Arts & Culture

More than two-dozen scholars and veterans from around the country will remember the United States’ so-called “forgotten war” with “The Coldest War in the Cold War: The Blood and Politics of the Korean Conflict, 1950-1953.” The three-day conference, which takes place May 8-10, is sponsored by Washington University’s International Writers Center (IWC) in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Missouri Historical Society. Events will include lectures, film screenings and panel discussions on such topics as the origins and impact of the war, the experience of minority soldiers and the larger framework of the Cold War in America.

Photo by Joe AngelesFashion Show May 4Art in Motion, the 74th annual School of Art Fashion Show, will take to the catwalk at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 4, at Saint Louis Galleria. The fully choreographed, Paris-style extravaganza features dozens of professional and volunteer models wearing more than 100 outfits created by the School of Art’s 11 senior and nine junior fashion design majors.

Charles Mee’s *Big Love*Classical drama collides with modern-day excess in Charles Mee’s Big Love, a fiercely extravagant adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens that The New York Times describes as “an MGM musical in Technicolor, a circus and, believe it, a Greek tragedy.”

Entertainment Economics: The Movie Industry,” is the topic of a public forum to be held from 9:30 to 4:45 p.m. April 3 in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom, Anheuser-Busch Hall at Washington University in St. Louis.

A still from *Having a Ball*, one of three circus-themed e-cards by Kristine Ng.For the estimated 7 to10 million blind and visually impaired Americans, the Internet has proven to be the most powerful — and most empowering — tool since Braille. Widely available software programs such as JAWS for Windows and Windows-Eyes can read aloud online newspapers and magazines and other previously inaccessible materials. Yet as bandwidth and memory improve, businesses have increasingly sought to drive customers to glitzy, graphics-heavy Web sites that are more difficult, if not impossible, for blind users to navigate. Thanks to a group of senior design students at Washington University in St. Louis, blind and visually impaired Web users can now experience some of the Internet’s increasingly expansive potential. The 23 students — design, illustration and advertising majors in the School of Art — have created some of the first Web sites showcasing new accessibility components of Macromedia Flash MX, the increasingly popular authoring tool for Web interfaces, interactive video, Web-based games, streaming music and other multimedia content.