Richard Yang, professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Friday, Oct. 12, 2018, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He was 93.

Born in Shensi, China, in 1924, Yang earned a bachelor’s degree from the National Central University in Nanking in 1946; a master’s degree from the University of Oregon in Eugene in 1954; and a doctorate from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1964, all in political science.  He became an American citizen the following year.

Yang taught at Yale University and the University of Colorado before joining the Washington University faculty in 1964. He was appointed full professor in 1977 and emeritus professor in 1988. From 1977-79, he served as president of the American Association for Chinese Studies. The university recently established The Stanley Spector and Richard Yang Undergraduate Student Awards, which support travel for undergraduates interested in deepening their understanding of East Asian languages and cultures.

Yang was author and editor of several books, including “Arthur H. Vandenberg and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1966), “The Chinese World” (1978), “The World of Asia” (1979), “Chinese Regionalism: The Security Dimension” (1994) and “China’s Military in Transition” (with David L. Shambaugh, 1997).

Yang is survived by his four children, Nigel, Wei-Li, Hwai-Li and Nien-Li; and by five grandchildren: Jeffrey Cameron, Jennifer, Madison and Sofie.

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Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive the 2018 Tradition of Literary Excellence Award.

Created in 2014 by the University City Municipal Commission on Arts & Letters, the award honors “the work of a living local author whose literary achievement has won national and international acclaim and, in so doing, has contributed to the distinction of the St. Louis area, upholding its tradition as a center of literary excellence.”

The award ceremony will begin at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 27, on the fifth floor of University City’s historic city hall, 6801 Delmar Blvd. Tickets — which cover beverage, reception and live music — are $25 per person, or $40 per couple, and may be purchased at at www.brownpapertickets.com. For more information, contact Winnie Sullivan, penultim@swbell.net or 314-447-3888.

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Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist, will discuss the estimated half-trillion-dollar cost of the nation’s opioid crisis in the inaugural Murray Weidenbaum Memorial Lecture at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12, in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom.

The lecture, sponsored by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, is free and open to the public. Registration is not required, but registrants will receive driving directions, parking instructions and other information prior to the event.

Krueger will discuss his highly cited work on “economics and the opioid crisis” and provide insight into how the crisis has affected the U.S. workforce. The Council of Economic Advisers estimates the national economic cost of opioid abuse reached more than half a trillion dollars in 2015, a year in which 33,091 opioid-involved overdose deaths were reported in the United States.

Krueger served as chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and as a Cabinet member from 2011-13. He also served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist of the U.S. Treasury Department in 2009-10 and as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994-95.

The memorial lecture is intended to be an annual event honoring Weidenbaum, the center’s namesake and founding director and a member of the university’s economics faculty from 1964 until his death in 2014.

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Bob Criss wants you to get your feet wet.

Criss has championed the Mississippi, Missouri and Meramec rivers, among others, in more than 25 years of work in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

His research focused national attention on local problems such as flooding and floodplain development. At times, he was considered a vocal critic of the Army Corps of Engineers. Above all, Criss took on some of the toughest issues relating to floods caused by man: channelization; flood risk; levee construction. He navigated them head-on, in the St. Louis region and beyond.

And Criss thinks that St. Louisans have been missing out.

“We’re way too isolated from our rivers, and that’s a heck of a mistake for this region,” Criss said. “This place is the best place in the world to look at and study rivers. We have more rivers — and a bigger disparity of size, management and natural qualities — than anywhere in the world.”

“These are marvelous parts of our natural resources, and we should embrace that,” he said.

With paddling power supplied by Big Muddy Adventures, Criss recently took an 8-mile, morning-long trip from the Columbia Bottom conservation area around Confluence Point.

“Rivers are still relevant, but we should change our thinking about our relationship to them, the economic possibilities,” Criss said. “We’re still thinking about what we did in relationship to the past — thinking that we’re still in a steamboat age, where river traffic is the only thing that matters. These are bad ideas. There is greater benefit to revising our thinking.”

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Today, more than 1 billion people live in informal cities — a number expected to double by mid-century. It is the most pressing urban design challenge of our time.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch its 2018 Informal Cities Workshop at 12:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, with a free talk by a Brazilian architect taking on that challenge, Jorge Mario Jáuregui.

“Jorge is one of the best practicing architects in the field,” said Matthew Bernstine, lecturer in urban design, who is organizing the event in collaboration with John Hoal, professor and chair of urban design and of architecture, and sustainable urbanism doctoral candidates Andrea Godshalk, Wei Liu and Andrew Wang.

“As founder and project director at Atelier Metropolitano in Rio de Janeiro, his work is at the forefront of upgrading and integrating Rio’s favelas into the city’s broader social, political and economic systems,” Bernstine added. “Not only is he transforming the way we design space, but also the way we invite people to participate in that process.”

Atelier Metropolitano

Atelier Metropolitano is a multidisciplinary firm specializing in public-interest projects located in formal and informal urban areas. The firm includes engineers, sociologists, legal specialists and cultural and communication consultants working under the guidance of a design team. Their projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, among many others. Honors include the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University and the Grand Prize at the Bienal Internacional de Arquitetura de São Paulo.

Informal Cities Workshop

Launched in 2014, the Informal Cities Workshop provides students with an intensive, hands-on opportunity to grapple with frictions and interconnections that exist between the informal and the formal aspects of the city. The annual workshop consists of a keynote lecture, which is free and open to the public, followed by a one-credit, weekend-long design charrette. Previous workshops have explored conditions in Lima, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Tijuana.

The Informal Cities Workshop is co-sponsored by the Sam Fox School and the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences as part of The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative. Jáuregui’s talk will take place in Givens Hall’s Kemp Auditorium. For more information, visit samfoxschool.wustl.edu.

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David L. Kirk, professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018, at Dougherty Ferry Assisted Living in St. Louis after a long illness. He was 84.

Kirk, who was an active and passionate member of the university community for nearly 50 years, spent a lifetime teaching developmental biology and researching the evolutionary origins of multicellular organisms. He was internationally known for his research on the spherical green alga known as Volvox carteri.

Kirk joined the biology faculty as an assistant professor in 1969, becoming a full professor in 1979. He served as acting dean of the Graduate School in 1979-1980.

In retirement, he worked to advance K-12 science education by improving the way evolution is taught in schools. For years, he was involved with the university’s Institute for School Partnership (ISP), and its precursor, Science Outreach.

He served as a faculty fellow for the ISP, committing not only his time but his money. He supplied books for the ISP’s evolution education book club and facilitated the discussion groups. He also helped lead the annual Darwin Day celebration, and he funded the David and Marilyn Kirk Teacher Fellowship, which supports a local leader in evolution education.

“He is an irreplaceable friend and colleague, and an intellectual tour de force, whose loss leaves an enormous hole,” said Victoria L. May, ISP’s executive director. “David will be remembered as a dedicated mentor to a huge number of school teachers in the St. Louis area, giving freely of his time, advice and expertise.”

Heather Essig, who teaches sixth-grade science and AP biology at Visitation Academy and is a former ISP Kirk Teacher Fellow, said hundreds of students in the St. Louis area have been enriched by programs Kirk supported.

“Schools throughout St. Louis owe him a great debt for enriching evolution education in many schools by helping teachers explore current advances in evolution science. Because of his efforts, teachers have engaged countless budding scientists,” Essig said.

Kirk’s passion for science education continued up until his death. He was awarded the 2018 Science Educator Award by the Academy of Science-St. Louis.

Kirk earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Northeastern University in 1956 and a master’s in biochemistry and a doctoral degree in biochemistry and physiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1959 and 1961, respectively.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Marilyn M. Kirk, research associate in biology in Arts & Sciences from 1971-1995 and a lecturer in biology in 1972 and 1974. He is survived by a son, Randolph Kirk, of Flagstaff, Ariz.

Learn more about David Kirk in this ISP profile, published in January 2017.

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In the age of social media and reality TV, what does it mean to be “authentic”?

So asks senior Grace Haselhorst in “The Realness.” Thyrsus, Washington University’s student-run experimental theater group, will debut the play Nov. 9-11.

Here, Haselhorst who wrote and directs the show, discusses playwriting, “The Realness” and the rewards of seeing your work on stage.

Thyrsus is known for its annual “Day of Shame” playwriting competition. You serve as co-president for the group, along with senior Catey Midla. What’s your background in drama?

Almost everything I know about theater, I learned through my involvement with Thyrsus. In high school, I had the opportunity to take some drama classes, including a playwriting class, but I wasn’t directly involved in the production process and had a pretty limited understanding of what theater could be.

But at WashU, I’ve been involved with a Thyrsus show every semester since I arrived. These experiences have informed so many of the creative decisions I’ve made as a director.

What do you find most rewarding about theater? What’s most difficult?

Theater is a collaborative art form, and that’s what I love about it. Many of my writing professors have told me that placing restrictions on yourself can serve as a catalyst for creativity. In student theater, we’re working with limited time, limited resources and sometimes, frankly, limited knowledge. I love working through these challenges and finding solutions that make the play better.

“The Realness” was selected for full production after winning Thyrsus’s annual Thyrmpetition. Tell us about the play.

“The Realness” explores the commodification of emotion. There are some scenes inspired by reality TV, and others that are more conceptual in nature, but the primary story follows a relationship between two college students. It’s a story about being young. My hope is that our audience — which is mostly WashU students — sees or hears something that reflects their own experiences.

But my greatest hope is that the many people who made this show possible — the cast, crew, designers and Thyrsus board —  feel that they’ve made something they can be proud of.

As a playwright, what do you learn from actually staging the work? How do things change when you hand the script over to the cast?

“The Realness” has evolved a great deal, and everyone involved can claim a degree of creative ownership. They’ve asked interesting questions, engaged in thoughtful discussions and thought of things that wouldn’t have occurred to me. I’m so grateful for how the writing, rehearsal and design processes have overlapped and informed one another.

The cast and crew have been generous and enthusiastic, sharing their creativity and sharp insights. The play is so much better for their involvement.

It’s a team sport.

Performances of “The Realness” begin at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 9 and 10; and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 10 and 11. Tickets are $5 and are available in the Danforth University Center from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the week before the show.

Performances take place at 6128 Waterman Blvd. For more information, visit Thyrsus on Facebook.

Day of Shame 2018

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With an estimated $8.5 billion spent on political ads for the 2018 midterm elections, many Americans relished the arrival of election day simply because it meant an end to the torturous and emotionally exhausting barrage of political attack ads and news coverage.

While advertising and campaign rhetoric are intended to get voters to the polls, ongoing social and political psychology research suggests that emotions such as anger, fear, disgust and disillusionment can have dramatically different effects on voter apathy and turnout, said Alan Lambert, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The idea of anger as a mover and shaker is interesting to consider in the context of politics,” Lambert said. “For one thing, anger — unlike most other emotions, such as fear or sadness — is an ‘approach’ emotion, one that motivates people to act on, and fix, perceived problems in our environment.

“Translate that quality to the realm of politics, and you would expect that anger would be a strong motivator for people to vote. In fact, this is exactly what a recent line of research in our lab shows. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, it is the people who are angry about politics who report the strongest intention to vote. Notably, the anger effect is much stronger than fear.”

It’s no secret that anger may be behind America’s renewed interest in voting, but to truly understand the political consequences of anger, one needs to ask what people are angry about, Lambert said.

“The anger effects we’re finding emerge most clearly when this emotion is relatively focused,” he said. “When anger is focused on a particular set of perceived wrongdoings by a group or a person, this is the feeling that motivates people to vote. When liberals are angry about Republicans, this is when anger swings into action. Likewise, when conservatives are angry about Democrats, ditto. However, a more global sense of anger at ‘politics in general’ generally has the opposite effect.”

Lambert’s own research reveals a fairly large percentage of Americans who are angry about the bickering and contentiousness of politics.

“Here, we find an aspect of anger that is a bit closer to disgust,” he said. “In this case, we find that this anger/disgust brew pushes people away, not toward, voting. Disgust is more akin to other types of negative feelings: Unlike anger, disgust is an avoidance emotion.”

The news media has focused a lot of attention on the intense anger that liberals feel toward President Donald Trump and the “Trump agenda.” Lambert found plenty of evidence of this in his own work. This raises a question: If liberals were so angry, why wasn’t there a bigger “blue wave” in this year’s midterm?

Democrats took back the House, but why didn’t they take back the Senate, too? Several factors are responsible here, but here’s one clue: Turns out, conservatives are really angry as well. For example, one of the more common responses that Lambert found among conservatives is anger towards liberals for mocking the president, and a feeling that their voices are not being heard by media elites (read: major news outlets other than Fox News).

Bottom line: Anger will motivate everyone to vote regardless of their partisan leanings, provided that it is focused on one or more specific instances of perceived injustice.

“Most people intuitively regard anger as a deeply unpleasant feeling that should be managed and controlled. Or, better yet, not to be experienced at all,” Lambert said. “As counterintuitive as this may seem however, anger also has some strong upsides. This is particularly true when we look more closely at the dynamics of justice. When people perceive an injustice in the world, anger supplies people with the motivational ‘push’ to rectify perceived injustices and motivates them to do something about such infractions.

“If it weren’t for anger, we would observe injustices in a relatively passive way,” he said. “Stated another way, anger is the opposite of apathy.

“Of course, different people see the world in different ways: The kinds of injustices that liberal see — and hence, what makes them angry — is very different from that of conservatives. So both groups see injustice, and both are angry. But they see different injustices, and hence they are angry about different things. This ends up motivating them in different ways, including who they end up voting for.”

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David Charbonneau, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, will deliver the annual Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, in Whitaker Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The talk, titled “How to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet,” is free and open to the public.

The NASA Kepler Mission taught scientists that Earth-sized planets are commonplace throughout the galaxy. But did life take root on any of these distant worlds? Charbonneau’s talk will describe how astronomers plan to use upcoming large telescopes to search the atmospheres of Earth-like planets for the telltale chemical fingerprints of life.

Since arriving at Harvard in 2004, Charbonneau’s research has focused on detection and characterization of extrasolar planets, with the goal of studying inhabited worlds. Charbonneau leads the MEarth Project and is a member of the NASA Kepler Mission team. Each of these projects aims to detect Earth-like planets that might be suitable abodes for life beyond the solar system.

The lecture is organized by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences in memory of Robert M. Walker, the center’s inaugural director from 1975 to 1999. Walker was a pioneering physicist who shaped research in the space sciences worldwide.

The McDonnell Center, established in 1975 through a gift from aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, is a consortium of Washington University faculty, research staff and students primarily from the departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Physics, both in Arts & Sciences, who are working on the cutting edge of space research.

For more information, contact Jan Foster at 314-935-5332 or janf@wustl.edu.

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Erin McGlothlin, associate professor of German, and Anika Walke, assistant professor of history, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, served as conference hosts for “Lessons and Legacies XV,” the premier intellectual gathering in Holocaust studies.

Founded in 1989, the biennial conference is organized by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, in partnership with a host university. This year’s conference, titled “The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives,” took place in St. Louis Nov. 1-4. Events included a keynote lecture by Omer Bartov, of Brown University, and a screening of Roberta Grossman’s film “Who Will Write Our History? The Secret Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

In all, more than 300 scholars attended hundreds of talks, dozens of panel discussions and other events held at the Sheraton Clayton Plaza and on Washington University’s Danforth Campus. University sponsors included the Office of the Provost; Arts & Sciences; the International and Area Studies program; the departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, and Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; the Center for the Humanities; and Olin Business School.

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How predictable is evolution? The answer long has been debated by biologists grappling with the extent to which history affects the repeatability of evolution.

A review published in the Nov. 9 issue of Science explores the complexity of evolution’s predictability in extraordinary detail. In it, researchers from Kenyon College, Michigan State University and Washington University in St. Louis closely examine evidence from a number of empirical studies of evolutionary repeatability and contingency in an effort to fully interrogate ideas about contingency’s role in evolution.

The question of evolution’s predictability was notably raised by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who advocated the view that evolution is contingent and unrepeatable in his 1989 book “Wonderful Life”. “Replay the tape a million times …  and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again,” Gould mused, noting that being able to “replay the tape” and give history a do-over would be impossible.

Yet since the publication of “Wonderful Life”, many evolutionary biologists have taken up this challenge and conducted their own versions of Gould’s experiment, albeit on smaller scales. In doing so, they have reached different conclusions about the interplay between randomness of mutations, chance historical events, and directionality imparted by natural selection.

“How history plays out isn’t really predictable. Historical outcomes are contingent on long chains of events loaded with tiny little details,” said Zachary Blount, senior research associate at Michigan State and a visiting assistant professor of biology at Kenyon, and lead author of the review. “Unlike history, though, evolution has the deterministic force of natural selection, but that determinism is always in tension with the chanciness. How does that tension affect what evolves? Which is more important: contingency on details of history, or determinism?”

Assisting Blount in the research was Richard Lenski of Michigan State and Jonathan Losos, the William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor at Washington University and professor of biology in Arts & Sciences.

The researchers focused primarily on three types of “replay studies”: laboratory evolution experiments with fast-evolving organisms — notably, the long-term evolution experiment with E. coli, started by Lenski in 1988; experiments that attempt to replicate evolution in natural settings; and experiments that compare lineages that evolved under similar conditions.

As an example of the third kind of replay, Losos has worked extensively with the anole lizards of the Caribbean, which separately evolved traits such as the length of their legs and tails to ease life in specific habitats.

What emerges in the review in Science is a complex picture of evolutionary change in which both contingency and determinism are evident.

“What we clearly see is that both convergence and lack of convergence occur a lot in the natural world,” said Losos, who also serves as director of the Living Earth Collaborative. “It’s not useful just to keep adding to the two lists. The real question that people are now turning to is: Why does convergence occur sometimes and not others? That is where research is now headed. That’s the question we need to focus on.”

Read the full story at Kenyon College: Replaying the tape of life: Is it possible? Evolutionary biologists explore the role of history in evolution

Read the review: Contingency and determinism in evolution: Replaying life’s tape

Funding: This review was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Michigan State University and Harvard University.

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Keith Hengen, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was selected by the Allen Institute as a 2018 Next Generation Leader. Hengen is one of six early-career neuroscientists who will participate in a special advisory council for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute. He will serve a three-year term on the advisory council.

“The idea behind the Next Generation Leaders Program is to bring in new ideas and foster collaborations and connections with our own scientists,” said Julie Harris, associate director of neuroanatomy at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and chair of the Next Generation Leader Committee. “In the five years since this program launched, many of us at the Allen Institute have benefitted from their insight on our research.”

Next Generation Leaders are selected each year through a competitive process that includes applications from around the world. This year, the six Next Generation Leaders come from universities and research institutes in the U.S., Canada and Germany.

The Allen Institute, an independent, nonprofit medical research organization, is dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease.

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Grandma: I sent you a hundred dollars but you sent it back. Why?
Hiro: Because. You need the money more than I do.

Hiro is young and successful, making a life in New York, a world away from her old Kentucky home. But when her little sister, Sophie, decides to get married — at age 22, to a born-again Christian she’s only just met — Hiro leaps into action, determined to stop the wedding.

In “Kentucky,” playwright Leah Nanako Winkler brings a shrewd eye and gentle touch to themes of love, identity and cultural division. Washington University’s Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present the slyly funny, coming-of-age tale Nov. 15-18.

“The family thinks Hiro is coming home to be maid of honor,” said Ron Himes, the Henry E. Hampton, Jr. Artist-in-Residence, who direct the cast of 16. “But Hiro thinks Sophie’s marriage is the worst possible thing in the world, a total disaster.

“For Hiro, this is a rescue mission.”

‘Bizarro-world’

 Like Hiro, Winkler was born in Japan, raised in Lexington, Ky., and currently lives in New York, where she launched Everywhere Theatre Group in 2008. And though “Kentucky,” was inspired by her own sister’s wedding, Winkler insists the play is not autobiographical.

“It started from a place of reality, but the events that take place aren’t real,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like a Bizarro-world version of my life.”

The story begins with a warning from Hiro’s therapist, Larry. “You’re about to make a big, huge, self-destructive mistake,” he says of her (anti-)wedding plans. “I’ll write you a prescription.” Touching down in Lexington, Hiro confronts her abusive father, hooks up with former boyfriend Adam and generally attempts to argue the world into submission. But argument only gets you so far, and Hiro quickly learns that the old folks back at home have thoughts and opinions of their own.

“Kentucky is a lot more diverse than we might imagine,” Himes pointed out, “and we see a lot of characters we don’t usually see on stage.” For example, the three leads – Hiro, Sophie and their mom — are Asian-American, and Sophie’s fiancé and pastor are African-American. “There’s even a talking cat,” he added with a laugh.

“Hiro has made herself a New Yorker, but Sophie is very committed to her conversion,” Himes continued. “It’s the choice she made, and the path she feels she was meant to find.

“Ultimately, what we see is a reverence for Kentucky from the people who consider it home.”

Cast and crew

The cast is led by Madison Lee as Hiro and Zoe Liu as Sophie. Alice Nguyen and Dominic Bottom are their parents, Masako and James. Dwayne McCowan plays Da’Ran, Sophie’s fiancé. Donovan Duggins and Jenise Sheppard are Da’Ran’s parents, Ernest and Amy.

Marek Rodriguez is Larry, Hiro’s therapist. Ebby Offord, Sarah Willis and Louis Gordon are Hiro’s high school friends Nicole, Laura and Adam. Grandma is played by Helen Fox. Emma Flannery, Barri Levitt and Brylie Noe are the bridesmaids. Natalie Thurman is Sylvie, the talking cat.

Sets and costumes are by Chris Cumberbach and Nikki Glaros. Lighting is by Sean Savoie. Justin Wright is assistant director. Stage manager is Isaac Simmons, with assistance from Rickeia Coleman. Dramaturg is Kaia Lyons. Props designer is Emily Frei.

Tickets

“Kentucky” begins at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Nov. 15, 16 and 17; and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 17 and 18. Performances take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.

PAD shows are free for Washington University undergraduate, graduate and University College students (enrolled in a degree program). Tickets for spouses, partners and family members of graduate students may be purchased at regular price. The free student tickets are not available online but can be picked up at the Edison Theatre Box Office Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

Regular tickets are $20, or $15 for students, children, seniors and Washington University faculty and staff. Tickets are available through the Edison box office.

For more information, call 314-935-6543.

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“Stan Lee was a man of contradictions: self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating; a great collaborator and someone who took credit for others’ work; hugely successful except when his endeavors crashed in failure. But unlike the superheroes, neither side was secret.”

So argues comics scholar Peter Coogan, lecturer in American culture studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre” (2002). For example, Coogan points out that for all his self-promotional bluster, Lee, who died Nov. 12, established the industry practice of crediting a book’s entire artistic team — writer, artist, inker, letter and colorist — on the splash page.

“It’s important to remember that Lee was co-creator of his characters, primarily working with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko,” Coogan said. “In a comics’ version of the auteur theory, it’s the artist who makes the comics — until they are drawn, they aren’t comics — and Lee was no artist.

“It’s hard to know what each contributed,” Coogan said. “The process was never as clean as Lee portrayed it, with him providing inspiration and direction and the artist merely fulfilling his vision. It’s well-understood that Kirby and Ditko created characters, plotted stories and sometimes wrote dialogue.”

But without Lee, “neither of these master craftsmen and creative geniuses was ever able to reach the same heights. Their work never had the same effervescence. Kirby in particular continued to spawn concepts and characters that shape our lives today — cell phones are real-life ‘motherboxes,’ from his Fourth World series at DC — and yet those stories don’t sing the same as his collaborations with Lee.

“And Lee’s work from 1970 on also felt flat, as did his efforts to turn Marvel into a source of Hollywood gold — though that vision came true with Kevin Feige taking a role at Marvel Studios that is analogous to Lee’s role in the Silver Age at Marvel. Lee’s genius was promotion, including self-promotion. His vision of the ‘Bullpen’, the ‘House of Ideas’ and the ‘Mighty Marvel Marching Society’ created an imaginary space where we could all feel a part of something special.”

Coogan met Lee in the 1990s, interviewing him for a college paper about teenage superheroes, and later edited the collection “What Is a Superhero” (2013), to which Lee contributed. He recalls one year at the St. Louis Comic Con, when he asked Lee whether Olaf Stapledon’s 1935 novel “Odd John,” about a balding telepathic mutant who works to protect younger mutants in a world that fears them, or William H. Shiras’ 1953 “Children of the Atom,” which focuses on mutant children living in a boarding school, had influenced creation of the X-Men.

“He claimed that he had never heard of them,” Coogan said. “Then, moments later,  another con attendee asked about his inspiration for the X-Men, and Lee boomed out, ‘Didn’t you hear that last question? I stole them!’

“And the audience laughed.”

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Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench.

The observations from the deepest ocean trench in the world have important implications for the global water cycle, according to researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“People knew that subduction zones could bring down water, but they didn’t know how much water,” said Chen Cai, who recently completed his doctoral studies at Washington University. Cai is the first author of the study published in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Nature.

“This research shows that subduction zones move far more water into Earth’s deep interior — many miles below the surface — than previously thought,” said Candace Major, a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the study. “The results highlight the important role of subduction zones in Earth’s water cycle.”

“Previous estimates vary widely in the amount of water that is subducted deeper than 60 miles,” said Douglas A. Wiens, the Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and Cai’s research adviser for the study. “The main source of uncertainty in these calculations was the initial water content of the subducting uppermost mantle.”

To conduct this study, researchers listened to more than one year’s worth of Earth’s rumblings — from ambient noise to actual earthquakes — using a network of 19 passive, ocean-bottom seismographs deployed across the Mariana Trench, along with seven island-based seismographs. The trench is where the western Pacific Ocean plate slides beneath the Mariana plate and sinks deep into the Earth’s mantle as the plates slowly converge.

The new seismic observations paint a more nuanced picture of the Pacific plate bending into the trench — resolving its three-dimensional structure and tracking the relative speeds of types of rock that have different capabilities for holding water.

Bringing water down

Rock can grab and hold onto water in a variety of ways.

Ocean water atop the plate runs down into the Earth’s crust and upper mantle along the fault lines that lace the area where plates collide and bend. Then it gets trapped. Under certain temperature and pressure conditions, chemical reactions force the water into a non-liquid form as hydrous minerals — wet rocks — locking the water into the rock in the geologic plate. All the while, the plate continues to crawl ever deeper into the Earth’s mantle, bringing the water along with it.

Previous studies at subduction zones like the Mariana Trench have noted that the subducting plate could hold water. But they could not determine how much water it held and how deep it went.

“Previous conventions were based on active source studies, which can only show the top 3-4 miles into the incoming plate,” Cai said.

He was referring to a type of seismic study that uses sound waves created with the blast of an air gun from aboard an ocean research vessel to create an image of the subsurface rock structure.

“They could not be very precise about how thick it is, or how hydrated it is,” Cai said. “Our study tried to constrain that. If water can penetrate deeper into the plate, it can stay there and be brought down to deeper depths.”

An important part of Earth’s water cycle

The seismic images that Cai and Wiens obtained show that the area of hydrated rock at the Mariana Trench extends almost 20 miles beneath the seafloor — much deeper than previously thought.

The amount of water that can be held in this block of hydrated rock is considerable.

For the Mariana Trench region alone, four times more water subducts than previously calculated. These features can be extrapolated to predict the conditions under other ocean trenches worldwide.

“If other old, cold subducting slabs contain similarly thick layers of hydrous mantle, then estimates of the global water flux into the mantle at depths greater than 60 miles must be increased by a factor of about three,” Wiens said.

And for water in the Earth, what goes down must come up. Sea levels have remained relatively stable over geologic time, varying by less than 1,000 feet. This means that all of the water that is going down into the Earth at subduction zones must be coming back up somehow, and not continuously piling up inside the Earth.

Scientists believe that most of the water that goes down at the trench comes back from the Earth into the atmosphere as water vapor when volcanoes erupt hundreds of miles away. But with the revised estimates of water from the new study, the amount of water going into the earth seems to greatly exceed the amount of water coming out.

“The estimates of water coming back out through the volcanic arc are probably very uncertain,” said Wiens, who hopes that this study will encourage other researchers to reconsider their models for how water moves back out of the Earth. “This study will probably cause some re-evaluation.”

Moving beyond the Mariana Trench, Wiens along with a team of other scientists has recently deployed a similar seismic network offshore in Alaska to consider how water is moved down into the Earth there.

“Does the amount of water vary substantially from one subduction zone to another, based on the kind of faulting that you have when the plate bends?” Wiens asked. “There’s been suggestions of that in Alaska and in Central America. But nobody has looked at the deeper structure yet like we were able to do in the Mariana Trench.”

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Helmet-heads of the freshwater fish world, African mormyrid fishes are known for having a brain-to-body size ratio that is similar to humans.

But there’s actually a great deal of variation in the size of mormyrid brains. These differences provide an opportunity to look at what’s behind the bulk.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have mapped the regions of the brain in mormyrid fish in extremely high detail. In a new study published in the Nov. 15 issue of Current Biology, they report that the part of the brain called the cerebellum is bigger in members of this fish family compared to related fish — and this may be associated with their use of weak electric discharges to locate prey and to communicate with one another.

The size finding in itself is not particularly surprising for those who follow this fish, said Bruce Carlson, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences. “It had almost become a truism,” he said. In mormyrids, at least, the thinking went, “big brains mean big cerebellums.”

Instead, the researchers are charged up about how their new measurements can help illuminate longstanding questions in neuroanatomy.

As brains get bigger, do all regions of the brain scale up in a predictable way? Or does natural selection act independently on separate regions of the brain — such that certain parts of the brain become enlarged in animals that have extra reasons to use them?

“When you look at human brains, the cerebral cortex has become this giant part that has engulfed the other regions of the brain,” said Kimberley V. Sukhum, first author of the new study, who recently completed her PhD in biology at Washington University. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“We see something similar with the cerebellum in the mormyrids,” Sukhum said. “But it wasn’t known how this region had gotten so big — or even if all of the species had a very big cerebellum.”

There are more than 200 species of mormyrids. Some have been studied extensively because of their special electrosensory systems. Researchers long sought answers as to how these fish use electrical pulses for communication and way-finding. Other species in the mormyrid family have been largely ignored.

For this analysis, Carlson and Sukhum chose to compare individuals from six mormyrid species, one species that was considered a close relative, and three other distantly related fish species.

Sukhum and Carlson used micro-CT technology to collect full scans of the soft tissue of the fishes’ brains, then painstakingly identified the landmarks that delineated distinct regions within them. The 3D maps they created allowed them to measure and compare the volume of individual regions of the brain with great precision.

Across all of the fish that they compared, they found that as total brain size increased, the sizes of individual regions within the brain also increased in a predictable fashion. However, with the mormyrids, they found that the size of the cerebellum could not be fully predicted by total brain size.

In other words, electric fish had significantly bigger cerebellums than fish with no zip. Electric fish also had bigger hindbrains than their related, non-electric cousins.

If one part of the brain can be shown to size up or size down independent of other parts of the brain, then neuroanatomists said this is an example of something called mosaic evolution. Mosaic shifts are thought to be relatively rare, and much of the current research on this topic is focused on identifying the kinds of situations in nature where such shifts occur.

“Here, we see the mosaic increases only in the mormyrids, and not in the outgroups,” Sukhum said. “And one of the things that we see in the mormyrids and not the outgroups is the electrosensory system. There is a potential relationship between these two things.”

Some of the mormyrids that they measured had extremely large brains — up to three times bigger than the smallest-brained mormyrids in the study. Despite this difference in total size, there was no evidence of mosaic changes in the cerebellum within the group. This is evidence that mosaic shifts are not just the result of evolving a big brain. Instead, the shifts are likely related to the evolution of novel traits, such as the electrosensory system.

This study cannot say for sure why mormyrids have such big cerebellums — only that they do.

But Carlson has a hunch. He thinks this part of the brain might be doing the lion’s share of the mormyrid’s work with motor planning, and also with how the fish anticipates the sensory feedback it will receive as it moves about and sends out electrical pulses.

“There’s a lot more planning and consequences to deal with than for your average fish,” Carlson said.

Funding provided by NSF IOS 1255396

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Justin Phillip Reed, a 2015 graduate of the MFA Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry. The award is generally considered among the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Reed received the honor for his collection “Indecency” (Coffee House Press, 2018).

“Reed’s visceral and teasingly cerebral debut probes black identity, sexuality, and violence and is inseparably personal and political,” Publisher’s Weekly wrote upon the volume’s release. “He displays a searing sense of injustice about dehumanizing systems, and his speakers evoke the quotidian with formidable eloquence . . .”

Born and raised in South Carolina, Reed earned his bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Tusculum College in Greenville, Tenn. He came to Washington University in 2013, where he served as junior writer-in-residence, eventually earning his master’s in fine arts. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Conversation Literary Festival and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis.

Reed is also author of the chapbook “A History of Flamboyance” (YesYes Books, 2016). His work has appeared in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian and elsewhere. He currently lives in St. Louis, where he organizes the community-based poetry workshop series “Most Folks At Work.”

Read a Q&A with Reed in St. Louis Magazine.

Founded in 1950, the National Book Awards are organized by the National Book Foundation, which is dedicated to celebrating the best literature in America, expanding its audience and ensuring that books have a prominent place in American culture.

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Eleven faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis — the most in a decade-and-a-half — are among 416 new fellows selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.

Samuel Achilefu; Victoria J. Fraser, MD; Robert W. Gereau; Kathleen B. Hall; Joseph Jez; Mark E. Lowe, MD, PhD; Linda Joy Pike; Deborah C. Rubin, MD; L. David Sibley; Lilianna Solnica-Krezel; and Gary Silverman, MD, PhD, are being named fellows in recognition of their distinguished efforts to advance science and its applications. Election as an AAAS fellow is an honor bestowed upon the organization’s members by their peers.

The new fellows are being announced in the Nov. 29 issue of the journal Science, and will be honored Feb. 16 during the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. They are:

Samuel Achilefu, the Michel M. Ter-Pogossian Professor of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of medicine, is being honored for his pioneering contributions to molecular imaging, particularly the development of near-infrared molecular imaging and image-guided surgical resection of cancer, and for his outstanding leadership in the scientific community.

Victoria J. Fraser, MD, the Adolphus Busch Professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at the School of Medicine, is being recognized for her distinguished contributions to the field of hospital epidemiology, particularly for developing strategies to prevent and control hospital-associated infections, adverse events and medical errors.

Robert W. Gereau, the Dr. Seymour and Rose T. Brown Professor of Anesthesiology and director of the Washington University Pain Center at the School of Medicine, was chosen for his contributions to research on determining the cellular and molecular changes that underlie the development of chronic pain conditions.

Kathleen B. Hall, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the School of Medicine, is being honored for her contributions to the field of RNA structure, dynamics and protein interactions.

Joseph Jez, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is being recognized for his contributions to the field of biology, particularly for studies on the molecular basis of biological processes in plants, microbes and nematodes.

Mark E. Lowe, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics and vice chair of clinical affairs and strategic planning in pediatrics at the School of Medicine, was chosen for his contributions to the field of molecular and translational medical science, particularly for elucidating the molecular mechanisms of pancreatic lipases in nutrition and pancreatitis.

Linda Joy Pike, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the School of Medicine, is being honored for her contributions to the field of signal transduction, medical education and the enhancement of the status of women in academic medicine and science.

Deborah C. Rubin, MD, the William B. Kount Professor of Medicine at the School of Medicine, was selected for her contributions in gastroenterology research, particularly with relevance to human short bowel syndrome and colitis-associated colon cancer.

L. David Sibley, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology at the School of Medicine, is being recognized for his contributions to microbial pathogenesis, focusing on the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii through genetic dissection of virulence factors and interactions with host immune defenses.

Lilianna Solnica-Krezel, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Developmental Biology and head of the Department of Developmental Biology at the School of Medicine, is being honored for her contributions to the field of developmental biology, particularly advancing forward genetics to define genetic mechanisms underlying inductive and morphogenetic processes during vertebrate embryogenesis.

Gary Silverman, MD, PhD, the Harriet B. Spoehrer Professor and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, was chosen for his contributions to the field of medical science, particularly for identifying the biological functions of intracellular serpins, for innovative clinical care and for physician-scientist training.

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Dark and light, past and present, movement and stillness.

In “Shadows,” celebrated choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess explores the poignant and sometimes conflicting psychology of our inner emotional landscapes.

On Friday, Nov. 30, Washington University in St. Louis’ Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present “Shadows” as part of “PastForward,” the 2018 Washington University Dance Theatre (WUDT) concert. In all, the performance will feature more than 20 dancers, selected by audition, in seven new and original works by faculty and visiting choreographers.

“In the late 19th  century, the concept of ‘art’ made a radical shift that today remains at the core of the artistic spirit,” said David Marchant, professor of the practice in dance and artistic director for WUDT. “This shift was not just a change of content, but of form, process and perceptual outlook. Painters, composers and choreographers leapt from being craftsmen to pioneers, from technicians to experimental intellectuals at the vanguard of their medium and contemporary culture.

“Today, artists are innovators, activists and community builders working at the leading edge of their craft,” Marchant added. “The works in this concert represent, for each artist, the ways in which they draw from influences and traditions of the past, while also continuing to seek new edges of the art form, and their own way of answering the question, ‘What is dance?’”

Click on images for more about each dance:

Tickets and performances

Performances of “PastForward” begin at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2. Performances take place in Edison Theatre, located in the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.

PAD shows are free for Washington University undergraduate, graduate and University College students (enrolled in a degree program). Tickets for spouses, partners and family members of graduate students may be purchased at regular price. Free student tickets are not available online but can be picked up at the Edison Theatre Box Office Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

Regular tickets are $20, or $15 for seniors, students and Washington University faculty and staff, and are available through the Edison Box Office, 314-935-6543. Tickets are available through the Edison box office.

For more information, call 314-935-6543 or visit pad.wustl.edu.

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In 1963, as public school desegregation battles raged across the South, three of the nation’s most prominent black leaders — Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond and Ralph Abernathy — quietly sought to enroll their own children in several of Atlanta’s most prestigious private schools, elite K-12 institutions, which, until then, had managed to remain all white.

“Our sole purpose in making application,” King stated at the time, “for our son, Martin III, was a sincere attempt to secure for him the best possible secondary education. This was not meant to be any sort of a test case, though we do desire for our son the experience of integrated schooling.”

While King may not have intended the application to be a test case, the school’s decision to deny admission would bring added momentum to forces pushing for the desegregation of elite private schools in Atlanta and elsewhere, suggests Washington University in St. Louis’ Michelle A. Purdy, author of a new book on the young blacks who broke the color barrier at the South’s most prestigious private schools.

The stories of these first black students remain important, Purdy argues, because lessons learned through their experiences are precursors to present efforts to foster diversity and inclusion within private schools and universities.

“In some ways, the book captures the mixing of worlds at a pivotal time in U.S. history because the mixing occurred both voluntarily and, in some ways, involuntarily,” said Purdy, assistant professor of education in Arts & Sciences. “It explores issues of race and identity, diversity and inclusion, education and equity that are as important now as they were then.”

While many historians have explored the bitter court-ordered desegregation of public schools following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the equally dramatic story of the voluntary desegregation of prestigious, traditionally white, private schools remains largely untold.

Purdy’s book, “Transforming The Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools” (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), sets out to fill that void.

Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta’s well-known The Westminster Schools, the book combines social history with policy analysis to recreate this overlooked history. It explores the political and social forces (and threats to tax-exemption) that led these schools to “voluntarily” embrace desegregation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as court-ordered desegregation was being bitterly contested in public schools.

Based on archival research and first-person interviews with former students, Purdy explains how and why elite private schools chose to embrace more black students and how that decision shaped the lives of the young black students who navigated entrenched racism on both institutional and personal levels.

While Westminster was not the first private school to desegregate, it was one of the first nationally recognized schools to face the desegregation challenge in the South. Its prestige and its location in Atlanta set the stage for it to become an influential national leader in private school desegregation.

With a sprawling 180-acre suburban campus and now one of the largest private school endowments in the nation, Westminster long has been an attractive option for Southern families who did not want to send their children to more established boarding schools in the Northeast. Located among luxurious homes in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, the campus was distinguished by its white columns, grand double staircases and vaulted ceilings.

In the early 1960s, Atlanta was itself struggling to establish a new identity. Headquarters to huge corporations such as Coca-Cola, the city billed itself as the “unofficial capital of the New South” and “the city too busy to hate.” Atlanta was eager to avoid the violence that had marred desegregation efforts in other cities, but its culture remained rooted in white Southern traditions.

For King, Bond and Abernathy, all residents of Atlanta and leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1963, their efforts to break the private school color barrier ended with mixed results.

Breaking the barrier

Martin Luther King III was denied access to Atlanta’s Lovett School, causing a rift that led the school to sever its ties with the Episcopal Church, an early proponent of integration. Abernathy’s daughter was unable to pass the admission test to Atlanta’s Trinity private school, but Bond’s daughters were eventually accepted for enrollment there in the spring of 1963.

At Westminster, the color barrier would be broken not by the children of prominent black civil rights leaders, but by a small band of young black men and women from middle-class families who began there in the fall of 1967: Bill Billings, Dawn Clark, Isaac Clark, Janice Kemp, Michael McBay, Jannard Wade and Wanda Ward.

Most of the “fearless firsts” came from families with well-educated parents, including some that worked as teachers at local black colleges and schools. The products of strong education in Atlanta’s segregated black elementary schools, several had scored well enough on admissions tests to be offered scholarships from the Stouffer Foundation, a fund started by a Reynolds tobacco heir to support the education of young black men.

While Westminster opened its doors to black students, some white students were less than welcoming.

On his first day, McBay was forced to hide in the bathroom after being teased and harassed by a group of white students he believed to be football players. Other white students made a habit of putting the empty exoskeletons of emerged locusts (cicadas) in his hair, laughing when he had difficulty removing them from his afro.

The first black students arrived in an atmosphere still dominated by white Southern traditions, including a fall dance in which the school was decorated as a plantation and male students encouraged to dress in Confederate uniforms. The school’s annual Christmas Fund Drive included a slave auction fundraiser.

When the school decided to desegregate its women’s dormitory for the first time in 1970, it told white students to arrive a day early so they could be warned that two black girls would soon join their ranks. The black girls “were different,” they were told, but they should not be “afraid.”

Still, the school’s administration, at times, did its best to make institutional changes to support the desegregation process. It fired the school’s football coach after he used a racial slur to urge the team, including Wade, its first black player, to work harder.

Black students also had strong support from black staff at the school, including the president’s assistant who volunteered to drive Ward across town to southwest Atlanta. Willie Harris, the school’s black athletic trainer and bus driver, was a strong supporter of Wade and other black athletes at the school.

Years later, Purdy interviewed some of the school’s first black students, documenting how they went on to attend top-notch universities and build successful careers.

Dawn Clark enrolled at St. Andrews University and later earned an MBA from the University of Tennessee. McBay, Wade and Ward enrolled at Stanford University, Morehouse College, and Princeton University, respectively.

McBay later earned his medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and trained in emergency medicine nearby at King/Drew Medical Center. Ward earned a doctoral degree at Stanford and taught at the University of Oklahoma before launching a long career at the National Science Foundation.

Although she was not interviewed for the book, another early graduate, Lisa Michelle Borders, would attend Duke University and eventually become vice president of global affairs at Coca-Cola. Borders also was  president of the Women’s National Basketball Association and of the Atlanta City Council.

“The first black students graduated from Westminster having courageously navigated the school’s racist and paradoxical school climate by excelling inside and outside the classroom,” Purdy concludes. “These students relied on their own educational experiences in mostly segregated black schools, their talents inside and outside of the classrooms, their work ethic, their families and communities, and the efforts of particular white and black individuals at Westminster.”

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