Below are past articles highlighted in the NEWS FLASH! area of our front page.

(Updated 08/23/2012)

“No More Adventures in Wonderland” (NYT, 10/09/11)

by Maria Tatar

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/no-more-adventures-in-wonderland.html?pagewanted=all

“Children today get an unprecedented dose of adult reality in their books, sometimes without the redemptive beauty, cathartic humor and healing magic of an earlier time. In “The Hunger Games,” the series that best exemplifies this shift, Neverland and Wonderland have been replaced by Panem, a country built on the ruins of what was North America. In an interview, Ms. Collins traced the origins of the books to her anxieties as a child about the possibility that her father might die while fighting in Vietnam. Then, reading the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, she imagined the horrors of parental powerlessness in the face of child sacrifice. The personal mingled with the mythical, then the banal fused with the tragic. While channel surfing years later, Ms. Collins found herself switching between a “Survivor”-style reality show and footage of young people fighting in a real war zone. The lines blurred, and “The Hunger Games” emerged.”

“Practicing Medicine can be Grimm Work” (NYT, 6/30/11)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01gribben.html?_r=1

“TODAY, after four arduous years of examinations, graduating medical doctors will report to their residency programs. Armed with stethoscopes and scalpels, they’re preparing to lead the charge against disease in its ravaging, chimerical forms. They carry with them the classic tomes: Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine and Gray’s Anatomy. But I have an unlikely addition for their mental rucksacks: Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

“Once Upon a Legal Time: Developing the Skills of Storytelling in Law” (2009)

http://www2.law.mercer.edu/lawreview/files/LWILuncheon.pdf

“I pulled out the conference brochure from last summer’s Applied Legal Storytelling conference in Portland and skimmed it quickly for the kinds of papers that were written.  They fall into several different categories. Some of the papers were theoretical. We started out the conference with a talk on The Science of Storytelling.  Some were empirical. We listened to another talk, on An Empirical Study of Storytelling in Appellate Brief Writing.  Some of the papers on storytelling were, in part, a matter of storytelling itself. For example, one was called Post- Disaster Narrative and Litigation: Reflections on Storytelling and Social Justice from the Gulf Coast.”

“Darpa Explores the Science of Storytelling” (Wired, 4/13/11)

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/darpa-explores-the-science-of-storytelling/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Fpolitics+%28Wired%3A+Politics%29

“...But another reason the Pentagon would want to spend time upping its sensitivity quotient is because of an ongoing effort on its part to understand the “human terrain” of the battlefields in which they fight. The Army is investing hundreds of millions in building a teams of “cultural counselors” to get into the minds of the locals in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea is that the better you understand the population, the easier it is to sway them to your side — and win the war.”