+
PAGE 6
MONDAY. DECEMBER 1, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Claremont Colleges student newspaper staff from left, Caroline Bowman, editor-in-chief, Rachel Lang, life and style editor, and managing editors Julia Thomas and Sam McLaughlin chuckle while trying to come up with a headline for the weekly sex column for "The Student Life," newspaper.
GENARO MOLINA/TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE
Sex column thrives at Claremont Colleges
JASON SONG
Tribune News Service
LOS ANGELES — Buried in the back pages of the Claremont Colleges student newspaper, which serves the consortium of five college in California, is a relic from a distant time when Sarah Jessica Parker was still on HBO every week and Facebook didn't exist. There, the student sex column thrives, amid a decline of such columns elsewhere.
Once common in the early 2000s, Carrie Bradshaw-style articles have become rarer, especially in California. USC, UCLA and UC Santa Cruz once published weekly articles that focused on everything from bondage to simple advice, but all have ceased.
"The full-blown, confessional, first-person story seems like it's peaked," said Dan Reimold, a professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia who wrote a book about college sex journalism.
There are several reasons for the decline, Reimold and others say. Many early columnists used HBO's "Sex in the City" as a template, and as the franchise faded from screens, sex columnists did, too. Recently, college sexual assault and rape have become hot-button topics, and some undergraduates say they are reluctant to take a seemingly frivolous approach to a sensitive topic.
Students also are becoming more aware of their digital footprint and are afraid the first thing that will come up when potential future employers Google their name is
a graphic description of their sex lives.
Editors at USC's Daily Trojan recently considered reviving the sex column but found few candidates, said Euno Lee, the paper's editor in chief.
There's definitely a PR concern," said Lee, who added that he gets requests from alumni who ask him to remove stories they wrote as undergraduates from the paper's website. (Daily Trojan editors have a policy of not taking stories down.)
"The full-blown, confessional, first-person story seems like it's peaked."
DAN REIMOLD Professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia
Accounts of students' sexual escapades are still popular on many campuses. The Daily Californian's weekly Sex on Tuesday column is one of the most well-read features at UC Berkeley. One columnist's recounting of her encounters in the library stacks and other academic buildings drew nearly 200,000 page views.
Reimold said he has never heard of a former sex columnist's career being harmed by his past; rather, some have gone on to other high-profile entertainment or media jobs, including writing for the TV show "Gossip Girl."
Elspeth Keller Scott, who wrote a sex and dating column for USC's Daily Trojan
and now writes screenplays, said her columns have never come up in her professional life.
But Keller Scott said she rarely wrote about intimate details. "It was never about what I did last night," she said.
Lara Lowenstein wrote a sex column for the Daily Bruin for two years in the mid-2000s and was concerned that it would come up when she was applying for jobs or to graduate school. But it was never an issue, so "that worry seems to have been unfounded," said Lowenstein, who is working on her doctorate in economics at Brandeis University in Boston.
One reason the Claremont Colleges' sex column may have had such a long run, dating back almost a decade, is that the feature has always been anonymous.
Editors go to great lengths to protect the columnists' identities. Their names aren't included in a staff directory, only their phone numbers. Columnists are invited to the paper's parties, but they don't have to reveal themselves and often just say they are contributors. "Maybe three people on staff know" who it is, said Caroline Bowman, the paper's editor-in-chief.
This year's columnist applied for the job and initially wanted to use her real name. Editors convinced her not to, so she uses a pen name that rhymes with a sex act.
Remaining anonymous "makes it easier for me to express myself," she said, "and it won't come back to bite me in the future."
Reading Harry Potter gives clues to brain activity
LAURAN NEERGAARD Associated Press
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Reading about Harry Potter's adventures learning to fly his broomstick activates some of the same regions in the brain we use to perceive real people's actions and intentions.
In a unique study, scientists who peeked into the brains of people caught up in a good book emerged with maps of what a healthy brain does as it reads.
The research reported Wednesday has implications for studying reading disorders or recovery from a stroke. The team from Carnegie Mellon University was pleasantly surprised that the experiment actually worked.
Most neuroscientists painstakingly have tracked how the brain processes a single word or sentence, looking for clues to language development or dyslexia by focusing on one aspect of reading at a time. But reading a story requires multiple systems working at once: recognizing how letters form a word, knowing the definitions and grammar, keeping up with the characters' relationships and the plot twists.
Measuring all that activity is remarkable, said Georgetown University neuroscientist Guinevere Eden, who helped pioneer brain-scanning studies of dyslexia but wasn't involved in the new work.
"It offers a much richer way
of thinking about the reading brain," Eden said, calling the project "very clever and very exciting."
No turning pages inside a brain-scanning MRI machine; you have to lie still. So at Carnegie Mellon, eight adult volunteers watched for nearly 45 minutes as each word of Chapter 9 of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" was flashed for half a second onto a screen inside the scanner.
Why that chapter? It has plenty of action and emotion as Harry swoops around on his broom, faces the bully Malfoy and later runs into a three-headed dog, but there's not too much going on for scientists to track, said lead researcher Leila Wehbe, a Ph.D. student.
The research team analyzed the scans, second by second, and created a computerized model of brain activity involved with different reading processes. The research was published Wednesday by the journal PLoS One.
"For the first time in history, we can do things like have you read a story and watch where in your brain the neural activity is happening," said senior author Tom Mitchell, director of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department. "Not just where are the neurons firing, but what information is being coded by those different neurons."
Wehbe had the idea to study reading a story rather than just
words or phrases.
But parsing the brain activity took extraordinary effort. For every word, the researchers identified features — the number of letters, the part of speech, if it was associated with a character or action or emotion or conversation. Then they used computer programming to analyze brain patterns associated with those features in every four-word stretch.
They spotted some complex interactions.
For example, the brain region that processes the characters' point of view is the one we use to perceive intentions behind real people's actions. Webbe said. A region that we use to visually interpret other people's emotions helps decipher characters' emotions.
A related study using faster brain-scanning techniques shows that much of the neural activity is about the history of the story up to that point, rather than deciphering the current word, Mitchell added.
That suggests we're using pretty high-level brain functions, not just the semantic concepts but our previous experiences, as we get lost in the story, she said.
The team's computer model can distinguish with 74 percent accuracy which of two text passages matches a pattern of neural activity, he said, calling it a first step as researchers tease apart what the brain does when someone reads.
'Wizard of Oz' Cowardly Lion costume fetches $3M
They were among Hollywood memorabilia offered at Bonhams on Monday.
NEW YORK — The Cowardly Lion costume from the classic film "The Wizard of Oz" and the piano from the movie "Casablanca" each sold for over $3 million at a New York City auction.
The big cat outfit, which went for just over $3 million, had been authenticated as the one Bert Lahr wore in the 1939 film. Its face is a sculpted likeness of the late actor.
A spokesman for costume owner James Comisar says a secondary costume used in the film sold at auction in recent years for close to $1 million.
The upright "Casablanca" piano fetched $3.4 million.
Comisar has a trove of TV memorabilia from shows including "I Love Lucy" and "Lost." He has said he plans to use money from the Cowardly Lion costume sale to exhibit his collection.
Associated Press
RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion costume from "The Wizard of Oz, part of the "There's No Place Like Hollywood" movie memorabilia auction at Bonhams auction house in New York, sold for more than $3 million.
Letter that inspired Kerouac found
JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press
Upon reading them, Kerouac scrapped an early draft of "On The Road" and, during a three-week writing binge, revised his novel into a style similar to Cassady's, one that would become known as Beat literature.
Turns out it wasn't, says Joe Maddalena, whose Southern California auction house Profiles in History is putting the letter up for sale Dec. 17. It was just misplaced, for 60-some years.
LOS ANGELES — It's been called the letter that launched a literary genre — 16,000 amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words written by Neal Cassady to his friend Jack Kerouac in 1950.
The letter, Kerouac said, would have transformed his counterculture muse Cassady into a towering literary figure, if only it hadn't been lost.
It's being offered as part of a collection that includes papers by E.E. Cummings, Kenneth Rexholm, Robert Penn Warren
Kerouac told The Paris Review in 1968 that poet Allen Ginsberg loaned the letter to a friend who lived on a houseboat in Northern California. Kerouac believed the friend then dropped it overboard.
and other prominent literary figures. But Maddalena believes the item bidders will want most is Cassady's 18-page, single-spaced screed describing a drunken, sexually charged, sometimes comical visit to his hometown of Denver.
As for the quality of the letter, Kerouac described it this way: "It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough
That was when the operator of a small, independent music label who shared an office with publisher Richard Emerson came to the rescue. He took every manuscript, letter and receipt in the Golden Goose Archives home with him.
It turns out Ginsberg apparently was trying to get it published when he mailed the letter to Golden Goose Press in San Francisco. There it remained, unopened, until the small publishing house folded.
to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves."
When it did, its owner planned to throw the letter in the trash, along with every other unopened submission he still had in his files.
"It's the seminal piece of literature of the Beat Generation, and there are so many rumors and speculation of what happened to it," Maddalena said.
"My father didn't know who Allen Ginsberg was, he didn't
827 MASSACHUSETTS
The 14th Oldest Jewelry Store in the Country
A TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE SINCE 1880
know Cassady, he wasn't part of the Beat scene, but he loved poetry," said Los Angeles performance artist Jean Spinosa, who found the letter as she was cleaning out her late father's house two years ago. "He didn't understand how anyone would want to throw someone's words out."
Although she knew who Kerouac and Cassady were, Spinosa had never heard of "The Joan Anderson Letter," the name Kerouac gave it for Cassady's description of a woman he'd had a brief romance with.
"It's invaluable," historian and Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally said. "It inspired Kerouac greatly in the direction he wanted to travel, which was this spontaneous style of writing contained in a letter that had just boiled out of Neal Cassady's brain."
785-843-4266
TH
RINGS, WATCHES, CRYSTALS
DIAMONDS, LOOSE & MOUNTED
WEDDING BANDS, JEWELRY, IN
HOUSE WATCH AND CLOCK REPAIR,
FINANCING, SPEED, SERVICE &
CUSTOM DESIGN
markuswurke.net
www.markuswurke.net
For wee
the brea
at t wid
who
Kew Wi
THE HONOR
SOCIETY OF
PHI KAPPA PHI
Featuring Keynote Speaker Stephen W. Mazza, Dean of the KU School of Law
ANNUAL INITIATION 5:30 p.m., Monday, Dec. 1, 2014 Kansas Union Ballroom
New KU initiates into Phi Kappa Phi should assemble in the Kansas Union Parlors at 5 p.m.
The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi is the nation's oldest and most selective honor society for all academic disciplines. More than 114,000 members maintain their active status in Phi Kappa Phi, which affords them numerous benefits associated with dues-paying membership, including access to $1 million in awards and grants each biennium.
Learn more at www.phikappaphi.org
1