HEADLINE: SURFING - A COMPENDIUM

November 4, 2001 Sunday, STATEWIDE

SECTION: NORTHEAST; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 887 words

BODY:

The Most Effective Way To Wash Away Germs

Amy Cheng Vollmer, a microbiologist at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa., was interviewed by Knight Ridder/Tribune reporter Seth Borenstein:

Borenstein: Postmaster General John Potter recommends washing your hands with soap after handling mail. Is that good advice?

Vollmer: It's wonderful advice for protection from all bacteria, including anthrax. The (U.S. Centers for Disease Control) says that if you suspect anthrax exposure, wash your hands immediately. ...

Headline: New products, bogus and legitimate, target public's bioterrorism anxieties

11/07/2001

Page A-3

BODY:

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- A $100 hand-held ultraviolet spore zapper. A $38 antibacterial filter for the home air conditioner. A $30 kit for testing dust or powder in the home. Sealed boxes for safely opening mail. By Internet, e-mail and phone, merchants are pushing a slew of new products designed to assuage the fear of bioterrorism fanned by the anthrax outbreak. ... All of them trade on people's fear -- even though the chance of being targeted for or touched by anthrax is infinitesimal.

...

Sales are brisk at dozens of Internet sites -- some of them new -- that sell the products and the antibiotic, Cipro. "Unfortunately, there's a sucker born every minute," said Amy Cheng Vollmer, a bacteria expert at Swarthmore College.

Headline: Experts to Assess Risks of Terrorism and the Nuclear Threat

11/12/2001

BODY:

News Advisory: What: Press Briefing -- Experts to Assess Risks of Terrorism and the Nuclear Threat When: Nov. 14, 9:30 a.m. Where: National Press Club, 529 14th St., Washington, D.C.

...

The line-up of experts includes:

...

-- Bob Musil, chief executive officer of PSR, is also adjunct professor in the Nuclear Studies Institute of American University and Adjunct Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College.

HEADLINE: Magic in the air

November 9, 2001 Friday Ontario Edition

SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. D01

LENGTH: 1486 words

BYLINE: Peter Howell, Toronto Star

BODY:

As most of the free world knows, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins will soon be battling the forces of evil at theatres everywhere. As the unlikely heroes, respectively, of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone (due out next Friday) and The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (Dec. 19), young wizard Potter and hobbit wanderer Baggins are enjoined to take up quests to save their worlds and to prove themselves.

...

The concept of a clear victory is key to the appeal of Rowling and Tolkien, agreed Raima Evan, a professor of English at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, who teaches a course titled "Fairy Tales And Magic Fictions." But the journey towards that clarity is often expressed in symbolic terms. Said Evan: "Both the Harry Potter novels and the (Tolkien) trilogy centre on a powerful magical object. This magical object is bound up with the future of the entire fictional world. The (Philosopher's) Stone and the Ring of Power can end up threatening and even destroying the world as the characters know it, if these objects fall into the wrong hands". ...

HEADLINE: THEATER REVIEW - A Polish Provocateur Trashes Decorum

November 14, 2001, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section E; Page 5; Column 1; The Arts/Cultural Desk

LENGTH: 750 words

BYLINE: By BRUCE WEBER

BODY:

Nose-thumbing outrageousness is the leading spirit of "Ferdydurke," the 1937 satirical novel by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. And it is a quality that is more than preserved in the stage adaptation of that book being presented at La MaMa through Nov. 25.

...

"Ferdydurke," his first novel, tells the story of a 30-year-old man who is forced by a sadistic pedagogue to return to school, where he relives the terrors -- and pleasures -- of adolescence. What results on the page is a celebration of immaturity, a rant against the normal, a comic screed against dogma, conventional wisdom, doctrinaire or institutional thinking. Theaters have found the sentiments of the work stageworthy almost from the time it was written. As collaboratively adapted by two Polish troupes, Teatr Provisorium and Kompania Teatr (the text is by Allen J. Kuharski, a professor at Swarthmore), the production at La MaMa is intensely committed to indecorousness. ...

HEADLINE: Theater - In Honor Of Wildness And Wit

November 11, 2001, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 2; Page 7; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk

LENGTH: 825 words

BYLINE: By MERILYN JACKSON

BODY:

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, the Polish-born playwright, novelist, diarist and iconoclast, earned a reputation as a scandalous genius in Poland, though he lived in self-imposed exile in Argentina for 24 years after being stranded there when Hitler invaded his country.

Gombrowicz (pronounced gom-BROH-veetch) had Rabelais in his DNA and his literary antecedents wend back through Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" to Moliere. Born in 1904, he was a leftist, anticlerical bisexual whose writings use brutal wit and outrageous sexual commentary to ridicule authority and class distinctions. His themes of infantilization and mutual debasement opposed all party lines and his books were banned in Communist Poland.

...

The English version of the play is by Allen Kuharski, the director of theater studies at Swarthmore College. Mr. Kuharski, who first saw "Ferdydurke" in a Polish-language production in Poland in 1981, said, "It was one of the funniest things I ever saw, and I knew I wanted to bring it to American audiences."

Another admirer of Gombrowicz's prose, the German novelist Gunter Grass, wrote "The Tin Drum" 30 years after "Ferdydurke" and the two works are sometimes compared. "The action in 'The Tin Drum' mirrors that in 'Ferdydurke,' " Mr. Kuharski said, "but it's a flip side, with Oscar, who never grows up," versus "Josef, condemned to return to adolescence." To Gombrowicz, arrested development in adolescence, with its heated and ambiguous sexual fumblings, was a far crueler fate.

The production of "Ferdydurke" travels to Philadelphia (Nov. 13 at Swarthmore College), Salt Lake City (Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 at Winchester College), Princeton, N.J. (Dec. 7 and 8 at Princeton University Theater) ...

Headline: Consumer Watch Column

11/14/2001

By Jeff Gelles

BODY:

If you've never encountered "payday lending" first-hand, consider yourself lucky. That means you've never had to write a post-dated check, say, for $240, just to get a quick infusion of $200 in cash. Or had to decide what to do two weeks later, when the payday lender calls to ask whether it's safe to deposit that check.

Often, the answer is no. If you had really only needed that money till payday, would you have been so desperate two weeks ago?

...

The trouble is, borrowers are likely to just get farther into debt. John P. Caskey, a Swarthmore College economist who has studied payday lending, says the majority of borrowers go back to the well seven or more times a year.

Headline: Season's weedings - Natural decor

11/09/2001

Page E01

FEATURES HOME & DESIGN

By Denise Cowie

BODY:

In just 20 minutes, Michael Petrie gathered a large collection of thistles, pods and foliage in a damp, overgrown spot off Route 1 in Chester County. "Most of these are noxious weeds," he said. "You drive by them all the time, but you just don't notice them." And some are lovely, even if you wouldn't want them in your garden. Petrie not only notices but stops to pick them. He's a horticultural designer with J. Franklin Styer Nurseries in Concordville, and his quirky imagination is behind many a winning exhibit at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

...

Scott Arboretum, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore : Holiday wreath workshops. Dec. 6, 1-3 p.m. and 7-9 p.m.; Dec. 7, 1-3 p.m. and 7-9 p.m.; Dec. 8, 10 a.m.-noon and 1-3 p.m. Materials supplied. Fee: $45 (members $30). 610-328-8025.

Headline: Protesting abuses of human rights

11/11/2001

Page B05

Section: CITY & REGION

By Kristin E. Holmes INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

BODY:

Linda Panetta will stop protesting, making speeches, and getting arrested when the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation has trained its last soldier. But until then, the 35-year-old activist is bound by faith and a promise made to villagers in Central America. ... Panetta's mission is to close the Western Hemisphere Institute, which this year replaced the controversial U.S. Army's School of the Americas (SOA). Critics allege that the center, based in Fort Benning, Ga., has been a training school for Latin American soldiers and strongmen who went on to commit torture and other human-rights abuses in their countries.

Panetta is the Northeast director of the SOA Watch protest group -and this week, she will be among scores of area residents traveling to Georgia to join the group's annual demonstration outside Fort Benning.

...

But right now, Panetta is focused on stirring interest in the annual march. At Haverford, a group of students from Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore told her they would be driving down to the demonstration. "Excellent," Panetta said. "I hope to see you all there."

Headline: AUTHOR RECOMMENDS CLOSE OBSERVATION FOLLOWED UP WITH A FERTILE IMAGINATION

11/12/2001

METRO - Page 1

By Kim Underwood JOURNAL REPORTER

BODY:

When her talking freckles clam up, Donna Jo Napoli does a little laundry. Napoli is the author of 35 or 36 or maybe it's 37 books for young people. Anyway, it's so many that she no longer keeps an exact count. And, in any case, more are on the way. On a recent two-day visit to Summit School, she discussed with students the art of writing and read from her books -including Soccer Shock, which has freckles that talk to the boy they live on.

Napoli does much of her writing while sitting by the washer and dryer in the laundry room at her home in Pennsylvania. When she's stuck, she stops and does a little laundry. Running out of laundry to be done has never been a problem because she and her husband have five children. After she has, say, pulled some clothes out of the washer and, if the weather is nice, hung them up on the clothesline outside, she returns to her writing. By then, she usually finds that the characters are speaking to her again.

...

Napoli came to Winston-Salem just to work with the students at Summit. In addition to being an author, wife and mother, she is the chairwoman of the linguistics department at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

Headline: G-Prep senior earns Eagle Scout

11/12/2001

Page B5

Compiled by Nancy Plourde

BODY:

...

Emery Ku was one of two delegates representing Washington at the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia this past summer.

Ku is a 2001 graduate of Pullman High School and is studying physics and engineering at Swarthmore College this fall.

ALUMNI

Headline: Into the dazzling light

11/11/2001

By EMILY EAKIN

BODY:

IN 1996, JONATHAN Franzen made a reckless public vow. He did it in the pages of the American magazine Harper's , in a bitter, eloquent, intensely personal essay entitled 'Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels'. The big socially engaged novel was dead, he declared, killed off by TV. Serious postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo were doomed to irrelevance. Contemporary readers wanted entertainment, not news, engaging stories, not ideology. Franzen did more than just diagnose the problem. He implied that he could solve it. He made a promise to deliver a book that had it all, a novel that was intimate, socially engaged and compelling.

...

Franzen's writerly life began shortly after he and Cornell graduated from Swarthmore in 1981. At a gathering of the campus literary magazine, she dazzled him with a casually brilliant interpretation of a particularly inscrutable poem. 'She's a really, really good reader,' he says. In 1982, they decided to marry and devote themselves to writing.

HEADLINE: Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" wins National Book Award

November 15, 2001, Thursday

SECTION: DOMESTIC NEWS

LENGTH: 540 words

BYLINE: By Carlin Romano

BODY:

NEW YORK -- Despite a controversy with Oprah Winfrey that threatened to harm support for his work, Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award on Wednesday night for his highly praised novel "The Corrections", about the relations in a dysfunctional family between children and their parents.

Franzen, accepting his award at the annual NBA gala in midtown at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, looked stunned.

"I was the person who provided some blood-sport entertainment to divert the literary community in this time of trouble," said Franzen, a St. Louis native and Swarthmore graduate, referring to the controversy caused when he seemed resistant to having his book chosen for Oprah's Book Club. ...

HEADLINE: A formidable problem-solver - David Lewis

November 9, 2001 Friday Final Edition

SECTION: A; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 735 words

BYLINE: FRANK JACKSON

BODY:

PHILOSOPHY is not the oldest profession but it is the oldest academic one. (This is why the holder of the generic doctorate is called doctor of philosophy.) Philosophy's age makes it hard to say something both good and really new.

Although many philosophers of recent times have made major contributions, they rarely reshape the whole way we look at a series of problems. David Lewis was one of the exceptions. He was a philosopher in the sense in which Kant, Hume and Plato were philosophers.

Lewis took his first degree at Swarthmore College, and intended a career in chemistry. However, he came across philosophy when his father took study leave in Oxford and decided to do a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard. ...

...

Professor David Kellogg Lewis, born September 28, 1941; died October 14, 2001.

SPORTS

Headline: A Look Ahead

Section: SPORTS

11/08/2001

Page C05

By Mike Jensen, Inquirer Staff Writer

BODY:

...

This week's Philadelphia small college basketball coaches association luncheon featured the best bunch of poor-mouthing this side of Lou Holtz.

...

* Swarthmore coach Lee Wimberly had the most exotic problems. Two of his players picked up parasites, he said, traveling overseas - one in Belize, the other in the Dominican Republic.

HEADLINE: Local teams shine in Division III

November 14, 2001, Wednesday FIRST EDITION

SECTION: SPORTS, Pg. C7

LENGTH: 2521 words

BYLINE: DON BOSTROM Of The Morning Call

BODY:

When it comes to women's Division III basketball, nobody does it better than the area colleges.

Championships, 20-win seasons, NCAA tournament bids, All-American players, nationally-ranked defenses and individual leaders, brilliant coaches and exciting games against the very best are the norm for the programs at DeSales, Muhlenberg, Moravian, Delaware Valley and Cedar Crest.

...

Easton native Ron Rohn returns to the area to take over a Muhlenberg program that had its five-year run atop the Centennial Conference East standings ended last season by Swarthmore.