Last Meal Sociology professor and criminologist Richard Moran appeared in a Scripps Howard News Service piece carried in many newspapers in March on the fascination many people have about what death-row inmates eat as last meals. According to Moran, the tradition of a last meal for the condemned dates back, in some ways, to the Last Supper of Jesus Christ and to practices in fifteenth-century England through which friends and family dined with criminals facing execution.

 

Break for Good A March 20 story in USA Today mentions efforts by MHC students to work in Washington, DC soup kitchens as an example of alternate spring break activities for socially conscious students.

 

Bush or Gore Ford Foundation Professor of History Joseph Ellis was tapped by the March 9 Wall Street Journal to comment on the forthcoming presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. According to Ellis, the nation, immersed in an economic sea change dominated by information technologies, globalism, and other emerging trends, is now facing a "transitional and transformational moment." The early years of the new century may well afford the political parties an opportunity to redefine such concepts as liberal, conservative, and the political center, Ellis noted.

 

Another First The March 6 Milwaukee Sentinel featured Pa Foua Yang '90, the first Hmong woman to become a physician in the United States. Now practicing family medicine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Yang first came to this country at age six as a refugee from Laos.