In the short story “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” a seventh-grade boy named Sam enrolls in a summer school class called How to Win a Nuclear War. The story traces Sam’s morbid reflections spurred by the course—“He wonders what the stars will see the day the war begins, the whole planet brightening, then going gray like a dead bulb”—as he simultaneously grapples with the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.
“It’s taking cold war theory and applying it to human relationships,” says Austin Bunn, performing & media arts. The story’s premise is based on an experience Bunn had in middle school, when he, too, took a class on nuclear war. The piece is included in Bunn’s recently released book titled The Brink (Harper Perennial, April 2015), a collection of short stories about “people experiencing what you might call transformational, apocalyptic, end-time experiences,” says Bunn.
To read more about Bunn's work on the Cornell Research site, click here.
More News from A&S
Provided
Tabs cofounders Deepak Bapat ’11 MEng ‘12, left, and Ali Hussain ’11, right.
Serge Petchenyi/Cornell University
From left, Xi Yang, PhD '10, senior lecturer of finance in the SC Johnson College of Business; Christine Ye; Christine Ye Award recipient Margaret E. Foster, doctoral candidate in communication; Cornelia Ye Award recipient Naman Agrawal, doctoral candidate in neurobiology and behavior; Cornelia Ye; and Derina Samuel, associate director of graduate student development at the Center for Teaching Innovation.
NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
Artist concept of the gas giant planet WD 1856 b orbiting a white dwarf star. The planet is 7 times larger than the Earth-sized white dwarf it orbits. WD 1856 b has methane and hazes in its atmosphere, which would give it a similar color to Saturn's moon Titan. The white dwarf formed from a star that died 5 billion years ago, and has been cooling ever since, giving it an orange colour similar to the Sun.
