Humanities & Society

A “topping out” ceremony was held Jan. 16 marking the final steel panel being raised and put into place on The Lofts of Washington University, WUSTL’s $80 million retail and student apartment complex under construction in the Delmar Loop. Construction of the first phase of the project is on target to be completed in July, with students and retailers moving in this August.

“The House leadership’s procedural excuses for blocking a vote on critical immigration reform make little sense,” says Stephen Legomsky, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and the recent Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Department of Homeland Security. In that position he worked intensively with White House and DHS officials and played a major role on comprehensive immigration reform. “It’s now been 7 months since the Senate passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill. Speaker Boehner should allow the people’s elected representatives in the House to consider it without further delay,” Legomsky argues.

Marie Griffith, PhD, is the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Griffith, the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, came to WUSTL in 2011 from Harvard Divinity School. Her husband, Leigh E. Schmidt, PhD, Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor, is also a faculty member at the Danforth Center.

President Barack Obama signed a memorandum Jan. 15 directing agencies to allow federal workers to take six weeks of paid sick leave to help with a new child or a sick relative. The president also asked Congress to pass the Healthy Families Act, which would grant Americans seven days a year of paid sick time. Augmenting the Family and Medical Leave Act is one place Congress might start if it wants to combat sex-role stereotypes and advance women’s equal employment opportunity, as well as supporting families in times of illness, say experts at Washington University in St. Louis.

The 27th annual Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration at Washington University in St. Louis will include a number of events on campus, all free and open to the public. Michel Martin, host of Tell Me More, National Public Radio’s one-hour daily news and talk show, will deliver the School of Medicine’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Lecture Monday, Jan. 20.

Women are underrepresented in the important fields of science, technology, engineering and math — minority women even more so. To help close the gender gap, Washington University will sponsor an innovate new charter school: the Hawthorn Leadership School for Girls, the first single-sex STEM charter school in St. Louis.

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in the continuing series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars held biweekly on the Danforth Campus beginning through April 14. The series begins Monday, Feb. 3, with Sean H. Williams, JD, professor at the University of Texas School of Law. His topic is “Dead Children: Tort Law and Parental Investments in Child Safety.”

Unpaid internships are the norm in many industries. The Career Center’s summer stipends help students pay their bills while working an unpaid internship. The Career Center also awards grants to students who must travel to a job interview or would like to attend a Career Center Road Show.

Falling oil and gasoline prices have prompted some in Congress to debate about increasing the federal fuel tax, which helps fund highway and bridge construction, among other projects. Increasing the tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1993 and isn’t tied to inflation, to help offset revenue lost through lower prices at the pump may seem like a good idea in theory, but it’s much more difficult in practice, says tax law expert Adam Rosenzweig, JD, of Washington University in St. Louis.

The food was terrible. Kool-Aid, Manwich, Jiffy Pop, Twinkies, Spam (when the word referred to something edible). But Pat Hazell loved it all. In “The Wonder Bread Years,” Hazell — one of the original writers for “Seinfeld” — turns a fond yet pitiless eye to the brick-a-brack of American childhood. The acclaimed one-man show comes to the Edison Ovations Series Jan. 24 and 25.