Columns

MORADI | Goodbye to All That

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I have never felt as young as I did last week, at 21, sitting behind my baba in a hospital room as a nurse explained some pre- and post-op procedures that he’d have to undergo. Baba kept repeating the same lines he had been for the past few days: I don’t have high blood pressure, I don’t have diabetes or high cholesterol, I exercise, I eat well. Why is this happening to me? Everything the nurse said that day came with sporadic yet pregnant glances in my direction. Baba was genetically predisposed for these heart problems, so chances are I’ve inherited them too, just as I did his big eyes and perpetual nervousness.

Opinion

MORADI | After Pittsburgh, the Pain We Share

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I grew up going to Quran school at my small, non-denominational mosque in a Virginia business center squished between a Days Inn and a dusty storage facility. It’s been vandalized and threatened on multiple occasions. Most recently, after the shooting in San Bernardino, California that famously triggered then-candidate Trump’s Muslim ban proposal, the masjid received a threat via voicemail. “You all will be sorry,” the imam claimed the voicemail said. “You all will be killed.”

I flinch writing those words.

Columns

MORADI | Hydro Flask and the Price of Fitting In

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Last week, I slammed my Costco-bought “Thermoflask” into a trash can in Anabel Taylor Hall, gave it the finger, then angrily strode out of the building. It was right after Friday prayers. Call it a spiritual awakening. My $10 cerulean Thermoflask from Costco was a point of pride for a while before it started leaking all over my readings.  I’d spent the first month or so of school flexing that I’d essentially gotten the same product for a fraction of what people were paying for trendy Hydro Flasks, joking that the only downside was that my Costco water bottle might give me BPA poisoning.

Columns

MORADI | CS Needs an Ethics Requirement

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Here’s a frightening proposition for this recruiting season: Cornell’s computer science undergraduates are woefully underprepared for careers in tech. Cornell’s CS undergrads are bright and technically apt. They learn from some of the best minds in the field, and they score some of the most coveted positions in the industry. It’s not that these future developers can’t solve the problems put forth before before them. It’s that they often have no idea what the problems are in the first place.

Columns

MORADI | You Don’t Have To Like It Here

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Somehow, every freshman is simultaneously horny and anxious and tired and excited and sweaty during O-week. Part of my on-campus job involves trying to parse through these feelings with first-year students, assuaging their fears and elevating their excitement. I generally try to keep things positive. I tell them how I love the Ithaca Farmers Market, Manndible oatmeal chocolate chip walnut cookies and running through Forest Home Drive. I slipped up last year when I was on a student panel for Cornell Days and a really perceptive prefrosh asked what I didn’t like about Cornell.

Featured in Category

MORADI | Disappoint Your Parents

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Last week, after a phone conversation on what I wanted to do after I graduate ended inconclusively in tabled arguments and passive-aggressive goodbyes, my dad texted me the median income of a political science Ph.D. “About the same payscale as an operator” at the company where he works, he wrote. “You will study hard for LSAT and then we can discuss.”

It hurts knowing it would be literally and metaphorically easier on his heart if I had just gone all-out for law school or had read Cracking the Coding Interview back when I had the chance. Anything would be better than my current trajectory of understably worrisome directionless half-assery. My father is painfully practical and intensely loving, with the kind of radical sensibility of so many other Asian immigrants in America. After all, Baba already took his risks: He started a revolution and fought for it through a horribly bloody war.

arts curriculum

MORADI | Dump the Distributions, Open up the Curriculum

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The great scam of Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences is that it fails to provide a liberal arts education despite purporting to do so. And with a $54,584-a-year price tag at that. In a comprehensive final report on recommended changes to the undergraduate curriculum, the Arts & Sciences Curriculum Review Committee suggested a simplification of the current system of distribution requirements. Instead of a confusing matrix of requirements, the Committee recommends requiring students to take one course in a simple set of 10 categories. The Committee’s proposal is a reshuffling of a curricular system that has promised a curriculum of breadth but instead left students with a failed curriculum of distraction.

Columns

MORADI | When Coming to Cornell Means Grappling With Guns

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“But it didn’t happen,” is the chill response I got from some friends (and my mom!) after learning that we may have been tiptoeing along the asymptote of terror. Apparently being on the brink of tragedy doesn’t cut it anymore, and why should it? Our generation found perverse unity in the wholly American constancy of lockdown drills, in the nonchalance of backpack searches and school security cameras. If you were to print the Wikipedia page for “List of School Shootings in the United States,” it would be 172 pages long. (For comparison, “List of awards and nominations received by Meryl Streep” is just 35.)

Gun violence is so routine that it’s easy to forget that we’re living in an international abnormality.

Columns

MORADI | In the Diaspora, You Come of Age Twice

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My visit to Iran over winter break was like catching up with your best friend from elementary school years later, as an adult: awkward, albeit familiar. My journal entries from the last time I visited — five years ago, when I was 15 pounds lighter and had recently rapped all of “Thrift Shop” in a live acoustic performance in front of my peers and World History teacher — were mostly about how weird the dubbed Turkish soap operas on satellite TV were and how everyone suddenly got really into volleyball. I spent most of that visit sleeping until 3 p.m. and then playing Super Mario flash games with my cousins until it was cool enough outside to go stroll through historic Shiraz and all its stunning mosques and mausoleums.

This time around, though, the entries have scribbled-in sentences like “Everyone keeps asking if I have a boyfriend,” “so many people got divorced” and “apparently depression runs in my family.” Trips to Iran used to be a welcomed hiatus from East Coast cynicism and a rare chance to have fun with some of my favorite people in the world who I missed so, so dearly; instead, this visit got really real, really fast. My best friend from back home just landed in India last week. She makes similar observations: “It feels harder to hang out now that everyone’s grown up, because we don’t talk about kid stuff.” Questions like “How’s school?” or “What movies do you watch?” no longer suffice.

Columns

MORADI | What’s ‘Not Normal’ About Sexism In Fraternities?

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A note to the Interfraternity Council: This was definitely “normal.”

To imply that the commodification and abuse of the female body is anything but ordinary is naive. To suggest that the sort of amplified masculinity inherent in the system of the American fraternity is neither an incubator of nor a conduit for misogyny is deluded. To deny that sexism in Greek life is routine is appalling. To say we should be surprised is an insult.

I won’t rehash all the arguments against Greek life, because I could never explain them as well as Priya Kankanhalli ’19 in the eloquent and chilling “Brotherhood Inverted” or as Ara Hagopian ’18 did bluntly and assertively in “Greek Life Should Not Exist” — and also because they’ve been repeated over and over again in almost every collegiate and national publication. But I have a lot of anger; anger not only at the recurring abhorrent conduct of members of Greek organizations, but anger at the responses from both the University and from the Greek community.