Dear readers,

Imagine yourself adding flour, sugar, salt, milk, water, and eggs to melted butter. You mix the batter before adding the vanilla last. Today, you are making crêpes. As the butter swirls around in the pan, you ladle the batter in, twisting it to create the delicate pancake soon to be enveloping strawberries, Nutella, or ham and eggs. Voilà!..

Three days before boarding a flight from Edinburgh to Los Angeles, I joined 30 strangers on a bus carrying snow equipment. We sat on pleather orange seats inside of what can only be described as a blue metal tin that carried us toward the snowy mountains. My friends and I readied ourselves for a day of skiing and snowboarding in the Scottish Highlands...

Oct. 9, 2017

I don’t remember much about the movie Sully, in which Tom Hanks plays the heroic pilot who crash-landed a plane on the Hudson River in 2009, but I do recall the thrill of watching the flight attendants do their jobs so well. As the plane nosedives, they leap into action in unison. They issue impossibly calm instructions and usher the passengers onto the wings while the cabin fills with ice-cold water. Everyone survives...

My fingers run along the rice paper pages as my eyes trace the inked lines for three characters: Yan Ji Ci.

It is the fall of 2015. As summer wilts, Columbia’s campus again transforms into the ant colony of activity that invariably defines the beginning of each academic year. Amid the moving in, the exploring and rediscovering, and the registration days, major pedagogical change looms large on the horizon...

Dear readers,