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Daniel Radcliffe strode up the steps of Low Library, dressed in a tweed jacket, sweater vest and a tie. With a rucksack slung over his shoulder and horn-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, he was the very picture of a first-year Columbia College student—circa 1943.

Lillian Hellman—playwright, memoirist, accused liar, communist, muse to mystery writer Dashiell Hammett—never wanted biographies written about her. “She destroyed personal papers,” says historian Alice Kessler-Harris. “She even wrote to her friends toward the end of her life asking them to send back any letters.” Many did, and Hellman destroyed them. In writing about Hellman, Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower, looks beyond the boundaries of Hellman’s life. She presents Hellman as a fascinating and flawed woman who…

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has named Paul LeClerc, former president of the New York Public Library and a noted scholar of French literature, to be director of Columbia’s Europe Global Center in Paris, one of a network of regional centers the University has established around the world over the past three years.

Six Columbia professors—with expertise ranging from neuroscience and mathematics to journalism and visual arts—were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious and oldest honorary societies.

A study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health finds that pregnant women in New York City exposed to higher concentrations of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by age 7 compared with women with lower levels of exposure. 

Ten Columbia faculty members have won 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships in recognition of their “exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

In anticipation of the potential for experimental verification of the existence of the Higgs boson—a long-hypothesized particle thought responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass—the World Leaders Forum hosted a special program, co-sponsored by the Columbia Science Initiative, on April 18 at 4:00 p.m. in the Low Library rotunda.

Columbia University will confer six honorary degrees and recognize the alumni recipient of its University Medal for Excellence at commencement exercises on Wednesday, May 16. 

Researchers predict that without changes to eating and activity, more than one in five young people will be obese by 2020

More Than 100 Former Students Will Return to Columbia for a Conference in Honor of Professor Richard Gardner as He Preprares to Retire After Six Decades

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger and Provost John H. Coatsworth have named Sean C. Solomon, a leading geophysicist whose research has combined studies of the deep earth with missions to the moon and the solar system’s inner planets, to be director of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Dear Fellow Members of the Columbia Community: The experience of being on the Columbia campus makes clear that a diverse university community is essential to achieving academic excellence. Indeed, fostering the uninhibited exploration of competing ideas and beliefs—expressed by people of different backgrounds and perspectives—makes possible the distinct brand of scholarship, learning, research, and public service that are Columbia’s reason for being. We can be proud that we have achieved notable success in building a student body that is one of the most diverse, both culturally and…

In completing his critically acclaimed memoir, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann eschewed chronological order. The iconic 87-year-old director of the definitive Holocaust documentary, "Shoah," dictated every word, in a method that “was a process of discovering myself,” he said. “As with 'Shoah,' I didn’t make a plan before I started.”

When a psychiatrist sets out to write a diet book, he doesn’t have a slimmer waistline in mind. Drew Ramsey, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and coauthor of The Happiness Diet (Rodale, 2011), believes good health and happiness are achieved when the brain is consistently fed all the nutrients it needs for optimal cognitive and emotional functioning.

People often say that a book changed their lives—for some it might be "To Kill a Mockingbird," for others it’s Plato's "The Republic." For Dimitris Anastassiou, it was a biology textbook.