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Work by Bradley Borthwick, assistant professor of art, will be included in the deCordova New England Biennial 2019 at the deCordova Sculptor Park and Museum in Lincoln, Mass. Borthwick, a sculptor, will represent Maine with three other Maine artists, along with the remainder of chosen artists from remaining New England states. A press release from the museum states that Borthwick "returns to ancient times by studying and simulating pre-industrial techniques and motifs." The exhibit is on view April 5-Sept. 15, 2019.
[caption id="attachment_42078" align="alignright" width="300"]
Blair Braverman '11 ready for Iditarod start[/caption]
Blair Braverman '11 started her first Iditarod March 3, but she's not new to mushing. Her social media posts about her dogs and their races have a large following—dubbed "Ugly dogs"—and the media has been interested in her story. National Public Radio's All Things Considered aired an interview with Braverman March 1 and posted a story on their website the same day. Braverman was also interviewed by NBC's Harry Smith for a piece on the Sunday edition of NBC’s Today show.
The Anchorage Daily News ran a front-page story about Braverman March 4 titled "An Iditarod rookie’s tweets of the trail are putting a new twist on a rich storytelling tradition." A successful author and a regular contributor to Outside magazine, "Braverman might be one of the best things to hit the Iditarod in a while — a Lower 48 musher with an abiding love for her dogs and a gift for sharing that love on a far-reaching platform," the Daily News reports.
On March 6 Vogue magazine ran "Cool Runnings," a piece written by Braverman that explains what it takes to mush 1,000 miles through the Alaskan wilderness. "I entered my first race, a thirty-miler, and it felt too short. I entered another race, a hundred-miler, and it still felt too short. Time after time I came to finish lines and wished that I were not done racing. I felt better on the trail, alone with my dogs and the wilderness, than I did anywhere else," she wrote in the article that also highlights other women mushers in this year's race and contains stunning photography and video.
Blair Braverman '11 ready for Iditarod start[/caption]
Blair Braverman '11 started her first Iditarod March 3, but she's not new to mushing. Her social media posts about her dogs and their races have a large following—dubbed "Ugly dogs"—and the media has been interested in her story. National Public Radio's All Things Considered aired an interview with Braverman March 1 and posted a story on their website the same day. Braverman was also interviewed by NBC's Harry Smith for a piece on the Sunday edition of NBC’s Today show.
The Anchorage Daily News ran a front-page story about Braverman March 4 titled "An Iditarod rookie’s tweets of the trail are putting a new twist on a rich storytelling tradition." A successful author and a regular contributor to Outside magazine, "Braverman might be one of the best things to hit the Iditarod in a while — a Lower 48 musher with an abiding love for her dogs and a gift for sharing that love on a far-reaching platform," the Daily News reports.
On March 6 Vogue magazine ran "Cool Runnings," a piece written by Braverman that explains what it takes to mush 1,000 miles through the Alaskan wilderness. "I entered my first race, a thirty-miler, and it felt too short. I entered another race, a hundred-miler, and it still felt too short. Time after time I came to finish lines and wished that I were not done racing. I felt better on the trail, alone with my dogs and the wilderness, than I did anywhere else," she wrote in the article that also highlights other women mushers in this year's race and contains stunning photography and video.Herb Wilson, the Leslie Brainerd Arey Professor of Biosciences, is in the news this week. Two reports of his January birding trip to Mexico were published: in the Portland Press Herald and in Yucatán Ex-Pat Life. Both articles recount a particularly successful day birding at Rio Lagartos, a "well-known birding hot-spot" on the Yucatán Peninsula. "Altogether we saw 83 species on our morning trip, including renewing friendships with a number of species whom we look forward to seeing again when summertime returns to Maine," Wilson reported.
Wilson will be at the University of Maine Farmington March 13 giving a talk on bird migration and climate change and reporting on his citizen science project. "There have been changes in the dates of arrival and dates of departure for the many of the species of birds seen in Maine. What factors underlie these changes? How big a factor might climate change be?" the Portland Press Herald reports promoting the talk.
The journal Nature has published an article by Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, in its News and Views section. The March 1 article, "Ancient plants escaped the end-Permian mass extinction," details what two papers (one by Fielding et al., the other by Nowak et al.) "reveal about what happened to terrestrial plants during the end-Permian crisis," Gastaldo writes. Written for a general science audience, Gastaldo's article concludes that, "In contrast to prevailing wisdom, Nowak and colleagues demonstrate that land plants did not experience widespread extinction during Earth’s most severe biological crisis. Their conclusion is similar to that drawn for terrestrial vertebrates11. This leaves the relationship between the end-Permian marine mass extinction and the effect on land at the time enigmatic for now, and still up in the air for further investigation."
An article by Professor of Education Lyn Mikel Brown and Jenny Flaumenhaft '19 was published in Phi Delta Kappan Feb. 25. Titled "Student-empowered curricular change," the article details their work using an initiative called TREE—Transforming Rural Experience in Education—at Maine's Seabrook Elementary School. TREE uses a bottom-up approach and recognizes that empowerment is key to student success. At Seabrook, which "has had the lowest test scores and the highest absentee rates in the district," Brown's "TREE team of undergraduate students, practitioners, and researchers set out to develop a student-empowered approach to curricular reform," the authors wrote. "By offering children more power and control over their learning environments," they concluded, "such practices help teachers support and encourage all students to be academically successful."
A Physics Today artcle titled "When condensed-matter physics became king" includes two Colby connections. Its author, Joseph Martin, was a faculty fellow in Science, Technology, and Society 2013-14. While at Colby, he became familiar with the Bern Porter Collection in the Special Collections Department. Porter, a 1932 Colby graduate, drew a Map of Physics in 1939, which was included in the January 2019 story. "The map aptly reflects prewar attitudes about how physics was organized—attitudes that solid-state physics flouted," Martin wrote.
Sandy Maisel, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of American Government, was quoted in the Feb. 17 Portland Press Herald article "Maine governor looks ahead after turbulent LePage era" that compares the style of Maine's Governor Janet Mills to her predecessor, "viewed by critics as a blabbermouth and bully systematically shifted the course of state government to the right with a take-no-prisoner style." Mills is undoing this legacy. "The general sense in the state is that people are breathing a sigh of relief that you don’t have to worry about what the governor is going to say next,” Maisel, told the Press Herald. “We might not agree with everything that was said, but at least she’s not embarrassing us.”
An article by Leticia Mercado, assistant professor of Spanish, was recently published by Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image (volume 2, Fall 2018). Titled “Sepulchral Space in Villamediana and Vaenius,” the study reads the textual construction of the sepulchral space in two ekphrastic sonnets written c. 1629 by Spanish Baroque poet Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana, in the light of three emblems in Otto Vaenius’s Quinti Horatii Flacci Emblemata (1607). The article explores how text-monument and emblem represent the tomb as the boundary where poetic voice and implicit reader confront the limits of language.
Biddy Mason Speaks Up, a new book by Arisa White, assistant professor of English, was the focus of the Feb. 8 New York Times "California Today" article "Meet Biddy Mason, a Black Woman Who Helped Build Los Angeles." The Times reporter was curious about why White decided to write about Biddy Mason and alternative ways of portraying historical figures. "A lot of what we thought about was the idea of the kind of linear, heroic narrative, where there’s one singular person who saves the day, versus more of a feminist recovery project,” White said. “We have to amass Biddy Mason’s story by pulling through different threads.”
James Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, was quoted in a Feb. 8 CNN piece titled "Cli-fi (climate fiction) on the big screen changes minds about real climate change." Climate change fiction genre—cli-fi—"seems to help people believe in actual climate change, even when Hollywood's version of the science is a bit off," the story reports. "Fleming, one of the world's better-known history of scientific experts that focuses on climate change, said 'Snowpiercer' was a 'free airplane flick.' He watched it, ironically, on his way home from a geoengineering conference 'where I had a lecture on the insanity of planetary intervention,'" CNN reported.
"He found the class conflict and the revolution on the train interesting, as (spoiler alert) was the ending. 'Two survivors of the inevitable train wreck (both people of color) seem to foreshadow a new beginning and a hopeful future,' Fleming wrote in an email. Yet a hungry polar bear looks down on them. The film ends suddenly before the polar bear has his dinner."