Posts tagged ‘Newsweek’
Professor Mia Bloom on Women Suicide Bombers
Mia Bloom, a faculty member in international studies and women’s studies, has a book coming out later this year called Bombshell: Women and Terror, and the research she conducted on female suicide bombers has her popping up in news stories.
This week, her research was referenced in a UPI special report called “Suicide Sisterhood: Al-Qaida’s Female Bombers.” And in late January, her book got a mention in this essay by Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey, which explored the role of women in jihad. Dickey quotes from a draft of Bloom’s book: “There is an army of female organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either enlist with their husbands or succeed those who are jailed or killed.”
Click here to learn a little more about Bloom and her colleagues at Penn State’s International Center for the Study of Terrorism.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Patrick Swayze and Pancreatic Cancer
Over at the Newsweek health blog, The Human Condition, Kate Dailey ’02 talks about Patrick Swayze’s death and why the survival rate for pancreatic cancer is so low.
Tina Hay, editor
Matt Lauer, Dr. Nancy—and Our Own Kate Dailey
Former Lion Ambassador Kate Dailey ’02 is now a blogger for Newsweek.com and makes an occasional appearance on the TODAY show. Yesterday she talked with Matt Lauer and NBC’s chief medical editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, about a new movement called “fat acceptance.” Check out the video here. (There’s a setup piece first, then the conversation.)
And, on a completely not-Penn-State-related note, a science writer I know called my attention to another piece that ran on yesterday’s TODAY show—a fascinating story of a man whose skin is permanently blue. And I mean blue. You can see that here. Again, it has nothing to do with Penn State (aside from the potential for cheap jokes having to do with our school colors), but, like I said, it’s fascinating.
Tina Hay, editor
Rod Nordland on the Three Americans Held in Iran
Readers of The Penn Stater may remember the cover story we did a few years ago on Rod Nordland ’72, who at the time was the Baghdad correspondent for Newsweek magazine. About a year ago, Nordland moved over to the New York Times, where he continues to cover the war in Iraq.
Today he reports on the status of three American hikers who strayed across the border into Iran on July 31 and were taken captive. There’s talk that they could be released soon.
Tina Hay, editor
Now Chip Kidd is in Newsweek
His work was just in the New York Times Sunday Book Review yesterday. Now Chip Kidd ’86 has a piece in this week’s Newsweek. Kidd, who designs book covers for Alfred A. Knopf, takes a look at seven book covers by other designers that he thought were especially memorable.
The piece—which is more of a slide show than an article, or at least online anyway—is called “My Favorite Covers.” Thanks to Joyce Hoffman, the alumni director for the College of Arts & Architecture, for calling my attention to it.
Tina Hay, editor
Kate Dailey on Michael Jackson’s Death
It didn’t take Kate Dailey ’02 long after Michael Jackson’s death this afternoon to post an entry to her Newsweek blog, in which she interviews an expert from the Cleveland Clinic about sudden cardiac arrest. Check it out here.
Tina Hay, editor
Steven Levy on the New iPhone
Penn Stater Steven Levy ’74g—who used to be the top technology guy at Newsweek but got lured away to Wired magazine last year—has written a review of the new iPhone 3GS, which he says “introduces a long list of improvements, big and small.”
The new iPhone will be released tomorrow, but if, like me, you already have an older iPhone (or an iPod touch), you can download the new 3.0 software for your current device any time now. The software upgrade has many, though not all, of the bells and whistles that the new device has. I did the software upgrade last night and can already tell that I’m going to like the Voice Memos app, the spotlight search, and the ability to turn the thing sideways while typing e-mails in order to get a bigger keyboard.
Levy says if you’ve already got an iPhone and you’re not yet at a point in your contract where you’re eligible to upgrade to the new 3GS, there’s no rush about getting the new device: “…the wise thing for those more recent buyers to do will be to install the new software and stick with their 3G iPhones at least until their contracts run down.”
If you don’t want to read the full review (which isn’t that long), you can read a quick-hit summary of it at Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog.
Tina Hay, editor
A Penn Stater Blogging for Newsweek
Newsweek magazine just launched a new blog called “The Human Condition,” and the main author of the blog is none other than Kate Dailey ’02, a former Lion Ambassador and former associate editor at Women’s Health and Men’s Health magazines.
There’s new content on the blog every weekday, and most of it (so far, anyway) is written by Kate. She explains the subject matter this way: “Our tag is ‘Mind. Body. Culture’ and, though the content so far has been very health/nutrition driven, we plan to cover a wide variety of topics relating to medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, gender, etc.—all the ‘people sciences.’”
Sample entries so far have ranged from “The Five Worst Gym Machines: Top Trainers Tell What Doesn’t Work” to “Surviving a Layoff: You Kept Your Job. Now Keep Sane” to “OMG! Grey’s Anatomy Finale Mystery SOLVED!”
I asked Kate how she got such a cool gig, and she said it goes back to a summer internship she did at Newsweek while a grad student in journalism at Columbia University. “I was reluctant about being an intern,” she says. “I had been running a section of the magazine at Women’s Health, and here I was working with kids 10 years younger than I was, while doing a lot of entry-level work. But I knew the opportunity would help my career in the long run.” A few months later, when she saw a posting for the Newsweek blogging job, she was able to use her contacts to get a foot in the door with the hiring manager of the blog.
“She asked me to do some sample blogging, and after our interview I harassed her almost every day via e-mail with more ideas that we could run on the blog and suggestions of how to shape and market it,” Kate says. “My persistence paid off.
“I feel very lucky to get a job in this economic climate, and even luckier that it’s this job.”
Tina Hay, editor
Who Remembers This Mac?
A couple of years ago we ran a feature-length Q&A with Penn State grad Steven Levy ’74g, chief technology writer for Newsweek, on his then-new book about the iPod. That was in our November-December 2006 issue. Since then, Levy has moved over to Wired magazine and continues to write about all things Apple, among other topics. In the current issue of Wired, he writes about the progression of the Apple Macintosh, which has now been around for 25 years.
Levy’s article also talks about “Apple’s long-running PC-versus-Mac ad campaign, with the nebbishy John Hodgman portraying the PC,” and how that campaign “has deeply unhinged Microsoft despite the company’s dominant market share.”
Seeing the photo-illustrated timeline that accompanies the article made me remember, with a laugh, my my first Mac, which looked pretty much like the one shown here. I got it—a Mac Plus—in 1987 in my previous job as the communications person for the College of Health and Human Development. The Mac Plus had a whopping 1MB of hard-drive space—the equivalent of, say, a single photo on my current Mac laptop.
Tina Hay, editor
What Becomes of the Hijackers’ Remains?
This week’s issue of Newsweek contains a fascinating story called “Remains of the Day,” about what can or should be done with the remains of the 19 hijackers who died, along with their victims, on Sept. 11, 2001. At the center of the story is Penn State grad Robert Shaler ’66g, ’68g, who at the time of the terrorist attacks worked in the New York City medical examiner’s office and who oversaw the DNA analysis of victims’ remains in the years that followed. (We ran a profile of Shaler and his post-9/11 efforts in our Sept-Oct 2004 issue.)
The families of the 9/11 victims, understandably, did not want their loved ones’ remains mingled in any way with the remains of the attackers, but, the Newsweek article points out, “The blunt reality is that no matter how fastidious their efforts, the scientists will never fully sort the victims from the hijackers. The fragments are too small, too ruined and too scattered for bodies to be restored in their entirety.”
Robert Shaler (photo courtesy of Penn State)
In addition to reading the online version of the Newsweek story, you might want to check out the associated photo album, which includes a photo of Shaler, as well as a photo of Somerset County coroner Wallace Miller—who, as a side note, was a high school classmate of mine. I always knew him as Wally Miller, and it was odd to see him in the national spotlight in the days and weeks after Sept. 11.
In 2005, Shaler retired from the New York City medical examiner’s office and joined the Penn State faculty, to set up an undergraduate program in forensic science. More recently he’s also been involved with the TV series Crime Scene University, which is filmed largely at Penn State.
Tina Hay, editor
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