Academic Household Research Articles

Bruce McEwen, 1938–2020

The pioneering neuroscientist Bruce McEwen died on January 2, 2020 at the age of 81 following a brief illness. He was the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and head of the Harold and Margaret Millikin Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University. Born in Fort Collins, Colorado, Bruce grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in an academic household; his father George was a Professor of English in the University of Michigan’s Engineering School. After graduating from Oberlin College, Bruce started graduate study at The Rockefeller University in 1959 and, after a postdoctorate in Sweden and a brief appointment at the University of Minnesota, served on The Rockefeller University’s faculty for 54 years until his death. He and his wife, the neuroimmunologist Karen Bulloch, collaborated in research and writing. Bruce remained active scientifically until the very end, with a paper published on the day of his death. His friend and coauthor on that paper, Huda Akil, and his brother, Craig McEwen, remember him. Bruce McEwen with Kobe and Buber on the coast of Maine. Image courtesy of Karen Bulloch McEwen (The Rockefeller University, New York, NY). Bruce has been a major force in neuroscience. He conducted groundbreaking research and inspired many of us to think differently about how we create science and how we use it for the greater good. The central theme of his research—the brain biology of stress—lends itself to every level of exploration, from the molecular and cellular, to the neural and behavioral, to the societal and global, and Bruce explored them all. In a seminal 1968 Nature paper (1), Bruce demonstrated for the first time the binding of glucocorticoids in the brain, specifically in the hippocampus. This was very surprising as the hippocampus had been thought to be primarily relevant to memory. That discovery led to the … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: akil{at}umich.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Sainte Marie-Jeanne

Sainte Marie-Jeanne* Tara Ison (bio) France, 1941. The French government, led by Marshal Pétain in Vichy, is collaborating with Hitler in exchange for the appearance of a token sovereignty. Danielle is a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, who grew up in a secular, academic household in Paris, and is now living as a “hidden child” with a Catholic family in a small village in the unoccupied zone. Her father was killed in the early days of the war, and her mother has gone underground; her “aunt” Berthe and “uncle” Claude (her grandmother’s former maid and butler), agreed to take her in and pass her off as their niece, “Marie-Jeanne,” in exchange for extra illicit ration tickets. This excerpt appears after Danielle/Marie-Jeanne has been living in the village for six months; the early months were quite traumatic, as she had to come to terms with her father’s death, what she feels is her mother’s abandonment of her, living with a family of complete strangers, and the need to “pass” as a Catholic girl—it has been made very clear to her how high the stakes are, that if she makes even the slightest mistake and is found out, the police will come and kill the entire family. By now, Danielle feels she has adjusted quite well to this new life and identity—but there are ongoing challenges, and ongoing threats … [End Page 98] October 1941 La Perinne, France Monsieur Monzie is delighted. He has been waiting months for a package to arrive from Vichy, supplies for the latest special school project. He gets so excitable about such things, clapping his hands, fussing with his wire spectacles, and working his eyebrows. He joins all the children in singing to Marshal Pétain every morning— You have worked ceaselesslyFor the common salvation!For giving us your life,Your genius and your faith!Marshal, we are here! —his hands clutching his heaving chest, his eyes moist. Because our dear Marshal loves you children, he quotes from the newsreels, he loves children who join him in the rebuilding of our proud nation! He loves children who work hard and sacrifice and obey! He practically jumps up and down when students write correct answers on the board: Yes, yes! he proclaims. Danielle and her friend Genevieve agree he is foppish and odd; they imitate him—Yes, yes? Yes, yes!—as a joke together, giggling, when they are alone. For the first project of the new school year each student had to learn and report everything about the saint for which they were named. The younger students were to draw pictures of their saint performing whatever they became a saint for, but the older students were to write a story about their saint’s miraculous act, and why the saint was so holy he or she deserved to be a saint. Danielle remembered, briefly, before the sick feeling came to her stomach and the pain in her head, her first night here, the last night she was still Danielle. How long ago it seemed! Her mother and that strange woman, Berthe, hunched over a candle in the smoky, cabbage-smelling house, whispering about false identity papers while that strange man Claude paced and cracked his knuckles, all of them ignoring her and busy coming up with the first lie, the biggest, most important lie. The lie of a name. Berthe wanted to call her “Marie,” the most Christian name there is, she’d said, and the purest of all women, and also “Jeanne,” such a good holy girl to listen to saints’ voices and die to save France. So Danielle, no, Marie-Jeanne, with a choice between the Virgin Mary or Jeanne [End Page 99] d’Arc, chose Jeanne. It would be too easy to make a mistake with Mary, to get a detail wrong about Jesus or some crazy thing like the Immaculate Conception. She had Berthe’s old copy of A Children’s Catechism, which was just endless lists of questions and answers she was supposed to memorize so she’d know everything about being a good Catholic and Christian girl, Who is God? and What...

Interview with David Brooks

April 2003 Historically Speaking37 Interview with David Brooks Conducted byJoseph S. Lucas David Brooks, author ofBobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon andSchuster, 2000) andeditor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing {Vintage Books, 1 996), is working on a book called How to Be American (forthcomingfrom Simon and Schuster ). His essays on American culture andpolitics have appeared in a wide variety ofpublications, including the Weekly Standard, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, the Washington Post, the TLS, Commentary, and the Public Interest. Joseph Lucas: When you were in college, at the University ofChicago, you planned to become an academic historian. What got you interested in history? Did you have an idea back then of what you would write about once you became a history professor ? took a number of courses from him on the effects of technology and other things on culture. Even at an early age I fixated on the books of the late 1950s and early 1960s— Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, William Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee, Cesar Graña's Bohemian versus Bourgeois, and the books that came from that American historical tradition of Richard Hofstadter and Henry Steele Commager. Those were the books I liked the most. Lucas: Do you still like those books? Brooks: Absolutely. I go back to those books all the time. I'm writing a book now that's sort ofan updated version ofDavid Potter's People ofPlenty. In the 1950s historical writing was more for the general public—sometimes a little too broad, maybe, but usually more interesting than the stuff that came before and after. David Brooks: I grew up in an academic household. My father was an English professor who worked at New York University and then Westchester University teaching mostly 19thcentury English literature. And my mother wrote her history dissertation at Columbia University —on Wimbledon Common —and then went on to teach Western Civ. as a traveling , starving professor. So history was basically something I grew up with. It was normal for me to want to become a history professor. It was the family business. I became interested in American history , particularly late 19th- and early 20thcentury technological history, and social and cultural history. One ofmy professors at the University ofChicago was Neil Harris . He was my senior paper advisor, and I . . . our look at the world does not take into account our victory in the Cold War. . . . we9re either too close to it or don't really understand what it means. We're shaped more by WorldWar II and Vietnam than our victory in the ColdWar. admire the serious scholarship ofthat era— on Neibuhr's part or Commager's (his book The American Mind). But there was also a willingness to generalize and the understanding that you were writing for the educated lay reader. Lucas: What do you think has changed since then? Brooks: I would say professionalization and scientism are the two main culprits. I didn 't become an academic in part because I didn 't want to write for journals whose readers numbered only in the single digits. When I was a senior in college I went to a conference which was put on by the Chicago literary magazine Triquarterly. Lots ofacademic all-stars were there, mainly from literary studies, but not exclusively: Wayne Booth, Edward Said, Ronald Dworkin. There were about fifteen or twenty superstars, very impressive people. I sat there for twenty-two hours, and I barely understood a word they said. I wrote in the school paper that maybe this language is useful, and I could go to graduate school and learn it. But suppose it turns out to be a racket? Then I'ILhave wasted ten years, and then I'll have to unlearn what I've learned. So I ended up not going to graduate school, and went into journalism instead. Lucas: At that time, historians were in the habit oftaking on big themes. They didn't hesitate to conceive ofand then tackle subjects like "the history of the American mind." Brooks: My favorite example is Reinhold Neibuhr's The...