Being an actor is hard. It is fraught with rejection, failure, insecurity and envy. Just ask John Lithgow. “It is a profession that is very hard on your ego,” he told a small group of UC San Diego master of fine arts in acting students during a visit to the campus last week. Even worse, he said with comic theatricalism, is the “humiliation of being rejected by people you have contempt for,” a well-rehearsed line that garnered laughs from the students. Still, he admitted, “I fret all the time.” It seems like an odd confession from an actor whose career has spanned decades and been marked by numerous accolades and awards, including his recent Emmy for his role as Winston Churchill in the Netflix series “The Crown.”
A noted scholar and a world-leader in microbiome research, Rob Knight, Ph.D. will take guests inside the human body and share the dirt on the microbiome, the focus of his new book, published in June 2017. On Tuesday, October 24, Knight will discuss Dirt Is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System, from 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. in Geisel Library’s Seuss Room. The UC San Diego Library talk is free to attend and open to the public. A reception and a book signing with Dr. Knight will follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event from the UC San Diego Bookstore.
The Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLWH) at the University of California San Diego once again launches a year-long series of educational events that will focus on the theme, The Possibility of Renewal: The Shoah Between Past, Present, and Future. This year’s programming, presented by the UC San Diego Library and the UC San Diego Jewish Studies Program, will unearth how renewal is possible in the wake of genocide, shed light on what it means for a defeated people to resurrect its past, and explore the roles of memory and justice in the process of renewal.
As the University of California San Diego’s second college, John Muir College admitted its first students in 1967. 50 years later, the college is celebrating its golden anniversary with a year-long series of festive events. Muir’s current students and alumni are invited to the college for a kick-off festival for the reveal of the time capsule sealed and buried by the founding class from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 2. Other events include a talk from one of the college’s founding faculty, Irwin Jacobs, a week of celebratory events for John Muir’s birthday, which coincides with the campus’s Earth Month activities, as well as an environmental conference featuring Muir biographer Donald Worster.
The UC San Diego Library and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla are teaming up to celebrate the work of internationally acclaimed multimedia artist Joyce Cutler-Shaw. The joint exhibition, “Library Duet,” highlights the many stages of a distinguished and prolific artist’s career. The Athenaeum exhibit, opening September 23, will display a retrospective of Cutler-Shaw’s artist’s books from its permanent collection, while the UC San Diego Library will exhibit Cutler-Shaw’s archival materials, including its permanent display—Alphabet of Bones—and Cutler-Shaw’s current work, Brain Project. An opening reception will be held in Geisel Library on Thursday, October 5, 2017 from 5 – 7 pm in the Seuss Room.
The Fall 2017 exhibition in the Qualcomm Institute’s gallery@calit2 at UC San Diego, Speculative Dolphin Theatre, opens Oct. 5 and runs through Dec. 8. A public reception follows a panel with artist Lisa Korpos and cognitive scientist Christine Johnson.
