Olivia DrakeOctober 13, 20102min
Cem Duruöz, private lessons teacher on guitar, will perform at the Weill Recital Hall in New York at 8 p.m. Oct. 28 in a concert sponsored by D'Addario Foundation and Alhambra Guitars. The program will include Turkish music, Brazilian Bossa Nova and Tangos from Argentina. The program will include solos and duos with guitarist Philippe Bertaud. A frequent soloist, Duruöz has appeared with more than 10 orchestras regularly performing Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez among others, under the batons of such conductors as Wesleyan's Angel Gil-Ordóñez. In January 2008 he gave the world premiere performance of Concierto Anatolia, a guitar concerto featuring Turkish melodies…

David PesciOctober 13, 20104min
The first data analysis released by the Wesleyan Media Project is making national news. The New York Times recently reported that ads mentioning China had been run by 29 candidates for national office and cited the Wesleyan Media Project and it's director, Erika Franklin Fowler, assistant professor of government. The data analysis findings were also reported by BusinessWeek, among other outlets, and indicate that spending on political ads has increased by $220 million over the 2008 campaign cycle. Some of the increases are a result of senate races in more populous states than in 2008, including California, New York, and…

Olivia DrakeOctober 13, 20101min
Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, assistant professor of history, instructor of Russian and Eastern European studies, has several forthcoming publications: “The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok” in Petersburg/ Petersburg: Novel and City, ed. Olga Matich (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010); “Cosmic Enlightenment: Scientific Atheism and the Soviet Conquest of Space” in Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture in Post-Stalinist Russia, eds. James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi (University of Pittsburgh); and “The Contested Skies: The Battle of Science and Religion in the Soviet Planetarium” in Cosmic Enthusiasm: The Cultural Impact of Space Exploration on the Soviet…

David LowOctober 13, 20102min
Jeffrey Lane ’76 is the book writer for a new Broadway musical, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, based on the Spanish film of the same name directed by master filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar. The musical deals with love and abandonment in 1980s Madrid and stars Patti LuPone, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Sherie Rene Scott, and Laura Benanti. The show is directed by Bartlett Sher (South Pacific, The Light in the Piazza), and the composer and lyricist is David Yazbek, who previously worked with Lane on the hit Broadway musical, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, also adapted from a film. Lane was…

David PesciOctober 13, 20101min
In an Oct. 8 The Los Angeles Times OpEd titled "Gaps in medical research ethics," Laura Stark, assistant professor of science in society, assistant professor of sociology, assistant professor of environmental studies, explains flaws in the current research review system in the United States. On the heels of a U.S. apology for medical research in Guatemala, the U.S. now has on opportunity to overhaul ethics rules. Stark shows how the ethics review process enabled the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use federal prisoners in experiments during the 1960s. The prisoners were infected with “pneumonia, influenza and the common cold,…