OC’s civic work doesn’t stop for a party. Witness last Wednesday’s groundbreaking of the first Be Well OC campus in Orange; it’s the first of three planned area facilities geared toward tackling mental health issues and drug abuse through a public-private partnership model.
Coming a few hours before the Business Journal’s own Civic 50 event, the Be Well event featured a who’s who of area healthcare execs including Michael Schrader, Mark Costa, Erik Wexler, Brian Helleland, Richard Afable, and Jeremy Zoch, as well as politicos like Lisa Bartlett, Andrew Do, Michelle Steel and Don Wagner.
Former Santa Ana Mayor and Irvine Co. exec Dan Young is helping Be Well with its real estate needs, and he credited the City of Orange for helping land the first facility. “It takes real courage to say they’ll be the first one.”
Young said the word is spreading on Be Well— “not a week goes by when I don’t hear about it.”
Check out next week’s edition for more on the Be Well plans, and this week’s Civic 50 coverage for more on the area’s community of givers.
George Washington University professor Dave Karpf became Internet famous last month, after his (at-first) barely read joking tweet comparing the New York Times’ Bret Stephens to a bedbug was found by the Pulitzer-winning columnist, leading at first to a much-ridiculed attempt by Stephens to censure Karpf by alerting his GWU bosses to the tweet, and then to a jaw-dropping dedicated column in the Gray Lady by Stephens that likened the professor to a Nazi propagandist.
To settle matters, the duo agreed to a debate at GWU earlier this month, but Stephens backed out of the anticipated Washington D.C. event. He’s found a safe space in Irvine, though: UCI this Wednesday is hosting a “conversational debate on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism” between him and fellow NYT’er Michelle Goldberg.
The event, open to the public, aims to give attendees “an opportunity to experience respectful discourse,” the school said. Reservations are required.
The irony isn’t lost on Karpf. “I’m curious whether he really thinks that calling someone of Jewish descent a metaphorical bedbug on Twitter is more anti-Semitic than comparing someone of Jewish descent to a Nazi propaganda minister in a New York Times column,” Karpf told the Business Journal last week via email.
Karpf approves of the UCI event, though, and notes that Goldberg is “a fantastic writer.”
“It’s nice to see that Bret is willing to do events that are open to the public with someone, at least,” he quipped.
It seems no matter where he goes in the world, Editor at Large Rick Reiff, our own Pulitzer winner, runs into other OCers.
A few years ago, he and wife, Mary Ann Brown, crossed paths with Karen and Bruce Clark on the Mongolian steppes. They’ve just returned from a Himalayan adventure that included another chance encounter, this time with Dr. Greg Kirkorowicz of Irvine, a former El Toro MD. They struck up a conversation while snapping pictures at a remote Buddhist mountain shrine and discovered they were from the same place nearly 8,000 miles away. Kirkorowicz said he was on a Sierra Club tour with 16 other SoCal members.
