Newsmakers

Asleep on the job? Dr. Sara Mednick ’95, Bard alumna and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, says that could be a good thing for productivity. Speaking with Discover magazine, Mednick shared insights into the cognitive benefits of naps, which “benefit everything that nighttime sleep helps, including emotional regulation, attention, alertness, motor function and memory.” The length and timing of a nap also impacts its effects on our well-being, with higher benefits from naps before 1 pm, leading many companies and universities to create “designated sleeping pods to allow students and employees to nap whenever they need to.” Building off of findings from a 2018 paper coauthored by Mednick, Discover outlines that while “the benefits of napping may vary across different individuals,” given their many cognitive benefits, it might be time to reconsider how naps fit into our personal and professional lives.

For her “lyrical and haunting” Senior Project, I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, Alice Fall ’22 won second place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards. “In Alice Falls’s I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, images are alive, the still photographs aren’t still,” writes Alexa Dilworth. Fall will receive $750 as well as a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge as part of the prize package. In an interview with Lenscratch, Fall described her process and artistic philosophy. “When I am in tune with my body and emotion and the way I physically respond to an image—whether I am making work or engaging with images I’ve already made, my vision is sharpest,” she said.

Micah Gleason GCP ’21, VAP ’22 is currently the music director and conductor on a project in residency at the cell theatre in Manhattan. The Final Veil is a new movement chamber opera based on the true story of Franceska Mann, a Polish-Jewish ballet and burlesque dancer who was captured by the Nazis and used her skills as a dancer to attempt to escape. It was composed by JL Marlor and co-conceived with dancer/director Cassandra Rosebeetle. The show also includes two current VAP students, Abby Cheng and Katherine Lerner-Lee.

Performances are July 14–31, on Thursday Friday, Saturday at 8pm, and Sunday at 5pm at the cell theatre. Book tickets and learn more here.
 

“How can we find such camaraderie in the very thing that so often slights us?” asks Joe Vallese ’04 MAT ’05, editor of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, calls the anthology “full of surprises.” Comprised of 25 essays on horror from contemporary queer authors, including 2018 Bard Fiction Prize winner Carmen Maria Machado, “the pieces are a brilliant display of expert criticism, wry humor, and original thinking.” Awarding it a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly says “there’s not a weak piece in the pack.” It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror will be published October 4, 2022, by Feminist Press and is available for preorder now.

“Sophocles had no trouble with structure,” writes Mary Norris for the New Yorker, struggling to find a way into her own tale. Taking a page from the late John Bennet, her friend and longtime editor for the New Yorker, Norris started at the beginning, telling the story of her trip to see Antigone with Bennet before his recent death. The Senior Project of Francis Karagodins ’22, Antigone, based on an original translation by Karagodins, was staged outdoors at Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, the sculpture park and museum created by the late Bard professor and alumnus Harvey Fite ’30. “The setting was evocative: birdsong and scudding clouds at twilight, with the mountains for a backdrop,” Norris writes. While Bennet was studied in the play, Norris found herself more unfamiliar, and as such found Tiresias’s entrance to be the play’s most startling development. “While the other performers all seemed afraid of stumbling on the paving stones (Fite actually died of a fall in his own quarry), Tiresias alone, blind and urgent, had a motive to place each foot squarely on the earth.” Shortly after the two saw Antigone, Bennet was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “Two weeks later, on July 9, he died, at home,” Norris writes, “releasing a great commingling of sadness and gratitude among family and friends, our lives graven where his plow had gone.”

Ahead of the release of his new documentary, Endangered, Ronan Farrow ’04 spoke with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show about the threats facing journalists worldwide. In the United States, journalists are facing threats of violence for their reporting, spurred by authoritarian figures framing them as the enemy of the people—a tactic that, while not new, as Farrow notes, is nonetheless troubling when it comes to the health of our democracy. “We need more and better reporting in communities around this country. We need to support our journalists,” he said. “Otherwise, we're going to have people who are in this state of rage, who are very manipulable by these political leaders, who want to deploy these authoritarian arguments.” Endangered, which follows four journalists and the dangers they face in their work, is streaming now on HBO Max.

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Stream Endangered on HBO Max

“Universities have a role to play in humanizing refugees and helping them establish new lives in new countries,” writes Rebecca Granato ’99, associate vice president for global initiatives at Bard College and the director of the Open Society University Network (OSUN) Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives. In an essay for Times Higher Education, Granato offers four simple ways universities can support displaced persons and students, using OSUN as an example of the efficacy of collaboration across networks. Alongside collective advocacy for expanded visa access, university networks like OSUN can “share best practices and develop new approaches to admitting and supporting refugee students, leverage their collective strength to advocate with governments for safe and durable solutions, and share both financial and human resources.” “There is strength in numbers,” Granato writes, “and university collaborations demonstrate this when it comes to supporting displaced youth in accessing higher education.”