David LowSeptember 22, 20091min
Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02 was featured prominently on the two-hour season premiere of the highly popular medical series House, which aired on September 21, 2009 on Fox. On this episode, Dr. Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie, checks himself into the Mayfield Psychiatric Institute, to recover from a Vicodin addiction and other bad behavior. The well-written premiere introduces several intriguing new characters who viewers are likely to see again this television season. Miranda plays Laurie’s roommate, Alvie, and becomes his co-conspirator at the hospital. Near the end of the show, Alvie and House perform a rap number together. Miranda is scheduled…

David LowSeptember 3, 20092min
Sadia Shepard ’97 is one of the producers of the new documentary The September Issue, directed by R. J. Cutler, which opened in movie theaters on August 28 to positive reviews. The movie focuses on the world of Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, and her influence on the fashion industry. Wintour was also the inspiration for the novel and movie The Devil Wears Prada. In his review of the film in Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman writes:  “… we observe the process by which Wintour and her vast army of editors, designers, photographers, models, and gofers labor, throughout the summer…

David LowSeptember 3, 20092min
Novelist Kaylie Jones ’81 has written a new memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (William Morrow, 2009) in which she explores her life growing up with her well-known father, who was also a writer (From Here to Eternity) and her mother, who as an alcoholic who could be cruel and unloving. Jones also writes about her adulthood as she struggles to overcome her own drinking problem and to become a writer in the shadow of her father, and the difficulties of dealing with her mother as she declines physically and mentally. In her review of the book in The…

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…

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…

David LowMay 19, 20093min
Paul Yoon ’02 makes his literary debut with a short story collection, Once the Shore (Sarabande Books), about residents of an imaginary island somewhere off the coast of South Korea. In his eight stories, Yoon introduces characters who live over a span of half a century, several of them working in modern tourism jobs or more traditional fields of fishing, farming, and diving. Yoon often writes about individuals who have suffered great losses in their lives. His imaginary world was inspired by a handful of sources he happened to read, and he did little research for the book. In the…

David LowMay 19, 20092min
Rebecca N. Hill ’91 is the author of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Duke University Press) in which she compares two seemingly unrelated types of leftist protest campaigns: those intended to defend labor organizers from prosecution and those seeking to memorialize lynching victims and stop the practice of lynching. Her incisive new study suggests that these forms of protest are related and have considerably influenced one another. She recognizes that both campaigns worked to build alliances through appeals to public opinion in the media, by defining the American state as a force…

David LowMay 19, 20092min
Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman ’83 (with David Koepp) co-wrote the screenplay of Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard, which was number one at the box office at $48 million during its first weekend. The film opened nationwide at at 3,527 theaters on Friday, May 15. Based on the novel by Dan Brown, Angels and Demons is a prequel to the best-selling thriller The Da Vinci Code which follows the adventures of Harvard University symbologist and theology sleuth Robert Langdon. The movie version of The Da Vinci Code, which also had a screenplay by Goldsman, was a hugely popular film internationally,…