Life have you stressed out? Weary of the endless news cycle? City College philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci has an idea–one that goes back 18 centuries. He’s a leader of a modern movement that’s popularizing the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Outcomes are not under your control, he says. What is under your control are your intentions, your decisions and your actions.

Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at City College. Born in Liberia and raised in Rome, he holds three doctoral degrees: in genetics from the University of Ferrara in Italy, biology from the University of Connecticut and philosophy of science from the University of Tennessee.  He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the author or editor of 10 books.

RELATED LINKS

How to be a Stoic: More about Massimo Pigliucci, his books and talks on the modern Stoicism

 

 

This episode of the CUNYcast features guests who are trying to make journalism and politics more inclusive: Jennifer Choi of the News Integrity Initiative at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism discusses a project to advance diversity in newsrooms and improve coverage of marginalized communities. And City College/Macaulay student Emilia Decaudin, the first openly transgender member of the New York State Democratic Committee, talks about how she got the state party to change the gender language of its rules.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CUNY’s Corey Robin–one of the foremost thinkers on American conservatism–set out to solve the puzzle of Clarence Thomas: How did a young black nationalist grow up to be the most right-wing justice on the Supreme Court–and without abandoning the core ideas that once animated him as a radical leftist? In his groundbreaking new book, Robin–a political scientist at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center– explores Thomas’s 28-year record on the court against the backdrop of his uniquely evolved vision of race.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas “is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive,” wrote The New York Times reviewer Jennifer Szalai. “. . . It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has made me think again.” Robin is also the author of  The Reactionary Mind, which The New Yorker called “the book that predicted Trump.”

 

RELATED LINKS

Read more about Corey Robin

Coming December 4 at The Graduate Center: A conversation with Corey Robin and Columbia law professor Kendall Thomas 

Read The New York Times review: ‘The Enigma of Clarence Thomas’ Makes a Strong Case for Its Provocative Thesis

Hear Robin talk about “The Reactionary Mind,” on MSNBC host Chris Hayes’s “Why is this Happening?” podcast.

Less than half the students who start at America’s public colleges make it to graduation. David Kirp, a prominent education policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, says it’s because few colleges bother to do anything about it. So Kirp went around the country to visit campuses that are doing something. Programs like CUNY’s ASAP, ACE and CUNY Start became an uplifting chapter of his provocative–and prescriptive–new book, “The College Dropout Scandal.”

Related Links

Read David Kirp’s New York Times op-ed about how CUNY is keeping students on track to graduate

Learn about CUNY’s model academic success programs

Read more about David Kirp and “The College Dropout Scandal”

 

The 2020 Census could miss millions of immigrants and others who are historically hard to count, affecting everything from seats in Congress to federal funds for education.  That’s why officials and groups from New York to California are using CUNY’s interactive Census mapping tool to focus their efforts on neighborhoods that will be the hardest to count. Mapping guru Steven Romalewski of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center explains how it works and the difference it could make.

 

Related Links

Explore the Hard to Count mapping tool

From the Harvard Kennedy School: Who Will Count in the 2020 Census? There’s a map for that.

Read about CUNY’s role in the NYC Census 2020 campaign

Learn more about the CUNY Mapping Service  

In Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, Mikhal Dekel discovers–and retraces–the agonizing three-year journey her father made as a teenager  fleeing the Nazis–from Poland to Palestine via an unlikely refuge in Iran. Dekel is a City College English professor who grew up in Israel as part of a post-war generation that was largely shielded from Holocaust history. In this CUNY Book Beat podcast, she talks about how digging into her father’s little-known survival story became a pursuit of self-identity.

From CUNY SUM: Dekel’s book is both a second-generation memoir and a deeply researched historical account that took 10 years to write. She unearthed archives, tracked down survivors, and deconstructed photos and letters. She also visited as many places on her father’s 13,000-mile journey as she could, from Tashkent and Samarkand, to an unmarked burial ground for a Russian gulag, to the Polish town of Ostrów, where their family lived for eight generations before the Nazis. “Nothing remained of Ostrów’s Jewish past,” she wrote, “no haunting, only plain, uncontested erasure.” Read more >

The New York Times: “The story at the center of this book is the way contingency shaped so many destinies. It makes these Tehran children not simply another detail of the Holocaust but a matter of enduring existential, psychological and moral reflection.”   Read the full New York Times review >

Read more about Mikhal Dekel and see a list of her upcoming speaking events

Mikhal Dekel’s father at 12 in Poland with his sister, father and uncle in 1939; and three years later (standing fifth from left) at a tent camp in Tehran. (Courtesy of Mikhal Dekel)

 

 

Allan Wernick founded the nation’s first university-based free legal service for immigrants two decades ago. Since then CUNY Citizenship Now! has helped thousands of New Yorkers become citizens. But now they need both help and hope. Wernick  talks about the obstacles for immigrants of every status in the Trump era.

To learn more, please visit CUNY Citizenship Now!

In “The Shadow King,” Queens College’s Maaza Mengiste digs into the history of her native Ethiopia and unearths a true-to-life story of women who fought for the right to defend their country against Mussolini’s army in the years before World War II. Nearly a decade in the making, Mengiste’s second novel is a mythic tale inspired by the stories she heard growing up–and the discoveries she made doing meticulous research in Italy and Ethiopia.

From The New York Times: “In war stories both old and new, women are nurses to the wounded, and the victims of rape — war’s unbanishable shadow. Rarely are they depicted as warriors. Is that a profound truth or a blind spot? Maaza Mengiste’s lyrical, remarkable new novel, “The Shadow King,” set during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, somehow manages to solve the riddle . . .[A]ll this grandeur, all this grace, is in the service of a tale of a woman, Hirut, as indelible and compelling a hero as any I’ve read in years. This novel made me feel pity and fear, and more times than is reasonable, gave me goose bumps.”  

 

Read the New York Times review 

* Learn more about Maaze Mengiste and see a list of her upcoming talks

Author and Brooklyn College creative writing professor Helen Phillips has struck a scary nerve with her genre-busting hit new novel, “The Need.” It’s a suspense-sci fi-ghost story that The New York Times playfully dubbed “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Evil.”

For more on Helen Phillips and “The Need” visit CUNY Sum

Photo on the CUNY Podcasts home page by David Barry 

 

CUNY's Yarimar Bonilla, a prominent voice on the volatile politics of Puerto Rico, spent the summer in San Juan, immersed in the revolt against the island's government. She's back with plenty to say about the historic events and how they're intertwined with the aftermath of 2017's Hurricane Maria. ​