Tag Archives: opera

‘Heart of a Soldier’ author recalls how New Yorker article became prize-winning book

James B. Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter for the New Yorker, talked on campus on Oct. 4 about the inspiration for and process behind “Heart of a Soldier,” his 2002 book about Rick Rescorla, a security guard at the World Trade Center who lost his life on 9/11. Stewart’s talk was sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale.

Tasked with reporting on the impact of the World Trade Center attacks on business, Stewart discovered — by chance — the heroic tale of Rick Rescorla and realized that his was a story worth telling. “If you have a character, anything becomes a story,” Stewart explained. (more…)

Read More

Fast Times in Physics

A U physicist will help determine if neutrinos can outrace light

Back in 2007, a physics experiment clocked elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos going faster than light.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. If the speed of light in a vacuum—denoted “c” by physicists—isn’t the universal speed limit, it would mean that Einstein put the wrong number in his famous E=mc2 equation.

University of Minnesota physicist Marvin Marshak was part of the experiment, called MINOS. It clocked beams of neutrinos shot from Fermilab, a national physics lab near Chicago, to a detector 457 miles away in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. (more…)

Read More