News Archive

Scientists have found evidence in a chunk of bedrock drilled from nearly two miles below the summit of the Greenland ice sheet that the sheet nearly disappeared for an extended time in the last million years or so. The finding casts doubt on assumptions that Greenland has been relatively stable during the recent geological past, and implies that global warming could tip it into decline more precipitously than previously thought. Such a decline could cause rapid sea-level rise. The findings appear this week in the leading journal Nature.

The study is based on perhaps earth’s rarest geologic…

From 19th-century studio practice through the independence era of the 1950s and 1960s, African photography has best been known for modes of portraiture that crystallize subjects’ identities and social milieus. Even contemporary art photographs are often interpreted as windows into African lives, whether actual or theatricalized.

This exhibition reconsiders African contemporary photographic portraiture by presenting the work of four artists whose concerns range beyond depicting social identity: Sammy Baloji, Mohamed Camara, Saïdou Dicko, and George Osodi. Works by these four artists lend greater…

Columbia’s Lee C. Bollinger was among the university presidents, deans, professors and policy makers who spoke at a Nov. 18 White House Summit on diversity and inclusion in postsecondary education.

The all-day meeting included conversations with students from around the country, including Karisma Price (CC’17) and Kiana David (BC’17), as well as a speech by the U.S. Secretary of Education, John B. King. The event was a call to continue successful efforts to create greater diversity among the student bodies and faculty at the nation’s colleges and universities.

The federal Department…

At Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Open House on Oct. 8 the motto of the day was, “Clean hands are not learning hands!” said seismologist Marc Spiegelman. The annual event is a day of free public lectures, demonstrations, hands-on workshops for kids and a chance for members of the community of all ages to learn directly from world-renowned researchers. The eruption seen here sent ping-pong balls flying to demonstrate the hurling power of volcanoes.

Along the walls of Oceanographer Canyon, fish dart in and out of colorful anemone gardens and sea creatures send up plumes of sand and mud as they burrow. Bill Ryan, an oceanographer at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, studied these scenes through the windows of a mini research submarine in 1978 as he became one of the few people to explore the seafloor canyons that President Barack Obama (CC’83) designated a national monument in September.

Learn more.

Although Desmond Patton went to school for social work, being a social worker was never on his agenda. “I didn’t have a lot of interest in direct practice work,” he said. “I wanted to do research. 

A New Yorker staff writer who also teaches and directs the Global Migration Project at the Columbi Graduate School of Journalism, Sarah Stillman has made a name for herself in the world of investigative journalism for richly empathetic stories that expose policies and institutions affecting society’s most vulnerable.

Spiritual enlightenment can arrive in the unlikeliest of places. For Josef Sorett, it came at an open mic night in a dark nightclub.

Election Day wasn’t just about the presidency. The election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in the Senate likely means a conservative majority will dominate the U.S. Supreme Court for decades.

“He could have two or three appointments to the Court in the next four years,” said Jeffrey Lax, a professor of political science who specializes in judicial politics, the U.S. Supreme Court in particular. He notes that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (LAW’59) is 83 and Anthony Kennedy is 80. “Four years is a long time,” said Lax.

A conservative Supreme Court, working with a Republican…

Dear Alma,

Is it true that a pair of Columbia graduates were featured in a Tony-nominated Broadway play?

—Curious Dentist

Dear Curious Dentist,

Yes, sort of. In 1991, The New York Times wrote a profile of a remarkable pair of sisters, two centenarian African American “maiden ladies.” Sarah (Sadie) Delany, 103 years old, and her younger sister Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, 100, living alone and sharp as tacks, recounted their life as two of 10 children born in North Carolina to a former slave who became the first African American bishop.

After they moved to New York City during…

Like much of the cutting edge work at Columbia, Zosha Di Castri’s compositions are enriched by their multidisciplinary nature. Her approach to music will be on display when she is the focus of a composer portrait at Miller Theatre on December 1.

Di Castri, who at 31 is one of the youngest composers to be featured, describes herself as a composer, pianist and sound artist. She finds this honor, “Humbling and exciting. When writing music, your ideas stay in the abstract for so long. It is necessary to have concerts to hear your work fully realized, and find out whether it works or not.”

Alice Kessler-Harris, a scholar of women’s and labor history, has witnessed a number of firsts in her career. She came of age as a historian in the late 1960s as the field of women’s history was being created. At the time, there were virtually no women studying with her in graduate school, and she had only one woman for a professor. Even her dissertation on labor organizing had no women in it “because few historians thought about women as appropriate or interesting subjects,” she says.

That began to change dramatically within a few years. “It was enormously scintillating to be in the…

For John Reddick, Harlem isn’t just a visual feast, it’s music to his ears. The architectural historian, who leads walking tours of the Upper Manhattan neighborhood, has been researching the cultural connections between early 20th century music written by African Americans and Jews who lived in Harlem.

Reddick also is a Columbia Community Scholar, one of 18 northern Manhattan residents selected by the University to pursue research projects and develop their skills at Columbia. They audit courses, have library privileges and meet one-on-one with scholars in their fields.

The program, which…

With the presidential election just two weeks away, the latest polls suggest that Hillary Clinton will win, some saying her chances are better than 90 percent. But individual poll results vary widely and some still give Trump a chance of turning things around.

Why the discrepancies? “Polling is not an exact science,” said Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science and founding director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia. “You have to be careful.”

With colleagues, he recently studied 4,221 polls to compare poll results to the actual outcome in 608 federal,…