After intense bipartisan negotiations, lawmakers came up with an imperfect immigration reform bill that both parties agreed needed more time to work out. The minority of Senators who voted to take up the legislation said they did not support the bill in its current form, but hoped to improve it with amendments later on in the legislative session. Allan Wernick weighs in on this so-called compromise bill and whether or not it has a chance getting through the Senate.
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Women of the Iranian diaspora have long felt an urge to break stereotypes. In her new anthology of poetry and stories, “Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing By Women Of The Iranian Diaspora,” Professor Persis Karim a fresh voice for Iranian women. At an event at the Graduate Center, Professor Karmin reads her work along with contributors Marjan Kamah Tavangar and Amy Motlagh.
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“Art and artists are not the enemies,” says the award-winning documentarian Ric Burns, “but the supreme allies of reality.” As the Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar at City College, Burns’ thought-provoking lecture focuses on three artists- Eugene O’Neil, Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol–all subjects of his individual films. He gives insight to the intimacy between a filmmaker and his subject that develops when making a documentary of an artist and his resulting epiphany that art is not opposed to science and real knowledge, but it is perhaps “the highest form of connection to reality that we know.”
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Frank McCourt goes back to Brooklyn-the borough of his birth and first home (for three-and-a-half years) before moving to Ireland with his family. In a delightful conversation with WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate, as part of the ongoing, “Brooklyn on My Mind” series at Brooklyn College, the ever-entertaining author talks about life before the phenomenal success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes.” McCourt reminisces about his many years as a public school teacher living in Cobble Hill and why he is excited about his latest project, “Angela and the Baby Jesus,” a children’s book due out this Christmas.
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As senior vice president of electric operations for Con Edison, John Miksad knows what it’s like to be in the hot seat. Speaking at a Queens College Business Forum breakfast, he discussed the company’s $90 million capital investment to avoid a repeat of last summer’s nine-day blackout in northwest Queens. Miksad explained how cascading events left thousands of customers without power in July and the fixes that have been made to the system. This summer, Miksad says, the utility is prepared for the heat, and lights and air conditioners will stay on.
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As an historian, the mission of Jan Gross has been to force Poland to confront its past. In his book “Neighbors” (a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001), Gross described a pogrom in the small town of Jebwabne, in northeast Poland, where 1,600 Jewish residents were killed, not by Germans, but by native Poles, on a single day in July 1941. A professor of history at Princeton University, Gross is a Polish Jew who immigrated to the U.S. in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. In a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center, Gross discusses his latest work, “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz” and how the brutalities suffered by Jews during the Nazi occupation did not end after World War II.
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In 1884, America’s most famous detective, Allan Pinkerton, dubbed the later half of the 19th century “The Era of Pickpockets.” Author Timothy Gilfoyle, speaking at the CUNY Graduate Center about his book “A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld Nineteen-Century New York,” tells how a skilled “dipper” could steal in one night what an average worker would earn in a year. Gilfoyle’s lens into this criminal subculture of yesteryear is the memoir of George Appo, a career criminal, opium addict and three-time Sing Sing convict. Gilfoyle unearthed the Appo memoir while researching an earlier book, “City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.”
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One of the most important and prolific playwrights of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams, is primarily known for his earlier works, including “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1948) and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), both Pulitzer Prize-winning plays that were made into films. But, according to New York City College Technology English professor Annette Saddik, it is his later works that deserve a fresh look. Saddik, the editor of “The Traveling Companion and Other Plays: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams (coming out next year) and the college’s 2007 Scholar on Campus, explains in her lecture, “Transforming Madness into Meaning” that Williams was ahead of his time and displayed the tragicomic style that would be seen in the type of drama being done in the 1960’s and 1970’s by Pinter, Beckett and Albee. “He was moving into a different kind of dramatic style, with more reliance on visuals than language, very experimental.”
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The mood on the final day of the fifth annual CUNY/Daily News Citizenship Now! Call-in was celebratory as a record-number of callers were brought a step closer on their path to citizenship. Sofia Carreño, communications coordinator of the Citizenship and Immigration Project, said approximately 10,000 people had already phoned this week, with more expected on Friday, to receive free information regarding citizenship and immigration. Also, Allan Wernick reflects on the event’s success and how the project’s hard working staff and committed volunteers made it all happen.
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped by on the third day of the CUNY/Daily News Citizenship Now! Call-in and only had good words for the newest New Yorkers, referring to the city’s hardworking undocumented immigrants as “exactly the kinds of people we want.” Allan Wernick comments on the mayor’s visit and answers other questions along with Kymete Kodra-Gashi, special coordinator of the CUNY Citizenship and Immigration Project.
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