Hannah Arendt and ‘banality of evil’ is subject of Worldview Pictures project

NEW YORK - In 1924 Hannah Arendt, a young Jewish PhD candidate fell in love with her professor, Martin Heidegger at the University of Marburg. Heidegger would become the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. He alo joined the Nazi Party in 1933; Arendt fled for her life.

    “The Best American”, a feature film project being scripted by Nancy Fitzpatrick and Stephen Trombley, tells the story of Arendt’s hair-raising flight from Germany to France, and then from a French holding camp where she once again fled the Nazis for the safety of neutral Portugal. From there, she emigrated to New York, where she became the most original political philosopher of the immediate post-war period.

    Arendt is notorious for coining the term ‘banality of evil’ to describe the actions of Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who played a major role in organizing the Holocaust. Arendt was pilloried for her observation, and for her support of a binational solution to include Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

    “The Best American” will tell the story of the enduring love of Arendt and Heidegger, and of her development of a philosophy of forgiveness to further the cause of a just and practical political future in the wake of Europe’s destruction and the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan.

‘Space Investigator’ Sigrid Close designs satellite to protect against damage from tiny meteorites

PALO ALTO - Sigrid Close, star of Worldview’s forthcoming series Sigrid Close: Space Investigator,

is working with her graduate students at Stanford

University to develop a canopy that can pop out of a tiny CubeSat satellite and protect larger ones from the dangerous impacts of tiny meteorites.

    Nicolas Lee, Sigrid’s graduate student pictured above, says that tiny meteoroids travel at tremendous speeds in orbit around the sun (more than 250,000 km per hour) and pack a hefty punch when they strike a spacecraft.

    Sigrid Close suspects these meteoroids vaporize into “free electrons and ions that float around in a little ball. As that ball expands in the vacuum of space, it gives off energy at radio frequencies that interfere with the electronic equipment on the satellite, disrupting communications and other essential functions.”

    In addition to her work as an academic and television personality, Sigrid is a talented singer and songwriter, whose album Mirrored Self self features, according to her, “all the angst of Tori Amos with only half the calories”.