Author: Nicolas Renier

  • Midday Melodies

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    By Derek Simon What makes great art? This is a question that thinkers have been pondering ever since civilization’s infancy and I dare not attempt to answer it in less than a page. Instead, I’ll posit what makes a great artist by using, in my opinion, the classical music world’s finest champion: Ludwig van Beethoven.…

  • Culture Corner : music roundup

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    By Bernie Lang In the past couple of months, I’ve been to live concert performances in the major music genres of jazz, rock, and classical music. I found myself reflecting after each show on how these differing types of music are standing up within my own personal test of time. My brother graced me with…

  • Ten Years of Natural Selections

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    By Daniel Briskin This month’s issue marks the tenth anniversary of Natural Selections; issue one was published in February of 2004. In these past ten years, much has happened, on-campus and off. For all that has happened, however, much has stayed the same, including the humor. This year we are republishing the best and most…

  • Doubly Distinguished

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    By George Barany, Jed Fisher, Micheel Hanko, and Marjorie Russel GB is a Rockefeller alum (1977); JF is a native New Yorker transplanted to the mid-west, where at the University of Notre Dame he continues to read, think, and write about important minutiae at the interface between biology and chemistry; MH is a NYC voice…

  • It’s Christmas Time in the City

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    by Aileen Marshall Like the old song says, the “city sidewalks, busy sidewalks” are “dressed in holiday style.” Besides the hustle and bustle of this busy shopping season, New York has many time-honored holiday activities.  Here are just a few to help you feel that holiday cheer. The gigantic tree at Rockefeller Center is an impressive…

  • Scientists Invade the Comics

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    By Jason Rothhauser This holiday season, two comic books that share one thing hard to find in today’s popular fiction: scientists are the stars of the show. One comic proposes an outrageous alternate history in which a cabal of real-world scientists use their public research as a cover for far more bizarre experiments, and the…

  • Artificial Brain Gains Sentience, People Lose Minds

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    By John Borghi Though it made a surprisingly small splash on the convention floor, the biggest news coming out of this year’s Society for Neuroscience conference were reports that the computational model of the human brain known as “Robby” has gained sentience. In a sparsely attended symposium, the husband and wife team of Roy and Irmgard…

  • Midday Melodies

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    By Derek Simon A friend of mine, who despises classical music, once sniped to me that “the background of movies” is the only fit place for “that kind of music.” Ironically, she hit upon a truth about music, but not in the way that she initially intended. It is true that you often hear classical-esque…

  • New York State of Mind

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    Olof Dallner, Post-doctoral Associate in the Friedman Lab by May Dobosiewicz From: Stockholm, Sweden Been in New York: 4 years Lives in: Upper East Side What was the first thing you did when you moved here? Went to IKEA. I thought, this is kind of sad—first day and I go to a Swedish store. But then…

  • Culture Corner – Interview with Michelle Tolini Finamore

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    Interview with a Curator: Michelle Tolini Finamore of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston By Bernie Langs Michelle Tolini Finamore is Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and she has written a fascinating and wonderful new book, “Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film,” that I started to read…