June 2008

ABC News: Students Spend Summer at Top of the Earth: “Not that Ben Wessel needed inspiration to pursue environmental initiatives, but his recent journey to the Arctic brought home the monumental challenges of combating climate change.

” ‘The Arctic makes you feel so small,’ said Wessel, a 19-year-old student from Middlebury College in Vermont, who joined 17 other students from around the world as part of the World Wildlife Fund-sponsored trip. ‘But it’s cool, because it makes you feel like you have a big part in this world when you realize that we have such a big impact on glaciers at such a huge scale.’ “

Why Poetry Matters, by Jay Parini – ChronicleReview.com: “Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

“In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands.

“In the 20th century, something went amiss. …”

Bill McKibben – End of the Open Road – washingtonpost.com: “In July 1893, 115 years ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner told an academic symposium that the American frontier was closed — a shocking notion for a people who’d defined themselves by their steady expansion across the continent. This spring, something just as profound and defining has happened: Pulled back by the inescapable gravity of higher prices and the growing scarcity of fossil fuels, we’re starting a slow recoil into more dense and compact regions and localities. The frontier of endless mobility that we’ve known our entire lives is closing.”

Beijing Pollution Threatens Success of Summer Games – Business of the Beijing Olympics – CNBC.com: “Visitors to this summer’s Beijing Olympics will get an immediate lesson in the environmental cost of China’s break-neck economic development: the worst air pollution in the world, which kills an estimated 656,000 people every year.

” ‘There’s simply no experience quite like it,’ recalled Don Wyatt, a China expert from Middlebury College, about deplaning at Beijing International Airport. ‘One’s throat instantly constricts. One’s eyes instantly water. Things improve very little once one exits the airport. The rest of it is all about adaptation, learning to cope.’ “

Bicyclists use pedal power to push voting IndyStar.com The Indianapolis Star: “Nathan Williams has peddled for fun since he was a kid growing up in Noblesville, but this summer his hobby is taking him for a longer ride than around the block.

“Williams, 20, a student at Middlebury College in Vermont and a 2006 Noblesville High School graduate, is taking part in The Great American Voter Trek, an effort to get people to vote in the Nov. 4 general election.”

Airing his laundry: Times Argus Online: “Alexander Lee is working to rope in out-of-control energy costs. So why does he think anyone can do that with a clothesline?

“Back in 1995, Lee was student leader of Middlebury College’s Environmental Quality club. Worried about the ecological impact of Vermont’s two main electrical sources — Hydro-Quebec dams up in Canada and the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant down in Vernon — he invited anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott to give a speech that, to his surprise, would change his life.”

Subcommittees Debate Proposal to Bring International Students to U.S. – Chronicle.com: “Since coming to the United States as a college student, Rachel Ochako, a Kenyan who was orphaned at age 13, has developed a love of economics and novels, enjoying discussions in her classes at Middlebury College where she is encouraged to disagree. She credits the Davis United World College Scholars program, which gave her a private scholarship covering much of her tuition, for enabling her to ‘take different perspectives back’ from the United States to her home country.

. . .

“The ‘Uniting Students in America’ program would finance 7,500 scholarships each year for undergraduates from foreign countries who come from low-income families. Rep. William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts [and a Middlebury graduate] who is the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, said he plans to introduce a bill by the end of the summer that would create the scholarship program.”

China Journal : Chinese Bloggers Really Are Edgy: “Western journalists often write about the ability of Chinese bloggers to challenge authority and provide an alternative voice to the propaganda that often fills China’s official news media. How accurate is that description across China’s vast blogosphere?

“Ashley Esarey, an assistant professor at Middlebury College, set out to describe the political discussion on Chinese blogs in a quantitative way. At the Chinese Internet Research Conference on Saturday, he shared the results of content analysis he conducted on more than 500 blogs with political content and discussion of news events from 2006. He compared the results of that study to a similar content analysis of major Chinese newspapers.”

Midd Grad Publisher Pairs Old and New Technology Seven Days: “Anne Callahan belongs to a generation that’s supposedly bagged books in favor of electronic media. But the 27-year-old Middlebury College alum remains very much a woman of the printed page. She recently launched an old-fashioned publishing business, Graphic Union Press, from her apartment in Harlem. And its debut book — titled Biking the U.S. of Awesomeness — further flouts the conventional thinking of the Digital Age by putting a collection of email messages into the form Johannes Gutenberg pioneered six centuries ago.”

A father’s memory loss spurred Middlebury’s Sue Halpern to learn more – USATODAY.com: “People over 40 might worry that a slip of the mind could signal the onset of Alzheimer’s. Sue Halpern, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, had seen her own father struggle with memory problems.

“Halpern decided to find out all she could about memory, Alzheimer’s and the aging brain. She spent five years talking to neuroscientists, visiting labs and learning about lifestyle measures thought to keep the aging brain in shape.

“She has published Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Front Lines of Memory Research (Harmony Books, $24). USA TODAY talked to Halpern about the latest research on memory.”

Vandals Forced to Study Poetry of Frost : NPR: “In December, more than two dozen teenagers were arrested for breaking into and vandalizing the one-time summer residence of Robert Frost. Their punishment? Attend a class about the American poet. Novelist and Middlebury College professor Jay Parini, who taught the class, talks with Robert Siegel.”

William E. Odom, 75; Military Adviser to 2 Administrations – washingtonpost.com: “William E. Odom, 75, a retired Army lieutenant general who was a senior military and intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations and who, in recent years, became a forceful critic of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, died May 30 at his vacation home in Lincoln, Vt. An autopsy will be performed, but his wife said he had an apparent heart attack.”

Odom, whose wife Anne and son Mark are both Middlebury alumni, had previously served as a member of the Middlebury board of trustees.

National Public Radio: The Legacy of William Odom

From bad to verse: Vandals get classroom penance: “MIDDLEBURY, Vt. (AP) — Call it poetic justice: More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.

“Using ‘The Road Not Taken’ and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways — and the redemptive power of poetry.

” ‘I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience,’ said prosecutor John Quinn.”