By Livia Caligor
Malia Mills swimwear, which celebrates body inclusivity and empowerment with its attention to fit, comfort and high-fashion aesthetic, pioneered an untapped market and galvanized industry attention, and has since expanded to cover-ups, draped dresses and rompers, blouses and trousers, in addition to swimwear. Within just a few years, Malia Mills swimwear was available through wholesale distribution at over 125 specialty stores across the globe, from Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus to Aman Resorts.
by Isabelle Pappas
Everyone has said that this year’s presidential election is the most important one of our lives. And yet, it seems that we’re all regarding it as one big joke, with many memes resulting from various campaign rallies and presidential debates.
by John Colie
Editor’s note: Historical information from this article comes from two main sources: “Our Most Vulnerable Election” by Pamala Karlan, published in the New York Review of Books, and The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents by William A. DeGregorio. By the time this article is published, we might have a slightly better idea of how this year’s presidential election might turn out.
By Harry Ducrepin
The presidential election is coming up in a few days and thinking about the consequences of America’s choice next Tuesday is both devastating and overwhelming. I’ve spent the past week or so trying to clear my head of the realization of what could soon become reality.
by Dylan McIntyre
Let’s face it: the world’s in a really bad place right now. America has never been so divided, and with the upcoming election, all of this country’s divisiveness will come to a head.
by Dylan McIntyre
Online education is a pretty polarizing topic nowadays. Most of us are experiencing it firsthand, and after several months of using Zoom, chances are you either love its flexibility and leniency (how else would I get to attend lectures in pajamas?) or you just want to throw your stupid laptop out the window because your background image has been permanently burned into your retinas.
by Isabelle Pappas
The class of 2025 will be applying to college in the midst of a global pandemic, and Cornell has chosen to relieve the single most stressful aspect of the college application process: standardized testing. The Sun reported back in April that Cornell would be the first Ivy League institution to waive the standardized testing requirement for both early and regular decision applicants in this year’s admission’s cycle.
by Dylan McIntyre
Let’s face it: making friends at college is hard. Adjusting to life on a college campus can be a real challenge, and in COVID times, these challenges have only grown.
by Isabelle Pappas
The method of college reopenings around the globe has been under public scrutiny during these initial weeks of the fall semester. Admins and students alike are being assessed on their ability to resume in-person instruction safely when very limited physical interaction is even deemed safe.
by Harry Ducrepin
The American prison system is incredibly flawed and unjust, but this is something we all already know. When we talk about problems in the system, the same ideas pop up, notably the privatization of prisons, mass incarceration and lack of rehabilitation programs. While it’s great that we have acknowledged these issues, we should start to think beyond the scope of them and get a little more radical.
by Katriana Galloway
You’re rotting. Your brain is shriveling, and your body is shrimping.
A candid conversation with FSAD alum Gizelle Begler ’08 about establishing her namesake couture label, destigmatizing the hijab and utilizing fashion as a vehicle for social change.
Compiled and written by Livia Caligor
As Toni Morrison shared with The Guardian in 1992, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” In a riveting dialogue on the implications of the African-American identity, she begs her readers to question what it means to be hyphenated, how it feels to be considered American by law but a second-class category of citizens by practice.
Stars: They’re just like us! There’s something comforting in knowing that I’m not the only one who has to stay home and at a six feet distance.
by Zachary Lee
With commencements and graduations nationwide either being cancelled or going virtual, the Veritas Forum is ensuring that before the year ends, members of the Class of 2020 still get to share their stories. The organization, which places historic Christian faith in dialogue with other beliefs and invites participants from all backgrounds to pursue Truth together, has partnered with The Augustine Collective and Comment Magazine to launch the #My2020CommencementSpeech Contest, which will publish five commencement speeches written by graduating seniors.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (in which case, don’t move), you know the importance of self-isolating to protect yourself and others during the coronavirus pandemic. We might be stuck at home, but we need not succumb to boredom.
Hardly a couple weeks ago, while still a student in the traditional sense, I observed the bespeckling of our once-tangible institution by a scattered but substantial population of a particular type of student. For the sake of your efficient recollection, I’ll attempt to compile them all into a cast of two characters (they aren’t a terribly varied crowd).
Paying absolutely no attention in an econ discussion section is student number one, daydreaming about enlisting in the active troops of America’s dumbest youth currently deployed on Miami beaches.
[Content warning: this article contains discussion of body image. Reader discretion is advised]
I was shocked when I got home and realized I had gained 15 pounds.
Don’t have a Goodwill near you? Can’t afford to independently wear down some white sneakers via walking in them, as one does?
Anyone who publicly professes their love for the hit series The Bachelor is bound to be immediately met with rolling eyes, judgmental smirks, and questions that sound like, “You don’t seriously watch The Bachelor right?”
Yes, yes I do. And proudly, as well.
In a world of increasing specialization, students of the University often feel pressured to narrow their paths of study. Business major, English minor and chimesmaster Sonya Chyu ‘18 was a joyful exception to this rule.
It’s the most eccentric, trailblazing and radical time of the year! Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, the planet of freedom, originality, rebellion and revolution.
I am holding a paper sign that says, “Because over 90% of LGBTQ tech employees surveyed reported experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination at work,” inside the intersection of Duffield Hall, where Women in Computing at Cornell (WICC) took a picture for their Fall 2019 Diversity Photo Campaign, #ILookLikeAnEngineer. Discovering my passion in Computer Science & Information Science
In Fall 2017, I took CS 1110 with Professor Walker White and became more interested in CS.
By the time December 26th rolls around, Instagram was suddenly flooded with memes revolved around the new year: Confessions of how awful 2019 was. Proclamations that 2020 will be the year.
December 22-January 20
It’s Capricorn Season! That’s code for: time to get your sh*t together!
By xylyls
Will prepares a birdseed taco for a ruminative Bird.
Founded in 1973 in memory of benefactor and Cornell Trustee Herbert F. Johnson (Class of 1922), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is home to over 35,000 permanent works of art. Its diverse collections span six millennia and a wide spectrum of cultural origins.
November 22 – December 21
How did Scorpio season treat you? Did you barely escape the murky waters alive?
Check-in time! It’s about halfway through the semester at this point, and everyone’s favorite time of year: flu, prelim, and snow season.
What many people don’t know is that having access to Cornell’s fitness centers also means having access to an array of group fitness classes – not just taught by elderly and overweight ex-PE teachers, but also your overly enthusiastic but super strong peers. Luckily, these classes span gyms across campus and boast tons of time slots – perfect for your 7 am Yoga or 7 pm HIIT.
By xylyls
[This is the first installation of the comic series BIRD & human. Enjoy.]
In an effort to escape running into a recent ex, Bird takes a detour across campus.
Anyone who has binge-watched Modern Family, Full House, or any other family based sit-com can admit to laughing loudly at situations, while simultaneously smirking and thinking “this would never actually happen…”
I’ll admit, I once believed this too. The events in those shows seem too scripted to ever actually happen.
We all remember the moment at the 2016 Met Gala when the lights dimmed, red carpet chatter silenced into hushed gasps, and heads turned to see Claire Danes step out in a ball gown that shined brighter than the explosion of camera flashes that quickly ensued. The whimsical piece constructed out of sheer organza and fiber optics was the fashion moment of the year — the LED gown fused other-wordly glamour with contemporary polish, a timeless silhouette with cutting-edge technology, and could only have been a creation of the legendary Zac Posen. I was immediately infatuated with his ceaseless passion for experimentation and
innovation — each custom gown jaw-dropping in a new way — paired with his unwavering vision as an artist, each piece unmistakably his.
In case you live under a rock, or, like some mysteriously sane person, don’t check social media, you might have missed the “Due Friday” memes that went around last week. What a wonderful way for students across the entire university to come together and do what we do best: 1) roast the f*ck out of each other and 2) poke fun at how busy, stressed, and depressed we all are. See below for my top picks from the notorious “Any Person, Any Meme” Facebook group…
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Happy Halloween and Happy Spooky SZN! It’s no coincidence that Halloween (and every U.S. presidential election) falls when the sun is in Scorpio, the most mysterious, scary, and downright frightening of all 12 Zodiac signs.
There’s something about throwing up a janky peace sign to yourself in a greasy mirror post-weekly Wednesday night sobbing session (no, not the one you had scheduled in your G-Cal that should have ended forty-five minutes ago, the one that came after you hit that point in the night where you realized it was an all-nighter kinda night) that gives you the strength to wash off your runny mascara that you paid an extra ten dollars for and wipe off the remnants of the half a gallon of chocolate milk you impulsively bought at Jansen’s twenty minutes ago (even though you’re lactose intolerant and wanted to go Vegan three days ago) and walk back into the Cocktail Lounge. I know what you’re thinking, “wow, Sara, that’s like really messy, maybe you should see someone” or “maybe just stop buying the chocolate milk?”, but I sweaarrr it’s totally not about me, and if it was, I’m only sometimes lactose intolerant.
We all get a warm feeling when we see the Friends cast laugh together as “I’ll be there for you” plays in the background… because they really will always be there for us. No matter how lonely or bad we’re feeling, we can always count on the Central Perk squad from the world’s most popular sitcom to cheer us up…
I certainly counted on Friends being just a couple of clicks away my entire first week at Cornell, since I was homesick and everything outside of the four walls of Bauer Hall seemed scary.
Last spring, I took the 6 train from the periphery of Spanish Harlem to my office in Soho every day. I remember the way I’d limp up the hill at the cross section of 110th Street, peering into the backlit shadow of the subway stop at the end of the street, blasting Bowie classics to cancel out the whisper of catcalls around me.
By xylyls
I try to catalogue everything that happens, maybe to the brink of obsession. To that point, I have three pillars on which I rely to retell what is effectively my story: my Google calendar, a five-year Hobonichi, and my bullet journal.
Given there are exactly 12 candidates vying for the Democratic nomination at tonight’s debate, I figured I had to highlight them all as represented by the 12 Zodiac signs. (Admittedly, I know way more about astrology than I do about politics- don’t come after me!)
Elizabeth Warren: Aries
Known to “swat and jab at the air” in interviews, Warren can seem a bit Aries Aggressive indeed.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, October 21 edition of the paper.
So recently I found myself in a tragic, embarrassing situation that may as well be straight from a viral college tweet. I mean, take the infamous “I am worried” email sent to a professor and multiply the awkwardness by twenty to get something near the level of cringe of my situation.
Every September 23rd, we say farewell to Virgo season. We express our gratitude to the ever-so orderly and rule-abiding Virgin for getting us back on track after that wild Leo end of the summer 🙂 Alas, Virgo brought us back down to Earth- and back to the library.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, September 23 edition of the paper.
Dear Mom & Dad,
How are you? Is the sun shining?
Welcome to the first installment of a 12-part series highlighting each Zodiac sign! In my opinion, astrology has fascinating implications that may guide us toward manifesting our greatest, fullest, and highest selves in the sacred time we have on this Earth.
Pack your schedule to the max
One of the great things about Cornell is that they are well aware of the difficult transition between high school and summer to living at college, and they go through a lot of effort to make the change as easy as possible for incoming freshmen with Orientation Week. Events start as early as the day of move-in, and if you take full advantage of the university’s scheduled activities, you shouldn’t have a single minute of empty time to stew over the discomfort of being in an entirely new and unfamiliar place.
We get it! You probably have a lot of questions.
For a period of time in my childhood, I thought Cornell was the only college. I didn’t understand the concept of a University, but I had also been conditioned well.
Writing about endings tends towards the cliché. I want to preface this by saying that it’s impossible for me to write about graduation without feeling uncomfortably self-aware of the redundancy of my feelings.
Songs for May 9
Act 1: Father John Misty – “Nancy From Now On”
Nothing says ‘How did I end up asleep on my friend’s porch?’ quite like a Father John Misty song.
Act 2: The Fray – “How to Save a Life”
Walk home.
Thanks for a great year of great captions! Feel free to submit a caption for the first paper of next semester.
Confession time: I am that annoying girl in your math lecture that obnoxiously munches on ice the entire time. But honestly, how could I not?
Have you ever had to sit segregated from your group of friends in lecture? Have you ever had to walk into a classroom and step over countless feet on your way to the most inaccessible corner of the room?
In case you missed Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, you can scan through my complete, updated Top 50 list for a quick refresher. This final group of players was so hard to rank that, after losing nights of sleep over it, my dad suggested that I go back to my original criteria for ranking players: “If you dropped this player onto any NBA team at random, by how much would they improve that team’s odds of winning the title?” I set up a spreadsheet with each of the remaining players as the columns and all the playoff teams as the rows, and I tried to estimate (as best I could) the increase in championship odds if each player were to be magically placed onto each team’s roster.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 29 edition of the paper.
I am here to send out a PSA to all those suffering from FOMO and all those suffering because of the people who suffer from FOMO. For those of you who do not know, FOMO stands for “Fear Of Missing Out.” A common occurrence in many friend groups, one of the most frequent cases is when someone suddenly finds out they were not invited to an event that their friends went to together, either through social media or word of mouth.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 22 edition of the paper.
By now, we’ve all learned that almost anything can be political. As public discourse is integrated into industry and culture, it’s almost unusual for a company to lack a hot political take or sympathetic philanthropic cause.
Q: So it’s going to be the end of the semester soon, and I have a problem: I’m a freshman, and I feel like I don’t have strong, sustainable friendships. My roommates are nice, but I don’t see us hanging out much after this year, and I’ve got some platonic friends from my FWS, but once that’s over, I have no idea if we’ll still talk to each other.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 15 edition of the paper.
I often wonder what people think of me when they look at my Instagram profile. Do they think that I’m 10/10 awesome?
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 8 edition of the paper.
Felicite Tomlinson, sister of former One Direction member Louis Tomlinson, died suddenly on March 13th at only 18 years old from a suspected heart attack – a reality being “increasingly recognized in young women”, according to Professor Simon Redwood, a consultant cardiologist at London Bridge Hospital. And Felicite isn’t the only one.
A close friend of mine once told me to seek discomfort. Actually, that’s not true at all.
You’re walking straight down College Ave. and find that someone else is walking straight at you.
The night Captain Marvel was released, my friends and I drove to the Ithaca Mall movie theater in a car, brimming with anticipation. Though I don’t consider myself a die-hard Marvel fan, I was particularly excited to see this film—the CGI effects and female-driven storyline captivated my attention.
Here I hand to you a figurative racket to bat back those mental health grenades. Everything is going to be fine.
They won two Billboard Music Awards, performed at the American Music Awards with their hit song DNA, and recently attended the 61st Grammy Awards to present the award for Best R&B album to artist, H.E.R. Surely you must have heard of them. BTS, also known as Bulletproof Boy Scouts when they first arrived on the Kpop scene, is one of the most famous boy groups to attract international audiences.
“The American dream has become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
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On page 12 of the standard N-400 Application for Naturalization, all foreign-born persons seeking U.S. citizenship are asked, “Have you EVER been a member of, or in any way associated (either directly or indirectly) with the Communist Party?” It is a yes or no question. Why is it there to begin with?
Screw quinoa, berries and especially whole vegetables. The newest health trend: celery juice.
Over the course of the past couple weeks, the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement has been a particularly hot topic on campus. From initial communications between SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and Martha Pollack to an uneasy session of the Student Assembly, the issue has taken center stage for many campus organizers and members of student government.
Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by black people and their role in history. Since 1976, February has been designated Black History Month, not only in the USA, but in countries around the world- including Canada and the United Kingdom.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, March 11 edition of the paper.
I have a confession: I’m an addict. The feeling I get when I succumb to the sweet, constant pull is utterly indescribable.
Last week, I was making conversation with a customer during one of my work shifts. She was speaking about a vegetarian friend, who was shaming her friends for their decision to eat meat.
Okay, I’m going to assume you’re behind on your work. Way behind.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, March 4 edition of the paper.
By Lev Akabas
The dunk contest was my favorite night of the NBA season as a kid, to the point where I would count the days down from months away until I would get to watch the most athletic players in the league see who could jam a basketball into the hoop in the coolest way. Many years after I reenacted every single dunk contest dunk on my NERF hoop, something about the event continues to enthrall me, so I’m handing out awards for the bests and worsts in dunk contest history.
New, original crosswords will appear monthly.
Solutions:
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, February 18 edition of the paper.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, February 11 edition of the paper.
Before people get mad, let me just say that I’m extremely grateful to have access to Cornell’s diverse dining options. Some of my friends back home only have one dining hall, so we are lucky to have six on West Campus, alone.
Millions of Americans have been affected by the government shutdown, and many workers’ livelihoods are at the mercy of the decisions of powerful elites. While witnessing the news about the American government shutdown, another shutdown occurred in my home country of Zimbabwe.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, February 4 edition of the paper.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for the first cartoon of the year! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, January 28 edition of the paper.
If you’re interested in which guys were 27 through 50 on my list, my criteria for these rankings, or the meaning of the different statistics I’m referencing in this article, check out Part 1. Additionally, after flubbing some players’ rankings in Part 1, I’ve decided to keep my Top 50 in a Google Doc, so that I can both correct my previous mistakes and continue to update the list throughout the season.
By Lev Akabas
We know how to rank teams: my team beats your team, therefore my team is better. Just rooting for our teams carries an old-school sense of hometown pride and loyalty, but ranking players is overwhelmingly more interesting and fun — it’s a combination of statistics and intuition, of situational evidence and conjecture.
Disclaimer: I formally recognize economic, racial, knowledge, gender, and every other sort of privilege as ongoing problems that we should all strive to become more cognizant of, as they have and continue to create inequality that provides for unjust pain and suffering. This article is my opinion on privilege on a much smaller scale within my personal experience.
Congratulations to the winner of Cartoon Caption Contest #19! “I’m sorry I must go!
This past weekend was quite the ride. I visited SUNY Upstate Medical University for a PATCH (a pre-health organization I’m part of) field trip, taught for a program called Splash!, and ran the Syracuse Half-Marathon.
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Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, December 3 edition of the paper.
One must still have cows within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Okay, so maybe that isn’t exactly how the quote goes.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, November 19 edition of the paper.
About a week ago, I watched this video:
And my goodness, did it make me think of Cornell. Anna Akana is a Youtuber, life guru, and mental health advocate who creates videos about relatable and relevant topics, as well as longer narrative films. In this particular video, she discusses how impossible it feels to be happy when it seems as if your whole world is on fire — a sentiment that many Cornellians share on a weekly basis.
In the past week I have napped an average of two hours per day, impulsively bought three sweaters that I cannot afford, practically inhaled Twizzlers and an entire sleeve of Oreos, and watched five of the raunchiest past episodes of The Bachelor, all while telling myself, “It’s called self care.”
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and looking back I think my actions were probably the complete opposite of self care. In the moment, however, I was so encapsulated in my stress from prelim season that I allowed myself to do practically anything just because I have this extremely vague mantra to “affirm” my desires.
‘Tis the season of campaign ads, mudslinging, robocalls, selfies of people with their “I Voted” stickers, and all of those other wonderful things that go along with election season. Let us all be grateful now that the ballots have been cast, and it’s over: our social media feeds can live in peace, for a moment.
There’s a time and a place for guilt. Most times it’s within reason—after doing something immoral, unethical, or unkind, it’s a necessary part of self-regulation that, without intention, keeps our emotions in check and subsequently provides a feedback mechanism for changing or continuing a behavior. Psychology Today assembled a short list of five types of guilt and how to cope with them.
Alcohol Use Disorder
The label “alcoholic” is no longer appropriate to refer to someone with alcoholism. My uncle is not an alcoholic; he has an alcohol use disorder (AUD).
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, November 5 edition of the paper.
Set your alarms to 7:00 a.m. sharp. Spring pre-enroll kicked off today for seniors, and the rest of campus isn’t too far behind.
Confessions of a Serial Napper
It’s the end, beginning, or maybe smack dab in the middle of a very long day. You’re trying to do your work, but your eyes feel heavy and you begin to droop.
Over 146,000 people—myself included—find Instagram user @yrsadaleyward absolutely beautiful. She’s got impeccable taste in fashion, gorgeous hair, and an uncanny talent for combining messy colors to create the perfect aesthetic.
I spent last semester studying in the far-off land of New Zealand. Now I’m back and it’s time for that self-hatred inducing study abroad post where I tell you how I made meaning out of fleeing the country for a little bit.
The two movies pictured above have set off a wave of Asian and Asian-American embracement both cinematically and across the internet that has given hope to millions of Asians, myself included, who finally get to see people who look like them in roles other than the stereotypical Harvard (blegh) nerd with humorously strict parents. The media’s Asian representation movement is powerful and wonderful.
You know the feeling: Your friend just got an A in the class you got a B in, your roommate got an amazing paid internship over the summer, your best friend just got into a relationship. You want so badly to be completely happy for them because they deserve the best, but you just can’t.
Jordans have been, are currently, and always will be infinitely times better than Yeezys. They outcompete Yeezys aesthetically in quality and range, and in most sales metrics, despite Kanye’s tweets.
New, original crosswords will appear monthly. S
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Ezra Cornell was a farmer. He was a scientist, a philanthropist, a politician, and a lover of nature, but on top of all that, he was a farmer.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, October 29 edition of the paper.
A nurse, dressed completely in navy-blue and gripping a clipboard, sprints down the hallway––in my direction, I assume. But my optimism proves short-lived, as she passes by my bed just as fast as I had gotten my hopes up.
Say it with me. Loud and proud.
As overachieving, hyper-competitive Cornellians, cultivating balance in our lives usually doesn’t make it to the top of our priority lists.
Here is a secret I have never shared with anyone: I haven’t paid for textbooks since sophomore year. I’m a senior this year.
Trump is determined to restore democracy in Venezuela. Mantras of egalitarianism and humanitarianism flood the American discourse surrounding the Venezuelan crisis.
The figure of James Baldwin has been buoyed in recent years by a revival across the liberal wings of the United States’ political, cultural, and intellectual establishment. Most notably, during remarks given at the dedication ceremony of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, former President Barack Obama quoted from Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” That same year, Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro enjoyed widespread critical acclaim over its solemn presentation of the Civil Rights-era writer’s saliency to the present-day (A.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, October 15 edition of the paper.
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Created by Monika Bandi ’19 and Gabe Ares ’19
Answers below
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By Jeffrey Ho
Biomedical research and engineering, genetics, biotech — these are all disciplines rising in popularity among research, academics and scientists, and with a similar goal in mind: they emphasize the use of multi-disciplinary teams to ensure quick “bench-to-bed” results which translate basic scientific research to the medical community and then to the patient. Yet these rising disciplines are gaining ground at such a fast pace that many scientists and physicians have begun to neglect an important aspect of translational research: the native and marginalized populations around the globe that are heavily involved in the medical research, yet rarely reap its benefits.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, September 24 edition of the paper.
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New, original crosswords will appear monthly.
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New, original crosswords will appear monthly.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, September 17 edition of the paper.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Tuesday, September 4 edition of the paper.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for the first cartoon of the semester! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Wednesday, August 22 edition of the paper.
This past Friday, June 27, 2018, marked the 65th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, a ceasefire agreement signed in 1953 between North Korea and the United States/United Nations that (1) did not officially end the Korean War, (2) established the Demilitarized Zone at the 38th parallel as the de jure border between North and South Korea, and (3) did not include the input or signatures of any South Koreans. The anniversary underscored what has been an exciting, albeit precarious period of swift developments in the triangulated relations between the governments of North Korea, South Korea, and the United States in recent months.
Since when did NBA fans become so spoiled? All I see online is people kvetching about another “boring” finals rematch between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers and how Kevin Durant has ruined the NBA.
Finals week can bring a lot of things to the surface: the sudden motivation to learn everything, a seasonal caffeine addiction, an awe-inspiring general state of self-loathing. After barely making out alive from seven finals seasons, I have come to realize that finals week also brings out the economically irrational agent hidden in all of us.
Dear Freshman Brittany,
Welcome to Cornell! You’re going to change so much over the next three years, and I’m legitimately so excited for you.
I have no right to feel guilty when I tell a rocket scientist or a pre-med I’m an English major. And yet I can’t seem to ditch that ball-and-chain question that follows me everywhere I go: why am I doing this?
Congratulations to the winner of Cartoon Caption Contest #10 (who was also the winner of our last contest)! “Yeah, I had some BRBs left.”
Fruit has been on everyone’s mind throughout history. According to the Bible, the only reason humans even have the mental capacity to think about fruit was because Adam ate a fruit.
Coming into freshman year, I came to know a typical Ivy profile, a profile molded from a strict checklist and meticulously groomed to satisfy all its criteria ever since childhood. I began to notice consistent commonalities among a seemingly diverse community of academics.
As of today’s date — Tuesday, May 1, 2018 — I am officially accepting applications from any and all individuals or entities interested in becoming founding members of Liberty in South Korea (LiSK). Serious inquiries may be sent to [email protected]
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Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, May 7 edition of the paper.
By Ethan Wu
The Wall Street Journal editorial board traffics in baseless doubt-casting and bunk. The president seems delighted.
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The answers to original crossword puzzles in the Cornell Daily Sun are posted monthly on Sunspots.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 30 edition of the paper.
“Just because you fight for something doesn’t mean you have to have a philosophical justification for it.”
By what was then the twelfth week of this semester, I had grown accustomed to 98% of the inane phrases which were tossed casually — as casually as one might toss a molotov cocktail — into the collective consciousness of my English/Comp Lit seminar. The ratio of neural/motor energy devoted to jotting down whatever convoluted statements followed the words, “This is important,” from one of professors’ mouths (it’s one of those rare two-professor courses) versus scrolling through Facebook and answering emails had gradually shifted in disproportionate favor of the latter.
People generally agree that music has an impact on mental health and our moods, whether through numerous studies that show correlations between music, relaxation and improved mental health, or through countless Twitter memes about sad Drake songs. Some people even program music around their lives, listening to certain music in the morning to pump themselves up for the day, or calming music at night to sleep.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done miraculous things, namely building a highly successful franchise with eighteen (and running) feature films, turning formerly B-list heroes into household names. Who had even heard of Tony Stark before his popular appearance in his successful solo movie, Iron Man?
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 23 edition of the paper.
A healthy person who begs for food is an insult to the generous farmer~ Ghanaian Proverb
Ava’s strongest memory of her father was the day he left. Memory is a weird thing, Ava thought as her toothbrush slowly crept into the inside of her jaws.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably had your share of derpy moments with those awkward and often embarrassing times when your face turns red and you let out a nervous chuckle. If you were anything like me during middle school… well, let’s just say that those moments did not make the sixth grade very pleasant.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 16 edition of the paper.
By Ethan Wu
The national conversation on gun control is deeply confused. One question looms large: should the Second Amendment be repealed?
Strangers come to know me as, “that girl who brings disposable cameras to parties,” a tagline I’ll accept. Though tokens of a past seemingly devoid of technology, these unmistakable plastic machines have become pretty fundamental to my college experience.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, April 9 edition of the paper.
Sampling in hip hop and rap has been done over and over again, adding a layer of background vocals and richness to the beat. Samples come from a broad range of musical genres: DJ Khaled sampled Maria Maria by Carlos Santana for his hit song Wild Thoughts, and Drake sampled indie singer Snoh Aaelegra for his introspective number Do Not Disturb.
Just last week, Toys “R” Us announced that it would be closing its U.S. stores, and I genuinely felt sad about this — sadder than I did when my parents told ten-year-old me we would no longer be going to Blockbuster on Saturdays for our weekend movie nights (until a year and a half ago, I actually kept a Blockbuster membership card in my wallet). Perhaps this especially wistful reaction is due to the fact that not three blocks from my paternal grandparents’ house is a shopping plaza, at which there used to be a Toys “R” Us location.
Last Friday, the second Avengers: Infinity War trailer was released, and millions of nerds around the country immediately creamed their pants. Let’s analyze it.
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New, original crosswords will appear monthly.
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New, original crosswords will appear monthly.
One of my lovely friends—I don’t know what I would do without him—recently introduced me to “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” a piece from Sampha’s debut album Process. The song’s title quite literally captures the essence of it, in which the British songwriter repeatedly croons, “No one knows me like the piano in my mother’s home.”
Like Sampha (“And you drop-topped the sky, oh you arrived when I was three years old”) and countless others, I began playing the piano at an early age—seven, to be exact.
Daydream for a moment and imagine that you’re standing in the wings of an auditorium, looking at the empty stage in front of you; the set pieces have been taken down, the lights give off a dim white glow, and it’s absolutely silent. You slowly walk forward, and you can hear your footsteps lightly thud and echo.
Olivia Faulhaber ’21: I will never forget the time that my family and I vacationed in Woodstock VT. We decided to take our bikes to Sugarbush Farms. However, the ride there was BRUTAL.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, March 26 edition of the paper.
I have a very peculiar taste when it comes to television. You won’t see me catching up on the latest Riverdale or binge-watching The Office.
“Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised.” – Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind
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Intra-Ivy League bickering aside, Cornell University is widely regarded as one of the top institutions of higher learning in the world.
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Part II: Matatu in the A.M
“By the time the fool has learned the game, the other players have dispersed.”- Ashanti proverb
Vacant eyes stared past Ava and onto some unseen distance. Her mother, Charity, sat in a rocking chair in the common area near the staircase.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, March 19 edition of the paper.
It is hard to think of an aspect of our material lives that Amazon has not touched. Amazon has become such a ubiquitous and practically tangible presence despite being based entirely online.
A new card game has been going around lately, invented by our very own Cornellian, Kevin Zhang 21’. The game Fish is a mix between Go Fish and Kemps, except it is much more difficult. My friend group and I have been obsessed with this game this past month, and gladly sacrifice way too much of our studying time to play Fish.
According to the World Happiness Report, Denmark, after Norway took the crown, is listed as the second happiest place in the world. Hearing this, it is easy for one to flee to the Nordic countries in hopes of getting a taste of what this “happiness” feels like.
This week, many people criticized the NCAA for its treatment of college basketball players. LeBron James called the NCAA “corrupt.” Stan Van Gundy, the coach of the Charlotte Hornets, remarked that they there were the “worst organization” and labeled their actions as “racist.” This criticism emerged after a report revealed that dozens of players had been paid and given loans as compensation for their play.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, March 12 edition of the paper.
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new.
Welcome to the zoo!
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The Crossing is a micronovel in the genre of Afrofuturism written in honor of Black History Month. It will be published in excerpts every second Wednesday.
By April Ye
For those who still haven’t quite mentally prepared themselves for adulthood yet (read: me), this could be quite a jostling thought: where exactly is home now? Prior to coming to Cornell, I was so caught up in the frenzy of excitement and eagerness to explore the newfound limits of college and independence that I never stopped to consider the consequences of the transition: once I moved out, would my definition of “home” change?
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, March 5 edition of the paper.
Sleep deprivation: it is a problem that students across the nation complain about almost daily. Personally, I can’t get through a conversation with someone without the words “I’m so tired” coming up, not to mention the slew of other complaints of work and extracurriculars contributing to the issue.
By Jeffrey Ho
With the 2018 Winter Olympics well underway, many have found inspiration to hit the gym and keep their New Year’s resolution well and alive. Here’s a playlist inspired by the music of the Olympics, whether it’s a song endorsed by athletes themselves or played during competition.
Meet us halfway and submit a caption for this week’s cartoon! The Sun staff will vote and the winning caption — along with the winner’s name — will appear in the Monday, February 26 edition of the paper.
As we speak, college students worldwide pull out their shotskis and ice luge molds in celebration of the most riveting quadrennial exercise in patriotism, team spirit, and demolition of self-worth—the Winter Olympics. This year’s games are being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, a city of 40,000, of which only 35.6% were interested in the Winter Olympics, according to a survey taken last April by the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
“Look, this is the Bill and Melinda Gates building,” my dad said to my mom for the fifth time as we drove past Gates Hall on our way to East Hill Plaza. My parents don’t get to visit often, and I don’t blame them, since they live 2,000 miles away.
Western culture loves to rank everything. From foods to sport teams to cities, we obsess over figuring out the best thing, the second best thing, and so on.
I haven’t seen Black Panther yet, but I know enough of the story’s basic premise — what might an African nation, untouched by centuries of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, look like in the 20th/21st century? — to use it as a generative point of speculation within my own interests in the history of the Korean War and its aftermath.
By Ethan Wu
The vile regime to the north is putting on a pretty face for the Olympics. Don’t be fooled.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
I painted my nails red for Valentine’s Day. Very cliché, I know.
Cornell has some great off-campus programs to offer, one of them being Cornell in Washington. This program offers students the opportunity to live, study and work in Washington, D.C., which means you get to kill three birds with one stone by earning Cornell credits, getting work experience and touristing.
Jacqueline Quach ’19: The flashy figure skating outfits! Where else can one appreciate such brightly colored, such meticulously designed and bedazzled fashions?
This article represents the first in a hopefully long series of articles which aims to address controversial topics in an open and civil manner here in Sunspots. The name was chosen carefully: the agora, the marketplace of ancient Athens, was at once a place where material goods were exchanged and where ideas and conflicting viewpoints could be expressed in the open air for all to hear and criticize.
By Lev Akabas
Forrest Gump → Forrest Dump
Synopsis: In this two-minute live-action short, a young boy on a hike in the Adirondacks walks 50 feet away from the trail, poops, walks back to the trail, and continues his hike. Critical Response: One critic calls the short a “hauntingly realistic slice of life” and many are even moved to tears, while a minority of writers call it “hogwash” and “utterly pretentious.”
Difference-O-Meter: Forrest Dump is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT film.
The past couple months have seen some exciting new music releases in the hip hop world. Between Drake’s new singles, Migos new album and so many more new projects coming out, there’s a lot to digest and review.
By Ethan Wu
America’s tech titans are stifling competition, skirting regulators and harming democracy. Time to break them up.
It is difficult to grapple with our complex understanding of the past. Sometimes we remember an event.
Ah, syllabus week. The time to lounge around with friends, partake in that Tuesday karaoke night at Loco, embark on that spontaneous trip to Niagara Falls with your friends—these are the good days.
Too often, true crime podcasts fetishize or take light of heinous human actions. I’ll admit, I’ve listened to many – and have even written about them.
Like any sleep-deprived college student earning a degree in Procrastination, I often convince myself I need a study break, only to find myself panicking two hours later because I spent too much time (1) reading about the endless antics of well-dressed but not-so-well-behaved Lapo Elkann (decadent heir to the Fiat fortune), (2) browsing the sale sections of online clothing retailers that shall remain unnamed (for the safety of your wallet) or (3) poring over the exceptional articles written by the Blogs section. However, as of late, I’ve noticed that I’ve been reining in those study breaks pretty well, so that the most they’ve gone on for is maybe half an hour.
First of all, why the bloody hell is this game called football if the least talented player is the kicker? But before I get too miffed, I’d like to tell you all about how this year’s American Football Championship Match will “go down” as you Americans say it.
A lot of students choose the spring semester to study abroad or take advantage of off-campus opportunities such as Cornell in Washington. As an international student, I’ve essentially been “studying abroad” since freshman year but this spring I decided to take a break from the Ithaca cold while also getting work experience and Cornell credits by participating in the Cornell in Washington Program.
Since my first purchase of MUJI pens back in 2013, I’ve personally witnessed an exponential increase in the number of people carrying around the signature MUJI clear-bodied gel pens in class. While many of you probably have also been introduced to this brand’s signature stationery, there is actually a lot more to MUJI than meets the eye.
By Ethan Wu
This past year offered gloom and uncertainty—and inspiration. A brief, hopeful retrospective on 2017.
By Nuri Yi
We’re in that strange twilight zone between the end of classes and going home: is it finals week or is it the end of all things looming? I couldn’t tell you how the time has been passing; all I know is that I wake up, work-work-work (or try, at least), forget to eat, get too tired to continue working, and go to bed at strange hours, the only constant in my life being the fact that I’m perpetually falling behind the rigorous study schedule I devised for myself in a last-ditch attempt to #savemysemester.
Standing beneath McGraw Tower at midnight is akin to experiencing the prolonged death throes of an eternity. Every day becomes as the instar of all time en miniature.
By Grace Chen
I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving Break! Like 80% of Cornell’s freshman population, I headed over to New York City for a nice and homey friendsgiving.
By April Ye
As we embark upon the homestretch of this semester, I often find myself spacing out over my usual Temple of Zeus iced mocha. Weirdly enough, I hadn’t even noticed how frequent my coffee consumption was until a friend from home pointed it out via cross-country Facetime—every time we talked, I seemed to have a convenient cup of coffee within hand’s reach.
In 2015, Jay-Z purchased Tidal for a cool 56 million dollars, touting it as a streaming platform “controlled by the artists”. Now, his Tidal holdings have boosted his net worth to make him the 2nd richest hip hop artist in the world, right behind Sean Combs and surpassing Dr. Dre.
By Ethan Wu
The push to expose sexual assault could give way to a long-awaited reckoning with America’s sexist rot. But if #MeToo becomes a mania, it might not.
On November 15, the military took over my country’s main broadcasting station, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Cooperation, and announced that it had put our president of 37 long years under house arrest. A week later on the 21st, President Mugabe turned in his resignation letter just as the impeachment process in Parliament began.
Women’s sports across the country are stuck in an vicious cycle, and an example of this cycle can be found right here on campus.
There is no question that, at an increasingly fast rate, technology and media have advanced significantly. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Internet, iMessage, text messaging, and other various forms of communication can now all reside on a single smartphone.
I’m not sure when I got my first pin, but the earliest documented proof I could find of me wearing a pin is from May 14, 2000. In the picture, my parents are conducting a mini-photoshoot at home with my older sister and two-year-old self, and you can see a tiny pair of red sunglasses pinned to the top of my pink cardigan:
To this day, I still have and frequently wear that red sunglasses pin, but it’s fair to say that my pin collection has since expanded.
By Ethan Wu
Robert Mueller has investigated Russian meddling with diligence and professionalism. Firing him would be disastrous.
Can’t decide where to eat today? We’ve got you covered.
I glare at myself in the mirror. Maybe if I stare at my reflection long enough, critically enough, I’ll finally see myself the way the U.S. government sees me: white.
Noah Harrelson ‘21: Risley’s overnight oats, that sweet nectar of Gods. As I eat, the world stops.
In late September 2016, Houston Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni announced that his star player, James Harden, would be switching positions to play point guard. This seemed like a peculiar decision at first.
As I get older and wiser (all 21 years and six months), I’ve come to realize that although I am an American, America (or my country) was not made for me. This land of the free was made on the backs of my ancestors who did not enjoy such freedoms. Having grown up in mostly white environments and choosing to attend a predominantly white university, I’ve become accustomed to being the only black girl in the room.
As the weather gets colder and the wind shows its wrath more and more, it becomes really difficult to walk around campus every day. It can also be especially cumbersome during these chilly times to keep our skin smooth and soft.
3:00 A.M. is high time for a deflated, depressed-looking bag of Cheetos. My mind steers me like a sleepwalker down a flight of stairs and into the bowels of my dorm.
While Cornell is known for its superb dining hall food, Ithaca has many of its own culinary gems, one of which is Louie’s Lunch Truck. A favorite among Cornellians, Louie’s is that place you go to when you’ve got those late night or post-partying greasy food cravings.
By Tony Li
Deciding what, when, and where to eat may seem like a simple task at first. But when our schedule becomes busy with clubs & classes, overwhelmed by personal circumstances, or just unorganized in general, proper and balanced eating habits can often take a backseat.
While I will never understand 90% of the logic behind the store layout of Ithaca’s Wegmans (e.g. why the dried noodles must appear in seven separate aisles), I will admit that the Wegmanites got one thing right: the strategic placement of the avocado bags. Their perpetual position in a giant wooden crate by the entrance has permitted me to develop somewhat of an avocado dependency in recent years.
I thought of some really simple, fun recipes that everyone should try this fall season! To kick things off, I’ll start with two takes on a seasonal favorite: the pumpkin spice latté.
Engineering = Warheads
For some reason, Mech-E’s and Chem-E’s think they’re at war with every other major at Cornell, and won’t go more than two minutes without reminding you that they’re engineers and that your major is inferior. They treat every project or interview like it’s a life-or-death situation and you think they might explode at any given moment.
By Ethan Wu
Tribal politics have paralyzed America. Amid our division, radical centrism offers hope of renewal.
This year, Cardi B exploded onto the rap scene with “Bodak Yellow” after remaining relatively unknown, though she did have a large Instagram following and became a regular cast member on a reality TV show, Love & Hip Hop, New York, in 2015. Due to “Bodak Yellow”’s success, Cardi B became the first female rapper to, unassisted, hit Number 1 on the Billboard charts (other female rappers only reached Number 1 with features on their songs).
Welcome back to my list of cool, creative, and borderline exotic beauty products! I’m going to be giving reviews on some popular face masks in this article.
By Nuri Yi
I have something to confess: I love Tinder. And, disclaimer (because it’s necessary): I’m not hooking up with anyone on it.
Last spring’s union election campaign may have ended with a disappointing result for the collective rights of Cornell’s graduate students, but Cornell Graduate Students United (CGSU) has continued to fight. In the past weeks, members of CGSU have been asking fellow graduate students at Cornell to vote about the future of their organizing strategy and the possibility of another election attempt.
I went to my friend’s event Tuesday night, a Hillel event, titled “A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to the Middle East,” in which Joel Chasnoff spoke about his life story, and in particular, his relationship to Israel. What started as a stand up bit—typical in its delivery, ingenuity, and laugh-generating ability but atypical in its Jewish-oriented humor—turned into a serious opportunity to discuss Israel in a safe space among mostly Jewish students.
By April Ye
Upon a cursory brows—ha, pun intended—everything can seem so easy. That is, until you’ve actually been through the process yourself.
For international students, moving to a new country with a different language and culture takes a big adjustment and relearning of social cues. One of the biggest worries as a black international student is whether or not you will find beauty products that cater to your hair texture and that understand your skin.
Thus far in my twenty-year tenure on this planet, I’ve traveled to quite a few places–within the United States, I’ve been to Portland (Oregon), Reno, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Niagara Falls, New York City, Boston, and Atlanta. Internationally, I’ve been to France, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Taiwan.
With the chilly weather and colorful leaves rolling into the Ithaca area, there’s no doubt that fall season is upon us. And with the fall weather and ambiance comes the obvious pumpkin obsession: pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pies (who could forget Patty’s delicious pumpkin pies?), and, of course, pumpkin spice lattes.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
A spectre is haunting America: the spectre of communism. In a world where more and more tasks are being automated, and more and more people are seeing the skills that separate them from the lower rungs of society reduced to a few lines of code on a computer, more and more people are starting to ask: what makes me more valuable to the company than the guy two floors down who makes half as much as I do?
Korean cosmetics have been gaining popularity in recent years, and many of the products that used to be sold exclusively in Korea have started to become more accessible here in the US. From 20-step skincare routines to Chateau Labiotte lip tints, there’s definitely a lot going on with Korean beauty that everyone can experiment with.
By Yang Lu
It’s a tumultuous time to be Cornell student. A University first founded on the principle of “any person, any study” has proven time and time again that the students themselves do not live up to these words.
Although there has been significant progress in recent years, there is still a lack of substantial representation of women and people of color in the entertainment industry. With that being said, podcasts are a cheap, readily disseminated way to share stories and cultural experiences.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
For this semester’s first installment of “Office Hours,” a series of interviews with prominent personalities on Cornell’s campus, Sunspots writer Gabriel Ares sat down for a chat with Applied Engineering Physics Professor Lena Kourkoutis. In the interview below, which has been edited for clarity, Kourkoutis talks about a range of topics, from electron microscopy–a technique that allows her to see the atomic structure of objects–to outreach to women in STEM.
See, Trump, I said it. Just like you wanted me to.
On September 29, The Daily Caller claimed that Black Students United (BSU) at Cornell had insinuated in their list of demands to President Pollack on September 20 that Cornell “is letting in too many African students.” Upon seeing this headline, I dismissed the article as the click bait material straight out of a troll handbook. But because college has taught me to question everything and dismiss nothing, I took another careful look at BSU’s demands.
This past summer, swaths of bright college students armed with alacrity sauntered into corporate headquarters and satellite offices, hoping to assert themselves in prestigious and difficult internships. For many of us, this time period was nerve wracking and intense.
Ithaca is known for its grocery stores—each with its own distinctive personality. Which one are you?
What would it be like to return to a home that no longer recognized you? Maybe the people you knew have packed up and left, maybe they are no longer on speaking terms, and you no longer feel at ease.
By Tony Li
A week ago, my roommate asked me if he could use my Netflix account. At the time, I didn’t think much of it.
If Ithaca possessed a “spirit food,” it would be the apple. After living in Ithaca for the past three years, I have consumed way too many apples in solid, liquid, and in-between forms. In their own subtle way, I feel as if apples define Ithaca just as much as the gorges or the freezing cold winters.
There are so many great things to do in Ithaca and I’ve certainly collected my fair share of memories and moments that have helped me to call this place home. I remember going to Taughannock Falls as a kid; I’ve been to the Ice, dog, and apple festivals; and I’ve spent days studying in the little coffee shops in The Commons and going to poetry readings at Buffalo Books (often because I was forced to trek down there when a professor didn’t want to support the Capitalist Pigs at the Cornell store).
April: Amidst the hustle and bustle—the only trace of New York City here in Ithaca—it feels liberating to venture outside every now and then to explore Ithaca and recharge in the loving womb of nature. Don’t let the “there’s nothing to do, Cornell’s in the middle of nowhere” eye-roll mislead you.
President Donald Trump is in many ways the antithesis of former President Barack Obama. In the beginning months of his presidency, Trump has attempted to do away with many of Obama’s signature policies, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Paris Climate Accord, and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
So, if time is really money, this hangs on the notion that time must indeed be real. Which then, arguably, hangs on the notion that money is inherently real as well.
The Cornell Daily Sun’s well-known list of “161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do” is very comprehensive and covers most of the essential Big Red experiences, but not all of them. So we asked our writers and our readers to think of some things that they would add to the list.
Since you readers seemed to enjoy my first article on this topic so much, I’ve come back with a second installment to this series with just as interesting and spooky factoids! Here we go:
1) Whispering Bench
When I was doing research for my other article last semester, I stumbled onto a thread on College Confidential, in which there was mention of a “whispering bench near Goldwin Smith.” However, after scouring the internet, I could not find any other website or article that referenced this bench!
The passing of a loved one is never easy. It’s even worse when it happens during prelim season and a continent away from home.
At this point in my budding blog I should probably add that these posts are not jokes—they are meant to highlight the contradictions surrounding campus life. Ahh, The Greek Reformer.
In an ideal world, flossing would be a part of everyone’s hygiene routine. At least that’s according to the American Dental Association.
That quote about being a tiny speck of dust in the infinite span of the universe—intended to be a comforting reminder that our actions do not merit the importance we delude ourselves into believing they do, and that we should really just relax—is actually quite demoralizing. Maybe it’s the leftover traces of teen angst that have dutifully followed me into my twenties, maybe it’s just how I’m feeling this particular rainy Thursday night—but that quote just makes me kind of sad.
By April Ye
Taking a step back, I can’t believe we’re already on week 4. My groggy brain tries to do the countdown of how many weeks left until the end of the semester.
There is something to be said about people-watching; something to be said about sitting in Olin Library staring out at the people playing Frisbee in the Arts Quad, or perhaps walking down Ho Plaza figuring out how to dodge the quarter card mania properly (NOT me though, I love all of your quarter cards… STAY #woke). From an outsider looking in it’s interesting to ponder, even for a millisecond, the thought processes that encapsulate another person’s mind.
“’Εν ἀρχή ῆν ὁ λὀγος, καì ὁ λóγος ῆν πρòς τòν θεóν, καì θεòς ῆν ὁ λóγος. οὗτος ῆν ἐν ἀρχὴ πρòς τòν θεóν.
By Tony Li
A few weeks ago, I received the best haircut of my life. What were my benchmarks?
By Yang Lu
This piece was written at the time of—and in direct response to—the “Unite the Right” rally and ensuing violence that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday, August 12th. Before you read this article, I suggest that you watch this video from Vice News first.
Since Trump rescinded the DREAM Act a few days ago, a number of articles have appeared on the internet citing the extreme cruelty of his decision. Many of these articles make their point by showing a Hispanic male in their early 20s doing something admirable—graduating as Valedictorian from high school, saving people’s lives during Hurricane Harvey, researching a cure for cancer—and juxtaposing it with the inevitable fate Trump has forced upon them just to gain a few political points: being deported to a country they have never known.
I am not ashamed to admit it, but I am an avid Bachelor/Bachelorette/Bachelor in Paradise watcher, debriefer, and obsessor. For the last six months or so, my Monday and Tuesday nights have been dedicated to watching who gets the first impression rose, the ever-coveted one-on-one date, and finally the Neil Lane ring. The franchise’s premise is a bit unorthodox; one person dates 25 people over the course of about 12 weeks in the hopes of getting engaged, then weeks later the Bachelor/Bachelorette rejects get shipped off to Mexico to find love in Paradise.
By Grace Chen
Whether you love to spend hours on dorm decoration or just want to do the bare minimum, it is undeniable that loving your dorm room is very important. After all, how comfortable you are with your personal space determines how much sleep you get, which affects your ability to get up for those 8am classes, which determines your GPA.
The violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Va. this August turned the idyllic town on the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains into ground-zero of the debate on statues and white supremacy in America.
Over the summer, I managed to save up for a trip to California, one of the places in America celebrated for its liberalism and openness. Ignoring the sinking feeling that few other tourists would look like me, I set about to explore the Bay Area.
Before the contemporary hipster existed, there was the hippie of the 1960s. (Ironically, the term “hippie” was derived from the word “hipster,” which referred to the jazz cats of the 1940s.) Perhaps the most notable year for any hippie is 1967, whenduring which the Summer of Love took place in San Francisco.
It really is something to chuckle at, the way Cornell speaks about liberal arts. Specifically within the College of Arts and Sciences, there exists an issue with the rhetoric surrounding our breadth and depth requirements, which I argue stems from our grade-centered education.
Sasha Chanko ‘19: Eat your f***ing breakfast. Wake up, have a bar or yogurt or something small in the dining hall.
Part I: The Drive Up
I remember quite clearly my drive up to Cornell in the summer of 2016. It was a lovely day on both ends of my trip—the Upper West Side wishing me good luck in the coming year with a warm, blue sky and Ithaca welcoming me with open arms as its sky held in its bladder to save rain for those driving up from New Jersey.
This entire summer, I’ve been dreading the day that Fall 2017 starts because it will signal the beginning of the second half of my college experience. As I’m honing in on exactly what I should do at the start of this second half, I’ve been reminiscing and reconsidering all the things I did at the start of the first half, by which I mean: freshman year.
Cornell is a difficult place – colloquially, we are known as the easiest Ivy to get into… but the hardest to graduate from. While many of you are among the swaths of high school valedictorians, science fair winners and speech and debate aficionados, all of you will certainly fail at some point in your college careers.
One of my formative orientation week events was Big Red Ball. For those of you who don’t know what Big Red Ball is, don’t worry—it’s really simple.
When I teetered into my dorm room on the first day, weighed down by three bags I had lugged across the country, I wasn’t inspired by any sense of new beginning despite all the people offering me their collegiate wisdom and telling me that my life had just begun. I missed home, I missed Mom, I felt like I was still just me, packed up and shipped 3000 miles away.
If you’re not one of those people who shows up to Ithaca waaaaay too excited about going to their first college party, have no fear. Your options for activities during O-Week are endless!
By Tony Li
Understanding Surroundings through Design Thinking
Last week, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new White House Press Secretary, read a 9-year-old boy’s letter to President Trump during a press briefing. This lucky 9-year-old boy is Dylan Harbin, also known by the nickname Pickle.
Across three Batman movies, five movies with cool-sounding one-word titles, and one movie you’ve probably never heard of, director Christopher Nolan has developed a distinctive style. So, with his latest film, Dunkirk, hitting theaters today, we’re going to answer a very important question.
For how many more finals do you anticipate the two teams will be the Warriors and Cavs (i.e. the next 3,4,5 years?)
– Kyrollos B.
Basically the Warriors’ entire roster is entering free-agency this offseason. Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant are going to do what it takes to both re-sign, but what about the other guys?
When the NBA season came to a close on Monday night, I had too many thoughts to sort out, so I decided to let my friends do it for me by sending me questions. Below are my answers to 10 questions about the 2017 NBA Finals, ranging from most simple to most complex.
David Pizarro has taught Introduction to Psychology and a number of other seminars since becoming an associate professor in 2012, and his research on moral judgement and emotion has been published in countless places, including an article for The Guardian that he co-wrote last month. He was nice enough to be the guest for my first Cornell Daily Sun podcast, during which he discussed his research, shared his thoughts on robots, and answered ten “Speed Round” questions.
When I graduated high school, I wrote a farewell piece in the school paper; it came easy, words were flowing without obstacles, I had a lot to say. Four years later, I still have a lot to say; however, this is one of those very few times when I felt that there might not be enough words, or that they will be too small and timid, too controlled, too human.
For our second installment of “Office Hours,” a series of interviews with prominent personalities on Cornell’s campus, Sunspots writer Andrew Shi talked with with Performing and Media Arts Professor Bruce Levitt, who has taught at Cornell since 1986 and is involved with Phoenix Players Theatre Group (PPTG), a prison theatre group at Auburn Correctional Facility.
You’ve worked with PPTG since 2010.
Atticus Finch is racist. That’s the shocking revelation in Harper Lee’s sequel to the beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
As a college student, it’s important to be aware and take advantage of the student discounts that places like clothing companies, restaurants and especially museums offer, because it’s going to be more than forty years until you can get a senior discount…forty-plus years of dreary adulthood in which you are expected to pay full price for everything—the horror! Seriously though, it’s always nice to save some money, so I whenever I go to a museum, I have my Cornell ID ready.
People know Ithaca for its beauty. When I first visited Cornell in the summer of 2014, I was struck by the seemingly endless verdant grass on the Arts Quad and the sea of trees that surround the school.
Like most Cornellians, I find that during the school year, amidst all the prelims and deadlines, it can be hard to set aside some time to treat myself and take things slow, which is why I decided to indulge in food, museums, and strolling around when I spent my Spring Break in New York City. I won’t be writing about every experience I had – only the ones I found to be interesting and fun.
For our first installment of “Office Hours,” a series of interviews with prominent personalities on Cornell’s campus, Sunspots writer Bruno Avritzer sat down for a chat with Computer Science Professor Walker White, Director of the Cornell Game Design Initiative. In the interview below, which has been edited for clarity, White shares his thoughts on why gaming may or may not be viable as a college sport.
You did it. After countless, grueling months spent slogging uphill (physically, intellectually and emotionally) in sleet and snow, you’ve finally made it to spring—and oh my god that summer internship is so close you can practically taste it.
One of the most frequently cited arguments in favor of affirmative action practices at universities is that they help those with societal disadvantages succeed. Yet, by propagating stereotypes about the relative achievement of certain classes of individuals, affirmative action policies have perpetuated discrimination on the basis of race.
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For our first installment of “Office Hours,” a series of interviews with prominent personalities on Cornell’s campus, Sunspots writer Bruno Avritzer sat down for a chat with Computer Science Professor Walker White, Director of the Cornell Game Design Initiative. In the interview below, which has been edited for clarity, White shares his thoughts on the global popularity of eSports, their potential as spectator sports and comparisons between certain video games and sports like football.
This NBA season, not a single rookie who played more than half of his team’s games averaged at least nine points per game while shooting at least 46%. For context, those were the 2016-17 statistics of 35-year-old defensive-specialist Tony Allen.
Our culture is sharing. Not sharing, with respect to giving to others, but sharing online.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
Usually I try to write something with facts, figures and opinions, but this time around I’m going to do something a little bit different. I’m going to talk about my personal experience with mental health.
Vladimir Nabokov first appeared to me as a stranger’s name on a Cornell t-shirt. A quick search online showed me that he’s a big deal—big enough to be printed on the same shirt as Ginsburg, Sagan and Morrison.
In the first weeks of his term, Trump issued a great many executive orders that have caused a lot of outcry and hurt a lot of people. He tried to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, raised border security and cut down financial regulations.
Trigger Warning: Potential Damage to Fragile Egos
Preface
According to Grief.com, “the five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling.
As you might’ve figured out, my blogging technique is pretty straightforward: something happens to me – something simple, everyday, insignificant to history or to my neighbors but exceptional to me, less meaningful that I build it up to be – and I write about it. And since I went to Los Angeles for spring break last week, that is what I am writing about today.
“WIr sind doch nunmehr gantz / ja mehr alß gantz vertorben. Der frechen Völcker schar / die rasende Posaun /
Daß vom Blutt feiste Schwerd / die donnernde Carthaun /
Hat alles diß hinweg / was mancher sawr erworben /
Die alte Redligkeit vnnd Tugend ist gestorben;
Die Kirchen sind verheert / die Starcken vmbgehawn /
Die Jungfrawn sind geschänd; vnd wo wir hin nur schawn /
Ist Fewr / Pest / Mord vnd Todt / hier zwischen Schantz vñ Korbẽ
Dort zwischen Mawr vñ Stad / rint allzeit frisches Blutt
Dreymal sind schon sechs Jahr als vnser Ströme Flutt
Von so viel Leichen schwer / sich langsam fortgedrungen.
Ich schweige noch von dehm / was stärcker als der Todt /
(Du Straßburg weist es wol) der grimmen Hungersnoth /
Vnd daß der Seelen=Schatz gar vielen abgezwungen.” — “Tränen des Vaterlandes”
It is the most logical thing in the world to yearn for the rigidity of the medieval cosmology, the moral landscape to which a stonemason, manuscript illuminator or painter could turn for artistic solace, and from whose ethereal, luminescent matter parabolic universes could take shape.
Over spring break, I had the opportunity to purchase my first car. The salesman at the dealership told my father and me that if I was the sole owner of the car, I would have to pay a lot of money for automobile insurance—compared to a “normal” adult. My dad and I eventually decided to be co-owners of the vehicle in order to save money through the insurance plan, since my father is cheaper to insure.
There are many things that literally everyone on Earth hates, such as airplane seats without flaps to rest your head, Hayden Christensen’s performance in the Star Wars prequels and those stairs leading to the footbridge at Cornell that are the worst possible length – it’s uncomfortable to go one step per stair and it’s even more uncomfortable to go two steps per stair. There aren’t many things that literally everyone on Earth loves, but one of those things is March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament.
By Yang Lu
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt infamously signed and issued Executive Order 9066. For the unaware, Executive Order 9066 was the authorization for the Secretary of War to create military zones and exclude certain people from these zones after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
If you’re looking for something to binge on, listen to the new podcast S-Town. S-Town, narrated by reporter Brian Reed, is a collaboration between the creators of Serial and This American Life.
When I was a kid, millions of other children and I watched the movie The Lion King, but I did not think really about what the movie meant. I can recall being engrossed in the characters and, to this day, I can repeat the choruses to Hakuna Matata,” “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” and “Be Prepared,” even though I probably haven’t heard those songs in twelve years.
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
With Dragon Day fast approaching, we recently asked a few members of the team behind the beast to share their thoughts and experiences on the process of creating the famed Dragon, from the initial E-board elections to the mad-dash of Dragon Week. Here’s what they said:
Yueer Niu, E-Board: Fundraising and T-shirts Chair
When Cornell students first hear the words “Dragon Day,” their usual reaction is not excitement or anticipation but confusion.
Nestled in the Milky Way Galaxy four light-years away from the Earth, Trisolaris is a planet in a three-star solar system. The stars move in erratic orbits that follow no clear patterns—this is the classic “three body problem.” No civilization in Trisolaran history has been able to predict—and thus survive—the chaotic eras caused by these unpredictable orbits.
Trump has a new scandal every week. Actually, it’s probably more than that.
This week I’ve decided to compile a list of interesting facts (or secrets!) that I’ve gradually discovered about Cornell this year. On their own, each of these locations would not constitute a complete blog post, which is why this one contains seven.
It is not easy to imagine what an entire city on fire must look like. It would be easier to imagine what Hell itself looks like: more than two millennia of referential material survive to aid in painting that mental portrait.
On November 9, the day after the US Presidential Election, I wrote a blogpost regarding market responses to the surprising Trump victory. It was an extraordinary day for markets as portfolio managers, institutional investors, traders, etc.
Part of President Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to his presidency is his perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He recently declared that the conflict may be solved in ways other than a two-state solution, bucking several decades of U.S. policy.
Every two weeks, the writers at Sunspots churn out some of the most diverse, unique content on the web (or at least on the eduroam wifi). Whether you missed them the first time or feel like reading them for the hundredth time, Sunbursts celebrates the highlights of the Daily Sun’s Blogs section in a nicely packaged selection of articles chosen by the editor, website statistics and the writers themselves.
A frequently unkept resolution of mine is to detox from social media, in particular on days like March 8th, International Women’s Day. This year, my newsfeed was stained with posts like artless and dark graffiti, policing the way in which the day should be celebrated, pointing out the obviously achieved equality, asking with dissimulated wit why there isn’t an International Men’s Day.
As fall break rapidly approached last semester, my friends and I were faced with the single greatest recurring struggle of our generation: where to spend those four precious days of freedom. Most of us could simply go home, sure, but where was the fun in that?
We tell tales of democracy: tales of a system in which all receive equal voice. Representation exists on all levels and if you speak, your voice will be heard.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
On March 7th the CIA made headlines across the nation when Wikileaks released 8,761 sensitive documents and several hundred million lines of code from the CIA’s cybersecurity division. Many of these leaked documents were fairly mundane viruses and malware, the type you might get from torrenting media, but a few were much more impactful.
I am not a sci-fi person, but I started reading The Three Body Problem due to several timely developments. Over winter break, I visited my friend in China and learned that this is the “Hunger Games” equivalent of what’s trending in China.
If you haven’t read the news yet, this year’s Slope Day headliners will be MisterWives and Big Gigantic, with Brasstracks and S’Natra also performing. Our writers share their immediate reactions to finding out the lineup.
Hello there, my fellow Cornellians! As you will have already noticed, this week’s edition of my blog will not cover any sites or events around Ithaca.
On January 25, the U.S. Department of Education initiated its sixth inquiry into alleged mishandling of sexual assault investigations by Cornell University, in accordance with Title IX of the United States Education Amendments of 1972. While seemingly well-intentioned, the Department of Education’s aggressive application of Title IX is a disquieting assault on the United States Constitution and individual rights.
Most people probably think at this point that Trump is not very competent. It certainly seems to be a reasonable conclusion, considering the non-stop flow of fiascos – Muslim ban, Jeff Sessions, now the Obama wiretap tweets – all in his first month or so.
“πάθει μάθος.” -Derived from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Refers to learning gained through adversary.
Every two weeks, the writers at Sunspots churn out some of the most diverse, unique content on the web (or at least on the eduroam wifi). Whether you missed them the first time or feel like reading them for the hundredth time, Sunbursts celebrates the highlights of the Daily Sun’s Blogs section in a nicely packaged selection of articles chosen by the editor, website statistics and the writers themselves.
By virtue of the quality of the education we as Cornellians receive, our university is a profoundly international community, attracting students and faculty from around the globe. Step outside Olin Library, or keep your ears pealed in a dining hall, and you are guaranteed to hear good-natured chatter between friends and family in a language totally unfamiliar to you.
Recently, CNN published a story—a love story that, CNN insists, “defies borders.” Carly Harris, a Mormon college student, was volunteering at a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, when she met Soufiane El Yassami, a Muslim fast food worker. El Yassami had studied industrial refrigeration and was seeking a better life in Europe, fleeing the dismal economic situation in Morocco.
In honor of National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day (yup, it’s a real thing), ten of our writers set out to answer an important question: What is the best way to eat peanut butter?
Hunter Moskowitz ‘18
For one to undertake the ultimate peanut butter creation process, one must commit oneself to three steps:
Put a hunk of peanut butter on a knife
Place said hunk of peanut butter on a Ritz cracker
Stick another Ritz cracker on top of the peanut butter hunk
We underrate sandwiches of all kinds.
Passing through Warren Hall and Mann Library, the typical student is likely exposed to a quarter card too many; these ubiquitous advertisements are found scattered across tables, the floor, and even pasted comically onto urinals. I would liken this experience to that of radiation exposure.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
It’s Oscar time and once again actors are using the awards show to make points about American culture. From the wage gap to racial issues, the Oscars were packed with political and social commentary this year.
Every two weeks, the writers at Sunspots churn out some of the most diverse, unique content on the web (or at least on the eduroam wifi). Whether you missed them the first time or feel like reading them for the hundredth time, Sunbursts celebrates the highlights of the Daily Sun’s Blogs section in a nicely packaged selection of articles chosen by the editor, website statistics and the writers themselves. Disclaimer: due to extenuating circumstances, this edition of Sunbursts covers the two-week publishing cycle directly preceding February break – articles published within the past week will go in the next edition.
By Lev Akabas
Last night, after discovering that his film had, in fact, not won the Oscar for Best Picture, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz took the mic, reverse-Kanye’d, and immediately overtook Denzel Washington crying and Nicole Kidman clapping as the meme of the evening. In honor of Moonlight’s win for studio A24, and to thank the movie gods that Moonlight won after La La Land was announced and not the other way around, I created 24 memes to celebrate the occasion.
Last week, Donald Trump did something that broke decades of history and infuriated much of the media. It was also one of the least surprising decisions of his presidency.
By Andrew Shi
This review continues where the first one left off. The protagonist Cora arrives in North Carolina, where she hides in the home of Martin, an abolitionist, awaiting word to continue travel on the Underground Railroad.
By Yang Lu
When I was in elementary school, my parents would gather with their Chinese friends every Friday night for a Bible Study. While the adults were upstairs, all of us kids would find a computer downstairs and crowd behind it.
President Donald Trump is arguably the most controversial and polarizing figure in politics today. Take Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.
Couch potato that I am, I surprised myself this past February Break by actually going outside and doing something active: hiking! Along with a few other residents of Bethe House, I trekked through the scenery of Roy H. Park Preserve, a Finger Lakes Land Trust Preserve that is a twenty-minute drive from West Campus.
By Thomas Kim
If I told you that there are no constraints on federal government spending, you’d probably think I’m a radical deficit hawk and thus fiscally irresponsible beyond conventional liberal economics. Even Paul Krugman, the personification of liberal economics, doesn’t take it that far and assumes that adequate revenue is necessary for a proper budget (i.e. since borrowing costs are low, the government should run an affordable deficit and spend to offset the lack of private investment).
By Emma Ianni
This year, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino impacted my break and my liberal college student intersectional-feminist-relativistic-somewhat nihilistic philosophy more deeply than I like to admit. His miniseries The Young Pope had me glued to the television in my colorful (green and red-walled) living room in Italy, caught up in a story that I never saw coming.
Kids in the liberal arts and social sciences get a bad rap. They are derided for their “easy” majors, lack of relevant job opportunities after college or for ending up in careers that aren’t related to their degree.
I’ve always been a bit of a chicken. I’m easily startled and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m afraid of the dark.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
I’m in Gannett to get some blood work done on a Friday afternoon. No biggie—I’m hoping to get in, get it done, and get out.
By Andrew Shi
This blog series is a first and a last. It is a first because it features book reviews, something I have never attempted to do outside of class.
By Lev Akabas
Every time I take a shower, I think about one of three questions:
If it weren’t for the Middle Ages, where nobody did s*** for 900 years, just how advanced would human civilization be right now? Does Anderson Varejao or Robin Lopez look more like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons?
The last two weeks have been rough. They have been really really rough.
On Tuesday night, Democrats in the Senate took the floor to speak out against the nomination of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. Earlier in the day, the Senate voted 52-47 to limit debate on Sessions and move towards the final confirmation vote.
As you all know, this week’s blog post will be focused on the winter portion of my trip to Portland, Oregon this past mid-December. For the sake of not being repetitive, I will gloss over the minutiae of how I arrived at the train station and boarded the train because the schedule was almost exactly the same, with the exception of my parents and I deciding to leave for Portland on a Friday as opposed to a Saturday.
Every two weeks, the writers at Sunspots churn out some of the most diverse, unique content on the web (or at least on the eduroam wifi). Whether you missed them the first time or feel like reading them for the hundredth time, Sunbursts celebrates the highlights of the Daily Sun’s Blogs section in a nicely packaged selection of articles chosen by the editor, website statistics and the writers themselves.
The Strawman Illegal Immigration Argument
One of the most devious tactics employed by seasoned debaters is to give the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. Deploying this rhetorical strategy is precisely what many have done when it comes to illegal immigration.
A few weeks ago, I could’ve woken up without seeing something totally insane in my news feed when I checked Facebook in the morning. “Donald Trump suddenly and without warning implements Muslim Ban, causing massive backlash worldwide.” “Eric Trump has a suspiciously high secret service bill.” “Sarah Silverman advocates military revolt against the presidency.” Honestly, though, the most surprising and annoying thing about the last one is that it’s news.
The following statement comes from a group of people from Islamic Alliance for Justice, Native American Students at Cornell (NASAC), Cornell DREAM Team, MEChA de Cornell and Asian Pacific Americans for Action (APAA) who were affected directly or indirectly by the events of this past week and decided to come together to organize. We’re a collective group of students, and this is our collective statement:
Over the past week, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive actions, some of which explicitly target marginalized communities including Muslims, refugees, undocumented peoples, Indigenous folx, Latinx folx, people who cannot access healthcare and working class people.
By Amanda Xu
The Sun hired me as a politics writer but my blog is called “Politics & Stuff” so I’m technically allowed to write about the “Stuff” part! Here’s a food review of Hai Hong!!
Trump’s anti-Muslim ban has had harrowing effects on the lives of real people, keeping loved ones away from each other, crushing the dreams of immigrants and trapping people in unfair and unjust situations. It is an aggressive act, designed to incite fear and hatred and put in place to validate a disgusting view of people around the world.
Olivia Lutwak
I’m looking forward to the food. Every year for the Super Bowl, my dad throws a party for which he cooks massive amounts of food.
We’ve all heard stories from our friends and family members about their reactions to Donald Trump’s election. Election Night 2016 has already, in our imaginations, reached the status of a defining cultural event, a “where were you when such-and-such happened” question along the lines of “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” or “Where were you on 9/11?” or “Where were you when Obama was elected president?” These are the types of questions by which we measure our personal histories.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
By Yang Lu
Lunch was probably my least favorite part of elementary school. Now don’t get me wrong, I wanted a break from school as much as everyone else.
How often do you look at your phone for no good reason? Once a day?
As our Uber weaved its way through the busy streets of Rio de Janeiro, the signs of the recent Olympic Games were littered everywhere. Although the banners had been taken down a month prior, logos announcing “Rio 2016” were still stamped across roads; huge signs strung across souvenir shops boasted their Games-themed merchandise; freshly-painted murals covered building walls.
I hope everyone had a wonderful break, filled with family, friends, food and anime binge-watching until some ungodly hour of the night. I know mine was.
This past August and December, my parents and I traveled to Portland, Oregon, where we ate like kings, dressed to kill and took a myriad of photos like the tourists we were. Due to this last fact, I am dividing my account of our Portland adventures into two blog posts–one about our summer exploits, and another about our winter shenanigans.
“No, Donald Trump’s pledge of allegiance to Putin does not disqualify him from being President, and the fact that you would even suggest that, Anderson, is just another example of this media bias that we see all the time now.”
“I think Justin Bieber is the best alternative rock musician, period.”
“No one really cares about Trump’s Muslim registry besides the press, so we’re just going to go ahead and do it.” “Mr. Trump has nominated me today to be his new Secretary of Propaganda.
Cornell University recently decided to replace Tapestry of Possibilities — the diversity event that has been presented to incoming first-year students for the past 11 years — with the Identity and Belonging Project. This change was due to a host of complaints leveled against the old program, particularly the failure of the old program to encompass enough topics.
TW: Trump, misogyny, racism
We wake up at 9 am and immediately check Twitter for news of the day’s first protests. Blockades have already gone up at key entrance points around the city; Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL and other organizers have chained themselves to each other and to the ground.
Meet Corinne. She is a contestant on Season 21 (yup, that’s not a typo) of The Bachelor, she inherited her family’s million dollar business, she is 24 years old and she has a nanny.
Last night, people around the world wildly celebrated, in intervals of exactly one hour, the Earth moving past an approximate, arbitrary point in its orbit about the sun. In New York City, specifically, thousands of people stood outside in the freezing cold for more than ten hours to watch a ball move slowly down a short to medium-length pole and then reach the bottom of that pole at the same time as the Earth reached the aforementioned point in its orbit.
By Lev Akabas
Sometimes when people mention the Seven Wonders of the World, for a few seconds I think they’re talking about the Fast and Furious movies. The Fast and Furious franchise has gone from low-budget street racing movies to big-budget street racing movies to big-budget action movies to even bigger-budget action movies.
Dear Julie,
How have you been? I hope the winters in NY haven’t been too harsh on you – you’ve always had cold hands and I hope you’re coping well.
By Andrew Shi
Re: “What Kind of White Faculty Should We Hire?,” Sunspots, Dec. 10
Christian Brickhouse recently penned an ambitious essay in this newspaper.
By Christian Brickhouse
Re: “Liberal Intolerance at Cornell,” Sunspots, Dec. 7
To the Editor:
In the last few weeks, The Cornell Daily Sun has published a number of articles by conservative students decrying the lack of “intellectual diversity.” Indeed, last week, a resolution was proposed at the Student Assembly meeting to ask the Faculty Assembly to create a committee on diversity of thought.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her biography of Voltaire, famously coined the phrase, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This should be a universally accepted principle at Cornell. But sadly, it is not.
It’s the end of the semester. Let’s play a game.
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
As a society, we suck at naming things. I don’t really need to defend this claim other than stating that someone decided to name this place “Greenland,” but there are countless other examples.
As a college student, sometimes I feel like I am in a bubble, or have blinders on. Here at Cornell, and probably at many other schools, you can go through your daily life focusing on nothing but school, those around you and whatever is happening on campus.
November has been a brutal month for me. I suffered immense heartbreak the night of the election with millions of people across the world, and then, a few weeks later, unexpectedly lost my 27-year-old cousin, whom I love very much.
By Andrew Shi
I’ve had two thoughts about theatre. The first is that it is a high art form.
Ever since Donald Trump’s stunning Electoral College victory, there has been a lot of talk about what Trump will do as president. A lot of people believe that his presidency will destroy America and that the world will descend into chaos under his watch.
When considering what to write about this week, I realized that I haven’t really lived up to my promise of providing “highly varied content” – not that anyone cares, but I would feel bad only writing articles related to the election all semester, no matter how much it reflects the current news cycle. Instead, here is a collection of things I thought about this week, which you may or may not find interesting.
“ᛏ Týr er einhendr áss
ok ulfs leifar
ok hofa hilmir
Mars tiggi.”
Time does not, and has never, suffered itself to be stopped on the whim of a mortal. If all mystified fatalism, be it twine-snipping hags at the base of the world-tree and the general stuff of soothsayers, has been stripped from our cold-fact cosmology, this central fact has never been, and almost certainly never shall, be doubted.
By Amanda Xu and Jeremiah Kim
Amanda:
For many Americans, we can trace the origins of our family tree to an immigrant story. One of hardship, sacrifice, and — for the lucky few — bittersweet triumph over circumstances.
If you’re ever riding a train in Japan’s Tottori prefecture, you might be lucky enough to ride the “Conan Train.” Which, as it happens, is exactly the same as a regular train, except for the fact that the outside is a giant advertisement for the “Conan” anime (that’s “Case Closed” in America). Why, you might ask, is there such an over-the-top advertisement for an anime in the middle of Japan’s least populous prefecture?
By Emma Ianni
It takes a long time to feel at home in another country. It takes mispronunciations, catching up on a lot of pop culture to understand the references, adapting to a different kind of humor, eating unfamiliar food and walking other roads.
If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet? And why?
As the Vice President of the Cornell University Democrats, I gave these remarks to our general body members the day after the election. A meeting that was supposed to be for all intents and purposes, one of celebration, was instead one in which we had to reel from an outcome that almost none of us had prepared for.
“How do we move forward?” This is a question I have asked myself every day since last Tuesday. In the hours following the election, my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds were in uproar.
If you tell me you’re in pursuit of happiness, I’ll tell you you’re awfully misguided (@KidCudi, wyd?). Happiness itself is simply a concept—a crude abstraction, nebulous by nature.
In the wake of this week’s election results (and it really does seem like a literal wake), the American people experience at this moment an unprecedented and unsettling division. There are calls for revolution and for resolution, for peaceful protest and property damage, for faithless electors and for faith in the decision made by the citizens of our great nation.
By Andrew Shi
This week is National Prison Visiting Week, a new initiative led by the VERA Institute of Justice to open up prison facilities to local community members to come in and interact with inmates and correctional officers. The “opening” of the prisons provides the public an opportunity to see the effect that a local institution has on people, many who eventually reenter society (studies estimate 95% nationwide).
I have heard a lot of people say that they were shocked by the election results, and I was in a bit of disbelief myself on Tuesday night. Yet as I heard from speakers at the Friday walkout and from others in my life, no one should be shocked by what happened on Tuesday night.
Why do we go to college? You’re probably thinking that the answer here is simple.
By Charles Yu
I grew up in a minority-majority enclave in the Bay Area. My elementary school was made up of 800 students whose demographics were made up of roughly fifty-percent East Asian and fifty-percent South Asian.
By Thomas Kim
November 9, 2016
Markets were disturbed when it dawned on investors that Trump became the frontrunner for the presidency. The shuffling and rumble were the manifestation of adjustments in market expectation of a Clinton presidency.
In the coming days, we will begin to understand the outcome of Tuesday night’s elections and see how Donald Trump triumphed when almost every major news source was predicting a win for Hillary Clinton on Monday. The results are shocking and deeply startling to many people whose personal identities were attacked by Trump throughout his campaign.
From Tuesday to Saturday last week, Punkfest Cornell took place throughout Ithaca, and included panel discussions (one of which featured members of Pussy Riot), live band and spoken word performances, an opening reception in Kroch and a film screening at Cornell Cinema. Unfortunately, I was incredibly busy last week, so I was only able to attend the aforementioned opening reception, but I have a feeling that would have been the event I enjoyed most anyway.
It’s 2016. Donald Trump is the president.
The prospect of graduate student unionization at Cornell University is becoming a serious possibility. There has been much debate about the relative merits of this decision from the perspective of graduate students.
Happy Election Day! Congratulations on surviving yet another excruciatingly long electoral cycle.
By Amanda Xu
1. Getting asked what you want to do with your major
“So, like, do you want to run for president?
You already know what this is about. And I get it, Halloween’s over – cultural appropriation isn’t a hot topic anymore.
We all have the painful awareness that, during our lifetime, we will not have time to read every book worth reading, to visit every place that fascinates us, to learn what we’ve always dreamed of doing, to play musical instruments and knit scarves. In response to this anxiety, we make lists; bucket lists.
Fanny packs are making a comeback. When most people think of fanny packs, they think of tourists scrambling about unknown streets of some foreign city or hikers trekking along in the woods.
“Tell me a story,” is a phrase that seems to come out of my mouth, or be sent via text message quite often. Sometimes, I am just looking for something to pass the time, idle gossip about people I don’t know and will never meet.
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
Cornell and President Rawlings are wrong. There is really no other way to say it.
“We’re more alike than I thought.”
Probably not, but I was too drunk to worry about the validity of the statement and too fixated on the idea of mitigating the inevitable wave of despair that I associate with falling back into sobriety. We lay there for a little while longer and chatted about pretty much everything , except for what was on our minds.
This week at Auburn I taught Chinese. It came as a surprise, really: when we checked our belongings in at the front desk I noticed a fellow tutor holding what looked like worksheets that were written in Chinese.
See what several of our writers have to say about some of the scariest things they’ve experienced during their years at Cornell. THE WALK TO MY HOUSE
Charlie Liao
As a non-guaranteed transfer, I had no clue that Cornell housing is basically over before Thanksgiving.
Awhile ago, Paul Krugman ran an op-ed piece titled “Plutocrats and Prejudice”, in which he observes the division between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the primaries as a division between what change is best. Senator Sanders says he, along with the people, will revolutionize politics, while Secretary Clinton says she will implement progressive reforms. The question of revolution or reform was discussed previously in Western Europe and pre-Soviet Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In just over a year since its founding in September 2014, AJ+ has exploded onto the scene to become the second largest news video producer on Facebook. In October 2015, AJ+ amassed over 1 billion views across its platforms. It’s safe to say that AJ+ has risen to social media preeminence.
By Amanda Xu
I am the child of immigrants. I am the child of two people who moved to another country with not a penny to their names and worked themselves to the bone for twenty years to finally earn a small house with a yellow lawn and white picket fence.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I attended Insectapalooza this past Saturday at Comstock Hall, where I witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly. However, before I delve into my experience, I’ll get the formal stuff out of the way: admission was $3 per person and free for kids aged three and younger.
NBA fans constitute one of the most delusional groups of people, along with people who think Chicago-style pizza is pizza, people who don’t like pizza at all, and people who think that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is anywhere close to knowledgeable enough about how anything works to be President of the United States. Rarely has this delusion been more palpable than in the aftermath of Kevin Durant signing with the Golden State Warriors in free agency this summer.
“Jezt aber, drinn im Gebirg,
Tief unter den silbernen Gipeln,
Und unter fröhlichem Grün,
Wo die Wälder schauernd zu ihm,
Und der Felsen Häupter übereinander
Hinabschaun, taglang, dort
Im kältesten Abgrund hört’
Ich um Erlösung jammern
Den Jüngling, es hörten ihn, wie er tobt’,
Und die Mutter Erd’ anklagt’,
Und den Donnerer, der ihn gezeuget,
Erbarmend die Eltern, doch
Die Sterblichen flohn von dem Ort,
Denn furchtbar war, da lichtlos er
In den Fesseln sich wälzte,
Das Rasen des Halbgotts.”
“Yet now, in the mountains,
Deep beneath the silvery summits,
And beneath the merry Greenness,
Where the woods shudder to him,
And the rock heads gaze down over one another
Upon him, the whole day long, there
In the coldest Abyss heard I
The youth groaning for salvation;
They heard him, how he blustered,
And railed at Mother Earth,
And the Thunderer, who begat him,
The parents pitying; yet
Mortals fled the place,
For it was dreadful, since he, lightless,
Tossed about in his chains:
the rage of the Demigod.” (Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der Rhein,” p.t.)
Youth’s high-esteemed vitality, grace in form, and strong, prattling innocence have as their all-too-easy obverses its seething rage, misdirection, and choking, desperate thirst for the authority. The last failing, the outcome is violence.
There’s a chill in the air, pitch-black darkness as I lug my suitcase down the steps. The rolling of the suitcase wheels on the uneven concrete reverberates through the air when at this time of night silence dominates.
At last, the election is nearly upon us. The United States of America will have voted and within a fortnight we will know the outcome.
I have an immense amount of respect for The Donald, and I could not be happier with how his campaign has unfolded. From his not-so-humble beginnings as just one hopeful drifting in a sea of infinitely more qualified candidates, Donald is the little, tiny-handed orange engine that could of American politics.
A while ago I attended the Kyoto International Manga and Anime Fair, which, as far as I can tell, is only international insofar as foreigners get in free. But hey, I’m not one to turn down a free anime convention.
Put a group of second-generation Asian Americans together in one room. Get them to open up about their childhoods, to describe what it was like growing up in their household, what their parents were like.
You are what you wear. The clothes that you choose to wear everyday reflect who you are, where you have been and where you are going.
I have inadvertently heard the song “Closer” so many times that sometimes I hear it even when it’s not being played. What I once took to be a constant in my life, an allegedly reassuring acoustic verification of my ongoing physicality—my heartbeat—has been aggressively replaced by the song’s superficial, Day-Glo, Capri Sun beat.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
While Donald Trump aimlessly paces around the debate stage after being asked a question, his mind undergoes a complex thought process that involves both asking himself questions (in blue), and blurting out statements (in orange). The following is an attempt to visually map this process.
Ladies and gents, step right up. You’ve all been waiting for this one.
Sometimes, they are just hard to avoid. They spring up, almost daily, prognosticating the future and therefore predicting what our country may look like in the years to come.
I’ll be 36 years old when he gets out of prison in 2030. It occurred to me that scientists have been saying that by that year all the polar ice caps will have melted.
For some time now, it has been a habit of mine — much like how a frequent cocaine user would call his addiction a “habit”, to take my coffee black. Sans crème, sans sucre — a straight, untampered and unholy noir.
I started cold showering over the summer. Did I do it to seem suave and perpetuate my image as an interesting business person?
We’re so quick to attack Trump and Clinton for being crooked, phony liars, but maybe it’s time we see ourselves as the true hypocrites. The 2016 presidential election has been touted as America’s most progressive election yet.
By Amanda Xu
Imagine a society in which almost 1 in 4 African-Americans are in poverty; for white people, the number is less than 1 in 10 (Proctor et al., 12). Imagine that society in which not only black children are more likely to be born into poverty, but half of them will also remain there as adults.
If after this weekend you were left wondering what the state of our political system has come to, you are not alone. After a video was released of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, claiming that he had the right to sexually assault women because he was a celebrity, the Republican Party started falling to pieces.
If there was ever a time for the Republican Party to regret nominating Donald Trump, it would be now. The Washington Post’s release of video tapes that include Trump’s abhorrent remarks about women in 2005 underscore not only his immoral character, but also his weakness as a candidate.
Remember 2009 when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the VMAs and we all laughed and it either made you love Kanye or hate Kanye? It’s probably the most familiar example of a pervasive cultural phenomenon: manterrupting.
Like most people, I don’t find insects particularly interesting, but I thought I’d attend a West Campus-scheduled Cornell Insect Collection Tour on Sunday, September 25 with my SA Erin! The Cornell University Insect Collection is located in Comstock Hall and is one of the world’s biggest insect collections.
“Jetzt komme, Feuer! Begierig sind wir,
Zu schauen den Tag,
Und wenn die Prüfung
Ist durch die Knie gegangen,
Mag einer spüren das Waldgeschrei.” -Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der Ister”
Almost two thousand years are to be retrospectively traversed from the death of Hitler to the object of my next inquiry.
For those that missed the news (it was quite a while ago at this point), Funimation and Crunchyroll have, at long last, announced a formal partnership. Essentially, Crunchyroll is begining to stream some of Funimation’s older, well-known titles like Cowboy Bebop.
There’s an old chain email/Facebook adage that goes something like: “It takes 37 muscles to frown but only 22 muscles to smile. So smile.
This piece is very different from what I usually write; it is inspired from the NYT Modern Love column, which I read avidly, and from my own life – for one can speak generally and universally only to a certain extent. When my mother told me about love, she always mentioned Paolo, her high school sweetheart.
Do you know what happens behind the seams? Think about the very T-shirt you are wearing, the socks that keep your feet warm, even the backpack that you just shrugged off your shoulder.
Where would I be without advice? I am frustratingly indecisive when it comes to making decisions regarding my own personal life; often, I find myself going in circles trying to make a decision.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
I want to dissociate. Split myself into two bodies, break myself apart into two corporal entities.
Immediately following the death of Keith Lamont Scott, protesters had come to the incontrovertible conclusion that the police officer who shot the 43-year-old African American man in Charlotte, North Carolina had clear racist motivations. Violent protests and riots erupted in Charlotte, forcing the North Carolina governor to declare a state of emergency.
There are some places where the eyes of the press rarely go. Maybe it is because they do not care.
The one-hour car ride back to Cornell from Auburn Prison is a time for tutors to talk about how the night went. On my last trip, a few of the tutors in my car observed a voting poster inside a classroom.
1. The Humble Brag
They say America runs on Dunkin, but I say otherwise.
“You liberals get off my lawn!” commands Lionel Shriver in her recent New York Times Op-Ed. Shriver, who might be more well known for her bellicose opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month than any of the 13 books she’s published, has more than several bones to pick with the “left,” or anyone who is not a blatant homophobe, sexist, racist or otherwise elitist.
A new census found that median household income in the US had risen by 5.2% in 2015 compared to the rise in income in the previous year. Although this is good news, the data turns out to be more a reflection of the health of the labor market, rather than the health of the economy.
If you are like many college students, you probably find that you have barely enough time to complete your class work, let alone follow the news everyday. In case you have managed to avoid a newspaper since you came to campus in August, I am here with some potentially bad news: Hillary Clinton has lost the solid lead in the polls that she maintained towards the end of the summer.
I have to hand it to Donald J. Trump, he truly is a genius in ways I never thought anyone could ever be. The man was amazing in the first debate!
Hello, all you beautiful people! I hope prelims, papers, projects and just life in general are all going well for you this week, but if they haven’t been, I’ve got the perfect momentary escape for you—San Francisco!
Dear Undecided Voter,
Hey, I hope you’re doing well. I am not going to make this too long, because I get it, we’re all busy people.
For those that missed the news, Makoto Shinkai’s newest movie, “Your Name.” (Kimi no Na wa.) recently released in Japan. And it’s a huge hit.
By Amanda Xu
My high school years were defined by my participation in public forum debate. PF is a two-on-two debate format that encourages discussion on current controversies such as gun control, education reform and constitutionality.
So. I’ve developed a habit where I try to pluck a fistful of leaves – or a solitary leaf – off as many low-hanging branches on as many passing trees as I can while walking home on pretty-good Saturday nights (weather permitting). I might do it on weekdays too, or even during daylight hours if the urge has really got a grip on these twitchy digits. It’s powerful, when it hits.
By Thomas Kim
Two weeks ago I explained that the Central Bank has the ability to bypass Congressional gridlock and should conduct monetary activities that can help assuage market troubles. In this post, I will explain what Congress should do if able to act.
By Lev Akabas
Like every other college, Cornell has tests. But, unlike every other college, we don’t call these tests “tests” — we call them “prelims.” Why, you may ask?
By Emma Ianni
This is an open letter, one that will never reach the addressee, the type of letter that mostly benefits the author and maybe open some isolated, outcasted pairs of eyes. One of those that are not meant to be read, but meant to be written and spoken to strangers with familiar faces about familiar situations, one of those often charged with aggressive passivity, when maybe all they do is delineate a relationship between two people where names are not needed, where intimacy is beyond the point and from which no friendship will spring.
If you have always wanted to be an economics major but couldn’t quite fit it into your schedule, this article will save you a lot of time. Keep reading for an overview of some of the core and elective classes in the curriculum.
To let go is to be free. It is to completely detach from societal expectations and latch onto what you expect for yourself.
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
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Part 1:
“Heh, Sam!?”
I bounded up the staircase on all fours, caught the baluster at the top and swung into my parent’s bedroom, gliding on the furnished wood floor Risky Business style. A small pair of brown eyes just barely peaked out over the king-sized bed from the other side of the room.
Dear Seniors,
This is an incredibly stressful time. We’re applying to jobs, we’re applying to grad school, we’re planning out the next chapter of our lives.
Hello, world! I am the iPhone 7.* You might have heard about me.
By Tina He
I was in New York City for the sole purpose of visiting some indie second-hand bookstores so I could get some best deal in town to justify spending a hundred dollars traveling here from Ithaca. I got a tote that says “If you go home with somebody & they don’t have books, don’t f**k ‘em” and loaded it with as many books as it would fit.
By Andrew Shi
When the cart rolled into the classroom, several of the students immediately left their seats and walked over. I followed suit.
By Charles Yu
Toward the end of last semester, and leading into the summer, I began to dabble in the hobby of poetry writing. The works I produced, while some of them are so atrocious that they will never see the light of publishing, were often very cathartic to write.
So if you’ve read my bio or just know me personally, I absolutely adore the party, fighting-game Super Smash Bros. So much so, that winning or losing in a game of four player free-for-all or one-on-one I will physically transform this angry, volatile beast that has me taking my shirt off and foaming at the mouth to play again and again and again.
As an Asian male, it’s quite safe to say that my peers and I get the shortest end of the recruitment stick. It’s no secret that we’re perceived as the meek and subservient types that belong in the professional friend-zone.
I know how to commit the perfect crime. Or at least I should, given the countless nights I spent watching Court TV (which has since been renamed truTV) and Lifetime with my mom.
Earlier this week, an article was published in JAMA Internal Medicine providing evidence that in the 1960s the sugar industry supplied funding for scientific research that identified fat and cholesterol as the main culprits of coronary heart disease, and downplayed the evidence that sugar consumption can also be linked to CHD. It is likely that this literature, sponsored by the Sugar Research Foundation and originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine, contributed to the rise of low-fat diet in the mid to late 1900s.
This week, I bring you all another event I attended through the charity of West Campus: Kitchen Theatre’s new play, Hand to God. For those of you (most of us), who aren’t familiar with this company, Kitchen Theatre is an organization in downtown Ithaca that performs plays in a small ninety-nine seat theater.
Over the past several months, France has been ravaged by Islamist terror attacks. On November 13, several ISIS militants executed a coordinated terrorist attack on Paris, leaving 130 people dead and hundreds more wounded.
“He knew his heart’s core was a fat, awful worm. His dread was lest anyone else should know.
This election season has left people with some tough choices. In our two-party system, it kind of makes things difficult when a lot of people don’t support either candidate.
The biggest news story from this past weekend isn’t that our nation just grieved September 11th for the 15th time. Nope, the biggest headline following this historic day is that Hillary has pneumonia.
By Amanda Xu
Arthur E. Levine once said, “When a quality education is denied to children at birth because of their parents’ skin color or income, it is not only bad policy, it is immoral.” It is because I believe education is a universal right, not a privilege, that I believe the United States federal government should help provide affordable college education through grants and federal aid. First, the cost of college has become an obstacle in accessing increasingly necessary post-secondary education.
I recently visited a department store near Kyoto station, hunting for a power converter so I could charge my laptop. The store was split into 7 floors, each selling different products.
A truck blocked my path. In the fading light of late afternoon, I could barely make out a group of white faces grinning at me through rolled-down windows. And then a voice called out:
“HEY PIKACHU!”
By the time I’d registered the words and bristled in preface to formulating an appropriate retort, the
By Lev Akabas
To Republicans, Donald Trump is like receiving scented candles for a holiday gift: you don’t want it, but for social reasons, you have to pretend like you don’t hate it. To Democrats, Donald Trump is like receiving a pet monkey for a holiday gift: it seems harmless and even amusing at first, but it’s actually the most annoying thing ever.
By Emma Ianni
A few days ago, I experienced the nth-to-last first day of school. Cornell was stunning on that Tuesday, Ho Plaza was crowded and the clock tower immortalized, the sun shone and the green was so bright it seemed to defy any memory or expectation of snow and white ice.
Long lines and empty shelves plague Venezuela’s grocery stores as its economic crisis shows no signs of stopping. Pets are also feeling the effects of the prolonged food shortages as residents are struggling to spare a single morsel, according to a report by CBS.
I have always had a dumbfounded expression whenever a Star Trek reference has been made around me; I am not the most avid sci-fi fan, nor do I even understand what the Star Trek craze is all about (yes, I have received questioning looks). When my Residence Hall Director, Eric, announced we would be watching an episode at our RA staff meeting, I didn’t qute understand how this related to the usual theme of our discussions, which usually revolve around raging social debates and issues.
Welcome to mi casa, — suit du jour —the place where fashion governs everything. While I am half-kidding, I am also half-not.
An old man drives angrily back home from the supermarket, shouting in disagreement with what seems like no one. He’s shouting a podcast playing over the in-car stereo system.
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With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
In the Indian community it often feels as though your worth is derived from your weight. Six months before I’m due to see my family in India again I’m already dreading the opening greetings which will undoubtedly revolve around how much weight I’ve gained or lost since the last time I’ve seen them.
In an interview with ABC this Sunday, Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, likened Donald Trump’s encouragement of Russia to hack into Hillary’s emails to the infamous Watergate scandal. Kaine’s comment was his way of deflecting negative attention off Hillary by pointing out just how much worse Trump is.
On its diversity and inclusion webpage, our ever enlightened university boldly regards itself as “a place where intercultural skills are developed and enacted among diverse campus constituencies”. Cornell bumptiously claims that more than 39 percent of undergraduates identify as students of color, and each year the admissions office touts “the most diverse class to date”.
On August 22nd, Gawker, a blog that had over 800 million page views in the last year, and posted more than 200,000 articles in its lifetime, was destroyed. Some in the media have argued argue that this came about because of Gawker’s own sins and that Gawker’s posting of “non-journalistic” material such as sex tapes and its public outing of powerful people led to its downfall.
By Andrew Shi
Auburn Correctional Facility is less than an hour’s drive directly north of Ithaca, in a city whose population is comparable to that of total enrollment at Cornell. Sitting atop one of the Finger Lakes, it looks like any other town to pass by on the rolling hills of Upstate New York.
By Tina He
“If you can bring this to the States…” He kept his voice low, trying not to make a fuss, but he could not dim the shine in his eyes. Four weeks ago, I probed into the underground art market in China, where insiders trade information with hungry artists trying to exhibit their pieces abroad.
By Charles Yu
Every so often, I like to play this game called “Be the Intellectual.” It’s a game fueled by high pretension; sometimes leading me into an art museum, in which I will pretend to muse at artworks (of which I know nothing about) and stand there, gazing— waiting for the art to speak to me! — gleaming a few extra seconds if the display card to the left mentions an artist that strikes a chord of recognition.
Marketing experts say that consumers love choice… but I’m not so sure. Especially in a day and age where all of us are, for some reason, becoming more indecisive, having too much choice can be supremely frustrating.
Not the first. Not the second.
I think part of me always knew I wanted to be more than friends, but in an attempt to avoid the emotional impaling that often comes with trusting another flawed human being, I kept the burgeoning feelings to myself. It wasn’t until she offered me socks that I realized I was in love with her.
In conjunction with low interest rates, the cash for trash program, or quantitative easing (QE), has led to inflation in asset prices, including housing. In exchange for toxic assets and treasury bonds, QE was supposed to flood banks with cash in order to encourage lending and thus stimulate growth.
I didn’t expect to be so excited about living on West Campus this year, but boy, am I enjoying its perks! This past Saturday, August 27, two charter bus-fulls of us West Campus students went to Niagara Falls for a ridiculously low price of $15 each(price of transportation, boat tickets and breakfast included).
Recently, The University of Chicago notified first-year students that it does not support trigger warnings or safe spaces, going against the current trend in a higher-education system that has been characterized by suppression of uncomfortable ideas. But just when it seemed that the tides had started to turn, Cornell University doubled down on the coddling culture that has consumed American campuses by capitulating to the demands of certain students, with the director of the Cornell Plantations, Christopher Dunn, announcing that he will be recommending the Board of Trustees to rename the Cornell Plantations to the Cornell Botanic Gardens.
The wind was more energetic, rowdier than it should have been. Perhaps I merely wanted the place to be completely silent.
In the wake of the recent and infamous Brock Turner case, Stanford University has responded with a new policy to combat sexual assault on their campus. Sexual assault is one of the foremost threats to student safety on college campuses across the nation, affecting one in five women and one in 16 men as of 2015.
Most people have probably imagined being the POTUS at some point. Fewer people have imagined their best friend as president, fewer still their business associate, and most have probably not considered actually running for the office themselves.
By Amanda Xu
As the consequences of racial inequality take center stage in US politics, America again uncovers its divisions across racial identities. From the abolitionist movement to the Civil Rights Movement, the fight for black liberation has been passed to the modern #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Welcome back to Manga Mondays. As you can see, not much has changed here.
Hello! Today I want to talk about why it’s not okay for non-black people of color – specifically Asian and Pacific Americans – to say the N-word.
By Michael Mauer
I recently watched Only Yesterday at the Cornell Cinema (highly recommend it!) and the show really got me thinking about the role of rural settings in Japanese popular culture. Note that I didn’t just say anime there!
By Becky Suh
We all have at least one friend – usually from high school – who thinks they are “deep” for posting pictures of maudlin statements like, “sleep doesn’t help if it’s your soul that’s tired,” in Helvetica on a white background with the Valencia filter on Instagram or Twenty-One Pilots lyrics on FaceBook. The people who typically pull this kind of shit are the ones that tell you that they are “different” from other guys or the girls that are constantly reminding you that they are “like, super weird.” Characterized by technological literacy, pessimism and melodrama, they are the archetypal members of what Noreena Hertz calls Generation K.
What does the K stand for?
Having devoted the better part of my free time to social media (and not proudly so), it has been remarkable to witness the transformation in the kind of material that crops up in my feed. There have been tangible shifts, to the extent that everyone I know seems to have become a political activist at some level.
The 2015 biopic Trumbo depicts the struggle that many screenwriters faced during the Red Scare. Dalton Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston), along with nine other screenwriters, was tried and charged for contempt of Congress under the accusation of writing films promoting anti-American ideals.
By Sarah Chandler
I’m going to be serious about something for one second. Okay, done.
By Sarah Palmer
The mythical demigod Theseus is a testament to the heroic ideal of the ancient Greeks. King of the Athenians, his mythical slaying of the minotaur is still present in the western cultural narrative.
By Griffin Smith-Nichols
“The chief failing of the day with some of our well-meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.” -Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race
As a prelude to his article, the second of my series on tumult and upheaval in 1916, I must warn any potential reader that the content may be distressing to those sensitive to racism and violence. I would advise discretion.
By Mary Burgett
Being happy isn’t something that others can do for you; it’s something that you need to find for yourself. Sometimes, or maybe too often, happiness is a battle.
By Katie Barlow and Rebecca Saber
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo!
By Eddie Dreyer
Do you feel weighed down by stress? Do you ever get lost in thought for long periods of time?
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By Charles Yu
While reading through my group chat notifications the other day, I noticed a little scuffle building in one of the groups chats that I was in: What had begun with a playful changing around of group nicknames soon escalated to personal jabs at different group members and real life drama. And at this I scoffed.
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By Greta Ohaus and Eleni Toubanos
Cuddling in Eleni’s queen sized bed recounting a fun evening, we began discussing our lack of photo documentation this year. By the time you reach senior year, is taking a #selfie in your novel mixer costume lame/sad/pathetic/overdone?
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By Emma Ianni
Starbucks never gets my name wrong: bold and thick, the four letters written with the sharpie mark my Cinnamon Chai Latte with comforting exactitude. My mother hated her name, could not bear the length of it, the excessive r’s and the harshness of the t, or maybe because of the fact that it was two names stitched together.
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By Brian Guo
In my first year of college, I made the misstep of taking class at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m. Against all advice, I, the beaming young student, was eager to tackle the demons of chemistry in the wee hours of the morning. The folly of my decision would soon become apparent through sleepless nights of composing reports and balancing equations, but for the moment I possessed an unrelenting determination to succeed.
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By Hunter Moskowitz
One summer, I gutted the prickly bush that sat on the side of my driveway. I was much younger, but I can’t exactly remember when it happened.
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By Michael Mauer
I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite some time now. Since about the middle of RWBY volume 3, in fact.
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By Jacqueline Groskaufmanis
Some forms of sexism are easier to detect than others. For instance, we automatically know that when a child is told that they “throw like a girl,” he or she is being insulted.
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There are many things that literally everyone on Earth hates, such as hangnails, hotels that charge for WiFi, late-2000s M. Night Shyamalan films, and that moment when you don’t check your phone for an hour and there are 257 unread messages from a single group chat when you come back. There aren’t many things that literally everyone on Earth loves, but one of those things is March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament.
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By Marina Caitlin Watts
Movies that walk you through how a movie is made give off a metatheatrical vibe. The Academy also happens to favor these kinds of film when choosing best picture.
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