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Faces
November 1999
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Hoping
to reduce the risk of a future world financial crisis as severe as the recent
one, U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers announced the creation of a new "Group of 20" finance
ministers from leading and developing nations. In an address inaugurating
the School of Management's International Center for Finance on September
22, Summers said the group would be "an informal mechanism for dialogue"
about global economic policy.
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"To
write badly is a necessary part of writing well," according to writer Tobias
Wolff, who visited the campus the week of September 13 as the
first John-Christophe Schlesinger Visiting Writer. "I wish I'd had more
patience with myself in the beginning. I now understand that if I go back
to something again and again, I may write something good." Wolff, author
of the memoir This Boy's Life, visited writing classes, gave a public
reading, and spoke to students at an Ezra Stiles College master's tea. |
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AT&T
chairman C. Michael
Armstrong brought an optimistic view of advancing technology
to the School of Management's Leaders Forum on September 28. "We're going
to be able to better export this country's economic system with the Internet,"
he predicted. "The Internet, more than anything else, delivers the truth,
and the truth is the enemy of tyrannies around the world." |
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Consumers should
be able to trust that their medical records will remain confidential,
said Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna
Shalala at a Harper Fellowship lecture at the Law School on
October 7. Shalala described her department's efforts to draft a federal
policy on the release of such information, and called on Congress to pass
a law protecting patients. "There's a federal law that prohibits video
stores from giving out our private information," she said, "but there
is nothing as to what can be done with medical information." |
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In
an address at the Center for International and Area Studies on September
29, former Secretary of State James
Baker said the Clinton administration's foreign policy is "pretty
much ad hoc" and that it showed "a disturbing lack of clarity and consistency."
He also criticized Republican leaders for failing to construct a coherent
foreign policy and urged that international issues be part of next year's
presidential campaign. Baker identified a number of issues the U.S. must
confront in the next century and stressed the need for a missile defense
system. |
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Close-Up: Edward Norton '91
There
was little of the movie star in the looks and manner of Edward Norton '91 when
he sat down to face a standing-room-only crowd at an Ezra Stiles
College master's tea on October 3. But Norton says that's part of
the secret of his success. Norton, who was brought to campus by
the Yale Film Society for a preview screening of his new film Fight
Club, told the audience that his ordinary looks gave him an
"elasticity" that matinee-idol types don't always have.
"People
of Dustin Hoffman's generation introduced the idea that you could
be a character actor and carry a film," said Norton. "They just
inverted the whole hierarchy. Now you have pretty boys trying to
get dirty and play junkies."
Norton,
who has earned two Oscar nominations, has played a backwoods Kentuckian
in Primal Fear, a singing and dancing suitor in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, and a skinhead in American History
X. In Fight Club, a dark comedy from director David Fincher,
he plays a Generation-X corporate drone who is drawn into a world
of reckless violence.
Asked
after the screening if he had any qualms about appearing in such
a film, which left many in the audience shaken, Norton said "There's
violence in our culture. And the responsibility of people making
films is to address dysfunction in the culture."
Norton
directed and starred in his next film, a romantic comedy called Keeping the Faith, which he wrote with friend and Yale classmate
Stewart Blumberg '91. While he said his "longest and deepest friendships"
are with people he met at Yale, he had not been back to campus since
graduation. "Since crossing Prospect Street," he said, "I've had
this fluttery feeling, like I have a paper due."  |
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