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In the News
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Week of 8 January 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 18 |
In the News
Now that Hartford is definitively established in the minds of Bostonians as a usurper, or at best a highway interchange on the way to New York, perhaps a therapeutic breathing space is in order. In a November 24 Los Angeles Times story about local reaction to the New England Patriots' defection to Connecticut, SED Professor Leonard Zaichowsky says that there are deep-seated issues of self-esteem involved. "The greater Boston area has taken a psychological hit," says Zaichowsky, who specializes in sports psychology, adding, "You wake up one day, and you're a quarter less of a major league city."
For the second year in a row the number of women and minorities applying to medical school has dropped. And although applications have declined overall, this particular statistic causes concern to Kenneth Edelin, an associate dean at the School of Medicine. "This is really a vicious cycle," he says in the December 10 Boston Globe. "If we aren't training folks from the neighborhoods and communities with the highest morbidity and mortality rates, who's going to go back . . . and begin to address the problem?"
"The menu here is one of severe pain now or excruciating pain in the future," says Laurence Kotlikoff, CAS economics professor, referring to the amount of new, permanent tax revenue needed to stabilize the Social Security system. Kotlikoff, an expert on Social Security, says December 8 in the Boston Herald, "The system is in very deep water, fiscally speaking, much worse than the government is letting on."
Our economy is global, our culture is increasingly global, so why not drive the roundest car in its class? The much-hyped new Volkswagen Beetle is an example of the curve toward the round in design. "There's a feeling of novelty to the design, and a lot of us appreciate novelty when we look at objects," opines Frederic Brunel, assistant professor of marketing at SMG, in the December 2 Hartford Courant. "Because novelty is exciting," Brunel adds, "it helps us break out of the box. No pun intended."
"The skills of tongue and ear, the dancing feet and chanting voices from which poetry was born" are elements James Winn, CAS professor of English, hopes to bring back to the attention of the word-bemused humanities. His new book, The Pale of Words, is spotlighted as "Nota Bene" in the December 18 Chronicle of Higher Education. In it he argues that the humanities have historically shied away from nonverbal expression, such as music, fearing its appeal to the subrational.
"In the News" is compiled by the Office of Public Relations.