From UCLA, ALOUD, Zocalo, Southwestern Law School, USC & the Milken Institute
Here's hoping there are madding crowds around town with noble striving to learn lots more this week about international criminal courts, Islam, Christianity, mammon-like matters, defamation, unemployment and happiness. Those are among the topics that will be or have been taken up in salon-like, free, open and public conversations across the area that also may require RSVPs or online patience.
- On the Westside this afternoon, for example, Gen. Wesley Clark, the one-time NATO supreme allied commander, and David Scheffer, the first U.S. ambassador at-large for war crime issues, will address whether aggressive war constitutes a crime and what the proper role might be for an international criminal court in the future of international justice.
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In downtown, Graham E. Fuller, a former vice chair of the CIA's national intelligence council, will join Tuesday night with Maher Hathout, an oft-quoted figure in the U.S. Muslim community, and Rabbi Reuven Firestone to ponder scenarios in which there might be a world without Islam? That session will be twinned with a Thursday night program with Eliza Griswold, a poet and prize winning journalist (shown at left), and Amir Hussain, a theological studies prof from Westchester, examining life along the 10th parallel, near which half the world's 1.3 billion Muslims dwell, as do 60% or so of the planet's 2 billion Christians.
- In downtown, too, but on Wednesday night, Sebastian Mallaby -- a noted journalist and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations -- will detail the rise and seek to explain the unprecedented position that hedge funds now occupy in global finance.
- With the appropriate caveat about a possible conflict of interest (since the home institution of the event mentioned next also happens to write a paycheck or two to the author of this post), it's worth taking note for the legal crowd that on Wednesday afternoon a group of international scholars and experts, as part of a symposium put on by a specialty law journal at the school, will detail and discuss emerging global issues in defamation law. In Exposition Park, of course, a similar symposium sponsored by another campus law journal recently considered the special ravages inflicted by the nation's soaring unemployment on minority groups that already were ignored or shunned.
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And, finally, for those who might wonder just what sort of program the smart set gets to see at the sessions detailed here, well, here's an online posting and a video from a recent Los Angeles appearance at a Bevery Hills think tank by Tony Hsieh, a corporate CEO (shown at right) whose company, Zappos.com, came to represent not only top notch customer service but also highly successful and profitable online innovation, which, incidentally and arguably, also brought considerable happiness to investors, employees and customers alike.
