David LowBrothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist ’02 have directed The Two Escobars, a documentary about the infiltration of drug money into professional soccer in Colombia during the 1980s and ’90s. The subjects of the film are Pablo Escobar, a founder of the Medellin cartel who poured some of his wealth from cocaine trafficking into pro soccer, and Andrés Escobar, a star of the national team who accidentally kicked a ball into his own team’s goal at the 1994 World Cup. The film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in April as part of the World Documentary Competition.…
Beautiful new work by veteran photographer Michael Yamashita ’71 may be viewed online in the May issue of National Geographic. His photos accompany an article “The Forgotten Road” by Mark Jenkins who traces the remnants of the legendary trail in China that served as a trading route for tea and Tibetan horses. The ancient passageway once stretched almost 1,400 miles across the chest of Cathay, from Yaan, in the tea-growing region of Sichuan Province, to Lhasa, the almost 12,000-foot-high capital of Tibet.
Missed Connections, a short documentary directed and produced by Mary Robertson ’01, will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan in April. Once found on the back pages of local papers, Missed Connections is a forum on Craigslist where those who regret their timidity make appeals to the "Ones Who Got Away." Robertson’s documentary peers inside these popular online messages-in-a-bottle asking whether love lost can be found again. Robertson is a producer and director of nonfiction media. For television she has produced and directed long- and short-form documentary programs for major broadcasters. She recently completed work…
The sophomore effort Congratulations was released by electro-pop duo MGMT (a.k.a. Ben Goldwasser ’05 and Andrew VanWyngarden ’05) this month and covered by media across the United States and abroad. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden first wrote and played their music as students at Wesleyan and found success after graduation that many musicians would die for. They were signed to the major label Columbia, and their full-length debut album, Oracular Spectacular, went gold on the Billboard charts with more than three million songs downloads globally. They had a hit single, “Time to Pretend” that won adoring fans who started to dress like…
Growing up, Steve Almond ’88 secretly desired to live the life of a rock star but after taking piano lessons he realized he had no musical talent. Though he didn’t become a musician, he became the next best thing: an obsessive music fan, particularly of rock and roll—or what he calls “a drooling fanatic.” Almond’s new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House), recounts his love for music from his earliest rock criticism to his devotion to obscure bands to his meeting with Erin, a former heavy-metal “chick” who became his wife. As he has shown in…
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press) by Seth Lerer ’76 has been honored with the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The $30,000 award, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism, is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University of California San Diego, where he is distinguished professor in the Department of Literature, will receive the award in a free, public event at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 6, in the Senate Chamber…
Suzanne O'Connell, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, director of the Service Learning Center, will be the K. Douglas Nelson Lecture Series keynote speaker at Syracuse University April 22. Her title is “Weddell Sea Sediment, ODP Site 694: One Clue to Antarctica’s Past.” The event is sponsored by Syracuse's Department of Earth Sciences.
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A streaming video of his talk is now available online here. Note, this is a 270MB video and may take a moment to load in your browser. Quicktime is required to view the video. You also may download the video to your desktop. Bruce McKenna ’84 returned to campus on March 30 to talk about his work on the new HBO mini-series The Pacific, which debuted on March 14 and continues on Sundays at 9 p.m. through May 16. The sprawling show tracks the intertwined real-life journeys of three U.S. Marines—Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge, and John Basilone—across the vast canvas…
Pauline Frommer '88, an expert on budget travel, recently talked to Smart Planet about why smart people travel and how traveling abroad can effect diplomacy and the leaders we elect in this country. She recommends travel to China, Europe, and South America. Frommer is the author of award-winning guidebooks, the host of a radio talk show, and a columnist for MSN Travel and Weight Watchers. In the Smart Planet interview, Frommer says, "I don’t think you can consider yourself a fully rounded person if you don’t get out of your native area and see what the rest of the world…
Habeas corpus has been known as the Great Writ of Liberty but history shows us that it is actually a writ of power. In Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Harvard University Press), Paul D. Halliday ’83, a history professor at the University of Virginia, provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world’s most revered legal device and changes the traditional way people understand the writ and democracy. The author examined thousands of cases across more than five hundred years to write this history of the writ from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Beginning in the 1600s, English judges…
Work by painter Ben Weiner ’03 is now on view in the exhibition Elements of Nature: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation at the Carnegie Art Museum (424 South C St., 805-385-8157) in Oxnard, Calif. The show also includes artistic contributions by Charles Arnoldi, Billy Al Bengston, Vija Celmins, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and Ali Smith. Works in this exhibition reveal the ability of art to interpret, replicate and reimagine the natural world. Some artists authentically depict the ephemeral beauty of the landscape, while others draw from nature to create their own fantasy environments. The show runs from now…