Humanities & Society

Halloween candy is a treat for many children, but for those forced to work on cocoa farms in west Africa it’s a mean and tortuous trick. Two WUSTL professors call attention to the hidden horrors of cocoa production — the base ingredient in chocolate — in an op-ed piece published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Participants in the Oct. 21 Second Annual Fall Arbor tour — led by Kent Theiling (right), grounds manager/horticulturist for the Danforth Campus — listen as Theiling points out distinguishing features of the different types of trees that dot the Danforth Campus. Arbor tours, which are led by Theiling, are held twice a year, in the spring and fall.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences will host the Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 28-30. Titled “The Past in the Present: Revolutions, Reactions, Transgressions,” the conference, co-hosted with the Office of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, will take place at the Crowne Plaza St. Louis-Clayton Hotel and in Eads and Wilson Halls on the Danforth Campus.

Connie Diekman, RD, director of University Nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis and past president of the American Dietitic Association, has several tips for enjoying Halloween candy, but doing it in a healthier way.

An international team of researchers based at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, including a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered well-dated human fossils in southern China that markedly change anthropologists perceptions of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern Old World.

Richard Heinzl, M.D., founder of Doctors without Borders, Canada, will present a talk, “Lessons from Abroad: The Opportunities of a Borderless World” at 7:30 p.m., Monday, Nov. 8 at Graham Chapel on the Danforth Campus.The event is co-sponsored by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy, the Gephardt Institute for Public Service and the School of Medicine

Luis Zayas, PhD, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, will be on this week’s Latino USA program on NPR discussing Latina teen suicide in the United States. Listen to the program at http://www.latinousa.org/916-2/.

University City Council member L. Michael Glickert (left) presents Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, with a proclamation during a city council meeting Oct. 18. The proclamation celebrates Sherraden, a University City resident, being named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The four newest members of the faculty fellows program have settled into their apartements in the South 40. The goal of the program, started in 1998, is to help integrate academic and residential life by having professors live in the residential colleges with students for three-year stints.

The Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis will host a symposium titled “What Hurts, What Works, and What Have We Learned in Eliminating Health Disparities” from 8 a.m.-noon on Thursday, Oct. 21, at the Eric P. Newman Education Center on the Medical Campus.