-colored gramophone; two fringed ottomans; a headless, one-armed female statue; a white-and-blue vase bursting with colorful flowers atop an old piano; and a stand with wine bottles and glasses—fight for floor space.

Soon the lights go down and the stage comes alive in a flamboyant, frenetic performance of the British play about the eccentric Bliss family and their weekend houseguests. The nine student actors swerve from polite chitchat to soap-opera drama—marked by lighting changes to blue or red—in the blink of an eye, hamming it up with exaggerated facial expressions and gestures while hardly flubbing a line. The three acts are punctuated by two intermissions, featuring 1920s period music and an original tune by Dan Sefik, ’08, which he sang through paper tubes, called “Isn’t It Bliss?”

In summers past, the Music Department organized a Shakespeare festival, but it dwindled until a single play, performed by University Theater (UT) in Hutchinson Courtyard, remained. This year, because of money issues, staff turnover, and renovations of the Reynolds Club’s first- and third-floor theaters, the Shakespeare show went “on hiatus,” according to Kushnick and production manager Reid Aronson, ’06. That’s why Kushnick is directing Hay Fever, UT’s only summer 2005 production, now; she originally planned to propose it for the school year.

“It’s been a great experience,” says Kushnick, who laughed a great deal during Wednesday’s final dress rehearsal and says the actors “do a really good job of keeping it fresh and doing it differently every night.” She enjoys the more relaxed summer atmosphere. “Everyone doesn’t have homework and school tugging beneath them,” she says, “so we can just have a good time.”

Hay Fever opened Thursday night and has three more $2 performances: Friday and Saturday night at 8 p.m. and Friday of O-Week, September 24, at 3:30 p.m.

Hana Yoo, '07

Photo: Hay Fever’s cast dances off the stage after curtain call.

Photo by Brian Klein, ’07

U of C’s answer to the Facebook

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg should be feeling mighty flattered right now. WhoUp, a student-made Web site reminiscent of the Facebook, sprang up this past year at the University. The original article is a wildly popular online network of college students, a bit like a continually updated yearbook. Users’ profiles feature a photo and information like the classes they’re taking, their musical tastes, and their relationship status. Aside from tweaking their profiles, students can browse other students from their school and request to add friends, acquaintances, crushes, or even strangers as their Facebook “friends.”

Anthony Pulice and George Michalopoulos, both AB’04, introduced WhoUp January 16. Besides browsing profiles—the Facebook, some students say, has become a de facto dating service—students can search for things to do at several different campuses in the site’s News and Events section, now in a summer lull. WhoUp strives “to pool campus resources in order to create one larger, more-informed, more connected campus,” its mission statement reads. Currently, users from five campuses other than Chicago—Northwestern, Michigan State, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan—have registered.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: WhoUp's Home page.

Scoring Chicago

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The numbers are in and the word is out: U.S. News and World Report’s 2006 rankings of America’s best colleges have hit newsstands, ready to be seized by anxious swarms of college-bound high-schoolers and their parents. Dropping one spot from last year, the University tied with Brown for 15th among national universities. Harvard and Princeton came in first, while Chicago’s Evanston neighbor, Northwestern, ranked 12th.

U.S. News compiles data such as student-faculty ratios, alumni-giving rates, and acceptance rates from colleges and universities to determine their standings. Though the rankings have become a major part of the college-application process since their 1983 debut, many observers dismiss them as limited and deeply flawed.

Also this month, competing college-score guide Princeton Review rated Chicago the third best college library, 12th most politically active—and 14th most unpopular or nonexistent intercollegiate-sports program.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: U.S. News's best-seller.

Rummage sale

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The Magazine is cleaning out its basement and offering its found booty. Up for grabs is the coveted “How many University of Chicago students does it take to change a light bulb?” T-shirt—the souvenir of a February 2002 contest asking readers to provide the answer. Paul L. Sandberg, JD’82, MBA’82, sent the winning retort, depicted on the back of the shirt: “Quiet! We’re studying in the dark.” Unfortunately for petites, there are no smalls available. Medium, large, and X-large T-shirts can be yours for $8, including shipping and handling.

A less-limited supply of editor Mary Ruth Yoe’s favorite goody, sets of three robust University icon magnets, featuring the Chicago insignia, the “C,” and the ubiquitous gargoyle, are available for $6, including shipping and handling.

Please send a check to: University of Chicago Magazine
c/o Rummage Sale
5801 South Ellis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: The winning T-shirt entry.

Chapbook and verse

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The backroom of Danny’s Tavern, faintly lit by candles and a single lamp that looks like an estate sale find, appears split-pea-soup green. Shadows of the dozen or so lounging undergrads and thirty-somethings cast themselves upon the walls at the Poetry Center of Chicago’s fourth anniversary poetry reading. By the time Eric Elshtain, a PhD student in the University’s Committee on the History of Culture, takes to the microphone, donning sunglasses, the spectators have moved on to their second round of drinks and made themselves at home; a pack of Lucky Strikes, Drum rolling tobacco and papers, chapbooks, and pints of Newcastle and Guinness litter the tables. The third of four poets to read, Elshtain declares in verse, “I’m the one bent on magnum bonum city,” and offers his chapbook, “The Cheaper the Crook, The Gaudier the Patter,” for free “so as not to be undersold.”

Fellow Chicago PhD student Matthias Regan winds up the evening. He not only offers his chapbook, “Worktown, being a small region of the North American Labyrinth,” for free, but also promises the audience members a penny for each copy they take. Take they do, grabbing the shaggy-haired author’s booklets, including a poem whose narrator aspires to “buy a Rolls & get a / Nubian chauffeur in a / leopard-skin jockstrap & / hustle w/ all the lights on / & a cigarette-holder a mile long.”

The Poetry Center’s next reading is slated for September 21.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Eric Elshtain takes the mic (top); Josh Baldwin, '06, and Sarah Hack enjoy the live verse (bottom).

Houses of cards

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David Barker, adjunct professor at the GSB, has researched the frequency of the term “housing bubble” in the headlines or leads of major newspapers. Pointing to a steeply inclined graph during a lecture last week, Barker explained, “After bouncing around at a couple of mentions a year from 1988 to 2002, it’s just taken off, and now, boy, everyone is writing articles about it. By the way, most of the articles are saying this housing bubble is about to pop.” He and fellow speaker Michael Munley, MBA’05, a business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, believe recent concern over the housing market may be in part manufactured by the media.

Ninety-five curious University alumni packed into a basement auditorium at the Gleacher Center to hear Munley and Barker’s talk, “What Housing Bubble? Perspectives on the Shape of the Real Estate Market.” The economists offered cautious reassurance to homeowners and investors: “I don’t want you to think that I’m an ideological purist and that you can’t have a housing bubble because markets are perfect,” said Barker. “There have been times that asset markets have fallen apart. It does happen and it is worth thinking about and worrying about. The question is, is it going on now?”

Some local real-estate markets, he admitted, are out of whack—“when Florida cab drivers are talking to people about flipping condos,” it’s a sign that the converted-condo market in the Sunshine State might be inflated. The country’s strong marcroeconomic growth, good financing conditions, and ever real American dream, he and Manley argued, will sustain housing growth. Only a handful of what Barker referred to as “rogue economists” think otherwise. “However,” he offered, “if you still believe in a housing bubble, look for a decline in sales volume.” Historically, he explained, homeowners are reluctant to bail out on their sinking ship before a housing crash.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Barker explains the bubble myth.

Better than hell

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“Everyone has heard of hell,” quips a T-shirt comparing hell favorably to the University. Like many jests, it contains a grain of truth. “We know from multiple studies that we are relatively unknown,” Vice President for University Relations and Dean of College Enrollment Michael Behnke said at Wednesday’s town-hall meeting, “Telling the University’s Story: How We Attract Students and Educate the Public.” For instance, a McKinsey survey of top SAT-scoring high-school seniors found that while half were “knowledgeable” about Yale—meaning that they knew “a lot” or “a fair amount” about the school—and two percent had never heard of it, only 22 percent felt knowledgeable about Chicago. 14 percent were unaware of its existence.

Why is Chicago—with its plethora of Nobel laureates, prestigious programs, and a seventh-in-the-nation ranking for producing science and engineering PhDs—so little recognized? Its location in the Midwest, a “fly-over zone” for people on the coasts, and its name—long, not catchy, in its full form mistaken for the University of Illinois at Chicago and, when shortened to the U of C, confused with the Universities of Connecticut and California—may be partly to blame, along with its not being a Big Ten or Division I school. “We’re also unapologetically intellectual in an anti-intellectual country,” Behnke said, and “don’t cater to the rich and famous.” The lack of news coverage, he added, doesn’t help. A 2004 study of 20 major U.S. publications, conducted by Chicago PR firm Lipman Hearne, found 76 Chicago mentions, trailing Harvard at 302, Michigan at 160, and Yale at 111; moreover, 81 percent of University news coverage was in the Midwest. Behnke hopes to combat this lack of coverage by developing the University’s communications and long-range plans in four key areas: the re-bid for Argonne National Laboratory; urban education; the arts; and diversity.

Since 1997 Chicago—with Behnke leading the charge—has striven to attract more, high-quality applicants to the College via aggressive outreach and recruiting efforts, such as direct mailings to high-schoolers and the Collegiate Scholars Program. The results have been striking. Between 1998 and 2005, applications shot up 64 percent, with early-action applications increasing by 43 percent, and the average SAT score rose from 1349 to 1428. African American and Latino enrollment numbers remain low—54 and 94 for the incoming class, respectively—but increasing and retaining minority enrollees, Behnke emphasized, are a top priority.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photos: Behnke and his survey results.

Chicago wonders

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The University has faced many competitors over the years, but this summer it may have met its toughest rival yet: the Chicago hot dog. The source of the contest? A reader-selected list of Chicago’s seven wonders, currently in the works by the Chicago Tribune.

The Tribune received thousands of suggestions for Chicago’s seven wonders between August 11 and 16, culled the results for the top 14, and began publishing them Monday, August 22, in its Tempo section, unveiling a new candidate each weekday. The only restrictions were that the nominee not be a person, that it be in the Chicago metropolitan area, and that it currently exist. Besides the famous hot dog and the University, other contenders include Millenium Park, the Sears Tower, and the Chicago theater scene. The last nominee will appear on the Thursday Tempo’s front page, and voting will open to the public. The final list will be revealed September 15.

So get ready to vote Maroon—or mustard.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photos: Hot dogs or life of the mind?

Cartoon vision

Nothing about the Columbia College Chicago’s brand-new A+D Gallery or its first exhibit, The Cartoonist’s Eye, looks rushed. The eclectic collection of comics—including works by artists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”), Art Spiegelman (“Maus”), Dan Clowes (“Ghost World”), and the curator himself, Ivan Brunetti, AB’89, who created the exhibit as a preview of his Anthology of Graphic Fiction, due out in September 2006 by Yale University Press—neatly lines the white walls or lies atop white blocks scattered throughout the gallery.

Yet the paint had been drying for only five hours by the time the gallery kicked off last night’s free opening reception. “The dry walls were sanded today and constructed just two days ago,” said gallery director Jennifer Murray, stopping briefly to talk as she threaded her way through the bustling crowd, meeting and greeting patrons. The gallery, affiliated with Columbia College’s Department of Art and Design, relocated to 619 South Wabash Avenue from 72 East 11th Street at July’s end. When Murray and her team arrived, the gallery office lacked a phone, an Internet connection, and furniture. Moving in and preparing an exhibit at the same time, especially an exhibit that had “not a lot of framed work,” Murray said, proved a challenge.

As curator, Brunetti selected the art, said Columbia College senior and photography major Sara Pooley, restocking the refreshments. The gallery team helped out with “errands” like hanging pictures and getting the glass for the frames cut. “It was a very small team for a lot of work,” she said, “but it all came together in the end.” At 6:30 the team got a break, as the crowd moved next door for “Brief Stories about Cartooning,” a lecture by cartoonist Seth—a.k.a. Gregory Gallant.

Hana Yoo, '07

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Photos (left to right): Outside the gallery; An Art Spiegelman work; A Peanuts sample.

Nichols’ nickelodeon

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From a makeshift stage in Nichols Park, Kathy Cowan’s soprano echoed down 53rd Street Sunday evening. The traditional Irish love songs she sang, accompanied by friend David Richards on keyboard, lured about 40 Hyde Parkers to the final concert in the “4th on 53rd Sunday Concert series,” hosted by the Nichols Park Advisory Council and WHPK, the University of Chicago’s radio station. Young families chasing after children, students picnicking, and several adults drinking beer out of bottles wrapped in plastic bags dotted the lawn.

Sprinklers watering the grass to her left, Cowan encouraged her audience “on this not-as-hot-as-we-thought-it-was-going-to-be day” to sing along with the chorus. “The only tricky part is you have to have a good short-term memory,” she forewarned. Though few voices rose to the challenge, Cowan’s melody did inspire two tykes to march in lockstep near the stage.

Named for its starting date—the Sunday after July 4—the series this year hosted a variety of genres, including blues, rock, reggae, and traditional Celtic tunes, as well as a performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by GroundUp Theater.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Cowan and Richards (top). Crowd members listen (bottom).

The OI is watching you

Unbeknownst to them, visitors to the Oriental Institute exhibition Empires of the Fertile Crescent: Ancient Assyria, Anatolia, and Israel, which opened in the museum’s east wing this past January, were being followed—and carefully watched. That’s because the OI hired an exhibit evaluator to trail visitors and make note of where they stopped to give displays a closer look. “The single thing that everybody seemed to see and stop and notice,” said OI Museum Director Geoff Emberling during yesterday’s lecture- and tour-filled Day of Discovery, was a text panel discussing the Israelites’ true origins. Because the controversial topic drew such interest, Emberling said, “we have been thinking that we want to, whenever possible, present areas of active debate within the field.” The evaluator also encouraged the museum to make the labels, which often include scholarly references, more general-reader friendly.

The evaluation is just one part of the museum’s initiative to critique its attempts at public accessibility. Since James Henry Breasted founded the Oriental Institute in 1919, “the museum has had an evolving role with the institute,” Emberling said, originating as “a tool for scholars.” Though the museum was open to the public in those early days, it was far from welcoming, lacking docents or helpful labels to explain the artifacts’ context. Now the museum hands out surveys and holds focus groups. “We’re really very interested in your comments,” Emberling told the Breasted Hall audience.

Yesterday’s Day of Discovery, planned in conjunction with the Boston-based, educational and travel-oriented nonprofit Elderhostel, also included a tour of the gallery, lunch at the Quadrangle Club, and a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls by Norman Golb, the University’s Ludwig Rosenberger professor of Jewish history. Another Day of Discovery is planned for Friday. Because of space constraints at the Quad Club, both events were limited to 90 people, and both days “filled up very quickly,” said Museum Education Program Director Carole Krucoff. “There was a waiting list, in fact.”

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Photos (left to right): The controversial panel, Emberling, and Krucoff.

Scaling Jacob's ladder

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“There are at least seven problems and ambiguities in the first paragraph alone,” pointed out James Robinson, assistant professor of the history of Judaism in the Divinity School, at last night’s quarterly Conversations in Divinity series. Fortunately for Robinson’s audience of 40, these comments described not a half-baked term paper but the biblical text of the Jacob’s ladder story. Tucked away on the fifth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, the crowd of faculty members, graduate students, and other curious attendees listened attentively as Robinson explained how medieval philosophers used the ambiguities of the ladder motif to investigate and expound their own worldviews. Take, for example, Jacob’s vision of the “angels of God ascending and descending” [Genesis 28:12] the ladder. Between 1191 and 1492, the Jewish Middle Ages, Robinson said, this passage raised intense debate about why divine beings would return to earth after ascending to heaven. Some scholars interpreted the angels’ descent as a political lesson in social responsibility—having known God, one should return to earth to impart a newfound wisdom. Others said the angels were symbols of the human mind returning from heaven to introduce God’s grace to the world.

Unlike many contemporary English translations that aim to eliminate such discrepancies, medieval philosophers, noted Robinson, “considered textual ambiguities an opportunity, not a problem.” By grounding themselves in a single biblical text, he explained, they could “create a common language” to frame their arguments. Particularly influential in the debate was philosopher Moses Maimonides, whose Guide of the Perplexed gave a detailed exegesis of the story, and, as Robinson explained, helped set up the ladder motif as a “strategic research site” for scholars to explore new ideas.

One of the most interesting aspects of these interpretations, he noted, is that each philosopher tended to read the motif in accordance with his known ideological background. Such an approach, Robinson emphasized, differs greatly from modern biblical studies, where scientifically minded thinkers aim to eliminate any trace of personal bias from their interpretations. Do they really accomplish this, he asked, or do scholars inadvertently read their own contemporary viewpoints into the text? A historian at heart, he declined to give a definitive answer. After all, Robinson concluded, “we won’t be able to answer this question for a good two or three hundred years.”

B.E.O.

Photo: James Robinson.

Putting the I in O-Week

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Nina Chihambakwe, ’07, still remembers her own Chicago orientation. She scheduled her 27-hour flight from Zimbabwe, with stops at Amsterdam, Capetown, and Detroit, to arrive on Saturday, the first day of O-Week. Because of bad weather, she missed a connecting flight and arrived on campus a day late, missing registration for placement tests. To top it off, “all my luggage got lost,” she recalls. “I didn’t get [my bags] for another week and a half.” Disoriented and homesick, “I was jetlagged all of O-Week,” she says. “I didn’t take anything in.”

That’s why Chihambakwe opted to help with the College’s first international student pre-orientation, an optional $140 program that took place last Wednesday through Friday. The program included events such as a bus tour of Hyde Park; a lecture on plagiarism by political-science professor Charles Lipson from his book, Doing Honest Work in College; dinner and an ImprovOlympic performance downtown; and a shopping excursion to Target. The students also received a goody bag and an international student directory. Two paid graduate student assistants, four undergraduate volunteers, and 42 of this year’s 91 international students stayed in the Stony Island residence hall for three days before they moved into their permanent residence halls on Saturday. “I haven’t studied in the U.S. before,” says Frances Tong of Hong Kong, who spent 16 hours on a plane to get to Chicago. “I thought [the program] would help me to know a bit more about education in the United States, to know what social life is like.”

“We got a great response, and we’re really delighted,” says College adviser Barbara Miner, who conceived the program “based on focus groups we’ve held for the last two years with international students.” Miner hopes to continue the program with quarterly events: possibilities include coffee hours with faculty and staff or “American” outings to a baseball game, dinner, the theater, or a bowling alley. As for the pre-orientation, she says, “it’s going to be a really important part of orientation” from now on.

—Hana Yoo, ’07


Photos: A welcome sign greets international students (top). Taking time to pose for the photographer (bottom).

One way to conquer writer’s block

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After 9/11, Jane Smiley developed a serious case of writer’s block. “I found myself unable,” the 1992 Pulitzer-Prize winner said at last night’s Seminary Co-op book talk, “to go on writing my dry little novel about deregulation.” She retreated to her room and the solace of reading books as distant as possible in time and place from the contemporary horrors. But instead of finding the escape from reality she had hoped for, Smiley said, “I began to see that these books, as old as they were, were relevant” to today’s world.

Beginning with The Tale of Genji, Smiley eventually read 100 fictional works, including Icelandic sagas, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and turned the project into her 12th and latest novel, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf). In the meantime she finished Good Faith (Knopf, 2003), the book she’d left in the lurch. All that reading “charged me up,” Smiley said. “It made me want to read more and more. I came away thinking, what can I read now?” It also made her realize that “there’s no greatest novel,” she said. “There are no greater novels. There are only novels that you like or don’t like, novels that you feel a kinship with” or don’t. Her experiences sparked a desire to try new things with her writing, such as “lingering” more on descriptions of people and scenes. “I won’t always feel the plot nudging me from behind, saying, ‘Move, move, move,’” she said, adding that the true test of what she’s learned will be her next novel.

After the Q&A session, which Smiley called her “favorite part” of a book talk, urging the audience to help her “more fully bake” the “half-baked” ideas in Thirteen Ways, she finished with an excerpt. “It’s worth knowing that serious thoughts are being thought, and also that serious fun is being made of fools everywhere,” Smiley read. “It’s also worth knowing, in dangerous times, that dangers have come and gone and we still have these books.”

Hana Yoo, '07

Photo: Jane Smiley

Dancing with Beckett

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“Hamza, could we get some fans in here?” a woman in a sheer black top, with a black bra underneath, asked the Renaissance Society curator, Hamza Walker, AB’88. Murmurs of agreement echoed through Cobb Hall’s film studies theater, packed with art connoisseurs and students fresh from viewing the museum’s newly opened exhibit, Failure is an Option.

The exhibit—a five-screen video installation and related drawings—features the videography of Berlin-based artist Peter Welz, who filmed the actions of choreographer William Forsythe. Welz, who considers himself primarily a figure sculptor, outfitted Forsythe with cameras at various angles to trace his movement from different perspectives. Welz titled the piece whenever on on nohow on, a line from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho and reference to the artists’ shared appreciation for the writer.

Welz, with rolled-up sleeves and cuffed jeans, emphasized his interest in “reduction” and “figures moving in space.” For Walker, however, Welz’s work was an occasion to intellectualize about modernity, “the dead horse I just love beating,” he said, laughing. Walker asked, “At what point does modernity begin to take shape?” He noted that modernity is often considered “a distinct historical epic,” so that modern dance “is spoken of as a break from ballet.” Yet for Forsythe, modern dance includes ballet because ballet provides a “framework for movement.”

As Walker and Welz discussed their differing perspectives, an audience member called out to Walker, “I think you’re overintellectualizing it.” To which he responded, “That’s what I’m paid to do.”

The exhibit runs through October 30, and the museum will host “a barrage of concerts”—five remaining—for its duration.

—Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Artist Peter Welz listens as his work is interpreted.

O-Week excursion

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Tuesday afternoon, as part of Orientation Week, five first-years and their O-Week aide trekked downtown to take advantage of the Art Institute of Chicago’s free-admission day. The plan was to give the first-years a break from their adviser appointments, Chicago Life Meetings, and placement tests, and to teach them how to use the city’s public transportation to explore neighborhoods beyond Hyde Park. That last goal was made more complete by a 25-minute wait for the 55 bus outside Pierce Tower.

When the students arrived at the Art Institute via the Green Line, they split up to see different exhibitions. Those who didn’t have to return to campus for another meeting later found one another in the lower-level photography galleries, observing A View with a Room: Abelardo Morell’s Camera Obscura Photographs. The premise of the exhibit is that any room can be used as a camera obscura (Latin for “dark room”), or any light-tight chamber with a small hole, through which external light can enter. Photographer Abelardo Morell converts rooms into camera obscuras by darkening the windows and creating a small hole in one. The scene outside becomes inversely projected in the interior, across whatever is inside the room. Thus viewers can see upside-down images of the Empire State Building, for example, made curvy by upholstery or bedsheet wrinkles—an effect captivating enough to charge the first-years’ El-ride conversation all the way back to Hyde Park.

Elizabeth Goetz, ’08

Photo: In front of the Art Institute.

Fairly organized

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It looked as if a small refugee camp had sprung up in Henry Crown Fieldhouse by 3 p.m. Sunday. Forced inside by the rain, the annual Registered Student Organizations Fair—normally held on North Field—set up in the gymnasium, where rows of tables representing more than 250 clubs filled the space under the glare of orange lights and basketball hoops.

As students promenaded through the maze of tables, grabbing free T-shirts, mugs, and candy from the clubs in their path, club members attempted to sell their organizations, tucking fluorescent flyers into students’ already laden arms and goading them to add their e-mail addresses to sign-up sheets.

One first-year girl, bedecked in a Class of 2009 T-shirt and dizzy with the assortment of activities, including the Squash Club, Russian choir, Society for Creative Anachronism, and University Ballet, remarked, “I’ve been here for 20 minutes and I’ve already signed up for about a billion listhosts.”

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photos: So many RSOs, so little time...

Chicago mourned

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In the second memorial service for Saul Bellow, X’39, who died April 5, friends, family members, colleagues, students, and admirers gathered Tuesday afternoon in the city he had made his own, at the University’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Eight speakers recalled Bellow’s life and work, alternating with Lyric Opera musicians who captivated the crowd with some of Bellow’s favorite pieces.

Some speakers focused on Bellow the man. Chanting the 23rd Psalm in the traditional Hebrew, Rabbi William Hamilton began the service, he said, “in the simple manner Saul would have wanted.” Son Gregory Bellow, AB’66, AM’68, discussed his father’s tenures at the University, as both student and teacher, “engaged with fine minds” and confronting “tough questions.” Friend Eugene Kennedy, an author and professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, recalled Bellow’s irrepressible sense of humor. One New Year’s Eve Bellow came home to find his wife had left him. She had marked all of their belongings with round stickers—a blue dot on his possessions, a yellow one on hers. Bellow told Kennedy, “I guess she just went dotty.”

Others highlighted Bellow’s professional triumphs: professor emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought, he had won the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and a Presidential medal. In 1989, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said, Bellow “stole the show at my first inauguration.” The man who began The Adventures of Augie March “I am an American, Chicago born,” Daley said, “understood Chicago like no one else.” Neither friend nor family member, Jeffrey Eugenides, who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex, noted his connection to Bellow as “the only person here who moved to Chicago entirely because of Saul Bellow. I came because of Herzog and Augie March and Humboldt’s Gift.”

And Richard Stern, Bellow’s friend and the Helen A. Regenstein professor emeritus of English and American Language and Literature, recalled that after reading a draft of Humboldt’s Gift, he had lunch with Bellow and told him, “I can hardly believe you wrote this.” What he meant, he said Tuesday, was “I could hardly believe such a wonderful creation could come from someone with whom I was having a hamburger.”

A.M.B.


Photos: As Rabbi Hamilton speaks, Mayor Daley, Gregory Bellow, Jeff Eugenides, Richard Stern, former student James Cohn, and Eugene Kennedy wait their turns (top). The audience listens as Lyric Opera soprano Susanna Phillips, accompanied by Alan Darling on piano, performs. (bottom).

Photos by Dan Dry.

Smart markets

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“Munch away,” Saul Levmore, dean and William B. Graham professor in the Law School, directed the audience in packed Classroom II. As law students and faculty chomped on turkey and portobello sandwiches last Thursday, Levmore set out to dethrone experts in the first lecture of the fourth annual Chicago’s Best Ideas series. He offered an array of anecdotes suggesting experts might not be any more knowledgeable than the average joe—or at least than a group of average joes participating in a prediction market.

In prediction markets, participants bet on the likelihood of an event happening, such as a Democrat or Republican being elected to office. The participants purchase either the Democratic or Republican stock, according to their predicted winner, and in so doing raise the stock’s price. The market prices are then taken as the group’s aggregate forecast. For example, if the Democrat’s stock goes for $30 per share and the Republican’s stock commands only $10 per share, the participants predict a Democratic victory. Levmore pointed to the Iowa Electronics Market, which operates in this fashion and has become “famous for predicting political elections with an accuracy not matched” by polls or columnists. Likewise, “futures market for oranges,” he said, “are a better indicator of the weather than the National Weather Service.”

Corporations have taken notice of these markets. In the past, when Hewlett-Packard introduced a new printer, the company asked regional sales managers to determine how many factories should be converted to produce it. In 1996 the company piloted a Web site where employees predicted sales and won prizes for their accuracy. The resulting internal predictions market was so on target, Levmore said, that HP has “ditched” its regional sales predictors. These markets work, he said, because if there is incentive enough—be it money or bragging rights—individuals will bone up on printer sales, politics, or orange growth, and their aggregate knowledge is as good as gold.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Saul Levmore

Medici’s main squeeze

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Many restaurants advertise all-you-can-eat deals. But how about “all you can squeeze”? Every weekend Medici on 57th offers infinite refills of fresh-squeezed orange juice for $2 a glass. The only catch—or the best part, depending on one’s perspective—is that patrons squeeze all their own oranges, and “you have to squeeze quite a number of them to get a glass,” says assistant manager Mattie Pool. From 9 a.m., when the restaurant opens, to 2 p.m., when brunch ends, Medici typically goes through 200 to 250 oranges, with at least 100 people lining up for their turn at the squeezers.

It all started in the 1960s, says manager Kim Hayward, as the brainchild of owner Hans Morsbach, MBA’61, a bona fide devotee of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Hayward remembers when the regular menu included the deal and the waitstaff had to bring the squeezer and oranges to people’s tables. She also remembers when the Medici purchased their produce “a couple times a week” and ran out of oranges “by Sunday, frequently.” There’s been no shortage of oranges, Hayward says, since the restaurant set up an account with Hyde Park Produce about ten years ago. Now the Med purchases the oranges fresh, by the box, each Saturday and Sunday. The staff cuts the oranges into halves and places them into a large glass container between two squeezers. Though the tradition remains “really popular,” says Pool, the supply never runs out.

Hana Yoo, ’07

The jaws of juice (top) turn orange halves into glasses of OJ (bottom) at the Med.

Veteran advice

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“It’s nice to hear that people do struggle,” said College third-year Christina Socias at last night’s Collegiate Mentoring Program (CMP) welcome dinner, “that not everything is perfect. It makes you feel like you’re OK.” Socias is a returning participant in CMP, a diversity-mentoring program that pairs undergraduates with graduate and professional-school students. Mentors and mentees meet at least once a week, said College senior adviser Elise LaRose, CMP’s founder and director, to talk, watch movies, catch a concert—or, in one case, visit a cadaver lab, which inspired that mentee to drop his pre-med aspirations. The program’s goal, LaRose told the students clustered around tables in Ida Noyes’s first-floor library, is “to help you have the most satisfying and successful experience possible—as you define success.”

When LaRose started the program in February 2003, she said later, she imagined it would be “more centralized,” with lots of group activities. But she found that students mainly wanted “to do their own thing,” spending one-on-one time with their mentors. For the most part, she said, “it’s really clear that students love their mentors.” In a Spring 2004 survey of 62 mentees, only four disliked their mentors, and none had approached LaRose to change their assignments. About 60 to 80 undergraduates participate in the program—the number fluctuates as students join and drop out during the year—and interest usually spikes after winter break, when fall-quarter grades have come in and, LaRose said, “the honeymoon is over.” Mentors typically work with two to four mentees and make $15 an hour. She pays them because “graduate students are generally poor,” she said, and as an incentive to attract the best grad students. Though the program is advertised as a “diversity-mentoring program,” anyone can sign up.

“This is from the outside, because I didn’t go to undergrad here, but from what I hear, [Chicago] can be an intense, depressive environment,” said third-year law student Linda Boachie, who mentored two students last year. “It’s good to talk things over with someone a little bit older who’s not a parent or teacher.” That’s what attracted first-year Sana Suh to the dinner. “I’m uncertain about what I’m going to do for the next four years,” Suh said, “and beyond that I want someone to talk to about how to manage my time and how to get into grad school” with someone “who’s actually been through the school.”

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: Mentors and mentees eat in Ida Noyes.

Green house

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With his ParaSITEs—tentlike structures attached to building vents, inflated and heated by the warm air the vents give off—Michael Rakowitz works with the homeless to create art. In 1998 he began the ongoing project by collaborating with a handful of homeless people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to custom design seven of these portable homes. Aside from a few ParaSITEs made of vinyl and nylon, most of them are composed of plastic bags and packaging tape. One inhabitant, Bill Stone, returned his ParaSITE to Rakowitz when he no longer needed it. Still dirty and stained from its time on the streets, it now sits in the Smart Museum as part of the exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art. On the wall behind Stone’s temporary shelter are a slide show about the project, sketches of other ParaSITEs, and a ParaSITE kit.

Beyond Green, which opened last Thursday, includes works by 13 artists and groups from the United States and Europe contemplating the idea of sustainable art. For many of the artists, sustainable art “must also be convenient, or aesthetically pleasing,” said docent Emily Warner, a fourth-year art-history major in the College, leading a tour group of about a half-dozen visitors Sunday. For instance, the artist collaborative JAM has produced a line of handmade, earth-friendly, cloth and leather handbags equipped with flexible solar panels, so consumers can charge small electronics such as cell phones and iPods while walking down the street. Soon JAM hopes to offer the handbags for sale. Another artist, Kevin Kaempf of People Powered, has developed both compost “tea packs”—bags of decayed organic matter made from kitchen and yard waste—and a palette of paints made from mixing together friends’, neighbors’, and strangers’ waste paints that otherwise would have been discarded.

Though exploring solutions to social problems, Warner said, the artists often see their job as raising questions and issues. Rakowitz, for instance, includes the following disclaimer as part of his ParaSITEs display: “This project does not present itself as a solution. It is not a proposal for affordable housing. Its point of departure is to present a symbolic strategy of survival for homeless existence within the city, amplifying the problematic relationship between those who have homes and those who do not have homes.”

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photos: A ParaSITE (top) and the handy handbags (bottom).

Hibernian humor

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Almost as soon as he took the podium in the Swift Common Room, Rory Childers—a Chicago cardiology professor, electrocardiogram expert, and native Irishman—had a packed house of students, faculty, and friends laughing out loud. “Irish hilarity involves a mix of graveyard humor, mockery, the celebration of calamity, the farcical, the knockabout, curses and spells, satanic laughter, the profane and the sacred, mendaciousness, roguish ineptitude, gaudy, exuberant invective, and wit honed to a fine art,” Childers said at the Divinity School’s Wednesday Lunch series. In the face of such a litany, he admonished his audience not to be squeamish. “A strong anticlerical vein permeates much of the comic in Irish writing,” he warned. “Language is often outrageous, even ludicrous—the verbal equivalent of the gargoyle.”

Apart from his life as the man Chicago medical students know as “the EKG guy,” Childers is the grandson of Robert Erskine Childers, an Irish writer and patriot executed in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, and the son of Erskine Hamilton Childers, the Republic of Ireland’s fourth president. (On Monday Ireland celebrated his birth centennial by releasing a postage stamp bearing his portrait).

At last Wednesday’s lunchtime talk, Rory Childers delivered an hour’s worth of bawdy anecdotes, rhymes, and one-liners from the likes of Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, poet James Stephens, and playwright Brendan Behan, who was once Childers’s patient. “Towards the end of his life, Brendan Behan had clearly become a type of stage Irishman, simply because the requisite shocking speech was expected of him,” Childers said. “On his deathbed he took the hand of the nun who was nursing him. ‘Bless you sister! May all your sons be bishops.’”

Lest any Swift Hall listeners think Ireland’s wit was purely the province of its literati, Childers offered plenty of boisterous waggery handed down through generations of ordinary citizens. Most every statue in central Dublin now has its own ribald—and rhyming—nickname. Monuments to Anna Liffy (the city’s main river), Molly Malone, Dublin’s waterways, a millennial clock, and two women shoppers have been rechristened, respectively: the floozy in the Jacuzzi, the tart with the cart, the box in the docks, the chime in the slime, and the hags with the bags. Meanwhile, locals are calling a new statue of Joyce seated on a bench “the prick with the shtick.”

L.G.

Photo: Rory Childers

Prison break

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You can walk into the Court Theatre production of Man of La Mancha knowing the 1966 Tony Award–winning musical inside out—able to sing along to the lyrics not only of “Impossible Dream” but also “Dulcinea,” “I’m Only Thinking of Him,” and even “Golden Helmet of Mambrino”—and still get caught up in the story.

It helps that the story is one of the best, a retelling of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. A play within a play, the musical is also a play within a prison, as Cervantes and his manservant await their fate during the Spanish Inquisition. Both Charles Newell’s direction and Josh Culbert’s set, a multitiered affair that suggests the seven circles of hell, underscore a storyteller’s power to open an audience to new possibilities and connections.

The music remains as stirring as the message, as the three lead characters sing their hearts out in tripartite performances. Herbert Perry plays Cervantes; acting out a story to save his manuscript from being destroyed by his fellow prisoners, Cervantes assumes the role of Alonso Quijana, an idealist who would prefer to be the great knight Don Quixote. Neil Friedman waxes comic and appealing as Cervantes’s manservant, who also plays Quijana’s manservant and Quixote’s squire, Sancho Panza. As the half-mad prisoner Escalante, Hollis Resnick plays the less-than-virginal servant Aldonza, transformed by Quixote into his own fair lady, Dulcinea.

Man of La Mancha runs Wednesday to Sunday through November 6.

—M.R.Y.

Photos by Michael Brosilow: Neil Friedman as Sancho, Herbert Perry as Don Quixote, and Hollis Resnik as Aldonza (top); Dulcinea and Don Quixote (bottom).

Covert choreography

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“This looks like a high-school prom,” said Kate Blomquist, ’07, as she examined the gem-colored Mexican sodas and Twinkies splayed like shrapnel on a table at the Renaissance Society’s open house Thursday afternoon.

Blomquist had dance on her mind, but she certainly was not adorned in taffeta. By 3 p.m. fellow dancers Marya Spont, ’06, Lixian Hantover, ’07, Terin Izil, ’06, and Courtney Prokopas, ’06, all dressed in T-shirts and jeans or black pants, entered the gallery, which currently houses a five-screen video installation depicting the movements of choreographer William Forsythe. In a performance Blomquist choreographed, the dancers promenaded among the 30 or so spectators intently viewing the exhibit. Intermittently the dancers struck poses or imitated Forsythe’s movements on the screen, to the surprise of their fellow screen-gazers. The audience, as if collectively mesmerized by the performance, drifted toward the room’s edges, allowing the dancers free rein of the gallery space.

The open house was the first by the Renaissance Society in partnership with a new student group, the Wrens, who hope to raise campus-wide awareness of the Renaissance Society by holding performances in the gallery.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: A dancer mimics Forsythe's moves behind the screen (top). Strike a pose (bottom).

Beaver tails and dragonfly spies

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Having beaten out 60 other poetic hopefuls to earn a spot on the bill at last Tuesday’s poetry reading—the first in this season’s Emerging Writers Series—Geoff Hilsabeck, a student in the University’s Master of Arts in Humanities program, shuffled toward the podium in Classics 21. The room was full; people crowded the couches and windowsills and lined the walls. Hilsabeck flashed a shy smile.

“There will be some swearing at some point,” he said. “I hope that’s not a problem for anybody.”

It wasn’t. From time to time Hilsabeck, whose work has been published in a chapbook called The Keeper of Secrets, whacked his audience with something serious, but mostly he kept them chuckling through more than half a dozen poems with lithe and lively wordplay and imagery that tended toward the surreal. From a poem called “Providing Assistance”:

Taken by storm
a swarm of sparrows
picked feathers under the overhang and listened.
We all did.
I even paid extra for two good seats,
a dragonfly, a cinched bouquet.
I leashed the dragonfly
with floss and trained it as a spy.

Hilsabeck shared the stage with poet Sam White, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop who teaches at the University of Rhode Island. White’s first book of poems, The Goddess of the Hunt is Not Herself, was published this year. It is a quiet and contemplative collection that owes its title, White said, to an artist he once dated, who created an entire exhibit by photographing herself with beaver tails sticking out of her mouth. “I met her and saw the photos at the same instant,” White explained. “I was so struck by everything about her.”

In “Life in a Big Sweater,” White mused: “I am unshod, / like an aged whisker from the lawn. / I am under you, on top. / Far off a light blinks / in the deep stretch of a window. / Part of me lives in a crow’s beak. / Part of me is nest.”

L.G.

Photo: Geoff Hilsabeck.

Saris and kurtas

Setting aside school rivalries, the College’s South Asian Students Association (SASA) and Northwestern University’s chapter came together this past Saturday to celebrate a joyful occasion: a wedding. A U of C “bride” married a Northwestern “groom” in a mock ceremony incorporating South Asian cultures and religions including Muslim, Sikh, Hindi, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi.

Like many weddings, it required months of planning. Preparations began last March, said second-year Prerna Kumar, SASA’s events cochair, as students dressed in traditional Indian garb—females in lengha, salwar kameez, and saris; males in kurtas—filed past her into the Shoreland ballroom. “We took [the idea] from Columbia and NYU,” Kumar said. The event was conceived as a way “to get students on campus to come out and have a good time,” she said, as well as “to educate people about South Asian culture—even teach Indians about their own culture.”

A key component was choosing a bride, whom the SASA board picked based on who answered the written application questions “in the cleverest, funniest, most creative way,” Kumar said. The honor went to second-year Aasha Barot. She “had a cute list,” Kumar said. “She wrote her answers as if she were really getting married.” Barot was decked out in red and pink, which “symbolize sunrise,” said third-year Yesha Sutaria, “the start of a new life.”

Organizers scattered rose petals on the round reception tables and on the stage, where a mandap, an Indian bridal canopy, squatted. “We built it from scratch,” Kumar said, in about six hours the previous day. During the ten-minute ceremony, “wedding photographers” snapped pictures of the couple performing rituals. SASA members sprinkled them with rose water, a ritual purification, as they entered (a Tamil Nadu custom). Female students—in a real wedding, saat suhagins, or seven happily married women—ground sugar cubes over their heads to ensure a sweet life together (Muslim). They exchanged garlands (Hindi and Sikh), and their “families” blessed them by placing placed blades of grass and grains of rice on their heads (Bengali). The remainder of the afternoon featured Indian dances by U of C students, a performance by a Northwestern Indian a cappella group, toasts to the bride and groom, and a meal from Viceroy.

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Photos (left to right): The groom awaits his bride; rose petals decorate the tables; the a capella group entertains.

Stand-up guys

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“I’m really shy,” Daniel Nainan confessed to his Mandel Hall audience as he stood on stage with Azhar Usman after their stand-up comedy routines this past Saturday, sponsored by the Chicago Society and the South Asian Students Association.

Strange words from a man who makes a living playing for laughs in front of large groups, though not so strange considering how Nainan got into the business. As a technical presenter at Intel from 1996 to 2001, Nainan had to represent the company, “sometimes in front of thousands of people or on TV,” when globetrotting with senior executives. “I was really nervous about speaking on stage,” he said. To combat stage fright he took a comedy class, which he enjoyed so much that after retiring early from Intel, he started doing stand-up full-time. Similarly, Usman, though always a “class clown” and involved in theater, only mustered the courage to pursue a comedy career in 2001, two years after graduating from law school.

During the show—Nainan performed first, Usman second—both Nainan, who is half Indian and half Japanese, and Usman, an Indian Muslim American, mined their cultural backgrounds for jokes, poking fun at their parents, Bollywood movies, and Indians’ mangling of English pronunciation and grammar. At one point Usman explained why Indians are always late (the show itself began 30 minutes past the scheduled time): “We are a people that uses the same word for yesterday and tomorrow,” he said. “Basically, if you’re within 72 hours, you’re pretty much on time.” The two also took on politics, with Nainan doing dead-on impressions of figures such as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Usman lamenting post-9/11 airport security checks (“It’s not pretty. Heads turn simultaneously. Security guard says, ‘We’ve got a Muhammad at four o’clock. Over.’”)

Before the two left the stage to sell their CDs and DVDs, Usman noted that stand-up comedy, which he called one of American’s few indigenous art forms, has enjoyed little scholarship compared to jazz, which “has been studied ad nauseam in academia.” Perhaps, aware of the University’s reputation for intellectualism—at one point he joked about proud Indian parents’ outrage at having “U of the C” (as Indians say it) being mistaken for his own alma mater, UIC—he was hinting that an audience member should take up the gauntlet.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: Nainan (left) and Usman after the show.

Dealing with demons

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“When a female pheasant, without cause, enters the house, its name is Spirit-Traveler. In the house, there is invariably a violent death. Leave quickly.” Thus reads one instruction in “White Marsh’s Diagrams of Spectral Prodigies,” a 10th-century Chinese manuscript explaining how to deal with demons and strange occurrences around the typical elite household. The manuscript, discovered in 1900 at Dunhuang on the Silk Road, offers helpful hints from White Marsh, a popular medieval protector deity. “When a leather belt glows at night,” cautions another directive, “make sacrificial offerings of ale and dried meat slices.” The manuscript also lists demons’ names; in some cases all it takes to scare a demon away is to say its name a certain number of times.

Such a manuscript provides a window into the medieval Chinese world. In fact, argued East Asian Languages and Civilizations Professor Donald Harper in a Humanities Open House lecture this past Saturday, until you have studied the manuscripts, “you don’t really understand ancient and medieval Chinese culture.” Though it is unclear how many Chinese could read, paper was “certainly affordable in medieval times,” and many texts were posted in public places. Furthermore, this particular manuscript provides important “everyday” knowledge, he noted, “not about fantastic things you’d never expect to see” but incidents that could occur “right in the environment of your own home.” Harper also pointed to parallels between the 10th-century manuscript and one from the 4th century B.C. For 14 centuries these instructions on how to deal with life’s “hidden, occult, magical,” and inexplicable phenomena were preserved via the written word.

Yet “somewhere in the medieval period” the Chinese left the book tradition behind, Harper said, instead hanging portraits of protector spirits in their homes. In about the 9th century people began nailing White Marsh portraits, or “A Diagram of White Marsh,” over their doors, the earliest evidence of this shift. The portrait still survives in paintings and block prints in Japan, though not in China.

Hana Yoo ’07

Photo: Harper at his Humanities Open House lecture.

Portrait of the martyr as a young girl

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Beany Malone would have relished the harvest-and-Halloween menu dished up by the Divinity School Wednesday Lunch cooking crew this week: pear and goat cheese salad, stuffed squash with hazelnuts and cranberries, and miniature cupcakes topped with bright-orange icing and Halloween candies.

Beany (née Catherine), the youngest of the four motherless Malones of Denver, is the heroine of Lenora Mattingly Weber’s series for teenage girls, and she spends much of the series (the first book appeared in 1943, the last in 1969) worrying about what to cook for dinner and if her family will like it.

Beany is also—argued Maureen Corrigan, longtime book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and author of the new literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading—a secular martyr, placed with the nuns’ seal of approval on Corrigan’s grammar-school reading list. Which is why Beany turned up in a discussion titled What Catholic Martyr Stories Taught Me about Getting to Heaven—and Getting Even.

As Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, told the Swift Commons diners, “The beauty of series literature is that you can see certain themes developing over the course of the years.” Beany’s life trajectory—including the moment when the handsome young man from whom she’s expecting a marriage proposal announces his decision to become a priest—is fueled by “the tension between self-fulfillment and offering it up” at the altar of self-sacrifice.

The Beany Malone books also make it into Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, a project for which Corrigan “decided to give myself permission to just talk about books that had stayed with me.” And, yes, she said during the Q&A, the books’ messages stayed with her, to “mixed” effect: “They toughened me to endure stuff that I would have otherwise more wisely gotten out of much sooner.”

—M.R.Y.

Beany Malone (top) may offer messages of self-denial but, says Maureen Corrigan, author of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (bottom), "Reading itself is essentially an antisocial act."

Witches in waiting

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A doctor, a princess, a Christmas present, and a couple of witches lined up outside Mandel Hall Saturday night in anticipation of the University Symphony Orchestra’s Halloween concert, “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble.” The audience, which took the invitation’s “costumes encouraged” suggestion to heart, awaited the USO’s renditions of Revueltas’s “Sensemaya,” Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the Prelude and Witches’ Chorus from Verdi’s “Macbeth,” and music from Williams’s “Harry Potter.”

Meredith Meyer, ’06

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Photos: The characters outside Mandel Hall.

Where the sidewalk begins

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This week fences enclosed the quads’ western walkways as workers dug up the old slabs and began laying new ground—sandstone, to be precise. Since Monday the workers have arranged the assorted-sized rectangular tiles less than halfway from the Administration Building to the center circle. What takes so long, said Nick Guerra, a Ward Contracting and Building Restoration laborer, is figuring out “how to work a pattern.” After Guerra preps the underlying sand “nice and flat,” the stone layers place the tiles, and then another worker sweeps more sand over the tiles to fill in the cracks. While the full main-quad project is scheduled through December 16, Guerra estimates another five days for this path—the widest of the five currently being repaved—to reach its center-circle goal.

A.M.B.

Photo: Workers set the tiles.

Penetrating matters

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Peanut butter and jelly. Ketchup and mustard. The eyeball and the phallus. As they used to sing on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong—or does it?

It turns out that the eyeball and the phallus turn up together quite a lot in images from 1st- and 2nd-century Rome, Shadi Bartsch, the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser professor of classics, informed her audience at Thursday evening’s undergraduate classics convivium. Often the phallus is attacking the eyeball: Bartsch showed a slide of a 1st-century Roman mosaic in which an eyeball is surrounded by hostile assailants such as a crow, pitchfork, snake, scorpion, and the phallus of a well-endowed dwarf. These images were placed at home entrances. In addition, upper-class Roman boys wore phallic amulets around their necks, and Roman generals returning victorious from battle had a giant phallus strapped under their chariots—all tactics to ward off the evil eye. The evil eye is penetrative, Bartsch said, so they used a “homeopathic remedy,” fighting it “with other things that penetrate.”

The ancients thought of vision as tactile, believing either in intromission, in which objects give off tiny particles that penetrate the eye, or extramission, in which the eye emits rays or “pliant sticks” that “grope” objects and transmit information back to the eye. In their “shame culture,” shame came from being looked at and judged by other people, rather than a more contemporary “guilt culture,” with its concepts of conscience and personal responsibility. The “poisoned penetration” of someone’s hostile eye, Romans believed, could make a person very sick or even kill him.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: Shadi Bartsch

Deathly celebration

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The victims of the Ciuadad Juarez, Mexico, murders all have certain traits in common, activist Lu Rocha said at this past Friday’s Day of the Dead celebration. They were female, slender, with dark complexions and brown hair, relatively young—many were in their teens or 20s—and poor. They were factory workers, waitresses, and students. Such women, Rocha said, are “a dime a dozen” in Mexico. Lacking economic or political clout, they can disappear without consequence for their murderers. More than 400 women have been abducted, raped, mutilated, tortured, and killed since 1993. Since the killings began, there have been 18 arrests but only one conviction, and even that conviction is suspect, Rocha said, considering recent evidence of torture-induced confessions. Rocha, who for three years has worked at Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, a Juarez organization of victims’ families that seeks justice and an end to the brutal murders, urged the Hutch Commons audience not to forget these women and to write letters to Mexican President Vicente Fox and other government officials.

“It’s very bittersweet, the Day of the Dead,” Rocha said. The Mexican holiday, celebrated November 1 and 2, honors the lives of the deceased, from friends and family members to victims of national disasters. Though the focus of Friday’s commemoration, female victims of Latino violence in the U.S. and Mexico, lent the event a sobering tone, it retained some joy: Nahualli, a Mexican ceremonial dance troupe, kicked off the night by performing several traditional dances; guests were then treated to a free Mexican dinner.

The event was sponsored by Student Government and cosponsored by MeChA, Organization of Latin American Students, Amnesty International, Feminist Majority, National Organization for Women, Rape Victim Advocates, and South Side SAVE.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: The dance group Nahualli performs.

Race debate

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More than 300 students, faculty, and staff members (along with a generous helping of reporters) crowded into Hutchinson Commons Tuesday night for two hours of soul-searching over a dorm party whose theme and theatrics have roiled the campus and made headlines across the country. On October 14, a group of students in Max Palevsky’s May House hosted what they called a “straight thuggin” party, encouraging guests to come in hip-hop dress. Less than 20 students attended, but when pictures turned up online showing revelers in gold chains, sideways baseball caps, pants sagging below their underwear—one even wore handcuffs and carried a bottle in a paper bag—complaints about the party’s racial tilt rose to a clamor. In a letter e-mailed to the entire University community, President Don Randel deplored the “distressing episode” and urged a thorough reckoning of the issues it raised. Meanwhile, reporters from the Maroon, the Chicago Tribune, local television stations, MTV.com, and elsewhere swarmed the campus. The party made the op-ed pages of the Trib and the Chicago Defender.

Tuesday night, more than one administrator alluded to a routine “thoughtlessness” among whites on campus when it comes to race. English professor and newly appointed Deputy Provost for Research and Minority Issues Kenneth Warren likened the situation to “being among neighbors who are quite willing to turn down the music once you bang on the door, but who are incapable of the kind of forethought that would have modulated the music in the first place.” Office of Minority Student Affairs Director Ana Vazquez put University race relations in starker terms. Out of 400 graduate and undergraduate responses to a monthlong student-life survey ending October 5, Vazquez said, 65 minority students reported suffering racial and ethnic discrimination, and 51 said they “have had to de-emphasize their race in order to fit in.”

Passing microphones back and forth, students took up the debate, posing questions and positing theories about the broader meanings of the dorm party and campus reaction to it. One student rejected political correctness but said, “What I am asking my peers to do is think about how the stereotypes you have about minorities on campus affect the decisions you make. Just think about it.”

Economics major Ken Jones was exasperated that some of his white classmates didn’t seem to grasp the party’s offensive nature. “This is problematic,” he said, “and I’m tired of having to explain my feelings to the majority. … You intellectualize racism now.” Second-year Kristiana Colon seconded Jones’ frustration. “Race is something that white people can choose to deal with or not,” she said. “We don’t have that choice. The responsibility should not be mine to disabuse you of your ignorance.”

Provost Richard Saller asked the crowd to consider why last month’s party “resonated in the way it did.” Several speakers noted how the outcry was sharpened by the fact that African Americans make up only four percent of the College student body, and that the campus abuts several struggling black neighborhoods. Pointing to growing investment in improving schools and safety in the surrounding communities and measures on campus aimed at heightening racial sensitivity, administrators said the University is moving in the right direction. “I would not have accepted this position [at the Office of Minority Student Affairs],” said Vazquez, “if I did not believe there was a framework to build off of and a commitment” to resolving racial divisions.

L.G.

Photo: Students and others mill about the Reynolds Club before the meeting.

Small feasts

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Chicago may be the city of big shoulders, but when it comes to magazines, Chicago poets have kept their publications small. The city’s “little” (as opposed to mass market) magazines have a long history of disseminating poetry throughout the nation. The current Special Collections exhibit, From Poetry to Verse: The Making of Modern Poetry and City Lights Pocket Poets Series, draws on the Regenstein Library’s modern poetry collection to examine the “highly risky endeavor” that poetry magazine editors have undertaken in Chicago and elsewhere.

Harriet Monroe put the city on the poetry map in 1912 when she launched Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Securing funds from city businessmen and civic leaders, Monroe solicited poems from a range of writers, including Ezra Pound. The magazine’s first “foreign correspondent,” Pound introduced Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the 1913 Nobel laureate in literature, to Poetry’s pages. Poetry was the first to publish Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. Today the publication receives more than 90,000 submissions each month. In 1936, after her death, the University received Harriet Monroe’s poetry library, her personal papers, and the editorial files of Poetry magazine.

Students at the University launched their own magazine, Chicago Review, in 1946. The editors’ mission was to “present a contemporary standard of good writing” and to compensate for the “exaggerated utilitarianism” they saw in postwar American universities. The Review achieved national infamy in the late 1950s, when then-editors Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll, AM’52, published excerpts from William Burrough’s Naked Lunch. Facing censorship from the University, the editors created an independent journal, naming it Big Table at Jack Kerouac’s request. Though short-lived, Big Table had lasting impact, publishing Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” and John Ashbery’s “Europe.”

The Special Collections exhibit runs through February 12, 2006.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Harriet Monroe (top) and an early copy of Poetry (bottom).

Homegrown laws

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Scanning the audience, a security guard’s gaze fell on the back of the Law School’s Glen A. Lloyd auditorium. The guard bounded up the aisle and approached a student in the audience. “Sir, your laptop,” the guard commanded, gesturing outside. The student reluctantly toted his laptop into the hall, where government agents had directed the rest of the audience to leave their belongings before U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ November 9 talk.

His physical security ensured by the horde of guards in the theater, the attorney general had more lofty concerns to ponder. Gonzales told the packed audience that he fears a “growing tendency” among some Supreme Court justices to cite foreign law in their decisions.

Referring to foreign law presents two primary problems, Gonzales asserted, reading closely from a prepared text. First, there is the “problem of selection.” By picking and choosing which foreign laws to consider, the court, Gonzales said, “can be seen as looking over the heads of the crowd and picking out its friends.” The other issue, he said, is undermining the court’s legitimacy and “our sacred text, the Constitution,” by referring to other countries’ precedent instead of America’s.

Although “we must be open to good new ideas whatever their source,” he urged that these ideas be expressed through the political process and not through the courts. Questioning how the “standards of anyone other than the citizens of the United States could decide the will of the people,” Gonzales insisted that his statements must not be “mistaken as isolationism.”

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Law School Dean Saul Levmore introduces Gonzales.

Anna Karenina, expatriate

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“Tolstoy understood human consciousness better than anyone who ever lived.” That fearless claim comes from an authoritative source: Gary Saul Morson, one of the foremost American experts on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and the author of books on Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bakhtin. Last week Morson, the Frances Hooper professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University, traveled south to talk to Chicago students and faculty about Anna Karenina’s suicide in Tolstoy’s 1877 novel. Morson supported his superlative praise for Tolstoy and overturned some popular misconceptions about the novel, especially about Anna’s tragic heroism.

Calling Anna a “genre expatriate from romance who has been placed in a work antithetical to romance”—that is, in a thoroughly realist novel—Morson presented material from a book he is writing about the philosophical climate of Russian literature. In Morson’s reading, Anna’s “interpretive totalism” is what leads inexorably to her death. Her single-minded faith in love, which befits a romance character but is pure hell on one who resides in a realist work, plunges her into isolation and paranoia. Tolstoy, said Morson, rued all forms of totalism, from romantic love to utopianism, and Anna’s fate illustrates the dangers of such kinds of all-or-nothing thinking.

In standard readings, Tolstoy is thought to foreshadow Anna’s suicide with two other deaths: the watchman’s fall in the train station in Part 1, and the death of Vronsky’s race horse Frou-Frou in Part 2. Tolstoy believes in contingency, not fate, Morson argued, so these scenes can’t be said to prefigure anything. Frou-Frou’s death is pure accident; Anna’s is an act of will. As for the watchman, Morson warned against reading his death as foreshadowing—perhaps the most arresting insight of his talk. Noting that the narrator delves deeper and deeper into Anna’s own consciousness as the end of her life approaches, Morson pointed out that she explicitly recalls the incident and reacts with a choice—“she knew what she had to do.” The character, not the author, fulfills the omen. Anna provides her own foreshadowing, and fate has nothing to do with it.

Laura Demanski, AM’94

Photo: Morson after his talk.

Gothic gore

Hamza Walker, AB’88, associate curator of the Renaissance Society, told the audience at the Sunday opening of All the Pretty Corpses that the Goth-inspired exhibit was appropriate for a campus where an older version of “Goth looms large.” The show brought together eight artists whose work shares elements of “mysticism, anger, mourning, horror, aggression, angst, apocalypse, and the post-human,” according to the museum’s Web site. A dropped ceiling stained with beet juice and coffee hovered over the stream of visitors entering the gallery.

During the artists’ talk the man responsible for the ceiling, Jay Heikes, was reluctant to discuss his work. “I don’t know how much I want to talk about Pat’s tumor,” he said, referring to his inspiration for the piece—his friend’s struggle with a brain tumor. The artist did divulge that the purple beet juice to him represented “being beaten” and the coffee suggested the “grit” of daily life. Heikes was ambiguous about his place in the dark exhibition because while the work “refers to a bloody, traumatic incident,” he said, “I like to think of it as a daydreaming, contemplative” piece.

Other artists were more comfortable with their position in the show. Tony Tasset constructed a stone grotto filled with melting, blood-colored candles as a memorial to “some generic tragedy,” in response to what seem to him “like very dark times.”

All the Pretty Corpses runs through December 23 and features the work of Jeremy Blake, Ellen Cantor, John Espinosa, Heikes, Kacy Maddux, Sterling Ruby, Steven Shearer, and Tasset.

Meredith Meyer, ’06

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Photos (left to right): Grotto by Tony Tasset; Amorphous Law by Sterling Ruby; 150% by John Espinosa.

A little night music

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“Could you draw those drapes, please,” Andrea Holliday, AB’80, directed the Fulton Recital Hall manager, referring to the curtains framing the stage’s rear window. With that the soprano, enveloped in a full fur coat, her hair curled and piled atop her head, announced in front of ten or so early audience members, “I am going to go put my dress on,” and exited Goodspeed Hall’s fourth-floor theater.

Ten minutes later Thomas Wikman, Holliday’s husband and accompanying pianist, ventured out to the hallway calling, “Andrea, the hour has come.” Time proved a relative concern for Holliday. Outfitted in a dark velvet evening gown, she initiated her concert, Night Songs at Midday, with four arias about nighttime, including “Chere Nuit,” written by Alfred Bachelet for soprano Nellie Melba, to whom peach melba and melba toast are also dedicated. Holliday rounded out the recital with a challenge to her pianist husband. Offering four songs by Tchaikovsky, she explained to the audience of 20 or so, “Tchaikovsky was not really a pianist and so did not show them a lot of mercy.”

Meredith Meyer, ’06

Photo: Wikman and Holliday perform.

Snacks from the Land of the Morning Calm

Pick Hall’s first-floor lounge overflowed with dried seaweed, or kim, and cooked rice, or bab, this past Thursday at the Korean Language Program’s annual Kim Bab Day. Every kim bab has these two components, and cooks add kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage), soy sauce, sesame seeds, vegetables, or meat, based on personal preference. Generally speaking, said Hi Sun Kim, a lecturer in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department, the sushi-like Korean roll does not feature raw fish. Kim bab are a near-ubiquitous snack in Korea, often called the Land of the Morning Calm.

Donning plastic gloves, about 55 attendees—Korean-language students and their guests—spread a thin layer of rice over dried seaweed sheets. Packing in spinach, egg, carrots, fish cakes, and yellow pickled radish, they rolled up the sheets, sliced the rolls into individual kim bab, and devoured them on the spot or took them away in Ziploc bags. An hour into the lunchtime event, the supply of both gloves and rice ran out. Soon afterward, so did the Choco Pies (a contest had been planned for who could make the prettiest kim bab, with the winner taking home a box of Choco Pies—no one complained about its cancellation). As the event came to a close, remaining diners divided the leftovers among themselves, some saying they would use them to make bibimbap, a Korean dish mixing rice, meat, vegetables, a whole egg, and hot sauce.

The Korean Language Program’s other annual events include Dduck-kuk Day, a New Year’s celebration taking place in February (the lunar new year), and Korean BBQ Day, which usually takes place in the spring.

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Students work away; the ingredients; the finished product.

Eat, eat.

Two nights before Thanksgiving, the University played host to another long-standing and food-related tradition in a packed Mandel Hall: the 59th Annual Latke-Hamantash Debate. Every year Hillel invites a panel of professors to consider which is the superior food—the latke, a potato pancake traditionally consumed during Hannukah, or the hamantash, a triangular pastry connected to Purim. History professor Ralph A. Austen, visiting assistant law professor Eugene Kontorovich, AB’96, JD’01, Harris School professor Colm O’Muircheartaigh, and linguistics professor Jerrold M. Sadock all weighed in on the matter. Philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB’62, moderated, as he has for almost 30 years.

Equating latkes with the South Side White Sox and hamantashen with the North Side Cubs, Austen came down heavily on the side of latkes. “Let one thousand, nay, one million hamantashen bloom in North Side bakeries,” he said, “but keep them far away from the sacred realm of baseball.” Both O’Muircheartaigh and Sadock favored hamantashen. After poking fun at his Irish name and heritage, O’Muircheartaigh produced charts and graphs analyzing Irish scrolls that he claimed surveyed popular opinion on the two foods (“most people prefer hamantashen”), while Sadock reinterpreted Plato’s Cratylus as a dialogue between Rabbi Socrates and two of his students––the wrong-headed Cratylus, a stand-in for latkes, and the wiser Hermogenes, representing hamantashen. “Eat smart, eat healthy, eat hamantashen,” Sadock advised.

Kontorovich commented that it felt good to be tackling “the big questions” in light of how much time is devoted to “esoteric and irrelevant matters” in academia, and he examined the latke and hamantash “judiciously” to see if they violated international law: could either food, for example, be used as a form of torture? The answer, he asserted, is yes. Latkes, those “oily monsters,” can cause organ failure, while hamantashen, named as they are for King Haman, whom the Jews roundly defeated, constitute “an implicit threat” to captives that they will be eaten.

As always, Cohen said once the panelists were done, audience votes would be tallied and the winner announced at the post-debate reception in Hutch, and “as always, we do not care,” as the point is “the symposium itself.” After plugging Ruth Fredman Cernea’s recently released The Great Latke-Hamantashen Debate (University of Chicago Press), a compilation of past panelists’ arguments, Cohen declared the debate adjourned.

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Alimentary affair (left to right): Historian Ralph Austen drew parallels with Chicago baseball, equating latkes with the World Champion White Sox; Colm O’Muircheartaigh analyzed ancient Irish writings to prove Ireland's preference for hamantashen; yet another audiovisual asked the eternal question.

Photos by Hana Yoo, ’07

Soap and glory

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The University of Chicago is not known as a party school, but that didn’t stop ABC Daytime from enlisting Chicago’s campus organizations in its Campus Invasion marketing initiative. Targeting 15 colleges nationwide on November 28–30 or December 5–7, Campus Invasion aims to motivate college students “to get hooked and win” on All My Children. The group that holds the best party earns $300 and a shot at the grand prize: a party attended by soap stars that will be taped and broadcast during the station’s soap lineup. Three U of C Registered Student Organizations—the Major Activities Board, Off-Off Campus, and the Organization of Black Students—threw competing All My Children parties. ABC gave each group $350 “just for having the party,” said second-year Off-Off Campus member Ariana Williams.

“This is a marketing strategy by ABC to tap the college market,” said third-year OBS president Letrice Gholson. Or, as Williams put it, to get them “addicted to All My Children.” Noted another student, “Sounds a little sinister, doesn’t it?”

At the MAB party yesterday, as the TV blared and students munched on food from Triad Sushi Lounge and Calypso Café in the Ida Noyes East Lounge, fourth-year Claire Mazur called out simple questions (“What’s her name?” “What color is her hair?” “What show are we watching right now?”), handing out sleeping masks, laundry bags, T-shirts, manicure sets, lip gloss, key chains, perfume samples, and knit caps to respondents—or anyone who wanted them. (ABC intended that the goodies be given to attendees who correctly answered trivia questions.) “What channel are we watching?” Mazur asked. “NBC,” one student offered. “ABC,” Mazur corrected, giving the student a prize anyway. Meanwhile, at Uncle Joe’s, Off-Off Campus also asked questions, reading them off of a three-page packet from ABC: “Did Kendall have Greenlee’s permission to be artificially inseminated with Ryan’s sperm?” (A: No.) “While in the ER, Krystal orders Adam to…?” (A: Stay alive.)

Hana Yoo, '07

Photo: Off-Off Campus watches AMC (top). Letrice Gholson cleans up after the OBS party (bottom).

Playing it safe

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“Safety is a responsibility shared by everyone,” emphasizes a University safety awareness manual. In an environment where dangerous chemicals are handled on a daily basis, who cautions researchers and cleans up hazardous spills? Who gauges radiation safety and conducts on-campus food inspections? Who makes sure employees don’t get carpal tunnel syndrome?

Meet the University’s Office of Safety and Environmental Affairs. Headed by director Steven Beaudoin, the office coordinates all campus emergency plans, supervises inspections, monitors industrial hygiene, and, through its workspace-assessment program, keeps individuals’ desks ergonomically sound. New nonacademic University staff members attend the office’s mandatory training class—a 40-minute session—where they learn about critical safety tips: for instance, the difference between a Class A fire that involves “ordinary combustibles,” such as paper or cloth, and a Class K fire—an emergency with kitchen cooking oils. (The former is fought with a pressurized-water or dry-chemical extinguisher, while the latter responds only to a wet-chemical device). The course also covers emergency events, which range from Category 1 (“affects only one department or division”) to Category 3 catastrophes like tornadoes and acts of war. Fortunately, noted Beaudoin at a training session earlier this year, those are rare. To date, the University has had only one forced shutdown of its operations—during the massive Chicago blizzard of 1979

B.E.O.

Photos: University safety training manual (top). The safety office encourages employees to protect against computer eyestrain (bottom).

On the map

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Call it the power of the Internet. In 1949 the University of California, Berkeley, bought the Mitsui family’s library, an extensive private collection of more than 100,000 items, including about 2,300 historical Japanese maps from the 17th through 20th centuries. In the half-century that these maps have lived at Berkeley’s East Asian Library, said Yuki Ishimatsu, head of the library’s Japanese Collections, in a campus lecture this past Friday, only seven people have physically viewed and handled them. But thousands have seen the maps online free of charge, thanks to the library’s digitization project. With help from David Rumsey Map Collection Cartography Associates, the library has scanned and put online some 900 of the maps so far. When the New York Times reported on the project in 2003, the Web site received more than 40,000 hits in three days.

Ishimatsu guided the audience through the Web site, demonstrating its functions and showing numerous examples of the four categories of maps: screen, scroll, city, and travel. Users can add notes and links to maps; save them to a file; and open up multiple maps simultaneously, comparing them side-by-side or superimposing one onto the other. By zooming in on the same spot in four different maps, a visitor can see how a given site has changed over the years. Within the next two or three months, users will be able to take advantage of a new feature: placing Japanese historical maps over Google Earth images.

As a librarian, Ishimatsu said, he sees it as his duty to provide scholars with interesting content. Librarians are like fishermen, he said, while scholars and researchers are like chefs, cooking the fish they find at the market for their colleagues and students. He hopes the Web site will both help academics by making these rare materials more readily accessible and increase general interest in Berkeley’s maps. “We’re very proud that this is open to the public,” Ishimatsu said. Perhaps that is why, though “many people have told me we should charge for this service,” the library continues to provide the images gratis, for anyone with an Internet connection.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: 1877 pocket map (top). 1864 pocket map (bottom).

Songs in the key of Advent

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“It’s like the craziest dessert bar you’ve ever experienced,” the University’s director of choral activities, James Kallembach, told the black-clad Rockefeller Chapel Choir and Motet Choir singers standing before him this past Sunday. “It’s all the fanciest desserts.” “No pudding,” interjected a choir member. Kallembach was referring to what the group had just finished rehearsing: the program for Advent Vespers, an annual worship service and concert held at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. The final run-through concluded, the singers scattered for a half-hour break before the event’s 5 p.m. start.

The candlelit evening’s selections included Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin, Carl Rutti’s O Magnum Mysterium, and, in its U.S. premiere, Eric Robertson’s Un Instant Mystique. At different points in the performance, music rang out from the chancel, the chapel’s side and rear balconies, and the center aisle. Organist Thomas Weisflog both accompanied the choirs and played several pieces solo, including a dramatic postlude by Marcel Dupre. Flute, cello, glockenspiel, and percussion also accompanied the singers. Following the musical sustenance, attendees flocked to the narthex (chapel-speak for vestibule) for doughnuts and hot cider.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: The crowd takes in the Advent Vespers program.

What's ahead for 2006

“Next year I expect that growth will be a little bit slower in the United States and marginally slower in the rest of the world.” That was the 2006 economic word from Michael Mussa, AM’70, PhD’74, at Wednesday’s Business Forecast Lunch. “Some of you will say that’s a pretty boring forecast,” Mussa, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, admitted to the audience of GSB alumni and other Chicago business leaders. “But in economics, boring is good.”

Since the Graduate School of Business began the forecasts in 1954, the annual event has expanded far beyond Chicago. By the end of February, ten prognosticators will have shared their best guesses with alumni in 13 cities, including Brussels, Hong Kong, and London.

Joining Mussa at the leadoff event (and doing a reprise the next day in New York) were GSB professor of economics Randall Kroszner and GSB professor emeritus of business administration Marvin Zonis. Kroszner, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003, batted .500 on his 2005 forecast. He came in on the money on trade balance (absolute value) and real government spending but overestimated real business investment—instead of the 9.5 percent growth he predicted, 2005 actuals are at 5.6 percent. Like Mussa, Kroszner sees more of the same for 2006, including a continuing “disconnect” between economic performance and public perception: “Despite the terrible tragedies of Katrina and Rita in August and September,” he pointed out, “the GDP data released last week show that the economy grew at 4.3 percent during the third quarter. No major industrialized economy in the world has had such strong growth over the last couple of years.”

Zonis, a principal of Marvin Zonis + Associates, political risk consultants, offered rapid-fire assessments of global hot spots and bright spots. On the upside, he said, “a new dynamic is beginning to spread in the Middle East, driven largely by Muslim revulsion at the violence perpetrated by the terrorists against other Muslims.” On the downside, “President Bush thoroughly misunderstands the nature of the Iraqi conflict.” Rather than continuing to see Iraq as “the central front in the global war on terror,” Zonis said, Bush should look “in Pakistan and Afghanistan—home to terrorist leaders—and to Western Europe—where terrorists are generated.”

M.R.Y.

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The first of the GSB's Business Forecast Luncheons, held in Chicago on Wednesday, filled a Hyatt Regency ballroom; Michael Mussa, AM'70, PhD'74, punctuated a prediction; GSB dean Ted Snyder moderated the panel of prognosticators (from left: Marvin Zonis, Mussa, and Randall Kroszner).

Photos by Dan Dry

Anything goes

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House debuted in 1879 amid scandal and controversy, shunned by many for its bleak view of the roles that Victorian marriage forced women to play. What was once shocking is now old hat, but in Mabou Mines Dollhouse, director Lee Breuer gives contemporary audiences something fresh to talk about with his avant-garde staging of Ibsen’s melodramatic morality play.

Most immediately striking about the Mabou Mines production, which premiered in New York in 2003 and is still evolving on tour, is how it plays with scale, turning Ibsen’s metaphor of marriage as dollhouse into a literal setting. As Nora, the play’s heroine, actress Maude Mitchell is dolled up in a blue-and-white costume (her daughter and her daughter’s doll appear in miniature versions of the same dress) and a china-doll face. Her voice—Lucille Ball doing a Norwegian accent—is as squeaky and mannered as a talking doll’s, and her movements are equally akimbo. At almost six feet, Nora is a long drink of water, as are the other females in the play. In contrast, Breuer has cast small actors—ranging in height from 3’4” to 4’5"—in the men’s roles, and the women must bend, crawl, and kneel to descend to the childlike level their menfolk expect.

Although many lines are played for laughs that most directors of Ibsen would work hard to avoid, the sight gags and bawdy humor don’t make the evening’s truly operatic ending any less tragic—or shocking—than it was back in Ibsen’s day.

A coproduction of Court Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Mabou Mines Dollhouse runs through Sunday, December 18, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

M.R.Y.

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Ibsen meets Mabou Mines (left to right): Actors 1. Honora Ferguson, Maude Mitchell, Mark Povinelli, and Ricardo Gil get cut down to size; the Helmers (Maude Mitchell as Nora and Mark Povinelli as Torvald) share a marital tête-à-tête—and wax operatic before an audience of dolls.

Photos by Richard Termine.

Let’s talk cosmology

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It didn’t take long for moderator Ira Flatow, host of National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday program, to set aside his prepared questions for the four renowned scientists seated on the Millennium Park Harris Theater stage. Audience members—who almost filled the 1,525 seats at the free public panel sponsored by the University’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, and the Illinois Humanities Council—had lined up six and seven deep at two microphones with their own queries.

These folks had done their reading. “Are dark matter and antimatter the same thing?” one questioner began. “And does the existence of dark matter put in question the big bang theory?” In fact, answered Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, the two are different concepts. While antimatter can “annihilate matter,” dark matter is “dark” because it doesn’t interact electromagnetically, or with photons. It does, however, interact with gravity. As for the big bang, dark matter is actually consistent with the theory.

When Flatow said he’d like to move on to extra dimensions, a corner of the crowd shouted that there was another audience question. The moderator could be forgiven for overlooking the asker, an elementary schooler who couldn’t reach the microphone without his father releasing it from its stand. “Is matter energy?” the boy asked. “And that tiny spark that started the big bang—how were matter and energy formed?” Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb joked to the child: “We’re hiring graduate students.” To answer his first question, Randall offered, “Matter is a form of energy in a sense.” Responding to his other query, she said, “We wish we knew that, but we don’t.” Flatow followed up with, “And what came before the big bang?” Case Western physicist Lawrence Krauss noted that Stephen Hawking would argue that “isn’t a good question.” If time arose only after the big bang, then what came before it doesn’t matter. Randall added, “It’s somewhat analogous to asking, What’s north of the north pole?”

A.M.B.

Photo: The discussion over, Flatow thanks the panelists: Wendy Freedman, Lawrence Krauss, Rocky Kolb, and Lisa Randall.

No U of C Apprentice

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With a broken ankle for much of the 13-week interview that comprises The Apprentice, Chicago-based business journalist Rebecca Jarvis, AB’03, earned her fellow candidates’ respect and proved qualified and experienced beyond most 23-year-olds’ ability. Yet on last night’s finale, Donald Trump chose Randal Pinkett, the 34-year-old, five-degreed Rhodes scholar who runs a consulting firm. Trump was clearly impressed with Jarvis, who began a nonprofit at age 15, was named one of “20 Teens Who Will Change the World” by Teen People magazine in February 2000, and earned a Point of Light from President Clinton. After telling Pinkett, “You’re hired,” he actually asked Pinkett if he shouldn’t hire Jarvis too, to work on a separate Trump project. Pinkett, tarnishing his nice-guy image, nixed the idea. “It’s The Apprentice,” Pinkett said, “not Apprenti.”

A.M.B.

Photo: Rebecca Jarvis.

Better to give

Need last-minute gifts for your favorite Phoenix fan? We’ve got ideas. Try some U of C cufflinks, a women’s jersey tee, or a travel coffee mug from the University of Chicago Bookstore. Begin your favorite toddler’s Chicago education early with a building-blocks bib, a teddy bear, or a onesie.

If Chicago-wear isn’t your thing, visit campus museum shops. The Oriental Institute’s suq offers archaeology and history books, jewelry, and even the reconstructed Royal Game of Ur, including instructions and game pieces. The Smart Museum shop sells museum publications, children’s books, Indian paper products, and hand-made textiles and jewelry. And the Robie House store includes art and architecture books and loads of related gifts.

Now on to wrapping paper.

A.M.B.

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Photos (left to right): Gifts for men, kids, and the curious.

Analyze this

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For readers whose minds have not yet left for vacation or turned to mush from that constant office-chocolate rush, UChiBLOGo points you to the Research at Chicago Web site. Collecting some of the most noteworthy and fascinating research under way at Chicago, the site features groundbreaking faculty discussing their work. Computer scientist Partha Niyogi, for instance, studies how children learn language as a model for programming computers. Other interviews include law professor Cass Sunstein discussing his Chicago Judges Project, Martin Marty, PhD'56, analyzing Martin Luther, and Raghuram Rajan exploring India’s recent growth.

The site also delves into student research, the many U of C–affiliated institutes, and Argonne National Lab—including the current management-contract competition. It’s a place for brains still working—or wanting to vacation in the life of the mind.

A.M.B.

Photo: Niyogi talks kids and computers.

UChiBLOGo bears online gifts

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While UChiBLOGo takes a break until January 3, we don’t want to leave our readers without work or home distractions. Here are some of our favorite holiday-themed Web activities and sites:

Make a Flake: Remember as a child, folding a sheet of paper into a triangle, cutting out various shapes, and unfolding it to find you had made a one-of-a-kind snowflake? Recapture the magic without the mess here.

The 12 Fads of YTMND (You’re the Man Now, Dog): A kitchy, pop-culture version of The 12 Days of Christmas. Turn up the volume.

Make Your Own Droidel Dreidel: Make an R2D2-inspired dreidel by printing out the Star Wars PDF and following the site’s directions. (found via grrl.com)

WXRT’s Holiday Music Channel: For holiday music that’s more John Lennon than Bing Crosby, set your computer to this holiday station. You’ll gain a whole new appreciation for holiday tunes.

A Christmas Story
in 30 Seconds (and re-enacted by bunnies): The movie’s funniest parts take on a life of their own. (found via Joy Olivia Miller)

A Beginner’s Guide to Hanukkah: Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated, assembles a New York Times newsletter as an antidote to Hanukkah cynicism.

A Very Special Sedaris Christmas: For This American Life and David Sedaris fans, these Real Audio clips will delight. (found via Joy Olivia Miller)

A.M.B.

Photo: A UChiBLOGo snowflake.

The dog ate my application

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College-application time can be stressful as students touch up their essays, collect recommendation letters, and rush the whole package to the mail (or e-mail) by the January 1 deadline—all during the holidays. Given that January 1, 2006, fell on a Sunday and the next day was a federal holiday, the College took pity, extending its deadline to midnight January 3—not Central, Eastern, or Pacific time, but anywhere in the world.

On the U of C’s Uncommon Application Web site, Associate Director of Admissions Gerald Doyle, AB’81, explained that if potential undergraduates wanted to submit their applications after midnight in their own time zone, they simply needed to e-mail him and tell him which zone they were using. So he’d get notes saying, “I want to let you know that I live in the Pacific Time Zone but I will be submitting my University of Chicago application under the Hawaii-Aletian Time Zone, which extends it by two hours.” To Doyle, it’s a matter of understanding. “The application process is fraught with anxiety,” he says. “It just seemed like a small thing to do.” And Chicago applicants, he notes, “never take more time than they need.”

In the days before last night’s deadline (one of the last times midnight hit, he notes on the site, was central-Pacific Baker Island), Doyle stayed up late answering student and parent questions on the Admissions Office blog, set up with NSIT’s help. For instance: “My brother went down to the post office on 33rd Street in Manhattan to mail my application, and he got stuck in a long line and it is now January 4 in New York.” Doyle replied: “This is fine. To anyone else driving this evening to reach a late night post office, drive safely.” A student from Karachi Grammar School wrote: “My computer had crashed yesterday and I have only managed to fix the problem right now. All my application data was on my PC and I had no hard copy of it. I am sorry about the delay in submitting my application but it could not be helped. I will be submitting my application shortly.” Again Doyle found compassion: “No problem,” he wrote. “If you need to take an extra day...say into the 4th...that would be fine as well...it’s been awhile since I’ve been to Pakistan and Karachi Grammar but it remains one of my favorite schools....”

As of 5 p.m. Tuesday (CST), 567 applicants had taken advantage of the extension. Now Doyle and the rest of the office start reading, a process that will go through the end of March, when they begin mailing decisions to the Class of 2010.

A.M.B.

Photo: Gerald Doyle

Cultural cross-trainer

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Lemon squares and powdered cookies were still circulating the room when Wallace Goode Jr. stood up to describe his “Chautauqua” life at Wednesday’s Divinity School lunchtime talk. A Woodlawn native whose career has taken him across the globe and into Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s office, Goode last August became director of the University Community Service Center and associate dean of students. He recalled his early experiences with the University, first as a fifth-grader tutored by U of C students and later as a chagrined high-schooler trying to blend in on campus. After being stopped once, he said, by a University police officer who “very clearly said, ‘You don’t belong here,’” Goode began sneaking into the Ida Noyes coffee shop and trying to effect the erudite nonchalance of students there. University police always picked him out. Finally, he asked an officer what gave him away. The answer: Goode’s Converse All-Stars. “So I went and bought some penny loafers.”

After studying at the University of Vermont—where he “would look into a mirror just to see another person of color”—Goode served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic and the Solomon Islands. Then he helped politicians and business executives avoid international faux pas as a cross-cultural trainer. That job eventually landed him in Chicago’s City Hall, where he spent seven years, working in workforce development and most recently as executive director of the Empowerment Zone program, providing commercial tax breaks to stimulate investment and create jobs in local communities.

Goode was still in fifth grade when his father recognized he was “bilingual.” He could converse with his U of C tutors at school and come home and talk to “the brothers on my street. My father said, ‘That is a skill you need to continue to cultivate.’” These days, Goode told Wednesday’s audience, “I am multilingual,” able to speak with educators, University development officials, corporate heads, government types, his 8-year-old son, and his 30-year-old daughter—with whom “I speak a language I’m not sure of.” Having crossed the world as a lecturer, volunteer, and teacher, Goode has also become a cultural polyglot. He encouraged University students and employees to do the same, saying they could start on the South Side by venturing into neighborhoods like Woodlawn, Kenwood, and Grand Crossing. “Volunteer,” he said. “Roll up your sleeves and get on the boards of community groups.” Cultural learning goes both ways, as does community service. “And you don’t always need to feel the hurt to understand it.”

L.G.

Photo: Wallace Goode Jr. at Swift Hall.

Art therapy

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Since spring 2005 passersby in the U of C Hospitals’ Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine have watched New York artist Audrey Ushenko create a large painting of the building’s three-story atrium, where she set up her canvas. This week Ushenko, a member of the National Academy of Design and a professor at Indiana University–Purdue University, Fort Wayne, puts the final touches on the 5 x 8-foot oil painting, which includes portraits of about 25 staff members, patients, and visitors.

As part of Chicago’s Art-in-the-Hospital program, Ushenko began by drawing the architecture and sketching the volunteer models. This past summer she composed the larger painting and started to add the details. She first noticed the space when she brought her husband for a clinic visit, impressed by the atrium’s open appearance and natural light. During subsequent visits she came to appreciate the ongoing human drama quietly played out each day in the specialty clinics that open onto the atrium.

While she painted, patients and staff observed the process, asking questions as Ushenko made compositional decisions and fine-tuned. “Many people have taken a lasting interest in the work,” Ushenko said. “They stop by to see how it’s coming, what’s changed since their last visit. Patients tell me it’s a nice distraction, something cheering and peaceful, unrelated to their medical issues. They look forward to seeing the project advance. Many say it can make treatment easier.”

Ushenko hopes to finish up the work this Friday or Monday. Once complete, it will likely be displayed in the Hospitals for several months before being shipped to her gallery, Denise Bibro Fine Art of New York, and sold. Negotiations with a potential buyer are already under way.

John Easton, AM’77

Photo: Ushenko wields her brush.

Burritos on the rocks

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A sure sign that the U of C winter festival Kuviasungnerk is under way: ice sculpting in Hutch Courtyard. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. today Jim Bringas of Chicago Ice Works chain-sawed and ice-picked a snowman, an eagle, and a sea horse. A former chef, Bringas learned the art as part of his culinary training, said coworker Angel Reyes, standing watch about ten feet away to keep onlookers and question-askers a safe distance from the roaring chainsaw.

Overlooking the ice art in progress outside the Reynolds Club, undergraduates manned three tables stocked with Chipotle burritos, which they handed out for free. “Chipotle donated 300 steak, chicken, and veggie burritos,” said third-year Bill McCormick, assistant chair of the Kuvia board. “In the first ten minutes we got rid of 150.”

Other Kuvia activities this week include Kangeiko, the 6 a.m.–8 a.m. daily calisthenics and sports at Henry Crown; faculty fireside chats in the dorms; nourishment-enhanced study breaks; and a dance marathon. The week ends with Friday’s morning lakefront “salute to the sun” and afternoon quads polar-bear run.

A.M.B.

Photo: Bringas sculpts a snowman (top). The masses reach for free food (bottom).

More than the dream

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Martin Luther King Jr. is in little danger of being forgotten as a charismatic leader and a civil-rights pioneer, but during a Monday night ceremony at Ida Noyes Hall to kick off a week of tribute, Woodlawn’s Bishop Arthur Brazier sought to remind people that King was also a Baptist preacher. His social-justice campaign, Brazier said, encompassed more than the “I have a dream” speech replayed annually in elementary-school classrooms and television documentaries. A resolute theology informed King’s words and actions, a belief in a “divine presence that binds all of life,” said Brazier, who worked closely with King during the civil-rights movement and whose own congregation, the Apostolic Church of God, claims more than 18,000 worshippers at 63rd Street and Dorchester Avenue. King insisted “all men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. … That I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be,” Brazier said. In other words, none are free until all are free.

Tracing the “fear, economic competition, and political needs” that spawned the South’s Jim Crow laws in 1838, Brazier warned the Ida Noyes crowd that King’s struggle against a racist social structure “stronger and higher than the Berlin Wall ever could be” remains unfinished. “The strife and despair in this country are a sign that something is still wrong in the heart of America.” Economic inequality continues to widen; social and political disputes divide along racial lines. “I believe we will choose community over chaos,” Brazier said, admonishing his audience to take up the cause of social justice. After all, he said, King’s speeches were healing and loving, but they were also fervent calls to action. “And procrastination,” Brazier said, “is still the thief of time.”

MLK Week continues tonight with an evening of “cross-cultural” music, poetry and spoken word at International House. Tomorrow the University Community Service Center sponsors at day of volunteering called “A Day in the Life of a Child,” and Sunday offers two performances of August Wilson’s Fences. The weeklong celebration concludes Monday with a noon service at Rockefeller Chapel, headlined by University Trustee Valerie Jarrett. (An additional event tied to MLK Week, a panel discussion of race and politics in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is slated for January 19 at the School of Social Service Administration.)

L.G.

Photo: Bishop Arthur Brazier with The Woodlawn Organization head Leon Finney.

Cultural evolution

Student-choreographed dances, demonstrations by the Wushu (martial art) Club, and vibrant, multicolored costumes graced the Mandel Hall stage this past Saturday evening at the Chinese Undergraduate Student Association’s (CUSA) tenth annual culture show and New Year celebration, Chasing the Red Dream. As usual, the show interspersed a narrative with dance and martial-arts acts, but in a departure from years past, the event “went in a more politically charged direction,” fourth-year CUSA show director Christina Pei noted in the program.

The fictional story portrayed a family of five during the Cultural Revolution: Xian, a district judge disillusioned by the corruption of his fellow government officials; Ying, his wife and a secret member of the Red Guards, civilian Cultural Revolution implementers; their two mischievous sons, who are sent to the desert to perform manual labor; and Xian’s elderly father, an adherent of Confucianism. Despite its political theme, Chasing the Red Dream remained lighthearted throughout, often playing for laughs. Though Xian narrowly escapes execution and his family is scattered, they reunite at the show’s (and the revolution’s) end.

“With this turn toward a more serious side of culture, I hope CUSA will open more doors for discussion,” Pei wrote. “Asian history is charged with politics and ripe with stories—Tibet’s struggle for independence, British settlement of Hong Kong, the Japanese invasion, and World War II.” Themes, perhaps, that CUSA will explore in culture shows to come.

Hana Yoo, ’07

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Photos (left to right): The Daughters of the Sea dance; a Wushu performance; a Red Guard rally.

Composition creation

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A night at the symphony evokes images of black-and-white-clad performers, silent save their instruments and the impeccably rehearsed pieces they bring to life. At this morning’s student-composer readings in Mandel Hall, audience members got a behind-the-scenes peek at how the magic comes together. Led by Cliff Colnot, principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary MusicNOW series and sometimes U of C orchestration instructor, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra—now in a three-year residency at the University—rehearsed, discussed, and tweaked graduate student David Smooke’s composition Breathing the Water. Smooke was one of four composition students to have his work performed and critiqued by the ensemble during the two-day event, organized by University of Chicago Presents.

The energetic, 13-minute piece incorporated piano, strings, and a mix of percussion including the marimba xylophone and crotales, metal discs known for their high-pitched, bell-like tone. Working section by section during the two-hour reading, Colnot made occasional on-the-fly revisions. “Mark that dynamic as forte instead of fortissimo,” he instructed the musicians. The ensemble also helped hone the piece. “Feels like between [measures] 37 and 41, there should be a crescendo, but there’s not,” volunteered the pianist. “Yes,” agreed Colnot, “there’s an implied build there.” Smooke, seated onstage behind the conductor, quietly recorded the suggestions.

The final product, played from start to finish an hour into the reading—and only after the union-member musicians voted and received the go-ahead from their personnel representative to slightly postpone their scheduled break—bounced from dark, jolting chords to soft, dreamy tones. At times menacing and frantic, at others somber and mysterious, the piece experimented with major and minor notes sliding together (“like Stravinsky,” commented Colnot during the reading), gentle piano and strings, and even a waltz-like moment. After the peaks and valleys, it ended quietly, like a violent wave subsiding, gently returning to sea. But the orchestra’s work was not yet done. “There are still three or four things in top quarter to work on,” instructed Colnot. He then released the musicians for their break

B.E.O.

Photo: Colnot leads the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at Friday's student-composer reading.

Media probe

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A spirited crowd of students, faculty, and occasional hecklers crammed into the Oriental Institute’s Breasted Hall last Thursday evening for a panel discussion on media responsibility. The Chicago Society organized the event, and Humanities dean Danielle Allen—who’d consulted the Federalist Papers beforehand and uncovered arguments favoring both a strong media and occasional government secrecy—served as moderator.

Fault lines opened quickly, if mostly cordially. On one side stood Nation Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel—who boasted about her magazine’s reputation for “steadfastness in speaking truth to power and its inability for turn a profit”—and John Nichols, the Nation’s Washington correspondent, who earned frequent cheers from the audience. Both decried the consolidation of media ownership, publishers’ increasing focus on the bottom line, and the softening—or narrowing—of hard news coverage. “Right now there is an assault on truth,” declared vanden Heuvel, pointing to the Bush Administration’s tight lips and relativist philosophies, a rollback on Freedom of Information Act requests, and reporters’ diminishing access to political heavy hitters. Calling local ownership of news outlets “one of democracy’s last hopes,” Nichols reminded the audience of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2003 proposal to loosen the rules for media conglomerates. Close to three million citizens wrote letters protesting the move. Even when satellite newspapers’ op-ed pages diverge from a parent company’s political leanings, Nichols said, “it’s with the full understanding of who owns the paper. What you get is a range of disagreements that are within the safest zones.”

Chicago Tribune Publisher and CEO David Hiller and Deputy Managing Editor James Warren, meanwhile, took a less stormy view. Defending the idea of a robustly independent and diverse Fourth Estate, Warren said, “The notion of a homogeneous force is dubious, if not laughable.” He conceded that arrogance, passivity, and bad marketing had “pissed away” much of the public’s goodwill and respect, despite good stories like the Tribune’s death-penalty series. Although newspaper owners worry more these days about profit, journalism’s ideals remain intact, he said. “And the more money we make, the more independent we can be.” Hiller agreed, cautioning vanden Heuvel and others: “If you go out of business, if the lights go out, guess what? You’re not doing any news.”

During the audience Q and A, one questioner asked about the Daily Show’s popularity. Nichols proclaimed it a “strong warning signal” for editors. “When the media lose the public’s trust, they turn to parody,” he said. “We’re much closer to that in America today than our leaders and media people want to admit.” Hiller and Warren, though, insisted the Daily Show proves the country’s wealth of freedom, creativity, and diversity of opinion. “It’s a well-written, funny satire,” Hiller said. “It’s a barometer of the health of the media content and landscape that people have the freedom and financial wherewithal to do this show.”

L.G.

Photo: The Nation's John Nichols and Katrina vanden Heuvel (left) listen as the Tribune's David Hiller speaks, sitting beside colleague James Warren.

Photo by Juliana Pino for the Maroon.

Global menu

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Braving the January cold, students lined up around the block outside Ida Noyes this past Saturday evening for the Asian Students Union–organized International Food Festival. Once inside, they waited some more, first in the lobby to gather plates, drinks, and utensils, then at three food stations in the library, east, and west lounges. Both student organizations and local restaurants—16 outfits in all—donated food. Tamales from the Organization of Latin American Students and pierogi from the Polish American Students Association jostled for space with menudo (Mexican soup) from Samahan, the Filipino Students Association, and shrimp fried rice from the Taiwanese Students Association. Aside from the two-course meal (entrees at 7 p.m., desserts at 9 p.m.), the gathering featured Cloister Club performances by a cappella groups Unaccompanied Women, Men in Drag, and Chicago Men’s A Cappella; Korean drumming troupe Loose Roots; the Middle Eastern Dance Society; the Balle Bhangra Team; and second-year Joy Lin, who did two solo Chinese dances.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photo: Students wait for plates and utensils (top). Ben Zimmerman, '07, enjoys Asian noodles (bottom).

Repeat performance

What do you give two people who have given millions to help sick children—on the South Side, in the city of Chicago, in the nation, and through the world? On Wednesday University trustees, administrators, physicians, nurses, past patients, and friends gathered in the lobby of the U of C Comer Childrens Hospital and gave Gary Comer, founder of the Lands’ End catalog company, and his wife Francie a standing ovation. Then they did it again.

The Comers did it again, too, making a $42 million donation—the largest single gift in the University and Hospitals’ history—to create the Comer Center for Children and Specialty Care. The $100 million facility will adjoin the Comer Children’s Hospital, which opened in February 2005, and will house the Comer Pediatric Emergency Department (scheduled to open this year) as well as space dedicated to specialty ambulatory care, advanced operating rooms and procedural areas, and inpatient units. Of the gift, $8 million will be used to recruit more physician-scientists to continue providing state-of-the-art care to U of C patients while doing research that can have global impact. “It’s not good enough to do the same thing tomorrow for a child that we did today,” said Pediatrics Chair Steve Goldstein, in thanking the Comers. “We can always do better.”

Since 2001, counting their latest gift, the Comers have donated more than $84 million to support what Gary Comer called “the best pediatric hospital in the world.” And like Goldstein, Comer hoped those gifts won’t be the end of the story: “It’s up to everyone else to dig into their pockets, to come up with the programs, to do the funding—to keep this thing going.”

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): The Comers at the announcement; Pediatrics Chair Steve Goldstein, Biological Sciences Dean James Madara, and Hospitals CEO Michael Riordan thank the benefactors; Former patient Ally Bain presented Comer with a poem.

Photos by Dan Dry

Twenty first dates

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This past Friday night, single graduate students from across the University’s divisions and schools gathered at the GSB Hyde Park Center for speed dating: 20 three-minute encounters conducted across 75 small tables in a crowded room. The ground rules? Wear your speed-dating identification number in plain sight; don’t exchange personal information; if you click with someone, write his or her ID number on your yellow date card; and “what happens at speed dating stays at speed dating.” After the event, the organizers would collate the yellow cards and put mutually interested parties in touch.

The morning of the event, all 75 slots reserved for women were filled while several slots were still available for men. But sometime between morning and evening, an epidemic of either last-minute cold feet or love by other means had befallen the women of Chicago—at 9 p.m. the shortfall was on their side, and the organizers were scouring the premises for willing female participants. They had some success, but a handful of men were still relegated to wallflower status during each three-minute session.

At evening’s end, some participants bolted. “I’d rather stay home and study than do that again,” one woman exclaimed, drawing her companion’s emphatic agreement. But many lingered, resuming conversations that had been curtailed by the clock and, when the lights went down, migrating to Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. The festivities benefited more than simply social life on a campus where fun allegedly comes to die: the evening’s $12 entry proceeds went to REMEDY, a group of Pritzker Medical School students that cosponsored the event with the Graduate Student Council and that sends medical supplies to the Dominican Republic.

Laura Demanski, AM’94

Photos: A GSB room fills with speed daters.

Attention must be paid

With his ten-work, ten-decade Pittsburgh play cycle, the late August Wilson set out to produce an African American epic. In Fences—his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama set in the 1950s, now at Court Theatre in a production directed by Ron O. J. Parson—the heroic nature of Wilson’s protagonist is clear from the moment he comes on stage. Troy Maxson is a big man, fenced in by racial prejudice.

Like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Troy Maxson has two sons and a long-suffering wife. Unlike Loman, however, Troy—a Negro League baseball star who still wonders what might have been—does not encourage his younger son’s interest in football or his older son’s interest in music. His own dreams deferred, he has trouble believing in theirs. Late in the game he takes one last swing at happiness, entering into an affair that leaves him with a daughter but costs him his wife.

Yet the somber trajectory of Wilson’s plot is shot through with humor, forgiveness, and heroic triumph.

Fences runs through February 12. On Thursday, February 2, U of C English professor David Bevington leads a post-performance discussion.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Every name tells a story: Troy Maxon (A. C. Smith) spins a yarn to his good friend Bono (John Steven Crowley). Jacqueline Smith plays Rose, Troy’s loyal, strong-willed wife. Victor J. Cole is Troy’s brother, Gabriel—wounded in WW II, he thinks he is God’s angel.

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Prodigal poet

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“As much as I recognize the value of poetry,” confessed poet and award-winning Sextus Propertius translator Vincent Katz, AB’82, at last Thursday’s Poem Present talk, “it is hard for me to believe in it.” Titled The Poet’s Fate, Katz’s lecture—part poetry reading, part autobiographical snapshot—confronted the psychological realities of being a poet in a society that often views the art as a “marginal occupation.” Sampling from his own pieces as well as those of influences such as Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, Katz took the Rosenwald 405 audience through his development as a writer and translator.

The son of painter Alex Katz, he recounted a bohemian ’60s childhood, when the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the “subliminal force” of his father’s paintings laid the groundwork for his later work as a poet, musician, curator, and translator. Katz even shared the first short poem he’d ever written: “I catch a cricket and a grasshopper in the same hand.”

Sipping tea, he described himself as a prodigal son of poetry who had ventured into translation, curating, editing, and other endeavors yet always returned, whether adapting the elegies of Propertius for a contemporary audience or pairing his own lines with the work of visual artists. For all its challenges, he mused, “poetry fills a need” to unlock the power of language. In writing poetry, Katz believes in getting it right the first time. “Only once,” he claimed, “have I successfully edited a poem into being.”

Although he still finds it difficult to say “I’m a poet” to anyone other than close friends, Katz cited the craft as his defense against the world, “a cushion from negative things.” His parting thought on the poet’s destiny: “You don’t find your fate, it finds you.”

B.E.O.

Photo: Vincent Katz © Vivien Bittencourt.

The names behind the buildings

A decade or so ago, when Jules Knapp first called the University to inquire about making a gift, he told a Wall Street Journal reporter last Friday, a receptionist misunderstood his purpose—and transferred him to the University Hospitals gift shop.

But Knapp, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side and whose first jobs included paper delivery boy, Marshall Field’s stock boy, and shoe salesman, is nothing if not persistent. The founder of United Coatings (he sold it for $108 million to Pratt & Lambert in 1994; two years later Sherwin-Williams bought the merged company), Knapp eventually got through to the right person, and the conversation resulted in a $10 million gift to establish the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research, housed in the five-story Jules F. Knapp Research Center.

The gift’s impetus was personal: diagnosed with lupus in 1981, Joy Faith Knapp, one of Jules and Gwen’s three daughters, was treated at the Hospitals for several years before dying from the autoimmune disorder in 2000 at age 37. “We were so frustrated by the lack of knowledge about lupus,” says Gwen Knapp of her daughter’s illness. “We wanted to find a way fill those gaps, to learn about the disease, what causes it, who is at risk, how to treat it, and how to prevent it. Our curiosity led us to the University of Chicago.”

Now the Knapps have made a second landmark gift to Chicago—$25 million to help fund a ten-story, state-of-the-art biomedical-research facility. The Jules and Gwen Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery—along with the Knapp Research Center and the Donnelley Biological Sciences Learning Center—will be known as the Knapp Research Complex, recognizing the family’s decades of biomedical-sciences support.

“My mother always dreamed that I would go to the University of Chicago,” Jules Knapp told the Journal. Her dream didn’t come true—Knapp attended the University of Illinois before leaving to start his career—but her son is definitely a Big Man on Campus now.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Toasting future discoveries (from left): Jules Knapp, University President Don M. Randel, Biological Sciences and Pritzker Dean James Madara, and Gwen Knapp; To keep the ten-story Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery from overpowering its neogothic neighbors, glass-curtain walls will balance height with translucence and openness; Under construction: Gwen and Jules Knapp pose in front of models and cranes.

Photos by Dan Dry

Musical aesthetics

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“I’m really nervous,” quipped James Kallembach, conductor of the University Chorus, Motet Choir, and Rockefeller Chapel Choir, “I don’t usually talk.” As attendees at today’s Divinity School lunch finished off rosemary potatoes, tomato and onion quiche, and dark chocolate mousse, he kicked off his talk, Mysticism and New Choral Music, with a disclaimer. “I don’t know much about mysticism,” he confessed, explaining that “contemplation” was a more apt term for his intended subject—the philosophy of aesthetics.

“Aesthetics,” Kallembach observed, “is what musicians chat about in the undergraduate cafeteria” before they’re trained with the scholar’s analytical tools. He compared the process to a Brita water filter made so complex that one forgets the existence of the water itself. Mourning this “crisis of meaning and value,” the U of C director of choral activities encouraged listeners to appreciate art’s “radiance of form” rather than forever trying to explicate its usefulness. “It’s OK that art is useless in the way a shovel is useful, and art is good in and of itself, in the way a shovel is not,” he said. “Utility,” Kallembach concluded, “need not be made into an idol.”

B.E.O.

Photo: Kallembach speaks in Swift Hall.

Honest Abe’s legal might

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Toting an armload of books and papers to a Law School podium Wednesday night, Duke University law professor Walter E. Dellinger III reminded Chicago students and faculty that just two years before winning the presidency, Abraham Lincoln considered himself a failure. On June 16, 1858—the day he delivered his famous House Divided speech against the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision—“Lincoln would have awakened a very disappointed man,” Dellinger said. His marriage was sputtering, his wife was slipping into mental illness, and his son was slowly dying. Depression overwhelmed him. Little known outside Illinois, he was beset by creditors and a failing business. His state-legislature career had proved unremarkable, and at 49 years old he felt his youthful ambitions ebbing.

“But that night,” Dellinger said, “what Lincoln did changed the history of the nation.” His speech “destroyed the middle ground on slavery” and catapulted Lincoln onto the national stage. It also, Dellinger insisted, offered a glimpse into the 16th president’s legal acuity. During his hour-long talk, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dellinger parsed Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas, his House Divided speech, the Gettysburg Address, and his second inaugural address, declaring him “America’s greatest lawyer.” He attributed Lincoln’s greatness to “deep humility, astounding candor, and an extraordinary ability to conceptualize or reconceptualize questions.” Lincoln, he said, “could look at a group of stars everyone had always seen as the Big Dipper and say it was Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. And he could convince others to see something other than what they saw before.” With the Gettysburg Address, Dellinger said, Lincoln recast the very founding of the nation, tracing America’s conception not to the Constitution but to the more stirring Declaration of Independence.

Sometimes, Dellinger said, Lincoln’s strengths introduced themselves as weaknesses. In the courtroom—and later in speeches—he would concede point after point. Just when he seemed on the verge of giving his whole case away, he would raise a single issue of disagreement, Dellinger said, “and that would be the point on which the whole case would turn.”

During the post-lecture Q & A, Chicago law professor Geoffry Stone asked what Lincoln, an “aggressive proponent of commander-in-chief powers,” might think of George W. Bush’s warrentless wiretapping. “There’s war and then there’s war,” Dellinger replied. “If Al Qaeda were occupying Baltimore or Richmond, it would be a different situation.” Constitutionally, the wiretapping is problematic. “I happen to think we should be getting this information. … But we’re passing through a troublesome period when there appears to be a violation of a statute intended to apply to the president and no necessity to do it.”

L.G.

Photo: Dellinger speaks in the Law School's Weymouth Kirkland Courtoom.

White out

The only snow missing from the current Renaissance Society exhibit, Forecast: Snow, is the cold, wet, and real kind. Knowing Chicago weather, it’s probably not far behind. In the meantime, synthetic white stuff blankets a small forest of genuine pine trees in the Renaissance Society’s galleries on Cobb Hall’s fourth floor. In one corner a bulbous, outsized snowman smiles beatifically from atop a pair of skis; how his boots and bindings are attached is a mystery. Highly magnified snow crystals float overhead (in two-dimensional drawings) and dot the gallery floor (in three-dimensional acrylic and plaster sculptures). What appears to be a vast baked Alaska turns out, on closer inspection, to include a collection of Tic-Tac–sized buildings along one edge—and to be, in fact, a sculpture of the Swiss Alps at St. Moritz, complete with village and ski lifts to the nearest peaks.

These are some of the sights to be found in Japanese artist Yutaka Sone’s show, which transforms the Renaissance Society into a temperate winter wonderland through April 9. As a whole, the exhibit provokes a child’s sense of discovery on waking to find the world transformed the morning after a snowfall. The placement of the trees creates winding paths and hidden spaces. Sone veers between scales, zooming in on individual snowflakes and panning out on a ski lift and entire resort. Single snow crystals are revealed as evanescent natural sculptures; snowmen and snowballs trigger nostalgia; and heaps of snow form the settings for upscale vacationing. Whether visitors approach Sone’s work reflectively—pondering the connections between all these themes—or as pure recreation, odds are they’ll leave with a plastic flake or two clinging to a hem or a cuff, a reminder of a winter idyll.

Laura Demanski, AM’94

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Photos (left to right): Faux snowflakes abound in the gallery; detail from a marble ski lift; the peaks of the St. Moritz installation.

Photos courtesy the Renaissance Society.

Rack it up

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Last Friday night Hutch Commons’s vaulting expanse made room for table after table of $3 shirts and $4 pants—part of a rummage sale benefiting Darfur relief efforts. The doors opened at 6 p.m., and within an hour the checkout line stood five and six customers deep. Weighed down by backpacks, students wandered among slightly scuffed shoes and loosely folded jeans, or logged silent-auction bids for a digital camera, television, and sound system. A pair of girls in boots and ponytails took turns modeling scarves for each other, while a man held up a sweater to check its size. At the other end of the room, members of the University’s Middle East Music Ensemble plucked out a sprightly Arabic melody on ouds (pear-shaped lutes), zithers, and hand-held drums. (As the evening wore on, a handful of student rock bands and an African-Brazilian performance group from the student organization Gingarte Capoeira took turns providing live entertainment.) Meanwhile, cardboard displays near the register exhorted shoppers to help quell the crisis in Darfur.

Coordinated by students from the University’s Amnesty International club—with help from Giving Tree, the Muslim Students Association, and Hillel—the rummage sale raised $1,800. The money, said co-organizer Alice Sverdlik, will go to Oxfam projects to supply clean water and sanitation for Sudanese refugees. “Oxfam is a nondenominational charity, and that seemed important, since organizations from different faiths were part of the rummage sale,” said Sverdlik, a fourth-year student and Amnesty International member. "Plus, it’s one of the few charities still working in the Darfur region.” Volunteers dropped off unsold clothing and books at local shelters. “It was a very successful event, and honestly a very simple event to set up," Sverdlik said. “We just sold stuff people gave us.”

L.G.

Photos: Scenes from the rummage sale.

Arctic arias

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It could have been mistaken for last weekend’s weather report. “Winter has done his worst,” sang soprano Jessica Cullinan at Thursday’s noontime concert in Fulton Recital Hall. Accompanied by pianist Patricia Spencer and attired in a long, black dress, Cullinan, a member of the Hyde Park group Chicago Chorale, serenaded the audience of about 30 with winter-themed music, ranging from Samuel Barber’s mournful “Must the Winter Comes So Soon?” to a soaring Copland etude. “This one doesn’t have any words,” the singer warned of the latter, “so don’t be shocked.”

Shadowed by drab winter gray peeking through the window behind her, Cullinan brightened up the hall with Pietra Cimara’s dreamy, waltz-like “Fiocca La Neve” and a powerful rendition of Roger Quilter’s arrangement of Shakespeare’s poem “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind.” Nostalgia about softly falling snowflakes was balanced with desperate pleas for deliverance. “And at times like this,” Cullinan belted to a Sondheim tune, “I think I would gladly die—for a day of sky!” She concluded the program with Molly Carew’s upbeat homage to spring, “Everywhere I Look,” before sending listeners out into the February cold.

B.E.O.

Photo: Cullinan and Spencer at Fulton Recital Hall.

Ragtime revival

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Toward the end of composer and pianist Reginald Robinson’s 90-minute ramble through ragtime’s history and music—punctuated by dizzying renditions of seminal songs and a digital slideshow of genre greats—the 2004 MacArthur “genius” award winner tried to describe ragtime’s rapturous hold over him: “It’s just something I had to play,” he said. “I wanted to play ragtime before I knew I wanted to play piano.” Seated at Fulton Recital Hall’s grand piano last Thursday night in a Chicago Society–sponsored event, the 33-year-old offered a full house of listeners a presentation that was half-concert, half-lecture. Sketching the contributions of ragtime composers like Scott Joplin, Louis Chauvin, Jelly Roll Morton, Eubie Blake, and James Scott, he explained ragtime’s particular rhythm, its use of syncopation, and its journey from New Orleans’s Congo Square to brothels and dance halls across the country and, later, onto concert stages. He argued for the continuing significance of ragtime in a hip-hop era. “This is music that black people created and then forgot about,” he said. “We tend to make music and then move on, but if you talk about the blues, jazz, hip hop, you’ve got to talk about ragtime too. I hear ragtime in hip hop every day. During Black History Month, everybody wants to talk about how George Washington Carver made the peanut. What about Scott Joplin?”

Robinson was 13 when he wrote his first rag—a short, simple piece he played for the audience. By 16, his work was more sophisticated; that year he wrote a song called “Just Trying to Escape the Devil.” As a grade-schooler on Chicago’s West Side, he’d been entranced when a group of musicians came to his school to offer a demonstration that included ragtime. “I’d heard this music on the ice cream truck plenty of times,” he said. “I thought [Joplin’s 'The Entertainer'] was just the ice cream song.” When he found out it was serious music, he began pestering his mother for a piano. All she could afford at first was a tiny keyboard. “Just two octaves, with small keys,” he said. “But I didn’t care. I didn’t know what an octave was anyway.” Piano lessons were out of the question, so he taught himself, learning to read and write music by using a songbook to follow along with a Joplin recording. “Each piece I composed I tried to make into an exercise,” he said. In 1992 he took a demo tape to Delmark Records, where the producers immediately signed him. Today he gives lectures and concerts across the country. “I’m trying to put ragtime and Scott Joplin’s legacy in front of people.”

L.G.

Photo: Robinson discusses, and plays, ragtime.

Photo by Brian Morris.

Fat Friday

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Fat Tuesday came early to Ida Noyes this past Friday night, with the Council on University Programming's (COUP) annual Mardi Gras celebration. Donning yellow, green, and purple masks and beads, students lined up for balloon animals, caricature artists, fortune-tellers, and face-painters. They consumed plenty of food and beer—if they were of age—or “mocktails,” water, and soft drinks. Local DJ duo Flosstradamus spun tunes in the third-floor theater, while live band the Cooker Boys and Jugglers Enriching Lives Like Ours performed in the first-floor Cloister Club.

COUP, the organization behind Blues ’n Ribs, Fall Formal, and Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko, has two more events on the roster for spring quarter: Dance Marathon April 8 and 9 and Summer Breeze May 19 and 20.

H.Y.

Photo: A caricature artist captures student revelry.

Putting it all together

The writers, photographers, and cameramen who showed up for a sneak peek at the Oriental Institute Museum’s new Robert F. Picken Family Nubian Gallery last Thursday got name tags inscribed with Nubian hieroglyphs, guided tours, and the chance to nibble on frog-shaped sugar cookies modeled on thedecorations on a painted-clay vessel from the first or second century AD. The vessel is on display in “Ancient Nubia,”an exhibit whose February 25 opening marked the conclusion of the museum’s 10-year, $15-million renovation and redesign.

Before there was an Oriental Institute, Chicago professor and OI founder James Henry Breasted led two expeditions to Nubia (now Sudan), where he was one of the first modern researchers to document the ancient civilization. Photographs taken during those early University expeditions, “Lost Nubia: Photographs of Egypt and the Sudan 1905-07,” can be seen in the museum’s Marshall and Doris Holleb Family Gallery for Special Exhibits, next-door to the Picken Gallery, until Sunday, May 7.

The 650 objects on display in the new gallery, however, are drawn from 15,000 objects brought back to Chicago far more recently. From 1960 to 1968, teams from the Oriental Institute excavated numerous archaeological sites in both Egypt and Sudan, sites in the Nile Valley that were destined for flooding as construction of the Aswan High Dam got under way.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): A photographer for the University of Chicago expedition to Nubia and Egypt focuses on an inscription on a stella of Egyptian King Thutmose; the photo was taken in 1907. Stephen Harvey, assistant professor in the Oriental Institute, is co-curator of “Ancient Nubia” (photo by Dan Dry) looks over the display cases in the new Robert F. Picken Family Gallery at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. This 1906 photograph shows Nubian pyramids, built from about 100 B.C. to 150 A.D. at Gebel Barkal.

High notes

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Despite soaring vocals that brought a standing ovation from the Mandel Hall audience, Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman never let it go to her head. “I’m actually an alto,” she joked, preferring to take credit for “having the sense” to partner with British pianist Roger Vignoles. Last Friday Brueggergosman and Vignoles—who has accompanied singers such as Kathleen Battle and Susan Graham—graced an almost-full house with theatrical renditions of everything from Hector Berlioz’s six-song cycle Les Nuits d’ Été (“The Nights of Summer”) to African-American spirituals.

Dressed in black velvet, Brueggergosman kicked off the two-hour University of Chicago Presents program with numbers by Reynaldo Hahn and Hector Berlioz. Some audience members followed along with booklets of translated lyrics while others relied on the singer’s expressive performance. Be it voicing the agony of a discarded rose in Berlioz’s “Le spectre de la rose” (“The ghost of the rose”) or turning on the smiles for Hahn’s homage to spring “Les Fontaines” (“The Fountains”), Brueggergosman went beyond delivery of the notes as every song seeped through her body.

Part actress, part comedian, she surprised the audience with a post-intermission program change. “Now, it’ll be all Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith,” she said. Passing up an operatic rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” she switched the Hugo Wolf and spirituals set. Blanking on the original order of the latter, Brueggergosman consulted the crowd. “What does the group consist of?” she laughed, accepting a copy of the program from a first-row spectator. With the sequence hashed out, she launched into a four-song selection of Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch (“Spanish Songbook”), followed by three songs from Strauss. The program’s high point, however, was the spirituals collection, and her haunting a cappella rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

Heeding cries for an encore, Brueggergosman returned to the stage. After confessing that she didn’t know it as well as she should, she capped off her recital with “Someone is Sending Me Flowers,” a tongue-in-cheek tale of a woman inundated with unsavory bouquets from a secret admirer. “The cactus corsage touched me deeply,” she sang. Minus the pain, the same could be said of Brueggergosman’s performance.

B.E.O.

Photo: Soprano Measha Brueggergosman, courtesy University of Chicago Presents.

Shape of sings to come

The flyer that greeted diners sitting down to lunch at the Divinity School this Wednesday warned that the shape-note singing they’d come to hear “is not polite music. The tone is piercing, loud, and somewhat raw. … The general dynamic is double forte.” This was no empty caution. After polishing off a Southern meal of red-pepper cornbread, collard greens, and black-eyed peas, members of the University’s Shape-Note Singing Association entertained the audience with an hour of forceful, full-throated hymns about God’s grace, man’s mortality, and the fearsome power of the Holy Spirit. Seated in a square that reflected their four-part harmony, the dozen or so singers took turns leading the chorus.

Singer Ted Mercer offered an abridged history of the music, which traces its roots to congregational singing in 18th-century New England, and beyond that, to Europe. During the early 19th century, the music migrated to the South (one Chicago singer declared Alabama a shape-note Mecca), and these days singing groups hail from across the country. The name comes from the notation system itinerant singing instructors used to teach music to illiterate American frontier-people. Called “shape note,” it uses different shapes to represent the sounds “fa,” “sol,” “la,” “ti,” and “do.” A seminal book of folk hymns, The Sacred Harp—which spawned the largest surviving branch of shape-note singing—has been in continuous publication since 1844. Late editions make room for new compositions, some by University shape-note singers.

Obviously unaccustomed to applause—shape-note singing is a democratic, not performative art—the lunchtime singers invited audience members to join in, passing out photocopies of some songs and a few extra songbooks. “There’s really no place for rehearsal in the tradition,” Mercer said. “We rehearse by singing the names of the notes.”

Formed 20 years ago, the University Shape-Note Singing Association holds regular sessions throughout the city, and they encouraged curious audience members to consider joining. Ida Noyes Hall will host the 21st Annual Midwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention April 29-30, and the U of C’s chorus will sing from 9:30 a.m. until 3 p.m., “just like they did on the frontier,” Mercer said. The convention will also include a potluck dinner. “Don’t worry about bringing food, folks,” he said. “We’ll have plenty. Just come join us.”

L.G.

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Photos (left to right): Shape-note singers.

Photos by Lydia Gibson

And the next president is...

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What it lacked in suspense, this morning’s presidential press conference made up for in enthusiasm. Everyone assembled in the Ida Noyes Library expected University of Chicago Board of Trustees Chair Jim Crown to announce, as he did, that Robert J. Zimmer had been elected, “by a unanimous vote, to succeed Don Randel as our 13th president.”

Also unanimous, Crown told the audience, was the level of respect for Chicago that he and Robert Pippin, who chaired the faculty committee advising the trustee search committee, encountered in their seven-month travels around the country to seek and sound out candidates for the post. It was apparent, he said, that other institutions pay a great deal of attention to Chicago “and they especially pay attention to our leadership.”

With cameras clicking like cicadas, Crown introduced Chicago’s next leader, an insider turned outsider who’ll be returning to Hyde Park after four years as provost at Brown University, where he is credited with strengthening both research and teaching. “I am so pleased and eager to be able to lead this University,” Zimmer said, noting that Chicago’s path to continued success must remain based on the institution’s “singular commitment to inquiry.”

Then came the inquiries from the floor. In a short Q & A, the president-elect voiced confidence on the renewal of Chicago’s contract to manage Argonne National Laboratory and emphasized the University’s roles in the city of Chicago as neighbor, citizen, and educator. But he was a bit more hesitant when a Maroon reporter asked his opinion of Max Palevsky’s architecture: “The colors are striking.”

Welcome back to Chicago, Mr. Zimmer.


M.R.Y.

Photo: President-elect Robert J. Zimmer addresses the Ida Noyes audience (top). Post-conference, Trustee Chair Jim Crown (right) chats with Zimmer and the University's outgoing president, Don M. Randel. Photos by Dan Dry.

Wayne's world remembered

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“Wayne’s world,” said English professor James K. Chandler, AM’72, PhD’78, is how the undergraduates he inherited from his colleague Wayne Booth for part 3 of a three-course sequence described the class they’d had for the previous two quarters. It was a place “where you could say anything you liked, as long as you got the tone right, but you could claim only what you had the evidence” to support.

Chandler was one of ten speakers (colleagues, friends, and family) at a March 9 memorial service for Booth, AM’47, PhD’50, the George M. Pullman distinguished service professor emeritus in English, who died October 10 at age 84.

The speakers’ claims for Booth’s prowess as teacher, thinker, listener, and inspired amateur were well buttressed by the evidence: founder of the journal Critical Inquiry, author of lit-crit classics (The Rhetoric of Fiction, to name one), a Quantrell Award-winning teacher, and a lifelong musician who played the cello with middling skill and exceptional enjoyment.

The Rockefeller Chapel service, book-ended with chamber music by the Pacifica Quartet, featured Booth’s own voice, both in selections from his memoir My Many Selves, read by daughter Alison Booth and in a 1999 radio interview on the publication of For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. Asked why he played the cello, knowing he played it less than perfectly, Booth credited wife Phyllis and his more musical friends: “They didn’t say, ‘Stop.’”

M.R.Y.

In 1997 Wayne Booth was honored as one of eight University emeritus faculty to receive the Alumni Association's Norman Maclean Faculty Awards, recognizing their extraordinary contributions to teaching and to the student experience of life on campus. Photo by Matthew Gilson.

Reading period

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“Unless you have a kid,” said Joe Edwards, AB’01, juggling 16-month-old Jack with one arm and a book with the other, “you don’t know what it’s like to have exams and a teething child at the same time.” The small band of student-parents seated before him in the Ida Noyes Library—all clutching their own little ones—nodded. In the midst of finals frenzy, Tuesday afternoon’s Story Time, sponsored by the Office of Graduate Affairs’ Student Parent Group, offered a brief respite.

“We’ll have a song, then a story, then a song,” explained Joe’s wife Renee, AB’00, before jumping into a welcome melody called “Good Afternoon,” followed by a reading of Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. The tale of barnyard bovines who discover a typewriter and begin, via letter, demanding better work conditions from their farmer elicited giggles from adults and kids alike. Next up was “Shake Your Sillies Out,” an upbeat tune by Australian children’s band the Wiggles, which got everyone— developmental-stage permitting—on their feet. A bedtime tale, Counting Kisses: A Kiss & Read Book, calmed the group before a round of Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor.” The hour concluded with Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are and Jane Yolen’s How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?

Aside from some restlessness on Jack’s part—quickly assuaged by a pacifier, or, as Joe called it, “a parent’s greatest joy”—the kids, who ranged from four months to four years old were a well-behaved bunch. Infants Anna (7.5 mos.) and Emma (4 mos.) bounced on their parents’ laps while Anahit (4 years) quietly took in each story.

The free event was one of many parent-child activities sponsored by the Office of Graduate Affairs’ Student Parent Group each week. Organized to support the University’s approximately 500 student-parents, the group has some 150 student, postdoc, and faculty families on its listserv and also hosts holiday parties, parent-education lectures, and a discussion board. As the Story Time drew to a close, Office of Graduate Affairs’ communications and project manager Natalie Tilghman, AM’04, reminded the group of other upcoming events: a workshop on healthy eating and making your own baby food and a lecture from the Erikson Institute on Getting Your Child to Sleep. “That’ll be standing room only,” joked Renee. Again, the parents all nodded.

B.E.O.

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Photos (side): Anahit (4 yrs) and her mom, Maria (top); Jack (16 mos.), Renee, and Joe Edwards read to the group (bottom); Photos (left to right): Anna (7.5 mos) and her dad, Suihan; Student-parents and kids bond in Ida Noyes; Jack poses with mom, Renee; Emma (4 mos.) takes in the stories with mom, Patty.

Photos by Brooke O'Neill

The luck of the medics

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Wearing green shirts that read, “Kiss me, I matched!” the Pritzker Medical School Class of 2006 piled into a Hospitals auditorium Thursday morning to tear open 105 white envelopes containing their residency placements. “This is one of the biggest days of your career,” said medical education dean Holly Humphrey, MD’83, assuring fourth-years that they’d always remember “who you’re sitting next to, how fast your heart was racing when you opened the envelope.” A ritual more momentous than graduation, Match Day marks the transformation from medical student to physician, and a giddy energy infected the room. Parents came out to offer congratulations; spouses and children came to find out where they’d be living for the next several years. The SRO crowd perched in the aisles and flanked the walls; some overflowed into the hallway.

Last month fourth-year medical students across the country submitted lists of their residency picks to the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), ranked in order of preference. Hospitals also rated applicants, and NRMP officials matched up students with the highest-ranking hospitals to accept them.

Amid the cheers and reflections—and convocation-day reminders about caps and gowns, student loans, and cleaning out lockers—President-elect of Pritzker’s alumni association, Russ Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’63, offered some advice: Have compassion. “Often there is too much of a hurry. It’s always too many patients, or you didn’t get paid enough. … Spend time with a dying patient. It will bring tears to your eyes, but it’s important.” Humphrey had a more immediate suggestion—“Don’t forget to get a temporary license to practice medicine in the state in which you will be a resident,” she said, to audience chuckles.

At 11 a.m., after handing out the last envelope to Lauren Whiteside, Humphrey ordered them opened. Long seconds of rustling gave way to hugs and cheers. Someone opened a spray can of string confetti. “The University of Chicago medical school,” Humphrey proclaimed, “is 100 percent matched!”

L.G.

Photo: The envelope please...

Bare emotion

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Don’t look for any shabby couch, threadbare rug, or forlorn vase of flowers on Court Theatre’s set for The Glass Menagerie. There are no end tables, no staircase, no furnace in the corner—not even the magic-lantern slides Tennessee Williams called for in the play’s original script. And, according to the production’s program, Court’s set designers insist the playwright would have wanted it that way.

By 1945, when he wrote The Glass Menagerie, Williams had grown weary of “the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions.” In search of expressionistic elements to sharpen his memory play’s dreamlike unreality (and enthralled with cinema), he instructed directors to outfit the set with a screen to project images and titles. At the time, this device constituted a controversial break with dramatic tradition; these days, however, multimedia doesn’t pack the same jolt. So Court Theatre’s set designers needed to find another way to remove the drama from strict reality and return to Williams’s original intent.

They settled on sparseness. Stripped bare of the usual clutter meant to evoke a Depression-era St. Louis tenement, Court Theatre’s stage offers the mere hint of a room inhabited by only the characters’ most resonant possessions—a typewriter, a Victrola, a high-school yearbook, a candelabra, a kitchen table, and the eponymous glass menagerie. Even the apartment’s fire escape, where some of Glass Menagerie’s seminal scenes take place, must be imagined by the actors and the audience.

In this illusory environment the semi-autobiographical drama that Williams called his saddest play unfolds. Mary Beth Fisher plays Amanda Wingfield, whose suffocating, disappointed life has transformed her into a harping mother. Chaon Cross plays her daughter Laura, a shy, crippled spinster who inhabits her own world of glass figurines and who waits for—but never quite finds—the kindness of strangers. Jay Whittaker is Tom, the play’s narrator, stage director, and Laura’s brother, a writer and factory hand who finally escapes the stifling confines of his family but never escapes his guilt at deserting them. As Jim, Laura’s long-awaited gentleman caller, Ned Noyes provokes the play’s rawest moments of hope and despair.

L.G.

Photos: Jim and Laura (top). Tom and Amanda (bottom).

Photos by Michael Brosilow

Wanted: College students

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With U of C students on spring break this week, the Magazine knows undergrads are spending their vacation time not on holiday in Cancun but reading this blog and considering their futures. And we have two ways to help them do it.

First, a call to fourth-years, who may need some extra cash to help pay off student loans, post-graduation grocery bills, or a trip around the world. Enter the Magazine's Future Alumni Essay Contest. Win $500. Have your essay published in the June issue of the alumni magazine. For more information, click the top image at right.

Next, a call to first-, second-, and third-years, who have been told by CAPS that they should spend their summers doing fabulous internships in fabulous places. What's more fabulous than honing your reporting, writing, and editing skills right on campus? If journalism may be in your future, we'd like to see you in ours. Click the bottom image at right for application info.

The deadline for both of these opportunities is Friday, March 31. Happy spring break, and happy futures.

Gargoyle glimpses

As manager of the Margoliash Lab, a post he's held for seven years, Daniel D. Baleckaitis can look out the Anatomy Building windows and see the Cobb Gate gargoyles on a daily basis. "I always found it fascinating that hundreds of people walk by every day," he says, "but they never look up." Soon after he started the job in June 1999, Baleckaitis, whose hobby is photography, began taking pictures of campus gargoyles, often on Saturday mornings when few people are around and, in the early light, "you can play with the shadows, make them more menacing."

Eventually taking some 300 photos of U of C gargoyles and grotesques, he posted them on a Web site. When viewers asked where he found the carved figures, he redesigned the site to include a campus map. He has since removed several images, after disovering Web surfers were downloading them and claiming them as their own—even the ones with Baleckaitis's watermark. Still, about 40 images remain online, including his favorites of Cobb Gate.

A.M.B.

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Photos (left to right): Gargoyles on Bond Chapel, Bartlett, and Ryerson, respectively.

Photos by Daniel D. Baleckaitis.

Back to school

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Laptops and books are open again. So is Cobb Coffee Shop. Campus parking—for both cars and bikes—is scarce. A few brave sprouts have popped out of the ground for an early peek around.

The 40- to 50-degree weather and threat of rain may be only hinting at spring, but today's return of students certainly signals the end of spring break. The Magazine welcomes the activity.

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Photos (right-hand column): The C-bench; GSB Winter Garden. (Row 1, left to right): Cobb Coffee Shop; Ellis Ave. (Row 2): Main quads; Jones.

Tea time

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Boasting “healthy signature drinks,” such as hibiscus tea sangria and bubble tea, Argo Tea—a Chicago chain started in 2003—set up shop last Wednesday in the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine (DCAM). Located in the first-floor lobby, the Argo kiosk offers hospital visitors a selection of hot and iced teas, coffees, pastries, salads, and sandwiches. Business has been good, barista Heidi confirmed Tuesday as she mixed a pom tea (a pomegranate and red tea combo) with one hand and rang up a tea latte with the other.

So far, customer favorites include Earl Grey vanilla crème, chai, and smooteas, a blend of fresh fruit and iced tea. For more conservative customers—“Some people seem scared of tea,” noted barista Liana—Argo also offers Illy brand Italian coffee. Open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays, and with more than 40 beverages to choose from, Argo may make tea converts of a few more Chicagoans.

B.E.O.

Photo: A line forms at the new Argo kiosk.

A man of faith and fiction

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As a packed room of diners sat down to plates full of sauerkraut and bratwurst—both pork and vegetarian—and glasses of beer Wednesday afternoon at the Divinity School’s lunch series, it became clear that the eminent (and invented) theologian Franz Bibfeldt would miss, once again, the annual lecture given in his name. Ever since writing a doctoral thesis on the missing year zero between 1 B.C. and A.D. 1, “Bibfeldt’s schedule is frequently one year off,” explained Martin Marty, the Divinity School’s Fairfax M. Cone distinguished service professor emeritus—and the architect of Bibfeldt’s legend.

A fictitious, if influential, character whom Marty and classmate Robert Howard Clausen created (first as a running joke) back in 1947, when they were freshmen at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Bibfeldt has since taken on a life and academic career of his own. Each year on the Wednesday closest to April Fool’s, a Divinity School faculty member or graduate student takes the podium at Swift Hall to present the latest Bibfeldtian scholarship. This year’s chosen speaker was James Robinson, an assistant professor of Judaic history, who expounded on “the abyss that separates man and animal” in a lecture titled “The Argument from Barking Dogs: Remarks on Bibfeldt and the Theology of Subaltern Species.” Divinity student Edmund Harris offered a toast and confessed astonishment at Bibfeldt’s absence from the online directory Facebook.

Asked about Bibfeldt’s health and whereabouts, Marty, who took in the proceedings from a seat at the back of the room, said he didn’t know. “Remember, he was born in 1897,” Marty said, quoting from Bibfeldt’s fictitious biography. “So if he’s alive or if he’s dead, we don’t like to think about it.”

L.G.

Photo: James Robinson gives his Bibfeldt lecture in Swift Hall Wednesday afternoon.

Receiving line

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With portraits of past leaders looking on, incoming Chicago President Robert Zimmer greeted University staff members Thursday morning in Hutch Commons. Although at times the line stretched 20 deep, Zimmer spent a minute or two with each person. Shaking the hands of two O-Week staffers, who insisted they wouldn't keep him long, Zimmer asked, "So you feel like it's in good shape? Everything's going OK?" Yes, they assured him. O-Week preparations were going well.

"I've just been talking to people about what they're doing," Zimmer told a Magazine editor who reached the front of the line. An hour-and-a-half into the event, he hadn't grown weary of the handshaking. "How could I be tired? It's only 9:30 in the morning." Staff members, grabbing up the coffee, doughnuts, muffins, and scones after their presidential chats, were equally enthused.

A.B.P.

Photo: Zimmer talks with a U of C staff member Thursday morning.

The hills are alive

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Recalling songs and stories passed from “generation to generation and from hut to hut through time and distance,” Zamira Sydykova, Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to the United States, kicked off last Tuesday’s crowded Noruz celebration at International House. A Persian holiday coinciding with the vernal equinox, Noruz welcomes both spring and the New Year. At Chicago, however, Noruz had to wait for the end of spring break. Presented by the University’s Central Asian Studies Society on March 28, the three-hour festival began with music and poetry. Soloist Akylbek Kasabolotov played traditional Kyrgyz flutes and jaw harps, and Kyrgyzstan national laureate epic singer Rysbai Isakov gave a riveting half-hour recitation—in Kyrgyz—from the Manas, one of the world’s longest epic poems.

Independent anthropologist Helen Faller, meanwhile, offered some cultural context for the concert. A Silk Road country and former Soviet republic, Kyrgyzstan is 97 percent mountainous and its societies are historically nomadic, Faller said, explaining the compact portability of Kasabolotov’s instruments. Introducing Isakov’s performance, she noted that Manas singers are called to their occupation by a vision. Those who ignore the vision succumb to “mental illness”; called at age 12, Isakov suffered crushing migraines, Faller said, until he devoted himself to reciting the Manas ten years ago.

After intermission, the five-man Tuvan throat-singing ensemble Alash brought listeners to their feet. Led by jovial virtuoso Kongar-ool Ondar (a celebrity and member of parliament in the Republic of Tuva, situated between Siberia and Mongolia), Alash breezed through a repertoire of humorous, catchy, and lively songs. Interpreter and band manager Sean Quirk explained the practice of throat-singing, in which the singer sustains a low, thrumming note while simultaneously humming one or two notes in a higher pitch. Tuvan traditional songs come “from nature,” Quirk said. “These are the sounds of the lifestyle”: water rolling downstream, feet in a horse’s stirrups, rushing rivers. The musicians played traditional jaw harps, drums, flutes, and stringed instruments to accompany their singing, and they also incorporated more modern influences, Quirk said, pointing to an accordion borrowed from Russian culture. “Tradition is not something that’s encased in a crystal box and doesn’t change,” he said. “It’s something that’s alive.”

L.G.

Photos: Akylbek Kasabolotov (top); Master throat-singer Kongar-ool Ondar, of Alash (bottom).

Sit down and vote

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There is a clear favorite in the Regenstein Library's recent election, but Jim Vaughan, assistant director for access & facilities, doesn't want to publicize it until all votes are counted. Chicago students, faculty, and staff have displayed strong preferences in the 2,377 ballots they've entered, as of Thursday, for the next generation of library chairs. Early on in the March 27–April 7 voting, says library facilities manager John Pitcher, "people were waiting in line" to try each chair and fill out a ballot.

Given $895,000 in capital funds to replace 1,983 reader chairs (purchased in 1989) and to reupholster about 125 club chairs, a library committee narrowed down the choice to three chairs and has left the final decision to Reg users. "It's the students who sit in these chairs seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day," Pitcher notes. Democratic as the process sounds, he's seen evidence of "voting irregularities," such as "bundles of ballots plainly inserted all at once, in the same handwriting, all for the same chair." Still, in true Chicago fashion, they're counting every vote.

All three chairs have black fabric with goldish specks. Number 1 has a cushioned back and a metal seat frame instead of plywood; Number 2, also with a cushioned back, is the "more traditional" style, Pitcher says; and Number 3 has a leather back.

Select voter comments:

Number 1:
"Yay, lumbar support!"
"I think 1 is a bit too prone to letting one fall asleep."
"Style #1 pitches me forward—it’s uncomfortable."

Number 2:
"Style #2 was an ergonomic and truly sensual experience. Loved every second of it."
"#2 is good, others suck. Bring us #2."
"Give me cushion or give me death."

Number 3:
"#3 is light, stylish, and modern."
"#3 is comfortable and light, but the back seems like it would wear out pretty quickly."
"#3 has no back support."

A.B.P.

Photo: Fourth-year biology major Leila Vaez-Azizi tries out the options. "I prefer the old chairs," she says. Voting ends today.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Road MAPSS

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An estimated 150 prospective students flooded into Hyde Park last Wednesday through Friday for a sneak peek of the one-year Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS). The prospies—all of whom have been accepted—visited classes, toured campus, and dined with current students to help them decide whether to join next year’s cohort. The Campus Days agenda kicked off with a welcome and Q&A with MAPSS director John MacAloon, AM’74, PhD’80, current preceptors, and staff. Department chairs from history, political science, human development, anthropology, and psychology also spoke with interested students.

On Thursday prospects gathered in the Pick Hall lounge for a wine-and-cheese reception with MAPSS staff, executive committee, and students. Although the would-be students have until May to accept the offer, many seemed impressed by the program’s interdisciplinary focus. “I’m worn out from the past two days,” confessed one woman taking a sip of wine, “but I’ve definitely made up my mind to come here.”

B.E.O.

Photo: Potential MAPSS students mingle in the Pick Hall lounge.

Delivery from DelGiorno

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"I didn't realize that many people read the Wall Street Journal," joked Bernie DelGiorno, AB'54, AB'55, MBA'55, at a champagne toast to celebrate his $5 million gift, announced this past Friday in the paper's "Gift of the Week" feature. Already he'd gotten e-mails and phone calls, he said, from recent graduates, student-athletes, and students who'd interned with him at UBS Financial Services, who said they too would like to do something for the University some day.

DelGiorno, whose gift will fund Stagg Field's lighting and artificial turf and also be used toward a new dormitory and an arts center, "is a leader among College alumni in getting us to think about other facets of University life," College Dean John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, told the Harper Library gathering of students, deans, administrators, and staff. DelGiorno "represents the spirit of the institution in all the best senses," added President Don M. Randel. For a glimpse of such spirit, one need only see DelGiorno at the annual Interfraternity Sing each Reunion weekend. "Anyone who believes we're all nerds at the University," Randel said, "should go to that event."

For entertainment the student a capella group Voices in Your Head performed two songs—Natalie Imbruglia's "Troubled By The Way We Came Together" and, from a U of C songbook that DelGiorno gave the group, the alma mater. As the students sang the 1894 tune, DelGiorno mouthed the words.

The formal presentation ended with DelGiorno's plea that students enjoy the diversions his gift would help produce. "Don't study all the time."

A.B.P.

Photos: President Randel and Bernie DelGiorno chat before the toasts begin (top). Campus a capella group Voices in Your Head sings the alma mater (bottom).

Hot for sandals

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Many times I said: stay at your level sandalmaker.
But ideas and words around me buzz like a beehive.
The immaterial swarm drinks the blooming soul’s dew.
And the poetry’s honey is made to give life.

The Harvard and Oxford libraries house his poetry, which he began writing in 1953 and which has gained international fame. But from 1954, when he took over the family business from his father, until his 2004 retirement, Stavros Melissinos—poet, playwright, essayist, and translator of great literary works into his native Greek—never gave up his day job: designing and hand-making leather sandals.

Melissinos may have retired, leaving Melissinos Art to his son Pantelis, but his reputation as the poet–sandal maker of Athens continues to attract visitors from all over the world to the tiny shop at 2 Aghias Theklas Street, next to Monastiraki Square, a shopping district near the Acropolis. Celebrities have flocked there and occasionally have been commemorated by sandal designs bearing their name, such as the Jackie O. and John Lennon models.

This past Saturday three U of C students studying abroad in Athens stepped into this tourist tradition. Though the walk back was somewhat precarious given Athens’s second garbage strike in a month, it was still quite comfortable in brand-new Aristotle, Hermes, and Spartan/Sophia Loren sandals.

Hana Yoo, ’07

Photos: Annie Toro, Cara Clifford, and Hana Yoo, all '07, show off their new foot dressings (top). Sign outside the poet-sandal maker's Athenian shop (bottom).

Photos by Annie Toro

The eye of civilization

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As director of the Oriental Institute Museum, I’ve recently been in Syria, exploring the possibility of constructing a special OI exhibit on the world's earliest cities. Although archaeologists have long known that cities had developed by 3500 BC in southern Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq), in the past ten years several scholars’ work has converged to show that cities of another culture had developed independently in northern Mesopotamia (now northeastern Syria, still between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers) by the same time. This recently discovered northern culture has been illuminated by OI archaeologists McGuire Gibson, AM'64, PhD'68, and Clemens Reichel, AM'94, PhD'01, at the site of Hamoukar, as well as by work I directed at the largest known of these northern settlements, Tell Brak.

After meeting with officials in the Directorate of Antiquities and Museums in Damascus, I took a pleasant four-hour bus ride north through the plain of the Orontes River to Aleppo, to visit the storerooms of the Aleppo Museum. Tell Brak was first excavated by Max Mallowan in the 1930s (his wife, the mystery writer Agatha Christie, wrote a charming account of their time there, Come, Tell Me How You Live), and he found a temple in which thousands of small stone figurines had been left as offerings. The figurines depicted an amazing variety of animals, including lions, bears, frogs, monkeys, hedgehogs, and goats. Most famous, however, are a series of enigmatic “eye idols,” which may represent the deity being worshipped.

We’re optimistic that we’ll be able to show these pieces, along with many more recent discoveries, in an exhibit in 2008—that should give us just enough time.

Geoff Emberling
Director, Oriental Institute Museum

Photo: Animal figurines displayed at the Eye Temple in the Aleppo Museum.

Legal writ

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Ever wanted to get in on conversations between some of Chicago's top legal minds? The Law School's faculty blog features daily posts on current affairs by the likes of Cass Sunstein, Saul Levmore, Geoffrey Stone, Randy Picker, Judge Richard Posner, his son and professor Eric Posner, and more. In yesterday's post, for example, Sunstein wonders why more economists don't advocate animal welfare. (For details on Sunstein's passion for his dog, and his prolific TV-interview career, see the April 21 Chronicle of Higher Education.) And people are reading. Sunstein's April 9 post about presidential declassification of materials prompted 45 comments. Other recent topics include teens and guns, Barry Bonds, detaining "enemy combatants," and online March Madness.

Begun September 28, 2005, the blog is meant to be "a forum in which to exchange nascent ideas with each other and also a wider audience, and to hear feedback about which ideas are compelling and which could use some re-tooling," the Law School's welcoming post says. Mission, it seems, accomplished.

Photo: Sunstein and his Rhodesian Ridgeback Perry.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

End not with a bang, but…

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Poems may be precious, powerful, and skillfully constructed, but even the best of them aren’t always perfect, poet C. K. Williams told a room of students Wednesday in a lecture sponsored by Poem Present. With latecomers still filing into Rosenwald 405 and refreshments waiting in the hallway, Williams, a Pulitzer Prize winner and creative-writing professor at Princeton, took the podium to dissect the “unsettling, dubious, unsatisfying” endings to four of his favorite poems: William Wordsworth’s "Michael,” Robert Frost’s “Out, Out,” Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. These poems—much-admired efforts of canonized authors—“fail to deliver what they promised, or in the way they promised it,” Williams said. Wordsworth’s pastoral gives short shrift to what would seem the poem’s narrative and thematic climax, while Frost ends his lyric about a tragic accidental death with what Williams called a “shocking, dismaying” shift in tone. At the end of their long poems, Rilke drifts into “mawkishness” and Eliot trades “metaphysical urgency” for “perfunctory, plaintive music.”

Still, Williams insisted—careful to allow room for his own misinterpretations—these poems’ flaws are “incidental to our affection” for them. “Odd endings” don’t diminish great poems; they remind readers that the poets are human. Recalling the advice of a master-carpenter friend who once said, “Nothing’s easy,” Williams told students: “Well, perhaps not nothing is easy,” but ending poems is certainly hard.

The next afternoon, Williams followed up his lecture with a reading of his own verse. With a volume of his collected poems due out later this year, he read both old and new works, including two (called “Shrapnel” and “Cassandra Iraq”) about “our new life at war” and one concerning global warming. “These days,” he said, “I have trouble writing about anything else.”

L.G.

Photo: Williams greets admirers after Wednesday's lecture.

New ambassador on the quads

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On a "listening tour" of America, new Saudi ambassador Prince Turki Al-Faisal on Friday visited campus, giving a lecture and answering questions as a guest of the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. "I spent 30 years of my life in the intelligence business, without speaking to anybody," the 60-year-old told his Breasted Hall audience of students, staff, and faculty, "so you can imagine how grateful I am to be able to talk to you all today." In his first 100 days as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, following the 22-year term of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Al-Faisal has traveled to Texas, Arizona, California, Washington State, Michigan, Kansas, Georgia, and Illinois—with more trips to come this summer. The Americans he's met, said Al-Faisal, who studied at Georgetown University in the 1960s, have been "open and curious" about Saudi Arabian people and culture.

Although "right now government relations between our families are very strong," he said, last November the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing called "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror?" "I felt that was an insult," Al-Faisal said. For 60 years "we have always seen ourselves as friends of the United States." After the hearing he spoke with committee chair Arlen Specter about the committee's concerns.

After a few more observations Al-Faisal answered questions. On his country's attempts to create jobs for the poor, he said, the recent economic boom and reforms, along with education investments, have helped. Literacy, meanwhile, has increased from 7 percent 50 years ago to 85 percent today. Women in particular have made strides, he said, and today more women graduate from universities than men.

On whether his country sponsors terrorism, Al-Faisal detailed his own attempts, as head of intelligence, to detain Osama bin Laden and called Saudi Arabia a "victim of that terrorism even before the U.S." When asked his views of America's efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East, he responded, "In our view reform and political development should be driven by the wishes of the people themselves." Imposing a system, he said, only creates a backlash.

Photo: Prince Turki Al-Faisal speaks at the OI.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Grand finale

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On Sunday afternoon the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra sat, instruments at the ready, on the Mandel Hall stage, poised to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth by performing his final three symphonies. But first University of Chicago Presents director Marna Seltzer introduced the group’s third, and final, concert of the season by listing all the other ways the orchestra, in the first of a three-year residency program, had enriched musical life in Hyde Park: coaching and teaching master classes, playing the works of composition students, performing in the public schools. Seltzer promised “more of the same—and more” for the 2006–07 season.

Then conductor Roberto Abaddo brought down the baton on Symphony No. 39, the least known of the trio, composed in summer 1788. As he led clarinets and bassoons, horns and trumpets, strings, timpani, and flute through the score’s twists and turns, Abaddo drew some phrases out like taffy, snapped others off minutely, sometimes leaning into the players, sometimes standing back, hand to his side, listening. There was no place for standing back in Symphony No. 40—hands flew and heads nodded as conductor and musicians moved through the four movements. “Beautiful sound, beautiful sound,” said an audience member through appreciative applause.

Beautiful sound continued after intermission with Symphony No. 41, the “Jupiter” symphony. The gods, or at least Apollo, seemed to be smiling on the performance, as afternoon sunlight moved center stage, spotlighting Abaddo (at the end of the first movement, he grinned and mimed the need for sunglasses). Again Mozart’s music took over the room, leaving the audience wanting more.

M.R.Y.

His hands floated and flashed as conductor Roberto Abaddo (top) led the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (bottom) through their final Chicago Presents concert of the year—the first of a three-year artists-in-residence program. Photos courtesy the SPCO.

Sweet dreams are made of this

The new Ellen and Melvin Gordon Center for Integrative Science, Ellen Gordon announced at the April 26 ribbon-cutting that formally opened the $200 million facility designed to cross traditional boundaries between physics, chemistry, and biology, “will be a place where ideas—and, of course, Tootsie Rolls—are shared.”

She wasn’t kidding. Gordon, president of Tootsie Roll Industries, and her husband, Melvin, the firm’s chairman of the board, have asked that the building—two wings encompassing 400,000 square feet at 929 E. 57th Street—be stocked with Tootsie Rolls and other company candies.

It’s a sweet footnote to a major science story. When the Gordon Center is fully occupied next fall, it will house 100 senior scientists as well as 700 students and other researchers, taking advantage of state-of-the-art instrumentation including a $600,000 scanning electron microscope, a $270,000 electron paramagnetic resonance instrument, and a $208,000 time-resolved luminescence spectrometer and microscope. The technology is great, the speakers agreed, but just as important will be the interdisciplinary connections made in hallway and lab conversations. Punctuated, of course, by Tootsie Rolls.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Under the skywalk that connects the east and west wings of the Gordon Center, President Don M. Randel welcomes guests; Melvin and Ellen Gordon gave a $25 million naming gift; after tours and lectures, guests dined in the Gordon Center's Kersten Family Atrium, named in recognition of a major gift from Priscilla and Steven (JD'80) Kersten.

Photos by Dan Dry.

C change

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Recent campus visitors may have noticed something missing: the foliage that formerly secluded the C-bench. Last week the thick greenery disappeared, replaced by a neatly manicured lawn clearing the view from Cobb Hall to Swift.

The changes, says University Planner Richard Bumstead, "are part of the overall campus upgrades that are underway." The arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis 'nigra') evergreens that formerly surrounded the bench "were in decline after last year's drought," Bumstead says, "and we were having a difficult time finding large enough specimens to match the existing shrubs." Those shrubs arrived in 2000, transplanted from the Jean Block Garden behind the Reg to accommodate the Palevsky Residence Halls. Before 2000 the C-bench "was surrounded by an old planting of burning bush (Euonymous alatus), which had become very leggy and was dying out."

The new plants, he says, "will include a row of Viburnum plicatum 'wantanabe,' which will remain much shorter than the arborvitae, and will be underplanted with Siberian iris 'butter and sugar.'"

A.B.P.

Photos: The C-bench before (top) and after (bottom) the recent pruning.

One nation under God

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Yale religious historian Harry S. Stout’s most recent publication, a 576-page reckoning of religion and morality during the Civil War—and its present-day cultural echoes—began as “a title in search of a book,” he told the audience on Swift Hall’s third floor Monday afternoon. Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War takes its name from a phrase used in wartime letters to the families of fallen soldiers. “I hit on the title,” Stout said, and the rest was “an odyssey of discovery.” What he discovered was that “the Civil War bequeathed to Americans the idea of America as a redemptive nation, that a ‘civil religion’ was incarnated in civil war.” From blood sacrifice, he said, rose a sacred devotion to nation, freedom, and their symbols. Even today, he said, that devotion informs moral justifications for war. Dissecting political speeches, newspaper editorials, letters, and diaries—and recounting incidents of devastating carnage—the book asks whether the Civil War was a “just war.” Stout’s answer: not entirely.

The Jonathan Edwards professor of American Christianity at Yale, Stout is a visiting fellow in the Divinity School’s Jerald Brauer Seminar, an annual program in which ten students and two faculty members discuss and write on separate topics with a common theme. This year’s focus: “religion and violence in American culture.”

At Monday’s event, a panel of three Divinity School professors—W. Clark Gilpin, AM'72, PhD'74, Martin E. Marty, PhD'56, and Catherine Brekus—offered critical synopses of Stout’s book and posed a few questions: Why not use slaves’ voices in the book? What was Abraham Lincoln’s role in convincing Americans that 600,000 Civil War deaths were “inevitable”? How were African Americans and Native Americans left out of the nation’s newly “consecrated land”? In what ways did the South win the war? Calling Lincoln an “emergent character” in Stout’s book, Marty said he wanted to know more about his “ethos, pathos, his logos.”

Audience members came with questions too, and for more than half an hour Stout and the panelists discussed Civil War nomenclature, the South’s “lost cause,” national memory and mismemory, and the definition of moral history. “Would it have been better for the country if the Confederate generals had been put on trial for war crimes and executed?” Stout asked listeners. “It’s almost impossible to imagine.”

L.G.

Photo: Stout and the panel address the Swift Hall crowd.

Photo by Terren Ilana Wein

Deadline stress

Ever wonder how the University of Chicago Magazine gets out? The four editors and designer work happily and steadily along for a few weeks—and then deadline hits. Currently on deadline for the June issue—the Magazine's pages are due at our prepress house today and at final press next week—our desks are messy and minds flustered—er, focused.

A.B.P.

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Photos (first row): Associate Editor Lydia Gibson uses a complicated post-it note system while editing the "Investigations" section

Alumni News Editor Brooke O'Neill reads carefully each word of Class Notes.

Graphic Designer David Duncil ensures every word and image are in the right place.

Second row: Diet Coke fuels Editor Mary Ruth Yoe as she finishes her feature story.

Our highly technical editing system involves printing out pages and placing them on a window sill for others to read.

Adventure venture

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Last Thursday some lucky students traversing the quads scored a free bag of M&Ms, courtesy of a new student Web site, Experience Chicago. Students handed out the candy, which came attached to a brightly colored flyer advertising information on restaurants, museums, shopping, health, movies, dance, and more, all contributed “For students. By students” and run by the Office of the Vice President and Dean of Students.

Covering 15 neighborhoods from Rogers Park to South Shore, the site scopes out the easiest public-transportation routes from campus and offers a brief description of each area. Site visitors can pick from four activity categories—sustenance (restaurants, coffee houses, bakeries, etc.), revelry (bars, nightclubs, etc.), civilization (museums, art fairs, etc.), and vanity (gyms, salons, etc.)—and log in with their CNet ID to add their own suggestions. Links to Metromix, Time Out Chicago, and the Chicago Reader provide additional activity options. Check it out to discover, as the site promises, “where University of Chicago students go, how they get there, and what they say about it.”

B.E.O.

Photo: Experience Chicago's home page offers a map of neighborhoods and categories.

The black-white education divide

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From the 1940s, when the census began including education data, through the 1990s, black Americans grew closer to white Americans in education equality. A decade ago that progress hit a wall, and Derek Neal wants to know why. Presenting his paper, "Why Has Black-White Skill Convergence Stopped?" (pdf) at Tuesday's inaugural Committee on Education workshop, Neal charted the statistics behind the trend—using test scores, graduation rates, and income levels—then ventured into the possible reasons.

Several economists blame the skill gap on a self-fulling prophecy, said Neal, economics department chair and director of the Chicago Workshop on Black-White Inequality. They assert that "blacks expect employers will not reward them for skills," so they don't invest in education. "Employers," he said, "if they expect that blacks will not invest in skills, will be confirmed in their prejudice." Neal doesn't buy this argument because it's a "tricked-up, fancy" explanation rather than the obvious answer that "because of historical discrimination...there are existing wealth discrepancies that make it more costly to become skilled if you're black than if you're white." Further, he notes, this scenario doesn't explain why the progress has stopped.

Marshaling more charts and graphs, Neal dismissed two other proffered reasons for the disparity. Although America's labor market changed in the 1980s to further separate skilled and nonskilled workers, that shift is not the reason. "Not that the labor market is fair," he noted, or that blacks "know there will be no reward for investing in skills." And schools? "There is no evidence that black kids fall farther behind white children after 8th grade."

A possible reason, Neal proposed, is "going to have to be a family story." In 2000 one in ten black children lived with neither parent, he noted, and in the past 20 years black family income has fallen relative to whites. Economists argue that "the adverse shock to black family income comes in part from the change in wage structure in the '80s," he said. "Then if the wage structure stabilized it would be a temporary shock" and black families would recover in the future. "More troubling to me," he said, are parenting style differences (see third image at right). "Is there a cultural difference," he asked, causing "even black and white families that have the same opportunities to have different preferences in parenting styles? I don't know."

After Neal spoke, psychologists Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Levine explained their own research on early language and math skill development. They are following 60 Chicago children, from different demographics, throughout their educations. As Neal later noted, if Goldin-Meadow and Levine "can define parenting styles that are effective and then look at different groups," there may be a way to explain whether resource discrepancies explain such preferences "or if it's culture." And that, he said, "is where we can be interdisciplinary."

A.B.P.

Photos (top to bottom): Neal gestures as he explains his paper (top); Susan Levine discusses how her research relates to Neal's; Neal believes parenting-style differences may be a factor.

Scavengers in the mist

Chicago’s 20th annual Scavenger Hunt got off to a soggy start Thursday morning as students took to the quads with carnival games, musical instruments, second-hand wares, and beat poetry to recreate the Near West Side’s Maxwell Street Market. Some participants huddled under umbrellas, but most resigned themselves to the rain. “Fresh fruit! Luscious fruit!” fourth-year Aaron Levine called out to passing pedestrians, while teammates Meade McCormick and Hilary Komlanc juggled on the sidewalk.

Circling the quads in a judge’s T-shirt and studying each team’s performance, Sara Rezvi, a fourth-year and former Scav Hunt contestant, felt a twinge of yearning. “You miss the blood,” she said. “You miss the hunt.”

A four-day competition six months in the planning, Scav Hunt this year sends ten teams searching for more than 300 items, compiled by the judges. Students wear themed costumes, decipher abstruse clues—some written in Arabic or acronyms or as chemical and mathematical formulas—and embark on a three-day road trip to pick up as many points as they can. This year’s list (pdf), kept secret until midnight Thursday, requires teams to drive to the Arkansas Ozarks to snap a photo of Eureka Springs’s Christ of the Ozarks statue, to “inquire about a tractor,” and to seek out “fragments of the Iron Curtain.” The Scav Hunt list also asks students to produce a wood-powered refrigerator, an upside-down sand castle, a diorama of “William Rainey Harper’s personal Hell,” and a hot-air balloon “made to Montgolfier specifications.” An item worth 24 points instructs contestants to pick up an armadillo from the side of the road (“random guy in armadillo suit not permitted,” admonishes a footnote), and “prove that he’s a criminal, a la Encyclopedia Brown.” For two points, students can “throw a snowball at outgoing president Tony Randall.”

The hunt concludes Sunday morning—on “Justice Sunday”—with an 11 a.m. judging ceremony at Ida Noyes Hall to pick the winners.

L.G.

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Photos (row 1): Meade McCormick (left) and Hilary Komlanc juggle; Liz Litchfield is "just your local belly dancer"; Julia Rotondo (in blue) squirts red liquid at a photo of President Don Randel.

Row 2: Anne Heminger tends the grill so her team can keep warm with marinaded chicken; Tric Dwyer begs people to buy "a kiss for a quarter"; Dwyer (right) wrestles with Erica Kaitz.

Photos by Dan Dry

Tribal talent

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At last Friday’s gender-studies brown-bag lunch, assistant anthropology professor Jessica Cattelino traced the Florida Seminoles’ “princess pageant” from its 1950s origins to the present, explaining how it evolved from a conventional beauty competition to an exercise “defining, celebrating, and disciplining Seminole nationhood.” In 1972 swimsuit contests gave way to competing lectures on sewing patchwork clothing and tanning deer hides. Looking pretty, said Cattelino, grew less important than looking native. During pageants, “there’s lots of talk of ‘passing down,’ lots of linking to authoritative knowledge and claims to cultural continuity.” The competitions highlight Seminoles’ “overlapping citizenship” in their indigenous nation and America, a duality Cattelino described as “imbricated” rather than simply “a coexistence or a rivalry.”

The pageant’s cultural evolution coincides with the tribe’s foray into casino gambling and the establishment of constitutional governance for Florida’s six Seminole reservations. Once crowned, Miss Seminole carries out a host of diplomatic duties, attending pow-wows, meeting with political officials (both Indian and American), and presiding over civic functions. In the days leading up to the pageant, Cattelino said, contestants are drilled in public speaking, proper comportment, and tribal politics.

A masculine parallel to Miss Seminole can be found in war-veteran groups. Noting that American Indians serve in the U.S. military at a higher rate than any other ethnic group, Cattelino said Native American ideas about what it means to “be a man” often lead to the armed services. “There is an indigenous attachment to the land—and to defending the land—no matter who owns it.” For Florida Seminoles, a tribe that considers itself unconquered because its leaders never signed a peace treaty with the U.S. and its people fended off expulsion from Florida, “the warrior legacy is strong. … And if you want to be a warrior, you can’t really do that within the tribe.” Veteran status also gets many former soldiers elected to tribal offices. “Military prowess translates into political eligibility,” Cattelino said. She closed the lecture by fielding questions about the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act—which granted blanket citizenship to the country’s Native Americans—Seminole names, and the tribe’s custom of tracing heritage along matrilineal lines.

L.G.

Assistant professor Jessica Cattelino (top). A Seminole veterans' color guard (bottom).

You are what you read

“We are turning the entire campus into an art gallery,” fourth-year Claire Mazur, executive director of FOTA 2006, told the University of Chicago Chronicle. “You just can’t avoid the art. It’s everywhere.” The Festival of the Arts, which runs from May 13 through Sunday, May 21, hits all of your major art forms: photography, sculpture, music, dancing, fashion, photography—and cooking.

On Monday morning the Culinary Club took to Bartlett Quad to hold the Chicago version of Books2Eat, a petit amuse modeled on the International Edible Book Festival. Held on April 1 since 1999, that worldwide event “unites bibliophiles, book artists, and food lovers to celebrate the ingestion of culture and its fulfilling nourishment. Participants create edible books that are exhibited, documented, then consumed.”

Using saltines, graham crackers, peanut butter, licorice sticks, bananas, and of course chocolate, students made sandwich-sized replicas of texts and then ate their words.

M.R.Y.

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Photos by Dan Dry

The art of appreciation

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Cookies, cheese bites, and 20-percent-off coupons greeted University employees Thursday and Friday at the U of C bookstore’s Faculty and Staff Appreciation Days. Held three or four times a year, the event this time coincides with Friday’s faculty book-order deadline for autumn quarter. Staff members stopped by a front table decked with free treats to chat with bookstore workers, pick up flyers on store services ranging from dissertation binding to catering, and score instant wins from a prize bucket. The most common jackpot giveaway? A free cup of coffee or tea from the café.

B.E.O.

Photo: Bookstore staff man the staff-appreciation table.

Fiddle dee dee

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Strings filled Hutch Court Sunday afternoon as fiddlers, guitarists, banjoists, and harmonica players jammed on folk tunes—"Rocky Top," "Louis Collins," and other standards—at the U of C Folklore Society's Fiddler's Picnic. Beginning at noon, the event featured students performing a traditional rapper dance, involving flexible swords, and old-time fiddlers performing. Listeners, meanwhile, laid blankets on the grass or sat at tables to chow down home-brought picnics, while the Folklore Society offered a catered spread. At 4:30 the group—grown cold on the sunny, 50-degree day—moved inside the Reynolds Club's Hallowed Grounds Coffee Shop to hear local bluegrass band Devil in a Woodpile cap off the harmonious affair.

A.B.P.

Photo: One group plays near Mandel Hall while another jams in the center of Hutch Court.

Lettice entertains us

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For its final production of the 2005-06 season Court Theatre has chosen Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage, a 1987 British comedy that celebrates the power of theater to “enlarge, enliven, enlighten.”

The motto comes straight from the figurative escutcheon of Lettice Douffet. Played by Patricia Hodges in half-dotty, half-grande-dame style, Douffet is a woman with a theatrical past and an expert on medieval cuisine (the lovage of the title is an herb used to "enlarge, enliven, enlighten" food and drink) and medieval weaponry. Douffet is also tour guide at Fustian House, a stately home in Britain where nothing ever happened. Then she begins to embellish her tours, with dramatic—nay, fustian—accounts of what should have happened there.

Sent by the Preservation Trust to investigate, Charlotte Schoen—Linda Reiter as bottled-up bureaucrat—is not amused and fires her. But the two women share a passion for larger-than-life people, stories, and buildings, and a larger-than-life friendship is born.

As a play celebrating the power of the theater should be, the Court production is an engaging and entertaining romp. Directed by Lucy Smith Conroy, Lettice and Lovage runs through Sunday, June 11.

M.R.Y.

Lettice (Patricia Hodges) strikes a pose before a sympathetic audience: Charlotte Schoen (Linda Reiter).

Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Old-school ties

Solemnly dressed and grazing on grilled kebabs and bite-sized eggrolls, University faculty members gathered at the Reynolds Club Wednesday evening to bid farewell to outgoing President Don Randel and present him with a gift: a framed drawing from architect Bertrand Goldberg’s plans for a never-built ABC tower in New York. Goldberg’s son Geoff, AB'77—who recalled his father as a friend to the University and the parent of two graduates—unveiled the drawing before a grinning Randel. “Everybody knows I’m an architecture junkie.”

Sociology professor Andrew Abbott, AM’75, PhD’82, who helped organize the event, recounted a few Randel-era triumphs—an invigorated Graduate School of Business and Biological Sciences Division, a strong bid to retain Argonne National Laboratory, new community ties, and a journey through the “wilderness of an arduous development campaign ... now within full sight of the promised land”—but most of the talk was about Randel’s administrative aplomb. Jim Chandler, AM’72, PhD’78, English professor and Franke Institute director, recalled that in the “scores” of times he’d heard Randel speak, he’d never seen him refer to any notes. “And never have I seen him stumble or lapse into cliché—well, almost never,” he said. “Who but a jazz musician could cultivate” those improvisational talents? Philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB’62, played clips of Randel’s performances in Quadrangle Club faculty and staff Revels skits. “It is a shame and a waste,” Cohen said, “now that he has mastered the Chicago song on the flugelhorn, that he will move to New York. … If you can’t get a gig in New York—or even if you can—you are always welcome to come back and play with us.”

Offering thanks, Randel reprised a few favorite lines, declaring Chicago “the greatest university in this or any neighboring galaxy,” and insisting he’d be in touch from time to time. “I have a professor emeritus ID card, and I have investigated thoroughly the benefits that accrue to such a person,” he said. “Thank you for your friendship.”

L.G.

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Photos (left to right): Randel, University CFO and VP for Administration Donald Reaves, and Kenneth Warren, English professor and deputy provost for research and minority issues, laugh along with the speakers; self-professed “architecture junkie” with his new Bertrand Goldberg drawing; Randel and Andrew Abbott.

Photos by Dan Dry

Viewpoints reloaded

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University of Chicago students may be opinionated as a whole, but the Chicago Maroon's "Viewpoints" staff of editorial writers take pontificating to a whole new level. Writing twice a week wasn't enough for three "Viewpoints" veterans, who this month started "The Editors Blog," an extension of the newspaper section. On the blog fourth-year George Anesi, 2003–05 Viewpoints editor; third-year Andrew Hammond, 05–06 editor; and second-year Alec Brandon, the current section head, share their opinions on topics including the Middle East, the Apple and Enron court cases, and European ski slopes.

A.B.P.

Everything old is new again

Members of Chicago classes ending in 1 and 6 have begun streaming into campus for the 2006 Alumni Weekend. Their starting point is Alumni House, where they register, pick up their reunion badges and schedules, grab breakfast, meet old friends, and catch a campus trolley. "I'm excited to see the campus," said Jessica Franklin, AB'96, MD'01, enjoying a bagel in the Alumni House library. "I haven't been back in five years." She and husband Suleman Khawaja, MD'01, came in from New York.

Also in the library, Marcia Earlenbaugh, AB'66, flew from Denver, while Jim Fullinwider, AB'66, arrived from St. Louis. Neither had been back in 40 years and planned to walk around this morning to see how much had changed. "The new stuff has probably been here for 20 years," said Fullinwider. Joining them were classmates Judy Cohen Siggins, AB'66, AM'68, PhD'76, in from Binghamton, NY, and Joel Brody, SB'66, in from Oakland, CA. They spent last night at Ida Noyes looking at old photos, Earlenbaugh said, "and wondering where everyone was" in life—that is, everyone but the 100-plus peers the Class of '66 expects to see again this weekend.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): The trolley takes alumni around; An alumnus gets reacquainted with a campus map; Jessica Franklin and husband Sulemen Khawaja grab breakfast; Members of the Class of '66 meet up at Alumni House; Returning alumni register and peruse the flyer table.

Singin' in the quads

In the 95-year history of the Interfraternity Sing, 1922 was a very good year: nearly 30 fraternities and more than 18,000 (no, it’s not a typo) fraternity actives and alumni participated in the Hutchinson Court event—which included awarding Order of the C blankets and emblems to student athletes—hoping to win a trophy for quality of singing or quantity of singers.

The numbers were down at this June’s event, held Saturday night as part of the 2006 Alumni Weekend. Representing seven fraternities and three sororities, about 500 students and alumni took the stage, vying for four trophies: quality, quantity, spirit, and best overall.

In the pre-contest briefing, Sing Coordinating Council members Greg Miarecki, AB’94, JD’97, and Lisa Magnas, AB’88, reminded the judges (the eight-person panel included this writer) that Sing rules emphasize tradition and spirit. Songs like “It was Founded by Our Fathers” (whose chorus runs, “Del-ta Up-si-lon for-ev-er, Del-ta Up-si-lon for-ev-er, Del-ta…”) let alumni join in, swelling both sound and numbers.

Although there’s no dress code, the women of Alpha Omicron Pi, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Delta Gamma all wore variations on the little black dress (emphasis on little) and three-inch heels, while the fraternity men wore variations on suits and ties—some more varied than others. As for the caliber of singing, as President Don M. Randel noted in accepting a pewter mug recognizing his attendance at all six IFSings of his presidency, “Thank God for coeducation.”

Bearing out Randel’s observation, the quality cup went to the women of Delta Gamma, who sang flirty and sweet with equal style and polish. Meanwhile, the women of AO∏, with 64 performers, won the quantity cup; Delta Kappa Epsilon, with a lively rendition of “Son of a DKE” and some vaudeville choreography, won the spirit award; and Phi Gamma Delta—whose men sang without recourse to crib sheets, sang in harmony, and sang the old songs—won best overall.

Same time, next year.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): The judges' table holds the coveted trophies; the women of Alpha Omicron Pi; the men of Phi Delta Theta.

Photos by Dan Dry

Fifteen ways of supporting the University

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From July 1, 2006, through June 30, 2007, the members of the University of Chicago’s Women’s Board have committed themselves to raising $350,000 to fund 15 projects that span four University-wide categories—faculty research and support, cultural institutions, quality of student life, and community outreach.

Added to $9,000 reallocated from the previous year, that’s $359,000 in programmatic support. Earlier this spring, a committee chose the winning projects from 28 proposals, and this Tuesday board members gathered at the President’s House to hear how the grant monies would be spent.

From an overhead door to a concert grand harp, the Women’s Board will give:

* $47,900 to the Enrico Fermi Institute, to replace the electric controls for an overhead crane and purchase a new overhead door in the Accelerator Building.

* $75,000 to the Smart Museum, to be the primary sponsor of the Smart’s 2007 exhibition Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen.

* $15,000 to the Center for School Improvement, to build classroom libraries for the University’s charter schools.

* $20,860 to Assistant Professor of Classics Helma Dik, to help build a Web site to teach ancient Greek grammar.

* $17,595 to the Department of Music, to buy a concert grand harp for recitals in Mandel Hall, Rockefeller Chapel, and Fulton Recital Hall.

The list goes on and can be found on the Women’s Board Projects site.

M.R.Y.

Photo: Fulton Recital Hall will get a concert grand harp.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Pomp and preparation

The wooden folding chairs have sat in formation since Wednesday, but the finishing touches were completed Thursday for this weekend's four convocation ceremonies. Beginning Friday morning with the Law School, Harris School, and SSA ceremony, the festivities continue this afternoon with Graham School, BSD, Pritzker, Humanities, PSD, and SSD graduates; Saturday morning with the College; and Sunday afternoon with the GSB.

Thursday afternoon the tents and audio-visual equipment were set up, and a small ramp was installed over the step between the quad's center circle and the road. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's people took a walk-through before their boss arrives Saturday to address the crowd—along with convocation speaker James Chandler, the Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke professor in English and the College.

The weather for the prep work was perfect; as Friday dawned cloudy, planners hoped any rain would hold off for Chicago's 485th convocation.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): The chairs await the graduates; workers prepare the dais; large screens will air the ceremony for those too far back to see; Mayor Bloomberg's people get a walk-through; Kevin from Facilities helps graduates avoid tripping.

Artists in transition

While Chicago visual-arts MFA grads were crossing the stage at this past weekend’s convocation, their work was hanging on the walls at Hyde Park’s Del Prado Building. Titled The Space Between, the eight-person, free exhibition opened last Thursday with a broad offering of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and performance art.

Reflecting on her immigrant family’s American assimilation, Maria Perkovic, MFA’06, created black-and-white landscapes meant to seem simultaneously “familiar and alien,” she wrote in her artist’s statement. The skyscrapers, ladders, and beams in her spare, almost surreal canvases look more like models than real objects. Perkovic’s work, she wrote, examines the “Western ideological umbrella” that equates “placeness” with identity and defines groups by locale. Photographer Rachel Herman, MFA’06, sought to generate “new stories” by skewing commonplace images: two painted doors, one cracked open to reveal a flood of light; a face obscured—all but a grinning row of teeth—by a parka hood. Meanwhile, Joe Cory’s (MFA’06) deceptively simple drawings made use of absurdity and humor. In Untitled (They never saw it coming), red clouds look down on houses blithely huddled around nuclear cooling towers squirting a bright green liquid. Grant Schexnider’s (MFA’06) paintings drew on pornography as a metaphor for everyday social and political interaction. “There is, above all, a brutal honesty” about pornography, Schexnider’s artist’s statement read. “It illustrates our need for power, control, and release. It exposes our weakness.”

Capping off a two-year program that combines artistic practice with critical theory and art history, the exhibition marks a transition from student life to professional career. Cocurated by art-history doctoral student Dawna Schuld and Smart Museum contemporary-art curator Stephanie Smith, The Space Between—open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 5307 S. Hyde Park Boulevard from noon to 6 p.m.—runs through June 18.

L.G.

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Photos (left to right): Untitled paintings by Grant Schexnider; visitors view Joe Cory's drawings; Untitled #1, Normandie (left) and Untitled #2, Normandie by Rachel Herman.

Yerkes sale nears completion

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After more than a year of speculation, the University has reached an agreement to sell Yerkes Observatory to New York developer Mirbeau Company, which plans to develop 45 acres of land near the 109-year-old structure, creating homes and a spa.

If approved by the village of Williams Bay, Wisconsin, the agreement with Mirbeau owner Gary Dower would preserve the observatory—which houses a 40-inch refracting telescope, the largest in the world—and 30 acres surrounding it, and create a four-acre conservation zone along Geneva Lake. Mirbeau would pay $400,000 a year to support the observatory as an education and outreach institution, and $8 million to the University, supporting astronomical research. Yerkes and the surrounding land would be owned by an exposition district created by the village and directed by a board of scientists, most of whom would be appointed by the University.

Proceeds from and taxes on a 100-room Mirbeau Retreat and 72 small homes to be built on 45 acres of the property would help fund the observatory. The University, meanwhile, would continue to manage Yerkes for at least five years and provide $300,000 annually for maintenance during that time. The U of C also would provide $1 million to help create a Yerkes education and outreach organization.

A.B.P.

Allegorical renaissance

In Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz’s The Rape of Europa series, a bull—the god Jupiter in disguise—drags maiden Europa to Crete and has his way with her. The second piece in the collection, featured in the Smart Museum’s exhibition Revisions: Modernist Sculpture by Rodin, Lipchitz, and Moore, shows Europa resistant yet clinging to the bull’s neck. By the artist’s third and last iteration of the Greek tale, created at the height of World War II, the allegory had become political commentary; Europa, representing Europe, stabs the bull, representing Hitler, with a dagger.

The Smart piece is one of a handful in the exhibit that demonstrates how Lipchitz, Auguste Rodin, and Henry Moore reintroduced allegory, a popular art technique during Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Divided into four themes—reclining female form, heroic male nude, sculptural fragment, and allegory—the exhibit shows how these three early modernists updated classical forms and also informed each others’ work. In the heroic male nude section, Rodin’s Le Penseur (The Thinker) sits near Lipchitz’s cubist bronze Seated Man, which the exhibit notes cite as an “intended homage” to Rodin’s sculpture. Comparing the two works, the first created in 1880, the second some 30 years later, illustrates an evolution not only in sculpture but also in man’s mental state. Though Lipchitz’s modern figure has its chin poised on the hand as in the 1880 Rodin, Seated Man slumps over in resignation, replacing The Thinker’s strong, quiet contemplation.

B.E.O.

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Photos (left to right): Jacques Lipchitz, Reclining Figure, 1928, Cast bronze; Henry Moore, Sketch Model for Reclining Figure, 1945, Unglazed modeled terracotta; Auguste Rodin, Reclining Figure (Study for Danaid), c. 1885 (model, Musée Rodin, cast 1969), Cast Bronze. All three sculptures are from the Smart Museum's Joel Starrels Jr. Memorial Collection.

Certifiably Chicago

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On Saturday afternoon, one week after the University’s 485th Convocation filled Harper Quadrangle with thousands of June graduates and their guests, a smaller gathering of soon-to-be alumni and their well-wishers convened a few paces to the west: an un-air conditioned Swift Lecture Hall—windows open to the afternoon breezes and carillon bells—was the setting for the 57th annual awarding of certificates to the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults graduates.

Now part of the Graham School of General Studies, the course began 60 years ago, an outgrowth of University President Robert Maynard Hutchins's Great Books program. The four-year, structured curriculum of Socratic-style classes stretches from Homer and Plato to Joyce and Freud and is, said Bertram Cohler, AB'61, the William Rainey Harper professor in the social sciences and a staunch Basic Programs supporter, "about words and actions," the idea that a text has meaning in the world beyond its pages.

Not all of the 93 students who’d earned either two- or four-year certificates braved the day's heat for the ceremony and reception that followed, but those who did covered the demographic and sartorial waterfront: from twenty-somethings to retirees, suits and ties to sundresses and sandals. What they had in common, said fourth-year graduate Lewis M. Schneider, is the realization that "this is not a conclusion.... Here's to a lifetime of learning."

M.R.Y.

Photo: Bertram Cohler spoke at Saturday's Graham School ceremony.

Book bazaar

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Ever wonder where books go to retire? In Regenstein Library’s southwest corner, wedged between the Interlibrary Loan office and Special Collections, hundreds of volumes—withdrawn from the library’s holdings—are for sale. Divided by discipline, offerings include French chemistry journals from the 1940s, dog-eared copies of The Communist Manifesto, and a well-preserved edition of John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage. Paperbacks retail for $1, hardcovers for $2, and recordings on LP or cassette are free. Staff members add items every day as the library clears its stacks of duplicates. The sale, which kicked off June 5 and draws 50 to 100 visitors daily, runs throughout the summer (Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m., 1:30–4:45 p.m.).

B.E.O.

Photo: Get in while the shelves are stacked.

Arts alliance

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Better known as an avant-garde poet and a ballet dancer, Mark Turbyfill—to whom Poetry magazine devoted an entire issue in 1926, and who in the 1920s and ’30s was a principal dancer with the nation’s first ballet company, Chicago Allied Arts—was also a painter. He viewed the arts as a continuum and sought to give his poems the feeling, he said, “that they were practically three-dimensional instead of a flat thing on a page,” according to an explanatory poster at the Smart Museum, where an exhibit of Turbyfill’s paintings opened last week. The show spans two decades of his career, from the late-1940s to the mid-1960s, when he exhibited work frequently at Chicago galleries and his style evolved from “unsettling Surrealist-inspired figuration” to the abstract. Often giving his paintings evocative titles like Feast at Sunset and Pride of Place, Turbyfill sometimes incorporated text from his writing into the canvas.

Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the Smart exhibit runs through September 10.

L.G.

Images: Mark Turbyfill, Untitled, 1953, Gouache on paperboard. Smart Museum of Art, The Joel Starrels Jr. Memorial Collection (top); Mark Turbyfill, Observation and Non-Identification, 1951, Tempera on paper. Smart Museum of Art, Gift of the artist (bottom).

Tut treasure trove

While the Field Museum exhibits the nationally touring King Tut display, the Oriental Institute shows off its own Tutankhamun treasures. On loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, 50 photographs by Harry Burton, who was there when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, hang at the OI through October 8. They document the Valley of the Kings; the tomb's initial discovery; the moment when the excavators first glimpsed the artifacts inside; the burial chamber's entry; the series of shrines and coffins that protected the king; and the mummy, wreathed in floral collars and bedecked with gold jewelry.

Some highlights:

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Photos (left to right): In the tomb's "treasury room," a statue of Anubis, the god of embalming, sits on a portable chest. Behind it is the great gold shrine that contained the king's embalmed viscera.

Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb in 1922, stands over the nest of three coffins positioned over the stone sarcophagus.

The royal mummy's head and shoulders were covered with this gold mask, inlaid with glass and semiprecious stones. In this photograph the false beard and the necklaces have been removed.

The tomb's burial chamber was filled with four nested wood shrines surrounding the sarcophagus. The seals of the third shrine were undisturbed, indicating that the ancient robbers had not reached the king's body.

Photos courtesy the Oriental Institute Museum.

Waste not, want not

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Department of Visual Arts graduates Sara Black, MFA’06, and John Preus, MFA’05, are building an artists’ collective out of trash. Working with University of Chicago and School of the Art Institute alumni, Black and Preus last year launched Material Exchange, which recycles cast-off materials from museums, theaters, and other cultural institutions and transforms them into tables and chairs, light fixtures, futons, and bookcases. The artists donate the finished products to charitable organizations. “We’re interested in the way materials move through the world,” says Black, “how the value of a thing shifts in varying contexts, and why our culture allows material obsolescence to occur so quickly.”

Based in Hyde Park, Material Exchange grew out of a Smart Museum internship Black did last summer, when Austrian artist collective WochenKlausur held a three-week residency as part of Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art. That exhibit demonstrated the ability to make useful objects from waste materials, and Black and Preus volunteered with the artists to build a table and set of stools for Deborah’s Place, a Chicago women’s shelter. They also helped create two databases: one of local cultural organizations that generate leftover materials and another of charities in need of durable goods.

Last fall the two enlisted local art schools’ help with one of Material Exchange’s first projects. Using leftovers from the $8,000 set of Court Theatre’s production of the August Wilson play Fences, students at the Illinois Institute of Technology built a reading loft and library shelves for Hyde Park’s Chicago Child Care Society.

“Objects and materials have a history that effectively ends when they enter the landfill,” Preus says. “We are certainly interested in reimagining and reusing these materials for environmental and social reasons, but also as a way to investigate questions that revolve around surplus and entropy. What a thing is includes the history of its fabrication and the functions and stories that keep it alive as a vital element in the world.”

Jennifer Carnig

Photos: Illinois Institute of Technology students built a reading loft (top) and library shelves (bottom) for Hyde Park’s Chicago Child Care Society.

Child’s play

“It’s amazing what kids will think up to do,” says Melissa Holbert, the Smart Museum’s outreach and education technology coordinator, overseeing the 30 or so youngsters clustered around long tables in the museum’s glass-walled lobby. Armed with scraps of construction paper, scissors, and glue, the kids (and their parents) flexed their creative muscles, designing brightly colored collages at this Wednesday’s Art Afternoon. Each week child artists, ranging from toddlers to grade-schoolers, gather to work on projects—be they painting, puppets, or other paper fun—suggested by Smart staffers. Started in 2001, the free summer program draws an average of 125 kids and parents each week and runs this year through August 30.

B.E.O.

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We the people

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This year the Law School offers Fourth of July revelers weary of barbeques and fireworks some patriotic reflection via the faculty blog. Visitors can check out a recording of professor emeritus David Currie, AB'57, reading the entire text of the United States Constitution—believed to be “the first free Web-based audio version” of the document. A constitutional law scholar who retired in June after 44 years at Chicago, Currie is also an actor and has been part of the University’s Gilbert and Sullivan troupe for more than 40 years. The reading was taped at Chicago’s campus radio station WHPK this past spring and can be listened to in its entirety or by section. Back in June, each 2006 Law School graduate received a copy of the recording loaded onto a USB flash drive. For everyone else, a quick download does the trick.

B.E.O.

Photo: David P. Currie, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus.

Patriotism measured

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As the blasts of Independence Day fireworks fade from memory, the U of C's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) shares news that U.S. and Canadian citizens are among the most patriotic people in the world—for different reasons.

In a recent NORC survey (.pdf) of people in 34 countries, Americans ranked highest in pride for the country's democratic system, political influence in the world, economy, science and technology achievements, and military. They ranked relatively low regarding the U.S. social-security system (12th) and sports (9th). Canadians ranked higher in pride for their social-security system (5th) and their treatment of different groups within their society (2nd) than on any other dimensions. They ranked relatively low in their pride for their sports (18th), arts and literature (16th), military (11th), and history (11th).

When asked if they would rather be a citizen of their country than any other in the world, people in the United States were first, with 75 percent strongly agreeing with the statement. The Canadians were sixth, with 56 percent strongly agreeing.

The survey was carried out by the International Social Survey Program.

Bill Harms

Photo by Dan Dry

Sports knockout

In the fall, the field behind Henry Crown Field House fills with football players practicing tackles and running sprints under head football coach Dick Maloney. This past Friday Coach Maloney was on the field, but he wasn’t giving instructions to big guys with shoulder pads. Instead he was giving water bottles to kindergarteners at a cookout for the U of C’s Super Summer Sports Camp. University coaches like Maloney make up the staff, while varsity athletes serve as counselors.

On the football field, the kids thought over their first three weeks of camp. Asked their favorite sports, one boy nodded earnestly, his mouth too full of hamburger to speak, as a friend rattled off every game from floor hockey to dodgeball. “My favorite sport is baseball,” a kid with big eyes and a red cap interrupted. “I’m great at first base.”

Meanwhile, third- and fourth-graders practiced their strokes in the pool at Ratner Athletics Center, working to earn diving-board privileges. Afterward they formed a ragged line and wove toward the field house for basketball, chattering about World Cup Soccer. The campers begged counselor and track athlete Emily Sayer, ’07, to play Knockout. “I’m about on par with the third- and fourth-graders,” she joked.

More than 200 kids aged six to 16 will be in the pool, on the courts, or on the fields behind Ratner and Crown through July 28. Next week: archery.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Seventh-graders wait to bat; a boy tosses his bat to run the bases; kindergarteners enjoy a cookout.

Of friends and football

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As millions of soccer fans crowded around their televisions Sunday afternoon for the 2006 Fifa World Cup final match between France and Italy, Hyde Park stirred with its own share of football craze.

Fans packed a Subway restaurant at 57th Street and Harper Avenue screening the game via satellite, enticing passers-by to stop in and catch a few minutes of the game. Loud waves of “oohs” met each nearly missed goal, and patrons applauded each team’s star players.

Two floors above, the mood was just as electric in the apartment of undergraduates Rob Law and Sarah Cohan, where a group of about ten friends gathered to watch the game. “Football is my new religion,” said Cohan, a rising fourth-year and recent convert to the sport. “I always watch all the World Cups,” said Law, a rising third-year in the College, making his loyalties clear with an Italian team shirt. “I’ve always been a fan.” Most of the friends shared his allegiance. “There is one person here for France,” Law said, “but we’re all having fun.”

When France’s Zinedine Zidane head-butted Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the chest with only ten minutes left in overtime, the friends quickly quieted each other down to find out exactly what had happened. Words like “shocked” and “surprised” circulated. “He’s not thinking about his team,” said Cohan after watching several slow-motion replays of the incident.

When the Italians emerged victorious after winning the penalty shootout 5-3, the delighted revelers headed downtown to cap off the evening. Fresh off the train, they ran into a crowd of elated Italians, waving their country’s flag down the sidewalk. “Come to Millenium Park with us to celebrate,” an Italian fan urged. But exhausted from an afternoon with friends, football, and nothing but finger food, the Hyde Park group opted for dinner—at a small Italian place—instead.

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photo: College students Sarah Cohan and Rob Law react during Sunday's game.

Material musings

“My problem here is that I want to touch everything,” said Dilshanie Perera, ’07, at the July 9 opening reception for Material Science. Soda and pretzels accompanied the first exhibition of works by Hyde Park Art Center faculty in the center’s new building, where college students, residents, and featured artists snacked and surveyed the show. Perera was drawn to Darrell Roberts’s untitled painting; he created a mossy look by slathering bright green pumice over thick layers of paint.

Visitors trickled in from the oppressive heat to the cool and cavernous entry hall, where Holly Cahill talked about her inspirations. In her modular painting, Undoing Mountain Building, Cahill evoked the dips and undulations of mountains and rivers as if seen from an airplane window. Having moved from Kentucky to Chicago, she said she now looks at books on Montana for ideas, but also studies cracks in the sidewalk and the way ice freezes along Lake Michigan.

In the main hallway, Linda Cohn interrupted a chat with friends to discuss the creative process behind her collage series a Patriot acts, begun as an attempt to “express a concept of loss, disenchantment, and hope” with the war in Iraq. Inspired by the story of original American flag seamstress Betsy Ross, Cohn stitched red, white, and blue embroidery onto her collages. “Sewing,” says Cohn, “is a subtle way of screaming.”

The artwork in Material Science, open through July 23, spans genres from metalwork to installation, and the themes are just as broad. Other contributors include Sarah Kaiser, MFA’03, and Dawn Brennan, AB’80, MFA’02.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Viewers gather in the HPAC hallway; Linda Cohn, And Crown Thy Good, 2004-06; Sarah Kaiser, MFA'03, Alice, 2005.

Law review

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In the lobby of the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum downtown, about 60 people took their seats Thursday evening for a discussion with U of C Law professors Geoffrey Stone, JD’71, and Richard Epstein. The program involved a broad discussion of the John Roberts-led Supreme Court and more specific reflections on some of the 100-plus cases heard in the last year. “We have an extraordinarily conservative Supreme Court,” Stone said—despite, he conceded, what some feel are politically balanced outcomes decided by a 5–4 vote.

Epstein saw the Court’s future differently. “It’s a court that’s going to move further to the left,” he said, referring to the influential role of liberal Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy, Stone agreed, “is a coalition builder.”

Stone and Epstein discussed one of the year’s most controversial cases, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (.pdf), in which the court ruled that President Bush’s military commissions to try Guantanamo Bay detainees were illegal and violated the Geneva Conventions. The case was so important, Stone said, because the Bush administration’s use of “secret evidence to prosecute” detainees “was never before done in Anglo-American law.”

While taking several questions from the audience, Stone and Epstein discussed the Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action, eminent domain, and gay marriage. “Gay marriage is going to be accepted in the U.S. in the not too distant future,” Stone predicted. “It’s just a matter of when.”

Drawing laughter after a relatively serious discussion, Epstein commended the audience for its interest and attentiveness. “These are issues,” he admitted, “that put most people to sleep when you talk about them.”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photo: Stone and Epstein discuss the Supreme Court at the Freedom Museum.

Fast times at Ratner Center

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The Ratner pool echoed with cheering and clapping from the packed stands Sunday morning as swimmers stepped up to the blocks in the seventh Gay Games Sports and Cultural Festival. The games are open to anyone, so amateur swimmers raced alongside pros like Audy Oktavian, who placed second in the 2000 Olympic trials and swam the second lap of Sunday's 200-meter medley relay for the New England Masters swim club.

Ben Thompson, a third-year PhD/MD student in the U of C’s Medical Scientist Training Program, was one of several volunteers checking in competitors and spectators. In a Tribune interview, he captured the atmosphere: “It’s like a giant week-long sports party,” he said. “We’re trying to pack in as much as we can.”

Later the swimmers clustered around the results sheets taped up in Ratner. Oktavian’s relay team posted the best time among the men, with all four swimmers finishing in one minute 47.27 seconds. Oktavian also triumphed in his solo event, swimming the 50-meter breaststroke in 29.68 seconds. Although younger swimmers often had the best times, there were exceptions. Maria Anderson, 43, clinched the women’s 100-meter freestyle, finishing in one minute 50 seconds.

Swimming continues all week, with the longest event, the 1,500-meter freestyle, scheduled for Friday afternoon. The All Styles Martial Arts Tournament began Tuesday at Ratner and continues through Thursday. Wednesday’s martial-arts events include weapons forms, empty hand forms, musical forms, and sparring.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photo: The crowd circles the pool between races (top). Swimmers mill about before the medley relays (bottom).

Resetting the molds

In the dank basement of Rockefeller Chapel, Moses, Plato, and the angel Michael lean against the walls, covered in soot. The 80-year-old plaster molds, commissioned by the chapel’s founders, were models for the final limestone statues that adorn the church’s Gothic façade.

“A mold was used to get the idea from paper to something physical, something three-dimensional,” says Lorraine Brochu, AM’88, assistant to the dean of the chapel. Designed by artists Ulric Ellerhusen and Lee Lawrie, known for his Atlas statue in New York City’s Rockefeller Center, the figures were sent between 1910 and 1920 to an Indiana limestone quarry, where artisans used them as blueprints for carving. Once the stone statues were hoisted upon the chapel, the University gave some of the molds away but stashed the rest in the basement, according to documents chapel intern Tera Ellefson, ’07, found in the Regenstein Library.

For years the molds remained unattended, collecting dirt and deteriorating from damage done by vandals and extreme heat and cold. While some maintain the most intricate details of the artists’ original work, most of the roughly 70 statues are too cracked and fragile for anyone to handle safely.

Plans to conserve the statues emerged after the chapel opened a basement interfaith center this past spring. Once preserved, Rockefeller will showcase the molds in the interfaith-center lobby. “We thought we’d choose three representative figures for the display,” Ellefson said. The chapel has selected Amos, an Old Testament Jewish prophet; Zoroaster, an ancient Iranian prophet; and Saint Francis of Assisi, the medieval Catholic patron saint of Italy, as the first statues to undergo preservation. Wisconsin-based Conrad Schmitt Studios will conserve the statues, which will be stored permanently in an improved basement storage space.

With limited funds from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial endowment, the statues will be fixed a few at a time, Brochu said. “Unless we get a huge hunk of money, it will take years,” she said. “We’re hoping for six statues a year, three at a time.”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

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Photos (left to right): The molds lean against Rockefeller's basement walls; some are missing eyes, and all are covered in soot; masking tape identifies some statues.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Center of diversity

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The University has entered a new phase in its plans to build a home for the Office of Minority Student Affairs (OMSA), the Amandla Center, and a resource center for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Queer (LGBTQ) community. As part of the process to renovate the groups’ new space at 5710 South Woodlawn Avenue, the University and architects from Urban Works will launch a blog to keep students updated on the project and to encourage student, faculty, and community participation in the final design.

“Student input is crucial,” says Bill Michel, AB’92, assistant vice president for student life in the University and associate dean of the College. “This will really bring together spaces for student groups, and we hope it will be a resource for students as well as the Hyde Park community.”

Urban Works Architects, the firm heading the roughly $1 million renovation and addition, proposed the blog idea, says Michel, based on previous success with blogs it had created for similar community-based projects. As a space for posting and sharing feedback, the blog will reflect similar student-input initiatives, Michel added, such as open meetings held while planning the new dorm south of the Midway Plaisance.

The plans to consolidate the Harper-based Amandla Center, the Administration Building–based OMSA office, and a new LGBTQ resource center call for a completed design by early fall and construction to begin early this winter. The groups hope to open their doors by the start of the 2007–08 academic year.

Michel looks forward to the blog’s launch, expected in the next few weeks. As he puts it, “We will begin to create a real sense of bringing students together to learn from each other.”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photo: The new center will be housed at 5710 South Woodlawn, currently home to the Publications and Training & Development offices.

Summer service

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In a half-refurbished building at 6100 South Blackstone Avenue, intern Sofia Narvaez-Gete, ’07, separates good bicycles from bad at Blackstone Bicycle Works, which plans to reopen this month after a fire devastated the site in 2001. Once the shop opens, Narvaez-Gete, who’s also designing a curriculum, will help teach kids age 8 through 18 business, math, and language skills as they learn how to fix bikes. Working 25 hours at the shop earns each youth a bike.

She got this internship through Summer Links, a program the University Community Service Center (UCSC) runs matching undergrads and grad students with community organizations for the summer. The Office of the Dean of the College provides a $4,000 stipend on behalf of the cash-strapped organizations.

While Narvaez-Gete researches business-education models for children and adjusts brakes and spokes on donated bicycles, other Summer Links interns work on refugee resettlement at World Relief and the Heartland Alliance or help out behind the scenes of Cook County Juvenile Court Clinic and Stroger Hospital. “We have internships all over the world. We could benefit from some in our community,” says David Hays, assistant director of UCSC. “You don’t need to go to India to learn about poverty.”

After ten years, Summer Links has placed 300 volunteers in the 11-week program, working more than 3,000 hours. Over the years, Hays says, he’s seen relations between the community and the University improve. The internship opened Narvaez-Gete’s eyes to the development going on in Woodlawn, from Blackstone Bicycle Works to a renovated 1920s ballroom at 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. “I’ve seen that there are people who are trying to bring the community forward.”

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photo: Intern Sofia Narvaez-Gete fixes bikes and teaches kids at Blackstone Bicycle Works.

Photo by Dan Dry

Creative intelligence

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A hot and rainy Thursday evening did little to hamper turnout at the fifth annual student reading of creative writing at Hyde Park’s 57th Street Books. Part of the University of Chicago Graham School’s Insight summer programs for high-school students, the session concluded a three-week course on fiction writing and the creative process. About 20 friends and family members attended the hour-long event, where students read short stories they had developed during the course.

In open-mic style, high schoolers from Wisconsin, New Jersey, New York, and California read pieces both serious and satirical, with themes that included death, insomnia, anorexia, and adolescent angst. “My mother always said silence was a killer,” began 17-year-old Jesse Glaze’s fictional story about a brother’s death and the family’s grief. “But silence was easier than confrontation.” “The boss had impeccable aim, so as to only hit the face and nothing else,” read senior Briana Finegan, whose dark comedy portrayed a ruthless young boss heaving coffee at her intern’s face. “The second-degree burns didn’t matter to her, but getting stains on a shirt was too low a blow.”

“This class was jam-packed with ridiculously talented kids,” said course lecturer Achy Obejas, a novelist and Chicago Tribune culture writer. “What they don’t have at the beginning of the class are specific craft tools like critical vocabulary to make a story really good, but that’s what we work on, day-in and day-out, over these three weeks.”

During the course Obejas gave the students an insider field trip to her Tribune stomping grounds, emphasizing the hands-on approach of the writing process. “In learning to write, you can’t just say, ‘You need to add conflict to this part of the story,’” she said. “It’s about explaining exactly what conflict is. And that’s not what you get in high school.”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photos: Budding writers read their original fiction at 57th Street Books.

Pageants with a purpose

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Hundreds of fans packed Stratford Square Mall in suburban Bloomingdale this weekend for a chance to meet the next Miss Illinois, and the University of Chicago was well represented. Valerie Lynch, a third-year in the Law School, was one of 21 women competing for the 2006 Miss Illinois crown, a preliminary round of the Miss America competition.

“Everyone’s been extremely supportive and fascinated by all this,” Lynch said during the lunchtime autograph session before Saturday’s final event. “It’s been a nice outlet, especially being at the Law School.”

Lynch is no stranger to the pageant scene. Originally interested in pageantry as a “great way to win scholarships,” she was crowned Miss Orlando during her senior year at the University of Florida in 2003, and she earned Miss DuPage County honors last year. Lynch said she has won $35,000 in scholarships over the past four years (the Miss Illinois pageant carried a pooled $20,000 scholarship prize for the top five contestants).

Lynch emphasized the need to look beyond the competition’s glitz and glamour. At the Law School and as her pageant platform, she is an advocate for mental health. Lynch is part of the Mental Health Advocacy Project, a program in the Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, founded in 1957 to provide legal services to underserved populations on Chicago’s South Side. She has worked with Law School professors to enact legislation to keep new federal Medicaid dollars in the community mental-health system.

“We’re working to illustrate that Illinois has got an F-rating from the National Institute of Mental Health, and we need these funds to provide higher-quality services to people afflicted with these illnesses,” she said, adding that a close family member suffers from bipolar disorder. “The Mental Health Project was one of the reasons I chose the Law School.”

Although Lynch placed in the top ten finalists later that evening, her name was not called as Miss Illinois 2006, so it was back to the Washington, D.C., law firm Patton Boggs, where she will complete her work as a summer associate before returning to Hyde Park for autumn quarter.

During her autograph session, she reflected on the hectic schedule ahead. “What girl doesn’t like to be in the mall?” she joked. “It’s much better than the library, that’s for sure.”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Signature smile: Law student/tiara wearer Valerie Lynch signs autographs and shows her pearly whites for fans after the Miss Illinois pageant.

Star campers

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The bleachers are throbbing. “We’re gonna have the best performance ever!” a little boy wearing maroon sunglasses hollers, leaping out of his seat and tearing across the gymnasium floor. It’s “Camp Idol,” a dance competition that caps six weeks of Adventure Kids Day Camp at the University’s Lab Schools. Kids age 6 to 14 fill the stands, drumming their feet, wriggling nervously, and chattering nonstop.

Out comes “Ryan Seacrest” to announce the first act. Camp staffers, high school and college students, are playing the roles of host Seacrest and the three judges on American Idol. A dozen of the youngest campers walk onstage in a wobbly line, wearing Styrofoam props around their neck with bottle caps and wires attached, imitating robots. Pairs of campers leave each end of the line one after another to dance together in the middle. When they’re finished, the judges give them resoundingly positive evaluations—there will be no tears or harsh words here. Even “Simon Cowell,” the notoriously hard-to-please judge, says in his best British accent, “I have to say that I felt a little electricity in your performance.”

Ten groups dance in all. Highlights include the “Great White Sharks,” a group of 10- to 11-year-old boys who dance to a cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” “Paula Abdul” says, “I was a little unsure about your choice of song, but you won me over.” A group of girls age 9 and 10 incorporate cartwheels into their dance to “Stop! In the Name of Love.” When the last performance is over, supervisors and camp directors come onstage. “Are they gonna pick a winner?” asks one mother. It’s not that kind of show, though. “Popsicles will be handed out outside!” says a supervisor, and within minutes, the stage and stands have emptied.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photo: Two boys shake their hips to Shakira (top); with judges and host looking on, girls dance to "Stop! In the name of Love" (bottom).

Carillon wrestling

Ten visitors arrive at Rockefeller Chapel a half-hour before the Sunday evening carillon concert, part of Rockefeller’s summer series, to hear assistant carillonneur James Fackenthal give a tour of the bells. “Has anyone ever seen a carillon?” he asks. One visitor raises her hand. “Has anyone ever seen a carillon player?” he jokes. “There’s one right over there,” he says, gesturing to tonight’s performer, Andrea McCrady, who hails from Spokane, Washington.

Fackenthal leads the group up a dark, steep, winding staircase that seems to go on forever. As they cross the catwalk, he cautions the visitors to watch their heads for low pipes. The group faces another winding staircase before finally reaching the small, dim room where the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon sits. Sweaty and breathless after climbing 200-plus stairs, these listeners have the privilege of watching McCrady’s hour-long performance up close.

“This is a lot of heavy metal here,” quips Fackenthal, noting that the carillon, given by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in honor of his mother, is the second largest musical instrument in the world—the largest is another carillon Rockefeller gave to Riverside Church in New York City. The biggest bell on the Chicago instrument weighs 18-and-a-half tons.

After a brief introduction to her program, McCrady, wearing a teal T-shirt and a white sweatband to hold back her short red hair, announces that she’s ready “to wrestle this thing.” She uses her fists to play a set of keys at the top of the carillon, and her feet to play a row of pedals along the bottom, attached to the heaviest bells. Her hands zip left and right while her legs stretch to reach the high and low notes on the foot pedals. To sound one of the biggest bells, McCrady, about 5-foot-3-inches, asks Fackenthal to stomp its pedal, which pulls a 500-pound clapper.

Out on the lawn, 20-some people lounge on blankets and in lawn chairs, reading or eating as they listen to McCrady’s first selection, Michael Corette’s “Le carillon des morts.” “Depending on the weather, a dozen to 100” listeners typically turn out, says Lorraine Brochu, AM’88, assistant to the dean for external affairs. This Sunday visitors on the ground enjoy blue sky and beautiful music—but do they know what the carillonneur looks like?

Jenny Fisher, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Rockefeller or Hitchcock's Vertigo?; McCrady at the keys; listeners relax on the lawn.

Admissions unscripted

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For about three seconds after assistant director of admissions Austin Bean, AB’04, asks the audience of close to 300 prospective students and their parents if they have any questions, there’s an awkward pause. Yet that brief moment of silence is the only one during the 40-minute student panel held in Ida Noyes at Friday’s Summer Information Day. Jenny Connell, AB’01, another assistant director of admissions, says the audience and the panel of five student tour guides often sound “like they’re scripted, they work so well together.” They’re not, of course—“sometimes they say things where you’re like, whoa, that was totally unscripted.”

Here’s an example. One father asks panelist Mitch Salm, ’09, who had introduced himself as a potential religious-studies major, why Chicago is such a great place for that interest. Salm hedges, saying, “Well, I’m still not sure,” and, “Technically, I haven’t taken any religious-studies courses yet—but I’m sure it’s great!” The audience eats it up. Another panelist chimes in: “He just likes this one religious-studies professor who looks like Gandalf.”

The panelists generally agree that it’s the people who drew them to this campus. Jeffrey Crane, ’09, says, “For me it was really the academic atmosphere—the nerdiness, if you will.” Salm waxes romantic about his peers. “I’m just constantly impressed by my classmates . . . There’s just this constant drive and desire to share ideas, this passion that so many people have here.”

Are the prospects buying it? While it’s too soon to tell, Bean says, “People who attend are very likely to apply.” Session over, about 30 students and parents stick around to talk to the admissions staff one-on-one in the Ida Noyes courtyard. Kelly Hofer, a rising senior at Phillips Exeter Academy who hails from Memphis, says the panel was “pretty telling.” Her next stop? Lollapalooza.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photos: The crowd listens to the panel at Ida Noyes (top); Prospies and parents enjoy refreshments afterward (bottom).

War and peace

“On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Chicago, it is difficult to put ourselves in places that are not so beautiful,” says Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine, to a crowd of nearly 60 peace activists gathered in front of the Henry Moore sculpture Nuclear Energy on Ellis Avenue. They’ve congregated for the annual Hiroshima Day commemoration, sponsored by Illinois Peace Action, remembering 61 years since the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Rothschild, the keynote speaker, parallels the 1945 events to current international hostilities. “This government of ours today is more eager to drop a nuclear weapon than any government in United States history since the early days of Ronald Reagan,” he says. “We must do everything we can to make sure that another 61 years go by without another nuclear bomb going off on a population, so that our children’s children’s children can look back and say that this is the generation that overcame madness.”

Some activists, such as Hyde Park resident and U.S. Pacifist Party member Bradford Lyttle, AM’51, caution against casting blame solely along partisan lines. “This is not a Democratic or Republican issue,” he says. “It’s a human issue.” Lyttle, in his late teens in 1945, recalls that the attack inspired him to pursue a political-science degree and join anti–nuclear weapons development efforts. “There are one of two things that can happen,” he says. “Either the human species is going to end war, or war is going to end the human species.”

The audience includes a couple in their 20s who’ve never before visited the campus monument. Recent immigrants from Hiroshima and self-described “rough English” speakers, they have no trouble understanding the messages behind each speech.

“I am actually really surprised that American people have such a ceremony for the victims of the A-Bomb,” says Tuji Uchida, who moved to suburban Northbrook with wife Kaori. “I thought that the issue of the A-Bomb is not that big an issue for American people, but now I know at least some people take this issue seriously.” Their home city, they recall, commemorates the August 6 anniversary at 8:15 a.m. local time, the exact moment of detonation. All of Hiroshima stands still to remember those who perished.

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Matthew Rothschild keynotes the event; the crowd at the sculpture; the Uchidas mark their first Hiroshima Day in the States.

Music for a summer night

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In the sea of concertgoers packing Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion lawn Wednesday evening, a small maroon-colored banner dots the landscape, marking the spot where more than 30 University of Chicago alumni have gathered for an evening at the Grant Park Music Festival.

“I come to many of these [events] to mingle and meet different alumni,” says Sandra Roth, X’52, joined by two friends around a folding picnic table. Before the concert begins, the trio pops open a bottle of Pinot Grigio over a Mediterranean assortment of baba ghanouj, grapes, and hummus.

“This tablecloth is from Provence, France,” says one of the friends, who supplied the picnic arrangement. Though not University alumni, the other two women accompany Roth to most Alumni Association programs, which are open to guests. “All of this folds and packs up very nicely,” she says. “I took it on the bus this morning when I left home.”

Entitled “Sagrado y Profano” (Sacred and Profane), the program gets under way and the crowd quiets down. Roth’s guests ease back in their folding chairs and take in the music. “Let’s just listen now,” one says, putting the conversation on indefinite hold.

Conductor Carlos Kalmar, music director of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, leads the Grant Park Orchestra’s performances of works by South American composers Heiter Villa-Lobos, Ariel Ramirez, and Antonio Estévez. Meanwhile, Roth points to an Alumni Association flyer promoting its next event, an August 27 polo match in suburban Oakbrook. She whispers to her companions, “Are you going to be there?”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photo: A sea of concertgoers at the Pritzker Pavilion (top); Roth, her friends, and their spread (bottom).

Believe it or not

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University Theater’s inaugural summer-residency program required students to lie—at least half the time. The two-week workshop culminated Sunday night with True + False, a performance featuring actors who recited two autobiographical stories, one true and the other false. The production team told the roughly 30 people on hand at the Reynolds Club’s Francis X. Kinahan Theater to “figure out for yourselves which is which”—the audience never learned which stories were authentic.

Eight college-age actors took the stage to put their stories’ veracity to the test. In “Mature,” Amber Robinson reflected on her recently widowed grandfather, explaining how he used an Internet-dating chat room to begin a relationship with a woman 30 years his junior. “He did not care, this was the women of his dreams,” Robinson read. Although he originally told the woman he was 50 instead of 85, Robinson said, the two had been dating for several months.

Tim Dunn’s “Feel My Pain” detailed his hypochondria during college. He recalled taking weekly home-pregnancy tests to check for testicular cancer (pregnant women produce the same hormone as men with testicular cancer). His girlfriend stumbled upon the test strips and confronted him before getting the whole story from Dunn’s roommate, after which, he said, they all had a laugh.

“It’s been a remarkable and invaluable two weeks here,” said Big Picture Group artistic director Roger Bechtel on behalf of his team, parked behind a giant control board orchestrating a wall of nearly 20 television monitors that displayed live and pre-recorded footage complementing each story’s plot. The Big Picture Group production company was among eight local drama groups that participated in the summer program.

Following its successful development at University Theater, Big Picture Group announced it would take True + False on the road in January, at a venue yet to be determined. And that’s no lie.

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photos: Amber Robinson reads her true-or-false tale (top). The screens showed taped and live video matching the stories (bottom).

Leaves of verse

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Indigenous to the Paroles region of Upper Volta, the fabled Story Bush derives its name from the text-like mottling that occurs on its leaves beginning in late May. During the growing season individual lines emerge on a plant. In autumn local story gatherers collect the fallen leaves and arrange them into a tale that will entertain villagers through the long dark days of winter.

The placard stuck into the pot holding Hugh Musick’s (AB’84) artwork Story Bush (magnolia fabula), at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, adopts the authoritative, encyclopedic tone of other conservatory text, but like Story Bush itself, the paragraph combines imagination with reality.

A magnolia displaying an original 255-line narrative poem inscribed on the leaves, Musick’s Story Bush can’t be read in linear fashion, he points out. And that’s part of its magic. This past weekend children and adults alike touched the branches and leaves, circling the plant while reading such lines as:

unexpected heiress to a great aunt’s fortune
anonymous
low-hanging cloud of discontent
thus the unprobable became possible

In a phone interview, Musick offers the analogy of a Magic 8 ball to explain how he hopes the phrases will affect viewers. “That’s the way music lyrics stay in my head. A turn of phrase can have certain substance and it can roll around in my head. If people are able to take away a bit or piece, maybe that seed will become inspiration to them.”

Musick has created hundreds of collages accompanied by short imaginative stories, but, he says, this is “the first time I’ve worked with a plant.” A few years ago he was walking in Lakeview when some hyacinth bushes, their leaves turning a brilliant red, caught his eye. “The image of someone writing a whole novel onto their bush came to me,” he recalls. Musick hopes Story Bush “will just stop you in your tracks and make you think, and reevaluate the potential of what things can be.”

In the fall Musick will play the role of story gatherer himself. Every day he will make a trip to the conservatory to collect the fallen leaves. He plans to transcribe the phrases in the order they have fallen. The resulting poem will be “decided entirely by the change of seasons.”

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photos: A boy checks out the poetry leaves (top). Musick's phrases can't be read in linear fashion (bottom).

Define "ranking"

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If the U.S. News and World Report rankings were the World Series or the Super Bowl, police would clear Hyde Park’s streets while a Maroon phoenix led rowdy fans back from today’s game, as the University of Chicago recaptured its No. 9 spot (last held in 2002)—leaving cross-town rival Northwestern at No. 14.

In the 2006 rankings, published in the August 21 issue and released today, Chicago tied for ninth best national university with Dartmouth College and Columbia University. The triumph didn’t result from new power-hitters or quarterbacks. Michael Behnke, vice president for University relations and dean of College enrollment, says the jump from last year’s No. 15 ranking has two main causes.

One factor is a rise in graduation rate, from 87 percent reported in U.S. News last year to 91 percent this year. To explain this increase Behnke points to student surveys the University has conducted for the past several years, which show more students participating in extracurricular activities, foreign studies, and internships as a result of the University’s increased “investments in student life.” The University’s efforts resulted in “higher levels of student satisfaction,” which, Behnke says, translates into a higher graduation rate.

A second factor, according to Behnke, has to do with how the University fills out its forms. “We’ve paid attention to how U.S. News & World Report defines things versus how we do.” Now the U of C’s Common Core writing program counts as a writing seminar, increasing the University’s percentage of small classes. In previous years the University also underreported its per-student spending by filing library expenditures in a category other than educational expenses. This year library spending was taken into account.

Despite the U of C’s leap, Behnke says that College applicants are too “sophisticated” to simply rely on one number when judging colleges. Although overall rankings are “not helpful,” he says, subcategories like percentage of classes with less than 20 students and graduation rate do provide useful information.

Perhaps the first challenge for future Chicago students is figuring out the ratings game. And even though rankings don’t matter, here are this year’s best national universities, according to U.S. News:

1. Princeton University
2. Harvard University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. Duke University
9. Columbia University
Dartmouth College
University of Chicago

Jenny Fisher, ’07


Photo: Graduates high-five at the 2006 ceremony.

Photo by Dan Dry

Noontime Noise wakes up crowd

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Last Wednesday afternoon brought a lunchtime treat to Hutch Courtyard—Chicago rock band Odium Nation. Marking the conclusion of ORCSA’s summer Noontime Noise series, the band entertained about 50 lunchers with an hour of songs from its new album, The Greater Good.

“We’re an interesting blend of hard rock, hip-hop, and R&B rhythms,” said Odium Nation guitarist John O’Brien after the set. “I think we’re hitting a middle ground that no one’s touched yet.” That “interesting blend” landed the band’s flagship song, “Wake Up,” a spot on Erin Carman’s “Local Music Mondays” show on The Loop radio station earlier this month.

The Noontime Noise event marked a new step for the band, which welcomed two fresh faces to its lineup. “We’ve been a band for four to five years now, but incorporating a DJ is new to us as of the U of C show,” said O’Brien of DJ Justin Faubion, who, along with the band’s new drummer, Mark “Coco” Phillips Jr., joined the group earlier this month.

The band consists of seven Chicago-area musicians in their late 20s, all committed to a common mantra: freedom. “Each member of this group was carefully selected for not only their musical ability but also their ability to think freely,” reads the band’s Web site. “Freedom stands at the very heart of why this band will succeed.”

This summer's Noontime Noise series also brought some U of C–centric rock bands to campus, such as Gamine Thief, which includes Renee Neuner, AB'06, and The Cathy Santonies, led by Raedy Ping, AM'05.

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photo: A Hutchinson Courtyard flyer previews Odium Nation's Noontime Noise performance.

Au revoir, foie gras

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In the two weeks leading up to Chicago's disputed ban on foie gras—the French delicacy made from force-fed duck or goose liver—Hyde Park's La Petite Folie restaurant has never served more orders of the dish. "We've gone through five loaves this week," said La Petite Folie co-owner Mary Mastricola, AB'93, August 9, adding that the restaurant would normally serve two loaves per week.

"We haven't really had 'parties,'" said Mastricola as she prepared that day's foie gras, referring to some downtown eateries' lavish "outlaw dinner" events that drew national media attention. Instead, the Hyde Park restaurant and its patrons commemorated the now-illegal dish in more subtle ways: diners ordered as much foie gras as their stomachs (and wallets) could handle. She referred to an example from the previous weekend, when each person at one table ordered four servings of foie gras.

At the restaurant Tuesday, the day before the ban would be enforced, Alma Lach said she spoke for most of her fellow gourmands in calling the policy "the most stupid thing." "I'm so mad about it," said Lach, a La Petite Folie regular and former Chicago Sun Times food editor. "If we give up goose liver, are we going to give up beef, lobster, or turkey? Thanksgiving's coming up." Author of Hows and Whys of French Cooking (U of C Press, 1974; Castle Books, 1998), Lach said she'll order her family's foie gras supply from the suburbs, Wisconsin, or Indiana.

Officially making Chicago the first U.S. city to outlaw the dish, the ban's first day of enforcement represents a sharp divide between City Hall and the city's higher-end culinary community. Mastricola said she thought the City Council, which passed the ban this April, had "better things to do."

A "memoriam statement" will fill the void left on the menu, Mastricola said. "Foie gras will no longer be served by order of the City of Chicago," the menu will read. "Contact your local alderman."

Hassan S. Ali, '07

Photos: La Petite Folie co-owner Mary Mastricola prepares one of the last legal foie gras servings (top); The dish that has stirred so much controversy (bottom).

Sunset blues

“Turn it up! Let’s go!” shouts a group of women sitting atop the Warming House overlooking the Midway Plaisance ice-skating rink. They’re waiting for the Willie White Blues Band, playing for the Park District’s “Midweek at the Midway,” a free series of summer concerts and movies. Despite a stiff breeze and ominous clouds, the ladies have lawn chairs and a picnic table stocked with food. Down on the rink, small children race each other, and about 15 people dot bleachers and seats. Another 30 or so lounge on blankets in the grass.

Shortly after 7 p.m., as a golden sunset begins to fill the western sky, singer and bass guitarist Joe Pratt introduces the band. The women on top of the Warming House form two lines, turning in rhythm and counting, “Back, step, two, three,” as they execute steps and twirls in perfect unison to the blues songs.

As it turns out, they've practiced—these ten women are all students of Marva Childress, who teaches line dancing for the Park District. “This is not our kind of music,” says Childress, 70, “so we just sort of improvise.” The women, aged 60 to 80, according to Childress, sway easily to the beat in colorful shawls with fringe. Why do they look so youthful? "'Cause we all dance!”

Pratt calls out, “Folks in the back—how you doin’?” The line dancers return the greeting. “These ladies have been here for a long time,” Pratt says, “and we’re gonna dedicate this show to them.”

Jenny Fisher, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Line dancing to the blues; the guitarist and saxophonist; a couple dances while their baby watches.

Horsing around

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It has been called the king of games and the game of kings, but for many of the roughly 100 University of Chicago alumni and their families in suburban Oak Brook, Sunday's polo match was a new experience.

“I’ve never been to a polo match,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, AB’83, over a glass of red wine, joined at a table by several Graduate School of Business (GSB) alumni. The sold-out event, sponsored by Chicago GSB Pakistan Club, Chicago GSB Club, and the University of Chicago Club of Metropolitan Chicago, brought College and GSB alumni to the Oak Brook Polo Club, the nation’s second oldest polo grounds.

“I’ve seen polo on TV, and I think it’s a ‘gentleman’s game,’” said Hoffman. “But it can be kind of rough too.” In fact, polo is the second most dangerous sport in the world, behind Formula One auto racing, explained local polo historian and game announcer Kirk Struggles to the group before the afternoon’s match. “Horses travel anywhere between 35 and 45 miles per hour, and the ball can reach speeds of up to 150 miles per hour,” Struggles said, adding that heavy Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian influences have forged the game’s 2,000-year history. The crowd also received a pamphlet, “A Spectator’s Guide to Polo,” which outlined the game’s rules and history.

Then the game began, with the Michigan-based Catamount team competing against the Morgan Creek team from Oswego, IL, for the Morgan Creek Cup title. Both teams featured professional players from Argentina and Mexico, among other countries.

During the relaxing afternoon with traditional Argentinian food, including asado (beef barbecue) and empanadas (stuffed pastries), alumni noted a change of pace in store for the GSB Alumni Club’s next program: a Chicago White Sox game.

Hassan S. Ali, '07

Photos: Alumni and guests take their seats for lunch and the polo match (top); An Argentinian Morgan Creek team member sizes up a shot (bottom).

Strawberry yields

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Friday afternoon Herbert Baum walked across the Rockefeller Chapel chancel to accept his PhD in economics—55 years after leaving the University “ABD,” or “all but dissertation.” At 79, Baum, AM’51, PhD’07, is the oldest person ever to earn a doctorate from the University. Perhaps more notably, three Nobel laureates sat on his dissertation committee: James Heckman; Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55; and Milton Friedman, AM’33.

Before returning to the U of C to discuss economics with Nobel laureates, Baum spent 33 years as CEO of Naturipe, a California company that sells strawberries. Elected twice as chair of the California Strawberry Commission, Baum helped transform the business: once available only locally and during a short season, California strawberries are now shipped all over the country, year-round. All the while, “I always had in mind that I was one of the many ABDs around,” Baum said in a phone interview. “I always wanted to finish my degree but needed an adequate dissertation. So that I could write about it intelligently, not as an abstraction, I accumulated boxes and boxes of data” about the strawberry business.

After retiring in 1991, Baum approached the University’s economics department about writing a dissertation on the strawberry industry. “They said it was certainly a suitable subject.” Baum set out to transform his boxes of data and years of experience into what became The Quest for the Perfect Strawberry, published by iUniverse in 2005. The book, he says, “analyzes the California strawberry industry from the point of view of pomology, horticulture, and marketing.” The new varieties developed by the University of California and new horticulture techniques created since 1972, Baum explains, contributed most to California’s dominance in the market.

“I did want to write a book anyway,” says Baum, but “I wrote it always having in mind that it might suffice as a dissertation.” He sent an advertisement for the book to James Heckman, who replied, “Please send copies.” So Baum and his wife packed up and moved from their home in Depoe Bay, Oregon, to Hyde Park for the summer, staying in the Regents Park apartment building. “We brought our desktop computer and laptop,” Baum says, because “we didn’t know what kind of changes we’d have to make.” On July 10 Baum appeared before the economics faculty at a public seminar. “They said, ‘Congratulations, Dr. Baum.’ It was pretty exciting.”

For now, Baum is still hard at work. Back in Depoe Bay, he teaches social studies and economics at a junior college. He's also inspired by Heckman’s call for investment in early-childhood education. “I’m trying to use his work in Oregon to emphasize early-childhood education there.” First, however, Baum is scheduled to meet with Milton Friedman in California.

Jenny Fisher, ’07


Photo: After the ceremony, Baum chats with a fourth-year Pritzker medical student and her grandparents.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

When it's over

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Photographer Laura Letinsky admits, “I never know when to throw something away”—like a vase of roses far past bloom. In her Monday evening talk “Free: By, For, and About Home,” at the Hyde Park Art Center, Letinsky explained that this quirk stems from a larger question: “When are things over?”

The body of photographs Letinsky showed along with her talk examined when things are over and what gets left behind. The photos included slides from her recent series, Morning and Melancholia, a study of leftover food and dishes as still life (displayed at the Renaissance Society in 2004). Letinsky, professor and chair of visual arts, also showed slides of her most recent work, photographs of apartments and homes taken soon after their owners moved out. “When you take everything out of a space, what gets left behind raises the question of what home is,” she told the audience of about 25.

The listeners, who had braved a downpour to attend, raised a number of their own questions. More than once an audience member asked how much Letinsky set up her photographs and how much she left to chance. “I want there to be a tension between the possibility of it being a real scene or set up,” she answered. “I don’t know when the contrivance starts and where the contrivance stops.”

Letinsky’s lecture was given in conjunction with the center’s exhibit Home of the Free. As her contribution, Letinsky had left a pile of magazines and free promotions on a table. They looked artistically arranged, yet at the same time they could have been dropped there without thought. Perhaps that was her intention.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photo: Letinsky's slide show (top) and her contribution to the exhibit (bottom).

The Song of Songs, set loose

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“Kiss me, make me drunk with your kisses,” Graham School of General Studies lecturer Stephen Hall reads to about 100 people in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater. The September 1 program, “Song of Songs: Eros and Allegory,” part of the Graham School’s “First Friday” lecture series, examines Song of Songs, a book and poem in the Hebrew Bible about two young lovers’ passionate relationship. “We will laugh, you and I, and count each kiss, better than wine,” Hall quotes the lyrics with eyebrows raised, before addressing the crowd with a smile. “What is this book doing in the Bible?”

Known in the Christian tradition as the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs presents a love story most commonly interpreted as an allegory to describe God’s love for Israel and the Christian church. But Hall asserts that apart from that meaning, the poem tells a more scandalous story about two unwed lovers, frustrated because social mores won’t allow them to pursue their relationship.

“We can read it and get lost in the drama, like a movie,” says Hall, “but there’s also this sense of voyeurism, that we’re watching this most private experience.” He dissects each verse, illustrating how the woman compares herself to a garden and nature. “My brothers were angry with me,” she tells her lover. “They made me guard the vineyards, but I have not guarded my own.” The man then describes the woman as “a hidden well”—Hall explains, “You want to lower your bucket in it”—and “a sealed spring”—Hall suggests, “You want to break the seal.” After several examples, he proclaims, “If this is not consummation, I don’t know what is.”

He expresses disappointment with how many of today’s churches frown upon the Song of Songs and do not commonly discuss the book. “I want to teach the Song of Songs in Sunday School,” says Hall, an evangelical Christian. “But my wife prohibits me.” Despite the book’s suggestiveness, he says, its basic message is still a testament to what drives believers to faith. “I think there’s something in the human soul that longs for the eternal, for the Divine,” Hall says. “Sometimes it is God pursuing us, and sometimes it is us pursuing God.”

Hassan S. Ali, '07

Photo: The Graham School's Stephen Hall gives his interpretation of the Song of Songs.

Divine madness

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In the basement of Swift Hall, the gods are duking it out. This week the prophet Muhammad is up against Chuang Tzu, a Chinese philosopher from the fourth century BC, considered by some scholars to be an early anarchist and known for his Daoist writings.

Grounds of Being, the Div School coffee shop, posts the results of its first-ever round-robin tournament on the blackboard behind the counter. Each week patrons vote with their tips, and whichever deity (broadly defined) brings in the most bucks moves on to the next round. As of Wednesday morning, Chuang Tzu was ahead $5.88 to $4. But there was a whole dollar in Muhammad’s tip jar that had yet to be counted in the day's-end tally.

“Some people were like, ‘You’re just doing it for the tips, aren’t you?’” says barista Karen Tye, ’07. In fact, she says, tips haven’t gone up noticeably—the contest is simply for fun. That said, some patrons take it seriously. The first week of August, fearing that Rastafarian Haile Selassie would prove more popular than J. K. Rowling, some Harry Potter fans accused the coffee shop of rigging the tournament, says Tye. Rowling won anyway.

Div School graduate students and coffee-shop workers Scot Ausborn and Brian Clites dreamed up the idea and handpicked the contestants. With quarter-finals beginning next week, Mormon prophet and angel Moroni, Michel Foucault, John Lennon, Pythagoras, Optimus Prime (an action figure from the Transformers), Poseidon, and Rowling remain in the running. Grounds of Being hopes to host another such tournament, but next time, says Tye, the shop will ask customers for the godly suggestions.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photos: It all comes down to the tip jar (top); gods battle behind the counter (bottom).

Spark of genius

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Friends of physicist James Cronin, SM’53, PhD’55, say it’s fitting that the Nobel laureate shares a September 29 birthday with U of C physics pioneer Enrico Fermi. More than 300 of Cronin’s friends, colleagues, and family filled Max Palevsky Cinema Friday as part of the Enrico Fermi Institute’s Cronin-fest, a weekend-long pre-celebration of the professor emeritus's 75th birthday.

Attendees came from all parts of the country to mark the occasion, which included seminars on Cronin’s groundbreaking contributions and ongoing work in physics.

While at Princeton University in 1964, Cronin and fellow physicist Val Fitch proved that a reaction run in reverse does not follow the path of the original reaction, suggesting that time has an effect on subatomic particle interactions. The experiment uncovered the CP violation, or a break in particle-antiparticle symmetry, and earned Cronin and Fitch the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“CP violations provide a window into the early history of the universe,” said Lincoln Wolfenstein, SB'43, SM'44, PhD'49, a former Carnegie Mellon particle physicist whose work has elaborated on Cronin’s discoveries, prior to the event. “There’s a hope we can understand why the universe has more particles than antiparticles,” he added. “Maybe CP violations are why we’re here.”

University of Pittsburgh professor emeritus Eugene Engels, Cronin’s first graduate student as a Princeton University professor from 1958 to 1971, addressed the audience first. “Jim was very interested in seeing what the spark chamber could do,” Engels said, adding that it was Cronin’s achievements that inspired him to pursue spark-chamber research, detecting electrically charged particles. Summarizing Cronin’s seminal 1964 experiment for the audience, Engels hailed the test as “the most perfect spark-chamber event created by the hand of man.” He then reflected on his early grad-student career, calling his working relationship with Cronin “the two most important years in my becoming a physicist.”

Cronin, who retired from Chicago in 1997 and is spokesman emeritus for the Pierre Auger Observatory, sat front-row and center, a rare turn on the other end of the lecture podium.

Hassan S. Ali, '07

Photos: Nobel laureate and birthday honoree James Cronin, left, joined by Cronin-fest host James Pilcher, director of the Enrico Fermi Institute (top); The program participants congregate in front of Max Palevsky Cinema for lecture registration, mingling, and refreshments (bottom).

To Egypt and back

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On a drizzly and chilly September Sunday, 15 people filtered into the Oriental Institute’s Breasted Hall, ready to be transported to ancient Egypt via the second episode of A&E’s documentary series The Great Pharaohs of Egypt (1997). Although viewing was held up as an OI worker struggled to unlock the projectionist closet door, he finally realized, “It goes in, not out!” and the show went on.

The documentary described the boy-king Pepe II, who ascended the throne at age six and ruled for close to 100 years, from 2278 to 2184 BC. Also featured was Hatshepsut, a royal family member who usurped the throne of her young co-regent Thutmose III, crowning herself pharaoh around 1473 BC. After her death, Thutmose III had her image rubbed from reliefs and had statues of her defaced, in what the narrator called “the ancient Egyptian equivalent of book burning.” Thutmose III's successor, Thutmose IV, was notable for something more positive: clearing away the sand from the Sphinx at Giza in 1400 BC.

As the Sphinx faded from the screen, the audience quickly cleared out. Among the mostly older men and women, a tiny girl in a red raincoat and pigtails emerged from the first row, holding her father’s hand—the U of C version of early education.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photos: Egypt-fans await the film in Breasted Hall (top); Thutmoses III fills the screen (bottom).

Flood of knowledge

Pouring off the bus parked outside Ida Noyes Hall came rain-coated women (and more than a sprinkling of men), headed for the Wednesday symposium kicking off the 58th annual Know Your Chicago program.

"We're very proud of all of you for swimming here today," Know Your Chicago chair Jean Meltzer welcomed the hundreds of participants who soon filled the Max Palevsky Cinema. Fortified by coffee and tea, their cellphones turned off and their notebooks pulled out, they sat ready for three morning lectures, a break for lunch, and two afternoon talks. Each presentation introduced one of five day-long tours of local venues (from a Hindu temple to a children's advocacy center) scheduled for September or October. Because each tour (repeated on consecutive days) is limited to approximately 120 people, everyone who registers for the introductory symposium enters a lottery to earn spots on one or more tours.

The day's first presenter was Bryan Samuels, AM’93, whose talk, "DCFS 101: Foster Kids are Our Kids Too," provided background for "Children at Risk: Safe Havens," a tour of social-service agencies with which the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) works. Samuels has directed the DCFS since 2003—the average tenure for a child-services director in the United States, he told the group, is just 18 months. Continuity is also an issue, of course, for kids in substitute care, a population that this year includes 16,700 Illinois children 18 or younger and another 1,500 youth between the ages of 19 and 21. That’s down from 51,000 in 1997, when the DCFS caseworker-to-child ratio was 50:1; today it’s 14:1.

Taking a “kid-based focus” and emphasizing its role “as surrogate parents,” Samuels said, DCFS works to “build bridges for these young people back to the community, so that they have a support system when they leave us.”

Begun in 1948 by Chicago civic leader Mary Ward Wolkonsky as a lecture series to encourage more women to participate in the city's life, Know Your Chicago is now sponsored by the University's Graham School of General Studies and organized by a 50-woman volunteer committee. Planning begins "at the end of the tour season," said vice chair Jean Berghoff, "when we evaluate the past year, brainstorm ideas, list them all, and vote." The aim "is an eclectic mix—we try not to have all education, all social service, or all city politics." The 2006 season is a case in point, with "Chicago Museums: Relevant and Reinvented," "Mystical, Magical India," Rejuvenating the Brain," and "Argonne: Science for Today and Tomorrow" filling the schedule—and the tour buses.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Jean Meltzer welcomes old friends and new faces to the 2006 Know Your Chicago; Terese Zimmer, wife of University President Robert Zimmer, is Know Your Chicago's newest member; DCFS's Bryan Samuels, AM'93, sees opportunities in the substitute-care numbers.

Photos by Hassan Ali, ’07.

Reinventing the wheels

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Orientation Week 2006 kicked off early Saturday morning with every first-year’s rite of passage: moving in. As much an endurance test for parents as for students, the process of moving into residence halls has been typically marked by a frenzied scene of bewildered freshmen, outnumbered orientation staff members, and a long line of cars and trucks waiting to be unloaded. And yet the scene at Shoreland Hall looked nothing as expected.

“This was the fastest move-in ever,” said house orientation aide Mitcho Erlewine, ’07, during one of the many lulls in front of Shoreland. “Every year we try to tweak things that aren’t working,” added Paul Ryer, assistant director of housing, who helped supervise the Shoreland operation. With Class of 2010 numbers comparable to recent years, Ryer attributed the improvements to smarter scheduling and better tools. Saturday’s move-in started an hour earlier at 7 a.m., and the orientation staff introduced so-called “purge bins,” large, wheeled, bright-orange, plastic containers to transport a student’s belongings to his or her dorm room.

Whereas orientation aides previously steered small, rickety shopping carts that required several trips to and from the car, the student helpers could now unload an entire minivan’s worth of gear into a single purge bin, which “improved things tremendously,” according to Ryer. In addition, because the purge bins were too big to fit inside the rooms, movers were quicker to shift items out of the hallways and into their rooms.

The efficiency relieved the orientation staff, who had been unsure if the new measures would help or hurt matters. “I was here from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. last year, unloading the entire time,” said orientation aide Andy Eisenberg, ’08, of Shoreland’s Fallers House. “But now I’ve been on a break for an hour and a half.” He added, “We haven’t even had a U-Haul truck yet.”

Hassan S. Ali, ’07

Photos: Orientation aides unload a first-year's car with the help of new "purge bins" (top); The Shoreland lobby stands clear of long lines and crowds waiting to move in (bottom).

Net gains and losses

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The chants and cheers resonating from Ratner Athletics Center’s Competition Gymnasium this weekend signaled the start of the inaugural Gargoyle Classic volleyball tournament. The University of Chicago hosted Lake Forest College, North Park University, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, Illinois College, University of Dubuque, Defiance College, Concordia University, and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges for two days of intense competition in the first four Maroon home games this season.

The Maroons (2-12) faced Concordia (3-2) and Wisconsin-Eau Claire (9-1) on Friday in front of about 50 cheering fans, some chanting “C-H-I-C-A-G-O” from the stands, and others donning T-shirts that read “Bleed Maroon.” Despite leading performances by the Maroons’ Diandra Bucciarelli, ’10, and Erin O’Neill, ’08, both Concordia and UW–Eau Claire defeated Chicago in three games.

Saturday morning was equally tough for the Maroons, who lost to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (5-3) after several close games. But Chicago turned matters around against its final opponent, defeating Illinois College in three games and snapping the Maroons’ seven-match losing streak. Middle hitter Koryn Kendall, ’08, marked a season high of 15 kills to lead the Maroons to a 1–3 record for the weekend.

With the Gargoyle Classic behind them, first-year players such as Bucciarelli said they had just one more challenge to take on: Orientation Week.

Hassan S. Ali, '07

Photos: First–year Diandra Bucciarelli takes to the air for a return shot against University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire (top); The team celebrates after third-year Erin O'Neill (No. 8) scores a critical point (bottom).

Unexpected echoes

After a month of pouring concrete and waiting for the forms to set, Dutch artist Avery Preesman opened his exhibit with a reception at the Renaissance Society last Sunday. Dozens of black-clad guests examined the series W68/Westpunt 68 (2000–06), a group of photographs crudely painted over with thick black ink, and circumnavigated Staketsel Floor Sculpture (2006), a massive, concrete-filled installation of unfinished plywood boards, before moving on to other installations and three silver paintings with raised designs.

The geometric angles of the floor-sculpture plywood mirrored the lines in the painted-over photographs and the angular projections of Choir (2006), a sand-cement sculpture extending across the windows. The lines of the artwork even seemed to reflect the scaffolding holding up the gallery’s lights. In a public talk with curator Hamza Walker, AB'88, Preesman admitted the motif was unintentional. “All these works function for myself as autonomous,” he said, but “for me that is something to see now, that this thing echoes.”

Resisting questioners who described his sculptures as "neutral toned," Preesman made a case for the suggestive quality of gray, arguing that "the color of concrete expresses something different than the weight." As to whether he was truly a painter or a sculptor, Preesman replied, "you should have your own rules, otherwise you cannot conceive anything."

Jenny Fisher, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Choir extends from the windows above Staketsel Floor Sculpture; a closeup of Staketsel Floor Sculplture; Preesman (left) and Walker (right) discuss the show.

You can go home again

Raisin, Court Theatre's revival of the 1973 Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, has a Hyde Park backstory. But along with a local angle, Raisin—which runs through October 22—has universal appeal.

Hansberry's plot centers on what happens when a black working-class family buys a house in a restricted neighborhood. The story is semiautobiographical: in 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of Hansberry's father and against a University-supported neighborhood association, opening up more than 300 properties in the Woodlawn neighborhood to African Americans.

The themes are heavy but the mood, under Charles Newell's direction, is joyous. A jazz band plays on an onstage platform, and the actors all wait for their cues while sitting onstage—half audience, half gospel witnesses.

Court's paying audience, meanwhile, is witness to some powerful performances, including one that offers another homecoming of sorts: Ernestine Jackson, who plays family matriarch Lena Younger, appeared in the original Broadway cast, playing Lena's daughter-in-law Ruth.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Ernestine Jackson, who was nominated for a Tony for her performance in the original Broadway production, as Lena "Mama" Younger; Malkia Stampley as Beneatha, David St. Louis as Walter Lee, and Harriet Nzinga Plumpp as Ruth; The cast of Raisin.

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Supply and demand

The quads filled up Monday for the first day of classes as students zigzagged across the paths, coffee cups and laptops in hand. In the University bookstore, student after student asked, “Is this the line?” as their eyes followed a queue that stretched through the bookshelves, past the calendars, and halfway up the stairs.

For the ever-popular Introduction to Microeconomics, more than 160 students crammed the first-floor lecture hall in Cummings, some sitting on the stairs. First-year Natalie Doss, who was hoping to pink-slip into the class, said simply finding the building had been an ordeal. Everyone she asked for directions said, “Oh, you’re totally in the wrong place,” Doss said, then pointed her to a different corner of campus. Finally, someone said, “It’s in the hospital,” where Doss eventually got the right directions.

Once she arrived, Doss faced a second trial. Economics senior lecturer Allen Sanderson asked the class how he should fill the 20 remaining spots in the course, capped at 120. Students suggested using seniority, an exam, or seriousness about economics as criteria for entry. Sanderson jokingly added violence (throwing 20 chips on the floor and letting students duke it out) and divine intervention to the list. “I could pass the list to Alison Boden, dean of the chapel, and say, ‘Here are the 20 names—who does He want in?’” In the end, Sanderson said he would take those students who had e-mailed him beforehand. Doss thought she would make the cut.

Jenny Fisher, ’07

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Photos (left to right): Students avoid construction between Rosenwald and Swift, make their way to Cobb, and start on homework already in Regenstein Library.

Flower power

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At the first Divinity School Wednesday lunch of the academic year, the Field Museum's William C. Burger wowed this week's crowd with heroic tales of flowers. Yes, said the animated, white-bearded curator emeritus in the Field's Department of Botany, flowering plants have changed the world. Without nice-looking and -smelling flowers, insects wouldn't be attracted to and pollinate them, creating the extremely diverse set of plants that make up, say, rainforests.

Even primate evolution wouldn't have occurred the same way without flowering plants. Primates, originally insectivores, climbed trees to eat the bugs gathered near the fruits and flowers, developing long limbs to reach their prey. Over time, as primates began eating fruits, bending wrists and fingers evolved to examine the food, and the monkeys' eyes moved to the front of their heads for better three-dimensional vision as they jumped the trees. The resulting flatter face meant monekys couldn't see behind them to ward off predators, so they lived in small groups and looked after each other.

Another unsuspecting flowering plant, grass, brought primates out of the forest. First appearing 25 million years ago in South America, grasslands expanded as Earth dried and cooled. Eventually, Burger said, summarizing millions of years in a sentence, "one of the apes got up on its hind feet and moved to the savannah," where herbivores grazed. Here primates found beef. Eating meat literally beefed up mother's milk with proteins and nutrients that helped infant brains grow bigger. So grasslands, he said, "allowed us to become who we are."

Ending on a not-so-high note from his book—Flowers: How They Changed the World (Promethius Books, 2006)—Burger warned of hazards to flowers and the rest of the earth. "There are 6 billion people on the planet, and no one's talking about pulling the brakes," he said. Such overpopulation, he writes, strains water resources, agricultural soil, urban environments, and declining fisheries; and more than half the human population is malnourished. "Clearly, human beings are not living in sustainable harmony with the biosphere that supports them."

A.B.P.

Photos: Burger in Swift Hall (top); An amateur photographer, Burger shot this beetle visiting a wild geranium (courtesy Prometheus Books).

On human rights

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“They told them, ‘You have to renounce your previous ideology,’ and because they weren’t willing to renounce it, they were executed.”

At International House Thursday, Iranian political dissident Akbar Ganji described his government's role in killing writers and dissidents in 1998, as he did in two books on the subject, The Dungeon of Ghosts and The Red Eminence and the Gray Eminence. Before an audience of about 300, Ganji recalled being jailed and tortured for speaking out about that abuse. Law professor Martha Nussbaum served as moderator, questioning him on human rights, Iran’s evolution toward democracy, the status of women, and the U.S.-Iran relationship.

“I should not have to suffer, and that is what brings me rights,” said Ganji, who embarked on a speaking tour of the West after he was released from prison in March. Since all humans know what it means to suffer, he argued, nations could agree on a right to be free from suffering. “If we go with this issue of suffering, could we justify the complete list of rights women are claiming?” asked Nussbaum. Ganji explained that “suffering” goes beyond physical pain, including mental anguish as well—something a woman could suffer as much as a man if her political and social rights are restricted. “Of course I will suffer when my rights are not equal to others,” he said.

Reflecting on Iran’s history, Ganji said that the last thing the country needs is another revolution. Civil disobedience is the best route to democracy, he said—a theory he put into practice in 2005 with a month-long hunger strike while in prison. What Iran needs now, Ganji says, is to unite the women’s, labor, youth, and student movements. “Everybody in some way is actually fighting this regime. And we’re trying to harmonize this movement.”

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photo: Nussbaum (far left) listens to Ganji (second from left) with the help of two translators.

Timber!

Heavy rain, high winds, and the occasional hailstone brought down trees and power lines across Chicago Monday night. Generated by what WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling described as a perfect “atmospheric recipe,” the thunderstorms, accompanied by 65-mph wind gusts, knocked out electricity for 320,000 ComEd customers, the Chicago Tribune reported, and as of Wednesday morning 70,000 of them remained without power.

Also hit: Chicago’s campus, where the main quads sustained the greatest damage. Students on their way to class Tuesday dodged upturned trees, broken street lamps, and fallen branches. At Ellis Avenue and 56th Street, one tree ripped in half, its canopy landing across the street from its trunk. Rockefeller Chapel also lost a few large trees, as did Ida Noyes, the Law School, and Burton-Judson Courts. “I don’t believe there’s any part of campus that has not suffered some wind damage,” says Bob Tiberg, operations and maintenance director for the University’s Facilities Services. Still working to clear away the mess—a task that will stretch into next week—his office hasn’t yet taken a precise count downed trees, but Tiberg predicts scores were lost, including some left standing but now unbalanced. “It’s staggering.”

While a few campus buildings lost power during the storm, flooding amounted to only damp basements and clogged storm drains. But Facilities Services will be dealing with lost and damaged trees—by far the biggest casualty—for some time, Tiberg says. Replanting them presents a dilemma. “You can’t replace an 80-year-old tree with an 80-year-old tree. We’ll have to figure something out for that.”

L.G.

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Row 1 photos (left to right): A student climbs over a fallen tree near Ryerson; Most of this tree fell across Ellis Avenue near the tennis courts; Near Swift on the main quad, this tree was completely uprooted.

Row 2 photos (left to right): A main-quads tree took a lamppost top down with it; Branches form a fork near Swift; Tree-removal crews work near Harper quad.

Photos by Dan Dry.

’Ud to Palestine

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“Then, of course, I was becoming a man,” said Palestinian musician Issa Boulos, recounting a teenage romance. “So I needed to start talking politics—because that’s what Palestinian men do.” The approach, said Boulos, director of the University’s Middle East Music Ensemble, failed to win over the young woman, but it did inspire a song, which he played at Thursday’s Noontime Concert Series in Fulton Recital Hall. Titled “Being Peace: A Palestinian Memoir,” the 45-minute program included five compositions by Boulos, all strummed on an ’ud (or “oud”), a pear-shaped traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument. As he played, colorful abstract paintings and black-and-white photographs of Palestinian children flashed across a large projector screen.

Seated on the dimly lit stage, Boulos shared stories of his life in the Middle East, including two years in the mountains being “hunted by the Israelis”; his arrest; and time in prison. “How can you maintain peace in the absence of justice?” he asked the audience of 50 before launching into a melancholy melody. Boulos capped off the concert with a brief instrumental, joking it would help “calm you down—to calm myself actually.”

B.E.O.

Photos: Issa Boulos plays the 'ud at Fulton Recital Hall (top); Photos and paintings flashed on the screen (bottom).

Research gold mine

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In the past few years, academic research has staged a quiet revolution. Gone are the days when students searched databases for journal references, found the publications in the stacks, and photocopied the corresponding pages. Now, with a single click of a "Find It!" button, researchers can view the full text of many journal articles online. The U of C library wants to show users how.

Friday afternoon reference librarian Rebecca Starkey led a workshop on navigating the quickest routes to such full-text articles. Six students (mostly graduate) sat at the low-screened Sony Vaio computers in Regenstein 153, clicking along as she gave directions and warnings. Humanities and history journals, for example, may be harder to find than science ones. Some newspapers and journals limit their online offerings to specific date ranges. Texts may show up only in certain formats—HTML, PDF, with graphics or without. And searching Google is not a researcher's best bet. "Most full texts are available only through subscriptions," Starkey said, "where libraries or other institutions pay fees."

To find an article on immigrants in Chicago, Starkey began at the library's home page, found "Electronic Resources" and clicked on "Database Finder." In the "Sociological Abstracts" advanced search, she typed in her keywords and came up with a search yielding three pages of articles. Starkey wanted No. 8: "Encountering the Color Line in the Everyday: Italians in Interwar Chicago," by Gugielmo, Thomas A. Sure enough, at the end of the citation was the desired "Find It!" button, which in turn supplied several online options. She clicked on "Academic Search Premier," which offered a PDF—jackpot. That format, Starkey explained, shows the article exactly as it appeared in print, including charts and images where applicable.

She then went through other ways to find full texts, including using the library's "E-Journals" list (fast and easy to search but hard to browse because so many titles begin "Journal of..."), the "Library Catalogs" list, and even "Books and Texts." The basic message: if a user knows where to look and keeps on clicking, more likely than not she'll find what she needs.

A.B.P.

Photo: Rebecca Starkey gives a heads-up on full-text searches.

Economics—minus the math

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“Wait a minute, didn’t you get a 2 on the calculus AP exam?” asked Freakonomics author Steven Levitt’s high-school math teacher at the U of C economics professor’s 20-year high-school reunion. In a Monday night talk at the Max Palevsky dorms, Levitt recounted several stories about his trouble grasping math concepts. His humor, along with tales of questions that he and other “rogue economists” hope to answer, captivated the largely undergraduate audience—at least those who managed to squeeze their way into the small auditorium to see the economist who studies, in his own words, “things that other economists don’t.”

Stories about Levitt’s norm-breaking colleagues took up much of the lecture. He cited John List, a Chicago colleague who “invalidated the life’s work” of economists who, using a lab experiment called the “dictator game,” believed they were finding evidence of human altruism. In the game, a person is given a sum of money and dictates whether or not to give part of the money to a stranger. The researchers found that most subjects would split the money with the stranger, but List discovered that, because it was played in a laboratory setting, the game didn't actually prove that people are altruistic; rather it demonstrated that they wanted to seem altruistic to the person in the white lab coat. “Just by thinking about the question,” Levitt said, List showed that economists who thought they were finding altruism “missed the boat.”

Levitt took more than 45 minutes of audience questions, which ranged from “What are you working on now?” to “What is the one piece of advice you have for somebody just starting in economics?” To the former, Levitt played close to his chest but gave a hint: are some doctors better than others, and what makes them better? To the latter, he again invoked his antimathematical past, urging students to demand introductory classes in which they are first taught the basics of economics to supplement the College’s math-heavy economics curriculum.

—Ruthie Kott

Photos: Students peer through the dorm screen to get a glimpse (top); Freakonomics author Steve Levitt (Photo by Dan Dry).

Looking for Love

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More than 300 people, mostly undergraduates, crowded into the Ida Noyes Cloister Club Thursday in hopes of finding out what love is. “Regardless of what they say about the U of C, we have a lot of love here,” began Nicole Baran, ’09, who organized the Chicago Society symposium featuring professors Martha McClintock, James Redfield, AB’54, PhD’61, Bert Cohler, AB’61, and moderator David Orlinsky, AB’54, PhD’62. “Or we’re looking for it.”

So what happens when you fall head over heels? McClintock, a psychology professor, described her research on MHC proteins, which vary from one individual to another and help the immune system distinguish the body’s cells from foreign ones. When McClintock took a set of T-shirts from male University students to female members of an isolated religious community, she found that they could detect tiny differences in the protein makeup, tending to prefer the smell of men with MHC proteins compatible with their own. “It was a sense of pleasantness,” McClintock said. “It just sort of made you want to go mmmmmm.” The compound in men’s smell, McClintock said, improves positive mood and decreases negative mood, contributing to that feeling of trust important to love.

Like McClintock, classics professor and Plato expert Redfield turned to his academic background for answers. In his 15-minute speech, “The Socratic Notion of Love: Sex as a Poor Substitute for Philosophy,” Redfield sketched out the Greek idea of eros, “a cosmic force” different from filia, which means friendship or kinship. Eros, or falling in love, “sort of hits you like hitting the pavement,” said Redfield. According to Plato, falling in love means “you see the god in a person” because you idealize him or her. But eros doesn’t last. “A few years ago,” quipped Redfield, “a woman said, ‘I adore you,’ and I said, ‘You’ll grow out of it.’”

Psychologist Cohler presented Freud’s theory of love. “In many ways, you love only as you love your mother,” Cohler said, explaining that your mother, the first person you love, becomes your lifelong model for love. It might not even be a person that you love, according to object-relations theory. “It could be an object. You could fall in love with shoes.” Orlinsky, a social scientist, joked, “If they smell right.”

Following the discussion, students lined up to ask questions. Overwhelmingly, they wondered whether knowing how love works would spoil it. “Does knowing the search process destroy the magic?” asked the first student in line. “Is there space for mystery?” asked another. The professors resoundingly answered that knowledge doesn’t spoil love. As Cohler put it, “Knowing the basis of love frees you to love more freely.”

Jenny Fisher, ’07

Photo: Students listen to Professor Cohler.

Get right with God

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Every person in the world, Chicago social psychologist Nicholas Epley said, is a mind-reader. Not that people are psychics or phrenologists or parlor magicians, but they cannot help trying to peer into each other’s heads: What does one friend really think of another? Did she marry him for love or for money? Was the crime premeditated? Did the North Koreans really test a nuclear weapon? What is the boss going to say next? “And most important,” Epley said to appreciative laughter from last Wednesday’s lunchtime crowd at the Divinity School, “do they think we’re hot or not?”

Yet the data show that such mind-reading isn’t nearly as reliable as people imagine. Rarely do they guess right, in large part because of egocentrism: people use their own thoughts, feelings, and knowledge to intuit those of others. “It works out disastrously,” said Epley, a Graduate School of Business assistant professor. “We overestimate the prevalence of our own beliefs in the world.”

When it comes to estimating the prevalence of their beliefs in the otherworld, people behave the same way, Epley said. Egocentrism becomes particularly difficult to resist when religion is involved. Flipping through a digital slideshow of survey results, he told the group he’d found a “huge” correlation between respondents’ personal beliefs about political issues—abortion, the Iraq war, affirmative action, and legalizing marijuana—and the beliefs they ascribed to God. People usually answered that God’s beliefs resembled their own, only more so. “And God is more extreme if your beliefs are more extreme,” he said. The pattern held true across religious and demographic categories, and it even held when Epley and fellow researchers manipulated respondents’ beliefs. As people changed their own opinions, they adjusted God’s accordingly. Epley thinks he knows why the correlation is so strong: “If you’re out of step with other Americans, your neighbor, or even your parents, it’s not such a big deal. But if you’re out of step with God, that is a very big deal.”

L.G.

Photo: Epley showed the Div School group a survey-results slideshow.

Bike shop gears up

Artists, volunteers, and bike enthusiasts crowded into Blackstone Bicycle Works for its grand opening Saturday, wheeling bicycles and carrying food. A man in a yellow jersey, black tights, and bike shoes praised the guacamole on his plate, while a woman pushed her chocolate cake on willing guests, saying, "It's so good I made two."

The bike shop is a project of the Experimental Station, housed in an unassuming brick building behind sprawling community gardens at 61st and Blackstone. Founder and director Dan Peterman, MFA'86, calls the nonprofit station "an incubator for small enterprise, a venue and workplace for the arts, [and] a laboratory of urban ecology and alternative education." Reopened after a 2001 fire, Blackstone Bicycle Works offers adult classes and employs local kids who earn bicycles, parts, and accessories by doing bike repair and maintenance for shop customers.

Ready for the kids, workbenches lined the shop's walls, fitted with tools in their outlined spots. Light streaming through colored glass disks in the plywood walls illuminated a mural depicting pre-fire youth-program participants, now in their 20s. Program director Christopher Wallace is still enlisting participants from nearby schools like William H. Ray and Andrew Carnegie elementary schools. Also at the opening was bike shop summer intern Sofia Narvaez-Gete, '07, who said she's excited to see how the program turns out. "I want to work in the shop or at least volunteer during the school year because I love the place and people, and I worked so much on getting the place ready for when the kids come that I want to be able to see the fruit of my labor."

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Experimental Station founder Dan Peterman (far right) chats with guests; a closeup of the mural depicting pre-fire youth-program participants; a boy examines the tool benches.

The brink of destruction

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The Philippines, Indonesia, and the U.S. are just three of nine countries Jared Diamond believes are in imminent danger. “I couldn’t tell you what society will collapse next,” Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the audience gathered in the SSA lobby at Thursday’s Helen Harris Perlman Lecture, but those countries “are all sources of concern.”

Diamond touched on a number of vanished societies, including Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, the Mayans, and the American Southwest’s Anasazi, whose ancient Pueblo dwellings were the world’s tallest structures until Chicago’s steel-framed skyscrapers rose in the late 1800s. Human environmental mismanagement, climate change, war, trade-partner dependence, and resulting inept institutional responses, he explained, can all induce societal disintegration.

“What do you think the person to chop down the last tree on Easter Island said?” asked Diamond, recounting a question he poses to his undergraduate classes. Typical responses—reflecting contemporary debates—range from “there will be a new alternative technology that will develop to replace the need for trees” to “it’s my property, leave me alone” to “all this environmental concern…You’re all fear mongers.” Like the Easter Islanders, he said, American society cannot afford to sweep problems of limited environmental resources under the rug.

So why do some societies deal with their issues while others do not? “If the elite suffer,” Diamond said, “the problems are solved.” He cited the Netherlands, one-third of which lies below sea level and, unlike the worst hit areas of New Orleans, is inhabited by both rich and poor. After a 1953 flood killed more than 1,800 people, the Dutch responded. Today, he said, the Netherlands has one of the world’s highest percentages of individuals involved in environmental organizations.

B.E.O.

Photo: Diamond called himself a "cautious optimist" at the SSA.

Photo by L.G.

Robie House: haunted?

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“There are no devils here, but there are shadows,” proclaimed a Robie House tour guide, playing the role of Lora Robie (the wife of the house’s first owner, Frederick Robie) during Saturday night’s “Secrets and Shadows of Robie House" tour. Just in time for Halloween, the seasonal event promised to show a different side of the Robie House, giving a glimpse into the mysteries, myths, and legends surrounding the house that Frank Lloyd Wright built between 1908 to 1910.

Orange lights glowing in the upstairs windows added to the eerie ambiance of the nighttime tour. At 7 pm, a motley crew of about 20 students, children, and adults gathered outside, where the first guide, Dwayne, emerged from the shadows to lead the group around the outside of the house. Approaching the front porch (where the doors have no external knobs), he pointed out that one of the mysteries of the Robie House is simply “how to get in.” Once Dwayne led the group to an entryway tucked away on the side of the house, different guides (clad entirely in black) escorted everyone from room to room, each with a unique story. In the children’s playroom, the group watched a slide show of the three families who lived in the house and heard about the death of Frederick Robie’s debt-ridden father George who, on his deathbed, demanded that his son pay back every dollar George owed. The tale told in the guest bedroom explained second owner David Lee Taylor’s death from a gruesome kidney disease in October 1912, only 10 months after moving in. The living room, meanwhile, held the “casket” of Chicago graduate Marsha Wilber, the 25-year-old daughter of Marshall and Isadora Wilber, the third and final family to occupy the house. The Wilbers abandoned the Robie House in 1926.

No ghosts appeared to tour-goers, but, as one guide admitted, “it does feel like there are other presences in the house.” Workers restoring the place have heard footsteps coming down hallways and doors closing unexpectedly when only one person was inside, and there have even been accounts of a woman’s faint image in thresholds and doorways. The same guide later said that, whether or not one believes in ghost stories, the truth of these rumors is “for you to decide.”


Ruthie Kott

Photos: Robie House guide speaking to the tour group (top); the Robie House at night (bottom).

Poetry of the absurd

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It is scribbled along the body
Impossible even to say a word

An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground
It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand

Yet not, not marks inside a box
For example, this is a mirror box

Spinoza designed such a box
And called it the eighth sky . . .

Visiting poet Michael Palmer began his reading Monday night with the poem “Eighth Sky,” explaining that he wrote it in memory of French writer and painter Max Jacob, who died in a Nazi deportation camp. Most of the poems Palmer read to the audience of about 150 in the Social Sciences building were dedicated to writers who had inspired him, and Palmer followed “Eighth Sky” with “SB,” for playwright Samuel Beckett, then read an untitled poem dedicated to contemporary poet David Shapiro that revealed Palmer's philosophical bent. "What is the relation of the painting to its title?” asked one verse. “The painting bears no relation to its title,” responded the next.

“There are plenty of seats,” Palmer said to students tiptoeing into the auditorium, before continuing with a selection from his latest book, Company of Moths, (2005). Reading the poem “Untitled, October 22nd,” Palmer began, “Eva Braun advised me in a dream to always be kind to dogs,” a line that made the audience chuckle. “So I summoned my dog, gnarly dog." Once he finished reading the poem, Palmer incited more laughter, explaining, “I ran into trouble when my French translator was trying to translate gnarly.”

Palmer, who will give a lecture Wednesday on his 30-year collaboration with the San Francisco–based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, finished the reading with recent and unpublished poems reflecting his sense of humor and taste for the absurd. After seeing Kane Kwei’s sculpture, “Coffin in the shape of a Cocoa Pod,” at San Francisco’s de Young art museum, Palmer wrote a poem beginning, “Bury me in a cocoa pod. It’s time," and going on with requests to be buried in a Mercedes-Benz, a pot of India ink, a cuckoo clock, and more. Before his listeners lined up for cookies, cheese, and wine, Palmer closed with another poem whose last line read, “Poem, don’t be so strange.”

Jenny Fisher, '07


Photo: Poet Michael Palmer reads his work.

Presidential celebration

It’s official. At a Friday morning convocation in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, mathematician Robert J. Zimmer was formally installed as the 13th president of the University.

The 487th convocation, noted University Marshal Lorna P. Straus, SM’60, PhD’62, followed a pattern established by Chicago’s first president, William Rainey Harper: the inauguration was an occasion to grant degrees, to look forward to “the opportunities and necessities of the future," and to come together as one community.

Trustees, faculty, alumni, and delegates from other educational institutions and societies who filled the chapel, as well as community members who viewed the ceremony by video or Webcast, heard the new president describe an institution with an essential value: “a singular focus on inquiry.”

After naming some of the many tasks that go with the office, Zimmer put the to-do list into personal and institutional perspective: “My core responsibility as the president of the University of Chicago” is to ensure that the University realizes its fundamental principles “in the most enduring way.” Because “enduring values should not be confused with enduring answers,” Zimmer urged “boldness, imagination, and discipline,” as the institution strives to "recognize and embrace change" in asking and answering the questions of the day.

In a day that stressed the spirit of inquiry and the community of academic tradition, seven distinguished scholars—including stem-cell investigator, Allan Spradling, AB’71—were awarded honorary degrees; representatives of Chicago's faculty, students, and alumni welcomed the president; and the chapel echoed Brahms's Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80: "Vivat academia."

M.R.Y.

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Scenes from an inauguration: President Robert Zimmer's family and friends greet him as the convocation procession goes by; Rockefeller Chapel fills with people and pageantry; from the inaugural address: "It is not that our predecessors discovered the right shape of the University once and for all."

Photos by Dan Dry

Play pitch

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“Committee members, I totally have cake,” announced a fellow University Theater (UT) member as she breezed into the Frances X. Kinahan Third Floor Theater 10 a.m. Saturday. Treats in hand, she settled in with the rest of the eight-person governing group, UT director Heidi Coleman, and a dozen other UT-ers to hear six student directors pitch shows for winter quarter. Contenders included an eight-women dance show called The Lonely Ones; Frank McGuinness’s graveyard drama Carthaginians; the 1960s Joe Orton farce What the Butler Saw; a student-written piece, but I cd only whisper, exploring a character from Ntozake Shange’s play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf; classic musical The Fantasticks; and Sylvia, a comedy about a man and his beloved dog.

The culmination of an intense selection process—students submitted lengthy proposals before Saturday’s public presentation—the meeting gave directors a last chance to sell their ideas and answer questions. “Seven people living in a graveyard—pretty nifty,” said fourth-year Phoebe Duncan, planning to stage Carthaginians as part of her BA paper. “What is really important about this piece, for you and the UT community?” Coleman asked the directors, noting that she did not want the “intellectual” answer. “The world can burn you,” responded Fantasticks hopeful Daniel Sefik, “and this play is sincere.” What the Butler Saw submitter Will Fulton had a different goal: “to rip the establishment a new one for being the way it is.”

After 45 minutes of presentations, the committee retired—with its cake—to an undisclosed location to make decisions. And the winners of winter stage slots, posted online Saturday evening, were dancer Kate Blomquist (The Lonely Ones), Duncan (Carthaginians), and student playwright Kristiana Colón (but i cd only whisper).

B.E.O.

Photo: The Francis X. Kinahan Third Floor Theater, quiet before UT members arrived Saturday morning.

Dressed to sell

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Although the University Bookstore was more whimsical than scary Tuesday, its Halloween flavor was clear. Employees took part in the store's costume contest, also open to customers. At the first-floor checkout counter, clerk Mary Cage dressed as a pumpkin, while assistant manager Heather Prescott sported Pippi Longstocking braids. Upstairs in the textbook department, violent royal death was the theme: Michele Joyce donned a gown as Ann Boleyn, post-beheading, while Ana Cabezas was Marie Antoinette—also with some red marks around her throat.

"The best part is trying to do returns with a serious face," said Cabezas, who spearheaded the contest. Throughout the day, as customers in Halloween costumes entered the store, employees took Polaroids, which they posted on a bulletin board. Participating customers received a free tall drink at the coffee shop, and the contest winner, chosen by store managers, would receive a $25 gift certificate.

By Wednesday morning the managers had narrowed their favorites to three people, finally choosing graduate student Jack Stockert, AB'05, covered in silver as the Vince Lombardi Super Bowl Trophy. The back of his shirt declared "Bears 2006."

A.B.P.

Photos: Foxy Cleopatra from Austin Powers in Goldmember, Pippi Longstocking, and Marie Antoinette worked in the bookstore Tuesday (top); Polaroids of costumed customers adorned the bulletin board (bottom).

Welcome to Bollywood

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Rochona Majumdar, PhD’03, assistant professor of South Asian languages and civilizations, was pleasantly surprised at the audience who came to hear her Bollywood lecture during the University’s 26th annual Humanities Day last Saturday. “We didn’t know how many had signed up until today,” Majumdar said, apologizing for a shortage of handouts as more than 30 people filed into the Stuart Hall classroom. When she asked if anyone had seen a Bollywood film—a movie produced by India’s Mumbai-based, Hindi-language industry—nearly every hand went up. Majumdar grinned. “Wonderful.”

One of 33 lectures, readings, discussions, tours, and performances offered during Humanities Day, Majumdar’s presentation centered on Bollywood cinema’s song-and-dance sequences, present in nearly every movie the industry produces. An “integral feature” that “turns the mirror back on society,” she said, the “song texts bear the imprint” of social change in India since its 1947 independence. One such change, she said, was the “death of the street” as an open, communal space for Indian people. Showing a song clip from the film Shree 420 (1955), in which the hero is a Charlie Chaplinesque tramp who comes to Mumbai to seek his fortune, Majumdar pointed out, “Here we see the nation comes alive in the street, and the street is the people.” By the 2002 release of Company, a gritty underworld drama, “the street has become a site of strife,” Majumdar said, and it no longer offers a haven for ordinary Indians. “Money for votes, a fraud in a dhoti, a wounded heart: / Meaning your friend fawns on you to your face, then stabs you from behind. / It’s all dirty, but that’s the business,” sing the characters in the Company song “Sab Ganda Hai.”

Comprising the most widely known—although not the only—segment of Indian cinema, Bollywood films today break down into three categories, Majumdar said. First are those like last year’s Bride and Prejudice, produced for Indian expats across the globe and incorporating a huge cast and numerous weddings into stories about happy, wealthy families. Gangster movies like Company, meanwhile, target a domestic audience and offer a grim, often cynical picture of India’s “global economy of crime.” Third—and fewest—are those that Majumdar called “alternate films”—movies that take on issues such as AIDS, sexual harassment, dual-income families, and women’s role in society. “These are the films I find most hopeful,” Majumdar said. “They talk about problems rarely addressed elsewhere.”

L.G.

Photos: As the Chaplinesque tramp in Shree 420, Raj Kapoor found a haven on Mumbai's open, communal streets (top); the 1955 movie poster for Shree 420 (bottom).

Sex, religion, and the Constitution

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Standing beneath the carved angels in Swift Hall’s third-floor lecture room and pondering religion’s long reach, legal scholar Geoffrey Stone, JD’71, offered more questions than answers Thursday night at the Divinity School’s annual Nuveen lecture. Focusing on the fate of the Constitution in the 21st century, he previewed two of his forthcoming books: Rights at War (University of Pennsylvania Press), which argues for judicial intervention against restricting Muslim Americans’ rights in the face of a terrorist threat, and Sexing the Constitution (W. W. Norton), which explores court rulings on moral customs that become law. “How do we deal with laws” governing personal behavior like abortion, birth control, and same-sex relationships, he asked, “that arise from sectarian beliefs rather than from public policy designed to serve the country as a whole? … Up to now, the law has been blind to this problem.”

When it comes to sex or war, said Stone, the Law School’s Harry Kalven Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Law, religion plays a powerful role in constitutional law. That role extends beyond the Constitution’s framers; tracing it for Sexing the Constitution, Stone found himself researching the Hebrews and early Christians. “When we look at decisions on contraceptives, abortion, gay rights, it is appropriate to understand them not as momentous steps in our time, but minor steps in a 1,500-year process,” he said. “Western culture is still trying to dig itself out from under Augustine,” the fourth-century saint whose teachings on original sin and salvation were critical to early Christianity.

“Can a law be constitutional when it arises from religious precepts?” he asked. The question is complex, he said. Laws against married couples using contraception, for instance—like the Connecticut statute the Supreme Court struck down in 1965—do not explicitly violate First Amendment clauses on religious free exercise or establishment of a state religion. And although an anticontraceptive law may be rooted in Christian teaching, it isn’t as if “being Muslim or Jewish requires one to use contraceptives,” Stone noted. In addition, faith influences not only pro-life activists or gay-marriage opponents; it also spurred 19th-century abolitionists and 1960s civil-rights leaders. “That doesn’t mean the 13th Amendment,” eliminating slavery, “is unconstitutional.”

L.G.

Photo: Stone expounds on constitutional law in Swift Hall.

Stagg Field's new look

With less than ten minutes to go in the fourth quarter, the Maroons were leading Minnesota's Northwestern College by only one point. Northwestern had won its last four games, while the Maroons were in the depths of a four-game losing streak. It wasn't just any game for Chicago's football team, however. It was the season's last home game and the last game on Stagg Field before its renovation. Bernard "Bernie" DelGiorno, AB'54, AB'55, MBA'55, sat in the stands waiting for the ceremonial groundbreaking following the game, which would honor his $2 million gift for the field's makeover.

Quarterback Mike Rinklin, '07, made a 16-yard pass to wide receiver John Kiernan, '09, and the crowd of more than 200 fans erupted in cheers as Kiernan snagged the ball for a touchdown. "You're done, Northwestern!" yelled a Chicago fan when the game ended at 28-20. "Nice try, Northwestern, maybe next light-year!"

As the Maroons slapped high-fives with Northwestern, a small yellow bulldozer slowly rolled to the "C" in the field's center. While the football team sang "Wave the Flag" (a tradition after winning games), the Chicago phoenix led athletic director Tom Weingartner, dean of the College John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, and DelGiorno onto the field. The bulldozer took a ceremonial bite out of the "C," and the groundbreaking was officially complete.

Over the next year, all of Stagg Field will go, replaced by artificial turf. The University will resurface the track and add lighting to increase the field's use. In a pre-game reception, Chicago athletes and members of the athletic department gathered to thank DelGiorno, who recalled complaining to Weingartner a few years ago about the quality of the locker-room soap and coming out convinced "that the University really needed lights on the field and artificial turf." Addressing the students, DelGiorno joked, "I hope you get good grades, good jobs, good high-paying jobs—to pay for the electric lights!"

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): DelGiorno addresses student-athletes before the game; Chicago fans, including the Phoenix, watch attentively; the football team gets mid-game coaching; the bulldozer begins to dig up the "C."

Community values

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“How can you not be a fan, with his charm?” asked one student. He was talking about third-year Tyler Zoanni, smiling and chatting with audience members before his talk in the bimonthly “What Matters to Me and Why” series. The series, sponsored by Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, encourages active members of the University community to reflect on their values and motivations. Zoanni, peer minister of Lutheran Campus Ministry, cochair of Interfaith Dialogue, and a member of his dorm (Wick House) council, was surrounded by friends and fans during Thursday afternoon’s brown-bag discussion in the chapel’s Interreligious Center as he spoke about finding meaning through the communities in his life.

“What matters to me,” Zoanni said, is a “surprisingly tough” question that people rarely think about. His father, he joked, suggested that “family, friends, happiness, health, and respecting your father” are what really matter, but Zoanni decided to focus on principles: community, decency, and honesty. People “strive to live lives that have meaning,” he explained, and they have a set of commitments by which they live. He has found a source of meaning in communities. After his mother was injured in a car accident and then diagnosed with cancer—Zoanni was in kindergarten—he spent a lot of time with neighbors in his small Montana town: “Without that, I wouldn’t have made it.” The broader importance of community, he said, is that “people who don’t know each other still care about each other.” For Zoanni, Wick House and the Lutheran Campus Ministry have provided food, friends, and an escape from the “rages of the academic world.”

Through the student organization Interfaith Dialogue, a group that brings together people from different religious backgrounds, Zoanni works toward creating “a community of communities” at the University. He suggests rethinking the partisan model, where a person espouses strong beliefs while “casting aside” others who may disagree; rather, a community should be a place for openness and vulnerability. It is valuable, Zoanni concluded, to remember how small one is in the grand scheme, and that listening to other people’s convictions can help a person “figure things out” in a messy, complicated world.

Ruthie Kott

Photo: In Rockefeller's basement, Zoanni tells friends and fans about community.

The divine world

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Praising the “grandeur” and “power” of her colleague William Schweiker’s 2004 book on theological ethics, Divinity School professor Kathryn Tanner couldn’t help chuckling at the “movie review” he’d slipped into a chapter comparing the Cain and Abel story with Natural Born Killers. While listeners polished off carrot cake and coffee during a Swift Hall lunchtime forum last Wednesday, Tanner—critiquing the book before the author took the podium—said Schweiker, PhD’85, put “religious stories to the test” of “the moral demands of the day” in his “analysis of the global cultural scene and the moral challenges it poses.”

With chapter titles like “Reconsidering Greed,” “Love in the End Times,” and “On Moral Madness,” Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers) argues for a realignment of ethical principles. It hails environmentalism on theological grounds and finds benefit in religious pluralism. As myriad cultures homogenize humanity—often to good effect but sometimes wreaking violence— “one can no longer make God, humankind, or nature the center of reflection from which to see everything else,” Schweiker said. Instead, he urged, “think toward the ‘integrity of life,’” which he defined as the union of “natural, sentient, social, human, and I would even say divine life.” Theological ethics has a duty to help preserve that union. “Christian stories and texts help us perceive and understand the world in a way that might transform,” he said. “They pay a debt to enhance and respect that integrity of life.” A “massive problem in Christian teaching,” he said, is its focus on sin, redemption, and heaven—all human-centered concerns that offer little guidance on “how to relate to the natural world.”

Jewish-studies professor Michael Fishbane, who also took part in the forum, compared Schweiker’s conclusions to those of philosopher Martin Heidegger, who thought of technology, Fishbane said, as a “Promethean and violent assault on nature,” and physicist Werner Heisenberg, who denounced “exploitative technology but [didn’t] see technology itself as a danger.” Schweiker, Fishbane emphasized, asks his readers to “think beyond our specific life to the world as a divine realm and to preserve its resources for all life.”

L.G.

Photos: Kathryn Tanner looks on while William Schweiker answers questions about his book (top); Michael Fishbane also takes part in the forum. (bottom).

Balcony scenes

What better way to raise money for an undergraduate trip to a Shakespeare performance than to stage a benefit where Chicago undergrads perform scenes from Shakespeare?

So this Sunday night, in a classic “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” move, Lee and Michael Behnke (she’s director of the undergraduate Latin program and teaches in the Core humanities sequence Human Being and Citizen (HBC); he’s vice president and dean of College enrollment) will turn over their Hyde Park apartment for “Cupid’s Pageant,” a one-shot benefit that—as you might expect when the theater is a living room—is already sold out.

The cause? Subsidizing ticket prices so that as many of the 300 HBC students who want to can attend a spring performance of Troilus and Cressida at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

They’ll be a knowledgeable audience. The play is part of this year's HBC syllabus, and the 13 students running the show—11 actors, costume designer, and graphics designer—have chosen ten scenes exploring Troilus and Cressida themes found in five more-celebrated Shakespeare plays, including Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.

Prefaced by an introduction from Shakespeare scholar and English professor emeritus David Bevington, the program focuses on aspects of romantic love: pining, wooing, betrayal, and the making of pacts. The curtain closer is from Troilus and Cressida (III.ii), in which the title pair plight their troth. What better way to end a benefit than with a pledge?

M.R.Y.

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A dress rehearsal gave Ryland Barton and Anna Christine the chance to peer out windows and over balconies. The invitation and program were designed by art-history major Simone Martin-Newberry, ’07, who drew a parallel between theater and the effect of entering France's Cathedral of Chartres, "where the contrasting darks and lights, shadows on the stone, and warm colors of the windows gave me the feeling of being transported to a place very separate from my regular world."

Rehearsal photos by Michael H. Behnke.

Like mother, like daughter

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Generations converged at the Oriental Institute on Wednesday afternoon. Not only did the “Embroidering Identities: A Century of Palestinian Clothing” talk pull an audience mixed with older adults and students, but exhibit curator and tour guide Iman Saca’s mother was also among the listeners. Both mother and daughter had a hand in the exhibit, which takes viewers on a colorful tour of regional clothing in pre-1948 Palestine: Iman, chair of the Middle Eastern studies program at Chicago’s St. Xavier University, was digging through OI storage facilities when she found a room full of Palestinian dresses that had never been displayed. She combined the dresses with garments, jewelry, and headdresses from the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem, founded in 1991 by mother Maha Saca, to create the exhibit.

Iman Saca began the OI tour with dresses from Palestine’s central region, noting that each region—central, southern, and eastern—has a common theme. “Villages had distinct styles,” she explained, and individual dresses “highlight aspects that represent identity.” A woman’s clothing revealed her marital status (or, as Maha added, “if she likes to have a lot of babies”), age, and social position. The “bridal dress of Bethlehem,” for example, known for its ornate and costly embroidery, was coveted by women from surrounding villages, though most could only afford a single side or chest panel, which they would sew onto a homemade dress. In the Bedoin Sinai Desert, a dress embroidered with blue thread meant the woman was a widow; if she later added red thread, it was a “signal that [she] was ready to be married again.” Women also wore jewelry and coins to flaunt their dowries, so “people could see how much [her husband] paid for her.” Even the act of embroidering itself held significance. Saca explained that a young girl would learn the patterns and techniques that her “grandma was familiar with,” and she would be deemed a good marriage partner “based on her stitch.”

After the 1948 partition, with its shifting of boundaries and resulting wars, Saca said, the craft of dress-making faltered. In the 1980s, however, the Palestinian nationalist movement led to its revival. One dress from this period is embroidered with the word “Palestine” encircling the sleeve and a Palestinian flag.


Ruthie Kott

Photos: Mother-daughter team of Iman and Maha Saca (top) lead Wednesday's exhibit tour; embroidered Palestinian dresses tell much about the identity of their wearers.

The distant beloved

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Introduced by associate music professor Berthold Hoeckner as “a true performer and scholar,” someone who has the 19th-century composers “at his fingertips,” University of Illinois professor and pianist William Kinderman explored the musical relationship between Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Schumann. Focusing on Schumann’s “most discussed composition” at last Friday’s music-department colloquium, Kinderman traced the evolution of Fantasy in C major, op. 17. The 1839 work, Kinderman explained to an audience of about 40, was a “musical monument” to Beethoven, who had died more than a decade earlier.

To demonstrate Beethoven’s influence on the younger composer, Kinderman played snippets of Schumann’s piece and showed a film clip of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, where political prisoner Florestan is rescued by his wife Leonore. In letters to his future wife, pianist Clara Wieck, while he was writing the Fantasy in C, Schumann compared himself to Florestan and his beloved to Leonore. The Beethoven work, explained Kinderman, was a “part of the personal mythology of Schumann and Wieck,” that served as creative inspiration. As much as he wanted to sit and talk with her, wrote Schumann in one letter to his distant beloved—he was in Leipzig, while she had been ordered to Dresden by her father, who wished to keep the two apart—he dreamed also of “overcoming space and time through artistic means.”

B.E.O.

Photos: Kinderman lectures on the connection between Beethoven and Schumann (top); Kinderman plays a section from Schumann's Fantasy in C major, op. 17 (bottom).

Cornell outside the box

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It’s possible to enjoy Hotel Cassiopeia—the Charles Mee, Anne Bogart, and SITI Company production playing at Court Theatre through December 10—without knowing that its subject is the reclusive but observant American collage artist Joseph Cornell.

It’s possible—but the more you know about the Surrealism-influenced artist, who lived with his mother and ill brother in Queens and worked a series of mostly drab day jobs, the more you can experience the Cornell-like pleasure in seeing how bits and pieces of his life and art come together. Even the play’s title combines two well-known assemblages or “Cornell boxes,” The Hotel Eden and Cassiopeia.

While the play’s text, which focuses on Cornell’s interior journeys and questions, doesn’t always cohere, the same can’t be said of the staging: Bogart has translated Mee’s suggestions for the set design—

A wall of stars:
the constellations
or the moon
or a vast star map of the cosmos covers the back wall
[or should it look like a Pollack painting?
splashes and droplets of white paint].

—into a fluid backdrop that melds Cornell’s collections of objects with his love of movies, ballet, and filmmaking.

M.R.Y.

A wall of stars provides the backdrop for Joseph Cornell’s assemblage of fascinations (birds, ballet) and responsibilities (mother, brother). Photo by Harlan Taylor.

Praise the lard

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If you don’t know from latke (or hamantash), don’t look here. Read a book. Better yet, as was pointed out several times during last Tuesday’s annual Latke-Hamantash Debate, buy the book. Or, if you’re blessed with a short attention span, read some excerpts.

The 60th incarnation of the Hillel event honored the traditions: mock academic procession, snarky introductions by U of C philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB’62, and musical entertainment. And, as always, at debate’s end the attendees moved to Hutchinson Commons to vote their appetites.

But, as is also traditional, there were fresh twists. A cappella group Chicago Rhythm and Jews startled the crowd by bursting into the opening bars of “Silent Night,” then reverted to repertoire. Marianna Tax Choldin, AB’62, AM’67, PhD’79—daughter of debate cofounder and U of C anthropologist Sol Tax, PhD'35—recalled how her father "invented the Food Channel," accompanying his pro-latke lectures with latke-making demonstrations. And Daniel J. Libenson, executive director of the Newberger Hillel Center, called for papers for the new Journal of Latke and Hamantash Studies—manuscripts and ideas for consideration are due February 14, 2007.

Psychiatry professor Elliot Gershon took the long view of the primal and primate conflict, going back to the Olduvai Gorge (aka the Garden of Eden) and a series of clashes between the chimps (projectile weapon of choice: hamantash) and humans (latke). Meanwhile Assistant Professor of Philosophy Yitzhak Melamed resorted to pure if convoluted reason to prove a) there are no equilateral triangles; b) therefore there are no triangles; and c) therefore there are no hamantash. End of argument.

You should live so long. Rockefeller Chapel Dean Alison Boden, channeling a small-town pastor who was part Church Lady, part televangelist, carried the hamantash banner by going straight to primary sources. Make that the primary source: “The Bible is the Word of God. It says so.” The New World potato makes no appearance in those pages, she pointed out, but Haman does. Recapping the story of Esther and Mordecai's victory over the villainous vizier, Boden took time for a cautionary aside prompted by the break-up of the King of Persia and Esther’s predecessor, Vashti: “Ladies, if your husband wants you to take off your clothes and dance for his pals, it’s time to rethink the relationship.”

Then it was back to praising the Purim "cookie": "Do I have a witness?" She did.

M.R.Y.

Let the debate begin: participants in the 60th Latke-Hamantash Debate march into Mandel Hall. Photo by Dan Dry.

Darfur debate

"What do we want?" shouted Michael Pareles, '07, bullhorn in hand. "Divestment!" responded the crowd of about 50 people, mostly students. "When do we want it?" "Now!" Tuesday afternoon the U of C's chapter of Students Take Action Now: Darfur (STAND) held a rally in the center of the quads. Donning bright green armbands, the crowd marched toward the Administration Building. In silence, students walked up one by one to post photographs of Darfur victims on black posterboard taped to the building's doors. "This is but a small memorial," Pareles said, then encouraged the protesters to visit the group's Web site and sign a petition urging the University to divest from companies that do business with the Sudanese government.

According to the Sudan Divestment Task Force Web site, created by activist group Genocide Intervention Network, more than 20 colleges and universities (pdf) have divested, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and the University of California system, as well as several states and cities. Typical targets for divestment, among others, include Chinese oil companies such as the China National Petroleum Corporation and Sinopec.

Chicago’s investment policies, guided by the 1967 Kalven Report (pdf), suggest neutrality, but STAND members point to a passage stating, “In the exceptional instance,” the University’s corporate activities “may appear so incompatible with paramount social values as to require careful assessment of the consequences.” They cite past University decisions, such as requiring sweatshop-free labor for University of Chicago Bookstore clothing and removing a Taco Bell franchise from Hutch Commons after students protested against unfair labor practices, as proof that the University has made exceptions.

To that end, Pareles and fellow group members Aliza Levine, '09, and Lauren Goldenberg, '08, met with President Zimmer, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives David Greene, and Board of Trustees Chair James Crown on November 7, asking that the University divest from all companies supporting the Sudanese government. The students emphasized the symbolic weight of divestment and argued the University could be a model for other schools and organizations. Divestment is important, Goldenberg said in an interview, because “it is the only act the University can do right now.”

Since the meeting, Pareles said, he and other STAND members have sent Crown information on how divestment might affect the Sudanese government and how divestment compares to diplomatic action and humanitarian aid. According to Greene, quoted in the November 10 Maroon, the meeting “was intended to be part of an ongoing discussion of the issues.” Meanwhile STAND waits, bullhorn in hand.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Last Tuesday Levine (right) and Rebecca Abraham, '08, chalked a message to President Zimmer in front of the Administration Building; protesters brought handwritten signs to the rally; students taped photos to the building.

Lunch and Hunger

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After the vegetarian Cobb salad, vegetable pot pie, and chocolate-chunk cookies had been served and consumed at the Divinity School lunch this Wednesday, the 50 or so diners settled back for the post-lunch entertainment, a concert by 2006 MDiv grad Ana Porter.

Porter works a day job as a consulting minister at Unity Church in Oak Park, Illinois, but the dark-haired, dark-eyed 34-year-old is also a singer-songwriter whose work Billboard has called “melodically rich...lyrically evocative." The songs on her 2005 debut album, Hunger (on sale at the lunch and via her Web site), provided the majority of her Swift Commons material, from the award-winning title track (inspired by “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) to the crowd-pleasing “Two Boyfriends":

I need two boyfriends,
one for the week, one for the weekend.

Lunch over, the audience was hungry for more.

M.R.Y.

Ana Porter, MDiv’06, sings of life and love at the last Divinity School lunch of the fall quarter. Photo by Joy Olivia Miller.

Rockefeller hosts Handel

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Wrapped from head to toe in coats, scarves, and hats, students, faculty, and community members flooded Rockefeller Chapel Friday night for the University Chorus's annual performance of Handel's Messiah. Conducted by University Chorus Director James Kallembach, the program featured selections from the 53-movement piece, which is three hours in its entirety. The program notes described Handel's expertise in Italian opera, one of his most frequent composition styles. As an oratorio, the Messiah parallels Italianate opera, including casts of soloists, a chorus, and an orchestra, but breaks with opera in its lack of costumes and sets and in its religious material.

"I'm in love with all the soloists," said history major and University Chorus soprano Rachel Berg, '08, referring to soprano Hyun Suk Jang, countertenor Lon Ellenberger, tenor Trevor Mitchell, and bass Andrew Schultze. After the performance Berg and other chorus members migrated to Medici on 57th for a late dinner.

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photo: University Chorus Director James Kallembach.

Uncommon protest

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Braving the season's first snowfall, about 50 students—seven shirtless—took to the main quads for a protest last Friday. "Who are we not?" "Harvard!" "Who are we not?" "Brown!" "Who are we?" "Chicago!" Some demonstrators wore or waved maroon T-shirts that read "I am UnCommon," while bare-chested students arranged themselves to spell "UNCOMMON" with red letters painted on their torsos. (One man sported two Ms.) They held hand-lettered signs including, "WWRD: What would Rockefeller do?" and "I love mustard. I'm not common." The latter referred to a 2005 College application question prompted by Costco: "Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard" and its relation to "impulse buys, excess," and "notions of bigness."

The students were reacting to news that, although the College will keep its unique essay questions as a required supplement, the Admissions Office plans to accept basic information submitted on the Common Application. Almost 300 colleges and universities use some part of the Common Application, including Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern. The University hopes the change, to take effect in the next two years, will encourage more students to consider the U of C, and that it will increase diversity. According to Michael Behnke, vice president and dean of College enrollment, "the percentage of African American students using the Common Application exceeds the percentage of these students applying to the University of Chicago." In an interview in the Nov–Dec Magazine, President Robert Zimmer discussed the idea of reevaluating the application process: "There is, of course, something to self-selection. Nevertheless I believe strongly that there are more prospective candidates who would make wonderful students at Chicago who are not applying."

Meanwhile, almost 1,500 current and former students have joined a Facebook group protesting the change. Group organizer Luis Lara, '08, wrote: "As students of the University we should have a say in such an issue. The UnCommon Application," a term coined in 1998 to distinguish Chicago, "is something we all cherish and it is the reason a lot of us applied to this school." Lara also set up an online petition, which more than 1,000 people have signed. "The long essay options are a key part of it," wrote Elizabeth Wampler, AB'04, "but the smell and feel and wording of the rest are the first steps that students take into the Life of the Mind."

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photos: Students voice their protest (top) and mark a message in the snow (bottom).

Photos by Dan Dry.

Forecast: cloudy

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The Graduate School of Business kicked off its Business Forecast 2007 series with a Wednesday press conference, where the emphasis was not on numbers but on trends. The Forecast series itself is trending up: since the GSB began its economic predictions in 1954, the annual event has expanded far beyond Chicago. By the end of February, six prognosticators will have shared their best "economic insights for everyday” with alumni in 18 cities, including Brussels, Hong Kong, and London. Chicago went first, a few hours after the press conference.

Michael Mussa, AM’70, PhD’74, a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, offered the prediction that “U.S. economic growth will slow to just above 2 percent,” but hedged his bets: “The risks around this central forecast are significantly greater than they have been for the past four years.”

Marviz Zonis, GSB professor emeritus of business administration, focused on "five major trends [that] are driving global politics,” including “the demands of the Islamic world for greater respect.” The United States will have to meet those demands, he said, not through bombs “but with massive accommodation.” Meanwhile, Zonis said, the U.S. will continue to suffer a loss in status as other global centers (“London, Bonn, Moscow, Riyadh, Tehran, Delhi, and Beijing”) rise.

Austan Goolsbee, the GSB’s Robert P. Gwinn professor of economics, offered five predictions. Prediction No. 4? “Prepare yourself for a hedge-fund shakeout, scandal, and, perhaps, regulation.” Why? “With a downturn, it is going to become immediately obvious that some hedge funds have been grossly inflating the values of their holdings and raking in huge fees based on those values.” As managers desert the foundering ships, some funds will collapse: “And then you will see the investigations.”

M.R.Y.

Business Forecast 2007 panelists Marvin Zonis, Michael Mussa, and Austan Goolsbee predict the economic future.

Photo by Beth Rooney.

Gifts aplenty

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Still searching for holiday gifts? The Chicago campus offers plenty of shopping options, starting with museum gift shops. The Oriental Institute's Suq, for instance, sells hieroglyph jewelry, Mesopotamian battle-scene paperweights, and "a soft padded pyramid that unzips to reveal a map of the Nile River and six soft toys." The Smart Museum store has art books, Indian paper products, jewelry, and Tigo leather goods. The Renaissance Society sells special-edition art crafts.

Local bookstores, meanwhile, offer more academic gifts. The Seminary Co-op stocks all manner of U of C authors and also recommends this year's notable children's books. The University of Chicago Bookstore has general-interest books as well as a slew of Maroon clothing and other items. The store also has a stack of boardgames near the register.

Of course, you can always make a gift to the University—holiday or otherwise. No wrapping required.

A.B.P.

Photo: Pockets Of Learning made the pyramid gift for the Suq.

Settled uncertainty

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“Being required to carry identification means we are never without a picture of ourselves,” begins the essay accompanying Ben Gest’s exhibition of enigmatic and oddly unsettling photographs at the Renaissance Society. “When are we at home with ourselves? Or more precisely, when are we at home in ourselves?” Gest’s photographs seem to capture people at moments of utter banality—moving a garden hose, lying on a couch, carrying a sleepy child to bed—a sense his titles reinforce: Eric Coming Back Inside, Alan with His Car still Running, Kate Fixing Her Earring, Samantha with Bags for William.

Yet the more one studies them, the less straightforward these portraits become. Looking less relaxed than their mundane suburban surroundings, the subjects gaze out of the frame. Their expressions are intense, introspective, disengaged from the situation at hand. As the exhibition essay puts it, “their demeanor suggests that the psyche has vacated the body’s premises.”

Ben Gest’s self-titled exhibition is on display through December 22. This Sunday Renaissance Society associate curator Hamza Walker will lead a gallery tour.

L.G.

Photos: Melissa Holbert and Jessica Moss, both Smart Museum staffers, study Kate Fixing Her Earring (top); Ben Gest’s Jennifer in Her Rooftop Garden (bottom).

Read on

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“So how do you separate modernism from postmodernism in literature? I always get confused,” asked a well-dressed man as he wandered through the Seminary Co-op’s low-ceilinged corridors with a female companion.

“That’s a good question. It’s something I’m trying to decide in my own work,” she responded as the two stopped to browse a table of books late Thursday afternoon.

As campus empties for the holiday break, intellectual conversation—and shopping—continues at the Co-op. Best-sellers, said a staffer, include New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s compendium Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978–2006; Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Against the Day; and The Great Latke Hamantash Debate. Students wanting to get a jump-start on next quarter’s classes can check out the back shelves, which are quickly filling up with course texts.

And for those parsing out modernism and postmodernism, a quick search on the Co-op’s database turns up more than 2,000 books on literary theory.


B.E.O.

Photo: Two shoppers chat literary theory.

Blanket memorial

While blue flags with silver stars line Rockefeller Memorial Chapel's narthex and red poinsettias decorate the chancel, the chapel's east transept holds a colorful yet somber display this December: six sections of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

One panel pays tribute to a South Carolina radio DJ and some of his favorite '80s movies and albums: Top Gun, The Cars Greatest Hits. An Andy Warhol-inspired piece features 18 identical images of AIDS victim Rollie James Kennedy III. Others include Bible passages, messages of love, birds, rainbows, and trees.

Rockefeller first displayed AIDS Quilt sections in 2004, when panels created by Rockefeller Dean Alison Boden and administrative assistant David Wyka were among those on exhibit. This time chapel staff requested Chicago-based sections. "A lot of people come in and are very moved by it," says Lorraine Brochu, AM'88, Rockefeller's assistant to the dean for external affairs. The display, Brochu notes, began December 1, World AIDS Day, and continues through December 23.

Founded in 1987, the AIDS Memorial Quilt now includes 5,748 sections, each comprising about eight panels. The works tour the country in organizers' goal "to reach more communities with messages of remembrance, awareness, and hope."

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): Six quilt sections adorn the chapel's east transept; Rockefeller staff requested Chicago-themed panels.

The power of print

In 1864 Toronto native Richard Robert Donnelley arrived in Chicago and founded a printing company at Clark and Adams. Over the next century and a half R. R. Donnelley & Sons became one of the world’s largest commercial publishers, putting out mail-order catalogs from Sears, Penny’s, Ward’s, and Neiman Marcus; Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Chicago plan; and tickets, programs, and postcards for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Donnelley also printed phone books, ad brochures, newspapers, and magazines such as Time, Life, Look, Popular Science, the Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic (as well as the University of Chicago Magazine). In August 1954 Donnelley published the inaugural issue of Sports Illustrated. In 1961 the company wooed the New Yorker away from its longstanding printing firm in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

Using archival materials donated to the University in 2005, an exhibit at the Regenstein Library’s Special Collections Research Center traces R. R. Donnelley’s history, often revealing customs long gone. In a 1926 application to become a book-binding apprentice, for example, 16-year-old Edward Lhotka lists his religion as Catholic, his parents as Bohemian, and his English and mathematics teacher as Miss Novotny. Among the collection of World’s Fair publications is a shimmering reservation card for the Cellophane Ball at the Drake Hotel.

Printing for the Modern Age” compiles letters, documentary and personal photographs, company records, printing artifacts, and published products to illuminate the origins of the company’s Indianhead trademark, its technological evolution, and R. R. Donnelley’s trail of heirs (several of whom have served as University trustees). While the exhibit, on display through February 12, represents only a sampling of the University’s Donnelley holdings, the full archives offer “great research potential,” the exhibit notes declare, for graphic artists, sociologists, and cultural and economic historians.

L.G.

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Photos (left to right): The first issue of Sports Illustrated, dated August 16, 1954; R. R. Donnelley’s 1915 crop of 14- to 16-year-old apprentices; 20th-century engraving tools, bearing a handwritten warning from the owner.

Winter wonderland

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While UChiBLOGo takes a holiday break until January 3, Hyde Park still offers plenty of winter activities. Some festive diversions: today from 4 to 6 p.m. locals of all ages skate with Santa and light a menorah, a kinara, or a spruce tree. Sponsored by the Chicago Park District, the festivities take place on the Midway Plaisance.

On Christmas Eve Rockefeller Memorial Chapel services include a 4 p.m. “Lessons and Carols” performance and children’s nativity pageant.

For post-Hanukkah fun, U of C’s Newberger Hillel Center recommends the Spertus Institute’s 9th Annual Community Festival on December 25, which offers musical performances, dance lessons, face-painting, and arts and crafts.

At Lincoln Park Zoo’s ZooLights festival, running 5-9 p.m. through January 1, Chicagoans can see their favorite animals under twinkling lights.

To see lights of a different kind, the University’s South Pole Telescope team hosts a December 30 Webcast. Led by astronomy & astrophysics professor John Carlstrom, the group of cosmologists will address how the ten-meter telescope, soon to be completed, will be used. Presented in collaboration with San Francisco’s Exploratorium, the team will tackle questions of dark energy, anti-gravity, and galaxy clusters. It's one way to get your brain revved up for the New Year.


B.E.O.

Photos: Lincoln Park Zoo lights up the night through January 1 (top); University of Chicago cosmologists will give a Webcast update on the South Pole Telescope (bottom).

Cover-girl collage

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Although he rarely picked up a camera, artist Robert Heinecken helped expand the scope of contemporary photography during a four-decade career that ended with his death last year at age 74. Rather than create new images, he manipulated and transformed existing ones using lithography, etching, cutouts, and photo emulsion. While some of his works were whimsical or beautiful, many others became—as a new Smart Museum exhibit demonstrates—intentionally disturbing juxtapositions of pop culture, violence, and politics. At the height of the Vietnam War, for instance, Heinecken superimposed a photograph of a young Vietnamese soldier, grinning and hoisting two severed heads, over fashion-magazine ads. He overlaid magazine images of women in rope-lace skirts and a pitch for Isotoner’s slimming “bodysuit” with pictures of suggestively posed women in whips and thigh boots. His 1966-67 series “Are you Rea” combined images on both sides of magazine pages by using a light to photographically expose the front and back simultaneously.

In a letter to Chicago collector and photographer Luke Batten, included as part of the Smart’s exhibit, Heinecken explains that he combined images in ways that were “visually stimulating” and that seemed “to reveal ironic or significant cultural conditions.” His work is on display through March 11.

L.G.

Photo: Robert Heinecken, Frost Tip, 1971, Newsprint (Glamour magazine page) with rubbing, black and white photograph. Smart Museum of Art.

New in every language

On Thursday, one day after the new Center for the Study of Languages (CSL) opened, glass-enclosed classrooms and curving orange walls butted up against boxes of foreign-language videos and handwritten room numbers. Students and faculty wandered in, wondering where small-group sessions would be held, looking for CSL staff, and generally asking about the new space on Cobb's second floor.

Manager Michael Berger, who has supervised the University's language resources since 1986, was there to answer the flood of questions, while an assistant moved box after box into the center. "I don't have a phone!" Berger exclaimed, after realizing he wanted to contact a faculty member. The CSL is still waiting for some furniture, televisions, and other items to arrive.

Designed by RADA Architects, Ltd., the CSL consolidates the Language Labs and Archives, originally located in the Social Sciences basement, with the Language Faculty Resource Center in Cobb. The firm renovated the Cobb space, creating small-group classrooms and faculty offices and adding cafe-style tables by the elevators for students to meet between classes.

The classrooms and equipment, including videoconferencing and satellite TV for foreign news and entertainment programming, will be put into use as small-group sessions begin next week. Meanwhile, the new center is attracting attention—one breathless student asked Berger to help her find where a Russian class on Nabokov's Lolita was being held. Berger was happy to oblige by checking the time schedules online. He did have a computer.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): A small-group room in the center; Berger (left) mans the front desk; students try out the new hallway tables.

So you want to be an actor

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More than a dozen hopeful actors auditioned at last Friday's callbacks for but i cd only whisper, one of three main University Theater winter shows. Written by student playwright Kristiana Colón and directed by theater and performance-studies lecturer Tiffany Trent, the play addresses mental illness in the black community through the story of Beau Willie Brown, a troubled Vietnam veteran who murders his two children. "An audience," wrote Colón in her original proposal, "should leave this production with a deep understanding of how things get broken, the importance of healing, and what it means when you are too hungry to try to heal."

Trent kicked off auditions at 12:30 p.m. with warm-up stretches and movement exercises. "Get comfortable," she urged, inviting the group onstage in the Francis X. Kinahan Third-Floor Theater. "Take your coats off, shoes off." After ten minutes of music and dance, students were ushered outside, then called by pairs to read for one of the play's six roles. Trent led auditions, occasionally stopping actors to give direction, while Colón took notes on her laptop.

Just after 3 p.m. Trent, Colón, and other production staff members convened to make their decisions. "Check out the board tomorrow," Trent reminded one actor as he left the theater. By 3 p.m. Saturday, his name, along with the rest of the cast, was posted outside the Reynolds Club's First Floor Theater.

B.E.O.

Photo: Actors warm up with stretches at last Friday's callbacks.

Will the real Martha Nussbaum please stand up?

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In 1996 writer Marc Estrin received a troubling phone call from a man in New York City. The caller wanted to procure a high-powered rifle—rifles are easy to get in Vermont, explained Estrin, a Burlington resident, to an audience of about 25 at 57th Street Books on Monday night—so he could “kill black people out of his window” for the coming “war between the blacks and the Jews in New York.” This maniac, Estrin said, along with “many other maniacs I’ve known,” was the inspiration for Alan Krieger, the protagonist of Estrin’s latest novel, Golem Song (Unbridled Books, 2006). According to folklore, the Golem was a Frankensteinian creature created to save the Jews from persecution in 16th-century Prague.

Reading from Golem Song along with Estrin was the inspiration for another character in the novel: Chicago professor of law and ethics Martha Nussbaum. In the story, Alan reads Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire, sees a photograph of her, and then “everything clicks because of this woman.” For Alan, who is dating both a Jewish social worker and a German psychologist and struggling to keep the two separate from each other, Nussbaum solves this problem: as Estrin explained, “She looks like a goy but must be Jewish because of the name.” Alan’s infatuation with Nussbaum comes to a head when he meets her, the scene used for Monday night’s reading.

The lively performance by Estrin (as Alan) and Nussbaum (whom Alan dubs “Helen of Academe”) was interrupted every so often by Nussbaum pointing out small differences between real and fictional Marthas: when the character talked about eating a Power Bar for lunch, Nussbaum explained, “Actually, it’s a Cliff Bar I eat.” This meeting scene, according to Estrin, serves an important function in the book: it is the “exposition of Alan’s romantic sexual greediness and his searching for rationalizations” for his twisted fantasies. Yet, Estrin said, the scene also allows both Nussbaum and readers to see Alan’s “charming” and “playful” side, challenging them to “like somebody who’s perfectly horrible.”

Although Estrin had been writing about the fictional Nussbaum for years while composing Golem Song, he took six months to build up the courage to e-mail the real Nussbaum for permission to use her as a character. He had used “real people” in earlier novels (Insect Dreams and Arnold Hitler), Estrin said, but they were “dead” and “well-researched.” After she granted permission, he corresponded with Nussbaum to make sure that her character was accurate—Nussbaum, for example, refuses to eat hot dogs, which is problematic for food-loving Alan when he offers her character a Hebrew National frank (“It’s kosher!” proclaims Alan). But Estrin was anxious about “putting words into someone’s living, breathing mouth.” Nussbaum, meanwhile, feared the flip side: “What business of mine is it to tell this creative artist” what to include or not include?

Ruthie Kott

Photo: The real Martha Nussbaum reads her character's part with author Marc Estrin.

King's antiwar legacy

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WWKD—What would King do? Although UIC history professor Barbara Ransby said she wouldn't purport to know how Martin Luther King Jr. would respond to the war in Iraq, all three panelists at Wednesday evening's MLK Week discussion seemed to have a well-educated hunch. The program, King: War and the Moral Imperative, used the civil-rights leader's April 30, 1967, sermon at New York's Riverside Church as a jumping-off point. In that speech King pronounced his opposition to the Vietnam War—at a time when much of the press and public still "cautiously" favored it, said the first speaker, Chicago theology and history of Christianity professor W. Clark Gilpin, AM’72, PhD’74.

In the sermon King explained how his nonviolent fight for domestic civil rights had expanded to international affairs. For one, the poverty programs enacted only a few years earlier lost their funding to the war. Also, King saw a disproportionate number of black and poor soldiers dying in Vietnam. Third, Gilpin paraphrased, the war "created a disastrous inconsistency in the moral claims of the nation."

As King noted in his sermon, when he tried to tell "angry young men" in urban ghettos "that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems" and that "social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action," they'd retort: "So what about Vietnam?" There the United States used violence to solve its problems. "Their questions hit home," King said, "and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."

Later in the sermon King discussed South Asia—a section that Gilpin "reread in terms of our current war in Iraq." To make the point, Gilpin quoted: "There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward [Selma, Alabama, Sheriff] Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.'"

Gilpin also saw modern parallels to King's statement: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Parallels also struck theology professor Dwight Hopkins, who focused on King's spiritual teachings. After his sermon King was "instructed that the black church should stick to domestic issues," Hopkins said, yet King "believed that failure to speak out would be a prime instance when silence meant betrayal to his interpretation of the Gospel of Christ." The "same forces that benefitted from the white power structure domestically" were the ones that "damaged people of color abroad and stole their oil."

Ransby spoke last, decrying recent incidents such as Abu Ghraib and Haditha and noting that King "advocated nonviolence for the poor but also for the president, the most powerful among us." During the "unjust" war in Iraq, she said, "King's words should be ringing loudly in our ears. He offered a powerful moral challenge: 'Somehow the madness must cease.'"

About 40 community members attended the panel in Swift Hall's third-floor lecture hall, one of several events held this week to honor King. On Monday NAACP chair Julian Bond will give a keynote address at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

A.B.P.

Photos: Hopkins and Ransby listen to Gilpin at the podium (top); The crowd considers the arguments (bottom).

Photos by Dan Dry

The future starts now

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Chicago students have been known to explore scientific and philosophical theories, but last Thursday at the 2007 Winter Career Fair, “career exploration” was the name of the game. The annual fair, sponsored by the University’s Career Advising and Planning Services (CAPS), brings employers from the information-technology, nonprofit, and financial sectors, among others, explained Corynne Pero, CAPS’s student and employer-relations specialist. Held in the Ida Noyes Library/Lounge and the Cloister Club, this year’s fair hosted more than 50 employers including Merrill Lynch, Teach for America, and Steve & Barry’s University Sportswear.

In preparation for meeting with potential employers, third-years, fourth-years, and masters’ students were advised to wear business attire and to bring their resumes, which CAPS could review at lobby walk-in stations. “A career fair,” Pero noted, “is really just an on-the-spot interview.”

Waiting in line to talk to representatives from Susquehanna International Group, an investment-banking firm, third-year Sherry Hwang thought the career fair offered worthwhile information about summer internships in finance and consulting. Yet not all students were satisfied with the on-site prospects. Egyptology majors Lindsey Miller, ’07, Janelle Pisarik, ’08, and Jessica Henderson, ’08, were disappointed that only one employer fit their interests: the Field Museum. There was an “entire room dedicated to finance,” Miller noted, yet “nothing for psychology, anthropology, sociology, English majors—the majority of majors at the school—except teaching.” Pisarik added, “I would have liked to see other museums,” employers from a wider range of disciplines, and some from farther distances. Still, resumes in hand, they walked the aisles and considered the options.

Ruthie Kott

Photos: A prospective investment banker gets informed (top); Job seekers overrun the Cloister Club (bottom).

Dispatch from study-abroad

Eight ways winter quarter is different in Barcelona:

1. The Reg may look like a fortress, but the library at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra is in a recycled citadel.

2. The first final—for the course Civilization in the Western Mediterranean: Barcelona, section Iberia: Ancient and Late Antique—falls in the middle of third week.

3. The UPF classrooms have no clocks—a good thing when class begins at 9:30 a.m. and ends at 12:30 p.m.

4. On Monday the class discussed the Roman amphitheater at Tarraco (modern-day Tarragona). On Tuesday they were sitting in the stands' remains.

5. Dorm rooms are in the Hotel Atlantis, breakfast included, but no cooking allowed in the rooms.

6. The nearest laundromat is a ten-minute walk from the hotel. To wash and dry one load costs €6, or $8.

7. Instead of cell phones, the students have digital cameras glued to their hands.

8. Even with global warming, there are still no palm trees in the quads.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (row 1, left to right): Chicago students Neil Lutz, Melissa Thomasma, Inez Jones, and Nicole Sindy chat at a Barcelona plaça off La Ramblas; Classics lecturer Lee Behnke leads the Iberia: Ancient and Late Antique course at Universitat Pompeu Fabra—no clocks in the classroom; Chicago students study at the recycled-citadel UPF library.

(row 2, left to right): At the laundromat, Emerald Gao counts her euros while Kira Bennett looks on; Greta Honold (in blue scarf) and Melissa Thomasma grab breakfast at the Hotel Atlantis; After Monday's lesson on the Roman army in Spain, on Tuesday the class traveled to Tarragona, known as Tarraco when it was a Roman imperial city and Iberian outpost, to see the amphitheater's remains.

Photos by Dan Dry.

How not to be a starving artist

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“Whatever passion you have,” encouraged New York jazz musician Paul Steinbeck, AB’02, “give yourself ten years to follow it.” Heidi Thompson, AB’01, MBA’05, executive director of Chicago theater company Barrel of Monkeys, seconded the advice to aspiring U of C musicians, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and other creatives. “There are ten years, maybe a few more, in your life when it’s OK to be poor,” she half-joked. Debating day jobs, MFA programs, and whether making a living in the arts means selling out (“No,” said all four participants), Steinbeck, Thompson, theater publicist Ted Boles, AB’01, and dancer/choreographer Julia Mayer, AB’86, weighed in at Saturday’s career panel on How to Make A Living While Living Through the Arts.

Part of the tenth annual Taking the Next Step program, where Chicago third- and fourth-years hear from alumni in different professions, the arts session drew 50-plus of the 670 student attendees. Among the 14 panels offered: More Than Just Blackboards (education policy and practice); You’re ‘The Man’ (government); and Get on the Write Foot (journalism, media, and publishing). More than 150 alumni speakers attended the daylong conference at downtown Chicago’s Hyatt Regency.

Sponsored by the College Programming Office, the Alumni Association, Career Advising and Planning Services, the College, and the Office of the Dean of Students in the College, each hour-long panel ended with audience questions. “You talked about how it’s hard to get started in the arts professionally and how many of you had to work in fields unrelated to your craft to support your art,” asked one third-year. “When did you lose your idealism?” All four speakers agreed they hadn’t. “You can be an idealist and a realist,” said Mayer, who worked in desktop publishing while pursuing her MFA in dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. “It’s very easy to make a living as a musician playing music you don’t like,” said Steinbeck, who saw non-music day jobs as preferable to the alternatives (weddings and bar mitzvahs). Learn how to use Microsoft Excel, advised Thompson. Then “you won’t be waiting tables. You’ll be doing something where you get health insurance.”

B.E.O.

Photos: Arts and entertainment panelists (left to right) Ted Boles, Heidi Thompson, Paul Steinbeck, and Julia Mayer share their experiences (top); U of C undergrads chat between sessions.

Paris in the downpour

Last Thursday, as gale-force winds blew through much of western Europe, Magazine photographer Dan Dry embarked on his own whirlwind photo-documentation of undergraduate life at the University of Chicago Center in Paris.

Dry shot the center—at 6, rue Thomas Mann, it’s two blocks from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and across the street from the new home of the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7—from morning ’til night. He also wanted to photograph Chicago undergrads against a few Paris landmarks, and five students stepped up to the plate, meeting him near the Arc de Triomphe on a cloudy Saturday afternoon. That shot complete, it was off by Métro to the Tour Eiffel. But the day had darkened, and the scene turned into an unplanned silhouette.

Après cela, le déluge.

M.R.Y.

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Photos, row 1 (left to right): A garden connects the Paris Center’s three buildings; scene from a Paris Center classroom; third-years Caroline Suh and Aparna Hirve chat over their texts while fourth-year Koh Kim descends the lobby stairs.

Row 2 (left to right): Students study in the great room, which also serves as the largest classroom, a conference site, a common room, and the center’s library; The campus, illuminated at dusk, shot from the nearly completed Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, which opens this fall, bringing thousands of French students into the area; At the Arc de Triomphe, winter-quarter students Zarah Carranco, Jennifer Kye, Mary Soo Anderson, Raymond Perez, and Erindira Tejada consult their map.

Row 3 (left to right): At the Tour Eiffel, it was about to rain: the students’ silhouettes disappear into the monument’s base; minutes later, tourists seek shelter from the storm.

Photos by Dan Dry

House of cards

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In the joint Court Theatre–Museum of Contemporary Art production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, playing at the MCA through February 11, the characters chase each other through desperate conversations, cavorting along the set's aisles, stairs, and platforms. Designed by Chicago architect Leigh Breslau, Millennium Park's master planner, the steel and wood structure provides a modern take on the Russian country estate where the 1899 play takes place.

Not that such contemporary construction seems incongruous. The story, about Vanya and his niece, Sonya, whose lives and home become disrupted when Sonya's retired-professor father and his young wife come there to live, contains pathos and humor, unrequited love and lifelong regret, environmentalism and fear of death—hardly old-fashioned themes.

Forgoing lives of their own, Vanya and Sonya have farmed the estate for decades, sending its earnings to the professor. Now Vanya realizes the worshipped professor's success was fleeting, and worse, he, unlike Vanya, enjoyed fame and beautiful women—including his young bride, Yelena. Sonya, meanwhile, loves the young doctor, Astrov, who comes to check on the self-absorbed professor. Yet the doctor, like Vanya, has eyes for Yelena. Directed by Court Artistic Director Charles Newell, the play reaches an explosive climax before the house is restored to its previous state—ignorant bliss.

A.B.P.

Photos: Both the doctor, Astrov (Timothy Edward Kane, top), and Vanya (Kevin Gudahl, bottom) flirt with the professor's wife, Yelena (Chaon Cross).

Photos courtesy Court Theatre.

Ice, ice baby

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It may be the dead of winter, but the Midway’s ice-skating rink is a lively spot. The ice becomes particularly busy after 5 p.m., when students get out of class and workers emerge from offices. Youngsters show up a few hours earlier. “Once the school kids get here, they’re here to stay,” observed a Park District employee last week while manning the skate-rental desk ($4-$5 a pair). “This is their after-school activity. On the weekend, people are here all the time.”

Out on the ice, bundled-up grade-school children chased each other the length of the rink, while couples holding hands steered careful circles around the outer wall. Adult beginners practiced crossovers and forward swizzles. Some parents watched rink-side, while others stayed by the fireplace inside the window-walled warming house.

Situated between Ellis and University avenues, the rink is open through February 28. Its hours are:
Sunday through Thursday, noon–7 p.m.
Friday, noon–4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m.–7 p.m.
Saturday, 1 p.m.–9 p.m.

L.G.

Photos: Skaters fly by the warming house (top); the campus skyline glows from the rink (bottom).

Lunch over antiquities

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Swift Hall's common room was packed for last Wednesday's Divinity School Lunch, where diners feasted on walnut- and orange–topped salad, baked potatoes with chili, and pear cobbler with ice cream for dessert. "This is like the best lunch I've had in years," declared Divinity School communications director Terren Wein before introducing the day's speaker, Oriental Institute and Near Eastern languages and civilizations professor McGuire Gibson, AM'64, PhD'68.

"You might say this food was divine, or at least the divines can cook," Gibson joked. Then he turned to more serious matters: the plunder of antiquities in Iraq. A leading authority on ancient Mesopotamia, Gibson and colleague Augusta McMahon, AM'86, PhD'93, published "Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums" (pdf) in 1992, part of a series by the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq and the first academic article to bring attention to losses after the 1990 Gulf War.

"When you have looting," Gibson told the audience, "you have lost the respect of the people." He described what he called the U.S. government's mishandling of the April 2003 ransacking of the Iraqi National Museum. "I started sending e-mails to the Pentagon when I heard about the looting," he recalled, waiting and hoping that he would see "the photo-op on TV where the general says, 'We've saved the antiquities.'"

"The Iraqis tried," Gibson said, by placing as many objects as they could in secret storage, "but the occupying power did not do its duty." The United States was at fault, he said, for "not having enough troops to do the job right."

Worse than the museum break-ins, Gibson said, were the people foraging through Iraqi archaeological sites, a problem he said is still going on today. "Some of the most important ancient Sumerian cities are now destroyed." The Iraqis, he said, "are digging up their own heritage and their own future," because the vandalism prevents future excavations that could stimulate the economy and bolster tourism. Excavating a looted site is "like digging in lace," he said with frustration. "There's holes here and there's holes there."

Gibson then took questions from the audience. "What can we do to prevent this current catastrophe from happening in the rest of the Middle East?" asked one woman. His answer came too quickly: "You can't."

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photos: Audience members listen to Gibson after lunch (top); Gibson describes the looting (bottom).

Starlight on Chicago

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Author Denis Johnson opens his Tuesday night reading with a story. "I've really been looking forward to reading this in Chicago," he tells the audience packed in Social Sciences 122, holding up a sheaf of paper. His first play, Hellhound on My Trail, had its Midwest premiere at the Viaduct Theater in Chicago in 2002, he says. One year later, a worker cleaning the stage found a letter a character in the play read aloud.

"You should write more letters from this guy," the worker said. So Johnson, now in his fifties, wrote "The Starlight on Idaho," a short story told through a series of letters from Mark "Cass" Cassandra, in rehab for alcohol addiction, as Johnson was years ago. Intro over, Johnson begins to read.

"I'm considering these hooks in my heart," Cass writes to his father and his grandmother. "Right now I'm just filling my notebook with jazz and waiting for my handwriting to improve."

"Dear Pope John Paul," he writes, "Do you have two first names, or is Paul your last name?"

Johnson has a knack for the one-liner. "Dear Brother," another begins. "I'm sitting on my bed, hugging myself, trapped in the arms of a moron."

Often Johnson interrupts with a personal aside. When Cass's grandmother tells him, "You are surrounded by demons," Johnson confides, "This is my grandmother, by the way. Everything is verbatim."

Cass's rehab center, the Starlight Addiction Recovery Center, used to be a motel. "It's based on this rehab I was in when I was a kid that actually had been a motel," Johnson says. Prostitutes would sit on the bus-stop benches outside, he says, "while we were inside trying to get straightened out."

"I was only in there a short time," he continues. "I bolted, but I didn't stop at the bus stop. I kept going." The author of five novels, five books of poetry, five plays, and the short-story collection Jesus' Son, Johnson did just that.

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photo: Denis Johnson reads in Social Sciences.

Folk jam

“This is a jam session—come on and sit down,” fiddler and accordionist Wilson Savoy called to a woman clutching her fiddle as she crept into the Ida Noyes library this past Saturday afternoon. The room was already packed: seven fiddlers, five guitarists, two accordionists, a pair of women strumming ukeleles, and another keeping time on a t’fer (triangle) joined the Louisiana band Pine Leaf Boys—Savoy is its lead accordionist—for a two-hour Cajun jam session. More than 60 others listened from the audience, most tapping their feet and a few leaping up, periodically, to dance. Shedding her apprehension, the fiddle-clutching woman made her way to an empty chair toward the front of the room and began to play. At the end of the song, a raucous Mardi Gras tune, Savoy looked up. “Any other requests?” he asked, after the applause died down.


Stretching past its scheduled 5 p.m. closing, the Cajun jam was part of the U of C’s 47th annual folk fest, a weekend-long event celebrating traditional American and international music. During two days of free workshops, visitors learned flatfooting and clogging, English or Scottish country dancing, Brazilian capoeira, Punjabi bhangra, and waltzing. Children flocked to a storytelling workshop, where Chicago artist and performer Judith Heineman enlisted their help recounting a tale about the origin of turtles’ cracked shells. Nearly 70 people crowded into a Saturday afternoon workshop to hear fiddler Heather Mullen and guitarist Jeff Lindblade play and discuss Irish music. Other workshops introduced visitors to bluegrass, klezmer, and blues music, sea shanties, shape-note singing, and Russian choir singing. Many people brought their own instruments, striking up impromptu jam sessions in the hallways, stairwells, and siderooms. Meanwhile, Saturday and Sunday evening concerts gathered musicians from Chicago, the Midwest, the Gulf Coast, Appalachia, New York, and Eastern Europe.

On Sunday the Pine Leaf Boys reprised their jam-session performance, leading some 100 people during two hours of Cajun dancing.

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Photos (left to right): Dancers revel in Cajun tunes; Wilson Savoy plays his accordion; both young and old enjoy the music.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Murder at Doc

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Dressed for the part of indie filmmakers in corduroy blazers and knit ski caps, eight members of the team behind Crime Fiction sat for a panel talk Tuesday night before the film's screening at Doc. The crew—five graduated from Chicago and three still attend—described a project that grew bigger than they expected, culminating in a 90-minute movie shot in high-definition that premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Director Will Slocombe, AB'06, told the audience of about 40—mostly members of the student filmmaking group Fire Escape Films—that the crew's "expectations were always lower than the results." All agreed that the strength of writer Jonathan Eliot's script was what got them so far. A PhD student in comparative literature, Eliot also plays the starring role—floundering novelist James Cooper, who kills his girlfriend and then writes a book about it.

During summer 2005 the crew shot 37 half-hour tapes in 18 days—a ratio of "realistically 5 or 6 to 1," according to Slocombe. That means 5-6 hours of tape for every hour of film. One audience member asked whether the crew made any money. They laughed and another audience member piped up, pointing to producer Jonathan Cowperthwait, '07. "I was that guy's roommate and I can tell you he didn't pay his bills. We almost got evicted because of it."

Fifteen minutes before the 9:30 showing, the audience formed a line that stretched out the theater doors and circled around the first floor of Ida Noyes. The film offered several Hyde Park and Chicago shots: 53rd and Kenwood, the University of Chicago Bookstore, Kimbark Liquors, Jackson Park, orange juice from the Medici Bakery, and City Hall.

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photos: Producer Marc DeMoss, AB'03, composer David Bashwiner, producer Graham Ballou, AB'06, and producer Jonathan Cowperthwait, '07 (top); Cowperthwait, director Will Slocombe, writer Jonathan Eliot, and producer Ben Kolak, AB'06 (bottom).

In the ghetto

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Until he finished writing Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered, Peter Dembowski thought about his subject every day: "If I didn't think about it, I had nightmares about it."

But when Dembowski, a distinguished-service professor emeritus in Romance languages & literatures, finished writing his 2005 book, he told the audience at this Wednesday's Divinity School community lunch, "the nightmares stopped."

A Warsaw native who participated in the city's uprising and was imprisoned by the Germans at Pawiak and Stalag XB Sandbostel, Dembowski wanted to tell the story of the 5,000 Christians of Jewish origin who lived in the Warsaw ghetto (whether recent converts or descendants of converts in generations past, they were Jewish under Nazi law). In describing what life was like for the Jewish Christians and how they were viewed by the ghetto's Jewish occupants, Dembowski drew upon archival materials—and his memories.

“I was there, I remember,” the professor said of his own interactions with the ghetto, but the question of memory “is very complicated. What you remember is the atmosphere, the fear. The emotions, which appear in the nightmares, are true."

M.R.Y.

Photo: "You didn't realize you were in the ghetto at first," said Peter Dembowski of life in the Warsaw ghetto. The Germans "did everything to instill in people the feeling of non-danger," of ordinary life.

A little afternoon music

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The Mandel Hall audience awaiting Sunday afternoon’s University of Chicago Presents concert witnessed a pre-performance premiere: Shauna Quill’s first appearance as executive director of Chicago Presents. Quill comes to Chicago with experience as an artist manager (Pavarotti was a client), administrator (Aspen Music Festival and School), and consultant (one assignment: developing classical DVDs for Berlin label EuroArts).

Her first day on the job was February 1, Quill told the audience, and the past ten days had been "a baptism by fire—but a wonderful one.” The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, in the second year of a three-year University residency, had been busy. On Thursday, Quill said, some 3,000 Chicago schoolchildren came through Mandel Hall as part of the orchestra’s CONNECT musical-outreach program. On Saturday more children—and their parents—arrived for the orchestra’s annual family concert.

Now, the lights dimmed, and the orchestra didn’t disappoint. First it offered its own premiere, its first performance of Rautavaara’s Fiddlers (1952), a suite inspired by Northern European folk fiddling (though he originally wrote it for piano).

Violinist and orchestra director Steven Copes and violist Sabina Thatcher led the group through a mesmerizing peformance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364. Shostakovich’s Chamber Sympony, Op. 73A—a 1946 piece that with its plaintive ending was denounced in Stalinist Russia—ended the program.

M.R.Y.

Questioning the other woman

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Fifteen minutes behind schedule, Larisa Reznik, AM'05, an organizer for the conference Modernity’s Other? Studies on Jewish Women, stood up to begin the two-day event’s last symposium, which, she said, might provide “the sort of pseudo-closure that never really happens.”

The first speaker, Shulamit Gunders, an anthropologist recently retired from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, “came here because of my daughter,” she said. Her daughter's doctoral work is on Orthodox Jewish women, who, Gunders noted, face a dilemma today between the secular world’s increasing gender equality and traditional Orthodox limitations on women’s roles. Gunder's daughter, an Orthodox Jew, trained to be an advocate in the rabbinical courts but didn’t become one because her husband “thought it would be bad for her soul to hear all those divorcing couples.”

Speaking next, Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor of modern Jewish thought in the Divinity School, observed that the many spheres Jewish women occupy had become a recurring theme in the conference's previous talks. Such overlap, he argued, is not only a modern but also a “postmodern condition”: identities are shaped and reconfigured by religious, secular, cultural, and other factors. “We are hybrids and constantly rehybridated,” he said.

Reznik then took questions from the small group gathered in Swift Hall’s third-floor lecture room. One woman asked about the purpose of the question mark in the conference’s title. Another organizer, Sarah Imhoff, AM'05, answered from two seats down. “Jewish women aren’t publicly discussed as Jewish women. They’re always falling under someone else’s category.” The question mark, she said, was meant to ask, “In what sense is she the other?” It seemed that the conference—hosted by the Martin Marty Center and the Center for Gender Studies—had answered with another question. In the Jewish community, in the women’s community, and in greater society, Imhoff said, Jewish women are sometimes the other, and sometimes they are not.

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photo: The poster for the Modernity's Other? conference.

Snow days

Tuesday and Wednesday were snowy, windy, and just plain miserable in Chicago, bringing a foot of snow to Midway Airport and gusts of 30–50 mph, according to the National Weather Service. On campus, Magazine photographer Dan Dry braved the sting to capture some classic moments.

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Row 1, left to right: On the main quads, faces hide as well as they can; students count the seconds until the bus arrives at Woodlawn and 57th; geese burrow in for a snack on the Midway.

Row 2: A burst of color brightens Hutch Courtyard; sidewalks yet unshoveled, pedestrians take to the street; sometimes German engineering is no match for Chicago weather.

Row 3: That's no backdrop: Hutch Court's a whiteout; This woman's face says it all: yuck.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Rockefeller illuminated

When campus is buried in snow, everyone could use a little color. Enlivening Rockefeller Chapel, artwork by Victoria Martin and Jessica Shapiro, MFA'06, is on display in conjunction with Cosmophilia, the Smart Museum's exhibition of Islamic art. According to the text accompanying Martin and Shapiro's work, the Islamic art chosen for Cosmophilia explores ornament through "writing, vegetal and arabesque forms, geometry, and figural imagery"—traits that inspired both artists.

It's clear how Martin's large oil-painted panels reflect that inspiration. All four integrate Koranic verses written in Arabic with English words and images of celestial objects, food, and body parts. Paradise depicts a giant, stylized pink pomegranate with the printed words "pomegranates and palm trees and fruit in both of them."

Shapiro's small mixed-media works are more intimate and much more abstract. Her pieces do, however, pick up the bright colors and patterns of Islamic art that can be seen in Martin's. From the hammock restless consists of rich red squares arranged on a black wash, intricately laced with decorative lines in pencil and ink.

In the late afternoon, the winter light illuminates the east transept where the artwork hangs. Two women with a noisy but cheerful baby peer upwards at Martin's bright panels. Later, three visitors from Chile explore the chapel, then head over to the Graduate School of Business. They want to see Milton Friedman's home turf.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Martin's Seven Heavens hangs beneath stained glass windows; detail from Seven Heavens; Shapiro's From the hammock restless.

Homagerie

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Nineteenth-century Romantics, who concocted the notion of artists as misunderstood loners, visionaries, and geniuses fated to lifelong suffering, also produced innumerable portraits to venerate the painters, writers, sculptors, and musicians they mythologized. In The Image as Homage: Portrait of the Artist, the Smart Museum assembles three dozen such works, some worshipful tributes to artistic ancestors, others affectionate gifts to friends.

Paul-Cesar Helleu, once famous for his paintings of beautiful women and Grand Central Station's astrological ceiling decoration, adopted James McNeill Whistler's drypoint method for an 1897 portrait of the American artist. In 1885 painter and lithographer Henri Fantin-Latour commemorated Les Miserables writer Victor Hugo with an image not of the man but of his grave, over which two robed figures mourn. Etcher Axel Herman Haig remembered John Dryden with an image of a couple transfixed before the poet's bust, which crowns his tomb at Westminster Abbey. Not long after he met Stephane Mallarme in 1891, painter Paul Gauguin paid tribute to the symbolist poet in a portrait that combined etching, drypoint, and engraving—a mixture so complicated that Gauguin had to seek technical advice from fellow artists. And 400 years after Albrecht Durer's death, Louis Corvath based his 1920 depiction of him on the Renaissance painter and engraver's own Self-Portrait at 28.

Curated by Smart Museum Mellon curator Anne Leonard, the exhibit runs through April 8.

L.G.

Photos: Félix Vallotton, To Ibsen (A Ibsen), 1894, woodcut (top); Anders Zorn, Prince Paul Troubetzkoy I (sculpting a bust), 1908, etching.

The whisperers

By the time the lights dimmed in the Francis X. Kinahan Third Floor Theater 8 p.m. Wednesday, the cast of but i cd only whisper—professional actor Osiris Khepara, fourth-years E'lana Jordan and Jamil Barton, second-year Jacob Marshall, and first-years Aaron Rodriguez and Tamara Silverleaf—had already spent nearly three hours getting in costume, posing for photos, and running scenes. “Can I go over curtain call with them?” director Tiffany Trent asked stage manager Katherine Greenleaf, ’09, before the house opened. “You have two minutes,” responded Greenleaf as Trent showed the actors where to stand for final applause. Bows practiced, the cast rushed offstage just as the theater doors let in the full-house audience.

"I was always in pieces long as I could remember," recounted black Vietnam vet beau willie brown midway through the play, written by third-year Kristiana Colón. Inspired by Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the piece chronicles beau's emotional journey as he undergoes a psychological evaluation for a crime revealed to the audience late in the action.

Their scenes played, the cast bowed again—this time to a standing ovation from students, family, and other theatergoers.

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Photos (left to right): E'lana Jordan, '07, as crystal, the mother of beau's children; Jamil Barton, '07, plays beau's best friend, marvin; Aaron Rodriquez, '10, as psychologist drummond, restrains beau (Osiris Khepera) in a closing scene.

Photos by Dan Dry

Black like whom?

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Leaning gingerly on his cane and warning his audience not to expect "politically correct" remarks, Harvard African American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. took the Mandel Hall stage last Thursday evening to thunderous applause. He sat down facing Michael Dawson, U-High'68, a race and politics scholar who rejoined Chicago's faculty in 2005 after three years in Cambridge. "I've come to recruit him back to Harvard," Gates joked.

In fact the two had come to discuss African American identity and politics for an annual lecture arranged by Chicago's Organization of Black Students in memory of George E. Kent, who taught English at the University from 1970 to 1982 and became its first black tenured professor in humanities. During their hourlong conversation, Gates and Dawson talked about globalization, affirmative action, class divisions, and homophobia. Gates recalled his upbringing in West Virginia and his 1969 arrival at Yale as an undergraduate, and he showed a clip from his most recent PBS documentary about tracing Oprah Winfrey's genealogical roots. "PBS has never had more black people watching," he said, than the millions who tuned in for his two specials on African American genealogy. "Black people are looking for their ancestors."

First, though, Gates and Dawson brought up the topic of Barack Obama. Scolding African Americans who "set themselves up as the high priest of blackness," Gates called the debate over Obama's racial bona fides "totally spurrious—of course he's black." The fact that 35 million African Americans live in this country, he said, "means there are 35 million ways to be black."

Meanwhile, a false sense of unity affects African American class relations, Gates argued. Since 1968 the black middle class has quadrupled, but roughly 30 percent of African Americans remain below the poverty line. Both middle and underclass have become self-perpetuating though totally separate, creating what Gates called "a crisis of identity." Cultural phenomena like hip-hop music gives suburban blacks the illusion that all African Americans belong to the same class, which, Gates said, "lets the middle class off the hook for the underclass." The rest of American society will do little to help impoverished blacks unless more affluent blacks lead the way. "We have to redefine the problem," Gates said, "as one of race and class."

L.G.

Photos: Henry Louis Gates Jr. (top) and Michael Dawson (bottom) spoke at Mandel Hall about the intertwined relationship between race and class in America.

Chocaholics convene

By 7:10 p.m., 30 students had gathered in Stuart Hall's basement, milling around a table covered with chocolate-dipped strawberries, chocolate almond bark, chocolate turtles, and chocolate lollipops. Waiting for the Culinary Club's chocolate study break to begin made them antsy.

Five minutes later, a club member raised her voice above the chatter. "You may take three chocolates apiece—and don't take more than one of the same kind." Members seemed worried about a free-for-all, but the students formed a neat line, choosing from white, milk, or dark chocolate confections and moose-, horse-, cow-, and cat-shaped lollipops all made by Old Town chocolate shop The Fudge Pot.

While most attendants then sat down, mouths full, a handful scanned the posted information sheets about chocolate's history, manufacturing process, and terminology, courtesy of the Field Museum's Chocolate Exhibition Web site.

When asked whose idea the study break was, the Culinary Club pointed to member Teresa Lim, '07. Lim said she organized the study break "because I like chocolate," before explaining that it was part of the club's winter sweets and desserts theme. Added another member, "Overall, it's just winter quarter and we thought chocolate would make people happy."

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Culinary Club members unveil the treats; students take their pick; some read up on chocolate.

Feed the mind

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From blogs to podcasts, there is no shortage of University news on the Web. By subscribing to one of the University's 38 RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, literary types can check out the latest audio and video presentations of Poem Present readings while aspiring lawyers can read a day-in-the-life blog from law school students and staff. Bibliophiles can stay up-to-date on the U of C Press's latest offerings and journalists can track down informed sources from the University's directory of expert researchers. When content is added to a site, the feed automatically updates and displays a link to the new information in the subscriber's Web browser. Provided by sites such as the University News Office, The Maroon, the Hospitals, and, of course, UChiBLOGo, feeds keep Chicago readers in the know.

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Photo: RSS feeds keep readers informed of the latest University news and events.

The Wilkins effect

Room 209, aka the Tea Room, in Eckhart Hall has seen its share of mathematics department gatherings, all presided over by a portrait of the department's founding chair, Eliakim Hastings Moore. Now afternoon tea will be consumed and theorems discussed under the equally watchful eye of J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., SB’40, SM’41, PhD’42. Wilkins entered the College in 1936 at age 13 and six years later became the seventh African American to earn a PhD in mathematics from Chicago—and quite possibly Chicago's youngest-ever PhD recipient.

Welcoming Wilkins and other guests to a Friday afternoon unveiling of a Tea Room portrait honoring his accomplishments, Physical Sciences Dean Robert A. Fefferman noted the exceptional nature of the occasion and the honoree: "Dr. Wilkins stands out among our alumni."

During his 61-year career, the South Side native worked on the Manhattan Project (where his contributions to nuclear-reactor physics included a discovery known as the Wilkins effect), designed microscopic and ophthalmologic lenses, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, and became the second African American named to the National Academy of Engineering.

Walter E. Massey, president of Morehouse College and former U of C vice president for research and director of the Argonne National Laboratory, saw a significance in the portrait that went beyond honoring Wilkins: "Students will see it and ask, Who was that? What's the story behind that? And to have a way of telling that story is a great thing."

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Ernest J. Wilkins Jr. and his wife Vera view his portrait in Eckhart Hall; Morehouse College president Walter E. Massey spoke at the ceremony; Sharon Wilkins Hill told of a math-filled childhood—from counting games to counting poker cards.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Basic training

If there was ever a place for the lab rat to shine, this was it. At a UChicagoTech event Friday afternoon, basic-science faculty, students, and researchers presented posters showing how their studies could lead to commercially viable products. Viewers, participants, and judges packed the BSLC lobby, noshing on biscotti and perusing tacked-up posters such as Fighting Fire with Fire: A Model of Antagonism between Spontaneous and Epileptic Form Acuity in Neocortical Networking.

In Fighting Fire, computational-neuroscience grad student Michael Carroll installed a flat-screen on the poster to display a colorful computer model of brain cells. As Carroll, in jeans and a ponytail, explained to one of two judges from consulting firm RPX Group, his team's research could lead to a new method to control epileptic seizures for people who don't respond to medication, in a way less intrusive than electrical brain stimulators.

"Would you and your team be interested in commercialization?" the judge asked. "Sure, yeah, I guess," Carroll answered. "I mean, I'm just a student."

The event, called From Bench to Bedside, was meant to show basic-science researchers that their work has practical applications—and that the University can help realize those uses, said UChicagoTech staff member Matt Clark. The office, formerly called ARCH and UCTech, used to pick a few projects a year to create start-up companies. Now the technology-and-intellectual-property staff hopes to encourage more patents "even for something as small as an antibody" a researcher discovers.

"This is a showcase for exciting work taking place," Clark said. "It's neat for other people in the research community to see what's going on." All 24 posters, he said, represented projects that UChicagoTech has already worked with "or would be very interested in." In addition to the two consultants, an investment banker and UChicagoTech Director Alan Thomas judged the posters and named three winners (see below), who received $500, $250, and $125, respectively.

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Photos (left to right): First-place winner Lucy Godley stands by her poster, Cell Characterization Using Chemically Functionalized Pores; Second-place winner Katinka Vigh and her poster, Allergy Profiling With Protein Arrays; and third-place winners Nancy L. Stein and Marc W. Hernandez and their poster, Making the Invisible Visible: Elementary School Children Learning about Thermodynamics.

Photos courtesy UChicagoTech.

Bobbing for improv

Thursday night, during College reading period, the Bartlett Arts Rehearsal Space was packed with students—laughing, not studying. They had come to watch campus improv group Occam's Razor.

In the hour-long show, Occam's played eight short "games" in which performers improvised skits on outlandish premises. One game, "Swinging Pendulum of Death," required three performers to switch between three different skits every time a group member offstage clapped. With each switch, someone onstage also had to die.

Next came "Helping Hands," in which one performer stood behind another, making hand gestures and speaking for the performer in front. "What's your name?" one character asked the other. "Veeeeelllmaaa!" the other character roared, frantically stuffing her face with imaginary chicken. "Why aren't you eating the bones?" Velma shouted, her face distorted. "Velma eats the bones!"

Toward the end of the show, the performers carried out a black bucket full of water and placed it on top of two wooden blocks for the game "Oxygen Deprivation." Some students seated in the front row tucked their coats around their legs. One performer stuck her head in the bucket. When she could no longer hold her breath, she began to bang on the boxes until another performer tapped her on the shoulder to switch places. What resulted was a disjointed but laugh-inducing skit. Two characters discussed microwaving Nilla wafers and marshmallows, interrupted about every 30 seconds by another character's entry, head soaking wet.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Zoë Thompson, '10, Natasha Sansone, '10, and Natalie Doss, '10, play "Swinging Pendulum of Death"; Matt Howard, '08, uses physical comedy; Daniel Flores, '10 and Kellen Alexander, '07, play "Oscar-Winning Moments."

Destruction of mass weapons

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Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who oversaw 700 searches across Iraq—and uncovered no weapons of mass destruction—before the March 2003 invasion, stepped up to a podium at Ida Noyes last Thursday afternoon. Invited by the Harris School, he had come not to say I told you so, although he couldn't resist a jab at the Bush Administration's "faith-based evidence" for war, but to urge worldwide nuclear disarmament. "Another arms race is taking place, despite the end of the Cold War," he warned, noting not only Iran's nuclear aspirations but also nuclear tests by North Korea, India, and Pakistan; new nuclear arsenals in the U.S. and U.K.; and Russia's potential countermeasures to the American missile shield. Moreover, Blix said, the Iraq war and last summer's Israel-Lebanon conflict constitute "arguments for greater restraint."

Now chair of the Stockholm-based Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, a group founded and mostly funded by the Swedish government, Blix traced 50 years of international efforts—some more successful than others—to halt the build-up of nuclear, chemical, and biological arms. The common perception that the world has become less safe, he said, is wrong. During the 1990s, the UN counted 50 armed conflicts worldwide, Blix said; today it counts half that many. And although new arms races are emerging, the U.S. and Russia have scrapped 28,000 of their 55,000 collective nukes. Widening globalization makes war among World War II foes or the U.S. and Mexico "unthinkable," he said. "And China and Russia do not really expect to be attacked by the United States." Meanwhile, the risks of global pandemics and environmental collapse intensify the need for international cooperation. Fighting terrorism requires shared police and intelligence resources, "maybe helicopters or even ground troops, but not aircraft carriers," Blix insisted. "Have you ever tried to shoot a mosquito with a cannon?"

Quoting from a report the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission released last summer, Blix urged obedience to existing test-ban and disarmament treaties and "multilateral guarantees of security" for countries like North Korea and Iran. He also argued for eliminating double standards that condemn countries such as India for behaving the same way as the U.S. and the U.K.

During the Q&A that followed Blix's talk, one student raised the theory that today's "peaceful world is built on a balance of nuclear weapons" and asked whether disarmament might reopen the possibility of bloody conventional war. Blix responded by advocating a corresponding reduction in conventional arms and by saying that "more nukes in more countries means more fingers on more triggers." At the same time, as nations continue to rely on each other, economically and otherwise, "the more absurd a military solution will be."

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Photo: Introduced by Harris School professor and deputy dean Charles L. Glaser (at right), Hans Blix called for renewed nuclear disarmament.

Photo by Beth Rooney.

High seas, high Cs

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The bass drums, trumpets, and singing sailors inside Mandel Hall echoed throughout the Reynolds Club on Saturday night. To benefit the Department of Music Performance Program, Hyde Park’s Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company partnered with the music department to produce HMS Pinafore, the company's 48th production and its 23rd annual U of C collaboration. Typical of Gilbert and Sullivan’s brand of comedy, the show’s combination of cheerful music and social commentary lightheartedly focused on class status—fitting for the start of finals week. The show was set on the ship against a painted blue sky, and the score was performed by the University's Chamber Orchestra, conducted by musical director William C. White, AB’05.

Directed by Thrisa Hodits, Pinafore spotlights a love triangle between Josephine, the captain's daughter (played by Rebecca Prescott), young sailor Ralph Rackstraw (Matt Edlen), and Sir Joseph, the "ruler of the Queen's Navee" (Howard Timms). Although the cocky Sir Joseph, who claims that “a British sailor is any man’s equal, excepting mine,” hopes to marry Josephine, she is in love with “ignobly born” Ralph. Ralph also loves Josephine, “a lass above his station,” and the characters meander through the concerns of social rank before reaching the requisite happy ending.

First performed in 1878, the opera drew laughs from the mixed-generation audience, and children’s heads bobbed to the music. At the show’s conclusion, a rousing rendition of “God Save the Queen,” the audience rose to salute the British flag.

Ruthie Kott

Photo: Josephine runs into the arms of Ralph Rackstraw while ladies and sailors look on.

Rugby's kinder, gentler side

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“It’s a sport that’s more touchy-feely than others,” said women’s rugby team captain Karyl Kopaskie, ’07, as she kneaded another student’s shoulders Tuesday afternoon. This past Monday through Wednesday, the team offered free ($2 suggested donation) massages to weary exam-takers passing through the Reynolds Club. “We have strong hands,” added team member Laurel Buchi-Fotre, ’10. The team, started in 1995, has held a massage fundraiser for the past five years. Though the masseuses don’t have formal bodywork training, said team member Laura McFarland, ’08, their heavy-contact sport—and the self-administered shoulder rubs that often follow a game—have taught them much about muscles. Students taking advantage of the team’s know-how agreed: “These guys know how to massage,” said a male student, leaning back into the dark wood chair.

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Photo: Rugby players Laura McFarland (left) and Karyl Kopaskie (right) set up a mini-spa, loosening tight muscles in Reynolds Club.

Flyin’ high

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Pearl Cleage’s 1992 play, Flyin’ West, tells the story of four African-American women who escape the racial violence of the post-Civil War South by homesteading in the all-black settlement of Nicodemus, Kansas. The plot mixes melodrama (the youngest sister’s abusive husband tries to sell her share of the homestead she and her sisters earned to white speculators) with humor and bite.

As staged by Court Theatre’s resident director Ron OJ Parsons—who orchestrated last year’s award-winning production of August Wilson’s Fences—Cleage’s play is as uplifting as the wide prairie sunsets that provide a backdrop to the characters’ daily lives.

The production runs through April 8, with playwright Cleage holding a post-play discussion at Court immediately following the 8 p.m. performance on Saturday, March 24.

M.R.Y.

Photos: Taking flight in Court’s production of Flyin’ West: Tyla Abercrumbie as Fannie, TaRon Patton as Sophie, and Monét Butler as Minnie; Cheryl Lynn Bruce as Miss Leah and Patton. Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Attention job hunters

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“Leave your interview suit in the closet!” suggests a flyer advertising Career Advising & Planning Services’ (CAPS) latest job-hunting opportunity. Through March 31, U of C students and alumni can log in to an online “eCareer” fair sponsored by the Nationwide Internships Consortium (NIC). Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and 13 other institutions are part of the NIC group, which posts full-time job and internship positions. Job seekers can view up-to-date postings and submit résumés to employers around the country—from software developer 1010data in New York to Blank Theatre Company in Los Angeles—all from the comfort of home.

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Photo: The NIC eCareer Fair is open to all U of C students and alumni with a username and password from CAPS.

Spring pruning

The whir of chainsaws and the thud of branches hitting the ground filled the quads this Thursday as tree-service company The Care of Trees gave the University's greenery a spring trim. On a balmy morning a seven-man crew donned hard hats and pruned oaks in the quads' northwest corner. After hoisting heavy-duty ropes around the trunks, workers climbed to the treetops using harnesses. At the top, the crew chopped off branches injured by the winter elements. According to The Care of Trees' Web site, such routine pruning is particularly important for city-dwelling trees, which must "contend with air pollution, road salt, confined roots, trunk damage, compacted or poor quality soils, improper pruning, and other stresses." Operations and maintenance director for University Facilities Services Bob Tiberg notes that the University has become "much more attentive" to arboreal care over the past few years. Since the trees are not yet in full bloom, he adds, now is the ideal time for trimming.

Such seasonal maintenance also prepares trees to deal with weather like last October's violent lighting storm that felled more than 40 campus trees. Discussions are underway to determine how many of the lost crop will be replaced, and Tiberg expects to see new trees planted late summer, when the environment is "most cooperative" for growth.

B.E.O.

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Photos (left to right): Tree maintenance on the northwest quad; a tree-service employee trims branches; Wheeling, IL–based company The Care of Trees descends on campus; more members of the tree-maintence crew.

A house in New Orleans

Wanting a break from our keyboards and books, four friends and I went down to New Orleans last week to volunteer for local relief organization Common Ground. We were among approximately 20,000 college students to help in New Orleans over spring break, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Joining us at Common Ground were students from Howard University, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke, the University of Illinois, DePaul University, Wesleyan University, and Barnard College, among others. Howard sent more than 500 students to New Orleans through its Alternative Spring Break program, approximately 200 of whom worked at Common Ground. Other schools came in smaller numbers.

At 6:30 each morning, volunteers awoke to clanging pans, a trumpet, or shouts. By 8:30, we began suiting up for a day of gutting houses, donning Tyvek suits, rubber boots, garden gloves, goggles, and respirators to block toxic mold spores from the floodwater that had sat in houses for weeks. Then we loaded a wheelbarrow, shovels, rakes, brooms, crowbars, and hammers into our car for the short drive to the house we would work on for the next few days, located in the Upper Ninth Ward, one of the most badly affected areas in New Orleans.

On the first day, we carried out a faded couch, rusty lamps, fans, and chunks of fallen plaster. Most of the smaller personal belongings had already been removed. With crowbars and sledgehammers, we knocked down the plasterboard covered in black mold, leaving only the wooden supports. Then we shoveled up the plaster pieces, a layer of rotting carpet, and the linoleum beneath, making giant piles on sidewalk.

The toughest part of gutting was removing the fridge. Common Ground workers warned all volunteers never to open one. The smell, they said, was unbearable, and what was inside was highly toxic. To make matters more difficult, the fridge in our house had fallen on its door. After shoving paint cans and bricks beneath to hold it up, the five of us slowly worked duct tape under and around the sides, hoping it would hold the door shut. Gingerly, we pushed it upright, as reeking water gushed out, then wrestled the box on a dolly to the front door, where we pushed it down the steps on its back.

On the last day, we pulled out nails, tore up more carpet, and swept, and swept, and swept. As we were collecting our gear to leave, a man living in a FEMA trailer down the block came by to look at our progress. Wandering through the empty rooms, he said, "You guys have done a lot of work. But there's a lot left to do."

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Trash quickly piled up in front of the house; Rachel Berg, '08, wields a shovel; Laura Eberly, '10, tears up rotting carpet.

The right thing

Pop-icon film director-producer Spike Lee, whose credits include He Got Game, Do the Right Thing, and Malcolm X, visited the South Side Wednesday afternoon to speak with some 300 Chicago Public School students, including 75 enrolled in the University’s Collegiate Scholars Program.

In his talk—part of this year’s four-city “Inspiration Tour,” sponsored by the Electronic Arts Corporation—Lee urged the students, gathered at the Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men in Ingleside, to thank their teachers and staff for all they do for them on a daily basis: “their riches come with the richness of your mind.”

In an after-lecture reception, Lee fielded the students’ questions on topics from film-making to college to sports. The New Yorker, an avid sports fan, closed the session by teasing the students about the past performances of the Chicago Bears and the Chicago Cubs.

D.D.

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Photos (left to right): Director Spike Lee prepares for his talk; at the podium; attentive listeners; and a thank-you gift, presented by Collegiate Scholar José Choto.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Santa Claus and lederhosen

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Down the chimney came old Saint Nick, which
was weird, because it was noon on a hot July day.

—from James Tate’s “The Special Guest”

Everyday people in the midst of bizarre events populate James Tate’s poems in his newest collection, return to the city of white donkeys (Harper Collins, 2004). Pulitzer prize-winner Tate, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, teamed up with U Mass colleague and poet Dara Wier on Thursday night for a reading from their respective collections. The mostly student audience filed into Rosenwald 405 and filled up on Rajun Cajun and red wine at 5:30 p.m.; the poets, detained by flight delays, arrived an hour later.

Sharing from her collection Remnants of Hannah and a book-length poem, Reverse Rapture, Wier peppered the reading with personal anecdotes. After seeing a baby in a stroller left alone in a parking lot, Wier mused, for the first time in her life, “I thought I could steal.” This baby, with “no one in earshot patrolling or guarding,” inspired a character in her poem “Limestone of the continent consists of Infinite Masses.” Another poem, “That Vagrant Minstrel,” is written in the voice of her daughter’s Chinese friend who moved to Amherst with her family at age two. Her parents’ plan, Wier explained, was to put her through university and then return to China. The poem expresses Wier’s concern about the girl, who knew her parents would be leaving: “I no longer had friends, no sister, no brother / They left me no instructions.”

Wier proclaimed she has a love-hate relationship with prose poems and often writes in fragments and lists; Tate takes a different approach. To control the length, he limits each poem to one page, which, he says, can lead to “very cramped pages.” Deadpan, Tate read a selection of poems, each drawing laughs. In “The Rules,” a hold-up in a candy store is thwarted because the owner asserts the “candy store protection plan.” In “The Radish,” a trip through a supermarket produce aisle brings about a strange turn of events in which the narrator, after being “jostled” and “rammed” by other shoppers, is separated from his cart and encounters “a man dressed in lederhosen and an alpine hat.” Remarking that his poems seemed long when read aloud, Tate concluded, “I think that’s good.”

Ruthie Kott

Photos: Tate reads from his work (top) then chats with students (bottom) after the reading.

Jon Stewart reveals his inner maroon

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The Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart has an undergrad degree from the College of William and Mary, which presented him with an honorary doctorate when he gave its 2004 commencement address. But he also has a tie to Chicago: Kahane Corn, AB’84, is the show’s coexecutive producer.

This winter, when Corn—an English major who started her career as a documentary filmmaker—gave the keynote talk at Taking the Next Step 2007, the Career and Planning Services (CAPS) annual program for third-years in the College, she brought along a video greeting from her boss.

M.R.Y.

The schtik is old but the delivery’s hip.

Randal's Trump card

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“I was a geeky kid. But Bill Gates was a geeky kid too.” Randal Pinkett, season four winner of Donald Trump’s business-savvy reality show The Apprentice, shared some personal stories and professional tips at the U of C Bookstore Tuesday afternoon as part of a national tour promoting his book, Campus CEO (Kaplan Publishing, 2007). Nestled in the store’s business, finance, and marketing section, about 20 fans gathered to hear Pinkett’s talk and get their copies of Campus CEO signed, many hoping to learn a few tricks of the entrepreneurial trade.

On December 13, 2005, Pinkett heard the words that 17 other Apprentice wannabes—all vying for the chance to work for real-estate mogul Donald Trump—had hoped to hear: “You’re hired.” (He beat Rebecca Jarvis, AB’03, in the final round.) After working for a year overseeing the renovation of Trump resorts in Atlantic City, he returned to his love: an information-technology consulting firm (BCT Partners) that he cofounded while an undergraduate at Rutgers. He continues to consult a few hours a week for Trump University, an online program for future entrepreneurs, and also manages a “Young Apprentice program for young people in Philly,” he said. Because of his experience on The Apprentice, Pinkett explained, he has been able to develop a career that combines his three passions—technology, education, and community.

Before the show, Pinkett had been a professional student; after receiving his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and later received a PhD from MIT. Throughout school he participated in business ventures, from selling CDs out of his dorm room to IT consulting. “Students have a unique lens into the marketplace,” he said, then shot off a list of business started by students: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Federal Express, Kinko’s, and Pizza Hut.

Responding to a second-year graduate student asking about starting her own nonprofit organization, he explained, “You don’t have to do everything.” Using lessons he’s learned from his own start-up experience, he advised that each business partner should learn one thing, be it finance, marketing, sales, or accounting, and know it well. “Don’t just be good,” he urged. “Be great.”

Ruthie Kott

Photo: Pinkett signs copies of his new book at the U of C Bookstore.

More than "spring prints"

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Presenting an exhibition of Japanese erotic prints, assistant professor of art history Hans Thomsen and his students hoped that viewers would see the woodblock prints—dating from the 16th through 19th centuries—not just as exotic or erotic images but also as windows into Japanese art and culture. In Recontextualizing Shunga: Text & Image in Japanese Erotic Prints, which opened Wednesday afternoon, each print was accompanied by historical background and a translation of the Japanese characters in the image.

Those who gathered to view the prints at the opening reception in the Center for Gender Studies seemed unfazed by the giant, exaggerated genitalia and contorted positions of the characters depicted in the artworks. Sipping wine and munching on pink- and yellow-dyed cauliflower, they were more interested in chatting with one another or reading the long texts accompanying each print.

For the exhibit, curated by Thomsen and ten College and graduate students who took his winter seminar on Japanese woodblock prints, each student helped prepare the text for at least one piece. Midway through the reception, Thompsen called on them to share what they had learned.

One student noted that the people crowded into the room were "changing the very form" in which the shunga (literally "spring prints") were traditionally experienced. The prints, she said, would have been viewed privately in books, in calendars, or as party favors.

The students shared their reflections not only on the prints but also on their professor. Thomsen, one said, "is the type of teacher who really wants students to get engaged with the work." The scene of people gathered in the room "is an example of his teaching method."

Sponsored by the Center for Gender Studies, the Smart Museum, and the Center for East Asian Studies, Recontextualizing Shunga—the first exhibition of shunga erotic prints in the Midwest—runs through April 30.

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photos: Thomsen (far left) and others view the exhibit; lovers unite in a print from 1904–05.

Chicago Review's British accent

Several dozen listeners climbed the stairs to a second-story space above Logan Square's Friendship Chinese restaurant Friday night to hear three British poets read from their work. Hosted by the nonprofit Elastic Arts Foundation, the event launched the University-published Chicago Review’s spring issue, a 232-page volume compiling poetry and criticism by UK writers.

Bristol-born Keston Sutherland, a literary-journal editor and small-press coeditor, kicked off the reading with a half-hour performance of his poem “Hot White Andy.” Describing it as both a love poem to two people (one of them a stranger chosen at random) and a political composition, he said the work, like his 2005 poetry collection Neocosis, was inspired by the rise of neoconservatism. Andrea Brady, a Philadelphia-born, Cambridge-educated poet now living and teaching in London, read poetry that was also political, albeit more lyrical and restrained than Sutherland’s sprawling and intentional absurdity. “If anything happiness is / our common predicament,” she read from “Sung to Sleep.” “not / knowing how to live in the bulge where our lives / bottom out, unelected popular incumbents, build capacity / to make good choices from / a given list.”

Acclaimed Mallarme translator and pamphlet publisher Peter Manson, meanwhile, injected a little black humor to the evening. Introducing “Depressions Gone from Me Blues,” about American blues guitarist Blind Blake, Manson said it was a poem “in which someone blows their head off twice.” After reading a recent poem dedicated in part to singer Kylie Minogue, he offered a verse he composed for a novelist friend who’d suffered a stroke six months earlier. “She felt much better after I wrote this poem,” he offered, smiling slyly. Later Manson, a Glasgow native, took the microphone to read, at breakneck pace, “An introduction to speed-reading,” an uproarious and delightfully nonsequitur prose poem by Chris Goode, who was unable to make the trip from London for the reading. “Tip: Undertake to read the text in a smoky environment,” the poem advised, while listeners laughed. “The text will think it is on fire and the words will form orderly queues and proceed to the nearest exit.”

The reading lasted a marathon two hours. Cheering each poet and taking breaks between performances, audience members—many of them U of C students—fortified themselves with beer, soft drinks, and bottled water from a counter at the back and perused the selection of books and journals for sale. “It’s been great to meet all of you,” Brady said during her turn at the microphone. “And it’s been great to get a new perspective on our work.”

L.G.

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Photos (left to right): Andrea Brady with literary critic Matt Ffytche, whose writing also appears in the Chicago Review spring issue; Keston Sutherland; Peter Manson.

Photos by Robert P. Baird.

April showers

Yes, "April showers" can often mean snow in Chicago. Still, the shock of the old doesn't dissipate. Today's heavy, slushy mix of rain and snow forced Hyde Parkers to unpack their heavy coats, hats, and even boots to muddle across campus.

An inch of snow is expected to fall in the city today, with 20-30 mph winds, according to local weatherman Tom Skilling, while another two inches could fall tonight. The Cubs canceled their final game in a losing series against the Astros (the Sox are in Oakland), and the city sent out 177 plows to clear the streets.

Despite the snow, spring does appear on the horizon. The National Weather Service's seven-day forecast shows highs of 62 degrees for Monday and Tuesday.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): This morning proved a whiteout at the U of C Bookstore; the Quads seem more January than April; tulips on 57th Street try in vain to guard against the snow (photo by Tony Englert).

Free writing

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At the first annual Robert H. Kirschner Memorial Human Rights Lecture—named in memory of Robert Kirschner, who helped found the U of C's Human Rights Program —speaker Sara Paretsky, AM'69, MBA'77, PhD'77, recalled her first meeting with Kirschner, a forensic pathologist and international human-rights activist: on a private tour of the Cook County morgue. Kirschner worked for the Medical Examiner's Office, and Paretsky—the author of a mystery series on private inspector V. I. Warshawski—was doing research.

"I've never fainted," Paretsky told the crowd of 150 in Social Sciences 122, but when Kirschner "sawed off the back of a suicide victim's head and scooped out the brains, I almost did." The procedure was standard in a nonaccidental-death autopsy.

Set in Chicago, Paretsky's novels abound with scenes that require a familiarity with, for example, the Cook County morgue. Her reading Thursday was not about the "made-up world of violent crime," however, but her concerns about the real world: the rise of mega-publishers, civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, and the Patriot Act.

Paretsky read a version of "Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape," an essay in her forthcoming book Writing in an Age of Silence. Writing, she said, is "a movement from silence to speech"—speech that may then be censored by market forces, public hysteria, or the government. When her first book was published 25 years ago, Paretsky said, there were about 20 publishers to go to. Now there are "only seven—Disney, Time Warner," and other media conglomerates who focus on what sells.

The government also restricts freedom, she said, noting that the Patriot Act requires libraries served with FBI letters to turn over some patron records to the National Security Administration—but they libraries can't reveal they've gotten such a letter. A New Jersey patron was imprisoned for two days without being able to call his wife, Paretsky said, because he was looking at foreign-language pages on the Internet.

"What is the appropriate response as a writer in times like these?" Paretsky asked. The best she could do, she said, was to "fumble my way as close as I can to the truth." As for the audience, "We have to decide where our most effective sphere of action lies and take on those actions."

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photo: Author Sara Paretsky reads in the Social Sciences building.

Words and enthusiasm

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Members of the University of Chicago Library Society who attended the group’s annual meeting last Wednesday evening not only received a guided tour of the Special Collections Research Center exhibition The Meaning of Dic’tion·ar’ies, but they also heard a talk by the woman National Public Radio has dubbed “America’s lexicographical sweetheart,” Erin McKean, AB'93, AM'93.

McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, took up where the last display case in the exhibition—which looked at English dictionaries from pre-Samuel Johnson through the U of C Press’s Dictionary of American English—left off, with the rise of the nonprint dictionary.

“Paper is the enemy of words,” McKean told the hard-core readers who made up her audience, admitting that such a thought is “very disturbing to someone who loves books.” But with so many words and so (relatively) few pages, dictionary makers are forced to make decisions about which words to put in and which to leave out. That kind of decision-making doesn't sit well with McKean, who resists people “who see the dictionary as a Social Register of Words, the Westminster Kennel Club of Words, and think I am the bouncer at the nightclub of words.”

No traffic cop, McKean put herself firmly in the descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) lexicographical camp. Transferring dictionaries from paper to electronic form, a move that is already well under way, she said, is a natural match: “The Internet is made of words and enthusiasms—which also happens to be what a dictionary is made of.”

M.R.Y.

Photo: Before there was Samuel Johnson, there was Thomas Blount, whose Glossographia, or, a Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words, was printed in London in 1656; the edition is part of the Rare Books Collection at the Regenstein’s Special Collections Research Center.

Ancient Nubia made young

Enchanted bowls and poisoned tomato soup are just two of the whimsical elements seventh- and eighth-graders from Woodlawn’s Fiske School dreamed up after studying the Oriental Institute’s (OI) Nubian art collection. Through Young Eyes: Ancient Nubian Art Recreated, on exhibit at the OI, features the students’ paintings, sculptures, and stories, each based on a piece from the museum’s collection. In a story called “The Green Glass Bowl,” inspired by a teal glass aryballos (circular flask), seventh-grader Catrina Redmond writes of a Princess Sabrina who so adores her green bowl that she has no need for friends. When Sabrina catches her maid stealing the bowl to sell it—a crime punishable by death—the princess forgives her, describing the maid as “a good person doing a bad thing.”

Royals are less benevolent in Devonte Ware’s “King Bob,” which tells of a King Untrustolot’s plan to poison his rival Bob by sneaking snake blood into his tomato soup. During dinner King Bob foils the scheme, switching bowls when Untrustolot takes a bathroom break. Untrustolot dies immediately. To keep the peace, King Bob keeps Untrustolot’s deception hidden and instead gives his nemesis “a royal burial complete with a ceremonial coffin head made by Nubians.”

After gallery tours and sessions with museum educators, the 59 Fiske students each photographed an object, then spent time at the Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center recreating the object on canvas and paper. Exhibited beside Ware’s “King Bob” story is his painting of an original coffin head dressing; Redmond designed a ceramic bowl similar to the green container she imagined Princess Sabrina would use. Funded by the Joyce Foundation of Chicago, the Through Young Eyes project is a collaboration between the OI and the Chicago Public Schools. Completed stories and artwork are on display, half at the OI, half at Little Black Pearl, through May 6.


B.E.O.

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Photos (left to right): Students' artwork and stories on display at the OI museum; Ware's painting depicts the slain King Untrustolot; and seventh-grader Ashley Hilliard's exhibit “The Ashley Stone,” tells of a young sculptor who wins an art competition with his sleek grinding stone.

Virtual spirituality

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Blogs may be fairly commonplace now, but blogging nuns are still rare. “There are only about 30 nuns with blogs, and about ten are young ones,” said Sister Julie Vieira—one of those young blogging nuns—at Wednesday’s Divinity School lunch. A member of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), a Roman Catholic community based in Monroe, MI, Vieira is the voice behind A Nun’s Life: A Blog about Being a Catholic Nun in Today’s World. She writes almost daily on what it’s like to be a nun; people she finds inspirational; her job at Catholic publishing company Loyola Press, where she manages the theological content of religious educational programs and resources; biking; and her favorite beer, Harp.

“Eleven years ago,” Vieira admitted, “I wanted nothing to do with religious life.” After earning a degree in philosophy and religious studies from the University of Toronto, she began contemplating her life and her role in the world. Returning to her Catholic upbringing, she found the IHM sisters and “fell in love” with this community of women who were funny, educated, religious, and liked sports. The sisters have supported her blog, saying that “ministry is not so much what you do, but who you are in it.”

A Nun’s Life evolved from a “post here, post there” every once in awhile, Vieira said, to an ongoing dialogue, “a place of hospitality, where people can come from any tradition or non-tradition, wear whatever they want, and feel what they want to feel.” A fellow blogger—a dying man who writes “one of the most uplifting, positive, life-affirming blogs,” Vieira said—made her realize the potential for virtual religious communities. After this man, who found Vieira’s blog and asked her to comment on a question about God on his Dying Man’s Daily Journal, she realized that, as a nun, she “might have spiritual insight, know a thing or two about God,” and be able to provide comfort through her own blog.

Recently the media, including the Chicago Tribune, Time magazine, and NPR, have picked up on Vieira’s blog, “not because they find it interesting,” she explained, “but because of the novelty of a nun who’s on the Internet.” Stereotypes, Vieira said, are one of her biggest pet peeves; because she fits neither the “docile servant” nor the “man-hating, radical nun” category, Vieira hopes to challenge these images by showing that there’s “no one way to be a nun.”

Ruthie Kott

Photos: Guests eat and chat at Wednesday's Divinity School lunch (top); Sister Julie Vieira speaks about A Nun's Life (bottom).

On the green

Last Friday's sunshine brought students to the quads to read, throw frisbees, nap—and to play mini-golf. In the southeast corner, Green Campus Initiative had set up a golf course made of mostly recycled materials. Curated by the artistic collective Material Exchange, the course included nine holes built by local artists and organizations.

Green Campus Initiative member April Morton, '08, said the group coordinated the event as "a fun thing for Earth Week." The course was also thought-provoking: many of the holes were designed as social commentary. In the first hole, for instance, made by students at Hyde Park Academy with help from the artistic group Puppet Posse Collective, multiple ramps led to a single opening in a recycled PC tower. According to the accompanying placard, the hole, titled "Learn the Hard Way," was meant to be "a critique of public education," forcing golfers to compete for success available through only one path. Michael Dinges's (MFA'05) creation, titled "Every Process Creates Disorder," included a giant trashbag-tornado hovering over a cluster of tiny houses on the green. It was meant to suggest society's "rampant, ill-conceived, and perhaps unsustainable development."

Some holes provided more frustration than reflection. "Quarter Pipe," by Matthew Dupont, consisted of a concave ramp leading to a hole about four feet off the ground. The placard said par was three, but students bogeyed and double bogeyed. "I got it for the first time today," Morton remarked. It had taken her all week.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Hole three presents an extreme challenge; a student attempts "The Quarter Pipe"; multiple entrances lead to one hole in "Learn the Hard Way."

Transplant ethics

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In 1905 U of C physiologist Alexis Carrel, after successfully stitching together blood vessels, reattaching severed limbs, and transplanting organs in dogs, declared that "the problem of organ transplantation in man has been solved." Although Carrel's work in Hull Court broke new ground and won him a 1912 Nobel Prize, his prematurely conclusive statement was "so Chicago," quipped professor Mark Siegler, MD'67, in Tuesday's Ryerson lecture. Scientists didn't yet understand immunology, and another 40 years would pass before the first partial-kidney transplant was performed on a person. That's when David Hume, MD'43, took a kidney from a newly dead patient and attached it to the arm of a sick woman. Hume and his team watched the woman's urine drip into the correct tube. Although the organ worked for only a few days, Siegler said, it was enough for her own kidneys to begin to heal.

Siegler, the Lindy Bergman distinguished service professor in medicine and surgery and founding director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, outlined these early achievements and more contemporary ones during his lecture at Max Palevsky Theater. Chosen by fellow faculty members to give the annual talk, Siegler noted that he'd heard 30 of the past 33 Ryerson lectures, including the 1974 inaugural speech by John Hope Franklin. His attendance record, he joked, might have been a factor in his selection.

He focused on organ transplantation not only because of Chicago's contributions but also because "we encounter every ethical issue in transplants." For Siegler, who coined the term "clinical medical ethics," such issues remain paramount. The two main ethical challenges for transplants, he said, are increasing the organ supply and distributing them equitably. One current solution to the organ-shortage problem is a Chicago-based proposal for paired-kidney exchange: if a living donor is a bad match for a relative, the two could find another donor-recipient pair to match with, thus increasing the organ supply. While some argue this exchange might violate federal law, this month, reported Siegler, the U.S. House and Senate both passed a bill to amend the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act and legalize the practice.

Before taking questions Siegler touched on other ethical issues of the day, including paying for organs and a joint Chicago-China program to improve that country's transplant policies. In China 1.5 million people need organs, mostly livers because of a hepatitis B epidemic, but only 10,000 transplants are performed each year. And most of those organs, Sielger said, are taken from executed prisoners. The joint program, he and the principal investigators hope, will help bring China's program up to ethical standards.

A.B.P.

Photo: Mark Siegler gave Tuesday's Ryerson lecture.

Undampened days of Darfur

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Wednesday evening was too windy for candles, too cold and rainy to draw much of a crowd. Still, more than a dozen students gathered under a tent in Swift Quad to hold a prayer vigil for Darfur. Sponsored by Chicago's STAND chapter, whose members advocate University divestment from Sudan, the vigil followed three days of campus lectures and discussions about the Darfur crisis. Forced indoors by the wet weather, most presentations packed capacity crowds into a Pick Hall conference room, said STAND chair emeritus Michael Pareles, "with people having to sit on the floor and even stand in the hallway."

On Tuesday Kuek Garang, a service coordinator for the human-rights organization Heartland Alliance and a Lost Boy of Sudan—one of tens of thousands of orphaned refugees forced to walk some 1,000 miles to escape the violence—offered listeners an account of his experience. Other experts, including Law School lecturer Susan Gzesh, AB'72, SSA PhD candidate Jonathan Wildt, and international-studies postdoc fellow Babafemi Akinrinade, delivered talks on the history of the Sudanese conflict and the international response. Pareles, a fourth-year, gave an explanation of targeted divestment.

Second-year Aliza Levine, STAND's chair, said the events, which paralleled others worldwide during the weeklong "Global Days of Darfur," brought newcomers to the discussion. "Lots of people we hadn't seen before," she said, "and they were asking all sorts questions. It's been great." Unlike previous STAND protests and marches confronting campus administrators in the wake of Chicago trustees' February decision not to divest from Sudan, this past week's events were "not about the University so much as about educating people," Levine said. Chimed Pareles: "No negotiations this week."

During Wednesday night's vigil, a responsive reading asked participants to imagine a tearful refugee mother, her starving child, a pitiless Sudanese official, and Darfur's suffering, slaughtered masses. "We will not stand idly by their blood," participants called out in unison. "We stand in solidarity with every one of us and every one of them." Afterward students listened to recitations of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish prayers, observed a moment of silence, and then marched to University President Robert Zimmer's house to sing: "What a goodly thing if the people of the world could dwell together in peace." Huddling in a circle, the students warbled a few rounds, then dispersed. They plan to meet up again Sunday evening for a vigil at Chicago's Federal Plaza.

L.G.

Photos: Divinity student Megan Wade, AB'05, leads the prayer vigil's responsive reading; students sing outside President Zimmer's house.

True to type

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With a solitary microphone in one corner, the Smart Museum’s lobby transformed into an open-mike coffeehouse last Thursday evening to host the release party and poetry reading for the spring issue of 1000 Typewriters, the biannual magazine of the Society for Undergraduate Poetry. Between 5 and 5:45 p.m., poets, fans, and friends gathered around tables, munching on cookies and brie and flipping through copies of Typewriters, established in 2004, before the reading began. Eleven of the 22 poets featured in the issue presented published and unpublished work, and editor Tara Maguire, ’07, acted as emcee, also reading two of her own poems, “After Buddhism” and “Easter.”

After joking with friends about performing an interpretive dance communicating the themes of her poetry, fourth-year Sheera Talpaz offered four poems; one, called “Goodbye Chicago,” reflected on her time at the College, “contemplating the last four years of contemplation.” Chris Cole, ’08, read five short poems, two scrawled on a yellow legal pad, concluding with his piece from Typewriters, “B-29” (“as in the airplane and the button on the vending machine,” he explained): “that ravenous beast…facing a row of vending machines, / tied down by the / plethora of choices available / to humanity.” First-year Sadie Lynn used a creamy metaphor to depict the poet’s fragile relationship with her craft: “I want my words to flow / like butter / …but the room is cold and the butter congeals / …a thick, gristly muck of words.”

Not all the poets appeared confident in their readings. “I like to mumble, and mikes keep me from doing that,” said Max Price, ’09, before clearly enunciating his magazine piece, “St. G’s Cigarette Under a Bridge.” Evan Cudworth, ’09, admitted nervousness but then smoothly read four original poems; the first, titled “Scenes from Suburban Life in Four Acts,” was inspired by Court Theatre’s recent production of Uncle Vanya.

Ruthie Kott

Photos: Friends gather before the poetry reading; Aaron Goggans, '10, reads his poem from the magazine.

Here we come a-carreling

Last spring it was chairs. This spring it’s carrels. Once again the Regenstein Library staff is asking its clientele to weigh in on a major refurbishing decision: the first new study carrels since the Reg opened in 1971.

Make no mistake: at an estimated cost of $1.05 million, it’s a big-ticket item. The figure doesn’t include the cost of removing and disposing of the existing carrels, installing new electrical outlets for them, and repairing and refinishing the library’s 213 wooden study tables. The Reg requested funds for all these projects from the University’s capital-projects budget last fall, and officials hope at least part of the requested funding—enough to renovate an initial floor, say—will come through this June.

After all, the 500 original carrels are coming apart at their aging seams. And built in a pre-computer era, they don’t have the electrical outlets today’s laptop users crave. Enter design consultant Cecelia Mitchell. Starting with comments from a student focus group, Mitchell worked with Chicago-based Agati Furniture to develop a 21st-century carrel. The resulting prototypes—one in drab white, one in drab gray—are on display near the Reg’s main entrance through Friday, May 4.

As facilities manager John Pitcher, AB'73, AM'76, points out, asking for feedback at Chicago guarantees plenty of critical thinking. And, if the first day’s comments prove a guide, says Jim Vaughan, the Reg’s assistant director of access and facilities services, user reaction is mixed.

Some students gave thumbs up to the model’s larger work surface, overhead light, shelf, and general openness. Others found the work surface too narrow, the light too harsh, the shelf too low, and the openness too open. So the Reg will likely go back to the drawing board, creating another prototype for further testing. “Because these will have to last for 30 years," Vaughan says, “we want to get them right.”

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Student reviews of the model carrels range from raves to pans to diagrammed suggestions for improvement; College second-year Gwen Moores worries that the built-in light's position might cause laptop glare; Antonio Sotomayor-Carlo, a doctoral student in history, checks out an under-the-table bump.

Photos by Dan Dry.

A poet's guilty conscience

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Arguably the English language’s greatest poet during the first half of the 20th century and one of the period's most engaged moral thinkers, W. H. Auden was a man wracked with guilt, said Columbia University scholar Edward Mendelson—and much of it was neurotic. On Thursday afternoon Chicago students and faculty crowded into Stuart 101 to hear Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, president of the W. H. Auden Society, and author or editor of nearly a dozen Auden books, deliver an hour’s worth of insight on the poet’s “inventive conscience.”

Auden's poems, Mendelson said, “allude to some great culpability,” and although the source of guilt changed from poem to poem, the guilt persisted. In “A Summer Night,” written in 1933, Auden ponders an unnamed “doubtful act” that allows “Our freedom in this English house / Our picnics in the sun.” Three years later in “Detective Story,” he declares, “Someone must pay for / Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself.” And "Musee des Beaux Arts," perhaps the Auden poem most often taught in high-school classrooms, describes Icarus crashing to Earth while the rest of humanity carries on indifferently: “And the expensive delicate ship, that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on.”

"But why," wondered Mendelson, “did Auden feel so guilty?” Standoffish in public, the poet was privately a kind and generous man. He paid for the college educations of two European orphans and corresponded with a convict who wrote to him from prison. For days he slept on a blanket outside a fellow church member's apartment to help her recover from night terrors. Likely, Mendelson concluded, Auden's self-blame stemmed from survivor's guilt: his relatively comfortable middle-class existence during the Great Depression, his escape from military service and from his native England during World War II, and his artistic occupation, which used others' suffering as literary material and inspiration.

What's more, Auden was gay, a “crookedness” that kept him out of the U.S. Army and which, Mendelson said, the poet may have traced back to a miscarriage his mother suffered before he was born. Quoting from a letter Auden wrote to a friend, Mendelson explained the poet's belief that if that other fetus had survived, he might never have been conceived. His life, therefore, came at the cost of another's death; in some sense, it was a “murder.” He considered his homosexuality the punishment. Like the miscarriage, his attraction to men, Mendelson said, “was another crime against childbirth and fertility.”

In his poetry, Auden “transformed his neuroses into ethical truths.”

L.G.

Photos: Auden scholar Edward Mendelson explains the poet's "inventive conscience"; both faculty and students filed into Stuart 101 to hear him speak.

The faces behind the gifts

The Graduate School of Business Rothman Winter Garden looked more swank lounge than study/social area Friday. Bright red and orange tables, bar stools, curved sofas, and ottoman seats decorated the light-infused space during a late-afternoon reception at the fifth annual Chicago Convenes, a day to thank University friends and supporters who have contributed to the Chicago Initiative's progress. At the reception President Robert Zimmer and GSB Dean Ted Snyder, AM’78, PhD’84, made the second big announcement of the day: the business school's Hyde Park Center had been given a naming gift. Charles M. Harper, MBA’50, former head of ConAgra Foods and RJR Nabisco, had made one of the largest cash donations in the school's history, and the 2004, Rafael Viñoly-designed building would now be known as the Charles M. Harper Center.

As a Chicago student, Harper said, he "learned about the power of markets, the power of people, and the difference between responsibility and accountability." He thanked Zimmer, Snyder, and other GSB staff members he'd met in recent weeks for helping to make the naming gift happen—a gift whose amount Harper prefers not to disclose. As of Friday, noted Chicago Initiative chair Andy Alper, AB’80, MBA’81, the University’s capital campaign, officially launched in 2002, had raised $1.84 billion, with more than 95,000 friends and alumni contributing.

Earlier in the day Zimmer had announced more big news. At the opening ceremony in Max Palevsky Cinema he greeted guests with the announcement that a new campus arts center had also received a naming gift. Art enthusiasts and philanthropists David, AB’39, JD’41, and Reva, X’43, Logan and their sons and grandchildren had given $35 million for the Reva and David Logan Center for Performing Arts, expected to open in 2011.

During the afternoon Convenes participants chose faculty panels and classes to attend, including sessions on the Federalist Papers, computational science, and China, and a tour of Chicago’s Donoghue Charter School. That evening, continuing a Convenes tradition, more than 400 guests dined in a dramatic spot: in Rockefeller Chapel, at tables placed on a temporary platform covering the pews. Before dinner 21 individuals and organizations were inducted into the Founders Circle, recognized for cumulative gifts of $1 million or more to the University. The evening culminated with President Zimmer awarding the University of Chicago medal to Gwen and Jules F. Knapp.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): David Logan, AB’39, JD’41, chats with President Robert J. Zimmer; Charles M. "Mike" Harper stands in the GSB’s Hyde Park Center, which now bears his name; University of Chicago Medalists Gwen and Jules F. Knapp share a kiss.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Team spirit

Waiting for the meal to arrive at the Women's Athletic Association (WAA) awards banquet Tuesday evening in Ida Noyes, the student-athletes began to grumble a little. "Shouldn't the people who had practice today get served first?" one woman muttered. At the table next to her, another wanting faster food wished for McDonald's.

When everyone had finally been served with chicken and wild rice, WAA president Petra Wade, '07, began the ceremony honoring varsity women. Although the banquet recognized statistics, scores, and records, Wade said those things weren't what really mattered to her about Chicago sports. "The reason I play softball," she said, "is because of my team," eliciting cheers and "awww"s from the softball player's tables.

As the women picked at chocolate pastry deserts, coaches, WAA members, and alumni athletes announced the awards. Cross-country and track-and-field star Jackie Kropp, '07, won the Patricia R. Kirby Multi-Sport Athlete Award, given to the senior athlete who received the most varsity letter awards. Kropp had 11. Another star runner, Dilshanie Perera, '07, won the Mary Jean Mulvaney Scholar-Athlete award, given to the fourth-year athlete with the highest junior and senior grade point average. The Gertrude Dudley Medal, given to a senior athlete who demonstrated outstanding leadership and skill, went to pitcher Wade and basketball player Korry Schwanz, '07.

Between awards, the night's entertainment showed the team aspect of sports. Members of the track, volleyball, and soccer teams performed dances. The soccer players were the highlight, bringing out jumpropes to demonstrate their skills. Two jumped at once, another rolled under the ropes and leapt up to start jumping, and another did dance moves as she jumped.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Wade gives the opening remarks; track athlete Nellie Movtchan, '07, listens to the awards; volleyball players show off their moves.

Air today, gone tomorrow

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According to the exhibition notes that accompany the Renaissance Society’s current show, “Katharina Grosse’s site specific paintings/installations are a phoenix from the ashes of late modernism. Since 1998 Grosse has been using a compressed-air spray gun to apply garish swaths and splashes of undulating color directly to gallery walls with sublimely spectacular results.”

Atoms Inside Balloons—a work the artist describes as “acrylic on wall, floor, and latex balloons”—lives up to its “spectacular” billing. Looking like gigantic bunches of tie-dyed grapes (or a flotilla of oversize beach balls), the clusters of spray-painted balloons seem to cast colorful reflections across the Gothic room’s white walls and light-gray floor, though the surfaces are actually painted. It’s like being at a birthday party.

And like birthday-party balloons, Grosse’s globes of air are subject to the laws of physics. Since the show opened April 29, several balloons have popped—with, Ren staffers report, rather loud bangs. At first the artist planned to let nature run its course, but now Grosse (back in her native Berlin) has asked the gallery staff to fill in the more easily reached gaps with unpainted balloons.

The exhibition, which runs through June 10, features a series of related events, including a May 12 concert, a June 3 lecture on Grosse’s work, and a June 10 lecture on modern color and architecture.

M.R.Y.

Photos: Katharina Grosse’s Renaissance Society installation piece, Atoms Inside Balloons (top), behaves as atoms inside balloons generally behave, shifting shapes and occasionally going bust (bottom).

Photos by Amy Braverman Puma

Survival of the Scavviest

On Saturday at 1 p.m., Scav Hunt teams took over the northeast corner of the quads. The Scav Olympics events included: "RPS-25," or Rock, Paper, Scissors with 25 possible hand gestures; limbo for two people, tied together at the ankles; a footrace in which "your feet are watermelons"; and "four-person telephone Pictionary."

At five past one, teams of Scavvies were anxiously scooping out watermelons, practicing the two-person limbo, and doling out duct tape. One girl wearing a prom dress held a bullhorn under her arm, gave frantic directions on a cell phone in one hand, and caught a bright red plunger from a teammate preparing for the "plumber's luge" with the other hand. Prom dresses—worn by women and hairy-chested men alike—distinguished team captains.

Soon head judge Jim Ryan, '08, announced the beginning of the competition and admonished the Scavvies: "All watermelon feet must be watermelon shoes—not watermelon ankle bracelets."

The first event was the plumber's luge. Contestants—dressed as Nintendo's Mario at the judges' whim—lay down on skateboards and propelled themselves with plungers in each hand, racing from 58th and University around the quads' center circle toward the finish line at Hull Gate.

Scav Hunt concluded with Judgment in Ida Noyes on Sunday. The Snell-Hitchcock team emerged victorious, with Max Palevsky's team taking second and the Federation of Indepedent Scav Hunt team in third place.

Jenny Fisher, '07

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Photos (left to right): Head judge Jim Ryan, '08, announces the beginning of Scav Olympics; a competitor in the plumber's luge; two Scavvies practice the limbo.

What's a six-letter word for fast?

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In the hushed corridor leading to the Reg's Special Collections Research Center, a handful of students hunched over a row of wooden tables, bookbags at their feet, pencils scribbling furiously, while two timekeepers watched from a few feet away. Midterms? No, a crossword-puzzle contest. Between 2 and 4 p.m. Monday, students dropped by the library to dash through a creation by New York Times puzzle master Will Shortz. Contestants took the exercise seriously—one shooed away a reporter with a camera, scolding, "You can't take my picture, I'm being timed!"—and scorekeepers grading early returns noted their expertise, whispering that many puzzles had only one or two wrong letters. Half an hour into the contest, librarian Julia Gardner, who organized the event to coincide with a Special Collections exhibit on dictionaries, wondered if she'd chosen too easy a puzzle.

After turning in their entries, students helped themselves to cookies and juice and perused the exhibit, The Meaning of Dic'tion·ar'ies, which traces the texts' history from their Enlightenment origins to the digital age. "We think of dictionaries as an authoritative, objective source," said Gardner, who curated the display, "but at different points in history, dictionaries have reflected the different societies that produced them."

A day after the contest wrapped up, Gardner finished checking the entries. Five students got perfect scores, so winning came down to speed. Finishing in seven minutes, 12 seconds, Harris School grad student Jessica Manvell took first prize, a $30 University Bookstore gift certificate, while third-year Laura McFarland won a $20 gift certificate, and third-place winner David Richter, also a third-year, won his choice of five Special Collections exhibit catalogs. "We hadn't planned on awarding a third prize," Gardner said, "but the third-place finisher was so close to second." McFarland completed her puzzle in 11 minutes, 17 seconds; Richter turned his in nine seconds later.

L.G.

Crossword contestants scribble furiously; a 1937 title page proof from volume three of the U of C Press's Dictionary of American English, part of the exhibit.

Where ears and eyes met

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The abandoned catwalk from last Saturday’s Festival of the Arts (FOTA) fashion show became the site of Wednesday night’s FOTA Open Mic. Gone were the bright lights, special effects, and bumping bass of the opening party, as the festival tent in Hutchinson Courtyard also housed the release of photography RSO Glass Eyeball’s Iris magazine.

Sawgrass (also known as James Moore, ’07) kicked off the open mic with a half-hour set on electric guitar, playing a mix of original tunes and classic covers, including Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Jackson Browne’s “These Days.” After stopping mid-song during his “Yellow Trees” because he “knocked the guitar out of tune,” Moore shook his head at the speaker, saying, “I need acoustic. I don’t like using electric—this is kind of a departure for me.”

Multiple guitarists took the stage, as well as a sax- and keyboard-duo—Tommy Gonzalez and Thomas Manganaro, both ’09—who decided to “try some jazz,” playing Duke Ellington’s "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" and Luiz Bonfa’s "Black Orpheus.” As a change of pace, Erik Born, ’07, read original stories and Jonathan Cowperthwait, ’07, tried his hand at stand-up, asking if it was “too soon to make dead Jerry Falwell jokes.” Between acts, students circled the tent looking at photography and munching on Chinese buns provided by Glass Eyeball.

A ten-day annual event begun in 1963, FOTA transforms the campus into an art gallery and performance space, showcasing paintings, plays, films, dance, and other works created by University students, faculty, and staff. Run entirely by students, the festival was spearheaded this year by Kristine Khouri and Hannah Kushnick, both ’07.

Ruthie Kott

Photos: Photographs on display by Chris Salata, '09, (top) and Marco Mambelli, research scientist at the Fermi Institute (bottom); James Moore performs for fans as Sawgrass.

Gone with the breeze

Saturday may have been Summer Breeze, the annual carnival on the quads and concert in Hutch Court, but for Magazine photographer Dan Dry there was work to do. Dry captured students and others enjoying the daytime games and food and the evening jams with Spoon and the Roots. With lots of sun and temps in the 70s, it was hard work indeed. Sunday was back to normal: cool, damp, and gray.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): It was a lovely day to barbeque burgers (beef and veggie); a student works the cotton-candy booth; concert goers cheer on Spoon.

A student navigates the mouse maze; another affixes herself to the Velcro wall; the winning chariot-race team rides from Harper Library to Hull Gate.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Beauty in the eye of the camera

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For her senior-thesis project, cinema and media studies major Claire Gilbert, '07, focused on something she knows and loves: her family—specifically, her younger sister Holly, who competed in the 2006 Miss Kentucky beauty pageant last July. Shown at Doc Films Tuesday night, "My Sister the Beauty Queen" fulfilled the creative component of Gilbert's BA project.

About 150 people gathered outside the theater at 9:30, waiting for the doors to open. Twenty minutes later (and 20 minutes late), the audience poured in. Gilbert stood diminutive before the giant screen, and the crowd—full of her friends—cheered loudly. "I'm sorry you had to wait so long," she said, "but I promise you it's worth the wait."

The documentary opened with a scene of Holly, 19, and youngest sister Ellen singing along to Switchfoot's "Meant to Live" in the Gilberts' home in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. Wearing a pink Transylvania University shirt, Holly hams for the camera, singing, "We were meant to live for so much more / Have we lost ourselves?"

Gilbert gives a complex picture of Holly, who ultimately finished among the top ten in the pageant: she bickers with her mother and despairs at not having close friends; she snaps at the camera and at Claire after a six-hour rehearsal—"please don't exploit me with your filmmaking"; and she says, "You're beautiful" while signing the notebook of a little girl wearing a tiara after the pageant.

In the final scene, Holly sings along to the radio again. Ellen says, "Claire, you know if you turned off the camera, she'd be sane," prompting Holly to consider how she reacts to being filmed. She sounds self-mocking but thoughtful when she says, "It's like being in front of a crowd of people, a nonexistent crowd of people that you've conjured up in your mind through a logical train of reasoning." The audience laughs, not because they think Holly is being facetious, but because it sounds like something they might say themselves in Hum or Sosc.

Jenny Fisher, '07

Photo: Holly Gilbert sings for the camera.

Movie still courtesy Claire Gilbert.

Color me indigo

Brick red, cerulean, fuzzy wuzzy brown—these Crayola crayon names are only infants in a long history of color production. Color names originally described the material from which the color was made and its region, but in the early 1900s "the development of fanciful, descriptive names" led to a system of standardization, said Elizabeth Long, curator of Crerar’s Origin of Color exhibit. Wednesday's exhibit talk in the library's atrium drew more people than expected; as late guests walked in and curious onlookers stopped to listen, Crerar staff members grabbed chairs from nearby carrels to accommodate them all.

The earliest uses of color for artistic purposes dates to Paleolithic times, Long explained, "most just made from straight pigment." Digging up clay or minerals, grinding them to "a relatively fine state," and then adding a medium—gum arabic, for example, was used to create watercolors—produced the pigments. Because natural materials decayed quickly and tubed paints did not develop until 1841, early painters needed to process their own paints in the studio.

As opposed to pigment, which "sits on top of whatever surface you use," Long said, dye is soluable and "completely penetrates the thing you put it on." Indigo dye, named for the plant from which it was produced, originally went through a long and smelly process before it would permeate cloth. Dye makers dried out the plants, molded them into "things that looked like little rocks," Long explained, and then stirred them in a vat to oxidize—the color is insoluable unless it touches air. After the cloth was dipped multiple times and exposed to the air, the rich blue color emerged. Today nearly all indigo dye is produced synthetically; the most famous use of the color, Long said, is the "ubiquitous blue jean." Contrary to popular belief, she revealed, denim doesn't fade; rather, "the dye is only applied to the outside threads," which eventually wear away to the white core.

Synthetic colors developed in the 19th century, when chemist William Perkin, attempting to cure malaria, discovered that chemicals derived from coal tar created a light-purple color, which he called "mauve." Mauve's earlier counterpart, Tyrian purple, was rare and expensive to produce, Long said. Made from the shellfish secretions, the dye required 12,000 mollusks to produce one gram. Purple was considered the color of royalty—a conception echoed in 1858 when Queen Victoria wore a mauve dress to her daughter's wedding. Because of its easy production and availability to the masses, Long said, the color then became "all the rage."

Origins of Color runs through October.

Ruthie Kott

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Photos (left to right): Two guests explore collections of natural and synthetic colors; Curator Elisabeth Long shares the secrets of medieval dye works; processed plants and minerals on display.

Nature's guard and gardener

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"What we know about plant diversity is very restricted indeed," Chicago botanist and evolutionary biologist Sir Peter Crane told a Women's Board audience downtown last Tuesday, "but of what we do know, the statistics are discouraging." Speaking on the International Day for Biological Diversity, which happened to fall one day before Carolus Linneaus's 300th birthday, Crane listed the myriad threats closing in on plants worldwide: habitat loss, invasive species, land exploitation, environmental changes brought on by fertilization, pesticides, and global warming. "Every place on the planet, even remote ones, is impacted by human activity," he said. "If it isn't cultivation or changes to the soil, it'll be climate change." Perhaps as many as 400,000 plant species exist on Earth, but scientists have documented only a fraction of them, and some they've seen only once. "Many are already rare when we find them, already fragile," he said. "The slightest perturbation causes problems, and we're perturbing the environment all the time."

Seven years after leaving the Field Museum's helm to become director of England's Kew Gardens, a job that earned him knighthood in 2004, Crane returned to the Field last year to study plant science and conservation. He also joined the U of C's geophysical-sciences faculty in part because, as he noted last week, conservation is increasingly linked to global physical forces like climate change.

But Crane did not come to the podium with only bad news. In the developing world, where rapid cultivation threatens whole landscapes, seed banks are helping to preserve native species for future propagation, and institutions like the Field Museum are working to produce quick inventories and conservation strategies in botanically rich regions such as South America and southern Africa. Crane also praised triumphs like Illinois's Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, a reconstructed ecosystem an hour southwest of Chicago. "That, frankly, is the future of conservation," he said. "It's a very interventionist approach. Unfortunately, the days when we could put a fence up" and count on the land remaining untouched "are waning." Conservationists, he said, will have to become gardeners.

L.G.

Photo: Sir Peter Crane gives Women's Board members a slide-show tour of botanical biodiversity.

Ad astra

On the fourth Tuesday in May, the staff at Yerkes Observatory observed its noontime ritual: a stand-up meeting on the building’s ground floor—just down the hall from the machine shop. Announcements are typically quick and to the point: who’ll be where when, a mid-afternoon birthday break, and reminders of upcoming events—including a June meeting when residents of the Williams Bay, Wisconsin, community will get a progress report from the Yerkes Study Group.

The study group has been meeting since early this year. Convened after locals vetoed a University proposal to sell 45 acres of the observatory’s land to a New York developer, its nine members are charged with figuring out the best way to transform the 110-year-old observatory into a regional center for science education and outreach.

Although its glory days as an astronomical-research leader are over, the new use seems to fit. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could walk through its wedding cake of an entrance rotunda, up the marble stairs, and into the dome that houses what was once the world’s largest telescope without getting starstruck—and without envying the researchers, engineers, machinists, and administrators for whom a day at Yerkes is still just another day at work.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): The grounds of Yerkes Observatory, seen from the south lawn, were landscaped by the Olmstead Brothers; Jim Gee, MBA’81, director of the University’s Engineering Center and Yerkes’s manager, leads the noontime meeting; research engineer Jessie Wirth adds liquid hydrogen to an imagining camera, being built for NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.

Yerkes director Kyle Cudworth has used the 40-inch refracting telescope to compare recent celestial photos to those taken with the same instrument 100 years ago; Vivian L. Hoette organizes education and outreach programs at the observatory; Jim Gee’s office has a distinguished lineage: it was Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s office when he was based at Yerkes during the 1940s.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Arts fall into place

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Guests at Alumni Weekend had a chance to hear a panel discuss the arts on campus Friday—the same day the University announced it had picked an architect for the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts. To be designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the center will open in 2011, housing performance and gallery space plus parts of the visual arts, theater & performance, music, and cinema & media studies programs. At Friday's panel discussion Larry Norman, Romance languages & literatures professor and deputy dean in the Humanities for the arts center, noted that the new building will help fulfill President Zimmer's priorities for arts on campus: convergences between the creative process and academic analysis, between the different arts programs, and between campus and community.

While Chicago has a storied arts history—the Haskell and Walker museums, Loredo Taft, the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago Presents, Court Theatre, the Compass Players, Philip Glass, AB'56, Philip Roth, AM'55—in 2001 a faculty committee recommended that the University strengthen its arts curricula and facilities, noted David Thompson, PhD'97, associate dean in the Humanities. The Logan Arts Center, said Associate Provost Mary Harvey, PhD'87, is one result of that report (others include the Arts Planning Council, the Art Speaks program, and the Hyde Park Cultural Leaders Group). "Arts here has been at the margins," said Visual Arts Chair Laura Letinsky. "This center represents a huge shift" for the University, "a recognition of art as firmly embedded in the culture."

After watching two videos—one on the architectural design contest and one on Williams and Tsien—the audience got to ask questions. "What do you know about Acrotheatre?" asked Leah Yee, AB'56. The panel, it turned out, didn't know anything about the group, which combined dance, gymnastics, and theater, and in the 1950s "performed a single web over Mandel Hall." Acrotheatre, Yee said, helped keep her at the University when she wasn't happy there. Realizing it was part of Chicago's arts history that current administrators had overlooked, Thompson told Yee, "We'll talk later."

A.B.P.

Photo: Associate Provost Mary Harvey tells Alumni Weekend-goers how around 2000 the Provost's Office began a committee to reconsider the arts on campus.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Secondhand tomes

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"You don't have much of an arts selection," complained a man in a button-down shirt to Romulus Stefanut, AM'06, a Div School PhD student working at the library this summer. "We used to," he answered. On the second day of the Reg's duplicate-book sale, the arts and cinema section already was down to a half-dozen volumes. If the customer had been looking for religion or psychology books, he'd have been in luck: those sections took up an aisle each.

The library still had some gems in stock for its $2-hardcover, $1-paperback sale. John Updike's Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit Redux, as well as the 1978–79 volume of Critical Inquiry, remained in the literature section, and several editions of Sweet's English Grammar, one from 1892, sat on the linguistics shelf.

Most books had frayed pages and ripping bindings, and customers flipped through them gingerly. Stefanut, meanwhile, continues to stock the shelves this week and next, as librarians wheel in two or three hand trucks a day. Sale hours this week are 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and 1:30–4:30 p.m. Next week's hours are mornings only.

A.B.P.

Photo: A customer scans library finds while Stefanut stocks the shelves.

Behind every cuckold, there’s a ....

Going to a Tom Stoppard play is akin to taking a refresher course in Western Civ—with punch lines thrown in. Big ideas and literary tag lines, scientific theories and metaphysical musings fly past at the speed of lightning.

Lightning, it turns out, is also the name of the box turtle (nee Plautus) who provides a clue to the literary mystery that fuels the plot of Arcadia, Stoppard’s award-winning 1993 comedy. As the action jumps between 1809 and the present, the turtle—along with love letters, notebooks of algorithms, garden plans, game records, and miniature dahlias—gets called into play as the present-day characters try to prove or disprove that Lord Byron cuckolded and killed a minor poet he’d possibly met at Sibley Park.

The final production of Court Theatre’s 2006-07 season, Arcadia, directed by Court artistic director Charles Newell, is both illuminating and luminous. Stoppard’s elaborate, iterating, and intersecting wordplay takes place in the library of a 19th-century English country estate, designed by Matthew York with classic simplicity: a circular parquetry floor patterned with its own arcs and intersections, a Chippendale library table and bookshelf, two halos of crown molding overhead. The characters pose, cavort, accuse, argue, and waltz against a black backdrop that suggests the play’s themes of entropy and death. ...Et in Arcadia ego.

Arcadia, in an extended run, can be seen at Court through June 17.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Precocious pupil Thomasina Coverly (Bethany Caputo) listens to tutor Septimus Hodge (Grant Goodman)—a schoolmate of Lord Byron who shares the poet’s rakish ways; two rakes and a cuckold: Septimus and Captain Brice (Keith D. Gallagher, left) both know the wife of would-be poet Ezra Chater (Raymond Fox); fast-forward to the present: writer Hannah Jarvis (Mary Beth Fisher) and Valentine Coverly (Erik Hellman) present literary sleuth Bernard Nightingale (Kevin McKillip, center) with proof that he’s taken a wrong turn.

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Name that graduate

"What's in a name?" asked outgoing Humanities Dean Danielle Allen at Friday morning's graduation—the first of four Chicago convocations held this weekend. She was glad the wind had died down and the threatening storms had passed, she noted, because otherwise her address—about the University's unique ceremony where each graduate's name is still read aloud—would have seemed moot: bad weather would have forced the students (in this session Law School, Harris School, and SSA) to graduate en masse.

Yet with the sun peeking out and gusts calmer after the previous day's 40 mph, her talk remained relevant. Pronouncing each name, she said, "makes plain the fact of human equality." Our last names "sing tales of human conflict and collaboration" and "hold us accountable to tradition," while our first names are "given by someone only slightly older than us" who hopes we'll lead a full life. Despite the students' different intellectual abilities and GPAs, "everyone crosses that stage as equal participants in the drama of life." Arguing that "an acceptance of the proposition of human equality is fully compatible with a love of excellence," she ended, "But I've talked long enough. Let's listen to your names."

After a choral piece and awards announcements, all the students—including one whose mortarboard read "Will work for social change"—crossed the stage as their names were called.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): Danielle Allen discusses the equalizing effect of reading each graduate's name; One student shares her post-SSA mission; New grads admire their own names on their diplomas.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Love in the time of Van Booy

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"If anyone speaks Italian, please leave," Simon Van Booy warned the small group gathered at 57th Street Books on Monday night. "I have to pronounce some Italian words." Dressed in a brown polo shirt and pristine white sneakers that made him feel "like an escaped mental patient," Van Booy—a professor at New York's School of Visual Arts and Long Island University—read from his collection of short stories The Secret Lives of People in Love (Turtle Point Press, 2007). Over the course of his U.S. promotional tour this spring, Van Booy learned "the power of suspense"; at the start of his trip, he said, he would read full stories, but then people would walk out satisfied. Now he reads only half a tale to leave people "wanting more."

Sharing selections from three stories set in New York, Paris, and Italy, Van Booy explained, in a quiet British drawl, his real-life inspirations for each piece. He paints settings in minute detail, down to the "Versace sunglasses" worn by a small-town man in "The Still but Falling World," and writes only about places to which he's traveled. Starting his reading of "Little Bird" with a paraphrased quotation from George Eliot's Silas Marner ("Sometimes a man…is led away from the path of destruction by a child"), Van Booy said that the story's main character Michel, an ex-con living in Paris, is "one of my favorite people." Even though the character doesn't really exist, he said, he has met many "Michels" around the world: men who are "rough around the edges" but then change after finding love. In "As Much Below as Up Above," he molded the narrator—a Russian ex-sailor in Queens—from two distinct images: the tragic sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine in 2000 and a neighborhood in Brighton Beach, NY, where "it could be 50 degrees and Russians are on the beach in Speedos, drinking vodka." The tale shifts between the man's past in Russia and the present, his life with his beautiful American girlfriend Mina.

Ruthie Kott

Photo: Van Booy shares his Secret Lives of People in Love.

Modernist escape

Against the backdrop of urbanization, industrialization, the catastrophe of World War I and the harsh reconstruction that followed, many early 20th-century German and Austrian artists turned for comfort and inspiration to Utopian visions. A Smart Museum exhibit titled Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890-1933, examines how these visions played out across disparate arts such as painting, sculpture, and furniture design. The pieces include a postwar vase by Hilda Jesser that, squared off like a Japanese paper lantern and painted to resemble a fine silk, conjures the ideals of Asian design. The disembodied gears, numbers, and rotating flywheels in Robert Michel's 1919 woodcut "MEZ (Central Europe Time)" alludes not only to his fascination with machinery, but also to the crosscurrents in German society between political intolerance and artistic exploration. Felix Nussbaum's "Masquerade," painted in 1937, shows grimacing revelers outside a gray, desolate-looking city. A German Jew, Nussbaum expresses the statelessness of fellow Jewish refugees during the late 1930s and the demise of German modernism under the reign of the Nazis.

The exhibit will be on view through September 16.

L.G.

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Robert Michel's "MEZ"; Wassily Kandinksy's "Sounds: Great Resurrection"; Otto Dix's "The War: Lens is Destroyed by Bombing."

Magazine on the move

Last week the University of Chicago Magazine's offices glowed orange, as stacks of Rent-A-Crates lined the office hallways. The crates were for the Magazine staff, along with other members of the Development and Alumni Relations department, to pack up and move to new office space. No longer in the campus Administration Building, the teams moved Monday to 401 N. Michigan Avenue—right next to the business school's Gleacher Center. While the Magazine staff still plans to spend plenty of time on campus reporting stories and blogs, we'll now also be able to cover more U of C events downtown.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): Donor Relations staffer Carmen Creel fills one of the endless orange crates; David Duncil, on the Creative Services team, gets in some work while the packing continues; Josh Levine of Donor Relations happily packs books.

Building the pyramids (again)

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Wandering around the work site outside Cairo, Egypt, Mark Lehner looks like a cross between Larry David and Indiana Jones. Despite the heat and his faltering building project, Lehner, a former researcher at the Oriental Institute (OI) who now directs the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Ancient Egypt Research Associates, seems assured that his pyramid will be completed.

Part of the museum’s Sunday Film Series, Lehner’s story unfolded on a screen in the OI’s Breasted Hall. This week’s film was This Old Pyramid, a 1992 NOVA documentary about Lehner and stonemason Roger Hopkins’s attempt to reconstruct a pyramid using ancient Egyptian building methods and materials. They hope to explain how the pyramids, especially the most famous ones at Giza, were built, evaluating whether archaeological theory works in practice. As the narrator intones,“What better test than to build one’s own pyramid?”

The film plays on the tension between Lehner’s historical, theoretical approach and Hopkins’s pragmatic, hands-on style. Lehner insists that stones be placed precisely and without the help of modern machinery, while the burly, bearded Hopkins rolls his eyes when Lehner’s demands complicate his task. Theorists interviewed in the film contend that the Egyptians moved scores of two-and-a-half-ton blocks by levering them up the pyramid or by pouring them—laying a limestone mix into blocks that harden—but Lehner and Hopkins’s experiment challenges their ideas. Levering proves too unwieldy to be the Egyptians’ sole method, and pouring proves too inexact. In the end, the modern-day builders pull the blocks up ramps over the course of three weeks, completing a project 1/27th the size of the Great Pyramid, which was composed of more than two million blocks. The Egyptians’ original task appears less inexplicable, though their achievement seems, if anything, a greater one.

The project left some questions untouched. “What motivated them to do that?” Lehner asks, reflecting on his and Hopkins’s discoveries. “That’s the real mystery.”

Seth Mayer, ’08

Photos: Lehner talks with Hopkins at the work site; the pyramids hold tombs and other relics.

Movie magic at the U of C

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The University campus turned into Syracuse University Monday for the filming of Universal Studios’ The Express. The movie stars Rob Brown as Syracuse running back Ernie Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. Dennis Quaid costars as Syracuse’s legendary coach, Ben Schwartzalder.

Jones and Kent Laboratories served as a backdrop for an outdoor evening scene between Davis and his romantic interest, Sarah Ward, played by Nicole Behaire Brown. Across campus, production staff transformed Ida Noyes Hall’s dark-wood lobby into a Syracuse trophy room. The director placed a photo of Jay Berwanger, AB’36, the first Heisman Trophy winner, among the “Syracuse” memorabilia for the scene after learning about the U of C’s football glory.

Nick Rafferty, X’03, who said he “fell into the [film] industry” after interning for the 2004 production of Proof, helped scout the location. The University is “a gorgeous space,” Rafferty said, able “to portray the history and grandeur” of Syracuse athletics.

The Express paid the University a $24,000 location fee, which will support student filmmaking and performance through groups such as Fire Escape Films and University Theater, said University assistant vice president for student life, Bill Michel, AB’92.

The film was shot across Chicagoland this spring. Other locations include area high schools and Northwestern University’s Ryan Field, which provided the setting for a racially motivated brawl between the Syracuse and University of Texas teams during the 1960 Cotton Bowl. Filming for The Express will conclude filming at Syracuse next week.

The Express is based on Robert Gallagher’s 1999 biography, Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express, the Story of a Heisman Trophy Winner. Shortly after being the top pick in the 1962 draft, Davis was diagnosed with leukemia and died the following year at age 23. He never played a professional game.

The film will be released in October 2008.

Ethan Frenchman, ’08

Photos: Trailers lined both sides of 59th Street between University and Kimbark Avenues; Universal Studios film equipment sits outside Ida Noyes.

Collegiate scholars aim higher

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The Collegiate Scholars Program, cosponsored by the University of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools (CPS), held its annual boot camp this past week. The 48 high-school seniors in the three-year program arrived at International House on Monday for college workshops, public-speaking practice, and career advice. The four-day program ended Thursday with a field trip to Notre Dame.

On Wednesday afternoon the students, some of CPS’s best, attended two workshops in Stuart 101. In a presentation by the University’s Career Advising and Planning Services, assistant director Max Brooks, AM’05, noted that, although career plans are important, students should “think about going to a school with a strong liberal-arts core curriculum.” Yet at least two students remained committed to their career tracks. Christian Daniels of Kenwood Academy said he was interested in the U of C for its academics and proximity, but his career goal was clear: aerospace engineering; while Jalisa Huckabee said she was determined to attend whichever school would best help her realize her “childhood dream of becoming a baby doctor, an OB/GYN.”

The first member of her family to seriously consider attending college, Huckabee said, “The program taught me to do more research about colleges and to look for lesser known colleges that may have something that interests me.”

An Office of Minority Student Affairs–sponsored panel of four U of C undergrads discussed race issues with the scholars. Angel Ochoa, ’08, noted that the University is making gains in meeting the needs of students of color. “Although elite universities are slow to change, there are a lot of exciting things happening now with a new diversity center being built on campus.”

Sofia Narváez-Gete, AB’07, said that although she had not experienced racism on campus, she had encountered ignorance and intolerance. Ochoa reminded the students, “Sometimes I am ignorant, too. The great thing about coming here is all the things that you learn.”

Ethan Frenchman, ’08

Photos: During a career workshop, Collegiate Scholars brainstorm sports-related jobs besides athlete; Students listen to CAPS speaker Max Brooks, AM'05, discuss how they should follow their career choices without limiting their options.

Religion without borders

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Both the audience and the projection system at McCormick Theological Seminary provided multiple perspectives for Suzanne Hoeferkamp Segovia's lecture, “A Divine-Human Encounter at the Cross Road of Creation,” last Wednesday. When the main projector refused to function, the staff set up two more on its left and right, projecting slides from different angles. The result fit well with a talk that criticized Western art for shutting out other viewpoints.

Segovia, an independent theologian, discussed how religion and art expressed colonialism's tortured history in the Americas. Western art places more value on the product, she asserted, while other cultures see the process itself as equally worthy. Westerners underestimate the creative process of art that she thinks is “inherently religious.” For Segovia, human creativity participates in divine creation itself.

The colonists did not see the worth of the Americas' religious art and creativity. Christopher Columbus, she argued, felt that Europeans had the right to subjugate indigenous peoples. Westerners understood themselves as objective and correct; in what Segovia termed a “war of images,” colonists called Amerindian religious art “idolatry,” denying its religious power.

Indigenous peoples, Segovia explained, did not deify their own viewpoint; instead they used myth to depict a world beyond the reality of the senses. Using their fragmentary culture's images and ideas, indigenous artists strove "to receive the holy" found in "the commonplace." The shrine of Señor de la Conquista in Mexico, a local portrayal of Christ as dark-skinned, blends native and colonial perspectives. It is "necessary to tolerate ambiguity," she explained, "necessary to be open to a new reality. Dare to cross borders.”

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: Suzanne Hoeferkamp Segovia lectures at McCormick Theological Seminary; Professor José David Rodriguez asks Segovia to elaborate on the relation between theology and art.

ORCSA's recipe for summer

Few things are sadder than a rained-out barbecue, but a venue change and a couple of signs promising free food, music, and Frisbees in Hutch Commons allowed ORCSA to prevent calamity. Concerned about the predicted rain, organizers moved the Summer Kick-Off Barbeque from its original Bartlett Quad location. Instead, cooks grilled in Hutch Court and brought food into Hutch Commons.

The downpour never came, but ORCSA’s campus activities coordinator, Dana Bozeman, explained that event planners wanted to avoid seeing “700 people dash inside.” Bozeman didn't mistakenly expect 700 indoor barbeque attendants; soon after the tables were set up students began to congregate and form lines, eyeing the grilled fare. “We’re starting at 12 o’clock,” an ORCSA employee reminded the early arrivers. A college tour came through, and the prospective students seemed more entranced by the trays of hamburgers than by the portraits of former University presidents lining the walls. After the barbeque began, the line for food snaked almost to Mandel Hall's entrance. Guests steadily flowed in for nearly an hour before the rush slowed.

Though the event mainly focused on informing summer students about ORCSA events—a schedule listing film screenings, music, pub nights, and a baseball game was printed on free Frisbees—the crowd that showed up was diverse. Police, maintenance workers, U of C students and employees of all ages, and the occasional bouncing elementary schooler all made their way into Hutch. A DJ nodded along to the beat as he treated the crowd to a set featuring pop, rap, and dance music. The occasional soft Frisbee flew by as plates, and finally tables, emptied throughout the room.

Seth Mayer, '08

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Photos (left to right): ORCSA moved the grills to Hutch Court; crowds flock to the food; a DJ scratches a record in Hutch Commons.

Genes unearth deep roots

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The U of C’s Rick Kittles was the star draw last Thursday night at the Newberry Library’s panel presentation, “Genetic Genealogy and the Ancestries of African Americans.” The crowd of more than 200 and a crew from CBS's 60 Minutes had come seeking something special. Kittles, an associate professor of medicine and the science director of AfricanAncestry.com, promised the black attendees history.

Taking the podium, Kittles said that genetics holds the key to tracing African American family lines beyond the slave trade. Panelist Christopher Rabb, a genealogist, spoke of his own struggle uncovering roots deeper than American plantations. Rabb spent nine years searching for where in Africa his ancestors had lived. He eventually went to Kittles, who used DNA to show Rabb that his ancestors likely included Moroccans, West Africans, and South Asians.

Both Rabb and Kittles recognized that genetic testing for ancestry complicates the history and social reality of race in the United States. Kittles noted that although “Halle Berry is at least, but probably more than, half European, she is a black woman.” African Ancestry's tests have shown that thirty percent of Americans descend from Europeans. It is a history that the country must come to recognize, Rabb said of the "institutionalized rape" that is part of his ancestry. “I was ashamed that I have five, seven, nine lines of blood coursing through my veins based on violence.” He found relief by understanding “the difference between ancestry—what you are—and heritage—who you are and what you choose to be.”

Genetic genealogy has its detractors. In a heated question-and-answer session, panel moderator and genealogist Tony Burroughs grilled Kittles on African Ancestry’s accuracy. Using a proprietary database of 30,000 genetic samples from Africa, the company’s work has never been published, reproduced, or otherwise independently verified. Furthermore, because the tests use the DNA of current population groups, the “ancestry tests” in effect tell only the location of “cousins” in Africa, not necessarily where African Americans' ancestors were located 400 years ago.

The audience was largely unconcerned by Burroughs’s objections, responding with murmurs, sighs, and rolled eyes. After the program, glowing smiles and firm handshakes bombarded the man whose work promises history and identity for millions.

The talk, cosponsored by the University's Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and part of the Illinois Humanities Council’s “Future Perfect: Conversations on the Meaning of the Genetics Revolution” series, is available online.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Rick Kittles discusses the science behind African Ancestry's genetic genealogy tests; audience members greet Kittles as 60 Minutes cameras roll.

Tabula rasa

Long after the “atomic" balloons popped or slowly deflated, red, yellow, blue, and every hue between colored the Renaissance Society gallery from floor to 30-foot ceiling. A team of workers arrived June 21 to remove the paint used in Katharina Grosse’s spring installation Atoms Inside Balloons, which closed June 10, and to erase the many signs of age that had developed since the gallery's last renovation in 1979.

Grosse's graffiti-inspired work "covers an entire space like a fresco,” said Renaissance Society marketing director Mia Ruyter. Her installations are also site–specific, incorporating elements of a gallery’s space into her works: in this case, extra paint dripped about the northwest ceiling to emphasize acute water damage. The spring installation gave the Rennaisance Society, located on Cobb Hall's top floor, time to clean over the summer. Erasing the evidence of 28 years of aging and four days of a spray-gun–wielding artist is no easy task. The wall and ceiling paint must be scraped by hand, requiring scaffolding. The entire gallery will then be repainted. Two layers of wax kept the paint from damaging the floor; workers will remove the wax and any remaining paint before repolishing.

Gallery managers expect the renovation to be completed by August 2, enough time to begin installation for a film by British artist Steve McQueen, which opens September 16.

Ethan Frenchman, ’08

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Photos (left to right): A gallery patron observes Grosse's installation before its April 29 opening; a painter scrapes paint off the gallery's walls; scaffolding lifts a worker to the 30-foot ceilings.

Left photo courtesy the Renaissance Society; center and right photos by E.F.

Summer school in ancient Athens

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Dean of the College John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, began his June 22 Western Civilization I class by surrounding his seat with Thucydides's The History of the Peloponnesian War, several reference works, notes, folders, a cup of coffee, and an eyeglasses case. Despite the fortifications between him and 20 summer students in Cobb 107, he discussed the Greek polis with casual ease, moving effortlessly between the classical and the contemporary. Comparing Chicago's legal system with ancient Athenian law, he explained that, as with Athens, there is a “distinction between law and Chicago law.” He continued, “Things are done a little differently in the city.”

Boyer then asked how modern readers should evaluate Thucydides's history. Students suggested that distinguishing objectivity and myth would be a good way to appraise the text, and Boyer agreed: “[Thucydides] expects us to believe this stuff, and he tells us he’s making it up!” Yet modern readers should apply their own standards, he asserted, while keeping in mind that “there is no New York Times for the ancient world.” Though Thucydides was not always objective and lacked access to 21st-century research tools, the same is sometimes true of historians today, Boyer said. They both earn readers' confidence through the “authenticity and seriousness” in the tone and detail of their histories.

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: Dean Boyer introduces the text to students; Boyer reads from Thucydides.

Pizza and pints

Beer flowed freely and pizza vanished quickly in Ida Noyes's otherwise vacant basement. Last Thursday night students, staff, and faculty members piled into the Pub's dimly lit Wisconsin oak booths for suds and slices at this summer's first ORCSA–sponsored pub night.

The event began shakily for ORCSA campus activities coordinator Dana Bozeman. Looking around at 5:15 p.m., she saw 20 pizzas cooling while a scattershot of mostly grad students nursed free beer. A few students took advantage of the library–like quiet to study their Arabic. But 30 minutes later Bozeman was standing at the door, commanding, "Get your tickets! That is, unless you don't like free drinks." The turnout was surprising. "We didn't expect this many people," she said. "Maybe it's because we advertised on Facebook." Whatever she did, it worked. Soon she was telling the event's 100 attendees to be patient; more pizza was on the way.

The pizza's second–round arrival signaled the hungry to jostle for position. By 7 p.m. Bozeman looked around: a drink-ticket roll was a slender shadow of its former girth, and pizza boxes littered a dark corner. With appetites sated and drinks enjoyed, cue balls and foosballs went on the move.

The final summer pub night will be held August 2.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

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Photos (left to right): Center for Middle Eastern Studies graduate students hit the books; patrons sit at the bar; community members line up for pizza.

Emerging art

During the Hyde Park Art Center's spring session, students in the Silkscreen: Posters, Propaganda and Protest class pasted politically tinged work on a plywood board outside the building. For the Impart Process exhibition, curated by Philip Nadasdy, the warped, thin board hangs on the center's second floor, alongside other works that give visitors a look into students' creative and learning processes.

Impart Process reveals how the students developed their silkscreen prints, including studies, proofs, and finished products. Viewers learn what ideas were scrapped but also the subtle variations in different prints. One print, reading, "Teach Our Children To Consume," comes in several versions; all feature two chubby, staring children, but only the more complete copies show the print's message and full array of colors.

The exhibit also features a separate class's white stoneware.Two ceramics students, Astrid Fingerhut and Penelope van Grinsven, AB'07, crafted pieces that incorporate water pumps and found objects such as stools. To conclude their class, Fingerhut and van Grinsven also worked together on a ceramic fish mobile, which hangs at the end of the gallery.

The exhibition runs through August 26.

Seth Mayer, '08

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Photos (left to right): Astrid Fingerhut's Katrina Survivor; Penelope Van Grinsen's Dwayne; the students' plywood board is now part of the Impart Process exhibition.

Desert discoveries

“We’d been in the desert,” explained Sam Boyd, ’08, when suddenly his group saw “beautiful virgin forests and there were deer everywhere.” While driving between Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon, the landscape metamorphosed, no longer the arid, rocky environment where they had spent the past week.

Boyd traveled the Southwest for Eric Larsen’s biology field school, Natural History of North American Deserts. For the two weeks after spring quarter's conclusion, Larsen, along with Boyd and 12 other students, drove from desert to desert, working on research projects and exploring their surroundings. During the field school, an optional extension of Larsen’s spring-quarter Deserts class, the students usually stayed near camp to avoid the daytime heat, according to Boyd, while at night they hiked and collected data. Because of the long driving time between locations, students spent around six nights in deserts doing research. As a result, they had small data sets compared to professional studies, but, Boyd explained, the goal was simply to learn research methodology.

The group explored many of the Southwest’s most well-known locales, such as Death Valley, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the Grand Canyon. Larsen made sure to include a trip to Mexico featuring a “tasty and inexpensive” lunch, said Boyd, for students who had never left the United States. He noticed that Larsen was much quieter outside the classroom, most likely because of how many destinations he had crammed into two weeks. “The driving," Boyd laughed, "took a lot out of the professor.”

Seth Mayer, '08

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Photos (left to right): The sun sets in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument; students walk down a trail in Death Valley; a student takes in the view in Bryce Canyon National Park.

Photos courtesy of Yaya Tang, '08.

Hard lines

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"It's my game!" says Catherine Braendel, U-High'81, greeting the rain-soaked attendees as they arrive. At a July 10 Newberry Library event, visitors try out Braendel's It Was a Dark and Stormy Night—a board game she developed with her husband Addison Braendel, JD'92. Addison did the research for the game, which has players guess a book's author or title from its first line. A corporate lawyer by day, Addison spent his nights compiling books' opening lines into huge spreadsheets. After leaving her full-time nonprofit job, Catherine turned Addison's lists into a game and cofounded Good Read Games, Inc., with him to publish Dark and Stormy Night, now on sale at some local independent bookstores, including Hyde Park's 57th Street Books. Taking its name from the oft-quoted opening line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's mediocre 1830 novel Paul Clifford, the game's clues include the first sentences of classics as well as pulpier tomes.

Before the Newberry visitors start playing, Catherine encourages them, "People know way more than they think they do," evoking laughs from her audience. One woman ironically suggests Braendel offer Dark and Stormy Night through Starbucks. When Braendel asks the woman if she has a contact, she pauses for a moment before offering her local barrista. The games finally start, and one team's first clue is the opening line of The Tale of Genji, a lengthy Japanese classic, which stumps everyone. The next card begins, "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched..." "War of the Worlds!" shouts the other team. Addison stops by the table to talk. "I'd be interested to see if it's too easy or not," he says. "No way," both teams rapidly respond.

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: A player reads the first line of 1984; a team puzzles over a clue.

Doc's diamond

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At Monday’s opening of the Regenstein Library’s summer exhibition, Doc Films at 75, approximately 30 students, alumni, and staff surveyed curiosities of America’s oldest student film society.

Doc Films was formally established in 1940 as the International House Documentary Film Group; its antecedents date back to 1932. Doc's leftist founders created the society as a venue for films that, according to the exhibition notes, “extolled cooperative living and critiqued American capitalism” through “socialist realist” documentaries. Groups accused the film society of communist sympathies through the 1950s—letters from the society’s records, such as a 1952 request for Soviet films from the Chicago Council of American-Soviet Friendship, support the charge.

Other objects displayed include Doc member passes from 1941, a poster advertising a 1950 showing of Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles (1948) for $0.65, and photos of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford speaking to Doc Films crowds. Director Fritz Lang’s martini recipe is written on the back of a picture of a stuffed monkey, whom Lang alternatively refers to as “Peter the gin-panzee” or, more affectionately, as “son.”

The exhibition runs through August 31.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Vistors survey Doc Films history; Fritz Lang and "Peter the gin-panzee's" martini recipe is preserved for the historical record.

"Ready to art"

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“I’m gonna look at you,” a short-haired girl announces to her friend, who shifts seats to provide a better view. They begin to draw one another, using pencil to form disembodied faces on their papers. Unhappy with the initial results of her work, the short-haired girl cocks her head to the side and asks her friend to take her hair down.

This perfectionist painter, who looks to be late in her elementary-school years, participates in the Smart Museum’s July 18 Art Afternoon. Including her, 133 visitors have shown up to paint and learn about the week’s theme: portraits. In the galleries, parents and children search out paintings listed in a handout, answering questions and doing their own drawings in pencil. Moving to the lobby, kids make portraits with the help of adults and docents.

One girl, so small that her T-shirt reaches almost past the bottom of her shorts, dashes into the museum and shouts, “I’m ready to art!” Too excited to notice the leaf in her hair, she rushes over to the docents' table, grabs a pencil, and begins to draw on a handout. Adults try to guide her to the painting tables, but only reluctantly does she relinquish her pencil.

Seth Mayer, '08, Smart Museum docent

Photos: A boy starts to paint; wearing a paper bag to protect her clothes, his sister concentrates on her portrait.

Community garden blossoms

To protect Woodlawn's Brickyard Garden from development, 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran and activists announced July 7 that the City of Chicago will transfer the lot's ownership to the nonprofit NeighborSpace for $1 as part of the organization's mission to protect open space.

The transition will help to ensure the garden, at 6115 S. Woodlawn, will continue to provide food to local residents and education for kids, as it did this past Friday, when more than 30 children descended on the lot as part of the nearby ChristWay Baptist Church's inner-city youth programming. The children, soaking in the sun on a cloudless, breezy day, drew pictures of red tomatoes, wildflowers, and green beans growing. Volunteers read stories and brought two guinea pigs. Meanwhile, gardeners came and went to inspect and water their plants.

Although the garden now encompasses 25 plots cultivated by more than 60 people, said garden organizer Dorothy Pytel, the space grew from humble roots. In 1975 three neighborhood residents took over the vacant lot, which had been used for "illegal activities," Pytel said. The garden received its name early, she added, "because the biggest harvest has always been bricks." Years of work and three truckloads of soil in the past decade have transformed the area into a community space that yields a bounty of vegetables and goodwill. About half of the growers are connected with the University, Pytel said, and the remainder are neighbors. Because "people invariably grow too much," they share their produce among themselves and give plenty away. Last year Brickyard Garden distributed more than 20 bags of groceries to local residents.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

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Photos (left to right): Boys show off their garden drawings; children stand fascinated by guinea pigs; gardener Jill Adams and her dog, Mr. Bojangles, care for their plot.

Hyde Park's Marriott?

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At a meeting this past Monday more than 200 community members heard the University’s plan for a combined Marriott Hotel and Fairfield Inn and Suites to replace the vacant Doctor's Hospital. Fifth Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston and University Vice President of Community and Government Affairs Hank Webber hosted the meeting, which featured speakers from the University Medical Center, proposed hotel operator White Lodging Services, and architecture firm HOK.

Harvey Golomb, chief medical officer of the U of C Medical Center, explained that the need for a local hotel stemmed largely from the center's prominence. Noting that the medical center has once again been ranked one of the nation's best, Golomb said that families “who come from 50 foreign countries and all 50 states . . . need a place to sleep while their loved ones are getting treatment at the hospital.”

Architect Todd Halamka reviewed plans for the building at 58th Street and Stony Island Avenue, which will have 380 rooms—250 units in the Marriott and 130 units in the Fairfield Inn and Suites. Amenities include a ballroom, conference rooms, gym, pool, coffee shop, and two restaurants. The current design proposes 15 stories, but the figure may change.

Acrimony was largely absent from the question-and-answer session, though many attendees were wary of the University’s plan. Jonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, a nonprofit organization committed to protecting historic buildings, said that although he was not against development and improvement, he was against what he saw as this plan’s “disrespect.” Criticizing panel members for “presenting a precast concrete replacement” for the Doctor’s Hospital, built by the Chicago firm Schmidt, Garden, and Martin, Fine urged the decision makers to consider the firm's historical importance and “the waste of taking a perfectly good building and dumping it into a landfill.” Other attendees questioned White Lodging Services representative Scott Travis on the hotel operator's employment practices. One Chicago hotel worker urged the audience to fight for union labor at the new hotel.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: HOK architect Todd Halamka discusses the proposed construction; the panel fields questions from local residents.

And we're walking, we're walking...

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On an ominously cloudy Friday, Ashley Rodriguez, ’09, takes a group of 19 students, parents, and sullen-looking siblings on what she calls her “jaywalking tour of the University.” They survive the tour without getting hit by cars or sudden downpours, moving easily through a mostly empty campus. The only obstacles are parallel summer College tours, led by undergrads skilled in the art of walking backwards while introducing prospective students and their families to life at Chicago.

After taking in the Reynolds Club, Bartlett Dining Hall, and Cobb Hall and discussing the core, the entourage files into a basement classroom in Rosenwald Hall to question a student panel and Assistant Director of Admissions Jeffrey Hreben, AB’05. Rodriguez, who sits on the panel, tells one parent that she “did not cook once during winter and spring quarter” because her first-year friends had so many extra meal points to share. When Hreben takes over, he details the admissions process. Explaining that applicants don’t need to say they love Ulysses or Shakespeare to get in, he describes an essay that was a “brilliant 400 words or so" about the prospective student’s love of O, the Oprah magazine. High-school seniors, he emphasizes, needn't be flawless. “Parents, you all think your kids are perfect,” he jokes. “If they’re so perfect, why are you spending $200,000 to send them to Chicago?”

Seth Mayer, '08

Photo: Jeffrey Hreben answers student and parent queries.

Improv of delight

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Despite having made use of the Facebook invitation system, before the show the performers look nervous about all the empty chairs in University Church. But it takes only 15 minutes to fill the seats at Off-Off Campus's July 27 improv-comedy performace, Popsicles of Delight. The revue takes its name from the frozen treats that event organizers pass out to cool off the audience, who watch the performance without the comfort of air conditioning.

Alex Yablon, '08, and Bobby Zacharias, '08, take the stage first, transitioning quickly from sketch to sketch. One features Yablon as a preacher casting out a demon from Zacharias. "Get out of this podunk idiot and infect somebody famous," admonishes Yablon. When he succeeds and Zacharias tries to repay him with kisses, Yablon becomes indignant. "Preacher reverend don't want to be kissed all over," he says. "He wants a tax-deductible donation."

Next Bryan Duff, '09, and Dave Maher, AB'06, perform "Bryan and Dave Get Rich," the story of two "Old McGee's New Electronics" employees' sudden prosperity. Switching between characters and time frames, Duff and Maher improvise a narrative about stealing a stereo on top of which somebody left the lost record of a Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix performance. When Bryan and Dave fulfill the title's promise, they find themselves disappointed. Maher laments that caviar is nothing like in rap videos. "It's like my grandma died and became something I eat," he whines, "only fishier." Maher agrees. "50 Cent was just, like, downing it!"

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: Alex Yablon exorcises Bobby Zacharias's demon; Bryan Duff, as Old McGee, question his employee, played by Dave Maher.

Ice cream tops career advice

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University students and staff sought relief from midday heat and midweek doldrums at the Career Advising and Planning Services’ Cool Off With CAPS event last Wednesday. Although the event was advertised as both an opportunity for free ice cream and a chance to ask CAPS staff questions, more students ate frozen treats than reviewed résumés.

A line snaked through the main quad, at one point more than 70 deep, as people waited for their chance to choose between ice-cream sandwiches, strawberry shortcakes, Choco Tacos, and fruit bars. The Cool Off's one blemish may have been its lack of ice cream, which was gone by 1:30. In contrast, few students requested job-search advice. Katy Huff, '08, went to the event for help with a résumé she had "been using for years." Huff, a physics major, reported that she was initially hesitant to use CAPS because she thought that the service did not have "many resources for science majors." She ended up pleased with both the advice and the side of ice cream.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: CAPS staff distribute cold treats; a woman assesses the view from the back of the line.

Sherds of Rayy

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The Persian city of Rayy, a center of discovery, trade, and craftsmanship between the 9th and 13th centuries, earned renown for its highly developed ceramics. Featuring fine calligraphy and decorative painting in a kaleidoscope of red, brown, blue, green, and white, many of the ceramics are on display in the Oriental Institute's exhibit Daily Life Ornamented.

Situated along Iran’s formidable Alburz mountain range, Rayy was a major stop on the Silk Roads, which, at its longitudinal extremes, connected the Near East and China by trade. The city's style of pottery developed out of its location, combining Islamic-world aesthetics with Chinese methods. For centuries after Rayy's decline, treasure hunters raided its remains, which were little more than scattered dirt mounds on the Iranian plain just south of present-day Tehran. In 1932 Oriental Institute archaeologist Eric Schmidt led the first excavation of Rayy’s matrix of buried markets, quarters, and streets.

The excavation turned up numerous sherds, many of which are on display for the first time. Among the noteworthy pieces are two turquoise-glazed ewer spouts, shaped like animal heads, from the 12th or 13th centuries.

The exhibition runs through October 14.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Archaeologist Eric Schmidt digs at Rayy; a woman's image decorates a sherd.

Photos courtesy the Oriental Institute.

The grounds of August

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At 8:30 Monday morning Cobb Coffee Shop looks dark. A man waits, peering through the front door, where a sign lists the shop's summer hours as 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.; he's sure he sees an employee moving around inside. After a few minutes a food-delivery man arrives and bangs on the door. Cobb employee Joe Gallmeyer, '09, lets him in, along with three customers waiting for Cobb's day to begin.

Open during summer session, which runs through August 24, Cobb isn't the bustling, noisy place it is during the regular school year, especially early in the morning. A couple of students munch on muffins and tap at their laptops, but the majority of patrons grab food on their way to class or work, leaving many tables empty. For the first few minutes after opening, most of the lights remain off. The cafe's famously loud music isn't yet playing; instead the refrigerators' hum fills the air. One student fills her travel mug with hot water and leaves without buying anything.

Twenty minutes after opening, the Talking Heads' "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town" blares from the speaker system. As the noise of marimba resounds, Gallmeyer starts a batch of coffee. The grinding of beans drowns out David Byrne's singing as another customer approaches the register.

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: A woman makes tea; students get ready for the day in Cobb.

Young scholars think big

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Presentation day finally came for the high-school juniors and seniors in GSB Professor Waverly Deutsch’s summer course, Elements of Entrepreneurship. On July 30 the five teams of four students distilled two weeks of classes, business-plan revisions, PowerPoint slides, 30-second commercials, and interviews into five-minute presentations before ten Goldman Sachs employees and a crowd of 40 well-wishers. Rather than millions in start-up capital, laptops would go to the team with the best business plan in the Collegiate Scholars Program (CSP) course.

A rising junior at North Lawndale Preparatory High School, Crystal Adams began by recounting her unemployment during the past two summers, despite having applied for several jobs. Her team’s nonprofit organization, Skills To Succeed, would teach basic clerical skills and grant credentials to the chronically unemployed inner-city youth of Chicago’s West Side, where Adams lives.

When Adams entered the program, she was so afraid of Deutsch, who lectures in a booming voice, that she could barely squeak out a word. In two weeks Adams worked harder than ever before: “Two hours before [the presentation] I was practicing,” she recounted. “I was really nervous. But standing up there, because I am passionate about the idea, it made me less nervous because it is something that I already know and I want to do. It was really great.” Adams impressed both the audience and judges. “Crystal is like a different person,” noted Deutsch afterward. “When she first came here she could hardly speak up, and now, wow.”

Despite competition from a dessert shop, an organic restaurant, a sports league, and a recycling business, Skills to Succeed carried the day. Adams and her teammates each won new Hewlett-Packard laptops donated by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, which funds the course. It was her family’s first computer. “Crystal now has the skills to succeed,” Deutsch said after distributing the prizes. “She just came a million miles in two weeks.”

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: In class a week before the presentations, dessert-shop team "Sweet Creations" mulls commercial ideas; GSB Professor Waverly Deutsch teaches the ins and outs of marketing.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Take me out to the ballgame

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Afternoon storms broke Chicago's August heat wave for an evening of baseball at ORCSA's "Summer in the City" event, the White Sox vs. the Cleveland Indians. A disappointing dozen U of C students came out to U.S. Cellular Field on Thursday—the low turnout may have been because of rain concerns or Chicago students' aversion to sports. Yet with blackened skies turned clear, the students enjoyed the game. The seats put the U of C contingent in the upper deck between home plate and first base, near hotdogs, and, for the over-21 set, beer. Although no waves swept the fans, an occasional "Go Sox!" and "Yeah, Paulie!" could be heard from otherwise staid Chicago faces.

The fourth-place White Sox put in a strong effort against the American League Central Division leaders, coming back from behind to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth with A. J. Pierzynski's home run off closer Joe Borowski. Shortstop Juan Uribe's two-run homer in the 13th redeemed his two errors and secured a 6-4 victory.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Rain looms on the way to U.S. Cellular Field; White Sox third baseman Josh Fields hits his first of two doubles.

Do the Wright thing

Surrounded by the brick walls of Robie House's courtyard, guide Terry Watson begins the Walk and Wine tour not by talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's 1910 masterwork, but by discussing Hyde Park. Initially the neighborhood was a getaway for Chicagoans, he says, leading the tour onto 58th Street, which, Watson adds, was a dirt road when Wright designed the Robie House. Wearing a Wright-inspired tie patterned with diagonal lines and prisms, he gestures toward the GSB's Charles M. Harper Center, once the site of an orchard.

With its emphasis on horizontal lines, the Robie House is a quintessential example of the Prairie Style architecture Wright pioneered, Watson says, but the "Hyde Park area attracted a lot of different architects," including Louis Sullivan. Watson leads a ten-person group around Ida Noyes Hall, pointing out the Gothic, Tudor, and French provincial buildings that surround Robie House, contrasting with Wright's modernism. On 59th Street Watson name-drops Frederick Olmsted, designer of the Midway Plaisance, evoking excited murmurs from architecture buffs on the tour. "If you had read the book Devil in the White City," he continues, "where the killer's at is to the west." Now the mystery fans ooh and ah.

Before bringing the group back to the Robie residence he mentions that the U of C gives Robie House some financial support. "If there's someone here with influence in the University," he jokes, "we could use a couple million dollars for restoration." The tour moves into the house, through the low-ceilinged foyer, and up into the open space of the second floor. In the kitchen, bare and dilapidated-looking during the restoration process, Operations Manager Janet Van Delft apologizes for the room's appearance. "This is not normally part of the tour..." she says, drawing out the last syllable, before bringing the group to a small room with hors d’œuvres, wine, and beer. The tourgoers move back through the kitchen and living room and onto the terrace, plates and drinks in hand. Van Delft follows, eager to tell the group more about Wright's architecture, even after the tour's end.

Seth Mayer, '08

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Photos (left to right): The exterior of the Robie House; Terry Watson relates the origins of the Midway; tourgoers relax on the terrace as Janet Van Delft discusses the building.

Driven suspense

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Doc Films patrons sat in wonder Saturday night before writer-director David Lynch's surrealist masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. About 40 people attended the 9:45 p.m. showing, the second of the night. They filled the room with gasps, shrieks, chuckles, and finally applause at the movie's mixture of film-noir, psychological-thriller, and art-house genres.

Mulholland Drive loosely follows aspiring actress Betty Elms's (Naomi Watts) attempt to help Rita (Laura Harring), whom Betty finds hiding in her aunt's apartment, recover from amnesia. As the mystery of Rita's past thickens, illusions abound, names change, and causality halts. The film opened in 2001 to critical acclaim, including a best-director award for Lynch at the Cannes Film Festival, but ticket sales fell flat. Since then, however, Mulholland Drive has developed a cult following. Devotees, some of whom were no doubt present at Doc, watch the film over and over again, searching for clues in the apparently nonsensical and bizarre plot developments and images, wondering, "What do the ashtray and red lampshade mean?"

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: The Castigliane brothers (Dan Hedaya and Angelo Badalamenti) tell director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) "the way it is" over a cup of espresso; Betty feels out Rita's memories at Winkie's diner.

Movie stills courtesy Universal Pictures

Still flying high

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Like the annual rite of Capistrano's swallows, U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges rankings returned Friday, reminding those in the higher-education business of the seasons' passing. Chicago again ranked 9th, tied with Columbia University and edging out Dartmouth College, with which the University tied last year. Northwestern University came in at No. 14.

Dean of College Admissions Ted O'Neill, AM'70, said in an interview that though "[the ranking] is a nice recognition of a great university, it recognizes the things we don't consider the most important." In creating its rankings, U.S. News & World Report uses variables such as student retention, endowment size per student, and alumni-giving rates. O'Neill said he was confident that "discerning students don't pay much attention to the rankings...because it’s a collection of data that doesn’t address issues of excellence or greatness."

In its coverage of the rankings' release, the Chronicle of Higher Education noted the swelling rancor among school presidents—only 51 percent filled out peer-assessment surveys, down from 68 percent in 2000. There has been a growing demand for rankings that more accurately reflect educational excellence. Although it is unclear what data such a ranking would use, dozens of administrators will meet in the coming month to mull plans for a university-generated system. Meanwhile, in the past decade U.S. News & World Report has seen the rise of several competitors in the rankings business, including Arizona State University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Times Higher Education Supplement, and Newsweek. These alternative rankings take into account other variables, such as faculty output based on awards and publishing volume.

Here is this year's U.S. News & World Report list of top national universities:

1) Princeton University
2) Harvard University
3) Yale University
4) Stanford University
5) University of Pennsylvania
5) California Institute of Technology
7) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
8) Duke University
9) University of Chicago
9) Columbia University

U.S. News & World Report's "Best Colleges 2008" issue hits newsstands today, August 20.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

All business

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Four Chicago GSB students battled a team from UCLA on CNBC's business game show “Fast Money MBA Challenge” on August 8. Eight teams of business-school students compete for $200,000, to be shared for educational expenses. The teams were seeded according to their 2007 U.S. News and World Report business-school ranking: MIT (4) vs. University of Texas at Austin (18), Chicago (5) vs. UCLA (16), Dartmouth (7) vs. Yale (14), and Columbia (9) vs. NYU (10).

Despite keeping a close game up to the last question, Chicago’s contingent of first- and second-years—Jeremy Crow, Fergus McKay, Ryan Preclaw, and Sabrina Thong—came up short against the Californians’ ability to answer trivia questions such as, “Which company’s private label brands include ‘365 Organic?’” The answer: Whole Foods. "The questions in the initial rounds weren’t too difficult, but we weren’t fast enough on the buzzer," McKay reflected. "I also think we played it a little too conservatively at the beginning, and we should have been more confident in our answers." UCLA lost to Yale in the following match. A number of early upsets have marked the show—besides Chicago’s loss, MIT fell to Texas and Yale defeated Dartmouth.

Texas and Yale go head-to-head in the championship round tonight.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: A bracket shows the schools' progress toward game-show glory.

A vision of dance

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Before the dance begins, the teenaged performers—one female and three males—walk in a circle, led by their school's headmaster. They pause, lined up near the back curtain, and walk toward the stage's edge. The dancers are orienting themselves to the size of the space—they come from the Shree Ramana Maharishi Academy for the Blind.

The troupe traveled from Bangalore, India, to International House for Notes of Hope, an August 18 concert put on by Asha for Education, a charitable organization that helps fund the education of underprivileged Indian youth. Started in Berkeley, Asha's U of C branch began in 1996. The dancers learned their classical Indian routines through the academy's "touch and feel" teaching method, in which instructors move students' bodies into positions that the performers commit to memory.

Soliciting Earth's blessing, three dancers begin the program by sprinkling flower petals on the ground for the Pushpanjali. For their second routine, the dancers balance lanterns on outstretched palms. They move into a line and wave their arms, resembling a candelabra come to life. In the third dance, one performer balances a pitcher on his head as he moves. Eventually he climbs atop a plate, jostling it back and forth and spinning in a circle, all without dropping the pitcher. When he finally removes it and bows, the audience loudly applauds. He lowers his head, revealing his damp hair and the smile on his face.

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: Dancers pose with lanterns; one dancer balances a pitcher filled with water while dancing on a plate.

Romantic, not Roman

The exhibit wall reads, "Not only under the Italian sky, among majestic domes, and Corinthian columns, but also under printed arches, intricately decorated buildings, and Gothic towers true art grows." The words of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, a German Romantic polemicist, fit well with Majestic Nature/Golden History, the Smart Museum's exhibition of 19th-century German art. The works in the show bespeak a self-conscious urge to forge a specifically Germanic style.

One artist featured in Majestic Nature, Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, broke with neoclassicism in works like Clouds, a small watercolor of puffy cumulus clouds, contrasting with the geometric exactness and large scale of classical Italian painting. Though Dahl was Norwegian by birth, he studied in Dresden with Caspar David Friedrich, one of Romanticism's most famous representatives.

Throughout the show, Goethe's influence on 19th-century German painting emerges. Peter Cornelius's cycle of 1816 prints, based on Goethe's Faust, features fine lines and silvery tones. "I wanted to be absolutely German," Cornelius said, "and therefore selected this form." The painting's medieval setting and Gothic feel earned Goethe's admiration; there's not a dome or column to be found.

Seth Mayer, '08

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Images (left to right): Peter Cornelius (designer) and Ferdinand Ruscheweyh (engraver), Valentin's Death (Valentins Tod), from the series Twelve Illustrations to Goethe's Faust, 1816, engraving; Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, Trees by the River Elbe in Rain, 1834, oil on canvas; Johann Anton Ramboux, View of the Moselle Valley below Trier with the Rocks of Pallien in the Foreground, 1824–27, lithograph.

No sweat

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Perhaps blinded by all the flash bulbs, parents and friends don't seem to notice the "NO PHOTOGRAPHY DURING CEREMONY" signs adorning numerous columns in Rockefeller Chapel. While the parade of robed graduates goes by, many guests attending Chicago's 491st convocation are intent on capturing their visages. Those receiving degrees try to smile as they pass their supporters without slowing the procession or tripping on their academic vestments.

As the audience members take their seats, University Marshal Lorna Straus explains that William Rainey Harper started the tradition of holding convocation every quarter. Chicago doesn't call it graduation or commencement, she says, instead emphasizing how the ceremony brings the University community together.

Next, José Quintáns, the William Rainey Harper professor in pathology and the College, ascends the pulpit for the convocation address, which he titled "Make It Easy, It Is Going to Be Hot." The provost, he explains, told him to keep his speech light because the chapel gets so muggy. Quintáns, master of the BSD, sports a Groucho Marx mustache; a bright yellow robe from his alma mater, University of Santiago de Compostela; white gloves; and a fringed yellow cap. One of his ancestors, he says, was "dean of academic attire" at the Spanish institution in the 15th century and "appreciated the fashion value of lampshades." He then gives the crowd a biological primer on sweating. As the listeners wallow in Rockefeller's warmth, Quintáns remonstrates, "Sweating is the adaptive response of non-furry animals to heat. For those who don't like it," he adds, "think of the alternative: panting."

Seth Mayer, '08

Photos: A family gets ready for convocation; a full house inside Rockefeller Chapel.

Gone in 59 seconds

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His face covered in a blue, pudding-like substance, a man lets two people and a dog take turns licking his countenance clean again. The scene comes from the film LIX, by Chicago-based artist Dubi Kaufmann. LIX is 59 in Roman numerals, and that's how many seconds the movie runs. It's part of the 59 Seconds Video Festival, the 53rd screening of which took place August 25 at Doc Films, an organization that, as it happens, is on 59th Street.

During all the festival videos, the number 59 keeps showing up: in signs, a girl's height and weight, even in the residue left by an opium smoker. The festival, put on by Project 59, encourages video artists from around the world to submit 59-second works that may or may not incorporate the chosen number into the piece. One video has a cat eating 59 food pellets. Another features a man calling a "she-male" escort service to see what 59 pesos will get him—which turns out to be nothing. A third clip compiles 59 pieces from the One Second Film Festival. The changing lineup has lit up screens from Slovenia to Australia to Brazil, where audiences, like the one in Max Palevsky Cinema, voted for their favorites.

Seth Mayer, '08

Image: Still from Perfect Family by Irina Danilova and Hiram Levy.

In the real world

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The chronicles of inequity are stacked high at fourth-year Leo Gertner's seventh-floor office on South Michigan Avenue. With titles like "Criminal Justice," "Housing," "Transportation," and "Education," the binders on the city of Chicago's racial discrimination could be daunting, but for Gertner, a Human Rights Program summer intern with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA), the work is "delightful." Gertner helps compile the Chicago section of an alternative report to the federal government's U.N.–required biannual statement on racial discrimination. A national network of nonprofits, including the JCUA, will ultimately put together a final report to highlight details omitted from the official U.S. statement.

Through his work, Gertner "has been able to witness a lot," he says. "The job has put me in contact with people who are agitating to change their lives." He's met with neighborhood residents, community leaders, and nonprofit workers to gather information about racial discrimination. The job has also taught him to be "better at negotiating and more aware of people’s interests when trying to reach toward goals," says Gertner, who plans to pursue a career in human rights.

Chicago gives aid to students in their search for a future career, funding or organizing hundreds of internships. One of 32 Human Rights interns, Gertner appreciates the extra help. "It’s a real program, not just funding," Gertner says. "People support you along the way." With the assistance comes more responsibility. "The Human Rights Program added a lot of legitimacy, knowing that I’ve already been screened by human-rights experts at the University of Chicago," he says. "The internship comes with a lot of weight in Chicago. After three weeks at my job I had to break it to my employers that I am not an expert in human-rights law, despite my internship title."

Ethan D. Frenchman, '08

Photo: Fourth-year Leo Gertner works at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs this summer.

Sweet, sweet study of the mind

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At 11 a.m. Wednesday Liz Majka, AM'07, and Kylie Power, a MAPSS student matriculating in the fall, line up candy in the Reynolds Club lobby outside the C-Shop, readying tables to entice passersby into taking their social-psychology studies.

They both have their own studies to administer today; the reward for Majka's, who works in Chicago Booth professor Ayelet Fishbach's lab, is Hershey's Sticks, while Power, who works under psychologist Penny Visser, offers an array of candy bars. Neither can reveal exactly what she's investigating because if subjects knew in advance, the results could be tainted. Labs conduct research in the Reynolds Club once a week or so, says Majka. Usually it's preliminary work, but sometimes psychologists gather data for actual studies. Holding the surveys there, rather than in a lab, works if they don't require a "controlled environment." It's cheaper to hand out candy, she explains, than to shell out money to research subjects.

"One minute of your time for chocolate!" Majka yells at a student. She asks a few people if they are undergraduates, a prerequisite for completing Power's study. "I was an undergraduate before your dad even existed!" one man shouts back, an indignant look on his face. He won't be receiving any chocolate today.

Seth Mayer, '08

Photo: Kylie Power, who begins the MAPSS program next year, participates in Liz Majka's study.

Sons and brothers

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“I talk too much,” Eva Fernandez, AM’82, a Basic Program instructor at the Graham School of General Studies, said during Friday’s poetry reading at the Chicago Cultural Center. Part of the First Friday lecture series, “The Taste of Copper: A Poetry Reading” departed from the series’ standard brand of lecture—more typically represented by Raymond Ciacci’s (AM’84, PhD’90) upcoming October 5 talk, “Is there a Form of Absolute Happiness?” Fernandez’s reading drew a crowd of new faces, said lecture coordinator Clare Pearson, AB’82, AM’01, who introduced the “long-time poet.”

Fernandez explained her poems before reading them to help the audience "receive the poems orally.” She grouped her works by topic, though they didn’t always fall neatly into her prescribed categories: poems about the body and about death; dream-like verses; good-love and bad-love poems; and poems about her family. A scholar of Old English and contemporary poetry as well as 17th-century English literature, Fernandez also draws inspiration from other writers’ forms and themes. “Sad Boy Collapsed,” written for her 10-year-old son Max, she said, is “strangely indebted” to Paradise Lost and Milton’s “insistence that Eden isn’t just a garden” from which Adam and Eve were expelled but an entire country where they lived. The poem begins with a disappointed boy who has grown too large to be lifted, but the tone later shifts: "The flat world is our Eden. Let’s go for a walk." In an untitled piece dedicated to her brother, she uses an English sonnet form—three stanzas of four lines, ending with a rhyming couplet: “What I wouldn’t give for one specific thing / That was his and now belongs to everything.”

Although the program ran slightly over its scheduled hour, the discussion continued after Fernandez stepped offstage; some audience members stayed to talk to the poet and each other. One of the first to approach Fernandez was one of her inspirations, Max.

R.E.K.

Photo: Eva Fernandez reads her poetry in the Chicago Cultural Center's Claudia Cassidy Theater.

Goals in progress

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Amid a crane’s low groans and construction’s hammering claps just south of Stagg Field, men’s soccer coach Scott Wiercinski orders his team to gather balls, mesh scrimmage vests, and water bottles at the start of Monday’s 2 p.m. practice. Huddling the team together, he asks, “Freshmen, what’s the team rule about e-mail? You guys need to check it at least once a day.”

Beyond inculcating the formalities of the four-day-a-week practices, Wiercinski focuses on bolstering the team's defense after its 2-2 start. Despite a 2-1 win Saturday, the team is still “operating at 70 percent,” he says. By the time practice ends, he hopes they are at 75 percent. But with another game Tuesday, he says, the team “can’t do that much physical work, so we’re focusing on defense and organizational issues."

He splits the team into two groups. Three players in each group grip blue scrimmage vests as the other players play Keep Away with the ball. “Focus on ball movement and your defensive positions,” says Wiercinski.

Ten minutes later, he brings the team together to demonstrate a drill aimed at breaking up a team’s offensive sweep. Half the players try to shoot the ball past the goalkeeper, while the others try to steal the ball and get it through one of two makeshift goals. “Left, left, left, right, right!” Wiercinski bellows, directing the defensive positioning.

After shifting to the regular field to scrimmage, then back to the practice area for a few drills, Wiercinski gathers the team together. “And we’re done,” says one player. “Not quite,” says Wiercinski, leading the team through yet another exercise.

Z.S.

Photo: The men's soccer team practices ball movement and defensive positioning during Monday's practice.

Children left behind

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Author and education activist Jonathan Kozol arrived at Rockefeller Chapel Wednesday evening in a suit and tie, but by the time he took the podium a few minutes later, he'd shed his jacket and rolled his sleeves up past his elbows. "My heart is very heavy nowadays," he told an audience of mostly teachers as he launched into a 90-minute declamation against the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead of true learning, he said, the 2001 law focuses on pumping schoolchildren with "mini-chunks of amputated knowledge." Its strictures, Kozol said, have sparked the exodus of young, talented teachers from urban public schools and stifled classrooms with "protomilitary instruction." Standardized exams now often begin in kindergarten, he added, and teachers spend as much as half their time drilling students in test-taking. Faltering scores can mean punishment for both teachers and schools.

Kozol called No Child Left Behind less an attempt at education reform than a "shaming ritual to discredit the entire system of public education itself." He added, "Strict classroom rules and sanctions and threats won't make wizards out of bad teachers."

He did offer a few words of encouragement. His most recent book, Letters to a Young Teacher, recounts his correspondence with a first-year elementary-school teacher he calls "Francesca." Working in Boston—where Kozol began his own teaching career in 1964—Francesca resists "teaching to the test," and the book offers strategies, he said, for "how to rebel against the things teachers find abhorrent" while keeping their jobs.

Kozol is also pushing for solutions from Capitol Hill. Since July 4 he has fasted to protest the No Child Left Behind Act—during his talk he looked and sounded frail—and he has formed an advocacy organization to push legislators, in particular Senate Education Committee Chair Ted Kennedy, to change the law, which comes up for reauthorization this fall. Sign-up sheets for Education Action! passed through the audience as he spoke. "I don't want to be alone in this fight," he said.

L.G.

Photo: More than 70 days into a fast protesting No Child Left Behind, Jonathan Kozol brought his case against the education law to a Rockefeller Chapel audience.

Light in September

Before the Maroons' first-ever night football game Saturday, the University saluted Bernie DelGiorno, AB'54, AB'55, MBA'55, who donated funds for Stagg Field's new lights and FieldTurf. At a late-afternoon picnic on the crisp, sunny day—ideal football weather—former student-athletes and athletes' parents joined Chicago administrators and DelGiorno's family and friends for hot dogs, hamburgers, and veggie skewers.

Director of Athletics Tom Weingartner noted that DelGiorno, a former student gymnast who's long supported Chicago athletics, "likes to brag that he's missed only one varsity football game since 1939." Weingartner jokingly called DelGiorno's bluff: Chicago dropped football from 1940 to 1968. "Still," he said, "to miss only one game since 1969 is a pretty remarkable record."

President Robert J. Zimmer presented DelGiorno with a replica of a plaque that now stands just inside the Stagg Field gate. His $5 million gift not only renovated the field—a project that began last November—but also helps offset costs for a new dorm and a performing-arts center. DelGiorno "appreciates the importance of these activities to our students," Zimmer said, "and has a very special passion for University athletics."

DelGiorno explained why both artificial turf and lights "made a whole lot of sense": the buoyant turf helps prevent injuries, requires no watering or mowing, and, made with recycled sneakers, is environmentally friendly. The lights, meanwhile, "effectively add thousands of hours of additional playing time" for both University Athletic Association and intramural teams to practice and compete. DelGiorno exclaimed, "Let there be light!"

A few football players, dressed for their 6 p.m. game against Elmhurst College, gave DelGiorno an official jersey and another surprise: he'd be an honorary cocaptain for the game and attend the coin toss.

Though the Maroons won the coin toss, they didn't fare as well in the game. Under the well-lit field, they fell to Elmhurst 36-13. Next week they host Macalester—in an afternoon match.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): At the picnic DelGiorno chats with President Zimmer and Chicago Initiative chair Andy Alper, AB’80, MBA’81; DelGiorno views the new plaque thanking him for his gifts; Chicago's first night game.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Sing out

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At second-year Angie’s music-department vocal audition Tuesday, James Kallembach heard something that sounded a bit off. "I detect some north-suburbs 'aah' in your 'ahh'," said Kallembach, the University's director of choral activities. "Think like an opera singer." Angie, a University of Illinois transfer student, was the seventh to audition for the University's three vocal ensembles: University Chorus, the largest campus vocal group; Motet Choir, a smaller group that frequently performs a capella; and Rockefeller Chapel Choir, 30-40 professional singers and students who perform at Sunday morning services. The auditions began Tuesday and continue through next Wednesday, and Kallembach expects upwards of 200 undergrads, graduate students, and faculty and staff members to sign up.

After Angie sang the soprano line of a prepared song, "Never Weather-beaten Sail"—Kallembach had left copies of the piece at audition sign-ups—she moved to sight-reading. Placing a new piece on Angie's music stand, Kallembach then played a chord in E-minor and the first note. "Go as slow as you need to get the intervals correctly," he said.

At the end of the audition, Kallembach said that the results would be posted before noon next Wednesday. Because of Angie's sight-reading ability, he said, "Chapel Choir will probably be out." That group uses a standard repertoire; her talents would be more valuable in another ensemble.

R.E.K.

Photo: Angie, a choral auditioner, sings for James Kallembach.

Accelerator slowdown

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Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron control room features mustard-colored metal panels sandwiched between monitors, computers, and telephones. The room, usually bustling with technicians scuffling amid monitors that showcase brightly colored graphs and charts, is empty. It's been abandoned since the beginning of August, as the Batavia, Illinois-based lab does the electrical maintenance, repairs, and upgrades impossible to conduct during the world’s largest particle accelerator’s standard 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week cycle.

Fermi plans to shut down the Tevatron in 2009, when the European Organization for Nuclear Research will open a particle accelerator seven times more powerful than the Tevatron. But first, Roger Dixon, Fermi particle-accelerator division head, says he is “trying to squeeze the most of the machine as possible,” namely by claiming a few more discoveries for the lab. The repairs will bolster machine-generated data, he says. “We’re improving the correction system, installing a new beam line, and improving the quality of our results."

The ten-week shutdown also has side benefits, giving the technicians who run the accelerator “time to breathe and see their families,” says Paul Czarapata, deputy division head. “They orchestrate the whole show," he says. "And because of that responsibility, I worry about their health and their families."

Come October 1, the Tevatron will run again and the room will return to its normal, semi-chaotic state.

Z.S.

Photo: The Tevatron control room operates the world's largest particle accelerator.

Dr. Maathai's neighborhood

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Speaking Sunday evening to a capacity crowd at Rockefeller Chapel, Wangari Maathai received a standing ovation before she said a word. The Kenyan environmental activist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner came to Hyde Park, she said, with an urgent message: global peace depends on keeping the environment healthy. "Look through the world," she said, "and tell me one war we are fighting today that doesn't have to do with the access, control, and distribution of natural resources."

Born in rural Kenya, Maathai, 67, is a biologist and the first woman in east and central Africa to earn a doctorate. In the mid-1970s she began organizing Kenyan women—"In my part of the world," she explained, "they're the ones who deal with resources like water and food"—into what became the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental organization that has helped Kenyan women plant, by Maathai's calculations, more than 30 million trees on farms, churchyards, and school grounds. In the last two decades, the Green Belt Movement has gone international. "The world is one," she said, citing in particular the problem of global warming. "We all live in this neighborhood."

Sponsored by the Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF), Maathai's talk was billed as an early glimpse at the two-week program, which runs October 27—November 11 and focuses on the environment. In addition, said CHF board member Karla Scherer and University President Robert J. Zimmer, who introduced Maathai, the talk demonstrated a strengthening partnership between the U of C and the festival, which will hold several events on campus and in Hyde Park.

L.G.

Photos: Wangari Maathai argues that people need good governments to "allow them to protect the environment"; before and after Maathai's talk, listeners bought copies of her autobiography, Unbowed.

Doc-steady

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Doc Films has a Web site and an e-mail list. Last fall the nation’s longest continuously running student film society even tried selling season passes online. This fall, however, it was back to old-school cash boxes and pen-and-paper sign-up sheets, as local cinema fans lined up Monday night to see Passport to Pimlico and to plunk down $26 ($24 with a Spring 2007 pass) for the chance to see a film a night (two on Thursdays, except Thanksgiving) through the first Saturday in December.

"Is there any way you could mark it and give it back?" a gray-haired patron asked as she held out her Spring 2007 pass. "Because the number was 007, and I'm loath to give it up."

"I think I remember you buying it," the Doc volunteer responded. She then handed over a new, less auspiciously numbered bit of yellow cardboard with a shot of Margaret Sullavan—the subject of the Tuesday-night series—as she appeared in The Shop Around the Corner.

Like the membership cards, the Doc schedule follows a tried-and-true format. Each weekday night is devoted to a different genre. Sunday nights show William S. Hart, aka "Badass of the West," with films from England's Ealing Studios on Mondays. Tuesdays are Sullavan, Wednesdays are Kurosawa, and African director Ousmane Sembène and Mormon cinema, 1905-2007, share Thursday evenings. On the weekends, it’s time for "Doc’ed Up," billed as "a sampling of the latest releases, including summer blockbusters and lesser known gems," beginning with Judd Apatow's Knocked Up.

This reporter will be there, the proud holder of Autumn 2007 pass No. 030.

M.R.Y.

The Doc Around the Corner: Margaret Sullavan graces the film society’s Autumn 2007 pass.

New Kim on the block

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At Wednesday’s Div School lunch, Kimberly Goff-Crews, the new University VP and dean of students, shared an alliterative agenda for her first year: “Pizza, policy, and procedure." While getting to know the University’s “very distinctive” culture, she said, she will also take in the city and its Hyde Park neighborhood; learning about the University's present and past will guide her in planning for the future.

Goff-Crews oversees 15 on-campus departments—including the Office of the Bursar, Campus Dining Services, and the University House System—that provide resources for Chicago's 13,000 students. The latest addition to her portfolio is Rockefeller Chapel. With the departure of former Chapel Dean Alison Boden this summer, the search is on for a "new, improved" campus spiritual leader, Goff-Crews said, who can build on the kind of support Boden provided for the community. Asking for input on "who it is we should be getting " and "what kind of spiritual community we should have"—regular communication between students and administration is a primary focus, she said—she turned the discussion over to the audience.

In the past few years spirituality and religious studies have been "bullied," a Div School student said. "We work in an environment of some hostility." Prayers are no longer a part of academic convocation, one man complained, and "the life of the mind" is valued more than spiritual life.

Few students, another attendee said, perceive the similarites between education and religion: "We approach studies as an ascetic practice." One's "discipline as a student," he argued, becomes a "spiritual and profound quest tying together different faiths." Both education and religious experience are transformative processes, a Div School student-services staff member said; the key is to explore how religion's vocabulary can apply to "larger University life."

R.E.K.

Photos: Div School student staff members serve plates of penne, tomato, and mozzarella; Kimberly Goff-Crews seeks student input.

'Round about noon

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At 12:09 p.m. Saturday, trumpeter Orbert Davis, wearing a charcoal-gray pinstripe suit, light-gray shirt, and yellow tie, walked onto the stage in the DuSable Museum’s near-full auditorium. Lifting his trumpet to his lips, he blared out a short phrase, paused, looked down, then played another short phrase. A moment later, Stewart Miller’s fingers danced along the neck of his bass and drummer Ernie Adams tapped a few quick hits to his cymbals. Then pianist Ryan Cohan and saxophonist Ari Brown burst into "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise," in the opening performance of the first annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, sponsored by the University, the Hyde Park Cultural Alliance, and the Hyde Park Jazz Society.

As Davis and his band boomed out the Oscar Hammerstein II standard, about half the crowd bobbed their heads to Adams’s beat, while a third ruffled through their programs and souvenir bags. When the song ended, Davis looked up at the crowd. “The funny thing is a lot of people think jazz in Chicago ends at Labor Day [when the city hosts its annual Chicago Jazz Festival],” he said. He then pulled his Blackberry out of his inner jacket pocket to take a few pictures of the crowd. “I want to say I was here for the first annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival.”

After two solo-heavy songs, including Miles Davis’s “Miles Ahead,” Davis looked at his wristwatch, saw nearly 50 minutes had elapsed and said, “Wow, how time flies…” One onlooker in the second row let out an audible sigh, dreading the end of show, before Davis and his band launched into a rollicking final number. As Brown soloed, Davis shuffled his feet. When the song ended, the crowd rose for a standing ovation before moving en masse to the Midway Plaisance’s skating rink, the next stop of the 14-hour festival.

Z.S.

Photo: Trumpeter Orbert Davis (left) and saxophonist Ari Brown (right) belt out jazz standards at the first annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

Maroons take Manhattan

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A far cry from Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap—the dark, smoky, one-room bar many U of C students frequent—the New York City nightclub Strata has two floors, wood paneling, and candles glowing on every table.

But words like “Sosc” and “Hum” and names like Machiavelli and Leo Strauss could be heard at Strata last Friday night. Young alumni living in New York City had come for Phoenixphest, an annual event held in 14 cities—including Chicago, Houston, and London—that gathered graduates from the last 15 years to eat, drink, and network.

“It was a lot of fun, very good food and drinks,” said Matt Chin, AB’07, an economics major who is now a Citigroup analyst. Alumni crowded an open bar serving beer and wine and snagged miniature hamburgers, tiny crab cakes, and beef teriyaki from the roving waiters’ platters.

Abby Sheldon, AB’07, termed the event “very classy.” A math and French major, Sheldon works as a paralegal at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. Friday night she ran into some friends she hadn’t expected to see in New York and met some new people. She also realized that she missed Chicago.

“At the time I didn’t appreciate how much fun I was having,” she said, “and now I look back at it, and it was the best four years of my life.”

Jenny Fisher, AB'07

Photo: Phoenixphest 2007 brought together young alumni from 14 different cities.

Appetite for understanding

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After the corn chowder, pasta, salad, and cinnamon cake, the several dozen guests gathered for dinner in the Brent House living room were ready for the main course: a conversation with Martha Nussbaum.

Kicking off Brent House’s Dinner & Conversation series, Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics, discussed her latest book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. She wrote the study of India's Hindu-Muslim conflicts "as a public service, to inform the American public," but she noted ruefully that the book is selling better in India, where "it's No. 10 on the best-seller list."

Five years after communal violence erupted in the northwest state of Gujarat, India's Congress Party government is on a course of religious pluralism, Nussbaum said, but she voiced a concern that the nation's current pedagogical system, with "less emphasis on critical thinking and more on the force-feeding of useful skills" for economic growth, may make it harder to develop the sense of self that harmonious pluralism requires.

Maintaining pluralism, said Nussbaum, may also require returning to the principles of the nation's founding father: "Gandhi understood that you can't just have good institutions, but you also have to have a strong symbolic culture," with symbols that "move people to act" for a larger goal. "The Hindu right does this brilliantly," a lesson that the right's pluralist opponents should take to heart.

Next up on the Brent House dinner calendar: on November 13 Shali Wu, SM’05, PhD’07, of the University's psychology department, will discuss the results of a recent study on how the relative interdependence of a culture can affect one's ability to see another's point of view.

M.R.Y.

Photo: The Clash Within, Martha Nussbaum’s latest book, focuses on the 2002 Gujarat riots in which Hindu extremists, allied with elected officials, killed some 2,000 Muslims.

Do the Wright thing

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Exhorting visitors to exercise their "Wright to vote," a five-foot-tall sign hanging outside the Robie House's gift shop is part of a campaign to win restoration funding for the 98-year-old landmark. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Robie House is one of two historic Hyde Park structures competing with 23 other Chicago-area landmarks for $1 million in rehab money. The other is sculptor Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time, which abuts Washington Park on the western edge of the Midway Plaisance.

Sponsored by the American Express Partners in Preservation Chicagoland Initiative, the competition is a Web-based election in which Chicagoans and architecture enthusiasts choose the winning landmarks. The online polls will remain open through this Wednesday, October 10 (visitors may cast one vote per day). Afterward a 20-person advisory panel will distribute grants to the sites with the most votes—dollar figures and number of winners to be determined—and announce the results in November.

Robie House staff members are requesting a grant to restore the guest bedroom's original finishes and fixtures. Meanwhile, Fountain of Time conservators seek funding to illuminate and protect the sculpture. Among the other sites in the running: the Great Lakes Naval Station's Hostess House, Evanston's Grosse Point Lighthouse, and Aurora's Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall.

L.G.

Photos: Robie House tries to get out the vote; the Fountain of Time needs money for lighting.

Fountain of Time photo courtesy the Chicago Park District.

Time's a-ticking

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On January 17 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declared the world two minutes closer to "doomsday." Now set at five minutes to midnight, the Bulletin's Doomsday Clock is a symbolic mechanism to show the destructive nature of manmade technologies, explained Bulletin editor Jonas Siegel at the Hyde Park Borders October 6. As part of Chicago Science in the City's discussion series, Siegel and online editor Josh Schollmeyer addressed a small audience of Hyde Park locals and U of C students, giving a brief history of the clock and explaining the international climate that led the Bulletin's board of directors and sponsors to reset the clock.

The Doomsday Clock made its debut on the Bulletin's cover in 1947. Designed by artist Martyl Langsdorf—the widow of Alexander Langsdorf Jr., a Manhattan Project physicist—the clock was first set arbitrarily at seven minutes to portray urgency. Since 1949, when the Bulletin decided to mark its reaction to world events by resetting the clock, the minute hand has been moved 18 times—as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs within nine months of each other.

We are now at the "dawning of a second nuclear age," Schollmeyer said; the January shift represents a "larger crisis in international relations." Events like North Korea's 2006 nuclear-weapon test, Siegel noted, are symptomatic of a shift away from international treaties and agreements, such as 1970's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile the U.S. and Russia, with a combined 26,000 of the world's nuclear devices, have missiles on "hair-trigger alert," Schollmeyer pointed out. A nuclear exchange could unfold within 30 to 45 minutes.

A world destroyed by nuclear warfare is no longer the only image of what Siegel called the "mythic doomsday." Climate change and biotechnology also have the potential to "drastically affect life as we know it," he noted: "Think of the idea of doomsday as Genesis in reverse, as uncreating the world."

R.E.K.

Photos: Bulletin editors Jonas Siegel (left) and Josh Schollmeyer predict a grim future for international relations; an audience member questions the editors about nuclear weapons.

Redford roars

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Doc Films's crimson curtains were drawn Tuesday afternoon for Robert Redford's latest film, Lions for Lambs. Hundreds of students and community members lined up outside Ida Noyes an hour before the showing, hoping to catch a glimpse of Redford's shiny golden mane during the 30-minute question-and-answer session afterward. By showtime Max Palevsky Theater's 483 seats were filled and Lions's stars Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise filled the screen.

The film follows three narratives surrounding a military mission in Afghanistan. Senator Irving (Cruise) tries to sell his "new" plan that will "win the war and the hearts and minds" in Afghanistan to a skeptical journalist (Streep). On the West Coast political-science professor Malley (Redford) engages in an early-morning office-hours session with a disaffected student, hoping to prove that politics still matters. In Afghanistan two of Professor Malley's former students (Michael Peña and Derek Luke) fight for their lives as soldiers in Irving's troubled operation.

Following the show, political journalist Rick Perlstein, AB’92, moderated questions for a panel of Redford and actors Peña and Andrew Garfield. Like the film, Redford's comments were politically charged. He noted that Lions is "not about current issues" per se, but "something deeper." Comparing the present climate to "the McCarthy trials, Watergate, and Iran-Contra," he said, the movie asks "questions through [verbal] duels" on the role of "combat, media, and politics."

Redford seems to have an affinity for the University of Chicago, having previously directed A River Runs Through It, based on U of C Professor Norman Maclean's autobiographical book, and previewed a rough cut of his film, Quiz Show, at Doc in 1994. Redford stressed the role that teachers must play in developing a sense of responsibility in their students, also a major theme in Lions. "Professor Malley is in a quiet rage. He's lost his ability to get students motivated," Redford said. "[Teaching] should be all about engagement and getting students involved. It must be something personal."

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Students and community members wait outside Ida Noyes; Michael Peña, Robert Redford, and Andrew Garfield (left, center, and right, respectively) answer questions as Rick Perlstein moderates.

Nobel mechanism

Monday morning’s press conference was part of "a rich tradition," said Chicago Provost Thomas Rosenbaum, "going back 100 years, when Joseph Michelson won the first American Nobel in the sciences." The latest—at No. 80—laureate with a Chicago connection was the reason for the media event: Roger B. Myerson, the Glen A. Lloyd distinguished service professor in economics, received the dawn phone call from Sweden announcing that he had won the 2007 Nobel in economics.

With Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota and Eric S. Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey), Myerson received the prize (formally known as the Sveriges Riksank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) "for having laid the foundation of mechanism design theory."

At the podium Myerson—a Harvard PhD in applied mathematics who in 2001 joined the Chicago economics faculty after spending the majority of his academic career at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management—beamed and beamed. "It's first and foremost about ideas," he said. "I'm excited that ideas I thought were important, that I wanted to devote my life to," have been thrust into the limelight.

Mechanism design theory, said Myerson, recognizes that "the economy needs to be understood as a communications system" as well as a market system, and thus provides a way to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. The theory has been used in many areas of economics and in parts of political science, helping to identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes, and voting procedures.

"Now that you've won," a reporter wanted to know, "what is the most important thing you're going to do next?"

The newly minted laureate didn’t seem to give that one too much thought: "I've got a seminar on Tuesday I've gotta give."

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Not just another day at the office: economist Roger Myerson gets a visit from the press; the Reynolds Club’s McCormick-Tribune Lounge was turned into a press room as media, colleagues, and students turned out to congratulate Myerson; newest member of the club: Myerson (second from left) is joined by 2000 laureate James J. Heckman; 1992 winner Gary S. Becker AM’53, PhD’55; and 1995 laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr., AB’59, PhD’64.

Photos by Dan Dry

Fight fire with forum

Nine of the nation's most controversial scholars took to the podium "In Defense of Academic Freedom" at a packed Rockefeller Chapel on Friday. The conference, which featured Tony Judt, John J. Mearsheimer, and, via video, Noam Chomsky, was held in the wake of two tenure decisions at nearby DePaul University that set off a firestorm in the academic community.

This past June Norman Finkelstein—a controversial historian of the Holocaust and critic of the United States's relationship with Israel—was denied tenure at DePaul. His supporters, including University of Chicago political-science professor Mearsheimer, claim that Finkelstein, whose "scholarship is known around the world," was dismissed in the face of "outside pressure," notably from Alan Dershowitz, a forthright defender of Israel and lauded Harvard Law professor. Mehrene Larudee, a supporter of Finkelstein's at DePaul, was also denied tenure.

Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus of linguistics, could not attend the conference in person, but he addressed the crowd of approximately 1,500 by video, declaiming "the ongoing assault on academic freedom" as part of universities' general "conformist subservience to power."

Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University, elaborated on the academy's susceptibility to power, taking up the cause of Mearsheimer's new book, The Israel Lobby. Judt criticized the interests that, he said, silence frank discussion of Israel's policies with accusations of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. Such efforts preclude "the openness to say that there is a difference between hating Jews and criticizing Israel," Judt said, warning, "if we don't allow that discussion we may get real anti-Semitism."

Ethan D. Frenchman, '08

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Photos (left to right): Finkelstein's supporters monger T-shirts before the conference; attendees file into Rockefeller Chapel; Mearsheimer addresses the crowd as Columbia professor Akeel Bilgrami, PhD '83; Tony Judt; and writer and conference organizer Tariq Ali look on (left, center, and right, respectively).

Thyestes holds court

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Director JoAnne Akalaitis, AB'60, presents Thyestes, Roman playwright–philosopher Seneca's tragedy of feuding brothers and family stain. In revenge for plotting to steal his kingdom and wife, Atreus, King of Argos, slaughters his brother Thyestes's two children and feeds them to him.

Seneca, once a close adviser to Emperor Nero who was later put to death, is believed to have based the drama's exploration of corrupt state power and moral perversity on his own experience. The themes resonated with Akailitis, who wrote in the production notes, "When a society is in trouble, as our society is now, there's a decline in moral values. No one is setting a good example."

The performance spans three epochs; it is a 21st-century American production of a Roman retelling of a Greek myth. Though the Greek is lost, the Roman and the modern commingle under Akailitis's direction. Costumes span millennia—Atreus, dressed in Roman armor, pulls the bloody faces of Thyestes's children from an Igloo cooler. The production approaches the violence of a gladiator match as Thyestes loudly devours a plate of saucy meat while the children's fate is graphically recounted, and Atreus is shown, by video, preparing the grisly feast.

Thyestes closes October 21. Court's next production, What The Butler Saw, opens November 8.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Mick Weber as the deranged King of Argos, Atreus.

Photo courtesy Court Theatre

Sacred coexistence

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In a low-lit corner of Rockefeller Chapel, 30 photographs hang just to the left of the pulpit in simple black frames. They are images of Macedonian churches, mosques, and monasteries; and colorful, half-deteriorated frescoes showing saints and angels and interlocking flowers.

Titled Time and the Sacred, the exhibition is the work of Macedonian artist and preservationist Pance Velkov, and it offers a glimpse into his country’s religious and cultural heritage. The Republic of Macedonia belongs to a region often mentioned in the Bible, and its collection of sacred frescoes and icons are among the most precious in the world. A part of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia never suffered the religious cleansing—neither ethnic nor communist—endured by its Balkan Peninsula neighbors, so its religious history is uniquely well preserved, albeit isolated and often ignored.

In a statement accompanying the exhibit, Velkov writes, “Mosques, churches, and monasteries have endured side-by-side for centuries in Macedonia—a rare example of coexistence in Europe and in the whole world. The sacred places in Macedonia do not exist by themselves, apart from the people; the people are present there as well, and therefore these sites represent a unique example of living heritage.”

The exhibit runs through December 24.

L.G.

Photos: top: After the Morning Prayer, The Colored Mosque, Tetovo, 18th century; bottom: Untitled, Church of Dormition of the Holy Mother of God, Treskavec, 13th–15th century.

An American evolution

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"Studs Terkel will not be with us tonight," the usher murmured to people entering Harold Washington Library's Cindy Pritzker Auditorium on Monday. "Should we send a card around?" an audience member asked. "We're big fans."

Author, historian, and broadcaster Terkel, PhB'32, JD'34, was scheduled to be part of the Chicago stop on the The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly (Doubleday, 2007) book tour, along with the book's editor Robert Vare, AB'67, AM'70, and writer William Least Heat-Moon. Instead, the 95-year-old's close friend, journalist and author Alex Kotlowitz, stood in. "I feel like an understudy," Kotlowitz said, before he read an excerpt from Terkel's Pulitzer Prize–winning The Good War, which Vare chose to include in The American Idea.

The Atlantic's editor-at-large, Vare took on the challenge of sifting through 150 years of issues for the book, looking for the magazine's "most influential writers," he said. Founded in 1857 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, the Atlantic was established to monitor and explore "the American idea," as the founders announced in their mission statement. Though the meaning of the "American idea" was never made clear, Vare said, the statement was an "implicit promise to the readers to take on America's most perennially relevant questions."

R.E.K.

Photo: Audience members line up to have their copies of The American Idea signed by William Least Heat-Moon and Robert Vare.

Sketched in time

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The wealth of drawings in the Smart Museum's exhibition Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery charts 400 years of European artists' creative evolution. The exhibit's 84 pieces, a mere five percent of Yale's total drawings collection, display a stream of experimentation flowing from 1480 to 1863.

Although European monastic illustrations flourished in the Middle Ages, exhibit notes point out that few artists sketched before the 15th century. The notes argue that a booming paper industry after Gutenberg's invention of movable type combined with the Italian Renaissance's emphasis on virtú, the creative or unique character of man, led to an explosion of artistic play and discovery.

French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Spanish artists used ink, charcoal, and chalk to experiment with styles and themes. In his Sheet of Studies (c. 1519–1522), Baccio Bandinelli, a Florentine artist working in the wake of Michelangelo, used hatching, a shading technique, to draw the bold, inky shadows on a classical man. One hundred thirty years later, Flemish master Jacob Jordaens demonstrated the Baroque concern with color, detail, and the secular in his study A Goat (c. 1657).

The exhibition closes January 2008.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Baccio Bandinelli, Sheet of Studies, c. 1519–22, Pen and brown ink on beige paper. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift in memory of Henry S. Chase and Rodney Chase; Jacob Jordaens, A Goat, c. 1657, Red, black, and yellow chalk, with touches of red and brown wash, heightened with white. Yale University Art Gallery, Everett V. Meek Fund.

A little noon music

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Sprinkled across the neat rows of seating, the audience for the Department of Music’s Noontime Concert Series numbered only two dozen, and Thursday’s performers—violinist Wolfgang David and pianist and composer David Gompper—delivered an equally intimate performance.

David, whose 2007 tour schedule includes performances in countries from Austria to Thailand, performed Bach’s Chaconne, tracing its variations while silhouetted against Fulton Recital Hall’s windowed backdrop.

He was joined by Gompper for a performance of Korngold’s Much Ado about Nothing. A professor of composition and director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa, Gompper wrote the day’s third and final work, Echoes.

Concert over, the audience applauded, then slowly gathered up coats and bags and returned to the workaday world.

M.R.Y.

Photo: Violinst Wolfgang David and pianist David Gompper perform at the Noontime Concert Series.

Freedom on the line

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"Every time we get a new mode of communication, there have been efforts to limit it," said Cindy Cohn, whose work has been dedicated to fighting for an open Internet. As legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization defending the rights of Internet users and innovators, she is in charge of "anything interesting that happens online," said Law School Dean Saul Levmore, introducing Cohn at this weekend's Law School conference, Law in a Networked World.

Cohn's keynote address touched on the myriad fronts where EFF is working to protect speech online, including path-breaking cases on electronic voting, file sharing, and federal wiretapping. Discussing trade secret law, copyrights, trademarks, and Internet-service-provider companies, Cohn weaved a story of a still-evolving Internet, where firms, users, government, and advocacy groups such as EFF negotiate the boundaries of privacy and free speech.

In these negotiations, EFF has seen its share of failures. Highlighting one particular example, Cohn discussed how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998)—a U.S. Internet law that limits access to copyrighted material and increases penalties for copyright infringement—"tends towards taking speech down," Cohn said. In a number of cases, she noted, firms have used powers granted under the act to make "phony" threats of copyright infringement to have information removed from the Internet without legal examination. Despite setbacks, Cohn remains "optimistic," acknowledging that gains "won't happen on their own; we will have to fight."

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director Cindy Cohn delivers Friday's keynote address at the Law School's two-day forum, Law in a Networked World.

March of the workers

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Dozens of campus clerical and facilities workers, along with students and community members, took to 58th Street Wednesday to protest what they considered the University's bad-faith contract negotiations. The latest contract offer would have raised wages more than three percent per year, short of the workers' desired four percent. Associate Vice President of University Human Resources Gwynne Dilday described the deal as "fair" to the Maroon, but workers ultimately rejected it the night before the protest.

The clerical and facilities employees have stood firm in demanding four-percent annual salary growth. Steve Hobbs, council president of the facilities workers' union Local 743, noted that employees will be ratcheting up their tactics. "We are going to have a lot of [workers] out from now on," Hobbs said. "We're not going to stand it anymore. We are just trying to keep up with the cost of living."

Marching outside the Administration Building's Ellis Avenue entrance, protesters waved posters and chanted, "No contract, no peace." Some wore masks bearing the face of President Robert J. Zimmer, distributed by students. Approximately 15 students, members of the organization Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), came out to support campus workers. Alex Moore, SOUL cochair and College fourth-year, remarked, "workers here make dorms a second home for us. They should be paid the wages they need to support a stable family."

Dilday said in a post-rally interview that she was "disappointed" by the employees' decision to vote down the agreement made between the University and workers' representatives. She will return to the negotiating table, but was "not sure...that the protests will make a tremendous amount of difference."

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Students chant, "U of C, shame on you," outside the Administration Building; protesters march to demand higher wages for campus clerical and facilities employees.

Move over, Buffy.

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He came from heaven, two stakes in his hand,
to smote the vampires and free that land.
Come now and join him, all ye strong and bold;
We'll fight together, like the days of old.

So the chorus heralds Jesus Christ's "return" to Ottawa, Canada, in the independent thriller-musical-kung-fu comedy Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, shown at the midnight Doc Films showing on Halloween. Roughly 60 students, many costumed for free admission, came to see Jesus, summoned by concerned Ottawa-area priests, use kung fu and poorly choreographed musical numbers to stop a cabal of lesbian vampires from taking over the world and to save his partner, Mary Magnum.

As one might expect from a roomful of midnight-moviegoing Chicago undergrads, their costumes ranged from retro to literary, gruesome, and even sociological. Get-ups included Carmen Sandiego of the children's video-game and television-show franchise, Alice in Wonderland, Wrath, and American sociologist Talcott Parsons.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Costumed students await Jesus's midnight slaughter of the vampires; Talcott Parsons, center, flanked by Chocolate Moose and Wrath, were among the honored costumes.

White noise?

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Many well-informed "culture-goers" read contemporary fiction, attend art exhibits, and go to art-house theaters to see the latest in Ethiopian cinema, yet fail to know about or understand contemporary classical music, said Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical-music critic, in Monday's discussion of his new book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, at Fulton Recital Hall.

As a result, Ross is often forced to ask himself whom he is writing for—the consensus or the well informed. “The New Yorker has always had a devoted readership, many of whom read it cover to cover and presume that if it is in the New Yorker, it is important,” he said. He views his position as a tremendous opportunity to bring readers into the classical-music world.

In the talk, Ross aimed to help the audience rethink the way they approach classical music. “Instead of plopping people down in front of an orchestra playing Beethoven, why not show them what contemporary artists, like Bjork, Sufjan Stevens, and Radiohead, are taking from their classical peers and then, once they see those connections, begin to look at composers from previous generations?”

Ross argued that classical-music critics are a key cog in the genre’s revival. “They are the faces of classical music,” he said. “Their review may be the only contact that people have with classical music all day—that is, except when they listen to Vivaldi in their dentist’s waiting room.”

Z.S.

Photo: New Yorker critic Alex Ross discusses the state of contemporary classical music at Fulton Recital Hall.

Swamped

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The Magazine staff is "bogged" down today, working to get readers' November–December issues in the mail.

The faux-authentic cranberry bog, sitting in Pioneer Court outside 401 N. Michigan Avenue—home of the Magazine's offices—is part of an Ocean Spray advertising tour, Bogs Across America. Next stop: Los Angeles. Next blog: Monday.

R.E.K.

Photo: Cranberry harvesters take Michigan Avenue.

A political calculation

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On a chilly November morning, Daniel Biss leans back in his chair and looks out over mounds of academic journals, books, and papers that cover a creaky wooden desk in his Eckhart Hall office. Biss, a 30-year-old assistant professor in mathematics and the College, has a long, narrow face, raven hair with a speckle of white, and wears a gray and black sweater and blue jeans.

When he speaks, his passionate prose seems more at home at the University than at a podium or on the floor of the Illinois State Capitol. Yet, Biss, a Democrat who lives in Evanston and is currently teaching two courses and doing research on topology—the study of the geometric figures or solids unchanged by stretching or bending—is in the midst of a campaign for the Illinois House of Representatives’ 17th District, which encompasses parts of Evanston, Glenview, Golf, Morton Grove, Northbrook, Northfield, Skokie, Wilmette, and Winnetka.

Biss, who wanted to be a mathematician since he was 13, became active in local politics early on in the Bush administration. “I felt betrayed enough that it didn’t really make sense to stand back. I didn’t feel comfortable throwing myself into math 24 hours a day anymore.” When he came to Chicago in 2002, he began volunteering for a slew of local races. Later he got involved with Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) presidential campaign. While the day-to-day work of grassroots campaigning was “very dull,” he nevertheless found it captivating. After months of considering where to concentrate his next efforts, he decided to take on Republican Rep. Elizabeth Coulson. “I want to create a community that can work together to make a significant difference in the culture of Springfield.”

Biss has garnered national coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the DailyKos blog, as well as in the local media. “I’m coming from a pretty different place than most state-representative candidates,” says Biss. “Most were recruited to run, and the fact that I wasn’t, and that I’m not motivated by personal gain, is energizing people.”

Z.S.

Photo: Daniel Biss talks with Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin before a political rally.

Photo courtesy Daniel Biss.

Portrait of a proton

It makes sense that the artwork hanging in the Gordon Center's third-floor atrium was created by scientists: close-up photographs of frogs and fruit flies, landscape paintings of intracellular structures, brilliantly fluorescent pictures of crystals forming, lasers firing, and electricity coursing through a leaf's veins. "Science and art both require a great deal of imagination, and they can inspire each other," says Rebecca Ayers, a fourth-year graduate student in biochemistry and molecular biology who cocurated the Gordon Center exhibit. Titled Science in Art, it gathers more than 80 works by Chicago, Fermilab, and Argonne faculty, grad students, and postdocs.

An amateur oil painter since college, Ayers first conceived the idea for the exhibit more than a year ago. This summer she enlisted the help of Lydia Bright, a painter and third-year molecular-genetics and cell-biology grad student who coran a small gallery in Burlington, Vermont, before coming to Chicago.

Alongside the paintings, drawings, photographs, and microscope images are six working clocks made by Tim Mooney, a software developer at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source. Constructed from cellophane, the clocks' faces are birefringent—they refract light into two directions—and Mooney manipulated the cellophane's polarization so that the clocks change color as the second hands rotate.

The exhibit runs through November 16. Some 300 people attended the opening in October, where scientists also provided the music, including not only jazz, rock, and techno, Ayers says, but also "the sounds of biomolecules," recorded using nuclear magnetic resonance equipment. Scientists at art openings, Bright says, are "different from other gallery visitors. Not only do they look at the art, but they want the sheet of paper; they want to know what they're looking at and who made it—and, if possible, how."

L.G.

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Photos (left to right): Cocurators Lydia Bright (left) and Rebecca Ayers, seated below a painting from Bright's Boom series depicting nuclear-test explosions; Argonne physicist Bernhard Adams's image of high voltage lighting up a leaf; a detail from Ayers's painting Homology; grad student Jane Maduram's star-shaped cells, photographed during her research on cytoskeletal architecture and cell polarity; and Argonne software developer Tim Mooney's color-changing cellophane clocks.

Charting the unknown

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The European worldview fundamentally shifted in the late 15th century when Arabic and Byzantine traders brought copies of Ptolemy's Geographia to Italy, argues the Oriental Institute's exhibition, European Cartographers and the Ottoman World, 1500–1750: Maps from the Collection of O. J. Sopranos. The revival of Ptolemy's techniques, such as latitude and longitude lines, led to an explosion of attempts to reconcile ancient cartography with contemporary knowledge.

European mapmakers gradually incorporated travelers' accounts, sailors' maps, and geodetic survey data to create increasingly detailed political and physical maps. The development of these maps mirrors both the Enlightenment and the changing European balance of power, as first the Venetians, then the Dutch, French, and British made advances in mapping the Ottoman Empire.

The exhibit, part of the Festival of Maps, which presents map collections at libraries and museums throughout Chicago, runs through March 16, 2008. For more on the OI show, see the Nov–Dec '07 Magazine.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Prima Asie Tabvla, Venetian Bernardus Sylvanus' 1511 revision of a map from Ptolemy's Geographia displays longitude and latitude lines; Englishman Herman Moll's 1720 map, The Turkish Empire in Europe, Asia & Africa, shows English interest in the Ottoman Empire.

Photos courtesy the Oriental Institute

One-man show

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“Stop mumbling!” a deep voice bellowed from the Mandel Hall audience Friday night. Onstage, comedian Demetri Martin peered out toward the voice and deadpanned, “Wow, that woman was mad.” Wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and his signature floppy haircut, Martin was soft-spoken as he threw out one-liners: “I remember when I really used to be into nostalgia. And the time before that was really great.”

Martin came to Chicago for the Major Activities Board’s fall show, a last-minute replacement for the indie-pop band the Decemberists—Martin’s explanation for the cancellation: they’ve decided to take their band name literally and tour only in December. The tickets, which went on sale November 12, were sold out in fewer than four days; by 7:00 p.m. Friday, an hour before showtime, the line snaked through the Reynolds Club into Hutch Courtyard.

A baby grand piano, a guitar, and as easel pad labeled, “Large Pad,” cluttered the stage. The piano, Martin complained, is such a pain to travel with. Playing the instruments as he recited lists he’s made—“get hit in the neck with a bag of marbles;” “wipe my ass with an uncooperative rabbit;” and “watch VH1” were all high on Martin’s list of “things I’d rather do than stand in line for a nightclub"—he also raised weighty questions, like how long it took to make the first clock and whether homeless people have homies.

After the hour-and-a-half show, an audience member yelled from the balcony, “Wanna come to a party?” To an eruption of laughter from the audience, Martin asked, “Are there a lot of parties at the University of Chicago?”

R.E.K.

Photo: Demetri Martin, a Yale alum who dropped out of law school to pursue a comedy career, is a Daily Show contributor and has hosted two Comedy Central specials.

Photo courtesy the Daily Show

Grief and questions

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Responding to Monday's fatal early-morning shooting of chemistry graduate student Amadou Cisse at 61st Street and S. Ellis Avenue, VP and dean of students Kimberly Goff-Crews and VP for community and government affairs Hank Webber convened a community gathering that evening to discuss the shooting and two other incidents—two young women were robbed and a man was shot at—that occurred near campus that morning. The meeting, packed with students and staff, took place in Reynolds Club's McCormick-Tribune Lounge; Goff-Crews, Webber, and Rudy Nimocks, chief of the U of C Police Department (UCPD) made up the panel to discuss community safety.

The meeting began with an acknowledgment of the community's shared grief. "There is no correct way to grieve," said Goff-Crews; Cisse's murder, a reminder of life's transience, also provokes feelings of outrage and fear. To cope with those feelings, she said, "we all need to engage in dialogue."

Discussing both short-term and long-term safety improvements, Webber began with the most immediate changes: police will increase their patrols, especially in the south campus; the University will add more late-night vans for students; and the UCPD will construct a temporary substation at 61st and Drexel. Longer-term safety plans, Webber said, include doubling the UCPD coverage from 55th to 64th streets, hiring some 20 new police officers, and working with the community to "craft a policy" for installing security cameras on campus.

Opening the floor, the panel fielded questions, comments, and suggestions from the audience. Students should have instant access to safety alerts, one woman noted, without having to sign up to the Crime Alert Listserv. "Err on the side of annoying people," another student suggested. Students also asked how increased UCPD presence will affect the University's relationship with the surrounding community. "I live in the neighborhood one block from the shooting," Nimocks responded. "The neighbors all want more police cars."

The shooting an hour before Cisse's death occurred in a cul-de-sac between 60th and 61st on Kenwood, one woman noted; the target, a University staff member, was trapped in a construction zone. "That almost made two deaths last night," she said, leading to a discussion of the crime risks associated with campus construction. The new police substation will be located on a prominent south-campus construction area, Nimocks said, helping to make the area safer; police need to be concentrated in those areas.

After 90 minutes Goff-Crews closed the forum, offering the audience the opportunity to speak one-on-one with members of the panel.

R.E.K.

Photos: Hank Webber, vice president for community and government affairs, answers questions about student safety as VP and dean of students, Kimberly Goff-Crews, and University chief of police Rudy Nimocks (seated, behind Webber) look on; students gather in the McCormick-Tribune Lounge.

New interpretations

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The maps, travel guides, photographs, and religious talismans on display in the Smart Museum represent a fraction of the materials Chicago professor Edmund Buckley gathered during his “academic pilgrimage” to Japan from 1886 to 1892. Buckley used the collection for a series of papers on Japanese art, dance, and religion, as well as his dissertation, which earned him a Chicago PhD in 1895. More than 100 years later, Chicago students in a spring 2007 art-history seminar selected pieces from the collection for display and researched the exhibition notes.

The exhibition contrasts multiple representations of similar subjects. For example, two woodblock prints and a household shrine show Benzaiten, the Shinto goddess of knowledge, art, beauty, and music. Both Benzaiten of Itsukushima Island and the deity in the household shrine have eight arms, which link her to the Indian goddess Sarasvati. In these two works, Benzaiten holds symbolic objects associated with both Buddhist and Shinto religions, which often merged in popular religious practices. Local Japanese culture influenced Benzaiten of Enoshima Island; she has only two arms and wears a modest robe, which reflects the simplicity of Japanese religious symbols. She also sits in a cave that evokes the rocky geography of the island.

The focus of the spring art-history seminar was museum studies, and this topic of inquiry is borne out in the exhibition. One case contains two pieces with labels from an earlier display on campus, probably at the Haskell Oriental Museum, which opened in 1896. A printed wood plaque of a white snake was previously labeled, “Serpent Cult. The serpent is cunning and mischievous.” While old exhibit labels often left interpretation to the viewer, the new note explains that although the white snake is associated with wealth and good luck, some snakes in Japanese folklore are identified with negative “feminine” qualities: envy, jealousy, passion, and deception.

The exhibition closes December 16.

Sarah Yatzeck, AB’01

Photos: Installation views of Objects of Inquiry: The Buckley Collection of Japanese Art.

Photos courtesy the Smart Museum.

Farce-forward

There’s no butler in Joe Orton’s farce What the Butler Saw, but if there were he’d be spending the play, now at Court Theatre under the direction of Sean Graney, running from one end of the door-filled set to the other, getting his knickers in a twist as he tried to keep up with a script filled with twists and knickers.

Here’s the plot in a press-release nutshell: "When a psychiatrist invents a series of increasingly outrageous lies to cover up his attempts to seduce his young secretary, all manner of pandemonium breaks out in the ward."

In his Court debut, Graney—founder of Chicago’s Hypocrites Theater Company—takes Orton’s play into the 21st century by pulling out all the stops. Sight gags and sound gags, schtick und drang, abound.

Butler runs at Court through December 9.

M.R.Y.

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Photos (left to right): Applying for a secretarial post, Geraldine Barclay (Mechelle Moe) finds herself on the couch with Dr. Prentice (Blake Montgomery) and under the care of Dr. Rance (Joe Foust). Dr. Rance and Mrs. Prentice (Mary Beth Fisher) confer as Dr. Prentice casts a shadow.

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Runaway runway favorite

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Project Runway fans with U of C ties have an easy choice for a favorite in the reality show's fourth season: Victorya Hong, AB'95, a world traveler-cum-journalist-cum–fashion designer, now living in New York City. The judges—Heidi Klum, Michael Kors, and Nina Garcia—seem to like her too; they, along with guest judge Sarah Jessica Parker, chose her episode-two design, a gray shirtdress topped with a dark-plaid racer-back vest, to appear in Parker's fall BITTEN line.

To see Hong sew, watch Bravo tonight at 9 p.m. (CST).

R.E.K.

Photo: Victorya Hong (left) on the runway with her winning design, along with teammate Kevin Christiana.

Photo courtesy BravoTV.com.

Pint, counter-pint

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The Class of 2008 took a sip before plunging into finals week on Wednesday at ORCSA's Fall Quarter Senior Pub Night. Tippling began promptly at 8 p.m. as a line of students, snaking from the basement up the stairs and around Ida Noyes Hall's main lobby, was set loose on the bar.

Outside the Pub's entryway, 342 "Senior Class 2008" pint glasses were distributed in the first 35 minutes, said College Programming Office assistant director Sam Maher Sheahan. Many seniors were ready for the event, coming on what Maher Sheahan described as the "Wednesday that falls before nothing." Tenth week ended earlier in the day, with reading period segueing into finals week on Monday. Even so, the turnout was unusual given the frigid weather. "People usually just drift in," Maher Sheahan noted, "this time the glasses ran out fast."

Senior Alexandra Raphel was not about to give up on a chance to receive her "free $120,000 mug," she said. The trip through the cold ended up being well worth it for Raphel: "The atmosphere was really lively and fun, and I was glad to see other members of the Class of 2008 I don't often run into."

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Zoë Samels, '08, and May Yu, '08, play with senior glasses (far left and right, respectively), while your reporter, in brown and beard, gets into the spirit of pre-finals jollity.

Photo courtesy Vania Wang, '08

All roads lead to Rome

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In the 1890s Berlin bookseller S. Calvary and Co. sold William Rainey Harper 994 engravings of Rome and Roman antiquities, all published using a title page produced by 16th-century printer Antonio Lafreri: Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae ("Mirror of Roman Magnificence"). Each collection of prints was different—Renaissance-era tourists and other collectors gathered and bound groups of individual images depicting such monuments as the Pantheon, the Colosseum, or the Capitoline Wolf, a bronze statue of a female wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, Rome's mythical founders. The University's collection, now part of the Special Collections Research Center, was first shown on campus in 1966 as part of an exhibit focusing on ancient Roman architectural monuments.

The current show, titled The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, is curated by art-history professor Rebecca Zorach, AM'94, PhD'99, and grad students Ingrid Greenfield; Kristine Hess; Iva Olah; Ann Patnaude, AM'06; and Rainbow Porthé, AM'05. It leads viewers through a timeline of 16th-century printmaking methods, such as woodblock printing and copper engraving, and explores how Renaissance Roman tastes for ancient architecture and art shaped image production.

As part of a larger project to digitize the collection, Special Collections has organized high-resolution Speculum images into different online itineraries, "mini-exhibitions designed by scholars" like Zorach and Yale University Art Gallery curator, Suzanne Boorsch, "that allow you to travel through the collection along a particular path based on a theme, location, collection, or artist." The physical exhibit refers to particular itineraries, giving the viewer the opportunity to revisit at home, for example, the Renaissance maps of ancient Rome displayed in the Library.

The Virtual Tourist closes February 11, 2008.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: Map of Rome. Etching, 1597. Theodor de Bry (1528-1598), etcher, after Ambrogio Brambilla. Theodor de Bry, publisher. Chicago Speculum Number: B287; bottom: View of the Colosseum. Etching, 1551. Hieronymus Cock (ca.1510-1570), etcher. Hieronymus Cock, publisher. Chicago Speculum Number: B212.

Photos courtesy Special Collections Research Center.

The art of war

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A loop of one-minute weather reports from an all-news station blares as visitors approach the Renaissance Society show Meanwhile, in Baghdad. The bulletins, which actually make up Kenneth Goldsmith’s poem "The Weather (Spring)," report the weather in New York and Baghdad for the Iraq War’s first 15 days of combat.

Just beyond the gallery’s entrance what appears to be a dead man wearing Middle Eastern dress lies on the floor with a chest wound covered with a white towel. The piece, appropriately named Deadman, is a representation of a civilian killed during the Iraq War, according to an exhibit brochure. Other pieces in the exhibit include Matt Davis’s psychedelically altered, photo-based image of a paratrooper who seems to be exploding, and Helsinki-based artist Adel Abidin’s video of a young girl sitting on a sidewalk in front of a rubble lot created by a recent bombing. The girl sings as she scrapes together bits of rubble to fill a white plastic teaspoon.

The exhibit suggests the arguments about whether the invasion was right or wrong are moot, the brochure says, as its premise is “a simple rhetorical question, namely, ‘Where are we in the Iraq War?’”

The exhibit runs through December 21.

Z.S.

Photos: Top: Deadman, 2006. Jonathan Monk, wax, rubber, human hair, oil paint, fabrics. Bottom: Construction Site, 2006. Adel Abidin, video.

Star-filled evening

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Covering everything from galaxy "mergers and acquisitions" to gamma rays shooting from black holes, ten Chicago astronomers and astrophysicists led a so-called "cosmic tour" of the universe Wednesday night at the Art Institute. Seated beneath spotlights on a dark and cavernous stage, University cosmologists Rocky Kolb and Michael Turner emceed the evening, peppering their colleagues, who appeared in panels of two or three, with questions about their research. Nobel laureate and physics professor emeritus James Cronin, SM'53, PhD'55, explained a recent "fundamental discovery" from the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina: the high-energy cosmic rays constantly showering Earth come from the violent cores of nearby galaxies.

Chicago professor and Fermilab researcher Joshua Frieman described the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Begun in 1998, it aims to map a quarter of the heavens in detail and illuminate how cosmic structures are formed. "We're doing archaeology on a grand scale," Frieman said. "We're using galaxies like pottery shards." Associate professor Andrey Kravtsov explained that dark matter, a still-mysterious entity that makes up most of the universe's mass, holds galaxies together. In about three billion years, he added, the Milky Way Galaxy will collide with its nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. "But don't worry, nothing will happen to the sun or anything," he said, detecting a nervous rustle among the audience. "If you want to stick around," he added, "the sky will be spectacular."

Punctuated by questions from the crowd, which filled the main floor and spilled into the auditorium's balcony, the program stretched past two hours. The scientists—each of whom brought a short video to illustrate their work—described their research, such as using a ten-meter telescope to scan the Antarctic sky for dark energy, a hypothetical force believed to accelerate the universe's expansion; or searching for dark matter, which emits too little light to be seen but nevertheless exerts gravitational power, in South Dakota mines and Cook County municipal tunnels, where surface-level cosmic rays won't disrupt the sensitive detectors. "How will we know if you find dark matter?" Kolb asked assistant professor Juan Collar. Joked Collar, "I will call you right away."

Capping the evening with one final question, an audience member asked, "What good will all this information do?" Kolb offered a philosophical response: "For the last 6,000 years," he said, "people have looked to the sky and wondered what's out there. It's our human curiosity, and once these cosmic questions are answered, there will be other, deeper cosmic questions."

L.G.

Photo: Chicago astrophysicist Andrey Kravtsov (second from left) displays a video simulation of dark matter's cosmic rotation while colleagues (left to right) Michael Turner, Michael Gladders, Joshua Frieman, and Rocky Kolb look on.

Eyes and ears

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Culture dictates the way that we see art and listen to music, argues the Smart Museum exhibit Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France. Throughout the 19th century, the way people viewed the world changed as audiences became increasingly sophisticated due to their increased exposure to the arts; mechanically reproduced images became more common; recorded sound emerged; and museums, galleries, and concert halls proliferated.

Artists in turn sought to reflect the evolving conceptions of viewing and listening. Such works as Émile-René Ménard’s Homer, which features three shepherds listening attentively to a craggy-looking Homer playing a lyre and reciting verses, focus on the listener's experience. The exhibit also examines the interaction between the visual and aural arts by accompanying a painting like Édouard Vuillard’s The Lerolle Salon with François Chaplin’s piano performance of “Lent (mélancolique et doux),” the first movement to Claude Debussy’s Images (oubliées). Debussy wrote the piece for Yvonne Lerolle, the teenage daughter of Henry Lerolle, whose home is believed to be the setting for Vuillard’s painting.

The exhibition is the culmination of an interdisciplinary course taught at the University by Martha Ward, associate professor and chair of the art-history department, and Anne Leonard, Mellon projects curator at the Smart Museum, in spring 2007. It runs through March 23.

Z.S.

Photo: Homer, 1885. Émile-René Ménard, oil on canvas.

Photo courtesy Smart Museum.

Teeth the size of bananas?!

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In 1997 Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno led a fossil-hunting expedition to Niger. Almost a decade later, one of Sereno's former students, Steve Brusatte, SB'06, now a graduate student at Bristol University, discovered that among the fossils found by Sereno's team was a new species: Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis. As carnivorous dinosaurs go, it is one of the largest to be found. According to a Bristol University press release, the predator "had a skull about 1.75 metres long, and its teeth were the size of bananas." The species was one of three known "mega carnivores" inhabiting Africa 95 million years ago, along with Spinosaurus and Abelisaurid.

For the December 2007 Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, published today, Sereno and Brusatte cowrote a paper about the discovery: "A new species of Carcharodontosaurus (dinosauria: theropoda) from the Cenomanian of Niger and a revision of the genus."

R.E.K.

Photo: Steve Brusatte digs for fossils in Wyoming, at a site where scientists have found the bones of Allosaurus—a close relative of Carcharodontosaurus, Brusatte's newly identified species.

Photo courtesy University of Bristol

Muffins and Montaigne

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An open house for the Graham School's Basic Program drew half a dozen prospective students to a Gleacher Center classroom Wednesday morning. They munched on muffins and bagels while instructor Amy Thomas Elder described the "beautiful canonical authority" of the curriculum's reading list. "It's kind of magical," she said. Handed down from Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler's great-books collaboration, the list changes a little every year, but remains timeless: heavy on Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare, with plenty of classical poetry and drama, Enlightenment philosophy, and seminal Western literature. Homer is on the list, as are Dante, Chaucer, Rousseau, and, of course, Thucydides. Recent additions, Elder said, include Conrad, Kierkergaard, and Woolf.

Offering a four-year curriculum, the Basic Program includes weekly discussion-style classes. There are no credits—and therefore no papers or labs—but students receive liberal-arts certificates after their second and fourth years.

The open-house group, which included two lawyers and a stay-at-home mom, said they were more interested in great books than bachelor's degrees. "I feel like this is my second chance," said Mary, whose three daughters are in college and high school. "When you're young, you get so distracted by papers and exams. It all looks different from where I sit now." A banker named Stu said he hoped to fill the holes in his education. "An engineering degree at Purdue, a tour of Vietnam, a Chicago MBA, and 20 years of banking—no great books," he said. "I think it's time."

Meanwhile, Mort, a retired math professor, said he'd always been interested in the great books. Elder smiled and said, "Well, we do read Euclid."

Then, after a coffee break and another round of muffins, the group settled back into their seats for a sample class: a close reading of the first three pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

L.G.

Photo: A room full of prospective students turned out for a 2006 Basic Program open house, for which the sample class was a close reading from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

File photo by Dan Dry.

The doctor is in

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Friday evening marked the Chicago premiere of Doctor Atomic at the Lyric Opera. A far cry from The Barber of Seville and La bohème, two other shows slated for the Lyric's 2007–08 season, Doctor Atomic is sung in English, with lyrics like "Matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only altered in form."

Set in summer 1945—almost three years after Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists set off the first controlled nuclear chain reaction beneath Stagg Field's west stands—the opera follows J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) and a team of Manhattan Project physicists and military officers as they work on the final construction stages of the top-secret A-bomb, leading up to the bomb's first test on July 16, 1945. As central as science is to the show's premise are the moral questions raised by the bomb; in the first act, scientist Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn), Fermilab director from 1967 to 1978, organizes a meeting in the lab to discuss the implications of "the gadget" (the bomb's code word). He urges his peers to sign a petition to the Truman Administration: "Atomic attacks on Japan cannot be justified until we make clear the terms of peace and give them a chance to surrender."

The three-hour, 17-minute production, which runs at the Lyric through January 19, 2008, was composed by John Adams and directed by Peter Sellars, a duo known for productions based on historical events—their first, Nixon in China, showed the meeting between Mao Tse-tung and Richard Nixon, and their 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, was inspired by the Middle East conflict.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project team's Los Alamos, NM, lab; bottom: Robert Wilson (in red) proposes a petition to Oppenheimer.

Photos by Dan Rest, courtesy Lyric Opera

A celestial Christmas carol

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The Bethlehem star remains the same, as do the shepherds and stable and angels on high, but each Christmas since 1998 sees a crop of new carols, thanks to the Welcome Christmas! Carol Contest. Sponsored by two Minnesota organizations, the VocalEssence choral ensemble and the American Composers Forum, the competition draws composers from across the country. It awards a pair of winners $1,000 prizes and a premiere with VocalEssence.

This year contenders from 32 states submitted 118 scores. Among the winners was Stephen Main, AM'89, PhD'98. Main's composition, "The Darkest Midnight in December," set new music to a 1728 text by Irish priest William Devereux. The poem is "remarkable for its sensuality," Main, whose Div School PhD is in religious philosophy, wrote in the composer's note that accompanied the piece. "Father Devereux makes his point with striking images: cold wind on a starry night, offerings of incense, the dazzling glory of the Christ child, and the softness of Mary's arms."

The contest seeks to bolster an 800-year-old tradition of carol-writing—"Imagine what it was like when 'Deck the Halls' was first heard," enthused VocalEssence artistic director Philip Brunelle in a program news release—and each year's entrants must adhere to a few compositional constraints. Scores must include a chorus and this year were required to also include a celesta, a small 19th-century keyboard instrument that plays chime-like notes. Its "sparkling pure tones," Main wrote, evoke "mystery, innocence, and vulnerability, all at the same time." VocalEssence performed Main's carol December 1 at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minnesota.

L.G.

Photo: Each December VocalEssence artistic director Philip Brunelle leads the ensemble in two new Christmas carols' world premieres.

Photo by Katryn Conlin

Happy holidays...and some gift ideas

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While UChiBLOGo takes a break until January 2, we want to leave readers with some last-minute gift ideas that show Hyde Park's holiday spirit.

Since 1942 Hyde Park's Museum of Science and Industry has celebrated the holiday season with an exhibit of Christmas trees decorated by volunteers from Chicago's diverse ethnic communities. The show displays more than 50 firs reflecting holiday traditions ranging from Kenya to Croatia; museum-goers can take home their favorite international ornaments and tree decorations from the MSI's Holiday Shoppe.

For presents to put under the tree, Hyde Park has many sites for late gift-buying: the Oriental Institute's Suq offers such children's treats as a plush pyramid and the Egyptian board game Senet; the Robie House Museum Shop sells Wright-inspired home accents and accessories; and the Smart Museum's gift shop indulges creative types with its selection of art books, paper products, and imported textiles. For bookworms, the Seminary Co-op, 57th Street Books, Powell's Bookstore, and the U of C Bookstore hit all the literary bases.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: the Museum of Science and Industry hosts more than 50 bedazzled firs in its annual Christmas Around the World exhibit; bottom: museum-goers visit the United States's tree, which was decorated by the Daughters of the Revolution.

New year, new deal

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After almost a year of negotiations, University administrators and U of C campus and facilities workers agreed on a new three-year contract on December 21. Since January 2007 the workers' union, Teamsters Local 743, and student supporters have argued for higher wages and bonuses.

According to Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), under the new contract clerical workers will get a three-percent raise, and service and maintenance workers will receive a 45-cent hourly increase, both retroactive to March 2007. Wages will continue to rise—two percent for clerical workers in March and September 2008 and 3.5 percent in March 2009, and 40 cents per hour in March 2008 and March 2009 for the other workers.

R.E.K.

Photo: For most of 2007 campus workers and U of C students campaigned for higher wages.

Photo courtesy Students Organizing United with Labor

Darger's debris

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By the time Henry Darger's prodigious artistic output was uncovered, his life was over. After 40 reclusive years in a one-room apartment on Chicago's North Side, the 80-year-old Darger was taken to Little Sisters of the Poor nursing home in 1972. Six months later he died. Afterward his landlord, Nathan Lerner, found in Darger's apartment hundreds of drawings and watercolors and a 15,145-page manuscript for a fantasy epic titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. A self-taught artist, Darger, who worked as a hospital janitor and dishwasher, also collected old newspapers, comic books, religious kitsch, and trash from the streets: Lerner discovered hundreds of Pepto Bismol bottles and nearly 1,000 balls of string in Darger's room. Darger drew inspiration from this debris and often incorporated it into his work. Most of the human figures in his drawings and paintings, for instance, were traced directly from images he'd found in books and magazines.

Now the Smart Museum's newest exhibit, Drawn from the Home of Henry Darger, brings together several pieces of Darger's work, donated to the museum by Lerner, and some of Darger's aesthetic stimuli, juxtaposing the watercolor drawings and a double-sided collage with a sampling of his art supplies and source materials. The display includes not only Pepto Bismol bottles and balls of string, but also coloring books, children's books, and magazines—which Darger had carefully cataloged—and archival photographs of Darger's apartment.

Running through March 16, the exhibit coincides with the installation of the Henry Darger Room—a display that uses artwork, furnishings, papers, and objects from the artist's apartment to recreate his living environment—at Chicago's Intuit, The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

L.G.

Images: Henry Darger's watercolor drawing, Second day Northwest at Jennie Richee are captured by general Federals glan-delinian near Aronburg Run River, and his double-sided collage, [Th]ey Awake to Find Themselves Really in Peril From Exploding Shells Hitting Their Prison at Norma Catherine / But Again Escape / Capture Enemys Plans.

Images courtesy the Smart Museum.

Back to Iraq

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Unlike most American museums, archaeologist Donny George said as he opened Sunday afternoon's guided Oriental Institute tour, the OI owns "legitimate material from Mesopotamia." Its artifacts come from registered excavations, making it one of only three institutions in the United States whose artifacts were all acquired legally. The Field Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are the other two.

George was director of the Iraq Museum's department of research and studies when the museum was looted in April 2003 following the fall of Baghdad. An estimated 15,000 artifacts—some documented and registered, others from Iraq Museum-run archaeological sites—were stolen and sold, and George has been a key player in recovering almost 50 percent of the missing pieces. Forced to leave Iraq in 2006 for safety reasons, George, now a visiting professor at SUNY–Stony Brook, led the OI tour as part of an event run by Saving Antiquities for Everyone, a nonprofit dedicated to raising public awareness about damage to archaeological sites.

The archaeology professor led 36 tour-goers in a 2:30 p.m. group through four of the OI's galleries: the Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Syro-Anatolian, and Megiddo galleries. Along the way, he compared the OI's holdings to those in other museums: the black stela communicating Hammurabi's laws that sits in the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery, for example, is a plaster cast of the original. As George explained: "The big one," a basalt obelisk acquired on a French expedition, "stays in Paris."

When asked about Iraq's looted artifacts, George was hopeful that additional pieces will be recovered. Material from the Iraq Museum has been found in locations including Jordan, Syria, Italy, Spain, Holland, and New York. However, the objects have not yet been sent back. Says George: "It is not the right time now."

R.E.K.

Photo: Donny George leads Sunday's OI tour through the reliefs of King Sargon III.

Sellars directs hope in Chicago

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"I wish it were a joke," director Peter Sellars whispered to his Mandel Hall audience glumly. "It's sickening to be alive at this time of history." In his lecture, "Art and History," Sellars reflected on art's responsibility to create lasting positive social change. Sellars, whose work began 30 years ago while an undergraduate at Harvard University, with a puppet production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, has since won numerous awards and wide acclaim for innovative and politically challenging productions, such as Nixon in China and Dr. Atomic.

Donning Buddhist prayer beads and intermittently lauding deep breathing and vegetarianism, Sellars delivered a message that appeared to resonate with his 200 listeners. He reflected on the responsibility of the arts "to create an atmosphere where it is OK to torture people or it isn't OK." The arts, he argued, both "measure our own voices" against those of history "and move us forward." Concerned that "future generations will look at this as one of the most evil ages," he said he hoped that artists will "help turn the page of history."

Sellars's talk was the first of this year's University of Chicago Artspeaks presentations. Musician Daniel Bernard Roumain plays Mandel Hall February 1, and conceptual artist Hans Haacke performs his "Dog and Pony Show" April 7.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Director Peter Sellars hopes art will provide the "momentum to move forward" during a difficult moment in history.

Home is where the art is

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"Don't say Immanuel can't," sings music PhD student David Bashwiner, "'cause he can." The crowd giggles as Bashwiner strums his guitar and continues the Kantian wordplay: "Don't say Immanuel won't..."

Bashwiner had already played two less silly songs, one on piano and one on guitar, for the 30-plus U of C community members gathered in the living room of married physics professors Sidney Nagel and Young-Kee Kim. For the past year and a half the two have hosted monthly art salons—featuring musical performances, lectures, readings, art installations, and anything else participants are willing to do—in their Hyde Park home.

The salons arose from piano lessons Nagel and Kim took from Majel Connery, AM'04, a musicology PhD student. In her studies Connery, who sings opera, "was always reading about rich women who sat around drinking absinthe and reading poetry," she says. When Nagel and Kim agreed to open their home and supply wine and pizza, Connery set about finding artistic-minded friends and acquaintances to create a modern take on those long-ago sessions. She hasn't been disappointed: "It's been interesting to see there are a lot of really nerdy people in, say, the math department who are also really good guitar players."

This past Saturday's salon is Connery's last for a while. Headed to Berlin to apprentice with opera director Christopher Alden, she hopes to return to Chicago eventually and finish her doctorate. In the meantime, Nagel and Kim plan to continue the events every other month, and they've enlisted some regular attendees—including Fermilab director Piermaria J. Oddone and physics professor/cello player Heinrich Jaeger—to organize them.

At this last Connery-organized salon, the group hears Bashwiner's singer-songwriter set; a reading of New Zealand poets; improv-jazz performances on piano, drums, and soprano sax; and two opera pieces, including one by Connery. At the end Kim presents Connery with a cake to thank her for starting the shows. Nagel gives her a framed photograph—photos of the drops he studies hang in the house. And Oddone hands her with a bottle of wine made at the Sonoma winery he owns. Now beyond poetry and absinthe, the salons may have one-upped Connery's Enlightenment forebears.

A.B.P.

Photos: Bashwiner plays his Kantian comedy; Connery thanks the group for sustaining the salons.

Photos by Lloyd DeGrane

Weaving the legal labyrinth

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Philosopher Robert Goodin posed a simple question at the Law School's annual Dewey Lecture Wednesday: "How can we know what the law requires of us"? With 364 volumes of U.S. legal code piled atop state and municipal laws, "ignorance of the law is inevitable," if not formally excusable.

Introduced by law professor Cass Sunstein as "the LeBron James of academic life and one of the world's most important social theorists," Goodin was welcomed in a forum that has previously hosted such luminaries as Amartya Sen, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Richard Rorty, AB'49, AM'52. Goodin argued that because law's primary function is to guide people in their actions, everyone must know their duties. The problem today, Goodin said, is that too few citizens know the law because it is no longer intuitive. A legal system based on commonly held and high-minded moral principles, Goodin concluded, would allow people to follow the law better.

The lecture received a mixed reception from the 40 attendees in the Weymouth Kirkland Courtroom. A row of professors that included Sunstein, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Epstein challenged Goodin on, among other things, his assumption that "Sunday-school morality" is common. But, as Sunstein predicted, Goodin proved he could "score, defend, and rebound" like a champion, while conceding that if people do not have access to moral principles, his argument "is stuffed."

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Social theorist Robert Goodin addresses the Law School in the annual Dewey Lecture.

Injustice anywhere still drives King admirers

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With Martin Luther King Jr.’s maxim—“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”—in mind, four Chicago professors addressed King’s unfinished dream. “We don’t want to think about justice just in one week,” said Susan Gzesh, AB'72, director of the University’s human-rights program, at Tuesday night's Graduate School of Business talk—one event in the weeklong campus commemmoration of King. Rather, Gzesh and the other panelists—law professor Craig Futterman, historian Richard Hellie, and political scientist Cathy Cohen—crossed disciplines to explore the work that remains to achieve King’s dream.

Futterman discussed his recent research on police brutality in Chicago, noting that “injustice isn’t just anywhere." He has found that Chicago police are more likely to violate the rights of those living in underprivileged communities than elsewhere. Futterman concluded by using King's words to call on the “good people” to end their "appalling silence" and stand up to “apartheid justice in the 21st century.”

Gzesh spoke of the problems facing America’s Mexican immigrants. In the United States, she said, Mexican immigrants suffer increasing hate crimes and racism. Though Mexicans are 25 percent of Chicago’s population, many are only allowed to vote in school-board elections. Nationwide, meanwhile, "Deporting 13 million immigrants," Gzesh argued, "is not an option.” She urged that they be given access to full legal citizenship.

This week's other Martin Luther King events include a Wednesday showing of the film Something the Lord Made at the Biological Sciences Learning Center, an address by civil-rights advocate Angela Davis Thursday at Rockefeller Chapel, and the Roots and Rhymes music and dance festival Friday at Hutchinson Commons.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Gzesh discusses America's Mexican immigrants while professors (left to right) Hellie, Cohen, Futterman, and moderator Charles Wheelan, PhD'98, listen.

A dish best eaten cold

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Titus Andronicus has a reputation as Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, with a body count of atrocities that includes at least three hands, two heads, and one tongue lopped off. Throw in a live burial, a rape, two sons baked in a pie, and a final scene that ends with all the major players dead, and keeping track of the carnage is a challenge.

Adding to the challenge in the current Court Theatre version, adapted and directed by Court artistic director Charles Newell, the audience finds itself watching a play-within-a-play, with Shakespeare’s tragedy staged as an initiation rite for new members of an elite men’s club. Scripts get handed out and the “players” stumble over their first lines, dueling with silverware. The death that starts the revenge cycle rolling—the ritual slaughter of the defeated Queen of the Goths' eldest son by the Roman general Titus—plays almost as slapstick. But with the death, payback time begins, and as Queen Tamora and her Moor lover, Aaron, fight back, the mood shifts, and the consequences start piling up.

The set is gleaming and multifaceted, the acting strong, and the food for thought almost too plentiful. At the end of the two-hour, intermission-less production, the opening-night audience seemed winded. But, as Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones noted in his review, “This one will have the denizens of the University of Chicago buzzing. And inclined to stay away from pie.”

Titus Andronicus runs through February 10. Next up: Newell directs Carousel.

M.R.Y.

Photos: The rape of Titus's daughter, Lavinia (Elizabeth Ledo), is only one of many acts of revenge plotted against the Roman general by the Goths' queen Tamora (Hollis Resnick) and the Moor Aaron (Philip James Brandon). Court Theatre photos by Michael Brosilow.

Why mommy must go back to work

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America has the 164th worst parental-leave policy in the world, Law School Dean Saul Levmore told the Women's Board at its annual dinner Thursday evening. In the United States new mothers and fathers get 12 weeks of unpaid time off. Norway, on the other hand, provides 42 weeks at full pay, plus child care up to age 6. In the United Kingdom, the first six weeks of a woman’s year off are paid at 90 percent of her salary. Even Rwanda "is pretty generous compared to us," Levmore said. "But I know what you're thinking," he told the 125 people at the Casino, a private club off Michigan Avenue. "It's not enforced." In fact, he said, one-third of eligible women in corruption-filled Rwanda receive parental-leave payments.

The U.S. policy may lie in America's abundance of babies, Levmore said: the higher a country's fertility rate, the less generous its parental-leave policy. The average American woman has 2.09 children—"perfect for replacement," Levmore said. With low fertility rates, most European nations worry about their social-security systems and other decreasing-population problems and so offer generous leave plans to encourage reproduction. America, with both a healthy birth rate and immigrants "trying to get in the country" for work, has no incentive to change its plan.

Yet offering parental leave to try to boost a country’s population, Levmore argued, doesn’t work as planned. "No country on record has been able to use its system to increase its fertility rate." Even in rare cases where the policies have begun to raise the population, new governments have taken over and reversed the programs before their effects could be studied.

There are other explanations for other countries’ generous programs. "Think of it as an insurance policy," Levmore said. In homogeneous countries such as Sweden, where most people earn comparable incomes and have the same number of kids, surveys show that residents often believe they'll have more than two children, think they'll benefit even more from a generous plan, and vote for it. Then they have two kids like everyone else.

In the United States, because private firms can either meet the government requirement or bolster it for recruitment, the result is a "a two-tier system" where lawyers and investment bankers, for example, get generous leave plans—sometimes four months at full pay, Levmore said—while paralegals and secretaries get the bare-bones 12 weeks with no pay. So while America may be going the logical route with its leave system, it's contributing to an income imbalance, Levmore said, that's more third world than first.

A.B.P.

Photo: Levmore speaks to the Women's Board's annual dinner.

Photo by Dan Dry

In from the cold

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"It's a cold, cold world," says Thomas, a homeless man living in Chicago, in the opening scene of More Colder for the Homeless, a 30-minute documentary by Christian Doll, AB'06, AM'07. Friday night was no exception: about 50 students and faculty braved negative wind chills and flurries to attend the film's premiere, held in Cobb's Film Studies Center.

Doll started shooting More Colder in August 2006 after doing a Summer Links internship at Southwest Chicago PADS, an ecumenical organization that provides resources and services for the homeless. Originally meant to be a promotional video for PADS, Doll's project was expanded to educate people about Chicago's homeless community—a topic that became his master's thesis. "These are not homeless people," he said at the screening. "They are people living in a homeless state" that they are forced into because of "social and internal conditions." With help from fellow students Nicole Flannigan, AB'05; Kasia Houlihan, AB'06; and Fulbright exchange student Barbara Ruhling, Doll filmed "miles of tape," said PADS executive director Sister Thérèse DelGenio, including interviews with PADS "guests"—as the organization calls its homeless visitors. Before Doll started the interviews, he feared that "people wouldn't trust me," he said in a Q & A after the screening. "But that's not the case. ... Once I showed I would just listen, it all came pouring out."

Also meant to educate prospective PADS volunteers, the film features interviews with Sister Thérèse, case managers providing guests with clothing and bus passes, and footage of PADS-organized events such as a spaghetti dinner last Valentine's Day. The organization, Sister Thérèse said, "tries to empower people, to make them realize that they have the power to change" their situation.

R.E.K.

Photos: Christian Doll discusses his documentary and the PADS organization; Sister Thérèse greets a guest entering PADS on a cold Chicago evening.

Movie still courtesy Christian Doll.

Path to the Peace Corps

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A young woman wearing a tie-dyed bandanna digs wells, uses her fingers to spoon food from a handmade bowl, and joins local African women in their washing and sewing. A blond guy with glasses teaches in a schoolhouse, bikes through town, and places large containers of water on villagers’ heads for them to carry. In a promotional video about the Peace Corps, these volunteers and others speak about what they have learned—and taught—during their two-year stints in the organization.

At Monday evening’s informational meeting in Ida Noyes Hall, about 18 students watch the film. If they end up joining the Peace Corps, they’ll continue a popular tradition at the University, which in 2007 sent more graduates than any other school its size to the organization. Clifton Johnson, AM’03, a recruiter in the Chicago regional office, follows the video with more info on the program, how to apply, and his own experience.

For the Peace Corps's 27-month commitment—three months of language and culture training before a two-year stint abroad—the organization “tries to match volunteers' skills with the country's needs,” Johnson, an SSA graduate, tells the Chicago students. His social-work background matched the needs on an island in South Pacific Tonga, where he helped young people find jobs, and Megan Dickie, a biological-sciences major at Cornell who also spoke to the group, did habitat conservation in Ecuador. If you have a college degree or life experience such as farming or starting a business, Johnson says, you’d be a valuable volunteer.

He walks through the application procedure, which includes filling out an extensive online form—“we want to make sure you’re mature enough, motivated enough, and have the skills needed”—meeting with a recruiter, and getting medical clearance. Finally accepted applicants receive an invitation from the Peace Corps. The whole process can take about a year, he says, so interested students should start early.

“How are you held accountable for the work you do?" a young woman asks during the Q&A. Every three months, Dickie replies, volunteers fill out progress reports, and once a year a Peace Corps official visits the site. A local villager is also in touch with the organization, “so if you weren’t doing anything,” says Johnson, that person could report you. “Still, it’s an independent work environment,” and volunteers can forge their own assignments: Johnson, for instance, eventually narrowed his focus to youths with developmental disabilities, and he also taught art classes at the local library.

A.B.P.

Photo: Johnson tells the group in Ida Noyes about working in Tonga.

Ex cathedra

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Last week, the Divinity School’s Wednesday Lunch packed the Swift Hall Common Room with students, faculty, staff—and a liberal sprinkling of Episcopal clergy. Lunch consisted of a salad, cheese plate, lentil soup, and cookies, but many came primarily to hear the day’s speaker: the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

As Div School Dean Richard Rosengarten, AM’88, PhD’94, pointed out in his introduction, Jefferts Schori is also the first presiding bishop who trained as a scientist (her first career was as a marine biologist), as well as the first to hold a pilot’s license. With short, upswept gray locks that suggested a miter and wearing a fuchsia clerical shirt under her black suit jacket, Jefferts Schori temporarily turned the podium into a pulpit: “Why are we here?”

Her own answer came in a mediation, “Theological Education and the Dream of God,” that was a variation on her September address at Union Theological Seminary. “The wags say that preachers usually have only one sermon—we just keep preaching variations on a theme. What dream of God is going to frame your sermons for the next ten or 20 or 50 years?” For Jefferts Schori, God’s vision is of a healed world, a view that by definition requires the presence of injustice and pain.

Homily over, Jefferts Schori opened the floor to a Q & A: “So…why are you here?”

M.R.Y.

Photo: The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, spoke at the January 30 Divinity School Lunch.

Photo by Marc Monaghan.

It's easy being green

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Toasting the Class of 2007–08 of named professors with a glass of Tabor Hill wine, Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum addressed nearly 20 faculty who received the honor this academic year—including Robert Gooding-Williams, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham professor of political science and the College, and William Wimsatt, the Peter B. Ritzma professor in philosophy and evolutionary biology. "We picked this day on purpose," Rosenbaum joked Monday evening, pointing to the looming gray clouds outside the GSB convention-room window. "You are the headlights of the University...lighting and pointing" Chicago in a new direction.

The reception also marked a new path for the University's special-events team. It was the first University-sponsored gathering to incorporate an "aggressive amount" of environmentally friendly practices, said event coordinator Beth McCullough. "Everything is organic or locally produced," she said, including cheeses from Wisconsin and a bar stocked with beers and wines from nearby microbreweries and wineries. Instead of plastic cutlery and plates, which "sit in landfills forever," said McCullough, all forks, knives, and dishes were rented. Simple ways to cut down on waste, she explained, included sending out electronic invites and reusing plastic name-tag holders. The University is becoming more aware of and open to conservational practices, McCullough said, noting two more green events planned for the spring.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: Faculty honored this academic year with named professorships gather in a GSB convention room; bottom: abiding by green practices, the reception's hor'dourves were either organic or locally produced.

With a song in their hearts and a frog in their throats

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Ten minutes before yesterday’s Noontime Concert Series: Vocal Showcase was to begin, a group of performers chosen from Chicago's three choral groups gathered just outside Fulton Recital Hall. The topic of discussion: three out of the ten singers were sick and couldn’t perform. “Is everyone sick?” asked one performer. Several nodded, including one woman gripping a bag of Ricola Herb-Honey Swiss Herb Drops.

Inside the hall, accompanist Thomas Weisflog, SM'69, who also serves as the University organist, adjusted the piano bench as the 28 people in the audience quietly chattered. Then right on time, James Kallembach, the music department's director of choral activities, rose from his chair next to Weisflog and announced, “The program is pretty much scrapped.” But, he said, two students would step in to perform in place of those too ill to take the stage, giving listeners a “net loss of one.”

While the crowd was small, the singers' voices filled the room. David J. von Bargen, JD'07, kicked off the concert, belting out Jules Massenet’s "En fermant les yeux" and Gaetano Donizetti's "Quanto è bella" in his rich tenor. And third-year Kate Lipkowitz performed Luigi Arditi’s "Il Bacio." As she raised her hands upward during a final, drawn-out note, the hour ended.

Z.S.

Photos: (top) David J. von Bargen belts out Jules Massenet's "En fermant les yeux" from Manon; (bottom) Kate Lipkowitz sings Luigi Arditi's "Il Bacio."

Stream of music

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On Saturday night the Vltava River swept away Mandel Hall's audience as the University Symphony Orchestra performed 19th-century composer Bedřich Smetana's ode to his native Bohemia, Má Vlast. Not to be outdone, American pianist Edward Auer followed with Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2.

The orchestra performed three of Smetana's six symphonic poems about his fatherland, then under Austro-Hungarian rule. A student of Franz Liszt, Smetana is best-known for his tribute to the Vltava (in German, the Moldau), which runs through Prague.

Auer brought to life Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2 following intermission. Completed the year after the final installment of Smetana's Má Vlast in 1881, the work received immediate and wide acclaim from 19th-century audiences.

Upcoming music-department performances include the University Chamber Orchestra's presentation of Dvořák's Czech Suite at Fulton Recital Hall Saturday, February 9, 8 p.m. Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and pianist Julius Drake perform Franz Schubert's song cycle, Winterreise, at Mandel Hall Friday, February 15, 7:30 p.m.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Conductor Barbara Schubert leads the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Music and the mind

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How does the human brain turn music into mental pictures? This was the question of the hour at the February 6 Chicago Humanities Forum lecture by Lawrence Zbikowski: “Birds, Spinning Wheels, Horses and Sex: Painting Images with Music.” Despite the snow outside, the talk managed to draw almost 20 people to the Gleacher Center.

The U of C music professor began by playing a short, lively guitar piece by Argentine composer Julio Salvador Sagreras. Displaying a portion of the score on a large screen, he pointed out that the nature of the piece seemed unclear because the fast, repeated notes included characteristics of both a musical study—written for guitarists to practice their technique—and a performance piece meant to impress an audience. Paired with the work’s title, “The Hummingbird,” Zbikowski said, the music aims to conjure images of a hummingbird in flight.

He then played and discussed three more examples of “program music,” composed to evoke specific images in listeners' minds. “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,” from Charles Gounod’s Faust, imitates the repetitive motion of a spinning wheel. Franz Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig” summons the pounding of horse hooves on a wild ride through the night. And Giaches de Wert’s seven-part madrigal based on Giovanni Guarini’s poem “Tirsi morir volea,” about an encounter between a shepherd and a nymph, suggests images of making love.

Our ability to interpret these images, Zbikowski explained, is linked to our capacity to make analogies, an idea he began to explore in his 2002 book, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis, and continues to develop in his current research. In the same way that we understand the equivalent characteristics of two different situations—electrons orbiting an atom’s nucleus and the planets orbiting the sun, for example—we can imagine the quick, constant movement of a hummingbird in flight when we hear the rapid succession of notes in Sagreras’s piece.

Sarah Yatzeck, AB’01

Photo: Professor Zbikowski responds to audience questions after his lecture.

Photo courtesy Mai Vukcevich.

And the bands played on

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This past Saturday, the second day of the U of C Folk Fest ended the same way it began: with skirts whirling and heels kicked high. Closing out a four-hour concert that sold out Mandel Hall and included performances by bands in five distinct styles—bluegrass, Irish traditional music, blues harmonica, old-time banjo, and Cajun—the Lafayette Rhythm Devils invited audience members to grab a partner and get out of their seats. “Pretty much all Cajun music is dance music,” admonished accordionist Yvette Landry as she led the band into another rollicking number. Two by two, listeners took to the aisles and the open space at the back of the hall. Some ascended to the stage and danced along its edges. Festival volunteers came spinning out from the wings, two-stepping and waltzing as the Rhythm Devils played song after song, until it was well past 11 p.m.

More than 12 hours earlier, the festival’s daytime schedule had kicked off at Ida Noyes with a Scandinavian dance lesson and a waltz workshop. The Rhythm Devils were on hand in the early afternoon to lead a 90-minute Cajun dance session in the Cloister Club. Leaving shoes by the door, participants also turned up to learn English country dance, Irish Céilidh dance, Balkan dance, and clogging and flatfooting. Meanwhile, button accordionist Pat Cloonan and tinwhistle player Kevin Henry led an hour-long Irish session that filled the Ida Noyes library with listeners and players, and multi-instrumentalist Gary Plazyk taught a workshop on the hurdy gurdy, a hand-cranked stringed instrument invented in medieval Europe. Junior Sisk and Rambler’s Choice, a band from Virginia and North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains who gave the opening performance at Saturday night’s concert, took listeners through a few bluegrass fundamentals.

Sometimes, though, the biggest commotion was caused by the impromptu jam sessions that sprang up in hallways, staircases, empty rooms, or any out-of-the-way spot. Folk Fest participants who brought their banjos, guitars, fiddles, and mandolins met up between workshops—or during them—to play a few bluegrass or Irish tunes.

Organizers of this year’s Folk Fest, the University’s 48th annual, dedicated the weekend-long event to late Chicago psychology professor Starkey Duncan, PhD'65, who served as the festival’s faculty adviser for 40 years, until his April 2007 death. At Saturday night’s concert, mathematics grad student Edward Wallace, copresident of the campus Folklore Society (which organizes the Folk Fest), told the audience that Duncan’s influence still guided the event’s volunteers. "We miss him very much.”

L.G.

Photo: Every Folk Fest features plenty of dance lessons and jam sessions. Images from the 2007 festival by Dan Dry.

Speaking of DIY...

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During college Dorothee Royal-Hedinger and Hassan Ali (both AB'07) found time to make short films for such media companies as Al Gore's Current TV. Ali, a former Maroon editor and Magazine intern, has produced and directed videos for Current TV's "What's Wrong With..." and "Joe Gets..." series, and Royal-Hedinger's credits include the film Sun-Powered Purses about an environmentally friendly bag-design company.

Now, the two have joined forces to start their own culturally aware online video production company, Fresh Cut Media. Launched in January, Fresh Cut focuses "on unique content that is often overlooked by the mainstream media," and its shows include Dropping In, short profiles of interesting people and places, and DIY. "These people got off the couch and did it themselves," reads the site's explanatory blurb. Much of the content comes out of the Chicago area—one of the Dropping In videos, "Avant Gaudy," features Deborah Umunnabuike, '09, and Vincent Choi, AB'06, who run an online fashion boutique of the same name.

R.E.K.

Photo: Fresh Cut Media posts online videos featuring non-mainstream art, culture, news, and commentary.

Beta vision

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Chicago’s Web site took on a new look Monday, when the University launched a test version of its new design. The new site aims to draw visitors to a slew of continuously refreshed content, most of which focuses on storytelling, including photographs and video that detail faculty research, alumni projects, and student activities.

The redesigned site also aims to provide more intuitive paths to information and to improve its accessibility to those browsing on devices such as smartphones. In April the new site will replace the old one. Until then, site administrators are seeking feedback and potential story ideas to feature.

Z.S.

Photo: Chicago's new Web site features multimedia content such as videos and photographs.

Pushing forward and giving back

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Computing innovations promise to "blow open communication," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told an audience of more than 400 students who gathered at the Graduate School of Business on Wednesday. Many more watched Gates's talk, “Bill Gates Unplugged: On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back,” on video simulcast at locations across campus.

In particular, Gates said new ways of controlling computers will combine with Web-based software to give users greater access to information. "We don't even realize how information-deprived we are," Gates said, noting that computer files and programs will soon be accessible by touch- and voice-controlled mobile devices.

"With all these rapid innovations," Gates said, "we should really not just focus on what these mean for the richest." He spoke of his growing involvement in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as he transitions out of full-time work at Microsoft. The foundation aims to make technological advances "relevant" to people worldwide who lack access to electricity, schools, and health care, Gates said. In the United States, the foundation has pledged $6 million to the University of Chicago's Center for Urban School Improvement to help establish model high schools across Chicago.

During a question-and-answer session, many students expressed interest in Gates's philanthropic work, asking about his foundation's activities in eradicating malaria and boosting educational opportunities. Others asked how Microsoft could provide software to better meet the needs of University researchers. Ultimately, one student asked Gates to name his most difficult moment. While Gates acknowledged that he is "not in a position to complain," he discussed his decision to drop out of Harvard College in 1975 to establish Microsoft.

Chicago was Gates's third stop this week in a five-campus tour that also includes Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Waterloo, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photos: Bill Gates addresses University students at the GSB on Wednesday.

Photos courtesy Dan Dry

Misunderstood Madison

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Modern academics and lawyers use James Madison to justify the rule of governing elites, such as the Supreme Court’s power to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Such power was actually an anathema to Madison, argued Stanford Law School dean Larry Kramer, JD’84, at a talk last Thursday in Harper Hall. “Madison was not as undemocratic as people want to make him out today,” but rather was “centrally concerned with securing popular government.”

Too many scholars, Kramer argued, emphasize particular passages by Madison in the Federalist Papers, written between 1787 and 1788 with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to advocate ratification of the Constitution. Scholars consider some of Madison’s passages the source of American separation of powers, which ultimately justified resting constitutional authority in the hands of the Supreme Court and limiting citizens’ role in government.

But interpreting the Constitution, Kramer said, was not part of Madison's vision for the Supreme Court. In fact, over the course of his lifetime Madison consistently fought against those who supported the idea of "judicial supremacy," that the court was the supreme arbiter of constitutional issues. Madison's positions, Kramer said, held that judging the Constitution was "between the people and their legislatures."

The talk was sponsored by the Center for Study of the Principles of the American Founding as part of its yearlong lecture series that brought David Armitage of Harvard University earlier this month. On April 10 Yale political scientist Steven Smith will discuss Lincoln and his writings.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Last Thursday Larry Kramer, JD’84, dean of Stanford Law School, addressed students, colleagues, and former teachers.

Photo courtesy Stanford University

Dedicated to diversity

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Boom! At the loud thumping of African drums, courtesy Chicago-based Funkadesi, the 75 or so people gathered in 5710 S. Woodlawn stopped chattering and began clapping and nodding to the festive beat. When the music ended a few minutes later, University President Robert Zimmer welcomed the crowd to the grand opening of the new Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA), LGBTQ Programming Office, and Amandla Lounge.

The building’s opening, Zimmer said, was "an exciting moment” for the University, not only providing a space for important programming and community events but also symbolizing "the University's expanding and deepening commitment to diversity in all of its aspects." 5710, as users refer to the orange-brick building, will both house "the rough-and-tumble of academic exchange" and offer a home for several registered student organizations, a "place where the communities involved can flourish."

After Zimmer spoke, Kenneth Warren, deputy provost for research and minority issues, noted that it was a group of students who, in 2003, approached the University asking for a space dedicated to diversity. Then Lizette Durand, AB'01, PhD'07, who sat on several student committees that helped make the new facility happen, discussed how minority students wanted a place "to express our individuality without feeling out of place on campus." Vice President and Dean of Students Kimberly Goff-Crews toasted the building’s past, present, and future, and Ana Vazquez, deputy dean of students students and director of OMSA—the “M” officially changed from “minority” to “multicultural” in July 2007—thanked the many people who helped, noting that the office was built entirely with institutional funds. Then Zimmer, along with student representatives from several minority RSOs, cut ribbons to make the opening official.

Free to tour the converted mansion—formerly home to University Publications and Human Resources Management—the guests roamed the three floors while nibbling on popcorn, quesadillas, dessert pastries, and chicken wings. They oohed and ahhed at the sunny lounges on each floor and noted it was, indeed, a place that students and staff of all cultures could call home.

A.B.P.

Photos: A member of Funkadesi grabs the crowd's attention; Zimmer and several student representatives perform the official ribbon-cutting honors.

Photos by Lloyd DeGrane

Inspired by the original

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At the entrance to the Smart Museum exhibit Adaptation, bright white walls frame a reading area stocked with copies of Melville's Moby-Dick, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and other books, as well as a television to show films like François Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child). Once inside, the viewer sees these classics transformed into film installations by contemporary artists. For Guy Ben-Ner's Moby Dick (2000)—produced in silent-film format with dialogue subtitles—the artist recruited his young daughter, Elia, to play "Pip, the little black deck-boy" to Ben-Ner's Captain Ahab. In another installation, Arturo Herrera sets a selection of abstract black-and-white images, drawn randomly from a computer database of Herrera's drawings and collages, to the music of Igor Stravinsky's 1923 ballet Les Noces (The Wedding). As the accompanying notes read, "No dance is ever performed exactly the same way twice."

Assistant professor of visual arts Catherine Sullivan's contribution is twofold: her video installation, Triangle of Need, uses four screens with overlapping films and musical scores; one screen shows Sullivan's interpretation of a common e-mail scam in which an African man named Dr. Patrick Obi invites the recipient to act as next of kin for the recently deceased Harold Bowen, with the promise of receiving a portion of Bowen's estate. The film shows the interactions between "Obi," "Bowen," and a character named "Next of Kin." Sullivan also taught a fall 2007 course, ARTV 24103: Practicum on Adaptation, to correspond with the exhibit; her nine students each chose a work to adapt—including René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, scenes from Pride and Prejudice, and letters between Civil War generals Simon Bolivar Buckner and Ulysses S. Grant—and made a 45-minute video that weaved their stories into a cohesive whole. "The final work," Sullivan writes in exhibit notes, "demonstrates both collective and individual interests adapting to one another through collaboration."

Adaptation runs through May 4.

R.E.K.

Photo: Guy Ben-Ner as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (2000).

Cabaret comeback

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This week the Divinity School marked the quarter's final Wednesday Lunch with bean salad, squash soup, and an hour's worth of lively cabaret from the New Budapest Orpheum Society. Led by Chicago ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, the group is a music-department ensemble-in-residence devoted to reviving and performing—in the original Yiddish, German, and Hebrew—the Jewish cabaret music that thrived in Austria and Germany in the early 20th century. During the Holocaust, it all but disappeared. Written on broadsides rescued from the Austrian censor's office, the songs, Bohlman explained to a packed Swift Common Room, "take the notion of the carnival and put it on the stage."

Giving a theatrical flair to songs about an adolescent Berlin pickpocket, an Eastern European schoolboy, a fiery-eyed idealist student, and an "irreconcilable optimist," cantor Stewart Figa donned a Sephardic-style yamulke and then a bowler, throwing himself wildly into the lyrics. Mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, who, waylaid by traffic, whisked into the room just in time for her first performance—Bohlman joked that she was the afternoon's "Sabbath bride"—sang a strident lullaby from father to child. She closed the concert with composer Fredrich Hollander's "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)", a song made famous by Marlene Deitrich in 1930's The Blue Angel, the first German talkie.

The repertoire of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, named for a turn-of-the-century Viennese cabaret, includes work by composers who died in Auschwitz and others who went on to Hollywood careers. Although the cabarets vanished, some of the songs—which range from silly to sociopolitical—survived in ghettos and concentration camps.

L.G.

Photos: Philip Bohlman looks on while Stewart Figa performs "The Irreconcilabe Optimist"; Julia Bentley rises to the climax of "Falling in Love Again."

Don’t be afraid of the dark

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Set on the Maine coast, with whaling ships, cotton mills, and clambakes as a backdrop, Carousel could hardly seem more American. However, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II took the plot of their 1945 musical (a follow-up to Oklahoma!) from Liliom, a 1909 drama set in Budapest by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. Nor was Molnár’s plot the standard upbeat fare of American musicals.

Court Theatre’s version of Carousel, directed by Charles Newell with music direction by Doug Peck, balances the light and dark in the story of the doomed love between carnival barker Billy Bigelow (Nicholas Belton) and mill girl Julie Jordan (Johanna McKenzie Miller).

John Culbert’s set—dominated by a rough-hewn backdrop that manages to suggest both waves and boardwalk and changes hues as the play's mood shifts from merry to menacing—meets at the border of land and sea, everyday life and escape to dreams. Carved into the shoreline's curves are moorings for the two parts of the Doug Peck's pared-down orchestra, and the conversation between the stage-right string quartet and the bass, piano, and woodwinds opposite adds to the balancing act.

During intermission, one audience member confessed to another, "I know all the words, and I'm trying not to sing along." Trying not to cry along is harder.

Carousel runs through Sunday, April 13.

M.R.Y.

Photo: Ernestine Jackson sings "June is Bustin' Out All Over."

Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Batting around ideas

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Statistically speaking, hitting a 90-mile-per-hour baseball with a bat is nearly impossible, said Steven Small, professor in neurology, psychology, and the College, Monday night at the book launch of Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans. “It takes about a quarter of a second for a muscle to move, and processing the visual system’s messages and reacting to those messages takes at least a third of a second,” said Small, who coauthored a chapter in the book, at the Cubby Bear kitty-corner from Wrigley Field. The aggregate of each hitting element, he noted, is greater than the time from a pitcher’s release to the ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. “That’s the great enigma.”

Cubs hitters like Alfonso Soriano and Derrek Lee can make contact with a speeding ball—at least some of the time—because their motor skills, refined through years of practice, set their brains in motion to swing or take a pitch before it's even released. The players "read into the pitcher’s movement,” Small said: “the sweat on his forehead, his eye movement, his grip on the ball, and the windup to figure out what is coming. If I can figure where the ball will come and at what velocity, I can start to swing in less time than it takes to make those calculations in my head.”

Before each pitch, baseball players—like athletes in other sports with intense preparation such as archery and golf—perform idiosyncratic, highly specialized routines that set their motor plan in motion. In Small's study of PGA golfers preparing their shots, the professionals showed less brain activity than amateurs. “Their total brain activity decreases,” he said, “and they’re so concentrated on their task that their brain activity actually becomes more efficient.” But don’t try to ask an athlete to articulate how he or she does it, warned panel moderator Jeremy Manier, a Chicago Tribune science reporter. The reason is simple, replied Small: “Once you master the task, it becomes difficult to break it down into component parts—I mean, can you explain how you are gripping the damn beer in front of you?”

Z.S.

Photo: Chicago neurology and psychology professor Steven Small discusses the science of hitting during a panel discussion that included Northwestern University psychology and neurobiology professor Aryeh Routtenberg (right) and Your Brain on Cubs editor Dan Gordon (left).

Restraining force

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Could a nation be seen as more powerful in the eyes of the world if it refrained from using force, rather than applying it? At an Alumni Association–sponsored lecture last Thursday Roger Myerson, the Glen A. Lloyd distinguished service professor in economics and the College, told a capacity crowd at the Chicago Architecture Foundation that this counterintuitive idea was true.

To make his point, Myerson, who also holds an appointment in the Department of Political Science and was a corecipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics, drew from game theory—a type of applied mathematics that explains how individuals, corporations, or countries use cooperation or aggression to maximize benefits and minimize losses. Applying these lessons to international relations, he gave an example: a small country, when threatened, might emphasize its resolve to use force because weakness would invite aggression. On the other hand, he argued, a large nation such as the United States should emphasize restraint, lest it be seen as trying to profit from aggression. “For the world to peacefully accept the military dominance of one superpower,” he explained, “its restraint must be manifest to all.”

By this model, Myerson concluded, the Bush Administration stumbled when it invaded Iraq in 2003 without the approval of the United Nations and the international community. Nations are less likely to cooperate with another nation that has been uncooperative with them in the past, he said, and the United States has thus diminished its international influence since the war began.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

Photo: Myerson applies game theory to international relations at the Chicago Architecture Foundation last Thursday.

Photo by Dan Dry.

After the Anschluss

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On the morning of March 12, 1938, the Wehrmacht's 8th Army rumbled across the German border into Austria. Greeted by flowers and salutes from jubilant locals, the Third Reich's takeover of its southeastern neighbor had begun.

In the decades that followed WW II, Austrians engaged in almost no public discussion of what became known as the Anschluss (a word that in German means "connection" and "political union"), and many Austrians preferred to think of their country as one of the Nazis' first victims, not a willing and enthusiastic collaborator. But in a talk at Harper Memorial Library last Wednesday—on the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss—Viennese historian Oliver Rathkolb described how Austrians' attitudes toward their Nazi past are changing. Introduced by fellow historian and Dean of the College John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, as a "courageous" scholar, Rathkolb is director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and the Public Sphere and a contemporary-history professor at the University of Vienna. "In 1946," he reported, "only 19 percent of Austrians said yes" when asked if they thought their country bore any responsibility for allowing the Nazis to come in. This, he said, was despite the fact that in a plebiscite held a month after the takeover, 99.7 percent of Austrians voted in favor of the Anschluss. More than a million Austrians joined the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht, and some took part in Nazi atrocities. Yet as soon as the war ended, Rathkolb said, "Austrians were quick to transform themselves into victims." The international community, led by Western allies more interested in the intensifying Cold War with the Soviets, facilitated the myth.

Over the years, there were several "conflict-laden attempts" by Austrian politicians and intellectuals to transform the "victim's doctrine," Rathkolb said. The turning point came in 1986 with Kurt Waldheim's embattled presidential campaign. A respected former UN secretary general, Waldheim was discovered to have hidden his student involvement with the Nazi movement and his wartime service in the Balkans, where in 1942 his commanding general led an operation slaughtering 60,000 Yugoslav partisans. Waldheim was elected, but the debate "split Austria," Rathkolb said, "and changed international ideas about Austria's contribution to the Nazis."

Polls bear out the results: in 1975 only 24 percent of Austrians were willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes, a slight uptick from three decades earlier. But by 2007 that number was 52 percent. This shift has its limits. "If you bring the issue of Nazis to the level of family histories," Rathkolb noted, "co-responsibility for WW II begins to fade away." But Austrians today are much more willing to ask themselves and their elders tough questions about the country's Nazi past. Public-school textbooks have changed to reflect an evolving understanding of Austria's Nazi complicity. International pressure, led in the 1990s by the United States, has focused attention on the Anschluss and its legacy. What's missing now, Rathkolb said, is an understanding among Austrians of how their WW II past fits within the broader European picture. Austrians now know their own Holocaust history, but not "the wider history, not as a part of European history."

L.G.

Photo: After his talk, Oliver Rathkolb takes questions from the audience.

Mismatched at the movies

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When Patricia Brett Erens, AM’63, saw last summer's comedy hit Knocked Up, she wasn't particularly amused by the plot (ambitious young career woman Alison Scott and post-college slacker Ben Stone accidentally get pregnant in a one-night stand; Alison decides to keep the baby). But she was intrigued by the film's popularity—and what it might say about American culture.

Are mismatches like Alison and Ben "just a condition for comedy," asked Erens, an adjunct professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, "or do they reflect 21st-century issues?" Are they a species of male fantasy, "a way of reassuring men that they can continue adolescence into adulthood and still get the woman when they're ready?"

During her March 13 lecture, "Modern Romance in Cinema: What Was She Thinking?"—which, sponsored by the Chicago Women’s Alliance, brought 60 people to the School of the Art Institute ballroom—Erens showed clips tracing the genre's trajectory, from 1938's screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, where a wealthy ditz and a nerdy paleontologist find love, through 2007's darker Margot at the Wedding, in which Margot's successful sister marries a less-than-impressive mate.

What did her audience think about the recent films? Erens asked. "Those men in Knocked Up were the worst," one woman of a certain age declared. "I wouldn't have gone out with any of them." Other women gave slackers like Ben the chance to grow up: "I think there's a healthy recognition that there are other qualities besides money and having a degree."

The Chicago Women’s Alliance, an affinity group for women 45 and over who are U of C alumnae, faculty, administrators, and/or research associates, was founded in 2007 (men are welcome to join or attend events).

M.R.Y.

Photo: What's a screwball comedy without someone ending up in jail? In Bringing Up Baby, both Katharine Hepburn's ditzy heiress and Cary Grant’s sobersided paleontologist end up behind bars.

Money, that's what they want

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“First we took our classes / then we wrote up our MAs,” sang Joe Grim Feinberg, a fifth-year graduate student in anthropology and Graduate Students United (GSU) member, at March 12's Rally for Grad Funding outside Swift Hall. “Then we took exams / and we proposed to dissertate. / Then we did our research in the field so far away. / Then we looked into our pockets / and we found we had no pay.”

Feinberg's song, “Ballad of the Marooned Dissertation Writers,” kicked off the protest against the University’s exclusion of students admitted before 2007 from the Graduate Aid Initiative. The funding plan, announced in February 2007, gives incoming graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and the Divinity School $19,000 each per year for five years, plus $3,000 for two summers of study. But for previously enrolled graduate students, who won't receive the funding, frustrations run deep—particularly following the Maroon’s February 26 report noted that the Office of the Provost’s Working Group overestimated the cost of extending the benefits to all students by nearly $24 million.

“Our faculty are the fifth-best paid in the nation,” shouted Eli Thorkelson, a second-year graduate student in anthropology and GSU member, from the stage. “But why don’t we compete with our peer institutions on [graduate-student] teaching pay? It seems clear that they can afford it—Cornell has the best-paid teaching assistants and a lower endowment.”

The disparity between current and future graduate students' funding situations, especially given the working group’s miscalculation, is unfortunate, said Deputy Provost for Graduate Education Cathy Cohen later that day. “Everyone agrees our teaching wages are too low.” To develop a long-term solution, the provost’s office has heeded the working group's recommendation to convene a committee that examines graduate students’ pay structure. The provost's office aims to have changes in place by the 2008-09 academic year. “That’s my hope and expectation,” Cohen said. “But we’re taking a different approach than in the past. Instead of doing something sporadic, we’re going to have an annual review of teaching salaries. … One good thing from this mobilization is that we will attend to teaching salaries in a way so that this problem won’t arise again in five years.”

Z.S.

Photo: Students protest the University’s exclusion of current students from the Graduate Aid Initiative.

Magazine heads to the city of New Orleans

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UChiBLOGo takes a break this week as the Magazine staff travels to New Orleans for the CASE Editor's Forum. While we're gone, please browse through some of the University's other online offerings:

A site about Arts at Chicago
The Law School's Faculty Blog
The University's new Web site in beta version

Enjoy the week.

A.B.P.

On your mark, get set, grow

While one might observe that facial hair has always been part of the University of Chicago tradition (see, for example, Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey), it might be more accurate to say the University of Chicago has merely followed in the ancient tradition of bearded classical education (see, for example, Socrates).

The long-abandoned Mustache Race, part of campus life through the first half of the 20th century, exemplifies the connection between the College and facial hair. Members of the senior class would try to grow a mustache over the course of a few weeks, at the end of which judges would crown a victor.

This year the satirical campus magazine Chicago Shady Dealer revived the event. The Shady Dealer gave it a more inclusive twist, adding to the original “mustachery” category “beardsmanship” and “female facial hairitude.” Opening ceremonies took place February 27 at the C-bench. On April 9, six weeks later, the contest will reach its dramatic conclusion. As one of 26 contestants (including four women), here I chronicle my journey.

Day 1: I wake up early for the last shave of the next six weeks, applying a liberal amount of aftershave—my face will not smell this fresh again for quite some time. At registration, the mustachioed judge gently caresses my face to make sure I haven’t gotten a head start. Despite this unwanted contact with my still barren cheeks, I sign a sheet saying that I’ll be growing a beard. I also pledge to steer clear of “performance-enhancing chemicals and treatments” like Rogaine.

Day 12: There’s a little bit of itching now. Until now this realization had only registered at a subconscious level, but I think I have an especially bristly beard. It is also still uneven. Wondering what sorts of things could cause these deviations in facial-hair length, I run through the possible causes: genetics, growing up near industrial plants, work-related stress, not eating enough leafy greens. Some things we may never understand.

Day 27: After all this time, I’ve gotten pretty used to my beard. There are still a few weeks left before the judging, but no matter what happens between now and then, I believe I could go beard-to-beard with the best of them.

Well, maybe not Dewey. Now that guy had a mustache.

Seth Mayer, '08

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Photos (left to right): Seth Mayer goes from bare to bearded. But could he beat John Dewey?

D.I.Y.

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Stephen Sittler, AB'62, believes that "everyone should build a boat." A gastroenterologist in Chicago for more than 40 years, Sittler retired in 2006 and left Hyde Park for Sawyer, Michigan, a small town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Quickly he realized he would need something to occupy him. That something turned out to be a 34-foot schooner with three anchors, a generous galley, plenty of bookshelves, and enough berths for four passengers. Building the boat from scratch inside a former auto-parts shop, Sittler is 15 months into the three-year project. Last November he finished the hull and hired a crane to turn the boat right-side up (the hull is put together upside down); since then he's been working on the boat's interior spaces: the galley, chart table, berths, and a slot in the stern for a 20-horsepower motor.

His purpose, he says, is greater than just having a sailboat to skipper and live aboard; the work is meticulous and obsessive, but "fascinating and gratifying." For him, it is sometimes more metaphysical than physical. "The chair"—where he deliberates on the project—"is one of the most important tools in the workshop."

L.G.

Photos: From atop a ladder Sittler sorts through the wood he'll use to build a marine bookshelf; Sittler sent away for a set of blueprints for his 34-foot schooner.

Pictures of Jewish life

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In the Regenstein Library's exhibit on modern European Jewish life, the images on display grow more colorful and more intricate as visitors progress into the Special Collections Research Center. Beginning with small illustrated prayer books and ending with bright paintings and decorated prayer books for Purim and Passover, the exhibit presents the Harry, AB'54, JD'57, and Branka Sondheim Jewish Heritage Collection, which Harry Sondheim has been transferring to the University in a series of gifts since 2005.

Organized around the Jewish life-cycle customs—birth, circumcision, naming, marriage, and death—and the Jewish calendar—the Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Simchat Torah, Sukkot, and Passover—the Sondheim exhibit includes books and artwork from 16th- through 20th-century Europe; viewers can see three-dimensional German New Years cards from the 20th century along with a 1730s colored engraving of London worshipers holding the Torah aloft.

"These materials will provide students with a much richer source base for traditional topics and open new areas for research," noted history and Jewish studies professor Leora Auslander, who organized the exhibition with graduate student Sara Hume and who is teaching a spring-quarter course on modern European Jewish history and culture, where she'll use items from the collection. "The numerous and diverse representations of the celebrations of major Jewish holidays will add substance to the arguments for innovation and creativity in the diaspora."

A.B.P.

Photos: Bernard Picart (1673–1733), The Jewish Manner of Holding up the Law in the Sight of the People at Duke's Place, London; These German Jewish New Years cards are chromolithographs showing Jewish men preparing for worship (left) and a Sabbath blessing over a child.

Autism's cultural spectrum

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April is National Autism Awareness Month, and in recent weeks autism has been at the center of media coverage. High rates of the disorder—the most current CDC statistic cites that one in 150 children in the United States have autism, compared to one in 10,000 a generation ago—have led to public fears of an epidemic, fueled by vaccine- and environmental-related worries, such as the concern that immunizations are directly linked to autism. "Well-funded celebrities are devoting their time to autism awareness," said Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University, which paves the way for scientific studies and increased services for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). His talk Thursday night, "What in the World is Autism? How Culture Shaped an Illness," kicked off the MAPSS program's 2008 Earl S. Johnson conference, Autism Through the Lens of the Social Sciences, a collaboration with Easter Seals: a partnership between "social activists and cutting-edge social-science research," said MAPSS director John MacAloon.

Grinker—the grandson of Roy R. Grinker Sr., SB'21, MD'21, who founded Chicago's psychiatry department—comes at ASD as an anthropologist, he told the 25-person audience in Swift Hall's third-floor conference room, exploring how knowledge about autism fits into history and culture. The higher prevalence is not caused by a medical epidemic, he said; instead, modifications in tools such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders cast a wider net, including people with more mild symptoms on the autism spectrum. Answering an audience member's query about "the scare with immunizations," Grinker said that, based on what he knows, "that question has been answered": there is no scientific evidence to directly link vaccines to autism.

Grinker also approaches the disorder as a father—his 16-year-old daughter, Isabel, has autism. In her lifetime, he said, he's seen advances in autism awareness; because of changes in our cultural perspective, not only has stigmatization decreased, but there are also more treatment options. Quoting National Institute of Mental Health psychiatrist Judith Rapoport, Grinker said, "I'll call the kid a zebra if it will get him the services he deserves."

Autism's place in the medical and media spotlight has far-reaching effects on international awareness, Grinker explained. On a trip to South Africa, he met a Zulu family whose son Big Boy "developed all the hallmark signs of autism." The grandparents wanted Big Boy taken to a "witch doctor," Grinker said, but his progressive parents were "truly terrified" of the doctor's techniques, which would likely include induced vomiting, blood-letting, and laxatives. The parents, however, "succumbed to custom," and at the son's first visit, the witch doctor concluded that Big Boy had autism. Surprised, the parents asked him how he knew. The witch doctor responded, "I heard about it on the Internet."

R.E.K.

Photo: Grinker's daughter Isabel, who loves animals, watches jellyfish at the Georgia Aquarium.

Photo courtesy R. Richard Grinker

Go figure

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When a Mesopotamian artisan finished a statue of a deity, the craftsman underwent an arduous ritual before the object was deemed pure and could be moved from workshop to temple. The custom deemphasized the human creator by sinking his tools, cutting off his hands with a wooden knife, and commanding the artisan to declare that he did not create the god’s image.

Such anxiety about mortals depicting a higher power, while extreme, is not unique, according to the Smart Museum’s Idol Anxiety, which opened Tuesday. “Idols are worrisome objects,” suggest the exhibit notes. “From ancient times to the present day, theological traditions have reflected on idolatry and questioned the transcendence, significance, and power of objects.”

While the pious have sought to depict gods for nearly as long as they’ve worshiped them, problems arise when those representations fall outside cultural norms. When they did so, societies either deemed them idols or were forced to reconsider their standards. For instance, early Christianity’s prohibition against illustrating Christ led to the idea of acheiropoieta, literally non-handmade depictions alleged to have appeared miraculously, such as the Shroud of Turin. Later, Saint John Damascene argued that because Christ was seen in the flesh, it made the Second Commandment’s declaration, "Do not make an image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above," obsolete.

Idol Anxiety runs through November 2.

Z.S.

Image: Albrecht Dürer, Sudarium Displayed by Two Angels, 1513, Engraving on cream laid paper.

Image courtesy the Smart Museum.

A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar...

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God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit decide they want to take a vacation. God suggests the Garden of Eden because he hasn't been there since he expelled Adam and Eve. Jesus has another idea: "How about Bethlehem? I haven't been there since I was born." Then the Holy Spirit pitches in. "No, no. I want to go to Rome. I've never been there."

That joke, which suggests the Catholic Church was founded on a fraud, said Chicago philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB'62, is a "very short story," a work of art. To get the joke, listeners need to share an understanding of the language and its reference points—which often include stereotypes. And ethnic or religious jokes are going to offend some people, he said, but does that mean they should stop being told? At the Gleacher Center Thursday night, Cohen's talk, "The Uses and Misuses of Humor," explored this question with an audience of about 50 alumni, asking: Is there any objective sense in which a joke could be deemed unacceptable?

For the jokes Cohen presented, the answer was no. Take the Catholic quip: someone sensitive to its content may say, "Well, it's not true" that the Catholic Church was founded on a lie. "Of course not!" Cohen said, exasperated. "A joke is a fiction," and stereotypes are not meant to express a general truth. Quite simply, some people think the joke is funny, and others get offended—they simply like different things. "I don't like Holocaust or dead-baby jokes," he said, "but I don't think they're doing anything wrong." If people want to make these jokes, he conceded, let them; Cohen just won't listen.

R.E.K.

Photo: Ted Cohen illustrates the first Ukranian joke he had ever heard: What does the arrow point to? The last link in the trans-Ukranian railway.

Art imitating life

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If the University of Chicago is where fun goes to die, Nick Zimmerman can name the spot: during one excruciating night in 1999, fun perished in his dorm room. That year, Zimmerman's first in the College, he threw a party inspired by the film Out of Africa, hoping to lure his crush, a fellow student named Will, to the get-together. But despite Zimmerman's posters and e-mails announcing the time and place, only one guest showed up the whole night—and it wasn't Will.

Nearly a decade later, that failed party has become a much more successful one-man show titled "Out of My Mind." The performance has Zimmerman wearing a Chicago T-shirt and standing before a large Out of Africa poster as he recites lines from the movie, talks to the reimagined party's lone guest—an engineering student he calls Ralph—and recounts the heartache and hilarity of his freshman year in the College.

Presented by the Upright Citizens Brigade—a New York comedy troupe that got its start in Chicago and aired a TV series for three prank-filled seasons on Comedy Central—Zimmerman's solo show hits the stage for an eighth time this Wednesday at the UCB Theater in New York.

Enveloped by an increasingly desperate unrequited interest in Will, Zimmerman retreated to his parents' home to regroup after spring quarter of his first year and ended up earning a religious-studies degree from the University of Colorado. Last year he was a finalist on the Web series Project Improviser, and currently he performs in New York with the Upright Citizens Brigade and Magnet Theater.


Photo: Writer and improviser Nick Zimmerman turned a lonely night on the U of C's campus into a comedic one-man show.

Eastern promise, Eastern threat

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“I’ve come to the conclusion that we are headed for a clash with China,” author Michael Levin announced at International House Tuesday night. “If there is going to be a war,” he went on, “it’s going to be in the next five to 20 years.” In a discussion of his book, The Next Great Clash: China and Russia vs. the United States (Praeger Security International, November 2007), Levin—who has worked at the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, at Diagnostic Products Corporation in China, and as a management consultant to the World Bank Project Coordination Unit in Moscow—predicted that a coming war with China would engulf the entire world in flames.

He argued that Harvard government professor Samuel P. Huntington’s much-debated “clash of civilizations” thesis, that the West will continue to be locked in conflict with the Muslim world, supports a “West versus the rest” scenario where a “China-Islamic alliance” will be fueled by trading “guns for oil.” Additionally, American debt to China is “tinged with vanity and hubris and threatens American authority all over the world.”

Levin also pointed to Chinese politics and history as cause for concern. Chinese history, he noted, has been marked by 700-year-long “cycles of expansion and retreat” that, according to the calendar, now find China “in the beginnings of an expansionary phase.” Furthermore, Chinese “hyper-sovereignty” over issues like Tibet and Taiwan hold potential dangers should the United States try to intervene.

Out of this competition, Russia has positioned itself as a Chinese ally. “China and Russia are closer” than they have been since the 1600s. Such an alliance to counterbalance American power, Levin concluded, will surely locate the next great clash in Northern Asia.

In a question-and-answer session, Levin was reticent to provide ways to avoid the impending crisis, saying, “I was afraid someone would ask that.” He did provide three suggestions that might prevent the next great clash: a national campaign to spread Chinese-language education in America, a larger Peace Corps to expose more Americans to the world, and military conscription, which might make policy officials less eager to go to war.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Michael Levin discusses the causes of a coming war with China and Russia.

To err is Ro-Man

Great Guidance: Earth Ro-Man, you violate the laws of plans. To think for yourself is to be like the hu-man.

Ro-Man: Yes! To be like the hu-man! To laugh! Feel! Want! Why are these things not in the plan?

Dozens of current students, joined by prospective students on campus for a pre-enrollment weekend, came to Doc Films' Thursday night showing of 1950’s sci-fi classic Robot Monster. In 1953 director Phil Tucker, then 25, crafted this B-movie masterpiece for $16,000. It took four days. Shot entirely outdoors in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, Robot Monster is widely considered to be one of the worst movies of all time.

Ro-Man, i.e. the robot monster, has come to Earth from planet Ro-Man under the direction of his leader, Great Guidance, to destroy the hu-mans. “People,” Ro-Man explains, “were getting too intelligent. [Ro-Mans] could not wait until you were strong enough to attack us—we had to attack you first.” Ro-Man, played by actor George Barrows wearing a gorilla suit and a diving helmet affixed with antennae, is largely successful in his mission. Using his death ray, he persuades the world's allies to attack each other with their “hydrogen bombs.” Ro-Man even “wipe[s] out the last scientists in their deepest shelters.”

After the slaughter, only eight hu-mans remain: a professor, his family of four, and his three assistants. All saved by the professor’s antibiotic serum, the hu-mans do their best to avoid Ro-Man as he stalks the desert looking to destroy them by “physical means.” Ro-Man eventually falters in his mission, developing strong feelings for the professor’s beautiful daughter, Alice. Communicating with Great Guidance via a bubble-powered transmitter, the Billion Bubble Machine (little more than a sheet thrown over a wooden board), Ro-Man learns from the hu-mans and is overcome by a conflict between his duty to planet Ro-Man and his own feelings: “I cannot—yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do 'must' and 'cannot' meet? Yet I must—but I cannot!”

According to Doc Films’ description, when critics panned the film Phil Tucker attempted suicide but was saved after being found unconscious in Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel. Robot Monster was featured as part of Doc Films’ ongoing series Cinemasaurus.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

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Photos (left to right): Ro-Man prepares to communicate with Great Guidance in his cave home; Ro-Man spirits Alice away from her family (please note Ro-Man's gorilla feet); opening credits to Robot Monster.

Photos courtesy Three Dimensional Pictures.

Why is this lunch different from all other lunches?

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By the time they gathered around a table at the back of Newberger Hillel's chapel, the ten Chicago students who stopped by for Passover lunch on Sunday had already had their fill of grape juice. Coming off three- and four-hour seders the night before, they'd been drinking plenty of it. Still, each filled a tiny cup from an Ocean Spray bottle and, after the kiddush was read, drank it. "Four more cups to go tonight!" one student joked, pretending to wince as she looked ahead to the weekend's second seder.

Launching its Passover celebration last Friday, Chicago's Hillel chapter hosted five seders over the weekend, each different: traditional, Reform, and student-led seders that coincided with a "freedom and responsibility seder" and a "skeptic's seder." Two others—a "feminist seder" and a "Red Hadaggah Yiddish seder"—are planned for Wednesday night. Throughout the holiday, which lasts until sundown on April 27, Hillel serves kosher lunches and dinners at its Woodlawn Avenue house.

During Sunday's lunch, which incorporated elements of the seder ceremony, students dined on spinach salad, broccoli soup, matzah, and latkes cooked with apricot. Tabletalk turned from matzah cereal ("Who would ever think that tastes good?") and Passover songs to unfinished schoolwork and classroom-related nightmares. One student offered a joke about a blind man handed a piece of matzah, only to have another student preempt the punchline: the blind man says, "Who wrote this nonsense?" After an hour of food and conversation, someone started singing the Birkat, and the rest joined in. Then they cleared the table and headed out into the warm spring day.

L.G.


Photo: The traditional seder plate including, clockwise from top: maror (romaine lettuce), z'roa (roasted shankbone), charoset, maror (chrein), karpas (celery sticks), beitzah (roasted egg).

Nice to give and receive

Last Tuesday more than 30 undergraduate scholarship recipients met the donors who helped fund their studies. At the Gleacher Center, President Robert J. Zimmer and College Dean John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, joined the students, endowed-scholarship donors, and prospective donors for Wolfgang Puck–catered hors d'oeurves, risotto bar, and carving-station mini-sandwiches.

Zimmer told the crowd that although a Chicago education is expensive, last year about half of the College's students received a total of $55 million in financial aid. The endowed scholarships helped 420 students this year by replacing some of those loans with grants.

Boyer introduced Carma Peterson Baker, AB'90, who said she endowed a scholarship because as a student, she would not have been able to afford the U of C tuition without financial aid. Fourth-years Mingzhu He and Amanda Finney said the scholarships have helped them focus on their studies—economics and English, respectively—instead of how to pay for their educations. Then it was on to mingling and eating those mini-sandwiches.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): Trustee Robert Halperin, PhB’47, talks with three of his scholarship recipients: third-years Alice Bynum (left), Denis Echtchenko, and Katah Hart; Zimmer chats with Baker and her husband, David Baker, AB'87, MBA'94; the students gather for a group shot.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Looting Eden

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In the 1930s, Oriental Institute archaeologists working in the ancient Sumerian city of Eshnunna (modern-day Tell Asmar) uncovered a pit filled with statues. Because they found the figurines beside an altar at the temple to the minor god of plants, Abu, the archaeologists theorized that individuals used the objects as stand-ins to symbolize their perpetual devotion to the deity. The sculptures’ burial implied that their owners had died. The excavation provided context that has fostered a better understanding of ancient Sumeria.

But for three days after April 9, 2003, when a euphoric Iraqi crowd pulled down a massive Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad’s Firdus Square, a mob of looters invaded the Iraq National Museum and took an estimated 15,000 artifacts. Since then similar, but less documented, mobs have driven excavation-site guards away, and looters have crisscrossed Iraqi sites to scavenge for antiquities. Losing these objects, argues the Oriental Institute exhibit Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past, destroys the perspective essential to understanding ancient civilizations.

Cast as villains by the exhibit's curators—McGuire Gibson, AM'64, PhD'68, professor in the OI and Near Eastern languages and civilizations, Katharyn Hanson, AM'06, and Geoff Emberling, OI museum director—are some art aficionados, auction houses, fine-art dealers, and museums throughout Europe and the United States involved (knowingly or unknowingly) in the antiquities-trade market. And given a U.S. law that allows objects held in private collections to be donated to museums for a tax deduction, the looted objects might end up in American museum display cases. “This financial encouragement increases interest in collecting, thereby driving the prices and profits for stolen artifacts higher, which in turn causes more looting,” suggest the exhibit notes. However, many archaeological museums, such as the OI, have strict policies against accepting such artifacts. The OI's artifacts come from registered excavations.

The exhibit runs through December 31.

Z.S.

Photo: Looters searching for cuneiform-inscribed bricks have destroyed this excavated temple facade at Umma.

Photo by Joanne Farchakh-Bajjaly, courtesy the Oriental Institute.

Race made visible

In an essay accompanying Black Is, Black Ain't, the Renaissance Society's current exhibit, curator Hamza Walker calls race "one of the more disputed of life's undisputed facts." Although "a biological fiction," he writes, "it remains a social fact whose history more than compensates for all that science disavows." With photographs of Emmitt Till's exhumed grave, Polaroids of grinning blackface figurines, eight disintegrating cones of flour, reflected images of now-demolished Chicago public-housing projects, and a six-foot-tall Black Power fist, the exhibit's 26 artists—both black and non-black—explore America's shifting racial rhetoric. In his essay, Walker notes that Black Is, Black Ain't, whose title alludes to a phrase from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, bears out the notion that transcending race, an abiding American dream for decades, remains a fraught, paradoxical task: "Our efforts to become less race conscious serve to make us more race conscious."

Nearly a dozen related events will coincide with the exhibit, which runs through June 8. Next Tuesday will feature a lecture by Harris School professor Jeffrey Grogger on the complex links between race and poverty. On Friday, May 16, Columbia University literature scholar Saidiya Hartman and Chicago geneticist Rick Kittles will discuss African American genealogical research.

L.G.

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Images (left to right): Andres Serrano's The Interpretation of Dreams (White Nigger) and Woman with Infant hang behind Randy Reiger's Impending Future Bus, in which white patrons sit at the back; behind Untitled T-shirts (P.R.O.J.E.C.T.S.) by Jerome Mosley is Paul D'Amato's photo, 624 W. Division, showing a half-razed Cabrini Green building; sugar crystals engulf Alex Haley's Roots in Edgar Arceneaux's Failed Attempt at Crystallization.

I've made a kluge mistake

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Can't remember what you had for breakfast yesterday? This common situation is not a result of poor memory, says Gary Marcus, an NYU psychology professor, but rather a poorly organized memory. In a Tuesday night talk promoting his new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin Co.), Marcus explained that your brain translates the question, "What did you have for breakfast yesterday?" into "breakfast, kind of recently," which then turns up a "whole bunch of breakfasts that blend together." We rely on clues to remind us of particular details but need the right cue to pull up the correct fact. People may not immediately recall who the 16th president of the United States was, Marcus said, but if reminded that he helped free the slaves, Abraham Lincoln immediately jumps to mind.

This imperfect filing system of a memory, Marcus said, comes from an "evolutionary kluge." An engineering term, a kluge is "a clumsy or inelegant—yet surprisingly effective—solution to a problem," he writes in his book. Instead of a complex supercomputer, our mind is in fact the outcome of an evolutionary process that doesn't aim for perfection. It goes for good enough: "satisficing," Marcus called it, borrowing a term coined by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, AB'36, PhD'43. Evolution has no foresight or hindsight and always works with what's already there—Darwin's idea of "descent with modification." While Google can retrieve stored information with the push of a button, the mind is organized more like an "old shoebox," Marcus said, cluttered with old photographs and tzotchkes.

A far more dangerous manifestation of the breakfast-memory scenario, Marcus relates, involves his "favorite" (albeit dark) statistic: about six percent of skydiving deaths are caused by practiced skydivers failing to pull the ripcord. They've done it so many times that they can't remember whether they've already done it; all the times before blend together. As Marcus pointed out, it's a good thing pilots make checklists before they fly.

R.E.K.

Photo: Gary Marcus talked kluges with an audience that included William Wimsatt (front row, in blue), Chicago's Peter B. Ritzma professor in philosophy and evolutionary biology, and Barbara Wimsatt, AM'61, AM'89, PhD'97.

I pledge allegiance...

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Early American citizenship was about more than formally separating from England, argued Stanford professor and president emeritus Gerhard Casper Thursday at the Law School’s annual Fulton Lecture in legal history. Rather it represented “a renunciation of the old monarchical world in favor of a new order.”

In his lecture, “Forswearing Allegiance,” former Law School Dean and University Provost Casper discussed the complicated history of American immigration law and concepts of citizenship. The Founding Fathers were anxious about incorporating European immigrants, long the subjects of sovereigns, into the republic. While Thomas Jefferson, for instance, “had a dim view of integrating” foreigners, Casper said, pamphleteer Thomas Paine “believed democratic principles of American government [would] take care of heterogeneity.” Consequently, for more than 200 years naturalization laws have required new citizens to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty.” Such requirements, Casper noted, no longer make sense in an age of increasing cosmopolitanism, globally shared values, and dual citizenship.

In a question-and-answer session, Casper remarked that his talk had a crucial autobiographical component. Born in Germany in 1937, Casper came to the United States in 1964. He waited many years to change his citizenship, not for lack of feelings for America, he said, but “because Germans of my generation have such a difficult time with national identity.” They “identify as citizens of the world…not detained by national elements.” Casper naturalized in 1979, when he became dean of what he called one of the country's "premier legal institutions.”

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Former Law School Dean and Provost Gerhard Casper addresses friends, former students, and the curious in the Law School's Kirkland Courtroom.

Invitation to help

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Setting up a tent on the Quads for three days last week, Resources for Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) closed out April—Sexual Assault Awareness Month—by giving away water bottles, popcorn, copies of the Women's Guide to the University of Chicago, and blue ribbons for passersby to honor victims they've known.

"A lot of people stop by and say, 'I never knew you were on campus,'" said RSVP peer educator Emily Tancer, '08, who staffed the booth with fellow fourth-year Liz Litchfield on Wednesday. The tent, Tancer said, helped spread the word about the organization, housed in the Administration Building basement as part of the Vice President and Dean of Students in the University's office. Professors, staff, and students had all stopped by that day.

Tancer and Litchfield attended a weekend training retreat earlier this year and now give workshops on "acquaintance rape and rape culture," Tancer said, for houses, RSOs, and other groups. Part of the reason for the tent, she said, was to recruit more peer educators for next year.

A.B.P.

Photos: The RSVP tent offered both popcorn and blue ribbons; images in popular culture, Tancer said, often portray women's bodies as objects and men as "hypersexual aggressors."

Pond patrons

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Brisk winds and cloudy skies were not enough to deter a few dozen guests from gathering to dedicate Botany Pond this past Friday. Acknowledging Julie and J. Parker Hall III’s (X’54) support to restore the pond to its original marsh-like splendor, a new plaque stands at the pond’s north side. President Robert J. Zimmer read the inscription to the crowd: “Botany Pond and Hull Court Restoration / In Grateful Recognition / Julie & Parker Hall / May 2, 2008.”

Joined by family and friends, the Halls were on campus to receive the University of Chicago Medal for distinguished service of the highest order later that evening. The family has a history of service to the University: Parker Hall is a life trustee, his father (PhB'27) served as University treasurer, and his grandfather was the first full-time dean of the Law School (1904–28).

In addition to serving on several campus boards and committees, Julie and Parker Hall have made gifts to the Division of the Humanities and the Laboratory Schools and established the James Parker Hall distinguished service professorship in law and the Julie and Parker Hall endowment for jazz and American popular music.

Through their botanic-garden endowment fund, the Halls supported Botany Pond’s restoration, which began in 2004. Now visitors can enjoy a pond similar to the one seen in pictures from 1910, when it served as an outdoor classroom and laboratory, in addition to being one of the most tranquil and picturesque spots on campus.

Charlotte Robinson

Photos: Parker and Julie Hall enjoy the dedication on Friday; Botany Pond in 2006; The pond in 1910.

Top two photos by Dan Dry; Bottom photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center.

The wonderful wizard of Scav

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If it's the Thursday before Mother's Day, it must be Scavenger Hunt. The 2008 version of the University tradition got under way at midnight when team captains "ransomed" their Scav Hunt lists. As the May 6 Chicago Maroon reported, "[E]ach team was given a list of demands to be fulfilled, including bringing the judges a black light, a toothpick, and a hula skirt. After each five-minute lapse, the judges burned a page of the list." Not to worry: the first pages contain the standard rules, and the list is online.

As usual, competing teams have until Sunday afternoon to produce as many of the list's 260-plus items, each with its own point value, as they can. They'll also participate in Friday night's Scav party and Saturday's Scav Olympics—where the sporting events range from "1. Finnish style wife-carrying competition. Must provide certified married couple (bonus points if marriage is still on after the race!)" to "11. Knife skills! Bring your Top Chef with a good set of cooking knives, and get ready to slice, dice, mince, and prance."

As usual, there's also a road trip. This year's (Item 23) twisted the Frank Baum classic:

“'Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.' No, but you will be before the end of the day. At 9:00 AM Thursday in Hutchinson Courtyard, present your team of Wayward Sons: Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Bat. They must be ready to travel over the rainbow in a flying house featuring a storm cellar door, chimneyed roof, picket fence, and the legs of that wicked witch you just ran over... ."

In a new twist, Item 20 commanded the teams, "Have your pre-selected Scav Warrior outside the Reynolds Club at 3:30 a.m. Thursday morning. They must be alone and they may not have any extraneous packages, bags or accessories. And, since it will be late into the evening, the attire for this event is evening-wear. Evening-wear with a bathing suit underneath." The solo warriors—who also were asked to come with IDs and $200—were blindfolded and driven to O'Hare, where they were presented with a ticket to Las Vegas—and a 46-item "ScavAir Addendum: Vegas, baby. Vegas."

M.R.Y.

Photo: With shoes painted red, this Dorothy is ready to follow the Yellow Brick Road, as the Scav Hunt road trip heads to Kansas. Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

The gift of books

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By 2010 the University will have a new library just west of the Regenstein, thanks to a $25 million gift from Morningstar CEO Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80, and his wife Rika, AB'91. Patrons will read and lounge beneath an elliptical glass dome reaching 35 feet high, while millions of printed volumes will live 50 feet underground, called up by an automated retrieval system.

The Mansueto Library, announced yesterday by President Robert J. Zimmer, provides space for the University to keep its ever-expanding collection local—and for the collection to grow another 22 years, says library director Judith Nadler. The Regenstein reached capacity in 2007, and while universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown have moved materials off-site, Chicago went a different route, maintaining its entire print collection on campus.

Designed by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn, the Mansueto Library will contain a conservation and preservation facility; an area for Special Collections staff members to pick up requested materials and bring them back to the Reg's Special Collections Research Center; an 8,000-square-foot reading room; and the capacity for 3.5 million volumes of print material. Library users will request a source through the online catalog or search engine (Lens), and a robotic crane will retrieve it within a few minutes.

A.B.P.

Photo: An architect's drawing shows the future Mansueto Library from the south; a cross-section rendering shows the automated shelving and retrieval system.

Images courtesy Helmut Jahn.

The art of the rewrite

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Writing, Jonathan Harr explained to the two dozen students and faculty gathered in Rosenwald 405 Tuesday evening, "is, thankfully, one arena in life where you can perform badly and then take it all back and do it again. It's not done until it's done."

That moment of completion, it seems, can't be rushed. It took Harr, an author, journalist, and the University's 2008 Robert Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence, eight years and five publishing-contract extensions to finish his first book, A Civil Action (Random House, 1995). When it finally came out, his account of a Massachusetts town's legal showdown with industrial polluters won a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award—and spent two years on New York Times best-seller lists. In 1998 it became an Oscar-nominated movie.

At Rosenwald, Harr read a few scenes and vignettes from a partially written New Yorker article. This past fall he spent six weeks in eastern Chad, along the Darfurian border, where tens of thousands of people fleeing violence and genocide have settled into sprawling refugee camps. Harr talked to international aid workers from Africa and beyond, refugees living in a camp called Farchana, and missionaries and residents in towns nearby. The story he ended up with, he said, is "a jigsaw puzzle" that he's still trying to shape into a coherent whole. Every few weeks he receives an e-mail from his New Yorker editor: "Any progress?" Harr's answer so far: "It's not done yet."

L.G.

Photos: Jonathan Harr (photo by Sandro Cutri); a refugee camp in eastern Chad.

Cast in stone

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Growing up in Kenwood, young Walter Arnold roamed the University of Chicago campus to admire the gargoyles. Now, when Hyde Park visitors stroll by the Laboratory Schools' Kovler gymnasium or the Medici's facade—note the coffee-drinking and pizza-eating figures—they can see Arnold's stone-carved grotesques. As part of the annual Festival of the Arts—a ten-day, student-run event that transforms the campus into an art gallery and performance space—Arnold gave a talk in Bartlett on gargoyles, followed by a three-hour stone-carving demonstration on the main quads.

Arnold started sculpting in stone at age 12. At 20 he apprenticed in Italy, and upon his return to the States he worked for five years on the Washington (DC) National Cathedral before returning to Chicago to start a private studio and gallery in 1985. Spending part of each year in Italy and part at his Fox River Valley (Illinois) studio, Arnold often shares his craft with the U of C community: in 1993, for example, he demonstrated Egyptian carving techniques for almost 600 people during June's Oriental Institute/Smart Museum Family Day.

Festival of the Arts 2008 runs through Sunday.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: Walter Arnold whittles a grotesque in a stone-carving demonstration; his wife and business manager, Fely (bottom, in beige blazer), leads onlookers through a photographic tour of Arnold's work.

Fly marks the spot

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Etched in each of the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol’s urinals, just to the left of the drain, is a black housefly, noted Richard Thaler Friday during the GSB’s 56th Annual Management Conference 2008 keynote address. The reason? It gives men a target. Since its introduction, restroom spillage has decreased 80 percent.

While dirty bathrooms may be a relatively minor issue, said Thaler, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller distinguished service professor of behavioral science and economics, the etching illustrates a "nudge," an environmental feature that attracts attention and spurs a particular behavior. In his new book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press), he and his coauthor, longtime Law School professor Cass Sunstein (who's bound for Harvard this fall), argue for policies that guide people toward making decisions that serve their self-interest while preserving their ability to make a choice.

For instance, the book advocates that companies automatically enroll employees in retirement-savings plans unless they opt out. In companies that have such programs, enrollment has jumped 40 percent. “Humans are imperfect,” Thaler said. “We need all the help we can get. Choice is good … but the idea that people will always make the correct choice is ridiculous.”

Z.S.

Photo: The housefly etched in an Amsterdam airport urinal gives men a target.

Expanding rates

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Even though the price of a first-class stamp rose to 42 cents in early May, you might want to consider buying some one-cent stamps—to use with the 41-cent stamp that honors U of C alumnus Edwin Hubble. Ninety-nine years after Hubble, SB'1910, PhD'17, helped the U of C capture a national basketball championship as a third-year physics major, and 85 years after he proved the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way, the U. S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp in Hubble's honor in early March. At the astronomy & astrophysics department's weekly colloquium on April 30, James Mruk, public-affairs manager for the postal service's Great Lakes area, presented Rocky Kolb, the department's chair, with an oversized reproduction of the stamp, one in a series honoring four American scientists.

"Hubble’s accomplishments in the field of extragalactic astronomy make him the greatest American astronomer of the 20th century," Kolb told the gathering of faculty and students. "About the only thing Hubble didn’t do in astronomy is to construct the Hubble Space Telescope."

Hubble's discovery that the Andromeda Nebula was actually the Andromeda Galaxy profoundly changed cosmologists' understanding of the universe, and today no fewer than ten astronomical concepts bear his name. Perhaps most famous is the Hubble Constant, a measure describing the universe's age and expansion rate. After his studies at Chicago—where he not only played basketball but also was a gifted boxer and high jumper—he took a job at California's Mount Wilson Observatory, where he worked until his death in 1953.

L.G.

Photos: The Edwin Hubble commemorative stamp; James Mruk (left) presents the stamp to Chicago astronomer Rocky Kolb.

Photos by Lloyd DeGrane.

The dig in the White City

Rusty nails, white plaster, and bits of glass: potentially dangerous debris to most of us, but this past Saturday such materials constituted buried treasure to a group of undergraduates excavating in Jackson Park near the Museum of Science and Industry. Conducting the first archaeological dig of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition site, the students may have found evidence of the buildings that formed the White City—and bottles of soda or beer that visitors consumed.

Back in a University lab, the students—taking part in the College's Chicago Studies Program—will further examine the artifacts, which also include bricks, ceramic pieces, and a streak of black soil that may be a foundation's decayed remnants. Teacher Rebecca Graff, AM'01, an urban-archaeology graduate student, is writing her dissertation on 19th-century American tourism habits and consumption, using the Columbian Exposition as her prime example.

Graff and the undergraduates hope to add to existing knowledge about the fair, which comes from photographs, pamphlets, and souvenirs. "We have the plans for the fair, for instance," she said, "but we don't have a map that shows exactly where the buildings were. This will give us some idea where they were actually built."

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Photos (left to right): Students dig right outside the Museum of Science and Industry; they arrange and record some of the recovered materials; this piece of glass may have been part of a tonic bottle.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Breath of fresh air

When The First Breeze of Summer premiered in 1975, it was the one of the first Broadway shows performed by an all-black cast. Since then few companies have produced it—"there simply aren’t enough venues that consistently produce African American playwrights," said playwright Leslie Lee in an interview with the Court Theatre's director of marketing and communications, Adam Thurman. But this spring the Court stepped up to the challenge.

In First Breeze, which runs through June 15, three generations of an African American family navigate racial and sexual boundaries. Gremmar (Pat Bowie), the family matriarch, looks back on her youth in the segregated South, where she was known as Lucretia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), and her affairs with three different men, including the white adopted son of her employer.

The Tony-nominated play is "semi-autobiographical," said Lee. "The character of Lou [played by Calvin Dutton] is loosely based on me. My grandmother had children by different men. It was a family secret that went hidden for years."

As the Court's 2007–08 season concludes, First Breeze continues the theater's tradition of "taking risks to make the theatre evening special," says director Ron OJ Parson in his director's note. Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones writes that, at the same time the play embraces the forced, obvious family conflicts of the typical 1970s sitcom, Parson also provides a "a richly complex experience that sparks a lot of different feelings in the viewer."

R.E.K.

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Photos (left to right): Lucretia with one of her lovers, Sam Greene (Taj McCord); Gremmar (middle) with the family's minister, Reverend Mosely (wearing the suit), and Gremmar's son Milton Edwards (A.C. Smith); Milton and his wife Hattie (Jacqueline Williams).

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

The city that never sleeps

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From the turn of the century through the 1930s painter John Sloan captured Manhattan’s mundane occurrences: a housewife hanging laundry out to dry, a couple sunbathing on their roof, a subway updraft lifting a woman’s skirt. Part of the Ashcan School of realist artists, Sloan based his work on observations—from the street and from his Greenwich Village studio’s windows.

The Smart Museum’s new exhibit Seeing the City presents that work alongside the artist’s diaries and letters to explore how Sloan made sense of his rapidly evolving city. In a 1922 diary entry about The City from Greenwich Village he wrote, “Looking south over lower Sixth Avenue from the roof of my Washington Place studio, on a winter evening. The distant lights of the great office buildings downtown are seen in the gathering darkness. The triangular loft building on the right had contained my studio for three years before. Although painted from memory it seems thoroughly convincing in its handling of light and space. The spot on which the spectator stands is now an imaginary point since all the buildings as far as the turn of the elevated have been removed, and Sixth Avenue has been extended straight down to the business district."

Curated by the Delaware Art Museum, the show is the first major traveling exhibition of Sloan's New York images. Seeing the City runs through September 14 at the Smart Museum, stopping next at Winston Salem, NC's Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Z.S.

Photo: John Sloan, The City from Greenwich Village, 1922, Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Smart Museum of Art.

A seat at the table

The Saturday afternoon conference, Teaching the Humanities in Difficult Times, was running a few minutes late, giving the 50-some people waiting in the pews at the Hyde Park Union Church time to notice that the four chairs at the maroon-clothed table didn't match with the eight advertised speakers.

The conference—coordinated by the Humanities Division's Civic Knowledge Project and cosponsored by, among others, the Illinois Humanities Council and the University's Darfur Action and Education Fund—focused on an educational project that had been hard to orchestrate: a Clemente Course in the Humanities being run in Darfur/Sudan for people who have been displaced by the conflict there. But it turned out that making it to the conference proved equally difficult.

Socratic seminars bringing literature, philosophy, and art to the poor, prisoners, and other distressed people in the hopes of transforming how they view the world and their role in it, the Clemente Course program was founded in 1995 by author Earl Shorris. The 110-hour courses are offered in Canada, Mexico, South America, Asia, Australia, and—since February 2008—for men and women in refugee displacement camps in Khartoum.

Shorris began his remarks by explaining that Cairo's U.S. Embassy had denied or delayed visas for some key people involved in the project, including Ismat Mahmoud Ahmed, a member of Khartoum University's philosophy faculty: "So we have a problem."

Denied a visa because, he was told, his English wasn't good enough, Ahmed wrote a letter about the philosophy course he taught, which Civic Knowledge Project director Bart Schultz read aloud. In his letter Ahmed outlined the curriculum (readings that began with Plato and ended with Islamic texts that "urge dialogue and call for openness").

"At first," Ahmed wrote, "I was much afraid to depend only on the Socratic method." In explaining how he would teach to his students, many of whom were used to rote instruction, he compared his role to ta traffic manager, theirs to the drivers, but confessed: "Mainly I was concerned that there would be no cars in the streets." Instead, he found, "there was a traffic jam."

M.R.Y.

Career advice for would-be profs

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Inside a second-floor Ida Noyes meeting room, Lesley Lundeen urged an audience of about 20 graduate students in baseball caps and blue jeans to do a little soul-searching. "Who are you?" she asked. "Where do you fit in?" An assistant director for the University's Career Advising & Planning Services, Lundeen led an hour-long information session Tuesday afternoon to help would-be future professors prepare for the academic job market. The presentation and others like it are part of several services CAPS offers to graduate students looking for jobs both inside and outside academia.

Applicants should start the process, Lundeen said, with some deliberation. At what kind of institution would they be happiest? In what type of city? Do students consider themselves researchers who teach, citizen scholars with an activist bent, or teachers who also do research? "It's all about the match," she said. "Often an applicant who looks like a shoo-in on paper doesn't end up getting the job, and almost always that's because the fit wasn't right."

Dispensing handouts and recommending guidebooks, Lundeen also offered immediate advice. First, she said, make sure your dissertation is nearly finished before embarking on applications—which can consume considerable hours over potentially a year. A good curriculum vitae, she said, is the "cornerstone" of the application, often the first thing selection committees read. Proofread carefully, she added, and don't pad: better to leave off academic-journal articles still "under review." In the cover letter—simultaneously a writing sample, personal statement, and critical argument—"any jargon has to go. If you didn't know a term before you got here, think about whether somebody else would either." The same goes for research statements. "Give it to someone completely outside your field," Lundeen said, "and then ask them to tell you what your research is about."

Finally, Lundeen reminded graduate students to stay abreast of their online presence. "Google yourself and Facebook yourself" to see what information turns up, she said. "If you keep a research blog, make sure it's honest, critical, that it's kept current, and not gossipy. ... Everything you do, even in the early stages of your application, is making an impression."

L.G.


Photos: Despite taking place at the end of a workday during the spring quarter's final week, an information session on the academic job market drew a sizeable crowd of graduate students.

Benched for the season

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Where the "leaning tree" (removed in 2005) once stood on a patch of grass between the Oriental Institute and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel—its low-lying bough providing a natural perch—now there is a sitting area with several benches, lampposts, and greenery. The benches form a circle at 58th and Woodlawn and also line up toward the OI and south along Woodlawn.

"It's nice to have a place out here to sit down and relax that's outside the main quads," said Tom James, the OI Museum's curatorial assistant, having a mid-morning snack on one of the benches Thursday. He noticed the new amenities, which had been surrounded by work fences for several months, early this week. He especially appreciates the added lighting. "Last night I was here until 9:30, and afterward I came out and sat for a while."

ABP

Photos: Tom James enjoys the new benches near the OI; two students sit in the circular area.

In the neighborhood

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"Is that Jimmy's?" asked Leong Tan, MD'58, as he looked out the tour-bus window at the more-than-50-year-old Hyde Park watering hole. Now there's a Starbucks next door, noted Tan's classmate Robert Weiler, MD'58, who sat with his wife across the aisle. Driving through the streets of Hyde Park, the 12 or so alumni on the Alumni Weekend UnCommon Tour (part of the UnCommon Core program organized by the University's Alumni Association) remembered those days when "the Tiki" sat at 53rd and Cornell (it closed in 2000) and were relieved that Harold's Chicken and Orly's were still up and running.

Amid nostalgic sighs, the group also observed the neighborhood's change. Sonya Malunda, assistant VP and director of community affairs, narrated the tour through Hyde Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Kenwood and Woodlawn. Having lived in the shadow of the campus since 1984, Malunda has experienced its ups and downs and seen a lot of changes.

As the tour headed west, she pointed out the area just beyond Ellis, where over the last 20 years the University has expanded its "medical and science enterprise." And where the Ida B. Wells public-housing project once stood at 37th and Vincennes, she told the tour-goers, there now are mixed-income condos. "Years ago," said Malunda, this was a "haven for all sorts of negativity," but in recent years that community has become safer.

The entire South Side is in a period of rebirth, Malunda said, partly thanks to the University of Chicago's "civic involvement," which includes four University-run charter schools. The University of Chicago, she said, is of Chicago, not just of Hyde Park. With that title, she explained, "comes obligation to be of the city."

R.E.K.

Photo: Assistant VP and Director of Community Affairs Sonya Malunda narrates a tour around campus and its neighboring communities.

Photo by Dan Dry.

The ringing, ringing, ringing of the bells, bells, bells

Some dressed in suits and ties, others in shorts and flip-flops, hundreds of students, faculty, and alumni packed Rockefeller Memorial Chapel this past Saturday for a concert to rededicate the chapel's E. M. Skinner pipe organ and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller carillon. Listeners, many of them children, stood pressed against the building's walls or sat, legs folded, on the stone floor. More than one audience member remarked that they'd "never seen the chapel so full."

The weekend performance constituted a coming-out party for the two instruments, following a three-year, $3 million restoration project that gave each a more powerful, more nuanced sound. Calling the event "a celebration of two University gems," Vice President and Dean of Students Kim Goff-Crews welcomed several special guests, among them former Rockefeller dean Alison Boden and former University president (and musicologist) Don Randel, who helped spearhead the restoration.

Kicking off at 4:40 p.m., the concert stretched past nightfall. Four University choirs accompanied organist Thomas Weisflog, SM'69, and carillonneur Wylie Crawford, MAT'70, and the program included organ pieces commissioned for the event from William Bolcom and Chicago music professor Marta Ptaszynska. Audience members had planned to assemble on the lawn after the organ performance to hear the carillon, but just after 7 p.m., as the final notes of "I was Glad When They Said Unto Me" faded from the organ's pipes, rain began to fall. When the downpour let up 15 minutes later, the bravest listeners made their way outdoors as Crawford warmed up the carillon and dusk began to fall.

Listen to the restored organ.

Laurie Jorgensen and Lydialyle Gibson

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Photos (left to right): Carillonneur Wylie Crawford crouches beneath one of the carillon's restored bells; Crawford and organist Thomas Weisflog smile in front of the organ, which now includes 8,565 pipes; after the rain stops, listeners gather outside to hear the carillon.

Left and center photos by Dan Dry; right photo by Laurie Jorgensen.

A woman of substance

At last Saturday's alumni convocation, Alumni Medal-winner Mildred Dresselhaus, PhD'58, noted that it was 50 years ago this month that she defended her physics thesis at Chicago. Now she was back—after a career at MIT conducting groundbreaking research in condensed-matter physics, encouraging more women to enter science and engineering, and directing the federal Office of Science under President Bill Clinton—to receive the University of Chicago Alumni Association's highest honor.

Speaking on "my University of Chicago roots," she told the audience gathered in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel—including other award winners and Alumni Weekend visitors—that her education had been broad. Physics professor Enrico Fermi believed graduate students "should learn the fundamentals of all subfields of physics," she said, "so when they decided somewhere during their graduate studies to pursue one type or another of physics, they would be able to do that." That breadth came in handy as she moved to new research topics, directed a lab "where I had responsibilities for many different areas," served on company boards where "I was the only scientist," and in the Clinton Administration was "able to ask people in other fields specific questions."

Another valuable lesson she learned at Chicago: "get up early in the morning and get my work done before everybody else arrived." Otherwise you spend your day in meetings or on things other than your own work. "Even when I was working in the government I used to arrive before any of the staff so I would have everything ready when they arrived."

Hard work was also a theme later in the ceremony, as professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics Peter Vandervoort, AB'54, SB'55, SM'56, PhD'60, shared some personal anecdotes about the medalist. As his teaching assistant, Dresselhaus "scolded me for neglecting to work as many physics problems as she knew I should," he said, drawing laughter from the crowd. As President Robert J. Zimmer placed the medal over Dresselhaus's head, the chapel audience applauded.

A.B.P.

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Photos (left to right): Dresselhaus tells the group what she learned at the University; the Rockefeller crowd listens to her speak; President Zimmer awards her the Alumni Medal.

Photos by Dan Dry.

How to get from MBA to CEO

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Storm clouds threatened, but rain never fell on the GSB's convocation Sunday afternoon. Umbrellas at the ready, families and friends of soon-to-be graduates began lining up outside Harper Quad more than an hour before the ceremony's start time, hoping to snag a good seat when the gates opened.

After the U of C pipe band led a cap-and-gown procession of more than 700 graduates and faculty to their seats, Steven Kaplan, the GSB's Neubauer Family professor of entrepreneurship and finance, offered what he called a "PEP talk." Pressing one last lesson on the graduating class, Kaplan explained that PEP was an acronym he used for "persistent, efficient, and proactive," the three qualities that, according to his research, make for the most successful CEOs. Almost all of those with PEP succeed, compared to fewer than half of those without it.

Kaplan also offered graduates a brief pep talk: "You are not the first class to graduate in an economically unsettled time," he said. The GSB classes of 1989 and 2001 found themselves in similar straits. Yet no matter how the economy fluctuates, he assured them, "your abilities and talents are constants."

After the ceremony ended, the newly minted alumni headed to Ida Noyes to pick up their diplomas, which University officials were keeping safe and dry indoors. As they had walked across the stage, President Robert J. Zimmer had handed them empty diploma covers.

L.G.

Photo: Professor Steven Kaplan addressed GSB graduates at Sunday's convocation.

Shedding light on dark matters

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Bucktown's Map Room bar was unusually crowded for a Monday evening, with people crammed into every table and leaning against the map-covered walls. The attractions weren't only organic pizza and international beers but also a discussion with astronomy & astrophysics professor Michael Turner, focusing on dark energy and dark matter. The event, part of the Cafe Scientifique series, drew both U of C and unaffiliated listeners, who turned their ears to hear Turner's baritone voice—even with a microphone he was sometimes faint amid other patrons' conversations across the bar.

We're in "the golden age of cosmology," Turner said, on the verge of answering "questions that Einstein and Newton couldn't answer." Cosmologists are close to sorting the puzzle of dark matter, which makes up 25 percent of the universe and holds it all together—"universal glue," he called it. "We think it's just particles," he said. Dark matter's particles are lighter than neutrinos and are called neutralinos. While he'd like to produce a neutralino at Fermilab, the particle accelerator there probably isn't strong enough, so later this summer he and other scientists will travel to Switzerland to use the machine at CERN.

Next up is figuring out dark energy, which makes up 71 percent of the universe (the other 4 percent is atoms) and has been battling the dark-matter glue by driving the universe's expansion. ("Who came up with the term dark energy? That's dumb," he joked before raising his hand and laughing: "That's me." Turner coined it in 1998.) Unlike dark matter—and everything else—dark energy doesn't seem to be made up of particles. It's more like "a sheet that's so elastic it can't be pulled apart." While Turner discussed dark energy, the microphone blew out, leaving some listeners in the dark. Then the mic came back. "OK," he said, "we're talking about the fate of the universe."

He looked to the far future: billions of years from now the universe might "stop expanding and fall back on itself," or, according to string theory, it could "collapse and then start over again." After audience questions about black holes, government science funding, and the big bang, the event was over. But many people waited for a chance to talk with Turner one-on-one, hoping to get more answers about the cosmos.

A.B.P.

Photos: An SRO crowd listens to Michael Turner at the Map Room; when the microphone went out, Turner stood on a table so the group could hear.

The rest is history

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The year is 1976: Jimmy Carter defeats Gerald Ford in the presidential election, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak develop the Apple Computer Company—and at the U of C, British-history PhD candidate Mark Horowitz prepares for his oral exam.

"To say I was nervous is an understatement," Horowitz wrote in a Winter 1976 Magazine article, "Fear of Failing." "It was soon determined that on February 6, from 1 to 3 p.m., the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' would join the head of British history for my Exam. I had been taking the Orals in my head nightly since December; by January I was reciting it. [My wife] Barbi couldn't even fix a skirt without a comment from her hebephrenic husband ('Did you know that worsteds like that skirt didn't really get going commercially until the sixteenth century? Why, in the West Riding of Yorkshire...!')"

He passed his orals but never completed his degree—the need to support his family pushed his studies aside, so he began a marketing and consulting career in Chicago. But on April 29, 32 years after taking his exam, Horowitz defended his 276-page dissertation, "Law, Order, and Finance: The Development of Statecraft in the Reign of Henry VII," in front of professors Adrian Johns, Steven Pincus, and John A. Guy. Last Friday, under the pretense of giving a history talk on campus, he surprised his family by inviting them to Hyde Park, where they watched him (finally) receive his PhD at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

R.E.K.

Photo: According to a 2007 study by the Council of Graduate Schools, fewer than 50 percent of history PhD candidates finish within ten years.

Photo courtesy the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Taking it to the street

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In the early 20th century, urban photographers such as Walker Evans and Paul Strand used only a camera and modernist techniques (like abstraction and fragmentation) to capture daily city life in New York City, Chicago, Paris, Havana, and Moscow, among others. With "an aesthetic unique to the camera," argues the Smart Museum's exhibit Street Level: Modern Photography from the Smart Museum Collection, their work "demarcate[d] a space for photography as an art form in its own right." The one-room show mirrors the theme presented by the Smart's six-gallery special exhibit, Seeing the City: Sloan's New York, which features artist John Sloan's early 20th century paintings and drawings of street scenes and cityscapes.

Curated by Rachel Furnari, AM'02, a PhD candidate in art history, Street Level is divided into three sections. Furnari starts with "On the Street," images of working-class immigrants next to shop windows: evidence, she writes in the exhibit notes, of "a new acceptance of camera's accurate, narrative scenes and abstract, aestheticized versions of 20th-century urbanity." The next stop is "Above," where the photographer's angle is "only made possible by modern technology like airplanes and skyscrapers." In one picture, Flying in Red Square, photojournalist Georgy Zelma shoots Moscow's Red Square from above through scaffolding, fragmenting the crowds of people gathered below. Finally, Furnari takes us "Below," back to the "more intimate scale encountered in 'On the Street,'" but this time, the subjects are "pressed in by tall buildings, elevated train tracks, and long, high bridges."

Street Level runs through September 7.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: Nathan Lerner, Cigar Store, 1934, gelatin silver print; bottom: Ben Shahn, Untitled (New York City), 1932-1935 [c.?], gelatin silver print mounted on heavy paper, vintage impression .

Photos courtesy the Smart Museum.

Art will move mountains

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The smell of raw lumber greets pedestrians strolling down Cornell Avenue outside the Hyde Park Art Center. Inside the building’s open doorways, two 16-foot-tall wooden skeletal mountains sit on a divided stage, linked to one another by ropes attached to pulleys. The piece, ‘Olympus Manger,’ Scene II, is “an investigation of scale, landscape, the built environment, and its relationship to the body,” according to artist Kelly Kaczynski’s exhibit notes. The piece allows viewers to remain a “spectator,” or assume an “actor” role by climbing on stage and partaking in a tug-of-war with the ropes dangling off the towers. Pulling the ropes results in a slow joining, and eventual collapse, of the towers.

Kaczynski calculated that the two stages’ collision should last the duration of the exhibition’s 13-week run, according to notes by Allison Peters, director of the art center's exhibits, thereby mimicking the slow pace of natural phenomena like plate tectonics. But just as earthquakes can suddenly rattle or volcanoes can erupt, Olympus Manger is prone to bursts of activity, based on the number of visitors to the gallery who choose to participate. Eventually the two stages will be fused together and the structural debris from the two mountains will transform into a single mass.

The exhibit runs through July 6.

Z.S.

Photo: Kelly Kaczynski, 'Olympus Manger,' Scene II, 2008, wood, dry wall, rope and glue.

Photo courtesy the Hyde Park Art Center.

Crash introduction

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Future MBAs from around the globe descended on the Gleacher Center this week for the 2008 start of the GSB's Executive MBA program. Wearing jeans and polo shirts (a few in slacks and Oxford shirts), nearly 300 new enrollees hauled rolling bags and laptotp cases through the building's lobby on Thursday, making their way to and from the day's lectures, group-study sessions, and a lunchtime talk by GSB professor Ron Burt, PhD'77, a social psychologist who studies social capital and competitive advantage.

By next week, two-thirds of the students will head home—the Executive MBA program draws students from roughly 50 countries—where they'll be based at the GSB campuses in either London or Singapore. (The rest study in Chicago.) During the program's 21-month curriculum, designed for working executives with at least ten years of professional experience, classmates from all three campuses gather and study together for four weeklong sessions. "Kick-Off Week is a chance for them to get to know each other and get their feet wet, and for the faculty to get them started in classes," said Deb Fallahay, associate program director. Some courses begin and end during Kick-Off Week; others continue when students return to their far-flung campuses.

Professor Linda Ginzel's Essentials of Effective Management is one of those all-in-a-week classes. On the agenda for Thursday afternoon's three-hour session, Ginzel announced as students filed into their seats and put up cardboard nameplates bearing appellations like Sergey, Chee Han, Yetunde, Stefan, and Vijay, was "group process and team decision-making." But before diving into the lesson plan, she offered what she called an "editorial" on working with others: "There are two ways to rise in this world," she said: step on other people, or lift them up and rise with them. The latter is much harder, Ginzel said, but "you should always leave people with the same dignity and sense of self that they had when you began the interaction. You will do better in life." And with that, she directed the class to a teamwork exercise involving a hypothetical plane crash in the Canadian subarctic and a list of survival items to rank in order of importance: among them, a flashlight, a compass, matches, snowshoes, sleeping bags, a shaving kit (with mirror), water-purification tablets, and a fifth of rum. Said Ginzel, looking at the clock at the back of the room, "You have 15 minutes."

L.G.

Photo: This week the Gleacher Center hosted Kick-Off Week for the Executive MBA program.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Rhythm and rhymes

Hip hop filled the usually staid living room at I-House, creating the expectation of a party instead of a book reading. A hundred folding chairs, seating an audience of white-haired professors and public-housing residents, replaced the usual pianos and soft-toned sofas. Grandmaster Flash—the legendary musician and deejay who, in 2007, became one of the first hip-hop artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—arrived at I-House at 6 p.m. last Wednesday to promote his new autobiography, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (Broadway Books).

“My chronic achievement,” began Grandmaster Flash, who was born Joseph Saddler and also goes by GMF, “is being the first deejay to make turntables an instrument.”

He grew up with music in the Bronx. His father had an extensive jazz collection that he wasn’t allowed anywhere near. But when he heard the “click of the key and the bang of the door” signaling that his father had left for work, he would sneak into the living room and play music. When his father found out that his records had been touched, he began beating the young GMF, sometimes sending him to the hospital. But it didn’t quell his curiosity. “For me," he said, the question was “how does music live inside those little black tunnels?”

He discovered not only how the "tunnels" held music, but also how to manipulate them to create new sounds. Credited with inventing "cutting," an early form of scratching, GMF described himself as a scientist. He was the first to violate the rules of the previous generation's deejays, who “treated records like a child” and cleaned them with velvet cloths. GMF used his hands on the records for complete control of the sound. He would mark them with crayon to know when to turn them counterclockwise, prolonging the parts of the song he preferred. He replaced the rubber mat on his turntable with a piece of felt that he spray-starched on his mother’s ironing board when her back was turned.

During the Q-and-A that followed the talk, a Cabrini-Green resident stood to explain that he was recently released from “the penitentiary” and had started a record label. “I’ve got a track,” he said. Anywhere else, a famous musician might have been annoyed at an opportunistic fan trying to get his track heard. But the I-House living room's audience, collectively holding its breath for a moment, seemed to perceive an implied bond between the two.

“I seen that,” said GMF. “I seen the projects. And I’m gonna play that track on my radio show.”

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): Grandmaster Flash performs briefly during his talk; afterward, he signs a copy of his autobiography and poses for a photograph with a fan.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Reduce, reuse, recaffeinate

Everything starts somewhere—and in the Backstory Café’s case, almost everything started somewhere else. Opened in Woodlawn last week, at first glance the place seems like any other coffee shop around the U of C. On a Monday afternoon the shop isn’t particularly busy, but a half-dozen patrons type on laptops or murmur conversations over single-serve coffee from Metropolis (all brewed to order using a special slow-filter method—no big pots of drip in this establishment) or fresh soup. One undergraduate pores over a stack of books on the ancient Near East. Photographs depicting couples in stark landscapes from the series The Imp of Love by Rachel Herman, MFA’06, decorate the brick walls. Near a shelf in the corner, which holds used books gleaned from Powell’s and available for perusal and purchase, two other students leaf through Slavoj Žižek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2005), discussing the chapter titles. But in Backstory, the books aren’t the only things reused.

Almost everything in the café is recycled and sustainable. The interior was designed by members of the Experimental Station, which hosts the café, and Material Exchange, a collective including several recent Chicago MFAs that repurposes cast-off materials from art exhibits, museums, and other cultural venues for both functional and artistic practices. Material Exchange recycled some of the tables from a Museum of Science and Industry exhibit and built others using leftover pine panels from the Art Institute’s Sharp Building—the same pine was used for the huge storage cabinet tucked in the corner. Maple from tabletops at a South Loop factory became the trash receptacle and part of the wood trim around the windows and doors. Even the decorative blackboards—which bear the scribbles of children and phrases like “if you want to go somewhere, come here!”—are recycled from a 2007 Hyde Park Art Center exhibit.

Backstory, which bills itself as a “café, infoshop, bookstore,” offers a place to gather, eat, and learn for both Woodlawn and Hyde Park by virtue of its 61st and Blackstone location. Owners Sara Black, MFA’06, and Saadia Shah are planning events to introduce Backstory to its community, including a film series—specific details to come. In its first week, says employee Chris Willard, the shop has drawn patrons including community gardeners and construction workers on projects south of the Midway. Backstory has hosted “a mix of customers from Woodlawn and from Hyde Park,” he notes, “the most relaxed, most friendly customers” he’s ever served. Maybe it’s the sustainable environment—or maybe it’s the prospect of a steady supply of fresh-roasted, hot coffee.

Rose Schapiro, '09

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Photos (left to right): Customers check out the used books; visitors have decorated the blackboard; the café offers tons of treats.

Three professors, three views

Ate too much over the long weekend? For some food for thought, check out these professors' opinions.

Read Geoffrey Stone's op-ed in the New York Times about the need for a "civil liberties adviser" to the president.

Listen to Jens Ludwig's NPR interview about the D.C. handgun ban.

Watch the "always entertaining" Richard Epstein discuss the administrative state at a Chicago's Best Ideas talk.

Shira Tevah, '09

Quick slips of the tongue

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At the start of Monday’s class, the 18 undergraduate, graduate, and visiting students in French 10100 seem nervous—they have two quizzes to take before the lesson commences, and it’s already the last week of the course. The instructor, Céline Bordeaux, also a French department program assistant coordinator, hands each student two sheets of paper, which ask questions like “Comment on dit en français?” (translate phrases like “She’s as tactful as them” into French) and “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire en anglais?” (offer English counterparts to French adjectives).

The course meets at 6 p.m. for two or three hours, four times a week. Next week French 10200 begins for most of the students, who are condensing an entire year of language lessons into the nine-week summer quarter. Their final exam is this Friday.

Bordeaux collects the quizzes, then turns to the day’s lesson. She cues a video showing a young French woman named Adèle on the large classroom television. Adèle begins, “J’aime bien beaucoup de choses…” and goes on to describe the music she enjoys, like jazz and French songs. The vocabulary lesson includes types of music—“le blues, le disco, la musique pop”—and before the two-hour lesson is over, students have also learned the vocabulary for television-show genres and objects one might find in a bedroom. Other topics include the difference between definite and indefinite articles, how to agree and disagree in casual conversation, and the conjugation pattern for verbs that end in “–er.” The last is important because the same pattern applies to verbs from “parler” (speak) to “trouver” (find): “Over 8,000 French verbs have this infinitive and will conjugate the same,” Bordeaux says.

Chicago’s summer language classes, offered in 17 different tongues, may be fast-paced, but they are also a draw. Ari Bookman, for instance, a graduate student in English at Northwestern, commutes from Evanston four times a week with several friends who are also taking Chicago language courses.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: Some of Monday's French exercises in the notebook of Ari Bookman, a visitor from Northwestern.

Students rally for labor

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More than 50 people crowded the corner outside the Friend Family Health Center (FFHC) last Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. A handful of students joined union members of Teamsters Local 743 to demand a new contract and pay raises for clerical staff. Camera shutters snapped, flip-flops slapped the sidewalk, and cars and city buses honked as they passed, adding to the cacophony that filled the air. "What do we want?" shouted the group. "A contract!"

Although FFHC is only blocks from the U of C Medical Center, it has its own board, according to John Easton, the Medical Center's director of media relations. "Our pediatricians see clients there," Easton said, "but the University has nothing to do with the management."

Despite FFHC's independence from the University, some students feel connected to the situation. “The issue,” explained Robin Peterson, '11, a member of Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), “started two years ago when the contract expired.” Negotiations for a new employment contract between FFHC and the 11 Teamsters who work there have stalled, she said, over points of contention including merit-based raises and relations between supervisors and their subordinates.

Peterson has been involved with SOUL since last September. A writer for the student-run Chicago Weekly, she covered the workers at FFHC for the paper. Activism and journalism are compatible, believes Peterson, who became dedicated to the FFHC issue while reporting her article.

The workers and students marched in a mock picket line to the front of the building and then back to the corner, where speakers included Richard Berg, president of Local 743; members of the organization Interfaith Worker Justice; and former alderman Leon Despres, AB’27, JD’29, in a wheelchair and shiny black 743 hat. Despres, 100, raised the bullhorn with hands trembling from its weight. “I want to tell you a brief story," he said, "from ancient times."

The story, from the Old Testament, described a tree branch that was weak by itself but strong with six other branches. “My wish for you,” he said, “is that you be so strong that you cannot be broken.”

A week after the rally, Friend Family CEO Wayne Moyer told the Hyde Park Herald that FFHC will continue contract negotiations through a federal mediator.

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: Students, workers, and community members rally at FFHC; former alderman Leon Despres, AB’27, JD’29, applauds their efforts.

Dancing with dips

"Lloro en el espejo y me siento estúpido, ilógico," Marc Anthony’s passionate cries from the song "Ahora Quien" filled the room—"I cry at the mirror and I feel stupid, illogical." But instructors Annmarie Micikas, ’09, and James Martin, ’10, looked neither stupid nor illogical as they demonstrated dipping techniques in a Latin-dance workshop. The July 7 class was part of a summer series for intermediate-level dancers, offered by the U of C Ballroom and Latin Dance Association. The series also includes lessons in Cuban salsa, Rueda, musicality, styling, and several unannounced topics.

The class began with a chance for the dancers to warm up: ten women stood behind Micikas; behind Martin were half as many men. Attendees formed couples and women rotated partners every few minutes. Micikas and Martin demonstrated the dips and explained how to do them step-by-step. "It's more of an optical illusion than anything," Martin told the men. "Make it look like you’re leaning more than you are."

But dipping wasn’t as easy as Martin made it look or sound. Most of the dancers didn’t know each other, and the teachers had to remind them to get up close and personal. "I can still see between your bodies; you’re not doing the dip right," Micikas admonished one couple. Learning with strangers comes with a risk of social discomfort—Vanessa Copeland, ’09, was initially told by one partner that she was "a below-average dancer." When she informed him that it was only her second class, he rescinded his judgment. The two even found common ground: they’d both learned to dance ballroom, not Latin, and were having similar difficulties with the transition. "Then," Copeland recalled, "he taught me a bunch of new steps."

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): Annmarie Micikas, '09, and James Martin, '10, teach a cross-body lead and dip; math instructor Alexey Cheskidov dances with Katharine Bierce, '10; Micikas explains what not to do; IIT student Imran Bashir sends Allison Ross, '09, to her next partner.

Alive and kicking

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“I can’t believe I just struck out in kickball!” exclaimed Cheryl Luce, ’09, as she watched her fourth foul land resolutely out of bounds. At the top of the fifth inning, Luce’s team trailed her opponents by several runs—but who’s counting?

Not most of the players. Instead, the two dozen kickballers gathered at Stagg Field were more intent on the pleasures of the game and less intent on winning. They clapped when the other team scored and high-fived as they reached bases. Low-level strategizing abounded among teammates—“Kick it slow and straight at the center.” “Try to get it down the third base line.” “Run no matter what!”

The informal summer league, which meets weekly, was organized in June by Amy Martin, Alejandra Mejia, Helen Gregg, and Luce, all ’09. They invited friends via Facebook and urged them to invite others. Mixed-gender teams are picked at the start of each game; intensity depends on who shows up and how much they remember about a game that most haven’t thought about in nearly a decade. Requiring only a set of bases and a rubber ball, the organizers realized that kickball could be played almost anywhere and enjoyed by even the least athletic college students. Mejia, who pitched for her team through several innings, claimed that she could not “run, kick, or catch.”

Around the seventh (and second-to-last) inning, after some haggling about how many innings had been played and the number of runs scored, the competition level intensified. Despite Mejia’s disavowal of athletic prowess, she made the play that decided the game. The bases were loaded, and as Bailey Scott, ’09, was speeding toward home plate to score a tying run, Mejia tagged her out. At the pitcher’s mound Mejia attempted to scoop up the ball with her foot, but instead kicked it away—and right at Scott, who looked surprised as it glanced her leg a few yards from the plate. “Does that even count?” asked Scott. It did. The game was over. The teams shook hands and headed off into the late-afternoon sun.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: Cheryl Luce takes the plate.


The trouble with TV

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For 48 hours Chad Broughton’s Consumerism and Popular Culture students did not watch TV, use the Internet (they were allowed to check e-mail once per day), read magazines or newspapers, or listen to the radio.

“You said there are other things to do,” said Michael Hirsch, ’11, during the class discussion after the media-starvation exercise, “but I wasn’t in the mood to read a novel or exercise after running around all day.” The eight students came to a consensus: nobody who reads for school wants to read for pleasure. Broughton, AM'97, PhD'01, wanted them to get a sense of their dependence on media through abstaining from it. “One of the criticisms of media,” Broughton explained, “is that it leads to less development of social capital and relationships.” But for Debbie Ao, ’09, who asserted that she spends time with her family while watching TV, it can have the reverse effect.

The class took an online PBS “media literacy” quiz and learned: the average American seventh-grader watches three hours of television per day, children view an average of 40,000 commercials a year, and excessive TV watching is associated with obesity. The students also took a quiz to evaluate their own relationships to media, which, in an ironic twist, turned out to be a marketing tool for a book about TV-free life. "Yikes," the site warned those high scores, "you probably have a serious addiction problem." But never fear, it continued: we have the solution for only $11.95!

During the class's second hour, students analyzed race perceptions in mass media through clips from Peter Pan, Pocahontas, and the 1986 documentary Ethnic Notions, which argues that the end of slavery led to popular-culture images of African Americans as threatening. “Psychologists say there are two primal emotions: love and fear,” Broughton said. “Love can sell some movies, some popular culture, but not as much as fear.”

He urged the class to consider today’s equivalent media images. “The constructed gangster rapper really is the polar social other” from the suburban residents who constitute a majority of rap consumers, noted Kendall Ames, ’10. Broughton pointed to connections between perceptions mass media help create of African Americans and policies regulating things like welfare and incarceration. “Conspiracy isn’t a helpful word,” Broughton said about the connections between media and policy, “but loop is. There’s a feedback loop.”

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: Kendall Ames, '10; Debbie Ao, '09; Liz Baker-Jennings, ‘09; and Michael Hirsch, '11, watch Ethnic Notions with instructor Chad Broughton; the film shows a popular media image of blacks from the slave era.

Be our Guest

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Poet Barbara Guest’s play "The Office” uses three scenes and six actors to satirize an office environment. As the office workers are quietly killed off over the course of the 20-minute play, the characters express themselves through increasingly disturbing quips—"Memo. A skeletal staff will remain."

One of the workers attempts to compose a note to a dead coworker’s wife. “Dear Madam: the death of your late deaf husband—deaf to no one but me. Now dead to all.” A surreal work, “The Office” was staged at the Experimental Station on Thursday, at the release party for the latest issue of Chicago Review. The play was originally produced in New York in 1961 but remained unpublished until the quarterly Review printed it in this month's triple issue. With a page-count of three magazines and taking three-quarters of a year to publish, the special issue is devoted to the work of Guest, who died in 2006. "The Office" closed out the night at Experimental Station, following readings by three poets whose work also appears in the issue: Dan Beachy-Quick, Ed Roberson, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The Barbara Guest edition of Chicago Review, a 62-year-old literary magazine edited by U of C graduate students, collects three of her plays and several unpublished poems along with critical and personal responses to her work by scholars and writers she influenced, including Charles Altieri and Andrea Brady. The editors hope, they write in an editor’s note, to "confirm Guest's importance to the history of postwar American poetry and demonstrate her continuing influence." Guest is one of the only women associated with the New York School of formalist, painterly poetics. She is also considered highly influential for the language poets, and her later work focuses more on the power of the word and less on Imagism.

“The Office” concludes with a conversation between the last remaining office worker, now "the boss," and a woman who heretofore had remained mute. When the woman notes, “You’re the boss,” the man replies, "Me? I've never had a glass of champagne. / I've never eaten an oyster. / I've never made a beautiful voyage…. / I’ve never seen you before.” For Guest’s work, the “never seen” can now be read, repeatedly, in Chicago Review.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: From Barbara Guest's "The Office": A strange game of tic-tac-toe; workers consult their papers.

Photos courtesy Robert Baird. See more here.

May I have this job?

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“How do you do?” inquired a man dressed in navy slacks and a striped tie as he shook my hand at the door. I was struggling to locate a response to the unexpected greeting when he asked, “Did you sign up in time for a sandwich?”

The man was Brian Flora, the foreign-service recruiter for the Midwest; the sandwiches were provided by CAPS at a July 17 information session at Ida Noyes Hall about State Department jobs. Twenty-five students, many in suits and ties themselves, attended the session. Vinayak Ishwar, ’09, admitted that he had begged his supervisor at Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office—where he has a summer internship—to allow him to attend the presentation.

“The Foreign Service is for people who are extroverted,” Flora said, “and don’t like to get stuck in a rut. It’s for people who don’t mind packing their stuff—their junk, their lives—and sending them around the world at the government’s expense.” The benefits Flora listed included good pay, health insurance, and the fact that the government will ship your dog anywhere with you.

But the jobs are easy neither to attain nor perform. “You don’t waltz into it,” he warned. He stressed the advantage of being at least 25, having graduate education, and speaking critical languages such as Mandarin and Arabic. You can take the Foreign Service exam once a year until age 58, he said, “but most people give up before then.”

The government sends first-time employees to the locations they request. But after spending time in “fun” places like Western Europe, he explained, “the computer spits out your name for hardship and danger tours,” which include regions that are isolated, impoverished, at high risk for disease, or under dictatorships. Flora, whose tours included time in Vietnam, where he’d been stationed during the war, as well as in Chad and Romania during violent revolutions, emphasized that danger and hardship tours are higher paid and last for only one year.

“Have you ever been in a position when your personal ideas conflicted with what the government told you to do?” asked Joy Wattawa, who is receiving her degree from the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences in August.

“You are expected to defend U.S. foreign policy,” Flora answered. “And usually that’s easy to do.” But, he added, “Most of us thought Iraq was the wrong thing to do.” Officers who disagree with U.S. policy make use of official rhetoric, Flora explained, pointing out that “for Vietnam and Iraq there were very good justifications.”

“And,” he said, “you always have the option of resigning.”

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: U.S. Department of State official seal.

Radio casts broader

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Moira Cassidy's radio show, National Public Rumpus, is heading out of its first hour, with two more to go. The program broadcasts on WHPK from 9 a.m. until noon every Tuesday during the summer—during the academic year shows are only two hours long, but the paucity of summer deejays means more work for those who stick around.

Cassidy, '11, who is also WHPK's station manager, is ready to take it on. "You're listening to WHPK, 88.5 FM, the pride of the South Side. It's 9:53 in the studio, so I hope that means it's 9:53 out there as well," she quips. "Sometimes I get worried that there's this radio time warp." After a plea for requests from “the real world” Cassidy cues her next song, experimental-pop band Deerhoof’s “Kidz are So Small,” and goes to pull albums from the station’s record library.

The WHPK record library, with its thousands of vinyl records and cds, looks predictably lived-in—deejays peruse the area 24 hours a day to find tunes for their jazz, rock, hip-hop, classical, folk, and international shows (WHPK also has a public-affairs format). To fill her additional summer air time, Today has been designated for J, K, and L, so she only plays songs starting with those letters—from All Girl Summer Fun Band’s manic “Jason Lee,” about nursing a crush on the actor, to the sweet, simple “Like Castanets” by Bishop Allen. Though some deejays manage to play 20- or 30-minute tracks, the challenge for Cassidy and her pop-inclined taste is finding 50 or 60 songs a week. She says, “I’m getting through it.”

The station’s rock-devoted hours, midnight until noon on weeknights, require students to give up sleep in favor of playing music through the wee hours of the morning. The effect is a station with a diverse group of rock shows ranging from indie-pop metal to experimental stoner rock. Having so many deejays with different tastes has earned the station accolades. In June alt-weekly Chicago Reader named WHPK as the city’s best college radio station. The Reader joked that WHPK “‘broadcasts’ from the University of Chicago on 100 watts of sheer willpower.” While the 100-watt station doesn’t even reach Chicago’s North Side, the station does stream to the entire world on its Web site.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: Moira Cassidy pulls albums from the library; during her show she plays a 7-inch record in the studio.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Sundaes for service

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A woman in a bright pink Greater Chicago Food Depository T-shirt ran up to greet David Hays. The University Community Service Center (UCSC)'s assistant director was standing with a group of students outside Margie’s Candies in Bucktown, waiting for a table. “Are you here for the intern get-together?” Hays asked. She wasn't: though Esther Del Valle, AB’05, is a Summer Links alumna, she and her family just happened to be at the ice cream shop last Tuesday night.

Summer Links is an 11-week paid internship program run by UCSC that places students in nonprofit and public-sector organizations throughout the city. It also has a social component: the program fosters relationships and discussion between current and former interns—with the help of amenities like ice cream, which, Hays says, “has been an integral part of Summer Links” during the eight years he's worked with the program, now 11 years old.

When a table opened up, Del Valle joined the Summer Linkers and introductions were made. “You’re my girl now,” Dana Kroop, AB’07, exclaimed upon discovering that they had both had Summer Links placements at Cook County hospital. “Trauma!” they cheered, referring to the hospital ward they worked in, and exchanged a fist bump across the table. Others included Annie Roberts, AB’06, who helped manage a mortgage fund at the Illinois Facilities Fund and now works at the Boston Consulting Group; Erin Franzinger, ’09, who interned previously with the Lakeside Community Development Corporation and is now a Summer Links coordinator; Hannah McConnaughay, AB'08, who worked at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture; and Hannah Snyder, ’10, whose internship this summer is at World Relief.

“Basically I spend all of my time at public aid and the doctor’s office,” Snyder said of her internship experience. Working for case managers and employment counselors helping refugees resettle, she estimates the cases she's seen at 45 percent Iraqi, 35 percent Burmese, and the rest a mix of Congolese, Somali, and others—prompting a discussion over turtle sundaes about the patterns of immigrant and refugee influx to the United States.

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: From left to right: Dana Kroop, AB'07, joins David Hays and Esther Del Valle, AB'05, at Margie's; Hannah Snyder, '10, Erin Franzinger, '09, center, and Hannah McConnaughay, AB'08, settle the tab.

Whole lotta Shakespeare going on

As noon approached last Wednesday, a troupe of actors descended upon Hutchinson Courtyard, bed sheets and instruments in tow. They began to prepare—draping themselves in the linens, tuning a violin, and testing their microphones. The ladders, speakers, and benches they had set up became castles and ships, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre began.

At ORCSA's request, the Dean’s Men, a student group devoted to performing Shakespeare on campus, was to present a Shakespeare play over four consecutive summer Wednesdays. The series, “Shakes and Shakespeare,” also features free milkshakes for attendees—which in this case spanned grad students to grade-school summer campers, who teemed on the courtyard's grassy slopes, awaiting the treats. Last Wednesday marked the first installment, and the final chapter runs August 13.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre features incest, famine, shipwrecks, magic, murder, and prostitution. While it may not be Shakespeare’s best loved or most performed comedy, director Benno Nelson, AB’08, chose the play because its episodic nature lends itself to easy serialization. The cast of seven undergraduates plays dozens of characters.

In the first scene, King Antioch (a spot-on menacing Greg Brew, ’10) and Pericles (a brooding Griffin Sharps, ’09) admire the beauty of Antioch’s daughter, whom Pericles intends to marry. Antioch says her “face, like heaven, enticeth thee to view her countless glory, which desert must gain; and which, without desert, because thine eye presumes to reach, all thy whole heap must die.” Hearing “dessert” for “desert,” one excited camper assumed the actors were offering him a shake. “Yes, I’d like my ice cream now!” he exclaimed, scooting closer to the stage.

Rose Schapiro, '09

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Photos (left to right): Ryland Barton, '09, as Gower, the narrator; Greg Brew, '10, and Griffin Sharps, '09, discuss Pericles' dilemma; children watch the performance and drink their milkshakes; Brew, Evan Cudworth, '09, and Anna Aizman, '08, play fishermen.

Still life with dinosaurs

A small boy with bowl-cut black hair and a blue shirt dotted with airplanes drew on the white tablecloth, using his clay's mud tracks for ink instead of making the demonstrated pot. He was among the 30 or 40 children, aged 2 through 10, whose parents or caretakers had brought them to the Smart Museum for Wednesday's final installment of the Art Afternoon series, a free summer arts-and-crafts program. The most dedicated attendees said they'd been to all four of the season's previous workshops. Smart Museum docents and the museum's outreach and education-technology coordinator Melissa Holbert supervised and assisted.

This week's activity was making pots and dishes—or, for the more imaginative, miniature chairs—out of clay. The artists could watch a demonstration on the Smart Kids Web site before they began. After viewing it, one mother warned her daughter that she was going to get dirty. “That’s OK,” responded the girl authoritatively from under her pink sun hat. “When it dries you can wash it off.”

Two cousins sat at the end of a table. “He’s making a dinosaur,” one said, pointing to the other, who was using a plastic knife to scratch figures into the bottom of his bowl. “No,” said the second boy, “I’m not making a dinosaur. I’m making a dino-SAUR!” He added a person to the scene. When asked if dinosaurs are extinct, he exclaimed, “There’s no such thing as that. I’ve seen a dinosaur, a real one. But it was in a cage. It was that really big one—what’s that one called?”

Tyrannosaurus rex?”

His eyes lit up. “Yeah, that one. A T-rex.”

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): A girl contemplates her lump of clay; participants watch the demo on a laptop; "It looks like chicken!" says the boy on the left; a mother helps her child.

Paper, plain

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At first glance, a Pablo Picasso-signed letter inviting a donor to his statue’s dedication in Daley Plaza doesn’t seem to have much in common with a series of decollage coasters—but in the contemporary gallery of the Smart Museum, they hang side by side. In the exhibit On Paper, on display through August 15, the curators examine the properties of paper as a "medium, material, and subject."

The curators are also the artists, and they took inspiration from the Smart Museum's permanent collection, which they culled to create this exhibit, choosing works that fit their thematic idea. Seven rising second-year MFA candidates curated the show, displaying their own pieces next to the ones they chose from the Smart. The students' pieces, hanging side by side with the Picasso letter and works by Kerry James Marshall and Walker Evans, investigate the limits of paper, and also of politics, the circulation of ideas and materials, and how repositioning some objects can make them art when they may not have previously been considered so.

The Picasso letter, for example, was not considered an art object when it was donated to the museum, says collections curator Stephanie Smith, who assisted the students. However, set in a frame and hanging next to a print by 20th-century abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt on letter paper detailing objections to the Vietnam War ("No Draft/ No Injustice/ No Evil"), and work by MFA candidate Vanessa Ruiz that incorporates four years of her own love letters, Picasso's invitation is seen as part of a tradition that makes correspondence into art.

The epistolary can be art—and in this exhibition, so can a simple brown-painted pedestal, placed in the center of the gallery and titled "Work on Paper." For the students, who also helped to install On Paper in July, physically arranging the art on the walls and producing it themselves allowed them to create a coherent exhibition where paper, and art, can be both made and seen differently.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos (top to bottom): Work waiting to be installed for On Paper; MFA students put up their exhibit.

Photos courtesy Erik Wenzel.

Business unusual

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Twenty students dressed in business attire entered a Charles M. Harper Center classroom in a steady stream, walking purposefully and carrying folders. They murmured to one another as they took their places up front. Some passed materials to the judges, a group of Goldman Sachs representatives who were already seated. Others mingled with the audience—mostly smiling parents.

The students who presented business plans Monday were not MBA candidates. They were Chicago Public Schools juniors and seniors, and the presentations were the culmination of an Elements of Entrepreneurship course offered by the Collegiate Scholars Program and sponsored by the Goldman Sachs Foundation. Professor Waverly Deutsch, who taught the two-week course, told the judges and parents that what they were about to see was “better than the first round of my MBA students' business-plan presentations. For sure.”

The presentations were polished—students introduced the germ of a business idea, proof that their idea would have a market, and financial projections for at least the first fiscal year. Presenting in groups of four, they used PowerPoint slides to exhibit their message and defended themselves against tough questions from the ten-person panel (which included five U of C alumni, from the College and the GSB).

First was WRAP (Writing, Reading, Arts, Politics). The project, a nonprofit magazine and after-school program, would provide a forum for students to discuss and write about issues pertaining to their lives and communities. Next came uGo, a campus bike-rental service; Super Squad, a handyman and companion service for the elderly that would hire only honor-roll students with a community-service background; and Third Degree, a college search and networking Web site for high-school students. The final group presented All Star Athletic Productions (ASAP), which would film and edit videos for high-school athletes looking to be recruited by colleges. Presenter Cory Wilkins, a soccer player, noted that when he had asked his mother to shoot a highlight reel, “there were really no highlights there," just shaky footage of grass and sky.

In deliberation, open to the audience but not the teams, the judges were initially torn—both Super Squad and ASAP had presented financially feasible plans with what the judges considered a large potential for market growth. But after more than 30 minutes, they deemed ASAP the winner. The four students in the group, beaming broadly, celebrated their victory by shaking hands with Professor Deutsch—and each accepted an HP laptop computer, the surprise prize for winning the competition.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photo: ASAP presents its plan.

Hotel uproar

“This is everything I was afraid it would be,” an elderly man lamented as he looked around Bret Harte Elementary's auditorium, packed with more than 100 people. The windows were open but did little to alleviate the tension in the sweltering room. Posters of modern hotels lined the walls—all built by White Lodging, the Marriott-affiliated company whose executive came to Hyde Park August 5 to update the community about its plans for a hotel on the old Doctors Hospital site. The U of C purchased the shuttered building at 58th Street and Stony Island in 2006 and later leased the property to White Lodging, which hopes to replace the hospital with a hotel including a full-service restaurant and 15,000 feet of meeting space. Individuals and organizations including block clubs, neighborhood associations, preservation activists, and labor unions have objected to the plans. Tuesday's meeting was called by 5th ward alderwoman Leslie Hairston, U-High'79.

Scott Travis, vice president of development for White Lodging, began by emphasizing that the company is a family-owned developer. “It’s bullshit,” a woman in the audience muttered. Travis noted that Hyde Park is not a prime location for a hotel. “The return is marginal at best,” he said. “Building in a residential community comes with some risk. The truth is that the owner’s father received much-needed surgery at the U of C hospitals, which is part of why he’s willing to make this investment. We want to build in Hyde Park. We want to understand the community. And we think a hotel will be a great benefit for the community.”

When Hairston opened the floor to questions and comments, many Hyde Park residents voiced concerns, though some applauded White Lodging’s effort. For example, in response to questions raised at last year's meeting, the company will provide parking for 75 percent of the rooms, Travis said, “way more than typically needed,” as well as an off-site lot for employees.

Residents wanted to know about White Lodging's labor practices and whether it would hire from the community (Travis said they did not discriminate), the effect on local rents (Travis said they didn’t know), the fact that the hotel would serve alcohol (Travis noted, “Our primary role is to put people to sleep”), and possible “synergies”—the word used by the Woodlawn Organization's executive director Carole Millison—between hotel and community.

As the meeting wore on , the atmosphere became increasingly combative. When a member of Unite Here, the textile- and service-workers labor union, asked for a meeting with White Lodging and did not receive an immediate affirmative, members of the crowd began to chant: “Yes or no! Yes or no!”

White Lodging does not plan to use the old structure, but rather to build a hotel “contextual with the neighborhood,” according to Travis. Preserving the building, he said, is “not economically feasible.” He projected 390 rooms, ten more than previously reported by the Maroon, the Hyde Park Herald (text of the July 30 article available here), as well as uchiBLOGo and the U of C Magazine. In discussing the plans, Travis referred to an environmental-impact study, an analysis of the feasibility of preserving the old building, and demographic information about employees. “All of that info is available," he said. "We’re glad to share it.” Hairston suggested that White Lodging bring the studies to the next open meeting, which has not yet been scheduled.

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): Scott Travis from White Lodging discusses the hotel plan; Hyde Park residents listen to his presentation; Alderwoman Hairston moderates during a turbulent moment.

You had to be there

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The audience at the last summer performance of Off-Off Campus started cackling at Alex Yablon’s Australian accent soon after the nine-member troupe took the stage Friday and laughed, often uproariously, well past the 10 p.m. ending time. The performers managed to keep straight faces throughout the show, cracking smiles only as they took their bow.

The show, directed by Drew Dir, AB’07, an Off-Off veteran, featured a parody of the opening sequence of Disney’s The Lion King and continued with more irreverent skits. The cast lampooned the U of C scene with a sketch in which an eager suitor (Dave Maher, AB’06) offered a specific list when queried about his interests (“semiotics, otters—when wet”) to his paramour (Sarah Rosenshine, ’09), who responded by saying, “You just recited my Facebook profile!” In another sketch, Melissa Graham, ’09, portrayed a man at a bar. Resisting advances from a waitress, Graham deadpanned, “You don’t want to get involved with me. I’m awkward. Real awkward.”

Framed by musical interludes, brief skits about replacing the characters on popular television shows with babies, and another about variations on the word “Google” (goo, gull, ghoul), the show continued with two sketches about clueless radio hosts. Yablon, AB’08, played a grumpy public-access host who objected to establishing a pizzeria in town, claiming that it “suggests intravenous drug use” among the youth: “You may as well have an opium den.” Kit Novotny, ’09, played host of a program called Meet History, and her stilted Midwestern accent made her sound, as one audience member pointed out, like “an android running out of batteries”—and made the crowd crack up.

After the show, when cast members could loosen their faces, they spilled out onto the front steps of University Church, giggling, to greet their adoring public, many of whom had gathered on the stoop to congratulate the performers.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos (left to right): Off-Off spells "google"; the troupe takes a bow.


All yours, naturally

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Set apart from the Hyde Park Art Center’s other exhibits in two connected second-floor galleries, Catherine Forster’s They Call Me Theirs examines the bond that humans feel to nature, and how that link is manufactured and distorted. Forster, a School of the Art Institute graduate exhibiting at HPAC for the first time, titled her installation, up through October 3, after a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem in which the Earth asks, “How am I theirs / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold them?”

The first gallery contains what the artist calls a “hanging garden” of inkjet prints from digital film stills of flowers and trees. Forster magnified and painted the images, then digitized them again. She printed the images on the kind of aluminum panels usually used for street signs. They hang in a white gallery, with two park benches arranged to view the art on the walls. Huge in scale, the prints depict a nature vibrant with colorful flourishes and stand out from the white wall.

Beyond the first gallery’s blatantly manufactured image of nature, another room beckons—speakers project the sound of a cityscape, and a cabin built with sturdy solid pine (salvaged from the 1905 Chicago Sears building at 3333 W. Arthington Street) looms in the middle of the black-box room. The small structure has wide windows on its sides and a door that swings open to reveal a nearly bare interior. After entering, a visitor hears the sounds of a field or a forest, and in the center of the room a small monitor shows digital film footage of flowers and trees from all four seasons. The peaceful cabin attempts to contain nature neatly, and its purpose, Forster writes, is to “question the distinctions we make between the natural and mediated worlds."

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: The cabin stands in the center of the second gallery; the monitor projects image of spring.

Photos courtesy the Hyde Park Art Center.


As the earthworm turns

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Lucinda left hers alone for three weeks. “They’re fine for that long,” she said. Phil’s were thrown out by someone who thought—correctly—that they were garbage. Kelin’s “disapparated.” Andrew had “ceased upkeep” of his. Eve was on the waiting list; Jennifer never got any either.

Finally, I found Alexander Muir, ’09, a biology major who was still caring for his composting worms, handed out mid-spring quarter during Earth Week. Composting worms digest plant and vegetable peelings and produce fertile soil; they help the environment both by reducing the amount of trash that ends up in landfills and by assisting plant growth. Muir, who considers his earthworms a “fun science experiment,” intends to grow all of his herbs and spices in soil they produce, and has started with potted basil.

“Technically only half of the worms are mine,” Muir said. The rest belong to a former roommate, gone for the summer. Muir was speaking figuratively: the hermaphroditic worms reproduce like crazy and the current residents of the 2-by-1—foot plastic box will not be those that Muir’s friend reclaims in September. The earthworms are similar to those in a backyard, but, because composting is best with a highly efficient worm, Zoe Vangelder, ’09, purchased special wrigglers—40 pounds of them at $20 per pound—to distribute at the workshop she coordinated on vermiculture. Her supplier was Cecelia Ungari, the Shedd Aquarium’s conservation programs coordinator known as “the Chicago worm lady.”

Even while housed in boxes, the worms created problems for some of their hosts. Muir and his worm-venture partner never informed their third roommate about the worms, Muir explained, because they knew she might be averse to sharing the house with vermin. They placed the box under the kitchen table and slipped their apple cores and carrot tops in while she was out.

But in the chaos of moving, she found and opened the box, probably thinking it contained books and clothes. Seeing the creatures, she “screamed so loudly," Muir said, "the upstairs neighbor called 911.”

More vermiculture workshops are being planned for the fall. Check the new sustainability site for updated information.

Shira Tevah, '09

Photo: Alexander Muir shows a few of his composting worms.

Photo by Dan Dry.

"Jump up" on the Midway

Heavy beats competed on the front lawns of the Law School and the SSA Saturday as several deejays played calypso, soca, reggae, punta, zouk, and "jump up," a drum and bass subgenre intended to encourage crowds to dance. The dozens of people needed little encouragement at the Chicago Carifete, an annual festival put on by the Chicago Caribbean Carnival Association and one of the City of Chicago's neighborhood festivals.

Carifete, according to the Carnival Association's Web site, is a "masquerade on the street representing a kaleidoscope of colors, cultures, and artistry and a celebration for people of every age, race, and creed." Modeled after the carnivals that take place in the Caribbean, the festival is a day of music, dancing, and food. As promised by the site, the Midway was "blazin'."

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): Capoeiristas prepare for a dance in front of Jamaican tent; the dancers compete; vendors sell soaps, oils, and incense; Ms. Chini's kitchen serves Belizean food; carnival tents line the Midway; promenaders join the crowd after the parade; a listener enjoys the tunes of the Haitian Cultural Group's deejay; a line forms at Maxine's Caribbean Spice tent; dancing continues throughout the afternoon.

Ivory tower’s weather station

One night last winter, Joe Cottral, ’10, camped out on a cot in the attic-like Ryerson Astronomical Society office on Ryerson's fifth floor. He was the support team for a group of students who brought the RAS’s telescope to the middle of a field in central Illinois to watch an occultation, which Cottral describes as “one astronomical object passing in front of another astronomical object.” Cottral was on the computer that night, with electronic maps in front of him to guide the students in the field. His other task was to stay alert in case they needed assistance. I met him in that same office on Monday to discuss the latest RAS project: a new weather station.

The RAS is one of the oldest student groups at the University, with records dating to the 1950s and a telescope in use since the '30s. The club has an observatory on Ryerson's roof, an antique-looking transit telescope that may soon be moved to Crerar for display, and the weather station.

The weather station—a term used for any location where meteorological data is gathered—has been up for a few months. Last fall the Student Government Funding Committee gave the club $1,000 to buy a weather-gauging instrument, which RAS members installed themselves on a Ryerson turret. They filled an old computer box with cement to hold the station's base. The solar-powered station measures temperature, wind speed, and humidity, and it uploads automatically every minute or so to a remote server that graphs inches of rain per hour, solar radiation, and UV index. The server archives the information, which could be used for research.

All of the data, along with charts from the National Weather Service and other organizations, is available at the UChicago weather Web site. The next closest weather station, Cottral says, is at Midway airport, but the Ryerson one is more accurate for campus because the lake can dramatically change nearby weather. “We still rely on NOAA for forecasting,” Cottral says, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but he hopes that students will increasingly use the site to check current conditions—especially for planning a night to watch the stars at the club’s observatory.

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): Close-up of the new weather station; the Ryerson turret that holds the station; the transit telescope in the Ryerson Astronomical Society office.

Photo on far left by Joe Cottral, '10.

The fine art of redevelopment

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The lights dimmed in the small room off the Hyde Park Art Center's lobby, and a black-and-white photograph of a glowing amusement park appeared on the wall. The park, built in 1899 at 60th and Cottage Grove, is an example of the huge-scale commerce and recreation that have all but disappeared from Woodlawn. The purpose of the program, presented on Tuesday evening by HPAC and the Terra Foundation’s American Art American City series, was to discuss the history and future of 63rd Street, and how its redevelopment relates to Chicago's creative community.

Architectural historian Lee Bey opened a brief description of 63rd Street’s history using the amusement-park image, and throughout the evening both he and Woodlawn-based artist Theaster Gates, who teaches in the U of C's department of visual arts, pondered the factors, such as economic downturns and shifting demographics, that “caused change” on the once-prosperous commercial strip. Citing air-conditioned stores and huge, glamorous theaters, Bey said that at one time 63rd was “the most profitable business district between downtown and Denver.”

Bey grew up around 20 blocks south of 63rd, which "felt like a main street" when he was a kid. He recalled going with his father to pick up work boots at one of the many stores that lined the sidewalk. Now an architectural critic and urban planner, Bey recounted 63rd Street’s history, from its commercial heyday to its current state—mostly residential homes and empty lots, “a double-sided boulevard of housing and not much else.”

The room was overflowing by the time Bey finished his presentation, and conversation turned both to memories of the street and what could be done to restore and advance its legacy. Audience members remembered restaurants, theaters, “wall-to-wall nightclubs” with lavish bars, and “beautiful old buildings,” now torn down. Some hopes were buoyed by recent developments such as the restoration of the Grand Ballroom at 63rd and Cottage Grove, and an upcoming project involving the Hotel Strand.

Gates thought the South Side’s artistic community could be well-equipped to help revitalize 63rd Street and its empty spaces—battling a commercial force that often “assumes heaven to be outside the South Side.” After the talk a group of U of C undergraduates gathered in the back of the room to discuss the presentation. Some had taken Gates’s spring-quarter visual-arts class, Intervention and Public Practice. For their final project they installed an apartment floor plan and furniture in an empty lot on 63rd. Others, like Luke Joyner, ’09, attended because of an interest in urban design and planning. After hearing about the recent redevelopments, he noted the importance of “how community can be created and imagined.”

Rose Schapiro, '09

Images, top: Theaster Gates (in pink shirt) after the presentation at HPAC. Bottom: The Tivoli Theater (located at 6325 S. Cottage Grove, demolished 1963) in its prime.

Tivoli Theater image courtesy of Jazz Age Chicago. Source: "Main Foyer, Balaban & Katz Tivoli Theatre, Chicago," postcard, Max Rigot Selling Co.: #428 (n.d.), cropped.

Fifteen minutes of wisdom

A statue of Aristotle and a large, bold, red question mark took the place of a graphed line on a PowerPoint slide in one of the Gleacher Center’s conference rooms. The x-axis was the year and the y was labeled “global wisdom"; the question was what the line would look like. “I don’t think we’ve seen the same increase in wisdom as we would expect,” said Barnaby Marsh, director of strategic initiatives for the John Templeton Foundation, comparing world wisdom to technological progress. “How do we advance our understanding of wisdom?”

Marsh wasn’t searching for the answer alone. The Templeton Foundation and the U of C's Arete Initiative have collaborated to create the Defining Wisdom Project, which gathered 40 young anthropologists, economists, geneticists, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists in an August 22 symposium, where they competed for grants. The project hopes to fund research that will create a coherent body of knowledge about wisdom, which Marsh sees as having been "elided from public discourse" in recent history. Those 40, termed “candidates” by Howard Nusbaum, chair and professor of psychology and the College and one of the initiative's principal investigators, were selected out of 631 applicants who each submitted a three-page letter of intent and a three-page summary of their qualifications. Finalists presented their proposals for 15 minutes followed by questions. The 20 winners will be announced later this week.

“Our purpose here today,” Nusbaum said, “is to take the first steps in the development of the field of research of wisdom.” He and Marsh are members of the Project Council, which selects the winning research proposals—to be funded up to $2 million total—and is composed of professors from the U of C and other universities.

In his opening address Marsh discussed changing definitions of wisdom throughout history and in the modern world. He argued that the “anti-free market atmosphere in much of the academy” is detrimental to progress. “All systems have advantages and disadvantages,” he said, and people should use the wisdom of the free market to solve problems like world poverty. He touched on the relation between wisdom and personal choices, decision-making, and values. Wisdom has the potential to be dangerous, he said, “without values and ethics,” referring to the examples like Da Vinci's killing machines and the Manhattan Project.

The selected scholars will look further into the topics Marsh presented, connecting with each other through a Web site and quarterly conference calls led by Nusbaum. “Our goal,” Marsh said, “is to create a nexus of people who will be creative, imaginative, and open to creating ways of defining wisdom in the 21st century. We’re hoping this catalyzes something new,” he concluded. “It’s up to all of you to make this successful.”

Shira Tevah, '09

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Photos (left to right): Scholars from around the world gather at the Wisdom Symposium; presenters listen to opening remarks by Howard Nusbaum; Barnaby Marsh demonstrates concepts related to wisdom; John (Jack) M. Templeton Jr.—son of the late Sir John Templeton and president of the John Templeton Foundation—joins the audience.

A temporary freedom

On August 15, 1967, poet Gwendolyn Brooks presented a dedication at the large Picasso sculpture’s unveiling in Daley Plaza. “Art hurts, art urges voyages,” she read. Through October 4 those words are printed on the wall of the DOVA Temporary Gallery in Harper Court—next to vibrant screen prints, photographs, newspaper articles, campus flyers, comic books, and underground pamphlets—collected by U of C art history professor Rebecca Zorach and her students as an addendum to a winter-quarter course, to give gallery visitors a sense of Chicago’s artistic landscape in the late Sixties.

The year following the Picasso dedication would be a tumultuous one, especially for Chicago. Forty years later, Zorach taught a course called Chicago 1968 about the cultural and political upheaval of that time and the art that it produced. Aware that some of her students wanted to go further with the complicated material, Zorach offered them the opportunity to help design and curate an exhibit based on the class.

For the resulting exhibition, Looks Like Freedom, Zorach and the undergraduate students selected works that were meaningful, she said, both in “the broader landscapes of Chicago” and on the South Side. One room is devoted to flyers collected by the U of C administration (and thus preserved in Special Collections) on campus in the late Sixties and early Seventies—advertising everything from women’s and worker’s rights to Black Panther recruitment.

Many of the prints are on loan from the South Shore Cultural Center and have been framed for the first time here. Bright screen prints by artists in AfriCOBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists) urge African Americans to join together and assess themselves as a community. Text in the works, such as ”Unite!” and “Relate to your heritage” (the pieces bear the same titles as their messages) asks the viewer to contemplate the underlying messages. Freedom and self-consciousness pervade all of the art, from the African American heroes on the Wall of Respect, a mural at 43rd and Langley, to the flyers that urge student action. As one essay from the underground newspaper The Chicago Seed reads, “We have only to recognize that we are free.”

Rose Schapiro, '09

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Photos (left to right): A collection of work by The Hairy Who, exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center in 1968; a poster by Barbara Jones-Hogu, a member of AfricCOBRA; the Gwendolyn Brooks inscription that opens the exhibit; A view of flyers and posters in DOVA Temporary Gallery.

Service desk

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La Rabida Hospital family help desk, Sarah speaking. Lorenzo, how are you doing?”

Sarah Grusin, ’10, regularly answers the phone this way during her summer Project HEALTH shift, Fridays 12:30-4:30 p.m. Her usual desk partner isn’t here this week, so she’s grateful for any visitors. Grusin has a caseload of 12 clients, who call her with problems such as finding a job and making use of government resources like food stamps. She gets new clients through phone calls, she says, and occasionally hospital patients visit the help desk.

Grusin joined Project HEALTH (Helping Empower, Advocate, and Lead Through Health)—a national organization in which students, “mini-social workers” in her words, connect low-income hospital patients with services for food, housing, and jobs—last year. The U of C branch began in fall 2006.

Lorenzo’s “was the most tragic story I’d ever heard,” Grusin says. The first person she spoke with on her first solo shift after completing training, Lorenzo told her his wife and son had been killed in a car accident a few months earlier, he was trying to obtain legal custody of his stepson, and he’d lost his apartment. Grusin worried, “I’m going to screw up your life and you’re getting evicted and I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s still terrifying,” she says, but “it’s actually difficult to make things worse for people.” None of the terror comes through in her voice as she congratulates Lorenzo on obtaining a job and recommends that he add his stepson to his food-stamp card instead of taking out a new application. She apologizes because it means a trip to the state Department of Human Services—she knows clients dislike the office, where many complain that they don’t get to see anyone even when they have an appointment.

Grusin hopes to continue with Project HEALTH—which has around 50 volunteers who work weekly two-hour shifts at three neighborhood locations, though her summer shift is longer—during the school year, but she may have to cut down on her hours to make time for coursework. She searches apartment listings for Lorenzo, fills out paperwork to refer him to a lawyer for his being denied his Social Security, and puts everything in an envelope. “Some volunteers are big on making all the calls for people,” she says, but she prefers to give people information they can use as their own starting points. “We don’t have to be a filter for them.”

Shira Tevah, '09

A junkyard to call our own

At the corner of 61st and Blackstone, the campus steam plant looms. The huge brick edifice powers the air-conditioning and heating systems of dozens of campus buildings. Even over the summer, when the plant works at a lower capacity—AC requires less steam than heating the buildings in subzero temperatures—the adjacent block buzzes with activity. Students in a Blackstone Bicycle Works workshop ride up and down the street, customers frequent the Backstory Café, and green thumbs work in the community garden.

But behind the steam plant, in a small field overgrown with wildflowers and weeds, the buzz of the street is replaced with calm. The field is empty of people, but full of a strange assortment of materials they once used—fences, pedestals, crates. Once a coal yard for the steam plant, the field now serves as a storage space for leftovers campus treasures. Two Bucky Schwartz sculptures previously installed in front of Woodward Court sit there, says campus planner Richard Bumstead, as well as “remnants from campus buildings that have been demolished,” or pieces of still-standing buildings removed for “various reasons.”

Some of the works eventually make it back to campus. According to Bumstead, the marble fountain that now decorates Hutchinson Courtyard “was crated and stored for years in the yard until the Class of 1990 selected the renovation of the fountain as their class gift.” Other materials behind the steam plant will not be so lucky.


Rose Schapiro, '09

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Photos (left to right): The steam plant stands next to the garden on Blackstone; the former Woodlawn Court sculptures; building materials from campus; a fence is grown over with weeds.

Summer reading, Chicago style

At Chicago, summer doesn’t mean a break from learning. In late August, three undergrads around campus pored over books as they waited for classes to resume in fall quarter.

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Justin Shelby, '10
Where: Studying at a table in Hutchinson Commons.
Reading: The Iliad
Shelby spent his summer on an epic task—tackling Homer in the original ancient Greek. He’s reading it “for fun and also for research.” As part of a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which supports summer academic projects, he is “researching syntax and morphology…formal correlations within the system of Greek and Latin and Hittite.”

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Sid Branca Cook, '09
Where: Working at Ex Libris, the Regenstein basement coffee shop.
Reading: Words on Mime (Mime Journal) by Etienne Decroux
Cook is preparing for her BA. “I’m doing physical-theater performance, so I’m reading up on types of theater that I’m interested in.” A theater and performance studies major, Cook’s thesis will include both a performance and written critical analysis. She spent part of her summer at Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts, training and learning.

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Ben Linsay, '10
Where: Taking a lunch break in Cobb.
Reading: Abstracts of journal articles from Genetics
Assisting in summer research in a genetics lab through the Biological Sciences Division summer program, Linsay also continues his job through the academic year. As part of his “homework” for his job, he reads papers from journals like Genetics to help understand "research and methods in my field"—today’s article is on chromosomal patterning and mutations.


Rose Schapiro, '09

No tiffs over TIF

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At Monday evening's public Hyde Park TIF Advisory Council meeting at Kenwood Academy, associate vice president for community and civic affairs Susan Campbell brought 50 community members, developers, and the 12-person council up to date about the University’s plans for Harper Court, the deteriorating shopping complex at 53rd and Harper purchased in May. “Our focus as the University—admittedly the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” Campbell said, “is to change this marketplace somehow. That’s why we’ve made the choices we have” to develop the complex.

University administrators terminated an agreement with a developer whose proposal they had recently selected, Campbell explained, “for a number of reasons,” and are back in the request-for-proposals phase of planning. “We decided it’s best to wait for everything to work in concert,” she said. Many proposals were rejected for requiring too much subsidy, such as the one-screen movie theater that requested $1 million.

Earlier in the meeting, Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, AB’69, MAT’77, said that the chosen developer may request TIF money—tax increment financing, a tool intended to enable development in poor areas through public subsidies—for creating public parking spaces.

“We still don't have a concrete plan,” Campbell concluded, but “we're hopeful that with the development of 53rd Street, that corner can regain its prominence as a vital retail area.” Howard Males, AM'77, PhD'81, the council’s chair, said they expect to see Campbell again soon.

“Yes,” responded Campbell, who plans to return in November with another Harper Court update. Another face at that session, Campbell said—“to get her feet wet”—will be former Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, hired this week as the U of C’s vice president for civic engagement.

Shira Tevah, '09

Photo: Hyde Parkers gather at a development meeting.

A Fermilab pajama party

Starting at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, roughly 300 physicists, students, and science fans gathered for a Fermilab pajama party to witness—virtually—the startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), soon to be the world's most powerful particle accelerator, at CERN, the European high-energy physics lab that straddles the Franco-Swiss border. Fermilab’s staff didn’t mean “pajama party” in a figurative sense; many guests showed up in nightclothes, including lab director Pier Oddone and University of Chicago physicist Young-Kee Kim.

In the Wilson Hall atrium, physicist Herman White welcomed visitors to the home of Fermilab's own accelerator, the Tevatron, which White noted would hold the title of the most powerful such instrument "until three-and-a-half hours from now." Cookies, juice, coffee, and Mountain Dew were on hand to keep excited but sleepy visitors awake. Large screens showed a live video feed from CERN, keeping the crowd updated as the European scientists put their new machine through its paces.

The rivalry between Fermilab and CERN, the two top particle-physics labs in the world, is real but friendly; Fermilab built a number of magnets for the LHC and even installed a remote operations center where North American physicists could control the collider without having to fly to Geneva. Pajama-wearing scientists in the remote operation center applauded as their screens marked down each milestone in real time, culminating with success: a beam of protons barreling around the LHC's 16.6-mile circumference at 3:25 a.m. This first run consisted of baby steps, with a proton beam just energetic enough to verify that all the components worked. Within a few weeks, CERN hopes to run the machine at full power, seven times stronger than the second-place Tevatron.

After an early breakfast, scientists and visitors continued to mill about, some watching a live teleconference with the scientists, some still peering through the glass walls of the remote operations center, and some watching data come in on their laptops. As the hour neared 5 a.m., they started to leave by twos and threes, venturing out of Wilson Hall into the prairie dawn.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

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Photos (left to right): Richard Ruiz, ’10, works in Fermilab's remote operations center; Fermilab director Pier Oddone (center, in blue) and professor and deputy director Young-Kee Kim (red) monitor the experiment’s progress; The Wilson Hall crowd awaits news from CERN.

Know Your Chicago: The program that works

While classes haven’t yet started at Chicago, the morning of September 10 saw busloads of students arrive at Ida Noyes Hall for a different kind of coursework. The women (and a few men) had come to learn how their city works through Know Your Chicago, now celebrating its 60th year. The program seeks to educate and enrich the civic lives of its participants, giving them behind-the-scenes glimpses at the city’s institutions. The five tours run in October, and the daylong September symposium is a required introduction.

Though Know Your Chicago was founded as a modest endeavor—fewer than a dozen women went on the first set of tours—it has grown significantly and now runs in partnership with the Graham School of General Studies. According to Mari Craven, one of the tour cochairs, whose mother also served on Know Your Chicago's committee, almost half of the committee members stay on for more than a decade. They seek, in the words of committee-member Joan Small, to “involve Chicago and Chicagoans in the life of the city.” She adds, “More informed citizens are better citizens.” Participants hear about the program by word-of-mouth, or from the brochures and booklets that Know Your Chicago sends out in mid-summer.

After coffee and tea, the participants—nearly 500 attended the symposium—filtered into Max Palevsky Cinema to hear a series of lectures. They took their seats as a slideshow from the program's past decades played on screen. After a welcome from Know Your Chicago committee chair Jean Meltzer, U-High'41, President Robert J. Zimmer congratulated the audience on the program's anniversary and drew correlations between Know Your Chicago and the University's commitment to inquiry. “I used to think 60 years was a long time," he joked. "I had a birthday recently that gave me a different perspective.”

Know Your Chicago is organized by a 50-woman committee, who begin planning the year’s tours with a January brainstorming session. This year’s tour participants will go inside the Board of Elections for “Voting Chicago Style” and inside the FBI for “CSI: Chicago.” For the latter, all potential participants agreed to undergo FBI screening. Other tours include a vision of the city’s 21st-century planning with a visit to the site of the future skyscraper Chicago Spire, an overview of some of the city’s philanthropic institutions, and a tour of older buildings that have been repurposed to serve the city's cultural life.


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The redesigned Know Your Chicago emblem features the Chicago Spire.


Rose Schapiro, '09

Hurricanes: not fiction

“There’s some redemption here,” Amanda Boyden said last Tuesday at a 57th Street Books reading. She was talking about her latest novel, Babylon Rolling (Pantheon). “All these characters are terribly flawed, but I like to think they have gigantic hearts.” She read from four sections of the book, which follows the residents of one New Orleans street in the year leading up to Hurricane Katrina. The street, which really exists though she moved it across town for the novel, is a microcosm of the city with “lots of different kinds of people jumbled together...messed up kids next to crazy old ladies, beautiful old mansions next to shacks falling apart.”

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One of the characters, Boyden acknowledged when prompted by an audience member, is loosely based on herself. Boyden moved from Chicago—which she considers her other home—to New Orleans and had lived there with her husband for 15 years
when Katrina hit in 2005. "We had to evacuate to Toronto," she said, and “we didn’t know if we’d ever be in New Orleans again." She calls the book her “tribute” to the hurricane.

“This time we did a much better job evacuating,” said Boyden, whose scheduled Tuesday reading in Miami was canceled because of Hurricane Ike. “We went to Baton Rouge during Gustav and evacuated right into the eye of the storm.” The home they left was a converted corner grocery store that she and her husband bought after Katrina. The tallest building on the block, it lost its roof to Hurricane Gustav. The new roof went up, she said, just in time for the next round of bad weather.

Boyden spoke about her characters as though they were real, and her face registered their emotions as she read. Apologizing when she got to the section narrated by a 15-year-old African American child, she implored her audience to “imagine a boy.” Her eyebrows raised in another section as the fictional Northerner asked a neighbor, “Is there an expression I’m supposed to know before a hurricane? Like, I’ll see you when the wind blows back?” There isn’t.

Shira Tevah, '09

Boyden reads from her latest novel at 57th Street Books.

Change is gonna come

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Last night’s performance of Court Theatre's season opener—the Midwestern premiere of Pulitzer Prize–winner Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change—started standing-room only and ended with a standing ovation. In between came what Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones called an “emotionally unstinting and thoroughly gripping four-star production.”

The emotion started with John Culbert’s subterranean set, centered on the basement of a house in St. Charles, Louisiana. Day after day, Caroline, an African American maid for a well-off Jewish family, does the laundry while listening to the radio and an interior monologue of sorrow, rage, and resignation: “16 feet beneath sea-level...caught between the devil and the muddy brown sea.”

Caroline was originally conceived as an operatic libretto. Athough that project was shelved, Kushner’s play, with a score by Jeanine Tesori that combines spirituals and Motown, Christmas carols and Klezmer, classical and folk music, remains operatic in style and power. E. Faye Butler gives a monumental performance as Caroline; Melanie Brezill dazzles as Caroline’s idealistic daughter, Emmie; and Kate Fry is equally, if more quietly, effective, as Rose Gellman, a Northerner who has moved South to marry a widowed friend and become the stepmother to his sad and angry eight-year-old son, Noah.

The play begins on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and indeed the only jarring note in the play’s magical realism, where radio, washer, dryer, bus, and moon have singing roles, is that neither Caroline nor the Gellman family learns of JFK’s death until the early evening. If you lived through that day, it’s hard to believe. But if you lived through that era, especially in the South, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll want to see Caroline again.

Directed by Charles Newell with music direction by Doug Peck (the two, with Culbert, have previously teamed on award-winning productions of Carousel and Man of La Mancha), Caroline runs through October 19.

M.R.Y.

In the heat of the Dryer: Harriet Nzinga Plumpp as the Washer (left), Byron Glenn Willis as the Dryer, and E. Faye Butler as Caroline. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Caught in a whirlwind

On summer evenings the wait at the eastbound bus stop opposite the Garfield Red Line station is usually a solitary experience. But last Sunday night—coinciding with the start of Orientation Week—was different. Hordes of Chicago first-years disembarked from the train and, excitedly chatting with their new roommates or friends or crushes, crossed Garfield Avenue to wait for the 55 or 174 buses to take them back to their new home in Pierce. It was a tight squeeze.


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The students were returning from an Orientation Week House Activities Night trip up north to play Whirlyball, a Henderson House tradition, says resident head David Muusz.

Whirlyball? It's "basically a five-on-five version of lacrosse, basketball, and bumper cars," he explains. The 43 Henderson students played ten-minute games with rotating teams. "It was just a great opportunity for everybody to get to know one another, to experience the CTA"—the Chicago Whirlyball location is right off Fullerton Avenue—"and to bond." Tufts House first-years also chose to play this year, sparking some friendly competition between the two houses. They played two games against the Henderson crew. Says Muusz, "[Tufts] managed to hang on and eke out a draw in both games. Pure luck!"

R.E.K.

Henderson House first-years enjoy a few hours of Whirlyball.
Photos by Stephanie Kahn, '12

Breakfast of library champions

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When Rika Yoshida, AB'91, interviewed at Morningstar for her first post-college job, the interviewer introduced himself as "Joe." "It wasn't until two weeks later," Rika said, "that I learned he was the CEO of the company." Not only did she get the job helping the investment-research firm start its first publication about Japanese companies, but seven years later she married that low-key executive, Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80. The two have three children (Rika's "start-ups," Joe joked), and they're working on a new legacy—the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, set to open next to the Reg in 2010.

On campus Wednesday for the library's official groundbreaking ceremony, the Mansuetos first met with almost 30 students over a light-buffet breakfast in the Quad Club library. The students, representing Student Government, the Maroon Key Society, and other leadership groups, dressed in suits and skirts, and they stood and smiled when the Mansuetos rounded the half-dozen tables to greet them.

During a casual Q&A the couple shared stories including Rika's Morningstar interview; Joe's initial foray into entrepreneurship—selling soda out of his Shoreland dorm room; and how they came to make their $25 million donation. Last winter Joe had lunch with President Zimmer, he said, with "no intention of making a gift to the University." But he left that lunch "convinced I was going to give to this library." The students laughed, and then Joe elaborated: "It just really resonated with me. It was already designed and just needed funding. It was the right project at the right place and the right time."

Rika added what appealed to her about the project: "It can benefit the entire student body," she said. The library also encompasses three of the couple's passions: the College; conveying information (aside from Morningstar's publications, the Mansuetos have invested in Inc, Fast Company, and Time Out Chicago magazines); and design. "We were drawn to the design of this library," she said, where the books will live 50 feet underground while a glass-domed ellipse will cover a vast reading room. "There's a freedom and airiness to the reading room. It seems to float on the ground like a jewel."

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A.B.P.

The Mansuetos talk with Student Government president Matt Kennedy (standing) and Maroon Key Society member Luke Rodehorst; At the groundbreaking ceremony, architect Helmut Jahn hugs Joe Mansueto after presenting his sketches; The official groundbreaking shot: Jahn, Board of Trustees chair Jim Crown, Zimmer, Joe and Rika Mansueto, Provost Tom Rosenbaum, library director Judith Nadler, and sociology professor Andrew Abbott, AM’75, PhD’82, grab their shovels.

Photos by Dan Dry

Sabbatical or bust


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Marine paleontologist Susan Kidwell will spend the coming school year in Washington, DC, just steps from the Potomac River, although most of her work will be done in the Smithsonian's library.


Almost as soon as I knocked on her office door on a late-September morning, geologist and paleontologist Susan Kidwell was up from her desk, shaking my hand and ushering me out into the sunshine with a single, swift motion. Her office on the fifth floor of Hinds was "disastrous," she declared as she closed the door behind us—piles of papers overwhelmed nearly every flat surface in the long, narrow room—and wouldn't we rather sit outside in the nice weather? "This is one of my last days on campus for awhile," she said, "and the flowers are beautiful." We found a shady bench in the Crerar quad across from a bed of purple hostas.

I'd come to interview Kidwell for a Magazine story about her research on marine ecosystems, 48 hours before she was scheduled to leave town for a yearlong sabbatical at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She hadn't packed a single suitcase. "My papers are all in boxes and ready to go," Kidwell assured me, but her clothes were still hanging in her closet. "Maybe I'll just go shopping when I get there."

Kidwell will spend most of the coming school year in the Smithsonian's library, tracking down other scientists' studies on the number and diversity of mollusks, both living and fossilized, from different years and at different sites around the world. The data provide a kind of time-lapse picture of the animals' changing ecosystems and the marks that those environments bear from human activity: fishing and farming and urbanization.

Her months away from Hyde Park will keep Kidwell busy, but not lonely, she said. Accompanying her will be a scholarly family of sorts: her husband David Jablonski, a Chicago paleontologist (who is shipping his own boxes of papers to DC), and her research associate, Adam Tomasovych. "We'll all be there together," Kidwell said, "my husband, my postdoc, and me."

L.G.

The city that votes—and often


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If you know one thing about Chicago elections, you know "vote early—and often." The phrase is variously attributed to such masters of clout as Al Capone and the first Mayor Daley, but whoever said it, it stuck. As Langdon D. Neal, chair of the city's Board of Election Commissioners, told the Know Your Chicago group visiting the commission's West Washington Street headquarters last Wednesday, "We have quite a history with voting in Chicago—but that's been a long, long time ago."

Today, Neal said, Chicago is "a model jurisdiction," consulting to election boards around the country. A three-hour look behind the scenes—including a visit to the Pershing Road warehouse where the city's state-of-the-art voting machines are stored, tested, and readied for each election—showed why.

  • It's big. The city (the rest of Cook County is its own jurisdiction) has 2,575 precincts and some 1,700 polling places.
  • It's trilingual. Chicago is one of two jurisdictions in the nation (Los Angeles County is the other) whose ballots are printed in three languages: English, Spanish, and Mandarin [See comment below—Ed]. After the 2010 national census, it's expected that ballots will also be printed in Korean.
  • It's organized. Beginning two weeks to ten days before Election Day, a blue Election Supply Carrier (ESC in board lingo) is delivered to each polling place. About the size of an armoire, the locked ESC contains a touchscreen voting unit, ballot scanner, and vote-card activator; shrink-wrapped ballots; collapsible voting booths; supply boxes; and an American flag. The ESC also doubles as a locked box where ballots can be inserted if the scanner goes down.
  • It still believes in voting early. Early voting for the November 4 election begins October 13 and runs through October 30, Mondays through Fridays, 9 to 5, at 51 sites around the city. The board hopes 160,000 citizens will vote early, easing pressure at the polling places in what they expect to be a record turnout.
Early voting ends a week before the general election so that voters' names can be crossed off the precincts' lists. Once is now often enough.

M.R.Y.

Eating locally, thinking globally

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Wednesday's Div School lunch, the first of the new school year, added some locally produced items to its standard vegetarian menu. The tomato-and-spinach quiche, roasted potatoes, and apple crisp were the same—but the bread, usually store-bought, was baked in the kitchen attached to the Swift Common Room, and the Disciples Divinity House residents grew the herbs used to season the dishes.

After the meal Dean Richard Rosengarten, AM'88, PhD'94, introduced another local: his former classmate Phil Blackwell, DMN'86, pastor of the Loop-based Chicago Temple, First United Methodist Church, who talked about the nature of an urban ministry—accommodating thousands of visitors of diverse faiths while staying true to his Methodist worldview. The oldest church in the city with more than 1,000 members, the Chicago Temple shares a multiuse building with more than 15 floors of lawyers and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which moved a little less than a year ago from its previous spot at 60th and Kimbark. The basement houses an organization independent of the church but with similar missions of dialogue and tolerance: the Silk Road Theatre Project. Founded in 2002 by GSB-student-turned-producer Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury, AM'92, the company showcases playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean backgrounds. Said Khoury, who spoke after Blackwell: "[Phil] is in the business of storytelling; we are in the business of storytelling—it's a great complement."

Some things at the lunch were imported—one of the guests, for example: a first-year MDiv student who commutes weekly from Rochester, NY (yes, you read correctly—that's New York), where he used to work for Bausch & Lomb. Flying to Chicago every Monday for classes, he returns home Thursdays to spend the weekend with his wife and two children.

R.E.K

Yohen is the first play of the Silk Road Theatre Project's 2008–09 season. It runs through November 2.

Photo courtesy the Silk Road Theatre Project

A new dam generates new art

When it becomes fully operational in 2011, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River will generate the same amount of power as 15 nuclear power plants, making it the largest hydroelectric project in human history. But the human cost of the dam—including about 1.3 million people displaced by its 410-mile-long artificial lake and thousands of years of archaeological sites and contemporary buildings destroyed by its flooding—is also great.

The Smart Museum exhibit Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art opened Thursday and features four artists whose work addresses the dam's effects. Curator and art-history professor Wu Hung gave an opening lecture to a crowd packed into the Cochrane-Woods Art Center.

For the artists he selected, Hung said, the exhibit was “not something external” but rather an opportunity to “respond and think about the issue” of the dam and how it affected them and their subjects. Zuang Hui, for example, was “thinking of the future in the future past tense,” said Hung. In 1997 the experimental artist traveled by boat down the Yangtze River and drilled patterns of holes in the rock near the dam construction. He photographed each hole, abstracting the circular shape in the rock. In 2005, after the government flooded the area to create an artificial lake, Hui sent a photographer back to the sites for new pictures. In Hung’s words, the images are now “only water, water, water.”

The exhibit's three other artists all work in different media. Chen Qiulin, a video artist born in a town displaced by the dam, made a series of mournful films, the first of which Hung said represents “the death of a place and the death of a woman.” Painter Yun-fei Ji used traditional Chinese scroll-painting techniques to depict and fragment contemporary subjects into the linear image shown on the scroll. And a massive 20-foot oil painting by realist Liu Xiaodong looms across the largest gallery wall, showing construction workers playing a card game. Using a long brush and “skilled determination,” Xiodong painted the canvas in three weeks at one of the construction sites. The “site-specific work,” Hung said, conveys how “the artist cannot remain inactive” when presented with such an overwhelming subject.

Rose Schapiro, ‘09

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One of Zuang Hui’s photographs; a panel from Liu Xiaodong’s larger painting.

Images courtesy the Smart Museum of Art.

Perfect symmetry

There’s a certain symmetry in the numbers: Tuesday the number of University of Chicago Nobel laureates rose to 82, the number in physics to 28.

Symmetry has long been a cornerstone of physics theory, as Yoichiro Nambu told an attentive audience yesterday morning, “but sometimes symmetry looks like it’s broken.” He offered a real-life example: “When you have a large crowd of people like here”—a Reynolds Club lounge filled with reporters, cameramen, colleagues, and well-wishers—“and they’re all facing toward me, not the other way around, there’s no physical reason they should all look the same way at the same time. That’s symmetry breaking.”

There was, of course, a reason to face toward Nambu, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics with two Japanese researchers. Asked to explain “for a general audience” the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) that won him the prize, the 87-year-old Chicago professor emeritus offered this caveat: “It’s rather difficult because it’s a concept, not an application, something concrete.”

But, as 1980 Nobelist James Cronin, SM’53, PhD’55—an experimental physicist who has known Nambu since the Japanese-born theoretician came to campus in 1954—told the Reynolds Club crowd, SSB is a concept with solid applications “in superconductivity, in condensed matter, in magnetism.” He also emphasized the work’s larger meaning: “These basic ideas were really the foundation of beginning to understand the [Standard] model that works so beautifully in particle physics.”


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It took several years of hard work to develop his theories, Nambu said, and reaction in the scientific community also took time. Cronin agreed: “It was not like a Eureka moment,” but “as experimental data came in and people tried to understand how it all fit together,” the work’s value became plain.

Nambu's Nobel, Cronin said, brought its own symmetry: “It's just a thrill from the bottom of my heart to see that the guy who started these ideas is recognized."

M.R.Y.

Out of the shadows: The University's newest laureate, physics professor emeritus Yoichiro Nambu, is introduced to the media by his colleague James Cronin, SM'53, PhD'55.

Photos by Dan Dry

Books, glorious books!

"Great Book Sale This Way," screamed the neon-orange sign taped to International House’s front door. A large arrow pointed the way to I-House’s Assembly Hall. A smaller, handwritten sign hailed, “Buy 1 Get 1 Free. Today Only!” The occasion: University of Chicago Press’s first book sale in more than 20 years—an opportunity for the press to get rid of some overstock—and for readers to purchase titles ranging from natural history to legal scholarship to critical theory.

Inside Assembly Hall, 20-odd tables held books nestled in brown boxes. In the background a live Johnny Cash album played. Around noon on the sale's second (and last) day, thousands of titles remained, and the room seemed more like a library—browsers quietly combed through the boxes of books—than a store with a fire sale. Although the selection was what one undergraduate repeatedly called "esoteric" as she peered into the cardboard boxes and mumbled to herself and her companions, the opportunity to strike upon true treasures did present itself—though of course, for every customer such a treasure was a different book. Some cooed over Lee Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, while others pounced on Richard Posner’s Aging and Old Age.

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As they scanned the titles, customers studiously avoided eye contact. Some filled up their own boxes with dozens of volumes, eager to cart home volumes upon volumes of critical texts. I picked up, among others, a book on 1960s psychedelics and rock and roll (Tomorrow Never Knows by Nick Bromell), which I found discarded in the natural-science section—it belonged in popular culture. I seriously considered but eschewed, for space concerns, a large art-and-architecture book on how hotels influenced the Cold War (Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture by Annabel Jane Wharton). I was more selective than most of the crowd, picking up only a half-dozen books—with the sale, it was difficult to leave with fewer. The only challenge came when the most eager customers, after purchasing a box filled with texts, had to figure out how to carry them home on the back of a bicycle.

R.S.


Truthiness in numbers

When I first met Nate Silver for a July–Aug Magazine article, he asserted strong opinions about Barack Obama’s ability to transform the red-state/blue-state divide in the general election. “If you look at the electoral map,” he said back in April, “Obama’s coalition could help him pick up Colorado and Virginia.”

One month earlier, under the pseudonym Poblano, Silver had started the political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, named for the 538 Electoral College members. The site features a forecasting system that weights polls based on a pollster’s track record, the survey’s sample size, and the poll’s age. But Silver wasn’t yet “out” to the public as a political forecaster. To the people who knew his name, he was the stats nerd who created PECOTA—a system that projects baseball players’ career arcs by comparing them to similar players from the past—and the man in charge of Baseball Prospectus, the Rolls-Royce of the sport’s numbers analysis.

But since unmasking himself in the June 1 New York Post, Silver's techniques have challenged the way pundits parse political polls. He’s been hailed as the “rookie of the year in this year's presidential campaign coverage” by Time’s Joe Klein and called "indispensable" by the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne. And it looks as though his April prediction is holding up—he suggests Obama holds 10 and 8 percent leads in Colorado and Virginia, respectively. But he hadn’t truly arrived until last week, when he was grilled by Stephen Colbert, the purveyor of “truthiness” and leader of the Colbert Nation. After hearing Silver compare Obama’s emergence to the startlingly successful Tampa Bay Rays, I'll stay tuned to see where Silver appears next.

Z.S.

Video courtesy Comedy Central.

Return of the seniors

Last Wednesday the first blast of cold air started to turn the quads’ leaves yellow, and around 5:30 p.m the Class of 2009 gathered in Hutchinson Courtyard. Open grills around two of Hutch’s entrances emitted the familiar smells of cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. As students trickled in from their afternoon classes, the grassy slopes lining the stone courtyard filled with crowds. Students perched on the side of the drained fountain and waited to hail their friends.

The College Programming Office, which hosted the welcome-back barbecue for fourth-years, advertised complimentary Class of 2009 water bottles for the first 500 attendees. Helpful CPO members gestured to permanent markers next to the bottles: “Don’t forget to put your name on it!” Printed on each bottle was a cartoon gargoyle perched atop a tower and reading a book—perhaps a timely prophecy for how many in the senior class have already been spending fall quarter: overstuffed schoolbags were as common a sight as overstuffed students.

After queuing up for bratwurst, chicken, hamburgers, and veggie burgers, some seniors jostled to fill their new water bottles with iced tea from bright-orange coolers set up on tables. The whole courtyard was awash with returning students munching on food while comparing summer adventures and plans for the new school year—presumably their last as undergraduates. The festivities spread into the Reynolds Club, where seniors lounged on the stairs that lead to the second floor. Even as the sun set and the quad lights turned on, scores of students returned for seconds and thirds before heading back to their residences or the library. By 7:30 p.m., although the garbage cans were stuffed with paper plates and empty condiment packages, the courtyard itself was almost empty.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

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The Class of 2009 poses for its first-year photo in fall 2005.

Faculty convene over Friedman

The first Faculty Senate meeting in more than a decade ignited the Hyde Park campus Wednesday, as students rallied on the quads and big-name professors gathered to debate the University's new Milton Friedman Institute. While backers say the institute will be a place for path-breaking research in economics, business, law, and public policy, some faculty members worry an institute named after Nobel laureate Friedman, AM'33, would tie the University to the free-market economist's politics. The controversy has heightened as some academics blame Friedman's ideas for the current financial crisis.

The media weren't invited to the two-hour meeting, which more than 200 faculty members (out of 1,200 faculty with senate membership) attended, but some spoke with the Chronicle of Higher Education afterward. “It was calm and collected,” said social-sciences dean Mark Hansen. “It was the kind of discussion that one expects from mature adults who are very smart.” History of religions professor Bruce Lincoln, a leader of the anti-institute faculty group CORES (Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society), estimated the room was about evenly split for and against. Most supporters were from economics, statistics, business, or law, while those opposed, the Chronicle reported, "represented a much broader range of disciplines."

The meeting, and the intense feelings its topic provoked, brought together heavyweights from several academic areas. Afterward the debate continued in the hallway: Lincoln traded concerns with economics Nobelists Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, and James Heckman; economist Lars Hansen; anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and John Kelly; historian Moishe Postone, SB'63, AM'67; and public-policy professor Bruce Meyer.

Before the meeting, about 70 students convened on the rain-soaked quads to protest the institute. They marched from the center circle to Ida Noyes, where they passed out flowers to entering faculty members, sucked pacifiers to signify the University saw but didn't really hear them, and held signs saying, "Will we all become 'Chicago boys'?" and "Students for Ideological Stubbornness." The CORES group meets Friday to discuss its next steps.

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A.B.P.

Chicago heavyweights (see above) gather after the Faculty Senate meeting; Students line the Ida Noyes stairs in protest.

Photos by Dan Dry

Muslim grassroots

"Many American and British non-Muslims believe that Islam and democracy are incompatible," said Amédée Turner, a former member of the European Parliament for Britain and the Queen’s Counsel. Turner, who also advised the Macedonian Parliament in 2001 on democratic procedures, presented to a dozen Divinity students the results of his recent study “Muslim Grassroots in the West Discuss Democracy,” which he carried out in 2005-06 while sitting on the Advisory Council of the Anglican Observer to the United Nations. Turner's talk in Swift Hall last Thursday was one stop on a tour including the World Affairs Council of America in St. Louis, the Middle East Institute in DC, and the London Houses of Parliament.

The study gathered 400 Muslims from different U.S. and British communities into 38 anonymous round-table discussions to consider whether democracy and Islam are compatible. The groups, set up by local Anglican and Episcopalian clerics, included "business and professional people, school teachers, their spouses, and students." For his study Turner defined democracy as one person, one vote; secret ballots; and government that follows the electorate. The groups were not asked to come to an agreement or to vote but only to discuss. “On the question of democracy,” Turner found, “they spoke with a unified voice,” agreeing that there is no clash between their religion and democracy. Their statements, compiled in a 90-page report recommended by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, echo Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

Democracy is compatible with Islam, said the participants, as long as the government doesn't contradict the Qur'an. In the Islamic text, "most punishment is in hell,” Turner pointed out, “so it’s not a problem for a democratic parliament.” Certain rules about modesty for women, he noted, and the requirement to cut off a thief’s hand could come into conflict with a democratic government.

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After Turner spoke, Graham School Asian-classics instructor Omer Mozaffar addressed those two potential conflicts of women and thieves. Less than 10 percent of the text of the Qur'an deals with legal matters, Mozaffar said. “The majority is focused on what we would call worldview, not law or governance. There’s a body of law that developed after the text, so the text may say, ‘Cut off the hand of a thief,’ but can that mean imprison them? What is literal and what is metaphorical?” There is no legal or scholarly consensus on these questions, he added; applying Qur'anic laws to the modern day “is a community project" that is "democratic in spirit.”

Shira Tevah, ’09

Omer Mozaffar and Amédée Turner spoke last Thursday about Islam and democracy.

Party under the portraits

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By 5:35 p.m. Friday, the Chicago Weekly staff had moved the Hutchinson Commons tables to the room’s edges and stacked hundreds of chairs on top of one another, so we thought we were running ahead of schedule for the 7 p.m. start time. Next we put together the dance floor—big enough to accommodate 13 middle-school step-team members and sturdy enough to remain in place while several ballerinas jétéed across its expanse. Turns out that it takes a half-dozen U of C students about an hour to put together a floor.

We were preparing Hutch for Reorientation, an annual event thrown by the Chicago Weekly, where I’m the arts-and-culture editor. Chicago Weekly focuses on Chicago’s South Side: campus culture and news, but also neighborhoods outside Hyde Park. Reorientation showcases some of the best of what we cover. This year, aside from Off-Off Campus and University Ballet, we invited a nationally ranked step team and two local rock bands to perform. The event also served as a release party for our zine, the Midwestern Edition, which features art, fiction, and nonfiction from both Weekly staff and others who submit work—an attempt to, as Weekly editor-in-chief Sean Redmond, ’09, put it in the first issue, “offer a bit of artistic achievement, unmediated, from our hands to yours.”

University students began showing up for Off-Off, who opened our show, at 7:10. Although Hutch’s high ceiling and somber portraits were not quite conducive to improvisational comedy, the troupe garnered laughs from the dozens of students in the crowd. The members of the KIPP Ascend Charter School team took the stage next and performed a 15-minute routine that showed their stepping skills, which incorporates dance elements and keeps rhythm with hand-clapping, stomping, and chanting. When they finished, visual-arts editor Yennie Lee, ’10, took the microphone and exclaimed, “I can promise you that the portraits on this wall have never seen something like that!”

After a performance by the Names that Spell, a Hyde Park–based rock band, headliners Brilliant Pebbles took the stage. Tossing the audience gifts such as a troll doll, pom-poms, and a bright-purple boa, the four-person, new-wave-glam band delivered an enthusiastic set. Often performing as an opening act and at Bridgeport art shows, the band enjoyed headlining. “You’re the most genuine audience we’ve ever had,” noted lead singer Monika Bukowska to the remaining crowd of about two dozen stalwarts, composed partly of dancing Weekly staff. The band finished at 10:45 p.m. and stuck around—handing us all psychedelic business cards and more glittery goodies. As they packed up their gear, we moved the large wooden tables back, and by midnight Hutch was its old somber self.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

The KIPP step team performs its routine; Brilliant Pebbles sings to us.

Open market

Andrew Cone, AB’06, and Steven Lucy, AB’06, have established a new produce store at 55th and Cornell. But Open Produce, now about a month old, offers more than fresh vegetables. Cone and Lucy also have plans to make information available to customers about how they run the shop and buy their goods—the theory is that if people know how the produce gets and stays on the shelf, they might not mind paying a bit more for it. On the blog that the partners have used to document the store’s opening, Lucy says they have set a January 1 goal for total transparency: “bank account statements, wholesale receipts, sales data, and everything else.” Before the partners decided to become social entrepreneurs, they worked in banking and information technology—and the idea of “open” business comes from open-source programming, when the source code for software is made available for public collaboration.

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I stopped by the shop on an overcast Friday morning with the single mission of acquiring pumpkins for a carving party I’m hosting tonight. According to Lucy’s blog, the store had recently purchased about 700 pounds of carving pumpkins (the bin cost $115, about twice as much as it would have last year—pumpkins are among many goods that have seen rising prices). They’re selling the pumpkins for $5 apiece, and because my party is not BYOP, that price sounded good to me. Recent graduate David Richter, AB’08, was working in the store—moving tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, and eggplants across the shelves. “I originally walked in to buy produce,” said Richter. “And then it occurred to me that they might be hiring.” Open Produce, he added, already has cultivated some appreciative customers. “People tend to be happy when they’re about to make dinner,” he said. “Transparency is a big part of it and a good business practice.”

I browsed the store: a bag of leeks was retailing for $1, and the store’s eccentric variety of non-produce items included kimchee, vegan cheese, and Mexican candy bought in Pilsen. Much of the produce comes from the Chicago International Produce Market, but the owners use several dry-goods wholesalers. Shortly I realized there was no way I would be able to carry home the requisite number of pumpkins—they are gigantic and heavy. Instead I settled for a few huge heads of red cabbage and some plump Asian pears, and happily sidled home. I’ll have to come back for my jack-o-lanterns.


Rose Schapiro, '09

Metaphor is forever

When the clock struck 4:30 p.m. this past Saturday—quitting time for the third and final session of the University’s 29th annual Humanities Day—dozens of liberal-arts enthusiasts who'd come to hear Chicago professors talk about Socrates and King Lear, J-pop, Erich Auerbach, African American literature's “Chicago Renaissance,” and the looting of the Baghdad Museum, put on their coats and walked out of Stuart Hall or the Classics Building into the afternoon chill. But in Harper 140, where philosopher Ted Cohen was discussing the Mystery of Metaphor, nobody stirred. An hour into his talk, Cohen was still unraveling nuances and delivering one-liners: "Thomas Hobbes inveighs against metaphor in a book he calls The Leviathan"; "Nietzsche likes metaphor, but as always with Nietzsche, it's very hard to tell what he's talking about." At 4:30 Cohen hadn't yet gotten to the Q&A.

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Over the next hour, a few listeners trickled out of the standing-room-only lecture, but most stayed put as Cohen roamed from jazz to politics, poetry to moral philosophy. He quoted Hemingway, Churchill, Shakespeare, Donne's Meditation XVII ("so good, it's enough to make you a Christian—almost"), the Song of Songs, Joyce's "The Dead" ("the best short story written in English"), Rilke, and T. S. Eliot, whom Cohen, recalling the bleakness of The Waste Land and "The Hollow Men," teasingly called "you desiccated bastard."

In the end, metaphor remained mysterious. Cohen concluded that to function, a metaphor must break the rules of logic and language—"Macbeth doth murder sleep" is as impossible syntactically as it is practically—and argued that perhaps metaphors "aren't giving you meaning, but a picture of the world. ... 'Figurative' means, like a drawing." But truly, he lamented, "we can never solve any of these things." A few minutes later, however, he gave it another try: "A metaphor, even a pretty humble metaphor—'Juliet is the sun'; 'Mussolini is a utensil'—is a very small-scale work of art," Cohen said. "It took a certain kind of creativity to make it, and it takes a certain kind of appreciative talent to understand it. I like that idea. It's a romantic idea, but I like it."

And then, looking at his watch: "We probably should go. It’s nearly 5:30."

L.G.

Expounding on the topic of metaphor—"a way of saying something you can't say in any other way"—Ted Cohen kept a packed audience engrossed and in stitches during his Humanities Day talk.

A maize maze

On the grass in front of Walker last Wednesday afternoon, nine students braved the chill for a higher purpose. Members of Brent House, the Episcopal Center on campus, they were hosting a labyrinth walk for students and passersby.

“It’s a spiritual meditative practice,” said Katy Fallon, ’10, “and an ancient metaphor for life.” The labyrinth consisted of a circular pathway—sprinkled lines of cornmeal so the birds and squirrels could later consume it—that wound around itself, changing directions many times before reaching the center. Spanning only 10 yards, the complex maze required five or 10 minutes to navigate.

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Although the labyrinth is a “tool used in Christianity and other religions,” Fallon explained, the event was not meant to push students toward any particular practice. Brent House organizes a labyrinth walk every fall and spring quarter, skipping winter for obvious reasons. Usually arranged in front of Classics—that quad is currently under construction—the walk provides students an opportunity to step out of their hectic academic lives. The organizers offer hot chocolate or some other treat for meditators; Wednesday’s reward was a plate of homemade cookies at the maze’s center.

“You can go into it and think about whatever you want,” said Brent House member Nick Currie, ’11, after completing the circuit. Currie was one of the hosts; he noted that it was important for them to remember to participate and not just invite others. “The idea," he said, "is to center yourself and recognize that you’re on a journey of some kind.”

The maze—advertised via e-mail—attracted a handful of participants throughout the day, and even some unintentional ones, said Brent House intern Ben Varnum, AB’06, a third-year student in the Divinity School. “Some people walked across, on a mission, and then all of a sudden they looked up and realized they were in it.” Although some kept to their accustomed path, others chose to join the maze they’d stumbled upon.

“We didn’t mind,” Varnum said, “but in general we preferred students to start at the beginning” and follow the lines.

Shira Tevah, '09

Nick Currie, '11, walks through the labyrinth.

Boo! Chicago

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Even though we’re in the middle of midterms—I’ve got a French test and a paper on developing countries coming up next week—Chicago students are still ready to trick-or-treat. From the Center for the Study of Languages, decked out in pumpkin lights and skeleton cut-outs, to bowls of candy in classrooms and the pumpkins that decorate the student-run coffee shops, the campus is hauntingly festive.

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Tonight at 8 costumed students will catch a screening of The Phantom of the Opera at Rockefeller Chapel, with live organ accompaniment for a spooky atmosphere. At 10 p.m. the Organization of Black Students will throw a “Back in the Day”–themed Halloween party, with music and dancing until the wee hours of the morning. At midnight Doc Films will show the 1982 version of The Thing, featuring a sullen Kurt Russell, adorable dogs, and ancient mutating aliens. After the movie, a costume contest will earn one lucky person a free yearlong Doc pass. A definite treat.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

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Photos: The language center shows scary movies all day long; skeletons decorate the hall of Cobb; in Cobb coffee shop, a lone pumpkin lingers.

The living enjoy the Day of the Dead

On Sunday afternoon a pink, yellow, blue, and red paper banner draped the door to Hutchinson Commons. Scores of students gathered in the hall, decorated with paintings and drawings paying homage to dead ancestors and friends. Colorful tables bore ofrendas such as bright paper flowers, candles, and sweets, made by students from the U of C chapter of Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Atzlán (MEChA), who organized the event: a celebration of Dìa de los Muertos. The holiday, celebrated primarily in Mexico on the first and second of November, honors the dead, so loved ones can both mourn and celebrate them. Although many cultures celebrate their dead, many aspects of the Mexican holiday can be traced back to the ancient Aztecs and the Maya, who were mostly eradicated by colonizing Spaniards.

The organizers invited several performers to the two-hour MEChA celebration, including the folk band Fandanguero and the Aztec-dance troupe Mestizarte, who performed in traditional costumes. The students also offered their guests food—beans, rice, fajitas de pollo, and pan de muerto, a traditional holiday treat of sweet glazed bread loaves.

Watch the Mestizarte dance troupe perform in Hutch. Based in Pilsen, the group uses traditional dance to connect with their ancestral and cultural roots.


Mestizarte at Dia de los Muertos from University of Chicago Magazine on Vimeo.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Dispatch from a voting expert

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Tuesday, 1:52 p.m.:

I signed up to be a polling-place administrator three years ago with recruiters at the Reynolds Club. It’s a good gig for a college student; the Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners paid $500 the first time—now it’s down to $300—for Election Day work and a few hours of training beforehand. It’s a fancy title for a simple job: I’m in charge of fixing electronic problems that the voting machines rarely have. Little expertise is necessary to plug in the ballot scanner or to press the green “override” button on the touch-screen unit whenever something goes wrong. For the most part today, I have done homework and written this blog entry.

This is the first time I’ve served as an administrator for a presidential election, and though my tasks are the same, it feels different. There are three precincts here at the Christ Way Baptist Church on 62nd and Woodlawn, and one other polling-place administrator. The morning brought hordes of people who lined up by 5:30—half an hour after we had arrived and begun setting up—and stood waiting. Ten minutes after the polls opened at 6 a.m., the large room had filled with more than 50 voters, and traffic was steady until 9 a.m.


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I feel like I’m at the center of things. More than a few people have had to vote using provisional ballots, and anxiety is high, but so is the excitement. There’s an almost tangible sense of community. “I know most of the people coming in to vote,” one Democratic judge tells me. “I’ve even met Michelle and Barack Obama.” I nod mutely, not allowed to say anything. A young Republican judge has to lend his white sweatshirt to a voter because she’s wearing a bright red Barack Obama “superstar” T-shirt. A discussion ensues about whether voters should be allowed to wear partisan gear to the polls. It’s a tough rule, one judge says, “especially for our people.”

I stand out here—the only white poll worker out of more than 20. Almost all the voters are black too, and my laptop and grapefruit slices don’t help me blend in. Neither does the Magazine’s photographer, causing an uproar with his camera. “Strike a pose!” the women across the room call out. Later they ask why I’m sitting on the floor to type. Turns out this job is a great way to meet my neighbors—I live half a block away. During the slow middle of the day we pass around ham sandwiches that a judge brought, and sugary fruit punch. The day is in fact a procession of food: representatives from 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran's office also stop by with lunch and donuts.

Many of my friends are spending the day canvassing in Indiana and driving voters to their polling places. Others are in class, reading the latest polls on their computers and not hearing a word their teachers say. They’re enduring the day anxiously, promising to catch up on the week’s neglected homework as soon as it’s all over. I may have originally signed up for this job to get paid, but now I would rather be here than anywhere, living this election instead of watching it.

Shira Tevah, '09

Woodlawn's Christ Way Baptist Church (top), watched over by a mural of Consuela York, the current pastor's mother, serves as a polling place on Election Day; as a polling-place administrator, Magazine intern Shira Tevah (bottom) gets a ground-level view of the presidential election.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Applause, applause

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By 4:50 yesterday afternoon, the Rothman Winter Garden teemed with chattering MBA students, invited only a few hours earlier to hear a special 5 p.m. announcement from GSB Dean Ted Snyder, AM’78, PhD’84.

The elbow-to-elbow crowd—faculty, staff, former deans, GSB Council members, University administrators and trustees, and alumni added to the mix—waited patiently, jockeying politely for a better view of the dais where photographers and videographers jostled for their own sight lines.

“Good afternoon.” Dean Snyder had the crowd at hello. When the applause died down, he introduced three people sitting front-and-center: Chandler Booth, a fifth-grader from Austin, Texas, who likes basketball and China; Erin Booth, an art-history major at Georgetown University; and Suzanne Deal Booth, an art conservator who directs Friends of Heritage Preservation. “Now, let me tell you about David Booth.”

Beginning with the first, “life-changing” course that Booth, MBA’71, took from finance professor Eugene Fama, MBA’63, PhD’64, Snyder traced the success of Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), which Booth founded in 1981 with Rex Sinquefield, MBA’72, and which based many of its investment strategies on ideas flowing from Fama and others at the GSB. Booth, a GSB Council member and University trustee, has long credited DFA’s success to a way of thinking he learned at Chicago. And now, said Snyder, the Booth family was demonstrating that gratitude—and confidence in the school—in a very tangible way.

One by one, Snyder revealed the details of the gift—which had been, until this moment, a phenomenally well-kept secret: “The largest ever to our school” brought whistles and applause. “The largest to any business school” increased the volume. “The largest to the University” turned it up a notch. And then: “300 million!” Could the sound-o-meter go higher?

In recognition of the gift, Snyder announced, the University’s trustees had voted that afternoon to rename the business school. With that, a new banner was unfurled above the dais. The noise soared. Chicago GSB was now “CHICAGO BOOTH: The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.”

Calling his gift “a partnership distribution,” Booth told the students, “Clearly we have the best business school, and it will continue to support all of us.” Fama described his student’s intellect and humility, and University President Robert Zimmer praised Booth as an exemplar of Chicago ideas and ideals in action.

And because a new name demands new gear, boxes of long-sleeved tops emblazoned with CHICAGO BOOTH suddenly opened around the room—just in time for a mass photo op.

M.R.Y.

A Thursday afternoon reception (top) fills the Rothman Winter Garden at the Harper Center; finance professor Eugene Fama, MBA'63, PhD'64 (left) and University President Zimmer applaud the GSB's new namesake, David Booth, MBA'71; and MBA students show their Booth colors in new Chicago Booth gear.

Photos by Matthew Gilson

Nectar of the Babylonians

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Students socializing at Jimmy’s over a pint of beer know that they’re participating in an age-old practice, but few likely realize just how old. Even before the dawn of recorded history, beer-brewing was widespread throughout the ancient Near East. In a presentation at the Oriental Institute last Wednesday, Kathleen Mineck, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, coupled a lecture on beer in the ancient world with a tasting of her own home brews, prepared in the Sumerian manner.

Beer’s basic ingredients—yeast, water, and barley or wheat—are the same ones used to make bread, and ancient bakers often made the two side-by-side.. The Greek soldier of fortune Xenophon recounted finding that “barley-wine,” as he described beer, was made in every home in Armenia. No bacteria or pathogen could grow in beer because of the alcohol, making it safer to drink than water. Sumerians considered beer a gift from the gods, Mineck said, and many artifacts show people drinking it both recreationally and ritually.

Mineck, whose husband was a home-brewer long before she began her research, attempted to recreate the beers using the same or similar ingredients available in ancient Mesopotamia. The process required some guesswork: while the basic brewing process of the ancients is well known, the precise spices and flavorings used are obscure. In the end, guests sampled beers flavored with dates, with grapes (“wine-beer”), and with honey. Drinks were served in Mesopotamian-style ceramic mugs made for the occasion and stamped with the symbol of the goddess Inanna, patroness of love and fertility.

Anheuser-Busch and Heineken needn’t worry about their market share being threatened by a flood of Assyrian ales: this blogger thought the beer tasted weak and flat (partly because of the absence of hops, an innovation of the past millennium, and partly because the beer was served at room temperature.) The date-beer and wine-beer both had too much fruit, though the honey wheat beer was, as Xenophon wrote, “a very pleasant drink to those accustomed to it.”

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

OI staffer Kaye Oberhausen pours a sample of honey wheat beer; Kathleen Mineck shares her home-brewed beer with the crowd.

Art break

It’s easy to tell when the halls of Cobb will be bustling and when they will be bleak. From about two minutes before one class session ends to about four minutes after the next begins—11:48 a.m. to 12:04 p.m., for instance—Cobb floods with students loudly stomping up and down the five flights of stairs.

Many students who stream in and out don’t know about the Renaissance Society, located on the fourth floor, which showcases cutting-edge contemporary art. But for those who do know about it, what’s a better place to spend a half-hour before class than in one of the Midwest’s premier galleries? It’s a great way to decompress with a few moments of something different.

The Renassiance Society’s current something different is Francis Alys’s Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues), on exhibition through December 14. The large installation features a room—a box, really—made of rough-hewn, industrial-building wood. Inside the box hang hundreds of drawings of a shoe being shined by a pair of skilled hands. Alys also turned the drawings into an animated film, which a visitor can watch by climbing external stairs to the top of the box. Five huge floor pillows sit in front of the video screen, which shows the animation, accompanied by music and lyrics that Alys composed.

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I spent my break watching the film, which empathizes with society’s relegation of the shoe shine to hierarchical invisibility—curator Hamza Walker, AB’88, notes in his exhibition essay that Bolero “converts animation into a site where drawing is not only privileged for harboring artisanal skill, but for translating that skill into a display of labor that, like that of its subject matter, has been marginalized.”

At 1:18, like clockwork, the sounds from Cobb’s corridors began to pervade the quiet gallery, and Alys’s haunting clarinet was joined by elevators grinding and students chattering about Plato in the hallway. And I was reminded that it was time to go to class—luckily, right downstairs.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

The inside of the Bolero installation.

Image courtesy the Renaissance Society

Drawing power



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More than 50 students crowded into the Smart Museum’s lobby Thursday night for “Make Your Mark,” an opportunity to sketch from a live model and enjoy sushi and music. The Smart provided drawing materials, but I arrived late and there was only newsprint left. I haven’t done any sketching since the Core art class I took as a first-year, so I thought the finicky nature of newsprint might put it out of my league. Instead, somewhat relieved, I took out my camera, pen, and notepad. The students' skill levels varied widely: a friend of mine had a blank page by the hour's end, while others had produced multiple detailed sketches.

The event was both relaxing and lively, with classical music and a brightness that contrasted the rain outside. People were courteously quiet but not oppressively so, and no one frowned on chatting. The “live model,” a heavyset man with reddish hair, was in fact clothed—this had been a topic of some pre-event discussion, especially for those of us unaccustomed to figure drawing.

Sue Donovan, ’09, cochair of the Smart Museum Activities Committee, which planned the evening along with the museum’s Director of Education Kristy Peterson, told me that this year’s event was “even better” than last year's debut. “We thought it would be nice,” she explained, “to do a combination of art gallery and constructing art.”

The aura was so creative, in fact, that Alaina Valenzuela, '11, became an impromptu model for her friends who sat on the stairs near the entrance and couldn’t see the model across the lobby well enough to draw him. She had no prior experience modeling, Valenzuela told me, but her friend Ainsley Sutherland, ’11, pointed out that she is a dancer so her pose—standing with both arms above her head—came naturally. “It was a lot easier for me at least,” Sutherland said. “We could tell her what poses we wanted.”

Shira Tevah, '09

Students filled the Smart's lobby; Noelle Barber, '10, sketches from the model.

Fundamentals: Issues and Sketch

“So, what are you all interested in?” asked Scott Sherman, AB’04, to the three dozen students nestled in seats in the Francis X. Kinahan Third Floor Theater, waiting to hear him speak. Sherman, who has written for The Onion, Comedy Central, Saturday Night Live, and several projects in development, stopped by campus while on a tour promoting his second book, The Devious Book for Cats (a parody of the popular The Dangerous Book for Boys, cowritten with four other former Onion staffers). But he wasn’t in the Reynolds Club on a Friday afternoon to talk about feline fancies—the subject of the workshop, sponsored by University Theater, was “Writing (for Money!).”

Writing for money, Sherman stressed, “is not Proust. It’s not like I will be able to write when the tea absorbs into the biscuits.” Students asked questions about subjects from getting an agent to balancing an academic workload with getting writing experience.

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Attendees, mostly undergrads, hoped for writing careers covering a slew of media—from sketch comedy to print journalism to online outlets. “That’s probably a smarter take,” Sherman nodded, adding that print media, in his opinion, probably wouldn’t be viable for much longer. He described his own career trajectory, spurred by interning and then working as an assistant to the producers at Second City while a student, and by his Fundamentals: Issues and Texts major, in which he focused on definitions and permutations of comedy throughout history. After college he went straight to satiric newspaper The Onion before landing at Comedy Central, where he’s a writer for a sketch series starring comedian Demetri Martin. It will have its premiere this winter. “I hope you watch it,” Sherman said, “and tell your friends to watch it, and we’ll get a second season. The Emmys will come, and I’ll thank you all.”

He advised the students to take writing seriously. “If you don’t have a work ethic, it’s just not going to happen.” Although Chicago doesn’t offer a lot of formal preparation for the intense grind of being a professional writer, he said, “you’re all way ahead of 90 percent of the people on the road you’re going down,” simply because students at Chicago are used to being challenged. “The only difference between the three all-nighters I pulled to do my Fundamentals exam and the three all-nighters I just pulled to finish [writing] a pilot for Fox was that during one I was surrounded by giant puppets.”

Rose Schapiro,’09

Sherman speaks to his audience.

Photos by Dan Dry

Which road to automaker solvency?

As GM, Ford, and Chrysler ask Congress for a bailout, University of Chicago scholars have their own opinions on what should happen to the Big Three automakers.

On the Becker-Posner blog economics professor Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, explains why he believes the companies should be allowed to go bankrupt: "Bankruptcy would help GM and Ford become more competitive by abrogating significant parts of their labor contracts with the UAW."

His blog partner, senior Law School lecturer Richard Posner, disagrees. The auto companies, he writes, "should be kept out of the bankruptcy court until the depression bottoms out and the economy begins to grow again." It would be similar to what happened with United Airlines after 9/11.

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Law School professor Douglas Baird, meanwhile, said on NPR it's possible that neither solution will help GM. The company has had problems paying creditors and retirees for decades, he said, "so why do we think that if we give them a month or two months' breathing space, somehow it's going to magically figure out the solutions to its problems?" He added, "There's nothing about a government bailout or Chapter 11 that's going to fix the underlying economic problems that a firm faces."

A.B.P.

From death, light

Rockefeller’s bells were ringing as 50 people entered Bond Chapel for Amadou Cisse’s service of remembrance Wednesday evening. “Assalamu alaikum,” Professor Mahmoud Ismail began. “Peace be upon you.” Cisse, a 29-year-old chemistry graduate student from Senegal, was shot and killed November 19, 2007, shortly after completing requirements for his PhD; four men await trial for his murder.

“I prayed many times with Amadou,” Ismail said before reciting the Sura al-Fatiha, the opening verses of the Qur’an. “We’re here today to celebrate his life. He was very well trusted by his friends and very well liked by all who had moments with him. We Muslims believe that you go from this life to another life, where you wait until the resurrection. May Allah make his grave a garden full of light, and may he make his life in this stage as pleasant as possible.”

Czerny Brasuell, director of multicultural affairs at Bates College, spoke of Cisse’s time as an undergrad there, where he became a member of her family, she said. “There was no self in Amadou. There was devotedness and kindness to others.” He intended to mentor a group of West African students at Bates this past fall, she said. Instead he became “the role model they never met.” The students have all been inspired by Cisse to take extra courses and declare early majors, saying, “If he could, we can.”

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The speakers encouraged the audience to act to honor Cisse. Mumtaz Champsi, MBA’86, from Hyde Park Muslim Families, said Cisse’s friends should “challenge the violence” that took his life. “Let’s start by being peaceful,” she said, “and then let us reach out: to each other and to our neighbors. May God make America dar al-salaam, the land of peace.” Omer Mozaffar, MLA’03, who first met Cisse at Friday prayer in Bond Chapel, made three requests of those present: first, “look at your relationship with yourself, the world around you, and the divine”; second, “introduce yourself to someone in this room”; and third, “work to solve the problems in our society.”

“Find a cause that you can give to,” Mozaffar said. “Make life come from this death.”

Other speakers included Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Students in the University Kimberly Goff-Crews; Student Government President Matthew Kennedy, ’09; Muslim Students Association Vice President Enal Hindi, ’10; and Cheikh Balla Samb, president of the Senegalese Association in Chicago. Muhammad Hossain, ’11, sang verses from the Qur’an.

George Vassilev, an international-relations graduate student and president of the International House Residents’ Council, and the council’s representatives closed the ceremony by lighting candles and reciting the I-House pledge: “As light begets light, so love, friendship, and goodwill are passed from one to another…”

Shira Tevah, ’09

International House Residents Council recites the I-House pledge.

The adventures of Augie Kleinzahler

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Latecomers to the warm fourth-floor lecture hall in Rosenwald sat eagerly on the floor, packing themselves against chairs and sofas, waiting for the poet to begin. The occasion was a Thursday afternoon Poem Present reading by August Kleinzahler. With works that are often tightly constructed and complicated but written in a stark vernacular, Kleinzahler has been prominent in the poetry community for decades and is considered a protégé in style and form of both modernists like Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting and American beats like Allen Ginsberg.

English professor Robert von Hallberg introduced “Augie,” offering the titles of the 11 Kleinzahler books he owns: simple, evocative phrases like Sleeping It Off in Rapid City and Red Sauce, Whiskey & Snow. Von Hallberg noted how even in the colloquial poetry for which he is known, Kleinzahler’s use of the strange, complex names of chemicals and drugs creates a sense of the bizarre.

In “Retard Spoilage,” he uses this strangeness to describe the familiar. The poem features a couple sleeping even as the long list of foods in their refrigerator rots away: “mephitic flora” and “ladders of polysaccharides” in a “fetor of broken proteins.”

In his reading, Kleinzahler barely paused between poems, starting each one a beat after the last. He maintained his flow of speech through poems both short and long: a portrait of his mother in New Jersey in January, a monologue by an older dying poet, an ode to the workers who ride the corporate bus that runs from the bottom of the San Francisco hill where he lives to Silicon Valley’s Googleplex. Introducing the long poem that forms the centerpiece of his recent retrospective anthology, “Sleeping It off in Rapid City,” Kleinzahler asked if anyone in the audience had been to the South Dakota town. “It’s a weird town,” he added, and then let his poem explain how. He describes the city, which once housed the U.S. government’s missile defense program, and its truckers, hotels, and tourist attractions like the (relatively) nearby Badlands and Mount Rushmore. Kleinzahler paused in the poem’s middle: “I should have also told you that Rapid City claims to be 60 miles south of the center of the United States. If you count Alaska.”

Rose Schapiro, ’09

August Kleinzahler offers some of the finer things in life.

Photo courtesy Poem Present


Six days till 60 Seconds

The Chicago Studies program has extended the deadline for its CHICAGO IN:60 SECONDS contest. Any Chicago undergraduate or grad student can enter the competition to make a one-minute video exploring the University’s "relationship to the city, its role within it or other unique cultural aspect that can only be attributed to being embedded in urban Chicago." The winner gets $500.

See some of the submissions on YouTube.

Ready, set, action!

A.B.P.

"John D. Rockefeller" invites students to make their own videos.

Art in science

Just off the elevators on the Gordon Center's third floor, Michael LaBarbera's Bay Scallop—Looking Back jumps out at visitors, displayed among other 20-by-26-inch prints. The photograph's neutral background—dirty white waves and jelly-like bristles—sets off eight of the organism's turquoise eyes, seven marching along a diagonal and one outlier at the upper right.

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The animal has hundreds more eyes that the photo doesn't show—but what does an organism with virtually no brain do with so many eyes? "We know that the scallop can use its eyes to census the number of particles in the water, which it eats," LaBarbera says, "and it has been claimed that they can see predators like crabs approaching, but the evidence is pretty bad for the latter." He found the scallop—Argopecten irradians—in the northern Gulf of Mexico and used it while teaching Invertebrate Zoology this past spring quarter. The image shows a shell at the bottom, the eight eyes and sensory tentacles, and an opening where water enters for feeding and respiration.

One of about 40 pieces in the Science in Art exhibit, which is brightening the Gordon Center's sunny atrium through December 13, the photograph is an example of the beauty in science. The exhibit, in its second year, aims to show how "people incorporate art into science or science into art," says organizer Rebecca Ayers, a doctoral student in biochemistry and molecular biology who also paints.

So while some of the art, like LaBarbera's, comes from scientists at the University, Argonne National Lab, or Fermilab, other pieces are by local artists who meld science into their work. Chicago artist Vesna Jovanovic, for example, contributed Timekeeper, a self-portrait in which she overlaid several years' worth of full-body X-rays, then drew or painted clock gears over the heart and other systems. Near the arms she drew the beginnings of wings, showing what may come in thousands of years. "The piece is a record of the passing of time," she notes in her artist's statement, "not only a lifetime (illustrated by the medical scans), but also time through evolution, technology, and culture."

A.B.P.

Photo courtesy Michael LaBarbera

Macroeconomics—with a local angle

“I’ve held hundreds of town meetings in towns of less than 100,” U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, AB’64, told hundreds of listeners in Kent Hall Tuesday night. “I’ve personally talked to every resident of the state of Vermont.” He wasn’t bragging, he said, but trying to convey a “dose of reality” that others might not get. “I’ve talked to people who have lost their jobs,” he said, “and people who work incredibly long hours and are further behind at the end of the week than they were at the beginning. I’ve talked to thousands wondering how they’ll stay warm in the 20- and 30-below temperatures in Vermont.”

Sanders, elected to the House in 1990 and the Senate in 2006, was on campus to register his protest against the University naming its new institute for economic research after Milton Friedman, a 1976 Nobel Prize–winner who taught at Chicago for 30 years. Sanders’s talk, sponsored by the Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society (CORES), Students for CORES, Chicago Society, Students for a Democratic Society, and Stand-Up for Progress, was funded in part by Student Government.

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A self-described socialist and the longest-serving independent member of Congress, Sanders traced his constituents’ hardships to Friedman’s (AM’33) “right-wing ideology, which has caused enormous damage to the working people around the world.” The ideas propounded by the longtime Chicago economics professor aren’t “brilliant economic theory,” Sanders said, but “a wish list for the wealthy and the powerful”: removing the minimum wage, unions, and the “estate tax that affects three-tenths of one percent” of Americans. Friedman once termed Social Security “unethical”; Sanders called it “the most successful antipoverty program in the history of our country.”

Now that the economy is in crisis, Friedmanites “have changed their tune,” Sanders said, and are “lining up for their welfare checks outside Congress”—the $7 trillion bailout. Instead government should “start dismantling those financial institutions,” he argued. “Friedman’s ideas are dead wrong,” he concluded, “economically, morally, and philosophically. It’s a bad idea to start an institution that emblazons and propagates them.”

On Sanders’s way out, two other Vermonters and I introduced ourselves. He was excited to see us and noted how rare students from his state are at the University. He asked my field, and I told him I was studying public policy. “DC is a very exciting place to be,” he said, encouraging me to go into government or policy. “28-year-olds are making all the big policies!”

Shira Tevah, ’09

Bernie Sanders, AB'64, addressed a crowd of several hundred Tuesday night.

Photo by Daniel Benjamin, '09.

Women's work

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An 1895–96 course catalog was projected on the wall in the Rosenthal Special Collections Seminar Room Tuesday morning. One course in particular was highlighted: The Somatic and Psychic History of Woman was the first course on women at the University of Chicago, explained Monica Mercado, AM’06, and Katherine Turk, AM’07. The two history PhD students found the course catalog while researching women at the University for a course they taught fall quarter called Alma Mater: The History of Women at the University of Chicago, 1892–2008.

Like the teachers, the class’s 12 students, mostly women, are contributing their findings to a campus exhibit and shared their themes and items they’d found—to be final projects along with a seven- to nine-page paper—during Tuesday’s final class. Sarah Butler, ’09, examined mental-health services for female students from the 1940s to the 1970s. “The University seemed to think that mental health care was an optional thing to provide,” she said. Administrators were “patting themselves on the back” when they brought in humanist psychologist Carl Rogers to set up a counseling center, but students, Butler found through oral histories, “didn’t know about the services or didn’t think they were working.” The administration was particularly concerned about women’s psychological health, Butler said, because of the widespread belief that a woman’s “biological clock” and constant desire to be a mother “made it ten times harder to be mentally stable.”


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Lauren Guerrieri, ’10, looked at women’s training in World War I. Although they were not “tied down to husbands and children,” the University’s female students “brought skills associated with wives” to contribute to the war effort. Guerrieri had found a photograph of the Green Hall Knitting Group; an advertisement for Liberty Loans, one panel of which featured a soldier abroad and the other a patriotic woman at home; a page from Marion Talbot's “Patriotic Program for Women”; and a Maroon article about a group of women who sewed uniforms, complete with vests and hats, for the 180-member men’s ambulance corps. “It sounds like the war definitely changed what women were doing on campus,” Turk interjected. “What were those changes?” They were doing the same things as before, Guerrieri responded, but the war effort “gave them the ability to be involved in something national.”


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Other students researched famous female figures like African American anthropologist, activist, and dancer Katherine Dunham, PhB’36; the University’s first female trustee, Katharine Graham, AB’38; and child psychologist and pioneer of “popularity studies” Helen Koch, PhB’18, PhD’21. A few looked at radical women’s groups from the Sixties, such as the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which performed underground abortions and inspired the documentary Jane.

Turk and Mercado’s exhibit, “On Equal Terms: Experiences of Women at the University of Chicago,” opens in Special Collections March 16. The students’ parallel exhibit begins later in March at the Gender Studies Center. The group also plans to get together after finals to watch Jane. “I’m looking forward to coming to the archives in winter to read feminist news,” Butler joked during a lull, “when I don’t want to work on my BA.”

Shira Tevah, ’09

Students present their findings on the history of women at Chicago; one student uses a poster advertising a radical women's group meeting; Emily Moss, '10, points out Katharine Graham's name on a trustee document.

Photo by Dan Dry.

To Reg or not to Reg

Mother Nature often brings one of the season’s first snowy bursts just in time for autumn-quarter finals week, which begins today. This weekend was no exception, and, as usually happens during a frosty reading period, students divide into two factions. One group frolics outside and extols the beauty of the snow-coated trees, often to the annoyance of the opposing bloc, which sees the constant chill of drifting snow as a good reason to stay in the library for an extra two (or three, or four) hours. And finals week is as a good a time as any—in fact, some might argue, the best time—to study ceaselessly.

Students line up for midnight breakfast

From early afternoon until late evening Sunday, nearly every seat in the Regenstein was occupied. This finals week I have to write too many long papers to appreciate the snow. But out the library windows I could see snowmen, stick arms and all, on the Bartlett Quadrangle. Students staged an impromptu snowball fight outside Max Palevsky, careful not to hit those headed to the Reg, identifiable by their heavy backpacks or armloads of books.

Eggs and books mingle in Hutchinson Commons

But even the most hardcore library sloggers need a study break. By midnight the temperature had warmed slightly, and both snow enthusiasts and study hounds met at the College Programming Office’s quarterly midnight breakfast in Hutchinson Commons. Students hugging the precious Marx-Engels Reader (Self, Culture, and Society) mingled with friends practicing Japanese characters and others who had come in from yet another snowball battle. After CPO and ORCSA staff had served hundreds of attendees eggs, pancakes, sausage, and hash browns, the crowds began to melt away. Some returned to perching in the all-night study spaces at the Reg or Crerar, and some went home to bed—or to write from the comfort of their living rooms. It seemed, at least briefly, that enough snowballs had been thrown to appease the revelers.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Students line up for midnight breakfast; eggs and books mingle in Hutchinson Commons.

Chicago Gothic

Steps from the Gleacher Center on Pioneer Court—right in front of 401 North Michigan Avenue, home of the Magazine’s office—warmly dressed art installers Nick Valenza and Doug Roberts spent the morning adding finishing touches to Chicago’s newest public-art installation: God Bless America (2005) by artist J. Seward Johnson Jr., grandson of the founder of Johnson & Johnson.

Workers install Johnson's God Bless America in Pioneer Court

Previously on display in Key West, Florida, the 25-foot-tall couple taking center stage reimagines Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), a popular painting in the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection, several blocks south. Only a few days earlier, tourists, office workers, and Chicago Booth students alike stopped to note the dethroning of Johnson’s King Lear, the previous tenant of the plaza’s pedestal.

Workers install Johnson's God Bless America in Pioneer Court

God Bless America dwarfs Pioneer Court’s other public piece: John Kearney’s permanent installation, a lonely moose made from chrome car bumpers that loiters near the Chicago River. A more familiar Kearney piece to many at the U of C may be his ram, nicknamed “Harold”—also made of car bumpers—that grazes in the grass outside the McCormick Theological Seminary.

The Hyde Park/Kenwood Community Conference has a virtual tour of public art in and around campus. A blogger at Public Art in Chicago tracks public art from all over the city.

J.O.M.

Although Johnson has already done his last step creating the Styrofoam covered by urethane statue, two workers reassembling the piece still had to manually piece it back it back together.

Nambu's Nobel

Chicago’s downright Scandinavian weather on Wednesday provided a fitting backdrop for a little bit of Stockholm transplanted to Hyde Park—a special ceremony at International House to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Emeritus Yoichiro Nambu. Because the 87-year-old Nambu and his ailing wife couldn’t travel to Stockholm for the official ceremony that day, Jonas Hafström, the Swedish ambassador to the United States, brought Nambu’s medal to him.

The musicians of Millar Brass open up the ceremony

The Chicago event began with a trumpet flourish from the Millar Brass. President Zimmer welcomed the crowd (physics faculty and graduate students, University staff, and assorted VIPs) and then stepped aside for taped highlights from Stockholm, where Nambu’s corecipients, Japanese physicists Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, received their medals. After King Carl XVI Gustaf was shown presenting Kobayashi and Maskawa with their medals, Hafström presented Nambu with his.

Nambu took to the podium to explain spontaneous symmetry breaking—the concept he pioneered in the 1960s that won him the Nobel. A system in a symmetric state is like a crowd of people looking about aimlessly, he said, favoring no particular direction. But when everyone in the crowd turns and looks in one direction—“as you are doing right now”—then that symmetry has been broken. Applying this concept to particle physics helped physicists to unify electromagnetism with the strong and weak nuclear forces, a milestone in the history of particle physics’ Standard Model.

Hafström presents Nambu with his diploma and medal

After a toast to Nambu at the post-ceremony reception, fellow Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of physics Jim Cronin said that Nambu’s prize wasn’t merely well deserved but also well overdue. (He speculated that the gap between Nambu’s Nobel-winning work and the announcement of the award—48 years—might be a Nobel Foundation record.) Nambu, for his part, thanked the University for treating him “like family” when he arrived in Hyde Park in 1954. Raising his champagne glass, he announced another toast: “Here’s to the University of Chicago!”

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

The musicians of Millar Brass open up the ceremony; Hafström presents Nambu with his diploma and medal.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Sketch-an-etch

The etching revival of the 1850s and the medium’s early 20th century popularity showed the growing breadth of everyday life. Etchers captured landscapes from pastoral Britain to colonial India, and occupations from trench-bound soldier to lime-burner. The Smart Museum exhibit The "Writing" of Modern Life (through April 19) makes an argument that etching’s range of subjects allowed it to capture modernity’s broad spectrum.

East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge, (1928) by Martin Lewis

The etching process allowed artists to reproduce individual works. An etcher would quickly draw through wax and expose the metal with a sharp scribe tool, then transfer the image to a metal plate, giving it an acid bath to eat away at the lines. Some artists applied the acid painstakingly with a feather; others would cover the plate entirely.

The exhibit’s variety shows the result of divergent artistic perspectives, in addition to difference in subject matter. Robert Sargent Austin’s The Bell, No. 1 (1926) shows a sharply etched bell in front of a broken wheel, with a richly depicted background. Other artists focus on details of modern architecture like bridges and cathedrals. Some etchings are dramatized; Clare Leighton, who immigrated to New York City from Britain in the early 20th century, made Bread Line, New York (1932), a stark, geometric representation of a crowd suffering beneath advertisements.

Hands Etching—O Laborum, (1865) by Sir Francis Seymour Haden

At the height of its revival, etching was regarded as the closest that art could come to writing—each artist had a singular style to transfer the image from mind to the final print. “Among the different modes of expression in the visual arts, etching appears the most literary,” wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire in 1862. According to the exhibit catalogue, an etching was considered tantamount to an artist’s signature, as distinct and identifiable as handwriting.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Holiday hours: The Smart Museum will be closed on December 24–25 and December 31–January 1. In addition, the Museum will close at 4 p.m. on Thursday, December 18.

A detail view of East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge (1928) by Martin Lewis; Hands Etching—O Laborum (1865) by Sir Francis Seymour Haden.

Etchings reproduced with permission from The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art.

Snow patrol

Campus snowfall Campus snowfallDespite a traffic-halting winter storm that had Chicago’s Snow Command fleet of 274 vehicles out on the streets by 3 p.m. yesterday, Magazine photographer Dan Dry braved the blustery weather to capture the campus blanketed by fresh, barely trampled snowfall.

Food for these times

MysteryCake.jpgIf you haven’t yet had your fill of sinful sweets and savory dishes this holiday season, feast on the University of Chicago Press’s always satisfying food and gastronomical offerings.

For a hearty main course, we recommend starting with an excerpt from Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations (Globe Pequot Press, 2008) by Chris Fair, SB’91, AM’97, PhD’04. If you’re hungry for more, why not order Sylvia Lovegren’s Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads and try out her depression-era canned soup recipe for Mystery Cake?

Bon appétit.

J.O.M.

Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago Press.

Frosty the gargoyle

FrostyGargoyle.jpgWhile UChiBLOGo takes a break until January 2, we want to leave our loyal readers with some festive ways to have some online fun.

Read how Chicago-based stone carver and sculptor Walter S. Arnold created the Class of 1999’s Chicago Millennium Gargoyle or watch a movie by James Waters, AB’05, that highlights all of the grotesques, bosses, statues, and ornate decorations—many currently buried in snow—found around campus.

UofC-yeti.jpgDon your hand-knitted U of C scarf and listen to Louis Armstrong read The Night Before Christmas.

Mix up a drink—may we suggest a Phoenix?—and watch Alfred Brendel perform Beethoven’s 200-year-old “Choral Fantasia” at Carnegie Hall.

Remember your favorite Chicago traditions and then start a new one: shaving a Yeti so that he, too, shows some school spirit.

J.O.M.

The new year begins in Africa


Magazine intern Shira Tevah, ’09, is spending winter quarter abroad as part of Chicago’s African Civilizations course. This is her first dispatch from South Africa.—Ed.

Medicine Reading material “We think we can just make these crazy plans for a few months away,” my friend Kelin Hall, ’09, once said to me, “and not think about them again until a few days before.” Her words describe my present position: I leave tonight at 11 p.m. for Cape Town, where I’ll spend winter quarter in Chicago’s African Civilizations course abroad. I didn’t seriously begin preparations until after New Year’s.

My thoughts revolve around the unknown: a continent I’ve never been to, a different daily routine whose appearance I can’t envision. The climate? Warm, I presume. The landscape? “It’s so beautiful,” everyone says, but I know little else. The people? I have a list of the 24 Chicago students going, but most I haven’t met. How will the hours be filled? For starters, we’ll have John and Jean Comaroff’s African Civilizations 1 & 2 readings—Economy, Society, Politics, and Law: Pre-Colonial and Colonial Perspectives; Colonialism and the Dialectics of Modernity—and trips to places such as Clanwilliam, Table Mountain, and even Johannesburg and Kruger Park at the end of the quarter. Details like how to do my laundry? I’ll find out when we get there.

Reading material Passport and wallet I decided to visit South Africa while living and studying in the West Bank last fall quarter—comparisons of the West Bank to South Africa under apartheid are widespread and widely argued. It would be interesting, I thought, to see for myself. I had been trying to avoid Chicago’s study-abroad programs because I feared they would be too cloistered (these programs consist of U of C faculty and students alone), but in the end I opted for, well, more time abroad. Knowing I’d miss a Chicago winter didn’t hurt.

The Cape Town program has an unwritten reputation for being both the most academically rigorous and the constant choice for students interested in social justice. I’m anxious about being a political tourist. I want to get to know every part of South Africa, including, for instance, impoverished townships, but I’m wary of turning people’s lives into spectacle by studying them and writing blogs or academic papers. I hope to balance, in whatever ways I can, the quest for knowledge with the commodification of the places and people where knowledge can be found.

I have a hunch the stack of paper I printed last week will help. I’ll get started on my 12-and-a-half hour flight to Dubai, followed by 12 hours in Dubai and another nine hours and 40 minutes to Cape Town. My reading list for the flights includes: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Life and Times of Michael K by former professor in Social Thought J. M. Coetzee, and King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard—which is, according to the girl working at the Seminary Co-op the day I bought it, a page-turning adventure perfect for long flights.

Shira Tevah, ’09

Clockwise from top left: I have to make space for textbooks in my suitcase; I'm bringing Malarone, a malaria suppressant that we'll be taking when we go to Kruger Park, as well as emergency antibiotics; passport and concealable wallet are, of course, a necessity; my stack of all the course readings.

2B or not 2B? That's the question. 2B is the answer.

Michael RobbinsEnglish PhD student Michael Robbins, AM'04, perks up the pages of the January 12 New Yorker with his poem "Alien vs. Predator." This morning UChiBLOGo chatted by e-mail with Robbins about his poetic influences, following his sister to Chicago, and his current project intersecting Wu-Tang Clan and the twin towers.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat's the story behind your poem in New Yorker?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI suppose it's the old story: boy meets capital, boy sells capital to someone who can't afford it, who then loans it to someone who can never pay it back. It's a love poem.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhere can we find more of your work?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy poems have appeared in various places: Lit, La Petite Zine, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review. The Hat published three of my poems last year, but they seem to have attributed them to my colleague Michael Robins (or 1B, as I like to call him), who is a fine poet in his own right. I wish the editors had asked themselves, 2B or not 2B? I also have a bunch of my poems lying around my apartment, if anyone wants to come over.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat brought you to the University of Chicago?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI arrived here more or less because my sister was accepted to the University of Chicago's PhD program in art history, and I didn't really have anywhere else to go. I was impressed by the English department, so decided to apply (took me two tries, though: I did MAPH first).
QandA_QDrop.jpgIn what ways has your time at the University influenced your work?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy friend Paul-Jon Benson suggests I answer: "I first saw Alien vs. Predator in Stanley Cavell's course on Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage." (I haven't actually seen Alien vs. Predator, though.)
But it really is impossible to overstate how much being a part of the English department, especially the Poetry & Poetics Program, has influenced me. I've met so many great poets who have come here to read as part of the Poem Present series: Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Donald Revell, Augie Kleinzahler. Just the opportunity to speak with them about poetry—I couldn't have imagined such a thing before I came here. And the department's own Chicu Reddy has been invaluably supportive of my work: without his encouragement I might well have given up writing poetry some years ago.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat specifically are you studying?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI'm writing a dissertation on lyric subjectivity after confessional poetry and the avant-garde poetic movements that developed, to some extent, in response to it. It basically asks, what are some of my favorite poets—Paul Muldoon, Jennifer Moxley, Frederick Seidel, Frank Bidart, Allen Grossman—up to when they employ a more or less autobiographical "I" in their poems? What problems does their lyric "I" allow them to address that a conventionally effaced "speaker" would be inadequate to?
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat poetry are you working on?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI'm working on a series of poems that advance my thesis that the Wu-Tang Clan brought down the twin towers.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat's your favorite place to find new poetry?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI really do think our own Chicago Review is the classiest place around.
Portrait by Jennifer Wild

Out of the question

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Where there's a fastidious editor, you'll also find the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS for short).

When my father was a professor at the University of Missouri, he kept his worn Manual on an off-limits bookshelf next to blandly bound academic journals. My high-school journalism teacher Mrs. H nestled her beloved copy between other references she shared with students. I bought my copy (the 14th edition) during college, but the practical guide's presence in my life didn't end there. Throughout 2003, I coveted a stylish black canvas bag featuring the cover of the 15th edition that Magazine editor Mary Ruth Yoe used to carry her belongings to and from the office. As I type this entry, I only have to turn my head to glimpse a new copy of the reference book on my cubemate's desk.

I get my inner grammar-nerd fix by lurking around the Manual's official Web site, where a straightforward, scholarly question-and-answer—which debuted in 1997—is published by editors under the leadership of Carol Fisher Saller, a senior manuscript editor in the books division of the University of Chicago Press.

Each month, visitors to the press's Web site submit several hundred questions related to the Manual's grammar and writing rules. From this pool, Saller's team reviews the submissions and picks out creative and complicated questions with hard-to-find answers. Laura Andersen, a senior promotions manager who has been with the press for five years, estimates that around 90 percent of the questions could be easily answered by referring to the Manual. "Readers are most concerned with how to cite sources," says Andersen. "Hyphenation issues are popular. Whether to capitalize job titles, whether to use a comma, whether to spell out numbers—these are the most frequently asked questions."

Manual fans in the Magazine's offices and beyond are hooked on the more obscure queries that make the cut. The result, called the Chicago Style Q&A, continues to grow in popularity. The free Q&A was profiled in the Reader in the spring of 2007. Earlier that same year, Harper's editors reprinted a page of their favorites under the title 'Stet Offensive' that "made us sound like a bunch of comedians," says Andersen.

It's hard not to chuckle at the dry humor in the answers. The press's three favorite pairings are proof:

QandA_QDrop.jpgAbout two spaces after a period. As a U.S. Marine, I know that what’s right is right and you are wrong. I declare it once and for all aesthetically more appealing to have two spaces after a period. If you refuse to alter your bullheadedness, I will petition the commandant to allow me to take one Marine detail to conquer your organization and impose my rule. Thou shalt place two spaces after a period. Period. Semper Fidelis.
QandA_ADrop.jpgAs a U.S. Marine, you’re probably an expert at something, but I’m afraid it’s not this. Status quo.
QandA_QDrop.jpgThe menu in our cafeteria shows that enchiladas are available “Tues.–Fri.” However, when I ordered one on a Wednesday, I was informed that enchiladas are available on Tuesday and Friday, not Tuesday through Friday. When I informed the cafeteria manager that this was incorrect, she seemed shocked and refused to change the sign. Please help determine who is correct.
QandA_ADrop.jpgAlthough the sign was incorrect, I’m not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.
QandA_QDrop.jpgOh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.
QandA_ADrop.jpgIn formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

The Press will release the 16th edition of the Manual in both cloth and online formats in fall 2010. Until then the press editors advise, "Read the Manual carefully and keep it close—but don't be afraid to bend the rules occasionally."

J.O.M.

The cartoon, which refers to the Chicago Manual of Style's rule about commas (6.18), is republished with permission of Mignon Fogarty, author of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

Much a-due about nothing

regreturn.jpgThe first week of a quarter doesn’t bring much in terms of deadlines. But one due date—a very important one—hovers over winter’s first classes. All autumn quarter, patrons borrowed books from the University of Chicago Libraries. As the students at the circulation desk scanned the books, they issued a warning, usually chipper: “All of these books are due by January 9.” The due date, which is always the first Friday after classes start, creeps up faster than you’d think, and the start of a quarter finds bibliophiles lugging many, many books to campus in order to get them all in before the library starts sending menacing daily notices. While anyone with a UCID is able to renew books online for up to a full academic year, at some point the jig is up—the books are due, and fines (which could impede graduation) loom.

So this morning I lugged an unusually heavy bag to campus, slipping and sliding on the fresh snow past the construction area for the Mansueto Library. I waddled into the Regenstein Library with my sack of books and waited patiently for a student with a hunter-green backpack full of volumes to finish using the return chute. The trick to returning books to the Reg on the day that all books are due is coming in the morning—by the time afternoon arrives, the book chute is so full that it cannot be opened. Grocery bags full of returned books often dot the foyer.

regwalk.jpgOf course, sometimes we make mistakes. Once, in the rush of returning books to the Reg, I accidentally deposited Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which I actually owned, into the chute. I had to wait patiently as the circulation-desk attendant retrieved it for me. It was the first Friday of the quarter—due date—so finding my book in the pile of newly returned volumes was no small feat. Now, even when it feels like my bag is bursting at the seams, I check the spine of every book carefully before sending it away. Once a book disappears into the library, who knows when you’ll be able to get it back?

Rose Schapiro, ’09

A Regenstein Library book-return chute early Friday morning, before the return rush; a view from the webcam mounted on Regenstein Library's east side.

Kuviasung-knit

kuvia.jpgDespite temperatures in the the teens and a blizzard predicted to blow through town, the annual weeklong winter celebration Kuviasungnerk (pronounced "Koo-vee-ah-sung'-nerk")/Kangeiko began at 6 a.m. with calisthenics in Henry Crown, led by sociology professor emeritus Donald Levine, AB’50, AM’54, PhD’57.

I wasn't on campus to join in on the first scheduled event of Kuvia's 2009 celebration, but Ellie Immerman, '10—whom I met while working for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—was one of the 384 in attendance. Ellie e-mailed that the first early session was fun: "Kuvia's eminently University of Chicago: taking the coldest week of the year and testing the limits of sleep deprivation and sanity. It's amazing and terrible: a brilliant tradition, yet one to which you resign yourself." Students who participate in all five days of the morning workshop are rewarded with a t-shirt, while the house with the highest participation rate also gets an unnamed prize beyond bragging rights.

Next up is this evening's Dance Marathon Study Break in Hutch Commons. During the dance, Kuvia organizers will collect and count donated scarves as part of a revived knitting competition that first took place 25 years ago, according to Jean Treese, AB'66, associate dean of the College.

countdown.jpgThe rules for entering the knitting competition were simple: knit a scarf 5 feet long by six inches wide using neutral-colored acrylic yarn. Members of the Council on University Programming (COUP) purchased around 90 six-ounce skeins of yarn to give to the first 50 crafty-minded Chicagoans who expressed interest. "We know that a lot of students are very into knitting, so we thought that it would be a good idea," says COUP chair Jane Li, '09, who publicized and distributed the supplies. "We wanted to bring it back last year, but it was too late. We didn't have time to organize everything."

The group with the most submissions wins $50, and the individual who donates the most scarves takes the $25 prize. The real winners, though, are the two South Side shelters who will receive the scarves: the Olive Branch Mission and Morning Glory Temple Shelter of Hope.

To learn more, visit Kuvia's presence on Facebook. To view the schedule and see photos next week, visit the COUP Web site.

J.O.M.


Update 10:09 p.m.: Scenes from this morning's calisthenics in Henry Crown

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Photos courtesy of Jeffrey Lee, '09.

Paint the town

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Artist Jim Lutes calls Chicago home, so it’s fitting that his first mid-career retrospective is on display now at the Renaissance Society. Lutes, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute, has painted scenes with roots in the city for two decades. But his Chicago is not picturesque lake views and sparkling skylines—it is surrealistic exposure, with figures that seem to squirm in empty apartments and on gray sidewalks.

The Renaissance Society retrospective traces his career from his early explicit work to newer, more abstract pieces such as Worryburg (2006), above, a small canvas filled with a mass of figures painted in mostly neutral shades of egg tempera. Lutes’s paintings, especially the more recent ones, must be seen in person to be fully appreciated—the subtle glow of the egg tempera gives them a luminescent quality, and they almost shimmer. Curator Hamza Walker, AB’88, notes in his essay on the exhibit: “The tempera has yielded an ethereal quality that is less expressionistic and more psychological, capturing a state of mind for which doubt and uncertainty serve as the basis of thought cum reflection. They are arguably the same paintings he produced at the outset of his career, only now operating under the rubric of self-reflexivity.” Walker characterizes Lutes as an essential “Chicago artist,” in the sense that he is a painter who continues to experiment with who he is, on his own terms.

lutes-video.jpgIn the fifth video from a series recorded for the Renaissance Society, Lutes and Walker discuss the shift in medium and attitude that Lutes has experienced and the range of expression afforded by the tempera he now uses.

Rose Schapiro, ‘09

Painting reproduced with permission from the Renaissance Society.

Life's work

berlant2.jpg On the coldest Thursday of the past few years, the first-floor lecture hall of the Social Sciences Research Building was packed with people, scarves, hats, and coats. The occasion was a lecture by Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman professor of English. Given in honor of Professor Iris Marion Young, who died in 2006, the Young lecture is presented annually by a member of the Center for Gender Studies faculty. Center director Deborah Nelson introduced the event by praising Young’s legacy, calling her a “pioneering political feminist theorist.”

berlant1.jpgAt work on a project about “modes of collective life and why it’s hard to detach from them,” Berlant encouraged the audience to e-mail her questions and to follow along with her research on her blog Supervalent Thought, where she explains, “I want to know why people stay attached to lives that don’t work. This is a political and a personal question….The projected book’s current title is Detachment Theory: its aim is to describe non-sovereign subjectivity in a variety of scenes, like anxiety, limerence, passive aggression, torture.”

Her lecture, taken from a chapter in her forthcoming book, Cruel Optimism, was called, “After the Good Life, an Impasse.” Using the films of French political director Laurent Cantet, Berlant analyzed the “spreading precarity” that defines contemporary experience in a society where the promises of the “good life” no longer guarantee happiness—or even personal comfort in the workplace or the home.

The lecture was followed by a question-and-answer session, where she eagerly took audience queries. She mused on the importance of films about pets (and inevitably losing pets), and the concerns of the contemporary age of uncertainty, where instead of imagining themselves in a happy life, people generate fantasies of simply not losing everything.

Rose Schapiro, ‘09

Photos by Dan Dry.

The power of hope

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Before heading to Washington to deliver the benediction at tomorrow's presidential inauguration of former Law School lecturer Barack Obama, civil-rights activist Rev. Joseph Lowery ushered in the University of Chicago's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. At Thursday's MLK Commemoration Service at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Lowery said King “gave hope to the hopeless, power to the powerless."

A team from the News Office recorded the complete presentation for anyone unable to attend; see the video embedded below.

The University’s student gospel choir, Soul Umoja, opened the MLK commemoration service with a medley of spirituals, including “Over My Head,” sung during the procession into the chapel; the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a civil rights activist who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was the keynote speaker.

Photos and video courtesy of the University of Chicago News Office.

Inauguration—Chicago style

Online


On campus

The University is providing a number of opportunities for the community to come together and watch the coverage of Inauguration 2009.

  • In the Reynolds Club, Inauguration Day events on Capitol Hill will be available for viewing between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.

  • From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Mandel Hall, join Robert Gooding-Williams, Professor of Political Science, and Charles Branham, Senior Historian at the DuSable Museum of African American History, to view the ceremony and discuss the significance of the inauguration.

  • Members of the University community also can view the live ceremony online from most locations on campus, via cTV at ctv.uchicago.edu. See nsit.uchicago.edu/services/ctv for details about available channels, supported locations and system requirements.

In Washington, DC

Members of the University community who plan to be in Washington, D.C., to witness the inauguration are invited to take part in a series of special events, including a panel discussion with University affiliates who took part in the campaign, an economic forecast dinner and a on open house near the parade route. Registration is required and space is limited—please see a full listing for details.

College reporters find inauguration's local angles

Undergraduate reporters in the Chicago Studies program swarmed both Chicago and Washington this week to write about Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Barack Obama's inauguration. In Hyde Park they covered the Rev. Joseph Lowery's MLK Week Rockefeller keynote before he headed to DC to give the inaugural benediction. (Photo by Beth Rooney)

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They found students spending Tuesday watching inaugural events on their dorm-room TVs (or in Mandel Hall, as Lloyd DeGrane's photo shows).

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And in Washington, fourth-year Sara Jerome attended a DC Alumni Club panel featuring NewsHour with Jim Lehrer senior correspondent Ray Suarez, AM’92; New York Times columnist David Brooks, AB’83; and Chicago Booth professor/Obama Economic Recovery Board appointee Austan Goolsbee. (Photo by Dan Dry)

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The night before the inauguration, Jerome partied—along with President Zimmer, shown in the photo—at the Illinois State Society Inaugural Gala. (Photo by Dan Dry)

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And of course, she found U of C community members at the event itself. Student Government president Matt Kennedy and Amanda Wall, both '09, took a Greyhound from Chicago to DC. (Photo by Dan Dry)

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See more student coverage as well as inauguration shots by Magazine photographers Dan Dry and Lloyd DeGrane on the Chicago Studies site.

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(Photo by Dan Dry)

Whistlin' Dixie

If you caught the 100th episode of Check, Please! (a restaurant-review show on Chicago's PBS affiliate), you know what answer President Obama would give if you asked him where to grab a bite in Hyde Park: Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop. Filmed in August 2001 but unaired until last Friday, during the episode the former U of C law lecturer recommended Harper Court's Southern-style restaurant as the place to go for "food that tastes good at a good price," including his favorites: peach cobbler and johnnycakes.

Photography 101 with Professor Dan Dry

You’ve read about our Peeps diorama contest in the Jan–Feb Lite of the Mind (if it hasn’t arrived in your mailbox yet, check out "Peeps into our Pages" tomorrow). But creating your UChicago-themed diorama and eating the extra marshmallows are only part of the fun. Before you point and shoot, check out these practical suggestions from Magazine photographer Dan Dry.

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  • Lighting: If you're shooting during the daytime, find a spot near a window to set up your diorama. You want the natural light to stream in from the side. If it’s nighttime, use a table lamp with a nonfluorescent bulb to add warmth to your photo.

  • Background: Iron a good, old-fashioned white cotton bedsheet, and tape it on the wall—the fabric should drape onto the floor. Set your diorama on top of the bedsheet, and remember to leave ample cloth in front, behind, and on the sides so that the interior of your home will not appear in the periphery of the pictures.
  • Zooming: Have your lens zoomed all the way out, and adjust the settings on your camera to take pictures at the highest-possible resolution.
  • Positioning: For a straight-on shot, arrange yourself at eye-level with the diorama, and then shoot away. Be creative and test out several angles.
  • Editing: Analyze your photographs. If you don’t like the pictures, redo your shoot. Even a professional like Dan believes there’s nothing wrong with taking additional pictures.

Prefer to learn by example? Use Dan’s photo (above) as a guideline for how to make a snap of your diorama. His example is well lit, simply composed, and taken without distortions at a high enough resolution so all details are visible.

E.C.

Never enough theatrics

portraits-of-the-artists-1.jpgWeekend mornings are not the most popular times for students to venture out to the Reynolds Club—especially when the windchill drops below zero. But some outliers are dedicated to spending as much time there as they can.

These enthusiasts can be found on the building's third floor, which houses the University Theater lounge and the offices for the Theater and Performance Arts (TAPS) program. Participating in what director Heidi Coleman calls "cocurricular" work, majors, minors, and other students spend hours plotting lights, practicing dramatic monologues, and printing flyers. This year is the first that the program graduates theater minors (four of them, and a half-dozen majors), all of whom must produce a creative work in addition to their course work.

This past Sunday morning the rehearsal was for Urinetown, to be performed during ninth and tenth weeks. Urinetown, written by Mark Hollman, AB'85, and Greg Kotis, AB'88, had its off-Broadway premiere in 2001. The tongue-in-cheek show tells the story of a downtrodden, corrupt town where residents must pay to use the toilet. Aside from performing a production that began with connections made at Chicago, in Urinetown students can work with director Jonathan Berry, a professional Chicago director and 2008-09 TAPS lecturer. A professional design staff also mentors student assistants.

Rose Schapiro, ‘09

Besides performing in Urinetown, TAPS major Augie Praley, '09, wrote a play that opened this weekend at the Gorilla Tango Theater in Bucktown.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Mr. Kass goes to Washington

sam-kass.jpgChef Sam Kass, U-High'98, AB'04, is headed to the White House. Known for his interest in preparing healthy local foods, Kass previously cooked meals for Chicagoans through his company Inevitable Table.

Photo from the Inevitable Table Web site.

Arts and tartes

andrea-fota.jpgWhen I entered the Reynolds Club last night, a crowded line of students trying to get to the second floor stretched all the way down to the front door. The occasion for the melee was not another distinguished speaker, but student literary magazine Sliced Bread's Winter Arts Festival.

The sounds of the One Dub Dirty Love Jazz Club (whose name is a good approximation of their oeuvre) echoed across the hall while some in the crowd perused a board displaying photographs and paintings from last year’s Festival of the Arts (FOTA), and others took advantage of clay workshops sponsored by Hyde Park Art Center. The hungrier throngs headed straight for Hallowed Grounds Coffee Shop, where I work as a barista, for the main attraction: free food, including fancy treats like tiramisu and strawberry shortcake.

jasmine-food.jpgOur usually serene coffee shop was a site of pandemonium. I generally don’t have to elbow my way in past concerned building managers. Because I already had dinner plans, I perched at the counter and looked on with Marie Donohue, ’11, who was about to finish her shift. Another barista, Jasmine Heiss, ’10, darted behind the counter, her plate full of free food. “I’m not sure I can stock anything right now,” she said, surveying the line, which blocked access to most of the shop’s essential implements. “This is crazy.”

By 8:30 p.m. the food line had shortened. Performance groups, including UC Dancers and three campus bands, cycled through all evening, doing their acts in the McCormick-Tribune Lounge. Across the building students settled in, making art on the plastic-wrapped tables until midnight. Support for the festival came from the UnCommon Fund, a Student Government initiative meant to stimulate participation in campus life.

Rose Schapiro, ‘09

Andrea Rowan, ’09, looks at the FOTA display; Jasmine Heiss, ’10, enjoys her free food.

Blinded by the light

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Henrik Ibsen wastes no time introducing a preoccupation with light in The Wild Duck, and Court Theatre’s latest production, directed by Charles Newell at the Museum of Contemporary Art, engages the theme quite successfully. The script, based on Richard Nelson’s new adaptation, maintains Ibsen's original content largely unaltered. The questionable moral behavior and revealing hereditary blindness that spread from the wealthy industrialist Håkon Werle’s light-filled home end in the breakdown of the family of his former partner, Old Ekdal.

The lighting, designed by Jennifer Tipton, becomes a character in its own right. In the Ekdals' shadowy loft, bare bulbs glow eerily above the action; one backlit wall diffuses the natural light of the outside world, while a humming, actor-operated spotlight illuminates an interrogation between Hialmer Ekdal (Kevin Gudahl) and his wife, Gina (Mary Beth Fisher). Although some players overact, Gudahl and Fisher shine. A well-matched pair, they portray the humor and calamity of Ibsen’s tragedy with ease and accuracy.

As the story unfolds into an untamed hunt for answers, the textures of light interact with the characters’ emotional and physical blindness. And when the play ends and the lights go down, the audience experiences its own blindness in the dark of the theater.

Take the opportunity to be the wild duck watching from the rafters and see the demise of the Ekdals for yourself. The Wild Duck runs through February 15 at the MCA.

Hanna Ernst, U-High’04

A scene from Charles Newell's production of Richard Nelson's new translation of Henrik Ibsen's play The Wild Duck.

Photo by Michael Brosilow, courtesy of the Court Theatre.

Magical thinking


Magazine intern Shira Tevah, ’09, is spending winter quarter abroad as part of Chicago’s African Civilizations course. This is her second dispatch from South Africa.—Ed.

“How to describe Clanwilliam?” Chris Dorsey, program staff and teaching assistant for John Comaroff’s course, repeated a student’s question. “The only thing I can really tell you is it’s magical.” After two-and-a-half hours through beautiful plain and over a mountain—and a tour of African music on Comaroff’s iPod—we arrived in a place that was, indeed, magical: we swam under the stars, examined rock art by flashlight, and learned firsthand about a small part of South Africa’s social, political, and geographic landscape.

Our group stayed at a lodge run by the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project, which involves residents for local archeology ventures. John Parkington, the most active of five project trustees, persuaded the University of Cape Town, where he chairs the archeology department, to buy the land in 1997. The university, he says, “has an idea of social responsiveness,” and a “responsibility to enrich the local school curriculum.” Clanwilliam’s current claims to fame are rooibos tea and pre-colonial hunter/gatherer rock art, the latter of which Parkington hopes to turn into an economic boon for the town.

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The rock art ranges from 10,000 years old to possibly 25,000 or 35,000—“about as old as it gets,” Parkington says. Each set of paintings were likely painted on different occasions, so it’s difficult to accurately place them in time. They depict people and animals in reds and yellows made from iron oxides, what probably once was white clay but has faded, and black. The sites we visited were not spaces for living, Parkington says, but only for ritual drawing. The drawings feature processions of men or women, often carrying weapons for hunting, and creatures that shamans might have seen in visions—half human, half animal.

The people in the paintings, says University of Chicago visiting professor David Bunn, “had a greater proximity to animals and apparent identification with them” than do modern societies, in part because they used poison arrows in hunting that took days to kill. “If you chase an eland for five days,” Parkington adds, “and skin it and put the skin on your wife, and she wears it for the rest of her life, how can you not identify with it?” And old farmer’s legend about baboons maintained that animals understood English and other human languages but refused to speak them because “if they did, they would be enslaved.”

southafrica-rock01.jpgParkington and others started the Clanwilliam project in 1995 by bringing local schoolchildren out to the rock paintings to remove graffiti and gather information. “They loved it,” he says. The University of Cape Town also trained community members to be guides and work in the hospitality industry; the project, which also receives funding from the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, currently hires around 35 locals. Parkington envisions people learning crafts and businesses to generate income if, as he hopes, Clanwilliam becomes a place where people come to “learn about archaeology.”

But whether or not the town becomes a hot destination, the work the Living Landscape Project does is an important part of the post-apartheid world. “During apartheid,” Parkington says, “there was no point in thinking about the past because you’d be painting yourself into a caricaturized corner.” Now people can “construct their identity with a foot in the past” and begin to have a history. Some of apartheid’s legacies are harder to undo. For instance, the Living Landscape Project had hoped to reach all schoolchildren, but the area’s schools are still mostly separated by race, and their schedules are not compatible. And, part of the land that holds the rock art is owned by white farmers, some of whom have been reluctant to work with the project.

Parkington’s hopes remain high. After all, “what we’re researching is not only the history of this area,” he says, “but the history of all of us.”

Shira Tevah, ’09

On Botany Pond

RevelsTake the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, hand it to the troupe of faculty, staff members, and others from the local community who write, stage, and perform the annual confection of comic scenes and musical parodies known as the Revels, and what do you get? A story line—cowritten by Andy Austin, Sara Paretsky, AM’69, MBA’77, PhD’77, and Will C. White, AB’05—that gives grown-ups a chance to masquerade as pond nymphs, turtles, pirates, and College students.

I quote from the program notes: “…the Revelers travel on the Beadle to the Galapagos, seeking to procure the mitochondrial fluids of an ancient turtle. Professor Codswollop and his brilliant teaching assistant have discovered that these turtle fluids, combined with Gunk from Botany Pond, will create an elixir eliminating the need for Botox, plastic surgery, and exercise. They must, however, beat the evil Big Pharm CEO Stacy Starkweather, who is after the same turtle and (horrors!) has plans to then drain Botany Pond! A beautiful French student and some trans-species mutation complicate the plot.”

The January 30–31 show was the last for Michael and Lee Behnke, who revived the Revels a decade ago. This June the Behnkes (he’s vice president for College enrollment; she’s director of the undergraduate Latin program in classics) return to their native New England. Gunk was dedicated to them, and with reason: Lee produced (Howard Timms directed) and Michael played himself, a.k.a. Il Doce, patter-singing admissions-related lyrics, written by Hyde Parker Ted C. Fishman, to the tune of “The Major-General Song” from The Pirates of Penzance:

I am the cheery fellow who lures students so that they’ll enroll
I’ve information rational, emotional, commerci’al
I co-urt high school couns’lors, and I woo their scho-ols’ honor roll
From Baltimore to Baraboo, I scout for kids cajole-able…

Another star turn came when Paretsky, as Stacy Starkweather, unleashed her inner diva, bringing down the house with her shopaholic’s lyrics to the “Vissi d’arte” aria from Tosca:

Vissi Prada, vissi Armani
I only did evil so I could buy clothes
Vissi Bulgari, vissi Manolo Blahnik

Sempre, with a faith sincere,
I shopped in Milan and the rue Saint-Honoré…

And, in a cameo role also cast to type, English professor emeritus David Bevington wandered happily amidst a bevy of text-messaging undergrads, occasionally looking up from his book (horrors!) to offer commentary straight from the Bard:

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

M.R.Y.

Photos courtesy of humanities lecturer Emmanuelle Bonnafoux.

The Revels, from top to bottom: Michael Behnke is the very model of "A Very Modern U of Enrollment General"; French-exchange student Emma (played by Sara Stern, left) temporarily foils the evil Stacy Starkweather (Sara Paretsky) by sending her on a shopping trip; Emma, TA Tripalong (Trip Driscoll), and Professor Codswollop's students belt out a song.

Down home music

folkfest09.jpgEach February I come away from the University’s Folk Festival with ringing ears, stomping feet, and a handful of new tunes to try on my mandolin. I also come away with a spinning head: this year’s weekend marathon included music from the Irish headlands, the Scottish highlands, Siberian plains, the Louisiana bayou, the Appalachian mountains, and the Chicago's South Side. Dozens of artists converged on Ida Noyes Hall to teach French Canadian quadrilles, Arabic maksoum, electric blues, and sacred harp singing. Organized by the student-run U of C Folklore Society the 49th annual festival wound to a close Sunday night with a sprawling, four-hour concert featuring five bands and five different styles of North American roots music.

I'm still just a beginner on the mandolin—my musical education comes in fits and starts—but this year I’m determined to conquer “Fall on My Knees,” a galloping old-time tune that Rhythm Rats fiddler Kenny Jackson, an Ohioan-turned-North-Carolinian, described during Sunday’s concert as the second official song of Surry County, North Carolina, my home state. (The ubiquitous “Sally Ann,” he said, takes first place.) I left Mandel Hall humming the melody and was still humming it when I got home. I should have gone to bed—it was after 11 p.m.—but instead I pulled my mandolin out of its case and started picking out notes, feeling for chords.

Lydialyle Gibson

To the old-time cadences of the Rhythm Rats, festival-goers (above) do-si-do their way through a Sunday afternoon barn dance in Ida Noyes's Cloister Club.

Cajun players (from left) Missy Roser, Heather Cole-Mullen '09, Charlie Terr, and Gene Losey met up in Hutch Commons Sunday evening for an informal pre-concert performance.


The Chicago Sacred Harp Singers drew a large crowd to Ida Noyes's second floor, where singers took turns standing at the center of a "hollow square" and calling out hymn numbers to summon a room full of voices.


Chicago guitarist and mandolin player Billy Flynn (right) led a blues workshop in the Ida Noyes library Sunday afternoon.

Information Booth

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Robyn Gelfand has been considering getting an MBA for about two years now. An account supervisor at a Denver marketing firm, she’s planning a move to Chicago with her husband. “The time is right” for her to return to school, she said before a Chicago Booth prospective-student information session last Friday.

And her decision has nothing to do with the recession, she emphasizes. “I’m happily employed right now, but I feel that business school is a valuable long-term investment.”

info-session.jpgOther applicants may not be so lucky in this economic climate. Chicago Booth has always been very competitive, but the school’s admissions committee has noticed higher-than-usual interest this year. “We have definitely experienced an increase in visitors over the past few months,” says assistant director of admissions Carrie Lydon.

Friday's session drew ten crisply dressed 20-somethings, including two men from India here on business—they work for the global management-consulting firm ZS Associates—who decided to check out the school. At the front of the room sat Andrea Schmoyer, Chicago Booth’s associate director of admissions and financial aid, and Cassandra Davis, a first-year MBA student, both taking questions from the eager attendees—about study-abroad opportunities, this year’s pool of applicants, and how career services is working to help students and alumni. Davis praised the career-services office, explaining that its staff reached out to the first-years as early as August to explain how to stand out “when you are out with the rest of the masses.” Recruiters still come to campus, though not quite as often as before, and her classmates have gotten internships and jobs: “There was celebration this year.”

The session wasn’t all shop talk. “No social-life questions?” Davis asked toward the end, noting that 70 percent of first-year MBA students don’t live in Hyde Park because there aren’t many good bars or restaurants. (Note: This writer disagrees: Jimmy’s is a charming neighborhood watering hole, and the U of C Pub offers a great beer selection. Also, more restaurants have been populating Hyde Park every year—the recently opened Shinju Sushi on 53rd offers quite tasty all-you-can-eat sushi. And the Med, Dixie Kitchen, Harold’s—classic!) Davis did highlight the selection of daily campus events and social activities open to Booth students: “You can be busy every day of the week if you want to.”

Ruth E. Kott, AM’07

Photos by Dan Dry.

Top: Chicago Booth offers daily half-day visits for prospective students, which include a tour of the Charles M. Harper Center. Bottom: The number of visitors has increased over the past few months; this past Monday's information session drew more than 15 potential applicants.

In love with love—and lousy poetry

Washington Prom couple, 1954

When midterms fall close to Valentine’s Day, it feels like the most serious, long-term relationship you can cultivate at Chicago is with the Library. The Reg is accepting, intelligent, and has a wonderful collection of books that you can borrow whenever you like. Although a library will never take you out to dinner or buy you flowers, it can still provide thrilling companionship—and the Reg always remembers to send students a valentine in the form of a special afternoon exhibit of rare books about love (or lack thereof). Special Collections Research Center librarians even offered candy, cookies, literary trivia, and temporary tattoos that read “U of C Library.” It was the best valentine I could have hoped for.

Masque of Youth, 1916People have been publishing about romance almost as long as they’ve been publishing at all—the earliest book on display was a 1515 version of the Roman de la Rose, a poem about a man who dreams that he has fallen in love with a flower. The Library recently acquired the original manuscript of the 13th-century poem. Other early modern books included a small volume on emblems of love, which provided detailed illustrations that lead into the text (written in Latin, English, Italian, and French) and an etiquette guidebook for the English gentleman that includes one of the first known uses of the word “fop.”

One Victorian book provided advice about becoming a mother while another warned against the “consolations of spinsterhood.” The Reg also displayed valentines (including a quite full dance card) from the 1914–15 scrapbook of Helena Jameson Stevens, U-High’14, PhB’18.

The last display of books, appropriately titled Love Gone Wrong, offered a 19th-century poem in verse about the romance of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, a cautionary tale called Satan in Search of a Wife, and a first edition of Charles Bukowski’s Love is a Dog from Hell, whose opening section carries the epigraph, “one more creature dizzy with love.”

Rose Schapiro, ’09

A couple enjoys a moment together at Washington Prom, 1954; students perform a Masque of Youth allegory titled "The Gift" in the Women's Quadrangles at the dedication of Ida Noyes Hall, 1916.

Photos courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center.

A presidential drugstore

“What is up with the Obama Walgreens?” a North Side friend wanted to know.

I had never really thought about it. It’s my local Walgreens, on the corner of 55th Street and Lake Park, and I’m in there at least twice a week. But its transformation into Barack Obama Headquarters—and it says so on the LED sign out front—was so gradual, I was like the frog that had been dropped into a pot of cold water and then boiled alive without realizing the water was getting warmer.

The store’s Obamafication took five years. In 2004 Obama, then an ambitious Illinois senator and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. Store manager Kevin Crowley picked up Obama’s biography, Dreams from My Father, and liked it so much he started stocking it. At the time, it was Obama’s local Walgreens, too, and on one of his shopping expeditions he signed Crowley’s copy. Later Obama signed a photograph for Crowley, who hung copies of it next to all 15 registers. Despite the Hyde Park connection, a few customers complained, Crowley says: “Not everybody’s a Democrat.”

A month after Inauguration Day the store still stocks hundreds of Obama products, though “Valentine’s Day has cut into his shelf space,” says Crowley. There are both of his books, one on Michelle Obama, and numerous magazines. There are T-shirts, sweatshirts, and hats. There are posters, plaques, pennants, a commemorative plate, and a coffee mug. There is a teddy bear, dressed in an Obama T-shirt, that dances to James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good).”

The two most popular products, Crowley says, are Spider-Man #583 ("Spidey Meets the President!") and the talking pen, which plays—quite loudly—two excerpts from Obama’s election-night speech in Grant Park. Crowley was skeptical about the pen until a customer came by and bought five before he had finished unpacking the box. He estimates he sells about 25 a day for $7.99 each.

obama-doll.jpgThe most controversial item, of which Crowley sold 300 but no longer stocks, was an Obama doll that danced to the tune “Oh Susanna.” As some patrons made plain, the Stephen Foster song was originally written to be performed in blackface. “Older customers were offended,” Crowley says. “I had no idea.” By that time, Obama was too famous to shop in the store personally. But a campaign staffer told Crowley, “He knows, and he’s OK with it.”

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

A cell-phone camera captured the "Oh Susanna" Obama dolls dancing on the shelves at the Obama Walgreens last fall. Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Photo by Mary Ruth Yoe.


All that's write

Shaindel Beers' poetry bookIntroducing one of her older poems, Michelle Taransky, AB’04, noted that it "was actually written in the Classics Café, so dreams do come true.” The poem was among the first Taransky had written about barns—she now has a forthcoming book devoted to the subject. And the Classics Café? Right upstairs.

Last week dozens of current and former students filled a reading by alumnae poets in the high-ceilinged Classics 110. Tied to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference held in the city February 11-14, the reading featured four poets with forthcoming or recent works—and also reunited the poets with their former professors, friends, and a building where they once found inspiration.

Kiko Petrosino's poetry bookThe first writer, Shaindel Beers, AM’00, had her collection A Brief History of Time released the day before. Beers asked the audience to shout out numbers between one and 65, and she recited the poems, ranging in form from sonnet to sestina, on the suggested pages. After reading a poem in which she gave her age as 27, Beers paused and smiled: “I sent this to publishers for many years, so I’d be very happy if you still thought I was 27.”

Kiki Petrosino, AM’04, was next. Her manuscript, to be published this summer, is a series of poems to a lover named Robert Redford (the title, Fort Red Border, is an anagram of the actor’s name). In her first poem, “This Will Darken the Cabin,” she and Redford fly into Las Vegas on a night plane, drinking brandy in plastic snifters and feeling uncomfortable in first class.

Stephanie Anderson, AB’03, an English doctoral student at Chicago, read several poems from her manuscript and several short collage poems. After she finished, the audience lingered only briefly. While nostalgia for the Classics Café can be a powerful thing, the conference was in full swing, and most of the poets had other readings to give or attend.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Hop to it!

peepshelves.jpgThe Magazine’s Peeps Diorama Contest ends at midnight on Sunday, March 29. Alumni or their families are invited to create a Maroon-themed scene using the sprinkled-sugar and marshmallow chicks and bunnies. Then e-mail us a high-resolution JPEG of the finished scene (a campus spot, a local hero, or a book, phrase, film, or production inspired by Chicago or linked to a Chicago alum) and sit back to see if you’ve won a prize (first-, second-, and third-place prizes of $250, $150, and $100). The winning dioramas will appear in the May–June/09 issue, and all entries will be exhibited in an online gallery.

Public knowledge

* Highlight the white areas with your cursor to reveal the trivia question answers.

Pub Trivia NightIn the basement of Ida Noyes, bartenders at the U of C Pub poured pitchers of PBR and Carlsberg as University students, alumni, staff, and their friends prepped for one of their favorite forms of intellectual combat: Pub Trivia Tuesday.

A trivia neophyte, I spent the evening as a guest member of team Null Set, also known as the Six Sigma Deviants, n Angry Men, and Edmund Mozzarella Fitzgerald (depending on what suits the team's fancy on any given week). They’re a longtime Pub Trivia force composed of Dean Armstrong, Carolyn Jannace, Dan Lascar, Benjamin Recchie (all AB’03), and Peggy Wilkins, AB’92. Facing approximately 12 other teams with spirited monikers like Guido and the Hugo Chávez Reelection Committee, we were ready for battle.

When Johanna and Jeff Jay, AM’98, covered Pub Trivia basics back in 2004 for UChiBLOGo, they noted a “reservoir of knowledge” necessary for success. This week, drawing on their own data pool, Null Set aced questions about science (what does the acronym LASER stand for?) (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation); the classics (whose death does Achilles avenge by killing Hector of Troy?) (Patroclus); and pop culture (in Battlestar Galactica, what sport does Sam play before the attack on the Twelve Colonies?) (Pyramid). A few of the more challenging questions (e.g., Dhaka is the capital of what country?) sparked debate: “I got it—Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh.” “Are you sure?” “Can you name the capital of Bangladesh?” “No.” “Then write that down.” Others—like name one of Abraham’s eight children besides Isaac and Ishmael (Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah, all with third wife Keturah)—left us and everyone else stumped.

As the organizers tabulated final scores, the Jerry Sadock Experience surged from behind to seize the top spot. Null Set spent the evening flip-flopping between second and third place but somehow finished a disappointing fifth. Perhaps the burden of my dead weight was too much for the team to bear, though I did know that the Jeffersons “moved on up” to Manhattan from Queens. No matter—the contestants will be back next week, hungrier than ever for a win.

Katherine Muhlenkamp

After announcing the final standings, the Pub Trivia organizers kick back and discuss.

20,000’s a crowd

oliver-poster.jpgSome 20,000 students eagerly wedged into the 985-seat Mandel Hall Saturday night to watch the comedic stylings of the Daily Show’s executive producer Rory Albanese and correspondent John Oliver. The fire marshal appeared about 15 minutes in to break up the dangerously large crowd, but quickly abandoned that task, hypnotized by the two comedians’ quirky, intelligent, and (need we say it?) side-splitting stand-up routines. So, just to reiterate: way more people came to this year’s Major Activities Board comedy show than last year’s, which featured the eponymous star of the new Comedy Central show Important Things with Demetri Martin (also a former Daily Show correspondent).

OK, OK, Oliver and Albanese told us to say that. (Oliver’s British accent is very persuasive.) When the MAB coordinators drove the funnymen to campus, they reported that the tickets sold were actually 100 fewer than last year. Not wanting to appear less popular than Martin, Oliver and Albanese appealed to the University of Chicago bloggers in the audience (ahem) to report that the duo had surpassed last year’s sold-out show.

During the two-hour show, the comedians seemed delighted to find themselves in a room full of “nerds” who had “stopped doing homework to come to a comedy show” on a campus that reminded Oliver of a “Dickensian wonderland.” When the auditorium went wild over punch lines about Milton Friedman, the Catholic Church’s testy relationship with Galileo, and the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese hands, it was hard to tell who was more amused: the audience or the comics.

After their performances, Oliver and Albanese took questions from the audience, discussing topics such as working with Jon Stewart (“We’ve never met him”), how to break into comedy (plenty of stand-up), the outlook for Liverpool football (not good), and the best place in Hyde Park to grab a post-show drink (inconclusive).

Elizabeth Chan and Ruth E. Kott, AM’07

Oliver's Daily Show interview of Kenyan ambassador Zachary Muburi-Muita (embedded above) went a bit "too far," he admitted to the Mandel audience.

Is this thing on?

Somewhere, a guy named Will finally has a human face to put on his restraining order. That face belongs to Ezra Deutsch-Feldman, ’10, political-science student, comic troubadour, and skulking admirer of this Will dude.

He even wrote a song about him:

Never let it be said that unrequited love taken to creepy extremes cannot be funny. In the hands of the amateur comedians who participated in Monday's RooftopComedy.com National College Standup Competition, that and other unsettling set-ups (punching a nun, the symbolism of a swastika) inspired the coveted reaction—spontaneous, authentic laughter, as opposed to the forced, sympathetic variety that serves only to break the agonizing silence. There was some of that throughout the competition, too.

Three alumni run RooftopComedy.com—CEO Will Rogers (swear to God, that’s his name), MBA’98; COO Alex Zelikovsky, MBA’96; and board member Hans Roderich, MBA’94. The company records live performances and provides content for a variety of media from its library of stand-up, sketch comedy, improv, and short films. It also produces events like the competition that turned the Reynolds Club's McCormick Tribune Lounge into Zanies for a night.

Eight students participated, and all of them advanced to compete as a team in a school-against-school Midwest regional stand-up standoff against Columbia College. Winners will be determined through formal judging and audience voting, in person and online. The final four teams will perform at the Aspen RooftopComedy Festival in June.

For Charles Arbuthnot, ’09, thinking ahead to June conjures concerns about what he will do for a living. Despite his stint on stage Monday, it probably will not be stand-up comedy, though a bad economy could lead to a lot of free time and open-mic nights. “It’s probably something that maybe I would have time to do if I don’t get a real job straight out of college,” the English and economics major said after his performance, “which I hope to do.”

If anybody will fall into something, he’s the guy:

Jason Kelly

No plain white T's here

The editors of the Core, the College supplement to the University of Chicago Magazine, have a theory: the T-shirt is a very Chicago form of expression. Now we’d like you to prove it in practice. Send us your favorite U of C T-shirt phrases and stories for an upcoming article. Photos are welcome, too.

E-mail uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu (with “T-shirts” in the subject line) by March 2.

Laura Demanski, AM’94

Sneaking in some study time while selling a classic U of C T-shirt for Breckinridge House.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

I wear my 3D glasses at night

Charming AugustineFiltering into the Film Studies Center on Thursday evening, we were each handed a pair of what looked like very unattractive sunglasses. They were plastic, black, and flimsy, but also absolutely essential for the evening’s program, a selection of films avant-garde filmmaker Zoe Beloff chose to contextualize her film Charming Augustine, a 40-minute stereoscopic work inspired by photographs of Paris’s Salpêtrière asylum in the 1870s.

Charming Augustine dramatizes the story of a young girl, Augustine, who was the most photographed patient at the asylum. Augustine’s poses both evoked her madness and alluded to the expressiveness of classical acting, and every word she spoke during her hysteric fits was documented. Beloff said that she set out to make the film that “the doctors wanted to make,” imagining the intersection of medical documentary and the medium of sound film, which would not be invented for another 50 years.

Underlining this point, Beloff showed D. W. Griffith’s melodrama The Painted Lady, the story of a young woman who is betrayed by her sweetheart and kills him by mistake before collapsing in hysteric fits and hallucinations. She followed it with the medical film A Case History of Multiple Personality, which features a woman taking on various personae in the company of her neighbors and friends.

To show Charming Augustine, Beloff wheeled out a special screen. The three-dozen audience members donned their glasses as the lights went down, and the projector, located in the center aisle, began its steady whirring. Beloff picked the stereoscopic format partly to evoke the feeling of what the film might have been if made in the 19th century, explaining that many of the photographs doctors took were in stereo, and that “the 19th century was actually much more about stereoscopic images than the 20th turned out to be.” The result was a lush black-and-white image that popped from the screen, with a pronounced, eerie foreground. The story of Augustine’s fits moves into her ether dreams and hallucinations, and finally concludes when Augustine steals men’s clothes and escapes the asylum—an ending taken directly from reality. The real Augustine was never heard from again.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Artistic specimens

Detail from Eduardo Kac's Move 3

Twenty-somethings donning funky scarves and businessmen in neatly pressed suits danced around each other to find seats before the start of last Monday's ARS Scientia salon, an event held twice a month at the Chicago Cultural Center. Knowing I couldn't stay for the entire event, I gave up my seat for another attendee. With the 6 p.m. start time looming, strangers reluctantly split from their parties and plopped into the few random single seats available while two Cultural Center staffers quickly squeezed a few more chairs onto the floor for some of the remaining crowd that was spilling out the doorway.

We didn't know it, but during the find-a-seat commotion, Dario Maestripieri, professor of comparative human development and evolutionary biology—and one of the event's four panelists—logged our predictable pre-event behavior as only a researcher would.

Watch as Maestripieri turned his amusing observations of our shuffling into one of the highlights of the evening:

Joy Olivia Miller

Filming just as fast as they can

Fire Escape Films took over the basement lounge of Stuart Hall last weekend, transforming it into an impromptu film-editing studio for the third annual 48-hour Film Festival. For the festival, open to anyone, students form film crews that write, shoot, and edit a whole movie.

On Sunday afternoon, two hours before the 6 p.m. deadline, I visited Stuart. Earlier in the afternoon Claire Tolan, ’09, woke up late after pulling an all-nighter to record her dialogue in a sweltering hallway. The ten-person film crew for Tolan's movie—Myrtle Goes to Her Sister’s—had topped off the evening with a breakfast at Valois before taking much-needed naps. Then Tolan and part of her group (Aidan Roche, ’09, and Jon Kurinsky, ’09) edited the film and put in final touches.

The basement scene was somewhat hectic—Bollywood music and guitar riffs blared from speakers. Some groups sat in front of computer screens, paying rapt attention to their works, while others frantically tried to recall everyone they needed to thank in the credits. Fire Escape required that group members attend an introductory meeting where they were taught some basics (how not to break the camera), but for many groups, a lot of the footage splicing involved learning as they went along. Fire Escape's committee members meandered among the editing computers, answering questions about background music and how to make a credits sequence.

In the end, 16 groups completed the marathon. Last night Fire Escape screened the completed movies in Max Palevsky cinema. Students gathered to see an ode to vices (with John Donne’s poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning recited as voiceover), a mash-up of the beginning of the animated dinosaur classic A Land Before Time, and a Slumdog Millionaire parody. All the films were met with applause—the viewers knew that they were watching the results of an atypical college weekend. This time, it was on the big screen.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Select entries from 2008's 48-hour Film Festival

They’ve created a monster

When we learned that two Chicago alumni were opening a state-of-the-art ice cream laboratory in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, we knew that this was an assignment that needed in-depth investigation (all in the name of good reporting, of course).

The mad scientists behind iCream Café—which opened Saturday—are Cora Shaw, MBA’07, and Jason McKinney, MBA’06, who met as students at Chicago Booth.

Shaw expects the shop will be brimming with new customers and employees, but it was nearly empty during our sneak preview on Friday—aside from a few curious people, the only ones behind the counter were Shaw, general manager Liz, and Neil Schinske, a representative from Cryotech International, who was there to confirm all was right with the café’s key ingredient: liquid nitrogen. Injected into a mix of milk and cream or yogurt, it freezes the icy treats within minutes. The liquid evaporates, and the crystals are much smaller than in regular ice cream or frozen yogurt, which creates a smooth and creamy texture. It’s essentially a science experiment for food lovers.

Indecisive people beware: the menu is fully customizable and offers myriad combinations. First, choose your base: ice cream, frozen yogurt, sorbet, hot pudding, Italian soda, or a shake. Then select up to three flavors, which are injected into a beaker via syringe (the science-experiment ambiance doesn’t end with the liquid nitrogen). Fancy purple ice cream? The truly brave can inject food-safe coloring into their creation. And once the sweet treat has been created, top it off with candy. Lactose-intolerant patrons needn’t feel left out: soy-milk ice cream is an option, which Shaw says tastes much like real ice cream thanks to the liquid nitrogen.

Because we are dedicated to service journalism, these enterprising reporters sampled chocolate-and-peanut-butter frozen yogurt, mint-chocolate-chip ice cream, burnt-sugar-and-cinnamon hot pudding (with a dash of purple food coloring), and pomegranate Italian soda—the perfect way to spend the first spring-like day in months. We returned to the office with full stomachs and sugar highs.

Elizabeth Chan and Ruth E. Kott, AM’07

iCream Cafe toppings and flavors

iCream Café is located at 1537 North Milwaukee Avenue.
Bring your U of C ID card and receive 10 percent off your purchase.

Laugh it off

Paul Chan, Law & Order still

I don’t find myself visiting Cobb much after winter-quarter classes end. The coffee shop closes, there are no more discussion sections to attend, and the building becomes nearly desolate. But even though it’s reading period, on Thursday night a few dozen students, myself included, plodded our way to Cobb’s fourth floor to attend a laughter-yoga study break sponsored by the Wrens, the student group affiliated with the Renaissance Society.

Walking into Paul Chan’s exhibit My Laws Are My Whores was slightly unsettling—and not just because of the detailed pen-and-ink drawings of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, smiling serenely and staring down at me from 15 feet up the gallery’s wall. Coats, bags laden with course books, and shoes were strewn in the corner of the gallery, and students gathered in the corner of the exhibit. As students continued to trickle in, curator Hamza Walker, AB’88, introduced both the Renaissance Society and the exhibition.

Paul Chan, My Laws Are WhoresWalker characterized Chan as a “post-medium” artist. The huge drawings of Chan’s “fonts” were on display on the back wall of the gallery. In his opening talk March 1, Chan emphasized the thought process that went into each font. Some of them speak in the voices of characters from the Marquis de Sade, while others echo historical or literary figures: Dr. Ebing and Gertrude Stein. Chan coyly noted in his talk that the fonts “say what you really meant to type.” Walker explained how Chan had used the fonts to subtitle an episode of “Law and Order,” emphasizing the themes of law, sex, and power that provide the structures for the show. He had stripped out most of the audio track, leaving only the characteristic menacing music, which intermittently descended upon the gallery.

After Walker finished, Ricardo Rivera, ’10, lead laughter-yoga exercises by directing the students to form straight lines. Walker turned the “Law and Order” music down, and the group began stretching. The purpose of laughter yoga (aside from providing a pleasant study-break opportunity) is to elicit unconditional laughter and combine it with Yogic breathing techniques. More extensive poses and exercises that stretched both the body and the diaphragm followed. The laughter-yoga exercises continue next week—this time away from the kind smiles of the Supreme Court. The Wrens are hosting daily study breaks on Bartlett quadrangles, weather permitting.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Video still from Paul Chan's "The Mother of All Episodes," 2009; detail from Paul Chan's My Laws Are My Whores, 2008.

Images courtesy the Renaissance Society


Urine good company

UT Urinetown practice

It’s a story you’ve heard before: boy from the wrong side of the tracks meets girl from the right side, they fall in love at first sight and sing about it. Will their slightly misguided yet genuine love conquer all?

Of course, there are parts you haven’t heard: boy is inspired to take over the town's pay-to-pee toilet facilities and kidnaps girl as collateral—and, oh, the whole shebang is a farce on the nature of musical theater.

Expect no less in Urinetown, a Tony Award–winning musical written by Mark Hollman, AB'85, and Greg Kotis, AB'88. The play was performed the last two weekends by the University of Chicago’s University Theater. It might have betrayed its Chicago origins a bit—few audiences likely laugh as uproariously at gags about Malthus, Hume, the free market, and the nature of metaphysics. At one point the villainous father, Caldwell B. Cladwell (Augie Praley, ’09), asks his painfully sincere daughter, Hope (Molly Zeins, ’09), “Did I send you to the most expensive university in the world to teach you how to feel conflicted, or to learn how to manipulate great masses of people?”

The play is framed by dialogue between Lil’ Sally (Amanda Jacobson, ’12), a poor child who counts her coins to use the toilet and asks questions like, “What about hydraulics?” and Officer Lockstock (Morgan Maher, ’09), who answers deadpan, “In a musical, sometimes it’s better to focus on just one thing.”

On Friday evening the 16-person cast performed to a packed house in the Francis X. Kinahan Third Floor Theater. Kotis and Hollman were in the audience, surveying the work of the students and Jeffrey Award–nominated theater professional Jonathan Berry, whom UT brought in to direct this show. Berry hand-picked a professional design staff, who worked with student apprentices to create the eerie, dirt-encrusted setting. The cast threw itself wholeheartedly into numbers about the inanity of most revolutionary discourse—see the initials of our hero, Bobby Strong (Lucas Whitehead, ’09)—and what can happen if water is mismanaged to the point of absolute scarcity. Although Urinetown may have, as Lil’ Sally puts it, “happy songs,” the moral is anything but.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

Molly Zeins, ’09 (Hope), and Lucas Whitehead, ’09 (Bobby), sing together during rehearsal in late February.

Photo by Dan Dry.

A life in layers

Meresamun

As soon as we started reporting our March-April/09 feature on the Oriental Institute’s mummy Meresamun—the focus of a special exhibit this year at the museum—we knew that a few pages in the Magazine wouldn’t be enough for the whole story we wanted to tell. So we took what wouldn’t fit in print and put it on the Web.

Meresamun was a high-ranking singer in Thebes’s Karnak Temple around 800 BC, but since 1920, when James Henry Breasted brought her coffin back from a trip to Egypt, the OI has been her home. Over the decades her life became a slowly unraveling mystery as Egyptologists there pieced together bits of information about who she was and how she might have lived. This past fall the mystery unraveled even further when the folks at the OI and the Medical Center strapped Meresamun to a gurney and loaded her into a new, 256-channel, “intelligent” CT scanner. Peering inside the mummy’s coffin, they saw a 30-year-old woman with bad teeth and perfect bones, an elite priestess who ate well and had a bunion on her right foot. Tendons still connected the fingers to the wrists, and everywhere expensive linen packing filled empty crevices.

And yet, other mysteries remained. Did she ever have children? Radiologists couldn’t tell. How did she die, and why so young? And what was that granular, gummy material that embalmers stuffed down her throat? Egyptologists had rarely seen anything like it.

So, alongside the online version of our story about Meresamun on the Magazine’s Web site, look for the interactive feature Meresamun: A Life in Layers. You can listen to Egyptologist Emily Teeter, PhD'90, talk about the sacred rattle Meresamun would have played during her work in the sanctuary and the scholarly debate over whether temple singers were celibate. You can see an ancient rendering showing what Meresamun might have looked like in life and view the CT images that convinced radiologist Michael Vannier that she had a pretty face. Examine her teeth, so worn they were almost concave, and zoom in on the hieroglyphic inscription that offered scholars the first clues to her identity.

Then head over to the OI exhibit for even more artifacts and images. You have until December 6, when the show closes.

Lydialyle Gibson

Meresamun's first home on campus was Haskell Oriental Museum, the predecessor to today's Oriental Institute.

Photo courtesy of the Oriental Institute.

Calling all helicopter parents

Intern Rose Schapiro, '09, waves to the Magazine staff from Bartlett Quad

I'm no longer a helicopter parent, hovering over the lives of my undergraduate offspring. It helps that my daughters have both graduated.

Also keeping me grounded—at least partially—was the response to my first attempt at "helping" my younger daughter negotiate college life. A polite but firm note from the student-affairs office let me know that if my yet-to-matriculate child had a problem with her freshman-year roommate assignment, the staff was sure she would tell them about it herself. I quickly wrote back, cc'ing my chagrined daughter, to say that the only problem she had was me and promising never to write them again.

I kept my promise, but I didn't keep my distance, thanks in part to her campus's Web cam. I'd be sitting at my computer when my office phone would ring. "I'm about to cross Marsh Plaza," she'd say. "I'm wearing pink. Near the statue. See me waving?" I'd wave back at the computer screen, and we'd go on about our day.

I recommend it—to College parents and their kids. The best of the campus Web cams is the one that scans the quad between Bartlett Dining Commons and the Regenstein Library. Since College kids have to eat—and study—it's a convenient place to phone home. If the conversation gets sticky, you students can always end it, "Gotta go read my Western Civ," leaving your parents feeling proud.

Mary Ruth Yoe

Intern Rose Schapiro, '09, waved to Magazine editors from the quad between Bartlett Dining Commons and the Regenstein Library.

Artistic tourism

Henry Moore's Nuclear EnergyInspired by Mayor Daley's stint as an art-minded tour guide on Monday, the Magazine chatted by e-mail with Smart Museum senior curator Richard A. Born, AM'75, about campus public art and downtown's must-see sculpture.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat public sculpture draws the most campus visitors?
QandA_ADrop.jpgHenry Moore’s Nuclear Energy is the most popular public sculpture on campus. Moore was an internationally renowned 20th-century sculptor, and this bronze sculpture sits on the site of a momentous event in modern history: the first sustained nuclear reaction. In light of the current debates about energy policy, Moore’s monumental sculpture continues to reverberate in complex ways.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s the newest piece of public art on campus?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt's probably the large, black-painted metal construction Star Sentinels by American master Louise Nevelson. The sculpture is on long-term loan in the Smart Museum’s newly re-landscaped Elden Sculpture Garden.
QandA_QDrop.jpgFor those who haven't been back to Chicago lately, what do you recommend as don't-miss public art?
QandA_ADrop.jpgDefinitely the “Bean”—as the Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate is popularly and affectionately called. It is a work of tremendous visual appeal and sensual form, and has in a very short time become an iconic image for Millennium Park and the City of Chicago. The sculpture’s reflections and inversions of passing people, buildings, and the landscape of the park brilliantly capture the flux of Michigan Avenue.

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No. 497

Winter Convocation, 2009

Unlike many of its peers, Chicago ceremonially confers degrees at the end of each quarter, giving people who love academic pomp and circumstance plenty of opportunities to indulge. This year's Winter Convocation, held last Friday afternoon, marked No. 497 in a series that began in 1893.

With the largest number of graduates, Spring Convocation gets broken into four separate ceremonies over three days and is held in Harper Quadrangle. Like its summer and fall cousins, No. 497 took place in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, where the pews were crammed with robed degree candidates and their well-wishers.

The day's first degree was conferred upon musicologist and Chicago president emeritus Don Michael Randel, now president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In presenting Randel with an honorary doctorate of humane letters, Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum termed him "an inspiring teacher and a brilliant speaker" who "called the University community to greatness, stressing the essential need for the highest forms of intellectual inquiry and expression, and embracing diversity as a personal obligation."

After a composition from Spain's Golden Age (Randel's area of expertise) was performed on the chapel's E. M. Skinner organ, the roll call of graduates began. Of the 565 degree recipients, the majority were Chicago Booth graduates, including 406 MBAs, urged by President Robert J. Zimmer to develop economic resources "for the benefit of all people," and one PhD (dissertation: "Why Are CEOs Rarely Fired? Evidence from Structural Estimation").

As the last candidate, Tiffany Noelle Mehling, came forward, the audience burst into long-awaited applause, growing to a low roar. A minute later, when it was time to sing the Alma Mater, the noise level dropped noticeably. Not to worry—Chicago's newest alumni have a lifetime to learn the lyrics.

Mary Ruth Yoe

President Robert J. Zimmer (right) watches as Don Michael Randel is hooded by professor emerita Lorna Strauss, SM’60, PhD’62.

Photo by Dan Dry

Silk Road in Hyde Park

After spending eight years on campus as a student and staff member, it feels distinctly strange to be living in Chicago but not in Hyde Park. So I’m especially looking forward to returning to the quads next week for a special event hosted by the Center for Middle East Studies, a talk by Israeli playwright and peace activist Motti Lerner. In my role as director of advancement at the Silk Road Theatre Project (founded by Artistic Director Jamil Khoury, AM’92) I’ve been busy preparing for our production of Lerner’s powerful play Pangs of the Messiah (through May 10—visit www.srtp.org for more info), and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say, surrounded by other U of C alumni, staff, faculty and students.

In Chicago fashion, Lerner is an interdisciplinarian to the core, balancing work as a playwright, professor, and peace activist. A true Israeli patriot, he has never hesitated to challenge his own countrymen on issues of nationalism, messianism, and the intersection of religion and government. His talk will focus on the role of writing plays in a society struggling with recurring wars, the obligations of the playwright to oppose the wars, and creating public discourse that will suggest alternative policies that are not lethal.

The U of C has never shied away from controversial or difficult topics, as evidenced by the Center for Middle East Studies’ enthusiasm to host Motti (an idea that seemed to frighten the faculties of some other Chicago-area universities). The talk will be followed by a Q&A, and we’re looking forward to a vigorous discussion—otherwise, how would I know I was back on campus?

The talk will be held Tuesday, March 31, at 4 p.m. in Pick 001. All are welcome to attend.

Kyle Gorden, AB’00

Peeps show reminder

Although you have until April 9 to enter the Chicago Tribune's Peeps diorama contest, the Magazine’s contest ends Tuesday night at midnight.

Alumni or their families are invited to create a Maroon-themed scene using the sprinkled-sugar and marshmallow chicks and bunnies. Then e-mail us a high-resolution JPEG of the finished scene (a campus spot, a local hero, or a book, phrase, film, or production inspired by Chicago or linked to a Chicago alum) and sit back to see if you’ve won a prize (first-, second-, and third-place prizes of $250, $150, and $100). The winning dioramas will appear in the May–June/09 issue, and all entries will be exhibited in an online gallery.

Let's play two... or 300

Brian BaldeaAlready the winningest head coach in Chicago baseball history, Brian Baldea earned his 300th career victory on March 23 during the Maroons’ ten-game, season-opening spring-break tour. Now in his 19th season at Chicago, Coach Baldea spoke to us from Phoenix while the team warmed up for a double-header against Colby College. The Maroons, now 5-5, play their first home games April 4, 5, and 7.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat went through your mind when you notched your 300th career victory?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI wasn’t thinking about it all until after the game and the guys told me. It feels good, obviously, but I’ve never focused on the number of wins as the No. 1 priority here, and certainly not the number of wins for me—that’s not what’s important.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo what is important?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe priority is the development of these young men and what they get out of their experience from four years of baseball combined with the most outstanding undergraduate education they can get. It’s all about how the experience they have with me and with baseball here contributes to them being better men and better people.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are fans going to notice about this year’s team?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe’re scoring a lot more runs than we have in the past couple of years. We’ve had some freshmen come in and immediately contribute to key spots in our order. I think we averaged about 13 runs a game in our first seven games. So this team is putting up big numbers like we used to do five, six, eight, ten years ago.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are your goals for the 2009 season?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’d like to see us be a very, very strong defensive team. I need all of our pitchers to contribute so we can still compete with anybody we play, even if we don’t have our top two or three pitchers available that day. If that happens, I’d like to see this team win 25 or more games this year, and I think that’s possible.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat would you do if you got some baseball-free, University of Chicago–free time?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIf I had total free time and no obligations, I probably would find myself watching baseball somewhere. To me, it would be awfully relaxing and satisfying just to travel around in Arizona or south Florida this time of year and watch all the guys who are trying to make their bones in Major League Baseball do it.
QandA_QDrop.jpgLast question: White Sox or Cubs?
QandA_ADrop.jpgSox. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, so that’s a no-brainer.

Elizabeth Station

Portrait courtesy of Dave Hilbert/University of Chicago Athletics Department

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Remembering John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus of history, died Wednesday at Duke Hospital in Durham, NC. He was 94. James A. Rogerson, AM’69, PhD’80, shares his memories. Add your condolences below in the comments section.

I delivered a personal message to John Hope Franklin in 1967. At the request of my mother-in-law, I told him about the death of their mutual friend, the head reference librarian at the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Library, who helped him with his doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860. Their friend had made space for Franklin to work in her office and retrieved materials for him when, by law, he wasn’t allowed to use the library’s materials.
After reminiscing, Franklin asked about my studies, and I told him about my research in Czechoslovak history. He asked why I chose this area, and I told him that after the betrayal at Munich in 1938, Czechoslovaks were referred to as “a people of whom we know nothing” by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and I did not want that to happen again. As a Southerner—from North Carolina—I wanted to understand racism in the American South. But I did not think that as a white Southerner, I could be objective. If I could understand racism in East-Central Europe, I decided, I could understand it everywhere.
After this first meeting, Franklin recommended me in 1970 for the University of Chicago doctoral program, and ten years later I completed my doctorate in East-Central European history.
The second time I met Franklin at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte at a 2007 event. He was there to speak about his autobiography Mirror to America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). He signed my book, and I thanked him for his recommendation at the U of C. He was gracious, and we spent time catching up.
Looking back, I am one "redneck" who is grateful and proud that Franklin's reach was broad enough to include me.

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Who is Dan Pawson?

Dan Pawson and Alex TrebekAnswer: a legislative aide to a Massachusetts state senator, husband, father, and University of Chicago Law School alum. In December 2007, Jeopardy! fans watched Dan Pawson, JD'06, begin a nine-game winning streak on the popular game show. He returned this past January to participate in the 2009 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, which aired last month. And although Pawson was happy to discuss his game-show fame with UChiBLOGo, we don't recommend mentioning the articles of the Constitution. Especially you, Professor Helmholz.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you get on the show?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI got on the show by taking the online test in January 2007. The threshold to get on used to be much higher: you had to either try out in L.A. or you had to be lucky enough to be in a city that the Brain Bus visited. Now you just sign up for the online test and spend 15 minutes answering rapid-fire questions, and if you pass and they pick you, you go to a regional in-person audition, which happened for me in May 2007. Then I got the call to come on in August.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat kind of mental/intellectual preparation did you do before a show?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI don't have any great mental-stimulation techniques right before a game, but I did a lot of studying before the Tournament of Champions—world capitals, Shakespeare, opera, and a bunch of other categories that come up time and time again. A lot of them paid off!
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are your strong areas in trivia? Were there any categories you were hoping for? Any you were dreading?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI'm very strong in politics and sports and was very fortunate to get a category about baseball in the Double Jeopardy! round of the last game. That category went very, very well.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was your favorite "answer"?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIs it too trite to say "Who is George?" the answer I won on ["Born in 1683, the second British king of this name was the last one not born in the British Isles"]? I guess it might be a clue to which I answered, "What is Buffy the Vampire Slayer?" ["Alyson Hannigan was nerd-hot as a geek-turned-witch on this series"] because I know there was a Buffy writer in the audience [sitting next to my wife] who squirmed a little when I said it.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAny I'm-kicking-myself moments?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNo question—the $2,000 question asking how many articles are in the Constitution. It is to my everlasting shame that I answered "six" instead of the correct answer (seven). I just started counting them in my head—Congress, executive, judiciary, full faith and credit, supremacy, amendments—but the ratification article slipped my mind. I am never going to forgive myself for that.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you have any behind-the-scenes secrets to share?
QandA_ADrop.jpgFor the games we were allowed to watch from the audience (in the quarterfinals, contestants that haven't played yet are sequestered), we're all quietly playing along, and virtually every one of us is phantom-buzzing. It's a disturbing compulsion.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you have big plans for your earnings (more than $420,000 combined)?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe $170,000 I won in my first run is mostly accounted for now—a bunch to a house fund, a car, a trip to Vegas, some charitable contributions, and I paid off a bunch of my student loans. With the quarter million from the TOC, [my wife and I] are doubling the house fund, paying off almost all of the rest of my loans, charity again, and taking a trip to Europe. The difference is that this time, we have about $20,000 with which we have no idea what we're going to do. It's a good problem to have.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhich is more nerve-wracking: Final Jeopardy! or facing the Socratic Method at the U of C Law School?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe worst thing that could happen on TV is that I embarrass myself in front of 12 million people. In law school, I could get a withering comment and stare from Professor Helmholz. I'm not sure there's anything that compares to that.

Elizabeth Chan

Photo courtesy of Jeopardy! Productions Inc.

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Chick it out

The Maroon-themed Peeps dioramas are in. While the judges split hares, you can take a peep and vote for the Peeple's Choice winner. All winners will be announced Tuesday, April 14, on UChiBLOGo.


SLIDESHOW TIPS:

  • AUTOPLAY: Press the triangle button in the center of the slide show to start the autoplay.

  • FULL SCREEN: For a full-screen view, start the autoplay, then click on the icon made of four arrows in the bottom far right of the slide-show nav. (Press the Esc key at any time to exit.)

  • CAPTIONS: Once in full-screen view, click the "Show Info" text link in top of the slide-show nav. Clicking this link will load the caption information.

  • ADDITIONAL VIEWING OPTION: View the complete photo set on Flickr.

Diary of a Div School chef

Chopped radishes

Little more than a butler’s pantry, the kitchen off of Swift Hall's Common Room is not cut out for the Wednesday Community Luncheon's usual 100 attendees. The cooking and dishwashing area is a ship’s galley kitchen: 20 inches wide at the narrowest. Ten student cooks—each armed with a full-size commercial cookie sheet (and an opinion)—crowd in and out of the space while preparing a vegetarian meal for students, faculty, and community members.

Chef and Divinity School graduate student Rebecca Anderson, ’10, logged the goings-on in the kitchen last Wednesday, the spring quarter's first lunch (bread, salad, soup, quiche, and strudel) and annual April 1 Franz Bibfeldt lecture.


7:45 a.m.
I arrive successfully—and uncharacteristically—before the rest of the crew. I unload the groceries that spent the night refrigerated in my car thanks to the freezing temperature the night before.

8 a.m.
Our new bread baker is the first to arrive, and I point out where the tools are that she'll need.

“Where are the attachments for the standing mixer?”
"Somewhere in these three drawers? Or maybe these cupboards?”

8:05 a.m.
I leave to park my car.

8:35 a.m.
It’s street-cleaning day, which makes parking impossible. I drive home and bike back to the Div School, where I find that some of the cooks are working on the bread and studel and others are trying to boil water to make vegetable stock for the soup.

9 a.m.
I peel carrots and chop onions for the soup.

“Does anyone feel like music?”

Someone pops the Rushmore soundtrack into a portable CD player.

9:30 a.m.
While working on the quiches, one cook remarks how disgusting and eggy it all is.

“There’s salmonella all over the kitchen."
“You don’t know that for a fact.”

Prepwork

10:30 a.m.
There’s always a mid-morning lull, once all the chopping is done. While the bread rises, we set the tables.

“Which side does the napkin go on?”

A twosome puts the strudels together, laboriously peeling apart sheets of delicate phyllo dough. The other cooks photocopy menus for the tables, arrange flowers, and fill carafes at the Div School coffee shop.

10:45 a.m.

“What’s burning?”

Someone accidentally left something on the stove's burner. About 15 percent of the time, it is a hot mat that has caught on fire.

11:30 a.m.
Some cooks leave to attend chapel. Everyone else starts to take care of things we ought to have done already.

“Did you fill the creamers?”
“Where's the dressing?”
“What’s this goat cheese for?”
“Who is filling the water pitchers?”
“Salad! Start the salad!”

11:50 a.m.
Lunchers start to line up in the lobby. Someone remembers to prepare the yellow soapy vat for dirty silverware.

12:02 p.m.

“I’m going to open the doors.”

12:10 p.m.
As people sit down, we start to serve drinks. In the kitchen, I ladle the soup and another cook adds a parsley garnish. We take the food out.

12:35 p.m.

“Can we start?”

The strudel takes too long. We whisper in the kitchen. Five of us, using two knives, get the messy strudel off the baking sheets and onto serving plates. We serve dessert.

Chef Rebecca with pies, before and after

Eventually the crew stands in a clump by the kitchen door, seeing that the coffee and tea are passed around. I notice something's missing.

"Whoops! The creamers are still in the fridge."

We sit down to eat while the inside-joke riddled Franz Bibfeldt lecture begins. For us it’s just a break before cleaning up, but it’s also the real Wednesday lunch.

Photos by Divinity School graduate student Monika Chaudhry, ’10.

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The treadmill or the cupcake

Two students were the envy of the other public-policy fourth-years last Saturday. I was one, and my Cape Town roommate was the other. The reason: our exemption—for having been abroad—from giving 15-minute presentations on our theses at the first Public Policy Symposium.

The 45 presentations were divided into nine thematic panels. I attended “Housing Policy” in the afternoon. Caroline Weisser, ‘09, investigated whether social capital can be used to reduce crime in New York City’s public housing. She began her research after the New York City Housing Authority announced a plan in May 2008 to close hundreds of community centers because of a budget crisis. Studying several factors to measure social capital, Weisser found that informal social control (people regulating each other outside of the legal system) and collective efficacy (or a group’s understanding that it can take action) had the greatest effect on reducing crime. So she concluded that the city should keep the centers open and streamline programming.

But there was some confusion in the audience about causation versus correlation. Could Weisser’s data prove, someone asked, that the community centers are actually responsible for lowering crime? What about changes in the economy, or stricter policing, or something seemingly unrelated, like the weather?

I can sympathize with the difficulty of making causal claims when it comes to crime. My own thesis is about the Chicago Housing Authority’s police force, and I’ve learned that crime data is one of the trickiest kinds to work with. So many things affect crime that it is nearly impossible to isolate a single variable. Actual crime also differs from reported crime, which differs from arrests, which differs from convictions. And crime data in places like Chicago have been subject to political maneuvering as well, meaning that old statistics may be unreliable.

At lunchtime we took a break from student presentations to hear a keynote speaker with some expertise of his own in tricky data: Charles Wheelan, PhD'98, Harris School professor and author of Naked Economics. Wheelan discussed the disconnect between good economics and policy, and good politics. If people have an option between losing weight on a treadmill or losing weight while eating cupcakes and taking magic pills at night, he said, they choose the cupcakes, however unrealistic that may be. “The essence of public policy,” Wheelan explained, “is convincing people to use the treadmill,” and “the essence of politics is talking about cupcakes.”

Professor Woody Carter disagreed during the Q&A. A sociologist, Carter believes that “people are already on their own treadmill.” What you’re telling them, he said to Wheelan, is “get off your treadmill and get on mine.” To make good policy, he continued, “we need to understand their treadmill.”

Shira Tevah, ’09


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Where peeps come to dioramas

No one ever went broke overestimating the creativity of U of C people—and the entries in the University of Chicago Magazine Peeps Diorama Contest prove it. The judges had lots of fun reviewing the Maroon-themed scenes and a hard time narrowing them down to the top three winners. But that’s what judges do, and we did:

The first- and second-place winners will also receive an array of Just Born Candy goodies.

All the entries can be seen in our online Peeple's Choice gallery, where the diorama garnering the most votes—and thus a signed copy of Magazine photographer Dan Dry’s coffee-table book of University photographs, was Eliot Nest and the UnPeepables,” by Katie Hrinyak, AM'06.

Choke hold

“There are two kinds of chokes,” said Amanda Wingate, ’09, “blood chokes and air chokes. We’re going to learn both.” We started Wednesday night’s beginning Krav Maga class with air chokes, the less scary of the two, in Wingate’s opinion, because with blood chokes “you don’t know how dangerous it is until it’s too late” and the blood flow to your brain is cut off. I found air chokes intimidating enough.

I went to the class to learn some self-defense, but I had little clue what I was in for. Krav Maga is the Israeli Defense Forces’ form of martial arts. Slow motion is not a part of learning the technique; bodily contact is. After demonstrating our first move, called “forward choke with a push,” Wingate, who has studied Krav Maga for six years and taught it for five, split us into pairs. I stood on the defense side of the room across from a stranger named Sam. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” I said. We switched places so I could be on offense. I hedged for a moment. Then I stepped forward and closed my fingers around his neck.

He responded as we’d been shown: he stepped back, pivoted on his right foot while arcing his right arm over mine to release my grip, caught my arms with his left, and threw his right elbow inches from my temple. We did it over and over, at least a dozen times. “Are you really choking him?” Wingate asked as she walked by. She encouraged me to use more intensity. “He has to feel the adrenaline,” she explained, to be prepared for a real encounter. If we were actually hurt or uncomfortable, Wingate had told us earlier, we could tap twice on partner, body, or floor. “If I ever, ever see anyone not stop immediately after a double tap,” she warned, “you will be out of this class.”

Finally I moved to defense. The first time Sam attacked I lost my balance, panic making me forget to pivot. By the fourth or fifth time, I was better. I had a painful, burning sensation on my neck—an unsightly bruise still marks the spot. Sam and I didn’t make much small talk; all I know is his first name.

I left with an adrenaline high, feeling empowered and ready to show off. But underneath the exhilaration, I’m frightened by what I didn’t know before—like which part of the fist to punch with—and by what I still don’t know. I felt nervous and jumpy in the Henry Crown practice room, as though preparing for danger makes it more likely—a trick of the mind. It was disconcerting how quickly I got used to acting violent. But I’m willing to risk heightened fear and being desensitized for some personal security, and I’ll keep going back.

Shira Tevah, ’09

Accidental gringo

Maybe it was last week’s scathing review of his new book, Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America, in the New York Times. Maybe it was his hometown draw as a '99 alumnus of the Laboratory Schools. Maybe it was his famous radical parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, jailed for their activities with the Weather Underground. Whatever the reason, Chesa Boudin—author, traveler, Rhodes Scholar, and Yale law student—packed a seminar room in Kelly Hall for Monday’s lunchtime talk and book signing. His presentation, jointly sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Human Rights Program, focused on the lessons he says Americans can learn if they pay closer attention to the region’s shifting political and social movements. Boudin, 28, spent eight of the past ten years crisscrossing the continent—studying Spanish in Guatemala, descending the Cerro Rico mines in Bolivia, riding a cargo boat down the Amazon, and serving as a foreign-policy adviser to President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. So maybe the audience showed up because they were interested in what he had to say. Here are some excerpts.


Why the book
Over the course of ten years of travel in Latin America, I came to believe that there was a story I could share that was worth sharing, that the on-the-ground experiences I had, the people I came across, the friendships I built were worth recounting to a broader audience. Not that Latin Americans aren’t capable of telling their own stories or sharing their own voices, but all too often the Latin American voices that get shared in this country are of a very narrow sector that’s not representative certainly of the social movements that I find so exciting and that have really been shaking up the region for the last ten years.
A few policy recommendations
Today in the United States, we have a unique and particular opportunity to redefine for the better our relationship with Latin America. There are three particular areas where Obama has opportunities that have vast implications for domestic policy as well as U.S. foreign policy in the region. First is the relationship with Venezuela and Cuba, which has been so strained. He can alleviate that tension and bring both of those countries back into normal diplomatic relations with the United States if he chooses to do so. The second is the war on drugs. It’s high time that the government in this country recognized it as a costly failure. Last is immigration. We should recognize the crucial role that immigrants play not only to our economy but also to the culture. It’s unconscionable that we continue to criminalize and incarcerate immigrants who come here looking for a better way of life.
How he travels
Many of the stories I ended up writing about were accidental. I don’t generally plan details, beyond visas, in advance. There’s a real advantage to not planning your trips carefully. When you’re doing overland travel, there’s a real advantage of having that flexibility because it allows you to get off the bus when a person says "Why don’t you stay at my family’s house tonight?" If I’d been flying in and out of capital cities, not only would my understanding of the region as a whole been fragmented, but I would have missed out on some of the best opportunities to get to know people in the countries I was visiting.
Why Gringo isn’t a tell-all memoir
The book has 85,000 words and about 3,000 of them are about my parents. It’s a theme of the book; it’s something I reflect on at various points, but it’s not the focus at all, and every situation where I bring them up I do it consciously within a context of a focus on Latin America.

Elizabeth Station

The greenest house

heppner.jpgThe Chicago Green Homes Program has a 1,000-point scale on which you can rate your home for energy efficiency and environmental friendliness. The first time Tim Heppner proposed his plan to the city program to certify his house as a “Chicago Green Home,” he told an audience at the Divinity School lunch on Wednesday, “the guy said, ‘You can’t get this many points.’” Heppner, an Iowa native who calls himself “just a carpenter,” had designed a home scoring 882 points. The nearest proposal was somewhere in the 300s.

Heppner and his brother Charles began their project four years ago when they bought a modest house at 86th and Marquette in South Chicago. It makes sense to build in an urban area like Chicago, Heppner says, because “there are only buildings here. We’re not going to bring back the swamps.” Starting with a whole building—instead of on empty land—was his “biggest resource.” He removed the walls and floors but says, “Every piece of wood I took out, I’m going to put back in.”

To make the house greener, Heppner put in three different layers of insulation—the walls now are 11.5 inches thick. “We’re basically at the point,” he says, “where when you open the front door,” the house is so tightly sealed that “it’s like a refrigerator.” He makes a popping sound to demonstrate and explains that a typical house has .5 air exchanges per hour, and his only has .1, meaning—in lay terms—there are never any drafts. He also calculated the angle of the sun and placed the windows so that “for 45 days in the summer, no direct sunlight will enter the windows” on the south face.

Using a topographical map of his backyard, Heppner planned rain management. The goal is to keep water away from the building, but also, Heppner says, to save it from the city’s system, where “perfectly good rainwater gets mixed with raw sewage.” Heppner’s design puts 120,000 gallons back into the environment every year with rain barrels that collect water from the roof, a garden on the garage that can take an inch of rain, and several bio-swales—“what we in the country used to call drainage ditches”—that are planted with native swamp plants and can take 400 gallons at a time.

Heppner emphasizes cost-saving with measures such as “the poor man’s geothermal heat pump,” which substitutes plastic piping and heat exchangers for an especially pricey technology. He hopes similar measures can be implemented throughout Chicago. Alhough he has worked on his home since 2005, he believes that multiple people working on a house could reduce the time to a few months. “We have to do this on 400,000 homes within the next ten years,” he says, referring to his involvement in the Chicago Climate Action Plan, “to meet the city’s sustainability goals.”

Iowa City is still Heppner’s official address, and although he spends the occasional night in the house-in-progress, it won’t be completed until June. Chicago’s greenest home is also one of its most comfortable, and Heppner is enthusiastic about finally moving in. “There’s no street noise inside,” he says, “no drafts, and the floors are radiant, so they’re warm.”

Shira Tevah, ’09

Out of Africa


Magazine intern Shira Tevah, ’09, spent winter quarter abroad as part of Chicago’s African Civilizations course. This is her last dispatch about her time in South Africa.—Ed.

I wore sundresses and nice shoes more often in Cape Town than I remember ever having done. That isn’t what you expect someone just back from Africa to say. It wasn’t what I had expected either—most of South Africa was more developed than I had realized it would be. On the South African rand I could afford a more elegant lifestyle than in Chicago. A fancy, several-course meal with wine usually cost less than $15, and often the temptation was too great to ignore.

My friends and I were uncomfortable spending so much time shopping, eating delicious food, and seeing occasional theater. We had hoped to focus on the sociopolitical landscape, but we didn’t find it very accessible. Cape Town is physically segregated: the city’s population is mostly white and middle- or upper-class, while the poor live miles away. Professors John and Jean Comaroff and David Bunn talked to us about volunteering and interning opportunities but warned that we might be more trouble for organizations than we’d be worth.

I did leave the city center several times to meet up with a friend of history graduate student Toussaint Losier. Losier worked with the Anti-Eviction Campaign last summer through Chicago’s Human Rights Internship Program, and he put me in contact with the campaign’s Ashraf.Ashraf introduced me to a community of squatters living in shacks of wood, tin, and plastic bags behind a housing development, planning to stay until the government gave them promised homes. I also met his cousin, a woman organizing a union of suburban hawkers upset because they were no longer allowed to sell their vegetables, socks, and electronics on the town square. But at the end of the day, I went back to my luxurious guesthouse on a hill.

We did have unlimited access to our South African professors. They invited us into their homes and introduced us to their friends. They drove us around the country for hours at a time, while we mined them for stories and information. (We were especially car-bound for two weeks in Kruger, where visitors may only exit their vehicles with a guide because of wild animals freely roving the national park). They put up with heroic amounts of student angst—about poverty, AIDS, inequality, and our place in it all—and scores of annoying questions.

I gradually pieced together an understanding of the city and nation, based on the courses, daily life, newspapers, and events including a panel of government officials from different political parties, hosted by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. The Cape Town program was the beginning of my Africa education, and I hope to build on it in coming years. Traveling transposes a vivid picture onto the imprecise and mostly blank world map in my head, and now, as I follow the South African elections and other news, the stories resonate.

Shira Tevah, ’09


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Let the games begin

Last weekend Material Exchange—a group of four Chicago alums who breathe new life (and art) into found objects—got Hyde Parkers young and old to turn off their iPods, put down their Wiis, and step right up to their latest project, a collection of artist-made carnival games called King Ludd’s Midway Arcade.

The show, which continues this Friday and Saturday, features a hand-crafted wooden pinball machine, a giant kaleidoscope made from steel drums, a vintage 1970s air-hockey table powered by bicycles, and more. John Preus, MFA’05—who organized the show with Sara Black, MFA’06; Alta Buden, AB’07; and David Wolf, MFA’05—explained the project to UChiBLOGo via e-mail.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did this show get its name?
QandA_ADrop.jpgA worker’s manifesto from around 1811 and other publications were signed Ned Ludd, or King Ludd. Lore has it that Ned broke two stocking frame machines and unwittingly ignited the Luddite movement, which began as a resistance to both the introduction of new technologies in the textile industry and of free-market practices, as opposed to standardized pricing structures.
The term “midway” was coined during the World’s Fair, more or less the site of the current arcade. [The 1893 World’s Fair] stands in history as an almost inhuman accomplishment, and one that inspired thousands of people, but which also left behind a black city, squatted by the homeless, many of whom had been laborers at the fair. It seemed akin to current economic and social patterns.
The games are almost all low-tech, hand-manipulated machines in a time when the digital-gaming industry is a multibillion-dollar behemoth.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are the big ideas behind it?
QandA_ADrop.jpgQuality of life as a subtle balance between individualism and cooperation, technological advancement, and restraint. The tactile joy of hand-made mechanisms. The relationship between art and games, and authorship of games as something akin to the development of a system. Games as an alternative mode of social interaction that evokes novel responses, humor, and generates social cohesion through both competition and cooperation. An arcade as a novel form of arts funding. The artists will receive royalties from the playing of the games.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you hope people will respond to the games?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe hope most of all that they enjoy playing them. We hope that they have a unique experience of games, seeing behind the curtain so to speak. We hope they are inspired to think about rules and what they mean, who makes them, and the degree to which they are adaptable.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow is Material Exchange funded?
QandA_ADrop.jpgSome of our projects are commissions/residencies; some, like this one, are funded through admission fees; some are not funded, and we eat lentils.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow does a recession affect artists who use recycled materials?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’m not sure a recession has much impact on recycled materials. It affects artists who rely on patronage or grants because art is discretionary by most accounts. We would like to say we do not use recycled materials; we simply use materials that still have some life in them.

Elizabeth Station

King Ludd’s Midway Arcade continues Friday, May 1, 7-11 p.m., and Saturday, May 2, 2-8 p.m., at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Avenue. Adults: $5; kids $3.


RECOMMENDED LINKS

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Swine flu

Of the five probable swine flu cases reported in the city of Chicago so far, two are Medical Center employees, according to an e-mail Dean of Students Kimberly Goff-Crews and CFO Nim Chinniah sent to students, faculty, and staff Wednesday evening.

The University News Office is maintaining a new Web site with up-to-date information and the University’s response.

Here’s a roundup of what others in the University community are saying about swine flu—globally and locally:


ALUMNI

David Brooks, AB’83
Op-ed columnist, commentator, and author


FACULTY

Kenneth Alexander
Chief of pediatric infectious diseases

Anupam Chander
Visiting law professor and scholar of globalization and digitization

Casey B. Mulligan
Chicago Booth professor of economics

Harold Pollack
Faculty chair of the Center for Health Administration Studies and SSA associate professor

Patrick C. Wilson
Assistant professor of immunology


STUDENTS

Erin Franzinger, ’09
Fourth-year Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations major in the College and Chicago Studies program coordinator

Asher Klein, ’11
Second-year English major in the College and news editor at the Chicago Maroon


STAFF

Jeremy Manier
Medical Center senior science reporter and new-media editor

University of Chicago Press editors


If we have missed a swine flu story with a University of Chicago connection, please leave a link and description as a comment. Thanks!—UChiBLOGo

Organic farming a long row to hoe

When organic farmer Larry O’Toole began explaining to a couple dozen students and Hyde Parkers in Bartlett Lounge just how hard it is to break away from conventional agriculture, I thought of a farmer I know back home in North Carolina, who converted his family land to organic crops after about 200 years of traditional agriculture. More than once he’s told me that it was about the hardest thing he’s ever done, but worth it.

A city farmer, O’Toole transforms more vacant lots than family farms; he works for Growing Home, a nonprofit that provides job training to homeless and low-income people on three organic farms in Chicago and rural Illinois. His comments came at a lunchtime forum on Earth Day—amid a week of green-focused campus events—and on the table in front of him sat boxes of soy milk, organic cheese cubes, a tub of organic hummus, and someone’s bike helmet. O’Toole shared a panel with Martin Felsen, an Archeworks architect looking for ways to replenish some of the 2.1 billion gallons of water that Chicago removes daily from Lake Michigan. Also in the discussion was Esther Bowen, AB’08, a TA for geophysical scientist Pamela Martin’s class-cum-study crunching the numbers behind environmentally sustainable farming.

All three panelists began on a note of optimism but quickly converged on the reality that altering America’s agricultural landscape will require difficult, fundamental changes. O’Toole discussed the outdated agricultural and zoning policies that made establishing a produce farm in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood nearly impossible, even though “the mayor and the alderman loved the project,” he said. “It took four years of fighting tooth and nail to get the farm going.” Growing Home’s Englewood site finally got under way in 2007.

Then there’s the question, O’Toole said, of ingrained tradition. “Historically, farmers rely for their training on knowledge that gets accumulated and perfected over generations.” Going organic means reversing centuries of momentum and starting over. “It’s like studying for a PhD,” O’Toole said, which was what reminded me of my friend in North Carolina. He lives just outside Asheville on the farm his family has owned for seven generations. He decided to switch to organic about a decade ago. He gave up pesticides and heavy machinery, found a new water source that didn’t require pumps, and figured out how to keep his goats warm all winter without heating the barn. “I feel like I’m studying for a PhD,” he once remarked about all the research his organic conversion required. And although his farm is more rural than O’Toole’s, he still had to clear a few municipal roadblocks. Ten years later, he’s finally making money.

What he and O’Toole both believe is that if organic farming can survive, it will flourish. “The demand from consumers is there,” O’Toole said. His Bartlett Lounge audience nodded their heads. “We could multiply our farms by ten or 20 and still not meet the demand.”

Lydialyle Gibson

Photo courtesy Growing Home.

Funky history

What were the three cities where musicians in the ‘70s and ‘80s could make it big? New York, Los Angeles, and Dayton, Ohio—according to Scot Brown, assistant history professor at UCLA and Thursday’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture lecturer with “‘More Bounce to the Ounce’: The Blues Afro-Futurism of Roger Troutman and Zapp.” Troutman and his brothers—who made up the funk band Zapp—lived, played, and recorded in Dayton for nearly three decades, contributing to an African American music scene in the Midwest that was characterized by commercial success, independent record labels and shops, and the fusion of music with black cultural nationalism and social activism.

“Think of Roger as a sound innovator and experimentalist,” Brown says, adding that Troutman’s most noteworthy work was his use of the talk box—which he “translated from an exotic effect to an instrument with lots of capabilities.” The talk box is a technology that transforms human speech into robotic, “futurist” sounds. Prior to the funk revolution, Brown says, the dominant “masculinist style” and “culture of cool” dictated that a man might go out to a club and stand at the wall. “Roger’s task,” Brown notes, “was to get them to take off their fedoras, ask a lady to dance, and get sweaty.”

Chicago’s music and humanities associate professor Travis Jackson, who introduced Brown, had another take. “Part of what makes Roger’s work seem exceptional,” he said, “is the correlation people make between African American musicians and the body, and European musicians and the mind.” He pointed out that Troutman was one person in a long line of sound innovators, some of whom implemented techniques such as rhythm boxes and dub recording. Brown acknowledged the critique, but it had little bearing on one of his favorite points: “You can think of sampling as reaching back to the past, or you can see the past as imposing itself on the present,” he said, “with a chunk of funk so thick that history has no recourse but to double back and make you dance.”

Shira Tevah, ’09

From the department of sticklers

By now, the Internet-savvy among you surely have noticed a trend: parodying Facebook news feeds to provide a laugh at the expense of some literary, political, or divine figure. Always good for a chortle, and nobody enjoys a chortle more than me. But look closer; doesn’t something about these strike as you as jarring, dissonant—just plain wrong? That’s right, the feeds go in the wrong direction! All the world knows that you read a Facebook feed in reverse chronological order—from the bottom up. And yet these spoofs are written from the top down! O tempora! O mores! Even the University of Chicago Magazine isn’t immune. What’s next? Will cats marry dogs? Aristotelians become Platonists?

You could gnash your teeth in woe or spam editors Mary Ruth Yoe and Amy Puma with hate mail. But why not join the U of C Magazine fan page on Facebook? If every one of you joins, perhaps we can show them the folly of their ways.

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

The write way

“How do you teach something that is an art form?” asked Elizabeth Crane, a short-story writer and a creative-writing faculty member at the University. The question set the tone for a panel discussion Tuesday evening featuring some of the city's most prominent authors.

1256494428_5b584ac69c_m.jpgTwo dozen students, professors, and visitors gathered in Classics 110 for the event. The participants were Crane; Aleksandar Hemon, author of two critically acclaimed novels and regular contributor to magazines such as the New Yorker; and Stuart Dybek, known as an expert short-story craftsman, winning a PEN/Malamud Prize for distinguished achievement and an O. Henry award. The three writers have been tag-team teaching an invitation-only seminar for ten advanced fiction writers at the U of C this quarter.

The conversation fluctuated between their methods of teaching writing and their own writing practices. Hemon noted, "You cannot approach it as, 'I'm an expert and these are what my tricks are.'" But the authors did agree that reading—observational, voracious, and broad—is essential to becoming a good writer. Hemon seeks out everything from Nabakov and Chekhov to names in phonebooks and nutritional information on the backs of cereal boxes. "I like the Yellow Pages," he said.

After a few audience questions that prompted the writers to explore associations between academia and creative writing, they explicated how they saw their own work in relation to their readership. "Reading is like dancing," said Dybek, who noted that, aside from popular musicians, writers have the most active audience of any art form. He offered an example: a student writing a dissertation chapter on Dybek's story "Blood Soup" read transubstantiation into the Miracle Whip jar full of holy water that the protagonist empties out. His dying grandmother urges him to empty it and embark on a quest for duck's blood to give to her. Dybek claimed he didn’t intend to make such a connection to the miraculous in the story, "but if I make things specific enough, then a great reader like that will be able to dance with it."

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photo by Silver Tusk (CC-BY-NC-SA)

Hyde Park snark

Yes, it was my idea. But I was still a little freaked out about meeting “Chicago Pop,” a.k.a. David Hoyt, AB’91, the man behind the notorious (his adjective) local blog Hyde Park Progress. Although I graduated in 1991 too and we have at least one friend in common, somehow we never crossed paths.

The blog’s name is pretty bland, and the content could be, given Hoyt’s narrow focus on neighborhood development, his background in urban planning, and his tendency toward wonkishness. But rather than a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, Hoyt prefers oil of vitriol. He has a particular genius for writing offensive, occasionally obscene headlines and photo captions, and his analysis is bitingly funny—as long he’s writing about somebody else. If you live in Hyde Park, that somebody else could be the guy who sells you bagels or who rents you a space in the community garden or who edits the weekly paper.

Because of conflicting work/parenting schedules, Hoyt and I agreed to meet at a local playlot. He arrived with a golden retriever, Ella; his two-year-old son, Isaac; and a shopping cart that Isaac likes to push around.

QandA_QDrop.jpg After college you earned PhD in European history at UCLA. When did you move back to Hyde Park?
QandA_ADrop.jpg In early 2006. I graduated in 1991, and when I came back to Chicago a decade later, the only thing that had changed about Hyde Park was that it had a Starbucks.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIf you had a magic wand, what are the five things you would change about Hyde Park? Put another way, what are the five lamest things?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWow, what a Facebook-y question. I don’t know.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWant to e-mail me later?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYeah.

[Later, by e-mail.]

  1. We need to get used to the idea of more density. That means more taller and bigger buildings, and more people.
  2. We need to recognize that Hyde Park is not an island, but is part of the South Side and shares many of its challenges, problems, and opportunities.
  3. We need to recognize that the University is not an Evil Empire. Related to #2, the University should be encouraged to develop outside its historic "boundaries" in Hyde Park. Concretely this means Woodlawn and Washington Park.
  4. It should be recognized that the goals of economic development in Hyde Park are inseparable from those of the surrounding, poorer, and primarily African American neighborhoods (which is why #3 is important).
  5. The University needs to be smarter about its opposition, and less solicitous of the opposition when their intentions are obstructionist.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you respond to the charge that you make ad hominem attacks?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYou think they’re ad hominem attacks?
QandA_QDrop.jpgThey’ve been described that way.
QandA_ADrop.jpgI define what I do as satire. If people think it’s too mean and nasty, sorry.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIs it fair to write under a pseudonym, when you criticize other Hyde Parkers by name?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYeah, it’s fair. There’s a long tradition of writing under a pseudonym for critical purposes. My identity is known. I write for the Huffington Post under my own name, and Hyde Park Progress is linked to that.

[Isaac, wanting to play in a different area, says, "Train. Train." Hoyt responds, "In a minute Isaac."]

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy do you do it?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI see the blog as community service. I don’t get paid. I don’t get anything out of it. I’d like to stay in Hyde Park, but if I’m going to stay here, it’s got to change.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat about your contributors, Elizabeth A. Fama, AB'85, MBA'91, PhD'96; Peter Rossi, MBA'80, PhD'84; and Richard Gill?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI don’t think it’s any coincidence that three out of four of us have PhDs. In graduate school you don’t think it’s impolite to point out that someone is full of it.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAnything else you wanted to say?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNot really. I hope I didn’t offend you.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Scav Hunt Valhalla

Most participants in the annual University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt are College students, but there’s no rule saying they have to be. Witness GASH, the Graduate Alumni Scav Hunt team. In its second year, the group is the brainchild of Sam Friedman, AB’04, who wanted to play with his friends and fellow alumni. When I dropped by GASH headquarters Friday afternoon—inside a former preschool with papered-over windows on Hyde Park Boulevard—to see how the team was faring, Friedman and a few fellow alums were pondering if and how they would attempt item 46: “Give us a new Alma Mater we can all be proud of and perform it in front of President Zimmer’s Admin office.”

Like Friedman, each person in the room had been involved in their own dorms’ Scav Hunt teams, often against each other. (“I used to hate Sam’s guts,” volunteered GASHer Alan Mardinly, AB’06.) One described GASH as a kind of “Scav Hunt Valhalla,” where the great heroes of Scav lore lay down their old rivalries and play together.

The GASHers filled me in on a few of the items they were working on. Item 11 (building a moai statue on the quads): they salvaged a steamer trunk left in the alleyway behind their HQ to serve as the body, then added onto it. Item 47 (a classical quartet on the “L”): after a short discussion they decided they could create a respectable quartet from two violins, a cello, and a slide whistle. Item 235 (“The Ark of the Covenant. Ark must be to specs, within reason.”): Clara Raubertas, AB’06, quickly determined that the phrase “within reason” meant that a scale replica would be acceptable.

As I bade the team good day and good luck, I opened the door, illuminating the artificially lit space with glorious sunshine. “Aaaghh!” Friedman winced. “Sunlight!”

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

The results are in: The Snell-Hitchcock team took home first place, and GASH tied for sixth place.

Slideshow photos by Eric Allix Rogers, AB'05, AM'07 (CC-BY-NC-SA)


RECOMMENDED VIDEOS

  • Audio: Item 8 ("Your success as a Scavvie and a U of C student implies a certain discerning and critical sensitivity for bullshit: you know the best of the worst. Demonstrate your peerless taste by finding the perfect submission for The Annoying Music Show and getting it played on the air. The show broadcasts on Saturday, so you’ll want to get your entry to AnnoyingMusic@aol.com by Friday night. And remember, when the competition is fierce, music that is merely bad will not be good enough." 13 points, Shoreland team submission)

  • Video: Item 43 ("Render the Sox/Cubs rivalry in the guise of up to ten iconic commercials." 2 points, Maclean Hall and Pierce Tower team submission)

  • Video: Item 51 ("Nothing is worse than a mismatched music video. Re-record the lyrics, keeping the tune, so that they explain what the hell the director was thinking." 8 points, Breckenridge House team submission)

  • Video: Item 105 ("Holy Mackerel! Proselytizing wall fish." 12 points, GASH team submission)

  • Video: Item 111 ("Make and drink a glass of chocolate milk as dramatically as possible." 2 points, Burton-Judson Courts team submission)

  • Video: Item 209 ("Build a vending machine. Vending machines must be coin operated, with multiple button-selected options to choose from. In addition to whatever sugary goodness you choose, machines must vend three other List items when you type in their item numbers." 250 points, Burton-Judson Courts team submission)

  • Video: Item 239 ("Perform the Scav Hunt Theme Song ("Under Pressure") on the greatest instrument of all time: The Mario Paint Composer!" 13 points, Breckenridge House team submission)

  • Video: Item 243 ("Have the Bad Horse Singers deliver a message to your favorite Evil MacArthur Genius." 20 points, F.I.S.T. team submission)

  • Video: Item 267 ("You know that game Labyrinth, where you try to navigate a little ball through a wooden maze? It's fun and all, but not quite deserving of the name. Construct a game of Labyrinth truly worthy of the Goblin King, using dials to navigate a bowling ball through the maze and avoid the pitfalls." 200 points, Burton-Judson team submission)

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Smart kids

burning_house.jpgThe big idea behind the University of Chicago’s model for urban elementary schooling is that every child should be engaged in ambitious, intellectual work. Students of all ages and in every school—public, charter, or private—should pose questions, scrutinize answers, and explore new ways of thinking. Last week, tagging along with third-graders from Beasley Academic Center on a tour of the Smart Museum of Art, I saw theory in action.

On this, their third visit to the museum through its Art in Focus program, 29 neatly uniformed boys and girls from the South Side public magnet school began with a review of earlier material. Constance and Caitlyn, Chicago student docents, asked and got quick answers to basic questions: What are the elements of art? What’s the difference between a three-dimensional and two-dimensional piece?

Moving into the Asia gallery, a small group contemplated some early Ming Dynasty sculpture. “What do you guys see?” asked Constance, pointing to a row of Buddhas. “What’s going on here?” Hands shot up. “It looks like they’re meditating,” said a boy.

Seated cross-legged on the floor, the kids defined and discussed—in that halting, quiet, third-grade way—the difference between representational and nonrepresentational art. They had questions of their own for Constance: Who made this art? When did they make it? How do we know? (Answer: read the label.)

Jumping ahead to Reg Butler’s Machine, a mysterious, modernist, cast-bronze sculpture, a girl wondered, “How come he made it like that?” “He just wanted to put something out there,” suggested a classmate. Constance told them the artist produced the piece just after World War II. That prompted more thinking. “I learned that they dropped a bomb in Japan,” a boy said, “so maybe he is trying to build a plane to get away.”

Last stop was a wood, glass, and tin sculpture called Burning House, featured in Your Pal, Cliff, the Smart’s exhibition of works by H. C. Westermann. What’s going on here? “I think someone set the house on fire to get payback,” said a boy. Why did they think Westermann gave his future bride the piece as a wedding present? “He’s burning in love with her,” smiled a girl.

The kids were excited to see a photo of Westermann’s studio and a reproduction of the wooden crate that Burning House was shipped in. The crate prompted more discussion: What’s the difference between fine and functional art? Can a crate be considered art? Does it belong in a museum? The group was divided.

After an hour in the galleries, the third-graders began to get fidgety, and so did I. Constance invited them to come back with their parents for an open house next week. Beasley Academic Center is a couple miles west of the Smart Museum—on South State Street and 52nd—but it’s not a world away. Something tells me these kids will be back.

Elizabeth Station

Photo of Horace Clifford (H. C.) Westermann's Burning House, 1958, courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art.

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Neighborhood vacancy

SSA's Community Economic Development Organization dinner

Foreclosure filings in Chicago rose 100.5 percent from 2006 to 2008, according to a flyer that greeted students and community members at the entrance to the SSA’s Community Economic Development Organization dinner last Tuesday. At the dinner, representatives from the city and four neighborhood organizations shared strategies for foreclosure relief. While the city is buying abandoned units—widely considered harmful to neighborhoods—community organizations also emphasize foreclosure prevention through workshops and homeowner assistance.

In January Chicago received $55.2 million in stimulus money from the federal HUD Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) to buy foreclosed properties in 25 “areas of greatest need”—identified using the program’s rules, explained Ellen Sahli from the city’s Department of Community Development. Chicago's abandoned properties were recently valued at $1.2 billion, Sahli noted, so the city must spend the stimulus money strategically because it “will not be enough to tackle all the vacant properties.” City officials will work with Mercy Portfolio Services to connect with neighborhood developers to rehab the properties, ensure they are up to code, and find occupants. “The role of the city is convener,” Sahli said, “and the role of community partners is to get properties into productive use.”

The other side of foreclosure relief—prevention—has been taken up by organizations across the city. Bruce Gottschall of Neighborhood Housing Services and Reverend Rodney Walker of Teamwork Englewood described their organizations’ work, such as mediating between lenders and homeowners and advocating in Springfield for legislation like HR 0521, which would authorize state funds for foreclosure-prevention counseling. Guacolda Reyes of the nonprofit Resurrection Project described a March workshop in which some 600 families met with potential lenders face-to-face. Reyes was frustrated that Resurrection Project’s neighborhoods aren’t on the city’s list—instead it has turned to statewide NSP funds—but condoned the city’s decision to work with Mercy Portfolio. “The city’s strategy of having one negotiator will have a good effect on the rates people get from lenders for their homes,” she said.

Chicago is addressing the foreclosure crisis through federal funds, city planning, and local organizations. Woodlawn East Community and Neighbors director Mattie Butler even sees an opportunity for her community to end up better off than it was “before the bottom fell out.” The city-community partnership, she believes, will help reinstate the area’s affordable housing. Woodlawn “lost a lot of affordable units during the area’s upward mobility to condos that are now empty,” she said. “We’re going to recapture those and make them affordable again.”

Shira Tevah, ’09


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A Misérables marathon

lesmis.gifStudents and faculty milled about ex Libris last Thursday, exchanging greetings while pouring glasses of Bordeaux and filling their plates with bread and cheese. The evening was à la mode française, and appropriately so: the minglers were there to kick off a marathon reading of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a benefit running through tomorrow, with proceeds going to Fonkoze, a nonprofit providing micro-credit loans to destitute women in Haiti.

At 8:45 p.m. Robert Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin professor of French literature, welcomed the crowd. “The idea for this exercise came out of a course I am teaching this quarter on Les Misérables," he said, "out of a rare confluence of life and literature, of text and our current economic context. No one has more deeply, more durably, and more magically explored the subject of human misery than Victor Hugo. We wanted to make this event not just an opportunity to read and listen to this wonderful work, but also an occasion to reflect on the values and morals of our society and a means to help others.” He thanked student organizers as well as the University Community Service Center, the Library, the College, and the France Chicago Center, all of whom teamed up with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures to cosponsor the event.

Then Morrissey introduced Daniel Desormeaux, a Haitian native and scholar of 19th-century French literature who will join the Chicago faculty next fall. In town looking for a new home, Desormeaux asked if he could participate in the reading. Morrissey replied, “Well, you can inaugurate it.”

Desormeaux opened a tattered, faded-red text and delivered the novel’s opening lines:“En 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel était évêque de Digne. C'était un vieillard d'environ soixante-quinze ans; il occupait le siege de Digne depuis 1806.” (In 1815, Monsieur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. He was then about seventy-five and had presided over the diocese of Digne since 1806.) Desormeaux passed the book to his wife Magda, followed by a series of current faculty, each of whom read a passage. Then Morrissey introduced the first student reader and announced that the event would move upstairs to the Regenstein outer lobby.

Since then the marathon has continued, starting at 9 a.m. weekdays and noon weekends by the C-Bench, moving to the Regenstein lobby in the evenings, and concluding at midnight. The student and faculty readers sit beside water jugs doubling as donation depositories. Tomorrow morning's readers will include Jean-Luc Marion, the John Nuveen professor in the Divinity School, philosophy, and social thought—and recent inductee to the Académie française. Marion happily agreed to participate, says Morrissey: “His only request was that he be able to smoke his pipe while reading.”

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

Not quite a cakewalk

The students rustled into Rosenwald Tuesday evening, making louder conversation than one usually hears at campus readings—greeting each another, asking questions about spring quarter classes, scoping out the book-shaped layer cake on a table by the doorway. “Congratulations!” the cake read in ornate yellow script. The occasion was the English Department’s annual BA-thesis reading. Ten students had volunteered to read from their newly finished works (due at the departmental office April 27 at 5 p.m.—and believe me, it was tight).

English majors are not required to write BA papers; they do so only if they want to receive honors in the major. So the projects are, for the most part, labors of love. Students who write theses tend to love what they are writing about, whether they manage to actively love what they are writing. We could write either a creative piece (a collection of poems, essays, or stories) or a critical thesis. My BA was the latter—a 38-page argument about the function of subjects and objects in Gertrude Stein’s literary portraiture.

As the audience settled down, Christina von Nolcken, the undergraduate chair in English, addressed us. She noted the incredible number of projects—50—turned in this year. “There were more than I’d ever had before, and they were wonderful,” said von Nolcken. She then distributed the annual departmental prizes—honors in creative writing and two awards for outstanding BA projects, one for criticism, one for a creative thesis. The first reader was Rachel Lewin, ’09, who began by explaining the books she analyzed for her paper, “Classical Friendship: Cicero, Bacon, and Cross-Dressing in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. “I’ll assume you haven’t read the book,” ventured Lewin, “because almost nobody’s read it.”

The reading continued with an alternation of creative and critical theses. Critical prizewinner Greg Conti, ’09, read from his “Spectatorial Thinking and Thoreau’s Ethics of Solitude,” explaining that for Thoreau, interacting with society was “secondary to figuring out oneself.” Conti wanted “to connect this to Thoreau’s economic and political thinking," he said. "Solitude is not socially or economically indifferent.” Creative prizewinner Luke Rodehorst, ’09, read from “Shape Notes,” his collection of poems about embarking on journeys. Rodehorst completed his second creative thesis this year—the first, a nonfiction essay, was awarded the same prize in 2008, when Rodehorst was a third-year. Elizabeth Block, ’09, elicited chuckles when she read from her creative thesis. Block’s poem about her hometown, “I Worry for Atlanta,” apologizes for her lack of Southern drawl, noting she was raised by transplanted Midwestern Presbyterians. Her kinship with the city, she explains, came from “a dogwood tree in my backyard and a vague sympathy with Margaret Mitchell.”

I abstained from reading my paper. Afterward, we finished off the book-shaped cake and tea sandwiches. “I don’t want any food left over,” said von Nolcken. We lingered in the hallway, exchanging jokes and library horror stories with friends to whom we knew could relate. There’s nothing like writing a long, somewhat scary paper to ensure solidarity with your classmates. And there’s nothing like a cake shaped like a book to get English majors to cheerfully show up to an event.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Intestinal fortitude

Joseph KirsnerIt is a truth universally acknowledged that when celebrating someone's 100th birthday, it is not unwise to start a little early. Doctors, especially, know this.

So on May 29, Joseph B. Kirsner, PhD’42—also known as "GI Joe" and as "Papa Bowel"—will celebrate the prospect of turning 100 with his friends—even though he was born September 21, 1909.

The American Gastroenterological Society is making him jump the gun. So are the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. All these gastro-groups and more will gather in Chicago at the end of May to discuss fecal incontinence, debate the fine points of inflammatory bowel disease, and investigate restaurants during Digestive Disease Week, the "largest and most prestigious meeting in the world for the GI professional."

Kirsner, the Louis Block distinguished service professor of medicine, has served on the University’s faculty since 1935. After more than 70 years in practice, he has seen a lot.

During World War II Kirsner was an army doctor in Europe, where he consulted on the difficult issue of refeeding those who had nearly starved in the Nazi concentration camps. Soon after VE Day, he was shipped off the Pacific theater, where he advised on the rehabilitation of more prisoners of war, including a group of Dutch prisoners held captive in Nagasaki by the Japanese army in August 1945, when the second atomic bomb obliterated much of the city.

Tight patient bonds were a hallmark of Kirsner's career. Early on he was recognized "locally and nationally for his successful and compassionate care of patients,” says gastroenterologist James L. Franklin, the author of GI Joe, a 305-page chronicle of Kirsner’s first 100 years distributed by the University of Chicago Press. "The love and devotion his patients felt for him was celebrated and admired." Although he no longer sees patients, they still call him for advice. The key to this lasting connection, says Kirsner, is "competence with compassion."

As competent and compassionate as ever, Kirsner no longer has the energy that enabled him to put in 12-hour days for weeks on end, well beyond the standard retirement age. The problem with turning 100, he says, is "having an active mind trapped in a body that's just too old." He looks forward to his 101st birthday, which he plans to spend "in my office, catching up on the literature."

John Easton, AM'77

Looking for Hyde Park in London

London, Hyde Park

Most travelers know there’s a Hyde Park in London; it’s the former hunting grounds of King Henry VIII and the modern city’s 350-acre green lung. But on a recent visit to London, I might have been the only person looking for signs of Chicago’s Hyde Park there.

En route to the Woolgate Exchange building—home to the European campus of the Booth School of Business—the biting wind and gray sky were reminiscent of a May day in Chicago. Tucked away on side streets near the drab cement canyon of banks and office blocks were some real (rather than Collegiate) Gothic buildings, including at least one with gargoyles.

Chicago Booth occupies a light-filled, modern space that evokes the Harper and Gleacher centers, in the heart of the City of London financial district. Students in the executive MBA program were off for the week, and the evening’s networking event hadn’t begun, so the empty classrooms and vacant lounges gave the place a bit of a ghostly feel.

London, Nobels wall

Is the global economic crisis affecting enrollment in executive programs? “Actually, I’ve been surprised at how well we’ve done,” said Arnold Longboy, MBA’08, director of Chicago Booth’s executive education and student recruitment for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The number of inquiries about nondegree and degree programs is comparable to last year at this time, he said. “People tell me, ‘I’m working on fewer deals now, so I have more time for personal development.’”

Chicago Booth’s London-based MBA program draws about 90 students annually, two-thirds of whom receive some funding from their employers. For one week each month, about three-quarters fly in for classes, some from as far away as South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Some 43 countries will be represented in the class beginning in June, said Longboy, and a near-record 24 percent will be women.

One of the program’s biggest selling points, he added, is that it connects students to the University of Chicago in a broad sense. Events featuring visiting faculty from Chicago Booth and other departments have drawn well. In April alumni and students turned out to meet Laura Letinsky, professor and chair of visual arts, and attend the London opening of Likeness, her latest photography exhibit. Dean of Humanities Martha T. Roth will be in town in July to give a talk about Hammurabi’s code.

London, Hyde Park

“We invite the whole University of Chicago community to events,” said Longboy, although “whenever the faculty make references to Hyde Park—meaning the campus—we do have to remind them that there’s a Hyde Park in London.”

Elizabeth Station

Chicago Booth was the first and only U.S. business school with permanent campuses on three continents: Asia, Europe, and North America. The Chicago Booth campus in London is located in the financial district. The Woolgate Exchange, a modern office building, is close to the Bank of England; The Nobel Wall on the London campus honors the achievements of some of the University's greatest minds; Between classes students can enjoy the calm of the pleasant lounge, chat with classmates, or perhaps check in with colleagues back at the office or the family at home during a break.

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Kalven calling

Almost from the moment they sat down, the three panelists at last Friday’s discussion on free speech on campus waded into what law professor Geoffrey Stone, JD’71, called “uncomfortable” issues for universities navigating the murky waters of academic freedom: professors at anti-abortion rallies, students in T-shirts with provocative Biblical passages, Communist petitions, antiwar movements, civil-rights marches, the Holocaust, genocides, and questions about divestment—not only from Darfur but also apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.

“It seems that issues of free speech and free expression are always with us in the University, and the past couple of years are no exception to that,” said social-sciences dean John Mark Hansen, who moderated the discussion among panelists Stone, Div School Christianity professor Margaret M. Mitchell, AM’82, PhD’89, and historian Ramon Gutierrez. Free speech on campus discussion“There is always the question of how one maintains an environment where free speech and free expression can flourish,” Hansen said, “in a community that deeply values openness and mutual respect as well.”

Held in Social Sciences’s first-floor auditorium, the 90-minute conversation revolved around the 1967 Kalven Report governing public expression at and by the University. As they walked in, audience members picked up copies of the three-page report, and Hansen posed a series of hypotheticals based on its rules. “Suppose a faculty member criticizes key tenets of Islam in class,” Hansen said. “What if he also characterizes Muslim believers as ignorant and bloodthirsty?” Or, “Suppose an academic center sponsors an event at which all speakers assail the government of Turkey…for unwillingness to characterize the actions against the Armenians in 1915 as a genocide.”

The panelists’ frequent answer to these and other scenarios was, in a nutshell: it depends. But when in doubt, err on the side of freedom. “The University doesn’t want to be in the business of drawing lines” about what constitutes appropriate discourse, Stone said. “Academic freedom should reach at least as far as the First Amendment.” More than once Gutierrez pointed out that what might look like provocation or even harassment might in fact be “a teaching moment.” Mitchell, who was hard-pressed to find any situation where she would sanction speech, urged listeners to remember the difference between “invective” and “argument.”

Then Hansen opened the floor to audience questions. Listeners pushed for answers about handling professors’ openly held political views, the strength or weakness of faculty governance, divestment from Darfur, and the University’s historical actions in the world. Time and again, the conversation came back to the notion of neutrality. “Look,” Stone said finally, “no person or institution can ever be wholly neutral.” As a business, the University must make decisions, and decisions involve judgments and consequences. “I don’t think the claim is that the University is absolutely neutral, any more than any of us are absolutely neutral. The claim of the Kalven Report is that the University should aspire to be as neutral as possible in taking positions itself—knowing, intentional positions—on matters of public moment. And that is an aspiration that I think is perfectly credible.”

To see how the discussion unfolded, watch the video.

Lydialyle Gibson

From left, Mark Hansen, dean of the Division of Social Sciences, was moderator of a panel that included Geoffrey Stone, the Edward Levi distinguished service professor in the Law School and the College; Margaret M. Mitchell, professor in the Divinity School; and Ramón Gutiérrez, the Preston & Sterling Morton distinguished service professor in history and the College.

Photo by Jason Smith.

Same ‘old-old’ story

Based on “official nomenclature,” economist Robert W. Fogel, who turns 83 in July, is not yet “old-old.” Only people 85 and up qualify for that status. “I’m just old,” Fogel said.

It’s not a trivial distinction. In the B. Peter Pashigian Memorial Lecture May 13 at Chicago Booth, Fogel presented his working paper, “Forecasting the Cost of U.S. Health Care in 2040,” exploring the complicated economics of an aging population. The Nobel laureate and Charles R. Walgreen distinguished service professor of American institutions offered “tentative answers” about the course of physical and financial well-being, assuming many more old-old people will be around a generation from now.

That safe assumption comes from the steep upward curve in life expectancy during the 20th century, from 45 to almost 80. A decrease in the prevalence of chronic diseases, delays in onset age, and more effective treatments also promise improvements in the quality and quantity of life. But at what cost? “Advances in both surgical and drug therapies have significantly reduced the rate in which chronic conditions turn into disabilities that severely impair functioning,” Fogel said. “However, many of the surgical procedures are quite expensive, and the cost of new and more effective drugs is increasing sharply.”

Fogel’s analysis indicates that demand, more than aging, will drive costs higher, perhaps to as much as 29 percent of GDP by 2040. Public policy, he believes, should not attempt to restrain that increase. “As people get richer,” he said, “they want to spend a larger share of their income on improving their health.” Between 1875 and 1995 that share grew from 1 percent to 9 percent while dwindling for other necessities like food, clothing, and shelter.

Governments and businesses, he said, need to provide basic, affordable coverage, but more expensive policies and private savings accounts for health services should be available for people with the means. “Health care is not a homogenous good, all of which is essential. There are large luxury components in health services that may appeal to some tastes but that are not necessary for sound basic health care”—for example, private rooms, shorter waiting times, expensive alternative treatments, and physicians nationwide.

“And if you want to,” Fogel said, “you can throw in 200 channels of TV.” Kids today.

Jason Kelly

Look at all the lonely people

cacioppo_john.jpgSocial neuroscientist John Cacioppo is kind of a big deal in his field. Without his own work, Cacioppo couldn’t even be called a social neuroscientist. His 1992 American Psychologist article coined the name of the discipline, which examines how the brain and social behaviors affect each other.

It was his groundbreaking research on loneliness that earned him this year’s Ryerson lecture. Loneliness, Cacioppo explained to a near-full Max Palevsky Cinema, is an evolutionary biological response to perceived social isolation. It has nothing to do with whether a person is alone or surrounded by people—the relationship quality is more important than quantity. (In fact, he said, those Facebookers aiming to collect the most virtual buddies may in reality be quite lonely.) Like hunger, thirst, or pain, loneliness triggers an impulse, telling a person that something is wrong. Loneliness “protects you as an individual body,” and engaging in social behaviors, said Cacioppo, “helps an organism survive, reproduce, and carry offspring.”

In the 30-minute lecture (plus a Q&A), Cacioppo detailed his findings on how loneliness affects emotions, biology, and health. His longitudinal studies have shown that, overall, chronically lonely people are at risk for more health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and stroke, than those who feel less socially isolated. "Loneliness is actually a very virtuous feature," Cacioppo concluded. "Chronic loneliness is not. But if you didn’t have physical pain as a process in your body," he said, "you wouldn’t survive because you wouldn’t know if you were harming your own body. Loneliness contributes to our own humanity because it motivates us to connect and do things for others."

Three findings in particular surprised Cacioppo and his colleagues:

  1. Collectivist cultures, like Italians, are lonelier than individualist ones: “When are people in America at their very loneliest? It’s not during the busiest of days—it’s during the holidays when the social norm is that everyone’s with friends and family.”

  2. “Loneliness is just as characteristic of popular kids as it is of unpopular kids.”

  3. "How lonely you feel on a particular evening predicts that night’s sleep efficiency."

Ruthie Kott, AM'07


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UChi Bizarre-ketplace: May 2009

Daft punk

When you’re thinking about spending $100 an hour—especially for help with something you really don’t want to screw up, like a work visa—you want to make sure the person offering assistance is actually qualified, right? Especially if the listing itself is a bit less than persuasive.

Visa Filing Help to help you deal with daft American employers

Having trouble getting your daft American employer (or daft Americans in general) to figure out the subtle nuances of the convoluted work visa process?

Reluctant to shell out thousands to scamster immigration attorneys who are probably as clueless about this as your boss or supervisor anyway?

Then contact me for informal assistance - I'll get you started up, & walk you through the whole process and the mounds of paperwork so that you always stay a step ahead.

$100 an hour for consultation.

Hmmm, okay. I guess in some cases, xenophobia can be an effective marketing tool. Perhaps it would be best to check out some of the seller’s other listings before forking over that C-note.

White Window Drape

This one has trouble coming down – and when it does it runs back up with a vengeance! In fact the harder you drag it down, the faster it runs back to the top! Pent up tensile acrylic rage you think? - I suspect it’s just a small catch somewhere in the bar’s rolling action, but I can’t be bothered to investigate.

Sometimes I play with this for hours on end when I have nothing better to do - just an experiment for my personal amusement, you understand? - winding it over and over again till it can't take any more - hey, everyone needs a hobby!

It’s true, hobbies can be a positive thing. But now I’m even less convinced of the seller’s claim to be non-daft. On to another listing.

Wittner Super-Mini Taktell Student Metronome

You know what's worse in music than being out of tune? - it's not keeping proper time.

That's why I use this Wittner Super Mini Taktell metronome:

It does not care.
It conforms.
It is ruthless.
It is relentless.
It is remorseless.
It is unwavering.
It is inexorable.
It does not compromise.
It does not yield.
It does not retract.
It does not resile.
It does not negotiate, nor has it, nor will it ever.
It is contemptuous of anything and everything contrary to its singular purpose.
It treats inferior garbage the way inferior garbage deserves to be treated.
It is scornful of irrelevant background noise.
It is indifferent to any opposition.
It does not bow to your whims.
It is as certain as death itself.

If you can handle that, then consider contacting me.

Wow. As Nietzschean prose poems go, that’s impressive. And resile? Very nice. But then, what’s this listing about?

Aquafresh Anti-Cavity Fluoride Triple Protection Toothpaste

Like the title says. Left behind by a former roommate. Never cared much for fluoride, so it's free if you pick it up. Used it once to try it out - just a small squeeze.

Check it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHTUswauQ4

Luckily, I am one of those daft Americans who can live and work in this country legally as it is. But if I weren’t, I think I’d call an immigration attorney.

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93


RELATED READING
For more from UChi Bizarre-ketplace, check UChiBLOGo the last Friday of each month and the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of the Core, the College supplement to the University of Chicago Magazine, available in early June online.

Help wanted

Laurence Shatkin, AM’71It’s June, and a brand-new group of Chicago graduates is jumping into the job market with ABs and résumés in hand. Career adviser Laurence Shatkin, AM’71, author of The 200 Best Jobs for College Graduates and Great Jobs in the President’s Stimulus Plan, discusses job prospects for the Class of 2009:


QandA_QDrop.jpgBefore the financial crisis, what were the best jobs out there for new graduates? Have things changed?

QandA_ADrop.jpgNursing is a very hot field—it was before the economic downturn and it still is now. A lot of high-tech jobs have been booming, and although they took a bit of a hit just like everything in the economy, they’re starting to come back. Systems analysts, computer-network and database managers—those high-tech jobs have been doing very well.

QandA_QDrop.jpgFor a typical Chicago grad with a bachelor’s degree, what are some opportunities?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSocial and community service managers—these are people who manage agencies that have a social mission. This might be something that someone with a humanities or social-science background might go into. Public relations specialists—people with a flair for writing would find this interesting and valuable. Substance-abuse and behavioral-disorder counselors is an interesting one—people who have empathy and are good at communicating with others. Actually, a lot of people go into this who have a past history of substance abuse, but I wouldn’t recommend that someone develop an addiction in order to prepare for it [laughs]. In business, jobs for accountants, auditors, and loan officers are expected to come back once the economy comes back.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat sources do you use to predict future job growth?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe best projections we’ve got in this country are from the U.S. Department of Labor. They have an Office of Employment Projections, and that’s what I rely on for these projections of job growth and job openings.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow will the recession force new graduates to adjust their expectations?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThere are fewer openings, and so the competition is going to be greater. There’s even going to be some competition from people in their 60s who normally would be retiring now, whose 401(k)s have taken a real plunge and so they have to go on working longer. Roughly 50 percent of graduates got jobs in their field last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This year it was down to half of that, so it’s a big difference.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWill salaries be lower?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI don’t think salaries will be dramatically lower, but they may be a little bit lower because employers have their pick of candidates. The main problem is going to be finding a job, and a lot of people are going to have to compromise and take something outside of their field. Some may start up a new business—throughout American history, this has been one of the ways innovation happens. Some people will go to graduate school and build up skills and stay out of the job market for awhile. Yet another thing is to go into some service opportunity such as the Peace Corps, Teach for America, or AmeriCorps, which have expanded quite a bit. I can’t overemphasize how valuable those are for building experience that employers are going to value.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYou have a BA, MA, and PhD in English. Do you have any special advice for English majors?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI would say keep your options open. Don’t think that you have to do what you see your professors doing out there. Realize that your skills can be applied in a number of different occupations or pursuits. And it also helps to have a broad range of interests. Know something about technology, for example. Know something about economics and the way the world works and not just literature and the humanities.

QandA_QDrop.jpgShould everyone’s back-up plan be to move in with Mom and Dad?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThat can be a back-up plan, but sometimes it doesn’t work out very well. Sometimes there are conflicts. Sometimes Mom and Dad are down on their luck too, and it isn’t feasible. I’ve heard of moms and dads who are moving in with their kids.

I would say in general about careers, it helps to have a back-up plan. While you’re still in school, you should have a Plan B in mind. When you applied to a college, you probably had a safety school that you applied to, and you might also have a safety career in mind, and take a few courses so you’ll be ready for that one as well.

Elizabeth Station


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How to pass the time

Ever wonder why flashback, a staple of so many novels and short stories, can seem so artificial in movies? The action stops as the camera zooms in or the screen goes wobbly, and suddenly we reawaken in the distant past. “Flashback is one of the great gifts of fiction,” said poet and short-story writer Stuart Dybek, a device that allows writers to begin a story as close to the end as possible, “a fulcrum to escape the tyranny of cause and effect.” But “it’s the F-word in film.” The reason, Dybek said, has everything to do with “temporal mode”: fiction belongs to the narrative mode; film is captive to the dramatic.

In a talk last Wednesday in Classics 110, Dybek, the 2009 Kestnbaum writer-in-residence, explained to an audience of faculty and students that film and theater, however illusory, mimic the experience of real time in a way that fiction never does. To break that spell and travel back in time against the forward momentum of the action on screen or on stage takes a director as masterful as Federico Fellini or a playwright like Arthur Miller.

Meanwhile, “there is no real time in fiction,” Dybek said. “It’s impossible.” Even reading a story aloud does not create a sense of time passing. Nor does dialogue—though it comes closer. “In fact, what the hell time is in fiction is absolutely mysterious.”

And what about poetry? Some critics say Dybek’s own fiction often sounds more like verse than prose, and he told last week’s listeners that in the “lyrical mode”—where poetry operates—time may not exist at all. “You can fly, you can travel as you do in dreams,” he said. “In poetry we don’t follow the clock.”

Lydialyle Gibson

Unspeakably hilarious

headshot-arika.jpg

Language lovers beware: Philadelphia-based author and linguistics expert Arika Okrent, PhD'04, is not your average polyglot. Forget pig latin. She knows Klingon.

Okrent traces the history of Klingon and 499 other dreamed-up languages in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz describes as "a lively, informative, insightful examination of artificial languages—who invents them, why, and why most of them fail."

Due to the book's popularity among the Magazine's editors, we asked Okrent to pull together a list of some of her favorites. As they say in Esperanto, gxuu! (Enjoy!)


Ten interesting words from invented languages

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p2846
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Cave Beck's Universal Character (1657)
"hired mourners at funerals" In 1657, this concept was apparently a subject of conversation important enough to be deemed worthy of a "universal" number word.

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cepuhws
INVENTED LANGUAGE: John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668)
"shit" While this word could be translated by a common profanity in English, doing so would obscure the fact that each letter in the word refers to a conceptual category that helps lay out the "true" meaning of the word. Cepuhws is "a serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward)."

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lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev
INVENTED LANGUAGE: James Ruggles's Universal Lanugage (1829)
"179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west" Now that's a word!

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dosifasol
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Jean Sudre's Solresol (1866)
"coffee" Solresol was based on the seven notes of the musical scale: do re mi fa sol la si. Words that are similar in meaning start with the same notes. So if you want milk and sugar with your coffee, you must also ask for dosiredo and dosifasi.

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pük
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Johann Schleyer's Volapük (1879)
In Volapük, pük means "language." It comes from the English word "speak" but it's hard to tell (vol, means "world", so Volapük is "word language.") Unfortunately, it looks a lot like a different English word. And even more unfortunately, it shows up in various other words related to the concept of language: püked – "sentence" and pükön – "to speak."

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birdo
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Ludwig Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887)
"bird" Esperanto is a hybrid built from a mixture of roots from existing natural languages, but it's predominately based on Romance languages. So when you see one of the English-based words, it stops you in your tracks, like an old friend dressed up in a disorienting costume.

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radíidin
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan (1984)
Láadan was a language designed to capture the unique perspective of women. This word means "non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help." Tell it, Sister.

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qIvon
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Marc Okrand's Klingon (1984)
A body part of some kind. Not further identified. All we know is that there is a left one.

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slicka
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Logical Language Group's Lojban (1989)
"cradle" What it really means in this language of logic is "x is a cradle made of y, holding z, rocking at speed a through positions b."

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pona
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Sonja Elen Kisa's Toki Pona (2001)
Toki pona is a "minimal language that focuses on the good things in life." It has only 118 words, so words are used in multiple ways. Pona can be a verb ("improve," "fix," "repair," "make good"), an adjective ("good," "simple," "positive," "nice," "correct," "right"), a noun ("goodness," "simplicity," "positivity"), or an interjection ("great!", "cool!" "yay!"). Pona!

Arika Okrent, PhD'04


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cover-arika.jpg

The other Booth

“I believe calling someone an organizer is the most flattering thing you can say,” Heather Tobis Booth, AB'67, AM'70, told a group of 20 activist students last Friday while discussing her own “life in the movement” and offering tips for campus and community work. Booth has been an organizer for more than 40 years and while at the University was the founder of the women's collective JANE, a group that provided anonymous abortion services.

The first flyer Booth ever handed out, she said, was about ending the death penalty. She was 13 years old, in New York City, and terrified: “I was so nervous dropping flyers everywhere,” she said. “I learned how important it is to train people for that sort of thing.” By the time she reached the University of Chicago in the early '60s, Booth was prepared; within a week she staged a sit-in with fellow students to protest the city's school segregation. Then she helped organize Chicago’s Freedom Schools, free learning centers that taught empowerment and techniques for social change. As the head of Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she went to Mississippi to respond to the “sanctioned lynching” of three young African American men.

“Back on campus,” Booth said, an acquaintance was accidentally pregnant and suicidal. “I didn’t know it at the time,” she said, “but three people discussing abortion were considered conspiring to commit murder." Booth found a doctor who would perform an abortion. A month later, another woman contacted her about the doctor. And then again. The underground abortion service known as the JANE Collective was formed and ultimately served more than 11,000 women throughout Chicago. “I wasn’t even thinking about it as something political,” she said.

Women's issues hadn't been widely politicized; for instance, contraception was not considered a right at the time. Booth was once searched for contraceptives upon returning to the dorm after “parietal hours,” designated hours after which female students were required to be home. The dorm managers assumed she was engaged in "illicit" activity, when in fact she had been comforting a friend about a breakup. Booth was outraged, she said, not by the curfew or the fact that contraceptives were contraband, but at being suspected of having them. “That was a different time,” she said.

Booth encouraged the students to change the world through organizing. She cited three principles from the manual of the Midwest Academy, a "training institute for the progressive movement," which she founded: organize in a way that gives people a sense of their own power, fight for concrete changes, and work to change the relations and structure of power. Now organizing a national grassroots campaign to “regulate the financial industry,” Booth can’t foresee how successful her current project will be, but she believes the economic crisis may make the time right. “You can’t create a movement,” she said. “You can only seize what’s there.”

Shira Tevah, AB’09

The embedded video is a selection from Jane: An Abortion Service by Nell Lundy and Kate Kirtz (1996).

Goolsbee’s Colbert rapport

Austan Goolsbee reported for mockery on Monday’s Colbert Report, the first Obama administration official to submit to the faux-O’Reilly treatment. “I’ll ask him if his arm gets tired from throwing money at problems,” Colbert said. “I wonder if he came up with ‘tax’ or ‘spend.’”

After he listed Goolsbee’s titles—“one of the chief economists on the president’s economic-recovery advisory board and a member of the presidential task force on the auto industry”—Colbert had a more sympathetic question: “Who did you piss off to get those jobs?”

“You have no idea how close to true that is,” Goolsbee said.

A Chicago Booth professor on leave to work in Washington, Goolsbee wants “to bring a certain humor or style” to the stuffy field of economics. He wisely let Colbert handle the humor, but the aspiring “Muhammad Ali of economic advisers” came equipped with memorable analogies—a la Ali’s floating butterflies and stinging bees.

Responding to the host’s open-minded curiosity—“How will socialism solve things?”—Goolsbee compared the administration’s economic policies to rescuing a child from a burning house. As the heroes carry the kid to safety, “now is not the time to accuse them of kidnapping.”

Colbert granted him the rhetorical territory, then appealed to Goolsbee on an emotional level: “Which do you love more, taxing or spending?”

Jason Kelly


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Spidey meets who?

Spider-Man #583Is it just me, or does the Obama character in Spider-Man #583, “Spidey Meets the President!” look absolutely nothing like our commander in chief?

The Obama issue got a lot of attention when it came out last year, from the New York Times to the Colbert Report. (In the episode “Obama Spider-Man Comic Bribe,” Stephen Colbert left a signed copy on his bookshelf to try to entice Obama, an admitted Spider-Man collector, to appear on his show.) But no one pointed out what seemed to me the obvious. The Obama character in the comic—and there’s also an Obama imposter who is revealed as shape-shifting villain the Chameleon—looks like... well, I don’t even know. So I turned to Dan Raeburn to enlighten me.

Raeburn, a lecturer in creative writing at Chicago, is the author of Chris Ware (Yale University Press, 2004) and several other books of comics criticism. (Yes, there is such a thing as comics criticism.) In Raeburn’s professional opinion, “the cover is somewhat of a likeness. That’s Obama if he packed on a few pounds.” Cover artist Phil Jimenez, Raeburb says, “at least knows how to do a photo swipe”—a direct copy of an existing photograph. “But the interior art is by a guy named Todd Nauck, who can't draw at all.”

A crucial plot point is that no one can tell the two Obamas apart. That makes it hard to understand why both Obamas not only don’t look like Obama, but also “they don't even look like each other,” Raeburn says. “One looks like O. J. Simpson on steroids, while the other looks like Grace Jones in man-drag. From panel to panel, the same Obama doesn't even look consistent, i.e., like his own self. He looks different every time, depending on what angle he's drawn from. This is the telltale sign of total artistic incompetence.”

obama-spiderman_both.jpg Perhaps James Nurss would have a kinder, gentler opinion. Nurss, the intrepid owner of Hyde Park’s only comic shop, First Aid Comics, says the Obama issue functioned as his own personal economic-stimulus package. It’s now in its fifth printing. Nurss figures he’s sold more than 1,000 copies out of his tiny, second-floor shop.

“You’d have to ask someone on the Marvel creative team, because they have the talent and ability to make him look exactly like Obama,” he says. “So this was obviously a choice. But Marvel continues to mystify me in their choices. I wish I could be more supportive of some of their decisions.”

Another odd decision was to tack the Obama story on as an afterthought to a regular Spider-Man issue. “It’s not even related to the main story,” says Nurss. “It’s a five-page, bonus backup feature.” As for the story itself, “I was disappointed. I mean, it’s cute. It reminds me of a classic ‘70s story—a really simple, dumb plot.”

For a final assessment, I decided to check in with Hamza Walker, AB'88, associate curator at the Renaissance Society on the fourth floor of Cobb Hall. Walker agreed that no one in the comic looked like Obama, “but I can’t blame that on the older epithet of all black people looking alike, because all of the white characters also look alike.”

Walker stares at the drawings. “Spider-Man’s musculature is so deformed,” he says. “It’s so hyper-stylized. I’m almost focused more on Spider-Man’s ridiculous, overwrought body than I am on Obama. And then the evil twin turns into a hairless albino called the Chameleon, this raceless entity.”

Obama and Spiderman fist bump

But is it degrading for the leader of the free world to appear in a comic book, fist-bumping Spider-Man? Is Obama somehow more subject to kitschification—the comic books, the dancing dolls, the Chia Pets—because he’s black? “These things aren’t being produced by a neoconservative group or as parodies,” Walker says. “They’re loving. He would be the first to laugh about the Barack industry. It just feels light-hearted, and we haven’t been light-hearted in eight years.

“With Obama being elected, there’s genuine restoration of anything being possible,” he says. “It’s so historically significant that he deserves to have a Chia Pet.”

Walker’s description of the Chameleon as a “raceless entity” stuck with me. So I call Nurss back with one last question. Why the Chameleon, when there are so many villains in the Spider-Man universe? Does he somehow mirror Obama’s own shape-shifting nature, his ability to appeal to all different kinds of voters?

“Hmm,” says Nurss. “I like that. It lends more credence to what Marvel did.” Nurss, like Obama, is a friendly, affable guy, and I could tell he didn’t want to say what he was thinking. So I ask him if I’m overreading. He laughs. “I suspect so.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Identity politics

Orit Bashkin’s grandparents came to Palestine from Europe in the ’20s and ’30s. They spoke Yiddish, but when they crossed over the border—where Yiddish was rejected as the “language of exile,” Bashkin said—they picked up Hebrew by necessity. Yiddish became "the language of letters and yellowish photos from family in Europe.” But in the 1980s, when her grandparents befriended a set of Russian Jews, they started to speak Yiddish more often. Her grandmother even began to attend Yiddish theater. They were loyal to the mission of Israel—to create a strong, unified Jewish homeland, even if that meant having only Hebrew books in the house—but “you can never erase a culture,” Bashkin said. “You can never erase a memory.”

Bashkin, assistant professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Chicago, appeared on a June 17 panel with assistant professor Na’ama Rokem as part of a program organized by Jan Lisa Huttner, AM’80, of the Chicago YIVO Society. Both Israel-educated Ashkenazi Jews—descendants from Europeans—the professors followed a screening of a 2005 documentary, Ha Ashkenazim, about the Ashkenazi identity movement in Israel, born of young, nostalgic Israelis who want to rediscover their roots.

Tammy Ben-TorAccording to some of the 20-somethings in the film, Israeli Ashkenazi Jews are thought of as nerdy and weak. Depression and sadness are ingrained in them, and Yiddish is nothing but an outdated language. But one woman, Tammy Ben-Tor (at left), sets Yiddish lyrics to electronica music to try to escape the gloomy language of ancestors who died in the Holocaust and capture the spirit of how they lived: “That’s what I’m interested in,” Ben-Tor says in the movie. “To get their lives back.”

The rich Ashkenazi identity, the part that is not depressing, said Bashkin, comes from this time before the Holocaust, the culture left behind in the shtetls. Still, she said, the film places too much emphasis on ethnic differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahi (Arab Jews), who are described as warmer, more rebellious, happier. “In my opinion, ethnic identity is much less pronounced today,” she said. “People team together. You can have Hebrew and you can have other things”—Yiddish, for example—“and the state will not collapse.”

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Hot fun in the summertime

ORSCA summer 2009

Among the throng of sun-soaked students and hyperactive kids, a content father patiently waited. With a small child in one arm and another by his side, he was firmly entrenched in the long lunch line that snaked around the eastern half of Bartlett quad. Free food, free entertainment for him and his family, and a beautiful early summer day—he looked happy.

Then the child holding his hand suddenly broke free and dashed off, answering the siren call of a nearby water slide. He took a step out of line to chase her, but then changed his mind, making a half-hearted cry for his wife and resuming his place in line. Free ribs can do that to you.

Indeed, hundreds were drawn to the Bartlett quad to kick off summer with the Office of the Reynolds Club & Student Activities (ORCSA). The Friday afternoon event was catered by the Hyde Park Barbecue and Bakery, formerly known as Orly’s, and two large water slides, which offered some complications for ORCSA volunteers.

“The very first girl on the very first run of the day sort of went down the slide wrong,” said David Muff, ’10, as he manned his post by the large, inflatable blue slide, corralling kids’ excitement just enough to get them to form a line. “And as she got to the bottom, all the water at the base sort of came spilling out, and the thing partially collapsed. So I had to refill it. Off to a good start.”

The event otherwise went off without a hitch, as attendees sought shade after finally obtaining their plates stacked high with barbecued ribs, chicken kabobs, salad, and dessert. The man behind the pig-out was David Shopiro, U-High’69, who has run Orly’s in Hyde Park for nearly 30 years and recently changed the place’s name, interior, and offerings. Judging by the lines, the barbecue and baked desserts were a hit—Shopiro brought enough to feed 400 people, but 90 minutes in there wasn’t a clean plate left, and he was nearly out of the more than 500 ribs he had prepared. People lined up with tiny dessert plates too small to fit the massive ribs they had their stomachs set on.

The event also featured Willy Chyr, AB’09, a balloon artist known for his installation in the Biological Sciences Learning Center and his sprawling, colorful dresses modeled at May's Festival of the Arts fashion show. Chyr sculpted elaborate balloon animals and bright headdresses for the faculty and staff's children who scampered about during the event, sculpting one balloon every two minutes for two hours straight.

With his two soaking children in tow, balloons in hand, the no-longer-hungry father started to walk off. He looked a little tired, like he had gotten too much sun. But at least he got his ribs.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Third-year students Lim En and Eileen Ting sample the good eats made by Hyde Park Barbecue and Bakery.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

The lost tale of the glass eye

Years ago, so long I can’t remember exactly when, I watched a TV documentary about the London Underground's lost and found. Umbrellas in every size and color, of course: but there was also a surprising number of improbable objects, such as artificial limbs. How does one manage to leave one’s leg on the Tube?

At the University of Chicago, where everyone is too preoccupied with intellectual matters to remember their scarves, there are ten lost and founds. The registrar's office is the keeper of the “official” one, but each library and a few other buildings have their own. This past spring I explored the lost things in the Reynolds Club basement.

Scarves, jackets, a gym bag or two, and of course, books. Someone had left behind Volume 8, Nineteenth-Century Europe, from the Readings in Western Civilization series; someone else had abandoned Volume 9. There were textbooks on micro- and macroeconomics; something in Greek that might have been the Iliad; a training manual for animal lab technicians; a printout of an original two-act play, Heat Wave, “a work of fiction based on the very real events of the summer of 1995.” Less expected was a book adaptation of the inspirational Lee Ann Womack song “I Hope You Dance,” CD single included—a jettisoned birthday present, perhaps.

The largest-ever object in the collection, says fourth-year Kathryn Fallon, Student Activities Center manager, was a nine-foot-long oar abandoned for most of last summer. The crew team had forgotten it after a recruiting event and somehow never missed it: “We had to e-mail the crew team to let them know,” says Fallon.

And then there’s the tale of the glass eye, a story I had heard from Jennifer Kennedy, assistant director of the Student Activities Center. As the story goes, last winter somebody sent a letter claiming that during a Halloween concert at Mandel Hall, he had lost a glass eye down a heating grate. “There was discussion about whether or not this was a hoax, because it was just too weird,” says Fallon. “The letter was from France, and postmarked a month afterward, which kind of compounded the weird factor.”

But sure enough, Bob James, manager of Mandel Hall, found an eye in Mandel Hall—“not the whole eye, but the front to the eye,” says Fallon. Still suspicious, they searched the Internet and discovered “the guy had been apparently planting the eyes.”

“Someone was definitely here and dropped off the eye—we don’t know if it was him or an accomplice in Chicago,” Fallon says. “So we mailed him a letter that said, ‘We found your eye!’ but apparently we weren’t either awkward or snarky enough to get on his Web site.”

I tried to find this alleged fake-glass-eye Web site. Usually Google is more than adequate for such junk-culture searches, but I found nothing. Was I using the wrong search terms?

I e-mailed Kennedy, who wrote back with the advice that I ask James, “the man who knows the full story of the eye and is currently its caretaker.” So I e-mailed him a couple of times—no response. I phoned him a couple of times and left messages—no response. I even dropped by the Reynolds Club, but our schedules were off, and I never managed to catch him.

I forgot about it for weeks, then months. I put my notes somewhere. I put my recorder somewhere else. Eventually I had to tear both my desk and my apartment apart to find it all.

I still don’t know what happened with the glass eye. I guess at this point, I never will. “Very little of what comes in is claimed,” Fallon had told me about the lost and found. “And of the people who come back looking for stuff, very few find what they’re looking for.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Wingy city

Kim BerylKim Beryl sits on the closest thing to a throne the Taste of Chicago has to offer.

Perched on a red chair overseeing the action at the Harold’s Chicken #71 tent, Beryl is a 27-year veteran of the ten-day marathon of chicken-wing frying and hot-sauce drizzling. And there’s plenty of it in the Harold’s tent at Columbus and Congress: patrons squeeze their way to the water-coolers-turned-hot-sauce-containers and vendors ask loudly, "Who wants Harold’s?" The air is crowded with smells, with Oak Street Beach Café’s spicy wings just across the street.

“I love the Taste,” Beryl says. “The people, the energy it takes—it’s gruesome to the body, but it’s all worth it.”

The world’s largest food festival, now in its 29th year, kicked off Friday, and the city expects to attract more than 6 million people. Beryl, an assistant manager at Harold’s #71 at 2109 South Wabash Avenue, says this might be the slowest Taste she’s seen, but Harold’s and the 53 other food vendors still expect a lively crowd to brave the economic downturn, overcast weather, and hundreds of extra calories to enjoy the festivities.

At least it’s not 2004. That year, Beryl remembers, a rainstorm hit like no other the Taste had seen. But even nature’s best attempt to stop the festivities only added to them. “It almost washed us out,” she says with a laugh. “It rained so hard for so long that people were coming into the booth. With the electricity and the propane tanks it was kind of scary.”

Rain or shine, the Taste goes on, and it had better with all the chicken wings Harold’s has on hand. Beryl’s restaurant staff spent weeks preparing 300 cases of wings—200 wings per case—for the event. For the past 11 years she has organized the 25-member team that cooks up the stand’s wings, hush puppies, and okra. Most of the workers have returned from last year, Beryl said, and people as far as Ohio have come to work the Harold’s tent.

Harold’s typically isn’t at the top in terms of Taste sales—that honor usually goes to Robinson’s No. 1 Ribs—and the chicken wing is less iconic that the massive turkey leg that Manny’s Cafeteria has taken over this year. Still, Beryl is glad to be back for another year, watching over the greasy wings that have won the hearts of so many Hyde Parkers.

Jake Grubman, ‘11

Living the sweet, sweet dream

Admit it. You've fantasized about escaping your cubicle or late-night cram sessions, fleeing to Paris, and enrolling in one of the best culinary schools in the world to become a master patissier. C'est très romantique. Now meet your newest object of envy: Teresa Ging, AB'00, who in 2006 did just that. After earning a U of C degree in economics and statistics and spending six years in the fast-paced world of Chicago finance, she traded bonds for brioche and entered the patisserie program at Paris's famed Le Cordon Bleu. Today her bakery, Sugar Bliss cake boutique, helps to satisfy the Loop's sweet tooth with its signature cupcakes and—prepare yourselves—$1 frosting shots.

Pre–Sugar Bliss, Ging’s own sweet tooth was far from fulfilled by the Loop’s offerings. “I live in the Loop, and I used to work in the Loop,” she says. “And there was nowhere to buy cake.” So the seed was sown. After she moved back to Chicago in January 2007, she realized the “cupcake trend” might be lucrative, and she started testing recipes. After almost two years of proposing, planning, and building—as well as launching her own cupcake catering business in the meantime—Ging entered the retail sector in January: “It takes forever to open a store, with building it out, the permit process, everything.” In the next few weeks she will finally get an awning.

Now with a high-traffic location and 11 employees, she has a good system going. Pointing to a schedule with five everyday flavors and five that change daily, she tells us her daily routine. Prescoop the batter, made from all-natural ingredients, the day before; arrive at 6 a.m. to bake everything in the double-deck oven; whip up frosting to get the right texture; pipe the frosting on the cakes in Ging’s trademark flower blossom design; and place the cakes in the display cases for serving. And, since she keeps the day-to-day books, her finance background comes in handy: “I enjoy crunching numbers.” In just six months, she says, the store has seen some 30,000 customers. Looks like Ging wasn’t the only one on the hunt for cake downtown.

Ging says that her favorite cupcakes change—and with such a decadent menu, who can blame her?—but recommends chocolate coconut, chocolate hazelnut, chocolate peanut butter, and lemon coconut. These intrepid reporters sampled the chocolate milk chocolate and the black-and-white cupcakes, two of the bakery's most popular combos, as well as cream-cheese and cappuccino frosting shots. Everything we tasted made our Monday afternoon just a little bit sweeter. Now, whose birthday can we use as an excuse to order some for the office?

Elizabeth Chan and Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Sugar Bliss is located at 115 North Wabash Street in Chicago. The bakery is open every day and delivers to many citywide locations Monday through Friday.

Herman Sinaiko is a rock star

“Sure I'll be a model,” Herman Sinaiko, beloved professor of humanities, e-mailed back when I asked if we could photograph him for a Core article on University of Chicago T-shirts. “But I need assurance that I will not be held financially responsible for any camera lenses that break taking my picture.”

No replacement lenses were necessary, and Sinaiko was just as charming in front of a camera as he is at the front of a classroom. But the Library's Special Collections Research Center has a small and rather random group of T-shirts, so unfortunately he ended up wearing a shirt that had nothing to do with him or his field of study. If only he had known, he said, he would have brought a shirt that some students had made a few years before.

“Herman Sinaiko is a Rock Star” began as a Facebook group set up by Rita Koganzon, AB’07, in 2005. At the time Koganzon was enrolled in the humanities sequence Greek Thought and Literature. The class was “incredible,” she says, “a demonstration of how to read texts closely and seriously by someone who also exemplified what it might be like to live a scholarly and thoughtful life.

“Sinaiko went very slowly and focused on the first chapter, or even the first lines, of whatever text we were reading—he said he had ‘a passion for beginnings,’” she says. “For instance, why does it matter that Herodotus is from Halicarnassus? What does it mean that he will record the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians alike? I was grateful to have been shaken out of my high school stupor and shown how to ask and answer such questions.”

Koganzon and another student in the class, David Kaye, AB’08, set up "Herman Sinaiko is a Rock Star" “around the time that Facebook fan groups for actual celebrities were proliferating,” she says. “We liked the idea of framing Sinaiko's awesomeness in celebrity terms.”

An early member was Anne Heminger, AB’08, who had chosen Sinaiko’s Greek Thought because it fit her schedule. Only later did she discover that Sinaiko, who has taught at Chicago since 1954, had been her mother’s master’s thesis adviser and that her step-grandmother had taken a class from him while studying for her doctorate.

Sinaiko is notorious for asking his students to think about topics that might or might not seem relevant to the text being discussed: “They weren’t crazy exactly,” says Kaye, “but definitely unpredictable.” During one class on Aristophenes’ The Clouds, Heminger and her neighbor Caitrin Nicol, AB’08, compiled a list of everything Sinaiko mentioned, from elephants and cell phones to dirty tricks and revenge. “This morning, I’m pretty sure he said, ‘What I’m asking you to think about is’ about 23 times,” Nicol wrote on the Facebook group’s discussion board.

"Feeling nostalgic” the following fall, Nicol says, she decided to make a T-shirt. “It’s certainly the case that all of us were in love with him,” says Kaye. He persuaded the News Office to lend him a high-resolution photograph for the front; for the back, Nichol and Heminger added a few of their all-time favorites to the Aristophenes topics list, such as “if dogs could vote.”

When the shirts arrived, Kaye, Nichol, Heminger and a few other students formed a phalanx outside Sinaiko’s new Greek Thought course. As it happened, says Nichol, “the day we crashed the class, the subject of discussion was a story from Herodotus on what it means to honor someone.”

“Sinaiko came rushing past us out of the Cobb elevator and into the classroom,” says Kaye. “He was completely oblivious to the students standing there with a huge picture of him on our T-shirts.”

“It was supposed to be such an epic moment, and it was so anticlimactic,” says Nichol. “But then he came back out and said, ‘Oh, it’s you guys!’ He was never very good with names. ‘You’re wearing my shirt! You’re wearing my face!’ It was classic Herman from start to finish.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Picture perfect

David SchalliolDavid Schalliol, AM’04, a PhD student in sociology, has been photographing Chicago’s changing landscape since he came to the University in 2002 for graduate school. In 2000, combining his artistic interests with his academic ones, he launched Metroblossom, which uses photography, paintings, and text to explore the evolving relationship between the urban jungle and the natural world in which we develop it.

Managing editor of the Chicago blog Gapers Block, Schalliol also adds to his online photo library through his Metroblossom Flickr page. His photography will be featured in the Catherine Edelman Gallery's "Chicago Project III" exhibition, alongside other Chicago photographers, beginning today. He recently spoke to UChiBLOGo's Luke Fiedler, '10, via e-mail.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you end up in this exhibit?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI am part of the Catherine Edelman Gallery's Chicago Project, which is, in their words, "an online gallery devoted to new and established photographers in the Chicago area who we feel deserve recognition." Every two years the gallery puts together a show featuring some of the members of the project.
QandA_QDrop.jpgYou’ve lived all over the Midwest and are originally from Indianapolis. What is it about Chicago that makes it such an interesting subject for you? What are you trying to capture?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy Chicago work is about transformation and social stratification. I often focus on buildings because they are particularly useful windows into understanding the historically layered nature of urban life.

As a teenager I would drive into Chicago from Indianapolis to visit museums and see punk shows. Among my clearest memories are those of the nearly solid wall of public housing that ran alongside 90/94 from 54th Street to 22nd Street: Robert Taylor, Stateway, Dearborn, Ickes, and Hilliard. On the north end, the wealth of the Loop was just a few blocks away, and on the south, Hyde Park and the parks that surround it were so very close. Documenting the rehabilitation and demolition of those buildings and their communities has been immensely fascinating. I hope my work casts a light on and contributes to the discourse surrounding these important policies.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYour Metroblossom account was just named among the “12 Superstars of Flickr” in the May/June issue of American Photo. What are your observations on how sharing contemporary photography have been reshaped?
QandA_ADrop.jpgObviously, I was excited about the way the American Photo piece turned out. The piece highlights the possibilities of virtual exhibition spaces like Flickr, particularly for individuals who aren't formally trained in photography and are seeking some feedback on their work (and wish to offer feedback to others). I see Web sites like Flickr and the fine-art community as complementary, but I think it is important to recognize there are important differences.
Portrait of Schalliol by Kara Elliott-Ortega, '10.

See Schalliol’s work on display at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 West Superior Street. The opening reception is tonight from 5-8 p.m. Visit edelmangallery.com or call 312/266-2350 for more information.

Down and dirty

Giant backhoes are digging. Dump trucks are hauling away dirt. And if you peer through the chain-link fence and green scrim at the corner of 57th Street and Ellis Avenue, you’ll glimpse the sweeping oval foundation of the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, scheduled for completion in early 2011.

Right now it’s just a big hole in the ground, but eventually the glass-domed library will hold 3.5 million volumes—and establish Chicago as the only top U.S. research university to house its entire library collection on campus. Last week UChiBLOGo's Elizabeth Station toured the site with Michael Natarus, senior project manager, who gave us the lowdown on construction.

QandA_QDrop.jpgSo how much dirt has to come out of this hole?

QandA_ADrop.jpg53,000 cubic yards of material, approximately. It’s anywhere between 4,000 and 5,000 truckloads, if you take an average of 10 yards per truck.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhere will the 53,000 cubic yards of earth end up?

QandA_ADrop.jpgAll over the place. Most of the dumps are located on the South Side, within a half-hour radius of the University. Some of it they recycle—some of it is sand, which I’m sure they can use in other places.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow long will the excavation phase last?

QandA_ADrop.jpgWe’re scheduled to be completed by October 1. We dig out one level, then we do the tie-backs around the perimeter to support the wall, and then we dig the next level and do the tie-backs. There are four levels and about 310 tie-backs total. That’s what is taking so long.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAre there any environmental issues associated with digging around the place where scientists did the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe Phase 1 Environmental Study determined that the site is clean, and we also did soil borings prior to the project start-up, which determined that there is no contamination.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHave you found any archeological treasures?

QandA_ADrop.jpgNo, nothing—no Indian burial sites or anything like that. But this used to be the site of Stagg Field, and we did find what appears to be an underground locker room, something with stairs leading up to the top, that was buried.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow does this project compare to others you’ve managed?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe biggest challenge is that it’s a very unique structure. An underground storage facility for books with a glass dome on top—there’s nothing like this in the world, to my knowledge.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAre you looking forward to that final phase?

QandA_ADrop.jpgAbsolutely; it’s going to be the cool part. There’s so much progress that’s happening underground. When you walk by you say, ‘Jeez, they’re not doing anything.’ But there’s actually quite a bit of activity.


RECOMMENDED LINKS

L-E-T-S-G-O, Let’s Go

Saturday morning on campus in late May before finals, and one of the few things stirring was the U of C cheer team. After gathering in Henry Crown Field House, the cheerleaders began an hours-long practice with a series of stretches, rolling out their ankles, touching their toes, sliding into splits.

Since cheerleading season ended in February, squad leaders Brittany Gordon and Denise Salinas have organized small-group workouts and more formal practices. This particular practice also served as an evaluation and introduction for two new members. While covering the cheer team for the Core last winter, I'd marveled at the squad’s hard work. This day's practice was no exception—the team moved from stretches to cheers to dance routines to stunts, stopping only for a few short water breaks.

After stretches, Gordon arranged the team in two parallel lines. “Now we’re going to go over basic motions,” she said. With her back to the group, she demonstrated a series of arm positions while Salinas called them out: “Low beam!” “High beam!” “T!” “K!” As the squad set the motions to a cheer—L-E-T-S-G-O, Come on Maroons, Let’s Go!—Gordon turned to watch and reminded her teammates to keep smiling: “During a game you have to be happy and continue cheering, no matter what happens. Practice how you perform.”

The team finished the day with stunt practice, starting with halfs—when a flyer is lifted to shoulder level and stands in a straddled position—and graduating to liberties—when a flyer balances on one leg supported by several bases. Falls were frequent, but so was encouragement. “I can’t do it,” said one flyer after several failed attempts. “Yes, you can,” her teammates replied. “Stick it!”

Katherine Muhlenkamp


RELATED READING

Romancing the story

Gwyn Cready, AB'83, MBA'86, writes time-travel romances. Her latest, Seducing Mr. Darcy, is nominated for a RITA Award, the most prestigious accolade a romance novel can win. The awards ceremony is Saturday in Washington.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you think your education at Chicago has helped you with your writing career?

QandA_ADrop.jpgChicago taught me to believe I could do anything I set my mind to. And Amy Kass, AB'62, taught me the magic of a really good story.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you first get into writing romance novels?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI came to romance by way of romantic-comedy movies. Good, bad, or awful, I've seen them all—and dragged my beleaguered husband as well. But I became a writer to honor the memory of my sister, who died unexpectedly at 31. Claire was a hippie poet/photographer. I was a buttoned-up marketing executive. We couldn't have been more different. I'm sure Claire finds my transformation both remarkable and entertaining.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you think is the most romantic Great Book?

QandA_ADrop.jpgHmm. Chicago's idea of a "Great Book" and mine are undoubtedly different. However, it would be hard to beat Pride and Prejudice on any list.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat misconception about romance novels do you think is most unfair?

QandA_ADrop.jpgImplicit in romances is the assertion that women's physical and emotional desires are important. Subversive? You bet. Hallelujah. You should also know that romances make up the largest segment of fiction. Thirty-three cents of every dollar spent on fiction is spent on romance. Among Americans who read, one in four read romance (and 10 percent of romance readers are men.) In the first quarter of 2009, when overall book sales declined 4 percent, booksellers report romance sales were up, and sales at Harlequin Enterprises were up 13.5 percent.

QandA_QDrop.jpgIs there anything autobiographical in your books?

QandA_ADrop.jpgHow can there not be? When Colin Firth finally writes his autobiography, all will be revealed.

Jake Grubman, '11

Book cover art and portrait courtesy Gwyn Cready.

Once more into the breach, dear friends

BoratIn the vast majority of College courses, the most anxiety-provoking assignment is the final paper. But in Consumerism and Popular Culture, taught by Chad Broughton, AM'97, PhD'01, that’s nothing compared to the Breaching Experiment.

In social psychology, a breaching experiment seeks to understand societal norms by deliberately breaching them. (The film Borat, for example, could be seen as one long breaching experiment.) For Broughton’s course, students choose to violate a norm that has to do with consumerism or commercial society—working alone, in a pair, or (for the particularly nervous) in a group. “Also,” Broughton advises on the assignment sheet, “please avoid arrest or getting you or me in big trouble (a little trouble is fine).”

Below are excerpts from three students’ write-ups of their breaching experiments.

Venti TMI, with ice

I didn’t really want to do this assignment and I’m sure the following write-up will reflect that. I worked with a partner, E., and she suggested that when somebody said, “Hi, how are you doing?” we should respond with TMI (too much information). After some discussion we decided the response should be, “Not good. I just found out I was pregnant and I have no idea who the father is.”
So I walked into the Starbucks in Bronzeville. I stepped up to the cash register, and the man working did not ask me how I was doing. I had to ask him how he was doing, and he finally asked how I was. I gave the agreed-upon response. The guy had a look of shock on his face. “You really have no idea who the father is?”
I said, “No clue, there are just a couple nights I can’t remember what happened.”
He paused a few seconds then asked, “You were drinking?”
I said, “Yeah. It was a party, I was having a good time and you know, one thing led to another.”
Then he asked, “But you know who was at the party right?”
I said, “I guess I should probably make a few phone calls.”
At this point I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I asked what they had going on in the decaf iced tea department, mentioning I should probably avoid caffeine given my current condition. I settled on a drink, he poured it, I left, and he followed me out. E. had left a minute before I did, and I think the man thought I was trying to distract him while my friend stole something from the store.

Tip off

The breaching experiment I decided on consisted of casually tipping two friends who had helped with small favors. One friend offered to accompany me on a trip to the grocery; on our way back, I acknowledged her company and slipped a dollar bill into her hand. Initially I was surprised when she played along and in an exaggerated, playful voice said, "Thank you," but when I revealed it as an experiment she admitted she had felt both confused and offended. The other friend, a roommate, lent me a key because I pretended to have lost mine. I put the key back in his hand scrunched up with a dollar bill, and to my amusement he immediately and vehemently refused as a puzzled look showed up on his face.
Evidently, I had breached an unspoken social norm—friendships are firmly altruistic. Each friendship is in a sense a tacit acknowledgment of narrow altruism in a wider, stranger world. It’s uncanny to break it.

The customer is always right

I went to a Jamba Juice store downtown and asked to order the unhealthiest smoothie on the menu. The Jamba Juice employee looked at me quizzically. “Our unhealthiest smoothie?” she asked, apparently unsure that she heard me correctly.
And then something completely unexpected happened. “Well, the Peanut Butter Moo’d is probably our unhealthiest smoothie,” she replied. “It’s got chocolate, peanut butter, and frozen yogurt.” And without further incident, she proceeded to make my smoothie.
My request violated social norms because I was choosing a food specifically because it was unhealthy. There were no other criteria. Although the average American eats a lot of unhealthy food, they do not usually choose food specifically because it is unhealthy.
But, after more thought, the reaction of the Jamba Juice employee made sense. American popular culture has enshrined the notion that the customer is always right. If I want an unhealthy smoothie, and Jamba Juice is capable of giving me an unhealthy smoothie, then it better happen!

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Making a home with eBay

If I’ve learned one thing over the past four or five weeks, it’s that keeping up an apartment is a lot of work. I moved off campus at the end of finals week in June, and more than month later, I finally have a bed. No more air mattress for me.

But I’m still short some items. Enter eBay. A quick perusal of the world’s digital flea market, and I’m well on my way to a complete apartment, school spirit included. Here’s a quick list of some of the best U of C–related items for sale on eBay, must-haves for any true Maroon.


Silver Spoon

The empty drawers in my kitchen sent me looking for the appropriate collegiate silverware. No spoon? No problem, says the “University of Chicago” search on eBay.

If I ever feel like I’m too far from Hull Gate, this sterling silver spoon features an embossed representation so that I can experience campus while eating my Honey Bunches of Oats.

If you look closely, you’ll see me lamenting my bio final at the Zoology Building on the right.


Blue Sky Painting

In the dorm I was fine with my “Rock of Love” and “Babar” posters. Now that I’m independent, I feel like my apartment needs more sophistication. Something like “Blue Sky” by Chinese artist K. Sing.

This bold view from the Midway is the perfect addition to any Chicago student’s living room, bedroom, or study. If a Chicago student buys this painting, it’ll also be just about the only blue sky he sees from October to April.


Fine Arts Books

I also decided to look for some fresh material to add to my bookcase. Thankfully, eBay has the National Art Society’s guide to the fine arts from 1907, edited by the University of Chicago’s own Edmund Buckley, professor of comparative religion.

A little pricey for a student, but hey, free shipping!


Girl Postcard

With all of this work to do around the apartment, I haven’t had time to write my parents in a while (actually, ever, because they live an hour away and both parties own telephones).

But the responsible student makes an effort to keep in touch, so I was thankful that eBay has a veritable cornucopia of postcards. This was my favorite find because of the woman’s daring fashion and also the catchy call for school spirit at the bottom.


Baseball Silk

I don’t know what to say about this item, because its uses are endless:

  • Dust cloth.
  • Bandana.
  • Wall decoration.
  • Reusable napkin.
  • Disposable napkin.

…And a great gift idea with the holidays just five months away.


Jake Grubman, '11

A Hyde Park mural, coming and going

mural

Perched atop her scaffolding, paintbrush in hand, Olivia Gude leans toward her mural until her face is mere inches away from a weather-beaten portrait of a little girl. “What was that supposed to be?” She takes a step back, then looks again. Another step back. “Oh! That’s her hand!” she says, then zooms back in to continue painting. “It’s just so different when you look at it up close.”

While a passing glance at Gude’s 800-square-foot mural “Where We Come From…Where We’re Going” (1992) on the Metra underpass at 56th Street and Lake Park Avenue might suggest that everything is in order, a closer look reveals the effects of 16 years of Chicago weather.

So, with the help of funding from the Chicago Public Art Group and the National Endowment for the Arts, Gude, MFA’82, is touching up her painting, which captures part of Hyde Park’s oral history. In 1991 Gude stood at the same intersection, armed with a tape recorder and a camera, and asked passersby two questions: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? The mural combines portraits of these residents and excerpts from their answers, which ranged from annoyed to polite, simple to profound.

The questions behind the mural are similar to those that propel much of Gude’s work. Hyde Park was relatively diverse, but does occupying the same geographic space signify a real community? Were people reaching out and communicating beyond their racial or generational groups? The mural created a dialogue between the people who called Hyde Park home.

Back at that intersection for several weeks this summer, Gude also plans to update it with new images. “Oh yes,” she says, waving a paint-smeared hand toward the blank walls across the tracks. “I’m going to start interviewing people again and add a whole new section. You know, new times, new times….”

Looks like that dialogue with the neighborhood is ongoing.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

ROOF is on fire

The Wit's Jackie KooWalking west down Lake Street toward State, I know I’m nearing my “L” stop when I see a long line of dolled up 9-to-5ers whose first choice for happy hour is a hotel bar. (You know it’s really a hot spot when locals are actually eager to drink alongside out-of-towners.) Perched atop the Wit hotel, designed by Chicago-based architect Jackie Koo, AB’86, ROOF offers cocktails, Italian tapas such as fire-baked pizza, and panoramic views of the city. For a seat in either the sleek indoor lounge or outdoor patio areas, you’d better get there early—by 5:15 p.m. the place is packed.

One of Koo’s tasks in designing the Wit was to give the hotel’s restaurants an independent identity, distinct from the guest rooms. “The success of project,” she said during a guided Chicago Architecture Foundation tour of the hotel, “depends on the restaurants.” Because of the hotel's location, smack on the border of Chicago’s theater district, its restaurants—which also include State & Lake, featuring American food and an artisanal beer selection; and cibo matto, Italian fine dining—needed to stand on their own.

To do this, Koo split the Wit into two sections, connected but each with its own unique look: the first is a glassy structure that holds the lobby, the second-floor library, and guest rooms. The second, which looks like a concrete high-rise, houses the three restaurants and meeting rooms, as well as more guest rooms. “It would have been a waste to take this great intersection and make it only a rooms hotel," said Scott Greenberg, the Wit’s developer, who chanced upon the Chicago Architecture Foundation tour on his way to watch a movie in the hotel’s plush screening room. “Jackie figured out how to organize it.”

The hotel’s location has its pitfalls—the noise from the “L,” for one. To keep the sound of clanking tracks out of bedrooms, some of which offer a direct view of passengers waiting on the platforms, the windows are made of double-layered glass. So guests can sleep soundly until they are roused by the voice of President Obama, Harry Caray, or Mayor Daley for their wake-up calls.

Quiet as the rooms are, the hotel’s exterior is loud. A chartreuse lightening-bolt shape adorns the front of the building, bathing passersby in neon yellow light. And Koo “played with geometrics” when designing the facade, she said, a response to the theater marquees down State Street.

The Wit is just…fun. With rooms named after the wit-blessed Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill, a spa and yoga studio on the fifth floor, and Rubik’s Cubes on some bedside tables, the hotel creates an atmosphere, said Greenberg, that “reinforces the idea of humor, playfulness, and joy.”

Ruth E. Kott, AM’07

A marathon, not a sprint

Fucked Up perform at the Pitchfork Music Festival, 2009

A weekend at the Pitchfork Music Festival

Fewer than three hours into the Pitchfork Music Festival this past weekend in Union Park, my friend Josh Nalven, ’10, already looked as if he had jumped rope in a sauna, fully clothed.

He had pushed through the crowd to the front of the main stage, sacrificing all regard for personal space to brave the near-riotous pit of devoted fans of the hardcore band Fucked Up. Watching from a safer distance, I could see the band’s hulking frontman, Damian Abraham, dive shirtless into this pit. Let’s just say Abraham has quite a belly and knows how to throw it around. Glad I’m not down there, I thought to myself.

“I was right there!” Josh later told the rest of our group. “Seriously close to the underarm region, dude.” He ran his fingers through a sweaty head of curls. “Amazing at the time, but now, perhaps not the best idea.”

One thing was clear—Josh needed to cool down. It was as good a reason as any to wander through the food tents.

With 40 bands packed onto three stages over the course of three days, it might not seem like there would be a lot of time to peruse the festival’s other offerings. But if, for example, you’re not interested in seeing Blitzen Trapper or Killer Whales during the 3 p.m. time slot, you might find yourself with an hour to kill. I haven’t heard of them either.

Although hardly a bargain, Pitchfork has a reputation for having some of the tastiest and fairest priced (i.e., only a slight rip-off) food selections. And whether you were a skinny indie vegan or a skinny indie carnivore, 15 Chicago vendors satisfied the mysteriously high metabolism of a slim and gangly gang of music lovers. I splurged on a chicken sausage cooked with apple and gouda cheese and an iced coffee horchata, with the damage coming out to $8.

Ponytail at the Pitchfork Music Festival, 2009There was much more to see, like the tent full of vinyl records, the arts and crafts fair, and the station where you could set a world record. The people-watching makes for a good time too. Wait—a “world-record station”?

Antics ensued as people ventured to set the fastest time for shaving one’s own mustache, fastest 52-card pick-up, or fastest kazoo performance of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” On Saturday, 48 people set the record for largest group of people to sing "Saturday in the Park" by the band Chicago. A free pair of shoes went to anyone with a record still standing by the end of the day.

Oh, I almost forgot—the music was great! At least, all that I was able to hear.

Toward the end of the Saturday lineup, I sat down to rest while the rapper Doom performed nearby. I felt my eyes getting heavy, and despite the thundering bass and the constant buzz of chatter around me, I did the impossible: power-napped through a performance.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Fucked Up's Damian Abraham (top) while fans crowdsurf; Ponytail's Ken Seeno.

Photography by silverfuture (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). View silverfuture's Pitchfork Music Festival set on Flickr.

A morning at the fair

World's Columbian ExpositionWe’re standing at the steps of the Museum of Science and Industry, and Paul Durica, AM’06, is organizing his players like a nervous elementary-school choir director.

Grover Cleveland, you’re at the top. George Pullman, you’re next to Thomas and Bertha Palmer. And where are the Duke and Duchess of Veragua?

It’s the opening scene of Durica’s Working Man’s Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition, a two-hour walking tour of the 1893 World’s Fair, part of Durica’s Pocket Guide to Hell Tours.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to look for. When Durica arrives, his blue marching-band jacket, complete with gold braid patterns and red tassels, announces him as our guide. Dressed as a Columbian Guard—a member of the fair’s security force—he assigns character roles to several tour-goers.

He instructs one woman to play a disgruntled Ida B. Wells and provides her with a sample of the antiracism pamphlets that Wells handed out in 1893. Later Durica notifies “Jane Addams” that her purse had been stolen, but—don’t worry—a Columbian Guard had retrieved it. I play Clarence Darrow for the post-fair segment, and Durica informs me that my ashes had been spread in the lagoons behind the museum.

Durica, a PhD student in English, makes the morning a pleasant stroll through the former fairground. He offers a detailed description of every aspect of the fair, from the 40,000 workers who labored for two years preparing the White City to the 264-foot Ferris Wheel to the economic turmoil of the 1890s that led to the mini-city’s quick demise when the fair ended.

The tour begins at the eastern steps of the museum and progresses through seven stops around the lagoons to the south. With a wealth of knowledge from his research at the Regenstein Library, Durica emphasizes the fair’s behind-the-scenes production, such as the construction of the massive Manufactures and Liberal Arts building and the failed plans for a revolutionary theater called the Spectatorium.

Durica has two more tours planned for August and September, one looking at jazz and blues on the South Side and the other uncovering the “secret history” of the University of Chicago. The tours are free, though the tips Durica accepts are well-earned.

Jake Grubman, ’11


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Squash squad

METROsquash“What you see in front of you is a bunch of junk.”

Alex Sisto, ’11, states the obvious, even if the half-dozen seventh- and eighth-graders in front of him are hoping for some greater underlying significance to the boxes of empty Gatorade bottles and cereal boxes at the head of the table.

One man’s trash is a tutor’s arts-and-crafts material. Sisto and four other tutors supplied the materials they had gathered over the previous several weeks for “junk sculptures” at METROsquash, an after-school and summer program joining squash practice with academics and activities for elementary-school students from Hyde Park and the surrounding neighborhoods. Minutes after Sisto’s pronouncement, all hands are active, cutting up the plastic bottles and taping together pieces of cardboard into a model city.

“I don’t think they get a lot of chances to work with their hands and actually build things—a lot of it is just sitting in a desk all day,” says Sisto, a work-study tutor at METROsquash since last October, “so we like to give them a chance to be creative.”

Squash isn’t normally known for its popularity in the urban community, but METROsquash executive director David Kay, a former squash pro, says “squash is a great unifier—people from many different backgrounds can play, meet, and share common values.” In addition to squash practice and competition, the program offers students help with schoolwork, assistance in the search for high school options, and mentoring for the older students.

It was a light group for the summer program on junk-sculpture building day, but since it began in 2005, METROsquash has grown from ten fifth-grade students its first year to about 60 fourth-through-ninth-graders expected when its after-school segment begins in August. With a full-time staff of several work-study and Lab Schools tutors and dozens of other volunteers, METROsquash’s extended community includes about 150 people.

Operating out of the University Church and Henry Crown Fieldhouse, METROsquash partners with the University’s Athletics Department and Office of Civic Engagement, which provide court space and work-study tutors through the Neighborhood Schools Program. Kay calls the University “a critical partner” in helping develop the program, though he sees it as a two-way street.

“METROsquash sees itself as a bridge between the University and the community,” Kay says. “Squash is a really wonderful sport. It’s a great differentiator for students who are trying to get into a good school, and we hope to see our students one day soon, within the next few years, knocking on the door of the University of Chicago and submitting some very compelling applications.”

Jake Grubman, ’11


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Of bookworms and squirrels

NewberrySquirrel.jpgI entered the Newberry Library expecting to see a few curious book-lovers and bargain-hunters. Instead, I saw squirrels.

At least that’s what the staff called the more than 8,000 people who attended the library’s 25th annual book fair last weekend, all searching for that rare first edition, fun bedtime story, or intriguing cookbook.

Stacks of cardboard boxes and brown paper bags awaited shoppers at the library’s entrance, and a side table called the “squirreling area” provided a home base for hauls too big to carry between the seven large rooms packed with tables full of used books.

After receiving my own bag, I was swept up in the quiet intensity that surrounded each table. Friendly fair volunteers corralled folks into lines that were deceptively peaceful. Much like while zigzagging through traffic, people masked impatience with just enough cooperation to get by, jumping at the first opportunity to speed ahead of a slow browser and resume digging.

And boy, were there lots of them: the Newberry received more than 100,000 donated books, to be resold at an average of $2 or $3, making it their largest annual fund-raiser.

I didn’t see a single uninteresting book: an illustrated atlas of Hawaii, a report on the Church of Scientology “from the inside by a non-member,” thousands of paperback romances with titles like Treasure’s Golden Dream and My Lord Stranger.

The fair also offered a small selection of donated CDs, records, and old magazines. It is a testament to the fair’s variety that fellow intern Jake Grubman, ’11, could walk away with both an old issue of Sports Illustrated and some Wu-Tang Clan albums.

I did some good squirreling myself, whittling down a shopping bag of books to a handful, eventually spending about $5. But that’s nothing compared to the woman ahead of me in the checkout line.

As she approached the counter, she pointed toward a group of eight brown bags and two cardboard boxes of books, all hers. It took three staff members to help move them all onto the counter. The unlucky elderly volunteer slowly raised himself out of his seat and looked in bewilderment at where to begin.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Rise of the she-conomy

blogher.jpgSocial media guru Leslie Bradshaw, AB’04, spent last weekend in Chicago networking at BlogHer, the annual women-bloggers convention. Eighty-five tweets (#blogher09) and six swag bags later, Bradshaw—who has worked in online brand management using social technologies and communications since graduating—shares her observations on social media, marketing, and gender.


Nowadays companies are turning to the blogosphere and Twitterverse to reach their marketing goals, and the main demographic they’re targeting is females. Although I have observed this trend as a blogger, Twitterer, and through my job, never had it been so apparent to me than during BlogHer.

Terms of endorsement

Marketers covet positive reviews from female power-users within viral and social media outposts, and these women covet their products. An entire economy has formed around this relationship.

From beverage samples and leopard-print thumb drives to “love lotions” and vibrators, everyone at BlogHer went home with some sort of free swag to make them happy. If I were still taking classes from Stuart Michaels in the gender studies department, I would certainly have a write up on the implications of the last two items, informed by theories from Foucault, Freud, and Rubin, of course.

Rockin' in the free world

Aside from the happiness derived from getting stuff for free, these product placements and giveaways reflect a change. Many women control their household’s spending, and companies recognize women are social creatures who are likely to share their experiences (the good, the bad, and the ugly) with their friends and family.

One of the reasons why I am fascinated by and enjoy participating in social media is because its users—especially the 9 million strong in the BlogHer community—are lowering barriers, whether they are geographic, socioeconomic, ethnic, or just purely asymmetries in information.

Save for tech daddies, such as CC Chapman and the Digital Dads, there is not an equal influx of male bloggers hyping products to other men. To borrow a term from Katty Kay while channeling a Steven Levitt-esque play on words and a James Carville delivery: “It’s womenomics, stupid.”

This might not be the next sexual revolution, but I’m happy to be recognized for my purchasing power, one free thumb drive at a time.—L.B.

Photos courtesy Leslie Bradshaw. View Bradshaw's complete BlogHer 2009 Flickr set, including images from her visit to the Quaker Oats booth (shown above) and free conference swag.

Go Stagg!

Amos Alonzo Stagg and his Monsters of the Midway

It's not quite tailgating season, but UChiBLOGo editors and Phoenix phanatix (hat tip to the Chicago Maroon's Tim Murphy, AB'09) are gearing up for this autumn's sweep of touchdowns thanks to new buzz about the Maroons' most famous coach: Amos Alonzo Stagg.

Today Sporting News ranked the football pioneer 40th on its list of the 50 greatest coaches of all time, and earlier this month Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel dedicated a column to his picks for all-time coaching legends. Of Stagg—the leader of the original "Monsters of the Midway" during Chicago's football heyday—and Pop Warner, Mandel writes: "As the sport's unofficial founding fathers, they're unquestionably legends."

We dug through our archives for Stagg stories and trolled the Web for fun UChicago football write-ups and photos to satisfy your pigskin fever. Here's to "the old man" and a winning fall season!


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A cut above

When I went over to Hyde Park Hair Salon—“Barack Obama’s barbershop”—I had the impression that barbershops were somehow exclusive, like country clubs that cost much less and provide haircuts instead of tee times. I think Ice Cube and the movie Barbershop gave me that idea.

A stereotypically awkward UChicago student, I thought I’d have nothing to say and would get odd looks from everyone in the place. But I learned quickly that this barbershop is nearly the opposite, where people can say as much or as little as they want, and the conversation goes on.

I spent most of my time chatting with barber Kris Golden, a laid-back Californian with a crazy hairstyle—half of his hair is short and black, while the other half is long and blond. He gave the short answer on why the guys in the shop can make anyone in the chair relaxed. “Barbers are social geniuses,” he said, because they must be able to talk to everyone who comes in. At $21 a cut, Hyde Park Hair Salon prides itself on providing a happy medium of average cost and high-quality haircuts, and the result is that the shop attracts a broad spectrum of clients.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a police officer or firefighter or a street hustler or a politician. It’s all about equality when it comes to haircuts,” Golden said. In the couple of hours I spent in the shop Saturday morning, it showed. “You wouldn’t know it, but the guy over there is a chess master,” Golden said, pointing to an older gentleman sitting on the couches in back. A couple of chairs down sat a signed rap artist, and at the front of the shop was another U of C student.

The light but steady flow of customers was typical for a Saturday, which Golden said is the shop’s quietest day. It’s usually Thursday nights—deep enough into the week that clients have a good supply of stories and enough stress to tell them—that spark some more animated discussions branching from politics to women to sports to women. On Saturday the discussion skipped from lady troubles to the X-Games, which were playing on both of the shop’s flat-screen TVs. At one point the whole group shared a laugh over YouTube videos on one barber’s laptop.

For all the chatter, Golden said all of the social skills are ultimately just part of the equation for the guys with the clippers. “Every guy in here is on top of his game,” he said. Some specialize in more conservative haircuts, while others—Golden included—are partial to flashy designs and graphics. The group takes its profession seriously, especially with clientele that includes the commander-in-chief.

The shop displays Obama’s chair at the front of the store along with his portrait, and tours continually drop by for a look. But even those who have grown accustomed to Obama-mania in Hyde Park can stop by the shop for a chat and a haircut.

Jake Grubman, '11

Barber Kris Golden trims up a young patron's mohawk.


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A Hyde Park time capsule

55th StreetAs the microphone was passed to him, a dapper Joe Marlin, AM’54, AM’60, slowly stood up and looked out at the audience.

“I’d like to start out with an apology,” he said. “I moved to Hyde Park in 1953. So I can’t tell you all old stories about the neighborhood.”

“I feel like a baby,” another man said later. “I came here in 1961.”

Look who’s talking. On Saturday this 21-year-old intern went to the Blackstone Library on 49th Street and Lake Park Avenue. The day’s event was fitting for the Chicago Public Library’s oldest branch: the “Hyde Park-Kenwood Stories,” a gathering for sharing neighborhood memories.

They weren’t kidding around—save for a few folks, I was the youngest person in the library’s basement auditorium by 50 to 60 years. Feeling a touch out of place, I secured a seat in a back corner and waited for the storytelling to begin.

Head librarian Lala Rodgers told the 40 or so guests that each speaker would get only five minutes, pointing to a trusty helper with a timer and a sign that said “Wrap It Up!” in big, bold letters. Alas, the gray-haired woman left in charge of this timekeeping never could master the stopwatch, and it beeped unpredictably throughout the whole two hours. We never saw that warning sign again.

But who needed it anyway? The stories were fascinating. One man told of living next door to Al Capone’s brother. Another woman told of working in the old Rosenwald mansion. Someone shared a cocktail glass from the original Morton’s Restaurant at 56th Street and Lake Shore Drive, and remembered the exact day he swiped it—June 6, 1964.

Who knew that the intersection where Ratner Athletics Center now stands used to be the site of the Frolic Theater? Or that 55th Street was a main drag filled with clubs, bars, and lounges? Or that streetcars used to take locals close to the lakefront in the summertime, and that the Jackson Park lagoon offered boat rentals for 25 cents?

Tropical HutThe most touching moment came when Arlene Rubin asked the group to shout out their favorite defunct Hyde Park location. Their faces lit up, each mention bringing a new swell of smiles and cheerful side conversations. The Tropical Hut! Kiddie Kicks shoe store! The Eagle Pub! Wimpy’s! The Bee Hive Lounge!

I listened in amazement at how much of their beloved neighborhood they had outlasted and how unwavering their love for Hyde Park was despite the changes.

No one could master the microphone. People complained they couldn’t hear. There were a few arguments over specific dates and locations. But in all, the gathering was a welcome trip back in time.

Afterward, caught up in the moment, I climbed the stairs to the library’s first floor. I reached the top and was instantly bumped by a baggy-clothed teenager, his eyes fixed on his iPod instead of me in front of him. The spell broke.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Photo of 55th Street courtesy of the University of Chicago Library (Archival Photographic Files, apf2-09780, Special Collections Research Center)

Wherefore art thou, Oreo?

shakeshakespeare.jpg

I have to think patrons at the Globe would have appreciated Shakespeare’s work even more had they seen his plays on free-milkshake day.

The shakes flowed freely—at least to the first 150 people—at Wednesday’s Shakes and Shakespeare event, with the C-Shop providing the goodies and the Dean’s Men providing the entertainment. A few dozen people watched the troupe’s abridged depiction of Julius Caesar through the first three acts, though we’ll have to wait until next week for the conclusion (warning: lots of impaling).

It was the first of four Shakes and Shakespeare events—part of the summer’s Bartlett Break Days series—with the Dean’s Men presenting Antony and Cleopatra in two parts later this month. The supply of free shakes lasted until well after the show started, but supplies will be limited if a bigger crowd shows up next week to watch Cassius meet his maker.

An informal affair, the play took place on a small stage at the north end of Bartlett Quad, where a student from ORCSA handed out the milkshake vouchers. I wandered between Einstein Bagels and the quad a few times before finding him at the back of the audience, but the strawberry-whipped-cream-Oreo goodness was worth the journey, and I still got a good view of Caesar’s demise.

Jake Grubman, ’11

A white-hot day for Pritzker

Someone needed to check the pulse of each new Pritzker School of Medicine student last Saturday. Although Rockefeller Chapel felt like a sauna, and despite the challenging road of medical school ahead of them, each of the 88 inductees appeared eerily cool and collected. Or maybe it was those clean, white doctor coats they had just received.

Controlled excitement filled the air at the annual white-coat ceremony, formally marking each first-year student’s entry into the profession. The event began at Pritzker 19 years ago and has since become a tradition at nearly every medical school in the country, although at many of those schools, the ceremony marks students’ transition from classes to clinical training. After Funmi Olopade, associate dean for global health and professor of medicine and human genetics, delivered the keynote address, each student was called forward to don the familiar white uniform for the first time.

An otherwise quiet and meticulous ceremony was occasionally enlivened by a nearly botched exchange between the coat’s recipient and the two people presenting it, resulting in a few smiles and sighs from the students as they returned to their seats, straightening out their jackets on the way. But the heat seemed to affect the intimate crowd of family and friends more than the students. The onlookers were proud but uncomfortable: A mother clicked photographs in one hand while fanning herself with the other. A father slowly gravitated toward one of the chapel’s many open doors. A baby impatiently waddled through the pews.

Nevertheless, as the newly clad Pritzker inductees faced the crowd to recite the Hippocratic Oath, it was clear that it would take more than an awkward coat exchange or a muggy Saturday afternoon to sway these students. They looked ready.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Students participating in the 2008 White Coat Ceremony.

Rendezvous with “Rowdy” Roddy

roddy.jpgI’m next in line, and I’m absolutely shaking with nerves.

On the other side of the table is former professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, whose easy smile shows how far away his days of smashing opponents with steel chairs are. We’re at the Wizard World Chicago Comic-Con, and as I step up to the table to have him sign a magazine featuring his likeness, I can’t help but think about how nerdy I must look.

Piper stands up and greets me with a handshake—pro wrestlers are always so kind—and then sits back down to sign. “I don’t know what I was thinking there,” he says, looking at the crazed eyes and kilted costume that defined his character in the 1980s. I tell him that I met him once at a book signing when I was 12 years old and that I wrote a book report on his autobiography (because that’ll really make me sound intelligent). He just smiles, presumably because no true fan can ever think of anything to say when they actually get up to the table, and says, “Well you’ve grown up good despite me.” Small talk with a former champ is never easy.

That’s the memory I’ll take with me from this year’s convention, which attracted tens of thousands of comic book enthusiasts over the weekend. The name Comic-Con can hardly be considered binding: The convention is part flea market, part conference, part art exhibit, and part autograph signing. A friend and I walked the main hall of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center for hours on Sunday, where we saw dozens of people dressed up as storm troopers, hundreds of young comic-book artists hoping to get their work noticed, and thousands of Marvel Universe action figures. I don’t even want to guess the number of comics for sale. And then there was the line stretching across the hall of people waiting to get Ernie Hudson’s autograph (Hudson, by the way, played Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters, and if you already knew his character’s last name, you probably should have been at the convention with me).

B-list celebrities have always had a presence at the convention, but several true comic enthusiasts grumbled over the absence of important comic-book figures like Marvel and DC. Neither company had a booth at the convention, meaning less contact with the industry’s elite and more room for autograph signings with Todd Bridges and Michelle Rodriguez.

By the end of the day, my feet were sore and my wallet was empty, but I was a few autographs and a few comics richer. Since I had volunteered for part of the convention, I was allowed to take away some convention leftovers, and I briefly considered taking Hudson’s placard. I thought better of it, though—people might have thought I was a nerd.

Jake Grubman, ’11

Piper poses for a picture.

Photo courtesy of Iron Ming

Robie House's private spaces

Robie House

At the corner of 58th and Woodlawn, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House looks a little like a boat, functions a little like a fortress, and continues to impress visitors with its innovation a century after its construction.

I stopped in for tea with the Robies last week, but since they weren’t there—and apparently haven’t been for almost 100 years—I settled for the new Private Spaces tour, a 90-minute walk-through that features the same stops as the normal tour but also allows access to the third-floor bedroom level, the kitchen, and the servants’ wing.

I’m no architecture buff, but the tour’s discussion of the house’s functionality was fascinating. Frederick Robie, a bicycle manufacturer and father of two small children, wanted his house to be safe from unwanted visitors, and Wright’s design allowed for both safety and interaction with the outside neighborhood. The house’s 174 art-glass windows are one example of how Wright separated the Robies from passersby: one cannot see through the windows from the outside, but those on the inside have a fine view of the house’s surroundings.

In several parts of the tour, our guide explained how the house actually connected the family with nature even while protecting them from people outside. That’s particularly clear in one of the “private” sections of the house, the upstairs bedrooms, where the windows open out onto the planters on the balcony and the trees beyond them. I’d be inclined to think of the master bedroom as a tree house if it weren’t a piece of one the most architecturally influential houses in the country.

Restoration efforts are ongoing, though even unfinished areas like the billiard room were interesting—there we learned that Robie House was once a Theological Seminary dorm. If you’d rather wait until more of the house is finished, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust has added a number of other programs, such as After Hours, a cocktail get-together at the house, and LEGO architects, where aspiring architects can build model designs.

Jake Grubman, ’11

Inside Robie House.

Photo courtesy of Smart Destinations

Stranger than fiction

La Perdida

As an English major, in class I’m often drawn to something I find just as fascinating as a discussion of a good book: watching other people interact. So when I heard about the most recent Gapers Block GB Book Club meeting, I jumped at the opportunity to go—not for the literature, but for the theatrics.

The selected book was quite good: La Perdida, a graphic novel by former Magazine contributor Jessica Abel, AB’91. It tells the story of Carla, a young American who travels to Mexico City in search of her Mexican roots and a fresh start. She crashes with a former boyfriend, Harry, who claims to be pursuing his literary dreams but instead drinks heavily and isolates himself from local culture. Carla soaks in as much of the city as she can—including meeting a few friends who lead her past the tourist traps and into a more complicated, dangerous relationship with the city.

But none of that mattered to me last week at the North Side bookstore The Book Cellar, as I cautiously sat down among the book-club members. Without a class grade hanging over me, I was more focused on the characters sitting next to me than Abel’s characters.

Two things distinguished the meeting from the rigorous UChicago classroom. First, a few people were cradling wine glasses. Plus, people provided refreshingly personal responses to the story, weaving their own lives into the fabric of the discussion. One woman used Carla’s bold decision to leave America as a way to express regret over not traveling more when she was younger. Another reminisced on the awkwardness of progressing from a foreign-language textbook to conversing with a native. Another attacked Carla’s dubious decision-making from the perspective of a concerned mother.

Despite the differences between the book club and the classroom, one annoying (and amusing) similarity remained—a “that kid.” Every U of C student can give a hall-of-fame story about the one person in class who, whether justified or not, irritatingly dominates the discussion while also providing suppressed chuckles and hidden smiles for everyone else. Although, in this case, the “that kid” was “that woman.”

She couldn’t let more than two other comments pass without adding her own. She answered questions with a bit too much self-assurance and talked just long enough for your mind to slip into its post-workday haze. But most fun to watch was her discomfort whenever someone else’s remarks provoked a hearty nodding of heads. You could see her desire to dominate, and she fought to never be upstaged—not that anyone else was keeping score.

In all, the discussion—and the people watching—was definitely worth the ride up to the North Side. Besides, you can’t bring wine to a U of C English class.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

King of the Hill

Carl LoofIn July the influential Washington, DC, newspaper the Hill released its annual “50 Most Beautiful” list of striking staffers and cute congressmen. This year Chicago’s own Carl Loof, AB’08, made the cut, winning over the paper—which received more than 320 nominations—and his colleagues with his international charm and intellectual curiosity. The 25-year-old legislative aide, dubbed “The Cosmopolitan,” was born in Bogotá to a Swedish family and raised in London and Boca Raton, Florida. The rigorous reputation of the U of C attracted him to Hyde Park as a transfer student, and he graduated with a political-science degree and also studied regionalism and European Union politics at Sciences Po in Paris. And here’s the best part, ladies: if you’re smitten, you can meet Loof when he hosts the DC Phoenixphest on September 24.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you find out that you were named to the Hill's 50 Most Beautiful People of 2009? What was your initial reaction?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI received a phone call to set up an interview and photo. A voice on the other end asked me if I was familiar with the “Top 50,” so I naturally assumed that the reporter meant the Maroon soccer team's unofficial mascot. The Hill has the largest circulation of any Capitol Hill publication and is a great source of political news, so to be honest with you, initially I was really very surprised, honored, and humbled by the distraction—I mean distinction—then went back to work.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat has the reaction been among coworkers, friends, and family?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI never knew so many people read the Hill until that article! Throughout the week, I got smiles and thumbs-up around work. I received a lot of calls, texts, and e-mails from friends, many of whom did not know I had moved to Washington, DC. People even tweeted about me. So it was a nice opportunity to connect with some friends I haven't spoken to in months. My mum is very excited to share the news with as many people as she can, and my dad thinks it is great but mostly is just glad that I have a job.

QandA_QDrop.jpgBesides impressing Capitol Hill with your dark, good looks, what does the day-to-day life of a legislative aide entail?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI don’t think people are too impressed. I handle a wide variety of legislative issues for a member of Congress, including health-care reform, education, trade, foreign policy, transportation, immigration, civil rights, and homeland security. I attend briefings, sit in on Congressional hearings, read journals/reports, and prepare memos. I [attend] meetings on behalf of the representative with groups that hope to highlight certain legislation or raise awareness about issues. I then review pertinent legislation and make recommendations. A lot of my job involves developing close relationships with colleagues in other offices and understanding others' perspectives and where there is room for cooperation. It has been a great experience.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYou have Swedish roots and have lived Florida, London, and Paris. What is it about American politics that appeals to you?

QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s the dedication and passion. People here really care about politics and the character of elected officials on a level that I have not seen in other countries. One need only look at DC internships or campaigns to realize just how involved and engaged young Americans of all backgrounds are in their political system—so much so that they forgo an entire summer of gainful employment in order to work for free.

In America people really want you to take part in society and succeed. Americans are a far warmer and more open people than many might credit, and this transpires in our political system. Even individuals with weird backgrounds and funny names are given the opportunity to achieve greatness, but once elected, public servants are held to a very high standard of expectations.

QandA_QDrop.jpgNow that we have a U of C–affiliated president of the United States, who do you think could be the next Maroon in the White House?

QandA_ADrop.jpgAt Chicago I was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity, an organization that can already count two U.S. presidents and two Supreme Court justices, including John Paul Stevens, U-High’37, AB’41. The fraternity was a big part of my decision to go into public service, and I believe it and the mentality of the University of Chicago help aspiring, young politicos understand that being a part of a community means to contribute, to respect others, and to champion the public good over glory. Among the more politically oriented gentlemen I have known is Nicholas G. Rodman, AB’09, a gifted and dedicated student patriot whose parents have both served our country with distinguished careers in public service. That said, the University does a good job of preparing many fine young men and women who take active civic leadership very seriously.

Elizabeth Chan

Photo courtesy the Hill.

Wide awake mind

pic2.jpgWhen Ryan McCarl, AB’08, AM’08, graduated last year, he knew his education was far from over—and not just because he’s pursuing an MA in education at the University of Michigan. McCarl, a promoter of self-education through several blogs and an upcoming book, recently spoke with UChiBLOGo’s Jake Grubman, ’11, via e-mail to discuss education outside of the classroom.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat is self-education, and why is it so important?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSelf-educators are curious about the world and willing to do something about their curiosity. They open themselves to learning opportunities wherever they occur, and they understand that education is a lifelong endeavor. It is absurd to think of our education as complete when we obtain a diploma, a slip of paper; education is about growth and self-actualization, about deepening our understanding of the world and the human situation. No degree or collection of degrees ought to give us the illusion that our education is complete or that we need not bother with learning any more.

QandA_QDrop.jpgTo some people, “self-education” might be a scary term because of all the work involved in formal education. What’s the fun side?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThere is a major difference between pursuing a topic because you are curious about it and completing homework for a class you have to take in order to earn a credential. Suppose you are curious about politics, and your initial encounter with the excitement of current events and political participation leads you to read better news sources, take part in a demonstration, research a policy debate, and wade into political philosophy. The material you encounter is interesting, the process of discovery is exciting, and, above all, the people you meet and the conversations you have can be very rewarding.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYour blog Wide Awake Minds is also part of the work you’re doing for a book by the same name; which came first, the blog idea or the book idea?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe book idea came first. I’ve been working on it on and off for the past two years, and I decided that a good way to get the book written and out the door would be to make a public commitment to writing it and to get others involved with the project by conducting interviews with other self-educators and sharing their stories and advice. The response so far has been fantastic, and it has strengthened my belief in the idea’s importance.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat Web sites or other tools would you suggest for those interested in exploring self-education?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe Internet has an infinite wealth of resources for self-educators. I recommend familiarizing yourself with RSS feeds and using a feed reader to read the best news sources and blogs you can find in your areas of interest. I also recommend trying the podcasts put out by NPR and the New Yorker. I especially like Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

It’s also important to understand the limitations of the Internet and the continuing importance of offline educational experiences. I am a firm believer in the virtue of reading good books. And if you want to increase your knowledge of the world, you could do worse than regularly reading the New York Times and the Economist.

Photo courtesy Ryan McCarl.

Persuasive writing

classicscafe.jpgIn my experience, there are certain groups that are simply not worth antagonizing. So: don’t try to pet wild animals. Don’t mouth off to police officers. Don’t flash hand signals at gang members. And don’t try to take coffee away from English majors.

And yet last month (perhaps on a dare) the Humanities Division proposed to convert the back room of Classics Café into a seminar room. True, there would still be coffee. But the larger of the two rooms—the sun-lit, south-facing Gothic space that overlooks the Midway—would be closed.

Almost immediately, an Internet petition went up. Interestingly, it was posted not by furious undergraduates, most of whom are away for the summer, but by two senior faculty members: David Wellbery, the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University professor; and Eric Santner, Philip and Ida Romberg professor in modern Germanic studies and chair of Germanic studies. In language typical of the café’s patrons, the petition states that Classics Café is “a physiognomy expressive of unique features of our academic culture” and “a Socratic space,” while closing the back room would “eviscerate a singular milieu of humanistic conversation.”

But don’t professors who hold named chairs have other ways of making their dissatisfaction known? “It’s not a scream of the powerless,” says Wellbery, pointing out that because the petition is online, it’s been signed by a number of alumni. “It was meant to be helpful in the decision-making process,” by demonstrating just how many people—792 had signed it by August 24 at 1 p.m.—love the café.

OK, but what’s a Socratic space? “In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates would leave the city and go to a special, quiet place,” Wellbery explains. “That’s where the dialogues take place. Socratic dialogues really set the pattern for learning in the humanities. Classics Café is just that kind of space, a space for teaching and learning.”

While the vast majority of the signatories (which reads like a Who’s Who of the Humanities Division) contributed only their names, those who wanted to could make further arguments in the comments section. Among grad students, pragmatism was a common theme. “Forget ‘utopian space,’” wrote Hannah McKeown, “it's the philosophy grad-office space! Either keep the café or build us offices.” Less crankily, Rocio Magaña, pointed out, “It's impossible to estimate how many dissertation topics have been conceived and brought to fruition in this place.”

Among the professors, several acknowledged the politics of the issue. “Being a professor in the linguistics department, I fully understand the need for more and better seminar space,” Jason Riggle wrote, “and I would love to have such space so close to my office. *BUT*, eliminating the open room of the Classics Café is absolutely the wrong way to go about this.” Herman Sinaiko added, “Don't damage the whole Division just to placate a departmental need.”

There were also critiques of the petition’s language: “I do not regard the back room of the Classics Café in quite the same light (‘utopian,’ a ‘singular milieu’) as my fellow signers, nor would I express those beliefs with such prolixity if I held them,” Jonathan Williams commented, “but nonetheless I feel quite strongly that the University gains more from that space as it stands than as a lecture hall.”

Still others opted for brevity: “Is nothing sacred?” “Worst idea ever,” “SAVE THE CAFÉ!” “'adamantly’ isn't strong enough,” “Leave my coffee alone!!!!!!!!!!!” “Please!!” while someone named Mr. Anonymous wrote plaintively, “Save [C]lassics....because it saved me first.”

*****

According to the Dean of the Humanities’ office, the decision to close the back room of the café has been put on hold.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Sox and sabermetrics

White Sox alumni event

Nate Silver, AB’00, has become somewhat of a champion for University of Chicago nerds everywhere, turning an economics degree into a career in baseball-statistics analysis and then a hugely popular political blog, fivethirtyeight.com. But for all his success, nobody ever called him immodest.

“I’m kind of an idiot when it comes to baseball,” the stats guru and White Sox fan said early in his talk at U.S. Cellular Field Sunday. He said that because he hasn’t focused all of his energies on the game this season, but I still have to think he’d destroy me in fantasy baseball. Silver and Christina Kahrl, AB’90, were in town for part of the Alumni Association’s fourth-annual event with Baseball Prospectus (BP), the baseball stats and history think tank Kahrl cofounded. Taking place in the Cell’s Conference and Learning Center, the talk was complete with PowerPoint charts and graphs—a day at the park only the U of C could sponsor.

Silver, who worked for BP until earlier this year, and Kahrl had some guidelines on statistical analysis in general, like valuing quality over quantity in data collection and actively avoiding optimism bias. They used specific examples to explain BP’s PECOTA system, which Silver created to forecast players’ careers, going into some of BP’s successes (see the Cubs’ Milton Bradley) and failures (see the Baltimore Orioles’ Matt Wieters). They had good news for the Sox fans in the room, praising the South Siders’ minor-league system and, in Kahrl’s case, predicting a first-place finish in the American League Central Division, though that might be the optimism talking.

To demonstrate BP’s strategy for comparing past and present players, Silver broke out the MS Paint—not a very good replacement for a whiteboard to explain multidimensional vectors. Still, White Sox faithful now have at least some empirical evidence that Gordon Beckham could be a Hall of Famer.

The presentation lasted until the start of the game, which saw the Orioles beat the Sox 3–2. Sunny skies and comfortable temperatures made up for the expensive food (that churro was hardly worth $14), and even this Cubs fan did all right at the Cell. Oh, and that guy at the end of the row, the one talking all those numbers? Not quite the idiot he said he was.

Jake Grubman, ’11

Photo by Eric Allix Rogers, AB'05

Strolling through handsome Hyde Park

International House

We all know about Robie House. We’ve all seen the Museum of Science and Industry, if only while zooming past it on Lake Shore Drive. But after meandering through the streets of Hyde Park with the Chicago Architecture Foundation this past weekend, I couldn’t help but ask myself: who knew Hyde Park had so much hidden architectural history?

About 20 people gathered in front of Rockefeller Chapel on a glorious Sunday afternoon to take part in a neighborhood tour and unearth the stories behind buildings I’d walked by hundreds of times but never stopped to appreciate. Embarrassing, I know. Docent Dinah Wayne led a perfectly paced tour, never stretching the group out for more than a five-minute walk between stops. Wayne touched on Hyde Park’s role during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—the Midway served as the fair’s entertainment center, and the MSI was originally known as the Palace of Fine Arts.

She also provided factoids that an average resident might not know. The statue at the east end of the Midway, for instance, is of Thomas Masaryk, the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia. The placement isn’t random: Masaryk visited the University in 1902 and 1907, and taught a course in Czech history during the summer of 1902.

Some homes built around the turn of the century, when Frank Lloyd Wright designed Robie House, emphasized horizontality, while those made a few decades later, during the height of the Art Deco movement, emphasized verticality. The Robie House had longer, slimmer Roman bricks to conjure up images of the American prairie. Art Deco-style buildings, like International House, displayed unbroken vertical lines to make it seem taller and more impressive.

The tour shed light on a handful of beautiful homes that I had never seen before, but we didn’t venture out of the neighborhood’s southeast corner until the very end. We made our way to the edge of the quadrangles, only to head back south toward Chicago Booth (did you know that 40 percent of the building is underground?). I was curious about other blocks that we didn’t cover. And the U of C was underrepresented: while we briefly touched on I-House, the Lab Schools, Palevsky Residential Commons, and Chicago Booth, we never went west of University Avenue, and never farther north of 56th Street. One man in an Arizona cap asked why we weren’t seeing more of the campus. Wayne sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “It’s its own two-hour tour!”

Some were disappointed to learn that President Obama’s house was not featured during the two-hour session. He actually lives right across the Hyde Park border in Kenwood, which—you guessed it—has its own tour.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Photo by Willy Feng, AB'04

Red Red Meat: A rare treat

It’s true that red meat can help make you healthy, but Red Red Meat can do something more: it can cure a stern case of the Mondays. At least, that’s what the bluesy alt-rock band did for me and a few hundred others this past Monday at a free concert in Millennium Park.

The concert was soothing and entertaining, but it was also significant for another reason—it was the last chance to see the group play. Bandleader Tim Rutili had recently said that they would be “retiring” after Monday’s show.

Red Red Meat perform in ChicagoWell, make that re-retiring. Red Red Meat released its first single in 1991, and its last album came out 1997, before the quartet went its separate ways. Although the Chicago-based band hasn’t produced new material in more than a decade, interest in the group recently grew after its primary record label, the influential Sub Pop Records, re-released a deluxe edition of its most critically-acclaimed effort, 1995’s Bunny Gets Paid, which had been out of print for years.

In support of that re-release, the band reunited to play a handful of shows culminating at Pritzker Pavilion on a clear, still Monday night. So why was I there? I wasn’t rocking out to Red Red Meat back when they were active, probably because by the time I hit double digits they had already broken up. No, I was there because of the band that came after Red Red Meat. Following the break-up a few band members, including Rutili, went on to found Califone, which, according to the blog Pitchfork Media, has “always been stupidly under appreciated, and the further we stumble into the 21st century, the more [its] music starts to feel both familiar and necessary.” I’m an enormous fan of Califone, and the chance to see a previous incarnation was enough to get me out to the park. That whole “free” thing didn’t hurt either.

Spectators dotted the grassy slope behind the half-full pavilion seats. Some brought wine; some brought full picnics. Others, strolling Michigan Avenue, heard the music and wandered in. It all created a vibe suited to Red Red Meat’s sound: sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, equal parts cohesive jam and scrappy, empty spaces.

Califone guitarist Jim Becker joined percussionist Ben Massarella, drummer Brian Deck, bassist Tim Hurley, and Rutili for a set that stretched just past one hour. And midway through the set, between songs, Deck quickly exited, returning moments later with his son, no more than six or seven years old. The boy took his position next to Massarella and his bag of noisemaking oddities, banging away for a few songs. His internal metronome, unmistakably on view in his gleeful head bobs, kept surprisingly good time. With a drumstick in one hand, the boy hit an extra floor tom, and used a shaker in the other, instantly establishing himself as the Coolest Little Kid Ever. The experience left me jealous of his inevitable rock-star status, relaxed after some great music, and ready for Tuesday.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Photo by John W. Iwanski

Serious inquiries only

When applying to college in 2006, I wrote one of my short-answer essays on how “serious” a school Chicago is. At the time, I didn’t really know what that meant, and I didn’t really know if it was true. Last week’s International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP) provided further evidence that the University of Chicago takes that “serious” descriptor very seriously.

Lars Peter HansenThe event, a conglomerate of the world’s foremost mathematical minds, focuses on programming for optimal decision-making. On the practical level, that means how much fuel a car’s internal computer decides to use at a given time or how an airline prices each seat. Last week was the symposium’s 20th incarnation—it takes place once every three years—and, in addition to Chicago Booth’s sponsorship, it has deep Hyde Park roots.

Advertised as the “60th Anniversary of the Zero-th Mathematical Programming Symposium,” the event celebrated the 1949 Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation meeting organized by University of Chicago researchers. Before that conference, few outside the military had heard of George Dantzig’s simplex method, an algorithm for solving linear-programming problems that allows for resource optimization.

Tjalling Koopmans, then a member of the University’s Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, planned that first meeting around Dantzig’s simplex method, bringing a group of 49 mathematicians, economists, and government workers to Hyde Park to discuss the algorithm’s implications. Most of the attendees had UChicago ties, and all five future Nobel laureates at the conference were associated with the University. Paul Samuelson, AB’35, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1970, presented on economic sustainability, while Herbert Simon, AB’36, PhD’43, the 1978 Nobel recipient, discussed technological change in a linear model.

Since then the ideas behind the symposium have remained mostly the same, focusing on optimization methodology, advances in the field, and applications across math, economics, and government. This year, Stephen P. Boyd of Stanford University was the week’s first plenary speaker, talking about Real-time Embedded Convex Optimization, while Berlin University’s Martin Skutella discussed network flows in Flows Over Time: Classical and More Recent Results.

I attended a talk by Lars Peter Hansen (shown above), the Homer J. Livingston distinguished service professor in economics, on Valuation in Dynamic Stochastic Economies, which examined long-range economic models. Again, I was reminded of my college entrance essay: as a humanities person, I’m not quite sure what “dynamic value decomposition” is, but I know it’s serious.

Jake Grubman, ’11

Through the Net

covering a women's soccer match online

It’s November 15, 2008, and Sean Ahmed, AB’06, and Emerald Gao, AB’08, are delirious.

The Maroon women’s soccer squad has just won a shootout against Calvin College in the second round of the NCAA D-III tournament. The broadcast team spent the whole game trying to be objective, but for a few moments unbiased analysis gives way to old-fashioned homerism.

“Emerald and I just began yelling and jumping up and down,” Ahmed said. “As objectively as we try to take things, when it came down to it and there was this incredible game we had just watched, and our team ultimately went through to the Sweet Sixteen, you couldn’t help but just be thrilled and really let out the fan in you.” He and Gao provide the voices of Chicago soccer as part of Go Maroons, a student-run group of announcers for the University’s soccer, basketball, baseball, and softball teams. Starting with last Tuesday’s men’s soccer game, Go Maroons is back for another year in the booth.

As the Maroon’s sports editor, Ahmed and two writers began Go Maroons in fall 2005, when production consisted of passing a lapel microphone back and forth in the athletics department break room, which overlooks Stagg Field. Mark Liskevych, AB’07, and Omar al-Ubaydli, AM’03, PhD’07, who covered international soccer for the newspaper, suggested broadcasting over the Internet to reach as many parents and other listeners as possible. With al-Ubaydli calling the play-by-play in his English accent and Liskevych—who now works for U.S. Soccer—on color commentary, Go Maroons quickly picked up, with parents listening from across the country.

Listen to a broadcast sample: "Chicago wins it in overtime against NYU" (38 seconds)

That year both soccer teams qualified for the postseason, and Chicago hosted the first four rounds of the women’s tournament. It was a perfect chance for the broadcasters, who had gotten comfortable with radio-style soccer commentary and open-source audio streaming by the end of the season.

Since then Go Maroons’ improved technology streams the games to more listeners. Using a cell phone connected to Skype, they can broadcast even without an Internet connection on site. Beginning last year, Jordan Holliday, ’11, and I have also blogged live during games when Internet is available, with readers posting questions and comments on the Maroon’s sports blog, MaroonCity.com.

There will always be rough patches with production, Ahmed says, like the time in 2006 when a deejay in Poland hacked the server and broadcast music on top of the broadcast. Unexpected dance tunes aside, Ahmed, now working for the Chicago Cubs, also calls Maroons games on the side. “We love doing it. There’s no other time we get to do it, we love the program as alums, and we’ve been treated to great, great soccer seasons in our time here.” Thanks to their work, anyone who can’t make the game can still share in the delirium.

Jake Grubman, ’11

To conserve and protect

Ann Lindsey

Trained in the art and science of preservation, Ann Lindsey became the University Library's head of conservation this past January. In prior positions at the Huntington (San Marino, California) and University of California, Berkeley, libraries, she gained experience in preservation issues related to library renovation and construction. That background suits her job at Chicago, where she will coordinate conservation efforts at the Regenstein until moving to new quarters in the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library in 2011.

Lindsey spends about half her time with sleeves rolled up, repairing fragile books from the Special Collections Research Center. I stopped by her workspace last week, and before our interview she quietly sewed together the pages of a tattered 18th-century English play. Outside we could hear the beep-beep of construction vehicles working on her future home, which will include a 6,000-square-foot preservation department.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you first become interested in book preservation?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI grew up in Austin, Texas, and there is a program there (at UT-Austin) for preservation and conservation. When I was an undergraduate I knew people in the program. Years later I ended up back in Austin and thought, ‘I really liked that stuff; I’m going to look into it.’ I plucked up my courage, went and visited, and totally fell in love. I said, ‘Whatever it takes for me to get into this program, I will do it.’

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was so intriguing?

QandA_ADrop.jpgWorking with your hands, the variety of materials. I love the history of technology and book preservation is a microcosm of that—of paper-making, ink and printing, pigments, cloth, and dyes. It appeals to me because it is an art and a craft, and at the same time there’s a lot of science that goes into it, a lot of chemistry.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAre you also interested in the content of the books?

Mansueto Library, under construction

QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s a conservation joke that you know you’ve become a conservator when you get shocked the day somebody points out that there are words in the books. But every aspect has some interest for me—including the words (laughter).

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat will be exciting about the new conservation lab in the Mansueto Library?

QandA_ADrop.jpgFor one thing, we’ll have more space. We are crammed in here now. We will have new equipment—a paper conservation sink, a drying rack, a suction table, a commercial freezer, and a fume hood—as well as increased security and a place to photo-document.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen the new library is finished, you’ll be responsible for conserving the country's largest on-campus university library collection. Does this keep you awake at night?

QandA_ADrop.jpgNo—I made my peace a long time ago with the fact that there’s more work than I can ever do, no matter where I am. The people who designed this building put a lot into planning it, and I think it’s going to be a really good environment for books, meaning the temperature, the humidity, and the things in place to deal with floods or water or fire.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you respond to people who say that the future of libraries is digital, and that it’s foolish to invest in the physical preservation of books?

QandA_ADrop.jpgWe are moving toward digital. If we were solely relying on conservation of the object here at Chicago, I would say, yes, we are definitely swimming against the stream; but we do have such a robust digitization project. What I would say about what we do is that there are times when you need to see the object, regardless of whether or not it’s online and how detailed you can get. Scholars want to see the object. So I think we will always be an arm of the library system, in addition to reformatting, digitization, binding, and Special Collections.

Elizabeth Station

Portrait of Ann Lindsey by Michael Kenny; construction site photo by Cheryl Rusnak.


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Oprah's block party

OprahStage.jpgAs a reporter, much of my job yesterday consisted of coming up with Oprah-related puns to begin this story. “Oprah-palooza.” Maybe something about “Chicag-O.” After seeing the final product Tuesday, anyone who was in downtown Chicago knows that this is truly the Winfrey City.

Get it? Anybody?

Oprah and fans packed onto Michigan Avenue rock-and-rolled all night (OK, part of the night) and partied all day for the premiere of the Chicago icon’s 24th season, probably the biggest block party this side of Obama’s election-night speech. Thousands turned out for the taping, held directly in front of the Magazine’s office at 401 N. Michigan. I swam out into the O-zone as far as I could yesterday afternoon, though by noon it was clear that I was about nine hours late to watch from the front row.

Mother Nature must TiVo The Oprah Winfrey Show, as the skies were sunny and the weather warm. I joined the crowd just in time for a sing-along with James Taylor, who played “How Sweet It Is” while the lyrics flashed across large video screens in the crowd.

OprahScreen.jpgToward Ohio Street, I saw several small groups of people practicing some kind of dance. I could tell these weren’t professional dancers, as their pants weren’t quite baggy enough, and their shoes weren’t quite fresh enough. No, these were just Oprah fans who knew people who knew people in the professional dance group that performed at the front of the crowd.

One woman said that there had been a small rehearsal on Monday but that she—and presumably hundreds of others—had just been recruited to dance to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” the night before. Those who had attended the rehearsal taught all of the newcomers the dance, and eventually it became the massive production that will air today.

Once Oprah actually made her way onstage a little after 5 p.m. and introduced the Black Eyed Peas for their performance, the dance worked perfectly. Watching from the corner office of the tenth floor, a number of my coworkers and I laughed at the lone dancer going crazy at the front of the crowd while everybody else stood still. Then the dance moved out to a few dozen people, then a few hundred more, and finally the entire group was moving in unison. I read this morning that the dance was supposed to be a surprise for Oprah, but who are we kidding? She probably choreographed it herself.

Afterward, Oprah called it “the coolest thing ever,” though I only had it in my top five for the coolest things ever. The entire event was one of the coolest Chicago has seen, if only for its magnitude: thousands of people crowded onto the city’s most famous street for a day of partying with Oprah and the Black Eyed Peas. Not bad for a daytime talk show.

Jake Grubman, '11

Photos by Dan Dry.

Market Madness: Yo-yos and Indifferences move on

Market Madness

Who fouled up the economy? Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson seeded the teams for our bracket. Was it the Chicago School? Investment banks? Consumers? As part of the University of Chicago Magazine's special issue on the economy, you can vote on each matchup to help determine who, or what, ultimately caused the deepest downturn since the Depression. The chosen culprit will be announced October 5.

The results from the first two rounds are in and voters picked the Yo-yos (68 percent) over the Distavores and the Indifferences (83 percent) trounced the PROGS. Sign-in and vote on today's matchup between the Moral Hazards and Feeding Frenzies. Participation enters you to win a free lunch on us. Check back at the Market Madness site weekdays at noon to see results and vote on the next matchup.


Sanderson, who—like a majority of our voters—picked the Yo-yos and Indifferences to move on, explains his choices:

sanderson-headshot.jpg Region I: Washington, DC

Yo-yos v. Distavores

The Yo-yos of the Federal Reserve trounce the Distovores. While there are certainly international aspects to the crisis (or crises), this one is pretty much “Made in the U.S.A.” and when things go south, pointing a finger at the Fed is usually a safe bet.

Indifferences v. PROGS

Although the Obama administration can certainly be blamed—and will be—for using a crisis to further its political agendas, which may well lead to an inflationary period and slower long-term economic growth, the recession began on W’s watch, and the Indifferences get the win here.

Dueling on the quad

Dueling on the quad

If you wandered through campus anytime in the past few months, you’ve probably noticed a flurry of activity that roused the quads out of their usual summer stillness—the beeping and rumbling of construction trucks, the chatter of students strolling to summer classes, an admissions tour guide barking out information to a group of nervous applicants. But wait—was that sword fighting that I just heard in Bartlett Quad?

About a dozen members of the University’s coed fencing club took to the concrete footpaths this summer between the Reg and Bartlett Dining Hall to stay in shape, fine-tune their form, and…beat the heat?

If choosing to head outdoors into the Chicago summer, dressed in the thick white fencing jackets and masks, seems a bit counterintuitive, just ask co-captain Jeremy Kane, ’11. “It’s just too hot in Henry Crown during the summer,” Kane said, referring to the poorly ventilated old fieldhouse that the team uses for its practice space during the school year.

And why not? The team was looking to work on new tricks to take into their fall training. There are about 30 members of the fencing club, while 24 members split evenly among the men and women make it onto the competition squad. The walkways that crisscross the quad substitute perfectly for the long, narrow mats the team usually practices on and allows them to enjoy the grassy campus and blue skies.

Not that the team’s decision to move outside was without its awkward moments. “We definitely got some weird looks,” said team member Krista Nicoletto. Kane shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we got heckled by some football players too,” he remembered. The team has mostly concluded its sessions outdoors as the remaining weeks of the summer dwindle by.

In general, the dueling and lunging was not too much of an inconvenience for people passing through, though I was reminded of a past sports-related scare on the same quad. In previous spring quarters, I have had to frantically duck to miss a cricket ball that whizzed over my head while walking by the Reg. A group of cricket players had decided that Bartlett Quad was the ideal place to set up their sprawling game, despite the dangerously close range passersby would be to their bats and balls.

I mentioned this to Kane, and his face instantly became animated. So quick to defend his team that he almost lunged at me like I was an opponent in a duel. “No way! We’re not as bad as those cricket players!” he said, looking down at his fancy blue fencing shoes and twirling his foil sword, “I mean, we’re just way cooler than they are, right?”

Luke Fiedler, '10

Matthias Jamison-Koenig, AB'09, and Isadora Blachman-Biatch, '11, square off during a recent summer training session on Bartlett Quad.

Market Madness: Moral Hazards and Excesses move on

Market Madness

Who fouled up the economy? Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson seeded the teams for our bracket. Was it the Chicago School? Investment banks? Consumers? As part of the University of Chicago Magazine's special issue on the economy, you can vote on each matchup to help determine who, or what, ultimately caused the deepest downturn since the Depression. The chosen culprit will be announced October 5.

The latest results are in and voters picked the Moral Hazards (77 percent) over the Feeding Frenzies and the Excesses (56 percent) beat the Bailouts. Sign in and vote on today's matchup between the Foreclosures and Malthusians. Participation enters you to win a free lunch on us. Check back at the Market Madness site weekdays at noon to see results and vote on the next matchup.


To date, all of Sanderson's picks (made in advance of the bracket's launch) match the public's vote. Picking the Moral Hazards and Excesses to move on, Sanderson explains his choices:

sanderson-headshot.jpg Region 2: Wall Street

Moral Hazards v. Feeding Frenzies

It’s easy, and not always misplaced, to blame the Media. But this one is a real miss-match and the Moral Hazards are simply stronger at every—pun intended—offensive position. The Feeding Frenzies can only watch and marvel at the sheer talent displayed by their opponents.

Excesses v. Bailouts

This is one of the more evenly-matched first-round contests. But in the end the Excesses eke out a victory on the basis a deeper bench; rather than depending on a declining, one-dimensional “auto”matic game plan featured by the Bailouts, the Wall Street team can beat you in so many ways.

Market Madness: Big MACs and Foreclosures move on

Market Madness

Who fouled up the economy? Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson seeded the teams for our bracket. Was it the Chicago School? Investment banks? Consumers? As part of the University of Chicago Magazine's special issue on the economy, you can vote on each matchup to help determine who, or what, ultimately caused the deepest downturn since the Depression. The chosen culprit will be announced October 5.

The latest results are in and voters picked the Big MACs (78 percent) over the Stuff Happens, and the Foreclosures (70 percent) beat the Malthusians. Sign in and vote on today's matchup between the Invisible Hands and Watchdogs. Participation enters you to win a free lunch on us. Check back at the Market Madness site weekdays at noon to see results and vote on the next matchup.


To date, all of Sanderson's picks (made in advance of the bracket's launch) match the public's vote. Picking the Big MACs and Foreclosures to move on, Sanderson explains his choices:

sanderson-headshot.jpg Region 3: Main Street

Big MACs v. Stuff Happens

Business cycles are indeed recurring events, but this one, in terms of duration and depth, is significantly different from recent experiences, and the Big MACs are more responsible this time around than the run-of-the-mill Stuff Happens squad.

Foreclosures v. Malthusians

Another mismatch. Although the demographic consequences are strong, the Malthusians are a few years and a few decisions away from advancing as the Cinderella team. The Foreclosures were on top of their game from day one, are relentless, and continue to wreak havoc at every turn.

Lights, camera, manuscript

Photoshoot set-up

Beneath tall, blazing lights that might illuminate a big-city fashion shoot, Manuscript 129 waits patiently for its close-up. Surrounded by velvety black curtains, in a dark corner of the Regenstein Library’s preservation department, photographer Michael Kenny sets up the shot. The compact, fragile volume—commonly known as the Nicolaus Gospels—still looks gorgeous, though its original provenance is 12th-century Greece.

Page by delicate page, Kenny photographs the manuscript with a digital camera, sending each image to a nearby PC. After a minute or so, he watches the scanned reproduction appear on his monitor. The quality of the 600-dpi image is sharp; zooming in, he can make the type even larger and clearer than the original. But photographing medieval texts is slow work, says Kenny: “Twenty-five or 30 pages is a good day.”

His efforts are part of an ongoing project to digitize the Edgar J. Goodspeed Manuscript Collection, a set of 68 New Testament manuscripts and 114 papyrus fragments that range from the fifth to the 19th centuries. “It’s a spectacular resource,” says Ann Lindsey, the library’s head of conservation who, with reformatting librarian Kathleen Arthur, advises Kenny on how to photograph the pieces without hurting them. Each page is exposed for just a few minutes under the lights, which have low-heat, low-UV bulbs.

When the work is complete, the Goodspeed Collection will include 21,600 high-quality, zoomable page images. Scholars around the world (or anyone, for that matter) can already consult the digitized half of the collection, using an interface that allows them to browse within individual manuscripts and across the collection.

The technology would have astounded and delighted Goodspeed, PhD 1898, a professor of Greek who, beginning in 1923, chaired the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Arguing that humanities scholars needed unpublished source material just as natural scientists needed laboratories, Goodspeed spent years combing Europe for original manuscripts. His goal was to “make the manuscripts now in the University’s possession more useful to the departments to which they relate ... [and] make the most of what we have.”

In their quiet corner of the Reg, Kenny and his colleagues are doing just that.

Elizabeth Station

Back cover of the Rockefeller-McCormick New Testament
Goodspeed Manuscript Collection, Ms. 965, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library


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Chicago’s DC debut

20090911_chicago_contributes2.jpg Good timing may be an understatement. When the University planned a September 10 event in Washington focusing on health care and education, administrators had no idea it would be the same week President Obama would give two hot-button speeches, one to kids about staying in school, the other to Congress about passing health-care reform.

Coming the day after Obama’s televised health-care address, Chicago’s program, called Chicago Contributes, opened with President Robert J. Zimmer introducing keynote speaker Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services. Sebelius asked the hundreds of University alumni, faculty, and other friends gathered in the soaring, columned Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium to participate “not only in the legislative debate” but also to use their “intellects” and experience as health-care professionals, educators, policy makers, or otherwise to share smart ideas.

After Sebelius spoke, Michele Norris, host of NPR’s All Things Considered, continued the conversation, moderating a panel of five health-care experts including Eric Whitaker, MD’93, an executive vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center. The University’s Urban Health Initiative, which Whitaker leads, takes a “public-health focus,” he said, partnering with nearby health-care facilities to get South Side residents the care they need as well as sponsoring local farmers markets to provide fresh fruits and vegetables in urban “food deserts,” where few stores offer healthy options.

20090911_chicago_contributes5.jpgPanelist Gerard Clancy, president of the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, and dean of its School of Community Medicine, noted that more insured citizens will require more physicians and nurses to care for them. Kavita Patel, director of policy for the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, added that to attract more students to medicine, the country has to forgive more loans and also “reform our perverse payment system,” currently based on medical tests administered, to “a community-based system, so doctors take care of people, not administrative details.”

“The incentives now are all wrong,” agreed Patrick Soon-Shiong, head of Abraxis Health and executive director of the UCLA Wireless Health Institute. “The incentive is to do more care, not better care.” Whitaker noted that Chicago’s Urban Health Initiative works not only with the Medical Center and Pritzker School of Medicine but also with the schools of public policy, social service administration, and business to approach public health. “We’re the fourth-leading provider of academic medicine,” he said. If Chicago teaches its students to “understand the importance of community medicine,” then those future teachers “will go into other academic centers and spread that knowledge.”

Later in the afternoon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, U-High’82—like Whitaker, a basketball buddy of Obama’s—gave the day’s second keynote. “Behind higher standards you have to have great data systems that tell you the truth,” Duncan said. He’s tapped John Q. Easton, PhD’81, former executive director of the University-based Consortium on Chicago School Research, to direct the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Easton told the crowd his goal is not only to publish reports and disseminate data but also to help teachers and administrators “understand how to use it.”

20090911_chicago_contributes7.jpgRay Suarez, AM’92, senior correspondent for PBS’s NewsHour, led a panel discussion on higher education’s role in improving urban schools. Charles Payne, the SSA's Frank P. Hixon professor, noted that many universities “that have tried to play a role have quickly found they didn’t know [as much as] they thought they did.” Timothy Knowles, who heads Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, referred to Lab Schools founder John Dewey, who “taught the world that children learn by doing.” Similarly, “if universities are to stay vital in education and K–12 improvement, we have to learn by doing.” For the UEI, that means training teachers and running four charter schools on Chicago’s South Side.

After the panels Washington lawyer Elliot Feldman, AB’69, noted that the University’s new ties to the federal government give the institution a distinct chance to participate in these national debates. “The University will never have another opportunity like this,” he said. “Its ties to the president, and his whole family, are so important. It’s a unique opportunity for the University to make itself felt in the world.”

That evening alumni and other guests returned to the auditorium for a jazz reception, where Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, AB’76, answered questions about policy and politics from the crowd, and told how he almost didn’t graduate with his class—because he hadn’t taken the dreaded swim test. A few hours before the deadline, he completed the five laps. Once again, good timing.

Amy Braverman Puma

The Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC was decked out in maroon and gold for Thursday’s ”Chicago Contributes” event; Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, presents the keynote speech; trustees David Booth (right) and Mary Lou Gorno (to his right) listen to Thursday's health care panel.
Photography by Dan Dry.

The unchosen ones

choose_me.jpg

The challenge: Come up with a name for the new online community (now known, rather colorlessly, as the University of Chicago Online Community): aka alumniandfriends.uchicago.edu. The grand prize: A University of Chicago alumni study trip to Iceland, India, or Spain. The contestants: UChicago alumni, family, and friends. The entries: More than 3,200.

The rules stated clearly that employees were not eligible, but several entered anyway. Perhaps these rule-breakers thought if they won, they would quit and start a new life in Iceland, India, or Spain. But none of their renegade suggestions made the top ten.

And now—drum roll, please—the shortlist, as chosen by the (also colorlessly named) Naming Committee:

  • Alumni & Friends
    Submitted by Alumni Board of Governors
  • Chicago Connect
    Submitted by Narong Silpathamtada, AB’96
  • Chicago Continuum
    Submitted by Susan Shin, AB’96
  • Connect Chicago
    Submitted by Marlo Del Percio, JD'08
  • World Chicago
    Submitted by Angel Ochoa, AB’08
  • Chicago Compass
    Submitted by Jeffrey Leeb, MBA’00
  • Chicago Connections
    Submitted by Rudolf Perina, AB’67 MBA’08
  • Chicago Exchange
    Submitted by Shariska Petersen, AB’08
  • UChicago Connect
    Submitted by Gregory Van Hyfte, AM’02
  • YouChicago
    Submitted by David Candland, AB’96

A distinguished list, to be sure. But let’s take a moment to contemplate the road not taken, and perhaps indulge in a bit of amateur psychology: What, for example, does it mean that someone thought the best possible name for the online community was Wrong Side of the Bed?

As expected from this crowd, there were plenty of learned/obscure suggestions, often supplied with background for the not-so-learned, such as Bensozia, "16th-century Italian dialect word that means ‘the good society’”; Confero, "which is Latin for 'to bring together, put together, collect' and likewise 'to discuss, debate, confer’”; and Clio, "muse of history, since alumni are connected through their collective experience of the University."

Equally expected, there were names that revealed (reveled in?) a certain bookish self-deprecation: Awkward Online, Nerds Haven, e-Dorks, iAwkward, Magna Geekia, MegaDorks, NerdSpace, Nerdvana, Talk Nerdy To Me, Ugly Duckling, and the activist-sounding WeAreNotWeird.org. There was also unresolved anger (I Blame You) and abiding loneliness (Marooned—a suggestion submitted by 22 different people).

Some names were cute, such as Lyceum Squirrelly, and so clever that they needed to be explained, like Ciao! "alternate characters in Chicago or UChicago."

Some explanations were so long that they trailed off mysteriously: "NetQuads would be a good name since ‘Net’ denotes being ‘online’ or ‘having to do with the internet,’ while the ‘Quads’ are known to be...” Known to be what? Square? Or “Chicago Rocks—where rocks can be used in many ways—as various acronyms such as Reconnect on Online Community with Knuckleheads and S...” Squares again? I guess we’ll never know.

There were addresses, but on a campus as sprawling as Chicago’s, which one to pick? Suggestions included 53rd & University, 57ellis, 57th & University, 57th & Woodlawn, 58th & Ellis, 58th & Greenwood, 59th & Ellis, and the metaphorical 57th & Counting and 57th & Net.

There were in-jokes like Dead Fun Society, DARKwithEVERYTHINGandFRIES, Off-Offline, and Shake Day Everyday, as well as in-jokes that were so in they were inexplicable: Binky and Dogs Eating Bicycles.

There were 1970s schlock-culture double-entendres—DeepQuote, AfterMaroon Delight—as well as a few more contemporary salacious suggestions: UC Hookup, CThrough, and where the only thing that goes down are the servers.

Interestingly—back to amateur psychology again—many suggestions seemed to conflate the business school with the entire University of Chicago. There were several Chicago Booth-based suggestions (Booth buddies, Boothanza, Boothorama, NetBooth) and names that might offend graduates of certain other departments and professional schools (Milton’s Hangout, The Free Market, Invisible Hands, Free Lunch, and the longer/shorter version of that, TANSTAAFL).

What does it mean that only Chicago Booth graduates seem susceptible to this kind of egocentricity? Hmmmmm.

There were the names of the famous: Barack, Bellow, Belushi, Dewey, Fermi, Goodspeed, Mikva, Stagg, and Harper, who also inspired Harper Valley, Harper’s Army, Harper’s Folly, Harpies, and Harpoons. (A quiz for alumni: which one of the above did NOT teach at the University of Chicago? If your answer was anything other than Belushi, please return your degree to 5801 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago 60637.)

There was the cynical (Donation House) and the blunt (I Want That Trip!).

There was one from someone who still seems confused about what his or her alma mater is called: u I c.

And then there was my personal favorite, Bookface. It didn’t even make the shortlist. It’s scholarly sounding yet also kind of smart-alecky, like the term What’s-his-face for someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

A younger, hipper colleague pointed out that while she liked the suggestions that played off existing names (Chitter, CobbWeb), how long would those names still be relevant? Hardly anyone uses the term World Wide Web anymore, and who remembers sites like Friendster? In which case UChicago’s online community is stuck forevermore with the equivalent of Maxbeta.

Not to bias the vote or anything.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

One fine Sunday

movein2009.jpg

Walking down Ellis Avenue to cover move-in day for incoming students, I saw the quintessential rite of passage in full swing. The street was lined with bumper-to-bumper cars transporting students, their families, and piles of luggage. A crowd had congregated outside the new South Campus Residence Hall. Student volunteers in lime-green T-shirts pushed bright orange carts up and down ramps.

Sporting jeans, a striped polo, and a ponytail—my best guess at what a 2009 college student would wear on such an occasion—I sat on a curb near the new dorm's entrance and tried to blend with the bustle. I listened to two students discuss European soccer and watched parents snap photos. Then a resident head announced that students would start heading to their rooms in groups of ten: “Only the students—no belongings, no parents—follow me.” After her son walked through the glass doors, one matter-of-fact mother said, “That’s it. I’m never going to see him again.”

The students filtered into SCRH, finding their rooms and reuniting with their parents. Up in Oakenwald House, animated banter had replaced the quiet conversation from outside. One student pulled clothes out of his suitcase while answering his mother’s questions:

“Can I make your bed?”
With a wry smile: “You can stay outside.”
From the doorway: “Are you sure I can’t help?”
“OK, fine.”

While listening to the exchanges I saw not a single tear, which surprised me at first, but then again, what was there to cry about? Perhaps one father put it best: “This is nice—a beautiful new dorm with a dining hall right next to it.”

Katherine Muhlenkamp

Photography by Dan Dry.


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Rising to the top

yeastnation1.jpg

They’ve done it again—maybe. Greg Kotis and Mark Hollman, the writers who won Tony Awards for Urinetown, a musical comedy about pay-per-use toilets, have delivered a new offering about another unlikely subject: the existential dilemmas of single-celled yeasts, one of earth’s first life forms.

Yeast Nation (The Triumph of Life) made its Midwest premiere September 23 at Chicago’s American Theatre Company. The story takes us back three billion years, when salt-eating yeasts (all named Jan) floated happily in the primordial soup. But trouble looms: as the yeasts consume too much, they multiply too quickly. That leads to scarcity, fear, power struggles, and a lot of singing and dancing.

Writer and lyricist Kotis, AB’88, says he chose the untimely theme because he wondered “how far back you can go and still tell a story.” Composer and lyricist Hollman, AB’85, added “mock opera pretensions” to the tale, which had a 1997 run in Juneau, Alaska. At a recent preview performance in Chicago, they huddled in the theater’s last row with director PJ Paparelli, scribbling notes when lines or gags didn’t work and guffawing appreciatively when they did.

Mostly, the show succeeds. Whether they are belting out ballads, stumbling across the stage, or delivering complex dialogue, the cast is superb, from the lead actors to the satirical Greek chorus. Simple costumes and staging bring the briny underworld to life—all it takes is neon-green rain ponchos, electric-pink Lycra, strobe lights, and lots of black nail polish. Some of the best songs have the most absurd lyrics, including a duet (“You’re Not the Yeast You Used to Be”) and the stirring act-one finale (featuring the lines “Stasis is our membrane/Stasis is our balm”).

Both in Urinetown and Yeast Nation, Kotis and Hollman artfully blend the cerebral and the mundane. Who else but University of Chicago graduates would rhyme “dreary” with “query,” “kill ya” with “cilia” and “that really blows” with “status quos?”

yeastnation2.jpg

Just days before the preview, the authors were rewriting songs, and there are still a few kinks to work out. The two-hour performance feels a tad long; perhaps the authors could pare down a production number or shorten a soliloquy. And while Kotis's script eschews overt pop-culture references, toward the play’s end, the characters’ preoccupation with romance—really, who cares about a yeast love triangle?—seems misplaced.

A focus on bigger questions (life, death, survival) is more warranted as we grapple with issues of scarcity and sustainability today. In the meantime, as one of the characters in Yeast Nation reminds us, “If science can’t save us, perhaps a piece of musical theater can.”

Yeast Nation runs through October 18 at the American Theatre Company, 1909 West Byron Street, Chicago.

Elizabeth Station

Photography by Michael Brosilow.


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Be curious—and comma conscious

movein-sm.jpg

Fall quarter begins tomorrow. Inspired by the College Programming Office's collection advice for the Class of 2013 from returning students, we asked alumni on Twitter and Facebook to share their wisdom. Here are some of their suggestions for first-years:

"Be endlessly, insatiably, gloriously curious forever."
Thomas Lee, AM'90 (@MindingGaps)

"Don't get behind on the reading."
Andrea Buford, AB'80

"Take classes outside your concentration. Often."
Kate Rockwood, AB'04 (@KateRockin)

"Make great friends, take the best and most advanced classes you can, get to know some professors and grad students, and don't be afraid to leave Hyde Park and check out other neighborhoods and events around the city."
Ryan McCarl, AB'08, AM'08

"Remember to sleep. You will actually get more done in your waking hours if you are rested."
Jay (@jayenbee)

"Take advantage of everything the University and Chicago have to offer: concerts, plays, clubs, museums, all of it. And don't forget the serial comma!"
Lesli Sagan, AB'85

Have a tip? Leave a comment and let us know.

First-year Luciana Steinart waits for the new south campus residence hall all to open on move-in day. See more pictures from move-in day on Flickr.
Photography by Dan Dry.

High hurdles

Taking the podium at the Gleacher Center last week, Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson apologized for his lingering fatigue from a recent trip to Japan. Once he began his lecture, “Chicago 2016: Bidding 'til Bankrupt?” Sanderson sounded most tired of inflated projections about the city’s potential financial benefit from the Olympics.

A February report, commissioned by the Chicago 2016 committee, predicted $22.5 billion in new economic activity if the city wins Friday’s International Olympic Committee vote. Otherwise impressed with Chicago’s bid committee, Sanderson leveled his strongest criticism at its willingness to present that estimate with a straight face. “It’s embarrassing,” he said. “They should be ashamed to shill in that way.”

For one thing, said Sanderson—a Journal of Sports Economics editorial board member—Olympic-related projects that exceed their projected costs actually would boost the “economic impact” in the committee’s formulation. An independent report issued last week put the potential net gain at $4.4 billion, citing much lower expectations for tourist spending, among other differences with the committee’s estimate. The report, by the Anderson Economic Group, sounded much more accurate to Sanderson, who said the bid committee's $22 billion projection is reasonable only "if they put a decimal point between the two 2s."

chicago2016.jpgSanderson is not against the Olympics in principle. “I’m not really pro or con," he said. "It’s sort of in the details,” which is where things tend to get sticky. The city's project cost overruns—he mentioned Millennium Park and the Dan Ryan reconstruction—have become a civic sport of their own. Combine that local “tradition” with the global impulse toward lavish spending on the Games, and the financial foundation seems less firm. After budgeting $4-5 billion for the 2004 Olympics, Athens ended up spending $14-18 billion, Sanderson said. London’s 2012 plans started at about the same level and have already surpassed $20 billion.

It satisfies the economist in Sanderson that Chicago’s plan would leave no “white elephants” standing as empty monuments to the Games. Washington Park’s Olympic Stadium and natatorium, for example, would be scaled down for local use. The Olympic Village, which houses athletes, would be developed along the lakefront on the near South Side and converted for retail and residential use. Private developers would have to invest in the area, though, to prevent it from becoming the taxpayers’ albatross. As an attraction itself, Sanderson said, the Olympic Village lacks appeal because “tourists will hardly come flocking to Chicago in 2017 to walk through a housing development where the athletes used to sleep.”

Even to Sanderson, economics alone do not define the Olympics. He sees potential intangible value, like many choices people make without hope of financial gain. Unlike London, Paris, or New York, he puts Chicago in the category of cities that truly could benefit from the Games, properly administered. As Friday’s vote approaches, Sanderson would wager on Chicago over its perceived chief rival, Rio de Janeiro—although he expected Paris to win the 2012 Games that went to London. (The voting process is an Olympic event of its own.) If Chicago wins the Olympics, and the city breaks even, “I’d say, ‘Great.’ It’s not an investment; it’s a block party.”

Jason Kelly


RELATED READING:

RELATED LINKS:

  • Video: Olympics expert John MacAloon, AM'74, PhD'80, supports bringing the games to Chicago.

Marooned in NYC

New York City's Phoenixphest party, held last Thursday at the nightclub Strata, lent a hint of geek-chic to Manhattan’s upscale Flatiron District. That is to say, there was some chic within each geek in attendance.

Phoenixphest 2009, New York City

In perhaps coincidental Chicago Maroon meta, dark red light bathed Strata’s entryway and front bar. The sound system blared the standard club fare of top-40 sprinkled with the occasional indie-esque Hot Chip or MGMT track. But cinching Phoenixphest NYC’s claim to party veracity was its ragtag remix of former Snell-Hitchcockers, Burton-Judson buds, and Shorelandians all grown up—and, why not, maybe some former Pierce and Woodward residents as well.

The beat of Phoenixphest NYC was decidedly down-tempo, as partygoers preferred mingling over mini-burgers, spring rolls, and open-bar bounty over showing off their Phoenix-phresh dance moves. But the alumni crowd ran the sartorial gambit—and perhaps the personality gambit as well—more diverse than the average boîte crew.

For starters, it should suffice to say that most Flatiron fetes don’t feature attendees sporting U of Chicago sweatshirts hobnobbing with others clad in Western business attire—or in vintage clothes with pink tights, for that matter. In any event, a conversation that opens with, “What was your College house?” generally is not a surefire icebreaker at most NYC clubs. At Phoenixphest, it was the ticket into witty conversation about Hyde Park memories, with a social doughnut soon forming around the cocktail table.

In fact, his College house itself was part of said bygone era for Sherrick Lewis, AB’09, who reminisced about his days in the now-closed Shoreland’s Hale House. Soon Betsy Block, AB’09, and Elizabeth Bellis, AB'03, a former B-J resident and RA in Shoreland’s Fallers House, joined in the banter.

The conversation came to a brief halt during a keynote address from NYC-area young-alumni chair Jen Glickel, AB’08. Although the acoustics were less than forgiving, her reminder to donate and volunteer should at least strike some sort of chord with young alumni.

After all, regardless of house affiliation or College major, the conversation eventually drifted toward topics uniting scientists, writers, and financiers alike: apartment searching, career networking, and the triumphs and tribulations of daily minutiae like subway lines, laundry drop-off, and grocery delivery.

Ah, New York living. Join the club, fellow Chicago alumni.

Anne Szustek, AB’03, AM’04

This “universe” really does revolve around him

turner-universe.jpg

“I am often asked to say some nice things about Mike Turner,” said his friend and collaborator Edward “Rocky” Kolb, the astronomy and astrophysics chair. “And I’m sick of it!” Such was the tone of “Michael Turner’s Universe,” the day-long celebration of the life and work of the Chicago astrophysicist, founder of particle cosmology, and noted wag. Turner was marking his 60th birthday—or, as handouts with the day’s agenda listed, 2 × 109 s. (Eh, close enough.)

Turner and Kolb wrote a 1994 book that is still the standard text on the early history of the universe, and it was the former who coined the term “dark energy” to describe the mysterious stuff that makes up the majority of our universe. An all-star team of presenters gave talks in his honor. Each was part scientific symposium, part tribute, and part roast. For example, Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories discussed Turner’s role in recognizing the dark energy's existence but joked, “He’s done almost nothing to illuminate the nature of dark energy, and now that he’s 60, he’s unlikely to in the future.”

Not every tribute was so cutting. Dennis Overbye, science reporter for the New York Times, came to thank the “eminently quotable” Turner for being available to explain in layman’s terms the astronomical discovery du jour. “On behalf of the New York Times and science journalists everywhere, thanks for making our lives a little easier and a lot more fun.” And Kolb, in a serious moment, compared Turner’s work with that of another Turner, Frederick Jackson Turner, the 19th-century historian who wrote about the American frontier. Kolb praised the younger Turner as an explorer of the scientific frontier of particle cosmology.

Turner occasionally delivered a witty riposte from his seat but took most of the ribbing in stride. During Chicago colleague Josh Frieman's introductory remarks, Turner jokingly asked if he would get a chance to rebut. Later that day, Freedman turned the tables by announcing that Turner would get a chance—at 6 a.m. Saturday morning. No word as to what kind of crowd he drew.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03


RELATED READING:

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Low on Monet

postersale.jpgAh, the first week of school. Along with trying to find that tricky room in Classics for Intro to Greek, students are still getting situated in their new digs. The photos of friends and family, the inspirational poster of a man at the top of a snow-capped mountain with “ACHIEVEMENT” stamped in all caps at the bottom, the colorful tapestry hanging over the desk—it’s all good, but there’s still room behind the bed for that perfect decoration.

The solution: the Reynolds Club's annual back-to-school poster sale. In the past, students pretty much bought only art prints, said the woman behind the counter, which was stocked with poster tack to dissuade students from poking holes in dorm walls. Monets are still a popular item, she said, “but now students buy everything.”

“Everything” consists of hundreds of large posters in the $8–$10 range, as well as smaller prints and $1 postcards. Did you become a Megan Fox fan after her recent stint as host of Saturday Night Live? Well you’re in luck: a scantily clad Fox revealing a Superman “S” was on display in multiple spots. Do you wake up in a cold sweat on Sunday nights wondering what’s going to happen with Chuck and Blair? Hang the Gossip Girl cast on your wall to watch over you while you sleep. For the spiritually inclined, the sale offered a selection of posters featuring the Dalai Lama’s nuggets of wisdom, like "We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves." And there was no shortage of famous artworks.

The friend I was with, a fourth-year English PhD student, pointed out the “Procrastinator’s Creed,” a list of rules by which all procrastinators should abide (starting tomorrow). “That’s perfect for you,” he said, before picking out the Gustave Doré drawing “Don Quixote in His Library” to hang in his new apartment.

The sale runs through tomorrow, October 2, from 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Market Madness recap

To: Market Madness Tournament Players & Bookies
From:   Allen R. Sanderson, Department of Economics
In re: The 16 Teams in Retrospect
Date: October 6, 2009

Dear Friends (or BFF—Best Former Friends),

Thanks to all of you who played Market Madness over the past few weeks. I hope you had some intellectual (aka University of Chicago) fun in the process and perhaps even learned something, or that it stirred some interest in you to read more about your least-favorite team or industry. It was fun for me to collaborate with the Magazine’s editor and her colleagues on this project.

In thinking about, and explaining, the discrepancies between alumni/friend voting and my own ex-ante completion of the brackets and explanations, I offer the following comments:

First, there is what I would call a sample selection bias. That is, I have no information on the “voting public” in this case. We know, for example, that gender differences exist in terms of political leanings, views about competitive versus cooperative behaviors, etc. Furthermore, students sort themselves into College majors that reflect, in part, their political and societal preferences. (At Chicago, about 59 percent of students take at least one economics class, and that experience may well influence their choices here.) Inasmuch as I/we did not sort by other factors, there is no way of knowing how representative—and representative of what—the tallies are.

In part, I am sure that the divergence of your picks from mine reflects the opinion of economists in general versus the general public—even a well-informed public. Whether the topic is gasoline prices, immigration, outsourcing, the level of U.S. foreign aid, tax policies, or international trade, economists simply think differently than the representative American about what constitutes the truth. (In addition, academic economists tend to be far less liberal than their social-scientist and humanities colleagues.)

We will have a good test of this assertion and observation in January 2010: the American Economic Association, the principal “parent company” for academic and real-world economists, holds its annual meeting—around 8,000 members attend, this year in Atlanta. The official in charge of putting together sessions and complementary activities was intrigued about our tournament and asked for the Magazine’s permission to reprint the brackets and my somewhat flip team descriptions in the conference program. So in the spring we should have good data from those professionals to compare with the voting patterns of University of Chicago alumni. We will get that AEA data for you later in 2010.

I would be willing to wager part of the University’s endowment that most economists, picking from the 16 original factors given in Market Madness, would have the Moral Hazards pitted against the Foreclosures in the final game.

Sincerely,
Allen Sanderson

500—and counting

This morning the University of Chicago held its 500th convocation ceremony. What’s that—UChicago is 127 years older than Harvard? Sadly, no. Since its founding in 1891, Chicago has held a graduation ceremony four times a year, at the end of each academic quarter, plus special convocations for occasions such as presidential inaugurations, when the University awards honorary degrees. Therefore—according to the same brand of creative accounting that allows Chicago to claim Bertrand Russell among its Nobel laureates—the University has achieved 500 ceremonies, not ceremonies for 500 years.

Curious about the convocation tradition, I visited Andrew Hannah, the registrar. Hannah showed me a breakdown of all University graduates going back to spring 1893, the first time degrees were given out. Suddenly the University of Chicago didn’t seem like such an exclusive club: how exclusive can it be when 232,127 memberships have been extended? (More creative accounting: the 1893 ceremony was actually the third convocation. At the first two, in 1891 and 1892, there were speakers but no graduates. If you don’t count those events, though, we’re only at 498.)

Convocations at the fledgling University were tiny, as you would imagine. At the 1893 ceremony 34 degrees were awarded: one doctorate (awarded first, to make the point that this was a graduate institution, not just another garden-variety Baptist college), four masters degrees, 14 divinity, and 15 baccalaureate.

UChicagoMedallion.jpgOf course, the numbers picked up quickly. By 1896–97 there were 205 grads, and the figure roughly doubled every ten years: 538 grads in 1906–07, 944 in 1916–17, and 1,697 in 1926–27. It stayed in the upper thousands—with the exception of a dip during World War II—until 1946–47, when returning GIs swelled the ranks to 2,269.

The hard figures clearly show the “small College” years: in spring 1965 the University awarded more master’s degrees than bachelor’s degrees, not even counting all the MBAs. The trend lasted until spring 1979, when ABs narrowly pulled ahead, beating the AMs 397–394. For the past 20 years, the AB number has been on the increase, cracking into the thousands for the first time in spring 2007. Last spring the University unleashed 1,097 freshly minted bachelor’s degrees upon the world.

Which brings me to another question: Why does UChicago make such a point of calling its degrees AB and AM? Yes, yes, I know, it’s Latin, Artium baccalaureus, got it. But if I think back to my creaky high-school Latin (Hi, Mrs. Zachry!), it is not a language—unlike German, for example—that puts much emphasis on word order. Why does the adjective have to follow the noun?

So I called over to the classics department to ask if anyone would humor me by answering a very basic Latin question. They not only humored me, they put me on speakerphone. “In basic prose composition, the convention is that the adjective follows the noun it modifies,” explained lecturer Jessica Seidman, AM’08. “In a longer work, you would have more variation in word order. But in a two-word type of situation, you would usually go with the canonical form.”

“College degrees came much later than classical times, but there was a long Latin tradition that lasted up until a century ago, and the AB word order would be part of that tradition,” added lecturer Alex Lee. “Having said that”—CAUTION: heresy alert—“grammatically speaking, it is not a violation to write BA.”

“Alas,” says University archivist Daniel Meyer, AM’75, PhD’94, today the language on the degrees is English. Originally the entire degree was written in Latin, including the graduate and faculty names. For example, on the doctoral certificate for Edith Abbott, PhD 1905, cofounder of the School of Social Service Administration, she is addressed in accusative case (Editham), and the signatures of University officials also appear in Latinate form: Guilielmus Raineius Harper, Martinus Antonius Ryerson, Henricus Pratt Judson. Another bygone characteristic: the degrees were printed on parchment.

At some point the language was changed to the vernacular and the medium to paper, but neither Meyer nor Hannah seems to know when. I considered e-mailing John Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, dean of the College, who has written 14 monographs on University history, but didn’t. Early in the academic year, surely he must be attending to more pressing matters.

So I’m left with as many questions as I had when I started, but different ones. For example: Why does Columbia University’s undergraduate college continue to print its diplomas in Latin (“The only thing I could read was my name,” says my cubicle neighbor and Columbia alumna, Katherine Muhlenkamp) yet call the degree a BA? Why does no one at UChicago seem to know or care why the degrees are no longer in Latin, but when Harvard changed to English in 1961, 4,000 furious Harvard students took to the streets in the Diploma Riots?

Finally, why are some degrees still in Latin at all? While searching for institutions that award Latin degrees, I come across this Internet plea: “Please translate this Latin diploma from Howard University! The secretary’s office at Howard University is...less than helpful. They print their diplomas in Latin and won’t give you a translation unless the graduate fills out a form. My boss and I don’t need an authorized, sealed translated diploma; we just need something in English so Immigration doesn’t get mad, and we need it ASAP.”

Is there really some additional cachet to the fact that degree recipients—classics graduates excepted—can’t read their own diplomas? Surely it makes one feel less educated, not more. After all, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. If you don’t know what it means, look it up on Wikipedia.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Global problem, global response

WeighingDay.jpgPeter Singer cut the rhetorical ribbon for the University’s new Global Health Initiative (GHI) with a daunting litany: each year 15–17 million people in the developing world die from infectious diseases—malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS being “the big three.” Then there are the “silent killers of children”—pneumonia and diarrhea. “Behind that, lurking like Jack the Ripper in the alley,” is malnutrition in children from birth to age 2.

The stark reality of so much suffering sounded as if it demanded not only action, but also an action hero. Enter GHI director Olufunmilayo Olopade. Or, as Singer called her, “the Arnold Schwarzenegger of global health.”

As Chicago’s associate dean of global health, Olopade has no special effects at her disposal—and the initiative’s agenda makes California’s budget issues seem trivial by comparison—but she and her colleagues do not lack for ambition. “We want to be working on the biggest problems of our time,” said Donald Levy, vice president for research and national laboratories.

Under the sprawling umbrella of “global health,” the problems are so big that the term itself remains open to interpretation. “There is no widely agreed-to definition,” said Singer, director of the University of Toronto’s McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health and a former fellow at Chicago’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

His September 30 lecture at the Knapp Center was a call to action on “the mother of all ethical challenges.” The nature of that challenge struck him when he worked on end-of-life care. It might take “$100 to save a baby’s life from cholera in Bangladesh,” he said, “but we spend $100,000-plus to extend life a couple weeks in Toronto.”

To Singer, such a disparity reflects the mission at the heart of global health—fostering a sense of shared humanity across continents. “The more important value even than equity is the issue of solidarity,” Singer said. “Until we feel a sense of moral linkage between my daughter in Canada and a farmer’s daughter in Uganda, these inequities won’t matter.”

That is, they will not spark the sense of urgency necessary to match the depth of the need. Toward that end, the GHI’s 15-member interdisciplinary steering committee is charged with developing solutions from more than just a medical perspective. The committee includes Susan Gzesh, AB’72, director of the Human Rights Program; anthropologist Kathleen D. Morrison; and Dali L. Yang, a political scientist who directs the Center for East Asian Studies.

Global health is not a discipline unto itself, Singer insisted, but a combination of many. “It’s about leveraging existing strengths and knowledge to help a much larger group of people. I want you to imagine unleashing that power of discovery against the problems in the developing world.”

Colleen Denny, a second-year student in the Pritzker School of Medicine, won the University's global-health photography contest with this image of Newborn Weighing Day at the Sagara Dispensary in Tanzania. The dispensary faces severe staff and supply shortages; its only medical attendant (Judith Deogracias, weighing the baby) has less training than a nurse, and the lack of an infant scale required the use of this tree-rigged harness. "But despite its difficulties, Tanzania has actually made vast strides forward in reducing infant mortality," Denny notes. "Community programs to educate mothers about the importance of vaccinations and regular check-ups have been noted successes, as evidenced by the number of waiting mothers in the photo."

New road to hoe

When word came down a few months ago that the 61st Street Community Garden was slated to be dismantled at the end of October, gardeners Mikael Karlstrom, AM'90, PhD’99, and his wife Beth Browning, AM’89, MSW’98, began planning to move to a different neighborhood. “The garden has been the greatest single factor keeping us in Hyde Park the past few years,” Karlsrom says. Longtime Hyde Parkers and University employees, he and Browning, along with their seven-year-old daughter, have kept a plot since 2006, growing tomatoes, raspberries, greens, peas, and beans. “There’s such a sense of connection with nature and community energy at the garden. Everyone’s holding onto some kind of hope that somehow this won’t happen.”

garden3.jpgThat hope is, admittedly, slim. The University owns the parcel on which the community garden’s 143 ten-by-ten-foot plots sit, and ten years ago when the place was vacant administrators invited a few community members to establish a garden. The agreement was always temporary, though, and the University has decided it needs the land back. Next spring, when construction begins next door on a new home for the Chicago Theological Seminary, the garden will be converted into a staging area for the project. On October 30 the garden will officially close, and two weeks after that the gardeners must move all their belongings off the lot.

The outcry from gardeners has been intense, and organizers Jack Spicer and Jamie Kalven, U-High'65, spent months trying to persuade the University to rethink its plans, to find an “elegant solution,” as Kalven calls it, that would spare the garden while allowing the construction to go forward. University officials offered to help the gardeners find a new location and move their topsoil, but they remained firm on their plans: no alternatives exist to closing the garden. Surrounded by three schools within a two-block radius and hemmed in by the University Press building, a University steam plant, and a busy Dorchester Avenue, the construction site offers few options, says Sonya Malunda, the University’s associate vice president for civic engagement. “We have a responsibility to make sure everyone is safe,” Malunda says, “whether they’re on site or nearby.”

Negotiations with the University are no longer active, Kalven says, though he, Spicer, and other gardeners still hope the place will be saved. In the meantime, Kalven, a journalist, last week began posting an online “live documentary” on the garden, featuring “The Garden Conversations,” two- to five-minute interviews with gardeners standing amid the verdant lushness of sunflowers, pole beans, tomato plants, corn stalks, peppers, and marigolds.

In the videos Debra Hammond, AM'90, MBA’95, describes how the garden helped temper her once-corporate existence: “It’s really changed me,” she says. “It teaches you about food, and it teaches you about yourself.” Marvin Hoffman and Rosellen Brown describe summers full of “garden meals” supplemented by the 61st Street farmer’s market, which along with Experimental Station next door to the east, forms a kind of "synergy," Hoffman says, with the garden. Leaning on a rake, retired Army veteran and first-time gardener Mike Slatton describes the bounty he shared with his Woodlawn neighbors: red cabbage, golden potatoes, sweet corn, watermelons, string beans, collards, kale, five varieties of tomatoes, and more. “I got three celery plants—big celery,” Slatton says. “I fed people celery all summer long.”

According to Kalven, one purpose of "The Garden Conversations" is to show how "the garden speaks in multiple voices" and articulate its meaning and value, not only to the gardeners, but to its neighbors, including the University. The videos are part of an ongoing effort, he says, “to describe and evoke what is unrelocatable about the garden, and what we’ve been nourished by all these years.”

Praising the work the gardeners have done, Malunda says she's sympathetic to their sorrow. But she hopes that in the end they'll take their trowels and trellises to another site. Gardeners say they can't "just pick this up and replicate it somewhere else,” Malunda says. “And I get that. But you also have vacant lots in the neighborhood that need community-building. What about them?”

Lydialyle Gibson

Photo by Patricia Evans.

Send in the clowns

Given the theme—laughter—of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, it seemed bold of the organizers to start the party on the U of C campus. Inviting a neuroscientist and a philosopher to give the opening lectures (and charging admission!) was equally audacious. As I scanned the crowd at Ida Noyes Hall last Saturday morning, the average age of audience members made me wonder if a giant fleet of Elderhostel buses had disembarked outside. Still, no one seemed the least bit worried about fun coming in to die.

laughter-humanities.jpg

Neurology professor Steven Small kicked off the festival with fair warning that he aimed “not to make you laugh, but to inform you about how laughter is mediated in the human brain.” He explained that laughter, “an exquisitely human phenomenon,” was also an anatomical reflex. Down the street in Fulton Recital Hall, philosopher Jonathan Lear dissected irony with the help of funny folks like Kierkegaard and Socrates. His goal was to explain irony’s basic structure and isolate what happens to us psychologically in the “ironic moment.”

Were there chuckles and appreciative nods? Sure. But no one really laughed out loud until the noontime session, “Deconstructing the Latke-Hamantash Debate,” in Mandel Hall. Following a brief history of the annual tradition, philosophy professor Ted Cohen emceed a mock version of the debate for the CHF audience. In full academic regalia, two presenters made their pitch. Opera expert Philip Gossett theorized about Verdi’s love of fruit pastries and showed how key passages in a newly analyzed manuscript of Rigoletto revealed the composer’s long passion for hamantaschen. Biologist James Shapiro (who showed his sense of humor with a 2007 journal article entitled “Bacteria are Small But Not Stupid” (pdf)) did a genomic analysis that proved the latke’s inferiority. The hamantash’s morphology, cortical development, and tasty “poppy-seed endoplasm” proved its intelligent design, Shapiro argued. Belly laughs followed.

Later in the day, audiences heard scholarly presentations on Molière’s comedic mission and the role of laughter in opera. The Chicago Humanities Festival—and the fun—will continue November 2–15 around the city.

Elizabeth Station

Heart of Glass

philip-glass.jpg

What is it about Philip Glass’s music that gives everything a hypnotic, monumental quality? With Glass, AB'56, on my iPod, even the morning commute feels epic. The rattle of the ‘L’ merges with the relentless, repetitive bass line; wires against the gray sky become a metaphor for human futility. Every person on the Red Line seems to brim with existential angst—especially me, with the soundtrack from The Hours blaring in my ears.

If you like Philip Glass, his music makes you want to throw yourself off a cliff—but in a good way. If you hate him, you want to throw him off the cliff. As a member of the former group, I was thrilled to nab a ticket to his sold-out performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art last week. And I had questions. What would he play during an evening of solo piano? Would he get jiggy with the artwork, like the Glass Ensemble used to do in the 1970s? Would the Chicago math and philosophy grad give a shout-out to his alma mater and former hometown?

Answers—like Glass’s thundering left hand—came fast and furious. Although last month he premiered an opera and released a new recording of his “Toltec” Symphony No. 7, the composer mined older material (the 1989 Metamorphoses and 1994–99 Etudes) for his one-hour MCA gig. Casually dressed in black pants and a gray button-down shirt, his demeanor was courteous and contained. He played with concentration but made no overt connection to the 300 people gathered in the small theater.

Which leads to another question: why, at 72, does Glass even bother to play live? Certainly not to showcase his virtuosity; introducing the second set, he joked, “I’ve composed 16 etudes, and I’ve learned ten of them.” Glass’s newer operas, film scores, symphonies, and chamber music are lush and lyrical, shattering early categorizations of his work as minimalist. The piano compositions, in contrast, seem spare and workmanlike.

Glass hinted at an explanation in a recent interview, arguing (like John Cage) that one of the principles of modernism is that “the audience completes the work of art, that a work of art has no independent existence; it’s a transaction.” For the performer, the encounter is necessary. And for the listener, there is something riveting about hearing a composer play his own work, regardless of the technique. When Glass trundles through Etude No. 2, we feel excitement and a sense of privilege, as when a master architect unrolls an old blueprint and guides us through the drawings, many years after the house is built.

Elizabeth Station

Photo courtesy Giorgio Constantine.

A sort of Homecoming

University of Chicago homecoming game, 2009

Okay, I’ll just come right out and admit it: I may have two degrees from the University of Chicago, but until Homecoming this past Saturday, I had never, ever been to a Maroons football game. But then again, I had never had six-year-old sons, who—in a triumph of nature over nurture—already know more about sports than I do.

“What’s the U of C, Division Six?” a friend of mine, a DePaul alumnus and former sports reporter, had asked when I told him about our weekend plans.

“Divison Three,” I corrected him snippily. “And founding members of the Big Ten.”

“Which actually has eleven teams,” he said. “And oddly, Chicago is still not one of them.”

Well, I didn’t know that either. I know what a touchdown is and what a first down is, and that’s about it. In fact, my ignorance of football was so deep and abiding that although I have lived in Hyde Park off and on since 1988, I could not even find the stadium entrance.

“Where are we going, Mommy?” one of the six-year-olds wanted to know.

“Why is this taking so long?” asked the other one.

“How are we supposed to get in?”

“Where’s the gate?”

“How did all those people get in?”

“Do we have to climb the fence?”

“We’re missing it! We’re missing it!”

“We’re never going to get in!”

For the record, fellow English majors, the entrance to the stadium is not on 55th Street. It is on 56th.

As usual, we were late in the first place, so by the time we arrived, it was the start of the second quarter. We walked along the bottom of the stands, looking for somewhere to sit, and—to my amazement—the stands were almost entirely full. True, they would hold perhaps 300 people, about as much seating as was provided for my high school's junior-varsity team, but still.

With just under 15 minutes to go in the first half, the Maroons were up 14-0. “The Maroons are good!” said six-year-old A. Later, apropos of nothing, he amended his opinion to “Whoever they’re playing must be really bad.” I explained that the opposing team was Denison (since I know as much about liberal-arts colleges as about Division III sports, I had to Google it to discover it was in Granville, Ohio). Six-year-old A, perhaps dreaming of Chicago’s storied Big Ten past, kept referring to them as Minnesota.

We ended up sitting crisscross applesauce at the bottom of the stands, just inside the fence. We could hardly see past the football players standing on the sidelines, so I watched the cheerleaders instead, which is what I mostly did at high-school football games anyway. I was hoping for some of the infamous University of Chicago cheers, which I had read about but never heard, such as:

Themistocles, Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War,
X squared, Y squared,
H2SO4.
Who for? What for?
Who we gonna yell for?
Go, Maroons!

Or perhaps:

Gimme the speed of light.....C
Gimme Planck's constant.....H
Gimme root negative one.....I
Gimme carbon.....C
Gimme the Bohr radius.....A
Gimme the gravitational constant.....G
Gimme the additive identity of a non-trivial group.....O
What's that spell?.....Chicago!

Sadly, no. The cheerleaders did some cool lifts and round-offs, but the cheers were nothing more original than “Maroon and white, all right all right, let me see you win tonight” and “First and ten, do it again, go fight win.”

By halftime the score was 17-0, despite a dramatic interception by Denison that gained 54 yards but no touchdown, and the six-year-olds were ready to leave. I managed, by offering a bribe of popcorn, to persuade them to stay for the halftime show, when 13 members of the original 1969 varsity football squad—the first varsity team since Robert Maynard Hutchins famously abolished football in 1939—were recognized.

The final score, as I discovered later by checking the athletics department’s Web site, was 38-7. I cut and pasted the headline “Maroons Celebrate Homecoming with a 38-7 Victory!” into the subject line of an e-mail to my sarcastic DePaul friend. “Over Denison,” I wrote, thinking that, as a Chicago native, he would have to be more up on Midwest colleges.

But to no avail. “Congratulations on a resounding victory over a college that you clearly just made up,” he wrote back, “to hide the fact that U of C doesn’t actually have a football team.”

Perhaps he's still bitter about the fact that DePaul—somewhat less famously—also abolished its football team in 1939.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Death row's new life

Lavi-1.jpgLara Lavi, X’82, is a new-media/entertainment-law attorney, singer-songwriter, CEO of WIDEawake Entertainment Group, and a self-described “Jewish soccer mom.” Her eclectic résumé includes a BA in wildlife biology and natural-resource policy from the University of Michigan; a law degree, with a focus on environmental law, from the University of Oregon; legal work for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe; and two solo albums, The Art of Living and Inside the Red Room.

In April, Lavi helped guide WIDEawake’s purchase of the infamous rap label Death Row Records and its back catalog, which includes recordings by Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to imagine anyone more different from Death Row’s enormous and terrifying founder, Suge Knight, who, according to legend, once dangled rapper Vanilla Ice off a hotel balcony to get him to sign over rights to the song “Ice Ice Baby.”

Lavi recently spoke to UChiBLOGo's Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93, by phone.


QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you like gangsta rap when it first came out?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNo. But I’ve grown to appreciate it, I will say that. Sort of.
No, I’m kidding. I appreciate all well-done forms of music. Am I the kind of person, demographically, that would gravitate towards gangsta rap? Probably not. I don’t think I should fool anybody or myself on that point.
People ask me all the time, what were you thinking? This is music that relates to gang violence, mistrust of the police, and misogyny. I have had to give this tremendous thought.
On a business level, this is an asset that is continually generating significant income. And on a substantive level, I’ve come to realize that a lot of this music in many ways is protest music. You have to peel back the swearing and understand that these guys were trying to find a way to align. They were trying to express the fact that they do not feel part of mainstream society. This was alternative socioeconomic folk music in some degree.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did your company end up acquiring Death Row?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI was recruited in 2005 to evaluate the viability of a new-breed entertainment company that cross-collateralized its divisions of music, film, production, and technology. About a year ago I got the green light to acquire a significant asset. And quite to my surprise, we publicly bid $18 million for Death Row and not a penny over that, and we were the winners.
Now in retrospect, I can see why people were reticent to acquire this asset. The books and records were in very poor order. But the biggest challenge has been trying to figure out a way to work with the artists, because they’re very hostile toward the brand at this point. They never got paid royalties under Suge Knight. He basically kept all the money, I guess. I still don’t really understand what he did.
Our practice is to pay royalties and have excellent relationships with artists. I could never live with myself if we were doing things that were disreputable. Amazingly, I thought the most difficult relationship was going to be with the Tupac Amaru Shakur estate, and as it turns out, it is our absolute best relationship. [Shakur, one of the best-selling hip-hop artists of all time, died in 1996 at age 25.] That’s 50 percent of our income.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAre there upcoming Tupac projects?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes. We’re entitled, as per the court documents, to 13 unreleased Tupac compositions. We’re going to put those out in June 2010. That’s the goal. And Afeni Shakur [Tupac’s mother] is trusting me with the creative control of it. I intend benchmark production value on All Eyez on Me, one of Tupac’s best-selling albums, which I think will make fans happy, because they’re looking for pure Tupac. We’re trying to honor Tupac and what he intended.
Tupac also wrote a screenplay for a film, Live 2 Tell, when he was in prison. I’m looking for ways that we can option that. The script is fabulous.

Lavi-2.jpg

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was your time at the University of Chicago like?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI loved the academic experience, absolutely loved it. I have very fond memories of my Chicago days. I realize now I was very privileged to take economics classes, which have helped me greatly in my business.
I was getting good grades, fulfilling all the requirements, but for financial reasons I had to drop out. I started working as a waitress at the Kingston Mines Blues Bar. By the time I was done, I was singing with [Chicago blues legend] Jimmy Johnson, who’s 80 now. He used to drive me home to Hyde Park on his way back to Harvey, and sing me blues licks and teach me blues inflection.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you end up working for an Indian tribe?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWith my science and environmental background, the obvious job if you want to stay pure—not end up on the polluters’ side—is to work for one of the tribes. So I ended up working for the Muckleshoot. I think I was making all of $18,000 a year.
Working for the tribe was a huge influence on me. I would periodically go to powwows, and spend time with elders. I ended up forming a group called the Songcatchers with a very dear friend of mine, Charles Neville, the saxophonist for the Neville Brothers. The group merged rock with full-on Indian powwow singing and drumming. That project toured all over the place, with Peter Gabriel and the Neville Brothers.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat kind of music do you like to listen to?
QandA_ADrop.jpgAnybody that knows me knows that I am a die-hard and absurdly neurotic Bruce Springsteen fan. I have no apologies. Bruce, if you’re out there, and you’re reading the University of Chicago alumni blog, I love you. I will always love you.

Pipe up

Rockefeller Chapel"We've got better bells than Notre Dame," Elizabeth Davenport, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, says, citing one reason Rockefeller gets more visitors each year. With the tower reopened after renovations last year, and increased arts programming, she expects 150,000 people to come through the chapel's doors this year, triple 2006's crowds.

If you haven't popped into Rockefeller since hearing the Aims of Education address as a first-year, here are some ways to make a virtual visit:

Rabbit is rich in metaphor

From the end of World War II until the summer of 1961, more than 3.5 million East Germans—20 percent of the population—fled the Soviet bloc nation. Their main escape path led from East to West Berlin. Something had to be done, the Soviets agreed, and that something began as a wire fence encircling West Berlin.

From fence to reinforced fence to concrete, the wall grew by 1980 to two massive fortifications, with a swath of barren land (aka the Death Zone) in between. Walls, armed guards, dogs, watchtowers, beds of nails, and other deterrents worked. Between 1961 and November 9, 1989, when the wall fell, only 5,000 East Germans attempted to escape.

That’s the human perspective. But a 2009 German-Polish documentary film, shown at International House last week as part of a three-day series marking the 20th anniversary of events that led to the end of the cold war, takes a rabbit’s-eye view.

Rabbit à la Berlin (in Polish, Królik po berlinsku) begins in the burned-out aftermath of post-war Berlin, as rabbits flock to makeshift gardens sown near Potsdamer Platz. Times are hard, but the gardens and the rabbits take it day by day. Years go by, and the rabbits wake one morning to the fence, to the wall, and then to the realization that they can't get out. But the basic necessities of life remain, and so the rabbits multiply. They believe the guards are there to protect them, and they are content. Until some aren’t. When they begin to burrow their way out, they become the hunted.

Through newsreel clips, we watch as the rabbits watch builders, guards, escapees, statesmen, tourists—and the wall itself—come and go. The archival and contemporary footage of the rabbits is equally revealing. But if Rabbit à la Berlin (up for a 2010 Academy Award nomination in the documentary short-subject category) follows the conventions of a nature documentary, its subject is human nature.

On the surface, the commentary is serene; underneath, hardly safe: “…for rabbits, this was almost like a zoo...” or “there would be individuals that would go against the herd….” The rabbits are not the only species still struggling to adjust to life after the wall.

Mary Ruth Yoe


"With Immediate Effect" The Events of 1989 Revisited
A film and discussion series reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the transitions in Central and Eastern Europe that marked the end of the cold war and altered the balance of power in the world. The Center for International Studies series was cosponsored by the International House Global Voices Program, Doc Films, and the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies.

Air Hubble

At an October 30 ceremony at Ratner Athletic Center, NASA astronaut John Grunsfeld, SM'84, PhD'88, returned the basketball used by Edwin Hubble, SB 1910, PhD 1917, and his teammates on the 1908-1909 Big Ten championship team. Grunsfeld had carried the ball aboard the space shuttle Atlantis on NASA’s final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Theresa Ebenhoeh, a development associate with the Physical Sciences Division, managed to get herself in this curious picture with Grunsfeld after the ceremony. Here’s how it came about, in her own words:

“John Grunsfeld was being interviewed by a writer for the Chicago Maroon while [Assistant Athletic Director] Dave Hilbert, Steve Koppes [of the News Office], and I were cleaning up. Dave had his camera, so when the interview was finished, I asked John if I could have my picture taken with him. He said yes, and went to the display case, unlocked it, and took the ball out. Dave shot a couple of pictures, and then he said, ‘Let’s do a jump ball!’”

The picture speaks for itself. (Ebenhoeh is the one on the left, without the mustache.)

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

Handsprings eternal

On Monday morning I bustled about my apartment, throwing gym clothes into a bag. “What’s going on?” asked my husband. “I’m going to gymnastics practice at the U of C.” Long pause: “OK…Be careful, Katie. You haven’t done gymnastics since you were 18.” A former gym rat who misses flipping, I had perused the Web site of the Gymnastics Club—an RSO that welcomes students, faculty, and staff—but never worked up the nerve to attend a practice. I decided it was time to take the plunge.

That evening I entered the gymnastics room in Lab’s Kovler Gym. It’s a cozy space packed with 80s-era gymnastics equipment: wooden balance beams, stiff uneven bars, a vaulting horse instead of the modern vaulting table. Settling onto a blue mat, I watched the club president, College third-year Joe Cacioppo, lead 11 male and female members through a warm-up of tuck jumps, stretches, bridges, and splits. Then Cacioppo, a former competitive gymnast and coach, announced the start of tumbling practice. With Bon Jovi blaring in the background, the gymnasts performed handstands, walkovers, and front and back handsprings up and down the yellow tumbling strip.

After tumbling, participants split up to work on different pieces of apparatus. Brian Callender, AB’97, AM’98, MD’04, an assistant professor of medicine who was a gymnast in high school and joined the club last year, breezed through a killer pommel-horse sequence of circles and flares, while Cacioppo whirled around the high bar, bending his knees to avoid the low ceiling. “I did that last year," said Callender, "hit the ceiling and sliced my knee."

The industrious atmosphere inspired me, albeit just a little. As I swung on the bars, the muscles in my stomach ached. Walking across the beam, I completed some of the basic dance moves from my old high-school routine. I decided to call it a day and wondered: how did I ever do this? “You can get it back,” Callender told me. “It just takes time.” Hey, why not? Maybe I’ll pack my gym bag more often.

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

Architectural digest

art-center_architects.jpg

Unveiling their design for the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts before an SRO crowd last Tuesday night, architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien showed off a building that will act as both University anchor and portal. Located at 60th Street and Ingleside Avenue, the $114 million building has a planned May 2010 groundbreaking and 2012 opening.

Along with practice rooms, classrooms, studios, and a shop shared by set designers and artists, the Logan Center will have lots of public spaces: three theaters, a gallery, a glass-walled penthouse performance space, and a ground-level cafe. Designed to become a South campus landmark, the building "will let people know that the University of Chicago has a deep commitment to the arts of the present," said Dan Logan, whose family committed a $35 million gift to support the center.

Students, faculty, alumni, and friends who couldn't make it to the Law School auditorium for the unveiling could watch via live Webcast as the architects walked through slides of the building and answered questions about their design. Here are a few architectural details:

What the principals wore
Tod's loose gray shirt resembled an artist's smock; Billie's blouse was tailored and green. Within minutes, they'd both pushed up their sleeves.

Conversational style
She stayed seated, advanced the slides, and wielded the laser-pointer. He jumped up, walked around, built boxes with his hands. Both got their points across.

Their marching orders
As told to the audience by the evening's emcee, Deputy Provost for the Arts Larry Norman: "First and foremost, an integrative arts center.... It had to be a very porous building. They were told, 'It's OK if the building has a front but it can't have a back.' You're going to see a building with a lot of entryways."

Their inspirations (global)

  • The skylit tower in New York City's Carnegie Hall where they had their home and studio (like the other artists who lived in the tower, they've been evicted to make room for programmatic space).
  • The American Folk Art Museum, which they designed and which was named one of 2001's best buildings. Wedged into a narrow slice of Manhattan real estate, it's also a tower, "with openings looking down from one place to the next," they explained, "where you know where you are and are curious to where a friend might be."

Their inspirations (local)

  • The Midwest. Tod: "We saw the project as a silo in a field."
  • The campus. The Indiana limestone of Chicago's English Gothic quads meets Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House brickwork in the limestone bars (4 feet x 4 inches x 4 inches) that will form the building's facade.

LEEDing question: How green is the building?
The center will achieve a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating. Contributing to the green factor:

  • Local materials
  • North-facing skylights (of double-glazed glass) reduce electricity consumption
  • Extensive green roofs
  • Two elevators (instead of the standard three) in the 11-story tower require less electricity--and promote taking the stairs

And the night's towering question
Is the center's tower taller than Rockefeller Chapel?

  • University Architect Steven Wisenthal gave the numbers: At its highest point, Rockefeller is 200 feet. The center's tower is 156 feet. Tod gave the reason: "I'd like to think we were respectful of Rockefeller Chapel, but if we had had the budget..."

After the slide show...
Architects and audience repaired to a lobby reception where renderings of the center were on display.

Mary Ruth Yoe

Smorgasborgia

borgia-1.jpg

It’s a rare occasion that either of us finds a reason to cross the state line into Indiana, but the promise of good Italian cooking proved incentive enough. Luckily, the Hoosier State is closer to Chicago than we’d remembered. After a quick, cheap train ride on the South Shore Line (a 28-minute journey from Hyde Park to Hammond, Indiana, costs less than $5), we found ourselves in the hospitable hands of Karen, AM’83, MBA’89, and Mike Jesso, the husband-and-wife team behind Café Borgia.

borgia-2.jpgThe Jessos had originally intended to open their café down the street from the Medici on 57th, naming their restaurant after the Italian Borgia family, historical rivals of the Medicis. When their Hyde Park plan fell through, they settled on a Lansing, Illinois, location instead and moved to nearby Munster in August 2007. But they kept the name. Ever the Chicago scholar, Karen had done her research on the Borgias, discovering that the family was known for its love of fine dining. She says her executive-chef husband even incorporated some Borgia family favorites into the modern Italian menu.

borgia-3.jpgThat menu led to some moments of agonizing indecision, as we wavered between prosciutto-wrapped mozzarella or mozzarella en carozza (essentially fancy mozzarella sticks) to start. We got both, each served in a pool of Chef Jesso’s tomato sauce—what Karen calls “a modern version” of the traditional sauces cooked for hours. The pesto sauce, which we tasted in the roasted red pepper pesto spread appetizer, is made from the basil plants the Jessos grow in small garden plots outside the restaurant—enough for a year's worth of pesto. Before the frost hits, they make 100 pounds of pesto, freezing it for winter.

By the time we got to our entrees—shrimp and seashells in a tomato-vodka sauce and rigatoni with smoked chicken—we were nearly stuffed. And the tiramisu summoned us with its ladyfingers, so we decided to take most of our pasta dishes home to save room for dessert, which also included the restaurant’s signature zucotto (chocolate cake filled with white-chocolate mousse and pistachios) and rice pudding. No surprise that we left with two heavy doggie bags.

For one of us, the leftovers were sadly never to be enjoyed. The victims of a surprise office refrigerator cleaning, the leftover rigatoni and smidgen of remaining zucotto most likely ended up in the trash or—the better option—were enjoyed by the person cleaning out the fridge. Another reason to make our way back to Borgia.

Elizabeth Chan and Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Photos by Dan Dry

Knit one, flash two

mittenbling.jpg

They knit; they crochet; they’re funny as hell. Sisters Kathleen, AB’84, and Sharon Kelly own Arcadia Knitting, a yarn shop in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Before launching the business in 2000, Kathy applied her Chicago economics degree as a marketing consultant and Sharon, in her own words, had “a series of crap-tastic jobs.” UChiBLOGo’s Elizabeth Station stopped by the store to fondle the latest yarns and hear all about the “data-bling mitten” (pdf pattern)—what the well-accessorized geek is wearing this winter.

QandA_QDrop.jpgTell me about the little mitten you’re wearing around your neck. Does it have a flash drive inside? How did the idea for this come about?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHARON: I’ve been working on the editing certificate at the Graham School of the University of Chicago. My very first professor, Susan Allan, always had two or three of these data sticks on, and she referred to them as ‘the data bling.’

QandA_QDrop.jpgSo she wore flash drives around her neck, but not with any knitwear?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHARON: Not with any knitwear, no. I was on the way home from class, thinking about the knitting and the bling, and wondering, ‘Is there a way to cute these things up?’ Because I see people walking into the shop all the time; they’ve got one or two flash drives on, they’ve got their work tag—the corporate tagging, if you will. I thought, ‘Is there any way to individualize that?’ Then I sat down and said, ‘I’m going to make a little mitten for this thing.’

QandA_QDrop.jpgWho are your clients at Arcadia Knitting?

QandA_ADrop.jpgKATHY: There are the new grandmothers who used to knit years ago, and started again when they got their first grandkids. Then there are the younger people who want to do something creative and think, ‘Not everything I own should be from The Gap.’ Knitting is also a way to meet people. Our clients are single and dating; they come in with their girlfriends, take classes, and do things together, and then they mate. They’re prepared to make the baby blanket, and then they have the baby and we don’t see them for eight years.

SHARON: I’ve actually seen that cut down to five.

maroon-yarn.jpg

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat about teenagers who knit?

QandA_ADrop.jpgKATHY: There have always been crafty girls.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAny men?

QandA_ADrop.jpgKATHY: Oh hell, yeah.

SHARON: There were four in yesterday. They’re looking for a mate or a partner, but they’re not necessarily looking for someone of the opposite gender.

KATHY: Knitting runs across sexual orientation. Even the tattoo artists are signaling, ‘I’m ready to mate, to pair up.’

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are you selling right now that you really like?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHARON: We have some fabulous yarns from Karabella. We have fabulous knitting bags and supplies from della Q. We have Jade Sapphire cashmere—100 percent Mongolian cashmere, the good stuff.

KATHY: Because cashmere supply is dicey. There’s a lot of mislabeling.

SHARON: There are also a lot of bad goats. Unhealthy goats.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow has the recession affected knitting?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHARON: I’m seeing a lot more people bring half-finished projects out of the closet. The record is 15 years. We found the sales slip.

Data_bling02.jpg

QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you learn anything practical in your college econ courses that help you run a business?

QandA_ADrop.jpgKATHY: You use the training every day. It’s the whole pushing-boundaries-and-always-testing-yourself thing. Oh, and being bossy. You can go out into the world and the world can present you with a lot of BS, but you’ve been taught to see through the BS.

SHARON: It wasn’t the degree in economics; it was that Core-class stuff of: ‘Here’s a subject, how do you study it?’ Watching her apply the University of Chicago approach to crochet and then spinning … [laughter]. She decides she’s going to conquer crochet, so she finds what are defined as, shall we say, the five core masterworks—the great books of crochet. So she sits down with the great works of crochet and her ball of yarn, reads a little from the beginning, middle, and end of each book; reads the index, cross-references, and makes her little program of study. And watching the piles of granny squares grow, I have to admit—

QandA_ADrop.jpgKATHY: That’s actually true.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWas it a good way to learn?

QandA_ADrop.jpgKATHY: Yeah, because the knowledge you gain when you realize that there is no one, standard granny-square pattern, that there are variations, then gives you the freedom when you practice the craft to do whatever the hell you want.

QandA_QDrop.jpgSo, granny squares as metaphor.

KATHY: Yes.


RELATED LINKS:

Will to sustain

090921.sustainability1.jpgWhen she became the University of Chicago’s first sustainability director in November 2008, Ilsa Flanagan discovered a quick path to the professional compost heap. “I’d tell people we should have an energy policy, and they’d say, ‘If you want to lose your job in the next two months, tell people that,’” Flanagan said. “They don’t like policies at the University of Chicago.”

Decentralized, opinionated Chicago might not like policies, but the energy generated from its interdisciplinary cross currents offers advantages. Flanagan’s previous employer, LaSalle Bank in Chicago, had a top-down structure both in its organizational chart and in its 45-story headquarters. The University's environment is different, and so its approach to sustainability must be as well.

Within the 211-acre Hyde Park campus, 30,000 people live and work in 260 buildings. From an environmental standpoint, “it’s all about the buildings,” Flanagan said at her November 12 Gleacher Center talk on “Sustainable Organizations: Building a Framework.” The impact of those facilities is so essential to campus sustainability that former Board of Trustees chair James S. Crown donated $2.5 million this year to study their greenhouse-gas emissions and energy use and to implement efficiency upgrades.

New facilities go through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)–certification process, but they do not simply follow the principles of sustainable design. The broader mandate is to make environmental practices a more—ahem—organic part of a building’s operation or a person’s daily routine. The Searle Chemistry Laboratory, for example, has a “green roof” that reduces the facility’s energy use. On an individual level, artists can conserve materials to reuse on multiple projects.

Flanagan engages academics such as economist Richard Thaler, author of Nudge, to brainstorm persuasive ways to frame the issue and subtle methods to change behavior. And behaviors have changed: Since her arrival last year the University has diverted 30 percent of its landfill waste into recycling. The word “recycle” itself has taken on an added meaning; it’s the name of the University’s new free bike-sharing program. Another initiative, SAGE (Sustainable Actions for a Greener Environment), enlists student ambassadors and others to educate people about sustainability practices.

With the range of issues she faces, Flanagan can use the help. Green construction, composting, light bulbs, double-sided printing—the subjects that cross her desk range from the big picture to the pixel. Then there are the product pitches, proof that the word “green” does not apply to environmental concerns alone. “I probably get two to three calls from vendors daily,” Flanagan noted, “saying, ‘I’ve got the best cubicle material, the best carpet, the best whatever.’

Determining what’s best for the University of Chicago remains an ongoing discussion, which she intends to continue until the idea of a sustainability director becomes an anachronism. “You want to work yourself out of a job,” Flanagan said—not that she would make that a policy.

Jason Kelly

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane

In style

subversive.jpg

“I did my job. It’s his byline, not mine. My colleagues will sympathize when I rail about this. This will make a great dinner-party story. Someday I’ll write a book.”

Channeling the workplace dramas of copy editors everywhere, Carol Fisher Saller wrote that book, titled The Subversive Copy Editor (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Saller, a senior manuscript editor at the press, is the person who (usually) patiently responds to the 3,000 questions submitted each year to the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual of Style’s (CMOS) Web site. The book was "the cumulative effect of reading a lot of anguished questions."

Never read the Q&A? Here’s an example. Note Saller's trademark wit, which, after reading 3,000 of these questions, the average person would be incapable of summoning:

Q: “The menu in our cafeteria shows that enchiladas are available ‘Tues.–Fri.’ However, when I ordered one on a Wednesday, I was informed that enchiladas are available on Tuesday and Friday, not Tuesday through Friday. When I informed the cafeteria manager that this was incorrect, she seemed shocked and refused to change the sign. Please help determine who is correct!”

A: “Although the sign was incorrect, I’m not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.”

The Subversive Copy Editor isn’t another style guide; rather, Saller has written a relationship manual for current and aspiring copy editors, offering suggestions for process and organization as well as how to deal successfully with editors and writers while turning out clean, well-styled prose.

I went to the Graham School last week to hear Saller discuss her book and her career. As the Magazine's proofreader for nearly a year-and-a-half, I was hoping to glean a few tips from the grammar guru herself. (You can imagine how daunting it is to be responsible for grammar and style in a magazine published by the same institution that publishes CMOS.) Despite a journalism degree and Catholic-school education filled with diagramming sentences and memorizing lists of prepositions, I’m still learning the trade—and I'm not alone. Around half of the attendees were fellow copy editors looking for wisdom. Several were hoping to one day wield the red pencil and wondered how to stand out during a recession that hasn't been kind to journalism. The master offered three suggestions for success:

  1. Read—but don’t focus on memorizing—style manuals.
    Chicago, MLA, and the Associated Press—which updates its guide annually—are good places to start. Don’t think you have to know all 861 pages of CMOS by heart; no one, not even Saller, does. But if you know the basic rules of grammar and the most common issues of style, and if you have a good feel for the type of information you can find in a style guide, you’ll be in good shape.
  2. Find a mentor to check your work.
    There will always be someone who has been editing longer than you have and who knows a few more CMOS rules than you do. She can help. And if you find yourself disagreeing with your editor about whether you need a comma after the word “because,” “fantasizing about your defense is a good learning process.”
  3. Read, read, read.
    “The best editors are good readers,” Saller noted, because voracious readers understand what makes good prose. And your reading list needn’t be limited to the style manuals of rule No. 1. Fiction, nonfiction, reference books, cookbooks, blogs, and even comic books count.

Before we headed home to curl up with our own well-worn copies of CMOS, an audience member wanted to know: why subversive?

“People in copyediting already know that you have to break the rules sometimes,” Saller said. “But it’s a dangerous idea to a lot of people.” Spend a few minutes reading the panicked questions submitted to the Q&A, and you’ll agree.

“Plus,” she added, “The Sensible Copy Editor probably wouldn’t sell as well.”

Elizabeth Chan

Fear and loathing in Mandel Hall

vaccine-crowd.jpgI’m not one of those people who thinks that vaccines are somehow worse than the disease. I’m all for vaccines. Tetanus, yellow fever, bubonic plague, hoof and mouth disease—if there’s a vaccine for it, Doc, I’ll take it. So when the University announced free H1N1 (“swine flu”) vaccinations last Friday, I was ready to bare my shoulder and take it like a man.

1:30: My comrade Katie Muhlenkamp also wanted to take advantage of the vaccine scene, so we met in the foyer of the Reynolds Club. I had expected a mob, but there didn’t appear to be many people at the vaccination clinic—a few dozen at most. We walked back towards Mandel Hall to join the line.

1:31: Our initial impressions were deceiving: the line went back through the entrance to Mandel. Still, I’d seen worse at the office picnic. We walked into the hall toward the end of the line. Then we noticed the scores of people quietly sitting in the rows. A student helper told us the wait was two hours. Two hours!? Katie had to go to a lecture at Pick Hall at 3:30, and I had plenty of other work to do, but I had to weigh that against my desire to be H1N1-free for the winter. Maybe it was like a restaurant, where they said the wait was half an hour but seated you in 12 minutes? We opted to give it a shot.

1:41: The many students sitting in neat rows in Mandel had brought laptops or other reading; neither of us had thought that far ahead. I started regurgitating everything I learned from BioSci 15106 (Plagues: Past and Present) as a fourth-year about influenza, live vs. inactivated vaccines, Guillain–Barré syndrome, and the vaccine industry. Katie nodded politely the entire time.

2:00: An announcement is made—no more people can join the line, and anyone who leaves now will not be readmitted. I brace myself for the sudden rush for the doors, like steerage-class passengers desperate to get off the Titanic, but everyone seems to take it in stride.

2:04: The “line” where we were waiting was actually a row of seats in Mandel. Every few minutes, another row would stand up to form an actual line and slowly shuffle toward the vaccination tables. At some point, I had an epiphany: measuring the rate at which each row stood up would allow me to estimate how long we had to wait for our vaccine. I announced my plan to Katie, who laughed and said, “You’re weird.”

2:06: We see our coworker Carrie Golus well ahead of us in line. She's probably all smug for having the foresight to get here early. I make a mental note to friend her on Facebook, then unfriend her to hurt her feelings. That’ll teach her.

2:13: The gap between rows is just under five minutes, meaning that we would get to stand up by 2:50 and then wait who knows how long to get our vaccines. If only my boss had bought me an iPhone, I could remain in contact with her and be so much more productive! (Hint, hint.)

2:28: Nuts to this. I had work to do and felt guilty about being out of the office for so long. I bade farewell to Katie, who soldiered on without me. But now I’m aiming to go to the make-up flu session this Friday. I can picture the syringe going into my deltoid now. Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

You read it here

In 2009 we tried some new things on our blog UChiBLOGo and kept things interesting in the pages of the Magazine. Some ideas played out more successfully than others. Here are some of 2009's highlights, by the numbers:

Five most popular magazine stories, online

  1. "Chicago Schooled"
    Michael Fitzgerald, AB’86, writes about how the visible hand of the recession has revitalized critics of the Chicago School of Economics.

  2. "Life under wraps" and "Meresamun: A life in layers"
    On display for nine decades, the coffin of a 2,800-year-old Egyptian mummy Meresamun has never been opened. But CT imagery peeled away paint, plaster, and linen to reveal the woman inside.

  3. "The Founders connect online"
    Leila Sales, AB'06, imagines how John D. Rockefeller and William Rainey Harper's relationship during the development of the University would have blossomed over Facebook.

  4. "Make no little quads"
    Jay Pridmore's look at how Chicago’s Hyde Park campus is undergoing its biggest building boom in a century was almost as popular as its complementary Flickr set of additional photos and images.

  5. "The fighter still remains"
    Cocaine and crack once consumed Mark Allen, AB’01, but now he battles his demons in the ring.

Five most popular blog entries

  1. "Unspeakably hilarious"
    Like us, even the editors over at Newsweek—who linked to this entry from their front page—couldn't get enough of linguistics expert Arika Okrent's (PhD'04) amusing list of made-up words.

  2. "Who is Dan Pawson?"
    Magazine copyeditor Elizabeth Chan's interview with Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Pawson, JD'06, includes plenty of charm—and zingers aimed at Law School faculty.

  3. "A presidential drugstore"
    Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93, takes a trip to Hyde Park's Walgreens to look at its transformation into Barack Obama Headquarters.

  4. "2B or not 2B? That's the question. 2B is the answer."
    After publishing a poem in the New Yorker, English PhD student Michael Robbins, AM'04, chatted with UChiBLOGo's editors about his poetic influences, following his sister to Chicago, and his current project intersecting Wu-Tang Clan and the twin towers.

  5. "Chicago gothic"
    Although it started as a last minute replacement blog entry, this behind-the-scenes look at the installation of artist J. Seward Johnson Jr.'s God Bless America (2005) outside the Magazine's office building downtown near Chicago Booth's Gleacher Center held its own among planned entries.

Snow-suited

Earlier this week Magazine photographers Lloyd DeGrane and Dan Dry snapped a few shots of students armored against a classic Chicago snowfall. Happy new year.

Some books bite

While doing research for the Nov-Dec/09 Lite of the Mind about fictional UChicagoans, I came across Chloe Neill's Some Girls Bite (2009), the first title in her Chicagoland Vampires series. I was intrigued—and evidently I wasn’t alone. Some Girls Bite is highly rated on both Amazon (4.5 stars) and Goodreads (4.21 stars).

some-girls-bite.jpgCould Merit, a University of Chicago grad-student-turned-vampire after a late-night attack on the main quad, be an interesting character? Could these novels be that vampiric something to fill the void until Joss Whedon decides to leave the Dollhouse and return to Sunnydale?

I couldn’t resist and finally bought the book, deciding to blog my verdict. But by the time the book arrived I had had time to think. I couldn't be an objective reviewer with all of my excitement. I have too much vampire baggage.

My back-up plan was simple: assign the review to the Magazine's pop-culture–savvy summer intern, Jake Grubman, '11. My instincts were wrong. Jake made it to page 120 before begging to cover something else. Anything else.

Magazine proofreader Elizabeth Chan, who read Stephanie Meyer's complete Twilight series, bailed me out. She offered to read Some Girls Bite and write a review. For four months the book gathered dust alongside her borrowed Season One DVDs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood. I understood her hesitation. I might be leery too if my only exposure to the world of the undead was limited to Twilight's sparkling vamps.

I snagged the book from her desk and gave it a shot over the holidays, a light distraction. It didn't disappoint, but the University of Chicago references are few, certainly not enough to merit spending time with Merit unless you have a thing for vampire lit.

While Some Girls Bite is a quick read (though not for Jake or Elizabeth), there’s better vampire stuff out there, even if the main character isn’t a former UChicagoan. Vampire-fiction fans know you can't beat Charlaine Harris' Sookie for sass and fun, Underworld's Selene for action, and Joss Whedon's Buffy Summers for complexity.

Maybe comparing Merit to those heroines is unfair. At a different point in my life, when my thinking was more in line with that of the Edward Cullen–obsessed crowd, I might have enjoyed this new addition to supernatural lore.

Joy Olivia Miller

How the sausage is made, part 1

carrie-interview-desk.jpgA few weeks ago, I interviewed three smart, charming third-graders—Shaniya, Jaleeia, and Daniel—for a brochure on the Urban Education Institute. I was hoping to hear the student perspective on STEP, a reading-assessment tool developed by UEI. It’s used at North Kenwood-Oakland Elementary, where my interviewees attend school, and as well as schools in New York, New Jersey, and Louisiana.

Shaniya, Jaleeia, and Daniel talked about how they felt when they achieved a new reading level (exhausted), what kind of books they liked to read (The Night of the Vampire Kitty and Bunnicula, among others), and what they wanted to be when they grew up (Shaniya and Jalieea wanted to work with animals; Daniel wanted to be a paleontologist).

My standard interview-ending question is, “Is there anything I forgot to ask you?” or “Is there anything else you would like to say?” With adults, it usually works pretty well. Here’s what happens when you put that question to third-graders.


QandA_QDrop.jpgAll right, anybody have anything else they want to say about the STEP assessment?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHANIYA AND JALEEIA: Yes.

QandA_QDrop.jpgShaniya, what were you going to say? One last thing to say.

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHANIYA: Compared to Daniel wanting to find out more about dinosaurs, just to let you know, whales back then had four legs. Can you find dolphin parts, if you end up being one of those [a paleontologist]?

DANIEL: Dolphin parts?

SHANIYA: Yes.

DANIEL: Dolphins weren’t around back then.

SHANIYA: Yes they were. They were walking.

DANIEL: They had flippers. They were sea creatures. They were just swimming around, and eating fish. And there was this big one that would walk on land, and it was bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would eat flesh.

QandA_QDrop.jpgJalieea, last thing?

QandA_ADrop.jpgJALIEEA: About that, did you know that whales used to have four fingers and walked like alligators? But something happened and they grew flippers all of a sudden. And even though they could breathe on land, they still need water to make their bodies moist because they could die without water. That’s why we need lotion––the humans.

QandA_QDrop.jpgOkay guys, I think we’re done, thank you so much for your time.

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHANIYA: This was great!

QandA_QDrop.jpgWas that fun? All right, I’m going to turn it off. What button do you think I need to press to turn it off?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSHANIYA: Stop?

QandA_QDrop.jpgAll right!

[End of interview.]

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

How the sausage is made, part 2: The good listener

Occasionally I have an entire interview professionally transcribed. It’s not something I do very often—only when the subject matter is technical or controversial or I’m really pressed for time.

I love the transcripts though, which read like plays written by someone who has never seen a play before. They expose how much of an illusion it is when someone comes off as articulate—how many sentence fragments, grammatical errors, and fillers contaminate the speech even of distinguished intellectuals. They’re also full of non sequiturs and—when done by me anyway—are completely one-sided.

For example, a few months ago I interviewed generous longtime donor Charles Jacobs, AB’53, JD’56. Of the 22-page, 10,000-word interview transcript, my contributions came to slightly more than 400 words. Here’s what would have happened if we had run just my side of the story (slightly abridged—sometimes even 400 words is too much).


QandA_QDrop.jpgI always make sure with lawyers, particularly, that I explain the tape recorder’s going on right now. So I thought what I would start with is your years with the Compass Players. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about that.

QandA_QDrop.jpgThat would be great.

QandA_QDrop.jpgThat would be great.

QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you miss it once you stopped doing it?

QandA_QDrop.jpgI’m just wondering if it influenced your law practice at all. Did you have a lot of time in the courtroom?

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow long were you there?

QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd is that when you went into real estate?

QandA_QDrop.jpgNot as much as I should be.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy is that?

QandA_QDrop.jpgI’m sorry?

QandA_QDrop.jpgYes, absolutely.

QandA_QDrop.jpgExcellent. How did you learn about medicine? How did you kind of get caught up in that if you hadn’t had any medical training?

QandA_QDrop.jpgSo are you still there?

QandA_QDrop.jpgI’m sorry. Suddenly it seemed very quiet on your end.

QandA_QDrop.jpgThat’s what I was driving at.

QandA_QDrop.jpgSo what was it like living in Hyde Park in the 1950s?

QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you remember a particularly influential book or favorite book of that period?

QandA_QDrop.jpgI understand. Do you remember a particular professor or an influential professor, a favorite professor?

QandA_QDrop.jpgI understand.

QandA_QDrop.jpg[Laughs.] You’ve been a hugely generous and longtime supporter of the College, and I wonder if you could explain what programs particularly appeal to you and why.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWow.

QandA_QDrop.jpgI don’t think that sounds naïve at all.

QandA_QDrop.jpgRight.

QandA_QDrop.jpgThat’s really interesting. That’s a really interesting approach. So what advice would you give to current College students based on your College experience and your life experience?

QandA_QDrop.jpg[Laughs.]

QandA_QDrop.jpgRight.

QandA_QDrop.jpgI wish I could do that.

QandA_QDrop.jpgI can’t claim to be, really.

QandA_QDrop.jpgThat’s amazing.

QandA_QDrop.jpgSo one last corollary question: how did you get interested in opera?

QandA_QDrop.jpgWell, that’s all my questions. Is there anything that you wish I had asked you?

QandA_QDrop.jpg[Laughs.]

QandA_QDrop.jpgYeah. I mean, maybe now is the time to write a memoir or something.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYeah, could be. Could very well be. And then as you say, these questions really haven’t been settled in the medical, you know, as far as….

[End of interview.]

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

How the sausage is made, part 3: Confessions of a traumatized graphic designer

On the last day of Kuviasungnerk, the College’s winter festival, students strip down to their underwear—or less—and run from Harper Library to Hull Gate (about a quarter of a mile). It’s a classic photo op, and both newspapers and TV stations cover it every year.

But the Polar Bear runners are, by definition, young students (if a professor has ever done it, we are unfortunately unaware) and the University of Chicago Magazine has to maintain a certain standard of decorum. That’s where graphic design comes in.

A former Magazine designer, who asked to remain anonymous out of her own sense of decorum, spoke about the fateful day in 2004 when she was given the Polar Bear Run assignment.


I was asked to hide the unmentionables using Photoshop®. I suppose I could have used digital pixilation, but I decided just to go with black boxes.

It raised all kinds of difficult aesthetic and ethical questions, though. Do I go with a dainty black box? In that case, what does that imply about the size of what I’m hiding? So in the end I decided to go with gratuitously large boxes.

If you look at the photos, they just look terrible. They look like a CIA document released under the Freedom of Information Act. It’s not done artfully at all.

And you know, graphic designers don’t have petite monitors. We have huge screens so we can see everything. It was definitely a case of NSFW (not safe for work), except that it was my work. I hope I’ll never have to do it again.

Ratner beach

%20beach-night2.jpgOur rivals down at Wash U might have six national championships between their men’s and women’s basketball teams, but no team in the UAA has a match for Beach Night.

The fifth annual beach night arrived last week, bringing with it a Ratner gym full of festive decorations, beach costumes (one guy went with the classic Hawaiian shirt and hiked-up khaki shorts, while a couple of girls splashed on as many brightly-colored layers as they could find), and the relief of a warm atmosphere on a cold 24-degree Friday evening.

Third-year Jordan Holliday and I were on the call to broadcast the Maroons’ doubleheader against NYU, and although we got several e-mails from listeners about the games’ action, the highlight of the night came from women’s coach Aaron Roussell’s father, Rick, who wrote in to say: “Please tell Aaron that he looks ready to move to Del Boca Vista Phase II. He could even go to dinner at 4:30 for the early-bird discount.” We read his message over the broadcast, but I’m not sure there’s anything we could have said to properly capture that green floral pattern.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your taste in shirts—Coach Roussell didn’t participate in the intermission costume contest, which featured both male and female students wearing mismatched beachwear who seemed to have forgotten that the bathing suit usually goes on before the short shorts. Personally, I was pulling for the house that collectively dressed up as an octopus; I think they would have had the $100 prize wrapped up if their whole cheering section weren’t inside the costume. The intermission also featured a limbo contest, but I graciously bowed out before the competition started—in the interest of fairness, of course.

Fun—and free Hawaiian pizza—was had by all, especially when both Chicago teams topped the Violets for their fourth straight Beach Night sweep.

I wouldn’t mind if every game were Beach Night; I wouldn’t go so far as to call it timeless, but my good friend Walt Whitman might disagree. Looking back, his “On the Beach at Night” was about 106 years ahead of its time: “Something there is/…Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter/Longer than sun, or any revolving satellite/Or the radiant brothers, the Maroons.”

That’s how it goes, right?

Jake Grubman, ’11

Photography by Camille van Horne, ’12.

The "Happy Games" that weren't

munich02.jpg“The official motto of the Munich Olympics was the Happy Games,” said Christopher Young, head of the German and Dutch department at the University of Cambridge, as he spoke to a small but rapt audience of social-sciences graduate students in Pick Hall. On a Friday afternoon in early December, students received a sneak preview of Young’s forthcoming book, The Munich Olympics 1972 and the Making of Modern Germany (University of California Press).

munich01.jpgYoung’s lecture—sponsored by the MAPSS program through the Earl and Esther Johnson Fund—focused on the years leading up to the ’72 Games and the stock that West German organizers had in hosting the event. According to Young, in the mid-1960s, the Federal Republic of Germany was at a crossroads. The country still faced the aftermath and stigma of World War II (e.g., the Auschwitz trials were underway in Frankfurt, revealing Nazi atrocities to the world). Nonetheless, West Germans viewed their present and future with optimism. They held high hopes for their country’s economic growth and forsook ideological struggle, as evidenced by a series of treaties between the FRG and the Soviet Union and talk of German reunification. This sunny, forward-looking climate facilitated Munich’s successful bid for the Olympics.

And “no other country took to the Games with the same zeal,” Young continued. Many West Germans had a passion for sport, and the country had much to gain from hosting the event. Eager to erase the enduring image of Hitler’s propaganda-laden 1936 Games in Berlin, the Munich organizers anticipated showing the world a rehabilitated and positive West Germany. And hosting the Games offered a tantalizing opportunity for economic growth; the 1956 Melbourne Olympics had proved an excellent investment for Australia as had the 1964 Tokyo Olympics for Japan.

In the end, the FRG’s intended themes of happiness and West German rehabilitation were shattered by the shocking murders of 11 Israeli Olympic delegation members by eight terrorists from the Palestinian group Black September. Today, a gray marble memorial to those who were massacred stands at the still-used site of the ’72 Games, Olympiapark München.

Four weeks after attending Young’s lecture, I visited Germany—which in 2009 celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—and traveled to Olympiapark, now a multipurpose sports, entertainment, and cultural complex. After taking the U-Bahn a few stops outside of Munich’s downtown, I walked inside the gates and admired the architecture—the sloping transparent roofs laced with steel supports are particularly striking. Munich residents jogged up and down Olympiaberg, a formation of yellow-green hills, and swam leisurely laps in the same pool where Mark Spitz won seven gold medals. Visitors snapped photos, stood quietly before the Israeli memorial, and peered at the handprints of musicians who have performed at the complex: Genesis, Carlos Santana, and Snoop Dogg among them. Reading the final competition results etched in stone, I thought about the Munich Olympic organizers and how the venue today expresses many of their aims as explained by Young—generating revenue, attracting tourism, standing as a symbol of a renewed, peaceful nation.

In 2010, Olympiapark seems a happy place.

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

Photography by David Muhlenkamp.

RELATED READING

A woman’s touch

Five years ago this week, the U.S. military announced that it was investigating reports that American soldiers had abused detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Soon after, 60 Minutes broadcast photos of the perpetrators in action. Several of the soldiers accused of torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners were women—a fact that riveted the New York-based artist and academic Coco Fusco.

cocofusco.jpgHoping “to figure out how it was that women had made it into the foreground of this story of torture in the 21st century,” Fusco began a series of creative projects. She spoke about her work last Friday in a campus talk titled “Torture, The Feminine Touch: Exploring Military Interrogation as Intercultural Performance.”

Women comprise 15 percent of the U.S. active-duty armed forces, Fusco found, but up to 35 percent of those engaged in policing and intelligence gathering. Digging further, she was “astonished” to learn that “sexual tactics were used in interrogations and that female sexuality was being transformed into a kind of weapon.”

As she sorted through news stories about women interrogators in Iraq, Fusco recalled: “There was a part of me that said, ‘This is morally wrong.’ And there was a part of me—the performance artist—that said, ‘Well, it may be morally wrong, but it’s incredibly powerful dramatic material.’”

Fusco's artistic response to the Iraq war was to create three works: a performance-lecture called A Room of One’s Own; a short film entitled Project Atropos; and a book, A Field Guide to Female Interrogators. She has also produced related street-theater and museum installations for audiences from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to the Whitney Bienniel.

When asked how she chose her medium, Fusco, who is director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons the New School for Design, gave a straightforward answer. “If I tried to paint something, it would be totally laughable and nobody would care,” she said. “I’m much better at doing performances and making videos and writing. I use the skills that I have.”

Elizabeth Station

Photography by Tracye Matthews.

The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture sponsored Coco Fusco’s visit through its artists-in-residence program. Upcoming guests include printmaker Ron Adams (February 3–4) and performer kt shorb (February 18–19).


RELATED LINKS:


RELATED READING:

The man who would be King

mlk-grubman.jpgIt occurred to me last Friday, as I sat in Rockefeller Chapel listening to Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell deliver the keynote speech at the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration, that as a 21-year-old I don't know the boundary between Martin Luther King the man and Martin Luther King the institution.

For me—and I have to believe the same is true for others who, like me, are too young to have seen Dr. King in the news or in person—this great civil-rights leader has become a symbol. That's not to say his role in our nation's history is in any way diminished; it simply means that, as an American youth, I sometimes struggle to view Dr. King as what he really was: one very human individual fighting for something he believed in.

That's why Harris-Lacewell's speech resonated with me as I sat in the pews last Friday. She told us about Martin Luther King the realist, a practical leader who, in attempting to clear a path for the civil-rights movement, displayed some of the same flaws that every human has. She told us about he marginalized homosexuals during that period, even those who had advised and mentored King. She told us about how he sacrificed certain movements, like that of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, with the idea that such sacrifices would help the civil rights movement as a whole.

But in discussing the practicality of these political moves, Harris-Lacewell's most powerful message was a call to faith, a belief that despite all evidence to the contrary, great things can happen if people continue to believe in them. When King started working toward equality in the 1950s, he was one man striving toward what he believed to be right. As Harris-Lacewell helped us understand, the significance of his efforts was the fact that he did this despite conditions that made equality and justice seem out of reach. The lesson of King and America’s other great civil-rights leaders is that even under the most dire circumstances, great progress can be made, and through the work of flawed people.

Jake Grubman, ’11

Some red, some blue, all Maroon

illinois-flag.jpgAs you’ve no doubt realized in recent days—ahem, Massachusetts—the 2010 midterm elections are going to be exciting. Even in a reliably blue state like Illinois, there will be a few nail-biter elections that could affect the balance of power in Washington for the next several years. And although we have to wait until November for the final results, election junkies can whet their political appetites with the upcoming primaries (February 2 in Illinois). Scanning the list of local candidates, we were delighted to discover that several U of C alumni are putting their critical-thinking skills to good use and seeking public office.

Know of any Maroons who are running for Congress or a statewide office outside of the Prairie State? Let us know.

U.S. Senate from Illinois

Former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman, JD’95, was once head of the Law School Democrats and articles editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. Now he’s running for Senate against a Democratic pool of contenders that includes Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias and Chicago Urban League President and CEO Cheryle Jackson. The former federal prosecutor has received primary endorsements from the Chicago Tribune; Chicago Sun-Times; Daily Herald; State Journal-Register; and retired congressman, judge, and senior director of the Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic Abner Mikva, JD’51. And, like a previous occupant of the Senate seat he hopes to fill, Hoffman is a lecturer at the Law School—this spring he will teach Public Corruption and the Law.

U.S. House, 5th District of Illinois

If you thought you just saw the name Mike Quigley on a ballot for this North Side district, you’re not mistaken. The rookie congressman made headlines this past April when he won the special election to fill White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s recently vacated House seat—and he’s already up for re-election. Quigley, AM’85, who holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Harris School and has served as a Cook County commissioner, is running unopposed in the primary, which must be a nice change from the previous one. He faced 11 other Democratic candidates in 2009, including fellow Maroon Charles Wheelan, PhD’98, a Harris School senior lecturer and alumnus.

U.S. House, 10th District of Illinois

Democrat Dan Seals, MBA’01, grew up in Hyde Park and married a fellow Chicago Booth alum, Miyako Hasegawa, MBA’02. A former high-school teacher in Japan and Presidential Management Fellow, Seals ran for the north-suburban 10th District seat (once held by Mikva) in the past two election cycles and narrowly lost to Republican incumbent Rep. Mark Kirk both times. Could the third time be the charm? Kirk is now running for the Senate, and there are signs the district might be receptive to Democratic representation—61 percent of residents voted for President Obama in 2008. Seals, who has two Democratic opponents, has been endorsed by the Daily Herald.

Arie Friedman, AB’87, is running for the 10th District seat in the GOP primary, channeling the Republican zeitgeist by campaigning as a political outsider. He wrote to local Republicans: “I am not a lawyer, a politician, or an MBA, but I believe this moment in history requires people with talents and experiences outside the mainstream of Washington, DC.” Friedman comes from a true Maroon family—he studied biology at the College, returned to Hyde Park to complete his medical residency at the Med Center, and has three siblings who also call Chicago their alma mater. Friedman, a Gulf War veteran, practices pediatrics, was recently named a top doctor by North Shore magazine, and has been endorsed by Reklama and Chicago Review.

U.S. House, 13th District of Illinois

Scott Harper, MBA’85, is already focusing his attention on the general election. Running unopposed in the southwest suburbs’ 13th District Democratic primary, he hopes his second attempt to unseat Rep. Judy Biggert will succeed this fall. Although he lost to Biggert in 2008 by 10 percentage points, he notes that it was her “lowest ever margin of victory” and that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee encouraged him to renew his campaign. Harper has worked as a manufacturing executive and entrepreneur. He started Closer Look, a consulting firm specializing in media, design, and marketing and also uses his Chicago Booth background as an instructor in ethics and leadership at North Central College.

Illinois Comptroller

Jim Dodge, MBA’93, is currently putting his Chicago Booth degree to good use as a vice president for the Nielsen Company, where his team provides information consulting to Fortune 500 businesses. He’s been active in Republican politics since the 1980s, when he was a volunteer in the Reagan campaign. Dodge has held elected office in Orland Park for more than 20 years, including 13 years as a village trustee. He has also sat on the Metra board of directors since 2004. Dodge has two Republican opponents in the primary, including former Illinois Treasurer and one-time gubernatorial candidate Judy Baar Topinka. He has been endorsed by several Republican organizations at the county and township level.

Cook County Board President

Toni Preckwinkle, AB’69, MAT’77, is campaigning on a platform of openness and transparency for a position that has been held by such controversial Chicago politicians as John Stroger and his son and successor Todd (who is running for re-election). Preckwinkle, who is married to Zeus Preckwinkle, AB’69, began her career as a high-school history teacher before turning to politics; she is currently serving her fifth term as the alderman of Chicago’s 4th Ward, which includes portions of Hyde Park. As an alderman, Preckwinkle has received five IVI-IPO Best Alderman Awards and has made affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization top priorities. The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Herald, and Chicago Journal have endorsed her.

Elizabeth Chan

Times of her life

Rachel Cromidas

“Rachel Cromidas is a Chicago freelance writer.” That’s the author bio that accompanied a January 9 New York Times article about economic development in Bronzeville in the wake of Chicago’s failed Olympics bid. But one detail was missing: Rachel Cromidas is also a 20-year-old undergraduate at the University of Chicago.

The third-year plans to take the spring off to intern full-time with the Chicago News Cooperative, a nonprofit journalism venture that provides local coverage for the Times and launched in late October 2009. UChiBLOGo sat down with Cromidas to talk about Bronzeville, journalism, and the difficulties of taking notes while wearing gloves.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you get involved with the Chicago News Cooperative?

QandA_QDrop.jpgThe real story is that I ran into [CNC board member and University of Chicago VP for Civic Engagement] Ann Marie Lipinski at the grocery store. I couldn’t find my wallet, so I backed up the whole line. When I turned around to say ‘I’m sorry,’ it was her—and she recognized me as a student interested in journalism. She said, ‘I know you want to be an investigative journalist, and there might be an opportunity coming up. I can’t talk about it yet, but I’m involved in it, and some other Chicago journalists are involved.’ Later [my friend] said, ‘You totally lost your wallet on purpose!’ and I was like, ‘No, I didn’t!’

It was pretty under-the-radar, but since Ann Marie Lipinski had tipped me off, I asked [Chicago Careers in Journalism adviser] Kathy Anderson what it was about. She got me in touch with the editor, Jim O’Shea, and he gave me an internship.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow long have you wanted to be a journalist?

QandA_QDrop.jpgSince tenth grade, when I started writing for a journal of opinion at my high school that some friends had started. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll write for it,’ because everyone who wrote for it was conservative, and I don’t have very conservative politics. I thought I would give this different perspective. I started reading New York Times columnists, like Maureen Dowd and less inflammatory people like Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, to get ideas. I ended up really loving their style of writing, and felt like I could mimic it.

QandA_QDrop.jpgIs it ever a struggle to balance your schoolwork and everything else you do?

QandA_QDrop.jpgI love to write, and I write really fast, so I try to take classes with essays and readings. I think I do a pretty good job of managing my time, through keeping really detailed schedules and planning pretty much every hour of my day. I usually don’t feel overwhelmed—or at least I don’t feel more overwhelmed than I’m used to feeling.

But definitely last week, when I was struggling to meet this deadline for the CNC, I really felt like my feet were to the fire in terms of being a full-time student with two jobs, and then living this double life of also being a reporter on a story that needed to get finished. [During class] I would be excusing myself to go to the bathroom so I could take phone calls. I had my phone on silent, but I would keep my phone on my desk so I could tell when it was going off. There was no other way to do it. I didn’t want to miss the first week of classes. I’m hoping now I can keep my priorities on school to get through winter quarter.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was it like to see your byline in the New York Times?

QandA_ADrop.jpgIt was the coolest thing ever. I have for a long time visualized in my daydreams what my name would look like in their nice all caps bold Arial font. I was really anticipating it, even before I thought it was possible I would have something published by the New York Times.

QandA_QDrop.jpgTell me about doing man-on-the-street interviews in Bronzeville.

QandA_ADrop.jpgIt was really cold, and I biked to 35th and Cottage Grove. ... I wore two pairs of gloves, but you can’t take notes with two pairs of gloves on. So I ended up hanging out on the street corner, after the people in Jewel-Osco told me that maybe I should stop interviewing their customers.

And my response was, ‘Well, can I interview a manager?’

QandA_QDrop.jpgYou’re going to have a very long and fruitful career in journalism.

QandA_ADrop.jpg[Laughs] Thank you! Honestly, I don’t know how any journalist does any kind of man-on-the-street thing in winter. There just aren’t people on the street, so there aren’t people to talk to. I just waited until I saw people leaving the apartment buildings around the neighborhood and walking towards the shopping plaza or leaving the shopping plaza to walk towards the apartment buildings. There were very few people to talk to, and my hands were very cold, and I eventually took refuge in an auto shop. It was an experience. The whole time, I just I remember thinking, ‘I’m doing this for the New York Times. I will do anything for the New York Times.’

Susie Allen, AB’09

Allen is the senior editor for the College Web site at the University of Chicago.

Photo courtesy Rachel Cromidas

My own private Idaho

marvel-cow.jpg
Roche calls Marvel's environmentalism too radical and inflexible, but he still believes there's room for common ground between them. "Because he's right on some things," Roche says. "With fencing, for example. He says, 'All a fence does is move a problem.' And that's exactly right."

For me, pretty much every Magazine feature ends with the same inevitable regrets: the anecdote I couldn’t squeeze in, the quote that didn’t quite fit, the people who gave fascinating interviews but never found their way into the final draft. There are always more stories to tell than space to tell them.

When I put together the Jan-Feb/10 feature story on Jon Marvel, AB’72, an Idaho environmentalist trying to abolish livestock grazing on Western public lands, a lot of good stuff stayed buried in my notes. Animal activist Lynne Stone talked about camping out of her truck among packs of wild wolves for six months at a time, getting to know them as individuals and scaring them off from hunters and ranchers. Marvel had a long yarn about losing all his money to Turkish cardsharps during an undergraduate summer abroad and taking a job as a spotlight operator at the Istanbul Ice Capades until he earned enough to get him back home.

Rancher Charlie Lyons described the enveloping loneliness for a cowboy gathering cattle on the range, and how he used to pretend to look for stray cows as an excuse to drop in on his neighbors. Lyons’s friend Eric Davis, while giving us a tour of his own ranch, drove up to a windswept ridge overlooking Idaho’s vast Owyhee Canyonlands and the mountains of Oregon and Nevada beyond. Turning to Lyons in the back seat, Davis said—with a rush of emotion flooding his cheeks—that when he died, he wanted his ashes scattered on the high Shoofly Bench across the valley. “You can see every direction from there.”

But the story I most regretted not being able to tell was about Jeff Roche. Twenty years ago Roche and his family bought the Utah ranch where his father had worked as manager when Roche was growing up. Since then they’ve expanded the place and begun renting out its hunting grounds and hosting City Slickers-like adventures. For family reunions and church groups, the Roches, who are Mormon, offer re-enactments of the arduous handcart treks that Joseph Smith's pioneer followers made across the Great Plains a century and a half ago.

Roche is a rancher—and not the only one—interested in protecting the environment. He’s worked with federal agencies that manage public lands on projects to eradicate invasive weeds and reseed the ground with native grasses. To preserve streambeds, he took part in an experimental program that sent a herder out to move cattle off the creek when they started to congregate there for too long. (A more conventional solution has been to fence creeks off for miles—a measure that ends up limiting wild animals’ access too—and then to divert the water into metal troughs for livestock.)

A year ago Roche ran up against Marvel’s brick wall. He’d applied for permission to switch some of his sheep-grazing permits to cattle-grazing, to create a buffer for a herd of wild bighorn sheep, which are susceptible to disease from domestic sheep. Roche had jumped through hoops for the wildlife-agency and public-lands officials. He’d gotten a group of bighorn advocates on board, and he’d spent $100,000 on a scientific study backing his claim. But when he filed his application, Marvel opposed it. Roche decided to drive up to Marvel’s headquarters in Hailey, Idaho, to sweet-talk him out of his objections.

No such luck. Roche says Marvel shook his hand and offered him a seat and glass of water. And then told him no. Nothing would convince him to drop his opposition. What Marvel’s after, Roche discovered, isn’t compromise with public-lands ranchers. He wants them gone.

Roche left Hailey shaken and disappointed, but undeterred—and still on friendly terms with Marvel. For one thing, the two agree on some of the environmental problems affecting public lands, if not on how to fix them. “I keep thinking,” Roche says, “if I keep communications open with Jon, maybe we can both…” He trails off. “Well, I know two things. You catch more flies with syrup than you do with vinegar. And I have no money to back me, and he does. So what’s the point of going to battle with him? If I beat Jon Marvel, I’ve got to beat him another way.”

Lydialyle Gibson

Photo by Dan Dry

It's not piracy if they offer it for free

piracy-johns.jpgAlthough it's already February, readers have one day more to download the University of Chicago Press's free e-book for January: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Chicago history professor Adrian Johns. Johns, author of the award-winning The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (U of C Press, 1998), here provides an "important reminder that today’s intellectual property crises are not unprecedented," writes Publishers Weekly, "and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution.”

Johns isn't the first Press writer to take on intellectual property. In Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property (2006), Press editor Susan M. Bielstein recounts a treacherous journey to find a famed Antonello painting in the remote Sicilian mountains. In a Magazine interview, Bielstein discusses how the Internet has posed copyright problems for editors.

See other free e-books from the Press, and check back there to see February's offering.

Amy Braverman Puma


RELATED READING:

  • "Piracy" (Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 3, 2010)

Like, Tchaikovsky funny?

“Tchaikovsky’s funny because you think the third movement is the end because it’s so big, and then you get to the fourth and it’s just like, ‘Oh.’”

Not exactly my idea of comedy, but that quote from a friend, after Saturday’s University Symphony Orchestra concert, is actually a pretty good way to summarize the 19th-century composer’s sixth symphony, Pathétique.

The orchestra’s third concert of the year—billed as Tchaikovsky’s Tapestry—opened in a big way. Conductor Barbara Schubert, X'79, led with the 45-minute-plus symphony and finished with fanciful and sweet excerpts from Swan Lake. As Schubert explained to the audience, it was too cold to leave with a piece as strong and serious as Pathétique.

Going into the concert, I was nervous. It’s not that I don’t like classical music; I played an instrument in high school just like everyone else at this university. It was the bassoon. Oh, I was good—sort of. Anyhow, I’ve been to my share of Chicago Symphony concerts, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t go into a classical-music concert feeling sleepy. And I was sleepy Saturday night; that’s what four weeks of winter quarter will do to you.

Tchaikovsky.jpgI arrived at Mandel Hall a few minutes early, and I was already worried. It was just the right temperature, just the right distance from the bright stage lights, and, in the opening moments of the symphony, just the right amount of bassoon solo to nearly lull me off to neverland.

Fortunately, Tchaikovsky was smart enough to include an alarm clock in the middle of that first movement. A sudden crescendo shook me from the brink, and the rest of the performance passed without the dread of falling asleep.

The program notes provided a full explication of the symphony and the ballet excerpts; I found most interesting Tchaikovsky's general philosophy of wanting to “express something fully” through his music.

Although I’m still well short of being able to understand composers’ intentions merely by ear, maybe next time I’ll be able to catch Tchaikovsky’s jokes.

Jake Grubman, ’11

And the winners are...

Illinois voters had their say in Tuesday's statewide primary, and four UChicagoans advance to the general election in November.

  • Dan Seals, MBA'01, won 48.2 percent of the vote, topping two opponents for the Democratic nomination. In November he faces Republican Robert Dold for Illinois's 10th District seat.

  • Toni Preckwinkle, AB'69, MAT'77, received 49 percent of the vote for Cook County Board President, beating three other Democratic candidates, including incumbent Todd Stroger. Her competition in November will be Republican Roger Keats.

  • Mike Quigley, AM'85, and Scott Harper, MBA'85, were unopposed in their campaigns for Illinois's 5th and 13th districts, respectively.

To learn more about these candidates, see "Some red, some blue, all Maroon."

Elizabeth Chan

Programming Doc

Doc Films programming meeting
Doc Films members voted on the Society's spring 2010 schedule Wednesday, February 3, turning in ballots to programming chair Edo Choi, '10 (center).

Presiding over the Doc Films planning meeting is programming chair Edo Choi, and he runs a tight ship. A representative for each film series proposal is allowed to make a one-minute pitch, and Choi cuts off any that run too long. Some pleas are emotional: "This is the last time I'm going to propose this series, because I'm leaving,” says Nick Tell, '10, of his list of French films from the 1970s and 1980s. Some pleas are pragmatic: "Considering how expensive the other series are [$3,000-5,000], this is incredibly cheap—only $1,100," says Joe Rubin of "Cinevangelism," a series of films with evangelical Christian messages.

Programming a series for the longest continuously running student film society in the country is not easy. Doc Films must maintain ticket sales while upholding its reputation for innovative film programming.

This challenge comes to a head on Wednesday of Week Five, when roughly two dozen members of Doc Films—including undergrads, grad students, alumni, and even a few faculty—cram into an Ida Noyes conference room to eat noodles catered by Chant and to vote on a ballot offering 14 themed proposals to fill the spring quarter's six programming slots.

Each proposal includes a list of ten films and at least two alternates, the official distributors for each print (usually in 16 mm or 35 mm format), fees for rental and for shipping and handling, and any on- or off-campus organizations helping to fund the series. The students also write 100 words summarizing the merits of each film and a longer essay to run in Doc's quarterly newsletter detailing the series' purpose.

breakfast-club.jpgOne of the few rules is that a film cannot have been shown as part of a regular series in the past four years. Although there have been some radical proposals over the years, Choi is reticent to criticize them. "I would hesitate to call any series...outlandish or crazy, because at Doc we encourage such ideas and take them seriously. The outlandish, for us, is closer to a virtue than a guilty pleasure. Even mainstream films like Avatar are pretty outlandish, after all."

The ballot for spring 2010 features the avant-garde (art-house auteur Stan Brakhage's films of 1980-2003), the generic (postwar westerns, proposed by Choi), and the populist (a retrospective of John Hughes movies and a collection of Spike Lee "joints").

In addition to voting for their six favorite series, members must also choose one "marquis" selection. The marquis series was implemented when Choi took his post in 2006, just after the club had gone through what he describes as a "near financial disaster." Choi and his cohorts decided that among the rare prints and oeuvres d'art on offer, they needed to program a weekly series that would help boost sales of season passes. In winter 2009 the marquis series was a popular collection of Coen Brothers films, and this winter features "Lynch and Cronenberg: Just a Couple of Daves."

After counting all of Wednesday's votes, including six absentee ballots cast by e-mail, Choi and general chair David Levari, '10, released the results last Thursday afternoon.

Doc Films’ official lineup for spring 2010 will be:

  • Urban Encounters: The City in Middle Eastern Cinema
  • Stage to Screen: Cinematic Visions of the Theatre
  • Cinevangelism: Christian Feature Films from the '70s and '80s
  • A Nos Amours: French Films in the '70s and '80s
  • British Cinema After the Death of British Cinema

The marquis selection is the John Hughes collection.

Emily Riemer, AM'09


RELATED READING:

Crafts renaissance

In the documentary Typeface, filmmaker Justine Nagan, AM'04, offers an ode to a definitively analog technology: the wood-type letterpress. The film, which made its Chicago premiere on January 29, centers on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in the sleepy tourist stopover of Two Rivers, Wisconsin (self-proclaimed birthplace of the ice cream sundae).

Typeface reflects a growing do-it-yourself crafts movement, which over the past decade ushered in a return to one-of-a-kind items produced with hand-operated technologies, such as knitting, sewing, and paper and book arts. The movement sparked events such as Chicago’s Renegade Craft Fair, featured in the 2009 documentary Handmade Nation and in Typeface. At the same time, online crafts marketplaces like Etsy.com, founded in 2005, continue to grow in popularity annually.

Despite DIY's popularity, Typeface documents some of the potential problems in reviving an outdated technology in the 21st century. For instance, though Greg Corrigan, artistic director of the museum, espouses the joys and virtues of wood type at the start of the film, he grows increasingly wearier of his job, complaining of boredom, of a lack of visitors, and of a lack of income. Finally, Corrigan quits his post as director, saying, “Life’s too short not to do what you want to do.” Meanwhile, the older generation of Hamilton's skilled workers have all retired, leaving the factory almost entirely empty. A viewer wonders if these occurrences signal the modern movement’s demise: once the novelty of the crafts renaissance wears off, will people tire of the expense, labor, and time required to make items like hand-printed paper products? Will there be anyone left who's willing to carry on these techniques?

Though Nagan depicts these challenges, she chooses to conclude Typeface with an optimistic epilogue of sorts. Jim Moran of Minnesota’s Blinc Publishing has replaced Corrigan as museum director, and a busy Hamilton is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its modern museum. A former Hamilton employee has come out of retirement to return to work, continuing the techniques and traditions of the industry. All this seems hopeful and promising, but a nagging doubt insists that the problems that arose at Hamilton before can and will surface again. What is to stop the next director from tiring of his post, and what is to ensure that a new generation of skilled workers will choose to learn the trade of wood typesetting? Nagan's optimism may be justified, but only time will tell.

Typeface is Justine Nagan's directorial debut at Kartemquin Films. Domestic and international screenings of the film will continue throughout winter and spring 2010.

Emily Riemer, AM’09


RELATED READING


RELATED LINKS

#snOMG

Snowflakes may have fallen throughout the day and late into the night Tuesday, but Chicago students remained unfazed. Magazine photographer Dan Dry caught them navigating the quads on foot and bike, as well as seeking warmth inside the bright-lit sanctuaries of Regenstein Library, the Reynolds Club, and other campus hangouts.

Brooke O'Neill, AM'04

First comes love...

The U of C may be where fun comes to die, but it’s also where love blossoms. Whether locking eyes across Hutch Commons or bonding over Human Being and Citizen readings, countless couples have found themselves tumbling head-over-heels on the quads. As Valentine’s Day approaches, we take a stroll down the exhilarating—and often rocky—road to romance.

1. Find love at first, second, third sight

For Gabriel Rhoads, AB’01, and Lauren (Lickus) Rhoads, AB’99, getting from “Hello” to a Rockefeller Chapel wedding photo (above) took a few missteps. Although they were introduced through a mutual friend, Merrick Schaefer, AB’99, during Gabriel's first year, Lauren has no memory of the meeting. When they “met” a second time, again through Merrick, the two became fast friends. In January 1999 Lauren showed up at Gabriel’s dorm room with wine and a foreign film—her idea of a perfect first date—only to find him completely oblivious to her romantic intentions. After much ado, they finally got on the same page and tied the knot last year.

2. Pucker up

Knowing when to make that first move is always complicated, but for ancient Greeks and Romans, says classicist Donald Lateiner, AB’65, kissing was an especially tricky affair. “It’s a behavior where errors can be fatal,” says the John R. Wright professor of humanities-classics at Ohio Wesleyan, who spoke about kissing protocols. After all, he says, romantic kissing is only one form of the activity; kissing can also show deference. In Homer’s The Odyssey, for example, Odysseus’s servants kiss their master’s shoulders upon his return, but they wouldn’t dare kiss his eyes or lips. Romans were even more cautious about who and how they kissed, as evidenced by first-century poet Martial, who suggested people avoid others’ kisses by smearing a salve on their face to feign mentagra parasitica, a potentially deadly facial disease. Of all the things he's learned about smooching, this "connection of kissing with personal catastrophe” was the most surprising, says Lateiner, who confesses that despite his research on the topic, his wife still “doesn’t think I’m a very good kisser.”

getting-hitched.jpg3. Get hitched

After surviving the tribulations of courtship, it’s time to say “I do.” For some guidance, couples can consult Getting Hitched: The Rough Guide to Weddings for Girls & Guys (Rough Guides), cowritten by Sean Mahoney, AB’00, and Nadine Kavanaugh, AB'99. Released earlier this month, the 250-page primer explains how to organize a ceremony that fits your personality, pick a bridal party that won’t drive you crazy, and, perhaps most importantly, weather the emotional storms that come with planning the big day.

Brooke E. O'Neill, AM'04

So you think you can dance?

One January evening in Mandel Hall, students pulled off their coats as they settled in to watch performances from Rhythmic Bodies in Motion, the campus's largest dance RSO. Part of the second annual Winter Arts Festival—sponsored by student literary mag Sliced Bread—RBIM members presented two back-to-back routines. The first, “Broken,” was a lyrical piece choreographed by Cassandra Harrison, AB’09. Think ballet sans pointe shoes. Nine barefoot performers donned black button-down shirts and matching shorts. Gliding onstage to Sia’s ethereal ballad “Breathe Me,” their eyes peering into the distance, they spun on relevé, floated through split leaps, eased through cat-like floor movements, and slipped offstage as the music faded. Seven new performers immediately took the spotlight, striking a hands-on-hips pose before launching into "Get Right," an energetic hip-hop number complete with stomping feet, undulating hips, and staccato break-dancing moves. The routine was choreographed by third-year Barbra Kim and second-year Kevin Lee.

A study in contrast, the two routines reflect RBIM’s commitment to practicing and performing different dance techniques. Founded in 2003, the group also promotes what they call “diversity in dance skill.” Any undergraduate or graduate student who wants to bust a move can do so; evaluative auditions are held in the fall, but no cuts are made. The company has a whopping 208 members, all of whom will perform in RBIM’s annual on-campus spring show in May. “We had 94 company members in last year’s show,” says third-year Nadja Otikor. “The audience must have enjoyed it, because this fall we had double the number of people auditioning.”

The 2010 show will feature approximately 15 student-choreographed performances, each representing a different dance style: lyrical, street jazz, belly dance/hip-hop fusion, flamenco, tap, Jamaican dancehall, African, Irish, and more. Fourth-year Katie Bailey, choreographer of the Irish piece, encourages all students, faculty, and staff to check it out, even if you're not an avowed dance aficionado: “All of our members put in a lot of effort and share their excitement with the crowd. And each year, the audience feeds off that excitement.”

Count us in.

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

Are you ready for some broomball?

broomball.jpg

The students from Crown and Alper houses streamed across the Midway early, boisterous to a level usually reserved for Scav Hunt. The two houses—Crown from the new dorm, Alper from Max Palevsky Commons—were converging on the ice rink for a match-up in intramural broomball, a favorite of College students since the rink’s 2002 construction. But this was no ordinary game: it pitted the house named for Board of Trustees chair Andrew Alper, AB’80, MBA’81, against the house named for former chair James Crown. Dubbed the first annual Chairman’s Cup, the match was given extra weight with the attendance of the two namesakes; Dean of the College John Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75; Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Students in the University Kimberly Goff-Crews; and a half-dozen other administrators. More important, the rink’s warming house held tables of hot cocoa and cookies, no doubt a byproduct of the special guests’ attendance.

broomball-2.jpgSimilar to ice hockey but with balls and brooms replacing pucks and sticks, broomball is played without ice skates. Deputy Dean of Students for Housing and Dining Services and Assistant Dean of the College Cheryl Gutman, one of the most vigorous spectators, noted that it is also played with no protective gear besides helmets. “Protect the brain at all costs,” she remarked. “You can break a leg, but don’t hurt your head. It’s very U of C.”

With the Alper House Penguins in red and the nameless Crown House team in black, the game began, accompanied by the raucous cheers and heckles of their housemates. After a period-and-a-half of spirited, if often chaotic, play, the score remained tied at 0-0. Several spills elicited groans from the spectators but had yet to cause any injuries. Happily, the fisticuffs often associated with ice hockey seem to have been among the aspects omitted from the invention of broomball. Then, with less than a minute remaining, Crown House got the ball past the Penguins’ goalie, bringing the score to a 1-0 advantage that held until the buzzer.

Both houses, and their patrons, streamed onto the ice for the presentation of the large Chairman’s Cup trophy, to be displayed in the Crown House lounge until the teams meet again next year. A smaller trophy topped with a miniature broomball player and engraved with “Chairman’s Cup, Alper vs. Crown, Established 2010” was also made to pass between the two men. Crown seemed delighted to receive the momento but unsure about where to display it. “I think any place I could put it, people will ask about it,” he mused, “and I would probably need to provide an explanation of each and every word of the inscription.”

Kyle Gorden, AB’00

Photos by Dan Dry

Hairy tales

Artist Barbara Siegel, AB’69, is inspired by extraordinary people. Her installation “Women with Beards,” for example, focuses on 12 real-life bearded ladies, most from the 19th century: “This was the heyday of uninhibited exploitation of these women by men—often their husbands—for financial gain,” says Siegel. But the mystique of female facial hair persists: “Women with Beards” also features two contemporary bearded ladies (one performs in a Coney Island sideshow), whose audio interviews supplement the show. A member of New York City’s A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative gallery in the country, Siegel is showing selections from this project as part of Locks in Translation, an exhibition that explores hair from 11 female artists’ points of view. Through March 10, Locks in Translation is showing at Suffolk County [NY] Community College’s Gallery West.

In an interview with UChiBLOGo, Siegel talks facial hair and wonders what it means to be a “freak.”


QandA_QDrop.jpgHas any particular story stuck with you?
QandA_ADrop.jpgLady Olga Roderick was the bearded woman who performed in Tod Browning’s 1932 classic horror movie Freaks. This movie—which I first saw when I was an undergraduate at the U of C in the ‘60s—made a lasting impression on me. In researching contemporary narratives for my project, I discovered that even though the film portrays the “normal” characters as monstrous and is sympathetic to the plight of “freaks,” Lady Olga felt exploited and hated her role in the film. Her words, “If the truth was known, we’re all freaks together,” are a concise reminder that underneath it all, we are fundamentally very much the same.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat media did you use for each piece?
QandA_ADrop.jpgAntique fabrics seemed appropriate because most of the women lived in the 19th century. I embroidered the names and dates of these women onto the fabric because embroidery is a skill associated with women of an earlier era. The “beards” are made of steel wool and copper wire because, though hair-like, they are clearly phony. Jennifer Miller, one of the two contemporary women in my project, told me that drunk and rowdy members of the crowd at sideshows would often harass bearded ladies by coming up and yanking on their beards to try to prove they were fake.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you feel a connection with the bearded women?
QandA_ADrop.jpgDefinitely! As an adolescent, I suffered from the usual massive array of body-image problems. I was also an artist and therefore a total outsider in a high school where football players and cheerleaders ruled. Finally, I am a member of A.I.R., founded 35 years ago because at that time, women artists were largely belittled or dismissed.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow would you describe your own hair?
QandA_ADrop.jpgLong, thick, and curly. I really appreciate it now, but when I was in college, the preferred look was long, straight, bohemian hair. Many girls I knew ironed their hair to achieve this look. My own method was to wind my wet hair around huge, round rollers that made me look like Minnie Mouse.

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

In which Benjamin channels Variety

Just in time for the Oscar kudocast, and following up on Emily Riemer’s (AM’09) post from last week, I’m pleased to present you with last quarter’s Doc Films box office winners and losers.

A few caveats about the numbers: the recent H’w’d pictures Doc unspools on weekends get three or four showings each, while films from the weekday series get only one. Attendance includes individual ticket buyers and season-pass holders, but not people who sneak in through the back door of Ida Noyes.

The leadership of Doc Films had a few comments about the hotsy biz (or lack thereof) done by a couple of the pictures.


Five most boffo titles by attendance:

  1. Up (731)
    “Kids loved it, old people loved it. Pixar is one of the only companies that can reliably make a film just as appealing to our entire audience, ages 9 to 90. Sort of like Sesame Street, but more expensive.”

  2. Star Trek (481)
    “Not only was this a rare franchise reboot that was actually entertaining enough for a second viewing, it capitalized on the traditionally political science-tinged reputation that attracts U of C undergrads in a way that Star Wars can't.” (As perhaps the only old-line Trekkie who didn’t like this movie, I’m going to reserve my vitriol for another day and move on.—BR)

  3. Inglourious Basterds (445)
    “Fetishized Nazi-killing provides the sort of cathartic release (particularly in advance of finals week) that no other film on our calendar can.”

  4. The Hangover (362)
    “Two frat boys puked in the cinema during the 11 p.m. screening. Appropriate, if disgusting."

  5. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (352)
    “For every undergraduate secretly wishing that our school was actually Hogwarts.”


Five worst floppola films by attendance:

  1. The Kitchen Presents Two Moon July (17)

  2. Selected Works I & II (18)

  3. Home of the Brave (26)

  4. Dirigible (28)

  5. Ellis Island and Book of Days (29)

“All of the bottom five titles are from the Downtown 81 series, except Dirigible (from Frank Capra). It's a shame that these sorts of series don't exactly hit it out of the ballpark in terms of attendance, but we still feel a duty to showcase them for the Chicago community regardless of the attendance, and we do gain a few converts to less-than-mainstream cinema with every passing quarter. That won't be changing anytime soon.”


To join the audience of a mainstream or not-so-mainstream showing, Doc’s Winter 2010 sked can be found here.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

Meet the folks

It’s Saturday afternoon, and famed fiddlers like the New Mules and Liz Carroll are sitting on stools in a half circle, sharing stories and songs with several dozen of their closest friends. The atmosphere at Ida Noyes Hall feels that friendly, anyway, which is what brings people back year after year to the University of Chicago Folk Festival, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this past weekend.

“The cool thing about the University of Chicago Folk Festival is that it’s very intimate,” says Paul Lucas, a software technician on weekdays and a folk enthusiast the rest of the time. The musicians are “very accessible,” Lucas says. "They’re very generous with their time and sharing their musical knowledge and ability. All festivals try to do that, but because of either location or because of sheer size—there was a good number of folks [this year] but it wasn’t overwhelming—it just seemed like a more intimate venue to have a folk festival.”

In addition to concerts Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening, this year’s festival featured 34 daytime workshops Saturday and Sunday, ranging from Scandinavian dance to 19th-century parlor music to the history of the hurdy gurdy. Lucas held a workshop on Piedmont-guitar stylings, featuring a wide-reaching history of the genre paired with some hands-on instruction in the art of Travis picking. The Piedmont blues, coming out of the Washington, DC, area, is characterized by finger picking and an alternating bassline, creating a jazzy, ragtime feel that's more upbeat than some of its folk counterparts.

Lucas, a Highland Park resident who has founded three folk-music Web sites, has a simple mission: help other people enjoy the Piedmont style as much as he does. He spoke to a group of a few dozen on Etta Baker, the first female Piedmont guitarist ever recorded, and hopes that festivals like the University’s will help continue the Piedmont tradition that started in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as “inspire someone to pick up Piedmont and bring it in a new direction and take that to a new audience.”

He’s not selfish about drawing attention to his preferred niche of folk music. The festival organizers "try to give you a wide block of music from Americana. They’ve got old-time, bluegrass, country blues, Cajun; the only thing they’re missing is maybe jazz from the ’20s and ’30s and maybe gospel.”

Jake Grubman, ’11

Photo by Lloyd Lee, ’11

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Retrospection

hindsight-freeman.jpgThe plot twists that shaped the narrative of Mark Freeman’s life were not instantly recognizable as important moments. Consider the car ride home from college with his father that still resonates 35 years later. Their four-hour conversation only took on such significance two months after it happened, when Freeman's father died of a heart attack.

Today Freeman, PhD’86, considers that road trip a central episode in his life story. He finds comfort in the recollection of time they had together but also a melancholy shadow of what their relationship might have become. “What my dad’s death seemed to do was activate the poetic function of memory, such that I would return to that ride home and try to disclose what was there, waiting," Freeman writes in Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford University Press, 2010).

When his daughter suffered a serious illness, the memory of that ride and his father’s death shortly thereafter sharpened Freeman’s awareness of moments with her and heightened his sense that life could be cut suddenly short. “What we are doing is remembering and narrating,” Freeman writes, “which means situating the experiences of the past in relation to what has happened since.”

A psychology professor at the College of the Holy Cross, Freeman explores how hindsight, often dismissed as a biased view of the past, also offers a path to insight, a way to create order from the messy course of events. Those events can be matters of life and death, or as trivial as a baseball game, as Steve Bartman discovered when he became a character in one such narrative in 2003.

Bartman’s fateful lunge for a foul ball was a minor incident among many that contributed to the Chicago Cubs losing in the playoffs that year. Yet it became a central storyline, symbolic of a cursed franchise’s suffering fate. Had the Cubs won, Bartman might have been forgotten, like Freeman’s car ride might have been had his father lived longer.

Many Cubs fans made Bartman an immediate villain, targeting him with beer cups and other projectiles, but the historical significance of his action depended on the outcome of the series. Although Freeman describes Bartman as a victim of the human craving for narrative, he argues that there are truths revealed in those retrospective stories that cannot be identified in the chaos of the moment. In Bartman's unfortunate case the "truth" about his role transcends the "fact" that many on-field mistakes contributed to the outcome.

Freeman insists that the public singling out Bartman, despite the many other factors involved, is not a distortion. "[T]he question of What Really Happened is not a matter of facts alone. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that we do not, and cannot, know What Really Happened until there is an ending. This is the way of narrative, and it is every bit as real as the events that happen along, clock ticking all the while."

Bartman's greatest mistake might have been losing himself in the moment. As he noted in his written apology to Cubs fans, if he had been conscious of his potential to cause harm, he never would have reached for that foul ball. Such hindsight—if only I had thought it through—can be a mechanism to prevent more than fan interference; it can lead to insight that encourages more ethical behavior.

Acting first and thinking later often exposes moral failings, leading to regret that is more private but no less profound than Bartman's. In that realm, Freeman writes, the act of "narrative reflection" becomes more than a way to shape the stories of our lives. The process "emerges as a potential vehicle not only of truth but goodness," adding perspective that helps produce better endings.

Perceived "endings" are themselves subject to change. Information gleaned years later can alter a person's experience. Life stories are not static, Freeman writes, even in retrospect. “We are neither the archaeologists of our histories, unearthing what had been there all along, nor their inventors, fashioning them ex nihilo, out of nothing. Not unlike poets, we are creators, fashioning and refashioning the work that is our lives, through narrative, via hindsight.”

Jason Kelly

Here’s to you, Judy Blume

It's not easy being a teenage girl. Between crushes, popularity contests, and training bras, junior high and high school can be a minefield of blush-inducing embarrassments. To make sense of the chaos—and hopefully to mitigate some of the disaster—it helps to have a good guide. For myself and thousands of other girls who came of age during the '80s and '90s, that guide was Judy Blume.

"They may never become classics," wrote author Joyce Maynard of Blume's honest coming-of-age books in a 1978 piece for the New York Times, "but they are among the first juvenile books to abandon happy endings, the notion of perfect parents, and images of children whose most serious problems are getting a horse or a paper route."

In honor of Blume’s 72nd birthday month and the 40th anniversary of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, I pulled out my copy of Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (Pocket Books, 2007), edited by Jennifer O’Connell, MBA’96. In the book O’Connell and 24 other contributors reveal how Blume’s stories helped them survive the challenges of puberty—and occasionally those of adulthood. Check out some of their insights:

Beth Kendrick on Tiger Eyes, Forever, and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
"When I read Judy Blume in middle school, I skimmed right over the mothers' dialogue. At that age I viewed parents as an obstacle that kept the heroine from attaining her dreams. ... In the fine tradition of stubborn suburban girls, I spent my adolescence rebelling. I enrolled in a college two thousand miles away from home. I made dating choices based on weighty criteria such as 'coolness' and 'hotness.' ... I did everything I imagined my mother wouldn't have wanted me to do. And, of course, I turned out just like her."

Meg Cabot on Blubber
"I don't know if there's something that happens to some adults—especially once they've had children of their own—where they selectively forget what being a kid is really like. ... Only Judy Blume never lost sight of the fact that girls are not made of sugar and spice and everything nice."

Kayla Perrin on Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
"Ask any sixth-grade schoolgirl, and she'll tell you that size matters. Like majorly. ... When you're eleven going on twelve, like Margaret in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, it's the thing that matters most in your life. You want more than anything to fit in. Like Goldilocks trying out the Bears' hospitality, you don't want a chest that is too big or too small. You want one that is just right."

Joy Olivia Miller


RELATED READING

A voice that carries

How many blogs are there in the world? Seventy million? 112 million? Even my six-year-old kids have a blog. Let’s just say there are a lot.

It’s a rare blog that can make itself heard against that much background noise. Hyde Park Progress is one. The Empowerment Experiment, written by Maggie Anderson, JD’98, MBA’01, is another. It’s inspiring, crushing, optimistic, pessimistic, angry, funny, dark, and personal, sometimes all in one 400-word entry.

For my University of Chicago Magazine story about the Empowerment Experiment, due out in mid-March, I had room to quote only a line or two. Here are a few more snippets from my favorite entries:


April 7, 2009
"To be or not to be"

Topic: Reggio’s Pizza, a black-owned business

So why is it that I can only find his pizza in the Black Walgreens? Are Black people the only people who like pizza?...

I want to boast, as I chomp on this unbelievably scrumptious pizza, made with that awesome, one-of-a-kind butter crust..., “John Clark is an extraordinary man, with an extraordinary plan, who has the work ethic and quality product required to guarantee success!” Y’all know I want to shout that from the mountain top!

But...

Wait a minute. I just have to finish this slice. Damn, it’s good!


March 29, 2009
"EE does not stand for Embarrassing Entertainment"

Topic: National news programs interview the Andersons

Yeah, they tried to make us out to be some militant, fringe, new-millennium racists on a mission to do something that’s not gonna make a difference anywhere. ... the STORY was ‘Meet the crazy lady driving 18 miles to buy eggs...’

So guess what happened.... We stuck to our positive message. We were not buffoons. We did not embarrass our families or our cause.

So will you still listen? Will they continue to cover EE? As Russell Crowe said in Gladiator, “Are you not entertained?!”...

I'm out.


February 7, 2009
"Windows and corridors"

Topic: Black-owned dollar store that hung photos of the Andersons in the windows

...the tears welled because I saw that Michelle and David, the owners of God First, God Last, God Always Dollar and Up General Store had posted pictures of my family on the windows and doors of their business. They had also printed copies of our Web site to distribute as flyers they were placing in every bag. I did not ask them to do that.

When was the last time you cried after shopping at Family Dollar or Kmart? When was the last time the owners of those stores took the time to get to know your family and talk to you about the issues that matter to you and your community?...

This is just such a thrill, such a revolutionary period in my life. ... It's tough to contain the joy and stay coherent!


Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Lost in translation

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Although there may be an extremely limited number of things I’m a low-level expert on—brewing a perfect cup of Earl Grey tea, planning a fantastic road trip, and procrastinating come to mind—19th-century Italian opera is not among them. So Monday night at a Mandel Hall recital featuring internationally acclaimed mezzo-sopranos Joyce DiDonato and Vivica Genaux, held in honor of retiring U of C professor Philip Gossett—widely recognized as the world’s preeminent scholar of 19th-century Italian opera—and attended by opera experts from around the globe, I felt a little out of my element.

gossett-3.jpg"If there were such a thing as a Nobel Prize for musicology—and there should be,” said Chicago Opera Theater’s general director Brian Dickie as he introduced Gossett, “he would add to the luster of Nobel laureates.” Known for his critical editions of Rossini and Verdi opera, Gossett has worked with some of the world’s most prestigious opera houses, including New York’s Metropolitan. In 1998 the Italian government awarded him its highest civilian honor, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce.

I, on the other hand, speak not a lick of Italian, so I was relieved that translations were provided. As Genaux launched into the first piece, an aria from Rossini’s "La Cenerentola" ("Cinderella"), I tried to follow along. Yet even on a bare stage, save the piano and two music stands, Genaux’s soaring vocals made it difficult to concentrate. Who wants to read when you can listen to sound like that?

gossett-2.jpgI looked around at the rest of the audience. Few were reading; I suspect many already knew the lyrics. Rather than be intimidated, I put down my sheet, closed my eyes, and let the lament of the girl "born to pain and tears" wash over me. DiDonato’s rendition of Beethoven’s "Four ariettas, Op. 82," which followed, was just as powerful. The pain in her face, the forlornness in her eyes, the melancholy in her voice revealed everything: she's a woman in love. Perhaps not a good love or the right love, but love nonetheless.

Sure enough, when I skimmed the lyrics, it was exactly that:

I hear you well, my heart/
Beating so very hard,/
Expressing your complaint, I know,/
That you are now in love.

As the evening continued, I barely glanced at the translation sheet. From Verdi’s "Stornello" to Sullivan’s "The Mikado," the stories were universal: love pursued, gained, and lost. When the recital ended, I wiped a tear from my eye and joined in the standing ovation. Turns out, you don’t have to be an expert to be touched by opera. You just have to be human.

Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04

For your amusement

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QandA_QDrop.jpg How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

QandA_ADrop.jpgFish.

Whether this punch line makes you laugh, says Ted Cohen, Chicago philosophy professor and moderator of the annual Latke-Hamantash Debate, depends on understanding the context (i.e., surrealists’ love of combining discordant concepts) and having some familiarity with the lightbulb-changing joke form. In his new book, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, available for free download from the University of Chicago Press through March, Cohen delves into why some jokes work and others don’t. Perhaps most fun are the dozens of examples he uses as teaching tools. “There is no formula for making up jokes, and not everyone can do it,” he says. “A joke cannot force everyone to be amused, and some people are unamused by some jokes.”

To see what tickles your funny bone, download a copy today.

Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04

Firestorm

“Jon Marvel’s going to be real proud when all this country is black from fire,” says Eric Davis, motioning past his pickup's windshield and the snaking asphalt to the sagebrush and grass on the hillside beyond. A rancher in southwestern Idaho's high desert, Davis has seen, and fought, his share of wildfires—“Our winter range burns about every third year”—and, like most ranchers, he believes in the power of livestock grazing to temper fire’s severity.

Environmentalist Jon Marvel, AB’72, does not.

In the Magazine’s Jan–Feb profile of Marvel, who seeks to abolish livestock grazing on 250 million acres of Western public lands, there wasn't much room to get into wildfires, an issue that, like every aspect of the grazing debate, is complicated by politics, emotion, history, and competing notions of ecological truth. Fire is a subject ranchers often bring up to illustrate how they believe Marvel’s approach would harm the land he means to rescue. Allowing cattle and sheep to clear out the tallest, driest leaves—what ranchers call "decadent" growth—reduces the “fuel load” available to fire. Grazed land, they contend, burns in a way that is more controllable than fields left unmanaged and untended. "The amount of fuel that’s on the ground determines the heat intensity of the fire," says Chad Gibson, a range-management scientist and former spokesman for the Owyhee Cattlemen's Association. "And the hotter it gets, the more impact it has on vegetation."

Inevitably, ranchers' talk turns to the Murphy Complex Fire of 2007. That summer, lightning strikes along the Idaho-Nevada border ignited a blaze that burned unchecked for two weeks. Dry, hot winds blew the fire forward, and the flames became so intense that stands of sagebrush exploded in its path. Before it was over, more than 650,000 acres had gone up in smoke. It was the largest fire Idaho had seen since 1910. Much of the incinerated ground had remained ungrazed for a decade, entangled in lawsuits brought by Marvel. In the fire's aftermath, Idaho Governor Butch Otter and Senators Larry Craig and Mike Crapo laid the blame at environmentalists’ feet, claiming that more grazing might have meant less disaster.

Davis and his neighbor and fellow rancher Charles Lyons seconded that assessment. “I could have guaranteed you that thing was going to burn, and it did,” Lyons says. “And what was the cost? Who knows. But it invited a whole lot of invasive species,” including, he adds, the highly flammable infiltrator cheatgrass, considered a scourge by environmentalists and ranchers alike. "And hell," Lyons continues, "the sage chicken”—an endangered bird that Marvel has launched a legal fight to protect—“it burned up all their habitat too.”

Marvel challenged ranchers to prove their point, to produce evidence that grazing inhibits wildfires. Soon enough, some proof arrived, although it hardly settled the dispute. In 2008 a study by scientists at the universities of Idaho and Nevada, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Land Management found that grazing levels had a “negligible” effect on the size of the Murphy fire. The wind was just too high, the fire too hot. But the same study also suggested that under more moderate weather conditions, grazing can perhaps slow a fire's spread and dampen the intensity of its advancing front line. Meanwhile, a 14-year study released in 2009 by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service found that grazed rangelands recover more effectively from fire than those kept free of livestock.

Botanist Beth Painter believes the definitive data on grazing and wildfires doesn't yet exist. “We don’t have really good documentation,” she says. “When it’s not wind-driven and there aren’t extreme weather conditions, we simply don’t have enough data." Painter, who learned to ride a horse before she could walk, grew up ranching in Wyoming, and her family has been raising cattle out West since the 1880s. When her PhD research began leading her inexorably toward grazing's negative consequences, it came at first, she says, as a "shock to the system." Now she serves on the advisory board of Marvel's environmental organization, Western Watersheds Project.

In the end, Painter says, the answers to the wildfire issue aren't likely to be clear cut.

"Yes," she says, the ground "probably wouldn’t carry a fire if there were no plants out there, if it looked like a feedlot." Or maybe it would: in California's coastal shrublands, where wildfires are common, she has found that the same area can burn two years in a row, before vegetation has a chance to return. "So fuel load is kind of a question.” In addition, the dried leaves that ranchers call "decadent" might actually shield a plant during a fire. "Sometimes it needs that standing material across the top to protect it from the soil overheating," Painter says. "Soils, if they get hot enough, will caramelize."

"It's a very complex question to approach, whether or not cattle have an impact on fire," she concludes. "We have to follow the science."

Lydialyle Gibson

Tsar search

Watch Golosá sing "Rasti da Rasti"—which translates to "Grow and Grow"—at the February 13 Folk Festival.

“Crunchy dissonance” is how Golosá choir leader Tammy Ghattas, AB’03, describes the sound of the group’s pre-Soviet, Russian folk-music repertoire. “Nobody would have written these folk songs down at any time,” she says in February 17 interview for WBEZ’s Worldview. They were passed on orally: “People learn them from their friends and people in villages." Two individuals might sing the same part in a song, but they each interpret it slightly differently. "So if they are singing the same part, and then one person thinks it’d be nice to go up, and the other person thinks it’d be nice to go down, then you get a really tight harmony.”

Started in summer 1997 after cofounder Noel Taylor, AM’99, SM’04, returned from studying German in Freiburg—home of one of the oldest Russian folk groups still in existence—Golosá performs around Chicago, nationally, and internationally. Interviewed on Worldview following the 50th annual U of C Folk Festival, at which Golosá sang, Ghattas and Taylor explain the group’s past and present.

Their next performance is April 9, singing with Georgian-music choir Alioni at an ethnomusicology conference hosted by Chicago’s DePaul University.

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

In an instant

SarahBest-Portrait.jpg More than 60 years ago, the Polaroid Corporation created the world’s first instant camera. What was the most appealing aspect of this new product? Arguably, it was its immediacy, its portability, and the instant access it provided to a picture users had taken just minutes before.

Sarah Best, X’03, understands the appeal of the Polaroid. In her photography exhibit, "Daily Photos," her cell-phone images—of friends in social settings, close-up portraits of faces, and inanimate objects—have that same sense of intimacy and immediacy. The compactness and ubiquity of cell-phone cameras make their presence at a party or social gathering virtually unnoticeable, and this lends Best’s photos an in-the-moment quality that puts the viewer in the room with her subjects. Adding to this sense of immediacy is Best’s preoccupation with movement. She captures a dancer’s twirling skirt as she spins across a wood floor, a cellist in the midst of an impromptu performance, and even the worktable in her kitchen as she rolls out and prepares to bake cookies.

cello.jpg

"Daily Photos" is an homage to instant cameras of the past: Best uses the iPhone App “ShakeIt” to give her photos a white border and a square shape, just like a Polaroid. But she also loves that a cell phone allows its user to take a picture and share it instantly by e-mail or via social networking sites. Best encourages visitors at her exhibit to instantaneously capture and share images of her show with their own phone cameras.

Best, a former poetry major at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, was inspired by Frank O’Hara’s poetry collection Lunch Poems (1964) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography exhibit “Polaroids” (1973). O’Hara particularly interested Best when she studied him in college a decade ago. “His poems made you feel as if you knew his friends. He caught the light on a building, the song playing on the radio. He made you feel that you were there in the moment. But, they seem more casual than they really are.”
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Best’s own work is minimally planned ahead of time, and she allows the process of shooting and experimentation to shape the kinds of photos she takes. However, after shooting, she spends a great deal of time choosing which images to display, often grouping them together in pairs or triptychs around particular themes or subjects, in order to convey a sense of movement over time. Best explains, “Grouping photos together allows me to show images that resonate with each other, or which juxtapose with each other in an interesting way, like images in a poem. I make an intentional effort to create an experience that the viewer can ‘read’ in certain ways.”

"Daily Photos" is on display at the Antena Gallery in Pilsen until March 20. Next, it will appear starting April 30 on the gallery wall at Paper Boy, a retail stationery store in Lakeview.

Emily Riemer, AM’09

"Pictures with bad cameras have such interesting aesthetic qualities,” Best insists. At top, writer Emily Riemer uses her own low-tech camera phone to capture a self portrait of Best displayed at the exhibit.

RELATED READING:

"Picture perfect" (UChiBLOGo, July 10, 2009)

"Cellphone photography is SO 2010" (Gapers Block, Feb. 3, 2010)

The Great American University (guess who?)

Holding a panel discussion at U of C entitled “The Great American University: The University of Chicago as an Ideal Type" might seem rather pompous. Yet when a campus outsider writes a book extolling Chicago as one of the nation’s superlative universities, a discussion makes sense. That event took place last Wednesday when Jonathan R. Cole, the John Mitchell Mason professor and former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia University, came to campus to speak about his book The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must be Protected (PublicAffairs, 2010).

The University of Chicago story is often told as one of an upstart: a scrappy, TheGreatAmericanUniversity.jpg Midwestern institution that in a few short decades rose to the preeminence of East Coast universities founded 100 to 200 years earlier. Yet Cole tells a different story that begins long after Chicago’s 1892 founding. According to him, the “great American university,” one propelled by academic freedom and meritocracy, truly began with the demise of another great higher-education system: Germany’s.

Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 resulted in an exodus of talent from the top German institutions. Hundreds were dismissed for being Jewish or having political views at odds with the Nazi party. Others, like James Franck, who later came to the University of Chicago and worked on the Manhattan Project, resigned from the University of Göttingen in protest. America was by far the greatest beneficiary of Germany’s loss. As a result, Cole writes, “American research universities were poised to become the greatest in the world.” Germany had intentionally violated both academic freedom and meritocracy—values Cole finds in every great system of research and higher education since 17th-century Europe.

Among American institutions, he says, the University of Chicago most epitomizes those principles. Faculty panelists joining Cole were clearly appreciative of his assessment, yet they didn’t hesitate to delve deeper into the academic-freedom point. Chemist Stephen Berry, the James Franck distinguished service professor emeritus, attributed Chicago’s encouragement of free inquiry to its interdisciplinary culture, citing “permeable departmental divisions” in many, but not all, disciplines. Historian John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, dean of the College, acknowledged Cole’s recognition of Robert Maynard Hutchins as “the champion of academic freedom before and during the Cold War,” but added the caveat that the man viewed as “fearless to the outside” was often seen as “reckless to the inside” by faculty who saw his abolition of tenure as a threat to academic freedom. Anthropologist Richard Shweder, the William Claude Reavis distinguished service professor of human development, concluded the session expressing concern that the University is walking a thin line by expanding the role of institutional review boards, technology-transfer initiatives, and offices of risk management, all of which have the potential to restrict research.

During the Q&A, several attendees commented on the relative merits of the University and other institutions, as well as American versus European universities. Appropriately enough, president emerita Hanna Holborn Gray, present as a guest, ended the event by questioning the book’s premise, deconstructing the conversation, and commenting on the self-congratulatory nature of the phrase “great American university.”

Kyle Gorden, AB’00


RELATED READING

Racing scholarly values leads author to Chicago (University of Chicago News Office)

Interview with Cole: Great American Research Universities and How They Got That Way (Columbia Record)

"Can American Research Universities Remain the Best in the World?" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2010)

"University of Chicago, a Bright Spot for the City" (The New York Times, January 9, 2010)

Lines of duty

TheWagon.jpgChicago police officer Martin Preib is “a born wagon man.” A cop by trade, a writer at heart, Preib gave up his publishing aspirations when he joined the force. But the troubled lives and grisly deaths he encountered while hauling criminals to jail and bodies to the morgue compelled him. There were stories in the wagon.

Now he’s compiled those tales in The Wagon and Other Stories from the City (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Preib’s collection explores race, class, and gender issues, along with the dark corners of the city encountered from his patrol car. There are no stock characters in Preib’s account, John Kass writes in the Chicago Tribune. Instead, “the hero is an intelligent man trying to figure things out.”

The Wagon is part of the U of C Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions series, which includes The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City and Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City.

Jason Kelly

Style guide

Since 2008, Sadie Stein, AB’03, has been an editor at Jezebel.com, a Gawker Media–owned blog that covers “celebrity, sex, fashion for women—without airbrushing.” It’s not your typical 9–5 job, but it’s one that requires an engaging writing style and wide-ranging knowledge of pop culture, politics, and even 19th-century English literature. Stein, 28, is in charge of the fashion beat, but she also shares the occasional personal story—such as the physical reaction she had last week to her first (yes, first) taste of Diet Coke—and puts her English degree to good use, arguing, for example, against New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s contention that Barack Obama is a modern-day Mr. Darcy.


sadiefreakedout.jpg

QandA_QDrop.jpgOn Jezebel.com, you write about fashion, pop culture, and women’s issues. What did you study in the College? Were you planning to be a writer at the time—or a fashionista?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI studied English—and wrote a “creative BA” as we called it then—so to the extent I was qualified for anything, I guess it was writing. In fact, both my parents write full time, so that always seemed like a realistic career option—realistic in both senses, because growing up around anything, you don’t romanticize it and are well aware of the challenges of making a living. As to fashion, I certainly never thought that would be a part of my professional life; in fact, my fourth-year roommate was the real stylish one—she worked at Harper and was known for her wardrobe of vintage suits. I did benefit from her closet.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you get involved with Jezebel?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI was working in publishing for a while in New York, and when I left that to work from home and take on a ghostwriting project, I decided to get a part-time job in my Brooklyn neighborhood. A new boutique had opened nearby, and I became their first employee. And that's really how the Jezebel job came about; through the shop, which I loved, I got to know tons of people in the neighborhood, and a bunch of them became friends. A few of them were Jezebel writers. They'd started reading my blog—which I'd been keeping up, just for fun, since Paris [where I spent a year after graduation]—and when the fashion-oriented job opened up, they thought of me and brought me to the attention of the editor. It’s funny; I think because I worked at this store, everyone assumed I knew about fashion. In fact, I didn’t know anything! I liked wearing eccentric getups, but my knowledge of the actual fashion world was nil, and I had to learn on the job. I “auditioned” for about six months before becoming a full-time staffer, and I've been there ever since.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat makes Jezebel stand out among female-oriented blogs?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe mix of subject matter, from news to social issues to reality TV, is genuinely engaging (I know some people rely on it for their news—and their Project Runway updates), and despite the range the site covers, there’s a distinctive point of view that manages to be irreverent without giving in to gratuitous snark. A lot of this comes from the fact that it’s just a terrific group of people—smart, funny, thoughtful, and I think that comes through. The commenters make a tremendous difference; their contributions are frequently hilarious, and the range of viewpoints is fantastic. It’s such a smart population—but at the same time, it’s a very respectful atmosphere (for the Internet!), which makes an incredible difference. We can actually engage and get to know each other in a way that’s very unusual.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s a typical workday for you? Where do you find your ideas for posts?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe all start early in the morning and hit the RSS feed first thing. Then, most of us have scheduled posts—for instance, I do a fashion roundup called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, so I’ll go to the photo sites and review the events from the night before. Our day’s schedule is variable: the editor, Anna, will generally send us ideas that caught her eye and correspond to our respective beats. We suggest our own ideas from things we’ve seen in the RSS or original ideas we might have come up with. We also have a great team of interns who send us links throughout the day. And it’s all subject to change throughout the day, of course, since the whole point of a blog is the ability to respond quickly to the news cycle. We rarely see each other in person—we almost all work from home—but communicate primarily through instant messaging. And once the day gets started, the pace is very fast. None of us breaks for lunch.
People always ask me if I get dressed, shower, etc. I do! In fact, I even put on a little makeup. I need to have a routine where I feel like I’m “going to work” in order to get in the right mindset. I admire people who are so on the ball that they can sit down at the computer and work in PJs, but I think I’d just spend the day on eBay and YouTube if I didn’t hew to my routine.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat advice do you have for aspiring fashion/women’s-issues bloggers?
QandA_ADrop.jpgRegardless of whether you hope to blog professionally, if you like to write, try keeping a blog: it’s a good discipline, it’s fun, and it’s good to be accountable to readers. Plus, it’s the best way to discover your voice. If something interests you, chances are it’ll interest someone else. Find bloggers you like, and read them regularly. Link to them if the spirit moves you. And good writing will win out, if you keep at it long enough.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy is fashion important?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s important to distinguish between “fashion” and “clothes,” despite how inextricably they’re linked. I’ve always been more interested in the latter—the way people choose to express themselves has always fascinated me. That said, fashion, as an art form and an expression of mores, is pretty fascinating too, especially the way it trickles into popular consciousness. I come from a family that never thought much of fashion and tended to dismiss it as frivolous, but I think, even if you don’t, you know, care about Fashion Week, it’s a bit disingenuous to opt out of the conversation entirely. We live in a time when there are no fixed uniforms anymore; whether you like it or not, you’re forced to make aesthetic choices all the time and define who you want to be in the eyes of the world. It might as well be someone you like. As Mark Twain said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

Elizabeth Chan

All’s fair in love and gore

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University Theater’s production of Big Love is, above all else, fun. Sure, 49 people die in the play, and most of the cast is soaked in blood by the time final bows come around. But with an upside-down set, a soundtrack featuring Drake and Lady Gaga, and a colorful cast of characters, this year’s winter-quarter production brings out a smile a minute.

Big Love, written by Charles Mee and first performed in 2000, tells the story of 50 sisters—represented by three women who enter and exit the stage in ragged wedding dresses—and their arranged marriages to their 50 cousins. Set in the present day, Mee’s production combines Aeschylus’s influence with a modern flavor, plus a distinct sense of self-awareness and frequent crowd interaction. (At one point, one of the sisters said, “Surely there’s a sociopath somewhere who wants to make a deal,” and pointed at my roommate in the front row.)

UT’s rendering of Big Love lets the audience know what it’s in for right from the beginning, as the audience—walking into a set that takes the form of an upside-down house—is warned of the possibility of blood and cake splattering into the few rows surrounded by stage on three sides. The first action on stage is one of the sisters entering and promptly stripping down to her underwear and taking a seat in the upside-down refrigerator.

The soundtrack also plays a role, with Billboard hits generously sprinkled throughout. Drake’s “Forever” escorts the cousins on stage for their tremendously cool entrance. During the wedding, the cast breaks it down to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”—at least until the brides start murdering their grooms.

It’s not all death-by-axe, though—one of the sisters does find love. When that comes around, the audience just has to try to forget that her groom is also her cousin.

Jake Grubman, ’11

Glorious Homilius

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Two weeks ago I slipped away from my desk and stepped inside Rockefeller Memorial Chapel to cover Tea and Pipes. A regular Tuesday event, the afternoon concert pairs music from University Organist Thomas Weisflog, SM'69, with tea and baked goods, all gratis.

With a cup of peach tea and two cookies—one dotted with sugar crystals and another iced in chocolate frosting—I walked toward the front of the chapel. Concertgoers of all ages were scattered throughout the pews. I settled into the second row and took in the imposing arches, the altar spires, the flower-motif stained-glass window.

Weisflog approached the microphone to introduce the afternoon’s "eclectic" program. He started with the strong, sharp sounds of Bach’s Prelude in C Minor, BWV 546, and ended with Louis Vierne’s dramatic, almost earth-shattering Carillon de Longpont. Nestled in between were lighter selections, including the chorale prelude to Gottfried August Homilius’s Durch Adams Fall Ist Ganz Verderbt for organ and oboe.

An 18th-century German composer who studied with Bach and taught Johann Adam Hiller, Homilius also played organ for the Dresden Frauenkirche church, which collapsed during World War II and was later reconstructed. In the Treasury of Early Organ Music, E. Power Biggs describes Homilius’s Durch Adams Fall: "As Bach learned from Pachelbel, so did Homilius from Bach. ... Originally for solo oboe and organ, the prelude has been adapted for organ alone by giving the chorale melody to the pedal."

Weisflog called the composition “a lovely little gem,” and I can’t think of a more apt description. Experience it for yourself above.

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

Manny about town

Manny.jpgWho can’t relate to stories about a three-year-old who likes to squat down and pee in the floor vents, a toddler who hides mommy’s tampons in the stereo speakers, and tender film footage of an exhausted dad dealing with midnight tantrums and visits to the ER? John Hildreth, AB’00, (below) doesn't have any kids of his own, but that didn't stop him from directing a new play called The Manny Diaries at Chicago's Gorilla Tango Theater.

The Diaries is a one-man show written and performed by Bob Wiltfong (left), Hildreth's former student at the Second City. Combining wry anecdotes with videos from the parenting frontlines, Wiltfong tracks his travails as a stay-at-home dad with three small kids and "zero idea what he’s doing." Getting acquainted with the "manny" lifestyle was fun for Hildreth (right), who worked with Wiltfong "to make sure that his material would have universal appeal—not just to suburban parents." The audience at the show's March 6 premiere included several people who had babysat for Wiltfong's kids, but the jokes also hit home with urban sophisticates.

hildreth.jpgHildreth may be the hardest-working man in Chicago theater. This week, he is directing an evening of radio theater at Columbia College—where he also teaches—and a long-form improvisational piece called Momma’s Medicine. An artistic ensemble member at Lifeline Theater, he has won Jefferson citations for his stage adaptations and has performed and directed at The Second City and other venues.

"When I was at U of C, there was no theater department," says Hildreth, who studied chemistry. "Pretty much anyone who wanted to put up a play would form a theater group, get a faculty adviser, and just do it. I’m sure it’s much more organized and professional now."

Elizabeth Station

Will freelance for food

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Wake up at noon, enjoy a leisurely coffee, then get to work in the comfort of your home office. You’re in the middle of a writing project you’re deeply passionate about. You’re thriving emotionally, creatively, and financially. Best yet, you’re wearing pajamas—because what else does one wear in her freelance fantasy life?

For those who’ve never done it, the thought of freelancing tends to elicit one of two things: the cliché described above or abject terror. The Graham School's March 4 freelance editing and writing panel discussion tackled both. Held at the Gleacher Center, the panel featured University of Chicago Press managing editor Anita Samen; freelance editor Sonia Fulop, who earned a Graham School editing certificate in 2006; and freelance theater, arts, and cultural critic Monica Westin, AM’08.

The panel gave some useful tips. The first set below comes from Ruthie Kott, AM’07, the Magazine’s Alumni News Editor and aspiring freelancer who wants to balance a full-time job with writing gigs on the side. The second comes from former Magazine staffer Brooke O’Neill, AM’04, a full-time freelancer since 2008.

So you’re wondering how to get started...
Ruthie Kott, AM’07

Avoid procrastination With constant temptations like Facebook, Bejeweled (my personal favorite), or even some old-fashioned Solitaire, this can be a hard rule to follow. But to freelance right, says Fulop, you need to be “very self-motivated, to be able to get work done without schedule and deadlines enforced in the office setting.” Westin agrees: “You do not want to get a reputation for being someone who turns copy in late.”

Get your foot in the door
A clip is all you need to break in, says Westin. “As soon as you’re writing for some publication, you have credibility to other editors.” She also recommends doing informational interviews with editors at publications you want to write for. And when you send a story pitch, she says, don’t just say that you’ll call and touch base within the next week; do it. Make contact with the people you want to work with.

Take advantage of the Web
In late 2009 Fulop started a Web site, which she has found useful when courting new clients. “I have found that, when I have my Web site at the bottom of an e-mail, people will go to it.” But Westin cautions against sending potential editors links to your personal blog. Some editors would consider it unprofessional; at best, a personal blog can help you connect with other writers. “I wouldn’t rely on any editors taking you seriously because you have a blog,” she says.

Get connected
Networking doesn’t have to be a terrifying experience. Westin imagined networking to be “a bunch of sleazy people, really fake and artificial,” but instead she's found that it’s “a community of people you can talk to and get advice from.” And the U of C connection was helpful; her editor at Newcity, where she is a regular arts writer, is Brian Hieggelke, AB’83, AM’84. Fulop also recommends LinkedIn and other professional social-networking sites.

So you’re already a freelancer (and wondering if you’re doing it right)...
Brooke O’Neill, AM’04

Hustle and flow The longer I freelance, the more I realize that no matter how many clients you woo, there’s never an end to the hustling. “You have to be persistent without feeling like you’re stalking people,” says Fulop. Stay at the top of editors’ minds by pitching story ideas regularly. After all, says Westin, “you’re going to have to make a case for your writing for the rest of your life.”

Fear not the long-distance relationship
When I moved back to Chicago from the West Coast a year ago, I fantasized about forging lifelong connections with editors over cocktails à la Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. Yet right now only two of my major clients are Windy City-based. With every e-mail sent off to another faceless individual halfway across the country, I wonder what I’m doing wrong. Nothing, it turns out. U of C Press editor Samen revealed that most of her freelancers live outside Chicago, and Fulop confessed that she’s never met most of hers.

Be formal
I sometimes worry that I’m excessively formal in an informal age. My e-mails to clients start with a proper salutation and end with a sign-off (“Sincerely,” “Best Regards,” “Best Wishes”). Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never quite gotten used to the brusque one-sentence missive that leaves out both. And according to Samen, formal is the way to go. ”The way I’m approached makes a huge difference,” she says. “Err on the side of honorifics.” A new writer who addresses her by first name raises a red flag for Samen. After all, if they're too casual with her, they might also be that way with her authors, who could get offended.

Find friends
“Often as a freelancer you feel isolated,” says Westin. For many writers, this solitude can come as a shock. After all, don’t many of us pursue this profession because we grew up as quiet children prone to reading in private and scribbling our ruminations in diaries? OK, maybe just me. Regardless, my latent extrovert is never more loud and irritating than when I’ve worked alone in my apartment all day, speaking only to a small, withering houseplant. Make sure you’re “someone who will not go crazy working from home,” advises Fulop. Coffee shops, lunch dates, and any other form of human contact can ease the pain.

For more great advice, check out the complete panel on video.

Ruthie Kott, AM'07, and Brooke O'Neill, AM'04

Go medieval

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Students in Chicago's south-side branch of the historical reenactment group Society for Creative Anachronism—Shire of Grey Gargoyles—have been "practicing any and all medieval arts, from broadsword combat to glassblowing to dance and everything in between" since the 1970s. In an e-mail interview with UChiBLOGo, SCA member Nicole Ridgwell, '11, talks about doing research in the Reg to pick her medieval name, attending the Rockefeller coronation of Midrealm's king and queen, and learning to sew so that she could construct her own period dress.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you come up with your medieval name?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy last name comes from a small town in England that is recorded in the Domesday Book. After some Internet research, I went to the Reg and checked [out] a book of all the personal names mentioned in the Domesday Book. I choose three that I really liked, and after some debate I decided on Alwynn, which can mean either noble friend or elf friend in Old English.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was your first SCA experience like?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI attended a Sunday fighter/sewing practice my first year. At that first practice I was able to choose some very nice fabric and a simple pattern to make my first costume. Caitlin, the student SCA group president at that time, helped me construct the dress and taught me the basics of sewing. I got to wear my newly made dress at Stone Dog Inn, a local annual event held at Ida Noyes. I played medieval gambling games using specially cast medieval-type coins and met a large group of friendly people who shared my enjoyment of medieval history.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDescribe your best SCA experience.
QandA_ADrop.jpgThis past fall our local group hosted the 40th anniversary of the Midrealm (a kingdom composed of the northern midwest) and the coronation of the king and queen of the Midrealm. The coronation was held in Rockefeller Chapel and around 600 people in medieval garb attended. The elaborate procession into Rockefeller was an amazing sight that I will never forget.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIf you had a friend interested in joining, what would be your pitch?
QandA_ADrop.jpg SCA is a fun way to explore whatever you want in medieval or even pre-medieval history. Unlike a history class you don't have to write papers or take tests. You can immerse yourself in history through crafts or fighting or dance instead of looking at history through the more objective, external lens of strict research.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat's the best way to get started?
QandA_ADrop.jpgCome to Sunday practices at Ida Noyes. Spring quarter practices start April 18, 2-5 p.m. We will be out on the Midway or in Ida Noyes' West Lounge on the second floor. Check our Web sites (http://www.midrealm.org/greygargoyles and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreyGargoyles) for more information about upcoming events. We can even loan you garb.

Joy Miller

Nicole Ridgwell (in green) with members of the UChicago SCA student group at Midrealm's 2008 Crown Tournament of Their Majesties Ullr et Annelyse. Photo courtesy of Ridgwell.

RELATED READING:

Silver screen

Lifelong activist Carol Ruth Silver, AB’60, JD’64, has placed herself at the center of many social-justice causes, from the 1960s Freedom Rides to, more recently, helping Afghanistan set up schools. In San Francisco she served, alongside Harvey Milk, on the Board of Supervisors (1977–89), and when the 2008 movie Milk was being filmed, she found herself even at the center of the production:

DJD_5640bw.jpg"Harvey and I were good buddies. We were elected together to the Board of Supervisors, and he and I were the anchors of the liberal consensus. We wrote things like rent control and condo conversion limitations. And of course our signature legislation was prohibition of discrimination by reason of sexual orientation, which was passed by a strong majority in San Francisco, just because the lesbian, gay, et cetera, community was so strong that there was no politician in San Francisco who could say no to it—and also because it was so right.

"And then along came these people who were making a movie of Harvey Milk's experiences, and I was recruited. I went to the casting event where they were casting my character. In the movie, as it finally was done, there's very little of my character [the person who played me] that actually shows. She got mostly cut out in favor of other things. But there was a sense that this was going to be an important character in the movie. So they had a casting thing where a whole bunch of actresses came and did their stuff in front of the director, Gus Van Sant, and the producer. … So I wandered in and met all these people. And somebody said, "Well, here. Take this number and go stand over there, and we'll take your picture. And maybe you'll get a job as an extra in this film." And I said, "All right. Sounds like fun." So now they had me on record.

"About two weeks later I got a call from somebody saying, “We've cast you as Thelma in the movie.” I said, "Who is Thelma?" And he said, "Thelma is a composite character representing all of the little-old-lady volunteers who used to come to Harvey's camera shop and help him with his political campaign." And so that is who I am in the Milk movie. I have one speaking part. I come on from the left and hand Sean Penn a piece of paper saying, "Harvey, Harvey. You have to look at this." And it's the death-threat letter that is an important item in the film. So that was my big Hollywood experience."

Amy Braverman Puma

Photography by Dan Dry

A presidential drugstore revisited

Kevin Crowley does not understand why I am calling him. A year ago, when the Hyde Park Walgreens he manages was the self-proclaimed “Barack Obama Headquarters,” he was kind enough to walk me through the store’s expansive selection of Obama-themed products and even let me shoot some shaky video.

But now, more than a year after Obama's inauguration, he doesn’t get it. I keep trying to explain my interest isn't a political thing. He keeps trying to refer me to corporate communications.

ObamaPen.jpg“I had a lot of stuff in the run-up to the election,” he says, too nice to hang up. “It’s like when the Bulls win the championship. You gotta wait until they win another one.”

I ask if the prices of Obama gear have dropped more or less than Obama’s approval rating (61 percent last March, according to Gallup, compared to 50 percent now). “I don’t think his approval rating is down in Hyde Park,” Crowley points out.

So I stop hassling him (I can’t afford to be banned from my local Walgreens) and a few days later stop by surreptitiously to do my own inventory. Ah, how the mighty have fallen. The post-election Obama extravaganza at the store’s entrance has shrunk to an end-of-aisle display between the shopping bags and the strapping tape. The clothing selection is now just a messy, multicolored pile of sweatshirts (marked down to a bargain-basement $4) and hoodies ($6.25), some with the presidential seal, others that read "Obama 44th President."

There are only a few remaining non-clothing items: stainless-steel portable Obama coffee mugs ($7.99); red, white, and blue Obama banners—“car flags,” reads the tag (two for $10); and a small charcoal drawing of the first family on the White House lawn ($3.99, or three for $10). This saccharine image is mixed in with various others of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and a furious, finger-pointing Malcolm X, all of which are labeled “Obama prints” on the price tag. Perhaps this collection is intended to get at his shape-shifting nature: when you look at Obama, you see what you’re expecting to see.

Just two Obama products rate a location at the front of the store. In the Chicago souvenir section, there’s an Obama shot glass ($1.99), unless you prefer the skyline or Al Capone. Then there’s the one remaining register-worthy impulse buy: the talking Obama pen.

I’ll admit it: I own three of these. A year ago, I bought one at the full price of $7.99. By Christmas, they had been marked down to two for $10, cheap enough so that each of my kids got one in their stockings. Obama no longer shops at the Walgreens, Crowley says. But apparently Santa still does.

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

Peeps...outside the box

PeepsatPond.jpgIt must be spring: we’ve started to hear a few peeps from readers clamoring for a reprise of last year's Peeps Diorama Contest.

This time we want you to take your marshmallow creatures out into the world. Our inspiration: the National Geographic Traveler’s Peeps in Places Photo Challenge.

Your mission:

  1. Check out entries on the NGT site for examples.

  2. Walk around the quads, Rockefeller, or any other campus site that strikes you as the perfect place for Peeps. If you're not near a University campus, put your Peeps in a place where Chicago peeps feel at home—or Photoshop them there.

  3. Shoot your pix and send to uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu with “Peeps Photos” in the subject line, or add photos to our Flickr group directly at www.flickr.com/groups/uchicagopeeps/

Although Peeps last forever, this photo opp has a shorter lifespan. All photos must be received by midnight on Monday, April 5.

Look for our favorites on UChiBLOGo next week. And, yes, there will be a prize. As soon as we peep one up.


RELATED READING

Washington Post Peeps Show IV : Annual Peeps diorama contest

Proportion control

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In the five weeks Albie Sachs spent on campus as a visiting professor, lecturing and teaching on South African constitutional law and what it has to say about same-sex marriage, torture, terrorism, and socioeconomic rights, it was hard to resist comparisons to the United States and how those same issues have been handled here. In his classroom discussions, Sachs—who helped write the South African constitution in the 1990s before becoming a constitutional-court justice—invited students to explore those comparisons. What is the American concept of justice? What does the constitution say about housing rights and religious freedom and the societal role of criminal punishment?

In a late January class on the second floor of Cobb Hall, Sachs laid out one fundamental difference he sees between South Africa’s constitutional philosophy and America’s: “proportionality.”

“It’s the theme of balancing,” he said. “Years ago I met a judge from Denmark, Isi Foighel, who was on the European Court of Human Rights. He said, 'You know, there's a very interesting thing you’ll notice on that court: the judges of southern Europe think their job is to distinguish between justice and injustice, right and wrong, lawful and unlawful. But the judges of northern Europe think that their main function is to regulate competing claims of right, when the case is not between right and wrong, but right and right.' Neither claim is invalid, but you have to find balance. It’s a very different crisis of reasoning.”

A similar difference exists, Sachs explained, between South Africa and the United States. In this country, he said, judges look to decipher right and wrong, lawful and unlawful. South Africa's judges think more like northern Europeans. He pointed to two cases as examples: a Rastafarian lawyer in Johannesburg denied admittance to the bar unless he swore off marijuana, and two Oregon Native Americans denied unemployment after being fired for eating peyote. Both filed suit, claiming the drugs as an important ritual elements of their religious exercise. Each claim went all the way to its country's high court, and in the end each was denied. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the Oregon case, arguing that religion doesn't give a citizen the right to disobey generally applicable laws: "To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."

In South Africa, the Constitutional Court's justices took a slightly different approach. They would not have been unhappy, Sachs said, to recognize Rastafarians' marijuana usage for religious reasons, but they determined that regulating the drug was unfeasible. (Sachs, who wrote the minority opinion in the case, disagreed on the issue of feasibility; he saw a way, he said, that it could have been done.) But their calculations were not so simple as figuring out who was wrong, which claim was outside the law.

In the United States, Sachs said, the term "proportionality" isn't often used. But increasingly it may be. “In a modern, diverse, pluralist society, those are the cases”—right versus right, not right versus wrong—“that are coming before the top courts. You’re not simply classifying, establishing a rule through classification. You’re not saying, ‘The rule applies or doesn’t apply.’ It’s balancing; it’s proportionality. It's weighing up, for example, the state interest in controlling the supply of drugs as against the intensity of the religious belief and its meaning for the adherents.”

Lydialyle Gibson

Photography by Dan Dry

Errand of mercy

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It was close to 7 p.m. that I got word we were going to fly. I had been waiting since dawn to go on a run with the University of Chicago Aeromedical Network helicopter, but an unusual fog had kept the helicopter grounded most of the morning, while a lack of beds at the University of Chicago Medical Center’s intensive care unit had kept us from flying through the afternoon.

Finally, the call came in: a man in Community General Hospital in Munster, Indiana, 23 miles away, with an unidentified illness required transport to the U of C, whose expertise in complex cases was needed. We traveled to the rooftop helipad of Mitchell Hospital, then boarded the helicopter in the gathering twilight.

My crash helmet blocked out most of the noise of the turbines and the rotors. I could hear the pilot talking to air traffic control as Aeromed One, identifying our origin, destination, and fuel load, as well as “four souls on board.”

Lifting off was gentler than an amusement-park ride, gentler even than an elevator. No one spoke or pointed out the sights on the eight-minute trip to Munster. After no time at all, we touched down gently at Community General. A policeman led us from the helipad to the patient, in the intensive care unit.

I stood back as the doctor and transport nurse hooked the patient up to the helicopter’s portable life-support equipment. I had never felt so superfluous in my life. Here were people racing against the clock to save this man’s life, and all I could do was try to stay out of their way.

The hospital nurses wrung their hands and looked on. One turned to me and said, “We want him to come back and visit us—you know, to walk in the door, healthy.” Another lamented softly, “We just don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

Eventually, the crew got him squared away and ready for transport. It took at least half an hour to do this, but it seemed like five minutes. I followed the gurney as we met the pilot and processed to the helipad. Finally, I got to be useful, holding an oxygen tank as the semiconscious patient was loaded aboard the helicopter. We climbed aboard, the pilot spun up the engines, and, within a few minutes, we were off. The pilot contacted air traffic control again: “This is Aeromed One. Five souls on board.”

Someone finally broke the silence. “This guy is a lot worse than they made him sound over the phone.”

Before I knew it, we were over the Midway. The helicopter slowly landed in a tight spiral and powered down again. I followed the gurney back to the ICU. Twelve hours of waiting paid off. In the end, I got my helicopter ride, and he got a fighting chance to live.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

Photography by Dan Dry

Baby, I don’t care

Out%20of%20Past.jpgWho’s that? What just happened? I thought she was dead. Are we supposed to know what he knows?

Robert Pippin got a big laugh with his approximation of what goes through many viewers’ heads when watching classic American film noir, with its labyrinthine plot lines and broken links between cause and effect, intention and action. Those of us who had recently screened the film at the center of his March talk, “Trapped By Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past,” could relate.

In the 1947 film, Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, an ex-hood who’s trying to lead a new, clean life in a new, clean town. In the opening scene Jeff is discovered by a former associate and, like Michael Corleone after him, pulled inexorably back into a world of crime and double-crossing. Doing most of the heavy pulling is Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat—the femme fatale without whom no noir would be complete. During the key San Francisco sequence, keeping track of the rapid succession of plot twists is all but hopeless.

So are the destinies of film noir characters, which seem ruled by an ancient form of fate. Grim urban settings, cold-blooded murders, official corruption, bitter irony toward the American Dream, a sense of predetermination: this is what film noir is made of, said Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef distinguished service professor of social thought, philosophy, and in the College. He focused on the disconnect between noir characters’ motives and their actions. The first noir line, he said, might be one in Oedipus at Colonus: "I suffered those deeds more than I owned them." “In this genre,” Pippin observed, “people say over and over, ‘I’m not going to do that,’ and then they do it.” Or they plan an action, meeting the formal requirements of agency, but don’t follow through.

If they did, they would be acting within the American philosophical tradition of reflective action; but in American noir nobody fits this model. When Kathie, whom Jeff suspects of treachery, protests her innocence, he responds with the famous line “Baby, I don’t care” (also the title of Lee Server’s first-rate Mitchum biography). Moments later they’re kissing, but Mitchum’s back to the camera prevents us from reading his character’s motivation.

Pippin's talk was the first of three in a series, “Fatalism in Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy,” analyzing the philosophic condition of noir heroes or antiheroes. The two subsequent talks looked at Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. Pippin will deliver all three again next week as the 2010 Page-Barbour lecturer at the University of Virginia.

Laura Demanski, AM’94

Plea for Peeps

PeepScarf.jpg

With sunshine and spring descending on Chicago, there’s no excuse not to take your Peeps places. Whether you’re strolling around Botany Pond, the Reg, or somewhere else in the world—entries need not be local—grab your camera, your marshmallow candies, and enter our contest today.

Send pix to uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu with “Peeps Photos” in the subject line, or add photos to our Flickr group directly at www.flickr.com/groups/uchicagopeeps/.

All entries must be received by Monday, April 5. Check out the competition here.

Photography by Hanna Ernst, U-High'04

On the write path

students_guide_cover_LRG.jpgThe University of Chicago Press doesn't suffer fools gladly. The Press released the fourth edition of Kate L. Turabian’s Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers on April 1—April Fool's Day—because turning students into good writers is no joke.

Aimed at advanced high school and beginning college students, the Student’s Guide is a step-by-step aid to writing university-level research papers. It offers advice on how to choose a topic, begin researching, plan drafts with a storyboard, find and evaluate reliable sources, cite sources accurately, and design visual aids and graphs. The guide also provides tricks for working through writer’s block and an overview of Chicago, MLA, and APA citation styles, including those for digital sources.

Perhaps most importantly, the manual addresses an insidious problem for rookie researchers: procrastination. Avoid the academic urban myth of the “one-draft wonder,” the editors warn. Nary a student has produced a perfectly developed, one-draft research paper the night before the due date. Steer clear of this approach at all costs.

Here are a few of the book’s anti-procrastination tips:

  • Start drafting as soon as you have all the evidence you think you need. You can always go back and gather more information later if necessary.

  • Write in short bursts instead of marathon sessions that will “dull your thinking" and "kill your interest.”

  • Set a goal to produce a small number of pages every time you sit down to write, even if they aren't very good.

  • Most of all, don’t kid yourself: a short text message, online chat, or computer game will NOT help refresh your brain or motivate you to get back to work in just a few minutes. So do your writing where you'll have few distractions.

The original author of the Student’s Guide, Kate Turabian (1893-1987) was a fixture at the University for many years, serving as the graduate student dissertation secretary from 1930 to 1958. She wrote a short style guide to help doctoral students, which eventually became A Manual for Writers and today has sold 8 million copies in seven editions. In 1963 Turabian published a version for high school and college students—the first Student’s Guide for Writing College Papers.

More than four decades later, an editorial team that includes Gregory Colomb, professor of English at the University of Virginia, and Joseph Williams, a former Chicago English professor who died in 2008, builds upon Turabian’s classic advice, tailoring it to twenty-first century students.

Yet despite today's digital resources and distractions, one constant is the panic that can overcome first-time writers. The editorial team behind Student’s Guide hopes to help.

Emily Riemer, AM’09


RELATED READING

Writing in College: A Short Guide to College Writing” by Joseph M. Williams and Lawrence McEnerney (The University of Chicago Writing Program)

Out of the Question,” (UChiBLOGo, Jan. 7, 2009)

In Style,” (UChiBLOGo, Dec. 8, 2009)

Foul territory

187_20100405442805.jpg“I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?”—Leo “the Lip” Durocher

As baseball season kicks off, don’t miss this peek inside the mind of one of the sport’s most colorful characters, player and manager Leo Durocher. His book, Nice Guys Finish Last, cowritten with veteran sportswriter Ed Linn, is now available for free electronic download from the University of Chicago Press. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or just like a good story, the tale of Durocher’s five-decade career, which started on the bench with the 1928 Yankees and took him all the way to a Giants' 1951 pennant win, gives an insider’s look at the feuds and scandals behind the game.

Peeps last call

Peeps_Reg.jpg

Perhaps they're sitting on your dining room table or languishing in an Easter basket. Wherever your Peeps are, you know you're not going to eat them. Put them to a good use and take advantage of our Peeps in Places contest extended deadline. Submit your pix by Sunday, April 11, midnight to win!

Send entries to uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu with “Peeps Photos” in the subject line, or add photos to our Flickr group directly at www.flickr.com/groups/uchicagopeeps/.

Don't delay any longer!

Photography by Hanna Ernst, U-High'04

RELATED READING

Where Peeps come to dioramas (University of Chicago Magazine)

Washington Post Peeps Show IV : Annual Peeps diorama contest

Peeps in Places contest
(National Geographic Traveler)

Around-the-clock theater

24hourplay.jpg

Six plays, 24 hours. Those are the important numbers for the fourth annual 24-Hour Play Festival, which graced the Reynolds Club this weekend, challenging more than 40 students to speed from auditions Friday night through writing, rehearsal and stage direction and, finally, to a performance Saturday night.

THE BREAK-DOWN

FRIDAY

  • 6:30 p.m. (Hour Minus-1.5): Auditions
    Prior to the festival, the event's curators accepted registration for actors, directors, writers, and crew. After announcing the six writer-director teams (most featured two writers and one director), the actors perform short skits to introduce themselves. For example, Charna Albert, '13, sings an a capella rendition of "I'm On a Boat" by the Lonely Island, while Amanda Fink, '12, reads the caption of a coloring-book picture of penguins.
  • 8 p.m. (Hour 0): Writing
    After writer-director teams agree on casts in an "arbitration" meeting—the actors were not present and found out their roles later on—the writers head to the Woodlawn Collaborative to work on scripts, which each run about ten minutes. Around 3 a.m., the writers convene to discuss and critique their pieces with dramaturg Chloe Johnston, AB'99. Says cocurator and writer Sara Tamler, '10, of early-morning writing: "There's a lot of creativity that comes out at 5 in the morning that wouldn't come out at any other time."

SATURDAY

  • 9 a.m. (Hour 13): Read-throughs

    The writers hand scripts to the directors and discuss ideas during the first cast read-through. After the writers depart, the six teams split up for rehearsals around campus, with one group staying in the Reynolds Club's First Floor Theater for in-space rehearsal. (Each play got roughly an hour to work in the space.) With an alley set (meaning that the audience sits on both sides of the theater, facing each other), groups have to account for unique spacing issues. "We really do try to change something every time," cocurator and actor Ethan Dubin, '11, says. "We very much think of it as an experiment in a laboratory."

  • 4:30 p.m. (Hour 21.5): Tech/Dress Rehearsal

    The teams come back together for the final dress rehearsals to figure out blocking under the lights and sound cues, including transitions between plays. While some feature very few cues, "Denver," written by cocurator Tamara Silverleaf and Aileen McGroddy, both '10, includes multiple light changes, musical accompaniments, and announcements mimicking an airport PA.
  • 8:00 p.m. (Hour 24): Curtains

    The show begins. With about 120 students in the audience, including several seated on the floor on each side of the stage, the hour-long performance keeps the flash-theatergoers laughing throughout.

To see more of the on-the-ground experience, check out our festival pix and video.

Jake Grubman, '11

Stress test

Stress.jpgIf I were a poet or a poetry scholar, I'd have something insightful to say about English doctoral student Michael Robbins's (AM'04) "Lust for Life," which appears in this week's New Yorker—his second poem published there this year. Impressive, but not my area.

Something I can comment on is stress. In the Daily Beast's "50 Most Stressful Colleges," Chicago ranks No. 11. As Ana Marie Cox, AB'94, tweeted: "#UChicago is so stressful they're probably relieved to be just #11 on this list." I don't know if a university's cost factors into a student's stress level at 35 percent, as the Daily Beast weights it. Seems to me that, although many students work to pay off student loans and other debt, the day-to-day schoolwork is more of an immediate stress inducer. And I'm not sure that having a rigorous engineering program deserves 10 percent of a school's stress-level indicator. Chicago has no engineering school, but have the Beast editors seen students in the Reg wrestling with Human Being and Citizen readings?

What do you think about these rankings? Or do you have a stressed-at-Chicago story to share? Please use the comment form below to commiserate.

Amy Braverman Puma

Photography by Lloyd DeGrane

Artistic impulse

Art.jpg

“Creativity isn’t a matter of ‘which color do I pick’ or ‘which word do I use.’ It’s an act of the mind which dares to ask ‘How do I take what I have and turn it into the message I want to communicate? ... Computer programming, regression analysis, means, medians, and standard deviations. Not exactly the colors of the rainbow, but they’re the colors on my paintbrush.”—Mark Desmarais, AB’06

Whether you’re a mathematician or a professional artist, everyone has creative insights. As part of 60 Days of UChicago Art, a campus-wide celebration of music, theater, dance, cinema, creative writing, and artistic thought, the UofC Theater Blog is collecting personal impressions of creativity with its 200 word project. Share yours today!

Your mission:

1. Please consider ONE of following in 200 words or fewer:

  • Tell us about an encounter with the arts that profoundly moved you or changed you.

  • How do you experience creativity in your work?

2. E-mail your submission to coleman@uchicago.edu with “200 word project” in the subject title. One entry will be posted each day April through June.

Entries are welcome from all University of Chicago students, staff, faculty, and alumni.

Chicago Molière Theater

ChicagoMoliereTheater1.jpgYesterday Court Theatre closed its production of The Illusion, Tony Kushner's adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 1636 L’Illusion Comique. The show marked Court's return to one of its strengths: the French Baroque. Exemplified by the works of its most renowned writer, Molière, the genre is considered a major pillar of the Western classic theater canon. Yet it is not Molière, but his English counterpart, William Shakespeare, whose name is often synonymous with “classic” theater in America.

Companies specializing in classic works often go so far as to include the bard’s name in theirs, from Chicago Shakespeare Theater to Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company and innumerable Shakespeare festivals in nearly every state. Yet few of these companies, despite their names’ implications, produce only Shakespeare's plays. Most, such as New York’s famed Shakespeare in the Park, make it a policy to include at least one work from “the canon” in each season. Their remaining plays vary widely, from the “Shakespearean” to the Shakespeare-inspired, and from generically “classic” works to productions of Willy Wonka and A Christmas Story. Nonetheless, these companies are considered Shakespeare specialists, and the actual Shakespeare plays are typically the highlights of their seasons.

From the beginning, the University of Chicago’s resident theater company and classics specialist has been different. Court Theatre’s inaugural 1955 season was made up entirely of plays by Molière. During its 55-year history, the theater has put up some 17 productions of 12 Molière plays, likely the most of any American company. As a result, although its history actually includes far more Shakespeare productions—44 in all—Court is known in theater circles as America’s Molière expert. And, like all those “Shakespeare” theaters producing not-quite Shakespeare plays, Court has frequently ventured into the Molière-ish, from its 1995 production of Celimene and the Cardinal and 1999 production of La Bête (modern works inspired by Molière’s style and characters) to plays by some of his successors in French theatrical history, including Marivaux and Voltaire. In fact, The Illusion is Court's second consecutive production of a non-Molière French Baroque play; in 2002 the company presented Jean Racine's Phèdre, aggressively adapted and directed by Joanne Akalaitis, AB’60.

As for The Illusion, Corneille described the play as “a strange monster,” “a bizarre and wild invention,” and “a caprice,” to which the Chicago Reader’s Tony Adler added “a calculated hodgepodge—a funny, sad, tricky fairy tale/melodrama, chock-full of high aspirations, low comedy, and unapologetic magic.” The Chicago Sun-Times’ Hedy Weiss wrote that “the work here is so good on every front…that you wish it could be airlifted whole onto the stage of the Comédie-Française.” What else would one expect from Chicago’s Molière theater?

Kyle Gorden, AB'00

Photography courtesy Court Theatre

RELATED LINKS

The Illusion: Corneille to Kushner (Court Theatre)

Chicago Sun-Times review

Gene shorts

"You keep calling me Mr. Mozaffar in your e-mails. Not to be cliché, but that's my father's name. And his father's before him. (But interestingly, not his father's. Apparently, the name only goes back two generations. Hmmm, maybe I should look into a DNA test)."

Khurram Mozaffar, AB'95, has DNA tests on the mind. A lawyer by day and an actor by night, Mozaffar recently appeared in The DNA Trail, conceived by Jamil Khoury, AM'92, and produced by Khoury's Silk Road Theatre Project. The show consists of seven original short plays, inspired by DNA tests taken by the playwrights (the play closed April 4). Mozaffar, who is Pakistani, took on a different identity in five pieces—including a generic "Arab Man" in Khoury's WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole, a ninja in Tony Award—winner David Henry Hwang's A Very DNA Reunion, and a son who never lived up to his dead father's hopes in Phillip Kan Gotanda's Child is Father to Man.

Despite his very busy schedule, Mozaffar took some time to talk with UChiBLOGo about his heritage and about playing several different parts within the span of about two hours.


Child%20is%20Father%20to%20Man.jpg
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was it like to switch between so many roles?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI can't take too much credit for that. The writing is so distinct for each of those characters that, by the time we opened the play, it was easy to slip into different skins. During rehearsal, we spent a good amount of time creating the particular nuances of each personality—everything from the way they would use their hands (Ninja Dude envisioned his arms almost like swords) to the amount of personal space they needed (Arab Man was a close talker). By the time the curtain opened, the characters were so specific that transitioning was pretty easy.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you relate at all to any of the characters you played?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNinja Dude.

Ha. Actually, my role in Child is Father spoke the most to me. During the rehearsal process, it was often noted how oddly similar the lives of the character, the playwright Philip Gotanda, and myself were. Both myself and Philip made the effort at a "respectable" career in the law. The character speaks of being told by a psychic that one day, he would have three sons. I actually have three sons. But more than the coincidences, I think the anxieties the character voices rang true to me. The uphill battle in choosing a career in the arts rang true to all of us involved in the show.

QandA_QDrop.jpgIs it difficult to go from lawyer by day, to actor by night?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt has its challenges. But the acting is actually a nice reprieve from the mundane nature of my day job. For two hours a day, I just get to play.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDid acting in the show bring out any hidden questions about your own heritage?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt's interesting. I know for some of the actors, the show did bring up questions about heritage. But not for me so much. My extended family is so ginormous that keeping track of those living is difficult enough without bringing in ancestors.

I am less interested in the genetic history of my family than I am in the personal experiences my elders have had. I am utterly fascinated by tales my father tells me of his delicate relationships with his parents and siblings. Or stories of my maternal grandfather as a rabble-rousing young man. That stuff, to me, is much more rewarding to learn about.

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

Photography courtesy of the Silk Road Theatre Project

The envelope, please...

book-peeps.jpgIt’s not always easy being a Peep, as our Peeps in Places Contest proved. While a few lucky chicks and bunnies rubbed elbows with celebs like Donald Duck, others toughed it out in the peep-eat-peep world of campus life. All of the 60 entries we received made us laugh, but a few really caught our attention. All winners will receive a copy of Magazine photographer Dan Dry’s coffee-table book of University photographs. Our thanks to everyone who participated.

So, without further ado, the winners:


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Poepnix.jpg


Peeps-Avoid-Eye.jpg


Peeping-Tom.jpg

Cured meat cure-all

Bacon-pix.jpgIt makes anything taste good. And it adds a little bit of crunch and saltiness to things that already taste good, whether sprinkled in chocolate or wrapped around filet mignon. At Saturday’s Baconfest—Chicago’s first annual, started by Andre Pluess, AB’96; Seth Zurer, AB’99; and their friend Michael Griggs—the honored foodstuff was featured in everything from Bloody Marys to doggie treats. Chefs from local big-name restaurants showcased their pork skills, creating masterpieces like bacon tacos, by David Burke's Primehouse chef Rick Gresh, and chicken-fried bacon with homemade pickles, by one sixtyblue chef Michael McDonald.

Serious Eats blogger Daniel Zemans snagged one of the 600 tickets and describes the event in excruciatingly tantalizing detail. Most intriguing thing on the menu: Dragon Turds, jalapenos stuffed with Italian sausage and fig, all wrapped in (you guessed it) bacon. File that under “Putting ThisIsWhyYou’reFat.com to shame.”

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

A delectable sampling of Fest offerings includes a bacon waffle with brown-sugar bacon ice cream, garnished with candied dehydrated bacon from Longman and Eagle chef Jared Wentworth; the bacon Bloody Mary from the Fifty/50; and bacon-covered chocolate from Bleeding Heart Bakery. Photos by Annette Janik.

Obama's Chicago way

Remnick-book.jpgDavid Remnick spoke Tuesday at the Harold Washington Library, describing how Chicago shaped Barack Obama, including the influence of his future wife Michelle Robinson’s tight-knit, striving family. With the caveat that he wanted to avoid psychoanalyzing his subject, Remnick waded into Obama’s head. The Robinson family represented everything his childhood lacked. With his father absent and his mother often abroad, Obama found in the Robinsons an example of what he might be able to achieve.

Obama followed a help-wanted ad to Chicago, lured by fate and newsprint to the city that would propel his political life. “Chicago is, if not everything to Barack Obama, the key arrival spot for him,” said Remnick, the New Yorker editor and the author of a new biography that traces the unlikely route from Honolulu to the White House.

In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf, 2010), Remnick details how a rootless, searching “man without a country”—just a figure of speech—developed an identity in Chicago. “Almost everything that he could find in life, he had to find here,” Remnick said, “especially on the South Side.” As a community organizer, a Law School lecturer, and an office-seeker, Obama established a stability he never had in his youth while retraining his ability to inhabit diverse worlds. It would become a potent political cocktail.

His own ambition emerged at Harvard Law School, Remnick said; in fact, Obama might have been too anxious to advance in Chicago. Already a state senator, in 2000 he challenged incumbent congressional Representative Bobby Rush—“an act of enormous impiety,” Remnick said. “Everybody around him, including his wife, says don’t do it. And he lost. He lost beyond his wildest dreams.”

After that loss, Obama discovered talents that translated beyond the district, revealed in campaign-style visits to farm towns and VFW halls throughout Illinois. “His uncanny ability to inhabit certain worlds and move one to another and translate them to each other” awakened bigger aspirations, Remnick said. “Connecting with people around Illinois suggested a political career beyond big-city mayor or majority African American congressional district.”

Political savvy and demographic appeal took him a long way, but Illinois Republicans inadvertently boosted his career too. Obama benefited from good fortune that even his closest advisers could not believe, particularly the revelation of 2004 Senate candidate Jack Ryan’s salacious divorce papers. Ryan dropped out of the race, leaving Obama with the equivalent of a winning electoral lottery ticket. When they learned Alan Keyes would be Ryan’s replacement, campaign manager Jim Cauley told Obama, “You are the luckiest bastard on earth.”

Jason Kelly

A year of YA lit

Book-YA.jpgAs a Chicago undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, AB’05, tutored a sixth-grade Lab student who devoured young-adult literature—everything from Carolyn Mackler novels to the Gossip Girl series. The student loaned her books to Barnes, who became hooked too.

Barnes graduated with an English literature degree, earned a master’s in library science from Boston’s Simmons College, and worked for three years as a teen librarian at Homewood Public Library, 25 miles south of Chicago’s Loop.

This month she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is searching for a new librarian post, working on a personal creative writing project, reviewing manuscripts for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest, and serving on the 2011 Best Fiction for Young Adults Committee (BFYA). Sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association, BFYA draws up an annual list of recommended YA fiction titles. Committee members can receive up to 80 books a month from publishers who hope their titles will nab a spot on the list.

In early April UChiBLOGo interrupted Barnes’s reading marathon to ask about her BFYA appointment:

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen did you become part of the committee? What does your position entail?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy one-year term started in late January. The committee will convene in June and again next January. We’ll meet 9-5, five days in a row each time. Committee members nominate books throughout the year, informing other members of their picks. We’ll vote on the nominated books when we convene, and the final list will be released in January. Last year approximately 120 titles made the cut.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow many books have arrived so far? Have you read them all?
QandA_ADrop.jpgBecause I’m moving to Cambridge, I arranged to have the books sent to my parents’ home in Massachusetts. My mom has been e-mailing me the titles that come in—so far I’ve received 98. I enter each title onto a spreadsheet and then go to the library and check out the ones I want to read. We aren’t required to read each book we receive, but we are expected to read each book that is nominated. Last year, there were 224 titles nominated. And we don’t have to limit ourselves to the books we receive from publishers. We can nominate any piece of YA fiction published between September 1, 2009 and December 31, 2010.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow are you pacing yourself?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’ve been trying to read a book a day, but so far I’ve fallen a bit short of that goal. At first, when I didn’t have a big stack of eligible books to read, I also read some books from the previous year to become accustomed to the pace. I’ve read 48 books since my term began, and I’m also trying to chronicle the process on my blog.

Book-schedule.jpg

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow are you organizing everything?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI started with Excel, but that drove me crazy. Now I’m using a program called Scrivener. I’ve created virtual corkboards to which I add note cards that state the title and author of a particular book. Then I color-code each card to indicate whether or not I think it should be on the final list.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do the different colors mean?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe point is to go along the traffic-light color spectrum from “go” to “no.” Dark green is a strong yes; light green is a weak yes; yellow is undecided; pink is a weak no; red is a strong no. And blue designates a book that I nominated.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHave you nominated any books yet?
QandA_ADrop.jpgFive so far. Just today I nominated Fat Cat by Robin Brande and Will Grayson, Will Grayson by David Levithan and John Green.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy those two?
QandA_ADrop.jpgFat Cat is an excellent book within what’s known as the “Fat Lit” genera. It’s about a girl who’s competing in her school’s science fair. She adopts the eating habits of a cavewoman for her project and loses weight as a result. I think the author handles the weight theme well. Brande never specifies how much the protagonist weighs or the number of pounds she loses. Sometimes these sorts of books state over and over that a character is overweight. It’s shoved down your throat, and you can’t tell where the author is going with it. And that’s a small gripe I have with Will Grayson, Will Grayson. The book has two protagonists, both of whom are named Will Grayson. One of them is described repeatedly as “fat.” Once someone’s physical description is established, there’s no need to restate those characteristics—unless you're Stephenie Meyer.
QandA_QDrop.jpgBut you liked the book enough to nominate it?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe need to be honest in our nominations. You can acknowledge that a book has a certain weakness, but argue that all the strengths outweigh that one weakness.

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

Barnes (top) surrounded by books vying for a spot on the list, all of which eventually make their way into her color-coded organizing system.

The face of evil

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Being a celebrity look-alike has its ups and downs. For Mounir, a fictional Saddam Hussein body double, the resemblance—right down to the mustache—brings plenty of grief. As the protagonist in Mr. Sadman, director Patrick Epino’s (AB’98) new feature film, the Iraqi gets attacked in the line of duty in 1990, loses his job, and then struggles to carve out a new life in Los Angeles. Unfortunately for Mounir, his personal upheaval occurs just as the real-life Saddam invades Kuwait, making the dictator the world’s most recognizable face of evil.

The dark comedy, coproduced by Harry Min Kang, AB’98, was screened April 9 at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of its Asian American Showcase. Epino took some time for a quick e-mail interview with UChiBLOGo last week.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was the inspiration for a film about a Saddam double?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI had this idea of taking this un-American face of evil and making him as American as possible. The film was a critique of something you see often in American or modern society: the dearth of soul, the alienation from the self, the lack of meaning, and how we comodify our lives and senses of self. ... If the main thing that gives you meaning in life, whether it be religion, art, philosophy, ideology, etc., is negated, somehow proven false or taken away from you, then how do you come back from that? How do you take bits and pieces of the world that is so readily available at our fingertips and create a new foundation to stand on? In Mounir's case, he goes to exaggerated extremes.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was the shooting process like?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe shot the film in 17 out of 19 days starting August 4, 2007. Slept about three hours a night. It was exhausting and intense because of the number of cast members [around 70-80] and locations. ... We had a few primary production locations, but also had to dress a lot of spaces to be somewhere else entirely. ... Combining all of those variables in a compressed amount of time can get gloriously interesting. Also, trying to shoot something that takes place in 1990 when Toyota Priuses are cruising by every 30 seconds is absurdly difficult.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat kind of budget did you have?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe were an "ultra-low budget" production. It's a Screen Actors Guild term for anything under $200K, and we were definitely under that amount.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s next for Mr. Sadman?
QandA_ADrop.jpg[It’s] screening opening night in Eugene, Oregon, at the DisOrient Film Festival on April 23, and at Boston College soon, but this is where we're kind of taking a divergent path. ... In an effort to get as many eyeballs on the film as possible, we're making the film available as a download and on DVD. ... The idea is to make it easy for people who want to watch the film to watch it.

For more from Epino, check out his Q&A from the Siskel Film Center screening.

Brooke O'Neill, AM'04

Proof of faith

JamesOssuary-1-.jpgNina Burleigh, AM’87, was amused when she first heard about what Israeli authorities called the “fraud of the century,” a forged limestone box that was believed to have been the first evidence of Jesus’s existence. Reading the New York Times “from cover to cover” while procrastinating writing her book Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt (Harper, 2007), Burleigh, a journalist, was drawn to the story about four antiquities dealers and collectors who had been arrested for “taking real artifacts and altering them to make them more valuable and appear to relate” to biblical tales and characters. It was late 2004, soon after the presidential election that was a blow to people of her “political persuasion.”

“One group credited with the reelection were the evangelical Christians,” Burleigh told an Oriental Institute audience in early March, and she read the Times article trying to imagine the kind of person who would try to fool believers. “I have to admit that my original motive was to amuse myself, I guess, by thinking about this.”

Her imagination--and months of research--led to a 2008 book, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land (HarperCollins), about the world of biblical archaeology and its contradictions. Archaeologists are the "natural enemies" of dealers and collectors, said Burleigh, who make money off people willing to pay for something that can be considered biblical proof. People of faith travel to the Holy Land in droves, she said, to visit John the Baptist's cave or the Jordan River, where John was said to have baptized Jesus. There, they can rent white garments and wade in the water. The tourist economy, said Burleigh, is a reason why looting and forgery is such a problem in biblical archaeology.

The limestone box, called the James Ossuary (of unknown provenance), was announced to the public in 2002 at a press conference cohosted by the Discovery Channel and the Biblical Archaeology Society. Inscribed with the words, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" in Aramaic, the ossuary had belonged to well-known Israeli antiquities collector Oded Golan. Many scholars who knew Golan didn't trust him, Burleigh said, because they knew he often bought looted artifacts. But still the ossuary was exhibited at Canada's Royal Ontario Museum for a couple months in 2002-3.

Eventually the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA)--a tiny, underfunded government agency responsible for protecting some 30,000 archaeological sites in Israel--claimed that the box was a forgery, discovered through an analysis of the patina, a film that builds up on an object naturally over time. After further investigation, IAA officials believed that Golan had made other forgeries as well, and he was one of the four arrested in 2004.

The trial is still going on today, and Burleigh believes that Golan is probably going to get off. The problem is that the prosecution put a lot of archaeologists on the stand who are not used to being "grilled by the most expensive lawyers in Tel Aviv." They've never had to defend their work within the constraints of a courtroom. What might look like compelling evidence to one archaeologist--like writing dated to a particular time period--could be shut down by another expert who claimed that, for example, the length of the leg on a particular letter signified an earlier time period. There's no compelling evidence on either side.

Many people still believe that the James Ossuary is real. Evangelicals, said Burleigh, are not interested in what those who suspect forgery have to say. And even with scholarly work, she said, it's hard to find disinterested biblical archaeologists. "Faith and science--they work together here. In the end, it really is what you believe."

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

The James Ossuary was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum from November 15, 2002, to January 5, 2003.

Stand up and be counted

Group-photo.jpgSylvia Puente, AM’90, holds a degree in public policy from the Harris School. Her training as an activist began at age 13, when she joined her mother, a former migrant worker, on Chicago picket lines to support the United Farm Workers. Puente’s 25-year career as an advocate for the local and national Latino community took a new turn in 2009, when she became the executive director of the Chicago-based Latino Policy Forum. She spoke with UChiBLOGo in mid-April about the 2010 Census, immigration reform, and other issues affecting Illinois Latinos.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy should Latinos participate in the 2010 Census?
QandA_ADrop.jpgCounting Latinos in the census is important so we can truly reflect the diversity of the population of Illinois. Since 2000, Latinos have been responsible for 90 percent of the state’s population growth. If all the nearly two million Latinos in Illinois are counted, it will bring $30 billion to the state’s economy over the next decade. We need an accurate count so the state can capture its share of federal dollars for everything from roads and transportation to education to human services. Finally, it’s really important because we know that the count is used as a basis for Congressional redistricting.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIs undercounting expected to be a problem?
QandA_ADrop.jpgDefinitely—it hasn’t received a lot of public attention, but there have been more deportations of undocumented immigrants during Obama’s first year than there were during Bush’s last year. People have neighbors whose families have been torn apart, and this instills a sense of fear about the government. So far, the unfortunate reality is that the turnout for the census in the Latino community has been remarkably low and not what we would have hoped for, especially given all the outreach and door-knocking that many groups did to try to educate people about the census.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat other issues is the Latino Policy Forum working on?
QandA_ADrop.jpgAccess to early-childhood education is a key issue for us and critical to reducing the educational achievement gap. One in three newborns in the Chicago metropolitan area is now Latino. Statewide, one in four children under age 5 is a Latino child, but we haven’t opened up enough early-childhood facilities in Latino neighborhoods and in areas where the population has grown. Another big issue is the state’s devastating economy, which has implications for the delivery of a whole array of human services for communities. And immigration, of course, is a huge issue.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are the chances that this Congress will approve comprehensive immigration reform?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s going to be tough. It’s really going to depend on how much capital President Obama is willing to invest in it. Locally, Senator Durbin has been an ally and there’s been a renewed call for him to take leadership on the issue. There’s never been a more cohesive, organized strategy for promoting comprehensive immigration reform in this country—but whether or not it will move forward at this time, we just don’t know. If federal legislation isn’t introduced by the end of the month, immigration reform activists are prepared to have mass mobilizations go to the next level to call attention to the issue.
Pilsen.jpg
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat specific reforms would the Latino community like to see?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe reforms being talked about are how do we regularize the status of the nearly 12 million undocumented people in the United States today? What is going to be the path to citizenship? Most of the proposed legislation is calling for fines and penalties, because people have entered the country in an unauthorized manner. We understand that, but there really has to be a way of allowing people to no longer live in the shadows.

We need to look at family reunification and how we manage future flows of immigrants. Should we create guest-worker programs, or programs that are tied to the economic needs of this country, so that people can come in and go back to their homeland? We’ve made it very difficult to regulate the flow of circular migration, so when people come to the United States they really feel like they’ve been forced to stay here.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat about securing our borders?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThat needs to happen, but it’s also important to point out that only half of unauthorized immigrants cross the border illegally. It’s a false issue to put all the attention on border control, because many people have arrived on a plane, on a visitor’s visa, and just never went back. Yes, people have come into the country in an unauthorized manner, but we need to understand that they wouldn’t have come if there wasn’t a labor market and an employer willing to pay them. We need to consider what the labor needs are in this country—and the vital role that low-wage labor has played in sustaining the quality of life that we as Americans have enjoyed.

Elizabeth Station

Puente (top, center) with Latino Policy Forum colleagues; Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood is one of the communities in which they work. All photos courtesy Latino Policy Forum.

Vested intellect

DJD_8090.jpgIt was about 5:30 p.m., more than 90 minutes before Bill Gates would appear at Rockefeller Chapel. The line for free, general-admission seating stretched from Rockefeller’s front door to 59th Street; west to University Avenue, where it turned north; and extended at least halfway to 58th. Standing four or five deep in places, people tried to calculate the crowd size and guesstimate the chapel’s capacity.

Including a couple hundred reserved-ticket holders, there was room for about 1,700, so the people along University did not wait in vain—but they did wait. After the doors opened and the pews filled to capacity, an hour still remained before Gates’ scheduled talk. But he was virtually there already.

The Microsoft founder’s admirers passed the time with the products of his life’s work, tapping at laptop keyboards and video chatting; one person held up his computer and rotated it to give his remote companion a 360-degree view of the digital-Gothic scene.

Large monitors spaced throughout the chapel gave the audience in the back a better view. When Gates walked into the room, right on schedule at 7:15, heads bobbed and cameras flashed. For a moment, at least, the televised image wouldn’t do.

As rock stars go, Gates seemed modest, pacing as he spoke—never standing behind the lectern—and often clasping his hands as if in prayer. The ambitions he spoke of, on the other hand, were anything but modest. Out of the software business for a couple of years now, he directs his influence, intellect, and a lot of that Microsoft income toward other goals. Goals like saving the world.

That’s what brought him to Chicago, one of five stops on the Bill Gates College Tour (along with visits to Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT). His tour’s stated intention was to inspire the smartest people to use their talents to combat the globe's biggest problems. Gates referred to a recent conversation with friends who spoke with passion and insight about the NCAA basketball tournament and the stock market; it made him wonder how to direct that intelligence toward more pressing concerns.

For the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the immediate concerns are global health, education, poverty, and climate change. Those issues, Gates acknowledged, were not on his mind when he began building his corporate empire. As he traveled and learned, his increasing awareness at first served only to make them seem intractable. “You’re kind of set back by how daunting it is,” he said.

With the targeted action of people who have the advantages of health, wealth, and education, Gates is confident in major progress. He cites improvements in the last half-century as proof. In 1960, for example, 20 million children under five died; today it’s 9 million. But solving big problems, he said, depends on cumulative effort focused on them—as opposed to basketball brackets or derivatives—pooling the intellectual capital of the assembled crowd and their peers.

The audience spent half of the hourlong session asking Gates questions, but he in fact was hoping to hear answers from them. After discussing his philanthropy and technology—and declaring that he does not recommend dropping out of college, as he did—Gates left the crowd with three questions of his own, soliciting answers on the tour’s Facebook page: What problem are you working on? What draws you to it? How will you draw other people to it?

Submit your answers here.

Jason Kelly

Photography by Dan Dry

Keep watching the skies

060518.see.jpg

Yerkes Observatory has a special place in my heart. It was there—the University’s beautiful, historic, and underused observatory in Williams Bay, Wis.—that I decamped after graduating from the College, intent on hunting killer asteroids. I spent the better part of a year living and working in the building, battling a balky telescope and Wisconsin’s none-too-mild winter. I made little progress—and no money; I volunteered my labor—but, as an engineer pointed out to me one day over lunch, it sure beat sleeping on my parents’ couch.

In terms of science, the observatory and its famous 40-inch refracting telescope became outclassed years ago. The University has been trying to figure out what to do with the facility for years. (I won’t rehash the debate here; just go read this and this.) Since I’m fond of the old place, it always makes me happy to see someone putting the observatory equipment to good use—such as when I learned that my old telescope was being prepared to join Skynet, a network of robotically operated telescopes located all over the world.

To learn more, I called up Vivian Hoette, the observatory’s educational outreach coordinator and point person for Skynet, whom I had known from my days in Williams Bay. Skynet, she explains, was founded in 2006 by an astronomer at the University of North Carolina, U of C alum Dan Reichart, SM’98, PhD’00; Hoette was part of the education plan for the original grant proposal. The Skynet software controls telescopes remotely, as well as prioritizes observations and processes images online. Soon, it will link more than 20 telescopes on four continents, including two of the smaller telescopes at Yerkes.

The 41-inch and 24-inch reflectors are in fine operating condition, but are too small for the kind of research that goes on at the University today and so are underutilized. Adding them to Skynet increases their scientific utility considerably. The 24-inch already uses Skynet's image processing functions, but can't be remotely controlled. Meanwhile, my old 41-inch will have its telescope control system integrated with Skynet and the controls for its protective dome automated.

Skynet was designed to research gamma-ray bursts, flashes of high-energy photons from the distant universe that often last less than a second. But the ability to control a telescope remotely also made it perfect for educational outreach—which is where Hoette steps in. Now, she uses Skynet telescopes to show students in Wisconsin how astronomy is done even when the local sky is covered with clouds.

The University’s internal debate about what to do with Yerkes doesn’t have an easy resolution. (If it was easy, it would have been resolved by now.) But as an admittedly sentimental fan, it’s good to see this old dog can still learn new tricks.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

From surprise to revelation

DSC09939-STRAND.jpgEven after the room was full, people kept coming. They lined the walls, crammed into odd corners, and bumped into each other every time the door squeaked open and another person crept in. Up at the podium, in front of the spot where several students sat cross-legged on the floor, the former poet laureate Mark Strand, looking strong and straight-shouldered just days after his 76th birthday, was reading his poetry aloud:

I think of the innocent lives
Of people in novels who know they'll die
But not that the novel will end. How different they are
From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,
Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,
And the wind rounds up the fallen leaves,
And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,
Riffles the pages left, knowing there's not
Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,
For the red light over the door, for the iris
Tossing its shadow against the wall...

Occasionally Strand looked up to smile and take in a few faces, but mostly he seemed apart, pleasantly and politely focused elsewhere. A former professor in the Committee on Social Thought who now teaches at Columbia University, Strand is one of the country's most famous living poets and Chicago's current Sherry poet-in-residence. On April 21 he gave an hour-long reading in Classics 110.

I had an English professor in college who told us never to miss the chance to hear poets read their own work. Listening to them, she said, you can pick up things that no amount of analysis will teach: intangible evidence of how a poem works, how the parts move together, and how an idea arises from that motion. In the years since then, I've listened to Mark Strand read half a dozen times (more by coincidence than design) and every time, I hear something in the poetry that I might never have seen in the printed lines. What struck me this time was the contrast between his poems' evanescent, fantastical meanderings—into dreams and waking visions, into Death's living room, onto the riverbank where Orpheus wept and sang and died, into a foreign land with a singing man and camel—and the concrete, even emphatic, endings those poems often have. Introducing Strand, Chicago poetry scholar Richard Strier noted his "measured, circuitous stalking of the subject, turning surprise to revelation." Strand's poetry is both substantial and insubstantial, surreal and sharply real.

After 50 minutes or so of reading, unperturbed by the listeners shuffling in and the buses wheezing past on 59th Street, Strand looked at his watch, glanced up at the wine and cheese waiting on the table at the back, and promised one more poem before the reception. "Actually, it's more like a song," he said. "More like a song written by a Spanish poet in, say, 1925." He paused. "Maybe García Lorca." Then he read:

Black fly, black fly
Why have you come

Is it my shirt
My new white shirt

With buttons of bone
Is it my suit

My dark blue suit
Is it because

I lie here alone
Under a willow

Cold as stone
Black fly, black fly

How good you are
To come to me now

How good you are
To visit me here

Black fly, black fly
To wish me good bye.

Lydia Gibson

Strand shares his verse. Photo by Lydia Gibson.

Mansueto rising

Scaffolding.jpgLike the tiers of a wedding cake, scaffolding has appeared over the big hole in the ground that will soon become the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. Built to facilitate construction of the library’s elliptical glass dome, the structure went up in late April.

Over the next four months, passers-by will be able to watch as the library's distinctive oval dome takes shape. First, a high-strength steel and aluminum grid will rise from the foundation up. When the grid is in place August 1, glass panels will be installed from top to bottom.

When I visited the work site recently, a tall crane swung bundles of sleek, silver tubing from a truck to the ground. The tubing was made in the Czech Republic and delivered directly to Chicago. To create the grid, workers will bolt together more than 700 six-foot tubes and nodes, "like a giant erector set," explained Michael Natarus, senior project manager. Special tools have been manufactured just to put the components together.

Seele.jpgAlthough Helmut Jahn designed the library, the current phase reflects the genius of architect and structural engineer Werner Sobek. "He takes Helmut’s ideas and does the structural calculations," says Natarus. Following Sobek’s specifications, Seele, the German company hired to build the library dome, recently did a successful test-run of the grid assembly at its plant near Augsburg. The pieces are designed to fit "within a tenth of a millimeter," said Tobias Karnagel, site manager. That level of precision is unusual, but necessary for ensuring that the frame will bear the weight of the glass.

Seele did steel-and-glass construction for the new U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC; high-profile Apple Stores in New York City and around the world; and many other projects. Two workmen on the Mansueto crew helped assemble Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, but according to Natarus, "nobody has worked on anything like this before."

Underground.jpgBelow ground, work on the library is also progressing. When Natarus led me down into the vast, five-story-deep cavern that will eventually house an automated storage and retrieval system for 3.5 million volumes, the massive scale of the project hit home. The space, now mostly empty, is gargantuan. I felt like a tiny flea in the bottom of a deep, dark mixing bowl.

But the giant oval won’t be empty much longer. Fireproofing, duct work, and construction of a corridor to the Regenstein Library are moving forward. Air-handling units, which will maintain the temperature and humidity in the book stacks, have already been delivered. A concrete slab now separates the Mansueto basement from the ground floor, the future home of a sunny reading room. And the dome is expected to be finished this fall.

Elizabeth Station

Library scaffolding (top, photo by Cheryl Rusnak); workers conduct test assembly of steel grid in Germany (middle, photo copyright Seele); construction is well underway below ground (bottom, photo by John Pitcher). For more images, click here.

RELATED LINKS

Mansueto WebCam

All over the map

Ebook-small.jpgGeographer Mark Monmonier explores maps' restrictive powers in No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control (University of Chicago Press, 2010). The Press's free e-book—available at no charge only for today, Monday May 3—the book shows how our experience in the world is influenced by boundaries, both those established for a common good, like keeping sex offenders away from playgrounds, as well as ethically questionable borders, like those forcing Japanese Americans during World War II to live in detention camps.

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

Keep the peace

Desk-image.jpgIn February the Peace Corps ranked the University of Chicago among its top ten medium-sized schools, with 30 Chicago graduates currently serving abroad. For Will Cohen, AB'08, who has spent the past 19 months working in a small town outside of Maputo, Mozambique, it's the U of C education that enables graduates to contribute in a meaningful way.

Cohen points to the Peace Corps' three goals: help the people of interested countries meet a need for trained men and women, promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served, and promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

"If...the Peace Corps wants to send people abroad who can work on all three goals, and not just the first, then a liberal Chicago education fits perfectly," Cohen says. "This is someone who could be a good though not flawless English teacher or community organizer or agricultural development worker. But it is also someone who is perceptive and tries to figure out why a different culture is the way it is, and who looks for a way to make a small, sustainable, but also meaningful improvement in his or her community."

Still, Cohen says, classroom studies of international development could only bring him so far in preparation for the Peace Corps.

"I knew that teaching in this environment would be challenging and I tried to prepare myself ahead of time, but that preparation didn't and couldn't actually make the difficulties less difficult," he says. "There's knowing and then there's knowing, and that second kind of knowing is what I learn every day here."

Cohen has had to come to grips with that second kind of knowing as he has worked to set up a computer lab at his school—he teaches eighth, ninth, and tenth grades—and help spread computer literacy. The project started with the donation of a dozen brand new desktop computers, but Cohen found he couldn’t jump right into the functional lessons, such as using computers for e-mail and, for teachers, school-based processes like grading and class-scheduling.

“Every time I’m working with a teacher trying to teach a certain concept on the computer, I realize for how much of my life I’ve been using computers and technology, and just how integrated the whole process has been in my daily routine up until now,” he says. “It’s not enough to teach my coworkers how to use computers to aid their daily work. I need to show them in the first place that that is what computers were invented to do, and that they are not just fancy typewriters or symbols of conspicuous consumption.”

Cultural differences don’t always mean challenges, though; in fact, a Mozambican version of “Old MacDonald” provided Cohen with one of his favorite memories of his stay. He was teaching animal names one day in class—important words, he thought, to go along with some of the students’ other classes and agricultural work at school—and he decided to use the nursery rhyme to help with the lesson.

“It took a while to get the words right, but once we had the pattern down and were going through the song animal by animal, the students started to improvise. You know that style of rhythmic African choral or gospel a capella music, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ and all that? They started changing their singing to fit that style, and soon the students in the back were whooping and boys were chanting and the girls were clapping,” he writes. “I don’t actually think that the students learned the names of animals any better that way, but it’s the best version of a nursery rhyme I’ve ever heard. As a single event it managed to join two normally separate worlds in a way that while surprising seemed to make sense.”

Jake Grubman, ’11

The ten most important questions you'll ever answer

Job-interview-2.jpgWhether you're craving a summer internship, looking to change careers, or seeking employment after being downsized, the face-to-face interview is a critical part of landing your dream job. To give candidates a leg up, UChicago's Career Advising and Planning Services has provided a comprehensive list of the most popular interview questions—and tips on the best answers. Learn how to wow on annoying-yet-unavoidable inquiries like "Tell me about yourself" and tackle trick questions such as "Would you rather be liked or feared?" (Answer: neither. You'd rather be respected.)

Brooke E. O'Neill, AM'04

Show-and-tell

Collage-2.jpgWhen the Oriental Institute invited friends and supporters to “Check Out Our Digs!” at an April 28 fundraiser, it meant just that. Ranged through the museum galleries at what OI Director Gil Stein jokingly called “the stations of the digs,” the directors and other team members of six active excavation projects—in Egypt, Israel, Syria, and Turkey—stood ready to answer questions about past discoveries and the coming season.

Taken together, Stein said, the six digs (a seventh will soon begin in Palestine) represent “the entire range of the development of civilization in the Near East.” The excavations also span the institute’s own history.

Stationed between the Assyrian and Syro-Anatolian galleries, Scott Branting, AM’96, has worked for almost two decades at Kerkenes Dag, an enormous ancient city—one square mile—near Yozgat, Turkey. The OI began excavations there in 1928, work that was a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack. Branting uses geophysical tools like magnetometers and resistivity meters to survey the huge city to find the most promising places to dig. Working with researchers at Argonne National Lab, he is also developing agent-based models, simulations that place “virtual people into the city plans,” to recreate patterns of city life, circa 600 B.C.

In the Egyptian gallery, Yorke Rowan explained a much newer dig, the Galilee Prehistory Project at Marj Rabba, Israel. The first OI dig in Israel in several decades, its goal is to understand the rapid changes in the relationship of villages, ritual sites, and mortuary practices during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Rowan expects to spend two or three more years at Marj Rabba, a small village site where the project began last summer, before moving on to a large village and then to a burial site.

Guests could stop for sustenance in the Persian Gallery, then return to dig deeper. For those interested in uncovering the OI’s own history, there was also “Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East, 1919-1920." The special exhibit details OI founder James Henry Breasted’s post-World War I trek through Egypt and Mesopotamia to buy artifacts for the new institute and to select sites for future digs.

Mary Ruth Yoe

Some guests check out the Galilee Prehistory Project, on display in video and photo form (top left), while others (top right) learn about Kerkenes Dag from Branting (in black). Photography by Hanna Ernst.

The new happy hour

lgbtalumni.jpgWhether you're a recent graduate or an emeritus, chances are you've been invited to a U of C happy hour. One of the most common type of alumni events, they are usually planned for alumni of a certain generation or region, but a recent trend has some of the guest lists getting more creative.

For example, when 50-some alumni gathered at the North Side bar Sidetrack last Wednesday, they weren't all members of the same College class, nor all "young alumni." Instead, all were LGBT alumni, members of a new "affinity" group that have self-identified to the Alumni Association.

Affinity groups cross geographic, generational, and University boundaries. Some, like the Life Sciences and Law Alumni groups, include alumni working in a given professional field, regardless of the school or division from which they received their University degree. Others, like the LGBT group, the Association of Black Alumni, and the Chicago Women's Alliance, are identity-based.

Since the outreach effort began last year, dozens of alumni volunteers have signed up to take leadership roles in the groups. Event turnout has also been strong: over 120 alumni attended the LGBT Alumni launch event last October, and Life Sciences events in New York have been regularly drawing over 100. The new affinity groups will also be well represented at Alumni Weekend, June 3-6, with events planned for LGBT Alumni and the Association of Black Alumni.

"It's all about finding new ways to connect alumni to the University," said Eric Rogers, AB'05, AM'07, assistant director for affinity groups at the Alumni Association. "Your connection to the University isn't just about nostalgia; it should help you in your professional life, your social life, and your intellectual life today."

Kyle Gorden, AB'00

Alumni at LGBT Happy Hour. Photography by Eric Rogers.

All that jazz

asas-02416.jpgIn June 2000, when lifelong jazz aficionado John Steiner bequeathed his collection of recordings and other materials to the University, jazz archivist Deborah Gillaspie, AM’88, walked into Steiner’s basement to find an extraordinary collection, remarkable for its unmatched contents—and its nonexistent organization.

At a May 1 workshop led with fellow Special Collection Research Center (SCRC) librarian David Pavelich, Gillaspie explored the University’s jazz archives and described the mayhem. “It was an archaeological dig," she said.

The dig was fruitful. Steiner’s basement yielded nearly 35,000 recordings and 200 linear feet (a standard measurement in library terms) of photos, arrangements, posters, periodicals, and all types of ephemera.

When the materials (all four moving vans full) arrived at the Reg, the Steiner Collection found a home on the third floor, where the rest of the University’s jazz archive sat in cardboard boxes, unprocessed. When researchers wanted to access materials, they spoke directly to Gillaspie, the only person who knew what and where everything was.

The University’s jazz collection had been growing since 1976, but the quantity and variety of materials were such that the University didn’t have the resources for proper organization.

“There was no money to process it, no money for staff,” Gillaspie told the audience of 20. “So here it sat.”

That changed in 2006. The University received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to process the collection, and since then, the SCRC has organized it to make materials as accessible as possible. Among the tools the SCRC offers are online databases that allow jazz researchers and enthusiasts to know the collection's contents before coming to the library.

Because of Chicago’s tight-knit community of jazz experts, the library provides resources that extend far beyond the University’s own collection. A jazz drummer herself, Gillaspie knew several of the archive’s benefactors, and she discussed the music with a familiarity that several members of the audience seemed to share. She talked about the contents of collections like that of Chicago saxophonist Franz Jackson, adding a quick “for those of you who knew Franz” before moving on.

With the library continuing to process its latest acquisitions, Pavelich said the SCRC is receiving more requests than in the past. The researchers, in turn, are happy about the reorganization of collections like Steiner’s; now they can easily dig into the material without having to dig for it.

Jake Grubman, '11

Song Successes from The New Pekin Theatre Chicago Reviews (New York and London: M. Witmark & Sons, n.d.) is one piece from the expansive John Steiner Collection. Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Watt experiment

My kids need a project for the science festival. They are in the first grade at a Hyde Park public school, and this year, unlike free-wheeling kindergarten, science-fair projects are mandatory. Acceptable projects, the school note explains, include experiments, research reports, and collections with “scientific value.” (Caveat: “Your Hot Wheels collection or some other toy collection is not scientific.”)

Considering that most first-graders can barely read, you could call this assignment academically rigorous, or (depending on your educational philosophy) absolutely ridiculous. But I don’t want my kids to be the only ones without a science-festival project, so I set about doing it for them. I mean, um, helping them do it.

Kid B decides he wants to do a report on the platypus. His babysitter, who likes to make crafts, helps him fashion a platypus out of clay.

Kid A isn’t sure what to do. Then one day at work late April, I come across a news announcement on the Regenstein Library Web site:

“ComEd has recently offered Kill A Watt™ meters to libraries for checkout. These meters measure the electricity used to run electrical devices. Kill A Watt™ Power Meters have been placed on reserve and are available for checkout for seven days at both Crerar and Regenstein Circulation.”

sciencefair12.jpgAha! I propose the idea of an experiment to Kid A: What uses the most electricity?

He is underwhelmed. I try another approach: Did you know that appliances that use electricity—even when they are turned off—are called “electricity vampires?”

“Vampires?” he says. “Are they really called that?” We have a science project.

On Saturday I have to be on campus, so I stop off at Regenstein. It’s not long after Earth Day, but apparently there has not been a run on Kill A Watt™ meters. One of the circulation assistants has heard of the program, but isn’t sure where the meters are filed. Someone else helpfully phones Crerar. I walk over there and walk out with a meter.

The week passes. With Little League and swimming lessons and a houseguest, we don’t get to the science experiment. On Monday morning, I receive an e-mail warning that the meter is overdue. When I call, hoping to renew over the phone, I’m told the fine for reserve materials is a dollar an hour.

I rush home from work and pick up Kid A. He suggests we start with the halogen lamp—a smart suggestion. (Once, the lamp was accidentally left on for a week or so, and the electricity bill was $20 higher than usual.)

I read the instructions while Kid A peels off the protective sticker; we are the first ones to use the meter. We plug it in and start pressing buttons: volts, amperes, hertz, kilowatts. The brochure does not explain how long the measuring process takes.

It’s one of the first warm afternoons of spring. It occurs to me that the dollar-per-hour cost is negligible compared to the opportunity cost of being stuck inside. Most of our neighbors are already in the backyard, drinking beer or playing in the sandbox, depending on age. Kid A and I look at each other. We would much rather be conducting experiments in applied physics, i.e. throwing a ball around in the light well.

After eight minutes, the lamp has used two watts of electricity (whether that is a lot or not, I couldn't say), and Kid A has completely lost interest in his experiment. “Can I do a report instead?” he asks. “Can I do a report on lions?”

He goes over to the babysitter’s to start on his clay lion while I take the meter back to Crerar. I pay the fine of six dollars—turns out it’s not charged by the hour, but a flat rate of three dollars a day.

The circulation assistant is intrigued. “Was it useful?” he wants to know.

“Kind of,” I say.

Now I just need to get a book on lions.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

The author investigates lions with Kid B (in yellow), and Kid A (in space invaders). Photography by Jason Pettus.

Hyde Parked

These perpetually parked campus vehicles are going nowhere fast.

Ah, spring in Hyde Park. The trees are blooming, the parakeets are squawking, the soon-to-be graduates are printing their theses and dissertations. But along with spring comes street-cleaning season, and with street cleaning comes the need to move your car before it gets a ticket. With that in mind, UChiBLOGo is pleased to present you with this photo essay of the Hyde Park clunkers that won’t be moving any time soon.


1. In a University-owned parking lot we see what appears to be a 1966 Mercury Colony Park wagon and a late-‘70s (maybe 1976?) Chevrolet Nova. (Seen at 60th and Stony Island.)

Mercury-Nova-2.jpg


2. Arguably the last decent car built by American Motors, the AMC Eagle mated a car body with a Jeep four-wheel drive, making it a sort of early crossover. I spotted this 1980s Eagle around 52nd and Dorchester.

Eagle.jpg


3. This early-‘70s (1971-1976) Cadillac Coupe de Ville doesn’t look capable of making its way from the eastern seaboard under its own power, although the plates say it’s from Maine. (Seen near Nichols Park, 54th and Greenwood.)

Coupe-de-Ville.jpg


4. Other than a thin coat of rust all over the body, this 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport seems to be cared for pretty well, with clean windows and nicely polished chrome. The lack of a current license plate and city sticker might make legal operation a problem, though. (Spotted at 55th and Greenwood.)

Chevelle-full.jpg


5. I can understand keeping a barely functioning old Caddy or muscle car around well past the point of no repair, but, seriously, a ‘77 Chevy Monte Carlo? This wasn’t a great car even new, so I can only assume there’s some kind of emotional connection for the owner. (Seen at 55th and Ellis.)

Monte%20Carlo%202.jpg


6. Badly damaged 1967 Chevrolet Impala or mock-up for a new building by Frank Gehry? You be the judge. (Seen in front of Breckinridge House, 59th and Harper.)

Impala%20full.jpg

For more deserted cars, click here for the complete collection on Flickr.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

Photography by Benjamin Recchie, AB'03.

Signing on...

Library help via IM hits the Reg.

OMG! On March 1 the University of Chicago Libraries began offering reference assistance by instant message.

In April Paul Belloni, business and economics reference librarian, chatted, via IM, with UChiBlogo about teenagers, typos, and how to know when a session is over.

IM.jpg

[10:45 a.m.] meeboguest137866: Hi, it's Carrie Golus.
Is now a good time for the interview?

[10:46] U of C Ask a Librarian: Hi Carrie
What's up?

[10:47] meeboguest137866: Have students and faculty been receptive?

[10:47] U of C Ask a Librarian: Yes,
Although we usually have no idea who we are talking to
I could be chatting with a teenager in Japan
Or an Economics Professor
[...]

[10:55] meeboguest137866: Can you tell the students from the profs?

[10:55] U of C Ask a Librarian: No, LOL
If it is a research question I can guess it is a student
Professors usually have tech questions

[10:56] meeboguest137866: Haha
Have you ever accidentally offended someone?

[10:56] U of C Ask a Librarian: not that I am aware of
but a coworker once typed
"I will be back in a sex"
rather than "I will be back in a sec"
we can't take it back once we hit enter

[10:57] meeboguest137866: How about joke or harassing IMs?
It seems too tempting...it's all anonymous

[10:57] U of C Ask a Librarian: no, not yet
I am a little surprised

[10:57] meeboguest137866: Do you like to IM with your friends?

[10:57] U of C Ask a Librarian: No

[10:58] meeboguest137866: You have to IM for work!
That's awesome

[10:58] U of C Ask a Librarian: I find people say something and walk away and I am too old fashioned
I am confused about if the conversation is over

[10:59] meeboguest137866: Right
Well, I think that's all my questions

[11:00] U of C Ask a Librarian: smiley faces usually indicate the end

[11:00] meeboguest137866: unless there was something you wanted to say
that I didn't know to ask about?

[11:00] U of C Ask a Librarian: :)

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Incongruent diagnosis

Does the forthcoming DSM-V mark a shift in how psychiatry thinks about transgender people?

In 2013 the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is scheduled to be published—the first major revision since 1994. When the American Psychological Association released a draft in February, one of the big changes was the shift from "Gender Identity Disorder (GID)" to "Gender Incongruence" as the DSM diagnosis for people who were born one sex but identify as another (male, female, neither, or both).

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The name change drew mixed reactions from students and faculty at a May 11 Center for Gender Studies documentary screening and discussion. Some said that any name is better than the stigmatizing burden of "disorder"; others argued that our societal notions of gender create this "incongruence" in the first place. But, as the man sitting in front of me pointed out, "society is fucked up."

The transgender activists in the featured hour-long documentary, Diagnosing Difference, essentially argue that the "disorder" moniker is both unscientific and unfair, that it "doesn't capture the joy that happens" when someone feels comfortable in his own skin for the first time. It makes one's gender identity into a pathology; it can affect a person socially, culturally, even legally. And who is a psychiatrist—who, one of the activists in the movie pointed out, may never have even given a thought to their own gender identity—to tell a person who she should be? But the way our medical system works now, the diagnosis is what gives trans people access to certain hormonal or surgical treatments.

Assistant professor of sociology Kristen Schilt, who researches transgender men in California and Texas, led the discussion. She explained that the GID diagnosis is really important in her Texan subjects' lives: some of their parents threw them out of the house before they knew about the diagnosis, said Schilt. But then, once the subjects could say that they had GID, "it became something real," and the parents could begin to accept it.

Ultimately, argued Schilt, the shift from disorder to incongruence doesn't really change much—the APA's conclusion is still that they know what's better for transgender people than the trans people themselves. That's not saying it'll never change. Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in the 1980s after years of debate, and, she said, "a similar victory will happen eventually with GID." She shrugged and smiled. "Maybe the 2020 edition will see Gender Incongruence fading."

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

The doctorate is in

It’s the economy, stupid. In 2010 Chicago received a record number of applications to PhD programs.

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When the economy gets tough, do the tough go to graduate school? Judging from the recent avalanche of applications to Chicago PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences, the answer is yes.

The Division of the Humanities received a record 2,160 applications to its doctoral programs this spring. “It’s the most we’ve ever gotten and about 10 percent higher than last year,” says Sarah Tuohey, assistant dean of students. Competition for available spots was stiff: only 142 candidates—less than 7 percent—were offered admission. Roughly half of all applicants sought spots in just three departments: English, Philosophy, and Art History.

An all-time high of 2,475 people applied to PhD programs in the Social Sciences Division in 2010. Economics, history, and political science were—and perennially are—the most popular fields. Interest in graduate school often jumps when the job market slumps, says Kelly Pollock, assistant dean of students. “In an economy like this, people want to understand what’s going on. You start to hear more about economists and that certainly helps application numbers.”

A year ago, responding to budgetary pressures, the Humanities Division opted to shrink the size of its PhD classes but continue offering five years of fellowship support to every incoming student. In the English Department, just seven students matriculated in the doctoral program in 2009; 543 had applied. This coming fall, classes will be more robust, with 13 projected to matriculate in English (out of 593 applicants), seven in philosophy (out of 250 applicants), and seven in art history (out of 245 applicants).

When, and if, the new arrivals finally earn their PhDs, they are not guaranteed jobs in academia. Nationwide, the percentage of tenure-track teaching positions is declining in all fields, especially in the humanities. Graduate school may lose its appeal as a result.

In at least one area of the University—the Divinity School—prospective PhDs may have already started adjusting their behavior to a new reality. Applications to doctoral and master of divinity programs were down in 2010, which has “a lot to do with perceptions of the job market and available jobs,” says Teresa Hord Owens, dean of students. “It may be a blip.” But it may also be the beginning of a bigger trend.

Elizabeth Station

Puppet masters

Scav hunt teams perform using their best life-sized marionettes.

The Scav Hunt teams from Burton-Judson and Max Palevsky have two things in common: they both finished in second place and impressed crowds with their life-size marionette performances.

Watch Burton-Judson recreate *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" and Max Palevsky do their best Mario Brothers' rap.

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Joy Olivia Miller

In which we protest too much

Defending the U of C against a bad first impression

After a recent report of students failing to spontaneously burst into song in the presence of prospective applicants, UChiBlogo suggests the following minimum guidelines for public displays of enthusiasm:

1. Smile. Doesn’t matter about what. Corollary: Travel in groups, preferably boisterous ones recounting last night’s Colbert Report or the latest episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine.

2. End as many sentences as possible with the phrase “on our campus near the shore of Lake Michigan.” Example: “I enjoy the educational challenges at the University of Chicago, but also the many exciting extracurricular activities and lasting friendships I’ve made on our campus near the shore of Lake Michigan.”

3. If your parents happened to meet here, consider erecting a memorial on the spot to illustrate that love can blossom amid the otherwise soulless rigor of the University of Chicago.

4. When referencing famous alumni—every student should work at least two into daily conversation—avoid Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners. Focus on contemporary entertainers. Tucker Max, AB’98, for example.

These are not idle suggestions. The perceived lack of a palpably happy spirit—and, apparently, a dearth of comedy-star alums—cost the U of C an applicant. Caren Osten Gerszberg explained why on the New York Times blog “The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid.”

Quads-walker.jpgOn a trip to Chicago, Gerszberg and her daughter, a high-school junior, visited both the U of C and Northwestern. In Hyde Park the campus tour alone convinced Gerszberg’s daughter the school was not for her. “I just don’t feel it in my soul,” she said during the tour, because “everyone is walking alone.” She asked her mom if they could skip the subsequent information session. Those sessions are supposed to be before the tours now, which only deepens the mystery of who knew what and when they knew it.

Gerszberg pondered how much influence she should exert over her daughter’s decisions. “As a mother I feel like it’s my job to lead her through situations with which she may need guidance—to be the grown-up who seems to know all the answers. Even though I clearly don’t.” This time she deferred rather than urging her daughter to “sit through an hour-long info session.”

An hour would have been a waste of time after she had concluded from the expressions of—what, a hundred kids on the quads?—that U of C students were humorless loners. Her daughter’s intuition rang true, Gerszberg writes, because the students “rushing from class to class and library to library did not appear to be smiling.”

Meanwhile, their experience on the Evanston campus “along the shore of Lake Michigan” included cooler name-dropping—Stephen Colbert and Julia Louis-Dreyfus compared to the Chicago guide's mention of Carl Sagan, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60—and, presumably, more apparent smiles. They stuck around for the information session.

Never mind that the “chatty” Northwestern tour guide’s story about his parents meeting on campus was an irrelevant coincidence; or that if Sagan were alive today he’d probably be a regular Colbert guest. Sagan’s novel, Contact, was made into a movie, so it couldn’t have been that boring. Matthew McConaughey was in it, and he seems like he’s always up for some hacky-sack. It follows, then, that McConaughey’s interest in Sagan’s story makes him a U of C kind of guy, which makes it a hacky-sack kind of place.

That must have been covered in the information session.

Jason Kelly

A student, who does not appear to be smiling, takes a lonely walk on the quads. Photography by Dan Dry

Word to the wise

Researchers forge new science of enlightenment.

Thinker.jpgGetting old? Enjoy some dark chocolate and let the antioxidants work their anti-aging magic. Having trouble concentrating? Drink coffee for caffeine’s focus power. Feeling bummed out? Pop some mood-boosting herbs like St. John’s wort or ginkgo biloba.

Awash in a culture of quick fixes for every conceivable physical and psychological ailment, I arrived at a May 12 talk on the University’s Defining Wisdom Project confident I’d leave a sage—or at least perceptive enough to stop doing foolish things like accepting a Facebook friend request from my junior-high nemesis.

No sooner had I started on my organic strawberry shortcake—the lecture was part of the Divinity School’s Wednesday lunch series—did Howard Nusbaum, project co-director and psychology chair, dash my hopes.

“I’m not going to define wisdom for you,” he began. “I don’t even know what wisdom is.” Seriously?

Had the whipped-cream-doused dessert been any less delicious, I might have bailed. Fortunately, the Div School student chefs know their pastries.

Turns out, the Defining Wisdom project hasn’t exactly defined wisdom yet, but it’s certainly tackling the beast head-on. The $2 million program, launched in September 2007 by the University’s Arete Initiative, has awarded grants to 23 psychologists, philosophers, biologists, computer scientists, and other researchers from around the world with the aim of understanding, measuring, and cultivating a field of wisdom science.

“Wisdom seems abstract, like a mystical superpower,” said Nusbaum, explaining why it’s traditionally been overlooked as a research area. No longer, thanks to the Defining Wisdom cadre. Selected from more than 600 proposals, their projects include:

Note to self: all Defining Wisdom findings will eventually—no publication date set yet—be compiled into a book. In the meantime, enjoy the shortcake and try not to be an idiot.

Brooke E. O'Neill, AM'04

Deep Matisse

A curator and her team go below the surface to make new discoveries about the French painter and sculptor.

If you think that languid nudes and colorful cutouts define the work of Henri Matisse, think again. The exhibition "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" reveals a surprising and pivotal period in the artist’s career. Stephanie D’Alessandro, AM’90, PhD’97, co-curated the show at the Art Institute of Chicago, which critics have called "thrilling," "spectacular," and "easily as demanding as it is intelligent." D’Alessandro spoke to UChiBLOGo about the project in a May interview.

Curator-2.jpgHow did the Matisse exhibition come about?

I’ve been at the Art Institute since 1998, and we hadn’t had a modern European painting or sculpture exhibition for some time. As a modernist, I knew this was something I wanted to do, and Matisse was a logical candidate. Early on, I began to think about our painting Bathers by a River, which ultimately was the origin of inspiration for this exhibition. In 1909 one of Matisse’s great patrons—a Russian collector named Shchukin—asked the artist to make two decorative panels for the staircase of his home in Moscow. The two paintings that were finished for that commission were Dance II and Music. But many scholars have suggested that Bathers by a River was somehow related to them.

What happened next?

Around 2005 we took Bathers by a River down from the galleries and started to do some initial research that then led to a longer study. That meant going back to the files, pulling all the historical documents together, and surveying the literature. Also, every work in the exhibition was subjected to a very detailed study in the conservation lab where we looked at X-rays; we looked at the painting with infrared reflectography, which is a kind of camera that allows you to see under-drawing, like the very early sketch of something. We also looked at the paintings with high-powered microscopes. Then I brought all the information that existed at that time, and with a conservator from our team plus someone at the Museum of Modern Art, we looked at the work together. As we began to look at a group of works, there was a new body of growing information about how Matisse began changing the compositions and how he produced them. It was eye-opening.Matisse-Bathers.jpg

What do you hope this show will contribute?

In the past, scholars have often pointed to this period, 1913-17, as one of the most ambitious for Matisse, one of the most experimental. I think that what this exhibition offers is a very close understanding of what that really means. There are beautiful paintings in this exhibition and in the catalog that have been marveled at over the years, but they’ve seemed like anomalies within Matisse’s career. I hope that people will agree that because of the new research we’ve been able to do to suggest the chronology and the timeline of his progress—as well as to dig in deeply to how these things were made—we can appreciate how Matisse executed this grand transition and how the works relate to each other. I think we can now see a very deep connection between this period of time and the rest of Matisse’s career.

Do you ever sneak into the galleries to see how visitors are reacting to the show?

I try to go in the galleries as much as I can to look at the paintings, and I always see things that I didn’t see before. It’s a joy to have worked so hard on something with great personal delight, but it’s also wonderful to walk into the exhibition and see so many people there. It just makes you feel like it was worth it.

You had a lot of help with this project.

My colleague John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and I worked really hard on the idea. The research was executed by a team of conservators, curators, technicians, and researchers from the Art Institute and MoMA. It wasn’t just art history that led the effort, or science, or technology, or conservation. It was each of these things mutually reinforcing the others.

You’ve said that curating a major exhibition is like doing a PhD. How?

An exhibition of this scale and intellectual and curatorial intention is very much like doing the research for and writing a dissertation. The only added part was imagining how to present it visually on walls, instead of just with a book. You have to make it a visual experience, sell it to the public, and make it understandable and interesting in a different way. It gets very intense, but if you like this kind of work, it’s the thing that you live for.

"Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," runs at the Art Institute of Chicago until June 20 and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from July 18 to October 11.

Elizabeth Station

Stephanie D’Alessandro (top) is the Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Below, Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Bathers by a River, 1909–10, 1913, 1916–17. Oil on canvas, 260 x 392 cm (102 1/2 x 154 3/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1953.158. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

Campus walks

Thousands of alumni will walk the quads this weekend. Most mornings, it's quieter.

This morning the main quadrangle has blossomed with Alumni Weekend tents and balloons. Next Saturday, the first all-University Spring Convocation in decades will blanket the expanse in maroon and black robes and a crazy quilt of bright summer dresses (or, should it rain, umbrellas popping up like variegated dandelions).

Most mornings, however, the scene is more serene. I should know. Since the Magazine's offices moved downtown a few summers back, I spend most of my time on the quads before 7:30 a.m.

With dogs, the rule goes, if you do something twice it's coincidence; more than that, it's a law of nature. So, most mornings, Knightley and I make it to the main quadrangle—the route goes through Bixler playlot, west on 56th past Alumni House and Crown Gym, and south through Bartlett Quad.

Good squirrel trees, smelly bits of pavement, the thick brush near Palevsky Commons where young rabbits dart at the sound of dog-tags—we know them all. Our progress through the quads—Classics to Harper to Social Sciences—is punctuated by the smallest of exclamation points. A squirrel gets spotted and the leash jerks. An early-to-work colleague stops to say hello. A maintenance cart drives along the wide limestone path. As Knightley sniffs at bits of flora to see what fauna has gone before him, I have plenty of time to stop and smell the roses—or at least take pictures of the latest campus landscaping.

Then it's back to home and (for me) to work.

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Botany Pond (drakes guarding their families are the highlight here).

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Terraced landscaping (left) now leads the way to the Regenstein (we stop here to look for nibbling rabbits); on the main quadrangle (where there are almost as many squirrels as flowers).

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Peonies bowed by a midnight storm.

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Gingko trees outside Chicago Booth's Harper Center.

Mary Ruth Yoe

My Brief Encounter with Muhammad Yunus, the Nicest Banker I Know

Harris School student Sohair Omar rubs elbows with the microfinance rock star.

Yunus.jpgThere was a lot of commotion in the lobby of the Hilton Chicago hotel, businessmen coming and going. I had butterflies in my stomach as I waited for Muhammad Yunus to arrive.

I’ve been learning about his work for years, how his group-banking model has helped more than 8 million people, mostly women, start businesses in small villages around the world. Now other banks are following his lead, helping people help themselves. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for this, though you would have never guessed it as he came walking down the hallway...

Read Sohair's story, as told to Steven Yaccino, here.

Muhammad Yunus. Photo courtesy the Harris School

Skyrockets in flight

Students at the Lab Schools have a little fun in the name of science.

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Liftoff! A second grader launches a model rocket on the Midway.

Sam Larson, U-High’03, holds up his hand to grab the children’s attention. "Launching in five!" he intones. The assembled Lab Schools students don’t need any more prompting. They count down with him: "Four! Three! Two! One!" The final word is an unintelligible shout, somewhere between blastoff and liftoff, but all anyone cares to hear is the whoosh of a model rocket racing its way down the Midway Plaisance.

For the past four years, second graders taught by Donna McFarlane (with her assistant, Larson) have built model rockets as a concrete way to pull together a number of different math and science concepts they learn in the classroom. The spring day her students finally get to launch their creations skyward—"Rocket Day"—draws more spectators every year. Children from the Nursery School and kindergarten, and a smattering of students from other grade levels, took up positions on the grassy berm of the Midway to watch the proceedings. The nursery schoolers occasionally started a countdown unbidden, as if the chant would magically produce a rocket launch.

Larson and his friend Ken Hecht, U-High’04, were responsible for running the launch pad; the second graders are kept back a safe distance by their U-High "buddies," a group of high-school volunteers. Larson and Hecht prepped each rocket, but the kids pressed the ignition button themselves. After each rocket’s motor burned out, it coasted for a few seconds before deploying a parachute and descending gently to Earth.

"It’s perfect weather" for rocketry, noted McFarlane, as she waited downrange for the rockets to land. After each launch, a second grader sprinted to retrieve their model with his or her buddy only footsteps behind. The high schoolers are having as much fun as the second graders, McFarlane observed with a smile. Not that they’d ever admit it.

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Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

Kids and adults alike enjoy Rocket Day festivities. Photography by Benjamin Recchie

Well-read lives

Behind every Norman Maclean Award winner, another inspiring teacher.

large_Kass.jpgFor its few thousand attendees, Alumni Weekend 2010 was a blast. But possibly none of them had quite as good a time as Amy A. Kass, AB’62, senior lecturer in the College. At Alumni Convocation Saturday morning, Kass received one of two Norman Maclean Faculty Awards, voted on by alumni. Later that day, she and her husband, Leon Kass, AB’58, MD’62, the Addie Clark Harding professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College, were the honored guests at a reception to mark their retirement from the University. About 180 former students and other guests showed up to thank two teachers who made the necessity of their Hum and Soc requirements a lasting virtue.

Each Alumni Award recipient was asked to provide a personal statement. The Norman Maclean award honors outstanding teaching, and Kass devoted part of her statement to recognizing a standout teacher of her own, the late Karl Joachim Weintraub, AB’49, AM’52, PhD’57. “Thanks to my teacher and then hero, Jock Weintraub,” she wrote, “I discovered that behind dry books and documents were living authors, agitating and exploring urgent questions, pressing for them and for me.”

I spoke to Kass during the last week of classes and asked her to share some memories of Weintraub. She offered one of her earliest:

The first quarter I was here, one of the courses I took was Western Civ. Mr. Weintraub was not then the popular teacher that he became. Everyone wanted to get into Mr. Mackauer’s section, the leavings went to Mr. Weintraub, and I was part of that. But oh my, what an impact he had on me. I think it was the end of the second week of class when he said to me in his heavy German accent, “Miss Apfel. Come to my office, I want to speak with you.” He was tall. He always taught standing up. And he never lost a grain of his accent all the years he was here. We were all intimidated by him, and I, perhaps, especially so.

So I went with fear and trembling to his office, and he said to me, “What are you going to do in graduate school?” I said, “What? I haven’t given it any thought.” And I made some kind of nonsensical conversation for the next ten minutes until it was polite enough for me to leave. As I was running down the stairs from his office on the fifth floor of Gates-Blake, I stopped the first person I met and asked, “What is graduate school?”

Coming from my family, I knew one and only thing: one went to college in order to become a doctor, and, if not a doctor, then a lawyer. What graduate school was or why one might go was beyond me. But shortly after I figured that out, I also figured out that I wasn’t going to be premed. I convinced my father that I could do it but didn’t want to, and I proceeded to major in Tutorial Studies, which involved creating one’s own program. At least for me, that meant the opportunity to concentrate on historiography or, basically, to major in Jock Weintraub. Years later, when we returned to Chicago, Jock, then dean of the humanities, was largely responsible for getting me a job teaching in the College.

The end of that story was the beginning of another, a story that became, as Kass put it in her statement of purpose some 34 years later, her “life-work: teaching people to read great books slowly and critically, to refine their ideas, to enlarge their sympathies, and to aspire to a richer life beyond self-centered quests for gain, fame, or power. What wonderful gifts!”

The people she taught agree.

Laura Demanski, AM’94

Convocation a rainy success

A downpour drenched the first unified Spring Convocation since 1929, but the University community soaked up the atmosphere.

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In devising the first University Convocation in 1892, founding president William Rainey Harper saw the occasion as an opportunity to “bestow the proper award for work accomplished…” and “to furnish an opportunity to look back for a moment over the months of work completed,” but also, and more unusually, “to bind together into a unity the many complex and diverging forms of activity which constitute our university life and work.” With this goal in mind, this year the University administration set a bold and daunting challenge: to hold a single, unified Spring Convocation for the first time since 1929.

For the past eight decades, spring convocations have been split into two, then three, and finally four sessions, held originally in Rockefeller Chapel, and since 1998, in Harper Quad. To bring the entire University together would require an even larger venue, and an imposing logistical challenge: host as many as 20,000 degree candidates, students, faculty, staff, and guests—at once—on the Main Quadrangle.

Staff worked for months to plan the event, an undertaking that involved renting some 22,000 folding chairs, erecting a huge temporary stage along University Avenue, and recruiting hundreds of staff and student volunteers. The event's emergency plan had to be amped up to include a weather monitoring radar system, a second ambulance on stand-by, three bicycle-mounted medics patrolling the Quad, and an evacuation plan. All turned out to be needed, given two ill guests and one sudden cloudburst that convinced many celebrants to monitor the rain-or-shine ceremony from Ryerson, Kent, Swift, and Rosenwald Halls. Not all guests felt the need to seek cover, however: the young family of one Harris School candidate was seen taking advantage of the scattering crowd to move into seats closer to the stage.

One of the trickier parts of planning for a new event of this scale is ordering the right number of the items that help guests stay comfortable throughout the day—bottles of water in case of heat and ponchos in case of rain—knowing that one will inevitably turn out to be far more in demand than the other. Turns out, there is plenty of water left over for the 504th Convocation on August 27th, but a new shipment of ponchos need to be ordered.

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Kyle Gorden, AB'00

Not even a downpour could dampen Convocation festivities. Photography by Dan Dry

Pedal power

UChicago's Office of Sustainability makes biking on campus a priority.

Boyer.jpgThe University's Office of Sustainability has already made its opinion on bicycling known: it's kind of an awesome—and environmentally friendly—alternative to driving to campus, where there's limited parking. September 2009 marked the launch of the office's ReCycles program, which provides 22 free bikes for students, faculty, and staff to check out and use.

This week marks Chicago's 20th Bike to Work Week (organized by the Active Transportation Alliance), and the sustainability office is coordinating the University's participation, advertising on University Web sites and spreading the word around campus. Although the office doesn't have stats yet on how many UChicago people are trading their cars for bikes, 12 University departments have registered—the highest number of any participating university, says Katie Anson, administrative assistant to the associate vice president and University architect. By the end of the week, the team leaders for each department will submit the information to the alliance. The teams that have the most members bike to work at least once win prizes from event sponsors, which include Goose Island Brewery, Caribou Coffee, and Village Cycle Center.

UChiBLOGo spoke to Anson about cycling on campus:


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow many people ride their bikes to or around campus on a regular basis?
QandA_ADrop.jpgAccording to a transportation study conducted in 2005, on average 1,000 people commute to campus via bicycle. User registration for ReCycles has been growing exponentially. There are now more than 700 registered users, and on average there are nearly 100 check-out transactions per week.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat is the most bizarre bike you've seen on campus?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe haven’t seen any bizarre bikes around campus, but we do get excited when we see students, staff, and faculty riding around on the refurbished ReCycles bikes. We have seen ReCycles bikes on the lakefront path, and someone has reported a ReCycles bike sighting downtown on the "L"!
QandA_QDrop.jpgI know it's early, but what kinds of feedback have you gotten so far from staff, faculty, and students about the event?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe have received positive responses about the event, primarily from University staff. People have expressed interest and enthusiasm, particularly those who already bike or who have been considering biking. We are really excited by the amount of interest expressed on campus about Bike to Work Week. Alternative transportation, along with recycling and sustainable food options, is an issue that has a lot of traction in our sustainability program. We’re happy to provide opportunities to commute on two wheels.

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

Dean of the College John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, hops on his bike during Alumni Weekend. Photography by Dan Dry

Bizarre-ketplace 4: Gut loaded

If garden pests are bugging you, Elise Covic, PhD'10, has just the solution.

Mantids.jpgAt the end of the academic year, UChicago Marketplace is infused with a sense of panic as graduating students seek to unload furniture, clothing, books, and random items like molecular model kits. “Price is negotiable!!” read one listing for a $200 dining table. “$50 OFF IF YOU PICK IT UP BY THURSDAY!”

Against this backdrop of crazed possession-dumping, Elise Covic’s listing, “Pet Praying Mantids/Natural Pesticide” stood out even more than it might have ordinarily. The listing included a large color photo, assurance that releasing mantids to the wild was legal and environmentally sound, and detailed instructions for pet care: “Make sure the prey has been gut loaded (feed a vitamin-enriched food to the prey, which will be passed on to the mantis).”

Covic, PhD’10, a researcher in Murray Sherman’s neurobiology lab, had this to say about her unusual hobby and her failed attempts to make money at it.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you get into raising mantids?
QandA_ADrop.jpgA few summers ago I was tutoring this kid in second-grade math. One day he showed me his mantid enclosure and all these little baby mantids. I thought they were the coolest little creatures—so cool that I couldn’t pay attention to tutor him that day. I went home and bought a couple of pods online that night.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhere do you buy mantid pods?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYou can get them quite easily, actually. A lot of organic garden supply companies sell them as beneficial insects/natural pesticide. I have a balcony garden, and there were all these aphids and annoying little bugs eating my basil. But I didn’t want to put any pesticide down in case I needed to use my ovaries one day.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat does your boyfriend think about all the mantids in your apartment?
QandA_ADrop.jpgHe thinks it’s cool, up to a certain extent. He’s working on his dissertation right now, on economic crises. This year, when the first pod hatched, I stormed in there screaming. He gets kind of annoyed that I’m always trying to stop him to come look at the bugs. My old roommate and I used to like to sit on the back porch, drinking beer and watching the mantids hunt. We could do that for hours.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIs this the first year you tried to sell the hatchlings on Marketplace?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes. In a 24-hour period, I had two pods hatch. I was incredibly poor, because I’m a new graduate—but I’m a terrible businesswoman. I pretty much gave them away to anyone who seemed interested. I sold, I think, a group of five mantids for $10. I gave away at least 50, mostly to undergrads who wanted them for pets.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDid your pods this year come from mantids you raised?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNo. I release so many outside every year, and I keep looking for their pods, but I can’t find any. They’re $12 for five pods, so it’s easier just to buy them. Last year I tried breeding them, but that didn’t exactly work out. If they did anything, I didn’t catch it. Maybe I needed some Barry White music.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAnything else you want to say about mantids?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe have lab mantids every year. We name each mantis after a neuroscientist. Last year’s mantis was Eric Kandel. Our Chinese mantis this year was Mu-Ming Poo. And the European one is Bert Sakmann. You have to keep them as separate as possible or they’ll start to eat each other.

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

A garden gnome cowers as a freshly hatched praying mantis (lower right) approaches. Photography by Elise Covic.

Graphic Reading, Part One

Summer is here, and the graphic-novel gurus at the Seminary Co-op have your reading list ready.

When you wrestle with words all day, there’s nothing like a big book with pictures. Three serious readers who tend the "Graphica" section at the Seminary Co-op think so, anyway. To accommodate the expanding popularity of graphic novels and comics, the bookstore offers a growing selection of the genre. Assistant manager Heather Ahrenholz, AB’94, and staffers Doug Riggs, AM’04, and Greg Pearson shared this list of recommended titles, keeping UChicago readers in mind.
Wilson_Clowes.jpg
1. To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner. A graphic-novel version of Bill Ayers’s memoir, from his perspective as an educator and school-reform activist.

2. Wilson, Daniel Clowes, U-High’79. These cartoons by Lab Schools alum Clowes—the author of Ghost World—feature a "navel-gazing, socially inept, perpetually depressed, but somehow appealing" protagonist.

3. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, R. Crumb. The legendary underground cartoonist’s take on the first book of the Bible.

4. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis. The life and thought of Bertrand Russell, including his encounters with the philosophers Frege, Hilbert, Gödel, and Wittgenstein and his study of the foundations of mathematics. Really.

5. Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966), Jules Feiffer. The first in a four-volume collection of "very New York" comic strips published in the Village Voice from 1956 to 2000.

6. The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume One: Microeconomics, Grady Klein, AB’96, and Yoram Bauman. The former Maroon cartoonist is rumored to have written his entire BA paper in comic form. Now an award-winning illustrator, he "paired up with the world's only stand-up economist to take the dismal out of the dismal science."

7. The Beats: A Graphic History, Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle, and Ed Piskor. Just out in paperback, a literary and cultural history of the Beat generation and such figures as Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Ferlinghetti.

8. Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco. "Essentially a journalist whose medium is comic strips," Sacco--who wrote Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde--investigates the 1956 Rafah massacre in the Gaza Strip.

9. Market Day, James Sturm. Twenty-four hours in the life of a Jewish rug maker in Eastern Europe, in the early 1900s.

10. Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke. A "thrilling, violent, and very noir revenge story," the first in a planned series of comic adaptations of the Parker novels by Richard Stark.

Stay tuned for Part Two of the list on UChiBLOGo soon.

Elizabeth Station

Daniel Clowes, U-High’79, explores a man's lonely, disenchanted life in Wilson.

Captured in time

Alumna Juanita Tamayo Lott traces the history of Filipino Americans in Washington, DC.

Book-cover.jpgWhile editing the spring/summer edition of social-sciences newsletter Dialogo, I became intrigued by an alumni-news tidbit from Juanita Tamayo Lott, AM’73, about her new book, Filipinos in Washington, D.C. (Arcadia Publishing, 2009). Coauthored with archivist and photographer Rita M. Cacas, the work offers a historical account of DC-area Filipino Americans. It starts with the first settlers, who arrived in 1900, and extends through 1964, when the Capital Beltway now surrounding DC was completed. "Before the Beltway, not as many people owned cars," says Lott. "They lived closer together, and there was a stronger sense of community." Cacas selected and scanned the book's 200-plus archival images. Retired federal demographer and policy analyst Lott, a San Francisco native who moved to the DC-area almost 40 years ago, worked on detailed captions and overall theme. The authors, both of Filipino ancestry, spent hours interviewing descendants of the pioneer generation.

Interested in the locale (one of my previous addresses was in DC) and different cultures, I couldn’t resist ordering a copy. The images range from young families inside exquisite Victorian homes to blushing brides surrounded by taffeta-clad attendants to proud Navy officers posing in crisp uniforms. The photos and accompanying captions illuminate the lives of ambitious families who made their home in America’s capital.

Earlier this month, Lott spoke with UChiBLOGo about how she and Cacas pulled the book together.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you and Rita gather all the photographs?
QandA_ADrop.jpgOne thing we did was to announce in the various places these families frequent—for example, churches and businesses: "We are looking for your family albums. Please make sure the photographs are black and white and from before 1964." And there was a family, the Toribios, who had lived in DC and then moved to Cobb Island, off of Annapolis, Maryland, bringing with them thousands of photos packed in Tupperware. Rita and I had access to these wonderful images—some are of the community’s annual balls.
QandA_QDrop.jpgThose photographs of the balls are breathtaking.
QandA_ADrop.jpgPeople cared about how they looked and really dressed up. And, as you can see in the images, even though there was segregation at the time, such events attracted a diverse crowd. One characteristic of Filipino Americans is that we tend to be quite open and receptive to other cultures. A lot of our children are of mixed-heritage. Rita and I also wanted to show that the people in this community saw themselves as Americans. Many of the Filipinos who arrived in Washington came to work for the government and did so via the military—the Navy, in particular, but the Army and Air Force as well. Even if you weren’t a U.S. citizen, if you had served in World War I or II, then you could secure a federal job. Public service was a big deal for these people, as was civic-engagement—getting involved in social groups such as the local woman’s club or the PTA or the taxi association. They joined organizations, and not just those for Filipinos.
QandA_QDrop.jpgEven though the photos are taken from personal family albums, Filipinos in Washington, D.C. seems to hit on a number of broader themes. There are images of war veterans, activists, people who worked for NASA.
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe wanted to go beyond personal stories to talk about history. Significant things happened in the 20th century—wars, economic depressions—that changed people lives. It’s easy to forget that a lot of what we do is not in our control. Major events often determine our ability to move forward or not.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat sort of reception has the book received?
QandA_ADrop.jpgFilipino Americans from other parts of the country have told us that that they can relate to it. They’ve said, “You know, my family had that same journey.”

Katherine Muhlenkamp


RELATED LINKS

Author Shines a Light on Local Filipino Heritage (Gazette.net, January 27, 2010)

Toe hold

Soccer blog editor Tom Dunmore, AM'02, knows a thing or two about World Cup fever.

Dunmore.jpgWith Landon Donovan’s heroics in Wednesday’s must-win soccer match prolonging U.S. participation in the World Cup, we have until at least Saturday to prove to our European/South American friends that we really do care about the world’s game. Really, we do. And we know it should be called “football,” thank you very much.

Donovan’s goal qualified the U.S. for the knockout round of the tournament, meaning you can (kind of) make the argument that the U.S. is among the 16 best footballing nations in the world. Doctoral student Tom Dunmore, AM’02, may be one of its most soccer-savvy residents and one of the most engaged fans in Chicago.

The editor of the award-winning soccer blog Pitch Invasion and chairman of Section 8, the Chicago Fire supporters' association, Dunmore has his hands full year-round, even without the World Cup to contend with. He’s also writing a soccer encyclopedia. (The final draft will be submitted after the World Cup, so Dunmore can include it.)

The blog—it's updated multiple times a day by Dunmore, several contributors, and an associate editor—covers soccer in the way Freakonomics looked at economics. “The idea was to look at soccer from more of a cultural perspective. We don’t really do game analysis or breakdowns of games or recent trades,“ Dunmore told me over the phone Tuesday. “We look at issues of gender, race, how they intersect with the game. There are endless intersections with society that are quite interesting...looking at the development of the game in the U.S., how it’s growing.”

Part of his goal is writing stories the mainstream U.S. media doesn’t cover—America’s familiar it’s-World-Cup-time-so-I-care-about-football conundrum—and it’s pretty hard work. “It takes up a lot of time, but through doing it I’ve gotten an awful lot of positive feedback and we’ve covered some stories that people might not have heard about,” he says, like this argument for why more statistical analysis won't improve soccer's visibility in America, no matter what ESPN says.

Dunmore, who's lived in America since 2001—a span of three World Cups—cites this year's competition as "definitely the most excitement I’ve seen. I’ve noticed a lot more places around town showing the games.”

Soccer is also getting more popular at the U of C. (Dunmore remains enrolled at the U of C, although he admits his dissertation—on U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s—hasn’t been a priority lately. “It’s really fallen off the radar for me the last year; I miss doing some of that,” he says.) With a lot of graduate students from overseas, there are often pick-up games on campus, if you know where to look. “There were a few of us who were getting a bit long in the tooth to be out there, especially in the hot sun of the summer," says Dunmore. "But there’s definitely a big culture of playing and it’s growing in [terms of] following the game."

A Brighton and Hove Albion fan as a kid, Dunmore believes one should root for the local team, wherever "local" happens to be—hence his involvement with the Chicago Fire. As for his take on the soccer/football debate, he keeps with the home-pitch advantage, calling the game soccer in the U.S., especially because “there’s already a more popular sport called football.”

Don’t worry, Tom, we know what it's really called. Besides, American football hasn’t really been that popular at the U of C since we dropped out of the Big 10 waaay back in 1939.

Asher Klein, '11

Soccer guru Tom Dunmore counts himself a fan of local Chicago teams.

From scientist to activist

Jane Goodall's journey continues, preaching hope for the future of the planet as she protects chimps and their habitats.

Goodall1.jpg“Sometimes to save the place you love, you have to leave the place you love.” That’s what primatologist Jane Goodall told a capacity crowd last month at Rockefeller Chapel, concluding a talk on humans, their closest animal cousins, and the uncertain future of Africa’s equatorial forest.

In 1986, Goodall left Gombe National Park, after having spent nearly her whole adult life there studying chimpanzees to whom she gave names like Goliath and David Greybeard and Flo and Freud. Since then, she hasn’t stayed anywhere for more than three weeks at a time; instead, she travels constantly, campaigning for better treatment of great apes and their disappearing habitats. On the Friday before Mother’s Day, she came to Rockefeller, and as the audience stood and clapped, she swept down the aisle toward the pulpit in a turquoise shawl, surrounded by a flock of paper doves carried aloft by Lab Schools students.

For the next 90 minutes, Goodall talked about her work, recalling her arrival at Tanzania’s Lake Tanganyika—50 years ago this year—as a 26-year-old secretary hired by anthropologist Louis Leakey and chaperoned by her mother. Struck by her passionate curiosity about African wildlife, Leakey had invited Goodall to do a field study of chimpanzees in western Tanzania. “I would have done anything,” Goodall said, “I would have studied any animal to be out in the bush.”

And so, her adventure began. As a renowned, sometimes controversial researcher, Goodall watched chimpanzees parenting their offspring and modifying tools to feed themselves. She saw them kiss and pat each other on the back, smile and swagger, hunt for food and attack each other with astonishing violence. She recorded a four-year war that began in 1974 and ended with the annihilation of one whole chimpanzee troop. “What’s clear after 50 years,” she told her Rockefeller audience, “is that chimpanzees help us understand our own position in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom.” Increasingly, it turns out, the difference between us and them is “a very blurry line.”

Goodall decided to depart Gombe after attending a 1986 conference called Understanding Chimpanzees, held in Chicago. Speaker after speaker described the destruction of the African rainforest, the illegal trade in chimpanzee bushmeat, and the cruel treatment of chimps in medical research labs. “It was shocking,” Goodall said. “I went into that conference as a scientist and came out an activist.”

Since then, the Jane Goodall Institute has worked to save the African rainforest and the animals that live there. Its programs rescue orphaned chimps and train “eco-guards” to patrol protected areas; they educate local farmers on sustainable agriculture and distribute microloans to villagers to buy fuel-efficient, tree-saving stoves. Goodall said conservation has also led her to a fight against poverty, “one of the most terrible destroyers of the natural world.” Her Roots & Shoots program enlists schoolchildren all over the world to participate in environmental projects—recycling, cleaning up public parks, volunteering at animal shelters. Young people need to feel involved and hopeful about the world they will inherit, she said; in order to take part in the effort to save the environment, they must believe it can be saved. “If we don’t dare to envision such a world, it will never come."

Before taking a few questions from children in the audience (“Which chimpanzee did you learn from the most?” “Flo,” who raised numerous offspring at Gombe, taught researchers a lot about family relationships and infant development) and retiring to Rockefeller’s foyer to sign books and pose for photos, Goodall closed her talk with a story she often shares, about a chimp named Jo-Jo—orphaned as an infant and raised in captivity—who lost a showdown with another male at the Detroit Zoo and, terrified, jumped into a moat circling the enclosure. He nearly drowned, but a man watching with his family plunged in after Jo-Jo, risking his life to save the chimp, even as the other animals were bearing down on them. In a video of the incident, captured by another zoo visitor, Goodall said, you could see the man, Rick Swope, look at Jo-Jo and then his family and then back at Jo-Jo as he decided to jump over the railing. Later when asked why he did it, Swope said, “I happened to look into his eyes and it was like looking into the eyes of a man. And the message was, ‘Won't anybody help me?’”

Read Jane Goodall's account of Jo-Jo's rescue in full.

Lydialyle Gibson

Goodall speaks to a full house in Rockefeller Chapel this past May. Photography by Anne Benvenuti.

Graphic Reading, Part Two

Ready to get serious about comics? Here are more picks from the folks who tend the "Graphica" section at the Seminary Co-op bookstore.

ap1.jpgSuperheroes. Bad guys. Philosophers who kick butt. The protagonists in comics and graphic novels can be larger than life, but "I have a hard time qualifying what I read as escapism," says Doug Riggs, AM’04. Deeper themes lurk under the pop-culture packaging. Riggs and fellow Seminary Co-op staffers Greg Pearson and Heather Ahrenholz, AB’94, recommend these titles as some of the best. For the first ten, click here.

11. The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You, Neil Gaiman. This stand-alone story provides an accessible entry point into Gaiman’s "dense and complicated" Sandman series, published from 1989 to 1996.

12. Carnet de Voyage, Craig Thompson. A whimsical travelogue and sketch book from the author of the moody comic memoir Blankets.

13. Demo, Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. Dark, deep coming-of-age stories about young adults, some of whom have supernatural powers.

14. Runaways, Brian K. Vaughan. An award-winning Marvel series about kids who discover their parents are super-villains.

15. Fables: The Deluxe Edition Book One, Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and Lan Medina. The conceit is simple; the series is "phenomenal"—fairy tale characters are exiled to modern-day Manhattan.

16. Walt and Skeezix, Frank King and Chris Ware. Graphic novelist Ware gathered King’s Gasoline Alley comics, published in 1920s daily newspapers, into this "wonderful Chicago book."

17. Moomin, Tove Jansson. Readers young and old will enjoy these classic comics about Finnish trolls.

18. Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives (Vol. 1), by Steve Ditko and Blake Bell. "Dark and twisted" early work from the co-creator of Spiderman.

19. Action Philosophers! Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunleavy. Comic profiles of the world’s great thinkers, from the pre-Socratics to Derrida.

20. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli. The illustrator of Batman:Year One drew this tale of a middle-aged architect, a good crossover book for graphic-novel neophytes.

21. All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. "Touching, well-drawn, and wonderfully imaginative," twelve new episodes reveal the softer side of the Man of Steel.

Elizabeth Station

Fractured finances

In Fault Lines, Chicago Booth’s Raghuram Rajan identifies surprising factors at the center of the economic crisis.

Rajan.jpg

Chicago Booth professor Raghuram Rajan saw the financial crisis coming years ahead of time, even spoiling a 2005 celebration for Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to say so. Back then Rajan’s warnings were received with the kind of disdain reserved for someone worrying about a hangover while the champagne’s still being poured. Or worse: “I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions.”

Because the risks he identified registered on an economic Richter scale in 2008, Rajan’s new book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton University Press) carries the weight of retroactive respect. He told us so. Now reviewers from the Economist to Esquire have come to praise his perceptive view of the crisis and a still-ominous global financial future.

Rajan, the Eric J. Gleacher distinguished service professor of finance, identifies an unexpected cause of the crisis: American income inequality. As the gap increased, he argues, politicians wallpapered the problem with cheap credit. The banks that offered it and the consumers who took it were simply responding to incentives that produced untenable risks. “The worrying reality is that both are to blame,” Rajan writes, “but neither may have been fully cognizant of the fault lines guiding their actions.”

His remedies combine “free-market Chicago School economics with good-government ideas straight out of Obamaland,” Esquire’s John H. Richardson writes, including expanding access to education, extending unemployment benefits, and improving health care. Insufficient safety nets, Rajan suggests, fueled the unsustainable political and economic remedy he dubbed, “Let Them Eat Credit.” A former International Monetary Fund chief economist, Rajan also supports reforms that would allow the IMF “to play a greater role in sorting out the macroeconomic imbalances that underlay the crisis.”

Rajan does not cast victims or villains in retrospect: “To him, this was a Greek tragedy in which traders and bankers, congressmen and subprime borrowers all played their parts,” David Wessel writes in the Wall Street Journal, “until the drama reached its inevitably painful end.”

Jason Kelly

Printing pride

Two U of C students are covering pride movements in Chicago this summer.

PrideParade.jpg
Ever been curious about the Chicagoans doing their best to challenge deeply entrenched structures of sexual power in our society, but, unlike the U of C's Lauren Berlant, haven't felt ready to jump into the thick of it? Not to worry, two student journalists have that beat covered.

Mitch Montoya, '11, has been writing for Time Out Chicago's Gay & Lesbian section, where he recounts what it's like to dance so hard "my quads are on fire" on a float at Sunday's Gay Pride Parade.

And, interning this summer for Newcity, Ella Christoph, also '11, writes this report on the second annual Chicago Cougar Convention, which was definitely not a gathering of feral cats.

Asher Klein, '11

Buy buy buy!

An alum is named one of New York's most attractive traders.

Register him with the SEC and call him a hedge fund, because Jason Mudrick, AB'97, is about to get some sizable returns.

That's because Mudrick was named one of New York Magazine's Foxes of Finance, one of only 14 New York traders to earn such praise. And not only are they attractive and, in our man's case, extremely intelligent; they're not taken!

According to the authors, the magazine basically just called a bunch of places on Wall Street asking around for the most attractive, nice, smart dudes still on the market. (Pun very much intended.) And then they stalked them on Facebook.

NY Mag explains the slideshow: "The rest of America may see the warriors of Wall Street as faceless, greedy jerks, but here in New York, we know them to be a rich tapestry of individuals with thoughts, interests, and feelings. Some of whom, in addition to being very wealthy, are actually quite good-looking!"

We may be biased, but we think Mudrick, who is president and CEO of Mudrick Capital (at just 35!), is the cream of the crop. Look at that smile! Talk about private equity. And he's taught at Harvard. So not only is he more attractive than a squirrel—a perennial U of C preoccupation, or so they say—he's braver, too!

Sigh. Jason Mudrick: he really puts the "stag" in stagflation.

Asher Klein, '11

Crime Lab's analysis? The court got it wrong.

U of C’s Crime Lab says the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Chicago handgun ban might make city violence more lethal.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Chicago’s 28-year handgun ban violates the Second Amendment. The decision didn’t surprise anyone—in 2008 the Court struck down a similar statute in Washington, DC. But Harold Pollack, the Helen Ross Professor at the School of Social Service Administration, sees the legal question as only part of the gun-violence dilemma. “I’m very sorry about the decision. There’s no doubt that the widespread proliferation of handguns is a huge public health problem,” Pollack says.

CrimeLab.jpgFar from wrestling with the ambiguities of constitutional jargon, Crime Lab directors Jens Ludwig and Pollack judge public policy with hard numbers. They've used statistics to evaluate pilot programs aimed at reducing gun violence in Chicago and across the country. Ludwig and Pollack believe that systematic, randomized studies of crime-prevention techniques can yield results as reliable as those found in medical clinical trials.

While there’s little definitive data on the effectiveness of Chicago’s handgun ban, Ludwig argued in a 2008 NPR interview that the similar statute in DC may have made it harder for criminals to buy guns. Before the ban, Ludwig said, “If I’m selling a gun at a yard sale, unless somebody comes up with their Rikers Island alumni hat, I have no reason to know that they have a disqualifying record.” Imposing a ban, Ludwig said, makes these informal markets harder to come by, and in the process makes it harder for criminals to buy guns.

But the ruling will hardly send Chicago back to the days of Dillinger—already the city is busy planning to reduce the impact of the ban’s repeal. The court’s decision states that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership for self-defense in the home, leaving a lot of wiggle room for other forms of handgun regulation. Crime Lab Executive Director Roseanna Ander said in a Chicago Tribune article this week that, whatever options the city considers, allowing the proliferation of handguns will only lead to more violence. “It's putting gasoline on a fire," she said. "What we need is more water."

With or without the ban, Pollack says, the city needs to adopt other approaches to the issue. “You can have a great handgun ban in Chicago, but if you have your girlfriend drive a short distance and legally buy a handgun that makes it difficult...we can do a lot to deter people from using or carrying or brandishing the guns that they have.” If gun regulation can encourage citizens to leave handguns at home, Pollack argues that a lethal element in everyday confrontations can be eliminated. “I would much rather that person not have a gun, but if it’s at grandma’s house he won’t be pulling it out when there’s a fight on the basketball court,” he says.

Another U of C professor, economist Gary Becker, AM'53, PhD’55, argued in 2008 (in agreement with respected economist Chris Rock) that a tax of “several hundred percent of the untaxed price” should be applied to lawful gun purchases, making prices in both legal and illegal gun markets surge.

Pollack says his concern with the court's decision reflects a more fundamental question of values. “The ban," he says, "served a very important function in expressing a message that we think guns are a toxic presence in our society."

Burke Frank, '11

Crime Lab directors Ludwig (left) and Pollack (right).

A first on the Fourth

U of C students and Hyde Parkers gathered at Promontory Point for its inaugural July 4th fireworks show.

Nothing brings Hyde Park together quite like a summer picnic or a parking crisis, and the first July 4th fireworks show held at Promontory Point gave them a little of both—and added some spectacle, to boot.

Rather than the bombs-bursting-in-air-worthy Grant Park extravaganza held every year since 1975, the city launched fireworks at three locations, including, for the first time, 63rd Street Beach in Hyde Park. The show lasted 15 minutes, and included novelties (heart- and smiley-shaped fireworks) and the perennial favorites (known to pyrotechnologists as bloom-y ones, waterfall-y ones, and sparkl-y ones, we think).

But the fireworks weren't the only thing bringing people to the Point. It was a wonderful sunny day, so the grills, swimsuits, kites, and low-rider bikes were out long before the fireworks started. As was the Chicago Police Department, which booked only seven people this year across all three shows, down from 30 arrests at last year's Grant Park display.

Everyone seemed to have a good time, but there was at least one downside: it was pretty hard to find parking. Luckily, no one seemed too upset. Below, a slideshow of the excursions and explosions.

Burke Frank, '11, and Asher Klein, '11

Tour de campus

Trying out ReCycles, the University's (relatively) new bike-share program.

Tour%20de%20campus.jpgA place where even professor emeritus David Bevington can be seen kickstarting his bike at a trot, the U of C isn't exactly hospitable for cyclophobes. Sadly for them, but happily for those of us who neither fear bikes nor own one, the University's bike-share program recently lost its training wheels, and it's doing well.

The ReCycles program, started last fall under the auspices of the Office of Sustainability, offers registered students, faculty, and staff free bike rentals at any of four campus locations: the Reg, Ratner, School of Social Service Administration, and the NSIT building on 60th and Kenwood.

As of this spring, when the program moved past its pilot phase, there are 22 bikes, 750 people registered, and 100 rentals a week, according to Colleen Christensen, a sustainability program coordinator. "We didn't necessarily know what to expect since it was a brand new program, but it expanded quite rapidly," she said in a phone interview, thinking about the past, present, and future of ReCycles. "It's a matter of knowing how best to expand the program."

I happen to be one of those 750 registered part-time cyclists and I've rented bikes quite a lot, a total of 10 times according to Christensen, who was nice enough to go through the records. After two years humping it around Hyde Park, seeing the neighborhood from the back of a lean, mean, cycling machine made everyday travel feel like...an adventure! (Mostly because I was constantly afraid of being hit by a car, but still.)

Why do I use it? Well, speaking from lots of experience, ReCycles is great if you live off campus and need to get home to print out a paper (or finish the paper, or...start the paper) and get back in a hurry. No longer speaking from experience, but from informed guess, it's even better if you're craving some fresh produce in your dorm room and you've got an hour to kill in the middle of the day. It's also great if you're concerned that it be a step in the green direction.

The program's big issue is that if you're bikeless and living off campus—rather far from one of the program's four pick-up locations—you're in for at least two long walks. Not the end of the world, but it can defeat the purpose of renting the bike in the first place. This is, by the way, the same problem likely to plague the City of Chicago's soon-to-be-rolled-out bike-share program.

So what if you have to be on campus already to rent the bikes, and then return them by 7 p.m. or so? Campus is a beautiful, engrossing place, but sometimes it feels good when you're just Breaking Away.

With that in mind, here's an illustrated list of biking ideas, collected from my latest sojourn around Hyde Park:

Asher Klein, '11

Photography by Asher Klein, '11.

Eye to eye

Chicago eye doctor recognizes everyday heroes with Lasik.

Lasik-offer.jpgForget parades and salutes. Ophthalmologist Mark Golden, AB'77, SM'78, has found a new way to honor everyday heroes like police, firefighters, paramedics, military personnel, and teachers: discounted Lasik.

For many of these individuals, particularly soldiers, "extreme physical activity, dust, smoke, and sweat make it difficult for most eyeglass and contact-lens wearers to function properly in their jobs," said Golden in a recent press release. "Freedom from glasses and contacts can become a critical issue." Typically costing anywhere from $2,200 to $3,500 per eye, the state-of-the-art procedure corrects vision problems to eliminate the need for corrective lenses.

To make the service more affordable, Golden's Doctors for Visual Freedom Laser Center is currently offering $1,000 off per eye. "This is an opportunity for us to thank the true heroes in our community," said Golden. "Their commitment and sacrifice is a debt we can never repay."

For more info, call 877.855.5961 or click here.

Brooke E. O'Neill, AM'04

Rumors, drawing on science

Unfounded (alas!) rumors had it that Fermilab may have discovered the God particle—the Higgs boson. Plus, some cool particle physics cartoons.

Map.jpgWell, this would have been big news: a University of Padua physicist blogged last week that he'd heard that Fermilab has discovered the elusive Higgs boson particle—the only particle predicted in the standard atomic model that has yet to be discovered.

"It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal," said the blogger, Tomasso Dorigo (who has a position at Fermilab), setting off sensationally suspenseful speculation that the notoriously discovery-shy particle was found, despite the fact that Dorigo reported it as a rumor, not fact.

Sadly, we God particle-enthusiasts can't celebrate just yet; Judith Jackson, communications director at Fermilab, smashed the rumors like two protons in a particle accelerator: "The Tevatron is functioning fabulously well and at some point [we hope] experiments will present evidence for the Higgs boson," Jackson said in a phone interview, "but these rumors are completely bogus."

Inside-lab.jpg"Bo. Gus," she added, dream-crushingly. Actually she was very nice about the whole thing, which seems to have been taken as a joke at Fermilab.

"There will be results from Fermilab Tevatron experiments presented at the ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics) Conference in Paris in a couple weeks," Jackson said, but they will refer to limits on what the mass of the Higgs boson may be, not the discovery of the particle itself.

Luckily, the new CERN accelerator in Switzerland, which replaced Fermilab's as the largest accelerator in the world, will perform more and more powerful experiments as it gets up to full speed—hopefully sometime in 2013—and it's the best bet to find the Higgs boson.

Of course, the boson may not exist, in which case science will have to come up with a new theory of the atom. Sad, perhaps, but as New Yorker and Scientific American cartoonist Roz Chast illustrates in these three delightfully unscientific cartoons on particle physics, laymen don't really need to, and probably shouldn't, think too hard about the nitty-gritty of these things, and leave it up to the professionals.

Asher Klein, '11

Check out an aerial view of Fermilab, not (yet!) the site of the Higgs boson's discovery (top), as well as Fermilab's DZero detector, which records the results of high-energy particle collisions, but has not (yet!) detected the Higgs boson. Photo credit: Fermilab.

Checking out history books

Mansueto may be the shiniest of our libraries, but a look through the archives reveals some surprising facts about other collections when they were new.

RegInterior.jpgI’ve heard it called the Librodome and the Egg, the Greenhouse and the Blister, but only time will tell how we’ll be talking about the brand new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library in a decade or two. And while the reception of the new library will certainly be different from those that already populate campus (never was there a HarperCam during its construction) it’s impossible to tell now what will stand out about the library in the future. But, thankfully, there’s a long history of placing a premium on the stored word—the second appointment President Harper made to the new University was of an assistant librarian: Mrs. Zella Allen Dixson in July 1891. (The first appointment was of a Latin professor, which I’m sure seemed urgent at the time.)

In that historical spirit, I decided to take a look through the Magazine archives to see what stood out about our libraries when they were built.

Harper Memorial Library was completed in 1912, to the great relief of everyone involved—before that it shared space with the University Press and the gymnasia (one for men, another for women) in a one-story brick building on the site of today’s Hutch Courtyard. It was full of high-tech gadgets, at least by the standards of its day: a Magazine contributor extols “electric book-lifts," “pneumatic tubes for the conveyance of book orders and charge-cards," and “speaking tubes and telephones which facilitate viva voce communication.” Real Flash Gordon stuff, if you ask me. And history really is cyclical—the massive Automated Storage and Retrieval System in Mansueto is a simply a modern, scarier version of that book-lift technology. (Maybe soon robots can read my Derrida?) Fun fact: apparently the University of Chicago seal is carved in six places around Harper. Can you find them?

Eckhart Library was built in 1930 amid a flurry of construction projects across campus for $725,000 (about $9.5 million today). At the time, Eckhart was seen as more modern-looking than the blockish Cobb and Ryerson Halls: according to a July-August 1931 Magazine article by art instructor Hugh S. Morrison, “[they] seem slightly old-fashioned now, rather bald in their lack of refinements; but the masonery is sound, and they have a bold picturesqueness of mass often lacking in the newer buildings. Perhaps the best of them is Ryerson Laboratory, now set off in all its ruggedness by the more feminine elegance of Eckhart.” I can’t imagine what the author would think of Mansueto if limestone Eckhart is the picture of airy femininity—to put it in 1930s terms, it’s a future much more Buck Rogers than Metropolis.

The D’Angelo Law Library, and the new law quadrangle it accompanied, were ushered in with a year of celebration and high-level recognition: a Supreme Court justice, British nobles and ministers, and Vice President Nixon all spoke at the ceremonies. But for all the fanfare, D’Angelo’s opening was overshadowed in the Magazine by a three-page article profiling the U of C Parapsychology Society in anticipation of a contest with Cambridge University. EckhartFeminine.jpg

The School of Social Service Administration (SSA) Library moved from Cobb Hall, the oldest building on campus, to the newest, a Mies van der Rohe steel-and-glass enclosure housing classrooms, offices, and research rooms for the School. This must have come as a shock to the faculty used to working in a block of limestone—I wonder how Regenstein staff in Mansueto will feel about unfettered access to the sky.

The inimitable Regenstein Library. Much was made of its location on the old Stagg Field, a symbolic gesture of academic supremacy noted in the Magazine in mythical proportions: “In the winter of 1969-1970, the destruction crews came in and the Stagg Field wall came tumbling down, to reveal, full-fledged from the head of Zeus, the new Regenstein library.” Whether you see it as a masterpiece or an eyesore, the Reg is the most massive building on campus. Much of the discussion surrounding the library's completion in 1970 was not simply about its brutalist architecture but the monumental task of moving two million books in the space of two months. Originally the senior architect for the project wanted to place the new library smack in the middle of the main quadrangle, which would have made it possible for some committed students never to cross 57th Street. Originally each floor had its own color of wall-to-wall carpeting: the first floor was gold, the second and third orange, the fourth green. “I feel a sense of elation when I enter in the morning,” one librarian said.

Crerar Library, the newest collection on campus, was built in 1984 as part of the new science quadrangle. A Maroon editorial fretted that the new quad would split up the undergraduate student body between science and humanities majors, but it seems that the absolute silence in Crerar draws like-minded agoraphobes from across the academic spectrum. Originally established downtown in 1894, the library was founded with very specific instructions from benefactor John Crerar. “I desire the building to be tasteful, substantial, and fireproof,” he wrote in his will. “I desire the books and periodicals selected with a view to create and sustain a healthy moral and Christian sentiment in the community, and that all nastiness and immorality be excluded. I do not mean by this that there shall not be anything but hymn books and sermons, but I mean that dirty French novels and all skeptical trash and works of questionable moral tone shall never be found in the Library.” If I ever find a dirty French novel in your library, Mr. Crerar, I'll be sure to let you know.

And so we return to our futuristic bubble, the Mansueto Library, and students such as myself look forward to many hours of solitary and communal misery inside the transparent belly of the beast. While it might have fewer gargoyles than its predecessors, a bold, expensive, titanic book cellar sure says University of Chicago to me.

Burke Frank, ’11

The target shoots back

Magazine photographer Dan Dry caught up in cricket mayhem.

When Dan Dry takes photographs, personal safety is only a passing concern. So maybe it’s not surprising that he got hit by the ball while shooting the cricket club—but rather that he got hit only once.

“It came fast and hard, and I sure didn't see it coming,” Dry says. The ball struck his left arm (Dry is left-handed) just above the elbow. “What started with a slight sting and a thud quickly became burning pain. I kept shooting, and no, I didn't cry.” The impact resulted in “a blackish-purple lump and bruise,” which “turned to a darker shade the next morning and mellowed out to a sunshine yellow within a week or so.”

Aside from the ball, Dry was also hit by one of the bowlers, Rohit Naimpally AB’09, AM’10. (In cricket, the bowler—the rough equivalent of a pitcher in baseball—takes a running start.) “He may be a small guy,” says Dry, “but he had the strength of a Bears lineman.”

Dry is accustomed to abuse. While taking photographs, he says, “I’ve been bitten by a multimillion-dollar racehorse, gotten shoved to the ground by a striking union worker, run into on the sidelines by members of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and fallen off the edge of an oil rig when the cap blew, spraying oil everywhere, only to be saved by my safety harness. I have stood waist-deep in the snake- and alligator-infested waters of Florida’s Everglades, been run over at half court by an All-American basketball player, and been screamed at, hit, pushed, and kicked by people on both sides of the busing movement in Louisville.”

On that scale of pain, being struck by a cricket ball, says Dry, “is pretty much at the bottom of the list.”

Read more about the cricket club in the summer issue of the Core.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Laughing all the way

Comedy writer and performer Tami Sagher, AB’95, wasn’t always funny. Oh wait—maybe she was.

Check out Sagher as straight-woman in this 1998 video, "Dirty Hole," filmed back when the former UChicago math major was an ensemble member at Second City:

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If that isn’t gynecological enough, watch the sketch she co-wrote for MadTV in 2005, about a feminine hygiene product called (presciently enough) the iPad:

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Sagher, a Brooklyn-based improviser and television writer, takes center stage in the latest edition of the Core. The article has a few jokes; we promise. But this woman is serious about comedy.

Elizabeth Station

Fed of state

The ideological origins of American Federalism—still important in America today and the title of a new book by a U of C law professor.

LaCroix.jpgThe federal government won't be taking Arizona's new law allowing police to inquire about immigration status lying down, filing suit instead. Asserting that "a state may not establish its own immigration policy or enforce state laws in a manner that interferes with the federal immigration laws," the Justice Department's July 6 filing references the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, which says that federal law trumps conflicting state law.

The United States of America v. The State of Arizona is the latest flare-up in a long line of conflicts between the states and Washington, a history that doesn't just go back to the drafting of the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, but, as assistant law professor Alison LaCroix argues in a new book, to ideological debates in the 13 colonies as early as 1760.

The Ideological Origins of American Federalism covers the era from 1760 through though 1810, charting how Americans developed the country's unique brand of government out of struggles for self-representation, rather than developing political philosophy on the spur of the moment at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, as others have written. This approach shows just how resistant many of the colonists were to a strong federal government and that it's a mistake to think of state governments and their federal counterpart as being at odds, said LaCroix last Tuesday during a talk at the Quad Club.
Book-cover-LaCroix.jpgAs politicians continue to cite the founding documents as proof that their positions are right and others' are wrong, LaCroix advocates a much less rigid approach, arguing that there was no clear consensus among the nation's founding fathers on who should have more power. Take the federal government's supremacy over states, for example, which is outlined in the Supremacy Clause as such: U.S. laws and treaties "shall be the supreme Law of the Land." While the government may see that as clear-cut and in favor of the federal government, states might have a more expansive view, LaCroix says. "Where does it say that federal power is exclusive?" There could be more of a role for shared power, even if the federal government is supreme, or more delegation of power.

There's another reason politicians shouldn't name-drop the founding fathers for partisan gain—it's not in the spirit of the founding. "A lot of the participants [in today's debates] are focused on who wins," LaCroix says. "I think early federalist thinkers were willing to postpone the question [of who wins]; the background principle that they were really committed to was this multilayered government."

Nevertheless, LaCroix argues that at least the history of American federalism was pretty clear in the Arizona case. If you asked people in the 18th century what they thought federalism means, she says, they would have said that authority of the federal government is bound up in foreign affairs, "so that seems like something that you would cede to the federal government."

Asher Klein, '11

Down the rabbit hole and onto the quads

Students and U of C families gather on Bartlett Quad to watch Alice in Wonderland.

It’s summer at Chicago. The air is muggy, the pace slower, and birds chirp well into the evening. For those of us here in town, the Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities is sponsoring a series of al fresco movie screenings. Films are shown after dark on an inflatable screen.

The selection for July 1 was Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton’s 2010 blockbuster. Moviegoers—undergraduate, graduate, and summer-program students as well as faculty, staff, and their children—started arriving at Bartlett Quad around 7:45 p.m. and plopped down on a sea of patterned and solid-colored blankets. When dusk descended, the film began rolling as some 70 attendees munched on self-supplied treats: candy, popcorn, assorted take-out.

Did Alice slay the Jabberwocky? We’re not telling, but we will reveal the dates of upcoming Movie on the Quad screenings. All are on Bartlett Quad, and begin at dusk (8:00 p.m. or shortly thereafter).

July 22: When In Rome
August 5: The Goonies
August 12: Shutter Island


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Crowds start to gather.

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Nightfall approaches.

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Showtime.

Katherine Muhlenkamp

Photography by David Muhlenkamp

Robots, celebrities wreak havoc downtown!

Transformers 3 takes up, and rips up, Michigan Ave. Luckily, two interns have photos!

looming.jpgOne thing many don't know about the University is that it has a set of offices on Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River, right next to Tribune Tower and across from the Wrigley building, on the very spot Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable built the log cabin marking the first, humble settlement that would one day become the city of Chicago. It's a nice place to work.

And it was even nicer on Friday, when we had some new neighbors—the cast, crew, and fiery hulks of wrecked cars of Transformers 3, which filmed right off the Michigan Avenue Bridge through the weekend.

If you've seen either of the previous Transformers movies, or, for that matter, any of the director Michael Bay's other work (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor), you'll know what kind of bananas destruction it entails, and this film will clearly be no different. That little bit of Chicago looked like it was body-slammed by an industrial-waste dump: mashed-up cars stacked at the bridge entrance, steel girders sticking out of cratered cement, and even a weirdly out-of-place and dirtied fruit stand abandoned in the middle of the street.

This was as off-the-wall as a film shoot gets, but it was incredibly efficient as well. (Actually, we should say of-the-wall, since some of the wreckage, with faux-terra cotta and green molding, imitated the Wrigley Building façade and hinted at great feats of CGI, or computer-generated imagery, to come.) Certain shots took only minutes to set up, and they were pulled off with a number of different cameras, including one mounted on a crane perched atop an SUV. Production assistants lit newspapers and cars on fire for most takes, then extinguished everything when the director yelled cut, over and over again.

The film's stars were just as efficient, running around in sweaters and heavy make-up despite the 90-degree heat. Shia LaBeouf (whose surname we can't help but pronounce LaBeoaeoeuaoeaeuf) looked like he stayed in character all day, spending time between takes stalking through the heat like his life depended on it. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who plays his love interest in Megan Fox's place, attested to her modeling past when she fixed a fierce gaze on us as she passed us in the lobby.

We couldn't tell what was going on in the scene besides some kind of scary Transformer fight that meant LaBeoaeoeuaoeaeuf and New Megan Fox had to hide in an overturned car, but it was clear that the film spent at least a few million dollars to capture what had to be no more than a minute of film. Amazingly, it was all cleaned up by Monday morning, when the shoot headed off to Upper Wacker Drive, where it will roll tape until Thursday.

Sadly, we missed most of the explosions (the crew saved those for the weekend, presumably to increase nearby office workers' productivity, a courtesy that seemed to have minimal effect) but we did take some shots of Friday's filming, which we thought were cool enough to share with you.

Still, we couldn't help but feel that these images were missing something, something sort of integral to the Transformers experience. Which is why you'll find University-cron, the U of C's very own Transformer, hanging out on set! He may not be the real deal, but we couldn't bear to look at pictures of Transformers without at least a little bit of animation. Call it nostalgia for the cartoons of our childhoods.

Enjoy!

Asher Klein, '11
Photography by Asher Klein, '11, and Burke Frank, '11
Illustrations by Asher Klein, '11

Lost and found

Rebecca Wolfram brings back her Museum of Objects Left on the Sidewalk, a community endeavor.

Museum-sign.jpgI wasn’t sure how I was going to find artist Rebecca Wolfram’s late-June museum opening. Given what seemed to be a home address in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I turned left down 21st Street and headed toward the sound of jingling bells (turned out to be an ice-cream truck). Some abandoned lots looked like they could hold a lot of people—but they were abandoned.

Sweating (and already 30 minutes late for the 5 p.m. opening), I turned around and walked in the other direction. Crossing California, I suddenly noticed about 10-15 people gathered on the sidewalk, huddled around four or five others holding beer bottles. Finally, I spotted the photographer I was supposed to be meeting there, Lloyd DeGrane. Bingo.

I got there at just the right time, DeGrane said. Wolfram, AB'71, wearing black sweats and a T-shirt with a very angry bear on the front, was about to start the official opening of her Museum of Objects Left on the Sidewalk. A chorus of whistles and low-pitched hums echoed from people blowing on beer bottles, as Wolfram tried to organize people according to the note they were playing. A young boy, about six or seven, was having trouble making the right noise, so a couple of people gave him tips on how to get the best sound out of the bottle. “Put it to your lips, sweetheart,” one woman said.

After a few more tries, the boy gave up. I barely had a chance to look around at the quirky collection of recycled objects (like the wooden chair that had been turned into a planter) crowding the lawn outside Wolfram’s house before she called on me: "Can you blow a bottle?"

I laughed nervously. "I'm an observer."

"Can you blow a bottle though?"

I gave in. But a few unsuccessful huffs led to a flurry of advice from the onlookers, Wolfram's neighbors and friends: "You just gotta blow out." "Like, right over the top." "Below the lip. It's almost like blowing in the bottle." "Like, right in between your lip."

"Oh, I think I just got it," I said, before not getting it at all. Wolfram looked at José, her next-door neighbor, who was standing next to me. "You have the same note, right?" José nodded, covering for my incompetence.

Museum-objects.jpgThe musical ceremony marked the opening of Wolfram's museum, a reincarnation of a 2007 project she started after finding some abandoned shelves in an alley—formerly "the head of someone's bed," she said—and attached them to the fence in front of her house. People could stop by and leave any objects they found on the sidewalk. Once, someone left a giant, ant-infested dead toad. Another time, Wolfram discovered on the shelves "this most beautiful coat-hanger wire sculpture that somebody, I don’t know if they made it or they found it, but it was a shark." After about a year and a half, the shelves "completely disintegrated," she said. "It was getting very trashy," so she closed the museum.

Earlier this year, however, she applied for a grant to reopen it. She had been trying to get grants for her painting, but unsuccessfully. "I was so sick of it," she said. "I never get anything." But then she saw an opportunity from the Puffin Foundation. "They fund, I don’t know, things that have to do with the community or something or other." So she wrote up a proposal, and got a $350 grant. She hired her neighbor Edward to construct the shelves.

At the opening, she called him her "partner in crime" and asked him to stand beside her while she cut the "wimpy red ribbon." José led the countdown from ten, and, at one, Wolfram made the cut, announcing, "The museum is officially reopened! And thanks to the Puffin Foundation. Thanks to Edward for his excellent work." Throughout her short speech, someone (not me) blew a beer bottle in the background.

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Ruthie Kott, AM'07

Wolfram brings the Museum of Objects Left on the Sidewalk back to Little Village. Photography by Lloyd DeGrane.

Summer sales

The UChicago Bookstore doesn't die during the warmer months.

Freakonomics.jpgSales still happen during the summer at the U of C Bookstore on East 58th Street, even if they're a little slower. People still need their T-shirts and polos, says Kai Douglas, who was working at the checkout counter when I stopped in yesterday. The maroon, gray, and white tees with the University seal are popular, she says, as are the cream-colored quilted zip-up vests. Older customers seem to buy a lot of polos, and campus visitors must have heard things about Chicago winters, because the sweatshirts on the clearance rack are pretty hot too.

Lest you think the U of C is all about fashion, people are still buying those things called "books" (even though there's a whole counter up front selling e-readers). Employee Eric Cioe, AB'09, showed me a list of the bookstore's best-selling faculty and alumni books from the past month:

1) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by econ professor Steven Leavitt (Interestingly, his follow-up, SuperFreakonomics, is selling much fewer copies than the original.)
2) How Judges Think, by Richard Posner, senior lecturer at the Law School
3) Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, by Chicago Booth professor Raghuram G. Rajan
4) Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, by Charles Wheelan, PhD'98; and Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Chicago Booth professor Richard Thaler
5) The Ideological Origins of American Federalism, by assistant law professor Alison LaCroix; and Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need For Social Connection, by psychology professor John Cacioppo

Ruthie Kott, AM'07

Accents sketchy, according to science

Study finds we're prone to distrust foreign accents, confirming what we all learned watching Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Count.jpgPerhaps complicating the fact, well-known in comedy-research circles, that accents are always silly and endearing, research by Chicago psychologists shows that we tend to mistrust those who speak differently. In the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers asked participants to listen to pre-recorded trivia statements and rate them on a scale of truthfulness. Participants ranked heavily accented speakers at an average 6.84 on the scale, compared to 7.5 for native speakers. A subsequent experiment showed that even when participants were informed about the nature of the testing, their trust of the heavily accented speakers was unchanged. “Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, eyewitnesses, reporters, or people taking calls in foreign call centers,” says Shiri Lev-Ari, a psychology postdoc at the University and lead author of the study.

This contempt of cadence might not surprise those of us well versed in American popular culture: all the best villains have accents, and many of them are quite hard to understand (frankly I find these two completely incomprehensible.) Some of them can even be quite finicky about their own style of pronunciation.

But we live in a modern age, one in which it's important to bridge gaps in understanding rather than perpetuate stereotypes. I, for one, think we need to begin healing the deep wounds of mistrust towards accented speakers. Let's take some positive examples of Englishly-challenged figures in the popular media: Count von Count, for instance, who routinely cooperates with his puppet-American castmates for mathematical justice. Or the Terminator who, in spite of the Austrian-inflected evil for which he was programmed, shows that he has the capacity for change in Judgment Day. So let's put our prejudices behind us and focus not on whether we can trust accented English speakers, but on what they have to teach us.

Burke Frank, '11

A leading mathematics expert whose credibility may suffer as a result of the study.

Shorts sighted

Armed with video cameras and ideas, Digital Media Academy teens use UChicago's campus as a backdrop for their short films.

Almost Unexplainable
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Broken
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Vision
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Joy Olivia Miller

Optimum deliciousness

The secret behind the hilarity that is viral video "Jones' Good Ass BBQ & Foot Massage," from its maker, Ramiro Castro AB'06.

I discovered Tobias Jones and his unlikely business ventures when strolling through Scav Hunt's Judgment Day, where one team was streaming "Jones' Good Ass BBQ & Foot Massage" in answer to a clue: "My dinner’s too beautylicious for you, babe. Head on over to the Hyde Park establishment where you can both order a meal and receive a cosmetic procedure. Get the procedure done, and show us before-and-after photos of your sad and scraggly, and newly beautified, selves. [12 points]."

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With its Harold's Chicken Shack look and improbable if nose-crinkling allure, it may come as a sad surprise that Jones' doesn't really exist (except, of course, in the hearts of the 1.5 million viewers who've seen it). But it isn't the only improbable combination of services Tobias Jones offers online; the video is the follow-up to another successful viral video produced by Big Dog Eat Child, a sketch-comedy troupe that includes Off-Off Campus alum Ramiro Castro, AB'06.

Big Dog Eat Child began down the metaphorical road to Internetical glory in 2006, when Castro came up with the character, Tobias Jones, played by stand-up comedian Robert Hines. The first Jones video, "Jones' Big Ass Truck Rental & Storage" took a while to become popular after its 2008 debut on YouTube, but after the comedy group began e-mailing bloggers, viewership began to rise, as did its reputation. And how could it not, with gems like, "Now friends, you ask yourself, how in the hell can he store this stuff for such a cheap price? ... The fact of the matter is, I'm pretty drunk right now...and this is a drunk discount sale." The video got 300,000 hits on the day YouTube promoted it on its front page. It now has 2.9 million views.

The group went on to film a second Truck Rental & Storage spot, the BBQ & Foot Massage spot, and "Jones' Cheap Ass Prepaid Legal and Daycare Academy"—the films have amassed a combined 6 million or so views—and scored Castro and Big Dog Eat Child interviews, t-shirt orders from around the world, an inquiry from Oprah's people (they wanted to know if Jones' was real, as did many others), and enough money to incorporate Big Dog Eat Child. The videos, especially "BBQ & Foot Massage" have also been screened at film festivals, including last Thursday's Chicago Short Comedy Video and Film Festival in downtown Chicago, which Castro told us about in a phone interview the next day.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow was the festival?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt was a lot of fun. ... Basically we, because it's an internet video, we don't get a lot of feedback besides hits and comments, and those are all over the place. ... They'll say "lol" or whatever, but to hear people laugh and enjoy your film makes you feel great.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd it's not the first festival you've been in, right? What others has Jones...worked over?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe LA Comedy Shorts Festival. That was a wonderful festival because it wasn't just, "Hey, let's show your movies and be done with it." They showed your films over a period of three days. They would have Q&A sessions. ... They had people from the film industry give advice on your films, people from Funny or Die, people from College Humor, people from Comedy Central. ... Oh, and there were parties every night.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo how did the Jones character get created?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI did Off-Off campus at the U of C and I have a big improv background. I take the train a lot, the red line, and there are so many characters you meet on the South Side, so many characters. People will tell you anything on the train.... I was actually Toby Jones in the original sketch, but it just didn't work. We met Robert Hines, he's a stand-up comedian. This was 2005. I wrote the sketch in 2006 or 7 and when we said we should make videos. We were like, "Oh shit, this guy's awesome, this guy's perfect for this role." ... We had a lofty goal of getting 100,000 hits in a year, and we were like, "No way, that's not going to happen," but we put it out there.
QandA_QDrop.jpgOne detail that stands out is that it looks like it was shot in a Harold's Chicken Shack...
QandA_ADrop.jpgNot the Hyde Park one, although that was my first Harold's, my first love. There's one over by where I am on the Southwest Side, on 119th and Western. We would literally go there every week or every other week, especially if things were going well for us...We were just sitting there eating chicken and said, "Why don't we do something here? This place is awesome. We literally don't have to do anything to it."
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhich video is your favorite?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI do like "BBQ" a lot, because it was almost the one we struggled with the most. ... Right now what I really like, we just released something called "Twenty Something Ninja Turtles." It's a little more episodic. ... I'm in the dinosaur outfit and it was just a ridiculous time.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy is it that the Jones videos are so funny?
QandA_ADrop.jpgA lot of it is timing. We just sort of, the timing we've been working on is: tell and outline this joke and get the hell out, just go away, move on to the next thing. "Truck Rental" is just a long version like that. Here's the premise: don't explain it, just let people figure it out. We're just going to have a machine gun of funny come at you. ... We like to just assault the audience with our jokes. We just want to have crazy things, crazy things, outlandish things, something that hasn't been done before. ... There are places on the South Side. ... There are pieces of reality thrown into the crazy. We're just taking what we know to be real and amplifying it a ton.
QandA_QDrop.jpgCan we expect any more videos from Tobias Jones?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe are making more videos of Jones. ... We took a break because we were wondering what to do with the character, but this year, we're going to make a foreign-language video spot, have Jones appeal to a Spanish-speaking audience, and have Jones basically hock his services as a spokesmodel.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAre you proud that the video showed up as an item in Scav Hunt?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI am! I think that there's a lot of U of C lore and part of the lore is, "Hey, Second City got its start at the U of C," and I was in Off-Off Campus. ...I was thinking about the legends that have come out of the U of C and of course I want that kind of fame. ... I know the level of detail that they [the Scav Judges] put in to go through that list and I was so proud that they put us in that. Popular culture, I guess.

Asher Klein '11

Poetry rocks

This fall former indie rocker Hadji Bakara joins the U of C's Department of English Language and Literature as a PhD student.

Photo-1.jpgIf there was any debate over whether or not indie-rock band Wolf Parade's lyrics were good poetry, Hadji Bakara has totally killed it:

Bakara = was in Wolf Parade; Bakara = English PhD student; English PhD student = appreciates good poetry; and ∴ Wolf Parade lyrics = good poetry.

My logic is flawless.

Bakara, the band's former keyboardist, didn't write the lyrics on Wolf Parade's 2005 and 2008 albums, but, if you look at some of them, it's pretty obvious he craved intellectual stimulation. I've taken the liberty of reworking some Wolf Parade lyrics into a poem that truly* expresses how Bakara must have felt.


It's in this language that I've found

In my head there's a city at night

So I got a plan

Gotta keep thinking, things, hunters and kings

And I don't sleep, I don't sleep, I don't sleep 'til it's light

And I'm content, I'm content, I'm content to be quiet

Some will sink, some will get called to the light

I spend boring hours in the office tower

I ain't quite the beauty

I might be here all the time

And I share no body, no mind

Oh follow me

Allow me to play the voyager

And I could give you my apologies

By handing over my neologies

Lalalalalala

But the fields are beyond belief

From tower out to where I can see

The band has just released its third album, Expo 86, minus Bakara.

*Truly = Probably

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Ruthie Kott, AM'07

Rocker Hadji Bakara, student-to-be. Photography by Joey Silberhorn.

Pledge drive

Help Woodlawn's Blackstone Bicycle Works collect a cool $20,000 toward educating youth.

Bike-pic.jpgAnonymous donors can really kick-start a community into donating to a worthy cause, like bike repair and educating youth. This press release will get you up to speed on just such a specifically-worded cause: "An anonymous foundation has just awarded Blackstone Bicycle Works, the Experimental Station's youth education program, a $5,000 matching grant for each of 2010 and 2011! To receive the grant, Experimental Station must bring in at least $5,000 in donations from NEW donors each year." Sweet!

Blackstone Bike Works employees, volunteers, and kids aged 9-16 from Woodlawn (who earn a bike of their own with 25 hours of work) refurbish and sell old bikes and repair or tune up others at its workshop on 61st Street and Blackstone Avenue, as well as on campus each fall and spring. The bikes they sell are inexpensive and sturdy and repair is cheap, too, and the Blackstone Bike sticker is common on bikes parked outside University buildings.

What more do you need to know to kick this fundraiser into high gear? Here's the link again: Donate!

Asher Klein, '11

On the air

Or, .-. --- ... -. . .-. .----. ... .-. .- -.. .. --- .-. . -.. --- ..- -... -

Rosner.jpg“There’s a radio teletype station on in the Persian Gulf,” observes Jonathan Rosner, the professor of physics who’s showing me around the oversized closet in the Research Institutes (RI) building that houses the University of Chicago Amateur Radio Society office. “Let’s see if we can decode something.” A computer translates a bewildering series of beeps into an equally bewildering string of characters. Rosner points out a few of the relevant details: an operator with call sign W3CC is calling a station from Oman, A41OO. Another American operator, KK5OQ, joins in.

This is the world of amateur radio, where hobbyists transmit radio signals of every conceivable variety—Morse code, teletype, voice signals, even television—to each other around the globe. In a world where the Internet has made Dakar as easy to contact as Dayton, the appeal isn’t just the ability to communicate. Amateurs—or hams, as they’re often dubbed—enjoy the challenge of finding just the right frequency and weather conditions to make contact with strangers in another state, or on another continent. Getting a license isn't hard; just pass a written test and pay a small testing fee, and the FCC will give you a call sign. (Having earned my license just last month, I can say that anyone can do it, though it does help to know some physics; by coincidence, Rosner was one of my physics professors in college.)

Rosner has been a radio ham since he earned his first license in 1953 when he was 11 years old. Using the antennas atop the RI, he’s contacted other hams operating as far away as Estonia—by bouncing a signal off the moon's surface—and as close as Ryerson Labs on the main quadrangles. In 1993 he used the amateur radio bands to establish a communications link with University astronomers in Antarctica.

Over the past two decades, Rosner’s been part of the University of Chicago Amateur Radio Society. The club, though intermittently dormant, has a long provenance—it was ejected from its original location in Eckhart Hall to provide space for the Manhattan Project. Today, though, you can count its members on one hand.

Rosner takes me up to the roof, where the club’s antennas are mounted. Incredibly, there are 11 of them up there, each designed to take advantage of a different wavelength. “Well, that’s all going to end,” he says matter-of-factly. The RI is slated to be emptied this year and demolished the next, to make way for the new William Eckhardt Research Center. In the meantime, the radios will be moving across the street to a temporary office in the Kersten Physics Teaching Center. The quarters will be even tighter, access to the office will be more restricted by building hours, and the loss of some of the antennas means giving up transmitting on certain frequencies.

So if you happen to be listening to the amateur radio frequencies, keep an ear open for Rosner, who might be using his own call sign of WO9S or the club’s call sign, N9UC. And if you hear a tentative transmission from a KC9STH, that’ll be me, trying out my new radio license.

Contact-board.jpg

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

Rosner (top) searches the radio spectrum for other transmissions; a display of QSL cards—each confirming a successful two-way radio contact with the U of C Amateur Radio Society—from around the world. Photography by Benjamin Recchie.

Something's cooking at the White House

Having taken the heat of what might just be the hottest kitchen in America, White House chef Sam Kass, U-High’98, AB’04, just got a promotion.

sam-kass_1.jpgWith a history degree from the University of Chicago and no formal culinary training, Sam Kass isn’t your typical presidential chef. But cooking isn’t all he’s brought to the executive branch—in the year and a half since he first joined Obama’s administration as an assistant White House chef, Kass has forged a role for himself as a key adviser of nutrition policy, especially for children. So Kass’s quiet promotion to Senior Policy Adviser for Healthy Food Initiatives wasn’t a huge surprise; he’s already been helping Michelle Obama design her ambitious food-policy agenda, including the Let’s Move! campaign to fight childhood obesity.

Kass's career with the Obamas started when he became their personal cook in Chicago roughly two years before the family's move to the White House. Since then he's founded a private-chef service, reshaped the White House garden, and even appeared on Top Chef to advocate healthier school lunches. And, incidentally, People magazine confirms that he's gorgeous, calling him one of "Barack's Beauties." ("The halls of power never looked so good!") It seems the U of C might be establishing itself as a hotbed of good looks.

Burke Frank, '11

Kass, presidential chef—and so much more. Photography from inevitabletable.com.

Does the flap of a tweet’s wings set off a tornado in Chicago?

When an intern discovers a strange URL on the University network, his curiosity leads him down the rabbit hole.

Last week a typical, terse little tweet twinkled out into the world. Tagged #UChicago, the tweet did but one thing: recommend, with a "lol," that its reader direct his web browser toward goat.uchicago.edu. Humble and unsuspecting intern Asher Klein, '11, saw the tweet and, using a trick he'd learned in his pre-intern days, typed "goat" into his University-networked computer, which he knew would bring him to the same page. He hit enter, and nothing was ever again the same.

Friendly goat

This picture was all that showed up on the page advertised by the (this week conveniently, perhaps mysteriously, unavailable) tweet. What was this strange picture doing on this random URL? our intern thought. What, or who, is this goat, and what could it possibly want with the University of Chicago?

Fighting his mystery-solving instincts, our intern put it out of his mind for the time being, to do other things, things involving real work at the Magazine that he soon accomplished with his trademark brand of humility and being unsuspecting (see above epigram). But soon another digital discovery shook him to his core, all the result of an errant keystroke.

Go to d.uchicago.edu, or, as our intern did, simply type "d" as the URL on a University computer, and you will find this image:

Cheshire Cat

On the website, the Cheshire Cat image links to an e-text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "What?" our intern may or may not have exclaimed when he came upon the page. "What madness is this?" His whole world spinning, the intern suddenly saw the scope of the situation.

Frantically, he began to type, and the plot, as plots are wont to do, thickened. "Cat" got him a page load error, but, the error message said the site seemed valid. The same message loaded for "Whale," "Bear," and "Owl." But typing "Horse," "Bull," or "Robin" got an NSIT page: "URL Reserved," they said, suggesting those with questions e-mail a listhost. "Dog" was a failed connection that referenced elk.uchicago.edu, but "Elk" failed too!

The animal searching continued, and new discoveries were made: some pages were under construction, others forbidden, still more just timed out. "Lobster" references the Office of Student Aid. "Tuna" brings up only the text "Diderot.uchicago.edu;" "Diderot" the same! The University network was looping in on itself, a Mobius strip of terror the likes of which mystery blog posts had never before seen.

Then, perhaps most dreadful of all, the intern's search for "Sheep" called up a one-word response:

sheep!

When he came to, the intern realized he needed help. He called Sara Worrell-Berg, director of web services at the University, who explained that "Goat" is the name of a development server, and, like all campus servers, it has a virtual host name as well as a number, which is easier for its keepers to remember. She said the programmers "might place an image on there," but that the goat image "should probably just be taken down."

Relieved, our intern made one more phone call, to Lead Web Systems Administrator Paul Barton. He confirmed that some servers are named after animals—the ones that host the Magazine are "Rhino," "Koala," "Wallaby," and "Kangaroo"—but there was only so much he could say. "There are thousands of servers on campus, and our group is only responsible for 200, 300 of them." He did offer that the goat was in his group's domain and was being taken down.

It was a mystery no more, but there was more searching to be done. The intern saw that "Duck" was more charming than terrible:

duck!

And, in fact, animals weren't the only server names; mythological figures (Zeus, Anubis, Loki, Chimera), things in space (Star, Nova, black hole), and German names (Otto, Simon, Marx, even Klein) all stood for servers.

With things seemingly back on track, the intern was humbly ready to return to his work and innervated with new trivia about the University's servers. But a thought buzzing around gave him pause. Was the goat really gone? It was surely just an image, he told himself. Pay it no mind. The truth is that you're just a paranoid intern who doesn't want to finish fact-checking his article. He laughed, but it rang hollow in his cubicle. He made one last foray into the server's domain.

goat-browser2.jpg

The old goat was gone, but in its place was an even more horrible goat, its one terrible coin-slot eye a metal stake boring into the intern's very soul!

It remains to this day.

Asher Klein, '11

Note: This is a fictionalized account of real events, but the interviews did take place, and they were transcribed faithfully. The real discovery was made in a somewhat less nervy and more nerdy way, and some of the server names were found by intern Burke Frank, '11, whose inventive searching was invaluable.

Teach a computer to hypothesize…

Researcher Andrey Rzhetsky programs machines to become better scientists.

Hal9000.jpgAndrey Rzhetsky, professor in the Department of Human Genetics and a senior fellow at the Computation Institute, designs computer programs that are voracious readers. One of them analyzed 368,000 scientific articles and 8 million abstracts to form new hypotheses about brain malformations in mice and humans, a feat worthy of the greatest fictional computers—HAL 9000 without the malice.

In an interview with Wired, Rzhetsky lays out the case for getting machines involved in scientific research. Although a 17th-century English scientist might have read all there was to know about the exploding field of physics, today the body of literature is too vast, and the relationships among data too obscure. Computer programs such as "Adam", which creates and performs genetic experiments, and "Eureqa", which designs equations to fit raw data, are the first in a new breed of machines that could someday design, test, and, perhaps most impressively, prioritize hypotheses for scientific research.

Normally computers do only the grunt work of scientific discovery. They perform complex calculations that researchers input or organize massive amounts of data (cleaning glassware, in a time-honored laboratory practice, is still left to homo sapiens—specifically interns.) Humans have controlled the hypotheses, methods, and conclusions.

These new programs prompt the question: when a computer sets the scientific agenda, will we understand the results? While Eureqa-generated models of living cells are producing accurate equations, scientists are confused by the output. Humans haven't developed an intuitive sense of how these complex systems work. The classic, visceral examples of Newton's falling apple and Archimedes shouting "eureka" in his tub might be a thing of the past; Eureqa hints at a time when there will be too many variables in cutting-edge research to fully understand their relations. (I'm reminded of Deep Thought, the city-sized computer in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that can provide the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, which happens to be 42. The computer can't interpret the answer, and neither can the machine's baffled creators.) What will be the place of human scientists when the head robot researcher becomes a cryptic oracle?

For now, humans remain in charge. For those of us with extremely complex problems, Eureqa is freely available from Cornell. Now to get my BA thesis proposal into spreadsheet form...

Burke Frank, '11

While robot scientists may not be as advanced as HAL 9000, they aren't (yet) as homicidal.

Chicago’s new Court connection

kagan-headshot.jpgFormer Assistant Law Professor Elena Kagan was confirmed for the Supreme Court last week. Her place on the bench means not only that three women will serve on the nation's highest court for the first time, but that the University of Chicago will maintain an affiliation with the Court for a long time to come. Kagan's predecessor, John Paul Stevens, AB'41, served for 35 years. Kagan, 50, is one of the youngest justices ever appointed to the lifetime post.

Asher Klein, '11

The book that dare not speak its name

Barbara and Bill Yoffee's (AB'52) gift of African American and children's literature provides new resources for research.

sambo-books.jpg“A blog on Little Black Sambo,” I said, when a colleague asked what I was working on. I watched his eyes widen, and stay wide, as I babbled on, trying to contain the damage, “...it’s actually a really important donation to Special Collections, all these different editions of Little Black Sambo.” He nodded but looked unconvinced. Great, I thought. Now he thinks I’m a racist.

“There is very little to say about the story of Little Black Sambo,” reads the preface to the first American edition (1900) which, thanks to the generosity of donors Barbara and Bill Yoffee, AB’52, I was able to hold in my hand. The preface explains that “an English lady in India, where black children abound and tigers are everyday affairs” had written and illustrated the story for her two young daughters during a long train journey.

Of course, there is plenty to say, or at least ask, about Little Black Sambo. As a start, why is it so widely considered racist? And if it’s racist, why is it still so popular?

“It’s a story that children love,” says Alice Schreyer, director of Special Collections, “a classic children’s story.” In the original (if you have forgotten the details, as I had) Sambo gets a new outfit: a Red Coat, Blue Trousers, a Green Umbrella, and “a lovely little Pair of Purple Shoes with Crimson Soles and Crimson Linings,” in Helen Bannerman’s quirky capitalization. “And then wasn’t Little Black Sambo grand?”

But as he walks through the jungle, Sambo has to give away his fine clothing, piece by piece, to four tigers so they won’t eat him; he manages to persuade them to take even the seemingly useless shoes (“You could wear them on your ears.”) and the umbrella (“You could tie a knot on your tail, and carry it that way.”). The tigers then fight over the clothes, chasing each other around a tree so quickly that they turn into melted butter (What? OK, it’s a kid’s story). Sambo’s father scoops up the butter, his mother fries pancakes in it, and Sambo “eats a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.” The End.

Awesome! Or not. Well, first there’s the name “Sambo,” which was “already in opprobrious use in the United States,” says Schreyer. Then there are Bannerman’s odd illustrations, which seem to reflect the influence of American racist imagery. But Bannerman, who was untrained, had never been to the States. Would she have seen racist drawings somehow? Would she have seen a minstrel show?

Despite Bannerman’s primitive illustrations (like many children’s authors of the time, she was just a parent desperate to amuse her kids), Little Black Sambo, published in England in 1899, was immediately popular. As the Yoffee collection shows, the story was adapted over and over again, with different words as well as different pictures. “The illustrations became increasingly stereotypical and harsh,” says Schreyer. “It became incendiary.”

But the most recent books in the collection take the opposite approach. Two versions, both published in 1996, attempt to sanitize the story in fascinatingly different ways. The Story of Little Babaji returns to Bannerman’s original words, superfluous capitals and all. But the illustrations, by Fred Marcellino, portray Indian characters, while the somewhat defensive “Note on the Text” points out, “The Story of Little Black Sambo... clearly takes place in India, with its tigers and ‘ghi’ (or melted butter),” so the characters have been given “authentic Indian names.”

Then there is Sam and the Tigers, written by Julius Lester and illustrated by Jerry Pinckney. As he perused more than 50 versions of Little Black Sambo, Pinckney writes in the introduction, “I struggled hard to find my own approach to right the wrongs of the original and several subsequent versions”—a process he found “liberating.” In this adaptation, the little boy, Sam, lives in Sam-sam-sa-mara. The characters are African American, the clothing from the 1920s, the language slangy: “Ain’t I fine,” Sam declares.

Both The Story of Little Babaji and Sam and the Tigers are sincere and well-intentioned. And both somehow just don’t succeed. It’s almost as hard to look at them as it is to look at the original.

The Yoffee collection includes nearly 1,000 works of children’s and African American literature—and a lot of it can make you feel pretty uncomfortable. Next year the collection will be available for researchers in literature, history, African American studies, gender studies, sociology, but the collection hasn’t been completely processed yet. I feel like I haven’t completely processed it yet either.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Biking brain Boyer begins to blog

Dean of the College John Boyer's new blog, Spacious Ideas, might just become a modern-day salon.

BoyerIt has long been known in certain undergraduate circles that Dean of the College John Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, is so cool. As dean of the College since 1992, Boyer presided over its rebirth as the hip, laid-back side of the intellectual life at the University. He is a coeditor of the preeminent American journal of European history, the Journal of Modern History, and serves as the University of Chicago's main modern historian, having written volumes on the topic. Boyer's scholarship on the Hapsburg Empire (the coolest empire) has won awards in Austria. And according to his Wikipedia page, "In 2009 John Boyer participated in the World Beard and Moustache Championships, a competition where men display their facial hair. His participation helped boost the contest's popularity and made 2009 one of the championship's most successful seasons." If it's true (and I kind of doubt it is): super-cool.

And Boyer's new blog, Spacious Ideas, promises to be so cool, too! Named in reference to a 1962 speech given by one of Boyer's favorite college deans, Alan Simpson (how cool is it that he has favorite deans?), Boyer wrote, "My hope is that this blog will be a forum for spacious ideas of all kinds, a place where the wisdom of the world can mingle with the learning of the cloister." Not only will he write about "everyday life in the College, my research on the history of the University and the College, and my scholarly work on the Hapsburg Empire," but he'll enlist colleagues to write "and give a sense of the 'full flavor,' as Simpson called it, of their fields."

Boyer even shows what he's reading—at present, professor Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines, a smart book I would read if I weren't scared out of my mind at the employment implications of the recession—a pretty cool feature that plays up what makes this blog really interesting: people are hungry to learn more about and hear from the really smart, really informed, and very influential people teaching here. And just as it was in the 18th-century Paris salons, comments, suggestions, and ideas will be welcome, Boyer writes.

Dean Boyer, consider my RSS feed yours.

Asher Klein, '11

Dear O-leaders: pucker up!

An open letter to the UChicago's O-Week, advocating extra historic, funtimes productivity for all.

Dear O-Week's O-leaders,

Last year you made the video above. I know, I'm sorry too, but I'm writing to tell you that you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not just to make it better, but to make something... magnificent. You can help make the Class of 2014 not just the biggest yet, but the baddest, the raddest, the coolest of them all. And I'm not just talking on campus, I mean in all Chicago.

I'll leave the Internet history to the pros, but suffice it to say the "lip dub," in which one sings someone else's song, preferably in one, long tracking shot, has been around for a long time. Lately, the lip-dub phenomenon has moved out of the bedroom and become popular among high schools and colleges, where students film themselves singing silly songs as they walk through halls, auditoriums, student unions, etc.

"Cute," you might say derisively, perhaps sipping sparkling cider atop a neo-Gothic ivory tower, but you may be surprised at which schools have gotten in on the action: the Universities of Wisconsin, Munich, Quebec, Montreal, and St. Andrews for starters. Boston University has (a lame) lip dub. McGill's is pretty decent, as is the 750-year-old Sorbonne's lip dub. Even Poland's prestigious Warsaw School of Economics joined the trend, and impressively.

Schools from Thailand to Chile have their own lip dubs. I've watched a good chunk of them, and they are by turns impressive and nauseating, but at least you get to see how enthusiastic and awesome the student body is, especially if they really try, and especially especially if it's made interestingly. Oh, and did I mention Chicago's WGN TV is hosting this Lip Dub competition among local high schools and colleges? It ends September 30, and with a little help from Fire Escape films, I'm sure your collective planning and clear, shear brilliance can win the U of C its place in the lip-dub pantheon. Which, yes, would be a cool thing. For the most part.

It seems that there are a few key rules to follow when filming one of these bad boys (this other internet historian explains why):

  1. Pick a good song. Peppy but not vapid—so, definitely not the Black Eyed Peas.
  2. It looks good to move through things, like doors. I dunno why but it's true.
  3. Be in a pretty place. You know where's pretty? The University of Chicago.
  4. Dancing is good, but not if you're gonna be all silly about it. Confident dancing is good, and helped by...
  5. Costumes! Which are really really good.
  6. Use a steadicam. Not following this rule is half the reason most of these videos are nauseating.

These two rival Seattle high schools' are the lip dubs to beat. Be inspired:

hey-ya-lipdub.jpg     hall-and-oates-lipdub.jpg

O-leaders, you could make my dreams come true. Okay, ya'll? Hey, ya'll.

Sincerely,
Asher Klein, '11

A Sunday service in Cos Cob

Connecticut Pastor Vicki I Flippin, AB'05, explores need and want.

In March, during a short visit to my childhood home in Connecticut, I spent quality time with family, enjoyed some New England seafood, popped into Friendly’s for ice cream, and took a day trip to Cos Cob, a small village known for its historic train station. While there I interviewed Vicki and Thomas Flippin, both AB’05, for a Core profile. Vicki is lead pastor at Diamond Hill United Methodist Church; Thomas is a classical guitarist and the composer of Neverland: Depicting the Narrative of a Dream (2009).

Before meeting the Flippins at their home, I attended Sunday worship at Diamond Hill and heard Vicki deliver the sermon she had spent the past week preparing. It was based on John 4:7-15, which describes a conversation between Jesus and a Samaritan woman. Referring to the water in a nearby well, Jesus tells the woman, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water I give him will never thirst.”

After reading the passage, Vicki called the children in attendance to the front of the chapel. She asked the congregation to consider luxury car commercials that ask, “How could your family not afford to buy this car?” Modern advertising, she said, tells us we need things we don’t even know we need. Yet as the scripture puts it: “Don’t you see all you need is right here?”

She asked the parishioners to close their eyes. “You’re running on a hot day," she says. "Then you arrive at a pool of water.” As she spoke, the children gathered around and help her pour water from a pitcher into a bowl. “That water is like God.” She extended the comparison: God is like sitting at a table to feast after one has gone hungry or hearing an uplifting story after receiving terrible news.

“Then you come full circle and realize, ‘How can I not afford to seek out God’s kingdom?’” she finished.

I left the service grateful for the chance to witness Vicki’s facility with language and imagery but regretful that I wouldn’t be able to attend one of Thomas’s performances before my story was due. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, all was not lost. I’ve spent more than a few hours back in Chicago listening to the videos on Thomas’s website. Who knew guitar could sound this glorious?

Katherine Muhlenkamp

Museum specimen

The MSI invites one person to live in the museum for a month.

Hyde Park's Museum of Science and Industry is taking Night at the Museum to a whole new level: its 2010 Month at the Museum challenge, in which one lucky person will move into the MSI on October 20 and "live and breathe science 24/7 for 30 days," interacting with guests during the day and hanging out with all the exhibits that (of course) come to life at night. If the guest completes the challenge, he/she gets $10,000 and a slew of public appearances.

Applications were due August 11, and many of the 60-second application videos are posted online. See the one below from Chicago author James Kennedy, who proved his prowess for sleeping in Hyde Park museums, including the Oriental Institute and the Smart:

James Kennedy

Note: I saw Kennedy read from his 2008 wonderfully quirky young-adult book The Order of Odd-Fish at a book club meeting back in May, and he was quite entertaining. I'm rooting for him.

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Filmonomics

What farflung phenomenon correlates with the release of the new Freakonomics super-documentary, starring professor Steven Levitt?

Remember Freakonomics, the book? Remember how much fun it was to read, how much learning it inspired? Wish you could relive that experience, but in feature-length, documentary-film form? Well, good news! Levitt and Dubner are back, in a movie directed by six acclaimed documentarians, including Morgan Spurlock, director and star of Super Size Me. Reviews of Freakonomics's showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this April were positive, if not glowing.

Freakonomics (the movie) will be available for download on iTunes September 3 and will be released in theaters October 1; look for a post on Freakonomics (the blog) explaining how this unorthodox release schedule will affect sales of knock-off Ray-Bans on the streets of Berlin. Meantime, check on the movie's trailer, which indicates it'll have the look and soundtrack of a twee new rom-com, and note the lorem ipsum in the title cards. "Aliquam sed neque" indeed.

freakonomics-movie-trailer.jpg

Asher Klein, '11

Seal of approval

Vincent Yu, '14, designs a new look for the University of Chicago’s old logo, just for kicks.

revised-phoenix.jpgVincent Yu, ‘14, hasn’t even started classes yet, but why would that prevent the incoming first-year from getting a head start on the kind of critical thinking he’s excited to partake in at the U of C? A self-taught graphic designer, Yu decided at the beginning of August to update the look of the University seal for a more modern audience, posting his slick new design on his blog, idionsyncratic reminiscences. The San Jose native took a minute for a phone interview with UChiBLOGo to discuss the what brought the beaming bird about.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat made you want to come to the University of Chicago?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe overwhelming intellectualism of the University, and also the art and culture of the city—an authentic, original American city.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat made you want to redesign the University seal?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI wanted UChicago apparel, but when I was looking through sweatshirts I didn’t like what I saw. Most people would get the normal logo and get it on a custom sweater…. It’s a pretty awesome logo in itself—it’s a pretty complex logo for a University seal—but as I was looking at it, it was more complex and, not retro, more classic than would probably be necessary for a sweatshirt in the contemporary world of design…. I wanted to design a seal that didn’t have as Byzantine a look, as complex a look as the original logo has.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat were you going for?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI guess you can say it was a hybrid of the Twitter logo and what I thought was UChicago, the original seal. I wanted something that was sort of a phoenix and had the remnants of the original logo, but was as accessible as the Twitter logo.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo what’s going on in the new seal?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt does have sort of the feather designs. You can see the patterns going on in the bird’s wing, but the shape looks a lot more symmetrical than the original logo was, in terms of the bird’s wings.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIts eyes look kind of vacant. Why’s that?
QandA_ADrop.jpg[The Twitter logo] is just a white oval, so I guess it was just pirated from that. I guess the biggest reason was I wanted it to be contrasted from the original Chicago seal—you can tell it was hand-ink done, or stencil done. I was using the computer, which makes it much more difficult to create intricate designs…. [The design] also makes it more accessible, in terms of making it a modern, cartoonish image.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd it looks like the font’s been updated too.
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe font is just Avant Garde; I guess the style is condensed too. The business school loves to use Helvetica condensed…. I wanted to adapt that, but I didn’t want to be as bold as the Chicago Booth type face…it’s great for a school like Booth—it’s a brand name that’s recognizable—but here I wanted the focus to be on the image.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow’d you get to be so artistic?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMy parents originally tried to enroll me in art classes when I was in second grade, like, paint-the-vase kind of classes…the traditional approach to art. I really didn’t like it, I really didn’t like the idea of art for the majority of my life, from like 4 to 14. And then entering high school, I was very interested in journalism but I didn’t want to do newspapers…there was no permanence in terms of writing; what I wrote wouldn’t really matter in the next month or the next week.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy did journalism appeal to you?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI wanted to do something more concrete, and I know yearbook doesn’t sound like journalism, but I made it my goal to make it more journalistic…I got to doing that. Obviously I didn’t lose my love towards journalism, I still love to report on the interesting stuff…. I sort of just transitioned from layout to actual illustrations, and I guess that’s how I sort of got into it.

Asher Klein, '11

Glass and steel, revisited

Seattle's glittering Central Library prompts comparisons to UChicago's own crystal book-palace-in-the-making.

On vacation in the Pacific Northwest last month, it was exhilarating to get out of Chicago and take a couple weeks of much-needed R&R. After all, a reporter can get pretty worn out covering the fast-paced world of rare books, precious manuscripts, andautomated storage-and-retrieval systems.

Call it a buswoman’s holiday, but just after landing in Seattle I couldn’t resist dragging my family to see the sparkling downtown Central Library. It was worth the visit. The minute we entered, we felt the thrum and hum of activity. We oohed and aahed at the views of the city and Elliott Bay through the building’s soaring glass-and-steel façade. My teenage nephew brought his longboard into the slick chartreuse elevator, which was packed with patrons who had come to use the public computers, collections arranged in a winding, six-floor “book spiral,” and vast, visually quirky reading rooms.

Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Ramus, the Central Library has attracted both kudos and criticism. This month, a panel of architects placed it near the top of Vanity Fair’s list of modern marvels and when the library opened in 2004, critic Herbert Muschamp extolled it as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review.” But six years into its young—and busy—life, the library has drawn fire for its functional shortcomings. Bottom line: the glittering glass box is a fabulous, flashy jewel in Seattle’s architectural crown, but maybe not such a great place to find and read a book.

Returning to my job at UChicago, I felt a bit of déjà-vu when I learned that the glass panels were being installed at our own Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. What’s more, the German company Seele—which created the Seattle Central Library’s dazzling grid and many other steel-and-glass constructions around the world—is also doing the work on our own crystal book palace.

It was tempting to compare the Mansueto Library’s sweeping elliptical dome, designed by starchitect Helmut Jahn, with the Seattle library’s radiant glass skin. From there, I easily jumped to worrying that in our own new building, form could trump function. But maybe not: the Mansueto is modest in comparison to the 11-story urban wonder in Seattle, and the dome is just a spectacular cap to what is mainly a gargantuan underground book-storage facility.

What’s more, UChicago has a long tradition of collections-based scholarship, and planning for the new library has benefited from the intensive involvement of researchers, librarians, archivists, and conservators. There’s every reason to hope that it won’t only be a cool building, but also a beating heart for research, a wonderful place to read, and a glimmering bridge between the past and future. In spring 2011 we can test that hypothesis.

Elizabeth Station

Service detour

Nathan Richardson, JD'09, was on track to work at a major law firm, but the recession changed his plans: now he works for a nonprofit environmental group in Washington.

In the world of law, it sometimes feels as if there aren't quite enough Atticus Finches around, fighting the good fight against injustice. Taking posts at multimillion- (and, in some cases, multibillion) dollar law firms is clearly the more lucrative route. But, perhaps in the footsteps of our Community-Organizer-in-Chief, more law students are taking the public-interest path.

A New York Times article last Thursday chronicled the trend of law firms that, because of the recession, deferred prospective hires, such as Chicago grad Nathan Richardson, JD'09, for as long as a year. With the extra time, and a stipend of $60,000-$75,000, many young lawyers decided to work in the public interest—in Richardson's case with Resources for the Future, a nonprofit policy group in Washington. Doing legal research on climate change and the Gulf oil spill, Richardson experienced a compelling alternative to his prospective work with Latham & Watkins. Many of his peers felt more at home with public defenders and nonprofits than with high-stakes megafirms. So when the time came for the lawyers in the Class of '09 to take their offers, recent graduates like Richardson decided to stay with public service in spite of the significantly lower pay.

“I’m working with a lot of really smart people and getting published," Richardson told the Times. "I’m not sure if there’s anywhere else I could do this, at least at this point in my career.”

Burke Frank, '11

11-0-2!!

Vaunted volleyball, scoring soccer, tireless track, unflagging football! The marvelous Maroons this season are…could it be?…undefeated!

UChicago PhoenixAutumn unofficially begins this week, and it brings with it quite the surprise: fall athletes have not yet experienced the winter-bleak misery of defeat, the attitude most often (and a little unfairly) associated with the Maroons. It may be early in the season—and I mean only two games in so far—but it's still a remarkable moment, as the school is collectively 11-0-2 (the victories-defeats-ties math explained below). As they say down in summery, all-conquering New Orleans: Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say they gonna beat dem Saints Maroons?

Let's begin our sports round-up with volleyball, a sport that always reminds me of summer. Third-place in the UAA division last season, volleyball has won each of its six matches so far this year, and it's sitting atop the division, though tied with 6-0 NCAA champs Wash U. There are upwards of 30 matches in a season, but it's a sunny way to start, especially since it's propelled the program into the top 25 Div III teams in the nation for the first time.

Moving on to the world's game—association football: the Maroons have taken to kicking butt like a summer blockbuster. After a tie in its season opener, the third-ranked Maroons women's soccer team put its season on-target with a 6-0 dusting of DePauw University, including a new team record for goals scored in one match: 4, by senior Sarah Loh. Fifth-ranked men's soccer fared even better, winning its first two games in overtime thrillers, 2-1, then 3-2. They are a combined 3-0-1.

Cross-country is doing just as well, running faster than the guy screaming "Shark! Shaaaark!" down at the beach. The men cruised to a second place finish at last week's 17-team, season-opening meet at Elmhurst, while the women dominated, coming first of 14. Let's conservatively call their combined record 1-0-1, since winners come in first and losers last. Tough cookies, second place. That's going to have to count as a draw.

Finally, football is also undefeated, winning its first game 28-25 at Beloit Saturday night, in what sounds like a thriller. The Maroons left it late, scoring the winning touchdown in the last minute, a six-yard pass from quarterback Marshall Oium, '11, to wide receiver Clay Wolff, '11, culminating a 64-yard, two-minute drive. But the Beloit Buccaneers almost brought it back, hustling the ball to the Maroon 30-yard line in the last 40 seconds, before having a hail-Mary pass intercepted in the end zone, preserving Chicago's victory and the Maroon's unbeaten, late summer run.

Keep your ears to the ground for today's matches: men's soccer against Dominican (4:00) and two volleyball matches against Edgewood (5:30) and Ripon (7:30). Unless this post has jinxed it all, the boys and girls of autumn might keep summer here to stay.

Asher Klein, '11

Scooping Charlie Rose

UChiBLOGo interview subject Stephanie D’Alessandro, AM’90, PhD’97, also talks to Charlie Rose about the Matisse show she curated.

dalessandro-rose.jpg

Noted and oft-meandering interviewer Charlie Rose sat down Monday with the Art Institute's D’Alessandro and the Museum of Modern Art's John Elderfield to talk about "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," the show they curated now showing at MoMA.

Way to jump on the UChiBLOGo bandwagon, Charlie! Feels good, don't it?

Asher Klein, '11

Goolsbee, king of economists

U of C professor now heads President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, making him one of the world's most influential economists.

Former U of C lecturer (and current U.S. President) Barack Obama named on-leave professor Austan Goolsbee the chair of his White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) today, a bit of a promotion for the young economist, who has served on the CEA since January 2009. Since Goolsbee will now be the chief economic adviser to the man with the most sway over the economy in the world, does that make Austan Goolsbee the King of the Economists? More importantly, it means he'll be extending his leave-of-absence, doesn't it? Lame.

More details are here, via Politico's Mike Allen. The most important things to know about Goolsbee, from that article, are: "As a University of Chicago economics professor, he advised Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign and 2008 presidential campaign. Last year, he won a 'D.C.'s Funniest Celebrity' contest." Long live the king!

Asher Klein, '11

Origin story

Playwright Emily Dendinger, AM'08, retells how Mary Shelley conceived of her Frankenstein.

Last Friday I went to see Hideous Progeny, a world-premiere play by Emily Dendinger, AM'08, put on by LiveWire Chicago Theatre company. I ran into Dendinger outside the Storefront Theater on Randolph Street—she was waiting for some friends from Indiana who'd come into town to see the show, and she was worried they wouldn't find the theater. Wearing large, black frames instead of her usual contact lenses, Dendinger discussed the show's reviews: TimeOut Chicago loved it—a comparison to Tom Stoppard!—but Leah A. Zeldes, at ChicagoTheaterBlog.com, found it "riddled with historical anachronisms."

Started as her master's thesis at the U of C (Dendinger was in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities), Hideous Progeny, which runs through September 26, recounts the genesis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein story. At a vacation home in Switzerland, Lord George Byron challenged his guests—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley (then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin), Byron's private physician John William Polidori, and Mary's stepsister Jane "Claire" Clairmont—to a competition of who could write the best ghost story (spoiler alert: Mary wins). In the play, the actors wear contemporary clothing—the actress playing Mary has a nose ring, for example—and none of them speaks with British accents. But the story, which Dendinger infuses with quotes from real diaries, letters, and poetry from the historical figures, is enjoyable enough to make the historical inconsistencies (almost) irrelevant. Call it "creative license."

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Mary Shelley (Hilary Williams) tries to work on her horror story while her stepsister Claire (Danielle O’Farrell) bangs on the piano.

Photo by John W. Sisson Jr.

Open for business

Surrounded by friends old and new, the University throws open the doors of its Center in Beijing.

“I’m constitutionally drawn to problems that can never be solved,” said Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton distinguished service professor of history and South Asian languages and civilizations. He's in good company. At the five faculty panel discussions that heralded Wednesday’s opening of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, complexity was invoked early, often, and with obvious relish. Whether the topic was China’s rapid economic development, the state of the research university, or cultural expression in a globalized world, “it’s not simple” quickly emerged as a leitmotif.

Even a simple celebration was complex—it was hard to get into the room. During the remarks that prefaced the 4:08 p.m. ribbon-cutting at the center, located in Beijing’s university district, eager guests filled every seat, lined the walls, and spilled out into the hallway. They applauded when nine representatives from the University and from China, wielding nine pairs of golden scissors, cut the ribbon and made the opening official.

By then the diverse crowd—alumni and friends of the University as well as scholars and dignitaries from Chinese institutions—was interacting like old friends. During the previous 24 hours they’d traversed Beijing in motor coaches together, taken in the ideas of more than 20 faculty panelists, and toasted the center at Tuesday’s gala dinner in the Great Hall of the People. Only a few days earlier, they’d been as far-flung as Chicago, Boston, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Many of the alumni in attendance had personal or professional ties to Asia, but others came simply because they wanted to share an important moment in the life of their university. Such was the case for Danette (Dani) Kauffman, AM’69, who flew to Beijing from Washington, DC. “It’s the University,” she said. “Whatever the University does, I want to be there.” Following the opening events, she was heading off to see other parts of China on an alumni study trip.

For Paul Weidang Wang, LLM’94, JSD’99, a native of Beijing, attending Chicago was “unforgettable,” and so was Wednesday's opening. Wang, president of the Alumni Club of Beijing, had looked forward to the occasion for a long time. Speaking for his fellow Beijing-based alumni, he said, “Before we felt Chicago was so far away. Now that it’s here, we feel more at home.”

Laura Demanski, AM'94

President Zimmer at the ribbon cutting; Chief economist of the World Bank Justin Yifu Lin, PhD'86, speaks at the forum “China: Economic Development and the Rule of Law” at the Shangri-la Beijing Hotel; Paul Sereno talks about his work with Chinese scientists and the Raptorex model displayed at the Center in Beijing.

Photos courtesy of the News Office. View our Flickr group pool for more pictures from the opening of the Center in Beijing.

Pictures from an excavation

In central Turkey, OI faculty and staff help get to the bottom of a puzzling ruin.

“The great expanse of ruins, once teeming with life and resounding with the voices of a powerful people who dominated most of Asia Minor, now lies mute and barren.” So wrote archaeologist H. H. van der Osten in 1926 about Kerkenes Dag, the low mountain in Turkey where a vast city once stood. Those who had seen the ruin couldn’t agree on its age, so James Henry Breasted asked his colleague Erich Schmidt, who was stationed nearby codirecting the Oriental Institute’s Hittite Survey, to look more closely.

Schmidt’s succinct wire back, “kerkenes posthittite preclassical + schmidt,” confirmed that the city belonged to the late Iron Age—not a period of immediate interest to the OI expedition. That was the end of any serious digging at Kerkenes for seven decades.

Fast-forward to 1993, when Geoffrey and Françoise Summers of Middle East Technical University launched a new excavation that soon drew researchers affiliated with the OI. Scott Branting, AM’96, then a Chicago master’s student in Hittitology and Anatolian Archaeology, wound up writing his dissertation on the city plan at Kerkenes. Today Branting is a codirector of the excavation as well as director of the OI’s Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) and assistant research professor.

Last summer Branting and assistant conservator Alison Whyte spent time working at Kerkenes. When they returned, they fielded questions about the significance of the site and the role of conservators at an excavation.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do we know about the city on Kerkenes Dag?

QandA_ADrop.jpgScott Branting: The city has been tentatively identified as the mysterious city of Pteria, mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus. If it was Pteria, it was built around 600 or 610 BC and was likely destroyed in 547 BC by King Croesus of Lydia. If not, it might date somewhat earlier, but a lot of our material points to the same range.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat else have you learned from the objects you’ve found there?

QandA_ADrop.jpgScott Branting: The objects we know something about tend to be Phrygian—the people King Midas belonged to. The pottery and the inscriptions, for instance, have many Phrygian features. But there are also strange, crazy objects that don’t have parallels anywhere else. There seems to be some experimentation that was going on.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you explain that?

QandA_ADrop.jpgScott Branting: In a city of this size, there might have been many different types of people coming together. This is a time when a lot of the older empires of the Near East were collapsing, so craftsmen may have been moving around, looking for somewhere to go. You may end up with a multicultural city where people are experimenting and trying out strange, serendipitous things. Some of the large stone objects we’ve found are just without parallels anywhere.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s the larger historical significance of all this?

QandA_ADrop.jpgScott Branting: For a long time it was thought that the Phrygians went into decline during this period and became part of the larger Lydian Empire. When Kerkenes was found, we suddenly had this massive city further off to the east that apparently is largely Phyrgian. It’s a little bit of a puzzle, frankly.

QandA_QDrop.jpgFrom a codirector’s perspective, how does having conservators onsite help you?

QandA_ADrop.jpgScott Branting: They’re responsible for daily excavation of very fragile materials. When something is very fragile, it’s removed together with all the dirt surrounding it and taken to the lab, where a conservator like Alison can finish excavating it under more controlled conditions. In 1996, one ivory plaque looked interesting and important enough in the field that we lifted out the whole block, and discovered in the lab that it had gold leaf and a carved frieze on the other side—it was really quite amazing.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you enjoy most about working on-site at a dig like Kerkenes?

QandA_ADrop.jpgAlison Whyte: It’s interesting and exciting to see an object freshly excavated. At the museum, I work on many objects that have been glued together or received some other treatment in the past. I’m working on a ceramic now that was probably glued together in the 1930s or ’40s and, because the adhesive has deteriorated over time, it has to be redone. It’s nice to have something you can start off fresh with. I also love the opportunity to travel and the experience of working in an area of Turkey that’s pretty much off the tourist’s path.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are the challenges?

QandA_ADrop.jpgAlison Whyte: You suddenly find yourself having to think about certain logistics that you take for granted at home. Things like: where am I going to get water? Will there be electricity, and, if so, what’s the current? How reliable will it be? What supplies will be available? Excavations are often in very remote areas, and it’s rarely possible to get everything you need locally. So I bring a lot of what I think I’ll need (adhesives, other chemicals, microscopes etc) with me. We’re lucky at Kerkenes that we have a building more or less dedicated to conservation that has water and electricity, but it’s not always the case. I have to think in advance of everything I may need and how I’m going to get it to the lab. This is a particular challenge because with an archaeological excavation, you never really know what’s going to come out of the ground.

Laura Demanski, AM'94

The ivory plaque discovered and conserved by the Kerkenes Dağ team in 1996; Alison and Noël Siver in 2010 conserving and restoring a large stone idol uncovered at Kerkenes Dağ; photograph of the city's ruins taken from a hot air balloon.

Photos courtesy Scott Branting.

Boldfaced name

Frances Oldham Kelsey, PhD’38, MD’50, whose courage and devotion to scientific rigor protected the public from harmful drugs, receives another round of applause.

Frances Oldham Kelsey, PhD’38, MD’50, came to the University of Chicago in 1936 because pharmacologist Eugene Geiling mistook her name for a man’s. Despite Kelsey showing up unexpectedly female, Geiling must have quickly realized that he hired the right person.

Their research helped prove that an industrial solvent in a medicine called elixir sulfanilamide was responsible for more than 100 deaths attributed to the drug. In the aftermath, Congress tightened testing regulations, although not to Kelsey’s satisfaction. Standing between drug companies and the dangers they could inflict on the public came to define her career.

While at Chicago she tested a malaria drug on herself. The study required her to provide regular urine samples—even while she happened to be at a play with her future husband. “So I had my little jar with a tight-sealing top and a paper sack, and during intermission, I went to the toilet,” Kelsey told the New York Times this week. “And then I got panic-stricken. Could I get to my seat without dropping this thing?” Her date, fellow pharmacology professor Fremont Ellis Kelsey, “relieved me of the bag. I thought it was the most thoughtful thing he could do.”

If handling a urine sample worried her, battling powerful drug companies did not. In 1960 Kelsey went to work for the Food and Drug Administration, staring down the William S. Merrell Company in its quest to approve the morning-sickness drug thalidomide. Testing remained informal and anecdotal, offering insufficient evidence for Kelsey, who denied the application.

Merrell pushed back, threatening to sue, but Kelsey insisted the drug’s safety had to be established beyond a doubt despite its approval in 20 countries. European reports of nerve damage related to thalidomide—which the company did not disclose—further entrenched Kelsey’s doubt. Proof of birth defects attributable to thalidomide soon became irrefutable, validating her skepticism that largely spared the United States “one of the biggest medical tragedies of modern times.”

Kelsey had a fleeting moment in the national spotlight at the time. A 1962 Washington Post report detailed her role in protecting children from the ravages of thalidomide and John F. Kennedy presented her with the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. A career spent shaping more stringent clinical trials made Kelsey a “rock star” within the FDA, but outside the agency her life-saving contributions have faded into obscurity.

This week the 96-year-old Kelsey received another round of applause. The FDA presented her with the inaugural Dr. Frances O. Kelsey Award for Excellence and Courage in Protecting Public Health, and the national media noticed, giving “the public’s quiet savior” a deserving moment as a boldfaced name.

Jason Kelly

President John F. Kennedy presents Frances Oldham Kelsey with the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.

Photo courtesy of the National Institutes of Health.

Dust more valuable than gold

Cosmochemist Nicolas Dauphas discovered his gold-mounted meteorite grains contained evidence of a supernova 4.5 billion years old.

In 1848 a lumber mill worker in California spotted a tiny trace of a very valuable mineral, a discovery that sped the development of a continent. Last year, a U of C scientist in California spotted a really tiny trace of an almost non-existant mineral, a discovery that has shed light on the development of the solar system itself.

TEMmicrograph.jpgThere may be no rush on chromium 54, but cosmochemist and geophysics professor Nicholas Dauphas's recently published discovery of the mineral in nano-sized meteorite particles is even more valuable than gold: it is the first physical proof that a supernova occurred in our neck of the universe, an event that could have kick-started the birth of the sun and the solar system, around 4.5 billion years ago.

Chromium 54 is an isotope of the element that is formed in nature only when stars explode. While scientists have speculated that such a supernova led to the creation of our sun (supernovae can be nurseries for new stars; they also lead to black holes), there was no direct proof that one had occurred. The presence on earth of chromium 54 changes all that. "It's the first time that we have solid grains in our laboratories," Dauphas said.

Moreover, since the isotope isn't spread out evenly through the solar system, which it would do if the solar system were formed when the event took place, it seems that it predates its birth, when the formation of the sun gathered the interstellar dust into the star and the eight planets (sorry, Pluto).

Dauphas called the process that led to the discovery "a fishing expedition." He and the team he'd assembled spent three weeks at Caltech painstakingly analyzing 1,500 particles with electron microscopes, each particle about 100 nanometers wide — so small, they're actually mounted on gold, for easy examination. To compare, the smallest thing visible to the naked eye is 50,000 nanometers.

(I got to see the box the gold ingots are kept in when I interviewed Dauphas. You know the awe you feel when walking among the dusty ruins of 5,000-year-old civilizations? This was waaay better than that.)

"People have been looking at these grains for a while using various means," said Dauphas, referring to other scientists and other, similar grains. He credited his team's success, published in the September 10 Astrophysical Journal, to recent refinements in using ion microprobes, only looking at similarly sized specimens, and a sense that the team had a historic problem to take on. "We had a strategy to tackle the question," he said, and "people who are on top of their game."

It was something Dauphas had wanted to do since 2002—the year he became a Enrico Fermi Institute research associate—but he hadn't had a chance until a five-month sabbatical in 2009. He took his samples to Caltech, where he'd managed to secure three weeks for the search, but it wasn't easy. Towards the end of the last session only one grain had tested positive for chromium, and without the confirmation of a second discovery, the team was getting disillusioned, worried they were on a wild goose chase. He told one colleague on his way back to his hotel, "If you find the grain, please call me, no matter what."

Not only did they find a second grain that tested positive for chromium 54, the specimen shone far brighter than the first.

(By the way, the 150-year-old meteorite the grains came from is called "Orgueil" and was already a pretty significant bit of science with a fascinating history.)

Asher Klein, '11

O-Week at the Reg

No introduction to campus is complete without a how-to session on all-nighters at the library.

As incoming students roamed the quads this week with bewildered parents or with dormmates whose names they’d only just learned, new arrivals also flooded into Regenstein. On Wednesday afternoon, a pack of 25 or 30 first-year graduate students gathered over by the circulation desk for a librarian-led orientation session and tour. Before getting started, their guide asked if anyone had questions. They did: “How late does the library stay open?” For the most part, he explained, the Reg is open 24 hours a day. Then came the disappointing news: during the weekend, the library closes at 10 p.m. “So on Friday nights,” he said, “you will have to find something else to do.”

Meanwhile, across the room a handful of College first-years were studying the floor plan laying out the library’s collections by subject and call number. Turning to his friend, one tall, skinny kid said, “Let’s go check out the A-Level. I’ve heard that’s a great place to study.” And they shuffled off down the steps.

Lydialyle Gibson

Graphic reading at the Reg

A new library exhibit traces the evolution of comics as social criticism.

zahra.jpg

On three floors of the Reg, “&#$! Graphic Novels as Social Commentary” displays gems from the library’s growing collection of graphic novels and comics. Sarah Wenzel, bibliographer for literatures of Europe and the Americas, helped organize the exhibit and maintains the collection. In a recent interview with UChiBLOGo, she spoke about her passion for books with pictures.


QandA_QDrop.jpgYou’re in charge of all the comic books in the library. How did that happen?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI’ve been particularly interested in building a collection of graphic novels, not only in English but other languages. Our current collection represents the cumulative efforts of many people over a long period of time. The great thing about being responsible for a collection is trying to read the tea leaves and figure out what people are going to be interested in over the next five to ten years, and this was one of the things that I thought was going to be really important. Because they can be a little bit ephemeral, I wanted to start collecting, and because there are relatively few places in the U.S. that collect non-English language graphic novels, I particularly wanted to collect those.


QandA_QDrop.jpgYou seem to be having fun.

QandA_ADrop.jpgComing from a very text-based field, it’s really exciting to work with something where images are so important. It’s just a very interesting, eye-opening format.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s distinctive about the Regenstein’s collection of graphic novels?

QandA_ADrop.jpgNot a lot of libraries in the U.S. are retro-buying graphic novels; that is, going back and buying the older editions and material. My coup was getting all the issues of Kramer’s Ergot—it’s a graphic-novel magazine, and the first two issues in a small format are almost impossible to find. That took a lot of hunting. Right now for Hillary Chute, a new assistant professor in English, I’m looking for the first issue of Raw, which was the Art Spiegelman–Françoise Mouly collaboration from the 1980s. It’s out of print and hard to get, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWho uses the collection?

QandA_ADrop.jpgBesides the faculty, a lot of students have been using the collection both for pleasure and for research. I could take you up to the stacks and show you what it looks like, but the problem is, the books keep getting checked out. Actually, it’s not a problem at all—it’s a wonderful thing.


QandA_QDrop.jpgIs there a problem with thievery?

QandA_ADrop.jpgNot as much as I was afraid of. We get lists of lost and missing books periodically, and I actually have more trouble with late 18th- and early 19th-century items that people decided they’d rather hold on to than return.


QandA_QDrop.jpgSo U of C library patrons return the comic books but keep the Samuel Johnson?

QandA_ADrop.jpgExactly.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are some of the highlights of the exhibit on graphic novels?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe display cases begins with antecedents of the graphic novel, including The Yellow Kid, a comic that appeared in the New York World that had a lot of really poignant social commentary. Then we show one of the very first examples of a graphic novel or a comic book, Rodolphe Töpffer’s The Adventures of Mr. Obidiah Oldbuck. He’s Swiss; in Special Collections, we have one of the earliest English-language editions of his work.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat else?

QandA_ADrop.jpgWe show comics from the 1930s and ’40s, like The Life and Times of the Shmoo by Al Capp. Then we jump to underground comics from the 1960s to 1980s—and Art Spiegelman, of course—and examples of social commentary around particular themes. We end with the present day and an online comic called Zahra’s Paradise. It’s done anonymously for the safety of the author and the artist, who are Jewish and Iranian, and it’s about the political tension in Iran right now. It’s published online only, although they have a book contract, and in ten languages.


Elizabeth Station

“&#$! Graphic Novels as Social Commentary” begins near the first-floor circulation desk of the Regenstein Library. Wenzel curated the exhibit with Nancy Spiegel, the Reg’s bibliographer for art and cinema, and Emmanuelle Bonnafoux, a PhD candidate in Romance languages and literatures. It runs through the end of winter quarter.

Images courtesy Sarah Wenzel.

Cloudy with a dash of habanero

Brushing off inclement weather, the 61st Street Farmers Market delivers the goodies and continues its pioneering program.

61st Street Farmers Market

On the second Saturday of September, after deciding that my McDonald’s bacon-egg-and-cheese habit was doing me no favors, I headed to Experimental Station’s 61st Street Farmers Market. Now in its third season, it runs through October 30 between Dorchester and Blackstone Avenues. After that the market moves indoors through December 18 at Experimental Station. Braving on-and-off storms to find produce free of alphabet-soup chemicals, I turned onto Dorchester and almost ran into the booth for Mick Klug Farms of St. Joseph, Michigan. “I can’t believe you guys made it out today,” someone said to the Mick Klug representative behind the booth. “Oh, we’re here rain or shine,” she replied.

Several other stalwart vendors had joined Mick Klug, and I stopped by each booth, perusing row after row of plums, pears, and Honeycrisp, Gala, and Cortland apples. I peered at the Flower Garden’s yellow-pink zinnias, and taste-tested Tomato Mountain Farms’s salsas. My purchases included two bottles of salsa—Habanero and Chipotle—as well as a delectable cheese roll covered in pistachios.

My last stop was at the information booth, manned by market manager Dennis Ryan. He told me about the market’s pioneering venture to double the value of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program coupons—or Link dollars as they’re often known in Illinois—up to $25 per cardholder, per market day. Committed to making healthy food widely accessible, the market has accepted Link dollars since it opened in 2008. Last year, Ryan jumped at the chance for 61st Street to become the first Illinois farmers market to institute a double-value program, which is funded by Connecticut-based Wholesome Wave.

In 2009, 61st Street led the state in Link farmers market purchases, with $5,000 worth and $700 in double value. This year, they project to do $10,000 in base Link purchases and $7,000 in double value. And they’ve inspired three independent Chicago farmers markets (Bronzeville, North Lawndale, and Englewood) as well as five that are city-run (Daley Plaza, Lincoln Square, South Shore, Division Street, and Beverly) to follow their lead. Starting this year, the independent markets have instituted Wholesome Wave’s double-value program while the city markets are accepting Link dollars for the first time and also participating in the double-value program. Experimental Station provided the independent markets with initial training and support for double value, and, through a Chicago Department of Community Development grant, hired a staff member who handles Link administration for the five city markets.

“Right now, compared to the data we have from other cities and their pilot Link farmers-market programs," says Ryan, “Chicago is on track to have the highest number of transactions that we are aware of.”

Katherine Muhlenkamp

The five stages of editing grief

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the edit.

Every writer learns how to do it: sit there and smile as your baby, your masterpiece, is revised within an inch of its life by unfeeling editors. Most pros develop a thick skin regarding editing early. But I came to the profession of writing late, and so was forced to adapt quickly to the, ah, rigorous editing of the staff of the University of Chicago Magazine. To all writers and would-be writers, and with apologies to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, I offer you my observations about how to get through this difficult interaction.


  1. Denial
    “What the...? This can’t be right, this is fine. There’s no need to change any of this. No, no, no.”

  2. Anger
    “I’m gonna go give my editor a piece of my mind. Doesn’t she see what I’m trying to do with this block quote? Who the hell does she think she is, anyway?”

  3. Bargaining
    “OK, look, I’ll shorten the part about the life cycle of the oak tree. But I’m not going to cut the bit about the guy’s mom. It’s a beautiful little story and really illuminates his personality.”

  4. Depression
    “God, I’m just an awful hack. I’m never going to make a living at this. I’ll probably never get another assignment again. All I’m good for is copy editing ads.”

  5. Acceptance
    “Ah, hell, just print it as is.”

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

UChicago Social

Scenes from the second alumni "Meet the Chef" night at Frontera Grill/Topolobampo

Due to popular demand, the University of Chicago Club of Chicago has set up a second night for a group outing to Frontera/Topolobampo. We hope the additional event will allow more alumni, parents, and friends to enjoy the widely acclaimed restaurants. We’ll dine in Frontera Grill’s Morales Room on a four-course, Topolobampo menu with wine pairings. We’ll learn about the cuisine and wine from sommelier Jill Gubesch and one or more of the restaurants’ famed chefs. Please note that Chef Rick Bayless’s attendance is not guaranteed.


James Orr

“OK, that’s a really bad angle,” says Beth Woods, AB’91. I’m trying to take photographs and interview alumni at the same time. The alumni are trying to get photographed and interviewed and enjoy their meal at the same time. It’s a little difficult.

I turn down the margarita I’m offered, so there’s no real reason why my first interview, with James Orr, U-High’61, SM’75, PhD’82, turns out like a vaudeville routine. I ask if he’s been to a fine-dining event like this before. “I think I have, but in my old age, I tend to forget which ones I’ve been to,” he says. How about other alumni events? “Occasionally I go to one of the financial discussions they have on Sundays, but that only depresses me.”

The table’s conversation turns to the appetizer. “There’s a very subtle pineapple flavor in the guacamole,” he says, and then I hear, “That depresses me.”

I’m confused. “That depresses you?”

Impresses me,” he says. “Impresses.”

I ask him what he had for lunch. “No lunch,” he says. “For breakfast I went to the W Hotel, where I had a brioche. I eat abysmally, but someone from Reed College took me out for breakfast.”

“You went to two alumni events in one day?”

“Yes. Usually I just eat oatmeal,” he says. “For lunch I get the calorie-controlled meal at my hospital.”

I’m confused again. “Wait—you live in a hospital?”

“Yes. They let me out during the day,” he says. “No, I’m a pathologist at Resurrection.”

“At Resurrection.” I’m finally keeping up. “OK.”

“That’s not the right answer,” he says. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Come again?’”


Floyd Elliot and Paula Froehle

Having survived that interview, I turn to Floyd Elliot, AM’84, MBA’91. He tells me he just quit doing a food blog, called GGG (Gourmet Gourmand Glutton). “The first post was, ‘Why I’m off fine dining,’” he says. “Basically, every fine dining restaurant that opened in the last two years sucked, with very few exceptions. They were overhyped and underperforming.”

He and partner Paula Froehle (“I’m not an alumnus,” she says apologetically) have been to Frontera “many, many times,” he says. “I like the idea of meeting the chef. I am definitely a chef groupie.”

But does he have a secret guilty pleasure? “I will admit that I do kind of like KFC,” he says. “That [expletive deleted]’s kinda awesome. But other than that, I’m a pretty orthodox foodie.”

“Very orthodox,” adds Froehle.

“Yes. I wear the prayer shawl.”


AmyGardner-KeithSbiral.jpg

Rick Bayless is in Mexico, it turns out. Instead Richard James—one of two chefs Bayless took with him when he cooked at the White House—walks the foodies through the menu, while assistant sommelier Liz Martinez explains the wine pairings: Ceviche Yucateco (shrimp and calamari) with 2007 Brooks “Ara” Riesling; Sopa Azteca (chicken and avocado soup) with 2008 Mahi Sauvignon Blanc; Borrego en Mole Rojo (lamb in red mole sauce) with 2004 Francesc Sanchez-Bas “Montgarnatx” Priorat; and Crepas con Cajeta e Higos (crepes with goat milk caramel and figs) with 2004 Ernst Bretz “Bechtolsheimer Petersberg” Riesling Eiswein.

“This is my favorite restaurant in Chicago,” says Amy Gardner, JD’02, Dean of Students at the Law School and the event’s organizer. Because a second night was added, she and husband Keith Sbiral have enjoyed the same food and wines two nights in a row. It is also Gardner’s second fancy restaurant in a single day: for lunch she ate at Park 52 with another dean from the Law School.

Does she have any guilty pleasures? KFC possibly? “Ohhhhh noooo,” she says in disapproval, but then confesses a weakness for Dairy Queen, especially the peanut buster parfait. “We also like to eat at Superdawg,” she says. “That’s D-A-W-G.”


ElizabethJohnson-BethWoods.jpg

I attempt to take a picture of Gardner and Sbiral, from a bad angle that provokes Woods's critique and offer of assistance. Then it’s on to Woods, who’s come to the event with Elizabeth Johnson, AB’90. They were “peripheral friends” as undergrads, says Woods, and hadn’t seen each other for more than 20 years when they reconnected at a UChicago tasting event at Pastoral in February of 2009.

Since then they’ve tried to go to all alumni events held at nice restaurants. Do they ever cook at home? “I have sweaters in my oven,” says Woods. “Every part of my kitchen is used for clothes, except for one cabinet. I do have glassware, because I make a mean cocktail.”

Johnson is similarly estranged from her kitchen. When she lived in Washington, she told her cleaning lady not to bother with the burners. The cleaning lady pointed out, “They get dusty.”

Woods kindly offers to reshoot my incompetent photos. She turns the flash on, makes sure she’s angling down slightly rather than up, and, sure enough, her pictures look great. Sbiral reshoots my photo of Woods and Johnson—also an improvement.

I ask Woods if she has a guilty junk-food pleasure. “Anything with Easy Cheese,” she says. “Like cheese fries, nachos. Or bacon.”

Johnson laughs. “I was going to say bacon!”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

All photos by Beth Woods except the final photo, which was taken by Keith Sbiral

Monte Carlo analysis

The results from the Magazine's parking-ticket contest are in.

montecarlo.jpg

I’m sure you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the results of our parking-ticket contest, described in the July–Aug/10 University of Chicago Magazine. Well, wait no longer. After countless minutes of judging, I present to you the best of the U of C-inspired parking tickets our readers could come up with.

Third prize goes to John L. Gann Jr., AB’64:

“This demonstration of the long-term effects of oxidation on ferrous metal is brought to you by the Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago.”

I believe the car in question was the mid-70s Monte Carlo featured in the original article. I took pictures of several junk cars that ended up in our Flickr pool and were featured on UChiBLOGo, but this one was a doozy.

Second prize also goes to Mr. Gann:

“A defamation action filed by the Monte Carlo Chamber of Commerce seeks removal of the name from all visible parts of this vehicle.”

OK, he’s fixated on that Chevrolet. But in fairness, if you don't frequent this blog (and why wouldn't you?), then you might not have realized there were more cars to mock.

Finally, first prize goes to…yes, John L. Gann:

“Sic Transit Gloria Monte Carlo.”

While I’m pretty sure Monte Carlo is not an indeclinable place name in Latin, I admire the effort, as well as the dogged determination to make that car funny.

If you haven’t guessed, frequent Magazine correspondent Gann was the only person who wrote in with suggested parking tickets, thus sweeping the contest by default. For his effort, we’re sending him only the best prizes from our prize room/surplus storage area: a U of C lanyard that I think belonged to associate editor Jason Kelly, a USB lamp of dubious provenance, and a copy of John Boyer’s Volume IV of the history of the University, The University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Thanks again to all of you—all one of you—who wrote in.

Wedding bells

How one alum ended up with a very U of C wedding

When I first got engaged and started planning my wedding last year, my mother asked me what the theme of the wedding would be. Theme? I thought “getting married” was the theme. In my male naïveté, I hadn’t realized that the invitations, decorations, refreshments, and flowers all had to conform to some kind of theme. (I think we settled on “autumn,” but don’t quote me on that.) But now, looking back at my wedding day from the comfortable distance of a week, I realize it had another theme. Over time, and unintentionally, I built a University of Chicago—themed wedding.

Consider the location. Like many other alumni, I opted to get married in Bond Chapel. (With a capacity of 800 people, Rockefeller Chapel was far too big. I don’t even know 800 people, much less 800 people I want to invite to my wedding.) My fiancée—er, wife—got ready with her bridesmaids next door in Swift Hall. For the reception, we chose the Quadrangle Club, a convenient two blocks away.

By coincidence, the date we chose, October 9, happened to be homecoming weekend (and the Volunteer Caucus), though I doubt anyone went straight from the reception to the homecoming game against Denison University (or to the caucus). Don’t think we didn’t try to get October 10, for the coveted 10/10/10. But the chapel was all booked up for that day, presumably by other alums who have been planning their wedding since meeting their future spouse during O-Week.

I had initially wanted my parish priest to preside at the wedding, but he retired first. Instead, we pressed into service Father Patrick Lagges, chaplain at Calvert House, the Catholic center on campus. Incredibly enough, he managed to work a reference to the Maroons' 4-0 record against Notre Dame's football team into the opening prayer. How about our music? That was provided by Tom Weisflog, University organist. Our photographer? My friend Avi Schwab, AB’03, assisted by his wife, Laura Staley, AB’04—who happen to be resident heads at Vincent House in Burton-Judson.

As a matter of fact, all three of my groomsmen were fellow members of the Class of 2003. Numerous guests were also alums; I’ll spare you a tedious accounting of alumni attendance here, but I’ll be sure to cram it into the class notes. (I will mention my aunt, Gay Ummel, AB’73, mainly because she hadn’t been back in Hyde Park since her graduation day. Boy, was she surprised.)

And the blushing bride? Well, OK, Valerie is not an alumna of the U of C. But she does work for the University, as director of events for the Humanities Division. (You can wish her happiness in person on Humanities Day, October 23.)

Now, if we had been really going for a U of C theme, I suppose I could have celebrated my bachelor party in the Reg, or had the reception catered by Aramark, or begun a toast with “If you read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason…” But to be perfectly frank, I still think themes are best relegated to high-school proms and budget cruises. Speaking of which, I’ve already got our tickets for our honeymoon. I promised my new wife a romantic trip somewhere tropical, sandy, and decidedly un-Hyde Park-like.

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

The ring bearer and flower girl find their niche in Bond Chapel.
Photo courtesy Lindsay Recchie.

While the cat’s away

Overheard in a creative-writing class.

Some conversations and comments caught during a graphic-novel writing class last Wednesday, while instructor Paul Hornschemeier ran late thanks to a lack of campus parking:


Student A: “Did you guys hear about the squirrel in Cobb?”
Student B: “What?”
Student A: “There was a squirrel in Cobb.”
Student B: “Is that the whole story?”


“That might be the worst reason to have an abortion I’ve ever heard.”


“It’s safe to assume that everyone on the Internet is 14, questioning their sexuality, and really angry at Jews.”


“I need to adopt a homeless person and feed them.”


“I worked at an Apple store for two years, and people ask some really dumb questions, including if computers work at night.”


“When the gas company came to fix [the leak in my apartment], they realized we hadn’t paid a gas bill. Ever.”


“[Cold showers] put hair on the chest.”
“I don’t need help.”


Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Editor's note: You don't need a wiretap to read more random campus conversations. If you enjoyed this mini sampling of overheard silliness, you might also like the regularly updated conversation comments at the Facebook group "Overheard at UChicago."

Picture-perfect caucus weekend

An unusually warm October weekend turns one Volunteer Caucus attendee’s mind to the rhythm of seasons on the quads.

Octobers are always a busy time at the University. Parents’ weekend, Humanities Day, and an annual parcel of symposia and conferences compete for space on campus at its most scenic time. A single recent weekend, October 7-9, hosted the Homecoming picnic and football game (the Maroons defeated Denison, 36-7), the Athletics Hall of Fame induction ceremony, a meeting of the Alumni Board of Governors, and the annual Volunteer Caucus. Although I work at the University, I attended the caucus this year primarily as an alumnus, joining more than 200 volunteers from across the University and around the world to share and learn about the ways they support the institution with their time.

Between meeting Sarah McGill, the new director of the Alumni Schools Committee; hearing from Board of Trustees chair Andrew Alper, AB’80, MBA’81, and new vice president for Alumni Relations and Development Thomas J. Farrell; and learning about upcoming improvements to the Alumni and Friends web community, participants’ conversations kept returning to the unusually warm weather. This was no surprise to those of us who live in the city: Chicagoans have been commenting for months about what unusually good weather the city has enjoyed this year.

A relatively gentle winter, long and warm spring, and generally mild summer are now being followed by one of the most beautiful autumns I’ve experienced since first coming here to attend the College in 1996. Most years, of course, the city has no such luck. When William Rainey Harper was first developing his plan for the new University of Chicago, he invented the quarter system in part to take advantage of the region’s climate. Students and faculty were intended to choose which three quarters they would attend, with the expectation that the winter quarter—not summer—would be the least crowded on campus.

Although the quarter system continues to thrive at the University and at other institutions that have since adopted it, Harper’s scheme for avoiding Chicago winters didn’t last until opening day. Still, on particularly beautiful campus days my mind turns back to that aborted plan, and I consider what a different experience generations of students might have had if they had spent Aprils-to-Decembers, rather than Octobers-to-Junes, on the quads.

Of course, the largest University events are carefully planned to fall on the most beautiful days of the year. Alumni Weekend has been the first weekend in June for decades, and most years result in picture-perfect weekends that make it easy to romanticize what it was like to live and study at Chicago. But as much as those early-summer days can warm an undergraduate’s (or an alumnus’s) heart, they don’t compare to the cool, crisp days of autumnal colors creeping across the facades of Cobb and Swift halls as the ivy turns and begins to shed its leaves.

Kyle Gorden, AB’00

The 2010 Volunteer Caucus attendees; autumn colors on campus.
Photos courtesy Dan Dry and the University of Chicago News Office.

Freelance or bust

Writers and editors debate the pros and cons of going solo.

When 60-some freelance writers and editors put on business suits, leave their home offices, and get together to network, it’s only a matter of time before someone lays bare the truth about self-employment.

“It’s not all sunshine and flowers,” declared Kelli Christiansen, founder of bibliobibuli professional editorial services. The first of four speakers at last Friday’s Graham School Freelance Summit, she was joined by networking expert Lillian Bjorseth, managing editor of the American Journal of Sociology Susan Allan, and University of Chicago Press managing editor Anita Samen. All offered bits of wisdom on going freelance:

On Work

“You have to have a literary bent. Be a reader. A good copyeditor is someone who reads everything.”—Susan Allan

For online grammar resources, “use institutionally connected websites like the Purdue Online Writing Lab and the Library of Congress. … ‘Frank’s Grammar Site’ might not do as well.”—Susan Allan

As you work on a project, “keep the publisher informed, for good or for ill.”—Anita Samen

On Building Relationships

“It’s important to see the whites of someone’s eyes.”—Lillian Bjorseth

“Know what your clothing represents. … Black is the most powerful color, sometimes too powerful. … Navy blue means responsible.”—Lillian Bjorseth

“If you send an e-mail and don’t get a response back, keep trying.”—Anita Samen

On Uncle Sam

“Don’t forget about paying your quarterly taxes, or April is going to be a sorry month.”—Kelli Christiansen

On Working Solo

“Your friends and significant other need to know that by the end of the day you’re going to be a Chatty Cathy because you haven’t talked to anyone all day.”—Kelli Christiansen

Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04

Photo courtesy Graham Holliday (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I improvise, therefore I am

A shared quest to better understand improvisation—in art and life—joins two academics in an uncommon dialogue.

“Artists teach people how to live,” said the jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie. And those who improvise may be the best teachers of all, argue philosopher Arnold Davidson and music scholar George Lewis.

This fall, they are coteaching a graduate seminar that explores improvisation “in many different disciplines and aspects of collective and individual life,” says Davidson, a Chicago professor whose scholarship crosses the boundaries of philosophy, history, comparative literature, and religion. Lewis, U-High’69, is on loan from Columbia University, where he teaches American music and directs the Center for Jazz Studies. He is also a trombonist, composer, and computer-music pioneer.

On November 12, Lewis will lead an evening of music and conversation at Mandel Hall featuring Davidson, free-jazz pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians' Great Black Music Ensemble. Last week, the pair spoke on “Improvisation as a Way of Life” at a forum sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities. The ideas—like free improvisation—weren’t always easy to follow, but they were catchy enough to get listeners thinking. Here are some excerpts.

Davidson: “In the history of 20th-century music, a great cultural contribution of the development of jazz is its demonstration that improvisation can assume all of the characteristics of a philosophical practice. Improvisation is not only an aesthetic practice but also an ethical and political exercise. All things considered, improvisation—for the person who plays and the person who listens—is a transformation of the world and of ourselves.”
Lewis: “In my view, improvisation is everywhere but it’s very hard to see, being fundamental to the existence and survival of every human formation from the individual to the community … Those of us who study improvisation seriously find ourselves at the center of things even as the myth of our marginality, our academic subalternity, if you will, is ever more anxiously repeated.”
Davidson: “The creation of new forms of social meaning often demands an exercise of seeing and thinking differently: an askesis of the self … [Improvisation is] part of the indefinite work of enlarging our spaces of freedom … Improvisation is the concrete form that freedom takes.”
Lewis: “The World Wide Web … has evolved into a dynamically and constantly changing society that’s the largest collective improvisation ever created: active in all time zones, 24 hours a day; as globalized as anything ever built on this planet … assimilating vast asymmetries of agendas—corporate, collective, individual—cultural viewpoints, infrastructure …”
Davidson: “When someone says to me, ‘I don’t like listening to free improvisation,’ I take that as a starting point … It takes some work, but there’s a pleasure that you will not get any other way.”
Lewis: “I don’t see pleasure as a goal. For me, improvisation is a space of learning and a space of opportunity. And what you learn may not be that pleasurable … The condition of improvisation can lead us in many different directions in our everyday lives … What I’m trying to get to is the larger question of how improvisation is a fundamental condition of being in the world, and in that sense, it goes well outside the aesthetic domain and the goal has actually something to do with living the life that you want to lead.”
Davidson: “With respect to everyday life, the main task is not to locate its improvisatory moments—which are typically numerous, even indeterminate—but to identify those dimensions of our life that are not usually subject to improvisation, but remain fixed and often invisible and provide the stabilized framework of constraints within which we improvise … No life should be the endless repetition of the same melody and we should sometimes attempt to experiment, without having to lean on any identifiable and so reassuring melody … What we should try to do is make our improvisations as broad and responsible, as forceful and intelligible, as our capacity for creative discomfort will allow. The space of liberty is up to us.”

Elizabeth Station

George Lewis (left) and Arnold Davidson, who spoke on philosophy, music, and more in a recent interview with Tableau, the Humanities Division magazine.Photo courtesy Tableau.

Math-Stat fire

schwab-fire.jpg

Resident head and University staff member Avi Schwab, AB'03, took a number of pictures of the Math-Stat Building fire last night. See the whole tragedy here.

Thankfully, the building wasn't occupied, and there was only one minor injury (a firefighter was hit by falling debris). But this is still a major setback for the Physical Sciences Division, which was renovating the building as the new home of the mathematics and statistics departments and the Stevanovich Center for Financial Mathematics. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

Photo courtesy Avi Schwab, AB'03.

City views

Professor Mario Small’s blog explores how organizations affect urban life.

The streets of some urban American neighborhoods are lined with amenities, including large grocery stores filled with fruits and vegetables: batches of ripe bananas, bushels of red tomatoes. But other, less affluent areas are “food deserts,” says sociology professor Mario Small, with high-quality produce sold nowhere in sight. He links to recent data on food deserts on his blog, Urban Orgs, which showcases research on urban organizations.

unanticipated-gains.jpgSmall, the author of Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2009), cofounded Urban Orgs with Northwestern associate professor and fellow urban sociologist Celeste Watkins-Hayes in 2007. Their aim was to promote a neglected niche within urban studies. “For many years, much of the research on urban issues focused on one of two things,” he says: “either the behavior of individuals or on the neighborhood—which neighborhoods have violent crime, for example. But a few of us began doing research on organizations and realizing that a whole set of questions that were important to the urban condition and to the experience of cities was being ignored. Whether it’s the child-care center, the barber shop, or the nail salon, all of these organizations are an important part of living in the city.”

Small and Watkins-Hayes e-mailed colleagues and culled through journals, discovering that urban scholarship had become increasingly focused on organizations. On Urban Orgs, Small and Watkins-Hayes write unsigned posts profiling such work. Recent entries address research on the Harlem Children’s Zone, on how nightlife establishments mitigate the effects of social and spatial isolation, and on the battle between rural and urban areas for prison population census numbers.

Says Small: “We’re hoping to convince researchers and policy makers—people who care about urban issues—that there is something important and distinct to be to be learned by looking at organizations and organizational issues.”

Katherine Muhlenkamp


RELATED READING

Cloning terror

We have met the enemy, says literary scholar W. J. T. Mitchell, and he is uncanny.

The so-called "war on terror," a legacy of the Bush administration, no longer grabs front-page headlines. But the phrase and the conflict are "a fact of life,” says scholar and critic W. J. T. Mitchell, and whether we’re paying attention or not, both are part of our present reality.

In a recent Humanities Day lecture, Mitchell sifted through some of the verbal and visual images that the war on terror created—and that created the war. His latest book, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9–11 to the Present (due out next month from the University of Chicago Press), does the same.

Mitchell’s talk analyzed the war on terror through the lens of the “uncanny,” a literary concept explored by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay. In fiction, the uncanny evokes dread, terror, and disgust; it blurs reality and fantasy; it uses ghostly doubles and repetition to conjure confusion and doubt.

Before and after 9/11, the Bush administration used the same strategies to advance its science and foreign-policy agendas, says Mitchell. Fear of new technologies, for example, prompted resistance to cloning, “and many lumped it in a category with stem-cell research, abortion, homosexuality, and other evils.” Administration officials and the media depicted jihadists as nameless, faceless, clones, prompting dread of evil-doers.

The administration’s major coup was to make the metaphorical war on terror a reality by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. “This is the central example of the moment of transition in the historical uncanny,” says Mitchell, “when something we thought was only fantasy, only a metaphor, is made literal because someone has the power to do it.“

Training his gaze on the torture of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, Mitchell gave a lengthy analysis of the image of a hooded prisoner with outstretched arms connected to electrical wires. The photo has been widely circulated, partly because of its “uncanny resemblance” to Christian iconography: “This is supposed to be the figure of the terrorist captured and brought to justice,” says Mitchell. “Instead it turns into a kind of composite of Christ welcoming–Christ mocked, wearing a blindfold; or Christ resurrected; or the ecce homo (‘behold the man’) with Christ standing on a pedestal.”

Mitchell’s talent lies in dissecting facts that we take for granted but which should rile us to the core, and asking disturbing questions about issues we don’t often pause to consider. Why, for example, were the rank-and-file soldiers who took and appeared in photos at Abu Ghraib the only people ever charged with abuse? Why has the Obama administration quietly retired the phrase “Global War on Terror” but continued many of its strategies under the aegis of “overseas contingency operations”?

And why should we examine recent history in terms of the uncanny? “We live in a country in which our politics are dictated by amnesia, by forgetting who did what, by taking the emotions of the moment and elevating them into political causes,” Mitchell says. “The period we have just come through is a great example.”

“My aim is to do what historians always do: remember the past so that we will not have to repeat it. Our enemy is the uncanny.”

Elizabeth Station

"In a classic case of culture jamming, Iraq gets mixed in with the iPod ... The torture victim and the narcissistic consumer are blended together," says W. J. T. Mitchell, referring to a poster (above) designed and circulated by New York artists. The caption for the poster read, “Our enemies never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” Another version said, "10,000 volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent."

UChicago Social: Every day is Halloween

Scenes from a young alumni Halloween party.

“Are you sure this is the right day?” Jason Pettus, the photographer, wants to know. “Are we in the right place?”

Uncharacteristically organized, I have a printout of the details.

Halloween Party
with Harvard, Columbia,
and MIT Alumni Associations

Evil Olive
1551 W. Division
October 28, 2010
7:30 p.m.

Costumes are encouraged.

But it’s 7:28 p.m., and no UChicago alumni anywhere. Instead, we seem to have stumbled onto open studio night at some secret, liquor-fueled art school.

In the main room of the Evil Olive, 10 artists are sitting at long white tables—some drawing with markers or ink, others painting in acrylic. Nine more are sitting at regular tables in the back room.

All of the artists have their own clamp lamps, making the bar uncannily bright. As they finish, they pin their work up in a makeshift gallery, along with super-cheap price tags: $10, $25.

We are in the right place—Evil Olive double-booked the Halloween party with its regular Atomic Sketch event. Distracted by the artists, we’d walked right past Sahar Malik, Columbia ’07, and Dona Le, Harvard ’05, at the welcome table by the door. Malik and Le are ready with blank nametags and star-shaped stickers, a different color for each school: silver star for Chicago, blue for Columbia, red for Harvard (“like the Harvard crimson,” Le explains), gold for MIT.

Slowly, the bar begins to fill with alumni. Some are easy enough to spot: there’s a cowboy, a baseball player, a geisha, a Native American, the pope.

Others make categorization more challenging. There’s a woman seemingly dressed like a gypsy, with bright scarves tied around her head and waist, and a short ruffly skirt. No, wait—I saw a skirt just like that at Urban Outfitters. That’s just clothing. Then again—she’s wearing a few too many big necklaces, and has a nametag. Alumna in a gypsy costume.

There’s a man in '70s-era rock-star garb, complete with hippie hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, just like the guys from MIT-spawned supergroup Boston. What an awesome costume for an MIT alumnus! Except he isn’t an alumnus. He’s with the sketchers.

And then there’s Inspector Gadget, aka Bill Fienup, one of the event organizers. As you would expect, he’s from MIT.

In real life Fienup does not have an extendable hand, true. But as a kid, he says, he liked to make all kinds of gadgets. He now has a degree in mechanical engineering and makes a living doing top-secret product development: “I can’t tell you about the products,” he says, in response to my pointed questioning. “They’re still in development."

Later, I discover that Fienup is the co-inventor of—no, I am not making this up—a condiment dispenser known by the charming appellation, "the catsup crapper." He even presented his gadget on the Martha Stewart Show.

So was he really in costume, or not? I'm thinking not.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Photos by Jason Pettus.

RELATED READING

Sex at dawn

The case against the “Flintstonization of prehistory.”

In Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (HarperCollins, 2010), husband-and-wife coauthors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá assert that “contemporary scientific speculation concerning prehistoric human life is often distorted by assumptions that seem to make perfect sense.” There are two things—food and sex—that humans experience so personally that we project our relationship with them onto our “nature,” and therefore onto our ancient ancestors, rather than recognize them as cultural, Ryan said last Thursday at an event organized by the student group Out in Public Policy and cohosted by the Office of LGBTQ Student Life and the Center for Gender Studies. Ryan, a psychologist, and Jethá, a practicing psychiatrist and former AIDS researcher, examine this phenomenon in the chapter “The Flintstonization of Prehistory,” where they argue such assumptions “can lead us far from the path to truth.” Contrary to the standard narrative that projects a conception of nuclear families built around monogamous couples onto our prehistoric ancestors, they argue that humans evolved in interdependent, promiscuous groups.

The basis for their argument is found in primatology, particularly of our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, as well as anthropology, comparative anatomy, psychosexuality, and logical deduction. All signs, they write, point to a case for prehistoric humans’ sexual behavior being very different than that of modern humans, or at least of that depicted in the “standard narrative.” Although humans are equally related to chimpanzees and bonobos, comparative anatomy points to greater sexual similarity to bonobos, the highly endangered “forgotten ape” living only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bonobos live in complex, matriarchal, and promiscuous groups, operate a “sharing-based economy,” and use sex to defuse conflicts, among many other uses. Perhaps as a result, violence is very rare, and no bonobo has ever been observed killing another, a relatively common occurrence in chimpanzee—and human—society.

At the campus event, held at 5710 S. Woodlawn, home of the Offices of LGBTQ Student Life and Multicultural Student Affairs, Ryan was quick to point out that the book is not meant to be prescriptive. Although it describes humans as naturally non-monogamous, Ryan was quick to point out that they are not advocating against monogamy as a choice, despite offers from publishers to put out a book doing so. He and Jethá’s intent was only to write a realistic exploration of sexuality in prehistory, based on the best scientific evidence available. Despite that academic bent, the book has reached No. 24 on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction, and a paperback release has been announced for July, 2011. Sex at Dawn has already found an audience on campus; turnout for the event was clearly larger than organizers expected, with a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 spilling out of the room and down the hallway.

Kyle Gorden, AB'00

A virtual altar

When 72 migrants were caught in the crossfire of Mexico’s drug war, a visiting journalist was moved to act.

Some 100 miles from the U.S. border on August 23, near the city of San Fernando, writes Alma Guillermoprieto in a recent New York Review of Books essay about the Mexican drug trade, "the Zetas stopped a bus full of migrants, herded them to a nearby isolated ranch, and after a confused series of events lasting several hours, executed seventy-two.”

Guillermoprieto, a journalist and Tinker visiting professor of history who has reported on Latin America for the past three decades, describes the Zetas as a rogue Mexican drug cartel that also specializes in human trafficking. Members serve as hired enforcers of illegal trafficking operations on Mexico’s southern borders. Smugglers attempting to guide Central and South American migrants across the border without a financial arrangement with the Zetas face repercussions. And although the migrants have left their countries to look for work in the U.S., they may be kidnapped, assaulted, raped, extorted, or—in this case—murdered en route. The gruesome August massacre in Tamaulipas, writes Guillermoprieto, was seemingly purposeless: “From the traffickers’ point of view, no practical end was achieved. The killers appear to have acted out of rage, on whim, or simply out of tedium or habit.”

In response to the murders, Guillermoprieto has teamed with other writers as well as photographers and musicians to create an online memorial to the slain migrants. The project, 72migrantes.com, combines striking photography with essays that tell the stories—real, and in the case of unidentified victims, imagined—of those killed. Visitors to the site's “virtual altar” can download music and make a donation to Hermanos en el Camino, a church organization that provides food, shelter, and support to migrants and others who have been kidnapped or threatened by Mexican drug and human traffickers. (The site is in Spanish but plans to include some English translations soon.)

“I’ve been writing about the illegal drug trade and its dreadful social consequences for decades now, as the trade has traveled like a deadly virus around Latin America," Guillermoprieto told UChiBLOGo. But what is happening now is different "in degree and consequences," she says. "From Phoenix to Tegucigalpa, the traffickers in charge of supplying illegal drugs to the U.S. market have evolved into warring groups of mafias deeply embedded in their own societies' social and law-enforcement structures.”

Increasingly, she explains, traffickers are feeding a local market of drug consumers, and branching out into human trade, from prostitution to the shipping and handling of undocumented migrants. "The desperate tragedy unfolding along both Mexican borders—where Central American migrants routinely are kidnapped, tortured, murdered—is what brought me to help put together 72migrantes.com,” says Guillermoprieto.

On November 11 Alejandro Paez and Claudia Mendez, journalists who cover the drug war from Mexico, will join Guillermoprieto for a 6 p.m. talk sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, in 122 Social Sciences.

Katherine Muhlenkamp and Elizabeth Station

Photos courtesy 72 Migrantes (Armando Morales; Edu Ponces).

RELATED READING

Pull over, I think I’m gonna be kitsch

Especially when you’re in a class called Reading the Road Trip, the best part of being on the road can be when you get off the road.

Asher

When you turn onto North Avenue from Lake Shore Drive, a couple of nice, cultural-type activities present themselves to you. There’s the Chicago History Museum right there on Clark, Second City half a block down Wells, Steppenwolf Theatre a mile or so down the street, and then come all the dives, second-hand stores, and chic taco places in Wicker Park when you cross the Chicago River. After that, things kind of thin out. First there are a bunch of bodegas, then a ton of body shops, and you see not just the first Menards of your life but three in half an hour.

Once you’ve let Route 64 take you that far out of Chicago, and by now you’re pretty far, what’s there to do? Let’s say you’re going to be driving on this road for three hours, out to the edge of Illinois to have a look at the Mississippi River, for an assignment in a class called Reading the Road Trip, and someone in the car is going on and on about the nature of thought and the psyche and signification, and not that you really want to, but you can’t get a word in edgewise? What’s there to do but keep driving?

Well, if you’re like me, you’ll put your camera behind the steering wheel and start making funny faces. If you’re smart, like my friend Mounica, you keep an eye peeled for a pumpkin stand. When you see it, you’ll know you’re in a nice town, like Virgil, Illinois, and you should pull over. And if you’re lucky, the pumpkins will sit in front of an old diner that’s been converted into an oddities shop, and is on its way back.

That’s Jason Seuben, the shop’s co-owner, standing in what will soon be Norm’s Diner. He talked with us for half an hour, about his place there on the corner of Route 64 and Country Highway 14. Neon signs and colorful metal ones hung everywhere, and on a table sat a sprawling miniature circus with working lights. Almost all the items had to do with either beer or cars. Best of all, there was a rusty motorbike that if you fixed it up looked like it could toot you around the North Side without too much difficulty.

Every book we’ve read in class (On the Road, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) shows the road throwing people together who might never have met. Jason has lived most of his life in Virgil, but I didn’t feel bad about grilling him on his collection, which was a sort of kitsch heaven for me even if it probably looks like home to anyone from the area. Jason and his coworker came right back with questions on what it’s like to live in the city (New York, actually, having seen my license plates)—what’s the music scene like, how do you deal with such a fast-paced lifestyle?

I kept my friends there way too long—sorry, guys—but he generously let us take home some of his signs, toys, and miscellanea. I grabbed a real country milk bottle and a vintage Motor Oil sign that’s now hanging on my wall.

The rest of the road? Let’s just say it was a long trip. All there is to do is give up planning your essay. Luckily, that’s when you stop arguing about signification and start playing Ghost. Much better.

Asher Klein, ’11

Photos by Asher Klein, ’11, Mounica Yanamandala, ’11, and Jena Cutie, ’11

For more on Asher's road trip, look out for the January issue of the Core.—Ed.


RELATED READING

Words to live by

studs-terkel.jpgThe newly created Chicago Literary Hall of Fame inducts its first class, which includes two UChicago notables.

“Chicago is America’s Dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.”—Studs Terkel, PhB’32, JD’34

Six members of Chicago’s literary community were posthumously inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame November 20, including Terkel and Saul Bellow, X’39.

Honoring “authors whose words have best captured the essence of our city,” the hall of fame was created by the Chicago Writers Association as a space to showcase the city’s literary tradition (it will be housed in the Cliff Dwellers Club at 200 S. Michigan Avenue). In the ceremony held at the Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium (3701 W. Bryn Mawr Avenue), U of C senior lecturer in Yiddish Jan Schwarz presented Bellow’s award, and Gregory Bellow, AB’66, AM’68, accepted it on his father’s behalf. For Terkel, Chicago author Stuart Dybek presented, and his son, Dan Terkel, accepted.

Ruth E. Kott, AM’07

Slay David

David-Brooks.jpgThink you can make David Brooks laugh at himself in the Magazine’s column-parody contest? He’ll be the judge of that.

In Friday’s New York Times, David Brooks, AB’83, muses about the marriage of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, expressing confidence where most observers foresee further journalistic decay. Brooks senses a society sobering up amid economic calamity. He believes NewsBeast could be the voice of a new, more serious middle-American mind.

“There must be room for a magazine that offers an aspirational ideal to the middle manager in the suburban office park, that offers a respite from the deluge of vapid social network chatter, that transmits the country’s cultural inheritance and its shared way of life, that separates for busy people the things that are enduring from the things that aren’t.”

That’s just the kind of mildly contrarian culture-mining readers have come to expect from Brooks. There’s much more: in the space of 806 words he finds room for Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Foster Dulles, Georgia O’Keefe, even Robert Maynard Hutchins. It’s a classic Brooks-style column.

A style ripe for parody, you might say. To gauge just how ripe, the Magazine created a David Brooks Column-Parody Contest. Readers are invited to submit their best Brooks impressions in 500 words or less. Brooks himself has agreed to select the winners.

Please send your entries by January 1 to uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu. The writers of the best parodies, to be published in the Mar–Apr/11 Magazine, will receive a signed copy of a Brooks book.

Jason Kelly

The Dark Knight’s UChicago origins

Forget Bruce Wayne. DC Comics storyteller Max Allan Collins reveals that Batman was actually Eliot Ness, AB’25.

batman-ness.jpg

I'll admit it. I'm guilty of judging books by their covers.

When I go to the thrift store to refresh my reading stash, I always pick up the ones with unusual or eye-catching artwork first. One recent find—the paperback comic book Batman: Scar of the Bat (2000)—made my must-buy pile because of its UChicago connection.

Part of DC Comics' Elseworlds series, in which "heroes are taken from their unusual settings and put into strange times and places," the Scar of the Bat story claims that law-enforcement agent Eliot Ness, AB'25—the legendary leader of the Untouchables who takes down Al Capone and his gang—is the real man behind Batman's mask. On the surface it reads like a comic's usual pulpy fun, but the one-page afterword by author Max Allan Collins is the best part. Collins describes the research he did to write as historically accurate a story as possible. My favorite detail is his aside claiming that Ness's opinion of Prohibition as a bad law was first published in Scar of the Bat.

batman-ness-2.jpg

Don't take it from me. Read it for yourself—on us! Leave a comment on this blog entry with the UChicagoan you would like to see as a comic-book superhero in an Elseworld for your chance to win our gently used copy of Scar of the Bat.

The Magazine's editors will pick a winner from comments posted by 5 p.m. Monday, December 6. Good luck!

Joy Olivia Miller

Critical distance

Architecture critic Blair Kamin isn’t ready to rate the University’s latest building projects—but his new book dissects a decade of changes to Chicago’s cityscape.

campus-downtown.jpg

We’re only ten years into the 21st century, but between the Great Recession and Mayor Daley’s imminent departure, the city of Chicago has reached the end of an architectural era. Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic, chronicles the building boom and more in Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age, just published by the University of Chicago Press. In a recent e-mail interview, Kamin reflected on a period “bracketed by two great thunderclaps in the sky”—the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 and the opening of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, in 2010.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWith 9/11 and the fall of the twin towers, we saw a nationwide push to secure buildings and public spaces. But Chicago also had a skyscraper building boom. How did this shift from “terror to wonder” happen?

QandA_ADrop.jpgMay I restate the question? I think that’s in order because so many new Chicago skyscrapers are not wonderful but awful. They look as though they were designed by refugees from East Germany. What you’re really asking, I think, is this: How could we have had such disparate, post 9/11 reactions—the security clampdown on the one hand and the exuberant building boom on the other?

Here’s why: Many of the security measures were necessary, even though far too many of them, like those endless lines at O’Hare and Midway, made us feel like cattle at the old Chicago Stockyards. But the September 11 attacks did not eradicate the profit motive. People build skyscrapers to make money. And build they did once the post-9/11 fear of heights ebbed. All the talk about “the end of the skyscraper” proved as unfounded as the post-September 11 predictions about “the end of irony.” Eventually, the pundits who forecast irony’s demise had to backtrack and say that they had really been talking about “the end of ironing.”

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat are the architectural success stories of Chicago’s boom years?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThere are many, starting with Jeanne Gang’s Aqua, an 82-story hotel and residential high-rise just north of Millennium Park. Its striking, undulating balconies bring the samba élan of Brazil to Chicago’s sober grids and rectangles. Millennium Park, with its interactive public sculptures like Cloud Gate and the Crown Fountain, is the great urban space of the decade. Yet the most significant development might turn out to be Mayor Richard Daley’s push for energy-saving, “green architecture.” Daley ruled with an iron fist and a green thumb.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAny notable flops or missed opportunities?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI could write a book about them—no, wait, I just did. Far too many of the residential high-rises that went up early in the decade were examples of what I call “plop architecture.” They saddled the cityscape with bland tops plunked atop brute bottoms, or podiums, that housed enormous parking garages. Here, Chicago utterly lost its legendary ability to marry utility and beauty. Also marring the cityscape: The renovated Soldier Field and its inglorious, Klingon-meets-Parthenon mismatch of classicism and modernism.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYou write about ways new buildings “converse” with their surrounding neighborhoods—and you’ve praised Millennium Park as an urban space that gathers people of diverse classes and races. How does the University of Chicago converse, architecturally, with Hyde Park and the rest of the city?

QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s a dialogue of opposites. The U of C’s serene quads turn inward; they hold the wild, disorderly city at bay. And their neo-Gothic architecture, with its picturesque irregularity (all those playful grotesques and gargoyles), couldn’t be more different from the regularized, bare-boned beauty of early Chicago skyscrapers like the Marquette Building or such mid-20th century masterpieces as the X-braced John Hancock Center. The U of C’s architecture is elegant, almost feminine. The city of Chicago’s architecture is brutally straightforward and very macho. I love them both.

QandA_QDrop.jpgCan you share your impressions of the Mansueto Library, Logan Center for Performing and Creative Arts, the Midway light bridge, or other 21st-century building projects on the UChicago campus?

QandA_ADrop.jpgAll represent bold, modern departures from the neo-Gothic norm, but I’m not prepared to offer any assessments because the projects are either nearing completion or their construction is underway. To get your answer, you’ll have to read my review.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHas the recession put an end to what you’ve called the “age of excess”? How will new building plans reflect a new era, in Chicago and elsewhere?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe built environment will invariably be affected by the shift from “the age of excess” to “the age of austerity.” Say goodbye to all those flashy museums that were big on bling. Clients won’t have the money to build them and even if they did, they wouldn’t want to look flashy. Doing so would seem out of sync with the new zeitgeist. Frugal is the new black. Unless we’re talking buildings for deep-pocketed health care and higher-education clients, the major new projects will be renovations, like the upcoming revamp of Navy Pier. And even those will have modest budgets. The years of the big architectural blow-out are over.

Elizabeth Station

Fall, slipping away

On a day when the skies over Chicago are an unmistakable winter-gray, Magazine photographer Dan Dry offers a look back at autumn on campus: luminous ginkgos in front of Hinds, the ivy turning red on the quads, fallen leaves in Botany Pond, shorts-clad students enjoying unseasonable warmth. Check out the photo set or watch the above slideshow.

Lydia Gibson

Art flow

A commanding ink-on-rice-paper painting draws in coffee drinkers and museum visitors alike.

The installation crew used wheat paste to attach the rice-paper panels

Walk into the Smart Museum now, and you notice, perhaps for the first time, that the back wall of the reception hall (where the café tables sit) curves at the top. Accentuating the curve is a new installation, curated by art-history professor Wu Hung, covering the entire 60-by-40-foot wall: an abstract, black-and-white landscape that suggests water and fire flowing downward—or it is upward?—in smooth waves.

The first installation in the museum’s Threshold series, Cascade will adorn the wall for more than year, through next December, explained Smart Museum director Tony Hirschel. Until then viewers can gaze at it from the café tables or lie on a futon brought in so people can look up at that concave wall and ponder the waves, splotches, and trickles. They can inspect the crinkly rice paper that artist Bingyi painted this summer in a Chinese basketball court, where it was so hot she could work only at night, Hirschel said, and where a windstorm ripped some of the panels, which Bingyi reinforced with more rice paper. She experimented with kitchen detergent and bathroom cleaner to see how they would alter the ink’s absorption into the paper.

After the panels were shipped to Chicago, Bingyi oversaw their installation last month. A Smart crew affixed the sheets to the wall with wheat paste to create what is thought to be the largest rice-paper ink painting ever made. The result: from every angle, Cascade reveals something new.

Amy Puma

Photo by Jason Smith.
Artist Bingyi oversees a Smart installation crew measuring Cascade's rice-paper panels.

Getting a Handel on things

rockefeller-choir.jpg

The U of C’s choral director talks about the annual campus performance of Messiah.

James Kallembach and I started with the University Chorus at the same time, in the fall of 2005. I had just moved back to Hyde Park to take a job with my alma mater; he had just been hired as the director of choral activities for the Department of Music. Every year since then, he has conducted (and I have sung in) the annual pre-holiday performance of George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah. Since after five years I could sing the choral parts with my eyes closed, I decided to see how it was wearing on Kallembach. A slightly edited interview with him is below.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow many times have you conducted Messiah?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThis is my sixth time conducting it at U of C, and basically my sixth time conducting it in any substantial manner. The funny part of that story is that I avoided it during my graduate-school days because I always had this thought that I would end up in a position where I'd have to conduct it every year anyway, and I didn't want to get bored of it from the start. It turns out I was exactly right.

kallembach-portrait.jpgI've done several of the choruses in church choirs, accompanied several of the arias, and, of course, studied it in detail in school, but I've fulfilled my own prophesy of conducting it every year.

QandA_QDrop.jpgMost performances of Messiah are truncated—not every movement is performed. Why?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe piece is so well-loved people want to perform it, but the two-and-a-half hour or more running time makes it difficult from a modern audience standpoint and from a soloist and choir standpoint. Plus, many of the movements don't lend themselves to certain times of the year. It probably began as a way for amateur choral societies to be able to perform the piece and ended up being a way to make it seasonal, i.e., Christmas and Easter movements as appropriate. One important note: there are several versions, so there are versions of arias and a chorus or two that hardly ever get performed at all.

What's unique in classical music is the almost insane popularity of this piece. I doubt there has been a year when it has not been performed since its premiere. This is very unusual in classical music (at least in performances prior to 1900 or so), and especially in the oratorio genre.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s your favorite movement?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI don't have a favorite movement, but some of my favorite moments are the first tenor aria "Comfort ye"—how unexpected that this massive oratorio would start with such a gentle and beautiful message. The first bars to the first tenor cadenza are my favorite (about the first 16 bars or so). I also love the little pastoral "Pifa" that opens up the angel visitation in Part I, "He shall feed his flock," "All we like sheep," "The trumpet shall sound," and the last few bars of the last movement. In general, I think the last movement is one of the most exciting movements in music history. Also, I apparently like the movements that involve pastoral scenes.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s your least favorite movement?

QandA_ADrop.jpg"He was despised" is an incredible aria, but amazingly long in the context of the whole work. I don’t dislike it, but I generally don’t include it for this performance due to its inordinate length.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhile the text of the oratorio is taken entirely from the Bible, it isn’t, strictly speaking, about Christmas. Why do you think Messiah has become a Christmastime staple?

QandA_ADrop.jpgTo be honest, I’m not sure. Handel just struck gold, and I doubt he had any idea of it at the time. On a rather cynical note, he needed a way to raise funds in a tricky London music and drama scene (although the work was premiered in Dublin). He basically created the best fundraiser of all time for things choral in the process. It was a huge success for him, and it continues to be one today.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy is it a staple, so firmly fixed in the canon?

QandA_ADrop.jpgA weird way to think of it is that things that endure associated with the Christmas season—cold, the solstice, however you want to look at it—have to do with "light amidst the darkness" of the long, long nights of winter. So in climates like ours, I think it's common to want indoor activities to turn inward, so to speak.

From a musical standpoint, I think Jennens' masterful libretto is a huge component in this equation. It deftly puts scriptures together in a way that touches on profound spiritual mysteries. It can touch a broad audience.

Handel had an uncanny talent for setting the mood in music, and for musical wit, and this libretto gives him the room to do so. It's more about general feelings than it is about specific action, as in an opera. We all sit there waiting to hear what the first thing is that will happen in this piece that is supposed to depict the story of one of the world's major religions. Similar to other religious narratives, we wait to hear if some powerful force will come and sweep our problems and our enemies away and sort of feed into our ego, but the first thing that happens are the gentle chords in the strings, and then the tenor, a hero in the opera world, singing so gently the words "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people." Quite a different message than we were expecting.

Although it would be impossible to look at the libretto and see it as universalist in some way, it doesn't matter: we can see the deeper human messages and narrative behind the symbols and the myths.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat should a first-time attendee at this year’s concert know?

QandA_ADrop.jpgWe have some great guest soloists this year: Kimberly Jones and Wilbur Pauley. Both have connections with the Lyric Opera, and Wilbur just finished up his role of "Snug" in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Lyric. We also have Matthew Dean, AB'00, and Lon Ellenberger (longtime Rockefeller Chapel soloist) singing solos.


To Kallembach's last answer I might add, "Come early": Rockefeller Memorial Chapel is big, but this concert packs the pews every year. Come see the University Chorus and Motet Choir perform Messiah for yourself, tonight at 8 p.m. at Rockefeller Chapel. Take it from me: the Hallelujah Chorus is worth the price of admission by itself.

Benjamin Recchie, AB'03

Joining the (glee) club

Voices in your Head hits the major leagues of college a capella, appearing on three national compilation CDs.

voices-boomerang.jpg

UChicago has been favored with a bunch of talented a capella groups—has your campus had a group open for President Obama?

One of those groups, Voices in Your Head, is experiencing a rareified moment in the sun (which I'm sure is especially nice in this wintry weather), featured on three major a capella compilations this year:

  • Sing 7, a free download for members of the Contemporary A Capella Society,
  • Best of College A Capella 2011, an upcoming CD release put out by Varsity Vocals, which runs the International Championship of A Cappella,
  • Voices Only 2010, a 38-track, two-disc album on which Voices in Your Head has been featured every year since 2008.

Not only that—"Boomerang," the Voices track on "Sing 7," is an original composition, which is a pretty special thing in a capella.

Only one other group in the country, On The Rocks of the University of Oregon, was featured on all three albums this year, and it had the benefit of being a YouTube phenomenon. Voices member Zach Denkensohn, '12, informed me that this trifecta has been accomplished only eight times since 2005.

Voices was already doing pretty well. The 15-member, co-ed group was featured on another compilation CD in 2008, this one put together by the acclaimed artist Ben Folds, who said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, "There’s a group from the University of Chicago called Voices in Your Head that sings “Magic” on the record, and to me they’re in a different league from the rest of the groups." Author Nick Hornby mentioned them in a New York Times piece. In 2009, they performed onstage with Ben Folds, and competed in the International Championship of A Capella

Voices is now angling to become a YouTube phenomenon in its own right. It will premiere a music video for "Resistance" (originally performed by Muse) at tonight's Fall Concert, which will be "Resistance/Thought Police/1984 themed," says Denkensohn. The video was filmed on campus, he said, and follows two Voices members the heads of a resistance group who are running away from...something. (Denkensohn wouldn't say what, so watch the video to find out—we'll post it when it's up). Tonight's concert, at 7 p.m. in Bond Chapel, also features the University of Michigan's Dicks and Janes.

Asher Klein, '11

A little light on the subject

The innovative design of the $215 million Eckhardt Center will illuminate the science inside.

The discoveries that could emerge from the William Eckhardt Research Center after it opens in 2015 strain the imagination—at least the scientifically impaired imagination. Home to the University’s new Institute for Molecular Engineering, and a central location for the Physical Sciences Division, the building will be a nexus for innovation. Whatever inconceivable forms it may take.

The form and function of the building—named in recognition of Eckhardt’s (SM’70) $20 million gift to support advanced science—is easier to grasp. There is a futuristic sheen to the renderings unveiled December 13, but the design relies on a retro resource: natural light. A collaboration between the firm HOK and the artist, sculptor, and architect Jamie Carpenter—whose portfolio includes the Midway light bridges currently under construction—the plan “will draw light deep inside to illuminate laboratories and hallways.”

Some of those illuminated labs will be below ground in spaces designed to limit vibrations and filter out contaminants. The seven-story, 265,000-square-foot building will have two basement levels. “One of the challenges is how to make the space feel light and connected to nature, given that so much of it is below grade,” University architect Steve Wiesenthal said in the News Office announcement of the new building.

He went on to explain how the $215 million design answers that challenge: “Perforated metal fins connected to serrated glass facades on the east and west will capture and reflect light horizontally into the building throughout the day. Further, a louvered glass ceiling over the north lobby will serve as a light well, capturing and driving light vertically into the building.”

Come to think of it, maybe the form and function of the building really aren’t any easier to understand than the science itself.

Jason Kelly

235 birthdays

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YO,* a scarf for this season

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere (as at least nine out of ten UChicago alumni do), today is the first day of winter. The higher your latitude, the lower the temperature is likely to be, and the higher the chances are that you didn’t leave home this morning without a scarf.

Which is where we come in. A few autumns ago, dreading the slings and arrows of Chicago winters, the University of Chicago Magazine commissioned knitting doyenne Silvia Harding, X’78, to design a University of Chicago scarf for readers to make for themselves or for the less-crafty Maroons in their lives.

Web stats tell us that from January 1, 2007, through December 19, 2010, the website Knitting Pattern Central has sent some 6,324 knitters our way. But if looking for a pattern were the same as knitting it, we'd all be waist-high in sweaters, hats, and fingerless gloves. So the question that has us knitting our brows is this: how many readers have taken up needles and yarn in response?

Show us your handiwork. If you didn't follow Harding's instructions to a C, that only means you're being true to your school.

Mary Ruth Yoe

* YO, or "yarn over," as the knitting cognoscenti know.

What’s different about the 2010 scarf modeled here? Sharon Kelly (co-owner, with sister Kathleen Kelly, AB’94, of Arcadia Knitting) brightened the C-stripe of the original design to creamy white.

Job satisfaction

A recent ranking highlights an obscure, but apparently well-satisfied, career path.

It always takes a little extra effort to explain what I do for a living. “I work for the University of Chicago,” I’ll say, to be quickly followed by, “No, I’m not faculty, or a researcher, or a doctor or nurse—I work in one of the administrative offices.” Technically speaking, the Department of Labor would classify many of the University’s staff, likely including myself, as “education administrators”, those workers who “set educational standards and goals and establish the policies and procedures required to achieve them. They also supervise managers, support staff, teachers, counselors, librarians, coaches, and other employees. They develop academic programs, monitor students’ educational progress, train and motivate teachers and other staff, manage career counseling and other student services, administer recordkeeping, prepare budgets, and perform many other duties. They also handle relations with parents, prospective and current students, employers, and the community.”

So it was nice to see my relatively obscure occupation highlighted in U.S. News & World Report’s recent list of “the 50 Best Careers of 2011,” a ranking that highlighted high-opportunity professions in the coming year based on job-growth projections, salary data, and other factors such as job satisfaction. It was that last factor—job satisfaction—that got "education administrator" added to the list. Although a few other lesser-known jobs such as "gaming manager" and "hydrologist" appear as well, the majority of the top 50 are more easily recognizable, such as "accountant" or "curator". Nearly half are in either the health-care or high-tech fields. Appropriately enough, the job-satisfaction data came from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC). Its 2007 study, “Job Satisfaction in the United States,” (pdf) lists the top 12 and bottom 12 professions in each of two categories, job satisfaction and “general happiness,” which would seem to beg the question of whether one affects the other.

Education administrator comes in fourth for job satisfaction, behind clergy, physical therapists, and firefighters. “Painter, sculptor, related” rounds out the top five. Those satisfied clergy and firefighters also top the list for general happiness, but my fellow education administrators and I, along with the physical therapists, painters, and sculptors, don’t even make the top 12. On the other hand, careers such as architecture and “transportation ticket and reservation agents” must attract inherently happy people, because they appear in the top five for general happiness without appearing in the top 12 for job satisfaction.

Some of the study’s findings are no surprise—many of the bottom professions in both categories are known for hard work and low wages, such as construction laborers and food preparers—while in other cases it seems that a small change can make a big difference. Considering a career in retail? Think Home Depot before H&M: hardware/building-supplies salespersons are the 11th happiest, but apparel clothing salespersons are the seventh least satisfied in their jobs. Good at fixing things? Think Toyota, not Toshiba: mechanics are the eighth happiest, but electronic repairers the tenth-least happy. In at least one field, a promotion can apparently make all the difference: “maids and housemen” are the eighth least happy, but their supervisors, “housekeepers and butlers,” are the 12th happiest.

Perhaps my colleagues and I should consider transferring to another field well represented here at the University; the “science technicians” who work in the many laboratories on campus may not have our job satisfaction, but they’re nonetheless the seventh happiest occupation. At least it would be easier to explain to people what we do for a living.

Kyle Gorden, AB'00

To dye for?

An interview with UChicago's own Tie-Dye Guy

I don’t know what I was expecting when I arranged to interview Rafael Menis, '11, a.k.a. “Tie-Dye Guy,” for the next issue of Core.

I knew Menis was a political-science major and philosophy minor. But for some reason I was not expecting—when I asked the obvious question, “Why?”—to hear that his unusual sartorial choice symbolized “support for the women’s-rights movement, the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement in particular,” as well as “my right to freedom of expression under the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.”

Here are some more outtakes from my interview with Menis. And no, Dan Dry, I did not think to ask if he wore tie-dye underwear.


QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you wear tie-dye every day?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYeah.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you find aesthetically pleasing about it?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI like the colors.
QandA_QDrop.jpgI’ve seen tie-dye done with a much more limited palette.
QandA_ADrop.jpgI usually like doing more rainbow patterns. I like having all the colors.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo you make your clothing?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI make some of it. My mom made some of it. My friends helped me with some of the items that I own. I don’t think I’m wearing any of those right now.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIs it difficult? Can you make it in the dorm?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI can. I’ve held a few workshops to teach people in my dorm how to tie-dye things. It just requires access to the proper materials. A pot to hold water to soak the clothing. Clothes of a natural fabric—at least 50 percent cotton or wool or silk. Soda ash water mixture. And then you need to have the dyes.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAny particular dyes?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThey’re relatively dangerous. You should use them with gloves on. And they’re colorfast. Extremely so. Quite frankly, my clothes get holes in them before the dyes wear out.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do people think of your clothing?
QandA_ADrop.jpgSome people react positively: “Oh, this is great; I like what you’re wearing; it brightens my day to see you wearing this.” Some people are like, “Are you a clown?” Some people just move away.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy? Is it threatening?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s different, certainly.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you get any street harassment? Do people yell comments?
QandA_ADrop.jpgEh. Sometimes people will say, “Nice clothes,” or they’ll laugh, or they’ll call me a clown.
QandA_QDrop.jpgPretty limited repertoire of insults?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYeah.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you do when that happens?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI smile.
QandA_QDrop.jpgNo one’s ever become violent, presumably?
QandA_ADrop.jpgOh, goodness gracious me, no.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you ever get tired of wearing tie-dye?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI like it. If I didn’t like it, I would probably wear something else.
QandA_QDrop.jpgCan you wear it to your job?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes. I work in the Department of Civic Engagement. I work with the Neighborhood Schools Program and Chicago Public Schools-University of Chicago Internet Project. I fix computers.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you have to dress up for the job interview?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNo. I was dressed like this.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow about after graduation?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI want to apply to the Americorps Program in California. I assume that if I was applying to be a business consultant or something like that, reactions would be extremely hostile. But seeing as I’m acting in public service, I assume reactions will be less hostile, and seeing as I’m trying to work in California, possibly even positive.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIt’s kind of obvious, but I hadn’t really thought of your clothing as a manifestation of your political beliefs.
QandA_ADrop.jpgRight.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWere your parents radical?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNot particularly. My mother was wandering around. She spent some time raising goats. My stepdad was in the Army at the time. He actually was in Italy. He didn’t have to worry about Vietnam. He spent a lot of time playing music and eating pizza. He’s still a musician. He plays various woodwinds and teaches. My dad, I think, was still in school then. He died when I was quite young.
QandA_QDrop.jpgMaybe you stick out more in Chicago than in California, where you’re from?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI don’t get this sort of attention in California. If I’m wandering around the U of C Berkeley campus, I might hear comments like, “Oh, I left my tie-dye shirt back in my dormitory.”
QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd you never wanted to tie-dye a coat, the whole time you’ve been here?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNo. I thought about tie-dyeing a trenchcoat, but I never quite got around to it.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

Photo by Dan Dry.

The paper campus

apf2-00164University buildings that never were.

I'm fascinated with things that never were, particularly when it comes to architecture. And particularly architecture from places I'm familiar with—it's fun to play "what if." So when I realized that the University of Chicago Library's Archival Photographic Files had a veritable treasure trove of drawings and models of campus buildings that, for one reason or another, were never constructed, I decided to start an occasional series. In each post I'll delve into the archives to examine some of these buildings that never made it off the drawing board.

First up is the Administration Building. Plans for a dedicated building for the University administration appear to have existed for a while before the Admin Building that we all know and, uh, ignore went up in 1948.

One early proposal (right) was this high-rise Gothic tower, a distant cousin to Tribune Tower or the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning!

Judging by the buildings in the background, I'm guessing this would have been roughly where Goodspeed Hall is now. If so, this design might well predate the first classes at the University: Goodspeed was completed in 1892.

	apf2-00163

Sticking with the Gothic theme, this proposal (above) would have blended in nicely with the main quads. It isn't obvious from the rendering where this building would have gone, or even from exactly when it dates.

apf2-00166

Architectural firm Holabird, Root, & Burgee proposed this design (above) after the Second World War, very close to what was actually built. It's notable for being perhaps the first infusion of modernism into the neo-Gothic main quads.

apf2-00280

But this rendering isn't quite as built: note the differences with the final version (above).

apf2-02693

Setting aside Admin, let's go to an old campus favorite—Harper Memorial Library. If you ignore the enormous central tower, this design (below left, top) bears some resemblance to the final product. Note that even at this stage, the third-floor reading room is in place.

I'm not sure why the architect or University settled on the now-iconic twin towers instead of a single spire, but I can't imagine Harper without them.

apf2-03084

In the 1930s there was a proposal to give Harper more space for books by adding another tower for book stacks onto the side of the building. I'm not sure why this idea fell through, but again, I'm glad. There isn't much detail on this model, but one can only hope those upper stories wouldn't really have been windowless.

Do you have further insight into the history of either of these buildings? Leave a message in the comments.

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

Photos courtesy of the Archival Photographic Files, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

The Craftsman cometh

From Wall Street to the woodshop, Richard Sennett wants to honor good work for its own sake.

In 2010 Richard Sennett's (AB’64) latest book, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), won Italy’s Mazzotti Literary Prize; he also received the Spinoza Prize for his contributions to debates on ethics and morality, and an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University.

A sociologist and essayist who studies labor, cities, and culture, Sennett divides his time between New York University and the London School of Economics. Trained at Juilliard as a classical musician, he has also written novels—so the man knows something about craft.

On a bitterly cold evening in December, Sennett packed the auditorium at the School of the Art Institute for a talk about craftsmanship, which he defined as “doing good work for its own sake.” At a time when recession and economic uncertainty make doing any work difficult, the topic seemed particularly apt.

Craftsmen can be male or female, said Sennett. They work as carpenters, orchestra conductors, lab technicians, or in any setting “in which sentiments and ideas can be investigated.” Master craftsmen, he believes, require roughly 10,000 hours of experience to attain a high level of skill. They take pride in their work and represent "the special human condition of being engaged.”

In a global, high-tech economy, Linux programmers who create free, open-source software are practicing “a public craft, the newest craft we have,” says Sennett. Linux systems draw highly skilled code writers to the Internet, where they exchange wares "in an electronic bazaar.” As with all quality craftsmanship, their work involves “an experimental rhythm of problem solving and problem finding … It’s always an attempt to see, ‘If I can do this, what can I do next?’” In contrast, the mediocre products of proprietary software companies like Microsoft represent "the anti-craft," says Sennett.

Sennett's talk and scholarship have analyzed the forces impeding craftsmanship, community, and creativity in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. Drawing on interviews that he and his students conducted with skilled laborers in several industries, he shared some findings:

  • In new-economy firms, workplace teams are common. But midlevel employees at many such firms allege that friendliness and cooperation are often faked to impress superiors. Team principles “evaporated the moment an actual problem arose,” replaced with the attitude of “save yourself.”
  • Older workers believe their service and experience don’t count for much; in fact, “as experience accumulates, it loses institutional value.” Sennett and his students asked their subjects the age at which people in their field began treating them as “over the hill.” In law, it was 50 to 52; in advertising, it was late 30s; in engineering, it was 31.
  • Back-office accountants who left jobs on Wall Street following the 2008 crash believed that “people at the top were uninterested in their skills and oftentimes were themselves incompetent at understanding what the back office was doing.” Skilled workers see craftsmanship as having “an inverse relationship to authority.” Hard work doesn't always bring financial reward and over the past generation, the wealth share of midlevel employees has stagnated while that of CEOs has ballooned.

The problem, says Sennett, “is not simply that people are getting rich off craftsmen,” but also that skilled workers see “an inverse relationship between competence and power.” In the United States especially, “we think of ourselves as a skills economy, but the value of the people who possess that skill has become marginalized.”

The solution, he believes, is to “think radically,” as the ancient Greeks and Marx did, about “changing our economy and our social mores so they are founded upon honoring the skills of the people who have them.”

Until that bright day comes, we can read his book.

Elizabeth Station

Photo by Thomas Struth.

The paper campus: Alternate Rockefellers

Part two of our series on the unbuilt campus.

As part of my occasional series on proposals for University buildings that never came to fruition, I’ve dug up a few early proposals for one of campus’s most iconic buildings: Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

Henry Ives Cobb designed the first buildings on the quadrangles and came up with the initial campus master plan. In this barely legible map from the University’s earliest days, there’s space reserved for a chapel at the intersection of 58th and University. Here’s an early Cobb design for a chapel (left) next to the completed Rockefeller Chapel:

apf2-06575r

The first thing to note about this design is that, while still Gothic, it’s a departure form the English academic Gothic that inspired the design of most of the other buildings on the quads. With its flying buttresses and ornate decoration, it’s much more like the French Rayonnant style.

Here’s another proposal from the early ‘20s by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, much more in the English Gothic mode:

apf2-06558r

At first glance, this appears to be much closer to the final design. Notice that this design, like the one by Cobb, features a crossing tower above the intersection of the transept and nave. By this time, the chapel’s location had been definitively moved to 59th Street. Note the surrounding buildings, proposed quarters for the Oriental Institute.

The University balked at the expense of Goodhue’s design. As a cost-saving measure, the architect proposed moving the tower to the side:

apf2-06567

But wait—the tower is on the west side, not the east. After Goodhue’s untimely death, and some wavering on the part of the University, the final design moved the tower to the eastern side and includes a covered walkway connecting it with buildings to be constructed on University Avenue:

apf2-06560

The walkway was never built. Only a small part of the secondary buildings were—today’s Oriental Institute.

Do you know anything more about how these designs were fleshed out? Let us know in the comments below. You might also be interested in part one of the Paper Campus series, on the Admin building and Harper Library.

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

Photos courtesy of the Archival Photographic Files, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Coffee, futon, art: done

A relaxing recline—and a little caffeine—brings a new perspective to Cascade.

cascade_below-view.jpg

"Do people come in and lie on the futon a lot?" I asked the Smart Museum barista making my latte last Thursday morning.

"Oh yeah," he said, "all the time."

With that, my colleague and I took our warm drinks, reclined on the leather bench, and stared up at Cascade, the black and white, ink-on-rice-paper work covering the museum cafe's back wall. Although we had only ten minutes to stare up at the splotches and waves, the experience was, as I'd imagined in the University of Chicago Magazine's Jan–Feb/11 Editor's Notes, cathartic.

Amy Braverman Puma

View from below: the wall curves up into the ceiling, so the futon provides the perfect vantage point to relax and absorb the work; my coworker, coffee in hand, takes in Bingyi's enormous painting.

Stand the test of mind

Writing down your anxieties before a big exam can mean a better grade, suggests new research from UChicago.

Tetchy testers take note: for students who get anxious about high-pressure tests, simply writing out their fears the night before can boost their grades by five percent, according to a study published in the January 14 Science.

Associate professor of psychology Sian Beilock, the study's coauthor, is an expert on "choking under pressure," the subject of her recent book. Gerardo Ramirez, the study's other author, is a graduate student of Beilock's. Both work in the Department of Psychology and the Committee on Education.

In the study, students who were asked to write their thoughts about the test for ten minutes the night beforehand did better than students who did not write (one control group was asked to sit quietly for ten minutes) or who wrote about unrelated thoughts. Anxious students who wrote about their fears averaged a B+ in one case, while the control group averaged a B-.

The technique is adapted from one used in treating depression, the article says, explaining that for depressed individuals, a few months of writing about a traumatic or fraught experience can unburden them, or, to use the technical term, "decrease rumination."

The theory with depression holds that anxiety and short-term performance both take place in the "working memory" part of the brain, and that anxiety disrupts the brain's focus. Writing about depression may reframe the emotional experience in a way that helps sufferers put it out of mind, and Beilock and Ramirez hypothesized that same logic might apply for chronically nervy test takers.

"This is a somewhat counterintuitive idea given that drawing attention to negative information typically makes it more rather than less salient in memory," they wrote. "However, if expressive writing helps to reduce rumination, then it should benefit high-stakes test performance, especially for students who tend to worry in testing situations."

The results of the study—which haven't yet been confirmed through repeat experiments—did garner attention in the media this past week: Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Toronto Star, BusinessWeek, Time, and CNN picked up on the story.

Now if only Beilock and Ramirez would study how to get rid of my thesis- and blog-post writing jitters.

Asher Klein, '11

Photo via iStockphoto

Revelations

Questions for MLK Day keynote speaker Judith Jamison

Judith Jamison, outgoing artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and one of the great dancers of the 20th century, became a star by embracing her identity at a time when there were few African American performers on stage. The 67-year-old dance legend was the keynote speaker at the University's Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Service last Friday at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

Jamison, whose aunt, Allie Brown, studied at UChicago in the 1930s, talked with UChiBLOGo about her connections to Chicago, her message for Martin Luther King Day, and the Alvin Ailey Barbie doll.



QandA_QDrop.jpgIn your very first professional dance performance, in The Three Marys, you came to Chicago.
QandA_ADrop.jpgI danced at the Chicago Opera House. I had been discovered in a dance class in Philadelphia, and I ended up guesting with American Ballet Theatre. What was my experience? I don’t know. I was in a fog. It’s only in retrospect that I think, my goodness, my life has been totally amazing.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHave you ever been discriminated against because you’re so tall [Jamison is 5’10”]? Female ballet dancers are usually much shorter.
QandA_ADrop.jpgI was always wondering why everyone else was so short. The teacher was always saying “Stretch, stretch, stretch longer.” I was already there.
I’ve only auditioned once in my life, and I was so bad. Three days later, Alvin Ailey called me and asked me to join his company. So I have no experiences of that kind of rejection. I don’t remember anyone telling me no. If they did tell me no, I didn’t hear it.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was it like, touring with the Alvin Ailey Company?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThere were times when, after we performed, we were not able to get a meal. But any places that wanted us, we would go. That’s why we’ve been around for 52 years, because we go to places that other dance companies won’t. Alvin said to bring the dance to the people, and that’s what we do.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you remember the day when King was killed?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe were performing at Lincoln University. Alvin had to make an announcement to the audience. There were a lot of tears.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow does it feel, being the keynote speaker for the MLK commemoration service? Is speaking similar to dancing in any way?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’m honored. It keeps being explained to me that the speakers in years past were politicians, or judges, or activists in the Civil Rights era. Our activism was our dancing. Our activism was our bodies—to take the culture wherever we could.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you have any advice to the nation, in honor of MLK Day?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe president said it beautifully the other day: it’s not about our differences, but about our similarities. See the humanness inside each other.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAny advice for young people?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWhatever you’re doing, go for it 150,000 percent. Stick to it beyond what you think you can do.
QandA_QDrop.jpgI have to ask you about the Ailey Barbie doll. You designed that?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes. It commemorated the 50th anniversary of the company. She wears the costume for Revelations (a signature Ailey work). I wanted a dancer that was my color. Most dolls are very fair-skinned, but I wanted this one to have a rich complexion. I wanted her to have a full mouth and full nose. And I wanted her to have short hair. But they said little girls like to play with hair, so I had to add hair.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93


Photo by Andrew Eccles

Love thy neighbor

Rhodes Scholar Stephanie Bell, AB'08, pens an open letter against an Iowa state rep trying to ban gay marriage.

In middle school, Stephanie Bell, AB'08, babysat for the children of Kim Pearson, the recently elected state representative for Iowa's 42nd district. Bell, who's in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, took to the Internet this weekend to argue against a Pearson-sponsored amendment to Iowa's Constitution to ban gay marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships.

Bell wrote the letter Saturday on her blog, Post.Culture.Shock. Detailing how the manners she learned growing up in Des Moines drove her to give back to society—including doing HIV/AIDS advocacy work while studying abroad in South Africa—Bell sought to let Pearson see one person her amendment would disenfranchise, as Bell might put it.

Bell's tone is mostly friendly and neighborly—she and Pearson didn't keep up their relationship after Bell left middle school, when she babysat Pearson's kids. Yet at times the letter is firm: "What deeply worries and outrages me is that I shouldn’t have to justify having equal rights because I’ve spent so much time giving back to all of the communities that I’ve lived in. It shouldn’t be relevant that the people we’re depriving of their rights are police officers, fire fighters, and school teachers. No other group has to justify their rights by pointing to all that they’ve contributed to the world."

The Rhodes Scholar, working on her M.Phil of Development Studies at Oxford, came out to her mother at the end of high school and her father in college, she writes.

An editorial in the Des Moines Register stood against the amendment. "Republicans in the Legislature were expected to roll out a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Iowa. They weren't expected to roll over so many other rights in the process, however." The amendment will end civil unions and domestic partnerships for same sex couples.

The op-ed notes that the amendment, which would apply to the first article of Iowa's Bill of Rights, would be the first to subtract a group's rights in the state's history. It is sponsored by 56 Iowa House Republicans and would nullify a 2009 Iowa Supreme Court ruling that struck down a previous ban on gay marriage. Iowa is one of five U.S. states where same-sex marriage is legal.

Bell's letter drew dozens of supportive comments by Sunday night, after it was posted on Web aggregator Reddit."Stephanie, you don't know me," one reader wrote. "I'm not gay and I don't live in Iowa. But I read this and thought, 'This woman is my new hero.' Bravo."

Asher Klein, '11

Brand new start

HaroulaRose.jpg

A former English major steps into the indie-folk spotlight.

“I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always written songs. But it took me a little while to get serious about doing it,” says Haroula (Spyropoulos) Rose, AB’02, MAT’02. Her debut album, These Open Roads, features 11 original indie-folk compositions.

Recently named one of the top 100 unsigned artists by Music Connection magazine, Rose—who sings and plays guitar—released her album independently this month. Fans can download the songs on iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby, and Bandcamp and they can buy the record. Really?

“I’m a big nerd, so I’m also putting it out on vinyl,” says Rose. “I like collecting records and listening to them, and I just think this kind of music lends itself to sounding better on vinyl [than it does digitally].”

But the digital versions of her tunes sound pretty good too. One spare but thoughtful track, “Brand New Start,” is available as a free download. A Los Angeles Times review praised the songwriting chops that underlie Rose’s gentle guitar playing and her “girlish but graceful” voice.

As a UChicago student, Rose sang with the a cappella group Unaccompanied Women and earned degrees in English and teaching. After graduation she landed a Fulbright to study in Spain and later headed to film school in Los Angeles, where she lives. She’s working on several animated videos to go with her songs.

If you're in Los Angeles on Tuesday night, February 1, you can catch Rose's album release show at the Hotel Café, beginning at 8 p.m. Her artist residency continues there with performances on February 8 and 15 and March 1. Next up, Rose plans shows on the East Coast, in Chicago, and in Austin—balancing rehearsals, gigs, and writing with attending to the business side of her career.

Elizabeth Station

Images courtesy Haroula Rose.

Elegy and exhortation

A year ago a tremblement de terre violently shook Haiti, the world, and Gina Athena Ulysse.

Ulysse, a Haitian native who spent the last week of January as artist-in-residence at the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture, commemorated the tragedy with a Court Theatre performance of her dramatic monologue, Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, Me and the World.

Weaving personal and Haitian history into songs and stories, the hour-long piece brought attention to Haiti’s troubled past and uncertain future. Lists of historic dates, events and statistics flew through the theater, hurled by this fiery woman with bright, orange hair. Breathless stories were unfolded and haunting voodoo chants were cast about the room.

An associate professor of anthropology, African-American studies, and feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University, Ulysse was born in Petion-Ville, Haiti, and as a teenager joined the Haitian Diaspora, migrating to the United States with her family. She gathers information for her works using “ethnographic collectables,” observing firsthand the subject’s behavior and culture. For this project she used her own stories and a capella songs, written over 20 years ago, as data. She was amazed to discover that these writings were still very relevant to Haiti’s present situation.

When the house lights rose at the performance’s end, she announced that she was really more than 31 years old, as her last song suggested, and began taking question from the 50 audience members for almost an hour. When asked what could be done to help Haiti she praised the work of the University of Chicago’s Rising in Solidarity with Ayiti for working to rebuild more than buildings. She feels that many NGOs are only working to solve Haiti’s immediate problems and are not addressing the larger issues that have been over looked for more than a century. She told the audience that she places her hopes on “progressive organizations” in Haiti, who are now struggling for money and manpower as they compete with the giant global relief organizations. Organization she suggests may just constitute another form of colonization.

The evening began in darkness with the chant of “Ready or not. Here I come. You can’t hide. I’m gonna find you and make you want me,” coming from a blackened area somewhere off stage. The night ended with the room aglow in light as she sang one last song.

Lisa Genesen

snOMG

The blizzard that swept through Chicago's worst effects are over, and some UChicago students—for whom classes were cancelled today—found playful ways to enjoy the storm's bountiful snowfall.

Here are some scenes from earlier today on campus, shared by Jillian Schrager on Flickr:

Sotomayor holds court

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor visits the Law School.

On a break from the Supreme Court's busy docket, Justice Sonia Sotomayor came to the Law School last Monday to speak to students, lunch with professors, and teach a class.

The court's second newest justice gave a surprisingly in-depth glimpse into her decision-making process and her short career on the bench, sharing anecdotes that were funny or poignant and sounded like good advice for the hundred or so students in attendance at the Glen A. Lloyd Auditorium.

During her hour-long conversation with moderator David Strauss, a constitutional-law professor who has argued 18 cases before the Supreme Court, Sotomayor discussed her first day as a district court judge in 1992, in the Southern District of New York. "My knees were knocking. Have you ever had your knees knock so you can hear them? Mine were."

She also shared what guides her decisions on the nation's highest court, a tidbit that garnered attention for its insight into the Judge's mindset. Sotomayor said she tries to be flexible making her decisions, balancing legislative history, briefs, oral arguments, and her colleagues' opinions.

Law students took away some life lessons:

  • When you're arguing before the Supreme Court, Sotomayor said, "it’s not [the place] for lawyers to be Clarence Darrow and to swing a jury," she said. Make your case in writing, and prepare good answers for justices' questions at the hearing.
  • Keep your integrity as a lawyer, because judges have long memories.
  • And if you want to clerk for Justice Sotomayor, be passionate about one thing, not capable at everything. "I don’t look at the kid who has a thousand things on their list," she said.

Unlike the newest justice, Elena Kagan, Sotomayor has no direct relationship with the Law School or the University of Chicago, although Dean of the Law School Michael Schill mentioned in introducing her that she once worked for a law firm run by the father of Law School professor Bernard Harcourt. At the end of the talk, Schill presented Sotomayor with a UChicago Law School softball sweatshirt, complete with her name emblazoned on the back.

After her conversation with Strauss, she took questions from the audience. One student asked her to tell a story about a personal failure, reasoning that great people were often motivated by some momentary lapse. The question invited laughter from the audience and from Strauss as Sotomayor sighed, gazing offstage for comic effect.

"It is so unbelievably difficult to answer that question," she said, "for the following reason: I have spent most of my life...running to make sure I don’t fall down, and when I do I pick myself up and keep running. Everything I’ve undertaken, I’ve had my knees knocking and my stomach churning.

"I can’t tell you how difficult my first year on the district court bench was," she continued, because she had to combat her fears as well as absorb tons of new information. She recalled "having a lawyer tell me after I ruled on a case, 'I’ve been a practicing lawyer for 39 years, and I’ve never seen a judge do that!'"

The comment worried her until a colleague told Sotomayor, "'You should have told him you don’t follow the mistakes of other people,'" which drew more laughs. "That’s a little quick for me, but it did teach me a lesson about not jumping too quickly to criticize myself."

Asher Klein, '11

Dumped

This is the story of an affair that never happened.

Last Thursday Rebecca Steinmetz, AM’09, was scheduled to give a workshop, Flirting for Nerds, at Ida Noyes Hall. Steinmetz, who earned a degree in gender studies from DePaul before studying social work at UChicago, is an educator and therapist specializing in relationship, sex, and gender issues.

I had been looking forward to the workshop for weeks. For the blog, I thought I might craft lists of what nerds should and shouldn’t do. I imagined a service journalism-type headline: “Five things you should never do if you’re looking for love!”

Then came the Snowpocalypse. More than 20 inches of snow were dumped on the city. The University canceled classes on Wednesday, and then again on Thursday.

In the morning I e-mailed Steinmetz. “Even though Flirting for Nerds is canceled tonight, I’d still like to interview you and write a blog about it,” I wrote. “Do you have any time to talk on the phone today? Thanks!”

It was a cheery message, I thought. Direct, but friendly.

She did not respond.

Was it the exclamation point? Was that too much?

I left her alone over the weekend. I stayed busy—went out with a friend on Saturday, gave myself a pedicure, got some things done around the house.

On Monday, I e-mailed her again. “Just following up on my e-mail message from last week… Any chance we could do an interview tomorrow morning? Or tonight, if tomorrow morning doesn’t work?”

It sounded desperate, I realize now. I made myself too available.

Once again, she didn’t respond.

I know, I know. It was my fault. I drove her away.

And now Valentine’s Day is less than a week away. I have no attention-grabbing headline. No lists of secret knowledge to impart. No greater understanding of how to connect with other human beings.

I, along with all the other nerds of UChicago, have been left out in the cold.

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

Note: Steimetz will be on campus next Thursday for the rescheduled workshop. For more details, see the ORSCA Facebook page for the event.

From Egypt, with hope

A young economist learns a few things at Chicago, but even more on the streets of Cairo.

Nearly two years ago, while working on a story about an exchange program that brings Egyptian students to UChicago, I met a remarkable young man named Mahmoud Khairy. A student from Cairo University, he had come to Chicago to study economics for the spring quarter. Mahmoud was intense, intelligent, energetic, fun—and determined to seize every opportunity available to him, from classes with Nobel laureates to bike rides along Lake Michigan.

He also had a clear idea about what he wanted to take back to Cairo from his U.S. experience. In Egypt, a rising sector of academics and professionals had begun to call for economic and financial reform. “By studying here, I now have a more solid academic and professional background and I can join this movement,” he told me. “This new direction needs more push.”

After our interview, Mahmoud and I walked across campus together because we both wanted to keep talking. He asked me what newspapers I read and recommended his favorite sources for online news about Egypt and the Arab world. It was May, and he paused to admire the bright green grass and blooming flowers. He urged me to visit Cairo someday, and he kept in touch by e-mail when he returned.

As events unfolded in Egypt these past few weeks, many of us in Chicago wondered how Mahmoud was faring. Had he joined in the protests or watched from the sidelines? Given the outcome, was he optimistic or pessimistic about the future? The answer came a couple of days ago in an e-mail that I’ll never delete:

Subject: The Egyptian revolution
Dear all,
A lot of things I want to share and I can't find the words. After 18 days in Tahrir Square we finally wrote our own destiny. I was there almost every day at the square, we were beaten by the police sticks and smoked with tear gas, when the thugs attacked and held a weapon in the civil resistance to protect our homes and public institutions from criminals. This truly was an incredible time in my life, what I've learned in the past two weeks is more than I've learned in my whole life.
I saw the power of human will when we are united. I saw people's differences dissolve for the common good. I prayed on Friday under the protection of Christians from the police. And I stood in a human shield around a nearby church to protect it from possible attacks.
In the last two weeks not a single murder case, robbery, harassment, or even dispute has happened in entire Egypt. We discovered that this regime was the worst thing in us. For the first time in my life I can taste freedom, something that is taken as granted for most of countries around the world.
As I said there are a lot of feelings now and later I will share the details of my experience. But I'm pretty sure that the whole world will not be the same. A beautiful world will be built here and we will build a different kind of civilization that will last for another 7,000 years.
Here and here you will find the links for two short videos that are really worth watching and can give you a clue of what happened in Egypt.
Best wishes,
Mahmoud A. Khairy

Elizabeth Station

Photo courtesy Flickr user Mashahed / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Bleak to chic

MODA’s bloggers share sunny fashion tips for an unforgiving winter.

As a teenager growing up in Connecticut, I wore the latest fashions and did so winter weather be damned. “Dancing shoes on ice—sure that’s a good idea, punkin?” my mom would call out as I teetered down the slick front steps in patent-leather Mary Janes.

College first-year Cathay Zhao is a girl after my own heart. Writing for MODA, a UChicago fashion organization that sponsors an annual runway show, Zhao outlines how winter fashionistas can look polished when temperatures plummet. Titled “What to Wear When Hell Freezes Over,” the entry offers some ingenious suggestions like layering leggings over tights to create insulation and maintain a sleek look.

Look out Anna Wintour—here comes Chicago style.

Katherine Muhlenkamp

A rocket's maroon glare, bursting with flair

Two new engineering-focused RSOs launch a 7-foot, 6-inch rocket on the University's main quads.

Friday was brisk, sunny, and a little windy, a welcome change from the last few frigid weeks, and no, not ideal rocket-launching weather but, hey, what are you gonna do? The Facebook page you made this week brought the 150 or so excited students and administrators standing around the center of the main quad, which is cordoned off for safety reasons that will soon prove academic, and are you gonna let a little wind stop you? Can you not launch your rocket?

Please.

At the center of campus stands the projectile attracting all the attention, though it's not quite the beauty the Facebook page described, "a 7'6" tall rocket powered by a cluster of three engines" evoked. (I was thinking a small-scale version of those Cold War monsters with the benign names, like Atlas or Titan.)

It is a tall and thin black pipe with a red-stripped snub nose, standing on a small platform supported by bags of rock salt. A small-by-comparison girl wearing a big backpack holds the rocket upright as 12:25 p.m. and lift-off ticks closer.

The fledgling Engineering Society is responsible for the launch, along with the months-older Student Organization of Aeronautics and Robotics and funding in part from Student Government. A boy from the Engineering Society stands near the rocket and says over the entirely appropriate PA system, "See? There is engineering at the University of Chicago."

The crowd is eager—besides the annual Polar Bear Run, the quad hasn't seen anything this crazy in recent memory—though not all for the best reasons; someone in the crowd told a friend, "The mere fact that something could go wrong makes me want to stay." But the group's organizers had assured people, via the event's Facebook page, that safety precautions had been taken. "This is an official ORCSA event planned in coordination with the Facilities and Safety offices. There will be a safety officer at the launch. Rocket altitude is within FAA limits and descent is controlled by a parachute system. Nobody is going to die, we swear."

The student holding the rocket steps away, and it slumps towards the administration building. The audience laughs. She sets it upright again, and it slumps the other way, prompting more laughter. But apparently it's fine, and the launch-pad is clear. All eyes are on the rocket.

A cry goes up, and the huge ring of people picks up the countdown.

"7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1!—"

Nothing. The expectant audience breathes out, with a chuckle.

Foom ssssssseeoohhhh! Smoke puffs out over the concrete as the rocket jumps up into the air. It arcs up, fizzing and listing and now over the crowd—will it hit someone? It's three stories up! As high as Rosenwald! How high will it go? And, it—sputters, and coughs, and oh well, dips down into a tree 25 yards from where it launched, splitting in half on one of the branches. A little parachute deploys and the lower half drifts the twenty feet back to terra firma.

Watch the video on Facebook

Everyone claps and the crowd heads off, while the students in the group congratulate each other by the launch-pad. One of the group, Arindrima Datta, '14, tells me the launch was fine, but two of the engines failed. Lexi Goldberger, '14, says the group expected the rocket would fly up five or 600 feet, but estimated that it reached "150, maybe 100 feet."

They tell me the rocket has no name, though "UCHI ES SOAR" is written on the side to commemorate the school, the Engineering Society, and the Aeronautics and Robotics RSO. They also say it was built based on a design from the internet in the basement of Pierce Hall over 3 or 4 meetings, that the Physics Department pitched in with a power generator to ignite the rockets, and that the groups have big plans in store, despite the fact that they are two and five months old, respectively.

Already being planned are a homemade cyclotron (as in a particle accelerator), a 3D-printer, something having to do with (undoubtedly awesome) robotics, a hoverboard project that is Goldberger's own, and a moon buggy that the Engineering Society will enter into a NASA-sponsored competition.

The students in the two RSOs seem to be mostly first-years and excited about engineering at the U of C. Though the school has no official engineering program, that didn't sway Datta from attending; she said she "came to Chicago knowing that you can do anything and start any RSO."

Asher Klein, '11

The smartest stylist in Chicago

Not unlike the editor he planned to become, Jason Berg spends his days trimming and adding color.

Soon after I walk into Salon Fete in Lincoln Park, Jason Berg, AB'04, sits me in his chair. We talk highlights (let's go warmer, we decide), cut (we won't go too short), and style (I straighten my hair, so he'll dry and flat-iron it before pulling out the scissors). A few minutes later he's wrapping my hair in foil, segment by painstaking segment.

Berg, who earned his cosmetology certificate in 2006 and finished a high-end training program in 2007, graduated college thinking he'd use his English degree to go into editing or publishing. "But those jobs weren't happening," he said, so he considered beauty school, picking up on a hobby he'd nurtured since childhood. Growing up in Denver as one of seven kids, he'd practiced on his sisters' hair, and in college he did his own and his friends' 'dos.

Now he rents a chair at the salon, where his services are not cheap but his skill is evident. I walk out of the salon 2.5 hours later, pretty sure I like it. A few days later my dentist, of all people, confirms it's a winner. She's been admiring my hair color since I walked in, she says. "Who did it?" I happily hand her Berg's card.

Berg's style sense goes beyond hair: on his blog he covers hairdos as well as music and pop culture (even with his U of C friends who come in for hair appointments, he doesn't talk Thucydides: "People want to relax," he says). And he's hip enough to have made the Time Out Chicago Singles issue. Hair might not be what he originally had in mind, but by now he seems to have wrapped his head around it.

Amy Braverman Puma

Jason Berg shows off his tools at Salon Fete.

Pencil pusher

An illustration of how one busy mom distracted her son—and made an artist out of him.

By Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93


When Core editor Laura Demanski and I saw Laura Shaeffer’s sketchbook—full of tender, but unsentimental drawings of her sons Jasper, 8, and Sebastian, 6—we knew she would be the perfect illustrator for one of the feature stories in the winter issue

"Bringing Up Baby," by David Hoyt, AB'91, was full of big thoughts about the small moments of parenting: taking his son to the playground, watching him get his first shots, picking up pinecones and chip packets, using stickers as potty-training bribes.

Shaeffer was excited about the project and started producing sketches. But then her younger son broke his leg. He had to stay home from school for weeks, growing more bored and irritable by the day. With little time to work and the deadline approaching, Shaeffer employed a classic parenting trick: “Hey, boys! Let’s play illustrator!”

Sebastian did not buy it. But Jasper took the assignment very seriously, producing the full list of drawings that art director Aaron Opie had requested.

One afternoon I interviewed Jasper about his first commissioned work—all the while being hampered by Benjy, my own seven-year-old, who refused to go upstairs and watch “Tom and Jerry” as he was told.


QandA_QDrop.jpgSo you did these in December. Do you remember what that (above) was supposed to be?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: Yeah, monkeys on a playground.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you see, when you look at your own drawing?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: A bunch of monkeys on a playground.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you like it?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: I guess. The monkeys weren’t my best.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd then there’s this one—
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: That was a doodle of a butterfly. That was a chip bag, turning into a butterfly. I think that was a bottle and—I’m not entirely sure what that thing is.
QandA_QDrop.jpgA pine cone, maybe?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: Oh yeah, a pine cone.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo you tried to make the butterfly and the chip bag look the same, and the bottle and the pine cone look the same?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: No. I just drew a bottle and a pine cone.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDon’t you think they kind of look the same, though?

QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: I think the butterfly and the chip bag look the same. But that’s just how the pine cone turned out.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was this one?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: That was supposed to be “wasp-like rage” [The four-month-old's understandable reaction to receiving his first shots].
QandA_QDrop.jpgOh. He doesn’t look mad though.
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: He turns into a hornet. It’s hard to make hornets look mad.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHe looks happy. He looks like a happy little hornet.
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: Really? I thought hornets were just naturally mad.
Benjy: BZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
QandA_QDrop.jpgI think this is my favorite one.
QandA_ADrop.jpgBenjy: I think it’s funny.
Jasper: I like babies in suits.
Benjy: I want to look at the lizard! (Crosses room)

QandA_QDrop.jpgThese are also really awesome. Tell me about them.
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: That’s a pop-up book [left], and a bunch of big adult books [middle].
Benjy: The lizard’s mad!
Jasper (to Benjy): No, it’s not.
Benjy: It looks mad every time it looks at me!
QandA_QDrop.jpgSadly, we could not use this [right]. No pictures of poo in the Core.
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: My mom told me to do that. That’s what it said to do.
QandA_QDrop.jpgYou put stickers all over his arm. And poo equals stickers.
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: Yeah.

QandA_QDrop.jpgAnd what’s this?
QandA_ADrop.jpgBenjy: A ton of hands on a hand!
Jasper: No. A kid’s head in the sandbox.
QandA_QDrop.jpgOh, right. Did you have the stories to read yourself, or did your mom read them to you?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: I didn’t even read the stories.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhich one is your favorite drawing?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: I liked the kid in the suit. That was the most fun.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhich one was the least fun?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: The poo one. This was one of the drawings when I just said, look, I’m done with this. Let me do something else.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow long did it take you to produce all of these illustrations?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: Half an hour.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you think you did a good job?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: I don’t know. I’d say no.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy?
QandA_ADrop.jpgBenjy: The lizard is trying to bite me!
Jasper: Did I say no? I meant maybe.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you ever think you might want to do illustration again?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJasper: No. I’m done. I’m more into magic now.
Benjy: Are you really magic? Tell me what tricks you do.

[end of interview]

Consonant craving

Georgian folk songs resound at Wednesday's Div School lunch

By Lydialyle Gibson


"It's very Georgian to have singing as part of the feast," Clayton Parr said as he and fellow members of Ensemble Alioni stood up from their meals—and the rest of the room dug into fruit-and-cream desserts—to begin their performance at this Wednesday's Div School lunch. Based at DePaul University, where Parr is a music professor and choral-activities director, Ensemble Alioni performs folk music from Georgia (Caucasus, not Appalachia): polyphonic, three-part harmonies about everything from work and war to religious holidays and historical figures. At the Div School, the group offered up a lullaby and Christmas songs that would have been sung house-to-house. ("A little like wassailing," Parr said. "Actually, a lot like it.")

Then the singers invited the audience to join them in an Easter song, "Kriste Aghsdga." Instructed Parr: "Just move as quickly as you can through the consonants to get to the next vowel," as listeners stared down at Xeroxed lyrics packed with consonants. "Krist'e aghsdga mk'vdretit," read the first line. The results were much more melodious than the words might have looked:

As the lunch hour came to an end, Ensemble Alioni found time for one more, closing with a war song that drew a laugh:

The group will hold its spring concert May 20 at 8 p.m. at St. Josaphat Church, 2311 N. Southport, Chicago.

Flying circus

An evening with the spectacular Le Vorris & Vox.

By Asher Klein, '11


Some students tutor high schoolers. Some of us write for the newspaper. Some play with fire, stand on their friends' shoulders, and dance suspended in air on two long ribbons.

These are the performers of Le Vorris & Vox, the University's circus/masque, leaping through Rockefeller Chapel Thursday, dramatizing the struggle of life, love, pain, and death. Their ringleader narrated a tragicomic trip through the underworld, where it seemed ghouls and the souls of those who died in love bounced around forever searching for some kind of resolution, dancing tangos when meeting old flames and building human pyramids for...some reason I didn't quite catch. With its inventive costumes, sultry lighting and music, and interest in the movement of the human form, Le Vorris & Vox is more interested in aesthetics than simple storytelling.

Its blend of clowning, metaphysical storytelling, and acrobatics is most familiar in Cirque du Soleil, though the group traces its roots to a more local source—a 2002 class with Malynne Sternstein on the circus through the years. Le Vorris & Vox feel like a work in progress, not too polished but the fun is catching. While the themes were perhaps a little mature for the children in the audience, they oohed and aahed through the whole thing.

Cat in the belfry

Modo the cat livens up Rockefeller Chapel.

By Rhonda L. Smith


Modo

One Tuesday evening last fall, a couple of students showed up at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel just as a restorative yoga class was about to begin. The instructor welcomed them and directed them to take blankets and sit down. After a couple of minutes one student said, “We really only came to see the cat.”

Reverend Elizabeth Davenport, dean of Rockefeller Chapel, laughs as she tells that story, which demonstrates the impression Modo has made since joining the staff. Modo, short for Quasimodo, holds the title Chapel Cat/General Health and Wellness of Rockefeller Chapel.

Modo

Davenport adopted Modo, an orphaned kitten left at a veterinary clinic, and brought him to the chapel on October 2, 2010, when he was just six weeks old. Appropriately enough, the bells were ringing on his arrival. Davenport informed him that “his namesake of old had swung on carillon bells and that he better get used to the carillon and organ.” He was introduced to the community the next day at the Third Annual Interfaith Blessing of the Animals.

Five months later, the sleek black-and-white cat is not only unfazed by the bells and the organ but is curious about all types of sounds, from printers to snow blowers. If he hears something interesting outside, he runs up his six-foot tower to look out the window. This winter the snowstorms gave him quite a show.

Modo“There’s a long history of cathedrals in Europe having a cat,” says Davenport, who's originally from England. “They take care of mice, not that we have mice at Rockefeller, of course—at least not that I’m aware of. If we did, Modo would get them.” From Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century to Julian of Norwich in the 14th century, “there’s just sort of a tradition of people who were associated with great religious buildings having their cats.”

Modo spends his time in the dean’s office, helping Davenport and chapel administrator David Wyka with their work or snuggling with his favorite stuffed bear. He’s even listed in the Sunday bulletin, along with his e-mail address for those who want to send fan mail (he already corresponds with a small following). And now that he's settled, he hopes to start a blog.

His antics liven up staff meetings, entertain visitors, and provide comfort to students missing their pets from home. Several times a week, someone visits the chapel just to see him. Davenport says, “We hope he will be around for a long time and entertain a couple of generations of students.”

This won’t hurt a bit

Ultramodern technology finds a place at the Oriental Institute.

By Benjamin Recchie, AB’03


oi-laser.jpg

I confess that when I was told about a special tour of the Oriental Institute involving “death rays” and ancient artifacts, arranged by William Harms of the University’s News Office for the Chicago Science Writers, I couldn’t help but think about Stargate: SG-1. Upon closer inspection, though, it became clear that this event would have a lot more to do with conserving artifacts than with Richard Dean Anderson. So much the better.

Emily Teeter, PhD'90, research associate at the OI, met our group, accompanied by lab-coat-clad conservators Laura D’Alessandro and Alison Whyte. (“We brought out our good lab coats for this,” confided Whyte.) Teeter led us to the Objects Conservation Lab, where the conservators preserve the artifacts in the OI’s collection. Some artifacts, having been buried for millennia, start to decay upon being unearthed; some decay because of clumsy restoration projects of an earlier generation. Others are coated with pollution from being stored in OI rooms open to the soot-filled Chicago air of the early 20th century. In short, said D’Alessandro, “If they think that something looks unhealthy, they call us.”

The science writers’ interest in the lab rested in the high-tech equipment the conservators use to preserve the past. Whyte uses a scanning electron microscope in the Department of Geophysical Sciences to determine if an artifact has “bronze disease,” a kind of corrosion that can occur when a previously buried artifact is exposed to the air. It’s usually obvious if the fluffy green detritus on the object is bronze disease. However, the treatment is invasive, so the conservators avoid it if there’s any suspicion that it might actually be something else. The microscope can reveal the presence of molecules that make their diagnosis certain. Whyte also uses the electron microscope for investigations; she and Teeter showed a pair of ancient Egyptian makeup palettes that still had cosmetic residue on them; the microscope’s scans revealed the makeup’s exact chemical, uh, makeup.

Then we came to the “death ray," a hand-held infrared laser designed for museums. Called the Compact Phoenix, it vaporizes the top few microns of any residue on an artifact. (See this video of the device in action in Britain.) D’Alessandro explained that each flash of the laser (which, in fact, did faintly resemble a Star Trek phaser) lasts only a fraction of a second, short enough that the all of the beam’s heat is carried away by the vaporized surface material, and none transferred to the artifact. The beam isn’t powerful enough to cause users serious injury (except blindness—the conservators wear heavy-duty protective eyewear when the laser is active). The laser is usually used only when traditional conservation methods have failed, D’Alessandro explained. To demonstrate, she showed a video of the laser being used to remove debris from a strand of fragile, millennia-old Nubian rope.

Last-ditch surgery is far from the lab’s only trade. Teeter consults with the conservators when choosing artifacts for an exhibition, such as the upcoming “Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization.” They can tell her if something is too fragile to be displayed, and sometimes they even suggest a replacement.

The science writers were full of questions. One, referring to the artifacts in front of them, asked how the conservators arrested the aging process. Teeter gestured to her face and joked, “Well, I use cream.”

Remembering Mr. Broder

A journalist shares memories of her mentor, David Broder, AB’47, AM’51.

By Suzannah Gonzales, AB’98


David Broder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who died March 9, has been called the dean of the Washington press corps who set the standard for political reporting. To me he was just Mr. Broder, a mentor.

David Broder

I first met Mr. Broder—I could never bring myself to call him “Dave,” even though his greeting was always “Dave Broder”—in the late 1990s when I worked as a research assistant to Bob Levey, AB'66, then a metro columnist at the Washington Post. It was my first job out of college. Washington and the Post newsroom were intimidating but exciting places during the Lewinsky scandal.

I summoned the courage to approach Mr. Broder's office, which was messy with stacks of paper, to introduce myself. My voice shook. I was a wannabe reporter with close to zero experience. I was sure he was busy and did not have time to talk to me.

He may have been busy, but Mr. Broder welcomed me into his office, and was kind and down-to-earth. His glasses and the pens in his pocket made him human and endearing. That year and periodically over the next several, he took the time to talk with me about journalism and my career, giving me advice about becoming a reporter. While generations and decades of experience separated us, we had a few things in common: we were both from the Chicago area, liked the Cubs and Wrigley Field, were graduates of the University of Chicago, and passionate about journalism.

He suggested that we go out for Cokes, I remember. He took me to lunch. And he laughed while I stood embarrassed when someone in the elevator commented on my platform shoes. (Why did I wear platform shoes to my lunch with David Broder? I will never know. All I can say is that I was young and that Mr. Broder was nice to look past this.)

He helped me land my first full-time reporting job at the Providence Journal, calling an editor there to put in a good word for me as they made their decision. “Yes, she’s still a work in progress,” I remember he recounted of his conversation with the Providence editor. A “but” and other words followed; I wish I could remember what. Whatever they were, they worked. When I shared the news with him that I got the job, he gave me a hug.

We met again in Providence for breakfast when he was in town for a conference. He greeted me warmly and ate Raisin Bran. He told me that the death of legendary publisher Katharine Graham, AB’38, had hit his newsroom hard.

He returned my calls from Florida, where I moved after Providence for another reporting job, and from Austin, where I moved next. We last corresponded about five years ago. I wrote him a letter, congratulating him on winning an alumni award. He wrote me back. He always seemed interested in hearing from me and knowing what I was doing.

I’m not sure why Mr. Broder helped me over the years, but I am grateful for his guidance and encouragement. I’m sad that he’s gone, but I feel lucky to have known him and count him as a mentor.

Free to choose

By Elizabeth Station


Photo courtesy Jonathan-Rashad, CC BY 2.0

After voting in Egypt's March 19 referendum, Mahmoud Khairy, a student at Cairo University who spent a quarter at Chicago, sent this update:

I just came now from voting on the constitutional amendments. I really don't know how to describe it. For the first time in my country I feel I'm a human being. My voice makes a difference. For the past two weeks there have been debates about the amendments in the media and on the internet and from all kind of political analysts and public figures. We had dozens of seminars in our college and in cultural centers. But now the mood is like a festival. Lines stretch as far as you can see with men and women laughing and joking; it's as if we are going out for a picnic. Cars on the streets honking their their horns and holding the Egyptian flag. I live by the pyramids and I saw tourist groups stop their cars to take pictures and videos of us; it was the first time I've seen tourists shoot something other than the pyramids! The new civilization is already beginning.

After the results were in, he wrote:

I voted "aye" and the result gladly came in my favor with 77.2 percent. I believe both choices will have the same result but with different techniques. One will bring the reform through a framework of institutions and laws, while the other will depend solely on the vision of individuals for reform. I trust institutions more.
After I came from voting, I saw TV news coverage of the voting places that showed a mute man casting his vote. Democracy for the first time in his life gave him a voice, something he wasn't even born with. That was the most powerful manifestation I have ever seen for democracy.

A detour worth taking

With a UChicago-style guide, two hours in the Loop cover surprising ground.

By Elizabeth Station


Chicago Detours

Leading a walking tour of the city for Chicago Detours, Amanda Scotese radiates the brisk confidence of a veteran guide and the friendliness of your favorite TA. That’s no accident. Before founding the company in 2010, she did research and tours for Rick Steves in Italy and studied architecture, urbanism, and history in UChicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.

Early in March I joined Scotese for a two-hour tour of downtown Chicago that promised to “explore the Loop without freezing.” About 20 participants—from the city, suburbs, and Oklahoma—gathered in the Chase Tower’s bright lobby on a drizzly morning. “We’re only going to walk half a mile, but there’s a lot to cover,” warned Scotese as she handed out three iPads to designated helpers.

Gathering around the iPads, we watched a short video about the Loop. Then Scotese laid out a two-minute history of Chicago architecture, encouraging us to “decode the cityscape” and “read the visual features” of the buildings around the plaza. We learned, for example, why the Italian Village restaurant stands stubbornly among modernist skyscrapers (the owners refused to sell), and the ornamentation got lopped off the top of the Walgreen’s at Clark and Monroe (lousy mid-20th-century taste).

Walking north on Clark Street, we ducked into the Chicago Temple, which houses the 1923 First United Methodist Church. I had hurried past the polished revolving doors a hundred times but never gone inside, where Scotese revealed the first-floor sanctuary. She greeted a sleeping homeless man and sat us down in the pews to admire the church’s ornate Gothic wood architecture. Next to multihued stained-glass windows depicting Jesus and the disciples, she pointed out surprising details like images of the Gary steel mills and cars winding along Wacker Drive.

Before stepping outside for a look at the Picasso on Daley Plaza, we watched a whimsical video in which Studs Terkel, PhB’32, JD’34, interviewed Chicagoans about the sculpture. “I’d donate to have it removed,” complained one citizen-critic after the piece was unveiled in 1967. “Whatever it is,” mused another, “it’s nice.”

Our next stop was the underground pedway that connects the Daley Center to Block 37. After slurping free samples of frozen kefir at Starfruit, we gathered to hear why the half-empty mall has “become infamous to Chicagoans as a development failure.” Re-emerging at the street-level entrance to Macy’s—in the old Marshall Field’s building—we admired the monolithic granite columns that were the largest in North America when the store opened in 1902.

Huddled in a quiet corner of ladies’ handbags, we scrolled through images from an early Marshall Field’s catalog on our iPads. Scotese talked about the products and services offered 100 years ago and how department stores reflected and shaped women’s changing roles. “Architecture really influences how we feel and behave,” she added, noting the Tiffany mosaic on the ceiling and its inspiration: Byzantine churches from the Middle Ages.

Our final destination was the Chicago Cultural Center, the original home of the Chicago Public Library and—who knew?—the Grand Army of the Republic Museum. Built in 1897, the building houses not one but two exquisite stained-glass domes, the largest that Tiffany designed.

Gazing out at Millennium Park and the Bean, Scotese closed the tour with a poem by Norbert Blei while we watched a video montage of the surrounding streets at night. Chicago is “a city you can’t shake off,” the poet wrote, “a city you sometimes have to imagine to believe.”

Chicago Detours, “for curious people,” offers educational walking tours of the Loop. This summer the company will launch two tours focusing on Chicago music history and the Magnificent Mile. Photos courtesy Chicago Detours.

A basketball coach walks into a gym…

Craig Robinson's Oregon State players prove that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

By Lydialyle Gibson


From the moment Oregon State basketball coach Craig Robinson arrives, his players know what kind of a practice to expect. If he’s not carrying a cup of coffee, they can’t joke around with him. If he’s scowling—“like this,” said senior forward Omari Johnson, twisting his face downward, narrowing his eyes to tiny slits—they don’t even talk to him.

“You have to watch how he smiles around here,” said Johnson. And whether he does.

Johnson and two teammates were describing life under Robinson, MBA’91, who just wrapped up his third season at Oregon State. I’d watched Robinson push his players through three days of practice to prepare for their January 2 game against Arizona. Sometimes he thundered at them; sometimes he almost whispered. Mostly, there was a lot of yelling.

So after practice one afternoon, I took aside a few players, who’ve become keen scholars of their coach’s body language, and asked them: on days when Robinson is in a good mood, how does he walk into the gym?

Immediately, Johnson bounded up and strode across the court, eyes wide, chest out, arms loose, leaning forward eagerly as he pretended to carry a cup of coffee. Teammate Angus Brandt narrated: “See the smile? And the arms are swinging.”

And Robinson’s bad-mood walk?

“If he’s twitching, you’ve gotta watch out,” Brandt said.

Johnson turned and stalked back toward the bench, frowning hard, snatching at his jersey, his arms tight at his sides.

“No arms,” Brandt said.

“He doesn’t have a shave,” chimed in point guard Jared Cunningham.

“His mouth is about this big,” Brandt added, pressing his fingers together.

“His eyes are going back and forth,” said Johnson.

"And," Brandt said, "no coffee."

Coach Craig Robinson, in a better mood than he might be without his coffee. To his left, freshman guard Ahmad Starks, whose pose mirroring the coach isn't an imitation. Photo by Dan Dry.

Bad hops

It’s not a curse that has doomed the Cubs for more than a century. A Chicago economist blames it on the beer.

By Jason Kelly


cheap-beer.jpg

All those people who think Wrigley Field is more of a bar than a ballpark might be onto something. A Chicago economist attempting to explain 102 years of Cubs futility identified a staple of bleacher appeal as a key culprit: cheap beer.

In his recent book Scorecasting, Tobias J. Moskowitz, the Fama Family professor of finance at Chicago Booth, charts Wrigley Field’s highs (ticket prices) and lows (number of wins). He and coauthor L. Jon Wertheim write that neither factor diminishes attendance—in contrast to most other Major League Baseball teams—but that increased beer prices do.

From 1984 to 2009, “attendance was more than four times more sensitive to beer prices than to winning or losing.” That sensitivity is evident at the concession stand. A beer at Wrigley Field, Scorecasting reports, costs just $5, cheaper than everywhere except at Arizona Diamondbacks and Pittsburgh Pirates games.

Tickets to Cubs games, on the other hand, have followed a different trajectory. Since 1990, prices have increased 67 percent (the league average is 44.7 percent). Only the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox command more.

Yet people have continued to pay Wrigley Field’s escalating cover charge, filling the stadium to 99 percent capacity. Across town at US Cellular Field, ticket prices and attendance rise and fall based on White Sox wins and losses, but the same beer will run you a buck-fifty more than at Wrigley.

Current Cubs owner Tom Ricketts, AB’88, MBA’93, who bought the team in 2009, has made capital improvements to the ballpark, enhanced the players’ nutritional regimen, and invested in a stronger scouting network. “But the fact that this philosophy is such a marked departure from that of earlier ownerships,” the authors write, “goes a long way toward explaining the previous century of futility.”

Futility that has been blamed on supernatural forces from a jilted billy goat to Steve Bartman’s outstretched hand. Not superstitious types, Moskowitz and Wertheim argue instead that Wrigley Field’s unusual economics skew the franchise’s incentives. If ticket revenue flows regardless of the team’s performance, the value of winning—and the investment it requires—decreases.

You might even say it’s a curse.

Photo courtesy Wally Gobetz, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sweet ride

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a giant Peep on its roof? Resistance is futile.

By Ruth E. Kott, AM’07


Driving past the University's Lab Schools: not a huge deal. Driving past the Lab Schools in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a giant, yellow Peep on its roof: mayhem breaks loose.

Called the Peepster, this attention-seeking vehicle is currently on a national tour, which started in New York City at the end of March and ends in Washington, DC, in mid-April. The car, says the tour's "chief engineer," Paul Gustafson, "is 100 percent guaranteed to make people smile." On April 4 Gustafson offered to take two Magazine staffers down to campus—the first university-campus stop he's made—to spread the smiles on an otherwise dreary day. And, of course, to help us advertise the deadline extension for the Magazine's UChicago Peeps Diorama Contest. (Come on, peeple, we're giving you more time. Dioramas aren't due until midnight, Sunday, April 10. Take advantage!)

During the drive down Lake Shore, Gustafson shared stories from the tour, like the tweet from Rumor Willis about her Peepster sighting and the school principals who wanted to take a photo with the "hot chick." Once we got to campus, we thought we'd be prepared for the people storming the car looking for photos and free marshmallow candies.

Unless those people were children. As soon as the Peepster came into view of the Lab Schools, children in tidy blue uniforms jumped up from their stretching and started waving their arms. Kids on the playground sprinted up to the gates and grabbed onto the bars. "Can we have some Peeps?" they shouted, before running out and crowding around us—Gustafson had given us packages of chocolate-dipped Peeps to hand out, essentially feeding us to the wolves.

The U of C students and staff were a bit slower to win over. Hesitant at first to approach the truck, the passersby usually responded to a simple call-out: "Do you want some Peeps?" (But not always: a group of faculty somehow ignored the sugary siren call.)

Third-year Megan St. John was excited enough to take a photo with the car to send to her mother. "I love Peeps," she said. "I eat way too many of them. I actually decided ten minutes ago that I was going to start a diet today, and then I walk out and see this car."

Photos by Joy Olivia Miller. See the complete set of Peepster pix at Flickr.

Sound of success

More good news for up-and-coming campus singers Voices in Your Head.

By Asher Klein, ’11


voices-win-again.jpg

Remember when we mentioned that the UChicago a capella group Voices in Your Head was experiencing a "rarefied moment in the sun" this winter because it had been featured on all three major a capella compilation CDs this year?

Well, there's more summery news for Voices: the group won best scholastic original song from the 2011 Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards for "Boomerang," written by MD/PhD student Chris Rishel, with lyrics by Elspeth Michaels, AB'09. The song is available for purchase from iTunes or you can listen to it on YouTube .

The group barely missed out on a trip to the International Championships of A Cappella with a third place finish at the Midwest regional qualifier, held at Northwestern in March. But they did win Outstanding Arrangement for another Rishel-arranged piece, an adaptation of pop tune "Break Your Heart," by Taio Cruz.

Straight talk

Journalist Ted Cox disguised himself as a gay man at meetings and retreats that aimed to “cure” homosexuality.

By Michelle Lee, '14


tedcox-lecture.jpg

Can you turn a gay person straight? Perhaps more importantly, is it ethical to try?

Those were the questions underlying journalist Ted Cox’s lecture last month about his experience going undercover at Christian straight camps. A straight Mormon-turned-atheist, Cox disguised himself as a gay man and, for two years, attended various meetings and retreats that aimed to “cure” homosexuality—that is, turn gay people straight. What Cox discovered was a distorted world of brainwashing, electroshock therapy, and “healing-touch” sessions.

Cox’s lecture, hosted by the University of Chicago Secular Student Alliance, Queers & Associates, The Sacred Flame, and Student Government, was a multimedia presentation involving music, video clips, and audience participation. At one point, to demonstrate an aversion-therapy technique camp participants were taught to overcome their homosexuality, students were instructed to snap rubber bands they had been given beforehand against their arms.

Cox revealed that camp participants were also taught that their homosexuality stemmed from strained father-son relationships—dubbed “The Father Wound”—and other dysfunctional relations. If campers never had such problems, they were convinced otherwise.

The “healing-touch” therapy sessions were purported to fill the supposed void of fatherly love. At Cox's Chicago lecture, several male students were selected from the audience to reenact this therapy. One sat between the legs of and was hugged by another while the others gently rested their hands on his body. Meanwhile, music that had been played at actual therapy sessions filtered through the room: “How could anyone ever tell you/That you’re anything less than beautiful?/How could anyone ever tell you/That you’re less than whole?”

Cox ultimately demonstrated how the tactics of straight-to-gay rehabilitation programs are ineffective at best and, at worst, inflict mental and physical pain on gay people. He further revealed what he suggested was hypocrisy underlying Christian straight-to-gay rehabilitation programs. Many of the founders were discovered to be gay themselves; one was discovered to be an ex-convict. The Christian organizations were also found to be reproducing the letterheads and pamphlets of scientific societies, but replacing the professional counsel with their own in an attempt to mislead educators and prompt them to rehabilitate gay children.

The lecture was solemn yet entertaining, alternating between moving narratives, photographic examples, and comedic asides. It also seems to have provoked an ongoing discussion among University students, as evidenced by the number that stayed afterward to ask questions and continue the conversation.

Once-in-a-lifetime lunch

A 100th birthday celebration attracts some very U of C scholars—and very U of C conversation.

By Amy Braverman Puma


I took a spot in the back of the Quad Club solarium, leaving room for A-list guests closer to the luncheon's honoree, Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase. Still, in the end pretty much everyone who’d come to celebrate Coase’s 100th birthday was A-list, and my out-of-the-way table filled with notables including economist Allen Sanderson, University provost Thomas Rosenbaum, and, sneaking in just after the salad was served, 2007 Nobelist Roger Myerson.

Myerson was still pulling in his chair when economist and New York Times columnist Casey Mulligan shot him a question: “Roger, do you think we should be in Libya?” It took Myerson only a moment to collect his thoughts and respond that, from his perspective, Arab-League and UN approval for the no-fly zone made it a justifiable intervention.

Meanwhile, Sanderson was delighted to be sitting next to Rosenbaum, he told the physicist, because he had a burning question—about the physics of kids’ soccer. “At my granddaughter’s games,” Sanderson said, “whenever the goalie gets the ball, she throws it. Wouldn’t kicking be better?” Yes, Rosenbaum agreed: legs are stronger than arms, so kicking, although less accurate, would get the ball farther down the field.

Ten minutes before the luncheon was scheduled to end, I worried aloud that perhaps no one would speak and I’d have nothing to write about Coase. Myerson generously launched into stories about the Law School professor emeritus, who had turned 100 this past December but whose University celebration had been postponed until late March because it had been too cold for him to venture out. Myerson recalled how, after a 2001 dinner to honor then-incoming University President Don Randel, everyone had left but the Myersons and the Coases, who stayed and talked awhile. On the Myersons' way home, they agreed that, should they live into their 90s, they hoped to be as sharp and interesting as the Coases.

Soon economist Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, a Nobel Prize-winner himself, did get up to speak. He told the room how Coase had been born in England, attended the London School of Economics, and later came to the United States, first to the East Coast but in 1964 settling at the University of Chicago Law School. “It was the first law school, to my knowledge, that had an economist teaching full time,” Becker said. Law School professor Aaron Director had started the Journal of Law and Economics in 1958, and after Director retired in 1965, Coase “really made it into a major and influential journal.” Becker noted that when he first met Coase in 1970, Coase “didn’t say a lot, but I began to realize that every time he did say something, it was really profound.”

Becker discussed Coase’s “four most important papers,” including his 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm" and 1960’s “The Problem of Social Cost,” which was cited when Coase won the 1991 Nobel. When that paper, about bargaining, social costs, and efficiency, was published, Becker said, “I read it, and it seemed revolutionary. I called [George] Stigler [PhD’38] and said, ‘This seems like an important paper.’ George said, ‘Yes, but a lot of people around here don’t think it’s correct.’ I read it again. It seemed correct to me. I assigned it to my class.” The paper laid out what’s now known as the Coase Theorem (although so many people misinterpret it that there's an academic paper (PDF) on whether economists teach it correctly).

“He’s still working,” said Becker, noting that Coase has coauthored a book coming out later this year, How China Became Capitalist (Palgrave Macmillan).

After a tasty chicken meal, Sanderson remarked that we were having “an intimate lunch with four Nobel Prize winners.” Along with Coase, Becker, and Myerson, 1995 laureate and Chicago professor Bob Lucas, AB’59, PhD’64, was also at the lunch. Intimate indeed: afterward I felt like I knew some of them myself.

After Gary Becker (left) addressed the room, Ronald Coase made brief remarks at his 100th birthday lunch.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane

The art of curation

Graduate students help tell the story of a Smart Museum exhibit as a part of their coursework.


Each student in the Materialities of Modern Art course researched, wrote, and revised object labels for two pieces in the Smart Museum's After the Readymade exhibit, curated by PhD student Emily Capper in consultation with art history professor Christine Mehring and assistant curator Jessica Moss.

The exhibit's works are on display until May 1 and include pieces of art that make use of materials from everyday life, like coloring books and sweaters.

‘This is not a treasure hunt’

After Egypt’s revolution, a Chicago archaeologist keeps close watch on the ancient past.

By Elizabeth Station


Egypt had not yet reached a boiling point on January 20, the day I interviewed a group of young faculty in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations for Tableau, the Humanities Division magazine. But for weeks afterward, I couldn’t help wondering how closely Nadine Moeller, an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology, was tracking events there.

Since 2005 Moeller has directed a major archaeological excavation at Tell Edfu, some 475 miles south of Cairo on the Nile River. The site has garnered attention for its unusually well preserved buildings that cast light on early Egyptian economic life. Moeller and her team—which includes her husband, archaeologist and Oriental Institute research associate Gregory Marouard, and three Chicago graduate students—spend every autumn quarter at the site.

With the Middle East in turmoil, Moeller and other scholars have worried about the safety of cultural sites. Egypt differs from Iraq, where looters have raided countless archaeological sites in search of antiquities to sell on the international market. But concerns have been raised about the security of Egyptian sites and storage magazines. Last week, Moeller spoke about the situation from her Chicago office.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen you’re in Chicago, what happens to the excavation site at Tell Edfu?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe site is in the middle of the modern town of Edfu, next to the Temple of Edfu, which is a major tourist attraction. So it actually is located within a protected area that’s marked as an ancient site. The local inspector and the people who are part of the antiquities organization have an on-site office. There’s a fence around it; people can’t really access it. In that respect we’re really lucky compared to sites in the desert where you have no fence and no protection. At Edfu there is also usually a police presence, mainly for the tourists, but they obviously stop anybody from walking on the tell, on our excavation site.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you stay in touch with colleagues there?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI usually call them once every couple of months. There are Egyptians who are really good friends—some of the workers and people from the Edfu inspectorate. When the revolution happened, I called several people just to see whether they were OK, more than anything. And I asked whether they knew anything about the sites and our magazine, which is a protected storage building half an hour north of Edfu. Every object we find on the site is shipped there at the end of our season.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat kinds of artifacts do you find and keep?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe don’t have anything like statues or gold or precious materials. We have a large number of ostraca stored there—around 150 pieces. These are pottery sherds that were inscribed with ink in Hieratic, which is a cursive script of the hieroglyphs, with administrative notes. One of my students, Kathryn Bandy, is writing her PhD on that material. The ostraca give you an insight into the economy of an ancient town at a given period. These are objects that don’t necessarily have a great value for an art museum—but they have a great value for research.
In the magazine we also have a lot of seal impressions; these are pieces of clay impressed by scarab seals. At their base, they have different motifs. Every ancient Egyptian official had his own scarab with his own motif—sometimes it was a name, sometimes just a decorative pattern. They would stamp objects like wooden boxes, doors, baskets—any sort of commodity that was going from Edfu to the capital, for example, or coming from another place to Edfu. We find only the little pieces of broken seals that were discarded once these things were opened.
QandA_QDrop.jpg What do seal impressions tell you?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIn some cases, the seals have the complete names and titles of people like the mayor or the overseer of the temple. When we know their names, we get a glimpse of the people who lived and worked at ancient Edfu and we learn more about their roles within the town and temple administration, which are closely linked. These pieces can also help to date archaeological remains in conjunction with ceramics.
But these objects are very small and fragile. They’re just pieces of sun-dried clay that’s not even fired. We have almost a thousand pieces and they’re just a few centimeters wide, so we store them in a variety of boxes and plastic containers. All this material goes to the magazine and of course, if somebody broke in and went through all that, it would be a mess. But luckily we have managed to take photographs of most of them as well as all the ostraca.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDuring the protests and revolution, were you afraid of looting at Tell Edfu?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI haven’t heard anything that would make me feel worried about the site. The locals and the inspectorate at Edfu have said that everything was fine, even though they had some time without a police presence at the magazine. There’s nothing that made me think there was looting going on.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat about elsewhere in Egypt?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI can only say from hearsay. I also consult a website called the Egyptological Looting Database 2011, which is a site-by-site database of damage to antiquities in Egypt. The looting is nothing on the scale of Iraq, first of all. It’s absolutely not comparable. There are certain instances of problems but mainly in the north, the area around Cairo and the Nile Delta. For example, I heard—which means I have no proof of what the real situation is—that the Austrians working at the site of Tell el Dab’a, in the eastern Delta, had their magazine broken into and some objects were removed.
The south seems pretty normal. I have not heard about problems at Luxor, where we have Chicago House and the Oriental Institute’s Epigraphic Survey. The director, Ray Johnson, has been in Egypt through the revolution; he never left. They just finished the season and he was saying everything was fine.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen will you return to Tell Edfu and what will you work on next?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’m planning to go back in the autumn again because we have an NEH grant for the project. I don’t think there’ll be much change from before—that’s just my feeling.
We basically finished our main excavation area for the past five years that focused on the excavation of a large granary court, a major grain reserve for the town; there are lots of silos for grain storage as well as an earlier administrative building complex.
And now we’re going to start work on a new area to find out about the earliest settlement remains at the town. We’re looking for the origins of Edfu and for any types of buildings from official to private houses. We’re going to be excavating in an area that’s very close to the much-later temple. So I think we might be in more of an official quarter than a purely domestic area.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you hope to find?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’m hoping we’ll find proof that Edfu already existed in the Third Dynasty, at the time of King Djoser [2667–2648 BC]. There are some indications that Edfu already existed then, but we don’t have any archaeological evidence yet. I would like to find some archaeological data or proof to show that Edfu was actually founded much earlier than we thought it was. We know so little about these very early periods of ancient Egyptian history, so it would add a lot to our research and understanding of the origins of an urban center and regional capital, which is what ancient Edfu was.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAre you nervous about returning?
QandA_ADrop.jpgObviously we have to see what the situation at the magazine is. We are also starting a new project at a small pyramid about four kilometers south of Edfu. We'll focus on the cleaning and conservation of this monument to create public awareness for its protection, since it's currently endangered by a fast-growing modern cemetery and village in the vicinity. This is also the last undisturbed pyramid among a group of small step pyramids that were erected in the provinces at the end of the Third Dynasty.
But the site is currently not protected very well, and the local people saw us spending two days there last year. So you never know; they might think there must be treasure there—why else would foreigners be interested in a heap of stones? Whether you have a revolution or not, unfortunately, it’s something that can happen from time to time regardless of the political situation.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s the best way to protect sites from looting, regardless of politics?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe best strategy is to create awareness among the population about the importance of their cultural heritage and the need to protect ancient sites—to make them realize that this is not a treasure hunt; we’re actually trying to understand and study the Egyptian past. The more you can educate people about the meaning and importance of their own past, the more they will protect the sites.

UChi Bizarre-ketplace: What do you want and why?

A sampling of what UChicagoans want—or at least what they’re advertising for in the Wanted section on Marketplace.

By Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93


WANTED: SONGWRITERS?

I’m pretty open to any style of collaboration–– I can write words for your music, music for your words, a bit of both, or we can just meet to test and swap ideas.

My big songwriting influences are Hank Williams, Kurt Cobain, and Rogers & Hammerstein.



WANTED: Portable AM radio

I'm looking for a portable radio that gets AM reception. I've tried a few before but they don't come in well where I work, in the stacks at the Reg. Now that I work on the B level I'm even less hopeful but if you have one that you think would be strong enough, please let me know.



WANTED: Models!

Are you interested in fashion or a career in modeling? If so, come to our casting call. We are looking for beautiful models for print in magazines and in fashion. Even if you have never modeled before, you never know what kind of talent you have inside you. I welcome anyone who has ever wanted to try to be in front of a camera. Pricing is negotiable and affordable and offers you a chance to get plugged into America's hottest fashion scenes! Our professional studios are located right here in Hyde Park!



WANTED: Participants for a Collaborative Video Art Kickstarter Project about LAKE MICHIGAN

Songs recorded on answering machines are so so nice. Exceptional & unforgettable is the sound of a jubilant voice through a phone line - and this special quality of audio is the kind I've chosen to apply in harmony with this video piece, SING TO ME: Lake Michigan.

How you can support and become involved in the project:

  • Collaborate by pledging to a SINGING SPOT, where you are given a chance to sing about Lake Michigan
  • There are 12 'Singing Spots' available for this project - reserve yours by pledging $10.00.*
  • When all $120 is raised, you will receive an e-mail with a special SING TO ME telephone number.
  • When you are ready, you will call and leave a 1 - 30 second freestyle or practiced song about Lake Michigan after the beep.

Note: All songs must be free of profanity, blasphemy, & general negativity/improperness. Total discretion is given to the artist to cut a song for any of the above reasons.

This song message will then be gathered with the other songs and incorporated with video art images from the Lake.

The final video art piece will be submitted to Chicago galleries and select film festivals.

*lowered from $30!

Raiders of the lost cornerstone

Just what did Enrico Fermi put in that time capsule, anyway?

By Benjamin Recchie, AB’03


The University campus is about to lose a long-time fixture, the Research Institutes building at Ellis Avenue and 57th Street. The RI, as it was called, was built just after World War II as a home for the children of the Manhattan Project: the Institute for Nuclear Research (now the Enrico Fermi Institute) and the Institute for the Study of Metals (now the James Franck Institute). But now more than six decades old and obsolete, the building is coming down this year to make way for the shiny new William Eckhardt Research Center.

In razing the RI, a minor campus mystery will be solved: just what did Enrico Fermi put in the cornerstone time capsule in 1949? Secrets from the Manhattan Project? Laura Fermi's meatball recipe? A singing cartoon frog? Maybe nothing at all?

You can find out during Alumni Weekend (you are coming to Alumni Weekend, right?) on Thursday, June 2, at 4 p.m., when the Physical Sciences Division will ceremonially open the time capsule. But in the meantime, write your best guesses in in the comments below or at our Facebook discussion. Anyone who gets it right will earn themselves a bit of U of C swag, courtesy of the Magazine.

Photo courtesy of the Archival Photographic Files, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

After bin Laden: now what?

UChicago terrorism expert Robert Pape and PhD candidate Jenna Jordan discuss the implications of the al Qaeda leader’s death.

By Amy Braverman Puma


pape-press-conf.jpg

The afternoon press conference had begun about five minutes before I slipped into the Gleacher Center lounge. I missed the statement by suicide-terrorism expert Robert Pape, PhD'88, about what Osama bin Laden's death could mean (if it was anything like what he had told several news outlets Monday morning, it was that bin Laden's death offered an opportunity to seriously scale down the war against terrorism). Now Jenna Jordan, AM'03, one of Pape's doctoral students at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, was addressing the handful of local Chicago reporters and TV cameras. Jordan, who studies how "leadership decapitation" affects terrorist organizations, said killing a group's leader "rarely brings about the demise of a terrorist group."

Jordan's research (pdf) has shown that terrorist organizations that are more than 20 years old, have more than 500 members, and are religious (rather than separatist or otherwise motivated) are the most stable and the hardest to dismantle. Al Qaeda, she said, fits the bill, indicating that in the case of bin Laden, "decapitation alone is not likely to be effective." (Read Jordan's editorial from today's Chicago Tribune. —Ed)

In fact, targeting such an organization's leader "can actually increase their resilience" and retaliatory attacks, Jordan said. In 2004, for example, when Israeli air strikes killed high-profile Hamas leaders, the group retaliated and gained support, winning Palestinian elections soon after. (So the answer, to get back to Pape's point that I missed but was now implied, is to pull out of Afghanistan quickly.)

After the two researchers' brief statements, they opened the floor to questions. Pape, the author of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, argued that getting American ground forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan would decrease attacks. Keeping troops there fuels anger and helps terrorist groups recruit. "If we can lessen hostility toward the US," he said, "we lessen support for the organization itself." Because suicide organizations by nature always need more members, they "depend on the next generation," Pape said. "Walk-in volunteers are motivated by anger about the presence of ground forces." In Iraq, he noted, as the United States has withdrawn troops, the number of attacks has fallen.

Finding bin Laden, Pape noted, was "an intelligence problem," not a military one. "Once you have accurate intelligence, you don't need lots of people on the ground." The United States should take this opportunity, he argued, to get much of the military out and keep a smaller, smarter presence in place.

Robert Pape and Jenna Jordan speak with reporters at the Gleacher Center.

Q&A with the bassist of Squat the Condos

Alan Mendelsohn, '12, talks to UChiBLOGo about college life as a rocker.

By Asher Klein, '11


squatthecondos.jpg

One of a few University of Chicago bands currently playing on campus, Squat the Condos is very excited for you to hear their second EP, We Should Be Together, which they've put online for download.

The line-up is Coby Ashpis, ’13, guitar and vocals; David Crespo, ’12, guitar; Etan Heller, ’13, drums; and Alan Mendelsohn, ’12, bass. They’ve been playing for a year-and-a-half, since they formed in the basement of Max Palevsky, and claim that no other band plays as many shows in Hyde Park as they do—from house parties to official University events, like a Green Campus Initiative's "No Trash Bash."

UChiBLOGo sat down with Mendelsohn to find out what it’s like to be in a UChicago band, how they balance school and music, and where their name comes from.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you guys find each other?
QandA_ADrop.jpgMe and David were suite-mates our freshman year, so the University found us.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow would you describe your sound?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe always say on our description, “fresh and dynamic,” but it is kind of like that. It’s kind of like power-pop. It’s hard to classify genre-wise; it’s always dangerous to do that. We have kind of a fun, energetic, lively sound. ... I was thinking about this recently, and bands just have a sound. It comes naturally. I can’t think of a band that I listen to that doesn’t have their own sound, like the Strokes have that Strokes sound, the White Stripes have their sound. Coby writes the songs, and he’s a really distinct and good songwriter ... and everyone in the band puts their own two cents in.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDo you have any inspirations?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe usually say the Pixies, early Weezer. We like the Flaming Lips a lot.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen did you first start playing shows?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe practiced for the first couple of months [in Fall 2009] to try to get a set in order to play. We started to play shows by winter quarter, I think, infrequently. We played a house party at [fraternity] AEII once, I think we played a birthday party or something. A couple things here and there, and then we played the Battle of the Bands in the spring, some other shows in the spring. At some point we played off campus. We played at Cal’s Bar.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you guys balance schoolwork and music? Is it tough?
QandA_ADrop.jpgEveryone at UChicago has to devote most of their time to doing their schoolwork, so Monday through Thursday we’re generally working. Friday night is usually when we practice. Sometimes we’ll have a show one of those nights, and we’ll practice sometime during the week to prepare for that. One practice a week for a couple of hours is not really that much. Recording was a little bit more time. It’s a sizeable time commitment, but now that we have our 15-song set list and we know our songs, it’s not an ongoing time commitment, now it’s just fun. We get to play.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhere’d you play April 15-17?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe played at the Pepperland [an apartment building on 57th and Harper], which is one of our favorite shows yet. Every time we get invited to play a show, we look at the Facebook event and there’ll be 300 people attending and we’ll say, “Aw yeah, this’ll be our best show yet!” And there’s no one there. ... [At the Pepperland] Coby had this brilliant idea to run this surge protector and strip through a [basement] window and into another surge protector—essentially an extension cord. So we set up all of our stuff out in the courtyard, and there’s 150 people surrounding us. There’s no stage, just us. ... I think live bands should be more a part of parties.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhere did your name come from?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWe were struggling so hard to come up with a name second year. There was a long time where we were not named, and it just got to a point where it was ridiculous. We wanted to be serious, we needed a name. Finally, Coby saw graffitied somewhere, “Squat the condos.” Originally when you Googled it, there’s some kind of anarchist rap artist in Chicago named Squat the Condos. You can find it, but I’ve never listened to it. (It’s the name of NY rapper Propaganda Anonymous’s album. —Ed.)
QandA_QDrop.jpgYou mentioned being serious about the band. How do you do that here?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThat is tough. We try to play as many shows as we can. We recorded our EP at the beginning of the year. We wanted to get good recordings of all our stuff. ... We spent like three full days on it. That was A Ghoul since Lollipop EP, but it didn’t really do much. We weren’t happy about it. This year we had all these songs, and we wanted to do a more serious recording. We were going to do it ourselves, but all of a sudden we got an e-mail from Eric Mayer of Lakesigns. They have a house in Pilsen where three of them live, and in the basement, they have a recording studio setup with an 8-track cassette recorder and a huge mixing table, all stuff they bought on eBay. It was pretty fantastic. ... That’s what we did all of last quarter. We basically played no shows—only two or three—and we recorded every weekend. We’d go up to Pilsen every day, and Friday night. It was a freezing basement. It was us, Eric Mayer, and his dog.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you guys plan to make it get big?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThat’s the problem. Putting out the EP and then sending it out to everyone we possible can. ... At the same time, it’s been pretty successful, in terms of being able to play shows on campus. It’s a lot of fun. We didn’t really start it to become famous, and we’re all working on getting internships and applying to law school. If something were to happen between now and when we graduate that made it seem like it would be worth investing more time into it, then we would do that.

Catch Squat the Condos Saturday at 3:30 p.m. on Bartlett Quad for a campus battle of the bands, and at the Elbo Room on May 4 for a city-wide battle.

Squat the Condos squatting an elevator.

Photo courtesy of Squat the Condos.

Rated R for nonviolence

A new documentary on the Freedom Rides, set to air May 16 on PBS, makes its Chicago debut at the DuSable Museum

By Lydialyle Gibson


freedom-riders-panel.jpg

It was just a few minutes before showtime when I arrived at the DuSable Museum's cavernous auditorium on a Saturday afternoon last month. The museum was screening a new documentary, Freedom Riders, about the hundreds of young activists who boarded southbound buses in 1961 to challenge segregation in interstate transit and met with violence along the way. The place was packed, but I found a seat up front next to an African American woman and her son, who was perhaps 7 or 8 years old. “Now, be still,” she told him as the lights darkened. “Pay attention.”

He did. His eyes were wide as saucers when the Freedom Riders’ bus was burned near Anniston, Alabama; when they were attacked at a bus station in Montgomery and the police stood by; when the Freedom Riders were sent to prison in droves at Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Farm.

The documentary, which airs May 16 on PBS’s American Experience, follows civil-rights activists’ path into the Deep South aboard Greyhound and Trailways buses. (Chicago alumna Carol Ruth Silver, AB’60, JD’64, was among them.) The film doesn’t shrink from the breathtaking savagery of the racism they faced. More than once, the DuSable Museum's audience recoiled or gasped or shook their heads in unison.

After the film, University of Chicago historian Adam Green moderated a Q&A with director Stanley Nelson and three of the Freedom Riders: Thomas Armstrong, Genevieve Hughes Houghton, and Dan Stevens. They talked about their earliest awakenings to racial prejudice and the experiences that motivated them to activism. “Any individual can do good,” Stevens said. “I’m not anybody special.”

They talked about school-age bullying, economic inequality, and how the recent nonviolent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia mirrored 1960s civil-rights struggles. “Once again you see the power people have to make change,” Nelson said. Stevens called nonviolence a tool that Americans should redeploy for social justice. “I don’t think nonviolence abandoned us; I think we abandoned nonviolence,” he said. “And I think once again we’re going to need it.”

“Being raised up in Mississippi,” added Armstrong, who helped register black voters there between 1958 and 1961, “it made absolutely no sense to use violence. Because it meant you were dead the next day. Nonviolence to me was not a tactic; it was a way of life. If you stepped beyond those boundaries for blacks at that time, there were consequences.”

Toward the end of the Q&A, Nelson started talking about his children, and about the importance of helping them understand their own history. “We have to figure out how to talk to our kids,” Nelson told listeners. “One thing that happens, especially with African Americans, is that we want to shield our kids from the racism in this country, but then when they get old enough, it’s too late.” They don't want to hear about history.

“Uh-huh,” chimed more than one audience member. “That’s right.”

“And also,” Nelson continued, “we have to say, ‘It’s up to you all now.’ All revolutions are made by young people. They just are.”

The final question of the afternoon came from a young boy, perhaps 12 years old, at the back of the auditorium. Standing on his toes to reach the microphone, he asked: “Did you guys ever lose hope, or ever think of giving up?”

There was a pause. Then Armstrong said, “Yes. Progress is not as fast as you wish it to be, and you can become disenchanted about it. But in Mississippi, we opened up a closed society, a closed education system, and a closed political system.”

Added Stevens: “Hope never gave up on us.”

After the screening, director Stanley Nelson and Freedom Riders Thomas Armstrong, Genevieve Hughes Houghton, and Dan Stevens (left to right) take questions from the audience and from U of C historian Adam Green.

Pipe dream comes true

Acclaimed organist Paul Jacobs performs at Rockefeller Chapel.

By Kyle Gorden, AB'00


Paul Jacobs is one of those people whose name can’t be mentioned without using superlatives. The New York Times called him a “wizard”; the Wall Street Journal said he had “mental clarity, stamina, and virtuosity…in abundance”; and the Atlanta Journal Constitution described him as “an artist of boundless talent.” But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Jacobs is his instrument: the pipe organ. As Gramophone put it, “If there is such a thing as an organ prodigy, Paul Jacobs seems to be it.”

On Sunday, May 15, Jacobs takes the reins of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel’s restored 1928 E. M. Skinner organ for a concert in the Brian Gerrish Organ Performance Series, performing Maurice Duruflé’s Suite Op. 5, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Gigue Fugue, Max Reger’s Symphonic Fantasia and Fugue, Op. 57 (Inferno), and the Chicago premiere of Reverie by contemporary American composer Wayne Oquin.

At just 33, Jacobs has long since taken the organ world by storm. He joined the faculty of the Juilliard School in 2003 and became chair of the organ department in 2004, one of the youngest faculty appointees in the school’s history. His performance awards include first prize in the 1998 Albert Schweitzer National Organ Competition, and he is the only organist to receive the Harvard Musical Association’s Arthur W. Foote Award or a Grammy Award for best instrumental soloist performance (without orchestra).

Known for his virtuoso marathon performances of the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen (spanning nine hours) and of Bach (at an astounding 18 hours), Jacobs is also noted as an expressive performer. “Smooth, sinuous, flowing, tender: Those are not adjectives always applied to organ playing, but they fit when Jacobs is the one doing it,” wrote the Washington Post in reviewing a Kennedy Center performance that “show[ed] the open passion of a young man intoxicated with music, longing for big statements, lovingly lingering over a golden fugue and ending with a gentle chord of submission, like a bowed head.”

Tickets for the 3 p.m. concert Sunday will be available at the door: $10 for general admission, $5 for seniors, free for students. For more information visit the event’s page or call 773.702.2100.

The May Day myth

No, Dialogo doesn't cast a hammer and sickle shadow on May 1—or on any other day of the year.

By Benjamin Recchie, AB'03


Dialogo sketchAs part of this year's Scav Hunt item #277, a kind of Scav-within-Scav (pdf) designed to set the world record for biggest scavenger hunt, contestants were asked to find which building on the quads has a Ferrari out front. It was a trick question, of course: the building is Albert Pick Hall for International Studies, and the "Ferrari" is not an exotic sports car but the 1971 statue Dialogo, by then-University artist in residence and professor of art Virginio Ferrari. As a generation of U of C tour guides have pointed out, Dialogo is the abstract sculpture surreptitiously designed to cast a shadow of a hammer and sickle, the international symbol of communism, on Pick's east wall on May 1—a kind of leftist finger in the eye to the University's famously capitalistic Economics Department. It's a compelling and much-retold story, the only problem being that it is not true.

The debunker of this myth is Will Vaughan, a fourth-year in the College, president of the Ryerson Astronomical Society, and self-described sundial enthusiast. Vaughan has long been suspicious of the hammer-and-sickle story. "The sun's altitude at noon changes very slightly from day to day, even near the equinoxes, so Dialogo's shadow should still resemble a hammer and sickle on April 30 or May 2," he point out. Also, the sun in the same place in the sky at noon twice a year. Since May 1 is 52 days before the summer solstice, the sun would shine at the same angle 52 days after the solstice as well. Thus, he says, "Dialogo should cast the same shadow at noon on August 14 as it does at noon on May 1." There's also the question of what "noon" is. Is it 12:00 local time, or is it solar noon, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky (which is at 12:48 PM on May 1)? Finally, he says, he saw the shadow for himself: "The sickle's OK, but the hammer's not right at all!"

While proving that the statue didn't cast such a shadow in practice may have been good enough at some universities, Vaughan decided (in true UChicago fashion) to prove it couldn't work in theory, either. First, he built a simple model of the statue in Google Sketchup, then verified its accuracy by simulating its shadow for May 1 and comparing that to his observations. He started building a more detailed model "when I realized that the geometry of the sculpture ruled out the possibility of its shadow ever looking much like the Communist hammer and sickle."

"There are three problems with the shadow," Vaughan says. "The sickle curves too much at its end, the hammer's handle crosses the sickle too close to the sickle's handle, and the hammer doesn't really look like a hammer. The third problem is the important one—the geometry of the hammer arms of Dialogo makes it impossible for these arms to cast a more hammer-like shadow." Instead of a hammer and sickle, the shadow resembles...well, I'm not sure what, exactly. (A sickle and two crossed golf clubs? "Duffers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your bogies!")

Vaughan says that if Ferrari had really wanted the shadow to resemble a hammer and sickle, all he would have had to do was swap the short element on the northeast corner of the sculpture with the tall hammer-like one on the northwest corner. He has helpfully provided a more detailed explanation with diagrams (PDF).

If you're still not convinced by Vaughan's research, then maybe you'll believe the words of the artist himself. In the May/June 1971 University of Chicago Magazine, Ferrari says:

"What I want to call to mind in this sculpture are the four corners of the world. Three of the four forms emerge from strong, geometric elements, representing the diversity, pain, and depression in the life on any continent. They rise up slowly and become soft and delicate; two of the forms almost touch in the center in a caressing manner. The third, almost a circle, hovers over the two, to suggest protection and security for the life of tomorrow. The fourth form represents a big wave, symbolic of the water that surrounds and unites all the continents."

As for the rumor that the sculpture scared the Economics Department out of the new Pick Hall, Vaughan debunked that, too. With the help of the University of Chicago Library's Special Collections, he determined that the Economics Department was never based in Pick Hall, and never planned to move there. In any case, stressing the unity of the four corners of the world doesn't seem as Marxist as it does internationalist, which makes sense when you realize that the building's namesake, Albert Pick Jr., was the former chairman of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. So much for that.

What a circus

Chicago arts supporters stepped right up for a night of female-produced entertainment.

By Katherine Muhlenkamp


On a rainy April evening in Humboldt Park, I arrived at the Kimball Arts Center for the annual Ag47 arts showcase. An arts-mentorship program founded last spring by Virginia Killian Lund, AB’04, Katie Hottinger, AB’05, and Cara Clifford, AB’07, along with five other local women, Ag47 sponsors art workshops for Logan Square girls ages 11 to 16.

In addition to improv sketches and other live entertainment, the circus-themed showcase featured artwork by the women and girls of Ag47, including colorful paper-mâché animal masks, an exhibit of assorted “healing potions” in a wooden medicine cabinet, and postcard collages described in the Winter 2011 Core. All the art was for sale, and I snagged a marvelous mixed-media portrait of a half-zebra, half-woman. “Ugh, I wanted that one,” someone groaned from behind.

Gloating over my acquisition, I hustled off and caught a few scenes from the event:

circus-sign.jpg

The most popular “circus booth” was Poetry Kapow! Participants shared facts about their lives, which the Ag47 scribes used to create personalized poems.

circus-kapow.jpg

A visitor contemplates the postcard collages, created out of red and yellow tissue paper and black-and-white images of circus animals and performers. On one collage an elephant sported a long, rolled-up piece of gold paper extending from his trunk and small paper flowers tucked behind his ears.

circus-postcards.jpg

Paper-mâché animal masks lined the wall.

circus-masks.jpg

Daley show

Braced for more urban-policy fights, the former Chicago mayor begins a five-year Harris School appointment July 1.

By Jason Kelly


Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, whom President Zimmer introduced Tuesday as a new distinguished senior fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, will coordinate ten guest lectures about urban issues. Daley put the University's task, and his impending part in it, in more pugnacious terms: "to combat these problems that gnaw at the fabric of cities."

He has come to the right place to continue the urban-policy fights that marked his political career. "The tradition of the University is to have vehement and sometimes destructive argument about every topic that's raised," Harris School Dean Colm O'Muircheartaigh said. "We feel that [Daley's] training as mayor for the last 22 years has equipped him well to participate in our discussions."

Saying he only hoped the University could offer the sort of bracing confrontations that Daley took on as mayor, O'Muircheartaigh added, "I feel confident, having been dean for only a couple of years, that the faculty and the students will provide all the trouble he could ever hope to face."

Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley addresses a gathering of scholars, researchers, urban planners and other City of Chicago leaders for the first Future of the City event held Feb. 1 at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Photo by Dan Dry

Writing on the stall

A graffiti list of undergrad dreams.

By Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93


Unlike Quinn Dombrowski, AM’06, I am an amateur graffiti appreciator. I only occasionally read it. I never document it.

Until last week. I found the following “Before I die” graffiti, scribbled on the back of the door of the first-floor women’s bathroom in the Reynolds Club, to be oddly moving.

This bathroom is used almost exclusively by young people, and their collaborative bucket list reflects that. Some of the dreams listed are grandiose. Some are small and reasonable. A few are just really, really bad ideas.

I stopped at 24. There were more. I had sat in the stall, fully clothed and audibly scribbling, long enough.

I had to make a second trip for the photo.

I remain merely an amateur.


Before I die, I want to…

  1. Publish a play
  2. [Sleep with] Charlie Sheen (later commentary added: "Rethink this one")
  3. Find inner peace
  4. Finish a play
  5. Be thanked in an Oscars speech
  6. See the Earth from space
  7. Fall in love
  8. Recover
  9. Love my job
  10. Swim w/ dolphins
  11. Have there be the world I want to live in
  12. Feel like I’ve lived the dreams I have today
  13. Make a pilgrimage
  14. Purchase a $12,000 camera
  15. Have a Wikipedia page on me
  16. Save a life
  17. Earn a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, and a National Book Award
  18. Travel the world
  19. Transition
  20. Give birth
  21. Make the Dean’s list
  22. Figure out what I want
  23. Plant a garden
  24. Get a pet lizard

Waiting for super-cops

In South Africa, public fear of violence feeds a popular obsession with crime.

By Elizabeth Station


“Our ideas about crime cannot be separated from our idea of truth,” anthropologist Jean Comaroff argued in this year's Ryerson Lecture. In contemporary South Africa, many citizens believe that the country has turned into “a Hobbesian war zone.” Post-apartheid, said Comaroff, there is the widespread conviction, “especially among whites and the new black middle class, that policing is ineffective, that an economy of violence and corruption has taken root, that civil and moral order can no longer be presumed.”

Comaroff based her remarks on The Truth About Crime, a book-in-progress that explores South Africans’ fixation with crime and detection in both their personal lives and public culture. She is coauthoring the study with her husband, John Comaroff; both are distinguished professors of anthropology who divide their time between Chicago and the University of Cape Town.

“South Africa exhibits high rates of lawlessness, to be sure,” Comaroff told listeners in Max Palevsky Auditorium. Yet statistically, violent crime kills fewer South Africans than do AIDS, heart disease, and car accidents. Stoked by sensational headlines, blaring car alarms, and TV crime shows, the public’s fear of rape and murder is disproportionate to risk. “South Africans are captivated by images of law and disorder, the more dire the better,” she said. “Many remain convinced that democracy has, with tragic irony, deprived them of their basic right to safety and protection.”

As anxiety grows, citizens have also embraced unconventional crime fighters and policing techniques. "Diviner-detective” and police colonel “Donker” Jonker, for example, created an occult-related crimes unit in 1992 to investigate homicides stemming from witchcraft. Next came the Scorpions, a now-defunct, FBI-trained police force that investigated smuggling and government corruption and staged televised raids on the homes of African National Congress politicians like Jacob Zuma. In the rural northwest—far from the national spotlight—the Comaroffs studied a case in which local police investigated a poor family’s complaint of assault by a tokoloshe, which, “as all South Africans know, is a squat, hairy, witch's familiar." Police didn’t solve the crime, but they called on both the media and a prophet-healer to help.

Such cases “bespeak a loss of trust in the will or the capacity of the state to enforce order,” Comaroff argued. Yet South Africa is not the only place where the public is obsessed with crime and detection—or where “the complex interplay of the state and the market has rendered authority ambiguous, inscrutable, ghostly.” In present-day Egypt—and previously, in post-socialist Central Europe and nascent Latin American democracies—political change ushered in "periods of moral ambiguity, legal uncertainty, and social disorder," said Comaroff. "In this light, South Africa is decidedly unexceptional."

The super-cop, or diviner-detective, "may be an apt embodiment of the paradoxes of law, order, and sovereignty in places and times rapidly outrunning the logos of modernity," she concluded. "But this figure also personifies a persisting faith in the possibility of a legible world."

On May 27–28 Jean and John Comaroff will participate in UChicago's African Studies Workshop spring conference, “Time, Place, and the Problem of Uncertainty in Africa." See the conference website for details.

Photo by Dan Dry

Signal to noise

In defense of the cassette tape.

By Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93


cassettes

Readers of a certain age, perhaps you, like me, still have a small selection of cassette tapes in your possession, which you hang onto for sentimental reasons. Mine are from high school (U2, Under a Blood Red Sky) and the period between college and graduate school, when I was traveling (Nirvana, Nevermind, and Sugar, Copper Blue). Not to mention the mixtapes made for me by random boys trying to improve my musical tastes, and their chances.

Ah, cassettes. Getting caught in the spools of your cassette player. Melting if you forgot them in the car on a hot day. Forcing you to rewind or fast-forward if you disliked a particular song. And distorting if you rewound or fast-forwarded them too much.

For years, these plastic leftovers have seemed ancient and a little embarrassing—the inferior products of an inferior age. No more. Cassette owners of the world, rise up, for tapes have become trendy—even though they were never particularly trendy before. Eric Hanss, ’11, who serves as program manager of WHPK and runs his own cassette-tape label, Field Studies, explains.


QandA_QDrop.jpgDefend the cassette to me.
QandA_ADrop.jpgAll right.
The cassette is great on a lot of different fronts. For people in the do-it-yourself, underground music scene, there is a long historical usage of cassettes as a revolutionary medium, going back to the late 1970s. When people couldn’t afford to press LPs, they’d use cassettes.
A lot of experimental and underground music and noise has been on cassettes for forever. So people see a cassette and there’s instantly a connection with an earlier time. There’s a grad student in the anthropology department [Brian Horne, AM'04] who’s writing his dissertation on folk music that was banned in the Soviet Union. These tapes were dubbed and dubbed and dubbed, to the point where you couldn’t hear anything on the tape at all. You’d have a 12th-generation tape circulating. But everyone already knew the lyrics, so the point was moot. What you could hear is every single person in the chain being in contact with you.

Eric Hanss

Cassettes make great art objects. They’re substantial. They’re the perfect size for really cool, small-scale graphic designs. They’re also the perfect size to trade with people or just give to someone. It feels good to have a cassette in your hand. Cassettes are so cheap that you can sell a cassette on tour for $5 and make some money to get to the next town. A cassette is the price of a beer at a club, so it makes a lot of sense.
And then personally, I really like the sonic aspect of them. The lows are boosted, the highs are clipped. There’s a noise floor, the cassette hiss, so instead of having a clean stereo space, there’s something different and weird going on. There’s a space to the medium itself that it imposes on the music.
So that’s why I really like cassettes. For the past couple years I’ve done mostly cassette-only shows.
QandA_QDrop.jpg Really?
QandA_ADrop.jpg Yeah. For the past year, more and more DJs have been bringing cassettes. A lot of music that’s really great, that really fits in with the do-it-yourself punk-rock thing that we have going on at WHPK, is starting to be only released on cassette.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat kind of music do you release?
QandA_ADrop.jpgField Studies releases underground experimental sound that engages with the broad concept of imagined space or spaces. Much of the music could be classified as drone, meditation music, inner journeys, or sound art. I’m primarily interested in non-narrative music that provides a tableau on which the listener can project their imagination or engage with the sonic space of the content.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen did you get started?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe very first Field Studies release came out in the summer of 2009 as a benefit tape. The label has only been highly active since the fall of 2010. I’ve put out five cassettes and one CD-R since then. I have six slated for release in late May and late June.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow many bands are on your label?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’ve done releases by eight different performers/groups so far: Astronaut, Faceworker, Cloaked Light, White Prism, 56K, Slag Heap, Lunar Miasma, and Quicksails. I have releases coming from Bil Vermette, Brett Naucke, Panabrite, Agnes, Dolphins into the Future, and Ultradome.
There are no bands “on” Field Studies, save perhaps Floating Gardens, which is my solo project. I am currently weighing how I would like to handle repeat appearances by the artists on Field Studies, if at all. Many artists have multiple recording aliases that are each a different facet of that individual’s output, or they play in different combos with other performers.
Many cassette labels are not run in the same way conventional labels are. Every single artist I’ve worked with thus far (and all of the artists I’m currently working with) runs their own label. Most agreements are done by word of mouth. The New Age scene is especially close knit, so this process generally involves asking friends or new acquaintances if they would be interested in doing a tape. There are no contracts. Field Studies operates in this way.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIs this something you plan on doing for the long term?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI plan to release cassettes for the long term under the no-profit business model. Whether that is with Field Studies, I don’t know.
Like many other cassette labels, Field Studies is designed under a specific mission. I currently have projects for two sub-labels in the works, as I’m afraid that Field Studies is falling into a trap that I’ve seen other labels fall into. I’m personally not interested in running Field Studies as a standard label with increasingly active promotion and visibility. While I do want the artists I work with to succeed and reach broader audiences, I don’t want cassettes to become generic commodities.
The sub-labels allow me to work creatively with the idea of what a label identity is.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow many copies of recordings have you sold, and for how much per cassette?
QandA_ADrop.jpgEvery release is printed in an edition of 45-100. I have 25 copies total remaining from my last two batches. The retail price for each cassette is $7, but some are sold at lower distribution prices to record stores, while many others are traded, given away, or sold at live shows for less. All told, 500 have passed through my hands in one way or another.
Cassettes photo CC BY-SA 2.0 by Alberto Garcia; portrait of Hanss by Aaron Opie.

Alumni Weekend in review

Already ready to relive Alumni Weekend 2011? Check out photos posted to Facebook or view the photos submitted to our Flickr group in the embedded slideshow below.

Enrico Fermi and the time capsule of doom

The cornerstone's contents revealed!

By Benjamin Recchie, AB'03


opening the time capsule

pamphletsLast Thursday Dean of the Physical Sciences Robert Fefferman presided over the public opening of the time capsule that Enrico Fermi placed in the cornerstone of the Research Institutes building 62 years ago. In front of a crowd of students, faculty, alumni, and a few TV news crews, emeritus physics professors Riccardo Levi-Setti and Roger Hildebrand opened the capsule to reveal:

  • University of Chicago directory

  • University of Chicago announcements (i.e., class schedules) from 1948

  • Architect’s sketch of the Research Institutes building

  • Booklet: “The New Frontier of Industry—Atomic Research"

  • Booklet: “The Institute for Nuclear Studies, The Institute for the Study of Metals, The Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics”

  • Timetables for several airlines (United, Capital, BOAC, Trans Canada, American, and TWA) and railroads (Union Pacific, New York Central)

  • Mobilgas road map of Indiana

  • List of postdoctoral fellows, Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics, 1948-49

  • Buffalo nickel from 1927, which wasn't in the time capsule proper but rather alongside it in the cornerstone

Buffalo nickelThere was some prestidigitation involved in the time-capsule opening. The June 2 event was just the public opening of the capsule; the Physical Sciences Division had already opened the box and examined the contents a few weeks beforehand. (It was good thing too, because the capsule had been welded shut and required a good 30 minutes to cut open). The commonplace nature of the time capsule's contents were baffling; more than one person at the public opening observed that it looked as if Fermi had been given 15 minutes to come up with items and simply emptied the bottom drawer of his desk. Nevertheless, the crowd gathered around the memorabilia after the event; the material will eventually be displayed in the new William Eckhardt Research Center.

In my previous post, I promised U of C swag to anyone who guessed the capsule's contents correctly. We got a lot of responses, but let me examine just a few in detail:

"An atomic bomb."

—GM

Fortunately, no. If the PSD got its own A-bomb, then all of the other divisions would want one too.

"Almost certainly, he'd have included a chunk of graphite from the pile. Gimme my UC swag."

—Richard Ehrlich

Almost certainly no.

"My guess about my grandfather's time capsule: His little slide rule (we have his other slide rule) and/or something to do with early computers. My brother Paul's guess is more humorous—he thought perhaps Enrico invented a cell phone and put it in the time capsule instead of announcing it at the time. LOL"

—Olivia Fermi

An educated guess from someone who might actually know! A little-known fact about Enrico Fermi is that he did in fact build an early analog computer, dubbed FERMIAC. But, no swag for the Fermi siblings.

"Laura Fermi's meatball recipe?!!! I can't decide if this comment is more offensive because of the sexism or the ethnic stereotype. Did Roman Jews even eat Neapolitan meatballs? Mrs. Fermi published six nonfiction books, some of which are still in print. If her writings were preserved in the cornerstone, I'm sure it would be something more significant than domestic advice."

—Tony Mayo

First of all, as an Italian American myself, I was very much looking forward to eating the polpetti that could inspire a man to discover beta decay. Second, my association of Mrs. Fermi with food comes from when I worked in the RI: the canteen was named for her and included a photograph of her baking. (Also, for the record, although Laura was indeed Jewish, Enrico was not.) However, Olivia Fermi did set me straight on one thing: her grandmother's signature dish was not meatballs but rigatoni. Mea culpa.

"Contents of the time capsule:
  • Superman comic book

  • U of Chicago course catalog

  • Restaurant menu

  • Daily newspaper; either the Sun Times or the Tribune

  • Copy of The Physical Review

  • Slide rule

  • Fountain pen
These are my guesses."

—Michael J. Harrison

We have a winner! For correctly guessing the course catalog, Mike wins a bit of swag.

"The recipe for cold fusion."

—Drew Sokol

Presumably not Laura Fermi's recipe for cold fusion. Besides, everyone knows Romans serve their fusion hot.

Photos by Jason Smith.

Hire the humanists

Seven alumni share tips for finding a job in a tough market.

By Elizabeth Station


after-maph-panel.jpg

Even before the economy tanked, humanities graduates had no predictable career path. At Alumni Weekend, the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) brought back seven alumni to prove the point.

Speakers at the Alumni in Unexpected Places panel included a winemaker and a filmmaker, a union organizer, design and financial services executives, and staffers from educational nonprofits. They shared their professional stories with current MAPH students and recent grads. When someone asked, “How the hell do you get a job right now?” they offered this advice:

Play up—and prove—your writing skills.
Humanities grads know how to write; that’s an advantage. But applicant pools are too crowded for the sloppy to survive. When Justine Nagan, AM’04, executive director of Kartemquin Films, sees typos in a job candidate’s cover letter, it goes to the bottom of the pile.
Volunteer or be an intern.
If there isn’t a paid position in your dream organization, work for free (sigh). You’ll have an inside track when a job opens up. Consider working overseas—after graduate school, Austin Gilkeson, AM’04, spent two years teaching English on a remote Japanese island. He’s now the education and exchange coordinator at the Consulate General of Japan in Chicago.
Tell everyone you’re looking for a job.
Share your story with anyone who will listen, says Starr Marcello, AM’04, director of operations for the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. Don’t be afraid to sell yourself. As you develop a 30-second elevator pitch, focus on what you can do for a potential employer today.
Highlight your quirks—those oddities that make you memorable.
Suzanne Gallo, AM’02, a project manager for Discover Financial Services, is also a competitive figure skater. She says the little picture of skates she put on her résumé got mentioned in almost every job interview.
Don’t apologize for a diverse skill set.
Humanities grads often have eclectic backgrounds. “Being a hybrid, being able to see things from multiple perspectives, is good,” says Adam Richardson, AM’97, assistant vice president for strategy and marketing at frog, a global design firm. “Companies are trying to break down silos.”
Be open to veering from your imagined path.
A humanities education trains people to be flexible. David McIntire, AM’04, studied philosophy and Hindu mythology; he’s now a winemaker in Napa Valley. Carlos Fernandez, AM’03, a former film student, works as a labor organizer with the American Federation of Teachers.

The event kicked off the program's 15th anniversary celebration on June 3. Later that day, six other MAPH graduates shared their original writing and tales from the job front at an alumni writers panel. More information is available on the afterMAPH website.

From left: Gallo, Gilkeson, Nagan, Marcello, McIntire, Fernandez, and Richardson.

Photo by Drew Reynolds.

Welcome new alumni

Magazine photographer Dan Dry and Kyle Gorden, AB'00, share their pictures from the 507th Convocation festivities on campus last Saturday, June 11.

Beyond patients

While their children are treated at Comer Children's Hospital, some families go without food. Medical students established a program to help.

By Jason Kelly


Hospital food has a bad reputation, but it’s better than nothing—and that’s not just a figure of speech. Some families of patients at Comer Children’s Hospital do not have the means to eat. They go hungry while their sick kids undergo treatment. “It has serious consequences on the families’ ability to contribute as fully as they would like to their children’s care,” says medical student Robert Stern.

Stern heard about the problem two years ago as part of the Pritzker School of Medicine’s health-care disparities course. Stacy Lindau, AM’02, presented her wide-ranging South Side Health and Vitality Studies and mentioned the Comer problem. It sounded like an issue worth exploring for a class research project.

Along with classmate Dan Thorngren, Stern organized the Comer Food Project, one of several student programs that have emerged from the course to address inequality in medical care. Monica Vela, MD’93, who developed the health-care disparities curriculum, liked their idea but didn’t think it would work. “It’s too difficult; the red tape is too much,” she thought. “Why would the nurses and social workers want extra work to do?”

To navigate the hospital bureaucracy, the students felt they had to emphasize their enthusiasm for more than just a good grade: “to really demonstrate that, although we are students, we’re committed enough to the project to see it through and make it the best it can be,” Stern says. Working with Comer chaplain Karen Hutt, the students found ample support from the staff to establish the program.

After a few months of planning—with $1,000 from a community organization, can openers from Whirlpool, and paper bags from Whole Foods—they stocked a closet in the Comer chapel with food from the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Distribution began in February 2010 with four to five bags per week.

Since then the project has grown, with $7,000 from the hospital and the University’s Urban Health Initiative, serving 625 families in 15 months. That’s about ten percent of the families at Comer, Stern says, “but if you look at the rates of food insecurity on the South Side, the numbers are much higher than ten percent.”

That tells Stern the program has to increase its reach at the hospital. Determining who receives food is mostly a matter of intuition and observation. “We know we’re missing people,” Stern says, so the group is working on a short survey that nurses or social workers can incorporate into discussions with families to identify those in need.

A first-year Pritzker requirement, the health-care disparities course where the Comer Food Project originated encourages students to develop solutions to problems that afflict poor communities. Mammography access and nutrition education are among the other programs that students have created. To Stern, the importance of the course comes from its emphasis beyond the science of medicine.

“It says that there’s more to understanding health than the disease process,” he says. “We can be the best doctors we can at curing disease processes, but that, in and of itself, is not going to bring health to the communities we’re serving.”

Join the discussion. Leave a comment on our Facebook page about the Comer Food Project and other medical student outreach projects.

Photo of Karen Hutt inside the food storage closet is courtesy Pritzker Pulse.

Under the dome

The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, in blog form.

By Katherine Muhlenkamp and Benjamin Recchie, AB’03


You’ve probably read a lot lately about the University’s domed robo-library, but the odds are good that you haven't had a chance to tour it in person yet. We at UChiBLOGo present this virtual tour, based on an actual tour we took on a ridiculously cold May morning with David Borycz, special projects librarian.



Starting in the Joseph Regenstein Library, we walked across the glass bridge to Mansueto. We entered the Grand Reading Room and gazed up at the sunlit, elliptical dome, composed of 691 glass panels buoyed by steel supports. The long wooden tables feature task lighting, outlet power, laptop locking bars, and seating for 180 people. During our visit on an ordinary end-of-year day, every seat was full.

Descending five stories below the reading room floor, the automated shelving has the capacity to hold a whopping 3.5 million volumes. (By comparison, the entire Regenstein was designed to hold 5 million.) It takes only a few minutes to process a patron’s request for a book stored there, said Borycz, meaning you can request an item from a computer on the Reg's main floor, walk over the bridge to Mansueto, and find your material waiting for you at the circulation desk when you arrive.

Two units of the preservation department—digitization and conservation—have new space on the north side of Mansueto (binding remains in the Regenstein). The digitization space is equipped with an overhead scanner, flat-head scanners, and a digital photo lab. The conservation area boasts a fume hood (pictured above), which removes fumes from chemicals used in the restoration process.

Crossing back into the Reg, Borycz pointed out the intricately crafted, lead silhouette printers’ marks lining a hallway wall. The trademarks, Borycz explained, are part of the R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company Archive, a gift to the University made in 2005 and 2007. They represent influential printers, publishers, typographers, and designers from the 15th through the 20th centuries. This silhouette is the mark of Daniel Berkeley Updike, who established Merrymount Press in 1893. The piece depicts Thomas Morton’s maypole of Merrymount, with six young people dancing around a pole and a banner that carries the Updike family motto, Optimum Vix Satis ("The best is hardly enough").

Facing the printers’ marks is a new, glass-walled exhibition space for the Special Collections Research Center. Building the walkway between the Reg and Mansueto necessitated rehabbing Special Collections' space in the former building.

Inside the gallery sit unassuming wooden benches with a special provenance: they were made from the wood of a tree cut down to make way for Mansueto (A few of the luckier trees were moved elsewhere on campus).

For more images, see the University of Chicago Library’s Mansueto albums on Flickr. This video explains the automated retrieval system.

Join the discussion. Leave a comment on our Facebook page about the new Mansueto Library.

Photos by Benjamin Recchie, AB’03; fume hood photo courtesy Cheryl Rusnak; Special Collections photo courtesy Jason Smith/University of Chicago News Office.

Crowds rain on my parade

An increase of attendance at Pride made navigating the parade route impossible.

By Christina Pillsbury, '12


pride-parade-2011_cp01.jpg

I know a lot of UChicago students now break the stereotype that we're socially awkward, pale, reclusive human beings, but at the Pride Parade last weekend I’m afraid I reinforced this perception.

I'm by no means new to the joyous, dance-filled festivities of Pride. The last time I attended I had a gay old time, and couldn't wait to relive that experience. Or so I thought.

According to all my friends’ Facebook statuses, the Gay Pride parade was the time of their lives, but for me the event became an unbearable rainbow nightmare. The Tribune reported that roughly 25,000 more people attended this year’s parade than last year's. No measures were taken to anticipate the increase in attendance.

pride-parade-2011_cp02.jpgI love supporting gay rights and busting out my rainbow outfits and dousing myself in glitter, but I can’t be alone in my fear of oppressive crowds. I’m positive other students from the school "where fun goes to die” must also be afflicted.

As I made my way from the corner of Halsted and Clark to Roscoe to meet some fellow UChicagoans, I attempted to navigate the Halsted and Belmont intersection. This turned out to be a mistake. For anyone who is claustrophobic, or who doesn't like being pressed up against 100 other sweaty, glittery people: avoid this area at all costs during Pride. Go West to Clark or even Sheffield, but don’t try to brave this awful intersection.

For at least 20 minutes—although it felt like hours—I stood at the corner as the crowd pushed, yanked, and squeezed me halfway down the block. I got to know my fellow parade-goers much too well as we were smushed into one another. The smell of beer and sweat filled my nostrils as armpits were thrust near my nose.

I had joined in on the festivities the night before, club-hopping in Boystown and running into several U of C alumni, and although the dance floors were more crowded than Psi Upsilon on Halloween, I managed to enjoy myself, so I thought I’d be able to have fun at the parade.

But the crowd induced a panic attack that bordered on psychosis. I was frozen, unable to breathe, and suddenly I was crying in front of a million people. Remember in My Girl when Anna Chlumsky, AB'02, finds out that Macaulay Culkin was stung to death by the bees? Yeah, it was kind of like that.

While the crowd wiggled me slowly toward my destination, I could vaguely make out some proud attendees in their rainbow gear and some half-naked performers on floats. Unfortunately, I couldn't get close enough to give my full attention the spectacle.

Needless to say, I wasn't able to meet up with the other UChicago students, but from what I can tell, they were smarter about getting to the less crowded spectator area. Perhaps there's a class I haven't yet taken on how to avoid impenetrable swarms of people?

With Gay Pride flags waiving high, the crowd of 750,000 packed between the corner of Halsted and Belmont to Diversey and Sheridan.

Parade of inclusiveness

Oversized crowds and outrageous conduct make for a gay day indeed.

By Mitchell Kohles, ’12


pride-parade-2011_mk01.jpg

I was stuck between two girls dressed up as fairies, then in the process of applying even more glitter to their costumes, when a canon full of rainbow-colored confetti exploded to my left. Ten minutes later, two men in feather boas and tight leather shorts tried to sell me something called “ghetto shots” on the corner of Halsted and Addison. Suddenly I was covered in glitter, confetti, and a purple necklace complementing the Franzia stain on my pink linen button-up. It was Sunday afternoon, and Chicago Pride was in full swing and sashay.

pride-parade-2011_mk02.jpgI had no experience with Pride before this weekend—to me the scene resembled a music festival more than a parade. Throughout the afternoon, the “no coolers” rule was ignored by both parade-goers and law enforcement. Whenever I looked up, I saw multicolored beads flying through the air; along with the much-valued free condoms, the necklaces were launched from the floats to pinwheel parabolically down onto the glitter-soaked crowd. I also learned that “pasty” isn’t just an adjective or a meat pie.

Before the event started, people had packed themselves between storefronts and barricades for a full six blocks, between Belmont and Addison. I only managed to navigate along Halsted, but the parade route weaved around Boystown for more than 30 blocks before ending at Diversey and Sheridan.

What I found so incredible about the parade is the inclusiveness. Pride encourages expression and refuses to insult. Everywhere I went there was an atmosphere of joviality and tolerance that tempered what looked like neon-hued chaos. “It’s actually a great day for me too,” said a police officer after the parade, then supervising the massive clean-up operation on Broadway Avenue. “Even with all the alcohol, no one is starting fights or causing trouble. They’re all just in a good mood.”

Of course, that inclusiveness goes both ways, and I was surprised to see more familiar parade entries: retired servicemen driving classic cars, smiling children walking and waving with their parents, politician-sponsored floats—Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for example, led the parade, moving quickly to shake as many hands as possible.

I certainly expected outlandish and colorful, but it was also nice to see the mundane side of Pride. But maybe what made Pride seem almost grown-up was the combination of the ordinary and the outrageous. It wasn’t just a bunch of drag queens and leather daddies—it was a community event.

Beyond the climate debate

Doc Films screens Michael Nash’s internationally acclaimed documentary Climate Refugees.

By Mitchell Kohles, ’12


In October 2006 Michael Nash read a report by the UN that claimed that there were more refugees as a result of climate change than of political or religious conflict. At the time, he wasn’t sure what that meant.

“I used to think climate change was about polar bears and Iceland,” said Nash, whose documentary film Climate Refugees screened at Max Palevsky Cinema in late June.

The film bypasses the debate over the science of climate change and focuses instead on the humanitarian crisis of people forced from their homes by rising sea levels and tropical storms. “For two years, I traveled through 47 countries in search of the human face of climate change,” said Nash when he introduced the film.

Nash’s film marked the end of “Migration: Causes and Consequences,” a three-day conference organized by the Center for International Studies (CIS) and the Program on the Global Environment (PGE) in which community members and educators from various fields learned about the social, legal, and economic issues confronting climate refugees.

“They were extremely interested in the topic of migration, and the screening was the culminating event of the conference,” said Jamie Bender, assistant director for programs at CIS.

After the screening, Nash joined Koko Warner, from the UN University-Institute for Environment and Human Society, and Mark Lycett, director of PGE, in a Q&A panel discussion with the audience.

Climate Refugees has received criticism from both sides of the aisle—the right claims Nash is an alarmist; the left criticizes him for opening the film with Newt Gingrich—and the panelists discussed the state of the debate over climate change in America. Although he hoped the film would be apolitical, Nash admitted, “Honestly, I think the right is better at selling a bumper sticker than the left is at telling the truth.”

After the film debuted at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, Nash and a friend hopped into a cab just as two Chinese diplomats working at the UN entered the cab from the other side. The four men decided to split the fare and went out for dinner. Later that night, one of the men said something that Nash will never forget. “Make no mistake about it, the world is going green, and nothing would make us happier than for the US to continue having this debate for the next ten to 15 years. We’ve been trying to catch you for a century, and we’re going to blow by you in half a generation.”

Nash avoids discussing climate science in the movie, and during the panel discussion he explained why, for him, the debate doesn't matter all that much anymore. After a long day of filming in China, a man on his film crew said something cut through the political debate: “We better hope that man is causing this, because if he isn’t, how the hell are we going to stop it?”

Alumna conjures up a magical Harry Potter finale

Ashley Demma, AB'11, shows off her knowledge of the wizarding world that rivals Hermione's.

By Christina Pillsbury, '13


One night when I was 16, my older sister was on her first date with her current boyfriend, and I was at the midnight release of the sixth Harry Potter book. At the end of their date my mom asked them to pick me up from the bookstore. They waited in the parking lot until 2 a.m., when I finally got my hands on the book. I emerged giddily with a lightning-bolt tattoo on my forehead, a Gryffindor scarf around my neck, and round black frames around my eyes.

I thought I was the ultimate Harry Potter super-fan. That is, until I encountered Ashley Demma, AB’11. Deemed the biggest “Uberfan” in an Embassy Suites competition, her passion puts mine to shame. The victory landed Demma $10,000, an iPod 4G, and 20 free stays at any Embassy Suites hotel.

I had heard rumors around campus about her legendary devotion to the books: she came to the University in part because the campus looks like Hogwarts, she wrote her BA thesis about war themes in the series, she plans on getting a Harry Potter-related tattoo, and she worked in the Museum of Science and Industry’s Harry Potter exhibition. But talking to her, I realized the rumors didn't do justice to her adulation for and intricate knowledge of the books and movies.

For the midnight showing of the final movie Thursday night/Friday morning, Demma and her museum coworkers purchased VIP tickets in advance, and spent the evening drinking cocktails and dressed head to toe in Harry Potter gear.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat does the final movie's premiere mean in the grand scheme of your fandom?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt’s kind of a slap in the face to my childhood. I just graduated in June, and now the last movie is coming out, and it’s like the world is saying, “Get your head out of the clouds and enter the real world.” But the books will still be alive for those who are reading them, and I can only hope the books will become classics.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIs there anything you were afraid would be overlooked in the translation from book to movie in this film?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI felt so good about the Deathly Hallows, Part I film that I think it will be great. The only thing I’m worried about is how they will work in Teddy Lupin in the epilogue. It would be so good to see a werewolf-metamorphmagus hybrid, but I’m afraid they’ll leave him out. He’s the orphan of Nymphadora Tonks [a metamorphmagus—a person who can change their appearance at will] and Remus Lupin [a werewolf], and he is kissing Bill and Fleur Weasley's daughter Victoire.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhich character do you most identify with?
QandA_ADrop.jpgTonks. She’s really the first strong teenager in a field of men—she has to keep up with all the greatest aurors like Mad Eye Moody. I really identified with her when I was a teenager. She was a spunky, clumsy, quirky girl in a man’s world. She was definitely capable of getting the job done, but she didn’t confine herself to ministry standards. She had pink hair and wore punk rock clothing. That’s exactly what I wanted to be like when I was 15.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen did your fandom start to emerge?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI remember making my own T-shirts when I was a kid. I had a countdown T-shirt for when the Half Blood Prince [the sixth book] came out. I put a different number on it every day, starting with 100. I also dyed my hair pink in high school because I wanted to be like Tonks.
I was upset when my Hogwarts letter never came. I had a friend who worked at Scholastic who got to write back to all the kids who wrote in asking where their letters were. She had to write something like, “Unfortunately Hogwarts is full this year, but you can still do magic in your own life by being a good person.” There are a lot of disappointed kids out there.
QandA_QDrop.jpgTell me about your experience working as a tour guide at the museum exhibit.
QandA_ADrop.jpgI got to act, which is something I have never really done before. Throughout the whole exhibit I had to learn how to do a British accent. I kind of fibbed on the application and said that I could do an accent, so I had to watch a lot of videos of Kiera Knightly to get it.
It was amazing to work with all the original costumes and props. They were all actually used by the actors in the films, not their stunt doubles or anything. It was very tempting to touch everything, because of course you wanted to.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you ever touch anything?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes—oh man they’re going to be so mad at me—but I touched Ron’s quilt. It just looked so soft. It actually wasn’t though.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy was Harry Potter worth writing about for your BA thesis?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWell, what I say to people who are not Harry Potter fans, and who don’t think the books are worthwhile, I say the same thing that I do about the Beatles. You don’t have to like the Beatles, but you can’t deny that they changed the game forever.

Addendum: After the movie came out, we followed up with Demma.
(CAUTION: POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!)

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was your reaction to the epilogue?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt was funny when it needed to be, serious, heartbreaking, all that. I think having David Yates on as director for the last few films has really maintained a nice cohesion for the series.
Teddy Lupin did not make it to the epilogue! Sadness. All I wanted was a punky little wolf-wizard hybrid. Is that so much to ask?

Hard hitting

Meet the UChicago doubles team who won back-to-back NCAA titles.

By Elizabeth Station


Kendra and Chrissy

Kendra Higgins and Chrissy Hu fell short of winning their third consecutive NCAA doubles title this past spring. As consolation, Higgins took runner-up honors in Division III singles—and Hu, AB'11, finished an economics degree and an honors thesis on the political economy of Taiwan.

Higgins, a fourth-year from Vero Beach, Florida, is a human-development and Latin American–studies major. Hu is from Palo Alto, California. Top athletes in high school, neither had played tennis indoors until coming to Chicago. They talk about finding their groove in the latest issue of the Core.


QandA_QDrop.jpgBack in high school, how did people react when you told them you were going to play tennis at the University of Chicago?
QandA_ADrop.jpgChrissy Hu: UChicago is kind of under the radar. Not that many people have heard of it. The tennis team was unranked when I came in. We didn’t really become strong until Kendra’s first year, when we jumped from something like No. 29 to No. 4 within a year.
QandA_QDrop.jpgEarly on, did you sense that you would be good doubles partners?
QandA_ADrop.jpgCH:The beauty of our first year is that we didn’t go into it thinking we were great. It was amazing that we won at the NCAAs in 2009—we went into the tournament unseeded.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s the secret to your success together?
QandA_ADrop.jpgKendra Higgins: When we play a match, we rely on each other. We’re always there to cover each other.
CH: She always knows where I’m going to be.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHave you learned anything in class that applies to tennis?
QandA_ADrop.jpgKH: I feel like tennis and school need to have the same work ethic.
CH: You have to go out and perform, even if you haven’t had any sleep.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAs Division III athletes, how do you balance practice with studying?
QandA_ADrop.jpgCH: During the season, pretty much all we do is tennis and school. When you’re not at tennis, you’re at the library.
KH: You’re in our brand new [Mansueto] library. It’s gorgeous.
CH: They did build it over the tennis courts, though.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat were your favorite classes at Chicago?
QandA_ADrop.jpgKH: A political-science course with professor Robert Pape. He’s the world expert on suicide terrorism, and our TA was the world expert on female suicide terrorism. I felt like we had insider information.
CH: I took Dinosaur Science, an upper-level bio class, and I loved it. After graduation we went on a 10-day excavation with Paul Sereno to Montana. For a class called Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Beyond, we looked at photos and manga—Japanese cartoon books—as primary sources. It wasn’t a typical University of Chicago course where you’re reading Freud and Marx and all that.

Photo by Jason Smith.

Reel volunteers

A night in the life of a Doc Films projectionist.

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


Doc Films

I remember watching Fight Club as a 16-year-old and first understanding how movies made it up onto the big screen. Or thinking I understood. It wasn’t until volunteering at Doc that I learned projection involves more than watching the upper right-hand corner of the screen for “cigarette burns.”

Unless you’re Tyler Durden, this isn’t the fun part: transferring the film onto show reels, rewinding the film, checking and repairing splices, and adding our own if necessary, noting the scenes where dots (those cigarette burns) appear to indicate the end of the reel, determining the print's proper sound format and aspect ratio.

Doc is dedicated to passing these skills on to new volunteers, and I let my APs do this prep work while I look over their shoulder or tend to the projectors. Hopefully, after three quarters of working under different projectionists, an AP will take the projectionist exam to become a PJ, running his or her own show the following quarter.

Doc Films

For 35mm film, we use a changeover system with two projectors, affectionately named Evelyn and Wanda for their east/west location. When the show starts, the film will run through Evelyn until the reel is almost empty—about 20 minutes. Eight seconds before the end of the reel, the dots will appear in the screen's corner for an eighth of a second–four frames-and I'll turn on Wanda’s motor and raise the douser to let the light flood into the chamber. In the print's final second, as the film is running through Wanda, a second dot will appear, and I'll step on the changeover pedal to project Wanda’s image instead of Evelyn’s, which is now just black filler, the reel’s “tail.” If everything goes well, the audience doesn’t notice a thing.

When my APs confirm the film’s aspect ratio, I swap out Evelyn and Wanda’s lenses for the correct ones. I also rub the film gate down with a 50-50 alcohol–water solution we call “the mix” and shoot pressurized air into the chamber to clear any loose dust. Before most shows, it is only necessary to clean the components that touch the film. The cool thing is that hardly any of the film actually touches the projector: despite looping through locks and clamps and pulleys, the film is mostly guided along by rotating wheels with sprockets that engage the film's perforations and prevent any significant transfer of dirt or grime. I try to perform this simple maintenance before each show, although the real cleaning is left to the equipment chair.

Of course, a screening doesn’t always run smoothly. Projectionists have nightmares about the bubbling, deep-colored metastasis on screen that signals a burning print inside the projector. Though not all mistakes in the booth have such inflammatory results. If a film breaks below the sound chamber, the outgoing film will spill onto the floor in huge ribbons while the projector continues to show the print on screen. A PJ can recover from this film spill if he is quick and cool-headed enough to find the broken end of the print, reattach it to a new takeup reel, replace the original reel with the new one, guide the spilt film back onto this new reel, and allow the stronger tension of the takeup motor to catch up to the film still running through the projector. All this can be done without stopping the show or alerting the audience. That’s the fun part.

Doc Films

Of course, this sort of stunt would only be done if the screening were more important than the print—we would never risk damaging a rare or archival print by letting it spill out onto the floor. In that case, it's better to just stop the show.

As a profession, projectionists’ numbers have been dwindling ever since the xenon bulb was introduced in the ‘60s. We became even more expendable when a new reel system that used platters was introduced in the ‘70s. Platters are used by most multiplex cinemas today: all the film is placed onto one giant reel–thereby avoiding the changeover process–and fed through the cinema so that the same print runs through several projectors and appears on several screens. That’s why Green Lantern will be showing at 6:00 and 6:15––it takes 15 minutes for the print to travel from one projector to the next. A multiplex can handle 12 or more screenings in a night with just one projectionist.

We don’t do that at Doc (remember Evelyn and Wanda?). We prep the print of Hitchcock or Brakhage, and we usually show it only once or twice before shipping it back to the distributor. The labor-intensive changeover system allows us to project films from archives that demand the more gentle system. On the other hand, most of us aren't pros. “As a volunteer-based student organization that puts a lot of emphasis on teaching people how to project film, Doc is not exactly at the top of the list of groups to lend fragile and valuable prints to,” explains Andrea Nishi, ’13, co-general chair of Doc.

Still, our changeover system makes us more attractive to film depositories than a platter house is. Kyle Westphal, AB‘07, former Doc programming chair and head projectionist at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, describes the tradeoff in an interview with the San Francisco Film Festival: “There are good reasons for such policies—namely that it forces the projectionist to actually be there during the screening and maintain the integrity of the print by not cutting and re-splicing it at heads and tails of every reel." There are upsides to platters too. "In some ways, platter projection extends the life of a print; a film opens at a multiplex, and it stays there for weeks. It screens dozens of times, but because it's all built up, there's less handling involved, less wear and tear and random damage in that each reel isn't rewound and threaded over and over every day."

The film industry is changing, and as distribution goes digital and film repositories become more selective about who they lend to, Doc’s commitment to showing original prints on physical media has become increasingly difficult and expensive. In May 2010 volunteers and board members (also volunteers) gathered to discuss how Doc would address the changes. Some proposed hiring full-time projectionists, cutting the volunteer staff nearly in half. Others proposed establishing an “office manager” position to maintain relations with distributors and handle Doc’s finances. Becca Hall, AB’10, a former Doc volunteer and cofounder of the Northwest Chicago Film Society, attended the conference and describes Doc’s predicament: “Basically, Doc presently operates as if it's still the 16mm era, when films were available to anyone and striking new prints was easy—and when the equipment used was simple enough for a schoolteacher to use and maintain. All this puts the possibility of Doc continuing to exist as we've known it in serious jeopardy.”

As part of the University community for more than 75 years, Doc proudly holds the title of longest-running student-operated film society in the country. As I watch my APs thread the 35mm film into the projector, I can only hope we don’t give that up.

How science can help you make a better cup of coffee

Cell biologist Stephanie Levi's Night Labs series makes science accessible.

By Ruth E. Kott, AM'07


stephanie-levi.jpgMolecular geneticist and cell biologist Stephanie Levi, PhD'09, wants people to understand what she does. To explain the Golgi apparatus, which she studied at Chicago, she uses a simile: it's "a structure in the cell that is like the cell’s post office," she says on her website, Science-is-Sexy.com. "The Golgi takes newly made proteins (the mail) and attaches a sugar molecule to them, which acts like a molecular zipcode that tells the cell where to send the protein."

She doesn't stop at similes. To bring science to a wider population, in 2008 Levi, who coordinates Northeastern Illinois University's Student Center for Science Engagement, started Night Labs, a series of public talks about how science fits into everyday life. "Science intersects everything," she says. "I wanted people to talk across those lines and help adults who weren't scientists see science as part of their lives—and important." After leading lectures on the science of sex and attraction and on the science of extinction, in May she hosted a Night Lab on the science of coffee, which filled the second floor at Schubas Tavern in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. Afterward she gave an interview about what science can teach us about coffee.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy do a Night Lab on coffee?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNight Lab is all about helping adults access science in an entertaining, enjoyable way, while highlighting science in their everyday lives. I have long been interested in doing programs on food, since in addition to being a molecular geneticist, I'm a huge foodie who takes full advantage of Chicago's rich food culture.
I don't know of anything more ubiquitous than a morning cup of joe, and I fell in love with Intelligentsia the first time I took a sip of a cappuccino from one of their retail stores. There's tons of science involved in every step of the processing, brewing, and enjoyment of coffee, and I chose to highlight those. I will be having numerous food programs in the coming years, although this was my first.

sexy-science-coffee.jpg

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat kind of research did you do to prepare?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI had multiple meetings with the program's presenter, Sarah Kluth. Sarah is tremendous and an incredible expert on all things coffee. She is the green manager and buyer at Intelligentsia and is basically air traffic control for the company, telling them when different coffees should go to market based on their seasonality and, I'm sure, many other factors. She had a great deal of scientific expertise on coffee and brought that to our discussions.
I did quite a bit of reading just out of my own interest, and, of course, being a scientist, I know the chemistry, physics, and biology that underlie all of it, but did not specifically know the information that pertained to coffee. One of the fun parts of doing Night Labs is that I get to learn about various aspects of science and continually make new discoveries about fields I would otherwise know nothing about, and offer a stage to scientists and other thinkers to share their work and ideas with the broader public.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat do you look for in a cup of coffee? What do you usually drink?
QandA_ADrop.jpgHonestly, a cappuccino at Intelligentsia is my ideal—it's creamy, mellow, tastes like caramel and chocolate; it is such a treat. The milk is perfect; the temperature is perfect. It's a Saturday treat for me.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you make coffee at home?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI have always used one of those Italian stove-top coffeemakers—you put water in the bottom, coffee in a metal filter right above that, and put it on the stove, and it percolates to a chamber in the top, which you then pour into your cup. I also have a French press and use that mainly at work. I'm switching to an automatic coffee maker, however, which, I learned from Sarah, gives the coffee preparer (me) less control.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat did you learn from Kluth's talk? Will it change the way you make coffee?
QandA_ADrop.jpgAfter the Night Lab event, I'm switching one of those gold filters instead of paper—the molecules that give coffee its aroma and complexity can stick to a paper filter. I now want to go out and get a burr grinder as well; it provides a uniform grind to the coffee beans, unlike an electric grinder, and I learned from Sarah that you really want a uniform grind to your coffee so that the surface area of each grain of coffee is even, and the extraction of coffee into your water is even, giving a good-tasting cup.
I also use purified water, not distilled or tap. Distilled has no minerals to attach to the molecules that give coffee a great flavor, so you wind up with a really weak-tasting, flat cup of coffee if you use it. Tap is loaded with chlorine, which gives you an off-tasting cup. Ideally, the temperature of coffee needs to be pretty precise too—Sarah shared with us that the ideal range of extracting a cup of coffee is about 195–205 degrees F (the boiling point of water is 212 degrees).
[Finally] I will never, ever put coffee in the fridge as a way of keeping it. I will try to use my coffee within two weeks of buying it. Sarah gave guests of the Night Lab program a half pound of coffee, and it had been roasted two days prior.

On Fermi Drive

In which Benjamin angers the ghosts of Italo Balbo and Ron Santo.

By Benjamin Recchie, AB’03


In June the Chicago Tribune editorialized that the city ought to rename Balbo Drive, a short street just south of the Loop. The reason given was its obscure namesake: the Italian aviator and general Italo Balbo, who led a formation of 24 flying boats on a flight from Rome to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. At the time, his flight was hailed as a triumph of aviation, but the years have dimmed his reputation: Balbo served as right-hand man to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The Trib’s suggestion was to switch the namesake from one Italian to another: UChicago Nobel laureate in physics and noted time-capsule stuffer Enrico Fermi. As an Italian American with a background in physics, I heartily agree, and you should too, darn it.

Sure, you might argue that Balbo wasn’t the worst of the Fascists—he opposed Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws, after all, as well as Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler. But being the world’s nicest fascist is a little like being the world’s biggest Chihuahua; you’re setting the bar pretty low. Or perhaps you agree with the Chicago Sun-Times’s counter-suggestion that the street should be renamed for the late Chicago Cub Ron Santo. No disrespect to ol' No. 10, but Fermi won more Nobel prizes (1) than Santo (0) and led the Cubs to the exact same number of World Series championships (0).

Besides putting the city back on the right side of World War II, the change would say something about our values. We elevate Fermi’s pursuit of scientific knowledge over Balbo’s pursuit of imperial conquest. We prefer to honor a man who left his homeland to avoid submitting to race laws rather than a man who brought the government that promulgated those laws to power. We celebrate an actual Chicagoan over a stranger who visited the city once. (And another guy who could hit a ball with a stick really well.)

Still not convinced? Then let me appeal to your Maroon pride: don't you want the name of a famous U of C professor gracing Grant Park during the Taste of Chicago, Lollapalooza, and the occasional parade? Oh, yes you do.

The University hasn’t taken an official position on the matter—Balbo Drive is roughly five miles from Hyde Park, after all. But that shouldn’t stop readers of this blog from taking their own stands. If you want to see Balbo Drive renamed for Fermi, then contact Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Alderman Robert Fioretti (in whose ward Balbo falls), and join my Facebook group made expressly for this purpose. There’s no time like the present to give one of my favorite physicists his due.

Photo courtesy Quinn Dombrowski, AB'06, AM'06 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Race against the machine

One lowly intern challenges the Mansueto.

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


By now you’ve read enough about the specs on the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library (especially if you follow UChiBLOGo). So how about we change gears a bit and take Dad’s new Camaro out for a spin?

Mansueto’s automated storage and retrieval system boasts a 15-minute-or-less retrieval time. But how fast is that compared to the old-fashioned “Ask a Librarian” option, or even pulling up the title on the Web? To put the cranes to the test, I’m going to race Mansueto to a book.

So let’s get to it. The rules:

  1. With the help of a librarian, I'll decide on a book that is both within Mansueto’s underbelly and tucked away in the Reg’s stacks.
  2. A third and theoretically impartial party will act as Mansueto’s proxy patron, submitting a request online and picking up the book at the counter.
  3. I can’t use a computer or any mechanical device, nor can I be aided by anyone accessing such device—I can “Ask a Librarian,” but he or she can’t ask a database.
  4. We line up at the turnstile. First one back through the metal detectors with the book in hand wins.

On the line: the relative value of Mansueto’s $81 million price tag and my $200,000 education. And just so we're clear: this isn’t some hackneyed plot to defend the “I-love-wandering-through-the-stacks” sentimentality. We’re talking pure, streamlined efficiency here. Let Man vs. Mansueto begin.

man-v-mansueto.jpg

The results:

Mansueto retrieved the book at 9:13:39.
Intern threw in the towel at 13:09:31.

Well, it was a crushing defeat, no question about it. It looks like the odds were right: the machine is better than the man. But I for one won't welcome our biblo-technological overlords just yet. In a post-race talk, Mansueto and I discussed the possibility of a rematch:

Intern: Well, I guess all that money was worth it, huh ManSweat?
Mansueto: I am worth precisely every penny, yes.
Intern: Well don’t get too cocky over there in that transparent turtle shell of yours. I’ll be back.
Mansueto: Come back as often as you like, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9:45 p.m. I can hold more than 3.5 million volumes.
Intern: No, Reg Egg, I mean for another race. I realized I’ve got an edge on you after all. I’m gonna learn my way around the stacks, brush up on my Dewey decimals, and come back better, stronger, and faster than before. You’re just a machine—you won’t learn anything.
Mansueto: I have learned that you are the inferior entity.
Intern: ...
Mansueto: Burn.

I’ve got a twin in Kalamazoo

Author Bonnie Jo Campbell, AB’84, may be my alter-ego.

By Christina Pillsbury, ’13


bonnie-jo-moose.jpgA couple of months ago, I happened upon a poem called “You Could Live at Meijer’s.” Based on the title alone, I knew I would love the author of this deeply personal piece of literature. The poem taps into the emotions that come up while shopping at the Midwest chain of hypermarkets, which I grew up with back home in Michigan. Meijer is part department store, part grocery store, part pure magic. In fact, if you have not been to one, stop reading this and go find one right now. Fittingly, the last line of the poem reads, “You could die at Meijer’s, they would put all of your groceries back on the shelves.”

Then I found out that the author, Bonnie Jo Campbell, AB’84, grew up in my hometown, Kalamazoo, that, like me, she attended the U of C, and that, like me, she is, of course, a writer. Granted, she’s a National Book Award finalist and a Guggenheim fellow, and I’m a Magazine intern, but that’s beside the point.

I had to meet her to see if she might be my doppelgänger. Campbell agreed to meet me at the Old Dog Tavern in Kalamazoo, a bar that she frequents when she’s not on book tour or playing with her donkeys.

I tend to hold successful novelists on pedestals, so I was surprised when Campbell strolled in wearing jeans, and even more surprised when she bought me a drink, she said she did so I would like her. That same day the New York Times had praised her newest book, Once Upon a River, as “an excellent American parable”—a book I loved so much that I would have looked up to her even if she had not provided me with gin.

When I asked about her 2009 collection of short stories, American Salvage, she offhandedly said, “I actually just won a Guggenheim, which I thought they just awarded to intellectual smarty pants, but apparently they include people like me too.”

Of course, her accomplishments contradict this—along with her philosophy degree from the U of C—but she must be the least pretentious intellectual smarty pants I’ve ever met; her life goal is to have a book sold at Meijer’s. “I always study the books they have there and I think, ‘What do all of these books have in common? How could I get my book there? There’s Nicholas Sparks, but then Devil in the White City is there, and that’s kind of edgy, so maybe I do have a chance.”

Once Upon a River is, in fact, edgy for a coming-of-age tale. The book opens with a scene in which the protagonist, Margo, is raped by an uncle and later is complicit in her father’s murder. She takes off down the river with her late grandfather’s boat, her shotgun, and few other resources. The story is part Huck Finn (although any time you put a teen on a river this reference pops up), part Annie Oakley, but with more violent and erotic scenes. It may be too racy for Meijer, but the Michigan setting might make her dream come true.

Campbell doesn’t make a fuss when she talks about her life’s crazy adventures. As if every farm girl has traipsed around the world via bike, hitchhiking, and a circus train.

One of her first hitchhiking experiences led to a summer serving snow cones with Barnum and Bailey. After her second year at the U of C, Campbell was hitchhiking with her boyfriend to Los Angeles. But the circus was in Phoenix, and she joined on a whim. One of her stories about that summer, “The Smallest Man in the World” won a Pushcart Prize.

Before we parted, I asked her if we are in fact the same person. To my excitement, she said, “Yes.” We have similar tastes in literature; we eat the same food; her grandfather was instrumental in the construction of my high school; we both have an extremely low tolerance for alcohol; and most importantly, we could both live and die at Meijer.

I hope this means my next career move will somehow involve Barnum and Bailey.

Beauty queen, associate dean

The 1960s were crazy, man—you know, beauty contests, women's hours, white gloves.

By Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93


JeanTreese.jpgJean Treese, AB’66, associate dean of students in the College, has served as an academic adviser to an estimated 3,000 students since 1981.

And probably not a single one of them knows that she was the runner-up in the 1963 Miss University of Chicago contest.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow were you nominated?
QandA_ADrop.jpgAny group on campus—RSO, house, intramural team—could nominate a candidate for Miss University of Chicago. The director of the orchestra mentioned it one Wednesday night at rehearsal. Of course everyone giggled and guffawed, and then somebody said, “Let’s nominate Jean!”
In high school I would have been the last person nominated for Miss Anything. My mom thought it was a stitch.
The girl who actually won, Pam (Smith) Lovinger, AB’64, AM’67, was from the Russian choir. I was told by somebody counting the votes, who should not have told me, that I came in second.
QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you have fun at Wash Prom?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes, but it wasn’t as fun as Twist Party Night. Every Wednesday night in Ida Noyes, in the Cloister Club, there was a twist party from nine until midnight, with the Paul Butterfield Band.
You didn’t have to go with a date; you didn’t have to dance with a boy. It was just wild. And not what we should have been doing on a Wednesday night. So the twist party went to 12, but you had to leave a little bit before 12 if you wanted to save hours for the weekend.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhy?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThere were women’s hours in those days. We were only allowed out two hours after midnight per week. I lived in Woodward, which hadn’t even been named yet; it was called New Dorms. It was the only co-ed housing on campus at the time.
The east wing was for men. Women lived in the north and west. And the doors between the north and east were cemented closed. You couldn’t get through unless you had a blowtorch.
The doors to the women’s quarters were locked at midnight. You had to enter the building through the basement. There was a matronly woman sitting there with a box of index cards, with all the women residents’ names. Everyone had one. And if you were a minute after 12 o’clock getting back, that was one of your hours for the week.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWas there any feminist consciousness on campus?
QandA_ADrop.jpgNot in 1963. But certainly by the time I left, in 1966, there were the beginnings of that.
I was called “Miss Sitterly” in class, all the way through. I always wore skirts, unless it was freezing out. There was no rule, but I almost always wore them. You wore white gloves to church. You wore white gloves to fly.
I got married at the end of my senior year, in May. There was the general feeling—although not so strongly on this campus—that if you didn’t have an MRS by the time you graduated, or one in the works, that you had failed college somehow.
A couple of years after I was in the Miss U of C contest, a refrigerator won. As I recall, it was a write-in candidate. Of course the organizers didn’t let the refrigerator win. But it began the demise of Wash Prom and the Miss U of C contest—things had hit such a low point that there just didn’t seem a reason to continue this farce.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhen did you become a college adviser?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe college advising system came into being the 1970s, after the sit-in and all the campus turmoil.
I had been a teacher in Chicago Public Schools for 13 years. Then in December of 1980, just before Christmas, we didn’t get paid because there was no money to pay us.
I started as a college adviser in the fall of 1981, and I’ve been here ever since.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHave you ever told any of your students about the Miss U of C contest?
QandA_ADrop.jpgOh no. I share a lot with them, but this doesn’t seem to be appropriate. I talk with my students very openly about failures—academic struggles, challenges—because I think it helps them to understand they can get through it.
I did tell my sons. They just laughed.

Print and politics

An alumna curator showcases works by South African printmakers—some never seen before in a US museum.

By Elizabeth Station


The Museum of Modern Art in New York City can overwhelm with its crush of tourists and massive, famous collection, especially in summer. Visitors looking for a different experience can escape to a small but powerful show organized by Judith Hecker, AM’97, assistant curator in the department of prints and illustrated books. Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now features contemporary prints by established and up-and-coming South African artists. They tackle serious themes—apartheid, torture, resistance, and reconciliation—using techniques from intaglio to linoleum cut. Hecker has worked at MoMA since completing Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. She talked about the exhibition during a recent interview at the museum.


QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat drew you to South African art, originally?
QandA_ADrop.jpgBecause I didn’t do a PhD, I never had a particular niche. The advantage of being a generalist is that you get to curate across the century, and so I’ve done both historical and contemporary projects. Years ago I became interested in William Kentridge (b. 1955), who is probably South Africa’s best-known artist. MoMA did a major monographic show of his work in 2010 that was part of a touring exhibition. He works in many different mediums: theater, sculpture, drawing, film animation, and printmaking. I became really immersed and interested in his work.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did that lead to building MoMA’s South African print collection?
QandA_ADrop.jpgPrints are created in such a way that there’s always more than one out there, unlike a unique painting, sculpture, or etching. And so the price point is lower, and we tend to collect more objects and take more risks, I think. We collected a lot of Kentridge’s work, and as I began to learn more about his career, I started to understand more of the context of printmaking and artistic production in South Africa generally. I took my first trip there in 2004. It was a great time to go because they were celebrating ten years of democracy since Nelson Mandela’s election. It was a terrific moment—all the museums were completely redefining their work and collecting more artwork by black Africans.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhere did you go on that first trip?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI visited Kentridge at his studio in Johannesburg, but I also went to many different provinces to research other artists and the role and prevalence of printmaking. I visited print workshops, universities, and community art centers in rural and urban areas. Printmaking is celebrated in South Africa in a way that's different from other countries. There are so many talented practitioners who aren’t well known either in or outside the country. So the trip was also an opportunity to bring new works into MoMA’s permanent collection, with an eye toward ultimately exhibiting some of the prints.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s the relationship between printmaking and politics?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWhat I wanted to illustrate with this show is how there are many different centers of production in South Africa, not just in the highbrow art world, because of the history and legacy of apartheid. There was a point when black artists couldn’t legally apply to colleges and universities, and they had to seek art training elsewhere. Printmaking was an especially accessible format that also had economic advantages—people could sell their prints and earn a living.
Wherever countries have undergone extraordinary political change, printmaking always plays a role. Mexico, Cuba, and South Africa are all examples. You can think back to Goya and Picasso too—there’s a strong link between printmaking and narratives about war, humanity, and cruelty. That’s part of the story with this show.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow have you continued to discover new artists?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI took another trip to South Africa in 2007, and since then I’ve stayed in touch with artists, publishers, and workshops. They’re constantly updating me on what’s being produced. The great thing about the print medium is that it’s not like shipping a sculpture or a painting—prints can be rolled up in a tube and mailed—so this has enabled me to continue acquiring works. Outside of South Africa, MoMA might now have the most holdings of prints by South African artists. At the same time, with this exhibition I felt really strongly about letting the artists be heard, so we brought some of them over to give presentations about their work.

Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now runs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through August 29, 2011.

Judith Hecker with Cameron Platter’s Kwakuhlekisa (stencil, 2007).
William Kentridge, General (engraving and watercolor, 1993).

That’s all, folks

Designed by architects with UChicago ties, a museum closes its doors.

By Elizabeth Station


On my way to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on West 53rd Street during a recent trip to New York City, I thought I’d visit the neighboring American Folk Art Museum. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects—the husband-and-wife team behind the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts—the 40-foot-wide building occupies a vertical sliver of Manhattan that’s easy to miss if you walk by too quickly.

Tsien and Williams's award-winning design garnered glowing reviews when the museum opened in 2001. Eager to step in and see the space, I was surprised instead to find the front doors padlocked and the lobby dark. I later learned that, struggling with low attendance and a $32 million debt, the folk art museum had sold the building to MoMA and moved to smaller quarters uptown. But the funds generated by the sale haven't restored the museum's financial health, and it may shut down permanently and donate its collection to the Smithsonian.

This UChicago Life

Stories about rumors and their repercussions on a college campus

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


uchicago-ira.jpg

Today on our show we have just one story, of an incredible rumor that spread through one college campus, if not quite like wildfire, then perhaps like a slow Lake Michigan fog. This is Mitchell Kohles with UChiBLOGo. Our show, in three acts. Stay with us.

I first heard the rumor from a friend, who had heard it from a friend of a friend, and he made me promise not to tell anyone: Ira Glass is teaching a creative writing class at the University of Chicago.

The details of the original rumor (read: the buzz by the time it got around to me) were that: a) Glass would teach a class during winter quarter, something about creative nonfiction writing, potentially with elements of radio broadcasting, and b) students who were registered for a certain creative writing class during the fall would be automatically enrolled in the Glass class for the following quarter. Come December, fans of This American Life would be encouraged to politely exchange blows over any remaining seats.

Whoa. This is serious news, right? Unless, of course, it’s not. My first thought was to browse the CRWR course listings for something that seemed to suggest Glass. Beginning Nonfiction, naturally. Writing Memoir: interesting, but probably not what we’re looking for. And lo, Documentary for Radio: Audio Verte,’ sounds juuuust right—except that the course is missing an instructor, and there aren’t any students enrolled.

At this point, I was beginning to doubt my informant, so I returned to the source and tried to track this thing back to someone with an office. The first person who had anything substantive to say was Isaac:

Regarding Ira Glass, I heard he was coming from Harry, who I believe heard it from Kathy Anderson (head of Chicago Careers in Journalism). I am loosely paraphrasing, since he told me this around two months ago, but as I understand it Mr. Glass will be coming for a weekend sometime in fall quarter to do some workshops on storytelling. Slots in these workshops will be given first to students in creative writing classes, and then to the general student body.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which writing class I’m in. Maybe Glass is coming sooner than I thought. Let’s talk to Harry:

The guy to get in touch with about the possible Ira Glass event and any other author events is Dan Raeburn [author of the comics zine The Imp]. I'm not sure whether the event is still on or if they'll want to talk about it quite yet, but I'm sure he'd let you know either way.

Dan Raeburn sounds like he might have the scoop. Maybe he can end this once and for all:

This isn't a rumor, it's a fact, so you can publish it. Ira Glass is indeed coming to the U of C in October. But he's not doing an event, i.e., a lecture or public performance of any kind. Instead he's doing something even cooler. He's meeting with students only.

Dan’s email went on to explain that Glass will hold a two-hour meeting with students who are pursuing their own creative projects. He will answer their questions, provide advice on their work, and share what he’s learned about “the art of telling true stories.” Although Glass was originally invited to be a part of the Arts Speaks series, he was more interested in talking directly with students. And so Glass agreed to come for free but had one important condition: no more than 100 students can participate. If it was going to work, it had to be small. For that reason, the event is not open to the public, and only students currently registered for creative nonfiction, documentary, radio, or journalism courses will be offered a spot.

Perhaps I’ve got a chance after all. It sounds like we’ve found a rumor that didn’t end in tears and broken friendship. At least until first week and pink-slip mayhem, things are looking good. Dan says:

I for one am thrilled, and hope your readers are too. Please spread the word.

You got it.

Searching for Scavies

Must-see Scav Hunt highlights

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


The University of Chicago Scav Hunt celebrated its 25th birthday this year, setting a world record for the world's largest scavenger hunt and churning out another gargantuan list (pdf) of apocryphal and near-impossible items.

While much of this history may be confined to alumni memories, we dug through the kipple of YouTube and relived some notable achievements from the past five years.


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“That Guy Kid” Action Figure – 2008
A great illustration of what it is to be both Scavie and UChicago student, but why couldn’t they get the title right? Who’s “That Guy?”


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SuperCrocks – 2010
Starring star professor Paul Sereno. Not much of a video, but this is just too funny.


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Strandebeest – 2007
The poor video quality belies the enormous accomplishment. Few items are worth 300 points.


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Hamlet: Will it Blend? – 2007
The kid just commits so hard that you can’t help but forgive him for using an immersion blender.


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Sexiled to the Library – 2007
First as tragedy, then as farce. This has definitely happened before.


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Science. Magic. Time – 2009
The “magic” trick is in tribute to Tesla's contribution to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, as is this soon-to-end exhibit.


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Avatar 1-D – 2010
Charming, and maybe the only video on the list with any production value to speak of.

Down the rabbit hole

A look back at UChicago's first transmedia game.

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


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If you happened to visit campus last spring, you probably noticed some bizarre ephemera scattered across campus: strange metallic lattices, rotationally symmetric veves (pictured below right), or a group of motionless bodies splayed out on the sidewalk in the center of the quad. Unless you were among the few to stubble upon a rabbit hole into this strange world, most of it probably went over your head.

veves.jpgOscillation, the University of Chicago’s first Alternate Reality Game (ARG), came and went without attracting too much attention. But you had to be holed up deep within the Reg not to notice the ways in which the game’s designers and players transformed campus in the last five weeks of spring quarter. Oscillation belongs to a new genre of interactive fiction in which players interact with various media—in this case, paper flyers, tape cassettes, websites, IRC chats, text-based adventure games, and even sidewalk chalk—to connect with each other and engage with the world around them in to create a unique narrative experience. Often these ARGs are used by production companies to promote more mainstream video games or movies, but Oscillation was a stand-alone project designed by students and faculty and sponsored by the UnCommon Fund.

The game centered on a fictional narrative about a group of scientists from a parallel universe who needed help from our own—players searched for clues and solved puzzles, both online and on campus, to ensure a balance between the two worlds. A few of the head designers and players got together in Walker Museum in July to reminisce about their experiences.

At the table:

  • Moira Cassidy, AB’11, game design writer
  • Patrick Jagoda, game design director, assistant professor of English
  • Patrick McWilliams, AB’10, player
  • Russell Ruch, AB’09, player
  • Ainsley Sutherland, AB’11, game design director

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QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was it like playing the game?
QandA_ADrop.jpgRuch: I remember one night Janice [another player] and I were at the MacLab until midnight just trying to solve this stupid puzzle. And there’s no reason that you have to do it, because it’s a game, but maybe the fact that it is an ARG and it’s not something where you can just put the console away and walk away from — it makes you want to do it more.
McWilliams: The stakes somehow seem higher because it’s not so clear that it is a game. It feels like it requires your participation almost.
Ruch: After completing a puzzle, we were able to find a box of electronic parts that we were supposed to solder together to build a lattice of lights, and it turned out I was the only person that knew how to solder. And I’m not a really good solderer, so that failed. But they adapted the story around it, so that turned out okay.
Jagoda: We actually kept open the possibility that you would fail, so we had that story ready.
Cassidy: Originally, there were several permutations of boxes and lights, so depending on which box you did, or if you did them together, the light patterns displayed would be different. Narrative-wise, you were supposed to figure out that one of the people giving you instructions would lead you to your doom. We were very Master-of-Puppets sometimes [laughs].
QandA_QDrop.jpgYou never officially announced that there was an ARG happening on campus. How did the players treat the game during those five weeks?
QandA_ADrop.jpgJagoda: There is this breakdown between game play and real life that happens in almost all of these games, and you start seeing things, and you’re not sure if they’re part of the game or they’re just part of the life of the campus. It produces this sort of paranoia.
McWilliams: I thought that was the appeal, the idea of being able to construct your own idea of what the game is. What is and what isn’t. It becomes a way to sort out the world around you and make it into some sort of parallel universe. You can only sort of half-see everything, and you have to use what you do see to fill in the rest.

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QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat were some of the challenges of creating an ARG from scratch?
QandA_ADrop.jpgSutherland: One of the challenges, with a game like ours, is that we didn’t have a product behind it. The players couldn’t say, “Oh, this is like Halo, so…” or, “Oh, I know what this word means.”
Jagoda: Virtually every other ARG has some advertising component and requires a type of funding that takes away from the experience, so actually one of the advantages of doing this at a University is that you don’t have to compromise your artistic vision.
Sutherland: A lot of the planning happened during the game too. Things went wrong, or things were discovered in the wrong order [by the players] and we had to reevaluate.
Cassidy: Or they cracked our puzzles in ways we didn’t think were possible. They looked at our source code to get the passwords. But once we found out they were doing it, we created a whole puzzle around using the source code to sort of respond to that.
Jagoda: It’s really a live design process, because you have to adapt on the spot. It’s not like making a movie or writing a novel where you already know what the form is and you have thousands of examples from which to draw. You’re making a new thing every single time—the form of transmedia games is only about a decade old.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat was the reaction on campus?
QandA_ADrop.jpgSutherland: Having people be like, “Oh, I’m so excited about this,” was such a big thing. Because we thought people were going to hate it.
Jagoda: I still think the first rabbit hole [the event depicted in the trailer] was still totally atmospheric and cool. It was a puzzle, but luring them in in this particular way, even though that many people didn’t show up, made it so there was still a description of this going around. I think we got that moment so right.
Sutherland: There were obviously people who knew us and knew that we were involved, but weren’t playing the game, and so we would get accused of things that were happening on campus. People would say things like, “I saw this happening, was this your fault?” We did have a police report filed on us.
Ruch: Really?
Sutherland: Well, we did this preview for the game where we drew chalk bodies on the ground and had weird little machines lying around, and somebody reported it to the police.

Kant buy me love

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One U of C student's quest to find out just how pretentious an alumni happy hour could get.

By Christina Pillsbury, '12


The Facebook wall for the “Harvard/UChicago/Cornell/Emory/Northwestern/Wash U Happy Hour” event page displayed the usual “I have a boat cruise that night... but hope you guys have a good turnout!” “Bummer, out of town still—next one for sure!!!!,” (yes, with four exclamation points), but there was one stand-out comment: “I cannot wait to hang out with people equally as pretentious as me!!!” (only three exclamation points). I was intrigued.

And so my quest for the evening was to find out how pretentious the conversation could get. Coordinator Tim Richards, AB’07, told me that eventually, as more drinks get consumed, students will commingle, the maroon will bleed with the crimson, and hopefully, some alumni might actually "score some dates," he said. "You’d be surprised at how many schools need help with that. It’s hard after college to pick someone up in a bar and talk about the Odyssey."

I heard him loud and clear: I have been known to blabber on about Foucault’s theories of authorship after a few drinks and it’s not generally an effective way to pick up men.

At the Kerryman bar Chicago happy hour, I started at the outskirts of the crowd, making the rounds to all the different schools. For some reason, many students were not keen on talking to a strange girl without a name tag who was writing down everything they said. Also, eavesdropping was hard in a bar filled with almost 100 people talking about what I hoped was the Odyssey. I would have also taken the Illiad.

But, sigh, for the first hour I heard nothing of the sort. Alumni stood in circles with their fellow college-mates—the drinks were mixed, but the alumni were not. I approached a few groups, and none were talking about anything of substance. As an arrogant U of C student, I was starting to get impatient.

I interrupted a conversation between Mary Potkonjak and Emily Wolodiger, both AB’11, regarding employers’ misconceptions about U of C women. “If they know the prestige of the University of Chicago, they expect you to know everything,” Wolodiger said. “If they don’t, they just assume you went to a state school.” Which, as every U of C student knows, is the worst thing anyone can think about you.

I was getting there. Things were getting slightly pretentious, but not close to what I was hoping for. I was thinking that it's possible that U of C alumni, perhaps, aren't what their reputation suggests.

Then I got to talking with Eric Blaschke, AB’06, MD’10, who was perturbed that the U of C students weren’t all cowered in the corner, isolated from the crowd, muttering to one another. Then he launched into a diatribe about how he expected the conversation to turn that evening, it seemed quite reasonable: “I assume that these U of C alumni will only discuss Kant in its original German. That seems pretty reasonable, maybe Aristotle in its original Ancient Greek.” He realized there should be a compromise; “I suppose it won’t get that pretentious; it will probably fall somewhere between Kant and Greek, though.” It's difficult to tell just how sarcastic his comment was.

My night ended with familiar faces: former Chicago Maroon editors—including former Magazine intern Asher Klein, AB’11—some of the most pretentious people at the University. Former sports editor Nick Foretek, AB’11, strutted in carrying Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, with a smug look on his face which negated any need for words. And finally, a former Maroon news editor, who preferred to remain nameless, said she could “come to this bar and find all the pretty people, and then see all the U of C people.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, is the type of sarcastic, self-deprecating, pretentiousness I was looking for that evening. Challenge complete.

Not your grandkids’ bricks

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Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie house gets the LEGO treatment.

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


In America, if you didn’t play with LEGO as a kid, you played with Barbie. If you didn’t play with either, well, maybe you ended up at the U of C.

Steven fits into the first category, but it’s too early to know if he’ll be a Maroon. “2,276,” he yells upon learning the brick count of the new LEGO interpretation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. “That’s even more than the Temple of the Crystal Skull!”

On August 28, Steven and others—most of them adults—visited the Prairie-style landmark to meet Adam Reed Tucker, LEGO master builder and the man behind the LEGO Architect Series. The event launched the 16¼L x 4¾H x 7½W mini-Robie, and visitors could pick up a set of their own for $199. I don't get an allowance anymore, but if rates haven’t changed much in the last 10 years, that price tag is no child’s play.

And obviously, the goal of the LEGO Architect and Landmark series is to target the adult market, to make the bricks feel like an art form instead of a toy. Or at the very least, a sophisticated toy.

Tucker, who had a nine-month LEGO exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in 2009, is all about the “brick as art” idea. Six years ago, he was working as an architect using rebar, glass, and drywall to construct his buildings. But when the economy took a bite out of his business, he realized his LEGO side-project might be something more. “I realized that I could use the brick as a medium, not just a toy.”

For the past five years, Tucker has been using those bricks to interpret famous architecture from around the world, from the Willis Tower to Burj Khalifa.

Build, play, stack? When asked, Tucker says he prefers “create.” And on August 28, visitors got to check out his newest creation: a jumbo version of the mini-Robie, this one not for sale. Tucker is using 12 of the retail Robie sets to build an extra large (or slightly less small, depending on what you're comparing it to) version of Robie.

“I’m not really building it to scale,” says Tucker. “It might be 1:127 or something else, but it is to proportion.” After working on it for four days at his home, Tucker brought the model along with him to show his fans and continue building—after four days of work, he had only completed the exterior walls. “I’m just taking it apart and putting it back together until I’m happy with it.” And instead of flipping through an instruction booklet (by the way, the booklet for the retail version is a hefty 195 pages), he consults Frank Lloyd Wright's photos and architectural drawings.

“I’ve studied him so much by this point,” Tucker laughs. He even has plans to build a home of his own in recognition of Wright’s work, using only stone, concrete, and wood. “Not a square inch of plaster.”

As for the jumbo-mini-Robie, once it’s finished Tucker plans to take it to the National Building Museum in Washington, where it will join 15 of his other creations, including Fallingwater, another famous Wright home.

The Robie House is the third Wright building to be featured in the LEGO Architect Series. Next up: Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, to be released before the end of September.

Campus celebrates life of Mandeep Bedi, AB'10

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Day of remembrance honors alumnus killed in a traffic incident in late August.

By Christina Pillsbury, '13


On September 1 the University community mourned the loss of Mandeep Bedi, AB’10, who died August 25 from injuries sustained in a traffic incident a few days prior. His wife, Elizabeth Bedi, is a fourth-year anthropology student in the College.

Bedi was run down by a female driver with whom Elizabeth engaged in an argument after she merged into traffic on August 19. The couple were rushed to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital. Elizabeth, who was also hit, was treated for her injuries and released. Police are investigating his death as a homicide. He was on his way to campus, where he was a sales intern at the University's IT Services Solutions Center.

In honor of Bedi's senior anthropology thesis that examined American graffiti, students and other members of the community began the day of remembrance by making a graffiti wall on the Bartlett quad. Following the tribute, approximately 150 community members attended a memorial service in Rockefeller Chapel, which concluded with a walk to the Promontory Point, led by Elizabeth.

From the podium at Rockefeller, friends and faculty members remembered Bedi as an active campus community member: As a student he served as a residential computing assistant, helping students and faculty with technological difficulties. Through the student-run organization SPLASH! Chicago, he taught two classes to high-school students—one on the politics of soccer and the other on contemporary freedom of speech. Friends also said his enthusiasm in the South Asian Student Association dance group was contagious.

“He never stopped dancing, ever,” Elizabeth said in her eulogy. “Even now I know he’s dancing.”

Others remembered the always-optimistic Bedi’s intellectualism. One of Bedi's most influential professors, John Kelly was unable to attend, but sent a statement, read by Director of the Anthropology Department Russell Tuttle, “Mandeep reveled in thinking along with other students rather than trying to distinguish himself from everyone else. He had the kind of intelligence that was there to help others.”

Bedi and Elizabeth were married a little less that a year ago.

“The night of Mandeep’s final SASA dance show, I leaned over to my roommate and said, 'I’m going to marry that man,'” Elizabeth said. “Since we met, our life has been a fairy tale.”

She concluded with Bedi’s signature phrase; “B.E.Z. [Be easy] Mandeep, B.E.Z. always.”

Out of the Core, the Phoenix rises to the stands

phil-on-steps.jpg Alumnus talks about his time playing the part of the U of C's mascot, Phil.

By Christina Pillsbury, '13


Stephen Bonnet, AB’11, proudly lists his position as the mascot at the University of Chicago on his résumé. But his stint as Phil the Phoenix, he says, is hardly the most eccentric detail about himself. Under the personal section he boasts about his Bullwinkle J. Moose impression. In fact, he considers it a big part of why he was hired as a Teach for America corps member, teaching tenth grade special education in the Bronx. He’s also pursuing a master’s degree in special education at Hunter College. He hopes to take his experience riling up the crowd to the next stage of his life–even if that doesn’t include mascot grad school.


QandA_QDrop.jpgDid you show any signs as a child that indicated a future career as a mascot?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThroughout my childhood I was shy, deathly afraid of crowds or large groups of people, a super-nerd who was not at all dancer-ly, and the last person on earth you would ever expect to do any of the things I have done over the past three years as our mascot. But it wasn’t until I got to high school of all places that, supported by my classmates and teachers, I really got comfortable enough with myself to do that. I came out of the closet in tenth grade, which stands in for just a total transformation over my first two years of high school that released publicly the gregarious extrovert I had been on the inside for so long.
QandA_QDrop.jpgIn what way did the skills you learned in the Core translate to Phil the Phoenix?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThey both required me to step into the perspectives of others. In the case of the Core, that meant thinking like an astronomer, a biologist, an anthropologist, and a philosopher, among others. Being Phil the Phoenix required me to understand, without talking, who of the players and fans was in the mood for getting fired up and who was in the mood for joking around, and who was in the mood for being left alone.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat is your best memory jumping around in the U of C crowd?
QandA_ADrop.jpgOne really heartwarming memory from this past year is that my parents flew from New York out to Chicago for Parents’ Night, which is the last home basketball game of the season, and so was also the last formal appearance from me of the season. I came up with the idea that in acknowledging parents of graduating seniors, my parents could wear the heads from the two old costumes that were just lying around the equipment room, and we could acknowledge “Mr. and Ms. Phoenix.” My boss agreed to it, and it was the most hilarious-looking thing to see me with two normally dressed adults wearing phoenix heads. I also really appreciated the chance to acknowledge my parents when they came out all that way to see me.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat other stories stick out in your mind from your days representing the Maroons?
QandA_ADrop.jpgOnce I was walking from Ratner to Summer Breeze, and a drunken person thought it would be hilarious to steal my head and run off with it. Now this was in the old costume, which actually was broken in a number of places. The shoe inserts were completely broken, which meant that my feet were just kind of sliding around all the time in these huge shoes. I literally could not run in the costume, because I would have landed on my face. Fortunately, while I tried to cover my head with my wings, one of my friends was nearby and immediately followed the thief, in heels I think, and got my head back within seconds.

Help help!

"Sports for people who like to read"?

By Mitchell Kohles, '12


the-classical-logo.pngIf the idea doesn't sound UChicago, the pitch sure does. Pete Beatty, AB’03, and Tom Gaulkin, AB’04, are helping to start The Classical, a website dedicated to smart, sophisticated sports writing. On board is a host of writers and bloggers who have written for everything from McSweeney's to SLAM, and who have story ideas that range from a piece on David Foster Wallace's relationship with tennis to an exposé on Jason Giambi's offseason entertainment.

The staff plans to launch the site in mid-October once they reach their one-year budget of $50,000—check out the sports artwork and editorial privileges offered in return for donations to their Kickstarter campaign. With only a few weeks left to reach the target (they're pushing 85 percent now), the website could offer a much-needed breather from the knee-jerk opinions and over-the-top fawning of standard fare sports journalism. Beatty, managing editor, shared some more details and showed his Chicago loyalties. Well, sort of.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow will The Classical fit into the landscape of sports journalism filled with giants like ESPN, websites like Deadspin, and unconventional upstarts like Grantland?
QandA_ADrop.jpgA friend (and fellow U of C alum) said she was glad someone was going to launch a sports website for people who read novels. That obviously doesn’t cover our whole mission statement, but it’s not a bad place to start. The Classical is a place for thoughtful, engaging, and stimulating writing about sports and beyond. There are a lot of great sites serving up sports coverage right now, but there is also an opening for a more literary-minded take on the games people play. I hope we can be a place where writers who can’t find full-time jobs in the new media environment can get great clips, make a few bucks (once we’re on our feet as a business), and do some wonderful writing. I’m hoping The Classical winds up like the sports-writing equivalent of an old-fashioned small mag—a journal of ideas, very much a Chicago idea. But, of course, on the web. And funnier than Ramparts or the New Left Review. With more skateboarding columns.
QandA_QDrop.jpgAre there any specific Chicago or UChicago stories that you plan to cover?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe Classical is going to wind up skewing very Chicago-y. I’m already lining up pieces from Moacir de Sa Pereira, AB’04, AM’05, and Edward “Whet” Moser, AB’04, and many other folks I know from the U of C. Between Nate Silver, AB’00; Christina Kahrl, AB’90; and Kim Ng, AB’90; et al, the U of C has put its fingerprints all over the sports world. I’m very much hoping The Classical can be in the same ultra-smart tradition. I am already looking for an angle to write about the American Professional Slow Pitch League’s Chicago Storm franchise, and their successor, the Chicago Nationwide Insurance team (what a boring team name!). One of our charter members, Tim Marchman, is a resident of Hyde Park and a pretty ardent White Sox fan, so the website is definitely going to have some Chicago flavoring, with an emphasis on the South Side.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat, if any, is the transition from FreeDarko to The Classical?
QandA_ADrop.jpgBethlehem Shoals, the animating spirit behind FreeDarko, is sort of the center of the hub of how everyone from The Classical knows each other. And that’s no accident; I think for a lot of people FreeDarko as both a blog and two awesome books opened their eyes to the fact that sports can be approached in brainy and provocative ways without feeling clinical or condescending. We’re going to branch out from pro basketball into the entire kingdom of sports, but I think we will always look to FD for inspiration.
QandA_QDrop.jpgThe promo video on your Kickstarter page emphasizes reader involvement. How do you hope this “conversation” will work on a micro level?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’m hoping, as the managing editor, to recruit writers from the commenter community if I can, and not just as a gimmick. On an even more micro level, I think our content—literally what our staff chooses to write about—is going to be shaped by how people react to our initial offerings. We’ve already gotten suggestions via Twitter and the Kickstarter drive for things that are going to be a part of the site, from a skateboarding video column written by a novelist/professor, to a call for an oral history of the Continental Basketball Association’s Cedar Rapids Silver Bullets.
QandA_QDrop.jpgYou offer your backers some pretty creative rewards—at least 15 people have donated enough money to request an essay on any topic. What’s the wildest request so far?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThe donor who requested that we write a sonnet about Manu Ginobili and/or Jerry Jones is the clubhouse leader in oddball requests, but there’s a ways to go yet—about 20 grand left to raise still, so we may have to do even more outlandish things to get our seed money.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSox or Cubs?
QandA_ADrop.jpgActually, Indians, but if I’m choosing a Chicago loyalty, White Sox all the way, division rivalries notwithstanding. I’m a sucker for the disenfranchised, and the Cubs’ ineptitude is a fig leaf for their establishmentarianism.

He said, she said

Lawyer-turned-drag queen Irwin Keller, JD'88, gave himself a pretty great interview.

By Ruth E. Kott, AM'07


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It was the easiest interview ever. After Irwin Keller, JD'88, agreed to an e-mail dialogue about his more than 17 years performing in “America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet” the Kinsey Sicks, I sent him some questions—"How did you decide on the name Winnie and her character?" "What's your most memorable performance experience?" "Do you think you'll ever go back to being a lawyer?"—but he wasn't really all that excited about them.

Keller took matters into his own hands, coming up with a quite entertaining set of questions and answers. "As I was writing," he said, "I kept modifying questions to elicit the answers I wanted to give, and before I realized it I'd written the whole damn interview. So here is my version for you to do with as you will!"

And we will publish it below.


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QandA_QDrop.jpgYou probably have one of the more unusual professions for a University of Chicago graduate, wouldn’t you say?
QandA_ADrop.jpgFor sure. I do read through the University of Chicago Magazine, and I rarely see anyone having as much fun as I do performing with the Kinsey Sicks. I imagine working on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary would’ve come close, but at least I’ve still got a job.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did you end up forming and performing in the Kinsey Sicks?
QandA_ADrop.jpgIt was during the early 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic was still raging unchecked and the work was difficult and heartbreaking that we formed the Kinsey Sicks. We were four gay men living in San Francisco, in the center of the storm, and two of us were doing HIV legal work—me locally and Ben Schatz nationally. To blow off steam we’d sometimes do little guerrilla drag outings, getting friends together and showing up somewhere inappropriate in drag.
So in December of 1993 we went to a Bette Midler concert dressed as the Andrews Sisters. A promoter approached us and asked us to do a number at an upcoming World War II-themed event. This was the first time that it dawned on me that all four of us had significant musical background. We were excited by the idea and began harmonizing as we wobbled home on our pumps. We stayed up till 3 a.m. coming up with song ideas, and the Kinsey Sicks were born that night.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow would you describe your act?
QandA_ADrop.jpgLots of politics, really smart songs, a generous helping of raunch, bad drag, four truly lovable characters, and some really good four-part a cappella singing. It’s very highbrow and very lowbrow at once—the musical styles range from Gaga to opera.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWas it hard to find an audience?
QandA_ADrop.jpgYou’d think, wouldn’t you? But no. We almost instantly became a cult hit in San Francisco. We’d write show after show in our evening hours and do four- or six-week runs at a local theater. But then we started touring and imagining what it might be like to do this full time. ... In 2000 we got an offer to open our show Off Broadway, and there was no way I could say no. I didn’t ever want to think that I’d had the opportunity to be a performer at that level and that I said, "No." So I quit my job and haven’t practiced law since.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow did Off Broadway go?
QandA_ADrop.jpgOur first production meeting for the show was September 11, 2001. That probably tells you something right there. We had all moved to New York that week. We already had a contract with Studio 54, which was building an Off Broadway–sized space around us. We had a production crew, designers, everything. We couldn’t just call it off. So we opened the show. It was a great show—the reviews were lavish. But New York was traumatized. No one came. The tourists stayed away. The New Yorkers stayed home. It was heartbreaking. We closed by Christmas, like everything else running Off Broadway at the time, except for Puppetry of the Penis. Go figure.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSounds like a big disappointment.
QandA_ADrop.jpgYes and no. It was sad, but it raised our sights. We realized we really could do this for a living. So we started touring full time, and we’ve been doing that now for ten years. We’ve recorded seven albums, starred in two feature films [including Almost Infamous, a behind-the-scenes documentary], and performed in theaters, colleges, and comedy festivals all over the place. Not just the big cities, but small towns and Bible Belt. It’s fun, it’s silly, and it’s often mission-driven. All in all, it’s a life I’d never expected.
QandA_QDrop.jpgTell us about your character, Winnie.
QandA_ADrop.jpgI love Winnie. She helps me work out a lot of stuff. She’s sort of the den-mother of the Kinsey Sicks and the musical taskmistress. She’s a lesbian but kind of old-fashioned—conservative and prudish. She hates when the group’s smiling veneer begins to crack, and she struggles valiantly to maintain a socially appropriate demeanor. But mostly her attempts fail, often leaving her having to face down the audience in long, awkward silences that have become her comedic stock and trade. I love those long beats.
QandA_QDrop.jpgSo how did your time at University of Chicago prepare you for a life with the Kinsey Sicks?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI loved University of Chicago. I loved and still love Hyde Park. My years studying obscure Semitic languages give Winnie no end of puzzling, esoteric factoids to blurt out impulsively on stage.
But most significant is that University of Chicago is where I became an activist. The gay-rights movement was still pretty new; the AIDS epidemic had just started. So I started organizing and protesting and lobbying. I was part of getting the University to adopt its non-discrimination policy. With the support of my law-school professors, I drafted Chicago’s human-rights ordinance, which was passed into law in 1989. I ran the Gay and Lesbian Law Student Association and organized the Chicago Conference on Sexual Orientation and the Law in 1987 (which is actually where I met fellow Kinsey founder Ben Schatz, who was at the time a baby lawyer with National Gay Rights Advocates and one of our invited speakers).
But it was a challenging time. Some readers will remember a horrific spate of anti-gay harassment that went down on campus in 1987—a concerted campaign by a group calling itself the Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist. They targeted some dozen visible queer activists on campus, my partner at the time and I among them. They researched us all and sent our parents and neighbors and employers letters telling them that their child or neighbor or employee was gay, and a probable carrier of AIDS, and encouraging violence against us. I became frightened to walk alone at night in Hyde Park, not knowing who these people were and what their actual capabilities might be. The campus community was shocked when it turned out to be a couple of students in the College.
It was terrible. But the experience hardened my resolve. I needed a life where I could be out and outspoken. And for a while, my HIV legal work served that function for me. But frankly, the chance to do social critique in a wig while singing four-part harmony and making people laugh? What could be better than that?

Red October

Soviet propaganda comes to Chicago.

By Elizabeth Station


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As a kid, I wept through Dr. Zhivago and Reds. During the Sandinista years, I rode buses around Nicaragua to glimpse the revolution. Later, on a trip to Moscow, I had to visit Lenin’s body in Red Square. It was rumored he was wearing a new Armani suit—and since the Soviet Union had just fallen, we had the mausoleum to ourselves.

Socialism is so 20th century, but I’m still a pushover for big red posters. Lucky for fans, Soviet art is on display in museums all over the city, as part of the Soviet Arts Experience festival. An intimate show called Process and Artistry in the Soviet Vanguard, now at the Smart Museum of Art, features works by Gustav Klucis and Valentina Kulagina, a husband and wife team who created public art for the Soviet government during the 1920s and '30s.

RedOctoberDrawing.jpgWhat is most interesting about the show—conceived as a companion to the Smart’s concurrent Vision and Communism exhibition—is its attention to artistic process. Klucis and Kulagina combined photo montage techniques with abstract graphic design; many posters are displayed with the photographs, newspaper clippings, and early sketches that the artists used to create the works. “This is where cutting and pasting started,” says Kimberly Mims, an art-history PhD student who curated the exhibition. “The artists were very experimental, and they freed themselves to work with photography in whatever way they wanted.”

Politically, of course, Soviet artists weren't free. Under Stalin, semi-autonomous artists’ collectives were disbanded and artists came under central party control. Without awareness of their process, it would be easy to write off the work as agitprop or kitsch. One poster exhorts Communist Party youth to pitch in and help peasants on collective farms; another celebrates happy rural workers and their tractors. The once-stirring slogans ring hollow: “The USSR is the Shock Brigade of the World Proletariat!” “Higher the Banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin!” “Male and Female Workers all to the Election of the Soviets!”

That doesn’t mean that art from this period lacks value. “The hook for me, and maybe for a younger audience that’s computer literate, is that this show offers a chance to see what came before,” says Mims. Today with the click of a mouse anyone can send photos, alter an image, or cut and paste copy—but in the 1920s, photo montage was entirely new. “Of course for the Soviets, the dream was for everything to be automated,” adds Mims, “but they were in a handmade world.”

Wanted: Undead or alive

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When a zombie infection spread across campus, a student task force armed the resistance.

By Mitchell Kohles, ’12


Now that it’s all over, it’s safe to talk about it. Humans vs. Zombies (HvZ), the one-week event in which a zombie infection spread across campus, ended with nearly everyone dead… er, undead.

It all started on Tuesday of second week, October 4. At 9 p.m. 190-something students gathered in the middle of the main quad to receive bright orange bandanas and foam-dart guns—the standard issue Nerf Maverick is rented out from the Zombie Readiness Task Force (ZRTF) for $5, but several “humans” opt for more heavy arms and purchase them independently.

Every player (except one, the original zombie) receives a weapon to defend themselves from the zombies who, if shot, have to run out of sight of the humans before attacking again. If you’re touched—infected—by a zombie, you lay down your weapon and join the walking dead.

It takes the ZRTF more than a month to prepare each game—just four students serve on the officer board—and the RSO usually reserves the main quad and a campus building for one or more nights during the week-long attack. These games are the only visible evidence of the ZRTF, but the group meets throughout the year to tweak the rules of each upcoming game. This year’s rule changes: Pierce is a safe zone, except for the front lobby; socks can be used as projectiles but not as melee weapons; no shields allowed, whatsoever.

At the dining hall on Friday morning, I asked one of my residents, Robin, how he’d managed to survive this long. “I don’t go outside. It’s kind of nice though because I get escorted wherever I go.” As it turns out, there is a hotline for humans to call and request an escort to anywhere on campus. “Walking alone is suicide. If you go out there alone, they [start chasing you], and you only have six bullets." Robin gestured to his two guns, connected by a piece string so that with one motion he can simultaneously load the next round in each gun. “Well, 12.” After breakfast, Robin made plans with a few fellow humans to get him safely to a 10:30 math class in Ryerson. It sounds like there will be running involved. “Hopefully I’ll see you guys tonight. As a human.”

“After the first day, about 50 percent were zombies. After the second day, 80 percent,” says Kevin Wang, Colonel of the ZRTF and a main organizer of this fall’s game. Running a campus-wide event of this scale attracts attention, and not all of it was welcome. Several non-player students donned orange bandanas of their own and patrolled the quads in search of the remaining humans, causing confusion among players and havoc among ZRTF members. Eventually, a directive was sent out to all the players to take the bandanas from the phony zombies.

The following Tuesday, the few remaining humans gathered for a final mission on the main quad. The objective: escort two scientists to three checkpoints and then get them safely to the Gordon Center for Integrative Sciences. Unfortunately, the humans were outnumbered, and those who didn't abandon the mission early on were soon cornered and converted into cold-blooded [I like "over-educated", but maybe that doesn't fly] brain-eaters [again, I like cerebrophages, but maybe too much?].

Chris Dewing was chosen to be the original zombie, both an honor and a responsibility. "It is a burden in the sense you don't want to be a failure," said Dewing over email. "One needs to by sure to get kills quickly, efficiently, and frequently." Plus, there's all that guilt.

Scorned and bitter zombies don’t have to wait long to try their hand at being human again. The next game is planned for eighth week of winter quarter. How will the snow affect the infection? “I’m excited," says Wang. "I think it just adds another element to the gameplay."

So, is there any cure? “There would have been one if they had completed the mission,” says Wang, “but no one did.”

Photo courtesy Arlene Wang.

Music of the night

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The University Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween concert is a treat for the ears—and the eyes.

By Benjamin Recchie, AB’03


Many a Hyde Park Halloween reveler has started his or her evening with the annual concert given by the University Symphony Orchestra. I caught up with Barbara Schubert, X’79, senior lecturer in music and conductor of the USO, about this annual tradition.


QandA_QDrop.jpgHow long has the USO offered a Halloween concert?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI think the first Halloween concert we gave was in 1980, when Mandel Hall was being renovated. That one took place in the Ida Noyes gym, which is now the Max Palevsky Cinema. It featured pretty typical Halloween fare: Night on Bald Mountain, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Danse Macabre. I’ve gotten a lot more creative since then.
There were a couple of years that I didn’t program a Halloween concert, but by now I think I’m up to number 28.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat music is the symphony performing this time around?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThis year the theme is “Arabian Nights,” a theme that provides a wonderful opportunity for costumes, dancing, and storytelling, along with great music. The central piece is Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which of course is a famous orchestral masterpiece. In addition we’re doing some lesser-known works that fit the theme: Charles Tomlinson Griffes’s The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan and several movements from Carl Nielsen’s Aladdin Suite.
QandA_QDrop.jpgHow do you choose what pieces to perform?
QandA_ADrop.jpgThere are so many factors that enter into my programming decisions for this concert, or for any concert: challenge and appeal for the musicians, enticement and entertainment for the audience, variety over the course of a season and from year to year, and appeal, challenge, and variety for me as conductor. In addition, I always try to program some repertoire that is not standard fare—great music that you don’t hear every day and that other orchestras may never play. I’m trying to do my part to counteract the “nothing-but-the-warhorses” approach of many professional, community, and university orchestras. The Griffes piece is one such treasure: it’s a luxuriant score, displaying the influence of the French Impressionist school as well as Griffes’s distinctive voice. It is, of course, inspired by the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that tells the story of Xanadu and its “stately pleasure dome” within a beautiful garden.
QandA_QDrop.jpgOne tradition of the concert is that you and the musicians come in costume, correct?
QandA_ADrop.jpgI’m always delighted to see the creativity of our musicians expressed through their colorful and imaginative costumes. The French horn section has a long-standing tradition of matching garb. They’ve had so many distinctive and occasionally flamboyant creations: one year they all came as Big Bird, another year they were all ice cream cones, and so on. I never know in advance what they’re going to do: they keep it a closely guarded secret.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat should a first-time audience member be prepared to listen for—and see?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWhile there are lots of theatrical extras involved in this concert, it is first and foremost a concert, featuring earnest and artistic performances of great music. Yes, there are decorations all around Mandel Hall; yes, there is a special entrance by yours truly down the center aisle; yes, there is storytelling, set by yours truly in patently unsophisticated verse; yes, there is dancing in the aisles by the wonderful young dancers from the Hyde Park School of Dance. But first and foremost, the purpose is to bring the audience excellent performances of great music. The orchestra works very hard to prepare the concert with only a month of rehearsal. It is a testament to the talent of our student musicians that they’re able to do that.
QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat’s your favorite thing about this concert?
QandA_ADrop.jpgWithout question, my favorite aspect of this concert is the enthusiasm of the audience. We have kids of all ages, family groups of all combinations, college students, community members, and the like who come to the concert—many of them in costume, of course. They are enthralled and inspired by the whole event, and many make it an annual tradition. I love talking to the audience members as they exit the hall. Energy and enthusiasm are both high, and it makes me feel that we are really doing something meaningful to build the audience for classical music. The most frequent comment that I get at the exit door, though, is the question of what I’m going to program next year.

In my experience, the Halloween concert has always been a lighthearted and family-friendly affair, so bring your kids (or just the kid in you) to Mandel Hall on Saturday, October 29. There are two performances, one at 7 p.m. and the next at 9 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are accepted at the door. (Suggested donations are $8 general, $4 students/children. Children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.)



Barbara Schubert in last year’s Halloween costume. What will she wear this year? You’ll have to come to find out.
Photo courtesy Barbara Schubert.