Frank McCourt
Francis McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on 19 August 1930 to Malachy McCourt, who falsely claimed to have been in the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan from Limerick. Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931. In the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Ireland. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by Malachy Senior's alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother's native Limerick, where they sank deeper into poverty, they lived in a rain-soaked slum, the parents and children sharing one bed together, McCourt's father drinking away what little money they had. His father, being from the north and bearing a northern accent, found this trait to be an added stressor to finding a job.
The twins Oliver and Eugene died in early childhood due to the squalor of their circumstances, two more boys were born: Michael, who lived in San Francisco until his death in September 2015. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was 11. McCourt related that when he was 11, his father left Limerick to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry, England sending back money to support his family. McCourt recounts that Malachy Senior abandoned Frank's mother altogether, leaving her to raise her four surviving children, on the edge of starvation, without any source of income. Frank's school education ended at age 13. Frank held odd jobs and stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers. In October 1949, at the age of 19, McCourt left Ireland, he had saved money from various jobs including as a telegram delivery boy and stolen from one of his employers, a moneylender, after her death. He took a boat from Cork to New York City. A priest he had met on the ship got him a room to stay in and his job at New York City's Biltmore Hotel.
He sent $10 of it to his mother in Limerick. Brothers Malachy and Michael followed him to New York and so did their mother Angela. In 1951, McCourt was drafted during the Korean War and sent to Bavaria for two years training dogs as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, in banks. Using his GI Bill education benefits, McCourt talked his way into New York University by claiming he was intelligent and read a great deal, he graduated in 1957 from New York University with a bachelor's degree in English. He taught at six New York schools, including McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Ralph R. McKee CTE High School in Staten Island, New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, Stuyvesant High School, Seward Park High School, Washington Irving High School, the High School of Fashion Industries, all in Manhattan. In 1967, he earned a master's degree at Brooklyn College, in the late 1960s he spent 18 months at Trinity College in Dublin, failing to earn his PhD before returning to New York City.
In a 1997 New York Times essay, McCourt wrote about his experiences teaching immigrant mothers at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn. McCourt won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and one of the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards for his bestselling 1996 memoir, Angela's Ashes, which details his impoverished childhood from Brooklyn to Limerick. Three years a movie version of Angela's Ashes opened to mixed reviews. Northern Irish actor Michael Legge played McCourt as a teenager. McCourt authored'Tis, which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela's Ashes and focusing on his life after he returned to New York, he subsequently wrote Teacher Man which detailed his teaching experiences and the challenges of being a teacher. McCourt was accused of exaggerating his family's impoverished upbringing by many Limerick natives, including Richard Harris. McCourt's own mother had denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981, shouting from the audience during a stage performance of his recollections that it was "all a pack of lies."
However, at the least, many of his Stuyvesant High School students remembered quite the mordant childhood anecdotes that he continually told during sessions of his senior-level Creative Writing elective. McCourt wrote the book for a 1997 musical entitled The Irish… and How They Got That Way, which featured an eclectic mix of Irish music. McCourt was married first, to Alberta Small, with whom he had a daughter, Margaret, he married a second time in November 1984 to the psychotherapist Cheryl Floyd. He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, in August 1994, they lived in New York City and Roxbury, Connecticut, he was a passionate fan of the New York Mets. In his free time, McCourt took up the casual sport of rowing, he once sank his WinTech recreational single scull on the Mohawk River in Upstate New York, had to be rescued by a local rowing team
The War of the Roses (novel)
The War of the Roses is a novel by Warren Adler. The War of the Roses tells the story of Jonathan and Barbara Rose, their descent from a picturesque family life into a world of macabre self-destruction; the novel begins introducing Jonathan and Barbara as they are introduced to each other for the first time. Some years they are living the good life in a Washington, D. C. suburb. They have a dream house, filled with a lifetime’s worth of antiques that they have collected, two children, a dog and a cat. Jonathan’s law career could not be better, they have hired an au pair to aid in the upkeep of the house and the children as Barbara has embarked in a gourmet business endeavour, she has received a small amount of acclaim for her pâté. Somewhere along the road to building to this ideal family unit, Barbara fell out of love with Jonathan, she realizes it. It would not be so bad if he died, she would not be distraught. Jonathan, on the other hand, only thinks of his wife as he is rushed to the hospital and cannot understand why she did not come to his bedside as he waited for the prognosis.
Upon returning home, Barbara tells him their marriage is over and it has been for some time and he never realized it. Barbara hires the best divorce attorney in town. Smart enough not to represent himself, Jonathan puts an attorney of his own on a retainer. Jonathan would like the divorce to go smoothly, he offers Barbara a generous monthly allowance, as well as half of everything. That is not enough, she wants it the house and all of its contents. She has earned putting the house together and making it a home they both wanted, she raised his children in the house. It belongs to her. Jonathan had to work to provide for her, the family, the home, he cannot let her have it so easily. He opts not to move out, citing an old legal precedent which permits a couple to live under the same roof while going through a divorce. Barbara is less than thrilled at the prospect of having him continue to live there. Despite the warnings of their attorneys, both take it upon themselves to make the other miserable, it begins with small acts of sabotage, but soon escalates.
Only the children are off-limits, everything else, from careers to prized possessions, is fair game. Their previous life together, a life of love, vanishes as aggression and territoriality engulf them both. In 1989, The War of the Roses was translated from novel to film, proving to be a huge success both financially and critically; the film starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner and was directed by Danny DeVito, who co-starred. Novel official website
William Gaines
William Maxwell Gaines, was an American publisher and co-editor of EC Comics. Following a shift in EC's direction in 1950, Gaines presided over what became an artistically influential and important line of mature-audience comics, he published the satirical magazine Mad for over 40 years. He was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame. In 2012, he was inducted into the Ghastly Awards' Hall of Fame. Gaines was born in New York, to a Jewish household, his father was Max Gaines, who as publisher of the All-American Comics division of DC Comics was an influential figure in the history of comics. The elder Gaines tested the idea of packaging and selling comics on newsstands in 1933. In 1941, Max Gaines accepted William Moulton Marston's proposal for the first successful female superhero, Wonder Woman. With the publication of Dr. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, comic books like those that Gaines published attracted the attention of the U.
S. Congress. In 1954, Gaines testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. In the following exchanges, he is addressed first by Chief Counsel Herbert Beaser, by senator Estes Kefauver: Beaser: "Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?"Gaines: "No, I wouldn't say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste."Beaser: "Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?"Gaines: "I don't believe so."Beaser: "There would be no limit to what you put in the magazines?"Gaines: "Only within the bounds of good taste."Beaser: "Your own good taste and saleability?"Gaines: "Yes." Kefauver: "Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman's head up, severed from her body.
Do you think, in good taste?"Gaines: "Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody."Kefauver: "You have blood coming out of her mouth."Gaines: "A little."Kefauver: "Here is blood on the axe. I think most adults are shocked by that." Gaines converted Mad to a magazine in 1955 to retain the services of its talented editor Harvey Kurtzman, who had received offers from elsewhere. The change enabled Mad to escape the strictures of the Comics Code. Kurtzman left Gaines' employ a year anyway and was replaced by Al Feldstein, Gaines' most prolific editor during the EC Comics run. Feldstein oversaw Mad from 1955 through 1986, as Gaines went on to a long and profitable career as a publisher of satire and enemy of bombast. Although Mad was sold in the early 1960s for tax reasons, Gaines remained as publisher until the day he died and served as a buffer between the magazine and its corporate interests.
In turn, he stayed out of the magazine's production viewing content just before the issue was shipped to the printer. "My staff and contributors create the magazine," declared Gaines. "What I create is the atmosphere." Gaines was devoted to his staff, fostered an environment of humor and loyalty. This he accomplished through various means, notably the "Mad trips." Each year, Gaines would pay for the magazine's staff and its steadiest contributors to fly to an international locale. The first vacation, to Haiti, set the tone. Discovering that Mad had a grand total of one Haitian subscriber, Gaines arranged to have the group driven to the person's house. There, surrounded by the magazine's editors and writers, Gaines formally presented the bewildered subscriber with a renewal card; when the man's neighbor bought a subscription, Gaines declared the trip to be a financial success because the magazine had doubled its Haitian circulation. The trips became a more elaborate annual event, the staff would visit six of the world's continents.
Despite his largesse, Gaines had a penny-pinching side. He would stop meetings to find out who had called a particular long-distance phone number. Longtime Mad editor Nick Meglin called Gaines a "living contradiction" in 2011, saying, "He was singularly the cheapest man in the world, the most generous." Meglin described his experience of asking Gaines for a raise of $3 a week. Recalled Meglin: "The check came, I said,'That's the whole raise!' "And Bill said, ` I like good food. I don't enjoy giving raises.'"In his memoir Good Days and Mad, Mad writer Dick DeBartolo recalls several anecdotes that characterize Gaines as a generous gourmand who liked practical jokes, who enjoyed good-natured verbal abuse from his staffers. Frank Jacobs paints a similar picture in The Mad World of William M. Gaines, a biography published by longtime friend Lyle Stuart. C. 2008, director John Landis and screenwriter Joel Eisenberg planned a biopic called Ghoulishly Yours, William M. Gaines, with Al Feldstein serving as a creative consultant.
The film, did not subsist past pre-production. One of his last televised interviews was as a guest on the December 7, 1991 episode of Beyond Vaudeville. Gaines
Liberal arts college
A liberal arts college or liberal arts institution of higher education is a college with an emphasis on undergraduate study in the liberal arts and sciences. Such colleges aim to impart a broad general knowledge and develop general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. Students in a liberal arts college major in a particular discipline while receiving exposure to a wide range of academic subjects, including sciences as well as the traditional humanities subjects taught as liberal arts. Although it draws on European antecedents, the liberal arts college is associated with American higher education, most liberal arts colleges around the world draw explicitly on the American model. According to US News & World Report, the top ten ranked Liberal Arts Colleges in America for 2019, by alphabetical order are: Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College, Middlebury College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Wellesley College, Williams College.
There is no formal definition of liberal arts college, but one American authority defines them as schools that "emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study." Other researchers have adopted similar definitions. Although many liberal arts colleges are undergraduate, some offer graduate programs that lead to a master's degree or doctoral degree in subjects such as business administration, nursing and law. Although the term "liberal arts college" most refers to an independent institution, it may sometimes refer to a university college within or affiliated with a larger university. Most liberal arts colleges outside the United States follow this model. Liberal arts colleges are distinguished from other types of higher education chiefly by their generalist curricula and small size; these attributes have various secondary effects in terms of administration as well as student experience. For example, class size is much lower at liberal arts colleges than at universities, faculty at liberal arts colleges focus on teaching more than research.
From a student perspective, a liberal arts college differs from other forms of higher education in the following areas: higher overall student satisfaction, a general feeling that professors take a personal interest in the student's education, perception of encouragement to participate in discussion. Many students select liberal arts colleges with this sense of personal connection in mind. From an administrative standpoint, the small size of liberal arts colleges contributes to their cohesion and ability to survive through difficult times. Job satisfaction is typically higher in liberal arts colleges, for both faculty and staff; the smaller size makes it feasible for liberal arts colleges to adopt experimental or divergent approaches, such as the Great Books curriculum at St. John's or Shimer, or the radically interdisciplinary curriculum of Marlboro. In addition, most liberal arts colleges are residential, which means students live and learn away from home for the first time; the distinctiveness of these attributes is somewhat eroded by the tendency of universities to adopt aspects of the liberal arts college, vice versa.
For example, several American universities, including the University of California system, have experimented with a cluster colleges model in which small liberal-arts-college-like units within a larger university form a "honeycomb of residential colleges". In addition, some universities have maintained a sub-unit that preserves many aspects of the liberal arts college, such as Columbia College within Columbia University. Liberal arts colleges themselves sometimes cluster to offer greater curricular breadth or share other resources. In academia, liberal arts refer to subjects or skills that aim to provide general knowledge and comprise the arts, natural sciences, social sciences, as opposed to professional or technical subjects. Most liberal arts colleges nowadays, offer more than just liberal arts subjects, such as computer science from the formal science discipline. Liberal arts colleges are found in all parts of the world. Notwithstanding the European origins of the concept of liberal arts education, today the term is associated with the United States, most self-identified liberal arts colleges worldwide are built on the American model.
The Global Liberal Arts Alliance, which incorporates institutions on five continents, refers to itself as "an international, multilateral partnership of American style liberal arts institutions."In 2009, liberal arts colleges from around the world formed the Global Liberal Arts Alliance, an international consortium and "matching service" to help liberal arts colleges in different countries deal with their shared problems. The liberal arts college model took root in the United States in the 19th century, as institutions spread that followed the model of early schools like Harvard and Dartmouth, although none of these early American schools are regarded as liberal arts colleges today; these colleges served as a means of spreading a European cultural model across the new country. The model proliferated in the 19th century; as of 1987, there were about 540 liberal arts colleges in the United States. The oldest liberal arts college in America is considered to be Washington College, the first college chartered after American independence.
Other prominent examples in the United States include the so-called Little Ivy co
National Medal of Science
The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, chemistry, engineering and physics. The twelve member presidential Committee on the National Medal of Science is responsible for selecting award recipients and is administered by the National Science Foundation; the National Medal of Science was established on August 25, 1959, by an act of the Congress of the United States under Pub. L. 86–209. The medal was to honor scientists in the fields of the "physical, mathematical, or engineering sciences"; the Committee on the National Medal of Science was established on August 23, 1961, by executive order 10961 of President John F. Kennedy. On January 7, 1979, the American Association for the Advancement of Science passed a resolution proposing that the medal be expanded to include the social and behavioral sciences.
In response, Senator Ted Kennedy introduced the Science and Technology Equal Opportunities Act into the Senate on March 7, 1979, expanding the medal to include these scientific disciplines as well. President Jimmy Carter's signature enacted this change as Public Law 96-516 on December 12, 1980. In 1992, the National Science Foundation signed a letter of agreement with the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation that made the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation the metaorganization over both the National Medal of Science and the similar National Medal of Technology; the first National Medal of Science was awarded on February 18, 1963, for the year 1962 by President John F. Kennedy to Theodore von Kármán for his work at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the citation accompanying von Kármán's award reads: For his leadership in the science and engineering basic to aeronautics. The first woman to receive a National Medal of Science was Barbara McClintock, awarded for her work on plant genetics in 1970.
Although Public Law 86-209 provides for 20 recipients of the medal per year, it is typical for 8–15 accomplished scientists and engineers to receive this distinction each year. There have been a number of years; those years include: 1985, 1984, 1980, 1978, 1977, 1972 and 1971. The awards ceremony is organized by the Office of Technology Policy, it is presided by the sitting United States president. Each year the National Science Foundation sends out a call to the scientific community for the nomination of new candidates for the National Medal of Science. Individuals are nominated by their peers with each nomination requiring three letters of support from individuals in science and technology. Nominations are sent to the Committee of the National Medal of Science, a board composed of fourteen presidential appointees comprising twelve scientists, two ex officio members—the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the president of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the Committee, successful candidates must be U.
S. citizens or permanent residents who are applying for U. S. citizenship, who have done work of outstanding merit or that has had a major impact on scientific thought in their field. The Committee values those who promote the general advancement of science and individuals who have influenced science education, although these traits are less important than groundbreaking or thought-provoking research; the nomination of a candidate is effective for three years. The Committee makes their recommendations to the President for the final awarding decision; the National Medal of Science depicts Man, surrounded by earth and sky, contemplating and struggling to understand Nature. The crystal in his hand represents the universal order and suggests the basic unit of living things; the formula being outlined in the sand symbolizes scientific abstraction. National Medal of Arts National Medal of Technology and Innovation National Science Foundation Searchable Database of National Medal of Science Recipients National Science & Technology Medals Foundation Using the National Medal of Science to recognize advances in psychology
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, teacher. He is noted for his serial and electronic music. Babbitt was born in Philadelphia to Albert E. Sarah Potamkin, he was Jewish. He was raised in Jackson and began studying the violin when he was four but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Early in his life he was attracted to theater music, he was making his own arrangements of popular songs at seven, when he was thirteen, he won a local songwriting contest. Babbitt's father was a mathematician, it was mathematics that Babbitt intended to study when he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. However, he soon left and went to New York University instead, where he studied music with Philip James and Marion Bauer. There he became interested in the music of the composers of the Second Viennese School and went on to write a number of articles on twelve tone music, including the first description of combinatoriality and a serial "time-point" technique. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree from New York University College of Arts and Science in 1935 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he studied under Roger Sessions and later at Princeton University.
At the university, he joined the music faculty in 1938 and received one of Princeton's first Master of Fine Arts degrees in 1942. During the Second World War, Babbitt divided his time between mathematical research in Washington, D. C. and Princeton, where he became a member of the mathematics faculty from 1943 to 1945. In 1948, Babbitt returned to Princeton University's music faculty and in 1973 became a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School in New York. Among his more notable former students are music theorists David Lewin and John Rahn, composers Bruce Adolphe, Michael Dellaira, Kenneth Fuchs, Laura Karpman, Paul Lansky, Donald Martino, John Melby, Kenneth Lampl, Tobias Picker, J. K. Randall, the theatre composer Stephen Sondheim and pianists Frederic Rzewski and Richard Aaker Trythall, the jazz guitarist and composer Stanley Jordan. In 1958, Babbitt achieved unsought notoriety through an article in the popular magazine High Fidelity. Babbitt said his own title for the article was "The Composer as Specialist" (as it was published several times, including in Babbitt 2003, 48–54, but that "The editor, without my knowledge and—therefore—my consent or assent, replaced my title by the more'provocative' one:'Who Cares if You Listen?'
A title which reflects little of the letter and nothing of the spirit of the article". More than 30 years he commented: "For all that the true source of that offensively vulgar title has been revealed many times, in many ways, even—eventually—by the offending journal itself, I still am far more to be known as the author of'Who Cares if You Listen?' than as the composer of music to which you may or may not care to listen". Babbitt became interested in electronic music, he was hired by RCA as consultant composer to work with its RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, in 1961 produced his Composition for Synthesizer. Babbitt was less interested in producing new timbres than in the rhythmic precision he could achieve using the Mark II synthesizer, a degree of precision unobtainable in live performances. Although he would shift his focus away from electronic music, the genre that first gained for him public notice, by the 1960s Babbitt was writing both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments combining the two.
Philomel, for example, was written for soprano and a synthesized accompaniment stored on magnetic tape. From 1985 until his death he served as the Chairman of the BMI Student Composer Awards, the international competition for young classical composers. Milton Babbitt died in Princeton, New Jersey on January 29, 2011 at the age of 94. 1965 – Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1974 – Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1982 – Pulitzer Prize, Special Citation, "for his life's work as a distinguished and seminal American composer" (Columbia University 1991, 70. 2000 – National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international, professional music fraternity 2010 – The Max Reger Foundation of America – Extraordinary Life Time Musical Achievement Award. "Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition". The Score and I. M. A. Magazine 12:53–61.. "Who Cares if You Listen?". High Fidelity.. "Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants," Musical Quarterly 46/2.. "Set Structure as Compositional Determinant," Journal of Music Theory 5/1..
"The Structure and Function of Musical Theory," College Music Symposium 5.. "Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History", Perspectives in Musicology: The Inaugural Lectures of the Ph. D. Program in Music at the City University of New York, edited by Barry S. Brook, Edward Downes, Sherman Van Solkema, 270–307. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-02142-4. Reprinted, New York: Pendragon Press, 1985. ISB
Edward J. Bloustein
Edward Jerome Bloustein was the 17th President of Rutgers University serving from 1971 to 1989. He was born in New York City, he graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1942, he served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University in 1948 and subsequently traveled to the University of Oxford as a Fulbright scholar and received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1950. Returning to the United States, he taught philosophy at Brooklyn College and spent close to a year in Washington, DC with the Office of Intelligence in the State Department, where he served as a political analyst, specializing in Marxist theory and international political movements in the German Democratic Republic. Bloustein earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1954 from Cornell University, entered Cornell Law School earning a Bachelor of Laws in 1959. During that time, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Law Quarterly. Bloustein began his professional career as a law clerk to Judge Stanley H. Fuld of the New York State Court of Appeals, serving from 1959 to 1961.
He joined the faculty of the New York University School of Law until 1965, when he was named president of Bennington College. In 1971, following the retirement of Mason Welch Gross he was appointed president of Rutgers University. During his tenure as President of Rutgers University, Bloustein implemented programs that expanded the institution's research facilities, attracted internationally known scholars to the faculty, achieved distinction as one of the major public research universities in the nation, leading to an invitation for Rutgers to join the Association of American Universities. Bloustein died in the Bahamas on December 9, 1989; the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers–New Brunswick is named in his honor; the Edward J. Bloustein Distinguished Scholar is named in his honor. A film clip "The Open Mind - American Values and the College Generation" is available at the Internet Archive
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