#columbia core classes

[sahara-solaris-solace]

Hydra FC Club General HeadCanons

An accurate definition of wild cards.

They are not malicious evil but are not merciful either.

Many players are from Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Columbia and Italy.

The club is supposed to originate from Australia but the shareholders and Coach Del Aqua originated from France so that's where the Floating Stadium takes place.

Always win the fastest players awards of the Super League, as well as greatest stamina awards every year.

The stadium is actually an underwater research facility in order to look after the ocean life, observe the nature and acted as mercenary ( Hydra Players ) to stop illegal poachers.

Del Aqua is actually a lead researcher who used to work as a Professor as he earned a Doctorate in Sea Life.

The players stipulation aside from knowing football, is good in swimming, ocean activities and sea lover.

Their diet and personal hygiene are two core rules by Coach Del Aqua and the players took those rules to their heart due to his strictness. The punishment is severe.

Liquido is the current player, such as Ninja from Cosmos FC that made his fame in Season 1 as during that time, Skipper is the star player for that season. Liquido worked hard and managed to garner his fame around Season 2.

All are laid back and surfer guys during off days.

They each have cabins like in Snowpiercer TV series ( Second Class Cabin ) in one corridor far away from the match and the visitors team so they won't be violated in privacy.

The crew and players have weekly meeting just for team building.

In the comics, One Super League Under the Sea, the players have some girls they hooked up for fun while watching TV in the lounge but in tv series, Coach Del Aqua forbid them to bring strangers in the living lounge as to prevent any robbery or intrusion so any hook ups or one night stands have to be done outside the stadium.

Most of them are single and childfree ( Thankfully 2000's era the topic of childfree being tackle and to prevent any unwanted neglected children that will turn to monsters ). I see possibly Skipper and White Ripples being taken as others prefer single.

They are all reluctant about Liquido leaving North stranded in the ocean in Season 3 episode so when North made it out alive, they decided Liquido's intention is too malicious so they no longer affiliated with Liquido's sly gesture, hence why Liquido being scolded without anyone in his side in Season 5.

They taunt rival teams but purely for football rivalry. They draw line as they have heart and to avoid real conflict.

At night, they like to gather outside for stargazing with cokes and barbecue.

Since Liquido is the newest in the group, most of them are wary of his hyperactive vibe but soon became accustomed with his.

Most of them knew Liquido has a crush on North, not that he will admit it.

Coach Del Aqua and Ursula are basically in charge with Ursula acted as a discreet Assistant Coach/ Manager, as well as the brain cells of the club.

[daresplaining]

I'm going to need to know your FULL opinion on the erosion of Elektra Natchios in The Red Fist Saga ASAP!

OOF. Okay, here goes...

Elektra's role in the Red Fist Saga directly follows the Woman Without Fear mini-series, so I feel like I should start there, especially since I haven't really talked about it yet on this blog. Woman Without Fear was an Elektra solo comic that came out just as Devil's Reign was ending and the creative team was gearing up for the Red Fist Saga. The mini-series's purpose was to introduce big, shocking changes to Elektra's origin story. These changes didn't end up having much to do at all with the Red Fist Saga, or with anything else really, but they did functionally strip her of her agency and autonomy and made her motivations instead revolve around Matt. Now, Elektra's origin story has changed before. Frank Miller himself gave us three versions: the original, introduced in Daredevil volume 1 #168 and #190, a slight variation in Elektra: Assassin (he changed the timeline a bit and modified the character of Elektra's father), and then an entirely new, in my opinion much less interesting version in Man Without Fear-- which was not intended to be part of the 616 continuity, though that didn't stop later writers from drawing from it, including Zdarsky, who seems to have used it as a core text to inform his characterization of Elektra in general.

I know you know Elektra's original origin story, but I'll provide the general gist for anyone who might be unfamiliar: Elektra Nachios was the daughter of a rich Greek diplomat and his wife. Her mother was gunned down by assassins while pregnant, but Elektra survived. Her father, now paranoid and fearful, put Elektra in martial arts classes from a young age, while also keeping her sheltered to protect her from harm. She ended up attending college in the US, where she met Matt Murdock, another sheltered kid with a beloved but overprotective father. They fell in love, but the magic was destroyed when Elektra and her father were taken hostage by terrorists. Matt tried to be a hero, and Elektra's father ended up getting killed. Shattered by grief, Elektra left school and traveled across the world to train with Stick, who had trained her childhood martial arts teacher before casting him out (in Elektra: Assassin, the timeline is slightly different; Elektra trained with Stick before attending Columbia, though the end result is the same). Stick saw Elektra's skill, but judged that she was too emotionally compromised to complete the training and kicked her out. Elektra devised a desperate plan to prove herself to Stick: infiltrating the Hand and taking them down from the inside. She failed tragically. Turned cynical by grief and hardship, she used the skills she had picked up from all of her training as weapons to protect herself from a harsh and unforgiving world. She carved herself a life from the tragedies she had endured. She became an assassin.

Note that I mentioned Matt's name a grand total of two times in that synopsis. It's not to say that Matt isn't important to Elektra, of course he is, but he isn't that important to her origin story. The star of this beautiful tragedy is Elektra, as she should be.

Woman Without Fear introduces something new-- at least, new to the comics (more on that in a moment). It takes the Elektra: Assassin timeline and suggests that she trained with Stick when she was still a child. (It also brings in things from the Man Without Fear Elektra origin, but I don't think I'm going to get into that here because that is a whole other rant and this post is long and tangent-y enough already). It then suggests that when Stick rejected her, she still ended up with the Hand-- but not of her own will, with the intention of destroying them. No! She was successfully recruited. And once the Hand had her in their clutches, they sent her out to go after another target: Matt Murdock. In this shiny new backstory, Elektra and Matt run into each other at college not as two kindred spirits, but because Elektra was ordered to hang out with him in order to bag him for the Hand...before, oh no!, accidentally falling in love with him. To add extra insult to this character assassination, we're told in the main series that even her behavior during her father's hostage situation was intended as a test for Matt.

What this change indicates to me is a fundamental lack of understanding of Elektra's character; or worse, a lack of respect for her complexity, or a conviction that she operates at her best as a tool to further Matt's narrative.

What is possibly most baffling to me about all of this is that this change had pretty much no bearing on the Red Fist Saga. Why was it made? What was the point? The term "MCU-ification", referring to changes being made in Marvel's comics that seem aimed at aligning them more closely with the MCU, gets thrown around a lot-- possibly too much-- but this really does seem like a case where there's no other clear explanation for the change other than to shift 616 Elektra's backstory closer to that of her live action counterpart. (In the Netflix show, Elektra recruited Matt for Stick; something I, as a huge Stick and Elektra fan, actually thought was a cool What If?/alternate universe because it presented an opportunity to explore a different take on their relationship). The new backstory is mentioned a few times in the main Daredevil series, but otherwise it seems irrelevant to the plot. And that's because Elektra herself is kind of irrelevant to the plot. She seems to have three purposes in this story: 1. To serve alongside Stick as an exposition machine and provide details about the Hand/Fist/Pinky Toe/etc.; 2. To be someone Matt loves and thinks about in moments of danger and conflict (despite the fact that they have very few moments of actual emotional connection in this story, despite getting married!), and 3. As a warm body onto which Matt can project his perpetual internal musings on good and evil ("Elektra was Bad, but she is Good now. She, like all people who have done bad things, is still worthy of God's love and is capable of rehabilitation, and look! Her decision to take on the Daredevil identity is proof that she is now Good! She has become a worthy soldier of God." Man, I wish I was exaggerating.)

Elektra's appearances in Daredevil comics have always centered around Matt to some degree, simply because it is his comic. There's miles of difference between reading a DD comic with Elektra cameos and reading an Elektra solo series. But that doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have comics like the Blackman/Del Mundo run, or the Dark Reign solo tie-in, that delve so deeply into Elektra's rich psyche, that truly do look at her worldview in a way that is complex and morally difficult and so, so compelling, and then to have comics like this where she barely even feels present because so little effort has been made to do anything other than slap some vague morality lessons onto her and make sure she and Matt sleep together every other issue.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

the excerpt of That Fucking Article this person is responding to is this:

here’s the beginning of the article on the first-year class that dames teaches:

in other words, it’s a core requirement taken by all columbia students, the vast majority of whom are not, in fact, literature majors. but please keep flexing about how smart you are while committing basic factual errors :)

[usaigi]

How @yellowocaballero and I Fixed Daredevil by Headcannoning Him as Mexican

When Daredevil first appeared in 1964, he was a second-generation Irish-American from Hell’s Kitchen, a working-class Irish-immigrant neighborhood. In a time where Irish people weren’t viewed as “white” or “real Americas.” They were a part of the oppressed working class, the bottom of the food chain, who had nothing but their religion, the vehicle of their culture from the old world, to keep them together.

Note: Today, the argument that “Irish people aren’t really white” has been co-opted by white supremacists and has often been used in bad faith against POC. I want it to be clear that what is considered “white” is and has always been a political term with no backing in science. Discrimination against the Irish back in the day was tied to anti-Catholic sentiment in predominately Protestant states, such as England, Scotland, and the United States. Naturally, Anti-Catholic discrimination overlaps with nativist, xenophobic, ethnocentric and/or racist sentiments (ie Anti-Italian, Anti-Polish, Hispanicphonia).

Jack Murdock was a poor boxer with no education or prospects who had to exploit his body to provide for Matt. And recognized that not a way to live and thrive, so he pushed Matt into academics for social mobility. Sound familiar?

At its core, the story of Matt Murdock is an immigrant story. Matt has the immigrant mentality;  immigrants-get-the-job-done type of thing. Gotta hustle and became a lawyer because that’s how he moves up the social and class ladder. And when he does “make it” he chooses to stay and help his neighborhood because he has a cultural connection to it. 

This worked in 1964, I don’t know how much it works now.  

Hell Kitchen isn’t a rough neighborhood primarily occupied by working-class immigrants, it’s another gentrified hipster hellhole. Irish people and people of Irish ancestry in the United States no long face systemic discrimination. 

Therefore, modern-day recontextualizing is to make Matt Mexican. 

Technically, Matt can also be from any other Latin American country or Filipino but I lean towards Mexican since a) this is my post go make your own and b) we get the most discrimination from the mainstream media. Yes, a lot of it is because racists use “Mexican” as a catch-all term for anyone from Latin America but still. Trump made his presidential platform by calling Mexicans illegal rapists and druggies. 

If Matt was actually the son of Jack Murdock*, an undocumented brown immigrant living in a working-class immigrant/POC neighborhood, it gives him the underdog immigrant arc the character is missing in modern-day adaptations. Matt's core is still the same Matt we know and love, he’s still the son of a boxer, whose dad’s pushed him into succeeding academically, who lost his dad to gang violence, and who is extremely Catholic. Someone who wants to fit into middle-class educated (white) society and feels like he has to suppress the "devil" inside until one day he can’t. He's seeing discrimination and poverty and crime and gentrification tear his neighborhood apart and the police turn their back on it since it's predominantly POC. The law has failed them, he's not going to fail them too. 

Meg made the fantastic point that Matt should still be white-passing (and ginger) so he could exist somewhere in between worlds.  And Matt takes advantage of that, as well as his Columbia Law degree to help his community. Matt not using his conditional whiteness and the fancy degree to “escape” his community and instead help it.

[justforbooks]

Alfa Anderson

American singer best known as a vocalist with the 1970s disco group Chic whose hits included Le Freak

Among the disco goddesses – the Donnas, Glorias, Evelyns, Gwens, Candis and Anitas – who serenaded the dancers of the hedonistic 1970s in such celebrated joints as New York’s Studio 54 and London’s Heaven, it seems likely that only Alfa Anderson’s destiny included leaving show business to resume her studies and eventually become a high school principal.

Anderson, who has died aged 78, had been one of the featured singers with Chic, the high-fashion disco ensemble whose chart-topping hits included Le Freak. Emerging from the ranks of backing singers in the Manhattan recording studios, she had been spotted by Luther Vandross, then a star-to-be, who introduced her in 1977 to the guitarist Nile Rodgers and the bassist Bernard Edwards, Chic’s ambitious young founders and songwriters.

The duo’s ambition was to create an upscale dance music blending funky dancefloor rhythms with the sophisticated style of an English band they much admired, Bryan Ferry’s Roxy Music. By comparison with their disco rivals, Chic were cool and restrained, their musicianship impeccable, their female singers conveying a matching sense of class.

On the sleeve of C’est Chic (1978), their second album, designed to look like the cover of a fashion magazine, it was Anderson who reclined in a white silk blouse and old-gold skirt against an expensive sofa in the garden room of a country house, while the other core members of the group struck suitably soigné poses. The message was unmissable: a dream of upward mobility which their audience was invited to share.

On another of their hits, I Want Your Love (like Le Freak, included in C’est Chic), Anderson took the solo lead, her voice finding a sinuous path between Edwards’s pulsing bass, Tony Thompson’s implacable drums, Rodgers’s flickering rhythm guitar, the cushion of strings, the syncopated trumpet figures and – in a typically imaginative touch – tubular bells prominently doubling the melody on the chorus.

The eldest of four children, Alfa Anderson was born in Augusta, Georgia, and named after the first letter of the Greek alphabet, its spelling varied to match the Christian name of her father, Alfonso Anderson, an employee of the US Postal Service. Her mother, Essie, was a social worker and Girl Scout troop leader.

Interested in music from a very early age, Alfa grew up singing in church and with the Girl Scouts, and learned the saxophone, flute and piccolo at Lucy C Laney high school. A degree in English at Paine College in Augusta was followed by a move to New York, where she settled in Harlem while studying for a master’s degree at the Teachers College at Columbia University and singing in the college choir.

She received her first significant public exposure through a role in Big Man, a play with music by the jazz saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and based on the legend of the Black railroad worker John Henry. Attending its sole performance at Carnegie Hall in 1976, her churchgoing mother was shocked to discover her daughter singing the part of a “whore” called Maggie.

Her next professional appearance was at Lincoln Center, singing a solo piece called Children of the Fire, written by the trumpeter Hannibal Marvin Peterson as a protest against US involvement in the Vietnam war.

She also appeared on the soundtrack album of the hit musical The Wiz, produced by Quincy Jones.

In the daytime she was teaching at Hunter College, the public university on Park Avenue, New York, and music was still a part-time occupation when she met the founders of Chic. Arriving early at the studio to sing background parts on their first album, she was discovered marking her students’ papers while waiting for the session to start, much to the other musicians’ amusement.

When the lead singer, Norma Jean Wright, left in 1978 to pursue a solo career, Anderson was invited to take her place. Giving her notice to Hunter College, she shared the lead role first with Diva Gray on Le Freak, which became a Studio 54 anthem, and then on the road and in the studio with Luci Martin.

Most memorably, her voice was also featured on At Last I Am Free, a spellbinding ballad tucked away on C’est Chic. It caught the ear of the English rock musician Robert Wyatt, who released his characteristically plaintive version as a single in 1980.

After Chic disbanded in 1983, Anderson toured with Vandross, whose solo career had taken off. Her session work included a contribution to Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love, a hit single also featuring Rodgers on guitar, its success boosted by its appearance in the 1986 film 9½ Weeks.

While with Vandross she met his bass guitarist, Eluriel “Tinker” (sometimes “Tinkr”) Barfield, who became her husband. Leaving the road and the studios in 1987, she went back to college, taking a second master’s degree, in educational leadership, at Bank Street College of Education, before joining the El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, first as a teacher and then as principal.

Although Chic later re-formed with other singers, there were occasional musical reunions with Norma Jean Wright and Luci Martin.

She and her husband also formed a group called Voices of Shalom, which released two albums of spiritual songs, Messages (1999) and Daily Bread (2005). Returning to secular music, in 2013 she released a single, Former First Lady of Chic, and in 2017 Barfield produced her solo album, Music from My Heart, featuring a song titled Perfectly Chic, which precisely recreated the sound of that most exquisite of disco ensembles.

She is survived by her husband and two stepsons.

🔔 Alfa Karlys Anderson, singer, born 7 September 1946; died 17 December 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[duncebento]

yes the bureaucratic institutions that make up the functional bodies of present-day colleges need upturning. but i'm seeing takes from ppl who are acting like education itself has been rendered valueless 😭 the truth is that even under present conditions, the experience u have inside a classroom is probably not in line with or sometimes even AT ODDS with the core of the institution of a place of learning. there is a reason much of the staff is walking out too right now. remember that it is entirely possible for a professor to teach fanon, for example, and for the class to read it voraciously and and for some of them to even internalize it, and then for the administrators and donors, who have no impetus to read fanon in fact, to be status-quo-enforcing fashy assholes. i get that columbia especially is the most expensive college in the country and i'm definitely speaking from a privileged position but that doesn't change the value of the knowledge i feel. but i've seen a few people come away from this with plain anti-intellectualism and that's super silly

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

To put it another way: Columbia cannot or will not pledge to make all open areas of the campus safe for Jewish students. Columbia cannot or will not take measures necessary to ensure that Jewish students will have access to the same educational opportunities that their non-Jewish classmates will have. Columbia cannot or will not even pretend to enforce its own rules evenly.

Look, I don’t blame the student or students who settled. But it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that Columbia has settled a civil-rights lawsuit by declaring its campus separate-but-equal. (And the “equal” part is pretty clearly still up in the air.)

Jewish students are already able to sneak around campus if they so choose. The entire point is that the school should be required to enact (or enforce) policies that make that unnecessary. Plus, students followed and harassed late at night on their way back to their dorms are still able to get into their building. What is a bureaucrat with a key and a beeper going to accomplish here?

Columbia is notorious for its professors—you know, the ones who hold the educational and thus professional fate of the students in their hands—openly targeting Jews. What’s the fix here? Next time Joseph Massad says that the rapes and murders of Oct. 7 were a “major achievement,” a student should just call the safety liaison to escort them from the building?

You begin to see here just how these safety liaisons can quickly become the Jew-baiters’ enforcers. A Columbia professor said Israelis are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus; if a safety liaison shows up to help Israelis use the back door, whose side does it look like he’s on?

Jewish students feel stigmatized, so Columbia has generously agreed to stigmatize them further.

But that’s OK, because the school’s new separate-but-equal doctrine says those students can just leave campus and watch their classes on Zoom.

Instead of “fostering dialogue” perhaps Columbia can foster some pink slips? The administration has a job to do; this lawsuit settlement acknowledges that that job isn’t being done. The answer isn’t to hire more administrators.

In fact, expectations—of the faculty and of the students—are at the core of the problem here. The entitlement one encounters at Columbia is far from universal.

[columbiauniversity-schoolboard]

‎

With the end of the semester approaching fast, Columbia wants to settle out a guide for this year's summer if any students might be interested.

L͟e͟a͟r͟n͟ m͟o͟r͟e͟

NYC Residential Summer

Whether you are enrolled and pursuing a degree at Columbia College or the School of Engineering, are a graduating senior completing your degree this academic year, or are simply planning to attend one of University's select summer programs, Housing offers options for living on campus during the summer semester.

Online Summer

Join our programs from anywhere in the world and experience interactive classes with high-achieving peers and dedicated instructors, engaging co-curricular activities, and resources like our online library. Monday through Friday, students will join their virtual classrooms to refine their academic skills through a variety of activities—class discussions, debates, simulations, individual and group projects, Student Life workshops, and more.

College Edge: Summer

In the College Edge program, students in grades 11–12 truly get the college experience by earning college credit as they learn alongside Columbia’s undergrad students on our Morningside campus. Students will also receive academic advisement and professional development opportunities.

Columbia’s Summer Course

Columbia students may choose to enroll in summer courses to catch up or get ahead in their academic programs, fulfill prerequisites such as Core requirements, or explore new fields. Whether you’re interested in exploring a budding passion or fulfilling degree requirements, consult with your advisor for approvals and to ensure that you meet the eligibility requirements to register or enroll in Columbia Summer courses.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ☟ SESSION DATES ☟

FULL SUMMER TERM (X)

Dates

May 20–August 9

SESSION A

Dates

May 20–June 28

SESSION B

Dates

July 1–August 9

SESSION G

Dates

May 20–June 14

SESSION J

Dates

June 17–July 12

SESSION H

Dates

June 3–June 28

SESSION R

Dates

July 1–July 26

Registration Dates ☏

Late registration, which is the same for all students, takes place on the second, third, fourth, and fifth days of each session. For some courses, permission from the instructor may be required. A $50.00 fee will be charged during the late registration period. A $100.00 fee will be charged after the late registration period.

Registration for the summer semester will be accepted below with a students name and their term or a teacher and their class.

OOC NOTE: Just like how Student Mods may decide they want to continue through the summer, Teacher Mods should be able too. So, please, comment your respective characters below if they will be able to be present through the summer unless they are absent.

[wormtoxin]

to be clear, latin american history IS an important case study in the way that the United States exercises soft power to extract cheap labor abroad and exploitable undocumented workers domestically and minerals and crops and drugs and fruit and flowers for the imperial core.

If you do not have an awareness of Latin American political economy you will say dumb shit online and I will not respect you.

But it is ALSO a land full of real living human beings who are your friends and family and housekeepers and tios and tias and councilmembers and post officers and streamers and voice actors and bloggers and mutuals. The lack of consciousness and action from US citizens of the imperial core is directly responsible for the oppression and despair of billions of my people.

If you don’t educate yourself and take responsibility for the chiquita bananas in your supermarket, you cannot be an ally, an antiracist, or a revolutionary. Your material analysis must include Latin America, The Middle East, India, China, The Ivory Coast, South Africa, Australia, British Columbia, Eastern Europe, and the South Seas. Your politics must be global, and your class consciousness united with all your peers and friends the world over.

So much ink and blood spilled and breath wasted on a tiny little corner of the world, this “imperial core”, while we all glut ourselves on the fat of continents and peoples and histories. Well-read erudite critics who only ever hear english. Whose only heroes are Americans and Englishmen. Whose conception of revolution never goes beyond France, never steps outside the bounds of republican democracy.

[hoursofreading]

What should first-year students read? We would suggest not only Solzhenitsyn but also François Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, Vasily Grossman, and Czesław Miłosz. Rather than imbibe a just-so story about colonialism and anti-colonialism, freshmen need to understand the true nature of totalitarian empires. Today’s students tend to value social influence more than human excellence. Worse, they pay more heed to antiheroes—people who tear down civilization—than heroes: those who protect, repair, and rebuild it. So, at the outset of their studies, we think undergraduates should encounter not just thinkers and writers but also founders, doers, leaders, and pioneers such as Abraham and Socrates, da Vinci and Mozart, Lincoln and Churchill. They should study the works of great men, to use another unfashionable phrase, but also of great women: Sojourner Truth and Malala Yousafzai, Ada Lovelace and Lise Meitner. It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead. No matter what they are obliged by their professors to read, most intelligent 18-year-olds will wrestle with what the creators of the Columbia Core called “the insistent problems of the present.” But a true educational foundation draws on ancient as well as modern wisdom, enabling students to understand the difference between the timeless and the ephemeral. Any edifice that rests on the shifting sands of contemporary academic fashion is bound sooner or later to fall. The university of the future will, paradoxically, need to offer its students an education with deeper historical roots.

What the Freshman Class Needs to Read

[oreganosbaby]

I'm maybe being a bit reductive here and also, not saying anything new at all but, it's obvious that within the imperial core, you can't protest war/military occupation (or rather, a war/military occupation that the us/allies are heavily invested in) without being met with violence from the state because this sort of violence is necessary to the existence of empire. like, this (re: violence toward Columbia University anti-zionist protesters) has happened many times before (Multiple Vietnam war student protests come to mind, many of which had heavy involvement with black liberation activists due to similar anti-colonial goals) and after a certain point, they don't really care whether these people are Nice Middle Class kids who go to an Ivy League School because the Admin of said school will work against their students and even facaulty should they "step out of line." Ultimately, universities, esp ones as prestigious and uh, Well Funded like Columbia, are made to work within and for this violent system (liberal capitalism, imperialism, etc.).

[whatevergreen]

Columbia University Uprising, NYC, 1968

"The Columbia University Struggle of 1968, 50 years ago, was in fact a struggle against Columbia University — as a ruling class slumlord, a racist gentrifier against the people of Harlem and Morningside Heights, and a genocidal war criminal carrying out weapons research against the People of Vietnam. It was one of the great miracles of the times that students who had been recruited to support The System turned against it and sided with the Black community and the people of Vietnam.

The struggle against Columbia was carried out by The Movement — a Black United Front in Harlem including Harlem Tenants Association, Morningsiders United and Harlem CORE, the Students’ Afro-American Society and Black Students of Hamilton Hall, Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, and national groups like Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SDS, with support from the national civil rights and anti-war movements.

The Movement demanded that the University stop construction of a gentrifying gymnasium in Morningside Park, opposed by the residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights, who called it Gym Crow, and that it also withdraw all institutional ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) — a Department of Defense think-tank that developed weapons to use against national liberation and communist insurgencies including the people of Vietnam. The Columbia University administration, after a two-month struggle, acceded to the core demands of the struggle — an unequivocal victory for The Movement at the time."

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3790-the-historic-1968-struggle-against-columbia-university

[mariacallous]

NEAR SOCORRO, New Mexico—There isn’t much left on the oppressive white sands of the New Mexico desert to mark that the nuclear age began here. On a wind-swept patch of land so barren that Spanish conquistadors, hailing from the sunbaked hellscape of Extremadura, once called the trek “the journey of death,” a lava-rock obelisk is the only thing marking the nearly 25-kiloton Trinity explosion that ignited the nuclear age.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered in an interview for a television documentary in 1965. The blinding flash of the detonation—which was only revealed to the public later—was visible for almost 200 miles. The wind blew much of the nuclear fallout toward sparsely inhabited communities in the New Mexico desert. The only reason the Trinity test did not irradiate 100,000 people was because of a shift in the wind: One wrong gust, and radioactive dust would have blanketed Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

The United States wasn’t just building a bomb. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 1 percent of the American civilian workforce, toiling everywhere from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to the Pacific Northwest to the sandy wastes of New Mexico. Most had no idea what they were helping to build.

“This is not a little tiny project. This is not even a weapons project in the traditional sense,” said Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology and an expert on nuclear secrecy. “This is building an entirely new industry from scratch in two and a half years.”

Nearly eight decades later, that industry is falling into disrepair. Over half of America’s nuclear infrastructure is more than four decades old, and a quarter of it dates back to the Manhattan Project itself, according to the Pentagon. The United States lost its monopoly on the bomb before the end of 1940s, and nuclear weapons have gotten exponentially more destructive. Russia claims just two “Satan II” intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) can destroy the entire east coast of the United States; the U.S.-made Ohio-class submarine, which the U.S. Navy will be phasing out as Columbia-class hulls slip their ways, was originally designed to destroy multiple Soviet cities at once.

The Biden administration insists it is not in an arms race with Russia and China. But the U.S. administration’s more than $1 trillion modernization of the nuclear triad that will see the United States field new fleets of nuclear-capable stealth bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarines has split American politics into warring camps. There are progressives who believe the Pentagon is tempting nuclear Armageddon and should dismantle the triad entirely. There are also hawks who believe the United States is too fearful of Russian nuclear saber-rattling.

“Disarmament is not something that’s feasible in the short term,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. “In fact, we might be, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, looking at a world where nuclear weapons begin to increase in great numbers around the world.”

For Oppenheimer and the core team of 250 staff at the site, everything was riding on the Trinity test. They would only have one chance to make sure that history’s deadliest weapon actually worked as advertised.

In the seconds after the “Gadget” bomb dropped from the top of a 100-foot tower to the ground in the New Mexico desert, two circling B-29 Superfortress bombers saw the Sacramento Mountains illuminated with a radiance brighter than daylight. The roar of the shock was felt 100 miles away and the sight of the blast carried even farther; the fireball from the explosion reached seven miles high. And thousands of pieces of trinitite, a mix of quartz rock and feldspar melted into an emerald green glass by the heat of the blast, were scattered along what was then the White Sands Proving Grounds.

Not only were Oppenheimer and his team convinced that the bomb, packed with 13 pounds of plutonium, had worked, but they were also convinced no one was in range of the fallout. The only nearby town was Socorro (an oft-used Spanish word for “help”), 35 miles away.

Tina Cordova is a sixth-generation New Mexican, hailing from a village of nearly 3,000 people an hour’s drive downwind from the Trinity site. It’s a community that has been fighting for decades to get recognition from the United States government about the Trinity test and compensation for millions of dollars—perhaps billions—in medical bills as locals have battled radiation-induced cancers for generations, stemming from the first nuclear test in New Mexico and dozens more above-ground tests in Nevada.

The bomb went off in the middle of a rural community, where many people were getting their water from ditches and cisterns, their meat and dairy from cattle and chicken coops outside. Thousands of people lived within a 50-mile radius of the blast site.

Cordova’s grandmother, who was only a little girl at the time of the Trinity test, was shocked out of bed. Her mother gathered her family up and prayed the rosary. For days, wet bed sheets that had been placed outside to bring a cool breeze inside were covered in layers of ash. People would rinse them off, and then rinse them off again. The heat of the explosion was so intense it burned the hide off of cows in nearby fields, Cordova said.

“It’s absolutely inhumane what we go through here,” said Cordova, who is a radioactive cancer survivor, a disease that has passed through generations of her family. “Dealing with the idea that we were collateral damage to our government’s pursuit of nuclear superiority.”

Cordova and the thousands of New Mexicans seeking restitution for radioactive illnesses and the 1,030 nuclear tests conducted by the United States between 1945 and 1992 form one of the major tentpoles in the American nuclear debate. It has pitted grassroots campaigners, Catholic priests, and dovish politicians who believe the U.S. nuclear arsenal exceeds any reasonable degree of security for a country that can’t or won’t tackle poverty or gun violence against U.S. officials and lawmakers who see nuclear weapons as a deterrent against Russia and China. But big bombs also bring big dollars—into their districts.

The nuclear enterprise is now intermingled in U.S. communities, growing from the skeletal structure of the Manhattan Project. Today, in South Carolina, just miles from the Georgia border, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has been pushing for successive U.S. administrations to restart the facility at the Savannah River Site—a onetime prolific producer of weapons-grade plutonium—to convert the existing facility into a production center for commercial nuclear fuel. In Oak Ridge, just 20 miles outside of Knoxville, where Gen. Leslie Groves first ordered a facility built to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb, a large national laboratory still produces uranium-235, one of the two radioactive isotopes produced by the Manhattan Project. And a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which Oppenheimer once led, is one of the plushest gigs available in New Mexico, one of America’s poorest states.

The Manhattan Project officially ended after the end of World War II, but it helped establish the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which heralded an era of mass weapons production during the Cold War. The number of U.S. warheads peaked in the 1960s, before the U.S. gradually reduced its stockpile over the following two decades owing to new arms control deals, even as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a new question emerged: how to rethink the use and production of nuclear weapons. And the answer to that was nuclear modernization.

“This [nuclear modernization] has been a multi-decade, multi-president process, and in some ways, remarkably bipartisan,” Wellerstein said. “It’s a hugely expensive, multitrillion-dollar program that’s been sort of a juggernaut moving along for the last few decades.”

Across three U.S. Air Force bases in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, the United States has 400 nuclear-tipped Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles on around-the-clock alert (American ICBMs have been on that alert status nonstop for 63 years.). Those Ohio-class submarines that can destroy the capital of any country in the United Nations? They flank the Pacific and Atlantic coasts in Washington and Georgia, their nearly 600-foot, four-deck hulls constructed in Rhode Island and assembled in Groton, Connecticut. The 1950s-era B-52, which is now being flown by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of its first pilots, will serve until the 2050s.

On paper, that looks like an insurmountable edge. The United States and Russia, combined, have 89 percent of the world’s inventory of nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists, though the American stockpile has been drifting slowly downward as it retires about one-third of its outdated arsenal.

China could be catching up. The Pentagon believes that Beijing assembled 400 warheads in just a fraction of the time that it took the United States to build a nuclear arsenal of that size, and if it continues at the same pace for the next dozen years, China could have 1,500 nuclear warheads ready to launch.

“They still refer to China as ‘Red China.’ They still refer to them as godless communists and still think that this is like a Cold War battle between good capitalism and bad communism,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a senior advisor at Global Zero and a former National Security Council advisor during the Obama administration. “The mindset inside the U.S. nuclear security community is very much of the Cold War mentality.”

The Biden administration was nervous. For more than a year, the Ukrainian military had held out against a superior, nuclear-armed Russian foe in the face of overwhelming odds. But last month, with Russia rattling its nuclear sabers so hard the rust almost came off, U.S. officials wanted to calm the tensions.

As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan approached the stage at one of Washington’s largest disarmament conferences in June, the U.S. administration faced a changed world even from the year before. Russian President Vladimir Putin had suspended participation in the New START accord. Ukraine was warning that Russia had designs to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest such facility, on Russian-occupied soil in Ukraine. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to Armageddon it had ever been.

But the U.S. administration insisted it was not in an arms race.

“[T]he United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” Sullivan told the crowd. “We’ve learned that lesson.” The message from the Biden administration was clear: Both Russia and China had an open invite to rejoin disarmament talks.

It’s far from an anti-nuclear stance, given that the Biden administration has paired the hope for disarmament talks with a buildup of more modern weapons. But they see it in another light: reducing risk of a destructive war. “One of the reasons we use the phrase ‘risk reduction’ is because the nuclear states don’t want to eliminate risk,” said Panda, the Carnegie expert. “If you eliminate the risk that nuclear weapons could be used, you don’t have nuclear deterrence.”

Even if the Biden administration doesn’t want an arms race, it may already have one on its hands. The United States delayed tests of the upgraded Minuteman ICBM before finally conducting them last year, prompting jeers from former U.S. officials and Republican members of Congress, who think that the administration has been too cautious about the threat of Russian nuclear escalation.

“The risk of escalation is not zero, but yet it’s not high,” said Marshall Billingslea, the former top U.S. nuclear arms negotiator during the Trump administration and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “It increases the more weakness that you telegraph to the Russians.”

For others, the game of nuclear brinkmanship is too much of a gamble. Take it from Sharon Weiner, an American University professor who for the past two years ran the Nuclear Biscuit, a virtual reality experiment that allowed participants to don a headset putting them in the situation room as the president of the United States amid a response to a nuclear threat. Realistically, the president would have 15 minutes or less to make a choice—and depending on how quickly they get to you, that clock might tick a whole lot faster. “The posture of U.S. ICBMs means any decision has to be made quickly, if you’re going to use them,” Weiner said.

Even though people who tried out the simulation were surrounded by a table of virtual advisors on call, Weiner found that her subjects often chose, and quickly, to use nuclear weapons. “It’s all about perception and lack of trust,” she added. “We have too much investment in nuclear weapons as a solution to problems as opposed to a creator of problems.”

When a nuclear weapon goes off, the radioactive core heats up to thousands—and then millions—of degrees Celsius. While the weapon is cooking into superheated plasma from the heat of the explosion, the energy from the reaction gives off soft X-rays, shocking particles of air in front of them with so much energy that they light on fire. In scientific terms, that is the beginning of a nuclear fireball.

After that, the impacts of a nuclear explosion are almost unpredictable, even with a room full of supercomputers crunching away data from more than 2,000 nuclear tests that have been conducted by the United States and other major powers since 1945. At the dawn of the nuclear age, the predictions were so divergent about the fallout from atmospheric tests that the 1954 Castle Bravo explosion, on Bikini Atoll, blanketed 7,000 miles with radioactive debris.

“The problems are so hard that even with a modern supercomputer, they’re only kind of tractable, and maybe not even that much,” said Edward Geist, a policy researcher at the Rand Corporation.

But scientists have been able to model what the aftermath of a nuclear war might look like. In a room full of reporters at the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University, often clad in sandals and tie-dyed shirts, explained what the planet might look like.

“It might look like this,” he said, pointing to a cloud of smoke covering the northern hemisphere that would likely shift to the southern hemisphere and block out the sun. “If there’s enough smoke, temperatures would get below freezing. We call that nuclear winter. It would get cold, dark, and dry.” Crops and cattle would wither and die with hundreds of millions of tons of soot in the air from industrial fires. Global caloric production might drop as much as 90 percent. And however many people died in nuclear explosions, 5 billion more could die from an ensuing famine.

“The current nuclear arsenal can produce nuclear winter,” Robock said. “And nuclear winter can kill most of humanity.”

[randommusingsstuff]

They surprised me because I was sure they weren’t going to do it so now this adds another layer to Ben and Devi because it’s a new level of intimacy unlocked and it feels serious now. Not the level of playfulness banter. There’s this still from 403 and Devi and Ben still seem to be avoiding each other on class and Devi still seems angry. But as someone theorized they’ll talk again in the trip to NYC (405) but won’t address the thing they need to address.

Ben and Devi at odds props to Devi being Devi and getting w Ethan. I don’t think this will be a Des situation. Ethan was described as a really bad guy so he’d probably be unpleasant. And this teaches a lesson to Devi about guys she definitely doesn’t want in her life (but also that she can pull bad guys now good for her).

The Ethan and Paxton arc will wrap before 408. Ethan’s arc probably earlier. So now they can focus on their endgame. I think the Paxton and Devi scene being teased is their only suggestive one and it will mark closure. A sweet one about their impact on each others life’s and that’s it. And that scene happens in 407 according to the picture source.

Prom episode is 409, at this point I agree with your that Ben and Devi know they are in love with each other so it’s not them but the fact they need to make choices about college. I see the bed scene to be rather emotional (and another sex scene happening there but this time is signifies a whole new thing for them)

Another person pointed out that Maitreyi and Jaren’s last scene with the yellow dress and corsage could be a retry to prom. And this is their confession scene after Devi gets a much needed push from Mohan. And the very last scene about the library could be Columbia’s library and this is a tiny bit of a skip forward to give us the answer that they’re together.

I love how this was sent to me weeks ago and every single point still stands. No notes, anon.

The only thing I’ll add is that Ben and Devi’s conflict won’t just be about college because that would lack emotional resonance. When building to a satisfying finale, we have to ask ourselves: what are the personal stakes in this conflict?

Okay, so Ben and Devi might not end up together. Why should we care? How does this affect Devi?

And, well, the obvious answer is that she’s in love with him and would be heartbroken. But the underlying stakes of her being afraid to embrace love are that she’s letting her own insecurities stop her from living a life that’s emotionally rich and fulfilling.

This will come to a head in the series finale, because that’s where the show’s central thesis of self-love needs to intersect with (and bring closure to) her core relationships.

[cearratrottier]

I grew up obsessed with giraffes.  when I was 7 years old I was diagnosed with Type one diabetes, my parents promised me when I out of the hospital we could go to Disney World. When in Animal Kingdom, one of the giraffes had just had a baby and I loved it. I came home from the trip and went to my school library and checked out all the books I could find about them! While my art may not be a perfect giraffe print, infact it looks more like a cheetah; however two things stuck with me. 1. Giraffes coats are like fingerprints, no two are the same. 2. Female giraffes are taller then males, this specifically stuck with me as I was always one of the tallest in my class, it made me feel that even if I was taller, I was as powerful as a giraffe. 

(1) I have two core childhood memories about orcas. Free Willy came out in 1993 when I was three years old. I remember Michael Jackson, the global superstar of the moment, did the theme song for the movie, and it was a sensation of a film that lasted well beyond its release date. I can still hear and visualize the opening scene where Jackson is on stage singing "Will You Be There." The film had a profound impact on me, and at a very young age, I could recognize how harmful orca captivity is. I remember going to SeaWorld when I was seven, and it haunted me to see the orca entertaining the audience in such a small environment. As I've grown older, I've realized that I strongly support the movement against keeping orcas in captivity. It goes against their natural way of life, as they are meant to swim up to 40 miles daily and not be confined solely for profit. These magnificent creatures have incredible personal strength and a strong sense of community. Their communication within their pods is unique to 

each group, which is why I created this artwork to honor them.

Being that I was born in the early 2000s (2003) Halloween Town was the biggest movie on Disney channel. 20 years later it is a family tradition to have popcorn with orange-white chocolate drizzled on top and watch the movie with my brother (16- who thinks he is way to cool for it) and mom.  

(3) I was born in 2003, The Columbia disaster happened, when NASAS space shuttle was destroyed in space and killed 7 astronouts. I never knew about this until I was researching for this project, I feel that this is something that should be talked about as it cost 7 people their lives. 

I can still remember it like it was yesterday, I would put on Justin Bieber and give my mom a concert of the whole My World 2.0 album, when Baby came on it was my time to shine- when the lyrics “when I was 13, I had my first love”. I remember thinking I was going to fall in love and never stop. Truth be told I fell in love at 14 and it wasn't how Justin Bieber could have ever sang about it. It did however play on repeat for 5 hours though my breakup two years later, a full circle moment. 

"the color or the fruit, need wader no longer" (89)

This quote symbolizes that two polar opposite things can be catorgized into one category, it is not until they leave the group that they get to be truly themselves.

(Homework for 9/18-9/26)

[lcrk]

I should probably come up with more details on it (but tbh I'm not great at that) for the teen drama Dorothea stars in, but the very bare-bones basics are:

--it's called One for the Money, set in New York, with only the first season taking place in high school (the overarching premise of the first season is two of the main characters transferring into the high school as seniors with the intention of conning their way into acceptance into Columbia University); seasons two through five see the core group through Columbia.

--the showrunner, Jason Cappara, stated that his reasoning for setting a teen drama more in college than high school was that most teen dramas act like these kids don't have parental supervision, homework, or actual class schedules anyway, so why not just put them in college a lot sooner. he also said that in his opinion, high school sucks anyway and even glamorized tv high school isn't as fun as glamorized tv college, and college is way more fun than high school.

--the vibes are similar to Gossip Girl (the og show) mixed with a little Beverly Hills 90210 and a little One Tree Hill, for irl show comparisons; the audience/ratings/cultural impact is probably comparable to irl Gossip Girl, the OC, or The Vampire Diaries.

--Dorothea's character is named Siobhan, and her dad is the Dean of Admissions at Columbia. Siobhan is a queen bee with a heart of gold type, a fan favorite who lots of fans think that it's Dorothea's performances that made Siobhan have as much depth as she did and evolved from what could have been one dimensional into what some considered the heart of the show (think like Brooke Davis from One Tree Hill).

--Near the end of season one, Siobhan started dating Connor (another of the core group of characters) after will-they-won't-they flirting all season, and by mid season two the shippers were convinced they were going to be endgame, until in the second from the last episode of season two, Connor was very unexpectedly killed off in what quickly made nearly every 'top most shocking/devastating tv deaths' list on the internet. (Showrunner Jason claimed it had been planned in advance, but it pretty clearly had not, considering there were some storylines that just got dropped without ever being tied up after Connor's death.) Ratings dropped temporarily for the first few episodes of the third season, and the remaining core cast was under a lot of pressure from the network to keep the viewer numbers. A few new cast members were added, drama and storylines were added, and got the show back on top.

--Midway through season three, Siobhan seduced one of her professors when she was failing a class and continued having an affair with her professor for longer than a lot of fans thought was necessary (with many fans thinking the entire storyline was unnecessary and uncomfortable). During that time, Dorothea seemed pretty careful with the press to not bash the storyline, but made several subtle comments that a lot of fans read (correctly) as her being very unhappy and uncomfortable with that storyline.