David LowAn article by Krista Giovacco at Bloomberg.com recently featured Timothy Clew ’93 and Brian Mota as founders of The Wine Trust, the only private-equity-structured wine-investment fund in the United States with a targeted amount of more than $20 million. Their firm TWT Investment Partners LP, located in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is in the process of raising some $50 million for the trust, which is “more like a private-equity fund. The money invested is basically locked up for as long as eight years, which helps managers ride out a decline.” Clew and Mota are former investment bankers. Clew told Bloomberg: “This was…
A fascinating study by theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb '81, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater (University of Michigan Press), considers large-scale theater productions that often run five hours or more and present special challenges to the artists involved as well as the audience. He takes a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, Peter Brooks’s The Mahabharata, and the "durational works" of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. Diverse and savvy viewers who may otherwise be distracted by film,…
Cati Coe ’92 is a co-editor (with Rachel Reynolds, Deborah Boehm, Julia Meredith Hess, and Heather Rae-Espinosa) of Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective (Vanderbilt University Press), which illuminates the wide-ranging continuities and disruptions in the experiences of children around the world, those who participate in and those who are affected by migration. When children, youth, and adults migrate, that migration is often perceived as a rupture, with people separated by great distances and for extended periods of time. But for migrants and those affected by migration, the everyday persists, and migration itself may be critical to…
Some Day Catch Some Day Down and Sunset Park Polyphony, two CDs released recently and produced by Wesleyan alumni, showcase the cross-pollination of world music and jazz at Wesleyan across decades, and specific collaborations of Wesleyan graduates and faculty for more than 30 years. The albums also reflect Abraham Adzenyah’s long contribution to the Wesleyan community as a teacher of West African music, and his deep influence on generations of Wesleyan students who now make up a large number of alumni. Some Day Catch Some Day Down by Talking Drums (innova Recordings) was originally released in 1987 as an LP and was…
Jay Geller ’75 is the author of The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (Fordham University Press). Geller considers how modernizing German-speaking cultures, undergoing their own processes of identification, responded to the narcissistic threat posed by the continued persistence of Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) by representing “the Jew”’s body—or rather parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them. Such fetish-producing practices reveal the question of German-identified modernity to be inseparable from the Jewish Question. Jewish-identified individuals, immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurations—in the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke,…
Paul Weitz ’88 is the director of the film Being Flynn (Focus Features), which he adapted from an acclaimed memoir by Nick Flynn and which opened in theaters on March 2. The movie drama deals with a young, self-destructive writer (played by Paul Dano) who works in a homeless shelter where he reconnects after 18 years with his alcoholic father (played by Robert De Niro), also a writer, who comes to stay at the shelter. The film also stars Julianne Moore and Olivia Thirlby. Weitz’s film had a long journey to the screen and along the way, the director wrote…
Dr. Halley Faust MA ’05 is co-editor (with Paul Menzel) of Prevention vs. Treatment: What’s the Right Balance? (Oxford University Press). In the West, prevention is usually underfunded while treatment receives greater priority. This book explores this observation by examining the actual spending on prevention, the history of health policies and structural features that affect prevention's apparent relative lack of emphasis, the values that may justify priority for treatment or for prevention, and the religious and cultural traditions that have shaped the moral relationship between these two types of care. The publication helps clarify the nature of the empirical and…
Ethan de Siefe ’95 has written an entertaining new book, Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin (Wesleyan University Press). In the preface of his study, de Siefe writes: “Director Frank Tashlin left an indelible impression on American and global film comedy. His films are some of the funniest, most visually inventive comedies ever made, and they feature landmark performances by some of the greatest comedians in American film history, a list that includes not only Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, but Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny.” Tashlin (1913–1972) was a supremely gifted satirist and visual stylist yet…
In his new work The Color of Citizenship (Oxford University Press), Diego Von Vacano ’93 suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought which has long considered the place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. He argues that debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermath of Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that…
The Wall Street Journal first attempted illustrating the news using the stipple drawing known as the hedcut with news maker portrait made from a series of dots and lines that modeled on currency engravings. Rutherford Chang ’02 now has transformed these illustrations into an art project called “The Class of 2008,” on display at the White Space Gallery in Beijing through March 18. He has reduced the Journal’s news coverage of 2008 to just the hedcuts and rearranged them, yearbook-style, in alphabetical order. “The Class of 2008” is “typical of his past works,” according to RedBox Studio, which promotes contemporary…
In Share, Retweet, Repeat (Prentiss Hall Press), John Hlinko ‘89 shows readers how to take their ideas, causes, and products, and craft marketing campaigns around them that create buzz—in a quick and cost effective way. In the world of constant communication using new technologies, the average consumers of information have become micro publishers of information as well. Hlinko has been involved in the realm of viral marketing for most of the last 20 years, working with a range of Fortune 500 companies and helping lead MoveOn.org and DraftObama.org. In his book, he shares his expertise on how to create spreadable…
What do Osama Bin Laden’s death, April’s deadly tornados in the southern US, the “Arab Spring,” and recent comments from the US Coast Guard and others about the Deepwater Disaster all have in common? They all are examples of what leaders can learn from Consilience Leadership (Inflection Point Press), a new book by Gary Cook ’64, which demonstrates how lessons learned from Highly Reliable Organization theory, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and other disciplines are helping us understand how to better deal with terrorism and Katrina-like disasters, and better anticipate and avoid political and other disasters. Read more about the book Cook,…