N A S S A U   N O T E S

Former television executive to address TV's role in presidential elections

Martin Plissner, former executive political director of CBS-TV News and author of "The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections," will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 6, in Bowl 1, Robertson Hall.
     His address is titled "Television and the Making of the President in 2000: Lessons for the Next Round."
     Plissner served as the executive political director at CBS News from 1980 to 1997. He joined CBS in 1963 and for three decades witnessed the behind-the-scenes decisions that determine how television networks cover presidential campaigns. In his book, he suggests that presidential elections have become a staged event in response to media coverage, and that television executives do not cover elections based on a political agenda, but on the goal of reaching the highest possible viewership and gaining the competitive edge over network rivals.
     The lecture is offered in conjunction with an undergraduate task force at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs taught by Assistant Professor Joshua Tucker on "Designing American Electoral Reform." It is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School.

	Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich to speak on women, work and poverty

Bestselling author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich will speak on "Women and Work in Post-Welfare America" at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 5, in 101 McCormick Hall.
     Ehrenreich is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001), a spirited and sobering examination of the difficulty of surviving on poverty-level wages in the late 1990s. For this study, Ehrenreich went undercover, working as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide and a Wal-Mart sales clerk.
     In her lecture, Ehrenreich will expand upon the subject of women, work and poverty in the context of welfare "reform" and a weakening economy.
     Ehrenreich has been a contributing writer for Time magazine since 1990. Her articles, reviews, essays and humor pieces have appeared in a range of national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Ms., Esquire and The New Republic.
     The Meredith Miller Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the Program in the Study of Women and Gender along with the Center for the Study of Child Wellbeing and the Women's Center.

Loyalty, politics topic for talk

Identity, Loyalty and Politics" is the title of a talk to be presented Tuesday, March 5, on campus.
     Jean Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, will speak at 4:30 p.m. in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall.
     A political philosopher, Elshtain has written and spoken extensively on the connections between political and ethical convictions. The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Center for the Study of Religion.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones

McCarter Theatre

With his group the Flecktones, pioneering banjo player Béla Fleck will perform at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 10, in McCarter Theatre. The group's mix of music reaches across genres from blues and bluegrass to contemporary jazz and pop. For ticket information, call 258-2787 or visit <www.mccarter.org>.

Biodefense expert to speak

A lecture on "Bioterrorism and the U.S. Public Health System" will be presented at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 4, in Bowl 1, Robertson Hall.
     Tara O'Toole, director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, will speak. She also is an assistant professor of public health at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and served as assistant secretary of energy for environment safety and health from 1993 to 1997.
     The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Afghan woman to give lectre on life under Taliban

A young woman who escaped from Afghanistan and the Taliban regime will speak about her experiences at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 5, in 202 Jones Hall.
     "Latifa" will present an address titled "My Forbidden Face: Life Under the Taliban" and sign copies of her book by the same name.
     The book is a firsthand account of life under the Taliban regime from a young woman's perspective. Latifa discusses how Afghan women and children were treated when the Taliban took control. "My Forbidden Face" was written in collaboration with Chekeba Hachemi, the founder of Afghanistan Libre, an organization that helps Afghans who live outside their homeland start to rebuild their country.
     Latifa was born in 1980 to a middle-class Afghan family in Kabul. She enjoyed fashion and music and dreamed of becoming a journalist until Taliban soldiers seized power in 1996. She says she was a prisoner in her own home, forbidden to walk down the street alone and forced to wear a chadri, the state-mandated uniform that covered her entire body. Latifa and her parents escaped in May 2001 through a French-based Afghan resistance group and now live in Paris.
     The event is sponsored by Princeton's Program in Near Eastern Studies.

The Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Architect Gehry to discuss his work

Architect Frank Gehry, whose bold, sculptural buildings have attracted worldwide attention, will deliver a lecture at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 6, in McCosh 50. His lecture is titled "Current and Recent Work."
     Princeton recently commissioned Gehry to build a new science library, which will be supported by a $60 million gift from trustee Peter Lewis. The new building, which is in the earliest stage of planning, is expected to be located at the corner of Ivy Lane and Washington Road.

	Frank Gehry

     Gehry founded his architectural firm in 1962 and has designed scores of buildings, from private residences to museums. In 1989, he received the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, and in 1999 he received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.
     Gehry's most prominent work of recent years is the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997 and received worldwide acclaim. He also has designed a new building for the Guggenheim museum in New York.
     Other current work includes several academic buildings, including the Peter Lewis building for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Construction also is under way for the Stata Center, a building designed by Gehry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, he recently has been commissioned to design a new wing for the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C.
     Gehry's talk is designated as a Stafford Little Lecture and is part of the University's Public Lectures Series. It will be Webcast; for viewing information, visit <www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/>.

Award-winning poets to read

Poets Mark Doty and Albert Goldbarth will read from their work in a program at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 6, in the Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau St.
     Doty is the author of six books of poetry and a memoir, "Heaven's Coast," which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. His collection, "My Alexandria," won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He also has written a second memoir, "Firebird," and a new prose book, "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon."
     Goldbarth's "Saving Lives" is nominated this year for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the award in 1991 for "Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology." He also is the author of "Many Circles," "Troubled Lovers in History: A Sequence of Poems" and "A Sympathy of Souls: Essays," among others. His other honors include the Chad Walsh Memorial Award and the Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Award in Poetry.
     The poets will be introduced by James Richardson, professor of English. The program is part of the Creative Writing Program's Althea Ward Clark Reading Series.

Diplomats focus on Central Europe

The ambassadors of Slovakia and Poland to the United States will present a joint lecture titled "Rejoining the West: Central Europe 10 Years After the Revolutions" at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 7, in Bowl 1, Robertson Hall.
     Martin Bútora, a sociologist, author and senior civil servant, currently serves as the ambassador of Slovakia to the United States. He co-founded the Public Against Violence movement in 1989, one of the leading Slovak movements in the Velvet Revolution against communism. From 1990 to 1992, he served as the adviser to President Vaclav Havel for human rights issues, and as the director of the Section for Human Rights in the Office of the President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic.
     Przemyslaw Grudzinski has been ambassador of Poland to the United States since September 2000, previously serving as undersecretary of state in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also is currently the vice minister of foreign affairs in the Polish government. In the 1980s, he was involved in independent publishing activities as a member of the Solidarity Movement.
     The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School.

Smith closes President's Lecture Series

Stewart Smith, the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics, will speak on "Imperfect Opposites: Matter vs. Antimatter at Accelerators and in the Universe" at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 7, in McCosh 10.
     It will be the third and final talk this year in the President's Lecture Series initiated by President Tilghman to bring together faculty members from different disciplines.
     Smith will discuss his work on an experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where a striking new difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter was discovered last summer. He will relate this work to the disappearance of antimatter in the universe after the "Big Bang."
     The lecture, which is open to the public, will be simulcast on Tiger Video Channel 7 and on Princeton community cable Channel A11. It also will be Webcast; for viewing information, visit <www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/>.