Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

From the publisher:
“There may be eight million stories in the Naked City, but there are also nearly three million dwelling places, ranging from Park Avenue palaces to Dickensian garrets and encompassing much in between. The doorways to these residences are tantalizing portals opening onto largely invisible lives. Habitats offers 40 vivid and intimate stories about how New Yorkers really live in their brownstones, their apartments, their mansions, their lofts, and as a whole presents a rich, multi-textured portrait of what it means to make a home in the world’s most varied and powerful city.

“These essays, expanded versions of a selection of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, take readers to both familiar and remote sections of the city—to history-rich townhouses, to low-income housing projects, to out-of-the-way places far from the beaten track, to every corner of the five boroughs—and introduce them to a wide variety of families and individuals who call New York home. These pieces reveal a great deal about the city’s past and its rich store of historic dwellings. Along with exploring the deep and even mystical connections people feel to the place where they live, these pieces, taken as a whole, offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the world’s most fascinating cities and a vivid portrait of the true meaning of home in the 21st-century metropolis.

“Prior to writing the Habitats column, Rosenblum was the editor of the paper’s City section and a former editor of the Arts and Leisure section. She is also the author of Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx

From the Institutional Investor article, “Since Crecelius’ arrival the endowment has moved to the top quartile for one and three years in the Cambridge Associates universe—12.6 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively—and is above the five-year median at 2.7 percent.”

The award was presented on April 16 at the APA’s 2013 National Planning Conference in Chicago. American Planning Association President Mitchell Silver presented Birch with the award, lauding her contributions to the fields of urban planning and design.

According to the Rice University press release, Halas is one of the world’s most-cited experts in nanophotonics and a pioneering researcher in the field of plasmonics. She is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in electrical and computer engineering and a professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. She is also the founding director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics and director of the Rice Quantum Institute. Since joining the Rice faculty in 1990, Halas has specialized in studying how light interacts with engineered nanoparticles. Her research spans from electromagnetic theory to chemical nanofabrications.

Halas is a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, the Materials Research Society, the Optical Society, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering, and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Council of the National Science Foundation. She is a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow of the U.S. Department of Defense.

For a full list of Halas’ accomplishments, see the Rice University press release.

The National Academy of Sciences, created by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, is one of four organizations that make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter.

In an AUC news release, Ikram stated:

Salima Ikram and Andre Veldmeijer, head of the Egyptology section at the Netherlands Flemish Institute in Cairo, retrieve extraordinary leather fragments of an ancient chariot from abandoned casings at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

“The discovery of such leather fragments is extremely rare and unusual. Only a handful of complete chariots are known from ancient Egypt, and of these, only one heavily restored in Florence, and that of Yuya and Tjuiu in the Egyptian Museum, have any significant amount of leather. Even then, they are largely unembellished and not as well-preserved as the fragments we found… Everything we saw about the chariot leather was new. It presented a revelation on how the chariot was put together, the technologies and materials used.”

According to the press release, Rivlin has been “recognized as one of the most distinguished and influential voices in policy dialogues on economic and fiscal issues that will shape the trajectory of social insurance.”

Currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, Rivlin also taught at Harvard and George Mason universities and The New School, served on the board of directors of several corporations, and served as president of the American Economic Association. With her economic and budget expertise ranging from Social Security to Medicare to disability policy, Rivlin has produced numerous publications and writings.

Some of Rivlin’s achievements include, serving as founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, directing the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration, and serving on President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. She received a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship in 1983 and the Moynihan Prize in 2008.

The award honors Robert M. Ball, who served as Commissioner of Social Security from 1962 to 1973, and was an important participant in every Social Security development of the past 60 years. An award ceremony will be held to honor Rivlin in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, June 25.

More information about the event and Rivlin’s accomplishments can be found in the NASI’s press release.

Pulitzer has been elected for her work in education and philanthropy as founder and chairman of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Savitz has been elected in public affairs and journalism for her work as vice president of the National Academy of Engineering.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 12, 2013, at the Academy headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Bourgeois is a doctoral candidate in French and Italian at Princeton University and her dissertation, “Saintly Asceticism and the Literary Machine: The Many Lives of Saint Anthony the Great,” explores the relationship between human and divine authorship in medieval and modern saints’ lives.

Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Newcombe Fellowship was created in 1981. According to their press release, it remains the nation’s largest and most prestigious such award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Over the past three decades, the Newcombe Fellowship has supported just over 1,100 doctoral candidates, most of them now noted faculty members at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Brown has been a professor of law at Quinnipiac since 1994 and for 15 years has served as the director of the School of Law’s Center on Dispute Resolution. She has also served on the law school’s executive committee, honor code committee, and the speakers and conferences committee.

Brown worked as an associate at the law firm of Winston and Strawn in Chicago from 1986-1989. Prior to working at Quinnipiac, she was an associate professor at Emory Law School, and over the course of her career she has taught at law schools including The University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Harvard University, and Yale University. She has been a senior research scholar in law at Yale since 1998. In 2008, she received the Honorable Robert C. Zampano Award for Excellence in Mediation.

Sullivan’s current project, The Danger of Romance, will focus on the clash between the historical and religious authors who rejected Arthurian romance during this time and the literary authors who embraced the genre.

From the Guggenheim website description of Sullivan’s project:

During the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when the tales of King Arthur, Lancelot of the Lake, and the Holy Grail were first composed, clerics like William of Newburgh, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Caesarius of Heisterbach criticized this literature for encouraging readers to reject reality in favor of fantasy, truth in favor of fiction, and, by extension, actual, ordinary life in favor of an imagined, extraordinary existence. These clerics viewed romances as lies, pleasant, but profitless, which distracted readers from the harsh but profitable truths of Holy Scripture. During these same centuries, however, the authors of Arthurian romance implicitly defended their works against these attacks. To claim that reality is necessarily limited to the conventions of realism, such as mediocre characters, tepid emotions, and everyday events, they maintained, is to impoverish the very notion of reality by denying that there can ever be heroes and heroines, passionate love, and marvelous occurrences. If their romances are as pleasant as they are, these authors insisted, it is because they tell, not lies, but truths, though truths happier than those other texts choose to recognize. By setting into dialogue the historical and religious texts which criticized romance and the literary texts themselves, Professor Sullivan shows how Arthurian romance makes a case for the truth value of its fictions and, in doing so, makes a case for the truth value of imaginative literature in general.

Sullivan is also the author of The Interrogation of Joan of Arc (1999), Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (2005), and The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (2011).

Guggenheim Fellowships are grants to selected individuals made for a minimum of six months and a maximum of twelve months. Since the purpose of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is to help provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible, grants are made freely. No special conditions attach to them, and Fellows may spend their grant funds in any manner they deem necessary to their work.