‘Theater has been my life, and it’ll continue to be my life’
Tuscaloosa News – May 26
Ed Williams founded the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance in 1979. Now he’s leaving it. In between those moments, four decades passed. Most of a life happened. Shortly after the Saturday night, April 20, performance of “Show Boat,” which Williams, 69, directed as his last official faculty show on the Marian Gallaway Theatre stage, friends, family, students and others gathered to celebrate Williams at nearby Morgan Auditorium. They included John Ross, who once taught him as an undergrad, Bill Teague, who succeeded him as chair of the department, and John Nara, a second-year graduate student, one of Williams’ last directing students.
AutoXLR8R summer program nurtures new ideas
The Tennessean – May 27
Kits that can convert a vehicle from gasoline to propane or natural gas, a tailpipe attachment that can cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than half and a new lightweight material that’s stronger than steel are among the ideas taking shape this summer during the area’s first “boot camp” for transportation start-ups. The 13-week AutoXLR8R program, sponsored by the Southern Middle Tennessee Entrepreneur Centers, is designed to help “identify, commercialize and fund promising new technologies applicable to the automotive industry,” said program director Mike Nichols … Rachel Frazier, a research engineer at the University of Alabama, whose company, Graphenics, is developing “a new way to make graphene, which is exciting because it is the strongest material known to man — stronger than steel, but lighter than a feather,” she said. Automotive applications would include putting graphene into plastic parts that would replace heavier metal parts. Automakers are under pressure to reduce weight in their vehicles to improve fuel economy. The program’s mentors are successful executives, engineers, scientists and venture capitalists who have the expertise the participants need to help move their projects along, Nichols said. Some of them are on site, while others participate by video conferencing from as far away as Singapore.
Working
New Yorker – May 27
It was edifying while it lasted. A bipartisan immigration bill, supported by an unusually wide coalition of business, labor, church, and humanitarian groups, made its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee last week … Not everyone agrees that this version of reform will work, of course, or that it will be personally beneficial politically. Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, who was on the losing side in Judiciary, told CNN, “I will not support citizenship for people who entered the country illegally.” … Asked by CNN to comment on Sessions’s obstructionism, Richard Fording, of the University of Alabama, said, “It doesn’t surprise me at all.” He added, “Politics here dictates you oppose whatever the President supports.”
Lawmakers reflect on session’s wins, loses
Florence Times Daily – May 26
Republicans are calling the 2013 legislative session one of the most successful in recent history. Democrats say it was a wasted opportunity…It also proved something about the GOP, said William Stewart, political science professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. “It showed us that Republicans, with their super majority, can do whatever they want if they are united,” Stewart said.
Foes: Act will hurt GOP in 2014 race
Florence Times Daily – May 26
After Republican lawmakers passed the controversial Alabama Accountability Act in late February, Democrats loudly and repeatedly called until the end of the legislative session Monday for its repeal. Democrats said the act couldn’t be fixed, and they largely stayed out of conversations about amending it, including when Gov. Robert Bentley suggested delaying portions of it for two years. That is probably not just because they didn’t like the bill, said William Stewart, political science professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. The more controversial the act is, the better an election-year issue it is for Democrats. “I think a lot of them would like for it to go into effect and blow up in Republicans’ faces,” Stewart said. The passage of the Alabama Accountability Act, which gives schools more flexibility on curriculum and spending and provides parents a tax credit to leave the state’s worst schools, is sure to be a talking point leading to the November 2014 elections.
DON NOBLE: Reed’s debut is full of deeply intimate moments
Tuscaloosa News – May 26
Wendy Reed is a familiar and respected member of the Alabama literary community, having co-edited two books on Southern women and spirituality for the University of Alabama Press, and been a prize-winning producer/writer on “Discovering Alabama,” not to mention the literary interview show “Bookmark.” “An Accidental Memoir” is, however, her debut volume of prose, and it is unusual, odd, offbeat. To begin with, it is a mixed genre volume. Reed begins with a gathering of short essays, some of them op-ed pieces. The introduction to this section begins: “People are buried every day. Death happens.”
Doug Weathers, Jr., son of longtime Savannah broadcaster, Doug Weathers, graduates
WTOC-CBS (Savannah, Ga.) – May 25
And here’s one more picture. This is a special graduate for WTOC…Doug Weathers, Jr. graduating summa cum laude from the University of Alabama with a bachelor of science in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. He’ll be on his way to Maine in the fall for his master’s.