News
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August 13, 2020
Renowned Jazz Drummer Milford Graves Fight to Keep His Own Heart BeatingIn the 1960s, Milford Graves became a groundbreaking drummer in avant-garde jazz, but intertwined with his career had been his constant study of music’s impact on the human heart. Now Mr. Graves, a 78-year-old who lives in Jamaica, Queens, has become his own subject: He has amyloid cardiomyopathy, sometimes called stiff heart syndrome. Doctors have informed him that the condition, also called cardiac amyloidosis, has no cure. When he received the diagnosis in 2018, he was told he had six months to live. Since then, Mr. Graves said, he has come close to death several times because of fluid filling his lungs. His legs too weakened to walk, he remains in a recliner in his living room with a tube feeding medicine to his heart and another draining fluid from his midsection. But he has hardly surrendered to the illness. Although he is under the care of a cardiologist, he is also treating himself with the alternative techniques he has spent decades researching.
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August 10, 2020
Free Speech Advocate Discusses Growing Talk of ‘Cancel Culture’Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor of education, political science, and philosophy, talks de-platforming, toppling statues, rescinding admissions, Twitter, the First Amendment, and hate speech.
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August 10, 2020
‘Avoid the Day’ In His New Nonfiction Book, Jay Kirk Writes About a Mystery that Involves Penn faculty, Staff, and the Libraries.“Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements” is the second book by Kirk, who has been teaching nonfiction creative writing in the School of Arts & Sciences for 15 years. He has been a writer primarily for magazines, with long-form narratives in publications including Harpers, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. Pursuing the mystery of a missing music manuscript has been an eight-year odyssey that took Penn lecturer Jay Kirk from Vermont to Europe to the Arctic Circle, with Philadelphia at the center of the search.
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August 10, 2020
Expressions of Color, Comfort, and Creativity in the Fight Against COVID-19the Architecture Department at Penn partnered with Surface magazine to create the Summer School at Penn, a month-long virtual lecture series and design competition. During the four-week program, 76 students from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design listened to public lectures by world-renowned architects, educators, graphic and industrial designers, and doctors and submitted their designs for a mobile-testing unit.
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August 4, 2020
A Book A Day’s Writing Contest Offers Kids’ Views of the PandemicA Book a Day, a West Philadelphia community-based initiative founded and organized by Sibylla Benatova - Senior Conservation Technician for Paper for Penn Libraries - launched a contest this spring, asking children ages 6 to 10 to write a story, memoir or cartoon about what it’s like to live under a pandemic shutdown.