the UCTV BLOG

Category: The Library Channel

  • Bearing Witness

    “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” – Elie Wiesel Following Eva Clarke’s presentation, you may be forgiven for thinking the title “Against All Odds: Born In Mauthausen” is an understatement. Clarke was one of only three children (the “miracle babies”) born into captivity in the notorious KZ Mauthausen concentration camp in…

  • Celebrating Paper Theater

    Paper theater (also called toy theater) is a form of miniature theater dating back to the early Victorian era. Paper theaters were often printed on posters and sold as kits at playhouses, opera houses, and vaudeville theaters, and proved to be an effective marketing tool. The kits were assembled at home and the plays performed…

  • Losing the Nobel Prize

    When Alfred Nobel stipulated the creation of the Nobel Prize in 1895, the inventor of dynamite could hardly have guessed that the award – considered by many to be the world’s most prestigious honor – would often come at the expense of the very careers and the disciplines Nobel sought to promote. Per Nobel’s will…

  • More Dirt for Kids!

    Rob Knight, the academic superstar who is leading the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego, says it’s important for kids to get dirty! He explains that exposing children to natural bacteria in the environment trains their immune systems how to respond to foreign threats. So, resist that urge to sterilize everything kids touch…

  • Micro-Fiction

    Contributed by John Menier In modern English, the word “amateur” is often used in a condescending or pejorative sense, which is unfortunate. It is a borrowed French word that derives from the Latin “amator,” meaning “lover.” Hence, the term amateur was originally applied to someone who does something purely for the love of it rather…

  • Ann Patchett

    Contributed by John Menier Listed by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2012, Ann Patchett is a true woman of letters: novelist, essayist, anthologist, and co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. Patchett is also a frequent and accomplished public speaker, noted for her anecdotes about the literary life, her…

  • Who Gets In?

    As the number of refugees escaping violence around the world continues to rise, Americans are once again confronted with the moral question of who is welcomed into the country and who is turned away. Author and journalist Eric Lichtblau recounts a similar situation after World War II. Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps were…

  • Archiving Atrocity: The International Tracing Service and Holocaust Research

    It’s all in the details. It’s the stories, the artifacts, and the documents that reveal the horror faced by victims of the Holocaust. As author and historian Suzanne Brown-Fleming explains here, researchers into this painful part of human history now have access to the world’s largest Holocaust archive through the International Tracing Service, based in…

  • Stop the Presses!

    UCTV presents two programs featuring two of the most acclaimed journalists of our time. First, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and host Michael Bernstein sit with Alex Butterfield, the source of Woodward’s latest book, The Last of the President’s Men, as Butterfield recalls his painful, yet brave decision to answer truthfully about the existence of…

  • The Legacy of Jonas Salk

    To those of a certain age, Jonas Salk is an icon. He’s the doctor who in the 1950’s, developed the first successful vaccine for polio; a disease that at its peak afflicted more than a half a million people a year. But as his sons Peter and Jonathan Salk describe here, the late Dr. Salk’s…