
There have been lots of Vassar professors in the media lately. Last week, film professor
Mia Mask did a piece on
orientalism and Julia Roberts' Eat Pray Love. For Mask, some of the film's eastern characters are "stereotypes" and "caracitures." According to Mask, films like
EPL, as well as the recent
Cairo Time and
Sex and the City 2 "don't teach you anything new about Asia or the Middle East.
They rely instead on the stereotype that the East is someplace timeless, otherworldly, incomprehensible, waiting to be discovered by Westerners in search of self."
This reminds us of a 2007
Slate article on
race in Wes Anderson's films. (Excerpt: "It's surprising how many white-doofuses-seeking-redemption-in-the-brown-skinned-world clichés
Darjeeling Limited inhabits.")

Also in NPR is psychology professor
Randy Cornelius. In an
article today on crying, Cornelius says, "You can imagine there'd be a selection pressure to develop a signaling system that wouldn't let predators in on the fact that you're vulnerable." Cornelius believes that unlike other animals, humans have evolved to cry based on emotional responses as opposed to just physical ones.
As we previously posted, another professor in the media lately is
Amitava Kumar, who first had his
book reviewed in
The New York Times and then did an
online piece for
Vanity Fair on the Cordoba House/"Ground Zero Mosque."
Images via Ask Banner.
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