Prisoners, Poems, and Principles
Why is attorney Marc Falkoff representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay and publishing a book of their poetry?
Digital Natives in Tomorrow’s Classroom
Today's Web-washed, text-messaging, technology-tethered undergraduates don't learn the way even their recent forebears did. Meanwhile, professors in the School of Engineering want to make them masters of technologies yet to be invented. When the two sides meet in the classroom, all the rules have changed.
Diagnosing Health Care
Four Penn scholars examine U.S. health care—and its political future.
Youth, Interrupted
The Adolescent Mental Health Initiative is a major, Penn-led effort to address what one expert calls the “chronic diseases of the young.”
The Ethnologist Sets Out
William Curtis Farabee conducted pioneering studies of the Amazon for the Penn Museum in the early part of the 20th century. His journals and notebooks offer extraordinary glimpses of the area’s indigenous peoples, and the artifacts he brought back offer an unmatched—and still largely unexamined—treasure-trove of cultural materials.
Web, Take Two
The ranger of a virtual dog park, an Internet entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist, a story scout, a “fake engineer,” and a word-of-mouth marketer are among the Penn players in a movement known (by some) as Web 2.0.
Mr. Olin’s Neighborhood
One of the most acclaimed landscape architects of his generation, the School of Design’s Laurie Olin has helped remake Penn’s campus, reclaim New York’s Bryant Park, and resurrect Independence Mall. Now he has joined forces with architect Frank Gehry to boldly reinvent the heart of Brooklyn. No urban development project in American history compares to their $4 billion vision. No wonder the locals are restless.
Biscuits Rising
The Disco Biscuits—Penn’s own jam band of the 1990s—have a new sound (some call it Bisco), a different (and non-alumnus) drummer, and a growing fan-base (“this whole, like, people-following-us-around-the-country, circus type of thing”). Their headlining performance at this summer’s Jam on the River at Penn’s Landing may have been their most memorable ever—even if it was shut down after only 30 minutes.
Alumni Weekend 2007
Slideshow. Plus: "Food for Thought."
Harold Ford’s Next Move
The notorious “Call Me” ad may—or may not—have cost former U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr. C’92 election as the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction. But despite his narrow loss in Tennessee last fall, he emerged from the race as “a rock star, basically.”
The Secret of Our Success
Women can achieve a fulfilling blend of motherhood and career—just maybe not perfection. And that’s OK, says journalist and mother Leslie Bennetts CW’70, in an excerpt from her new book, The Feminine Mistake.
Across the Borderline
Building on the international connections of “the most networked man in the world,” the new Center for Global Communication Studies is exploring the vast and tangled web of global media.
Prognosis Botswana
Penn doctors, nurses, and scholars are collaborating with their counterparts in Botswana to try to change the course of HIV/AIDS (and health care itself) in one of the countries hit hardest by the disease.
Arnold Eisen’s Moment
With his appointment as chancellor of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, the noted religious-studies scholar—and one time Gazette student columnist and assistant to former Penn President Martin Meyerson—is only the second non-rabbi to serve as the symbolic head of American Judaism’s Conservative movement.
The Wife, the Lady, and the Book of Dames
When an English professor set out to create an animated opera based on “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she decided to bring in some very un-Chaucerian characters. That’s when the real fun began.
Journey to Estonia
Louis Kahn Ar’24 Hon’71 left Estonia as a little boy in 1906. A century later, some members of the great architect’s “family through choice” went back to explore his tangled roots and legacy.
The Radical and the Restorer
As the international blockbuster King Tut exhibition comes to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, the Penn Museum has unveiled an eye-opening companion show on the radical religious and political experiment imposed by the boy-king’s predecessor (and putative father), the Pharoah Akhenaten.
Homecoming 2006
2006 featured the Game (a tough loss to Princeton, unfortunately), the Awards of Merit Gala, and the finale of a year-long commemoration of the 125th anniversary of the University’s first African-American graduate, James Brister D1881.
Music Lessons
Carol Muller’s ethnomusicology class partners with a West Philadelphia Islamic school to explore the sounds of the Qur’an, and each other’s communities.
Lowering the Temperature
The threat of terrorism is real, but America’s response to it is dangerously counterproductive, writes Penn political-science professor Ian Lustick in this excerpt from his new book, Trapped in the War on Terror.
Law Made Plain
Though it pushes plenty of hot buttons in the issues it takes up for debate—domestic spying, torture, criminal sentencing for juveniles, and immigration reform, to name just a few—for close to a decade the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Justice Talking program has functioned as the opposite of “shout” radio.
Workers of the World, Adapt!
After 30 years in the trenches, Andy Stern has become the labor movement’s rising star. But can he change unions fast enough to save them?
New Campus Dawning
Penn’s recently approved master plan envisions playing fields and green space where there are now parking lots; the transformation of Walnut Street’s “dead zone” into a mixed-use mecca; new housing, research, and athletic facilities—plus river views and a seamless connection between University City and Center City.
Retiring Ringmaster
Acclaimed composer Osvaldo Golijov Gr’91 doesn’t mind being famous, but he’d rather talk about music than himself—or better yet, write it.