BOSTON UNIVERSITY NEWS

Terriers, Crimson Face Off in Beanpot Tonight (Click Here to View) With the coveted beanpot trophy, and its attendant bragging rights, at stake, the women’s hockey Terriers square off tonight against the Harvard Crimson in the 34th annual Women’s Beanpot Tournament. The opening round for all four teams is at Walter Brown Arena, starting at 5 p.m. One of the longest running women’s tournaments in college [...]

 

OTHER BOSTON UNIVERSITY NEWS

Introducing BU’s New Registrar
When Jeff Von Munkwitz-Smith was studying Sanskrit for his PhD, he had no idea he was preparing for a career as a college registrar. “Sanskrit is an incredibly complex language,” he says. “If you can understand that, you can understand student-athlete eligibility rules.” Von Munkwitz-Smith became BU’s registrar and an assistant vice president on March [...]


Travis Roy Speaks on Campus Tomorrow
Just 11 seconds into his first hockey game at BU, freshman Travis Roy crashed headfirst into the boards. The horrifying images from that October 1995 accident were broadcast around the country. In an instant, Roy’s fourth cervical vertebra was shattered, severely damaging his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. Now a [...]


Playing with Fire
For many years it was believed that humans didn’t use fire until about 800,000 years ago. But two College of Arts & Sciences archaeologists have found evidence in South Africa of a man-made fire dating back 1.2 million years, the earliest such discovery. The finding by Francesco Berna and Paul Goldberg substantially pushes back the [...]


Huntington Theatre Company Turns 30
Walk into Michael Maso’s office and the first thing you notice are the walls. They are covered nearly floor to ceiling with show posters, photographs, and props—all bearing witness to the Huntington Theatre Company’s remarkable 30-year history. One poster commemorates Kate Burton’s performance in Hedda Gabler (2000–2001 season), another Esther Rolle’s in A Raisin in [...]


Will’s Choice
In nightly dreams, Will Lautzenheiser still rolls out of bed in the morning and walks wherever his adventurous spirit takes him. He’s still a lanky guy, a graceful 6 foot 2, with straight hair and a generous laugh that seems somehow at odds with his contemplative blue eyes. In real life, Lautzenheiser, doesn’t get out of bed, at least not without a great deal of help. And he hasn’t walked anywhere since last fall, when a group A streptococcus infection shut down his lungs, kidneys, and heart, then unleashed a toxin that brought death to his limbs.


YouSpeak: Justice for Juveniles
Late last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in two murder cases testing whether sentencing someone under the age of 18 to life in prison without parole represents cruel and unusual punishment. The two cases involve 14-year-old boys who were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In one case, which took place [...]


Rachmaninoff’s Bells Resounds at Symphony Hall
When accomplished baritone Anton Belov was a child in Moscow, one of his favorite recordings was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s The Bells. A choral symphony scored around a freewheeling Russian translation of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, the piece was composed in 1915, but acquired political baggage in the Soviet years, when its composer was denounced [...]


Nights of the Roundtable
Science and religion often make such incendiary bedfellows that even as arid-sounding a lecture as The Self-Disclosure of Ultimate Reality can summon the culture warriors. In 2005, that talk kicked off the Cambridge Roundtable on Science, Art, and Religion, a dinner forum of scientists and theologians from BU and nearby universities seeking to learn more [...]


Kilachand Professorship for Dellheim
Historian Charles Dellheim’s book-in-progress will explore a largely ignored aspect of the plunder of great art by Hitler’s henchmen. “I am less interested in how and why Nazis ransacked Jewish-owned collections—a tragic but well-known story—as in how Jewish outsiders acquired so much great art in the first place,” he says. Illuminating history’s murkier corners requires [...]


Writing for Mad Men
Last Sunday, AMC’s critically acclaimed series Mad Men returned to television after a 17-month hiatus. The show’s creators were concerned about whether fans would return for season five since the show had been dark for so many months. They needn’t have worried. Critics hailed the season premiere, “A Little Kiss,” and even more important, a [...]


Time to Take Back the Night
Boston University police have logged nine reports of sexual assault and five reports of rape so far this academic year, double the number the department received in the previous two years combined. While the women in those cases reported the alleged crimes, most survivors of sexual assault tell only their closest friends and family members—or [...]


Terrier Tech: Google’s New Privacy Policy
When Google implemented its new privacy policy earlier this month, it drew howls of protest from consumer watchdog groups, privacy experts, and lawmakers. The new policy consolidated 60 privacy policies for individual products such as Gmail, Blogger, YouTube, and Search into a single privacy policy—thus allowing the world’s dominant search engine to share data across [...]


Weekender: A Little of Everything
Last week’s unseasonably warm weather has been replaced by more typical March temperatures, relegating those shorts and flip-flops to the closet for a few more weeks. But not to worry. There’s lots going on this weekend, and happily, most of it’s indoors. This Weekender features a wide variety of local happenings, including music, film, fundraising, [...]


Templer’s Sense of Snow
When Pam Templer muses about silver white winters that melt into springs, she is thinking beyond the photogenic snowfall of show tunes and poetry to the complex natural world hidden beneath. It is a world in delicate balance, with soil nourished by dead leaves and rich in insect and other life that thrives in part [...]


SMG among Top U.S. Undergrad Business Programs
The School of Management sprinted into the top 20 undergraduate business schools nationally in the latest Bloomberg Businessweek rankings, leaping 13 spots to number 18. It’s the highest position ever given by the magazine to SMG, which just three years ago placed 43rd, and it marks “a remarkable rise,” says Stephen Davidson, an SMG professor [...]


Nicastro Court Hearing Rescheduled to May
A Brighton District Court judge yesterday postponed a probable cause hearing for Max Nicastro, the suspended BU hockey defenseman facing rape charges. First Justice David Donnelly set a new hearing date of May 7 after defense lawyer Hugh Curran and Suffolk County assistant district attorney Cameron Merrill agreed to the continuance in proceedings that lasted [...]


2012 Wellness Expo Today
Whether you’re stressed, sore, or just plain exhausted, chances are there will be something at today’s Wellness Expo to help you feel better. Sponsored by Student Health Services (SHS), the annual event offers free acupuncture treatment and massages, demonstrations, and professional advice on ways to feel better mentally and physically. The expo features 49 vendors—20 [...]


Introducing the Class of 2016
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to gain admission to BU, as the students accepted to the Class of 2016 make clear. This year, a record-breaking 43,979 students applied for 3,900 spots, and the University offered admission to only 45.5 percent, the lowest percentage in BU’s history. (Last year’s admission rate was 49 percent.) “It’s been an [...]


Lunch, Anyone? Genki Ya
Looks can be deceiving. From the outside, Coolidge Corner’s Genki Ya is all surface—shiny and bright. But once past the bright aqua awning, the fluorescent apple green door, and the bamboo stalks that curtain the window, you’ll find some of the freshest, healthiest sushi anywhere in Boston. Genki Ya offers dozens of different types of [...]


A Defense Plan for the 21st Century
“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” John Kennedy famously declared in his 1961 inaugural address. Uh, no. Kennedy gave this speech during the height of the Cold War. For the past two decades, even with [...]


Ibrahim Miari, a Man in Between
Some days Ibrahim Miari is a living metaphor for the promise of Middle East peace and reconciliation; other days he might be accused of being anything from a knee-jerk Zionist to a radical Islamic terrorist. The Israeli son of a Jewish mother and a Palestinian Muslim father, Miari is an actor, a playwright, and a [...]


Storytelling Journalism Goes Digital
New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary has spent much of her career pursuing this question: in a media-soaked age, how can a single story hold a reader’s attention? That question is at the core of this weekend’s College of Communication annual nonfiction conference. The three-day conference, which has sold out, will explore the role of [...]


Major Charge Dropped in Trivino Case
A Brighton District Court judge yesterday granted a prosecution request to drop the most serious felony charge against former BU hockey star Corey Trivino for lack of evidence. As a result of Suffolk County assistant district attorney Cameron Merrill’s request, Trivino will not have to go before a grand jury in Boston Superior Court. The [...]


Alternative Spring Break: Hobe Sound
Nearly 400 students volunteered in this year’s BU Community Service Center Alternative Spring Break program. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, ASB paired students with 37 organizations around the country involved in environmental, affordable housing and homelessness, children’s services, and animal welfare efforts. All week long, we are bringing you first-person accounts of some of those [...]


Alleged Sorority Hazing Investigated by University, Police
Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore is weighing the fate of the Sigma Delta Tau sorority after it was temporarily suspended earlier this month for alleged alcohol-related hazing. Elmore says the University is investigating both the group and roughly 20 individual students—SDT sisters and members of an undisclosed fraternity—involved in the alleged hazing. The fraternity is [...]


Terrier Tech: Apple’s New iPad
This week “Terrier Tech” reviews the brand-new Apple iPad (known on the street as the iPad 3), the third generation of the world’s best-selling tablet. While on the surface it appears that little has been done to improve the design, Apple has been busy replacing the innards of the tablet—most notably introducing 4G LTE service, [...]


Weekender: Brazilians, Hawaiians, SPF 2012
Bostonians had a taste of summer all week, but the temps will head back down in the next few days. It might be too chilly for bare legs and naps in the grass, but there’s plenty going on—much of it indoors. Check out this Weekender for the chance to spend time with Hawaiians, Brazilians, or, [...]


Alternative Spring Break: Kincaid, W.Va.
Nearly 400 students volunteered in this year’s BU Community Service Center Alternative Spring Break program. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, ASB paired students with 37 organizations around the country involved in environmental, affordable housing and homelessness, children’s services, and animal welfare efforts. All week long, we are bringing you first-person accounts of some of those [...]


Softball Terriers Open at Home Today
Three weeks on the road, 22 nonconference games, teams from all over the country: you might say the BU women’s softball team is ready to wield bats and gloves at home. The Terriers host the Boston College Eagles this afternoon in the season’s first home game and first America East conference matchup. They enter the [...]


Life after BU
While grad student Mandy Patrick credits her parents with teaching her life skills such as time management and financial management, cooking was not on their agenda. Patrick (SAR’11,’13) recalls the first Thanksgiving dinner she hosted for friends, when she opted to make a squash cranberry dish she found on a popular cooking website. “It was [...]


State High Court Upholds WBUR Courtroom Coverage
WBUR may continue to archive publicly accessible videos from its OpenCourt project, the state’s highest court ruled last week. OpenCourt beams live coverage of Quincy District Court proceedings and archives the videos. The Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) decision says that a request by the Norfolk County District Attorney to ban posting of a hearing would [...]


Alternative Spring Break: Nashville
Nearly 400 students volunteered in this year’s BU Community Service Center Alternative Spring Break program. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, ASB paired students with 37 organizations around the country involved in environmental, affordable housing and homelessness, children’s services, and animal welfare efforts. All week long, we are bringing you first-person accounts of some of those [...]


Physical Therapy of the Four-Legged Variety
Omo walks like John Wayne. The honey-colored dog’s right hind leg kicks out to the side as he shuffles through a loop around the animal clinic reception area, sniffing strangers. Every couple of steps, the leg gives out and he sinks onto his rear, his bushy tail strewing hair across the floor. “You must be [...]


Tuition, Room and Board to Rise 3.79 Percent
Tuition for the 2012–2013 academic year will rise to $42,400 and the cost of basic room and board to $13,190, a combined increase of $2,032, or 3.79 percent, over last year’s costs. The New York Times reported last week that on average, tuition and fees rose by 4.6 percent this year at the nation’s private [...]


YouSpeak: Birth Control
Last month, the Obama administration announced that health insurance plans would be required to offer coverage for free birth control for women—a policy that angered many officials in the Roman Catholic Church and led one U.S. senator, Mike Johanns (R-Nebr.), to accuse the president of “trampling on religious freedom.” Earlier this month, the Senate narrowly [...]


Alternative Spring Break: Bronx-Bound
Nearly 400 students volunteered in this year’s BU Community Service Center Alternative Spring Break program. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, ASB paired students with 37 organizations around the country involved in environmental, affordable housing and homelessness, children’s services, and animal welfare efforts. All week long, we are bringing you first-person accounts of some of those [...]


To Bus or Not: Boston’s School-Choice Program
This past fall, Boston school buses regularly arrived as much as an hour late. Months later, some students still don’t make it to school before the first bell, bringing to a head a problem that has dogged the Boston Public Schools for decades: the vast cost, in time and money, of letting parents choose where [...]


Have a Beer with Notch Brewing
Listen up, all you beer aficionados. Notch Brewing celebrates its second anniversary tonight at Firebrand Saints in Cambridge by serving its celebrated Notch Saison beer. Known for the flagship year-round Notch Session Pils and Notch Session Ale, the Ipswich, Mass., brewery introduced a third, Notch Saison, last summer, and recently began selling it in 12-ounce [...]


When Irish Eyes Are Smiling
This weekend, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Patrick or a Bridget. On St. Patrick’s Day nearly everyone in Boston is Irish by association. And in a city with deep ties to the Emerald Isle, there’s plenty of ways to celebrate the holiday. Check out this Weekender for recommendations about joining in the festivities. And [...]


Terriers: Hockey East Title on the Line This Weekend
The fifth-ranked BU men’s hockey Terriers are two games away from their eighth Hockey East title. In tonight’s first hurdle, they face the University of Maine Black Bears in a conference semifinal battle. The Terriers (23-13-1, 17-9-1 Hockey East) and the Black Bears (22-12-3, 15-10-2 HE) are fairly evenly matched entering the contest. BU is [...]


Bill O’Reilly Serves Up Justice
For more than a decade, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has ruled the cable airwaves. His controversial nightly show, The O’Reilly Factor, is cable’s highest rated news broadcast, with an average audience of six million viewers. The program is known for its mix of news analysis and investigative reporting and its popular “No Spin Zone” [...]


Splash into Spring Break
If you’re not among the lucky ones traveling to Florida, Puerto Rico, or Jamaica this spring break, don’t despair. It may be too early to hit area beaches, but there are a number of indoor waterparks and pools just a short walk, train ride, or drive away. So dig out that swimsuit, find a beach [...]


Ma Rainey: Searing Look at Racism through Music
When Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opened on Broadway in 1984, New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote that Tony and Pulitzer winning playwright August Wilson (Hon.’96) “sends the entire history of black America crashing down upon our heads.” A play about white racism and its victims, Ma Rainey is driven by music, especially the reign [...]


Syria: What Can or Should the World Do?
As the news seeping out of a bitterly divided and blood-soaked Syria grows more alarming by the day, scholars as well as pundits, expatriates, and concerned citizens are asking what can be done. A logical step, a vote from the United Nations Security Council calling for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s resignation, was quashed early last [...]


A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
Most people know Marian Hooper Adams, if at all, for the tragic circumstances surrounding her death. Known as Clover, Adams was the wife of historian and author Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams). On the morning of December 6, 1885, she committed suicide by swallowing a vial of potassium cyanide. Her grief-stricken husband, a [...]


The Making of Kony 2012
In what may be the world’s fastest spreading instance of viral media, an activist video aimed at stopping Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony was viewed by more than 70 million people in its first six days on YouTube. The video, Kony 2012, was created by the nonprofit Invisible Children, whose former chief operating officer, Margery Dillenburg [...]


A Show Any Arachni-phile Would Love
If you don’t like spiders and snakes, give a wide berth to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. But we suspect many creepy-crawly-craving children will drag their parents to Spiders! a temporary visitor to the museum’s permanent arthropods’ exhibition. It isn’t just the star attraction, a live tarantula, or the 39 jars holding anywhere from [...]


A Week of ASB Tweets
This past weekend, nearly 400 BU students boarded planes, trains, and automobiles for places as far away as Montana, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico as part of the Community Service Center’s Alternative Spring Break program. All week, they’ll spend their vacation helping communities: restocking food pantries, caring for the ill, tutoring children, improving the environment, and [...]


Why We Are Fat
We all know why Americans are fat, right? We gobble chips and chug 16-ounce sodas and then park our butts in front of the TV. Seems pretty straightforward. But what if that’s not the whole story? Biochemist Barbara Corkey has an idea that turns this conventional wisdom on its head. What if, asks Corkey, obesity [...]


Icewomen Shoot for Return to Frozen Four
The women’s ice hockey Terriers and the Cornell Big Red write another chapter in their budding rivalry tomorrow when the two powerhouse teams battle for a return to the NCAA tournament Frozen Four. The two squared off in last season’s semifinals, with BU’s 4-1 victory advancing the Terriers to the national championship game. BU lost [...]


Angels and Demons Theme of InCite 2012
A one-act opera about a man who kills his wives and a reimagined 90-minute staging of an epic drama are the featured events at this year’s InCite Arts Festival, which begins tomorrow and runs through Monday at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York. Created four years ago to promote collaboration among the [...]


Recalling Japan’s Tsunami, One Year Later
“The wall of water was thirty feet high.” So begins Michael Mendillo’s new memoir, An Earthquake, a Tsunami and a Meaningful Life. The book is both remembrance and repayment: remembrance of the titular disasters that crippled Japan one year ago Sunday, and repayment for the kindness shown Mendillo, the lone American stranded at the city [...]


Women’s Lacrosse Home Opener Tomorrow
The women’s lacrosse Terriers finally play the season’s home opener tomorrow, after the scheduled opener, against Yale on February 29, was postponed because of snow. Tomorrow, they’ll take on the Notre Dame Fighting Irish at Nickerson Field. The Terriers are looking to rebound from a disappointing 2011 season that saw them finish 8-9 and lose [...]


BU Abroad: Arts in Ireland
On a cold winter afternoon in Dublin, four BU students gather in a large open space at Dublin City University’s Inter Faith Centre to meet Padhraic Egan, one of the lecturers in their elective course Arts in Ireland. With its vaulted ceiling and tall windows, the room is bright and reverberant—the perfect setting for the [...]


Project Mailbox
It’s a quirky sight: a three-and-a-half-foot-tall antique red and white mailbox standing just outside of University Grill on Commonwealth Ave. Its purpose is even more unusual: instead of dropping in mail, people drop nickels, dimes—even the occasional dollar or two—into the slot. Welcome to Project Mailbox, a charity cofounded by Nick Dougherty (ENG’12) and Kaylee [...]


Weekender: Kickoff to Spring Break
Spring break begins tomorrow, and we bet most of you are counting down the hours. Check out our Weekender to start your spring break off right. Know of a cool event? Please add it in the comment space below. Thursday, March 8 Styleta’s Spring Sweepout BU’s nonprofit Styleta club uses fashion as a way to [...]


President Names Task Force on Ice Hockey
In the wake of sexual assault allegations against two BU hockey players in the space of 10 weeks, President Robert A. Brown has convened a special Task Force on Men’s Ice Hockey to assess the culture and climate of the hockey team and to recommend ways to ensure that they are wholly consistent with the [...]


Lunch, Anyone? Ecco Pizzeria
A quick glance at Ecco Pizzeria’s menu board lets you know this is no standard-issue pizza joint. Ecco prides itself on using the freshest natural ingredients. The pizza dough is made from organic flour, wheat germ, and flax seed, the sauce from organic tomatoes and fresh herbs. The salads feature organic greens. Even the coffee [...]


Change of Venue
In the 2009 Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “Identity Crisis,” Gray Vanderhoven is enjoying the high life, living in a sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment and attending black-tie events. But Vanderhoven is a poseur who has duped his wife into believing that he’s a Princeton graduate and a successful businessman of noble descent. The sham [...]


The Dark Side of Drug Trials
Drug testing in clinical trials has always involved a kind of moral trade-off—subjects are asked to take risks for the greater good. But in an age when consumerism has infiltrated medicine, regulatory protections for the so-called guinea pigs who volunteer for trials are flimsy at best, with inadequate accounting of the deaths and injuries to [...]


A Modern Wing for a Venetian Palace
When the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened in the Fenway in 1903, its namesake envisioned that her private collection of some of the world’s greatest art, housed in a 15th-century-style Venetian palace, could be enjoyed by everyone. What Gardner, one of the nation’s foremost art collectors, could not have envisioned was that her museum would [...]


Say Good-bye to Stress
On a recent Thursday evening, a group of Warren Towers residents filed into their common room. Snippets of conversation could be heard about the next chemistry exam and whether anyone had begun studying for it. Inevitably, the discussion turned to the topic of sleep—specifically, that most of the women gathered weren’t getting enough of it [...]


Global Health in Focus
A withered Indian man infected with tuberculosis sits cross-legged on a hospital bed, his sunken eyes averted, as a doctor listens to his heart. A new mother breast-feeds her baby boy in Malawi only months before both die of AIDS. And two young girls in Sierra Leone bathe along a polluted stream flanked by a [...]


Rising Stars Receive Sloan Fellowships
Three College of Arts and Sciences faculty members have been awarded 2012 Sloan Research Fellowships. Robinson Fulweiler, Margaret Beck, and Tulika Bose are among this year’s 126 recipients. The two-year fellowships are given to young academic scholars who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in their respective fields of science, mathematics, economics, and computer science. This year, [...]


BU Covers Super Tuesday
Student journalists from the College of Communication will be jockeying for position alongside national media today, as they cover pivotal Super Tuesday primary contests that could determine the next Republican presidential candidate. More than 30 students from COM’s broadcast, print, and photojournalism programs are reporting the day’s breaking stories and polling results on the ground [...]


Growing Pains for BU’s Hindus
The first sign of reverence is the shoes left outside the School of Theology room. Inside, their 50 owners sit on the carpeted floor as incense perfumes the air near a table draped in white and splashed with colorful murtis (icons) of Hindu deities, including Ganesh, dispatcher of obstacles. (Traders chant his many names at [...]


Weekender: Spring Forward
This Weekender includes a healthy dose of culture (ballet, jazz jam, Museum of Fine Arts) and the more trendy (Spring Formal, basketball, shopping) events. Got some other ideas about weekend happenings that readers shouldn’t miss? Tell us where to go. Write them up in the comment space below. On a more serious note, the search [...]


Hoop Dreams
For five of the past seven seasons, the women’s basketball Terriers have reached the America East championship game, only to come up short each time. That makes this year’s mission a given—capture the school’s first AE title since 2003. The Terriers embark on that goal tonight, when they face the University of Maine Black Bears [...]


Teaching Business with Frankenstein, Jazz, and GPS Tours
For its first hour and a quarter, Jack McCarthy’s Organizational Behavior 221 class serves up your standard-issue business lecture, replete with corporate-ese—“task interdependence,” “mutual accountability,” “the five dysfunctions of a team”—and organizational flow charts. McCarthy enlivens things some by playing movie clips and an interview with Hollywood director J. J. Abrams to underscore points about [...]


Fencing with Freud
Mark H. Dold still shakes his head at the surprising twists that keep him playing the role of C. S. Lewis in the Off-Broadway play Freud’s Last Session. Dold got what he calls a “9-1-1 phone call” from the director of the Barrington Stage Company in summer 2009, asking him to read the part after [...]


Hariri Institute Names First Junior Faculty Fellows
Studying how mice use their whiskers to explore their surroundings. Hunting eventual treatments for epilepsy. Analyzing your privacy protections on Facebook. These have been the work of some of the newly named junior faculty fellows of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering. The projects of the fellows epitomize the [...]


Lunch, Anyone? The Salty Pig
From the moment we stepped into the Salty Pig and heard the Jackson 5 singing “One More Chance,” we knew we were going to love this lunch spot. In the Back Bay, only steps from Copley Square, the Salty Pig is a blend of flavorful food and stylish atmosphere. Its chalkboard walls are adorned with [...]


Dean of Boston Jazz Radio
The wavy, melodic strains of “Blue Monk” fill Eric Jackson’s WGBH studio in Brighton. Deftly performed by contemporary pianist Eric Reed, it’s a tribute to jazz giant Thelonious Monk. Jackson (CAS’72) follows this up with Monk’s band paying homage to Duke Ellington, another legendary composer and piano player. Jackson gives listeners his signature greeting in [...]


Wendy Mariner on U.S. Supreme Court Health Care Reform Case
Led by BU’s Wendy Mariner, more than 100 health law professors have submitted a brief amicus curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court in the highly watched case concerning the constitutionality of the 2010 federal health care overhaul law. The case, Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, will be argued before the justices on [...]


Lovin’ the Body You’re In
Heather says she’s always had a complicated relationship with food and body image. By the time she was a high school freshman, she had admitted to a counselor that she was binging and purging. At the counselor’s urging, she told her parents, but the cycle accelerated sophomore year. Friends, she recalls, would fall silent when [...]


Today, BUworks Answers Your Questions
BUworks, the business project designed to update and streamline the tracking of expenditures and move human resource functions from paper to online, among other things, hit some turbulence when it launched in July. It went down three times, worked too slowly to satisfy many people, and its language could be hard to understand. Many people [...]


Talking about Sexual Assault on Campus
Against the backdrop of sexual assault charges against two BU hockey players and the creation of a task force that will investigate the hockey team’s culture, a live chat and town hall meeting today will ponder a possible Rape Culture at BU. Both events will take place at the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, [...]


Terrier Tech: Livescribe Echo Smartpen
This week, “Terrier Tech” examines Livescribe’s Echo Smartpen. Featuring various memory storage capacities, a microphone and built-in speaker, and an OLED display, this pen guarantees “you’ll never miss a word.” With a promise like that, we couldn’t wait to find out how classroom-friendly this gadget really was. Priced between $100 and $180, the Echo Smartpen [...]


YouSpeak: Linsanity
Linsanity, the adoration of Jeremy Lin, the come-from-behind point guard for the New York Knicks, has roared up the coast from New York to Boston, and spawned, among other things, some of the worst puns in recent memory. Harvard grad Lin was unknown to most Americans just a month ago. No NBA team drafted him [...]


Facebook Post Blasts BU Hotline Glitch
Last Wednesday night, Allison Francis called the after-hours operator at the Student Health Services (SHS) crisis hotline, the University’s first line of support for victims of sexual crimes. Prompted by recent sexual assault allegations against two BU hockey players, Francis made the call, she says, to test the University’s emergency support system. What happened next [...]


We May Not Be Alone…
“Science’s crisis of faith.” That’s how Harper’s magazine headlined an article last December describing a revolutionary theory that could not only upend physics, but blur the border between science and religion. Some BU physicists dispute that last point, made by MIT physicist Alan Lightman in his piece. One, Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, BU’s Arthur G. [...]


Weekender: Where to See Oscar-Nominated Flicks
This Weekender includes plenty of music, comedy, and film to keep you busy. Got some other ideas about weekend happenings that readers shouldn’t miss? Tell us where to go. Write them up in the comment space below. Thursday, February 23 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Animated Just in time for the 84th annual Academy Awards on Sunday, [...]


Terriers Aim for Splash in America East Championship
Boston University is hosting this year’s America East swimming and diving championships, and what could be sweeter than taking first place at home? The conference championship starts today at the FitRec competition pool and runs through Sunday. Both the men’s and women’s teams are coming off seasons that poise them to perform well against their [...]


Brown Will Convene Hockey Task Force
In the wake of the second allegation of sexual assault by a BU hockey player this season, Boston University President Robert A. Brown will convene a task force to examine the culture of men’s hockey. The task force, says Brown, will make recommendations to ensure that the conduct of the team conforms to the “very [...]


Coaching, a Life
Growing up on Long Island, Joe Jones spent summer days in the jungle-like heat of a dry cleaner’s, watching his father press clothes. It wasn’t his choice. Each morning his father roused him and his brothers, James and John, and insisted they join him on the job. Amid the hot steam and the hissing of [...]


Il Matrimonio Segreto an Upbeat, Comical Opera
While the world can’t get enough of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the 61 operas of his contemporary Domenico Cimarosa have been mostly relegated to obscurity. One exception is the Italian composer’s Il Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage). Premiered in Vienna in 1792, this lyrical domestic romp became one of the most popular 18th-century comic operas, delighting [...]


BU Literary Lions Take the Stage Tonight
One of Boston’s premier literary events takes place tonight when BU’s Creative Writing Program hosts its annual Faculty Reading, where faculty and recent graduates of the program read from their poems, novels, and plays—some of which have never been shared publicly. The six faculty members reading are Ha Jin (GRS’94), a College of Arts & [...]


BU Hockey Player Pleads Not Guilty to Rape
BU hockey defenseman Max Nicastro pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape at his arraignment yesterday in Brighton District Court. Nicastro was ordered to post a $10,000 cash bail. Defense attorney Hugh Curran told the court, “We believe that, when all the facts are out, it will be found it was not a criminal [...]


Third Peeping Incident in a Month
Smartphones are convenient, pocket-sized gadgets that allow users to snap pictures or record videos on the fly, and in the wrong hands they can be dangerously invasive devices—especially on a college campus. That was the case early Friday morning when a woman showering at Warren Towers spotted an iPhone on the floor, apparently recording her. [...]


Terrier Tech: Samsung Jetpack 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot
This week “Terrier Tech” reviews a mobile hotspot. For students living on campus, Internet access is free and it’s everywhere. But for laptop users who live off campus or are on the go, wireless access may not be so easy to come by. Buying a data plan may seem like a practical move. Unfortunately, that [...]


Hockey Player Arrested for Sexual Assault
Max Nicastro, a defenseman on the BU men’s hockey team, was arrested on the Charles River Campus early Sunday morning by the Boston University Police and charged with sexual assault. BU Police Chief Thomas Robbins says his department is working with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, which is investigating the allegations. He says the [...]


Unmasking the Past
James Johnson is the kind of historian who wants to get inside people’s heads. In his 1996 book Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, the College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history, explored what it was like for people 200 years ago to attend concerts and how they experienced music differently from modern [...]


The Editor vs the Sheriff
They knew they’d rattled the sheriff after the theft, the so-called theft, of evidence from his office. The Times-Tribune, in Corbin, Ky., suspected Whitley County Sheriff Lawrence Hodge of running drugs and guns—all seized in arrests—from the back of his barbershop. (The Kentucky county is small, so the sheriff keeps a day job.) As part [...]


YouSpeak: BU Memes
The combination of sarcastic one-liners and popular images has been a mainstay of internet humor for a while. This creative genre of wisecracking roared through the BU campus recently with the blossoming on Facebook of BU Memes. There is now no doubt that BU Memes are popular, at least with BU students. The real question [...]


Lunch, Anyone? Darwin’s Ltd.
Stroll out of the Harvard Square T station and down Mt. Auburn Street, and tucked between cozy cottages, you’ll discover Darwin’s Ltd., a funky sandwich shop and café that’s worth the walk. Opened in 1993 by Cambridge couple Steve and Isabel Darwin, Darwin’s Ltd. describes itself as a “purveyor of sumptuous comestibles and caffeinated provisions.” [...]


Weekender: The Long Weekend We All Need
This Weekender recommends a mix of comedy, sports events, art exhibitions, and music. Got some other ideas about weekend happenings that readers shouldn’t miss? Tell us where to go. Write them up in the comment space below. Thursday, February 16 Comedian Jim Gaffigan Stand-up comic and actor Jim Gaffigan, whose best shots are aimed at [...]


To the Outer Limits, and Back
With 40-pound backpacks and a temperature hovering at five degrees, seven men and one woman pushed their way toward the barren, windswept summit of Mount Adams, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The eight members of the BU Outing Club climbed the 5,774-foot behemoth with water bottles tucked into their shirts and pants to prevent the [...]


Entrapped Takes Redstone Top Prize
Entrapped, a comedy about a young woman’s efforts to lose a clinging boyfriend, took the top prize at the 2012 Redstone Film Festival Wednesday night. Written, directed, and edited by Maggie Kimball (COM’12), the quirky comedy had the packed house at the Tsai Performance Center laughing throughout its nine-minute run. “I’m shocked I won. I [...]


Is Pornography a Public Health Issue?
In Catharine MacKinnon’s 1993 treatise Only Words, the feminist scholar writes that “the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country.” This semester, students at the School of Public Health are examining that collision through an unusual lens—not through the study of law or human [...]


BU to Take Its Eggs Cage-Free
Whoever said one man’s actions don’t count hasn’t met Nathan Shin. Last semester Shin (CAS’12) heard about a student-run campaign sweeping local college campuses that was successfully lobbying administrators to buy only cage-free eggs for their food services. Shin, a vegan member of the Vegetarian Society, did some sleuthing and discovered that Aramark, BU’s food [...]


Rare Faculty Assembly Vote Pending
The first Faculty Assembly vote in approximately five years is asking members to decide if BU lecturers with more than a half-time appointment should become voting assembly members. Currently, lecturers cannot vote. The question is one of several amendments to the Assembly constitution on the ballot. The 2,300-member Assembly is the representative body for professorial-rank [...]


New Sports Field Coming to West Campus
Athletic shoe manufacturer New Balance has pledged $3 million to Boston University for a new and much-needed sports field that will greatly improve athletic and recreational life at the school on many levels. New Balance Field will be built on Babcock Street, near Nickerson Field, and will open in fall 2013. It will effectively double [...]


Read This and You Could Land a Job
There’s good news for graduating seniors. According to a new survey, students graduating with a bachelor’s degree will see a 7 percent increase in available jobs this year over last. The survey, by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, reports anticipated growth in fields as varied as computer science, engineering, finance, agriculture [...]


Terriers Lose Beanpot OT Heartbreaker
In one of the most heartbreaking losses in recent BU hockey history, the Terriers lost last night’s Beanpot championship game to the Boston College Eagles 3-2 in an overtime stunner. For 79 minutes and 54 seconds, the Terriers—who entered the game as the second-ranked team in the nation—and the Eagles—ranked number three—were dead even. But [...]


YouSpeak: Can Men and Women Be Just Friends?
The romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally explores the differences in the ways that men and women approach relationships. In one of the film’s first scenes, Harry and Sally, two recent college graduates who barely know each other, drive together from Chicago to New York. Along the way, Harry famously observes, “You realize, of course, [...]


Indoor Tanning Dangerous, Warns MED Prof
The title of a congressional report last month said it all: “False and Misleading Health Information Provided to Teens by the Indoor Tanning Industry.” With students already heading to tanning salons before next month’s spring break, Barbara Gilchrest, a School of Medicine professor of dermatology, is echoing the report’s warnings against bronzing on a tanning [...]


African American Writers on African Americans
Should bad writers lose their civil rights? Thomas Jefferson thought so. In his time, Phillis Wheatley was a respected poet during an era when few women, let alone black slave women, could become writers. Jefferson, however, was not impressed. In his iconic Notes on the State of Virginia, he denigrated Wheatley’s work. As Gene Jarrett, [...]


The Dark Side of Domesticity
One of the first artists to come to mind when thinking of interior genre painting is Johannes Vermeer. In exquisitely composed paintings like The Music Lesson and The Concert, we see the 17th-century Dutch artist’s mastery at capturing light, particularly as it falls from windows and plays across the objects in a room. The interiors [...]


BU Goes to the Grammys
Sunday’s Grammy Awards telecast will include lots of music’s familiar faces: Foo Fighters, Lady Gaga, Adele, Scott Jarrett, Justin Blackwell… OK, you won’t see the last two during the show, airing on CBS at 8 p.m. Jarrett (CFA’99,’08) and Blackwell (CFA’09)—Marsh Chapel’s director and associate director of music, respectively—are nominated in the Best Choral Performance [...]


CFA Stages a Chilling Monster
When it comes to sturdy metaphors, Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818, has been the gift that keeps on giving. Variations on the cautionary tale—an egotistical or overzealous mortal creating a monster beyond his control—make for an ageless meditation on misguided power, from politics to business to science. In Neal Bell’s Monster, [...]


Filmmakers Strut Talent at Redstone Film Festival
This year’s Redstone Film Festival could be the spark that ignites the careers of 17 finalists, whose works range from a romantic comedy to a stirring drama about an emotional rift separating two brothers. “The Redstones gives me one more chance that industry leaders will see my film,” says Maggie Kimball (COM’12), director of Entrapped, [...]


Lunch, Anyone? Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers
If they bestowed a Nobel Prize in burger-ology, Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers would be right up there in the running. This bustling establishment near Harvard Yard has been a Cambridge institution since 1960, when Joe and Joan Bartley converted it from a small convenience store. These days, it’s their grandchildren serving Bartley’s continuously updated menu [...]


The Musical Economist
Nearly every seat is full in Robert Margo’s Tuesday morning economics class. The department chair, with a horseshoe of downy white hair and theatrical eyebrows, paces methodically at the front of the classroom as he discusses the Solow-Swan growth model, a standard model of economic growth. Margo tosses out a question about the constancy of [...]


Weekender: Love Is (Almost) in the Air
This Weekender features a mix of comedy and music, plus a few early Valentine’s Day events for precocious lovers. Got some other ideas about weekend happenings that readers shouldn’t miss? Tell us where to go. Write them up in the comment space below. Thursday, February 9 Terrier Men’s Basketball The Terriers hit the court at [...]


Sh*t Nobody Says at BU
It all started with a Twitter feed. In August 2009, comedy writer Justin Halpern started to post his father’s often salty, always opinionated, observations. The site, “Sh*t My Dad Says,” became an instant sensation and morphed into an eponymous best-selling book and a short-lived CBS sitcom, starring William Shatner. Like most popular ideas, Halpern’s creation [...]


Reefer Madness
If you have a serious medical ailment and if your doctor recommends medicinal marijuana to alleviate pain or other symptoms and your state allows medical marijuana use, the law has two words for you: You’re fired. Employers nationally are canning medicinal pot users who flunk workplace drug tests, and courts uniformly are approving the dismissals, [...]


Little Rock at Center of Big Controversy
In an office on Commonwealth Avenue sits a small rock that is shaking geology to its core. About an inch long, gray and a little chalky, to the untrained eye it’s indistinguishable from any other lying on the sidewalk. It’s a small piece of basalt, derived from some of the Earth’s oldest mantle, the big [...]


Terrier Icewomen Fall to Huskies in OT
A heartbreaking 4-3 overtime loss to the Northeastern Huskies put paid to the women’s hockey Terriers’ quest for their first Beanpot championship in program history Tuesday night. In a back-and-forth game highlighted by a breakneck pace, 13 penalties, and near-magical goaltending, the Terriers and Huskies were dead even after 65 minutes and 27 seconds, when [...]


Terriers Shoot for 30th Beanpot Title
The men’s hockey Terriers will attempt to regain ownership of Boston’s college hockey scene when they face off against the Harvard Crimson tonight in the 60th annual Beanpot tournament at the TD Garden. In a town where hockey is the predominant collegiate sport, the Beanpot affords the winning team bragging rights for an entire year, [...]


The Art of Fantasy
For centuries, art frequently depicted fanciful creatures such as unicorns, angels, and Roman gods passing themselves off as bulls or swans. Think Hieronymus Bosch’s busy canvases or the vast number of Renaissance religious paintings. Artists used these imaginary figures to tell pictorial fables and parables. Modernism, especially minimalism and abstract expression, seemed to put an [...]


Tweet the Beanpot
BU Today will be at TD Garden tonight to cover every face-off, penalty, and goal as the BU men’s hockey team (15-8-1 overall, 12-6-1 Hockey East- TKTK need to change after Friday night’s game) takes the ice against the Harvard Crimson (6-6-9 overall, 5-4-7 Hockey East) in the first round of the 60th annual Beanpot [...]


Teaching Doctors How to Close Life’s Last Door
At age 78, Charles Swanigan could jog three miles at a stretch. One year later, with the prostate cancer he had battled for a decade spread throughout his body, he could hardly move. Just getting out of bed, he tells his doctor and two BU School of Medicine students paying him an autumn house call, [...]


YouSpeak: Who Best to Beat Obama?
Last Tuesday’s Florida GOP primary handed Mitt Romney a decisive victory. The former Massachusetts governor beat Newt Gingrich 46 percent to 32 percent. But Romney’s support among Florida Tea Party supporters, white evangelicals, and voters who identify as “very conservative” remained soft. Those voters are sticking with Gingrich, who has vowed to stay in the [...]


Kenmore Square Will Close During Super Bowl
With Kenmore Square under lockdown on Super Bowl Sunday, the University will broadcast the New England–New York football face-off on Agganis Arena’s JumboTron, adding free skating, free food, and a “touchdown dance contest” with prizes into the mix. Boston police will shut Kenmore to all pedestrian and motor vehicle traffic after the game’s third quarter [...]


Super Bowl Mentality
Super Bowl fever has hit Boston, and Sunday night’s game is one of the most eagerly anticipated in years. The showdown between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants pits two equally talented longtime rivals, one with a burning desire to avenge 2008’s heartbreaking loss (in case you’re from Mars—Giants 17, Pats 14). [...]


Tracking the Elusive Orangutan
Crashing through undergrowth, splashing through creeks, Cheryl Knott races to keep up with the 100-pound ape adroitly clambering through the lush canopy overhead. She’s following the wild orangutan, whom she calls Beth, through the Indonesian rain forest, documenting the animal’s daily search for fruit to feed herself and the newborn infant clinging to her reddish [...]


Lunch, Anyone?
An Ethiopian meal among friends is the very definition of breaking bread. There are no utensils, just stacks of the spongy flat bread known as injera, used both to cradle and to scoop a range of mild to spicy salads and stews served on a common plate. A recent, welcome addition to the string of [...]


BU Abroad: Hands-on in Dublin
Coming out of high school, Matthew Whitney thought about studying finance and trying to play hockey at the collegiate level. A shoulder injury put that plan to bed. The physical therapy that followed, he says, “really changed my mind about what I wanted to do with my life.” As Whitney (SAR’12) was treated in various [...]


Weekender: High Culture, Low Food, Ultimate Football
This Weekender features comedy, music, film, and yes, Super Bowl festivities. Got some other ideas about weekend happenings that readers shouldn’t miss? Tell us where to go. Write them up in the comment space below. Thursday, February 2 Sundance Shorts As part of the Sundance Institute Art House Project, a series of short films from [...]


Mad Men Director Comes to COM Tomorrow
Fans of AMC’s critically acclaimed series Mad Men may well recall an episode from 2010 titled “The Suitcase.” In the episode, Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) ditches her birthday dinner with her family and boyfriend to help her boss, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), put together a last-minute ad campaign for a suitcase company. After pulling an all-nighter, [...]


Terriers, Crimson Face Off in Beanpot Tonight
With the coveted beanpot trophy, and its attendant bragging rights, at stake, the women’s hockey Terriers square off tonight against the Harvard Crimson in the 34th annual Women’s Beanpot Tournament. The opening round for all four teams is at Walter Brown Arena, starting at 5 p.m. One of the longest running women’s tournaments in college [...]


BU Launches Virtual Concert Hall
When Melanie Burbules (CFA’14) walked onto the stage of Symphony Hall last spring to perform in a BU production of Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah, both of her parents were watching, despite the fact that her father was stationed in Baghdad and her mother was home in Chicago. Each viewed a live-stream of the performance on a [...]


Terrier Icewomen Take Round One of Beanpot
The Boston University Terriers are on target in their quest for their first Beanpot championship, skating to a 5-2 victory over the Harvard Crimson last night in the first round of the 34th annual Women’s Beanpot Tournament. They’ll face Northeastern next Tuesday night in the championship game. A victory in that game would give them [...]


Wanted: One Good Physics Teacher
Michael Thees wants to rearrange molecular and atomic structures and study what happens. The senior physics major has applied to graduate programs and is waiting on a response. But should Plan A not work out, he has a Plan B: becoming a high school physics teacher. “I have been known at BU to talk about [...]


Hometown Role Model
At first glance, the athletic training room at Boston’s English High School seems standard-issue: a stack of multicolored exercise balls in one corner, resistance bands attached to the wall, a locked closet housing first-aid equipment. To gain a real appreciation for the cinder-block room in the school’s basement, ask licensed athletic trainer Shari Davis what [...]


YouSpeak: Combating Piracy on the Internet
Two Congressional bills designed to curb pirated content on the internet were stopped dead in their tracks earlier this month after a massive protest by Wikipedia and other websites persuaded lawmakers to take a closer look at the legislation. The bills, known as PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) in the House and SOPA (Stop Online [...]


Developing a New Weapon Against HIV
The latest news on AIDS is sobering. In 2009, 2.6 million people became infected with HIV, according to data released in November by UNAIDS. That’s down from 3.1 million in 1999, but still amounts to 7,000 new infections and nearly 5,000 deaths every day. Deborah Anderson is working to reverse this trend. Armed with a [...]


Winterfest Brings Alums Back to Campus
The action on the ice at Walter Brown Arena Saturday afternoon was fast and furious. Shots pounded against the plexiglass. Goalies defended their nets. Players cheered and high-fived when a teammate scored. But this wasn’t Terrier hockey by any stretch of the imagination. This was broomball—no skates (except for the refs), pucks, or hip checks [...]


Sometimes, Nice Guys Finish First
If you argue hockey with Canadians, it helps to have your facts straight. It helps even more to have a diplomat’s finesse. Women’s hockey coach Brian Durocher needed both last year during a practice where several of his Canadian players were flubbing their signature power play. That’s when a team tries to muscle past an [...]


Warm Up at Winterfest
Quidditch is back, but the broomball tournament is new. The cooking class and the ice sculpting competition are back as well, but a panel discussion on the state of Africa is new. All are part of the seventh annual Winterfest, taking place this weekend on the Charles River Campus. The event will offer two dozen [...]


Green Eyes: Steamy, Intimate Play
Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes starts with a tousled young newlywed fixing her wide eyes on the audience and saying in a come-hither drawl, “Welcome to my honeymoon.” She means it. The new Company One production of the one-act play, written in 1970 but discovered as a series of rough drafts after the playwright’s death, is [...]


New Bus Service Caters to College Club-Goers
With the thermostat hovering in the 20s last Friday night, BU alums Ryan Kaplan, Eric Pasinski, and Jonathan Castillo gingerly applied a sticky sign the size of a giant toboggan to the side of a charter bus. They were shooting for zero bubbling and a level presentation, and they nailed it. Castillo squeezed out extra [...]


Weekender: Local Thrills, Plus Some Chills
This week BU Today launches Weekender, a weekly listing of area happenings both on and off campus that will run each Thursday. Plus, BU Today asks readers to do everybody a favor and tell us where to go. Got some other ideas about weekend events that readers shouldn’t miss? Write them up in the comment [...]


NEIDL Goes Public
John R. Murphy and Ronald Corley may be the most highly educated tour guides in Boston. Murphy, a School of Medicine professor of medicine and microbiology, researches the ways that bacterial protein toxins get into cells. Corley, a MED professor and chair of microbiology, investigates immune responses to viruses. But much of their time recently [...]


All-Nighters Hazardous to Health, Grades, Happiness
Every night, nearly 60 percent of Americans are awake and staring at the ceiling when they should be in the arms of Morpheus. We are a nation of insomniacs, according to a string of studies, most recently a 2011 poll of 1,500 adults by the National Sleep Foundation. And when it comes to sleep deprivation, [...]


Lunch, Anyone? Campus Trolley
Food trucks come and go at BU, but Campus Trolley has stayed put since 1988, when it started serving Lebanese fare on the busy corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Granby Street. The diminutive red trolley, which draws a long lunch line even in January, is a whimsical counterpoint to nearby Warren Towers. Nadim Kiwan and [...]


BU’s Road to Washington
Newt Gingrich’s stunning come-from-behind victory in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican presidential primary has thrown a turbulent primary season into further chaos, with no clear GOP front-runner yet emerging just a week before the next big contest, in Florida on January 31. Gingrich captured 40.4 percent of the vote January 21 to Romney’s 27.8 percent, handing [...]


High-Heeled Scholarship
Academic research often requires great personal sacrifice, like stepping into stilettoes. That was the case for Ashley Mears, who spent three years lugging her portfolio to casting calls and strutting runways in addition to interviewing agents, magazine editors, and models for her new book Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. The College of [...]


Solar Storm Hits Earth
A record 14 weather and climate disasters, each causing more than $1 billion in damages, hit the United States last year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Now, just weeks into 2012, the Earth is in the midst of the largest solar storm in more than six years. But experts say there’s no [...]


Student Injured in Blaze Remains Critical
A 19-year old Boston University student who suffered severe head injuries after jumping from the second floor of a burning Allston apartment early Sunday remains in critical condition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The father of Joshua Goldenberg (COM’14) says that while his son’s medical condition had not changed, a neurological examination on Tuesday [...]


How Far Would You Go for $20?
Remember that hit from TV’s golden era, The Millionaire, about an inexplicably generous rich guy who gave away a fortune each week to a total stranger? This is not that story. In this one, the stranger comes away with only $20, but the story has the advantage of being true. Since September 21, Richard Cook [...]


Allston Blaze Sends Seven Students to Hospital
One BU student is in critical condition after leaping from the second floor of a burning Allston apartment early yesterday morning and six others were taken to area hospitals, where they were treated for smoke inhalation and other injuries. Boston Fire Department spokesperson Stephen MacDonald says that more than 60 firefighters battled the fire at [...]


YouSpeak: New Year’s Resolutions
Every new year comes with resolutions: lose weight, quit smoking, study harder, save more. A nationwide survey recently found that two-fifths of Americans planned to make New Year’s resolutions, but the same poll showed that only one out of four people who had made resolutions the previous year thought their plans led to “significant, long-term [...]


Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back…Sort Of
Jesse Garlick bears little physical resemblance to Frank Sinatra. With his untucked shirt, rolled-up sleeves, and sneakers, neither does his appearance have any of the great singer’s famously elegant style. And for the record, Garlick’s eyes are brown, not the famous azure that earned his hero the nickname “Ol’ blue eyes.” But when Garlick (CFA’14) [...]


COM Prof Pleads Not Guilty in Vehicular Homicide
A court entered a not guilty plea Friday on behalf of a distinguished former ABC journalist and BU professor facing misdemeanor charges of vehicular homicide and failing to yield after an October crash that killed a motorcyclist. A pretrial hearing was set for Robert Zelnick, a College of Communication professor of journalism, on May 25 [...]


Brookline Blaze Puts Renewed Emphasis on Fire Safety
A four-alarm fire in Brookline left 10 School of Law students homeless Monday. The students have found shelter with help from BU and others. While the cause remains under investigation, the blaze prompted University officials to remind students about fire safety precautions, as outlined on a University website. “The University’s interest is, let’s all be [...]


Grownups Behaving Badly
Grownups behave very, very badly in Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award–winning God of Carnage, the new Huntington Theatre Company production. As the two couples navigating the stylish set of the fast-paced one-act play regress from polite restraint to mouth-foaming profanity, the proceedings invite comparisons to the vitriolic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (Hon.’10). [...]


Trivino Back in Court
Former BU hockey star Corey Trivino returned briefly to Brighton District Court on Wednesday, where the case charging him with indecent assault and battery and breaking and entering was continued until March 22. Trivino pleaded not guilty to all charges. Trivino, who was flanked in court by his parents, was arrested on the night of [...]


BU Bridge Project Nearly Finished
At last. After more than two years of traffic-tangling renovations, the BU Bridge now has bike lanes, and two experimental reconfigurations of auto traffic will be test-driven between now and summer on the crucial Calvin Coolidge–era artery. The prerenovation bridge had four car lanes—two in either direction—and no bike lanes. The current configuration, put in [...]


ENG Student Makes Forbes 30 Under 30 List
Most scientists spend years striving for the kind of recognition that 26-year-old Kyle Allison has achieved in the past few months. In November, the College of Engineering PhD candidate won first place and $15,000 in the annual Collegiate Inventors Competition for his discovery of a simple and inexpensive therapy for persistent infections. Now, Allison’s research [...]


Celebrating a Century of Performance Art
There’s something a bit ironic about 100 Years (version #4 Boston, 2012), the Boston University Art Gallery’s new show examining the evolution of performance art over the last century. As Roselee Goldberg, one of the exhibition’s organizers, notes, “Performance art is the avant avant-garde.” Yet as the show makes clear, the cutting-edge, genre-bending art form [...]


Lunch (or Breakfast), Anyone?
Who doesn’t love a good breakfast joint? The food is filling, delicious, and usually cheap, the perfect antidote to a late night out. The Boston area offers a number of restaurants serving up innovative breakfast fare, one of the best being the Friendly Toast in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. The restaurant makes almost everything they serve [...]


Throwing Punches
When boxing teacher John O’Brien sends his students to the equipment room at the FitRec Center for gloves and pads, they often notice a laminated news clip tacked to the door. The headline reads, “Hull Native Returns as National Boxing Champ,” and the story beneath it recounts how O’Brien won the 201-pound National Masters Championship [...]


Celebrating MLK Day at BU
BU will celebrate the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) with a special service at Marsh Chapel, a remembrance ceremony with speakers and jazz music, discussions on King’s legacy and on nonviolent resistance, and a classical piano recital. Events will take place across the Charles River and Medical Campuses. King, [...]


MLK’s Mentor Revealed
He criticized Christianity for its racial segregation, the New Deal for being half-hearted, and America for mimicking, in its Jim Crow laws, the fascistic tendencies of Europe’s real fascists. Having already labeled Jesus’ virgin birth a myth, albeit a religiously instructive one, he was no stranger to hot-button commentary. Howard Thurman (Hon.’67) (pictured below) expressed [...]


Ghost in a Red Hat
When her close friend, the writer Deborah Tall, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, it was almost inevitable that poet Rosanna Warren would record snippets of their conversations and her own feelings of anguish in her notebooks. For Warren, recording in journals what she reads, sees, and hears is a way of making sense of the [...]


See the Hottest Cars in the Coldest Month
If you’re in the market for a new car or just get goose bumps ogling a sleek metal torso, kick off the new year’s show circuit with the 2012 New England International Auto Show. Held for 55 years, this year’s show will display the latest in hot cars (Chevy Sonic, Fiat 500, VW Beetle, Subaru [...]


Still Devastating 2,000 Years Later
The guard dog struggles to dig his way up through the volcanic ash as it falls around him. His paws scrape at the air. He twists madly to free himself from his chained collar. It is all in vain: the animal suffocates in the toxic ash on August 24, AD 79, in the Roman city [...]


Explore Winter Trails
Those new to Boston might be surprised to learn that skiing New England doesn’t require a four-hour car trip and the expense of overnight lodging. There are several snowshoeing, downhill, and cross-country skiing spots within a 30-minute drive of Boston. Here is a quick list of spots north, west, and south of the city. Add [...]


A Debut Novel Nearly Two Decades in the Making
Jessica Keener has had a rich and varied literary life, including stints as a freelance journalist for the Boston Globe, a literature and writing teacher, and author of numerous short stories that have appeared in such publications as Wilderness House Literary Review and Night Train. Her debut novel, Night Swim (Fiction Studio Books), comes after [...]


Goddess of Love and Beauty Takes Center Stage
Valentine’s Day may be more than a month away, but a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts is already celebrating the goddess of love and desire, Aphrodite. Aphrodite and the Gods of Love is billed as “the first ever exhibition dedicated entirely to the goddess” who was known as Aphrodite to the ancient [...]


The World Watches North Korea
With the official mourning period now over for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who died December 17, attention has turned to his youngest son and successor, Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-il ruled the secretive state with an iron fist for 17 years, succeeding his father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994. In late December Kim Jong-un was officially [...]


Ringing in the New Year
Celebrate a brand-new year by checking out the activities and happenings Boston has to offer. Explore new museums, see new musical groups, and get to know this beautiful city better. First Night For the past 35 years, First Night, a local nonprofit that promotes Boston’s artistic and cultural diversity, has become synonymous with New Year’s [...]


Athletes + Books = Holiday Cheer
Joe Walsh has several reasons to support the Boston public schools. He and his two sons attended Boston schools. His wife taught in the school system for many years. And as BU’s executive director of community relations, Walsh is familiar with the University program that awards full scholarships to as many as 25 Boston public [...]


Have Yourself a Merry Boston Christmas
Winter break is almost here. So as of noon tomorrow, December 22, all University residences will close and not reopen until 10 a.m. Friday, January 13, 2012. Residence dining service ends with dinner today, December 21, and will resume with dinner on Saturday, January 14, 2012, at Shelton Hall, West Campus, and Warren Towers. All [...]


We’re Taking a Break
As the University prepares to go dark for the holidays, BU Today is doing the same. We’ll resume publishing on January 9, and we’ll add a list of New Year’s Eve–related events next Monday, December 26. The staff of BU Today wishes all of our readers a joyous holiday season and a happy and healthy [...]


Exploring Mexico’s Gardens in All Their Mystery
Another New England winter officially begins on Thursday, ushering in a season of bitter cold, gray skies, and barren trees. For those already anxious for spring, consider stopping by the current show at the BU Photographic Resource Center (PRC), titled Los Jardines de México. Featuring verdant images of Mexican gardens by noted photographer Janelle Lynch, [...]


Fungus Found to Be Killer of Little Brown Bats
On October 26, the day BU biologist Thomas Kunz was seriously hurt in a car accident, a government study confirmed that a fungus Kunz and other researchers have investigated is the mystery killer ravaging little brown bats in North America. Saving the ecologically vital bats has been a passion for Kunz, an internationally known researcher [...]


Link Found Between Contaminated Water, Risky Behavior
From the late 1960s to 1980, an estimated 600 miles of water pipes contaminated with a known neurotoxin were installed in nearly 100 cities and towns in Massachusetts. According to a new study by researchers at the BU School of Public Health examining Cape Cod residents exposed to the neurotoxin PCE, children in contact with [...]


French Cuisine for the Young and Broke
Eléonor Picciotto’s love affair with French cuisine and all things culinary began as a child. Growing up in Paris, she had a mother who didn’t like to be in the kitchen and would put her in charge of dinner. The experience came in handy when Picciotto (COM’11) arrived at BU. Undeterred by the lack of [...]


Gingerbread Wars
Diminutive gingerbread houses, their doorways framed with peppermint canes and cinnamon candies dotting their gabled roofs, can bring out the competitor in some people. “I plan to win,” said Marissa Schneider (CAS’15), sitting at a table loaded with marshmallows, M&Ms, gummy bears, and a pastry bag of white icing, the tools provided for Boston University’s [...]


Where Deans Go for Guidance
Karen Antman was fortunate: when the School of Medicine dean arrived in 2005, she inherited an advisory board that was eager and engaged. At her first meeting with the board, Antman asked for suggestions about how to raise money for scholarships. Her advisors brought up the possibility that decreasing costs for medical students might accomplish [...]


Michael Chiklis on How It’s Done, Seriously
Michael Chiklis’ blue eyes bore into his audience with a wattage that makes people want to confess. Anything. Chiklis (CFA’86), the Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning actor who played morally sketchy Detective Vic Mackey on FX’s The Shield, returned to the College of Fine Arts TheatreLab stage last Friday to chat with School of Theatre and College of [...]


Ethics for Eighth Graders
It’s 9:30 a.m. on a typical Tuesday, and a group of eighth graders is discussing the philosophical ideas of Thrasymachus and the fall of Yertle the Turtle. The former is a Greek sophist and a character in Plato’s Republic who unsuccessfully argued that “justice is the advantage of the stronger”—or, in plainer terms, that might [...]


Cairo, Up Close and Personal
A year ago, when Margaret Litvin decided to spend her upcoming sabbatical in Cairo, she had one concern. “My husband and I were afraid we’d be bored,” she says. “We thought that Egypt was so stable it wouldn’t be that interesting. That didn’t end up being a problem.” Litvin, a College of Arts and Sciences [...]


BU Men’s Hockey Star Arrested
The starting center on the BU men’s ice hockey team was arrested Sunday night and charged with three counts of indecent assault and battery after he allegedly entered the room of a female student and attempted to kiss and grope her. Corey Trivino (MET’12), the leading scorer in Hockey East, was also charged with two [...]


As Protests Against Putin Mount, Where Is Russia Headed?
To steal political pundit Monica Crowley’s line, how crummy a dictator are you when you rig an election and almost lose it? Such was Vladimir Putin’s fate after the Russian prime minister’s United Russia party barely won a parliamentary majority on December 4. International and local election monitors condemned the regime for widespread fraud, prompting [...]


Coping with Stress
See if this sounds familiar. It’s the first day of the study period. Finals start on Friday. You’ve got papers to write, projects to complete, and exams to prepare for. The holidays are looming and you haven’t shopped at all. And the boss at your part-time job wants you to work just one more night [...]


Lunch, Anyone? Soulfire BBQ
The Boston restaurant scene is known more for seafood than for barbecue. Yes, there’s Redbones, in Somerville, Blue Ribbon Barbecue, in Arlington and Newton, and the upscale East Coast Grill, in Cambridge. But happily, BU students can find genuine Memphis-style barbecue much closer at hand: Soulfire, in Allston. The restaurant’s ribs, fried catfish, pulled pork, [...]


2011’s 10 Worst Toys
A duck pull toy with a 33-inch-long cord that could strangle a child. A “sword fighting Jack Sparrow” with a stiff plastic sword activated at the push of a lever that could wound a child’s eye. A trampoline whose package insert instructs that it should be used only with a “controlled bounce.” (How do you [...]


What Happens if We Run Out of Doctors?
A doctor deficit plagues the country, and persuading more medical students to become old-fashioned general practice family docs requires three measures: more public subsidies for medical education, more primary care provided by nurses and foreign doctors, and a stomach for alphabet-soup abbreviations. Those conclusions spring from two studies now being conducted by Stephen Davidson, a [...]


Changing the World Through Service
On a recent Thursday night, Alex Reese pulls open the doors of a 12-passenger van in front of Panera Bread on Comm Ave and deposits a trash bag full of day-old pastries. Reese (COM’13) is among 95 volunteers participating in Student Food Rescue (SFR), one of 13 programs run by BU’s Community Service Center (CSC). [...]


CFA Presents Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid
Emily Ranii prefers to direct plays that terrify her. Near the top of that list is Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, a 16th-century satire about hypochondriacs, quack doctors, and thwarted lovers. “If it’s not something that scares you, the challenge isn’t worth it,” says graduate student Ranii (CFA’13), who is directing a production featuring students and [...]


Green Light for Biosafety Lab
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs has announced a draft decision that would allow researchers to conduct lower-level biosafety research in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) on the Medical Campus in Boston’s South End, where controversy has precluded all such work since the building was finished three years ago. The [...]


Healthful Cooking Made Easy
Long before cooking became a competitive sport, Deborah Chud’s grandmother was a top chef in her own right—a restaurant owner and caterer who created sophisticated sauces and exquisite, multi-tiered wedding cakes. “She was the sort of chef who in those days used wine in cooking,” says Chud (MED’84) of her paternal grandmother, Leah Friedson, who [...]


Malibu, Mount Gay, or Molson?
Almost 15 years ago, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company ended its Joe Camel advertising campaign after research suggested that the cartoon character was fueling an uptick in youth smoking. Now, a team of researchers from the BU School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will examine the correlation [...]


The ABCs of HPV
Here’s a rather sobering statistic: at least half of sexually active people will contract the human papillomavirus (HPV) at some point in their lives, and most won’t even know it. Currently, 20 million Americans are infected with HPV, and another 6 million become infected each year, making it the most common sexually transmitted infection, according [...]


What Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us about War
Think ancient literature is only for scholars? The Pentagon paid almost $4 million to Theater of War, a New York performance company, to present Sophocles’ Ajax at military sites around the country. Why would the brass promote a play about a mythical Greek hero who tries to assassinate his generals after the Trojan War for [...]