Yi | Regrets and All

This year, when I walk to Schoellkopf stadium, baking under the sun in my cap and gown, hearing the roaring claps from faculty, staff and families, I know I won’t be able to help but smile this time and feel like I did it right — regrets and all. 

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR | Find Your Place at The Sun!

Since the pandemic, The Sun has undergone numerous ups and downs and remained afloat amid various challenges, including the general decline of local news and journalism as a profession.

Despite these challenges, we continue to publish daily online and twice a week in print. So, what keeps a place like The Sun moving every day? The students.

YAO | Saying Goodbye to ‘Hello Katie’

I’ve been accumulating ideas for this final column since freshman year. Amorphous thoughts stored in the back of my mind, half-baked phrases in the notes app on my phone, 3 a.m. text message wisdom to friends. Yet now, when I have to transform my jumbled miscellanea into coherent sentences, nothing I can write feels adequate. After all, how do you consolidate four years, one pandemic, a million existential crises and a billion more memories into a cohesive narrative? 

FRIEDMAN | Keeping Them Honest

As Andrew Morse ‘96, a distinguished media executive, wrote in a sentimental 2011 Sun piece, “I still have such great reverence for The Cornell Daily Sun.” 

In an exercise of deep contrast, in November of last year, one Reddit user wrote: “Why do these kids treat every article like a blog post. I’ve never seen a university paper so unprofessional and simply hard to read.” Another wrote in 2018: “In my opinion 90% of the newspaper is irrelevant to every day student life, uninteresting, or intentionally provocative.”

During my time writing for the paper, I have been fortunate to receive favorable reviews from faculty and other University stakeholders. As a reader of the other columns, I have also found a number of columnists discerning and thoughtful.

Not Always as Happy as a Clam: The Cultural Clashes Underpinning Long Island’s Shellfishing Industry

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article misrepresented a source. The year is 1686. King James II looks on anxiously from his plushy throne in England as his New York colonial subjects become increasingly unruly. To tighten his grip on the settlers and quell whispers of rebellion, he appoints Thomas Dongan, a Royalist military officer, to govern the New York territory and issue decrees known as Dongan Patents for the creation of trustee-run towns across the royal province. One of these towns was Long Island’s Town of Brookhaven.

SIMS | As Seen on TV

The best fictional dramatization of a newsroom is the 2012-2014 HBO series The Newsroom. The best dramatization of a newsroom, though, is the Sun office. They have a lot in common: ringing phones, dry humor, hair-trigger reactivity, lots of take-out, late nights, more coffee, love-hating co-workers, excitement, frustration. It’s regrettable that The Newsroom doesn’t have scenes about being late to a meeting because you were playing mini golf with the other editors or when you have an office slumber party and watch The Proposal. But their main characterizations about journalists — as seekers of goodness and truth, tireless and exhilarated workers and self-righteous investigators — mapped accurately to my time at The Sun.