George Clooney Research Articles

The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen by S. Nielsen

Nielsen, Susin. The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2012. Print. Susin Nielsen is the acclaimed author of Word Nerd and Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mother. She has won several writing awards and has consistently created compelling, charismatic, and fully drawn characters. In her new novel, The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen, Nielsen explores dark and uncomfortable themes such as mental illness, bullying, violence, tolerating differences, and the quiet desperation felt by those who must refashion their lives after a tragedy. For readers concerned that the novel will break their heart, it does. And then it fills that broken heart with joy. Through his affecting journal entries, readers come to know 13-year-old Henry K. Larsen. His therapist recommends that he write about his thoughts and feelings in the aftermath of “IT”—hence the ‘reluctant’ diary. However, Henry’s diary entries are laugh out loud funny on one page and provoke tears on the next. Henry has an extraordinary voice that is unlike any other narrator. He is angry, confused, saddened, shamed, and lost after “IT” happened. He has moved with his father to Vancouver to try to piece together a new life but in reality, his family barely manages to make it through the day. Henry is leery of other people, pushes them away, and he cannot find a place for himself or make sense of his emotions after “IT.” The last thing that Henry anticipates is that he will open up to anyone about “IT”—not to his wonderful new friends Farley and Alberta, to his therapist, or to his two new neighbours. However, incidents at school and at home force Henry to talk about Jesse and the “IT” that changed everyone’s lives forever. The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen is a quick and deeply satisfying read. This book is required reading. Despite the darker themes, the emotional payoff is not only gratifying, but inspiring. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Tami OliphantTami Oliphant works as a research librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries and for the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She earned her Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of Alberta and her doctorate from the University of Western Ontario. She has worked in academic libraries, public libraries, communications and planning, and as a sessional lecturer and researcher at the University of Alberta and the University of Western Ontario.

The Perfect Storm: Section 12, Mandatory Minimum Sentences and the Problem of the Unusual Case

In Wolfgang Peterson’s enjoyable 2000 film, The Perfect Storm, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as fisherman in a doomed struggle against Mother Nature, a wonderful scene shows a local weatherman/meteorologist, flushed with excitement, outlining the details of an incoming mega-storm to a member of the newsroom:

Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions

Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions

<em>Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill</em>, by Edward Adams

Reviewed by: Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill by Edward Adams Nathan K. Hensley (bio) Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill, by Edward Adams; pp. x + 322. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, $39.50, $29.50 paper. Near the end of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), we watch the assassination of an Arab prince through drone eyes: inside a CIA control room, on a video screen. As functionaries in Virginia count down to impact, our point of view shifts to the desert, where George Clooney confronts the man he’s been trying to warn of the attack. Just as the [End Page 746] two make eye contact, everything explodes. Instantly the film cuts back to the control room, where the roaring fireball has become a silent white puff on a monitor, only pixels. Somebody says, “Target destroyed.” Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill examines self-consciously modern representations of war from the eighteenth century to the present, so it’s no surprise that this important book—awarded the 2013 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative—would help us understand Gaghan’s seemingly ultra-contemporary shift between scales. Syriana splits two perspectives with a jumpcut: on the one hand, we have satellite optics and the euphemized violence of military bureaucracy; on the other, individual heroes who experience the face-to-face connections that go by the name “human.” The film’s suggestion is that institutional doublespeak is subsuming authentic human life. For the more analytically precise Edward Adams, the cynical drive to euphemize violence (“target destroyed”) and the fetishization of agency in the form of individual heroes (or Hollywood stars) are two sides of the same coin: both are constitutive features of modernity. Liberal Epic’s central claim, a persuasive one, is that modernity loves heroes just as much as it pretends to hate violence. That is why the genre of epic, focused as it is on single combatants in martial struggles, so vividly illuminates the tensions at the heart of post-Enlightenment thought. For Adams, epic in its original Homeric and Vergilian form shows brute terror and physical harm without recuperating that violence into any universalist system of ethics. By contrast, modern epics tend to “glorif[y] war and violence in the cause of liberty,” working hard to depict warfare in service of humanity (22). We see two results: poetically sanitized violence and a lingering belief that heroic individuals push history forward. “Liberal epic’s basic paradox,” then, consists in its emphasis on single (male) actors who kill, but only to bring peace and justice into the world (235). Contra György Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920), therefore, Adams follows Herbert Tucker’s recent Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008) to show that the rumors of epic’s demise in modernity have been greatly exaggerated. Adams’s big book shares with Tucker’s even bigger one both encyclopedic ambition and what we might be tempted to call heroic erudition. With impressive agility, Adams reads Greek and Latin originals against their French and English translations, which are themselves reworked through the centuries. In fact, Adams’s subtitle “The Victorian Practice of History” shortchanges his book’s scope, which extends beyond both the Victorian era and historical writing as such. Phonebook-thick histories like Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) and William Francis Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula (1828–40) share space with works in other forms, from other historical and national situations—Alexander Pope’s Iliad (1715–20), Walter Scott’s romantic fictions, Thomas Hardy’s long verse drama The Dynasts (1904–08), Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862), and (in the prologue and epilogue) contemporary video games like Halo. All are grouped into the capacious genre Adams names liberal epic, a “coherent, self-conscious, but acknowledged tradition of epic literature” that is simultaneously fascinated with violence and committed to the idea that it might someday become obsolete (2). To trace this internally conflicted genre Adams works genealogically, showing the ways...

Nespresso: Branding the "Ultimate Coffee Experience"

Nespresso: Branding the "Ultimate Coffee Experience"

The fallacy of the autonomous celebrity activist in international politics: George Clooney and Mia Farrow in Darfur

Celebrities have been accused of oversimplifying the conflict in Darfur, of exaggerating the number of people killed and of cursorily labelling it the ‘first genocide of the 21st century’. Celebrity activists have also been criticized for advocating drastic measures like military intervention, and for aggressively pursuing the fulfilment of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court at the expense of quiet diplomacy and reconciliation, ultimately making matters worse. This article examines the role of two Hollywood celebrities—Mia Farrow and George Clooney—in Sudan's ‘messy war’. It claims that most proponents and critics of celebrity activism overestimate the role that these two individuals played. Clooney and Farrow did not act alone but were latecomer adherents to a transnational advocacy network (the Save Darfur Coalition) and their role was more in strengthening than in altering messages.

Chronology, Causality . . . Confusion: When Avant-Garde Goes Classic

STILL TODAY, THE DOMINANT VIEW of contemporary mainstream film is that such films adhere to the conventions of classical Hollywood style. This style, as so influentially described by David Bordwell, Janet Stalger, and Kristin Thompson in their Classical Hollywood Cinema, is mainly characterized by a clear and comprehensible flow and a complete disguise of the film's artifice.1 Linearity and causality are, arguably, the main traits of classical Hollywood narrative. However, when we look at today's landscape of popular film, the large number of nonlinear plots employed is more than astonishing. It seems that in 1994, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction marked the beginning of this kind of discontinuous and fragmented as a new appeal in mainstream film. Once the way was paved, many other films followed. Guy Ritchie's Snatch (2000), for instance, though mostly linear, features some scenes with an unusual use of time (such as time sped up and cause and effect presented in reverse). Syriana (2005), which was directed by Stephen Gaghan, has so many subplots that it is extremely difficult for the audience to put it all together at the end of the film. Steven Soderbergh seems particularly fond of time shifts as well, as we can see in The Limey (1999) and his mainstream breakthrough Out of Sight, which was released in 1998 and starred major Hollywood actors George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006) deliberately plays with conventional and even makes fun of it, thus misleading the audience right from the beginning. Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Marc Forster's Sfojy (2006) epitomize heavy fragmentation and discontinuity caused by parts of or even the whole story taking place inside a character's head. In The Fountain (2006), director Darren Aronofsky crosscuts three interlocking time periods in which the two main actors inhabit all three different times and embody three different parts of the same person. Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (2007) illustrates that discontinuity on a plot level works perfectly even in a biographical movie. Perhaps the most extreme form of an untraditional structuring of narrative, namely, relating the story backward, was done in Christopher Nolan's Memento (2001) and Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002). Of course, many more films with a discontinuous plot could be listed. Because of this apparent development in recent years, this article seeks to analyze what happens when time is not treated as a fixed entity but is (mis)used as an important tool in film narrative. It explores how filmmakers alter the story itself or influence the response of the viewers when they tell the plot in a seemingly arbitrary order. Furthermore, the central question posed here is why discontinuous emerged in mainstream film as late as it did even though these techniques as such are not a novelty. Modern novels as well as avant-garde films throughout the twentieth century employed unconventional plot structures rather successfully, yet in mainstream film, Hollywood remained quite dominant-until recently. The following discussion of narratology in film, the concept of montage as the governing principle of film, and the long tradition of unconventional editing in avantgarde film helps us approach this matter. The Concept of Time in Narrative First of all, we must consider how narratology deals with the aspect ottime and how this aspect is translated onto the screen in film theory. The crucial binary opposition in the discussion of the concept ottime in is temporality versus logic? that is, a chronological order versus a causative chain. In Introduction of the Structural Analysis of Narratives, Roland Barthes points out that exactly this confusion between consecution (that which comes after) and consequence (that which is caused by) is the mainspring of narrative (94). This potential atemporal logic behind the temporality of forms the core problem of syntax, which divided theorists until recently. …

Open Between Us (review)

Reviewed by: Open Between Us Mark Brazaitis (bio) George Looney. Open Between Us. Turning Point. If you google George Looney, you'll be asked if you meant to google George Clooney. I would love to hear George the Actor read poems from George the Poet's latest collection, Open Between Us. Pre Up in the Air, Clooney wouldn't have possessed the maturity of tone to carry off this duty. Now he's ready. Poems on cd, anyone? Looney's poems are dense, somber, contemplative. More important, they're the poems of someone who has lived with his eyes wide open, someone who, like most of us, isn't given a map to navigate life but must bushwhack his way toward where he's going. There are pleasures along the way. There is also pain and sadness. With luck, there's wisdom. There's certainly wisdom in Looney's work. The enlightened Clooney at the end of Up in the Air, his heart broken, his lifestyle exposed as vacant, would know how to read Looney's "The Worst We Can Do," which is a love poem to love itself. But it isn't love as romantic inspiration or love as pseudonym for sex. It's love as an endurance test, a marathon of the heart. The speaker's father is shown coming home drunk and falling asleep in front of the television. The mother copes as best she can, sometimes leaving him to sleep in his chair, sometimes waking him and urging him upstairs to bed. It hurt her, and I couldn't understand howshe could limp through such painand still love him. But she did. If love is true, the poem concludes, it "makes it through the worst we can do to it." Love isn't a conqueror, it's a survivor. Looney's collection is filled with such insights. Whereas younger poets—or, anyway, poets who haven't reconciled what they hope life is versus what it actually is—might be tempted to flavor the themes Looney addresses with grand observations and stirring epiphanies, Looney is content to allow his work a quieter wisdom. Take, for example, the collection's opening poem, "How It All Is." Read out of context, the concluding stanza might seem grandiose: How predictable this sore world can be.Always take as much of it inas you can, my friend, to love. But what comes before offers no fireworks. It is honest in its understatement, its adherence to the way life, in most instances, is lived: quietly. But if consolation is sometimes small, at least it's present: [End Page 163] A woman practices the celloacross the courtyard. Sometimesat night I watch her feed her cat. It's a comfort to know something,at least, is well cared for. Coupled with its quiet prelude, the ending of "How It All Is" isn't grandiose at all. It is merely the inevitable conclusion to what precedes it. The advice it offers, one imagines, isn't intended to be blared to a large audience but to be whispered to a companion. In Open Between Us, Looney pays homage to his poetic heroes, especially James Wright and Richard Hugo. It isn't hard to see the influence of both poets on Looney's writing in this and his other work. (Looney's previous books of poetry are The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, Attendant Ghosts, and Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh. He is also the author of the novella Hymn of Ash. All of his books have won awards.) Certainly Looney's unsentimental gaze is akin to Wright's, whose "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" could easily have inspired a dozen of the poems in Open Between Us, in tone if not in subject. It's hard not to admire a poet who not only admits to his influences but highlights them. Looney dedicates the book's sixth poem, "Into the River You Lost," to Wright. The poem opens "It was pain that moved you to speak of the river …" (Wright, of course, wrote about rivers the way Bessie Smith sang the blues...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Essentialism

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Essentialism

George Clooney Effect? High-Earning Women Want Older, More Attractive Partners, Research Finds

George Clooney Effect? High-Earning Women Want Older, More Attractive Partners, Research Finds

Being Bogart: Professional Identity after Michael Clayton

best movies are more than entertainment; they also can teach us lessons we need to learn. Movies can offer us both critical insights about how the world really works and also hints of a better future. In this essay I suggest the George Clooney character in Michael Clayton performs the first function and the Humphrey Bogart character in the The Maltese Falcon the second. Young lawyers might find that “being Bogart” might be the answer to the riddle of how to be a good lawyer in a bad world.

International business travel in the global economy * J. Beaverstock, B. Derudder, J. Faulconbridge and F. Witlox (eds)

It would be impossible to review this book without reference to the movie Up in the Air and corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham’s (played by George Clooney) love affair with the perks that accrue to a frequent business traveler. Ensconced in a cocoon of status, which allows him to bypass lines at airport security checks and access exclusive lounges, Bingham personifies a number of the topics contained within this timely and engaging book. Performing a sensitive business function that is ill-suited for video conferencing, Clooney’s character embraces business travel as both vocation and recreation but in so doing loses touch with any real domestic life. But transcending the entertainment value of the movie, this book provides a wide range of important and engaging insight on a central means by which global capitalism functions that hitherto has received little attention from scholars. Emerging from an international workshop at Ghent University in Belgium held in January 2008, this edited volume of 11 different approaches to the study of business travel provides a welcome answer to the relative lack of study on this important topic. Beginning with an introductory forward by Brian Graham, which deftly sketches out the key contours of contestation within airline networking and aircraft strategies, this book offers an important framework around which future research in this area can build. Most importantly it refines our understanding of the diversity of geographies within air travel. Although the uneven nature of airline networks is well established, this book shows that within this geography, there is yet more variegation (ranging from the scale of the city to the person) within the experience of air travel.

Global Gender Inequality and the Empowerment of Women

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation. Half the Sky brings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

Global Gender Inquality and the Empowerment of Women

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwideis a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation.Half the Skybrings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

Global Gender Inequality and the Empowerment of Women

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation. Half the Sky brings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

20세기 서구 남성 수염 스타일의 상징적 가치

The purpose of this study is to research the symbolistic values of western beards' style in the twentieth century. Namely, it is to consider the relationship between social-cultural factors and aesthetic meanings of western beards' style. The contents are, firstly, studying the conception and the types of beard. A beard is the hair that grows on a person's chin, cheeks, neck, and the area above the upper lip. At the World Beard & Moustache Championships, there are moustache category (natural, english, hungarian, dali, fu manchu, freestyle), beard category (natural, musketeer, goatee, sideburns, freestyle), and full beard category (natural, garibaldi, verdi, van dyck, freestyle), Secondly, this paper is continued by researching the history of beard from the ancient to the present day, and thirdly, analyzing political dictatorship, social resistance and expression of personality, religious dignity, related with the change of world situation, the formation of postmodern anti-culture and pop-culture, and the coexistence of traditional culture. There are long and bushy full beards in some religions like Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. The meanings of their beards are purity, life and holiness. The beards of some politicians symbolize dictatorship. Namely, the chaplin of Hitler, the moustache of Hussein and the musketeer of Castro express strong power and charisma. In 1950s'-70s' subcultures, Hipsters' goatee, Bikers' horseshoe, Beat generations' goatee and Hippies' natural represent the lack of adaptability and social resistance. Also, the celebrities and artists like Ronald Colman, Clark Gable, Don Johnson, George Clooney, and Salvador Dali express freedom, personality, and taste with beards. For that matter, the symbolistic values of beards' style in the twentieth century are the religious dignity, the political dictatorship, the social resistance and the expression of personality. Today the beards' style is one of fashion items as well as a symbol of masculinity, customs and classes.

Homer Meets the Coen Brothers: Memory as Artistic Pastiche in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Coen brothers' 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? presents an intriguing and unusual case for the question of whether historical accuracy is important in films that use classical antiquity as a direct setting or indirect reference point. With key elements of the film based on Homer's Odyssey, O Brother is set in the American south during the Great Depression. Those familiar with the often whimsical style of the Coen brothers probably did not know what, if any, connection this effort would have either historical period. However, lovers of Homer have noted many clever allusions the adventures of Odysseus in the O Brother, while those interested in the myth of a charming Old South appeared pleased at how the film nostalgically presented 1930s southern culture. Classical Allusions Homer's Odysseus becomes Ulysses Everett McGiIl (George Clooney) in the Coens' reimagining of the epic Greek story. Though he is also a who prizes his intellect as a mechanism for making his way back home, Everett soon discloses a shallow obtuseness beneath his clever and fast-talking rhetoric. Still, like Odysseus, Everett longs get back his beloved wife Penelope, a.k.a. Penny (Holly Hunter), who is being courted by a suitor. Unlike her ancient counterpart, Penny is not exactly the faithful wife; she divorces Everett in his absence pursue a more profitable match. And even when the couple is reunited at the end, the last scene depicts Penny nagging her ever-apologizing husband, who is followed by seven daughters rather than one son. Homer's blind prophet Tiresias is central in the Coens' version, too, though now he appears as an old black (Lee Weaver) who says he works for man and has name (echoing Odysseus' famous lines). In riddles, this blind seer warns Everett and his companions (Pete played by John Turturro and Delmar played by Tim Blake Nelson) of the perils of the journey but predicts a successful homecoming. In O Brother, the Cyclops takes the guise of John Goodman's conniving, one-eyed bible salesman, who examples an on-going religious subtext (again similar but quite different from Homer). The Sirens now appear as seductive songstresses in wet dresses (played by Mia Tate, Musetta Vander, and Christy Taylor), also filling Circe's role as beautiful witch by supposedly turning Pete into a toad (and they even recall the role of Nausicaa and her maids with their clothes-washing). But Ulysses Everett McGiIl, unlike the ancient Odysseus, has no defense against any of their feminine wiles. Along with his companions, Everett gets liquored up and intends to fornicate because he does not have the good sense see that the Sirens plan tum the men over the law for the reward money. More subtle references Homer's story include: the hero's journey the underworld, which has become the fire and brimstone meeting of the KKK; the conversion of the Lotus Eaters into the glassy-eyed crowd waiting be dunked in the river for baptism; the saving of Odysseus from the watery deep, mirrored in Everett emerging from the floods of the Tennessee Valley Authority; the transformation of Poseidon into Sheriff Cooley (Daniel Von Bargen), who also represents an unrelenting and blind revenge (note the sunglasses). And just as Poseidon ignores Zeus' decree that Odysseus shall return home, the trooper also does not care about anyone else's authority - in this case the indifference concerns the governor's pardon at the end. The modern Ulysses also returns home in disguise, through a fake beard and blackface in the film, making Everett appear be a down-and-out, old hillbilly like the beggar Odysseus. Once again there is a showdown among opposing forces at a banquet. The ancestral home is threatened but still intact, at least long enough yield an object that gives legitimacy Ulysses' relationship with his wife (the tree-bed in Homer vs. the ring in the film). The hero is saved in both cases by a deus ex machina; fate plays a prominent role in both stories -all is foreordained, as Everett claims. …

The left temporal pole is important for retrieving words for unique concrete entities

Background: The neuroanatomical basis of lexical retrieval has been studied intensively. The current review focuses on the special case of proper nouns. Aims: This article reviews a programme of research that has used both lesion‐deficit and functional‐imaging (PET) approaches to investigate the neuroanatomical basis for lexical retrieval of proper nouns. In lesion‐deficit studies we found that damage to the left temporal polar (TP) region leads to reliable and specific impairments in naming famous persons (e.g., “George Clooney”) and famous landmarks (e.g., “Golden Gate Bridge”). In functional‐imaging studies we found that when participants name famous persons and landmarks they produce specific activation (increases in regional cerebral blood flow) in the left TP region. Main Contribution: These findings converge with lesion and functional‐imaging data from other laboratories to support the idea that the left TP region is important for the retrieval of names for unique concrete entities, persons and landmarks being typical examples of such categories of entities. Conclusions: We have interpreted these results within a theoretical framework which suggests that left TP contains convergence regions that operate as intermediaries between conceptual knowledge retrieval and lexical retrieval for classes of unique concrete entities.

Surface tension

Surface tension

Security, quality and the sharing of data

George Clooney's suffered from it. Britney Spears has suffered from it. And Sir Bobby Robson has too. Patient confidentiality and the breach of patient records makes headlines on both sides of the pond and continues to affect all manner of healthcare delivery.