Desmond Hanan walks into the buffet area of John Jay Dining Hall—past the vegan, nut-free, and gluten-free stations, the crowds of people in front of the drink machines, the grill, and the salad bar. Then a Columbia College sophomore, Hanan navigates the dinner rush crowd to the desserts. Cakes sit on pedestals, soft serve swirls in its machines beside chocolate sprinkles and marshmallows, chocolate sauce, and warm caramel. This evening, they are also serving blondies—thick chocolate chip cookie squares—stacked into pyramids on a counter. He picks one up...

Dear readers,

The story of how I came to live in Harmony Hall my sophomore year begins with a shipwreck off the coast of Greenland in 1894. The Miranda, a ship full of arctic explorers, strikes an iceberg, and a group of survivors is left drifting southward in a schooner. It is upon this lonely schooner that the explorers first float the idea for an Arctic Club. In 1929, what is now the prestigious Explorers Club, a group of adventurers and expeditioners, moves into new headquarters on West 110th Street. The same building that now houses dozens of undergraduates was advertised as “especially fitted to make a home for men who devote their lives to exploration.” In the basement, where large lockers once stored exploring gear, laundry machines now spin with students’ dirty clothes...

“Computer science is a man’s sport. Why are you here?” Jada Hawkins’ high school computer science teacher asked her. “This isn’t for you.”

The un-air-conditioned 7 train subway doors opened, fogged up with heat and the swampy dew of sweat. It was the sweat of the shrunken old man in his baggy plaid suit, the sweat of the woman stroking a comatose lizard with cotton candy hair shish-kebabed around oversized chopsticks, and that of the man who stunk of piss and defecation by the door half a foot away from my face half-shouting a song that only he could hear: “Hello darling, won’t you dance with me?” The temporarily isolated bubble was introduced to new cacophony: Cantonese and Mandarin and Vietnamese and Singlish; a dog howling in pain; vendors hawking duck heads; a fat, brown, barefoot boy wearing only a soiled diaper and sobbing for the 10-cent lollipop he’d dropped onto the tracks. Somewhere far off in the distance, I could hear the trailing refrain of a boomboxed Reggaeton seduction. I was propelled out of the train car by the flood of entrances and exits. Flushing, Queens, stretched out before me—a moving river of people and shuddering neon lights. I exhaled. Columbia felt as distant as any foreign country...