Departments
In the News
|
Week of 30 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 33 |
In the News
"I'm a trainer of tortoises, not hares. If you're born with a certain body type, you've got to work with that. So a lot of it is just acceptance," says Mike Boyle, assistant strength and conditioning coach at BU, whose client list in the athletic world is growing. Profiled in the April 7-20 issue of the Improper Bostonian, Boyle continues, "Life is lived standing up, so we work on building functional, multijoint strength, as opposed to nonfunctional strength. Like on a leg press. What do you ever do in life lying down and pushing 200, 300 pounds with your legs?"
In the revved-up world of Wall Street, a deluge of information fosters the expectation of instant returns, according to Jeffrey Heisler, SMG assistant professor of economics. He says in the April 12 Boston Globe, "People are being lulled into a false sense of security by all this information. They can't sort what is important from what is market noise, and they wind up making mistakes."
In response to the current wave of women debunking the feminist movement, COM Journalism Professor Caryl Rivers has a suggestion. "If I had a time machine," she writes in her column in the April 12 Boston Globe, "I'd ship these bright young women who now get paid handsomely for writing books and commenting on TV back to the '50s, to the lifestyle they so admire. They'd be getting the coffee, doing research in a stuffy backroom for some guy with a byline, or getting shuffled off to the women's page to write about weddings. They might complain, but they'd just be told they're cute when they're mad."
During a recent trip to the United States, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji seemed like one of the boys. "Of all the Chinese leaders, he is the one with character traits which most appeal to Americans," says Merle Goldman, CAS history professor, in an April 8 Boston Globe story. "He is the best emissary they could send. He is tough, efficient, has a sense of humor, and is self-deprecating."
As Confucius is invoked by East Asian intellectuals as an up-to-date alternative to Chinese Communism, Western scholars are training the same critical lens on him that Biblical scholars have used for centuries. And the results may be equally unsettling to some. But Robert Neville, dean of BU's School of Theology, is unfazed. "The authority doesn't rest with the person but with the teaching," says Neville in the Atlantic Monthly's April issue. Intellectually sympathetic to Confucianism and perhaps accustomed to the critical agenda, Neville adds, "It's like Christianity -- Christianity isn't monolithic, and it has changed over the centuries to accommodate changes in society."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.