ARTICLES
Here are a few of the many stories I've written. I add more regularly, so stop by again.
HOW TO TEACH AGAINST HATE? LEAN ON GENOCIDE SURVIVORS
Trojan Family Magazine
The 2018 Winter Olympics were in full swing and the students in Ivy Schamis’ high school classroom were upbeat. The teacher was guiding the students in her Holocaust history class through a discussion about the 1936 Summer Games. She described how a German man had given famed black track athlete Jesse Owens a pair of specially designed running shoes despite risk of repercussions from the Nazi government.
“Does anybody know who that man was?” Schamis asked. A young man raised his hand. For the first time Schamis could remember, a student knew the answer. The shoemaker was Adi Dassler, the founder of Adidas, 17-year-old Nicholas Dworet said proudly.
PRESIDENT OBAMA HONORED BY USC SHOAH FOUNDATION
USC News
In recognition of his efforts to protect human rights, his commitment to education and his work advancing opportunities for all people, President Barack Obama was presented May 7 with the Ambassador for Humanity Award by Steven Spielberg, USC trustee and founder of USC Shoah Foundation-The Institute for Visual History and Education.
Obama’s acceptance speech centered on the theme of memories and stories — good and bad. Urging the audience to share stories so others can learn from them, he credited Spielberg with safeguarding Holocaust stories before they are lost to history and thanked the USC Shoah Foundation for “setting alight an eternal flame of testimony that can’t be extinguished.”
RAISING A GUIDE DOG
Daily Breeze
It’s big world out there and it’s filled with all kinds of fun things to do: There’s trash to sniff, bugs to taste and nice people who all seem to want to stop and say hello. Tola positively vibrated with excitement at the endless possibilities.
She was all bright-eyed and loosey-goosey with paws ready to splay out in play as she and a group of puppies visited an Office Depot in Torrance on a spring day, but this wasn’t a pleasure trip. There was work to be done, a destiny to be fulfilled. Tola doesn’t know it, but if all goes according to plan, in less than two years, she will become the eyes for someone who can’t see.
And it’s Pat Whitehead’s job to raise Tola from a rambunctious puppy to a dog mature enough to enter a rigorous five-month training program — college, they call it — at the San Rafael campus for Guide Dogs for the Blind.
Latest Work
DIGITAL JOURNALISM: YOUR SUNDAY PAPER WILL NEVER BE THE SAME
USC News
When Robert Hernandez looks through Google Glass, he sees the future of journalism.
Google’s computerized wearable glasses have become not only symbols of the future of technology but also, perhaps, a future that’s a bit unsettling. They incite fascination and curiosity, as well as fear over privacy concerns — and more than a little mockery.
But as a self-described technology nerd and assistant professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Hernandez sees something else entirely. To him, Google Glass is an important new tool for a craft as old as humanity: The telling of a great story.
CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL DOCTORS MAKE 7,500-MILE HOUSE CALL
USC News
Too many young patients, too far away. Instead of bringing the ailing children to Los Angeles, the doctors opted to visit them abroad.
The overseas house call meant a team of plastic surgeons from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles traveled 7,500 miles to Jordan, where they operated on dozens of children with physical deformities too complicated to be treated by doctors at the King Hussein Medical Center in Amman. And the physicians paid for all of it out of their own pockets.