Social Issues
Members of the Northwestern community share the works of art — from classic American theater to a hit rock song — that have changed their outlook on life.
Released this spring, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life provides the most complete account to date of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, his relationships, his brilliantly strategic mind and his flaws. Eig’s biography draws on hundreds of interviews with King’s family, close friends and others who knew him; thousands of FBI documents that have been declassified in recent years — White House phone recordings, personal letters, unaired TV footage; and other previously unpublished materials.
On her final day at WBZ-TV in Boston in July 1965, reporter Joanne Desmond ’58 heard that the old news reels were going to be destroyed, so she asked her news director if she could take a roll of film from her reporting on the Boston Strangler. Her news director obliged, and that film clip was restored and featured in Hulu’s 2023 film Boston Strangler, which stars Keira Knightley as Desmond’s real-life news counterpart Loretta McLaughlin.
During a freezing winter quarter in 1988, most of Jarrett Kerbel’s Northwestern peers likely dreamed of spending spring break on sunny beaches. But Kerbel made plans to visit Holy Cross Monastery, an Anglican Benedictine community in West Park, N.Y., and he has devoted his life to the Christian faith ever since.
As members of the Northwestern University Black Alumni Association (NUBAA) mingled at the Black House during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend in 2022, Charla Wilson hoped the alumni would find some familiar faces in her photo display of Black student life at the University. Wilson, who is Northwestern’s archivist for the Black experience, had recently launched a crowdsourcing campaign called “I know them!” to learn more about 1,400 images from the past six that depict Black student life on campus.
Bicycle sales in the U.S. skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as consumers avoided public transit and indoor gyms. Cycling, however, can be risky in urban settings.
Literature can help us make sense of life’s biggest questions. And no one did that better than the great Russian novelists, says professor Gary Saul Morson.
In May 2022 Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History renovated its outdated Native North America exhibit hall and opened Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories, a permanent exhibition. Doug Kiel, assistant professor of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a citizen of the Oneida Nation, served on the Native American advisory committee that spent 4 ½ years setting the agenda for the renovation and bringing it to life.
Looking for a place to pitch a story about Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters in December 2020, journalism student Dan Hu discovered The Yappie, a digital news publication focused on activism and policies affecting the AAPI community. Soon after that initial pitch, Hu joined The Yappie as a writer and is now its executive director.
We’re all generating an exponential amount of data all the time, and the ability to connect the dots between those bits of data is cause for concern. Northwestern alumni who work in privacy protection agree that comprehensive federal legislation is needed to set reasonable expectations for individual data protection rights and to harmonize the growing patchwork of state rules that protect only a subset of the population.
