Boston Globe Research Articles

Eleanor & Park by R. Rowell

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor & Park. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2013. Print.“Disintegrated. Like something had gone wrong beaming her onto the Starship Enterprise. If you’ve ever wondered what that feels like, it’s a lot like melting, but more violent. Even in a million different pieces, Eleanor could still feel Park holding her hand. Could still feel his thumb exploring her palm. She sat completely still because she didn’t have any other option. She tried to remember what kind of animals paralyzed their prey before they ate them...Maybe Park had paralyzed her with his ninja magic, his Vulcan handhold, and now he was going to eat her. That would be awesome” (p. 72).Eleanor & Park is a smart, funny young adult romance that takes place over one school year in 1986. Told in alternating voices, this is the story of two teenagers who don’t quite fit in. Eleanor comes from the wrong side of the tracks and has big red hair and wears all the wrong clothes. Park is half Asian, loves comic books and alternative music. Eleanor has had a rough life, living with her mother, her mother’s new husband, and her four siblings in a rundown house without even a door on the bathroom. Park’s family is much more stable, yet his military veteran father and immigrant mother do not quite know what to make of Park, with his black clothes, eye makeup and love of music. Pushed together on Eleanor’s first day of school when she takes the only seat left on the bus, the one beside Park, they bond over comic books and mixed tapes and help each other survive the tumult that is high school, and life. The characters, young and old, in Eleanor & Park are far from perfect, and their imperfections and weirdness make them likeable. Young adult readers will identify with these outsiders and will be cheering for them from the beginning. Some of the pop culture references may not be recognized by today’s young adults; however, the specific music and comic book references are less important than what they represent in the story. Rowell has written a nuanced and balanced story that will appeal to young adult fans of realistic and romantic fiction. The ending is satisfying without being easy and Rowell has created characters that are believable and heartwarming. Eleanor & Park won the 2013 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for Best Fiction Book. Rainbow Rowell is the author of Attachments (2011) and the recently released Fangirl (2013). The book contains some scenes with some mild sexuality, violence, and language. It will make an excellent addition to any school or public library collection for young adult readers ages 14 and up.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewed by: Joanne de GrootJoanne de Groot is a teacher, librarian and mom who loves to read children's literature (especially with her two kids!). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta and teaches primarily in the Teacher-Librarianship by Distance Learning program. Joanne teaches courses on resources for children and young adults, children's literature, educational technology and Web 2.0, and contemporary literacies.

Training for Primary Care’s Future

Editor’s note: With support from the California HealthCare Foundation, JGIM is pleased to continue this occasional series of first-person narrative reports on clinical innovation. In its current incarnation (formerly “Interval Examination,” now called “Frontline Account”), this series will continue to highlight clinical quality improvement, but with a special emphasis on primary care, often from the perspective of trainees. Contributors will share their perspectives as participant-observers in the development or implementation of a quality-enhancing innovation. The series is edited by two JGIM contributing editors: Ishani Ganguli, MD, an internal medicine resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital and practicing journalist who has written for the Boston Globe and New York Times; and Thomas Bodenheimer, MD, an expert in primary care policy and faculty physician at San Francisco General Hospital. In this lead-off article, Dr. Ganguli describes her experience as a resident participating in the Massachusetts General Hospital Ambulatory Practice of the Future.

Teaching the Catholic Novel: What Took Me So Long?

Teaching the Catholic Novel:What Took Me So Long? Debra Campbell (bio) My Introduction to Catholicism turned thirty this past spring. I have taught it every other year since 1983 at Colby College (Waterville, Maine) and during a brief stint at Gettysburg College during the mid-1980s. The original name of the course, “The Catholic Church in the Modern World,” was in honor of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, but it was also strategic. It was to show my (Protestant) colleagues in a joint Philosophy and Religion Department at a traditionally Protestant liberal arts college that I intended to focus upon a topic of universal importance: the Catholic Church and Modernity. (The title also suggested a discussion of criticisms of the church’s responses to many aspects of modern life, and this is what has attracted a significant portion of my students.) One of my colleagues, an Episcopal priest, immediately recognized the reference to a pivotal conciliar text, but for the others, the course title was an assurance that I would not be teaching material of strictly denominational importance and appeal. What I did provide was a basic, though fairly sophisticated, course on the legacy of Vatican II. We started by reading Bokenkotter’s hefty Concise History of the Catholic Church, proceeded through my favorite Vatican II documents, and then moved on to the controversy over Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). The rest of the course varied from year to year, depending on what was happening in the church at the time. Often we found a juicy controversy to examine together in the Catholic and secular press, which provided an opportunity to underscore my mantra, repeated as often as necessary: the Catholic Church is a living organism, not a fossil. Documents on nuclear weapons (1983) and economic policy (1986) issued by the American Catholic bishops provided material for especially heated debates, as did the conversations in the mid-1980s in [End Page 61] preparation for the document on women that ultimately failed to materialize. Our prior discussions of the evolution of Humanae Vitae prepared us for the complexities and polarizations we encountered in these later conversations about Catholic responses to nuclear weapons, the economy, and women. Articles from the National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, America, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times helped us to follow the evolution of the documents from draft to draft. We could see how the institutional church approached contemporary issues – and intramural dissent. When I aligned myself with the bishops’ ideas on the economy, it cost me the respect of a vocal group of senior (male) economics majors who challenged my competence – and the bishops’ – to discuss such issues, but this, too, was a teachable moment. Following these conversations gave us an opportunity to explore the crucial distinction (and interplay) between institution and movement in the history of the Catholic Church, a unifying theme in all of my History of Christianity classes. Gradually, by the 1990s, a growing interest in life writings affected my syllabi, and the course was renamed “Catholics.” I shifted the focus away from the institution and toward Catholic people and their stories about living the faith. Classic Catholic memoirs such as Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain (1948) and Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (1952) had been included in the original version of the course, usually one memoir toward the end, so that we could take a close look at how Catholic teachings were applied in real life. The shift toward Catholic people meant that we saw the institution through the narratives of individual Catholics rather than the other way around. This made a crucial difference in my students’ responses to the material. They became invested in the stories, and especially specific decisions made by the authors when faced with the complexities or contradictions of life and faith. They disagreed on the authors’ choices and perspectives, and on whether they were permissible options for Catholics. Could Catholics disagree with their bishops? Could they discern for themselves what the Gospel challenged them to do? These memoirs also provided students with glimpses into the strange world of the pre-Vatican II church. We stopped over individual incidents...

Solidarity and moral perception

The images of three young people are very much in my mind as I write this editorial: The first, a thin injured teenager believed to be a terrorist, being worked on by emergency services in Boston; the second, a young student nurse, speaking at the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, England, about the value of nursing; and the third, a young woman being pulled from a collapsed building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The world seemed very small around the time I was writing this editorial. I woke to find an email from a Boston friend telling me about the explosions at the marathon. I immediately checked the Internet and learnt more about the bombings. It made no sense. What we saw and heard, in addition to the devastation, were Boston citizens and the emergency services doing everything they could to save lives and alleviate suffering and many ordinary people doing heroic things. A few days later, we heard President Obama sympathise with the families and friends of those who died (Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi and Sean Collier), offer hope to those who were injured and praise to all who helped, including Boston nurses and doctors. He emphasised the resilience of the people and the need for justice and peace. As time went on, we learnt more about the background of the brothers accused of the Boston bombing. The media were actively engaged in analysing the brothers’ biographical details and gaining perspectives from those who knew them or had views: most were emotional, many were baffled and some struggled with conflicting ethical perspectives. We heard a senior Boston policeman, for example, talk of the need to do more for marginalised groups and then go on to say he would not oppose the death penalty for the younger brother. It was reported in the Boston Globe that neuroscience researchers were keen to conduct an autopsy on the older brother who died. They are, the report states, keen to find out whether trauma from boxing injuries may have contributed to his behaviour. We all are rightly challenged by such events and crave explanations for the inexcusable and perhaps for the inexplicable. In the United Kingdom, as readers will know from previous editorials, nursing has been rocked by relentless reports that members of the profession are implicated in different forms of inhumanity. Many patients in our hospitals and care homes, often the most vulnerable, have been neglected and have been at the receiving end of behaviours that result in violations of their human rights. Many nurse leaders, educators and researchers around the United Kingdom are involved in initiatives to understand and respond constructively and effectively to care deficits. Many are also prioritising the celebration of good practice, and we have had such examples in this journal, for example, with the human rights and nursing awards and local presentations for exemplary ethical practice. This is, however, generally not so newsworthy. That is, until the appearance of a second-year student nurse at the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool in April. Molly Case performed her poem ‘Nursing the nation’ which she said was a response to the ‘bad press’ and to ‘highlight how wonderful we are’. Her poem concluded, ‘You say we’re not doing enough. We promise

Focus on Authors

Focus on Authors

The Little League Champions Benched by Jim Crow in 1955: Resistance and Reform afterBrown v. Board of Education

This article tells a little known story that began in South Carolina in 1955, a few months after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. The story concerns the Cannon Street YMCA All Stars Little League team, which Little League Baseball, Inc. today calls “the most significant amateur team in baseball history.” The 11-12-year-old All Stars won the Charleston, South Carolina city championship; the South Carolina state championship in Greenville; and the southern regional championship in Rome, Georgia. They traveled to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. as guests of Little League’s national office, but they were not permitted to play for the national title because they had won each of the earlier championships by forfeits. At the local, state and regional levels, all 70 other teams refused to play the All Stars for one reason – the other teams were all-white and 11-12-year-old All Stars were all-black. White parents and southern newspapers expressly linked interracial youth baseball competition to Brown’s recent order to integrate elementary and secondary school classrooms. In the early summer of 1955, the Charleston Post and Courier publicly condemned the All Stars and their parents for trying “to force the colored team into the league,” where they “weren’t wanted.” When the city of Charleston honored the All Stars in 2'008 however, the paper praised them as “classy, forgiving men” whose sterling example taught a “lesson of courage and inspiration.” When Little League invited the All Stars back to Williamsport to throw out the first pitch at the World Series in 2002 and 2005, fans representing teams from around the world responded with sustained standing ovations. The Boston Globe calls the Cannon Street All Stars’ story “one of baseball’s cruelest moments,” and ABC News calls it “the civil rights story that got lost in history.” Histories of individual indignities such as those suffered by the All Stars, and accounts of the victims’ lifelong successes and dignified forgiveness, enrich understanding of Brown and its influence on America and the nation’s children.

Franz von Lichtenberg (1920-2012)

Franz von Lichtenberg, a pillar of knowledge regarding tropical infectious disease and a pioneer in the field of schistosomiasis, died on September 16, 2012, in Boston, MA, at age 92. J.M. Lawrence, a correspondent for the Boston Globe , wrote an inspiring personal obituary of Franz (http://goo.gl/VfhyO). I was honored and, in fact, delighted to join the family and friends of Franz in celebration of a truly amazing individual at his memorial service on October 13, 2012, at First Parish Church in Brookline, MA. The sadness that might have wrenched me when I learned of his passing was nothing compared with the enduring joy I still feel from having known and worked with him during the last decade of his life. He was a treasure who lived his life fully and shared his knowledge and kindness freely. Young in my medical training, I said really odd things like, “I want to work in Africa” or “I really want to focus my career on tropical diseases.” I was pointed in the direction of Franz as an able mentor and guide. I wanted a mentor who had already done what I wanted to do for my career, but in Franz I found a master of all things: a caring and endearing …

Don't Show Us, Tell Us: An Interview with Jean Little

Jean Little was born in Taiwan but has been living in Canada since the age of seven. She began writing as a child and has never stopped, in spite of the challenge of her blindness. Despite limited vision, she attended regular school and graduated in 1955 from the University of Toronto with an Honours Degree in English. Little taught handicapped children until 1962. Her first book Mine for Keeps, published that year, won the Little, Brown Children's Book Award. Since then, she has written over 30 works, including novels, picture books, autobiography, poetry and short stories. Written with a talking-computer, her books have been translated into 10 languages and have won many awards, including a Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award (for her Dear Canada title, Orphan At My Door), the Ruth Schwartz Award, the Canada Council Literature Prize, The Vicky Metcalf Award and the Boston Globe Horn-Book Honor Book Award. Her other Dear Canada books include Brothers Far From Home (2003), If I Die Before I Wake (2007) and Exiles from the War (2010). Little lives in Guelph, Ontario, with her sister, great-niece and great-nephew, and a house full of dogs, cats, birds and other pets. In addition to all the awards and nominations, she has received four honorary degrees and has been made a member of the Order of Canada for her outstanding contribution to Canadian children's literature. The following interview was completed by email; Little's responses were submitted on September 2, 2011. It explores her views about Canadian children's writing and her writing process for Dear Canada: Exiles from the War, a fictional diary that draws on many of her own war-time experiences and that was a finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People, 2011. It examines her views about writing a fictionalised diary as opposed to a traditional novel and her reliving of and research into Guelph during the Second World War.

Evolutionary activism: Stephen Jay Gould, the New Left and sociobiology

Stephen Jay Gould was a paleontologist and scientific celebrity at the close of the twentieth century, most famous for his popular writings on evolution and his role in the American creationist controversies of that era. In the early 1980s, Gould was drawn into the “nuclear winter” episode through his friendship with Carl Sagan, an astronomer and popular science celebrity. Sagan helped develop the theory of nuclear winter and subsequently used the theory as evidence to petition the United States government to scale back its nuclear armament. The theory of nuclear winter claimed that even a small nuclear exchange could result in a atmospheric blackening akin to the extinction event of the late Cretaceous. Gould was not a climate scientist but he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives as an expert on historical extinction events. Gould's insistence on the value-neutrality of nuclear winter reveals much about the moral politics of science in late Cold War America. Coming at the heels of leftist scientific activism of the 1980s, the nuclear winter episode demonstrates how value-neutrality emerged the salient feature of scientific involvement in American politics in this period.

Reassessing the All-Volunteer Force

When America ended the military draft in 1973 and transitioned to the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the success of this ambitious enterprise was not guaranteed. Yet by the early 1990s, decisive victor...

The Family and Marriage as Victims of the Gender Revolution

Frisch1 strongly contested our findings of a shortened homosexual lifespan in 2009, but has recently2 published findings from Denmark in harmony with it. We compared adult Danes’ deaths 19822011 (n= 1,709, 850) with adult US obituaries 2000-2012 from: 1) the San Francisco gay press (1,322 gays, 78 lesbians, 19 transsexuals); 2) a haphazard sample from the main-stream press (~1,200 adults); and 3) a systematic sample from the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe (n= 2,228 adults). The Md ages of non-homosexuals located in the 70s and 80s in both main-stream press obituaries and Denmark (with those married to the opposite sex living longer). The Md age of homosexual deaths from the gay press located in the mid-to-late 50s, those partnered tending to die younger; the Md age of death recorded for married gays and lesbians in Denmark and 47 gays and lesbians from the main-stream press ranged from 57 to 61. These findings reinforce the notion that those who enjoy homosexuality, even in highly accepting environments, live sharply foreshortened lives. 1 M. Frisch, H. Bronnum-Hansen, Mortality among men and women in same-sex marriage: a national cohort study of 8333 Danes, Am J Public Health. 2009 Jan; 99(1), p. 133-137. 2 M. Frisch, J. Simonsen, Marriage, cohabitation and mortality in Denmark: national cohort study of 6.5 million persons followed for up to three decades (1982-2011), Int. J. Epidemiol. V. 42, p. 1-20, Advance Access published March 11, 2013.

A Conversation with Steve Almond and William Giraldi

A Conversation with Steve Almond and William Giraldi Ryan Bradley (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 154] STEVE ALMOND is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America, which features a Best American Short Stories 2010 selection, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” and which won the 2012 Paterson Fiction Prize. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the Rumpus and the Boston Globe, Almond is among the nation’s most arresting essayists on culture and politics. WILLIAM GIRALDI is the author of the novel Busy Monsters and fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. In addition to being a novelist and memoirist, Giraldi is also a literary critic whose essays and reviews appear frequently in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Daily Beast. His next two books, a novel and a memoir, are forthcoming from Norton. Both authors use humor to excavate the messy truths of human emotions. Fellow Bostonians and close friends for a decade, Almond and Giraldi allowed me to interview them outside their reading at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 18, 2011. [End Page 155] RYAN BRADLEY: How would you define voice in writing, particularly voice in short fiction? STEVE ALMOND: You’ve been writing more short fiction. Do you have a rap on voice? WILLIAM GIRALDI: I believe I’ve got a rap on voice. And by voice, you mean style, I take it. When you’re talking about voice, are you talking about the voice of the writer or the voice of the character himself? For example: Barry Hannah. He has a voice, a language, that’s pretty uniform throughout all his books, no matter which character’s perspective he’s writing from. But if you look at Steve’s short stories, the voice varies a little bit— ALMOND: A lot. GIRALDI: Depending on who the character is. So voice, or style, has to fit that character, his or her vision. Steve’s collection My Life in Heavy Metal—those stories all have the same theme of longing and of shame. ALMOND: No. That’s not true. GIRALDI: Of young people struggling to make it through their tumultuous lives. ALMOND: Wrong. Wrong. That’s a lie. Don’t listen to that. GIRALDI: But whether the story is in first person or third person, that voice shifts a little bit. It shifts because it has to match the vision of the character. So whenever you say “voice,” I think you’ve got to connect it to vision. Go ahead, Steve. It’s your turn. ALMOND: Well, let me give you an example of Billy’s early work because I know Billy’s early work pretty well. Like he knows mine not very well, actually. Totally mischaracterized my work! This is typical of young writers. Young writers want to be taken seriously. They want the world to take them seriously, and they think it’s important not to joke around, to not make light of anything, be like [End Page 156] Hemingway and Faulkner, all the badasses that get the big awards. So Billy’s early work, although it’s interesting, was pretty self-serious and curtailed. This was true of his fiction and nonfiction. It wasn’t bad. It was competent and occasionally had pathos, but it was very obedient. And then he showed me the book you’ll hear him read from tonight, Busy Monsters. The voice wasn’t just like the full range of Billy’s personality had gotten onto the page. It was as if he had found a voice that was an exaggerated version of who he is. His kind of machismo and his erudition and all the stuff that is in his personality that as a friend of his, I knew had been turned up to eleven. Which is, I think, my conception of voice. Voice is an effort to get onto the page a version of your natural speaking voice, edited into eloquence, amped up by the writerly attention you have while you’re at the keyboard. You’re saying about first...

The Little League Champions Benched by Jim Crow in 1955: Resistance and Reform after Brown v. Board of Education

The Little League Champions Benched by Jim Crow in 1955: Resistance and Reform after Brown v. Board of Education DOUGLAS E. ABRAMS Introduction Little League Baseball, Inc. calls them “the most significant amateur team in baseball history.”1 The Boston Globe calls their story “one of baseball’s crudest moments.”2 ABC News says that their story is “[n]ot about man’s inhumanity to man but man’s inhu­ manity to children.”3 They were the Cannon Street YMCA All Stars, a team of eleven- and twelve-year-olds who went to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. in 1955 after winning the Charleston, South Carolina city champion­ ship; the South Carolina state championship in Greenville; and the southern regional championship in Rome, Georgia. They did not lose a single game.4 The Cannon Street All Stars were also the only team that ever went to Williamsport but was forbidden to play there for the World Series title. They attended as Little League’s guests, but they sat in the stands and watched, barred from competing because they had won the city, state, and regional titles by forfeits.5 The All Stars were “the team that no one would play.”6 Every other Charleston Little League team refused to take the field against them in the city championships. All sixty-one other South Carolina teams eligible for the state tournament joined the boycott, and so did all seven other state champions that qualified to play for the southeastern regional title, the final step on the road to William­ sport.7 In the wake of the mass boycott and forfeits, Little League’s national office recog­ nized the Cannon Street All Stars as the city, state, and southeastern regional champions.8 None of the other teams—more than seventy in all—ever suggested that the Cannon Street All Stars played dirty. None ever suggested that the All Stars violated any 52 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY The Cannon Street All Stars traveled from Charleston, South Carolina, to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to play in the Little League World Series in 1955. They were not allowed to play, however, because they had won their place in the World Series through forfeits—the other teams had all refused to play them because of their race. Little League rule. The several dozen teams refused to play them for only one reason—all the kids playing for the All Stars were black and every other southern Little League team with eyes on Williamsport was all white. Jim Crow laws had enshrined statesanctioned racial segregation in the Deep South for decades,9 and race relations remained especially tense in the summer of 1955. Barely a year had passed since May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board ofEducation held that racial segregation in public elementary and secondary schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.10 Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III calls Brown “the story ... of a thousand tales of human suffering and sacrifice subsumed in the winning of a principle.”11 The story of the Cannon Street All Stars belongs in this vast array, but the story has evidently gone untold in extended studies of the Court’s landmark decision. The All Stars and their young prospective white opponents in the Deep South were The Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public elementary and secondary schools violates the Equal Protection Clause on May 17,1954, barely a year before the All Stars were kept out of the World Series. THE LITTLE LEAGUE CHAMPIONS BENCHED BY JIM CROW IN 1955 53 caught in a drama that transcended Little League baseball. Black and white South Carolina children often played informal pickup baseball games together on local sandlots, at least until police broke up the contests.12 The prospect of integrated Little League tournaments, however, struck a raw nerve among white parents enraged by Brown’s threat to the existing legal and social order. The Supreme Court confined Brown’s holding and rationale to public elementary and secondary education, without explicitly dismantling official segregation in all walks of American life. Southern whites who dug in their heels, however...

Literature Review: Rescheduling of Marijuana

Medical marijuana legalization has become both a medical and legal issue. Papers range from casual discussion, passionate and involved such as those by Annas1 and Okie2, to serious logical argument exemplified beautifully in Cohen’s3 work. Annas1 and Okie2 focused on California’s 1996 medical marijuana law and the 2005 Supreme Court trial Gonzales v. Raich respectively. Cohen3 had a larger scope, reviewing marijuana’s history in the United States from the colonial era to present-day. While the former sources made mention of some valuable scientific evidence, they did so amidst a great deal of personal appeal and anecdotes about those affected. Quotes from doctors, talking about their personal recommendations for patients to use marijuana, and, admittedly, evocative statements from politicians or newspapers frame the discussions. For instance, Annas quotes a Boston Globe writer’s question asking that if legalizing medical marijuana would send the terrible message to children that “If you hurry up and get cancer, you, too, can get high?”1. Cohen’s argument did not lack pathos, but he presented his opinion in a strong logical argument, clearly referencing medical findings. All three papers argued, presuming that sufficient medical evidence exists to prescribe marijuana. They, instead, focused on the issue marijuana’s legality, rather than on analyzing the validity of the cited data.

The Elements of Style: A Tribute to Suzanne Corkin

When Brad Postle invited me to submit a contribution to this Festschrift for Sue Corkin, I had to mull over what to present. I knew there would be many scientific papers but wanted to do something more personal. What I decided might be meaningful to Sue would be a contribution about her role in the development of women scientists in her lab. I know she was very important to me in this respect. I started with all the women I could think of who had been in Sueʼs lab around my time, contacted them, and asked them to help me find others, especially those who came before and after me. Those who responded are included here. There are 20 women representing many different roles in Sueʼs lab: research scientist, undergraduate student, graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, secretary, research assistant. Their dates and roles in the lab and what they are doing now are presented in Table 1. To provide a little structure but not to constrain their responses too much, I provided some intentionally vague guiding questions and left it up to them as to which ones they wanted to address. My edits have been confined to explaining abbreviations and special terms [in brackets], shortening some responses without changing the meaning (I hope), and offering some grammatical improvements that I believe Sue would have done herself if sheʼd been given the opportunity. Though my name is here as author, I can properly take credit for only one twentieth of the content of this article. I am indebted to these many women who took the time to reminisce in a public forum—the “public” part may not seem extraordinary until you get to the final entry! Needless to say, we are all tremendously indebted to Sue herself, in both predictable and surprising ways. We hope you enjoy the reconstruction of life in the Corkin lab over the years and its reverberations in our lives to the present day.

The case for Obamacare

> “There’s nobody in Mississippi who does not have access to health care.” > > Haley Barbour, former governor of Mississippi Governor Barbour made this remark to the Boston Globe in April 2011,1 insisting that people without health insurance in Mississippi can get charitable care from hospitals and doctors whenever they need it, and poor people can rely on Medicare, a national insurance programme run by the United States government. I was recently in Mississippi to experience the US healthcare system myself. Early one morning at 7 am, I sat slumped on a sofa, bleary eyed, waiting for surgery to start. A doctor sat down on the sofa next to me. “Did you hear what our president is doing?” he asked me. …

Chemist Charged In Crime Lab Scandal

Police arrested a Massachusetts forensic chemist on Sept. 28. Annie Dookhan allegedly tampered with drug evidence in criminal cases, forged colleagues’ signatures, and faked her academic credentials while working at a state crime lab. The unfolding investigation, which could upend thousands of narcotics convictions, has already led to the shutdown of the lab and the resignation of the state public health commissioner who oversaw it. Dookhan, 34, was charged with obstructing justice by lying about the integrity of evidence, as well as about her academic qualifications. She is thought to have tested some 60,000 drug samples during her career at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute, a state crime lab. “Annie Dookhan’s alleged actions corrupted the integrity of the entire criminal justice system,” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said at a press conference. According to a police report obtained by the Boston Globe, Dookhan told investigators that she forged ...

Michael W. Suleiman (1934-2010)

For all of us who knew Michael Suleiman over many years, news of his illness and untimely death came as both a shock and cause of enormous sadness. Michael's accomplishments in the academic world are simply astonishing. A quiet and unassuming man Michael did perhaps more than any other single person to establish and champion the study of Arab Americans. At the same time, he was an unfailing spokesperson for the rights of the Palestinians. Michael balanced academic rigor with a meticulous scholarship that is apparent in everything he wrote, edited and in any conference he organized.Michael was born in Tiberias into a poor family (his father was a mason) of two brothers and four sisters. When the Nakba of 1947/48 forced the family out of Palestine they became refugees in Jordan where a scholarship enabled Michael to complete his secondary schooling at the Anglican sponsored Bishop's School in Amman. After graduation he taught at the school for two years before moving to England to teach science and math at Abbotsholme. Although he was accepted by both Oxford and Cambridge his admission was deferred owing to the large number of returning veterans from World War II who were also pressing for admission. Through the sponsorship of a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Page, Michael was able to come to the United States to attend Bradley University on a scholarship attained after he convinced the college director of his determination, work experience, and abilities. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin where he completed his MS ( 1 962) and PhD degree ( 1 965) in Political Science and where he met and married his beloved wife Penny. Married for 47 years, Michael and Penny had two children, a daughter Suad and son Gibran.In 1965 Michael joined the faculty of political science at Kansas State University (KSU) in Manhattan, Kansas where he served as head of the department from 1975 to 1982. In 1 972 he was awarded a university Distinguished Professorship. Michael held a wide range of advisory positions including among others, the Dean's Advisory Committee, African Area Studies Center Planning Committee, and the KSU Task Force on Financing the Library for the 21st Century. Over the course of his career, Michael was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, University of London, and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.Michael was awarded no fewer than five Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, in addition to receiving research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Maghribi Studies, and a Ford Faculty Research Fellowship among others. Michael was also the recipient of a number of operating grants to arrange conferences, lecture series, and concerts.As a recognized scholar in Middle East studies, Michael was asked to consult by a wide range of scholarly journals and presses including, to name just a few, the American Journal of Political Science, Arab Studies Quarterly, Arab American Almanac, Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Pluto Press, and many university presses. His work as an evaluator for grant proposals was highly valued by Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), the League of Arab States, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Media organizations as diverse as ABC Nightline, Associated Press, PBS (McNeil/Lehrer News Hour), NPR, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and the New York Times interviewed and consulted with Michael on developments in the Arab world and about Arab Americans. As recognition of his achievements he is included in many directories of leading scholars and Arab Americans including Who 's Who in America, International Who 's Who of the Arab World, 2000 Prominent Arabs of the 20th Century.As an active member of MESA, Michael frequently presented papers and chaired panels at the annual conventions and rendered valuable advice to the Ethics Committee during the 1990s. …

Career Development in Nutrition and Dietetics: Carving Out Your Own Route

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