Faculty/Department

Frankenstein: The enduring appeal of Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old creation

In 1804, when the use of electricity was in its infancy, a scientist named Giovanni Aldini jolted the recently hanged body of an executed convict from London’s Newgate prison with bolts of electricity, momentarily re-animating the limbs of the corpse — an experiment conducted at the Royal College of Surgeons. This moment was vividly described in newspapers of the day, discussed widely among the educated and middle classes of the times, and debated by scientists for years to come. Author Mary Shelley was just 7 at the time, but the impact of it jolted through her as well, and ultimately…

Alain Mabanckou’s novel ‘Black Moses’ wins 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Franco-Congolese poet and novelist Alain Mabanckou won the 2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for fiction for “Black Moses,” a novel that follows the journey of an orphan from Loango through a revolution in the Congo to Pointe-Noire and the home of a madam with “ten girls, each more beautiful than the last.” “It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I’d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko,” the novel opens. “A long name, which in Lingala…

How a UCLA philosophy professor helped construct ‘The Good Place’

A funny thing happened in the esoteric world of philosophy in late 2016 — professors and students were buzzing on social media about a sitcom. Is there really a television show that muddles through questions like “Is it ever OK to lie?” and “Is morality judged on results or intentions?” And even more surprisingly, how is this mainstream network TV show getting these debates so right? That show is “The Good Place,” which debuted on NBC in September 2016 and whose third season opened Sept. 27. The show picks up the story of a young woman immediately following her untimely death by shopping cart….