David LowRobert Gardner ’51 recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) at the group’s annual meeting on February 20, 2010 in San Diego, Calif. Gardner was recognized for writing more than 130 hands-on science books for children during the past 35 years. Terry Young, chairman of the award selection committee, noted that Gardner’s clear presentation of science at all grade levels, along with his creative writing and use of common household materials, have excited thousands of children to get involved in science and understand the scientific method, all while having fun. The…
John Behlmann ’03 and Kate MacCluggage ’04 will star in the off-Broadway production of The 39 Steps that will open April 15 at the New World Stages in New York City. Previews begin March 25. Directed by Maria Aitken and adapted by Patrick Barlow, the play is a comedic take on Hitchcock’s 1935 classic thriller of the same name about a man who is forced by a mysterious woman’s death into a cross-country race for his life. The show played previously on Broadway for 771 performances. Behlmann plays leading man Richard Hanney and MacCluggage is the sole female performer in…
Fiction writer and essayist Amy Bloom ’75 was interviewed on March 13, 2010 by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, UK. Bloom’s third collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Random House), was published in January to general critical acclaim. In the interview, Bloom talks about her previous career as a psychotherapist, growing up with parents employed as writers, writing novels vs. short stories, reviews (she doesn’t read them), writing for television, and her personal life. Bloom was asked why in an era of withering attention spans, short stories aren’t in greater demand. “It’s a question of…
Bill Cunliffe ’78 received a Grammy Award in January for his arrangement of “West Side Story Medley.” The track appears on the CD Resonance Big Band Plays Tribute to Oscar Peterson (Resonance Records). Cunliffe, an associate professor of music at California State University, had been nominated for a Grammy twice before for best instrumental arrangement. In 2007, Cunliffe joined the California State Fullerton faculty after having toured as a pianist and arranger with the Buddy Rich Orchestra and performing with Frank Sinatra and jazz legends such as Ray Brown, Benny Golson, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, James Moody and Joshua Redman.…
Tony winning actor Frank Wood ’84 is currently starring in Clybourne Park, a darkly comic play by Bruce Norris, which deals with race relations among neighbors. The play opened to good reviews in February, and runs through March 21 at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons. Clybourne Park begins in 1959 in a Chicago neighborhood as a white family moves out. In Act Two, the action shifts to 2009 and a white family moves in to what has become a predominantly black community that promises to be gentrified. During the intervening years, change overtakes the neighborhood, along with attitudes, inhabitants, and property values.…
In the Feb. 1 issue of The New Yorker, Carlo Rotella ’86, the director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, profiles U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Rotella points out that President Obama has allotted Duncan more than 70 billion dollars in federal economic-stimulus funds to hand out to the states—more money than any Secretary of Education has had before him. Duncan has exceptional leverage with this stimulus money and his close relationship with Obama, which dates back to when Duncan worked in Chicago. Rotella writes about Duncan’s childhood on the South Side of Chicago, his passion for…
In The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Duke University Press) Joseph Litvak ’76 offers a rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America by uncovering a political regime that did not come to an end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) conflated Jewishness with what he calls…
A performance/installation work by Aki Sasamoto ’04, titled "Strange Attractors" will be on view as part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Avenue at 75th St., 212-570-3600, www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial) from Feb. 25–May 30 in New York City. Sasamoto will be performing occasionally as part of the installation (on days of the month that contain the numbers 6, 9, 16, 19, 26 and 29) at 4 p.m., a.k.a. 16 o’clock. She applies mathematical concepts to personal life stories, while somehow making sense of her kaleidoscopic worldview. She says that her work deals with such varied…
Kristin Bluemel ’86, a professor of English at Monmouth University, has edited a new essay collection, Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press). This volume of original critical essays encourages readers to accept a new term, new critical category, and new literary history for 20th-century British literature. Its primary subject is the intriguing and typically neglected British writing of the years of the Depression and World War II, including the fiction, memoirs, criticism, and journalism of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, Rebecca West, John…
"Restrepo" filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. On Jan. 30, Restrepo, a documentary about the Afghanistan war co-directed by Sebastian Junger ’84 and Tim Hetherington, received the grand jury prize for a domestic documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Junger and Hetherington spent a year with part of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in Korengal Valley, known as the deadliest valley in Afghanistan, and as a stronghold of al Queda and the Taliban. Indie Wire recently interviewed the two filmmakers and said that the documentary “may be one of the most experiential and visceral war…
The successful CBS sitcom, How I Met Your Mother, had its milestone 100th episode on Jan. 11. The show was created by Carter Bays ’97 and Craig Thomas ’97, who serve as executive producers and writers for the program. The series deals humorously with the lives of a group of friends living in New York. How I Met Your Mother gets its title from a framing device: the main character, Ted Mosby (played Josh Radnor, with narration by Bob Saget) in the year 2030 recounts to his son and daughter the events that led to his meeting their mother. The…
The critically acclaimed film and television director Michael Arteta ’89 (Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl, Six Feet Under) has directed a new film, Youth in Revolt, which is based on the cult novel by C. D. Payne. The film opened nationwide to generally positive reviews on Feb. 8. The work had previously been shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and will be part of the upcoming Berlin Film Festival Generation lineup. The movie stars the popular young actor Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno) who plays a frustrated 16-year-old virgin named Nick Twisp. Cera’s character takes on…