Investigations

The case of the hidden colophon

Starting with a mysterious text, Margaret M. Mitchell, AM’82, PhD’89, ushers in a new way to analyze old documents.
The 21 people seated in the Special Collections Research Center’s new seminar room stare at two plasma-screen displays on the front wall, each projecting the same ancient images from an open book—amid Greek calligraphy are gold, red, blue, and black illuminations of men with page-boy hairstyles, wearing tunics, one piercing Christ on the cross with a spear, four others kneeling. The yellowed but sharply delineated pages fill the 50-inch screens. “What you see in front of you are two images of a real thing,” says Divinity School and Humanities professor Margaret M. Mitchell, AM’82, PhD’89, “a hand codex of the Gospel according to Mark, which is this big.” As she picks up a 3x5-inch, brown, cracked leather–bound manuscript and the right-screen image disappears, the audience collectively gasps.
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Acting globally, thinking locally

Gone are the giddy days of globalization. Domino-effect market failures like 1998’s “Asian flu” and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks emphasize that rather than one happy village busily churning out prosperity, the globalized world is a network of sometimes painful connections. As Marvin Zonis, Dan Lefkovitz, and Sam Wilkin put it in The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and Local Politics in a Crisis-Driven World, (Agate, 2003), by the time those crises hit, the “party had gone on too long. Globalization’s heightened intimacies became increasingly uncomfortable, as many of the guests turned out to be angry, unpredictable, duplicitous, or violent.”
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Teens describe lust for guns

They’re, like, tight,” Professor Bernard Harcourt tells a small audience at Chicago’s Law School one December afternoon, demonstrating how youths talk about guns. Harcourt picked up the expression—and a slew of other slang—interviewing teenage boys detained in an Arizona correctional facility. Inserting their voices into the national conversation about gun crime, he argues, is critical to understanding the widespread and still growing problem—and to evaluating current policies to curtail it. “I wanted to be a bad motherf*cker,” he quotes another teen, continuing the final installment of a three-part discussion series: Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America. Harcourt, who helped organize the series, also edited a book by the same title (New York University Press, 2003).
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