Middlebury Voices in the News: Umbrella Revolution, MoMA Exhibition, and Where's Kim Jong Un?

David Stoll, professor of anthropology, was quoted in a New York Times story about the seemingly intractable crisis of smuggling children from Central America to the United States. “It’s a pyramid scheme,” said Stoll. “The only way [families] can recoup their losses is by passing the game on to those below them.”

Orion Lewis, visiting assistant professor of political science, was quoted in a story in The Atlantic, “Can Protest be Too Peaceful?” Discussing the role of domestic vs. international media in helping the cause of protesters, Lewis said, “I would say that favorable international coverage of the Hong Kong protests might help them on the margins, but will not be a decisive factor.”

Middlebury student Ho Wang Adrian Leong ’16 was featured in a video news story produced by The Guardian, in which Leong describes the role of youth in leading the protests for voting rights in Hong Kong. ”It seems like this generation is willing to break the law and to dirty their own records just for a cause they believe in,” said Leong in his interview. “This is the kind of break-through that the government has never seen before–a young generation that is not willing to back down…we are wiling to fight until the end. It doesn’t really matter what’s the outcome.”

“The brooding realism of Robert Gober, which will be haunting 13 galleries at the Museum of Modern Art beginning Saturday, is as American as apple pie — with the sugar left out, “wrote New York Times critic Roberta Smith in her review of the current exhibition by Middlebury alumnus Robert Gober ’76. “There are more layers of history and meaning to be explored here, but Mr. Gober’s great subjects are autonomy and self-knowledge, which this exhibition demonstrates at nearly every turn.”

Jeffrey Lewis, of the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, spoke with the Los Angeles Times about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s noticeable absence from the public eye and the rumors about what it might mean. ”There are some things out of place,” said Lewis. “Something weird is going on. But they do weird things all the time that shock us.”

In an opinion piece for CNN.com, Professor of English and Creative Writing Jay Parini poses the provocative question, “Would Jesus OK same-sex marriage?” “Even Christians–who once stood uniformly against same-sex marriage–have become more comfortable with the idea,” wrote Parini, “and, one by one, mainstream churches have begun to reconsider it.”