Laura Silver

Summer 2019 THE U’S JED ELISON BELIEVES IMAGING IS THE KEY TO PREDICTING AN INFANT’S CHANCES OF DEVELOPING AUTISM

Jessica Simacek was nearly eight months pregnant when her son, then a toddler, received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). That meant that her unborn baby had a nearly 20 percent chance of developing the condition as well.

As an autism intervention researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration, Simacek knew that the earlier a child is...

September 2018. Lisa and E. Gerald O’Brien in front of Douglas Argue’s oil canvas work, Untitled, affectionately known as the “chicken painting.”

Jerry O’Brien was an undergraduate art history major at the University of Michigan when he got some thrilling news from Sotheby’s in New York City. The venerable auction house had awarded him one of its coveted summer internships. In fact, the human resources director told him, two different departments wanted him, and he could have his pick. Elated, O’Brien, who w...

Spring 2018. U Law Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin has worked for peace, held war criminals accountable, and investigated rape as a tool of war. Now, with the U.N., she's protecting human rights in an era of counterterrorism.

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin has spent her career rooting out the worst human rights abuses in some of the most forbidding places on Earth. Yet, here she was on an early winter morning, gracious and unflappable, holding a coffee to go and a small paper bag, the contents of which would have to s...

Fall 2017. Abigail Gewirtz and the ADAPT parenting program bring help to returning military parents and their children.

BABY BOOMERS—those rock-’n’-roll–listening, Vietnam-War–protesting, birthcontrol-using, all-around-groundbreaking members of the post–WWII generation—have been at the forefront of societal and political change almost since the oldest of their ranks were born in 1946. Now ranging in age from 52 to 70, boomers are again doing things their way, this time in pursuit of more meaningful retirement years, or what University of Minnesota sociology professor Phyllis Moen (Ph.D. ’78) calls “encore adulthood.”

Why Fred Amram speaks out.

Summer 2017. By Laura Silver. Fred Amram (M.A. ’59) thought he and Alice Musabende couldn’t be less alike. The 83-year-old author, inventor, activist, and professor emeritus of speech communication and creativity at the University of Minnesota often speaks to schoolchildren, military organizations, and civic groups about his experience as a Jewish child in Nazi Germany. When he met Musabende, a young survivor of the Rwandan genocide, she was speaking on the steps of the Capitol in St. Paul. She ...

Fall 2015. By Laura Silver. In her young-adult debut novel, Kathleen Glasgow (M.F.A. '02) has written about a girl much like her younger self.

American Craft December/January 2016. By Laura Silver. Anika Smulovitz brings a scholar’s eye to Judaica. (Photo by Doug Yaple.)

In 1966, Michael McConnell and Jack Baker (J.D. ’72) fell in love. McConnell was the adored son and brother of a big, close-knit family he describes as a “Norman Rockwell painting.” Baker was clean-cut and ambitious, an orphan who’d been raised in a Catholic boarding school, served in the Air Force, and was working as a field engineer. They were introduced at a Halloween party near Norman, Oklahoma, McConnell’s hometown.

Was it McConnell’s optimism, shaped by his loving family, or Baker’s mat...

Teen pregnancy. Self-mutilation. Fratricide. These sound like themes from reality TV, but in fact they run throughout The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, the new, first-ever English translation of all 156 tales from the earliest edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Translated and notated by University of Minnesota professor emeritus of German and comparative literature Jack Zipes, this collection will be a fascinating, albeit grisly, revelation for those familiar with later ve...

April 2016. Six articles by Laura Silver.

The Catholic Schools Center of Excellence is a nonprofit organization with a simple two-part mission: to help Catholic elementary schools achieve and maintain excellence while increasing student enrollment.

In 1946, newly returned from his wartime tour of the Pacific, Tom Swain (B.S.B. ’42) was offered the position of athletic scholastic adviser at the University of Minnesota. His charge: to help athletes, mostly returning veterans like himself, with their academic struggles. He persuaded college deans to readmit one such candidate—future NCAA champion and pro-wrestling impresario Verne Gagne (’48), who was, “to put it mildly, not a very diligent student,” Swain says.

The deans were harsher: “He...

Fall 2015. By Laura Silver. The mostly abandoned Jewish cemeteries of Bohemia and Moravia (in the present-day Czech Republic) are the focus of Still . . . Life (December 19, 2015, through July 10, 2016), a collaborative installation that is a meditation on memory, survival, and rebirth in the face
of horrific intolerance.

by Laura Silver, Spring 2014

It was on a walk across the Washington Avenue Bridge during her first days as a University of Minnesota student that Mary Relindes Ellis (B.A. ’86) saw a mysterious sight: 79 wooden steps leading from Washington Avenue down the face of the bluff to the riverbank. It was the former approach to the long-gone village of Bohemian Flats.

Her curiosity and her imagination were piqued....

By Laura Silver, Photo by Sara Rubinstein

As the fifth of 10 children, Minnesota Army National Guard Major Amber Manke (M.Ed. ’12, Ph.D. ’15) jokingly says she initially found military service a breeze: Her drill sergeant was a far less intimidating disciplinarian than her long-suffering mother. And she took some transferrable skills to the military. “I could eat fast and I already walked fast and I could listen to orders,” she says with a laugh.

Despite her self-deprecating insistence to the...