Author: Sarah Foust

  • Winter 2026 Book Reviews

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    Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (non-fiction) The line between humans and nature is beautifully blurred in Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. Kaishian’s training as a mycologist and her lifelong connection to the outdoors culminate in a voice that compels the reader to view nature…

  • Looking for Faces in Flowers During the Pandemic

    Looking for Faces in Flowers During the Pandemic

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    The flowers of Manhattan kept me sane during the pandemic. Over the 5 months of the lockdown and gradual re-opening of New York City, they were my substitute for company, and I enjoyed myself (as much as one could during the quarantine) by taking portraits of them.  Over this time, I learned a bit about…

  • Making Scents of New York City

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    A New Yorker presents and rates seven of their most salient experiences, in no particular order. They call it the city that never sleeps, call it high-energy, say it grows and even eats people alive. Well, as a near-living entity, I can tell you a couple more things it does: it breathes, and when it…

  • Borges’s Eleven

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    When ChatGPT was first made public, I amused myself by asking it to combine the styles of disparate authors. I had just finished reading Ficciones, so I asked ChatGPT to rewrite popular films in Borges’s cerebral voice. The mental image of Borges reworking Star Wars—carefully imbuing it with ideas of the infinite, mirrors, and mazes—was…

  • Basquiat: A Griot and His Skulls

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    “I don’t know how to describe my work, because it’s not always the same thing. It’s like asking somebody, asking Miles [Davis], “How does your horn sound?” I don’t think he could really tell you why he plays this at this point in the music. You’re sort of on automatic.” – Jean-Michel Basquiat It’s hard…

  • Bear With Me: A Dispatch From My Photography Trip to Alaska

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    It is 9:48 p.m. on June 25, and I am at Fairbanks International Airport. The airport is bright and spacious, much as Alaska itself had been promised to be, and as I struggle to stay awake while waiting to board, I remind myself why I decided to come here in the first place. When I…

  • Working Towards Gender Equity in Academic Science Requires Addressing Systemic Barriers

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    Would you continue pursuing scientific curiosity if you had to constantly fight for your place at the bench? What if it were highly likely that your work would be overlooked, minimized, or even written out of history? For many women in science, this is a lived reality. Despite persistent barriers to training, recognition, and career…

  • From Barre to Bench: When Art and Science Converge

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    I have spent more of my life in a ballet studio than in a traditional classroom, let alone a laboratory. From a young age, I dreamed of a career as a ballet dancer, and ballet consumed my day-to-day life. I was homeschooled to accommodate my training schedule and moved away from home at sixteen to…

  • Celebrating the Fourth Anniversary of Five Trailblazing Women Scientists at The Rockefeller University

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    In 2020, Women in Science at Rockefeller (WISeR) and the Women & Science Initiative commissioned a portrait by Brenda Zlamany titled “Five Trailblazing Women Scientists at The Rockefeller University.” This portrait, the University’s first depicting women scientists, was installed in the lounge of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Hall in 2022. Behind the scenes, a group…

  • A (freezing) Saturday afternoon in Astoria, brought to you by Zohran Mamdani

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    During the 2025 New York City mayoral election, social media was filled with videos of the now-mayor, Zohran Mamdani, listing his favorite places to eat in Queens. The recommendations ranged from hidden gems, like a Bangladeshi halal steam table spot in Astoria, to neighborhood favorites, like Jackson Heights’s Kabab King. This was a very successful…

  • RU’s (un)official cat rescuer, Kristen Cullen

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    “There’s a ‘cat condo’ on campus!” a co-worker told me a few weeks after our office moved to the Rockefeller campus this summer. I had to go and see it for myself. Inside a safety net, I found a few cat shelters with straw beds and plates for food, all underneath a staircase. I was…

  • You Can’t Have Science Without Migration: The Rise of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment is Hurting the Scientific Community

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    Migration is woven into the fabric of the scientific community. Many scientists move across regions or continents to pursue opportunities for training, education, and collaboration. These journeys affect both an individual’s life and the trajectory of scientific innovation, fostering diversity of thought and new discoveries. However, as anti-immigrant sentiment increases in the United States and…