Elizabeth Birmingham

Fearing the Freak: How Talk TV Articulates Women and Class

Abstract Although the television talk shows known as “trash talk” shows have faced public criticism nearly from their beginnings in the early 1980s, the proliferation of these programs in the 1990s has led to a growing backlash. Talk shows and their hosts–Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Sally Jesse Raphael, Maury Povich, Geraldo Rivera, and Jerry Springer–have faced criticism crystallized by the murder of a Jenny Jones guest by another guest. The program was to air surprise meetings between secret admirers and the objects of their affections. Jones show staff arranged one such meeting by convincing twenty-four-year-old Jonathan Schmitz to appear on the show and meet a person with a secret crush on him. According to People magazine, in anticipation of taping the show, Schmitz purchased more than

Review of The Soundscape of modernity: Architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in America, 1900–1933 by Emily Thompson: Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2002 (Paperback 2004)

300 of new clothing. Once on the program, Schmitz was confronted by a man he knew slightly, Scott Amedure. Three days after taping the show, in early March, Schmitz killed Amedure with two close-range shots from a twelve-gauge shotgun, claiming he had been humiliated.

The Case of Marion Mahony Griffin and The Gendered Nature of Discourse in Architectural History

My interest in the histories of architecture has been career-long, but that interest was born in an art history program, where aesthetics and formal analysis and not technologies were the focus of academic study. When offered the opportunity to review this book, I was unsure I would be able to read and comprehend a 500 page book on architectural acoustics, much less review that text for an audience interested not in architecture, but in listening, and the role of listening especially within experiences of teaching and learning. But Emily Thompson not only makes the physics of architectural acoustics accessible to her readers, she makes the history interesting.