WORLD AFFAIRS Reinventing Iraq “If we were starting today, who would invent Iraq the way it is?” Dr. Brendan O’Leary asked. It was a rhetorical question, with a clear answer. “No one.” Continued...

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS Outlaws and Covenants Lead to a Scholarly Marshall Plan Adam Zimbler knew he should have been studying for his finance midterm. It was three o’ clock in the morning; the exam was looming—and he needed a break. So he turned on the TV and flipped through the stations until he hit the History Channel. Now, more than two years later, he doesn’t remember the name of the program, but he knows that the segment he watched was about Blackbeard, the pirate. Continued...

APPOINTMENTS New Dean to Emphasize “Wholesale Social Work” In the eyes of Dr. Richard Gelles, the School of Social Work was already positioned to make a great leap forward by the time he took over the dean’s office on an interim basis in September 2001. Continued...

VISITORS Rushdie: Out of Hiding, Yearning for Anonymity “To live in a day when your books can be quite famous and you can remain completely anonymous seems to me incredibly enviable,” Salman Rushdie was saying before a standing-room-only audience in Irvine Auditorium last February. “Now, it’s too often the other way ’round. People get to know the names of writers without really feeling the need to read their books.” Continued...

SYMPOSIUM How to Succeed in Hollywood
By Really Trying FADE IN: INTERIOR KELLY WRITERS HOUSE—NIGHT. A packed audience stares intently at a television set on a wheeled metal stand at the front of the room. On the screen a nighttime shot of a glittering city skyline gives way to a gritty urban street scene as the camera pans down to follow a young woman —the actress Rosie Perez, quickly established as a crack-addicted prostitute—who buys drugs and, in the dark, narrow stairwell of a crack house, is brutally robbed, her face slashed when she tries to resist. As she crumples to the floor, and a crack-dealer, coming upon her body, steps over it to flee the scene, the film’s title appears: Continued...

RESEARCH Low Self Image? Avoid Mirrors, Watch TV You’ve just found out that you’ve done badly on an intelligence test. Very badly, in fact. Your self-image has just taken a major hit. How do you cope? Continued...

EXHIBITIONS The Many Faces of the Qur’an Three Penn art-history scholars were given a challenge last November: Put together an exhibition on the Qur’an in three months. Despite the lack of lead time, they managed to assemble a rich trove of texts from local sources. The exhibition at Van Pelt Library’s Rosenwald Gallery, The Qur’an: Revelation, Illumination, and Tradition, also brought to light numerous objects that had been languishing in storage for years. Continued...

PENN AND THE CITY Praxis Makes Perfect at Penn’s Landing When Graduate School of Fine Arts Dean Gary Hack and architect Harris Steinberg C’78 GAr’82 were discussing a new program that would combine classroom education and professional experience, they hit upon the analogy of a clinical practice in medicine, where the work includes both patient-care and medical research. Continued...

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