Stuff Happens Research Articles

President's Page:What Sets the IADC Apart?

In his recent book, Imagine--How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer studied the characteristics that have helped to make Pixar Animation Studios one of the most successful movie companies of all time. Since 1995, when Toy Story was first released, Pixar has created thirteen feature films, and each one has been a major commercial success. Along the way, Pixar also earned critical praise with twenty-six Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and eleven Grammys. Why has Pixar been so successful? Lehrer believes that it stems from its commitment to providing maximum opportunities for meaningful personal interaction between its writers, artists, animators, and computer engineers. Rather than isolate each of those groups in their own areas, Pixar encourages candid discussions of problems and ideas across disciplines so that new approaches are more readily discovered and implemented. Fostering these random interactions is so important to Pixar that it actually designed its headquarters building with only one set of bathrooms so that its employees are literally forced to see and interact with each other every day. As noted by Alvy Ray Smith, one of Pixar's co-founders, wanted people to want to learn from each other. That's always when the best stuff happens: when someone tells you something you didn't already know. While the IADC is not a movie studio, when people ask me what sets our organization apart from other legal associations, I almost always point to the opportunities we provide for meaningful personal engagement among our members. While many organizations offer access to excellent CLE programming and on-line legal resources, the IADC really distinguishes itself by providing our members with multiple ways in which they can directly engage and learn from each other. By leveraging opportunities for meaningful personal interaction, our members' lives are enriched not only professionally but personally. IADC's Midyear and Annual Meetings provide multiple opportunities for our members to interact and learn from each other in ways that go well beyond traditional legal conferences. At early morning Committee Business Meetings, our members focus on cutting edge topics in their particular fields of interest. More importantly, they also have the chance to engage each other in exchanges that might never take place over the internet or through a telephone conversation. While our Major CLE Presentations are not designed for open debate among all the attendees, they are intended to present subjects that will promote additional discussion outside the walls of the conference room. We encourage spouses, partners and significant others to attend Foundation Forum and General Interest presentations at all of our meetings. This serves to further enhance the overall quality of our interactions and gives each of us a chance to share ideas and know each other better. Our Annual Meetings also provide unrivaled opportunities for our families to engage with each other. The meeting locales take us to places that we might have never visited if not for the IADC. More importantly, when our families get together and share these experiences, it enhances all of our lives. We begin to see that although we are geographically diverse and may not have identical views on all issues, we still share certain core values and beliefs. While the internet, email, and social networking sites are wonderful tools, they will never be an adequate substitute for a face-to-face conversation with someone who is truly interested in what you have to say. …

Transatlantic Miscommunication in David Hare’s Drama Stuff Happens

This article addresses the transatlantic relations between the United States and Europe and specifically Great Britain in the context of post-9/11 international politics as reflected in the drama Stuff Happens (2004) written by British playwright David Hare. It focuses on the way re- cent history is performed and contextualized in dramatic form and analyzes the function and power of the theatricalization of historic events and particularly of finding ways to address 9/11 on a stage. Furthermore, it discusses the method of mixing parts of public speeches quoted ver- batim with fiction and its effects on readers and audiences. The play addresses the struggles and fragility of international diplomacy in the aftermath of 9/11. It reflects a general skepticism to- wards politicians and their decisions as well as the helpless position of millions of observers who are affected by these decisions and yet feel like they have no influence. This article sees post-9/11 verbatim theater as a chance for playwright and spectators to get access to the world of politics and to take part in the process of writing transatlantic history. More generally, through the ex- ample of this play, the article aims at discussing new challenges and functions of post-9/11 theater.

Stuff Happens, and People Make it Happen: Theory and Practice in the Work of Terence Ranger

There were various moments in social theory from the late 1970s through to the ’90s when ideas changed significantly; and the Zimbabweanist historian Terence Ranger always seemed to anticipate them. How did he do this? In this paper, I try to answer that question by highlighting the key elements in Ranger’s methodology and examining his underlying theory of history, actors and agency. The paper is based on four and a half hours of interview with Ranger, across two sessions, carried out for History Workshop Journal in late 2009. All quotations are from that interview unless otherwise indicated. A distinctive feature of Ranger’s style is the extensive use of direct quotation. I have followed that style here, hoping as far as possible to allow Ranger’s voice to dominate. Professor Ranger with fellow historians Professor Gordon Chavunduka, head of ZINATHA (Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association), and Pathisa Nyathi of AmaGugu Publishers, at the Britain Zimbabwe Society conference on Religion in Zimbabwe, Oxford, June 2010.

Necessary Connections and the Problem of Induction1

For the purposes of this paper, I take the problem of induction to be a genuine sceptical problem. The challenge is to provide a reason to believe that inductive inferences are rational – a reason that does not beg the question against the sceptic by enshrining presuppositions that the sceptic will reject. The proposal that I shall consider and reject in this paper is that the sceptical problem can be solved if we focus on the metaphysics of laws of nature. Why might one think that the problem of induction has a metaphysical solution? Well, one thing that might be worrying the inductive sceptic is this: here we are, cosily occupying a tiny corner of the vast reaches of Time. Everything’s been going along pretty nicely up to now – but it might all fall apart! Anything could happen! After all, what’s stopping it? Stuff happens. So far, stuff has been kind enough to happen in nice, regular, predictable ways, by and large. But maybe the regularity of the Universe thus far has just been a matter of cosmic luck, and maybe next year or next week or in the next ten minutes our luck will run out and chaos will descend – or maybe the Universe will start behaving in other regular but far less friendly ways. Simon Blackburn calls this unfortunate condition ‘inductive vertigo’ (1993, 98). What the vertigo-sufferer apparently needs is a metaphysician, for only a metaphysician is in a position to tell the afflicted that, in fact, it can’t all fall apart. It looks as though the kind of metaphysician who is in a position to offer a cure for inductive vertigo will be someone who holds that there is something in the world that makes it regular: something that constrains how things can happen in such a way that they are guaranteed not to fall apart. In other

Balloon-borne photography [Hands On

Get a bird's-eye view on a budget. Although there's a certain awe-inspiring beauty to the images that hobbyists' weather balloons can capture from the edge of space, in fact most of the good stuff happens much nearer the ground.

When "Stuff Happens" Isn't Enough: How An Evolutionary Theory of Doctrinal and Legal System Development Can Enrich Comparative Legal Studies

Abstract Comparative legal scholarship will benefit from better explanations of legal development. While the complications of legal systems are a challenge for cause and effect stories, evolutionary theory offers a powerful, yet relatively simple, set of explanatory principles that can be appropriately applied to both doctrinal topics and legal systems as a whole. The necessary starting point for an evolutionary analysis is to examine the three core components of evolution: descent, variation, and selection. Engaging these topics and developing good descriptions for each of them for the targeted system can be very helpful in providing good explanations to the “why” questions of comparative law analysis.

Thanks be to Zebrafish

During the last 10–15 years, the tiny, tropical, freshwater zebrafish has become one of the most powerful and versatile models for studying vertebrate heart development. Three recent reports in Nature remind us of just how much we owe to this fishy friend of research. The zebrafish was first developed for use as a model organism by George Streisinger at the University of Oregon in the 1970s. A common resident of household tropical aquariums, the fish soon became a common laboratory resident thanks to its hardiness and many other research-friendly characteristics. The zebrafish is small, easy to keep, and produces large numbers of offspring on a regular basis—female zebrafish can produce up to 200 eggs per week. Such features make it perfect for genetic analysis. Its genome has been fully sequenced, large-scale mutation screenings have been carried out, and countless transgenic strains and human disease models are available. In addition, the zebrafish embryo is transparent, develops rapidly, and grows externally from the mother, allowing for easy experimental manipulation and observation. The zebrafish is, thus, close to being the ideal model organism for studying vertebrate development. In the field of cardiovascular biology, studies of zebrafish heart development have revealed a large number of genes and pathways that are conserved with higher vertebrates and mammals. Thus, although the zebrafish is coldblooded and its heart has just a single ventricle, it serves as a great tool and starting point for comparative analysis. One feature of the zebrafish heart that differs dramatically from that of mammals is the capacity for regeneration. In 2002, Kenneth Poss (Duke University, Durham, NC) and colleagues reported in the journal Science that after removing up to 20% of the fish's ventricle, the heart could regrow fully.1 This led to the exciting idea that if scientists could discover how the …

The Newspaper Test [From the Editor's Desk

It's something we've seen a lot of recently. Something very bad has happened, and a prominent person from industry or government is forced to appear before either official government investigators or the press to explain what has happened, why, and what is being done to correct the problem. The process usually begins with a prepared statement that acknowledges that something really bad has happened but claims that there was no way that anyone could have predicted it or done anything to prevent it. You know—stuff happens. Then the questioning begins. If the context is a formal government hearing, penetrating questions are framed in very polite terms. If the media are involved in asking, questions flow in a constant stream with little time for answers. The person being interrogated tries to answer questions, embarking on long, convoluted technical explanations that the questioners don't have the patience to listen to. Questions are asked for which the person being interrogated clearly doesn't want to answer, and so the response is that blank, “deer in the headlights” stare, followed by a mumbled answer that actually avoids the point that the questioner is trying to get at. Some questions are framed as statements, with the demand that the person being questioned either agrees or disagrees—yes or no—as if there is no gray area. The person being questioned has little credibility; no one believes anything he says. You really feel sorry for the person in the hot seat.

The management mythbuster

The management mythbuster

The Path to 9/11 vs. Stuff Happens: Media and Political Efficacy in the War on Terror

Spring 2010 151 The Path to 9/11 vs. Stuff Happens: Media and Political Efficacy in the War on Terror Jay M. Gipson-King On September 10 and 11, 2006, the ABC television network aired a two part miniseries entitled The Path to 9/11, which dramatized the build up from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Initial advertisements claimed the miniseries was “based on the 9/11 Commission Report,” and both the director and the screenwriter bragged of the film’s accuracy.1 Nine days before the miniseries aired, members of the Clinton administration caused a small controversy when they wrote a letter to ABC claiming that “the content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate,” and that, “while ABC is promoting ‘The Path to 9/11’ as a dramatization of historical fact, in truth it is a fictitious rewriting of history that will be misinterpreted by millions ofAmericans.”2 Former Secretary of State MadelineAlbright and former National SecurityAdvisor Sandy Berger accused the film of slander, and average citizens wrote letters of protest by the thousands.3 Exactly two years earlier on September 10, 2004, a new play premiered at the National Theatre in London: David Hare’s Stuff Happens. The play depicts the George W. Bush administration’s push toward the invasion of Iraq, covering the period from 2001 to early 2004. It advanced what was at the time a disputed proposition, that the invasion was a premeditated affair based on fabricated evidence. The play’s opening was heralded as the return of political theatre to the London stage.4 Although there were some dissenters, it was by and large praised for its ideological balance, and even Hans Blix, the United Nations Weapons Inspector, commended its credibility.5 One Member of Parliament called it “crude propaganda,” but the worst rebuke it received was a quintessentially True Brit remark from Tony Blair to the play’s director at a cocktail party: “Well, you’re giving us a hard time, aren’t you?”6 Stuff Happens has henceforth become part of the canon of contemporary British theatre. These two historical narratives address the “war on terror” from a sweeping, top-down point of view, each taking the September 11 attacks as either the beginning or end of the dramatic conflict. Both depict high ranking government officials as their central characters—many of whom were still in office when the pieces Jay M. Gipson-King is an instructor of theatre at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon and a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University. He has previously published on the use of time and history in the work of Timberlake Wertenbaker, and has presented on contemporary British theatre at numerous conferences, including the 2009 international Howard Barker conference in Aberystwyth, Wales. 152 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism premiered. Both possessed the potential for political controversy, as each made an implicit case either for or against the continuation of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, which was in the full throes of its anti-insurgency campaign during this time period. However, despite the similarities in content, these two pieces provoked polar opposite reactions in their respective countries, which gives rise to a series of critical paradoxes. For example, while the creators of both pieces vociferously asserted their accuracy,7 pundits lauded the play for its fairness and condemned the television program as egregiously biased. Hare’s reputation as a notorious leftist made the praise of political even-handedness for Stuff Happens even more surprising.At the same time, both narratives explicitly claimed not to be documentaries, a position that not only contradicts their insistence upon accuracy, but begs the question: if the television program had been judged by the rules of a theatrical history play, would it still have provoked such a violent reaction from members of the Clinton administration? Lastly, Stuff Happens was an epic play (both in scope and style), written by a world renowned playwright, performed on the stage of England’s National Theatre, and yet it barely caught the attention of Britain’s political leaders. The Path to 9/11, on the other hand, was...

David Hare's Stuff Happens in Seattle: Taking a Sober Account

As The Power of Yes, the third play by David Hare to document recent history, opens at London's National Theatre, J. Chris Westgate examines in this article Hare's Stuff Happens in a regional production in the United States, at Seattle's A Contemporary Theater in 2007. He tracks the emphasis placed on controversy during the advertising and marketing of the play, which stands in direct contrast to the response to the play, which was received with self-satisfaction rather than increased insight in this highly liberal city. From this contrast, he discusses the way that this production of Hare's play – and the play itself – fails to produce controversy because it never holds those actually attending US productions as accountable for the Iraq War. Controversy, then, becomes a marketing device rather than a way of challenging the status quo. J. Chris Westgate is Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He has recently edited an anthology of essays entitled Brecht, Broadway, and United States Theatre and has published articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and The Eugene O'Neill Review.

“Stuff Happens”: Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld exercised great influence over U.S. policies in the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The Secretary’s leadership presents a puzzle—accounts agree that Rumsfeld was a masterful bureaucratic infighter who ruthlessly gained control over the major decisions and marginalized colleagues, yet, having secured that control, was remarkably blase about events on the ground in Iraq. I argue that Rumsfeld’s paradoxical performance was rooted in key aspects of his worldview—measured through systematic content analysis of his verbal output on the principle that the words individuals say are related to the way they see the world—and his bureaucratic style, identified through interviews with Bush administration insiders. Rumsfeld’s worldview centers on a low perception of the control of self in relation to macro-political events, and a very high conceptual complexity, indicating a nuanced view of issues. This low perception of control and heavily contingent worldview is the discursive, “stuff happens” side of Rumsfeld which so frustrated critics of the U.S. occupation. His bureaucratic style, however, was controlling, suspicious, and overbearing. I suggest that this approach offers a more complete explanation of Rumsfeld’s actions, and so contributes to understanding of the Iraq story, as it is rooted in consideration of the basic dispositions that condition how individuals approach their roles.

25-Hydroxyvitamin D Assays: The Quest For Accuracy

The recently reported difficulties experienced by Quest Laboratories (1) have once again highlighted concerns about the reliability of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OH-D)1 results, particularly those generated by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), the method used by Quest. In the New York Times article of January 8, 2009 (1), a spokesman for Quest admitted that some erroneous results were reported because of problems with calibration and that some of their laboratories “did not always follow proper procedures.” One suspects these shortcomings were influenced by the eye-watering number of 25-OH-D requests received by Quest: 500 000 per month according to John Cannell, quoted in a pathologist’s newsletter (2). This unfortunate episode dramatically emphasizes the need for a rigorous internal quality-assurance system. Such a system must include a role for a quality manager (preferably independent) who should be responsible for the monitoring of internal quality controls and the results of external proficiency-testing schemes. Some of us learned of the Quest problem through John Cannell’s Vitamin D Council newsletter sent out in July 2008 (3). In the same issue, he was promoting, without apparent irony, a commercial kit designed to “accurately” measure 25-OH-D in patient-generated blood spots, a technique that cannot easily be monitored by external proficiency-testing schemes. Those of us who work in clinical laboratories know that “stuff happens.” At some stage in our careers, many of us will probably have to contact clinical colleagues to admit reporting errors of some sort, although almost certainly not on the scale reported in the New York Times . It is to Quest’s credit that they admitted the problem and offered to repeat these analyses free of charge. It is important that the publicity given to Quest’s problems not lead to LC-MS/MS being regarded as an inherently unreliable technique. The introduction of LC-MS/MS represents …

Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi (review)

Reviewed by: Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi Emily Roxworthy Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi. By Jeanne Sakata. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, Los Angeles. 1 December 2007. Although Dawn’s Light seems most noteworthy for introducing audiences to real-life Nisei civilrights activist Gordon Hirabayashi—a man who has been called the Rosa Parks of Japanese America for resisting the World War II internment—behind this one-man show stands a woman making her playwriting debut in a fairly inhospitable climate for new plays by minority voices. Playwright Jeanne Sakata made her name as an actress of stage and screen: in 2002, she won an LA Ovation Award for Best Lead Actress for her performance as Beijing Opera star Master Hua in Chay Yew’s Red at East West Players; during the 2006–07 season, Sakata defied stereotyped expectations that an Asian actress could not [End Page 661] conjure the fierce passion needed to portray Italian opera diva Maria Callas in East West’s production of Terrence McNally’s Master Class—a veritable oneperson show itself. Red and Master Class represent the two competing though complementary poles that sustain a long-standing ethnic theatre company like East West Players, which commits itself both to celebrating the work of prominent Asian American playwrights such as Yew, and providing opportunities for underemployed Asian American performers (such as Sakata) to take on the prominent roles usually reserved for white actors. Dawn’s Light, on the other hand, represents a quieter mission that guarantees the future of minority theatre in this country: cultivating new playwrights (especially women and artists of color) that larger mainstream institutions have found increasingly easy to abandon. In the wake of her award-winning performance in Red, Yew—who also headed the now-defunct Asian Theater Workshop at LA’s Center Theater Group—decided in 2003 to give Sakata a commission to complete her unfinished play about Hirabayashi, which had not yet coalesced as a one-person show despite Sakata’s decade of intensive research into the topic. In this climate of minority-playwright development (eliminated by Center Theater Group in 2005), Sakata finally realized Dawn’s Light as a solo documentary play. It weaves together her own interviews with Hirabayashi himself, who remains active as he approaches age ninety, although he has long since retired from his position as a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta; wartime letters written by Hirabayashi that are now housed in the University of Washington archives; accounts of his infamous Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States; and oral histories gathered from Hirabayashi’s surviving family, friends, and acquaintances. Yet Dawn’s Light bears stronger resemblance to the interview-based solo plays of Anna Deavere Smith than to the recent wave of multi-actor documentary plays such as Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain’s Guantánamo or David Hare’s Stuff Happens, which indict the systemic intolerance and injustice of US policies at home and abroad. These documentary plays may have gathered particular force in the British and American theatre since the disastrous interventions undertaken by the Bush administration in response to 9/11, but documentary playwrights have cut their teeth on earlier transgressions of the US government—not least of which include the World War II evacuation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of whom held US citizenship) from the West Coast. Even so, Sakata’s play about one of the few internment resisters contains little of the strident melodrama or hypertheatricalized caricatures wielded against the US perpetrators in the main vein of contemporary documentary plays. In the place of such easily identifiable theatrical villains, Dawn’s Light gives the audience humanizing, empathetic portraits even of the military leaders, prison guards, and Supreme Court justices who were unapologetically complicit in perpetrating the US internment policy six decades ago. Certainly part of the impetus behind empathizing with the perpetrators comes from the fact that all these characters are played across one performer’s body: that of Korean American actor Ryun Yu, who balanced dozens of portraits with virtuosity and charisma on the evening I saw him perform...

Tragic Plots from Bootle to Baghdad

This article applies the template of tragic structure as described by Aristotle in the Poetics to offer readings of three significant plays of recent years: Shopping and Fucking (1996) by Mark Ravenhill, Blasted (1995) by Sarah Kane and Stuff Happens (2004) by David Hare. The article proposes that each could be described as a contemporary tragedy, as each in some way follows the changing fortunes of a ‘hero’ or central protagonist, and some or all of the features of hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia and pathos can be seen operating within their plots. Examining their underlying dramaturgical structure in terms of the design of the events of the plot (muthos), as opposed to judging them by their surface content, raises questions as to whether they can be categorized so simply into ‘in your face’ theatre versus ‘verbatim’ or documentary theatre. The article therefore questions the division of plays into private, non-political stories focused on the individual (Ravenhill and Kane) versus ‘large’ stories, engaged with public events of historical and political magnitude (Hare), arguing that it is intrinsic to tragic plot design to demonstrate the deep connection between the two.

Towards a Post-millennial Mainstream? Documents of the Times

This essay considers David Hare’s Stuff Happens, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Max Stafford-Clark and Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists as examples of a recent turn (or return) to documentary theatre in recent British drama.

"Stuff Happens": A Brief Overview of the 2003 Destruction of Iraqi Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries

On March 20, 2003, military forces of the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia invaded Iraq. In the course of this invasion and subsequent occupation, Iraq's cultural infrastructure suffered a great deal of destruction. While international attention has focused primarily on the immense destruction done to the country's pre-Islamic archaeological assets, domestic Iraqi attention has focused equally on the losses suffered by the country's manuscript collections, archives, and document collections. This article provides a general overview of the latter category, including a brief discussion of the events involved, damages sustained, and current status of the collections in question. While in certain key cases the damage sustained by collections was not as severe as initially reported, there were significant losses and a great deal of work lies ahead to reconstitute the facilities involved.

Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change

The pillage and burning of Iraq’s National Library and its National Museum in the spring of 2003 sent cultural shock waves around the world. “Stuff happens,” Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Secretary for Defense, declared offhandedly, dismissing these events. 1 But such events, and the variety of responses that they evoke, raise a number of urgent historical questions to which the articles in this volume represent tentative answers. The collections and services of libraries and related agencies, such as museums and archives, are important components of social and institutional memory. They are both physical places of intellectual work and highly symbolic places. They represent national and cultural identity and aspirations. They are venues for individualized access to educational and cultural resources. They are also part of an infrastructural continuum for disseminating information, forming opinion, and providing literate recreation. At one end of the infrastructural continuum lie telecommunications, mass media, and more recently the Internet and the World Wide Web. Libraries have traditionally been situated at the other end of this continuum as places of access to the historical diversity of opinion represented in cumulating collections of printed materials, though in the digital era they are clearly moving to a more central position on this continuum. Libraries, Information Infrastructure, and Revolution Those who write (and those who read) the history of wars and revolutions have tended to focus their attention on creating (or consuming) inevitably dramatic narratives. An important aspect of these narratives is the causal framework of antecedent, contemporary, and subsequent political, economic, and social developments by means of which the narratives are given coherence and explanatory power. Each of the large categories that

Two Theatrical Responses to War: Embedded and Stuff Happens

Two Theatrical Responses to War: Embedded and Stuff Happens

Reclaiming a Plundered Past

“Stuff happens.” United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’slaconic comment on the widespread looting triggered by Baghdad’s fall inearly April 2003 arguably marks the lowest point in Iraqi archaeology, afield already stained and tarnished by the ugliness of international geopolitics.Priceless treasures were plundered by well-informed gangs of thieveswho smashed or ignored replicas on display and went straight for the concealedoriginals, while the more opportunistic looters simply made offwith whatever they could seize. Despite briefings by archaeologists beforethe war, the American government did not order its military to intervene, andthereby allowed the damage to Iraq’s cultural patrimony to accelerate beyondrepair.In a fitting introduction, Magnus Bernhardsson uses this preventable disasteras a segue into the theme of his work: the largely unfortunate sublimationof the archaeological record to nationalism and nation building. As heaptly notes, “nationalism influences the kinds of questions archaeologistshave been willing to ask and determines what sort of historical sites to ...