Arts & Sciences

In the age of reality TV, what does it mean to be “authentic”? So asks senior Grace Haselhorst in “The Realness.” Thyrsus, Washington University’s student-run experimental theater group, will debut the play Nov. 9-11.

David L. Kirk, former professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, died Nov. 1, 2018, in St. Louis after a long illness. He was 84. Kirk spent a lifetime teaching and researching developmental biology and, in retirement, worked to improve the way evolution is taught in K-12 schools.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch its 2018 Informal Cities Workshop at 12:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, with a free talk by Jorge Mario Jáuregui, a Brazilian architect taking on the challenge of population growth in informal settings.

During an 8-mile journey from the Columbia Bottom conservation area over the Chain of Rocks in a canoe, Bob Criss in Arts & Sciences talks about Lewis and Clark, navigation and the relevance of rivers today.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist, will discuss the estimated half-trillion-dollar cost of the nation’s opioid crisis in the inaugural Murray Weidenbaum Memorial Lecture at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom.

Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive the 2018 Tradition of Literary Excellence Award Oct. 27.

Storms help form an important chemical that is highly significant in the search for life on Mars. A team led by Alian Wang of Arts & Sciences created a simulation in the lab that sheds new light on what’s being kicked up by those massive Martian dust devils.

At the river’s edge, where water and soil meet, microbes churn out methane and other greenhouse gasses. Jeffrey G. Catalano, of Arts & Sciences, wades into local Missouri wetlands to determine the role of heavy metals in this process.

Richard Yang, professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Friday, Oct. 12, 2018, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He was 93.

What’s it like to be a member of the Washington University in St. Louis Class of 2022? First-year students Ella Holman, who is a dancer and member of the Deneb STARS, and Marissa Kalkar, a soccer player, have chronicled the first weeks of life on campus by shooting one second of video every day.