There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise,” said author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. “The human soul cannot be permanently chained.” These and many other inspirational words from Black leaders in a wide variety of fields are gathered in the latest self-improvement book from Joseph Holland ’78, MA ’79.
Titled Make Your Own History: Timeless Truths from…
Joe Wilensky/Cornell University
An outdoor showing of the classic Notorious, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
"There’s a real joy in sitting with people and experiencing a film,” says Molly Ryan, director of Cornell Cinema. The chance to watch a movie the way its creators intended it to be seen—with other humans, on an oversized screen in a darkened room, uninterrupted—has long been a cornerstone of the Cinema’s mission.
Now, more than 50 years after its founding, the Hill’s beloved film organization…
Mary Crawford, awaiting the nine-day voyage to France in 1914
“There has been a call for nurses and doctors to the Red Cross, for work abroad,” Mary Crawford 1904, MD 1907, wrote shortly after World War I began. “Tomorrow I’m going to find out if any women doctors need apply, and if so, what sort of work they’d be allowed to do. If only laboratory work, it doesn’t appeal, but if practical caring for the sick or injured, I’m getting on the list.”
When…
What do rapper Tone Loc’s platinum hit “Wild Thing,” the soulful tune “Time After Time” by ’80s pop queen Cyndi Lauper, and the soundtrack to the musical South Pacific have in common? They’re among the hundreds of thousands of songs whose rights now reside with a company helmed by a Cornellian.
Steve Salm ’93 has spearheaded the massive, headline-grabbing acquisitions of the rights to some of…
For their extraordinary contributions to human knowledge, 50 people associated with Cornell have won the Nobel Prize over the years—an august roster that includes alumni, former faculty, and several current professors. The Big Red laureates have primarily won in the categories of physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine, but also in literature and economics; two have been honored with the…
Cheryl Engelhardt ’02 was in the midst of a meditation retreat when the nominees for the 2023 Grammy Awards were scheduled to be announced. A musician and composer, she was hopeful that her album The Passenger would be a contender in the category of New Age, Ambient, or Chant Albums.
Resisting the temptation to ditch the session—as it happened, a meditation on miracles—she turned off her phone…
As an author and professor best known for satirizing higher education, Julie Schumacher, MFA ’86, is often asked if she’s afraid to go to work. In fact, when the first book in her current trilogy was published, Schumacher’s husband—who, like her, teaches at the University of Minnesota—joked that he was glad they had different last names.
Schumacher has been lovingly-but-brutally roasting the…
(Rare and Manuscript Collections)
Students from Chinese diplomatic families in 1940.
Cornell’s Asian American Studies Program (AASP) has launched an oral history project—and it’s seeking alumni who are willing to share their stories. The goal: to explore not just the program’s genesis in the 1980s, but the on-campus experiences of students of Asian descent from the mid-20th century onward.
Led by history professor Derek Chang and supported through crowdfunding, the project…
S.E. Cupp alongside Joy Behar as a co-host on “The View”
On most Wednesdays, S.E. Cupp ’00 is in her Connecticut home, exchanging emails with her editors at CNN. The TV host and political commentator—an outspoken voice of practical conservatism on the network since 2013—is fleshing out what to cover on her next segment of “SE Cupp Unfiltered,” which she records on Thursdays.
“That’s a fun conversation,” Cupp says on a sunny day in rural Upstate NY,…
Joyce N. Boghosian
Speaking at a dinner for the museum in 2022
When Lisa Sasaki ’97 was tapped in March 2021 to serve as interim director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, she knew she was taking on a daunting task.
The job was, as she puts it: “to build a museum that’s going to be around for as long as there’s an America.”
Of course, planning any museum from the ground up—not to mention one that will stand among the iconic…
You’ve heard the expression “it’s not rocket science”—meaning that the topic at hand is comparatively simple. But in his breakthrough 2020 book, Ozan Varol ’03—who contributed to two Mars Rover missions as an undergrad—rejects the idea that designing a voyage to the cosmos is inherently unfathomable to all but the most rarified experts.
Instead, in Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple…
How many times have you uttered the name of a Cornell building—whether you lived, ate, took classes, or studied there—without knowing anything about the person it honors? Here’s a look at some of those memorable lives. (And be sure to check out part one!)
John McGraw
McGraw was a self-made millionaire lumber mogul with a deep reverence for classical education, though he himself never…
Provided
Kreynovich (left) and Carroll on a supply run
It was a Saturday morning in Kyiv in March 2023. Just days earlier, the Russian invasion had reached its grim one-year mark. Dillon Carroll ’20 and Mark Kreynovich ’20, BS ’19, were observing a different, though directly related milestone: the one-year anniversary of their arrival in Eastern Europe, in an impromptu effort to aid Ukrainians impacted by the conflict.
“There’s not one family that…
A husband and father on a supernatural journey to find his missing family. A sane man locked in a mental institution where a buffalo-headed monster terrorizes patients. A down-and-out janitor who learns he’s destined to join a group of paranormal researchers.
They’re just a few of the protagonists Victor LaValle ’94, BA ’95, has created in his more than two decades as a writer.
Having…
At the start of the fall ’22 semester, craving a creative experience outside the classroom, Grace Elmore ’25 sat on the Slope and sketched the buildings of West Campus—playfully, a bit mindlessly, and (as she admits with a laugh) “really inaccurately.”
When Elmore shared her work on Instagram, it garnered an overwhelming positive response—along with a slew of requests for her to draw other…
