Penn in the News

In the past two weeks, Penn faculty members have been quoted in the national media on a wide range of subjects. Some samples:

"The old traditional idea of a family sitting around a dining room, eating, is more of a treat than it is anything else. It's a special event, increasingly, throughout our society." -- Sol Katz, professor of anthropology, in a CNN story about American eating habits.

"Just as the responsible physician must consider the symptoms, the state of mind, and the resources of the patient, the responsible profession has a vital creative obligation to diagnose and treat the health-care system itself."-- Dean Rosemary A. Stevens in a op-ed article about the American Medical Association's Medicare proposals.

"They gave themselves a new and improved afterlife." -- David Silverman, curator of the Egyptian Section; professor and chairman of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, in a USA Today story about his recent excavation. He was referring to two tombs that suggest a pair of ancient Egyptian officials secretly built themselves a royal stairway to heaven.

"They have become an element of the normalization of hyperbole. The danger is that it exhausts the capacity of language to express outrage. When someone actually does act like Hitler now, we don't have the words anymore. Crying wolf doesn't work anymore." -- Annenberg Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson in a New York Times story about the rising use of references to Nazism for political shock value.

"It was [Johnnie] Cochran, with his skill at indicting the police, but also his mastery of ethnic code words, clothing and symbols, who managed to turn O.J. into a 'race man'--the kind of historical figure that African-Americans believe they must defend at all costs."-- Sociology professor Elijah Anderson in a Newsweek article about the aftermath of the Simpson verdict.

"Talking about race for people of color in this nation is the natural thing to do. Blacks carry race around with them all the time. But for whites, talking about race is uncomfortable. It's a wild card. Whites believe blacks rejoiced in the verdict because it was a payback for white racism, or that blacks are gloating because a black man got away with murdering two white people.... The rejoicing is not that somebody got away with murder, but that somebody beat the system." -- Law professor Lani Guinier in Newsweek and on "Face the Nation" and "CBS This Morning."

"Even though this is the earliest frog, it was clearly a good jumper. It's a very unique and specialized design that didn't evolve overnight in a single step." -- Neil Shubin, professor of biology, in a Los Angeles Times story about the results of his work that sheds light on how frogs evolved. In Navajo territory, a team discovered fossils of what are believed to be the earliest known frog dating back 190 million years. The hind limbs, which are longer than its forelimbs, point to one of the main factors in what makes a frog a frog--its leap.

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