Harold Vincent Kennedy, Jr., 76, a resident of Fort Myers, FL, formerly of Darien, CT, passed away Friday, December 24, 2021 in Fort Myers. He was born June 21, 1945 in White Plains, NY to Harold and Madeleine Kennedy, Sr., now deceased. Hank graduated Scarsdale High School, Class of 1963, where he captained the Varsity Basketball Team.

He is survived by his beloved wife of 36 years, Susan Kennedy of Fort Myers; two loving children, Douglas Kennedy (Tracie) of Naples, FL, and Meredith Antonelli (Rob) of Bradenton, FL; sister, Claire Keen (David) of Fort Myers: six grandchildren, Ronan, Hudson, Reese, Madeleine, Avery, and Hayden; a sister-in-law, Rosemary Perley Kwauk, a brother-inlaw, Edward Perley, a sister-in-law, Althea Garner Perley as well as his loving niece, Althea and nephews Teddy (Erin), Timmy, Harrison and Peter.

https://mullinsmemorial.com/obituaries/harold-vincent-kennedy-jr/

Robert Andrews Gibson died on April 4, 2021, at the VA Medical Center in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania. He was 86. The cause was complications of dementia. Born New Rochelle NY March 10, 1935, he was the son of Helen Andrews Gibson, a homemaker, and Lloyd Camden Gibson, a geological engineer and attorney for Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon Mobil). The family moved to Scarsdale NY in 1939; Mr. Gibson graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1952.

He was predeceased by his parents and his sisters, Julia (Gibson) Axtell, SHS ’42, and Mary(Gibson) Masich Friedlander, SHS ’44. He is survived by eight nieces and nephews, and many more in succeeding generations.

In terms of talent, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (SHS 1979) is Hollywood royalty, and he's got both the awards and the bank account to prove it. For two decades, Sorkin's work has wowed audiences on television, the silver screen, and even Broadway. Historically, Sorkin's projects have high-caliber casts, and even higher-dollar budgets.

Screenwriting, however, wasn't actually his first passion. In fact, when Sorkin was younger, his goal was to be an actor. Like many who move to Manhattan to chase this dream, Sorkin struggled financially, but eventually found his way to screenwriting, and the rest is history. In 1992, Sorkin scored his first box office hit with "A Few Good Men," and since then, his writing genius has continued to reap him a massive following of die-hard fans, and millions of dollars in fiscal returns.

Despite Sorkin's plentiful cash flow, life in the spotlight hasn't always been perfect or easy. Even throughout some of his career's most lucrative years, the screenwriter has had his struggles. Is this a case of 'mo money mo problems'? Perhaps, but on the other hand, the talented — and especially the rich — tend to rise right back to the top. As for the Oscar and Emmy award-winning screenwriter's wealth today, read on to see how much Aaron Sorkin is really worth.

First trumpeted by the prime minister at a National Press Club address in February 2020, it proposed that the energy transition plan Australian business has been begging for for more than a decade — and that Turnbull lost the Coalition leadership over twice — should be built around gas. Also that Australian taxpayers should underwrite the manufacturing sector’s efforts to deliver it.

There is, the PM said, “no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia that does not involve the greater use of gas”. The howls of protest that greeted this were voluminous and widespread.

They came from the 82% of Australians concerned about the effect of climate change in our backyard and appalled that the leaked draft report backing the strategy didn’t even mention the climate crisis, nor propose a single alternative to centring Australia’s energy future around fossil fuel.

They also came from governance experts, appalled at how the membership of the National COVID-19 Coordinating Commission that wrote the report had been stacked by members from the mining and fossil fuel industries, including taskforce head Andrew Liveris, who was also a board member of Saudi oil company Aramco and mining business Worley.

The AXA Art Prize launches the fifth edition of the prestigious competition on February 1, 2022. Since its début in 2018, the AXA Art Prize has quickly become one of the premier student art competitions in the nation and a showcase for the next generation of major artists.

Submissions for the 2022 edition of the Prize are now being accepted; the submission period closes March 31, 2022. The Prize is juried in three rounds: all submissions are first evaluated by Regional Juries drawn from the AXA Art Prize Strategic Advisory Board, a collection of 30 studio art programs, including Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), California College of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pratt Institute and the Savannah College of Art and Design. A total of 40 artists will be shortlisted by an Exhibition Jury composed of curators from leading museums, and works from these finalists comprise the Exhibition, which goes on view in New York in November 2022. From these 40 finalists, a First Prize and Second Prize are selected by three renowned contemporary artists, with the first prize winner receiving $10,000.

When it was first announced that Nicole Kidman would be playing Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin’s (SHS  1979) Being the Ricardos,” many fans of “I Love Lucy” were beyond skeptical, calling for a replacement for the “miscast” Kidman. But shortly after the first public preview of the fictionalized Amazon Studios biopic at a packed Westwood theater in mid-November, the tone began to change. Kidman’s name in the end credits elicited thunderous applause, and her entrance for a post-screening Q&A was welcomed with a standing ovation.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew is joined by Christopher Shroeder, the author of Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East.

Christopher Schroeder (SHS 1982) is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He is the author of Startup Rising. In 2010, he wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post about the start-ups in Dubai, and was subsequently invited by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to judge a start-up competition in Cairo one week before Tahrir Square. He is on the boards of advisors of the American University of Cairo School of Business and regional start-up resources Wamda and Oasis500. He lives in Washington, DC.

I just got done with a talk for a college about how we squandered the possibilities for a networked society by focusing on IP in the cloud rather than the people with whom we were connecting. Afterwards, during the Q&A, a student wanted to know why I was so pessimistic about the digital future. I was a bit surprised. Because while I do think we screwed things up, I wouldn’t still be writing and speaking and podcasting and Zooming if I didn’t believe we can still turn this all around.

I’m no pessimist. I’m usually accused of the opposite. I was one of the first to celebrate how the digital renaissance could unleash the wild potentials of the collective human imagination. This renaissance included everything from the chaos math and quantum physics to fantasy role-playing and the Gaia hypothesis. We believed that human beings, connected as never before, could create any future we wanted. The internet would do for humanity what LSD did for the individual.

I Love Lucy was just about the most famous show in the history of television, but the dramatic behind-the-scenes story stayed off screen, until now. Amazon Studios’ Being the Ricardos incorporates several of the true stories of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman), Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) and their staff. Only writer-director Aaron Sorkin sets them all in one week.

In Season 2 of I Love Lucy, Ball gets two pieces of troubling news on a Monday: A magazine reports that Arnaz has been seen around town with another woman, and Walter Winchell discovers that Ball had once applied to be a member of the Communist party, sharing that news with his audience.

USC women’s basketball postponed another Pac-12 conference game Wednesday as COVID-19 issues in the program continue. USC‘s next scheduled game is at Colorado on Jan. 7.

Two days after postponing a home game against No. 4 Arizona, the Trojans pushed back a Jan. 2 game against Arizona State at Galen Center, their third consecutive conference game affected during the national rise in coronavirus cases. USC’s original conference opener at rival UCLA was rescheduled from Dec. 28 to Jan. 20, but matchups against Arizona and Arizona State don’t have new dates yet.

COVID-19 turned the world upside down two long years ago, and the omicron variant is giving us something new to worry about in the coming year. Meanwhile, the pandemic is still prompting people to withdraw from social activities, and many continue to work from home, with weekdays blurring into weekends, month after month.

With all this stress, social isolation and disruption, it’s no wonder if you’ve been feeling the effects, even being more forgetful or absent-minded. Maybe you’ve found yourself unable to remember a common term, what day it is or why you walked into a room. Experts say prolonged stress can affect people’s everyday memory and cognitive skills.

“If we’re under a lot of stress, sometimes it can very negatively impact retrieval of information,” said Daniel Schacter (SHS 1970), a professor of psychology and director of the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University. He's also the author of “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson (SHS 1973) had a fiery back-and-forth during the press briefing on Monday.

Psaki addresses a multitude of issues that President Joe Biden’s administration is currently facing including the announcement of a U.S. diplomatic boycott from the 2022 Beijing Olympics, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and her office’s viral tweet that stirred some controversy.

Liasson asked a question that shifted the focus towards the administration’s efforts to quell the spread of Covid-19, which is posing an urgent threat with the Omicron Variant’s arrival.

Think of an Aaron Sorkin (SHS 1979) production and several things spring to mind. Zinging dialogue, yes. A cheesy orchestral flourish, perhaps? A fist-pumping denouement? Certainly. The writer-director’s name has almost become an adjective, its own distinct sub-genre. Not Lynchian, or Hitchcockian, but Sorkinian. In Sorkin’s breakthrough film, 1992’s A Few Good Men, there was Tom Cruise vs Jack Nicholson (”You can’t handle the truth!”). There was the rat-a-tat political drama ofThe West Wing, perhaps Sorkin’s crowning achievement. There was Mark Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network, speaking at breakneck speed, his sentences swathed in cold erudition, stressing the importance of "final clubs". And there were the swelling strings at the climax of The Trial of the Chicago 7, when the protesters are acquitted.

The leading student-first connected learning platform, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Busuu, one of the leading language learning platforms which has reached over 120 million learners to date across more than 160 countries. Busuu provides courses in 12 different languages to over 500,000 paying subscribers.

"The addition of Busuu gives Chegg the unique opportunity to expand our business while also adding tremendous value to our existing users," said Dan Rosensweig, President and CEO of Chegg. "It will allow us to drive further into international markets, as well as accelerate Busuu’s growth in the US market. Busuu’s team, who we have known for many years, are a great cultural fit. 

The research adds to a growing body of work finding that climate change is increasing fire risk in California and elsewhere in the West.

The hottest summer days in the Sierra Nevada in California greatly increase the risk that wildfires will ignite or spread, and as the planet keeps warming the risks will increase even more, scientists said Wednesday.

The research, which examined daily temperatures and data from nearly 450 Sierra Nevada fires from 2001 to 2020 and projected the analysis into the future, found that the number of fires could increase by about 20 percent or more by the 2040s, and that the total burned area could increase by about 25 percent or more.

we all predicted back in the 1990s, the net has spawned new opportunities for independent creators and consumers of all sorts. Blogs, YouTube, print-on-demand, 3D printing, Etsy, eBay, 99designs, Upwork, SoundCloud, Substack, and many many other platforms give creators the ability to make things and sell (or at least distribute) them pretty directly to wide audiences, without signing a contract or getting a job with a movie studio, magazine, publisher, record company, or advertising agency.

The problem is, all this activity was subsumed by a few monopolist platforms that take way more of a share of the profits than they deserve. YouTube and Spotify aren’t much better for the typical artist than Uber and DoorDash are for the typical gig worker. But the decentralized web — that blockchain stuff — could change this. At least for a while.

Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem and writer-director Aaron Sorkin (SHS 1979) made one of their first public appearances in support of their new film Being the Ricardos on Saturday night, hosting a screening and Q&A at the Bruin Theater in Westwood.

The trio were also joined by costars J.K. Simmons, Tony Hale and Nina Arianda as they reflected on the film, which looks inside the world of I Love Lucy and Hollywood power couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Kidman, who takes on the role of Ball, admitted she had “massive trepidation about a month prior and Aaron had to get on the phone and send me some emails saying, ‘You got this’ and he had to champion me through,” adding that the whole cast was “really championing each other through the whole show because it was frightening, but incredibly exciting.”

While the traditional fall festival circuits have produced a number of strong contenders for the next Academy Awards, there are more question marks than usual for this time of year. Part of this is due to the pandemic, which forced many high-end films to delay in 2020 and early 2021 as most theaters were closed for safety concerns, leading to a backlog of titles arriving in November and, most notably, in December.

Before we get there, where does the Academy Award race for Best Picture stand? Heading that list for now is “Belfast,” given that director/writer/producer Kenneth Branagh’s ode to his childhood that was disrupted by the “troubles” in Northern Ireland won the People’s Choice Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The nine previous winners of the prize have gone on to secure a spot on the list of titles competing for Oscar’s top prize