Perfect Pitch

Demystifying Dissertations: Inside Higher Ed featured Emory’s efforts to showcase doctoral dissertations produced by PhDs this year and offer scholars the opportunity to communicate how that knowledge is having an impact. “In a field like business, it’s important to get people to understand that the work academics do has a lot of applications to real-world business settings,” Jongwoon “Willy” Choi told IHE. Choi earned his PhD in business this spring with his dissertation “When Are Signing Bonuses More Than Just ‘Pay to Play’? An Experimental Investigation.” Choi, who took a job with the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business, said he encourages all academics to think of an “elevator speech” about their research.

Trial of Tears: “There was a march of survivors, I would say approximately a hundred survivors, who came into the witness box and told the story of what happened to them. And people watched them and listened to them and heard them in a way they hadn’t heard them before,” explained Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, in an interview with NPR about her new book, The Eichmann Trial. Her work has received wide acclaim this past spring, including a review in the New York Times.

Rapture Unrealized: Theology professor Brent Strawn spoke with CNN on May 22 about the belief by some that May 21, 2011, would mark the end of the world. “This sort of calendarization about the end of time is misconstrued and wrong-headed . . . people need to know that Christianity is a complex phenomenon and that these sorts of groups that attach specific dates are very few and rare, and they don’t represent the mainstream of Christianity,” he said.