David LowMarch 3, 20102min
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…

Cynthia RockwellMarch 3, 20102min
(By Anne Calder ’11) Allison Heaney ’09 has been awarded a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the study Professional Ethics. A law student at Duke University, she will spend two weeks this summer traveling to New York, Poland and Germany. The Fellowship enables students in law, medical, seminary, journalism and business to address contemporary and future ethical issues by looking to the past. In the context of Nazi Germany and Auschwitz, Heaney will analyze the responsibilities lawyers have to their clients and to society. Heaney was a psychology major at Wesleyan, and is now pursuing a master’s degree in psychology while…

Olivia DrakeMarch 3, 20102min
Bruce McKenna ’84 is the lead writer for the HBO series The Pacific. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced this as follow up to Band of Brothers, for which McKenna also wrote. According to a Feb. 28 article in The Los Angeles Times, McKenna accompanied a locations crew to a tiny coral island near Guam known as Peleliu to prepare for the $200M show. A ridge there is laced with hundreds of caves -- undisturbed for more than half a century -- where Japanese troops hid out from U.S. Marines during one of the WWII's deadliest conflicts. "There are still skeletons…

Olivia DrakeMarch 3, 20101min
John Bonin, the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science, tutor in the College of Social Studies, is the co-author of "Banking in Transition Countries, Chapter 33 in the Oxford Handbook of Banking. The book is published by Oxford University Press, Oxford U.K., 2010, pages 844–867.

Olivia DrakeMarch 3, 20101min
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, and Annie Paladino ’09, are the authors of a new article on children’s numerical thinking, based on data collected by Paladino with support from her Hughes fellowship for research in the life sciences. The article is titled "The development of numerical estimation: Evidence against a representational shift." It will appear in the journal Developmental Science in 2010.