Horror and Hope

For some of the 14 Penn students who spent two weeks helping at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village for Rwandans orphaned in the country’s genocidal conflict, the experience brought back memories of personal tragedy. For all of them, it was a stark reminder of the horrors humans have inflicted on each other. But it was also an inspiring time, “all about hope, all about the future.”

The Other Health Care Revolutions

The Affordable Care Act may have gotten all the attention, but American medicine will be transformed even more profoundly by forces that neither the government, insurance companies, nor even doctors themselves can fully tame. It’s already happening, and three trends provide a preview of the shape of things to come.

The Perils of Parenting Style

Penn sociologist Annette Lareau says that the way middle class parents interact with their children promotes an “emerging sense of entitlement” that better equips them for success in the world.

Getting Engaged

The Civic Scholars program, which fuses civic engagement with academic courses and projects, is shaping some remarkable, passionate students who are already having an impact on the communities they serve.

Surprises Are Always the Best

Like her four previous books, Jennifer Egan C’85’s A Visit from the Goon Squad received generally stellar reviews. But it didn’t look like this resistant-to-summary novel-in-stories would catch on with the public—that is, until she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Park of a Thousand Pieces

Penn Praxis has a plan for adding 500 acres of open green space to Philadelphia in the next four years. Their approach, informed by novel research by Penn scholars in areas ranging from real-estate economics to criminology, is a new way of imagining urban parkland.

Cup O’Doodles

Artist Gwyneth Leech C’81 started drawing on used paper cups as a distraction when she got “antsy,” but “then it began to really take over.” A few hundred cups later, she spent six weeks doing the same thing while sitting in a window in New York’s Fashion District in an exhibit called Hypergraphia.