Mixed Media
Fugitive Pedagogy By Jarvis R. Givens ’10, Ph.D. ’16
AFTER STEEL MILL CLOSURES IN THE LATE 1970S led to the exodus of nearly
The God Equation By Michio Kaku, Ph.D. ’72 IN HIS LATEST BOOK, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST and master
storyteller Michio Kaku walks readers through humanity’s gradual discovery of the fundamental forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics—before explaining how string theory can unite them all under a single grand framework that might allow us to, as Einstein put it, “read the mind of God.” Kaku has written a book about unified field theory that’s digestible by just about anyone, packed to the brim with colorful metaphors and simple explanations that delight as much as they inform. To hear Kaku tell it, the laws of physics are the harmonies found among the elemental strings of the universe, chemistry, the melodies you make from them, and string theory itself is “cosmic music resonating throughout space-time.” If that’s a bit too woo-woo for you, Kaku gets in plenty of no-nonsense explanation, too, covering topics that range from how electric currents work to how we know that space-time is curved to just what, exactly, these mysterious strings are that might tie the universe in a bow. —K.B.
two-thirds of its residents, Youngstown, Ohio, was plagued by rising crime, widespread housing vacancies, and a sudden drop in civic engagement. But the remaining residents haven’t given up hope. The Place That Makes Us, a documentary film produced by Alexandra Nikolchev, follows a small group of Youngstown community leaders as they fight to revitalize their city. “The easy thing is to flee like everyone does in the Midwest,” says Ian Beniston, executive director of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit that fixes up abandoned homes to attract new residents. “But those of us that are gonna change these places, it’s gonna be the ones that stay and fight.” Crowned “Best of the Festival” at the Arlington International Film Festival, The Place That Makes Us challenges common misconceptions of Rust Belt towns, focusing not on urban blight or the factory closures that rocked the region, but on the hard work and resilience of those who live there. “As cities struggle to emerge after COVID, themes in our film feel as relevant as ever,” says Nikolchev. Originally aired on PBS’s America Reframed series, The Place That Makes Us is now available for streaming on PBS platforms. —M.W.
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— P.J.
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TREPCZYNSKI: ANDRIA LO; TULSA GRAVEYARD: AP PHOTO/MIKE SIMONS/TULSA WORLD
The Place That Makes Us Alexandra Nikolchev ’05
former CAA Achievement Award Scholar and now an assistant professor at Harvard, elucidates the historical struggle of African Americans to educate themselves in spite of staunch white resistance. His title is an interesting one; as Givens notes, our modern word “pedagogy” comes from the ancient Greek, paidagōgos, denoting a slave tasked with accompanying a boy to school. And fugitivity is a powerful idea in Black history, both in terms of the escaped slave as folk hero and the educated mind as a freed spirit. As Frederick Douglass’s master once put it, a slave learning to read was a slave “running away with himself.” As an exemplar of this fugitive spirit, Givens presents the story of Carter G. Woodson (18751950)—teacher, historian, founder of Black History Month, and author of the 1933 treatise, The MisEducation of the Negro. As one reviewer remarked, Givens’s work restores Woodson, now somewhat overlooked, to his “rightful place alongside figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.”
STRING THEORY: NATALI ART COLLECTIONS/SHUTTERSTOCK
IN THIS SCHOLARLY WORK, GIVENS, a
