Arts & Culture

SWAN | This Should Be a Given

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Last week, Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music. This was the first time that a non-classical, non-jazz work was awarded the prize. I love Kendrick Lamar and I thoroughly enjoy Damn., but nevertheless, my reactions to this decision are mixed. Not, of course, about whether Kendrick Lamar’s work is deserving of such acclaim; indeed, the musical complexity and poetic mastery present on Damn., as well as earlier albums like To Pimp a Butterfly, warrant the utmost critical respect.

e.coli

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Details Investigation of Processed Food

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Michael Moss, a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, spoke about his effort to expose harmful impacts of the processed food industry and its advertising strategies in a lecture Wednesday. Moss drew heavily from his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Fast Food Giants Hooked Us in his talk. He recalled reporting on the Iraq War in 2008 for the New York Times when he said his editor assigned him to write about a salmonella outbreak in the U.S. caused by tainted peanuts from the Peanut Corporation of America. “These peanuts were being used as ingredients in this $1 trillion processed food industry about which we really know very little,” Moss said. “That outbreak became the story about how that industry had lost control over its food chain.”
Moss said this first experience with food safety reporting later led him to report on an E. Coli outbreak in Minneapolis in 2007, food industry.

composer

Composer Professor Steve Stucky Ph.D. ’78 Dies at 66

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Prof. Emeritus Steve Stucky Ph.D. ’78, music, a widely acclaimed composer and Pulitzer Prize winner, died Sunday at his home in Ithaca. He was 66. Stucky taught at Cornell for 34 years, during which he founded Ensemble X — a musical collaboration between Ithaca College and Cornell faculty. He retired last year to teach at the Juilliard School, according to a Department of Music press release. Stucky was born in Kansas and studied at Baylor University in addition to Cornell.