Bill HolderSeptember 3, 20091min
A recent New York Times story noting that Shanghai and Beijing are “new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates” featured Joshua Arjuna Stephens ’07, who took a temporary job with China Prep, an educational travel company. Stephens told the Times that he new little about China and didn’t speak the language, but he wanted to “do something off the beaten track.” Now, two years after leaving for China, his is fluent in Mandarin and works as a manager for XPD Media, a social media company based in Beijing that makes online games. Young Americans are attracted by the…

Olivia DrakeAugust 6, 20093min
Garfield Lindsay Miller '99 is featured in a July 29 article titled "Dramatic Choices," published by the BC Local News North Shore Outlook section. Miller's filmmaking resume includes co-writing and producing the award-winning and Gemini-nominated documentary The Fires that Burn about Sister Elaine MacInnes and co-writing Stone’s Throw, an award-winning dramatic feature film set in Nova Scotia – among many other film credits. Most recently, Miller, who is back living in British Columbia, was voted one of the top 20 Top Canadian Film Makers by a jury of his peers. Miller’s new feature film, The Last New Year, which recently debuted…

Olivia DrakeAugust 6, 20091min
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter named Katherine Gajewski '02 as the new director of the Mayor's Office of Sustainability. According to a July 18 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mayor Nutter interviewed several candidates as he searched for someone with political savvy and operational experience who was also a team player. Ultimately, the mayor said, "we found that person and she was just across the hall." Gajewski was a current staff member in the office. As an aide to the chief of staff, Gajewski oversaw two citywide "spring cleanups" and advised Nutter on appointments to city boards and commissions. Before joining…

Olivia DrakeAugust 6, 20092min
More than 1,700 incoming University of Dayton (UD) students are required to read Melody Moezzi's ’01 book, War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, before they arrive on campus Aug. 22 for first-year orientation, according to a July 26 Dayton Daily News article. The book is an award-winning collection of essays about young American Muslims, Moezzi is an American Muslim of Iranian descent. UD is a Marianist Catholic university. Moezzi’s book will serve as the basis for a series of student dialogues on the issue of diversity and differences. “I hope that they’ll be able to see a human side…

Olivia DrakeAugust 6, 20091min
According to Variety, Ray Tintori '06 is slated to direct Shane Jones' debut novel "Light Boxes." Spike Jonze has acquired feature rights. "Light Boxes," published earlier this year by Genius Press, is centered on a mysterious town that endures a deadly 1,000-day winter. Tintori's directed numerous music videos plus short films "Jettison Your Loved Ones" and "Death to the Tinman," the later of which was completed while he was a student at Wesleyan and later featured at the Sundance Film Festival.

David LowJuly 14, 20092min
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen directed by Michael Bay ’86 with a screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman ’95, opened in late June to mixed reviews, but the film, a sequel to Transformers (2007), sold some $201.2 million in tickets at North American theaters over its first five days as the number one film at the box office. In his review of the film in The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote: “Mr. Bay is an auteur. His signature adorns every image in his movies … and every single one is inscribed with a specific worldview…

David LowJuly 14, 20092min
Now through Dec. 20, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. presents Consider the Lobster, the first major survey of New York-based artist Rachel Harrison ’89. Named after an essay by the late David Foster Wallace, this exhibition encompasses more than 10 years of large-scale installations by Harrison, all of which will be reconfigured for the CCS Bard galleries, as well as a number of the autonomous sculptural and photographic works for which she is best known. In addition to Rachel Harrison’s work in the CCS Bard Galleries, six artists, including Nayland Blake, Tom…

David LowJuly 14, 20092min
Mark Schafer ’85 is the translator for Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems of David Huerta (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), a bilingual anthology of one of Mexico's foremost living poets, David Huerta. The collection contains translations of 84 of Huerta's poems selected from 12 of his 19 collections along with the original Spanish-language poems. The book is a powerful antidote to recent news coverage of Mexico that depicts the country as often violent and drug-ridden. Huerta has been a central figure in two of the most influential poetic movements in late-20th-century Latin America—the neobaroque movement and that…

David LowJuly 14, 20092min
Michael Rau ’05 is the director of the play Evanston: A Rare Comedy by Michael Yates Crowley at the Undergroundzero Festival at P.S. 122 (150 First Ave.) July 14–17 and at the Summer Sublet Series at HERE! Arts Center 145 Sixth Ave., between Spring and Broome Streets, enter on Dominick Street) Aug.  3–5 in New York City. Presented by Wolf 359, Evanston: A Rare Comedy begins with the disappearance of a teenage girl in deepest suburbia and ends when a meeting of The Evanston Women’s Book Club goes horribly awry. In between, a transgender student dreams of death, a housewife…

Olivia DrakeJune 4, 20094min
Other presenters at the Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns included author Mark Harris; Mark I. Bomback ’93, screenwriter, whose credits include Race to Witch Mountain, Live Free or Die Hard, and Deception; Miguel Arteta, film and television director of Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl, Six Feet Under and Youth in Revolt. Also Liz Garcia ’99, producer, editor and writer of Cold Case; Evan Katz ’83, screenwriter and the executive producer of the television series 24; David Kendall ’79, director of several television series, including Jonas, Hannah Montana and Growing Pains; Dan Shotz ’99, producer, editor and writer, Jericho, and the…

David LowJune 4, 20092min
Alexander Laban Hinton ’85 and Kevin Lewis O’Neill have co-edited Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation (Duke University Press), a book of essays in which leading anthropologists consider questions about the relationship of genocide, truth, memory and representation in the Balkans, East Timor, Germany, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan and other locales. These specialists draw on ethnographic research to provide analyses of communities in the wake of mass brutality. They examine how mass violence is described or remembered, and how those representations are altered by the attempts of others, from NGOs to governments, to assert “the truth” about outbreaks of violence.…

David LowJune 4, 20092min
In her ethnographic account, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (Duke University Press), Shalini Shankar ’94 focuses on South Asian American teenagers (“Desis”) during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. The diverse students whose stories are told are Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations, including first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents’ careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. Shankar analyzes how Desi teens’ conceptions and realizations of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, and she provides a compassionate portrait of a vibrant culture…