Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Elected in 2014, Michael A. Hestrin has served as district attorney of Riverside County since January 2015.

Born in the Coachella Valley, Hestrin graduated in 1993 from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona with a bachelor’s degree in history. After college, he spent a year living in Mexico with relatives working as a reporter for a small newspaper based in Guadalajara. He then returned to the United States to begin his legal studies at Stanford University, graduating in 1997 with both a JD and a master’s degree in Latin American studies.

Hestrin spent 18 years as a line prosecutor in the DA’s Office before being elected as district attorney. During his years as a prosecutor, he represented the people of Riverside County in many difficult and challenging cases. He has completed more than 100 jury trials during his career. As trial team leader for the DA's Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit, he prosecuted those who target and abuse children. For most of his last 10 years with the DA’s Office prior to becoming district attorney, Hestrin was assigned to the Homicide Unit where he conducted more than 35 murder trials including seven successful death penalty cases.

Hestrin has been recognized for his achievements during his legal career. In 2003, 2005, and again in 2010, he was named Countywide Prosecutor of the Year for Riverside County. In 2008, Hestrin was chosen by the legal publication, The Daily Journal, as one of California’s “Top Twenty Lawyers Under Forty.” In 2009, he was honored as the Statewide Prosecutor of the Year by the California District Attorney Investigators Association. In 2010, the California District Attorneys Association recognized him as California’s Outstanding Prosecutor of the Year.

In addition to prosecuting cases, Hestrin conducted trainings for prosecutors, paralegals, law enforcement officers, Riverside County Bar Association members, and social workers in ethics, trial advocacy, sex offender prosecution, homicide prosecution, and capital case litigation. He has also been an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University for the last 10 years teaching American Government, Introduction to Criminal Law and Procedure and Latin American History.

Mr. Hestrin's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

Kathleen Stock is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of the monograph 'Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination', forthcoming with Oxford University Press in summer 2017; and the editor of 'Philosopher on Music' (Oxford, 2007). She has published widely on questions concerning the imagination, fiction, and art, as well as on the nature of sexual.

objectification. In the past she has been the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council research grant; a trustee of the American Society of Aesthetics; and the Secretary of the British Society of Aesthetics. She continues to be an Editorial Consultant for the British Journal of Aesthetics.

Professor Stock’s Athenaeum talk is facilitated by a Mellon Global Liberal Arts Visiting Scholar grant.

View Video: YouTube with Kathleen Stock

Esther Chung-Kim, associate professor of religious studies at CMC will moderate the discussion by first setting the stage of the European Reformation by outlining the impact of religious change on social welfare reform, especially as it relates to poverty, wealth and social change. Her research interests include religious authority and conflict, as well as the religious impact on social change. Her current research project focuses on religious reform and poor relief in early modern Europe. 

Lori Anne Ferrell is the John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of Government by Polemic: James I and the King’s Preachers (Stanford University Press) and The Bible and the People (Yale University Press) as well as many articles on Renaissance literature and the Reformation, the early modern sermon, and the early modern Bible. Her revisionist analysis of the role scripture played in the English Reformation is featured in the new Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017). She will present the concept of conversion to a national church as sincerely and religiously (rather than politically) motivated. Her case study for this concept is the poet and Church of England priest John Donne, whose corpus of St Paul’s sermons she has edited for the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (forthcoming 2018), work that allows her also to discuss the nature and importance of literary evidence in Reformation studies.

Seth Lobis is an associate professor of literature at CMC. He is the author of The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Yale University Press) as well as essays on Erasmus, Milton, and others. He will cover the topic regarding "The Disenchantment of the World." This phrase, which Weber borrowed from Schiller, has long been associated not only with the progressive rationalization of western culture but also, more specifically, with the particular significance of the Reformation in that broader process. On this account the reformers opposed and sought to eliminate the magical, or more magical-seeming, elements of Christianity. In recent decades, historians have challenged Weber's thesis from different angles even as the idea of modernity as a complex configuration of ideas about magic, science, and religion has remained entrenched.

Carina Johnson is a professor of history at Pitzer College. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography, memory, and the experience of violence in the 16th century Habsburg Empire. She is also interested in questions of material and visual culture, religious and cultural identities, and theorizing colonialism in the early modern era. She will present on Reformations in the European, Mediterranean, and global contexts. The Reformation is often described in terms of its profound religious, social, and political impacts within Europe, or as counter-Reformation Catholicism and Protestantism moved across the globe through European colonial structures. Her presentation focuses on two other important components of the Reformation era: the parallel confessionalization process occurring in the Islamic Ottoman and of the extra-European world, Safavid empires and the Reformation’s impacts on European conceptualizations of the extra-European world.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The War on Cops (2016), warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk.

A lawyer by training, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has testified before numerous U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York. In 2004, she received the Civilian Valor Award from the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers. In 2008, Mac Donald received the Integrity in Journalism Award from the New York State Shields, as well as the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies. In 2012, she received the Quill & Badge Award for Excellence in Communication from the International Union of Police Associations. In 2016, she received the Excellence in Media Award from the National Police Defense Foundation's State Troopers Coalition.

A frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English; she also studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.

Ms. Mac Donald's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by The Rose Institute of State and Local Government and the Salvatori Center.

(Source: Manhattan Institute Website)

View Video: YouTube with Heather Mac Donald

Robert Sapolsky is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, a professor of biology, neurosurgery, and neurology at Stanford University, and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. In 2008, National Geographic and PBS aired an hour-long special on stress featuring Sapolsky and his research on the subject. In addition to A Primate’s Memoir, which won the 2001 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in nonfiction, Sapolsky has written three other books, including The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and Monkeyluv and Other Essays on our Lives as Animals. Sapolsky was awarded Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 2008. His articles have appeared in publications such as Discover and The New Yorker, and he writes a biweekly column for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Mind & Matter.”

His newest book entitled: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst will be published in May 2017 by Penguin Press.

Professor Sapolsky's Athenaeum talk is part of the Science and Skepticism series co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

(Source: Steven Barclay Agency Website)

Photo Credit: Thompson McClellan Photography
 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Robert Sapolsky

​Mary Gaitskill is "among the most eloquent and perceptive of contemporary fiction writers," says The New York Times. The author of several novels including Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1998) and Veronica (2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005, as well as the story collections Don’t Cry (2010), Bad Behavior: Stories (1988), and Because They Wanted To (1998), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, Gaitskill has been praised by the Village Voice as "reaching deep into what she calls the trapdoors in personality and obsession, and pulling what she finds there back out into the world. Past, present, future; heartbreak, desire, and loss: none of it is quite beyond her.”

Her story Secretary was the basis for the feature film of the same name. The film received the Special Jury Prize and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. One of her most controversial essays, "On Not Being a Victim," appeared in Harper's. In 2002, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction; in 2010 she received a New York Public Library Cullman Center research grant.

She has taught at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, Brown, and Syracuse University; she was the Writer-In-Residence at Hobart College William Smith College. She has also taught at Claremont McKenna College.

Her most recent novel is "The Mare" which was on the “Best Books of the Year" lists for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Ms. Gaitskill’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

Photo credit: Derek Shapton

The senior thesis requirement at CMC is challenging and rewarding and seniors endeavor to produce innovative, thoughtful, comprehensive, and well written work. In this inaugural Senior Thesis Showcase, nine seniors across the disciplines will present 5 to 7-minute synopses of their capstone project. Come hear about their research, motivation, and findings, as well as their overall thesis journey. Most importantly come support and celebrate your CMC peers!

View Video: YouTube with Senior Thesis Showcase

Medicare regulations and payment rules can erect barriers to evidence-based care designs to address non-clinical needs, which are particularly important for individuals with chronic conditions and functional or cognitive impairments. Matthew McKearn, the associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Health Project, will discuss BPC's work on developing recommendations to improve value in the U.S. health care system. BPC is working on policy ideas to finance long-term services and supports that have the potential to address non-clinical needs and avoid expensive hospital stays and other avoidable care episodes. BPC has partnered with CMC's Policy Lab to work in this policy area, focusing on proposals for lowering costs and improving services for people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

Prior to joining BPC, McKearn served as the director of the office of legislative affairs and budget for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the Department of Health and Human Services. He also worked at the Office of Management and Budget where he was a senior analyst. His issue areas included long-term care hospitals and post-acute care, hospice, Medigap, rural Medicare payments, delivery system reform, and the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

Gary W. Evans is the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Ecology in the departments of design & environmental analysis and human development at Cornell University. An environmental and developmental psychologist, he is interested in how physical environment affects human health and well being in particular among children. His specific areas of expertise include the environment of childhood poverty, children's environments, cumulative risk and child development, environmental stressors, and the development of children's environmental attitudes and behaviors. 

Evans is the author of over 300 scholarly articles and chapters plus five books. He was a core member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, the board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Academy of Sciences, and the board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Center for Disease Control. Evans is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and received a Docteur Honoris Causa from Stockholm University. Celebrated as an award winning teacher, he has taught and lectured in over 50 countries.

Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot were two of the most luminous figures of 20^th century poetry. Milosz, who was inspired by Eliot’s work (he translated “The Waste Land” into Polish during World War II), developed his own response to the atrocities and despair of the modern world and toward literary and cultural traditions, often in contradiction to Eliot’s.  After years of studying and writing about the two poets, Peter Dale Scott provides a trenchant assessment of their work as part of a new study on Milosz.

In the 1960’s Peter Dale Scott was a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, having previously served as a Canadian diplomat to Poland. At Berkeley he met Milosz, a colleague in the Slavic Languages department and poet then known mostly for his book about totalitarianism,The Captive Mind, and for his courses on Dostoevsky. Scott and Milosz collaborated on a landmark English translation of the selected poems of Zbigniew Herbert and eventually on stunning, witty English versions of Milosz’s own poems. Milosz went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A poet himself, Peter Dale Scott has published numerous volumes of poetry, most notably the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (2000). In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994, published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars), Mosaic Orpheus (2009), and Tilting Point (2012). In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.

An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass, who has served as U.S. Poet Laureate,  wrote that "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time."

Peter Dale’s Scott’s lecture is sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

After graduating from CMC in 1996, Greger Larson spent a year in Central Asia on a Watson Fellowship before starting a job in the environmental consulting industry in Azerbaijan. Subsisting on a literary diet of Stephen J. Gould’s writings, he worked and wandered the deserts of Turkmenistan over the next three years.

Ultimately concluding that “evolution was cooler than oil,” Larson pursued his masters in archeology at Oxford University, continued further studies in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, and completed his Ph.D. in zoology at Oxford in 2006.

Larson is currently a professor at Oxford University where he uses ancient DNA to address a wide variety of questions about evolution, migration, and domestication. He also directs the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network, also at Oxford University.

(He says that he rarely wonders what his salary would be had he stuck to oil.)

Dana Ivgy is an award-winning Israeli actress, and star of the highly acclaimed film Zero Motivation. In 2002 she garnered the attention of the Israeli Film Academy when she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress award for her portrayals of Sarit in the sports drama Beitar Provence. She also received the nomination for her role of Tikva Ida in the drama, The Barbecue People, based around a picnic celebrating Israeli Independence day. She has numerous film and television roles to her credit, including in the critically acclaimed film, Broken Wings. 

Ms. Ivgy’s Athenaeum appearance is part of the Western Jewish Studies Association Conference held at CMC.

James Strock, an independent entrepreneur and reformer in business, government, and politics, is a frequent speaker 21st century leadership, servant leadership, and presidential leadership. A student of presidential leadership, his first book, Reagan on Leadership: Executive Lessons from the Great Communicator was published in a commemorative edition for the Reagan Centennial. Strock is also the author of Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership. Both books are widely used in business and not-for profit organizations, educational institutions, government agencies, and the military. Strock is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Leadership (Goethals and Sorenson, eds.), and wrote the articles on Winston S. Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and Theodore Roosevelt.

In addition to extensive business and legal experience, he has served in senior positions in both federal and state governments. From 1991-97, Strock served in Governor Pete Wilson’s cabinet as California’s founding secretary for environmental protection. Following confirmation by the California State Senate, he led the Cal/EPA, an organization comprising 4,000 employees, achieving worldwide environmental, energy and economic impact. During this time, he also served on the Intergovernmental Policy Advisory Committee to the U.S. Trade Representative. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush appointed Strock to serve as assistant administrator for enforcement (chief law enforcement officer) of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he led a major expansion and reorganization of the national program, while driving civil and criminal enforcement to record levels.

Strock is a graduate of Harvard College (A.B., magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Charles Joseph Bonaparte Scholarship) and Harvard Law School where he was a teaching fellow for Professor Richard Neustadt’s course on presidential leadership. 

Walter Thompson-Hernandez is a Los Angeles-based social documentary maker, multimedia journalist, and doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles. His stories and research have been featured by NPR, CNN, BBC, Fusion, Los Angeles Times, Remezcla, and UNIVISION. His latest academic project will be featured in a forthcoming book titled, Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas.

View Video: YouTube with Walter Thompson-Hernandez

Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. His latest book is Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), for which he traveled across the United States.

Dreamland was selected as one of the Best books of 2015 by Amazon.com, Slate.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by Nobel economics laureate Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University.

Quinones’ previous two highly acclaimed books grew from his 10 years living and working as a freelance writer in Mexico (1994-2004).

Quinones, whose father Ricardo Quinones taught literature at CMC for many years, is a former reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years (2004-2014). He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, and the border.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Sam Quinones