Wonder and the Core

Posted on March 23, 2026 by cw2770

Snow falling in front of the Met (photo credit: Billy Hughes)

Recently I went to the Met with a friend. Having both taken Art Hum, we decided to play a game in the Medieval wing: we would prohibit ourselves from reading the explanatory signs, and instead try to deduce the very basic information (subject, time period, place of creation) about each object we saw. We were wrong almost 100% of the time, but our game was a lot of fun. Since we had taken Quechua together and co-developed an interest in Inka art, we tried this again in the Met’s new ancient American wing, where we were, again, incorrect but happy. 

Later, I was struck that the foundational clues of this game– Marian blue, use of perspective, the folds in sculptural fabric, etc.– would have gone unnoticed by me even just two years earlier. It was only because we had taken Art Hum that my friend and I could engage with the Met’s collections this way. My coursework had enhanced my leisure time. More generally, I saw how my education was playing offense against boredom and apathy; the more I learned, the more interesting the world became to me. 

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Getting Down to Business on School Break

Posted on March 16, 2026 by jjs2310

The trees I can view from my bed at home, taken while I was attempting to work on job applications. (Credit: Julia Sherman)

It’s 5:27 PM. Maybe your last class has just ended, or you’ve just turned in your last final. Your flight, train, bus, or subway is fast approaching, and you can’t wait to get back home so the rest and relaxation can finally begin. After throwing whatever you need in your trusty carry-on and sprinting to Broadway and 116th, break has finally begun. Put your headphones on, turn up your music, and you’re almost home.

For many Columbia students, we’d love for this to be the end of the anxiety. To get our five-day or five-week break from the hustle and bustle of college life in New York City and settle down at home (or wherever you spend your breaks). However, often, there’s a voice at the back of your head claiming there’s more to be done. Classes to prepare for, personal projects to work on, jobs or internships demanding applications. I’m not advocating for listening to that voice, and I often practice a zero-work break, but there are a few things to do that will quell the anxiety to have the best (and most productive, in whatever sense you want) break possible.

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Toodling in Tubingen (on Hegel’s removal from the Core and its relation to his ideas)

Posted on March 9, 2026 by jbk2191

Hegel graffiti in Tubingen (photo courtesy of the author)

It was a balmy August day in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, a sleepy (but immensely wealthy) Western European metropolis with the skyline of a much smaller city and one of the more incoherent transport networks I had encountered in Germany (which, given the state of Deutsche Bahn, was saying a lot). The town is known as the nerve center of the German automobile industry—hosting the headquarters of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, as well as their respective car museums. It is also the easiest way to get to Tubingen, an even sleepier Medieval college town nestled in between the Neckar and Ammer rivers, about an hour south of Stuttgart by bus.

That day, there was a regional train outage (Deutsche Bahn again!)—so bus it was. By the time I reached Tubingen, it was getting dark, but the charming Neckar riverfront, and the endearing and distinctive Hölderlinturm (home to its namesake, the German romantic poet Hölderlin, for the last 37 years of his life) were still teeming with tourists. After leaving my travel backpack in the local youth hostel, I made my way back to the center of town. Not for Hölderlin, but for his classmate, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 

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AI Ethics and Research

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Ishaan Barrett

Image generated by Google Deepmind. Aside from this image, none of the text or content of this article has been AI-generated or refined.

In a little over five minutes, Adam Aleksic’s Ted Talk about social media, language trends, and AI software completely changed my relationship with writing. It’s no great secret that the tools Aleksic is talking about—Sora, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others—have dramatically changed the way we approach everyday tasks, from writing simple sentences, to gathering information online. But the rise and fall of linguistic trends and the inherent ways we train programs like ChatGPT and Claude invite a lot more questions than answers. Aleksic is incisive in his critique about AI and the way these tools, often trained using social media posts and other freely available online media, falsely inflate consumer trends and language behaviors. He points to popular fads driving consumer spending and new colloquial words that have entered our vocabulary almost without our noticing. I think Aleksic’s talk offers a lot to the everyday social media and ChatGPT user; but it also means that the pervasive use of AI—from image generation to text editing—must be examined and questioned deeply. I contend that there is no better way, nor perhaps important realm, to examine the concept of AI ethics than in research. From the mundane to the complex, from text generation to data analysis, AI is finding a foothold in academic research. Yet, our ability to determine where and how to use it seems to be limited, especially when students and our academic work in the University is concerned. 

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The Science Core and the Humanities

Posted on February 23, 2026 by sc5184

Hummingbird and Passionflowers, Martin Johnson Heade, MET

When I arrived at Columbia, the Science Core was the course requirement that I most dreaded. As a prospective English major who had loathed physics in high school, the prospect of squandering three class slots on the sciences felt annoying at best and extremely frustrating at worst. To make matters worse, the other students I knew who did take Science Core–satisfying courses in my first couple years of college weren’t keen on them; the way they described it, the classes consisted of vast amounts of memorization of facts that they weren’t particularly interested in.

I let my first two years at Columbia pass without enrolling in any science classes, but when my junior year was approaching I decided that it was time to bite the bullet, especially since I would be abroad in the spring. I spent a while looking carefully at the different options, trying to find something with content that I would find at least somewhat interesting. I eventually settled on a class called “Human Origins and Evolution,” the introductory course for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology majors. I remembered high school biology as a dreary time filled with memorization of terms that had all since been forgotten (except, strangely, for the definition of mitochondria). Still, the theory of evolution seemed interesting enough, not only for the way that it explained who we were but also for the effect that it had had on religious belief.

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In Search of an Original Contribution

Posted on February 16, 2026 by cw2770

The author at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.. Here I am reading a 500-year-old Quechua grammar, and looking for something new to say about it.

When I began the senior thesis process, my seminar instructors made it clear that my project should address a “gap in the scholarship” in order to make an “original contribution.” This terrified me. I had serious doubts that I, at the undergraduate level, could find any holes or unaddressed questions in the work of the scholars I respected. Of course there were mysteries to be solved about 16th century Latin America, but it seemed incredibly unlikely that I would be the one to identify them, let alone solve them. 

I took some solace in the fact that all my fellow thesis-writers seemed to feel the same way. In talking with my friend and fellow Rose fellow Sagar Castleman, who has done research on originality in Oscar Wilde’s poems, I also came to see that this feeling is pervasive enough to be an object of study in itself– e.g. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. Genre-wise, a senior thesis is pretty far afield from Romantic poetry, but I started to think about my mandate of an “original contribution” along the same principles that were laid out by Bloom and relayed to me by Sagar. I was facing, essentially, the same predicament as these poets: what could I possibly say that hadn’t been said before?

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A Trip to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum

Posted on February 9, 2026 by jbk2191

Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (courtesy of the museum’s website)

Last spring, while studying abroad at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, I decided to pay a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum—one of the largest remaining monuments to Britain’s history of violent subjection and extraction of cultural artifacts from imperial territories. The site, named after Augustus Pitt Rivers, an English soldier, aristocrat, ethnologist, and avowed racist, is home to hundreds of thousands of masks, spears, pieces of jewelry, clothes, guns, figurines, works of metallurgy, and until recently, a collection of shrunken heads and other human remains.

Gruesome stuff. But it’s a stunning collection. So much cultural history, packed in a mind-bogglingly dense but entirely intelligible space. My hour-long visit was a fertile mixture of discomfort and reticent awe. 

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Five Tips for Pursuing Humanities Research as an Undergraduate

Posted on February 2, 2026 by sc5184

Portrait of a Young Man, Bronzino, the MET

  1. Choose a topic you’re interested in. People often talk about the importance of choosing a research topic that you’re passionate about. Passion can be helpful, but I think that curiosity is even more important. The first research project I pursued was about Oscar Wilde’s poetry, which wasn’t something that I had always loved—in fact, a key part of my project focused on why Wilde’s poems failed. But I had a research question about these poems that I was very curious about. Neither before, nor during, nor after my project did I feel any real aesthetic or emotional attachment to these poems, but my scholarly interest in them continued to increase the more I learned about them. This curiosity was the driving force of my research, and I think it can be an even stronger motivation than passion.

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Research and Higher Ed in Crisis

Posted on January 26, 2026 by cw2770

The Suzzallo Library of the University of Washington, Seattle (image courtesy of Zoshua Colah from Unsplash)

Somewhere between the libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and faculty offices on campus, something in the university has gone quiet. The buzzing of intellectuals at work and the powerhouse centers of academia tackling their pressing challenges is harder to detect, and if you’re anything like me, you probably have a reasonable guess as to why. The broadening crisis facing universities is putting the funding mechanisms for academic research under strain, threatening to halt the medical, social, and public interest work of higher education. Ever since Columbia became caught up in the middle of this crisis, the swirling questions about how we ended up here have only increased. But I struggle to understand, in many ways, how the looming issues surrounding federal funding and the leveraging of government research contracts were ignored. History has a lot of teach us about the way the government has supported the expansion of university-level research since the turn of the 20th century; the growing dependence on these funds only grew following two world wars and the rise of global, nuclear technology. I want to be quite clear in surfacing the foreseeable nature of the challenges that universities like Columbia are facing at this present moment, not only so that we might understand our circumstances in greater depth, but also so that we might do something to fix the precarity of academic research that seems to weigh on every corner of the nation today.

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“Why Bother?”: An Answer Found in Fieldwork

Posted on January 19, 2026 by cw2770

At the beach in Sisal, Yucatan, after a full day of language documentation work (credit: Sarah Bryden)

“Why do you study Maya?”

This is a familiar question for me, given that the language is not commonly taught in the United States. I have a standard answer: I study linguistics at university, I’m curious about languages that are different from English, and Yucatec Maya is a fun and fascinating case study. Usually this answer is met with nods and smiles, but on this day my interlocutor– a taxi driver in the Maya-speaking region of Yucatan– frowned.

“What I mean is,” he clarified. “Why do you study a dying language? Why bother?”

My profession of curiosity and enthusiasm suddenly felt very hollow. I had been asked variations of this question before (often in the form of inquiries about the “usefulness” of learning Maya), but never so directly. I was in Yucatan that summer as an envoy of US academia, where the importance of studying endangered languages is widely discussed; I had never faced such a point-blank question about the value of my research. A bit shaken, I said something semi-coherent about the link between language and culture, and my hope that language documentation work can prevent language loss. I left the taxi with new self-doubt. Why couldn’t I explain my motivations? If I couldn’t put my motivations into words, was I wasting my time?

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