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Where art and science meet--The Mount Holyoke Art Museum's 1994 exhibition Altered States is prominently mentioned in the May/June issue of Museum News, the journal of the American Museum Association. The article, "Conservation Center Stage," uses the MHC exhibition as a prime example of how "new public attention is focusing on the preservation and restoration of cultural heritage." Altered States explained how museums preserve and restore artworks, and it won the IIC Keck Award in 1994 for increasing public awareness of conservation.

Good question--In a May 9 op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle, Naomi Barry '96 questions why, in a national climate in which affirmative action is increasingly under attack for students of color, no one questions the apparent ease with which Chelsea Clinton was accepted at so many top-notch schools. Something to do with her family's power, no doubt? Barry writes, "I wonder why we, as a society, do not similarly recognize these admissions tactics as 'affirmative action.' " Barry's piece was also published in Hispanic Link Weekly Report.

The Adweek years--Barbara Lippert '76, longtime columnist for Adweek (1982-97), is lionized in that magazine's April 21 issue in a piece by Clay Felker, director of the Felker Magazine Center at the School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Lippert put her imprint on our culture--at least our popular culture--by astutely critiquing advertisements and advertising campaigns. She now writes for the magazine New York, casting her insightful eye on the broader aspects of pop culture.

New York, New York--A May 4 story in the New York Times about the one hundredth anniversary of the melding together of forty municipalities into the modern day megalopolis featured insights by history professor Daniel Czitrom. The unification into one urban entity, Czitrom contends, has made little, if any, difference to working people.

Focusing on the death sentence--Sociology professor and National Public Radio commentator Richard Moran and Tufts philosophy professor Hugo Bedau wrote an op-ed piece in the May 1 "Focus" section of the Boston Globe on the high price of the death penalty. Massachusetts, now weighing a death penalty statute, should look at the high cost that reinstituting the death penalty has had in other states, such as New Jersey. There, the death penalty was put back on the books in 1982, resulting in capital cases that have cost the state millions in court and legal costs without a single execution.

In medias res--Madeleine Albright's commencement role drew media attention regionally, nationally, and internationally. Media outlets in this area, Boston, and New England buzzed on Sunday, May 25, and Monday, May 26, with news of Albright's commencement speech. The story was also picked up nationally on ABC World News Sunday and National Public Radio's All Things Considered, while papers including the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post carried an Associated Press photo of Albright being hooded by Dean Peter Berek and Professor Joan Cocks. While reports of "hit" sitings are still coming in, alums in Scotland and Hong Kong have seen coverage in national papers there. And, according to one overseas report, Albright's commencement address was played, in toto, on radio broadcasts, presumably on the Voice of America, in China.