Author: Sarah Foust

  • Summer Recommendations

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    These summer recommendations are great for anyone who is new to New York, is looking for great family activities, or just wants to explore New York City beyond the Upper East Side! Elizabeth Street Garden: If you are looking for a mental palate cleanser, I highly recommend walking through this garden. Tucked away between Prince…

  • Cool Space Experiments? Have a Cute Alien Instead.

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    WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD   I first got wind of the hype for the Project Hail Mary (PHM) movie in January of this year, two months before its scheduled release date. The buzz was so promising that I bumped the novel to the top of my lengthy reading list so I could finish it in time…

  • Un toro, unos fríjoles, y muchos mártires: three Spanish anti-war paintings

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    “ . . . But this number [the number of people killed in the Holocaust], like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract…

  • Notes from the 91

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    As a new New Yorker, it’s almost a rite of passage to lament how boring and homogenous your hometown is. For me, that place is Orange County, California. But to say that it is boring and homogenous glosses over its sordid history of racial discrimination, religious fundamentalism, and Reagan-era policy. Indeed, even as your average…

  • Diversity Under Pressure Need Institutional Actions Rather Than Statements

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    “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is a familiar phrase with two interpretations: actions can lead to unforeseen harm, and good intentions are worthless without proper execution. It is not a phrase that I would typically associate with diversity-related initiatives in higher education. However, recent financial and political pressures have highlighted the…

  • Lewis Thomas Prize Lecture: Method and Marvel in Science

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    In the labs at The Rockefeller University, scientists’ attention is turned to the microscale as they investigate the fundamental mechanisms of life and disease. At the Lewis Thomas Prize Lecture, held at Rockefeller this spring, astronomer Chris Impey asked the audience to turn our attention upward and outward to the vastness of the entire observable…

  • “Give Back Through Arts and Craft”: A Creative Community-Building Initiative

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    If you happened to peer down into the Collaborative Research Center basement on a chilly Thursday evening this past winter, you might have seen clusters of scientists hard at work at the tables. But instead of discussing posters or a symposium talk, they were participating in “Give Back Through Arts and Craft,” one of several…

  • The Evolution of Insect Research

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    When thinking of the most popular animals used in scientific research, most people would not imagine an insect. Yet these underappreciated creatures are an integral part of many modern scientific discoveries. Research on insects has established foundational tenets of genetics, insight into the ways vectors efficiently spread diseases worldwide, and recognition of the complex social…

  • 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…