Excerpt: "In literature, there exists a danger, or so Italo Calvino believes; that danger, he believes, is of overanalyzing works and in doing so, destroying the enjoyment of reading. In his novel If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino attempts to shift the focus of the reader from the words in his novel and other novels that speak about life to the life that those words show; he tries to alert the reader to the dangers of unrestrained academic analysis…"
Summary: Is opposition (in contrast to cooperation) the fatal flaw of modern culture? And if it is, what do we do? This tirade/rant stumbles into the problem, and heads toward some kind of more open discussion.
Excerpt: "…By acknowledging the symptoms, we're obscuring the causes. Medicines that just suppress symptoms don't cure us, our body does. And if our body is too sick to cure itself, we die, but at least the medicines we were taking meant that we didn't feel so bad… We need to get past denial. We need to get past trying to treat just the symptoms. But to do that, we need to stop conflating the symptoms with the causes."
from PGSS (back in summer '98); co-written w/ Nithin Iyengar and Zhonglei Lu
Summary: This essay looks into the question of whether Leni Riefenstahl's legendary "Triumph des Willens" is propaganda or artistic vision (or both). Specifically, it looks at the manipulation of time in the documentary as a ways of answering this question.
Excerpt: "In March of 2002, the government proposed a new set of procedures to be used for FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) cases. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) rejected this proposal, which would have allowed law enforcement officials to initiate, direct, and control FISA surveillance (Br. of ACLU at 3). In response, the government submitted a FISA application in July that included the previously rejected procedures. The FISC granted the application, but required that it be subject to the procedures modified in response to the government's March request. The government next appealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which granted the government's original requests for procedural modifications, overturning the FISC's decision. This is a response to the Court of Review's opinion."
Reports detailing efforts at organizing a high school science fair.
Files Available:
Summary: Attempts to combine the ideas of shadow ecologies (that certain communities exert an ecological influence far beyond the boundaries of their immediate and physical ecology), deep ecology, and Gaia theory in order to live more lightly on the earth.
Abstract: In 1994, a U.S. Forest Service biologist, noting a marked decline in the Swainson’s hawk population in the western United States, decided to investigate further, and used radio transmitters to track two birds to their non-breeding habitat. The route led to Argentina, where fields were found littered with dead hawks. This was eventually tied to the grasshopper pesticide monocrotophos. The following year resulted in an even more dramatic episode of deaths, with as many as 20,000 dead hawks. A response was quickly initiated, resulting from the interplay between numerous actors from NGOs, academic institutions, government agencies in three countries (Argentina, Canada, and the United States), and industry. In a remarkable turnaround, the actions of these parties and the agreements reached resulted in only 24 hawks dying the following year, in 1996.
This thesis addresses the question of why this case was successful. It highlights three aspects that were significant in the ability of the actors to cooperate and achieve a goal: (1) knowledge, and how that knowledge was utilized by actors in directing the path of action; (2) NGOs, and the unique pressure and support afforded by their participation; and (3) contextual factors of how the issue was framed and the domestic structures of the political and social forum in which it was addressed.
Excerpt: "Sounds like an interesting enough book—A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Turning over to the back cover, you, the reader, are met with the following summary: "With dramatic eloquence, [Dickens] brings to life a time of terror and treason, a starving people rising in frenzy and hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent regime." Immediately you the reader are set on edge, for something doesn't sound quite right. After all, you the reader have read Citizens by Simon Schama and The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre…"
Excerpt: "The task of a writer is not an easy one, and yet we often take for granted the works of great authors, assuming that they never could have been any other way, or that what we read was the final work of the genius. Goethe, certainly, did not write his works in a vacuum, and his life had a very real impact on his writings. Like most of the works of Goethe, as with the works of most important authors, The Sorrows of Young Werther is drawn largely from personal experience."