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Food Fight Panel Discussion
Facing the food problems of under-supply and mal-nourishment in the 1920’s and 1930’s, American agricultural policy has grown to promote a system that boasts big farms and even bigger food processing conglomerates that favor cheap commodities and long shelf life over fresh, healthy, flavorful food. The film Food Fight provides a fascinating look at how this food culture developed, and how the California food movement in the 1960’s created a counter-revolution with values centered on local, tasty ingredients and healthy meals. From the Farm Bill to one's daily food choices, people have the power to share in this revolution. Chris Taylor, Alison Arnett, Scott Soares, and David Waters discuss how in this post-film panel discussion
Prince of Thieves and The Town: A Boston Crime Story as a Novel and Movie
Novelist and New York Times bestselling Chuck Hogan discusses his book Prince of Thieves, that was adapted into the 2010 film The Town, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, with Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, and Blake Lively. Carlo Rotella and Christopher Wilson, both professors of English at Boston College, join the conversation. Presented as part of the Lowell Humanities Lecture Series.
The Tumultuous Milky Way and Its Satellite Galaxies
Current theories favor the idea that large galaxies such as the Milky Way grow by swallowing neighboring dwarf galaxies. During this process, the dwarf galaxies become severely distorted, producing streams of stars and gas. The Magellanic Stream of gas and the stellar stream associated with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy consist of debris torn from satellites have been interacting with other dwarfs or with the Milky Way in our local group of galaxies.
Using state-of-the-art simulations, Elena D’Onghia of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics demonstrates how spiral galaxies and their dwarf satellites form: how dwarf galaxies distort larger spiral galaxies when they pass in the proximity of galactic disks, yielding the magnificent spiral arms that we commonly observe in many disk galaxies like the Milky Way.