"Show and Tell"
Many Americans will remember the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006, which prompted violent riots, consumer boycotts, and death threats. Few will remember the cartoons themselves, and with good reason. In the United States, only a handful of magazines and newspapers reprinted the notorious drawings.
"'The Protest Singer' by Alec Wilkinson"
Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2009
In "The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger," Alec Wilkinson outlines Seeger's life in spare prose. The book, which began as a profile in the New Yorker, is not a biography. It is, in Wilkinson's words, "a factual novella," which centers on a series of recent interviews conducted at Seeger's home in upstate New York.
"ZZ Packer's edition of Southern stories straddles old and new Dixie"
Independent Weekly, August 20, 2008
In her introduction to New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2008, ZZ Packer, co-editor of the collection, calls the American South "a land of contrasts." "There's the sweet tea, and the bourbon, and the mint juleps," she writes. "But there's also the low-brow Rally's and Checkers and White Castles." Indeed, it's true that Dixie contains multitudes: The South, which includes the Ozarks and the Outer Banks, the Pisgah and the Piedmont, has given us Ralph Stanley and R.E.M., Ludacris and Little Richard.
"Yearning to Study War No More"
The New York Times, February 11, 2007
It is on Thursday evenings that Henrietta Yurchenco, a 90-year-old former City College professor and radio producer, collects a few of her students to sing the same protest songs she sang and taught 40 years ago. The war on their minds is a new one, but many of the songs they sing, like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Study War No More," were the product of wars long past.
"Poet McFee Returns to Cornell"
The Cornell Daily Sun, November 4, 2005
In 1986, the “North Carolina Poetry Mafia” ran Goldwin Smith. Its senior members -- immigrants from Whiteville, Hendersonville and Asheville -- were notorious. They had inimitable accents. Their work was award-winning. The late Archie R. Ammons was Capo di Tutti Capi, and Robert R. Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English, and Michael A. McFee, now Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), were his consiglieri.
"Computer Science Prof. Wins MacArthur 'Genius Award'"
The Cornell Daily Sun, September 21, 2005
When Prof. Jon M. Kleinberg '93, computer science, got a telephone call from someone who claimed to represent The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, he was skeptical. Kleinberg, the caller said, was to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, arguably the most coveted grant in the United States. Could he be the butt of some scheming academic’s cruel practical joke?
"'Brand' Is Not a Four-Letter Word"
The New York Times, November 4, 2004
The American academy is a competitive market, so administrators must carefully cultivate their institution's identity to attract applicants, faculty, grants -- and attention. That means a logo suitable for bumper stickers and admissions brochures that reflects the campus's character, history and values. Cornell's minimalist logo, universally derided as the Big Red Box and a J.C. Penney clone, did not exactly resonate with the university's core mission. So Cornell canned it.