Humanities & Society

An outdoor chess park. Cargo containers transformed into compact restaurants. A sustainable urban farm. On April 11, Washington University in St. Louis and the City of St. Louis will announce which of these or several other concepts will win the inaugural Sustainable Land Lab Competition, the first of its kind in St. Louis.

Why is it so hard for some people to resist the least little temptation, while others seem to possess incredible patience, passing up immediate gratification for a greater long-term good? The answer, suggests a new study from Washington University in St. Louis, is that patient people focus on future rewards in a way that makes the waiting process seem much more pleasurable.

Author and political scientist Cathy Cohen studies American politics and particularly how they affect African-Americans, women and the LGBTQ community – never ignoring the intersections between these identity categories. She will be on campus April 9 to give a lecture titled “Race, Sex and Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama.”

A team of four WUSTL students, including sophmores, Grace Kuo and Amy Patterson, shown to left accepting a trophy, won the College Nationals in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 30. Click here for a video of a rolling ball bearing setting off a chain reaction in “Rube Goldberg’s office” that eventually drop a hammer on a nail–the assigned task.

“The anthropological concept of culture is extremely important and often misunderstood because many of the things that are assumed to be biologically determined, like criminality or homosexuality or IQ, are really behaviorally and societally defined,” says WUSTL physical anthropologist Robert W. Sussman, and it forms the basis for his Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture, “The Importance of the Concept of Culture to Science and Society,” the next Assembly Series program held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 9.

As the U.S. Supreme Court hearings on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) conclude, it looks like the justices are ready to strike down the law, says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, constitutional law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “The crucial thing about this case is that the Court can strike down DOMA without impacting the right or lack thereof of someone to marry,” he says.

Despite a snow storm, students came out for Hoops Day March 24, sponsored by Thurtene Junior Honorary, a lead-up event to the annual carnival. Organizers offered a youth basketball clinic and a 3-on-3 tournament at the Athletic Complex.

Surveillance is everywhere, from street corner cameras to the subject of books and movies. “We talk a lot about why surveillance is bad, but we don’t really know why,” says Neil Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “We only have a vague intuition about it, which is why courts don’t protect it. We know we don’t like it, and that it has something to do with privacy, but beyond that, the details can be fuzzy.” Richards’ new article on the topic, “The Danger of Surveillance,” will be published in the next issue of the Harvard Law Review.

A group of some of the country’s top scholars in First Amendment law recently gathered at Washington University in St. Louis to discuss pressing challenges being faced by the first of our Bill of Rights. Three issues rose to the top of the list for Washington University’s first amendment experts: free expression in a digital age; impaired political debate; and weakened rights of groups.

When Carl Neureuther, a 1940 graduate of Washington University, set up an endowment in 1987 to support library collections, he was also ensuring support for something more: a lifelong love of reading. The results are in for this year’s Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition sponsored by Washington University Libraries.