Note: This is a double issue.

Delaware County Daily Times (PA)

Dance Students Help Out

January 7, 2011

SWARTHMORE - A dozen tri-state area dance studios will team up with the young cast of locally filmed movie-musical "Standing Ovation" to put on a show benefitting the Bahamian orphanage, the Ranfurly Homes for Children, on Sunday, Jan. 9 at 6 p.m. at Swarthmore College's Lang Performing Arts Theater.

The event, entitled "Love that Child," will feature guest speaker, The Ranfurly Homes President Alexandra Maillis-Lynch, as well as a performance by Bahamian entertainer, Funky D. Craig Woods. Phil Andrews, former sports reporter on WPVI Channel 6 and Comcast SportsNet, will act as host.

Kathmandu Post (Nepal)

Art and Therapy

January 4, 2011

Nepal, Jan. 4 -- With a series of installations and exhibitions organised of late, art has been gaining importance in our city. The therapeutic nature of art is now being employed to release suppressed feelings and to heal the suffering borne from trauma by child victims of the insurgency.

Sneha Shrestha, a senior at Swarthmore College in the US, has been conducting a project titled 'The Creative Studio' funded by a scholarship she won in her college. The project attempts to use to the power of art to awaken the imagination and create new possibilities: it allows children and other vulnerable groups to share their stories of trauma through vibrant and playful methods of art and storytelling. The project has been effective for the children have opened up courageously and released their emotions that were bottled up inside.

"By capturing the trauma on paper, artwork shifts the trauma away from the individual and allows the individual to view the trauma clearly in a non-threatening way. Talking about symbolised trauma is easier and improves the healing process," says Shrestha. A child who participated in the therapy last winter says he feels lighter every time he colors and draws. "First I think and then I paint. It's just like writing a story," he shares.

...Shrestha gained experience on training for art therapy during her two-month internship in Mumbai with the NGO Dreamcatchers foundation. "The therapy even made a participant reflect upon his life for the first time in thirty years," says Shrestha, making evident its sheer healing power.

Winnipeg Free Press (Canada)

Keeping a Journal Can Give Gardeners a Different Kind of Experience

By Dean Fosdick, Associated Press

January 4, 2011

Gardeners seeking a different kind of growing experience with the start of the new year might try keeping a journal. It's a great way to get a better picture of what's happening in your yard.

"To effectively journal is to learn the art of observation," said Elizabeth Haegele, a horticulturist who teaches nature journaling at The Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pa. "It's a tool for learning patience and using time. You come away with impressions you wouldn't necessarily get if you took up a camera."

Journals can be as varied as the landscape. Some hold personal observations. Others detail plants and insects. Many resemble a ship's log, noting such things as the dates of the last killing frost or the seasonal return of a favourite bird species.

"You don't have to live on a farm or a cabin in the woods. You can find nature wherever you are," Haegele said. "Write about an eclipse. Colourful butterflies. There are plenty of things you can see just by looking out your window."...

U.S. Federal News

Professor Laitin Named To Kluge Center Chair In Countries And Cultures Of North

January 3, 2011

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed David Laitin, a political science professor at Stanford University, to the Chair of the Countries and Cultures of the North in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

At the Kluge Center, from December 2010 through March 2011, Laitin will analyze data he has collected over the past several years on the social and economic integration of Muslims into contemporary France. He hopes to use the Library's vast resources to provide him with materials on the historical origins of French secularism and the cultural context of Senegal, the country of the Muslim migrants whose descendents he has studied.

...A graduate of Swarthmore College, Laitin earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at Sciences Po Paris (the Paris Institute of Political Science). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.

Time Magazine

How America Fights Its Wars

By Ishaan Tharoor

December 29, 2010

With tactical commands located on all of earth's continents, the U.S. military is the world's sole colossus. But ambivalence to the use of American power has always run deep within the U.S. In How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War, Dominic Tierney, an assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College, outlines what he sees as two parallel modes in the American experience of war that have lingered since the Civil War. TIME spoke to Tierney about recent American crusades and quagmires and how different it all was for the nation's founders.

It seems that zeal has been central to much of this nation's feelings behind war. You call Americans the most ideological people in the world. That must sound like news to most Americans.
There's a profound national ideology, which is this belief in democracy and freedom and self-determination and limited government. It's basically a consensus belief; Americans don't see themselves as ideological because everyone believes in this ideology. What's interesting is that Americans are far more ideological than Soviet communists or, say, Chinese communists were. At the end of the Cold War, those countries just discarded their communism. But it would be impossible for Americans to discard their belief in the American way so easily.

How did you decide upon this dichotomy of crusades and quagmires?
If you look at the wars in American history, from the Civil War to the World Wars to Iraq, they all seem quite unique. But there are actually some important patterns about how we experience war, how we think about war. These conflicts don't repeat themselves, but they do rhyme. Basically, for the past 150 years we've liked smashing tyrants, but we've hated dealing with the messy consequences. And so what we see in U.S. history is that wars against enemy countries [including the Confederacy] are seen as crusades for grand majestic objectives like regime change. But nation-building missions where we try to stabilize a conquered land - we tend to see these as quagmires, as disastrous failures. (more)

Marketwatch.com

Markets aren't the Answer to Every Problem

By Rex Nutting

December 22, 2010

...Markets are indeed wondrous institutions, but like all man-made creations, they are endowed with the same vices and virtues as their creators.

Many of us are taught at our mother's knee the Gospel of Adam Smith: Greed is good. It is not the charity of the baker that brings us our daily bread, but his self-interest. In this tale, we humans are motivated by only one thing: our own material needs.

...Adam Smith himself taught that markets were appropriate only in the economic sphere. But that hasn't stopped well-meaning reformers from expanding the reach of markets. ...

This sounds like good advice in theory, but, in practice, education, health care and even finance can be ruined by the blunt application of market incentives.

In an important new book to be published next month, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe of Swarthmore College show that, too often, giving people monetary incentives to do the right thing gets us exactly the opposite.

We can pay kids to read books, but only at the cost of killing their natural love of reading. We can pay doctors to reduce costs, but that might give them an incentive to refuse to treat the sick.

"When incentives are introduced into a situation, they can undermine other, better motives to do the right thing," Schwartz and Sharpe write. "Financial incentives can lead to demoralization - in two senses. First, they take the moral dimension out of our practices; second, they risk demoralizing the practitioners themselves."

What do they mean by taking the "moral dimension" out of life? Simply put, we do many things because it's the right thing to do, not because it benefits us financially.

...Turning every human interaction into a market relationship has a high cost. Even in the corporate world or in high finance, financial incentives can be counterproductive.

...From Wall Street to the neighborhood kindergarten, we need to foster the practical wisdom to help us to do the right thing, to be teachers who teach, doctors who heal, bankers who nurture capital, or journalists who tell the truth.

We want to do the right thing, but too often we are demoralized by the perverse workings of markets.

Targeted News Service

Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy Partners with Swarthmore College for New Site

December 20, 2010

Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa., has been selected as a new site for the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy (MMLA) for the summer of 2011. MMLA, a language immersion summer program for pre-college students in its fourth year of programming, currently offers four-week residential sessions in Arabic, Chinese, French, German and Spanish on campuses in Vermont, California, Illinois, Ohio, Rhode Island and South Carolina. At the Swarthmore location, sessions in Chinese, French and Spanish will be available.

MMLA began as a collaboration between the Language Schools of Middlebury College and the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., a graduate school of Middlebury College. The program at Swarthmore will bring together over 70 educators and staff from around the country and 250 middle and high school students.

"We are excited to be partnering with an institution that understands and values the importance of foreign language skills," said Kevin Conroy, director of MMLA. "MMLA's immersion approach to teaching language and culture -- like that of the internationally recognized Middlebury Language Schools -- is an ideal way to provide today's young people with the skills and resources to become tomorrow's citizens."

"We think that MMLA is a good match for Swarthmore, both for the richness and rigor of its curriculum and for its tradition of successfully preparing students to further their academic goals," says Swarthmore College Provost Constance Hungerford. "We are especially glad to realize this partnership at a time when language immersion is increasingly critical to so many different career paths. We hope to enjoy a relationship with MMLA for many years to come."

SPORTS

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Women's College Basketball

January 5, 2011

...Swarthmore (8-2, 3-1 Centennial Conference) completed an unbeaten slate at the NYU New Year's Classic by beating New York City Tech, 72-47. Senior Kathryn Stockbower (Upper Dublin) led the way with 19 points and 13 rebounds, good for the 72d double-double of her career.  ...

Delaware County Daily Times (PA)

McDevitt Puts On Long-Range Show

January 4, 2011

...NYU 73, Swarthmore 58

Will Gates, the Centennial Conference's top scorer, led the way for the Garnet (4-7) with a game-high 26 points in a contest played at the NYU New Year's Classic. Gates has netted at least 25 points in five of Swarthmore's 11 games.

NYU won its 10th consecutive game to start the season.

Swarthmore 74, NYU 67

Kathryn Stockbower showed New York what's up.

The Swarthmore senior scored 22 points and snared 17 rebounds in the opening game of the NYU New Year's Classic.

Stockerbower, Nicole Rizzo (14), Ceylan Bodur (12) and Genny Pezzola (10) all reached double digits in scoring.

Stockbower recorded her 71st career double-double, leaving her eight short of the NCAA Division III women's record.

Swarthmore (7-2), which has won three in a row, went on a 13-0 run over the final five minutes of regulation.