UMASS AMHERST

Commentator Hannah Tran-Trinh graduated last week from UMass Amherst. She says she learned a lot there, but the best lessons were hard-won.

I grew up in Boston. My friends were quite the colorful bunch, but I never thought twice about the fact that we were a diverse group of kids. I just loved feeling comfortable. Being a part of something I felt I belonged to.

But then I showed up in western Mass. and it was the whitest place I'd ever seen.

Commentator and journalist Shaheen Pasha was a 19-year-old newsroom intern when a male colleague behaved in ways she felt crossed a line. As stories of sexual harassment in the media are surfacing more often these days, she's got some requests of her colleagues.

Graduation at UMass Amherst is less than two weeks a way. One senior, a public health major from Medford, wants to carry the Tibetan flag in a parade of flags, but the university says no.

"A probing and deeply ruminative cross-genre odyssey."

That's how Kirkus Review describes the newest book of short stories from UMass Amherst professor Edie Meidav, called "Kingdom of the Young."

I sat down with Meidov this week and asked her how she describes her writing.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The world renowned linguist has lectured and written extensively on the subject, as he has on philosophy, politics, international affairs and numerous others.

Chomsky was invited by the UMass Amherst Political Economy Research Institute to speak on the existential threats posed by nuclear weaponry and climate change.

His talk, “Prospects for Survival,” was recorded on April 13th, 2017 at UMass Amherst.

John Rickford is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, where he studies the relationship between language and social structure.

In this talk, he delves into vernacular English to show how differences in language can lead to distrust and disregard between communities. Rickford concludes by offering solutions to help bridge linguistic gaps across cultures.

He is the author of several books on language and culture, including "African American, Creole and Other Vernacular Englishes: A Bibliographic Resource."