In a New York Times Magazine story published March 4, Alex Kotlowitz ’77 examines the Cleveland, Ohio, housing market, which has been ravaged by foreclosures and criminal activity. “Cleveland is reeling from the foreclosure crisis,” he writes. "There have been roughly 10,000 foreclosures in two years. For all of 2007, before it was overtaken by sky-high foreclosure rates in parts of California, Nevada and Florida, Cleveland’s rate was among the highest in the country.” The number of empty houses in the city and Cuyahoga County is so high that no one has an accurate count, he says. At least 1…

Two Wesleyan alumni are serving on the U.S. Treasury’s task force reviewing the auto industry. Dianna Farrell ’87, recently appointed by President Barack Obama as deputy director of the National Economic Council, is the White House representative to the task force. Ron Bloom ’77 is also on the task force. He is currently a special assistant to the president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworks union. In that role he has helped the union revive bankrupt companies and consolidate the nation’s steel makers to make them profitable, and he has helped to save jobs, according an article co-written by New York…

Michael Lobel ’90 is the author of James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2009), the first full-length scholarly volume devoted to the artist. Rosenquist's paintings, notable for their billboard-sized images of commercial subjects, are emblematic of 1960s Pop Art. The artist’s startling and provocative imagery deals with some of the major political and historical events of that turbulent decade, from the Kennedy assassination to the war in Vietnam. Lobel combines close visual analysis with extensive archival research, He provides social and historical contexts in which these paintings were produced and suggests new…

On March 12, Seth Lerer ’76 was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for his scholarly work Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press, 2008). On the website Critical Mass, NBCC board member Carlin Romano commented: “Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative ‘transformations’ wrought by the books.”…

Majora Carter ’88 was featured in February on HBO’s The Black List: Volume 2, which focuses on the achievements of a variety of African Americans. Carter discussed her work as an environmental activist. As founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, she rallied an economically challenged community to create Hunt’s Point Riverside Park and began a program to train people in green jobs. Carter now heads the Majora Carter Group, a green-economic development consulting film. She also hosts the NPR radio series The Promised Land and is a host for the Sundance Channel’s The Green, the network’s weekly prime-time…

Film director and screenwriter Mike White ’92 (Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, Year of the Dog) has teamed up with his 60-year-old father Mel as a team on the popular Emmy-winning reality competition, The Amazing Race. Mel White is a prize-winning documentary producer, a gay-rights Christian activist, and a best-selling author who ghostwrote books for Billy Graham and Pat Robertson. White and his father have been interviewed for their appearance on the show in such publications as Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, and Mel White’s hometown newspaper, The Lynchburg News and Advance in Virginia. In various interviews, Mike White…