Departments
In the News
|
Week of 22 October 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 11 |
In the News
"A major, traditional American proposition has been that our greatness consists precisely in the fact that we are making it up as we go along -- that we are perpetually in the process of devising ourselves as a people," says Robert Pinsky, CAS professor of creative writing and U.S. poet laureate, in the October Atlantic Monthly. "An improvised, eclectic, synthesizing quality pervades our cultural products. This quality seems unmistakable in both the most glorious and the stupidest of our cultural manifestations -- in the transcendent music of Charlie Parker and in the embarrassing dumbness of Super Bowl halftime shows."
"The flu is a pretty tricky virus," says Dr. Helen Hollingsworth, an associate professor at BUSM and a pulmonary specialist at Boston Medical Center, in the October 3 Boston Globe. She advocates a yearly flu shot because "unlike other viruses for which childhood vaccinations can provide lifelong immunity, the flu changes its coat every year."
Instead of lining up for the shuttle bus to Foxwoods Casino, you can now go to various Internet sites and win a little money gambling on the stock market. Remarking on this emerging trend in the October 4 BusinessWeek, SMG Assistant Finance Professor Jeffrey Heisler says, "People need to remember that this is entertainment, not investing."
The UN secretary-general implied recently that political borders will be no shield for human rights abuses and voiced approval for intervention in other countries to forestall such crimes. But Uri Ra'anan, UNI professor and director of the BU Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy, disagrees in a story in the September 29 Christian Science Monitor. "This is a moral principle that is going to be used selectively in the least moral way, against the weak by the strong," he says. Such a policy "is a weapon with a life of its own which cannot be controlled by anyone."
Andy Goldman, BU men's and women's fencing coach, referring in the October 3 Boston Globe to the sport's need for skill and grace over brawn, says, "That's the beauty of fencing. It attracts kids to the sport who wouldn't have thought of themselves as athletes. Especially in high school, kids with no experience can make the team. Kids who thought sports were for other people join right up. And if you get them when they're little, then see them a couple of years down the road, it's amazing."
Sixties radical Katharine Ann Powers was recently released from prison for her part in a politically motivated bank robbery that cost the life of a Boston policeman. "In many ways, she was a symbol of the virulent edge of the antiwar movement and a symbol of how young people got drawn into that conflict in many ways," says Caryl Rivers, COM professor of journalism, in a story in the Boston Herald October 3. "But that generation is moving on. You get the sense that with this case the '60s and all the turmoil over Vietnam are ending and things are healing."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.