Columbia News

Apr 2, 2024 | news.columbia.edu | Joseph Patterson

For many people in the U.S., the total eclipse of April 8, 2024, will be a life-changing event. For me, it was the eclipse of March 7, 1970, on the sand at Virginia Beach with two of my fellow high school teachers, that set my life in a new direction. On that day, the real drama began when the moon was covering about 70% of the sun from view, also known as the 70% phase. I noticed that my shadow on the sand was sharp on the left, but very fuzzy on the right.

Mar 27, 2024 | news.columbia.edu | Ellen Neff

In 2015, a class of two-dimensional materials called the transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) entered the scientific limelight for their ability to produce just one particle of light at a time. Such single-photon emission was a natural, and somewhat random, ability in TMDs with structural defects—missing atoms here and there, or a wrinkle where the crystal should have been straight and even.

Mar 12, 2024 | news.columbia.edu | R.O. Kwon |V.V. Ganeshananthan

In her first memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison, the head of the nonfiction concentration in the Writing Program at School of the Arts, turns her powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life. In examining her love for her young daughter, her ruptured marriage, and the legacy of her parents’ complicated bond, Jamison explores what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.

Feb 21, 2024 | news.columbia.edu | Jonathan Friedman

On February 15, a standing-room-only crowd of students, faculty, and staff gathered in Pulitzer Hall for a panel discussion on civil dialogue. The event was co-hosted by University Life and Columbia Journalism School, as part of the Dialogue Across Difference initiative, to explore how the often binary conversations around current events inform our understanding of democracy, the elements that prevent us from coming together for civil discourse, and where we go from here.

Dec 27, 2023 | news.columbia.edu | Philip Kitcher

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill’s apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal. Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now.