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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Hoping to reduce the risk of a future world financial crisis as severe as the recent one, U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers announced the creation of a new “Group of 20” finance ministers from leading and developing nations. In an address inaugurating the School of Management’s International Center for Finance on September 22, Summers said the group would be “an informal mechanism for dialogue” about global economic policy.
“To write badly is a necessary part of writing well,” according to writer Tobias Wolff, who visited the campus the week of September 13 as the first John-Christophe Schlesinger Visiting Writer. “I wish I’d had more patience with myself in the beginning. I now understand that if I go back to something again and again, I may write something good.” Wolff, author of the memoir This Boy’s Life, visited writing classes, gave a public reading, and spoke to students at an Ezra Stiles College master’s tea.
AT&T chairman C. Michael Armstrong brought an optimistic view of advancing technology to the School of Management’s Leaders Forum on September 28. “We’re going to be able to better export this country’s economic system with the Internet,” he predicted. “The Internet, more than anything else, delivers the truth, and the truth is the enemy of tyrannies around the world.”
Consumers should be able to trust that their medical records will remain confidential, said Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala at a Harper Fellowship lecture at the Law School on October 7. Shalala described her department’s efforts to draft a federal policy on the release of such information, and called on Congress to pass a law protecting patients. “There’s a federal law that prohibits video stores from giving out our private information,” she said, “but there is nothing as to what can be done with medical information.”
In an address at the Center for International and Area Studies on September 29, former Secretary of State James Baker said the Clinton administration’s foreign policy is “pretty much ad hoc” and that it showed “a disturbing lack of clarity and consistency.” He also criticized Republican leaders for failing to construct a coherent foreign policy and urged that international issues be part of next year’s presidential campaign. Baker identified a number of issues the U.S. must confront in the next century and stressed the need for a missile defense system.
There was little of the movie star in the looks and manner of Edward Norton ’91 when he sat down to face a standing-room-only crowd at an Ezra Stiles College master’s tea on October 3. But Norton says that’s part of the secret of his success. Norton, who was brought to campus by the Yale Film Society for a preview screening of his new film Fight Club, told the audience that his ordinary looks gave him an “elasticity” that matinee-idol types don’t always have.
“People of Dustin Hoffman’s generation introduced the idea that you could be a character actor and carry a film,” said Norton. “They just inverted the whole hierarchy. Now you have pretty boys trying to get dirty and play junkies.” Norton, who has earned two Oscar nominations, has played a backwoods Kentuckian in Primal Fear, a singing and dancing suitor in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, and a skinhead in American History X. In Fight Club, a dark comedy from director David Fincher, he plays a Generation-X corporate drone who is drawn into a world of reckless violence. Asked after the screening if he had any qualms about appearing in such a film, which left many in the audience shaken, Norton said “There’s violence in our culture. And the responsibility of people making films is to address dysfunction in the culture.” Norton directed and starred in his next film, a romantic comedy called Keeping the Faith, which he wrote with friend and Yale classmate Stewart Blumberg '91. While he said his “longest and deepest friendships” are with people he met at Yale, he had not been back to campus since graduation. “Since crossing Prospect Street,” he said, “I’ve had this fluttery feeling, like I have a paper due.” |
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