Elevator or spiritual portal?

One Barnard dorm’s elevators are not like every other dorm’s elevators. Do they contain a dark secret, or have they just not been renovated since the fifties? Senior Staffer Betsy Ladyzhets investigates.

Imagine – it’s 11:30 pm on a Sunday. I’ve got a mound of dirty clothes taking up space beside my bed and a hundred pages of reading due at 10 am the next morning that I haven’t started yet. So, I do the only logical thing: I grab a load’s worth of laundry and head out to the elevator.

But when I haul my clothes into the elevator and start going down, I realize a problem: the elevator button for the basement isn’t lighting up when I press it. Actually, it’s flickering, like a candle during a seance.

I breathe slowly, tell myself not to panic – it must just be a glitch, the elevator is fine. And it is fine, as far as it delivers me safely to… the first floor. The elevator is staunchly refusing to let me into the basement. I press the button a few more times, jamming on it as though breaking down a door, but it doesn’t give. Pissed, I drag my laundry bag out into the lobby, glaring around in the hopes of finding somewhere to redirect my malice.

What’s going on in this elevator?

Artists from Italy, India, and more this week!

New York City is packed with amazing culture and inspiring art, but sometimes it’s difficult to break the Morningside-bubble and experience it all first-hand. “Where Art Thou” is a weekly guide to interesting and notable lectures, events, and performances for the literary/musically/theatrically-inclined on campus.

On campus:

• Monday night at Miller Theatre, Arthur Mitchell—the first African American lead dancer for the New York City Ballet and founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem—is directing a show featuring dozens of professional dancers. The show will highlight Mitchell’s commitment and contributions to the world of dance. You can read more about the event, and how to get tickets, here.
• Tuesday night, the Italian Academy is hosting the Momenta Quartet, a NYC-based string quartet that combines classical Italian music with the work of contemporary composers. The event is free, but register for your spot here!
• On Wednesday night at 7:00 pm, the Glicker-Milstein Theatre is hosting Mallika Sarabhai—one of the most successful dancers and choreographers India has ever seen. She’s the founder of Darpana Dance company, AND she has a PhD in organizational behavior. Seating is first-come, first-serve to enjoy this incredible talk and demonstration.
• This Friday is opening night for Revolt, Defiance, and Resistance in Prints!, a new exhibit of prints at the School of the Arts’ LeRoy Neiman Gallery. These prints are from a selection of diverse artists who all use printmaking as a way to challenge the status quo and resist oppression. The reception starts at 5 pm.

Off campus:

• The Studio Museum of Harlem, just a few blocks away at 124th and Clayton Powell (right by the  125th 2-3 station), is currently hosting an exhibit titled Fictions. The exhibit showcases work from dozens of African American artists all over the US, discovering what black culture looks, feels, and sounds like to them. The show features countless mediums, from photographs to sculptures to video. The museum is free with your CUID.
• If you’re one of those people in knitting club who sits in Lerner 510 right before our meetings every week, then this event may be for you: The American Folk Art Museum just opened an exhibit featuring quilts made out of British military uniforms. Each quilt brings together hundreds of small pieces of fabric into one beautiful design, representing how so many lives become interwoven in the face of war. The museum is even in the upper west side on W67th and Columbus (and admission is free).

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Even Alma is excited!

After a slew of impressively professional Facebook photographs and extensive flyer-based marketing campaigns, we made it! CCSC, ESC, and SGA election results for first-years have arrived, and the below are the winners. The PDF at the end of post contains the full vote count for CCSC/ESC. Congratulations to the new leaders of the Columbia University Class of 2021!

CCSC

2021 CCSC President & Vice President:
Prem Thakker and Skye Bork (LionRoar)

2021 CCSC Class Representatives:
Aja Johnson (‘21 SAVAGES)
Ramsay Eyre (‘21 SAVAGES)
Sarah Radway (Unaffiliated)

CCSC International Students Representative: 
Sim Mander

ESC

2021 ESC President:
Jaidev Shah (SEAS the Change)

2021 ESC Vice-President
Alina Ying (SEAS the Change)

2021 ESC Class Representatives
Nicolas Acosta (SEAS the Change)
Adheli Gonzalez (SEAS the Change)

ESC VP Finance:
Austen Paris

ESC Disability and Accessibility Issues Representative:
Adriana Echeverria

ESC International Students Representative:
Katherine Liu

SGA 

(Fun fact: First-year election turnout was 60.9%, which set a new highest record!)

SGA First-Year Class President:
Sara Morales

SGA First-Year Class Vice President:
Tina Gao

Alma, Balloons, Background, and Glass via Pixabay

Look at those! Look up there! Look at all those strawberries!

Ah, Ferris Booth Commons. For many Columbia students, Ferris carries some inexplicable air of nostalgia in its winding made-to-order hot pasta line, its inevitable hike up the stairs to find open seating, and its multiple fruit stations currently in an on-and-off relationship with bananas. But perhaps most nostalgic of all is the dessert station, containing a wide array of desserts – tiramisu, red velvet cake, chocolate-dusted brownies, a garnished mousse or two, and flavorful cookies galore – all decorated with one fruit: the humble strawberry.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining, just curious. Ferris holds a compelling selection of desserts with an even more compelling presentation, and I would even go as far to say that the desserts often prove downright artistic. But what is up with the usage of strawberries?

Ferris’ deliberate choice to decorate so many different types of desserts with one sole fruit is a bold move, and I commend them on this gesture. But the fact that the strawberry poses such an omnipresent force within the Ferris dessert community can’t help but leave me guessing, and even imagining, some potential alternatives to take down the strawberry as the #1 decoration at the dessert station.

The contenders after the jump

You fucked it up, Pulitzer.

Did you know that every seven seconds, someone drops out of Columbia? Did you also know that I just completely made up that statistic? But imagine dropping out of Columbia, then a few years later receiving a Columbia diploma in the mail like you never even left. This I didn’t make up. It’s a true story, one that happened to the one and only Leah Finnegan. 

I met Leah last year at a Young Media Weekend event in a swanky SoHo loft put on by our dear friends at NYU Local. The event was a panel discussion featuring prominent young writers in NYC who work for nontraditional media sites—places like Bwog, but a thousand times more legit. Leah currently works for The Outline as Features Editor. During the discussion, Leah casually mentioned the fact that she attended the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism back in ’09, but that she dropped out after a few semesters to accept a job at Huffington Post. But, in the spring of 2011, an odd letter showed up at her parents’ house.

It was a fucking diploma from Columbia. The administration screwed up so badly that they literally sent a diploma to someone who didn’t graduate.

Read more to find out what happened.

Mo Money, Mo Problems

Happening in the World: First an enigma, now deemed a full-scale attack. 21 diplomats at the US embassy in Cuba have contracted the same serious disease, with symptoms including hearing loss and other cognitive issues. Calling this a deliberate, targeted “attack,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plans to withdraw the majority of the embassy’s staff, with profound implications on current US-Cuba relations. (CBS)

Happening in the US: The Senate Budget Committee presented a 2018 budget plan yesterday proposing a ‘uuuuuuuge $1.5 trillion tax cut. In an analysis, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that the top 1% of Americans would receive around 80% of the tax cut benefits. (CNBC)

Happening in NYC: To combat homelessness, a pilot NYC program will fund 12 months of rent for homeless families, as long as they live outside the five boroughs. With 17 apartments available in Newark, New Jersey, the initiative brought families to Newark this week to browse the apartments. (Newsweek)

Happening on campus: DACA, Hurricane Harvey, and the ramifications of both on US immigrants comprise the topic for a discussion tonight at 6-8 pm, hosted by an alliance of several student groups. Taking place in 555 Lerner Hall, the event, “Climate of Immigration: The Aftermath of Harvey and DACA,” will feature free food, interesting law professors, and dynamic discussion!

A Yahoo Answers question for your reading pleasure:

Overseen: A sad, lost little mozzarella stick perched outside Kent Hall. If this was you, you sick fuck, come retrieve your mozzarella stick NOW.

This truly is an emergency.