LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Please Vote

Dr. Wickham’s recent letter was an important and helpful clarification of the redistricting changes affecting the Cornell community. With the election just a few days away, I’d like to add a further exhortation for everyone who’s eligible to get out and vote.

GUEST ROOM | Your Vote Matters

When juxtaposed with the housing and location stability that many adults enjoy, it’s no wonder that our voter participation rates are so staggering. With the addition of on-campus polling places this year due to fierce student advocacy, voting will become a little easier for some Cornellians. However, since significant percentages of our domestic student population live outside of New York state, in order to participate in this year’s elections, they likely will have had to navigate the same absentee ballot request process that I struggled with. 

Why Urban America Can’t Forget Its Farmers

Why do agricultural issues matter to young cosmopolites attending an Ivy League institution and who quite possibly are from a family in the top one percent? Besides being consistently ranked as one of the top agricultural schools in the country and the world, Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences conducts an enormous amount of research and outreach to help end food insecurity, combat climate change and, most recently, protect food production workers against COVID-19; just check out the litany of innovations here. Cornell is in a unique position to conduct its research; unlike many of its peers, it’s role as a land-grant institution informs its involvement in communities surrounding it. 43 percent of the counties in the Southern Tier are classified as rural. If you include upstate micropolities, such as Corning and Cortland, as semi-rural, that figure jumps to 57 percent.

Comfort Foods for When You’re Terrified for the Future of Our Country and the Upcoming Election

The phrase Presidential Debate has become synonymous with “petty shouting match.” Ballot deadlines were extended and then revoked. Some Americans still haven’t received their absentee ballots, while others report “faulty” ballots that don’t list any presidential candidates at all. Everywhere we turn, it seems that there is new election news to lament and almost no way of letting out this stress while locked at home. The week before one of the most important elections of our lifetimes, Americans have never needed comfort food more. 
Logically, we all know that a bowl of chicken soup or mac and cheese can’t actually solve any of the turmoil our country is currently going through. A bag of crunchy, salty chips won’t do the trick either, yet we still turn to these familiar foods to support us emotionally when everything seems like it’s a bit too much to handle.

ST. HILAIRE | This Is What Donald Trump Has Done for Me

Like many people, I tuned into the last presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle last week. The fragile masculinity of two American grandfathers and the way it manifested itself took up 90 minutes on every major news-media station and held the attention of myself and 63 million others on Thursday night. In a way, I think that we have been spoiled. I spent so much of the first debate pointing out disrespectful quips, laughing, internally crying and outwardly cursing our founding fathers for drafting a governmental system that could be completely decimated by “an unlikely candidate.” You know, as if ‘unlikely’ has recently become synonymous with racist, misogynist, xenophobic and ignorant. I have been seeing this new classification of the incumbent President Trump as “an underdog.” I had to refresh my definition of the word and found that it meant “a victim of injustice or persecution.” I feel obligated to express my displeasure that we classify the offender, our persecutor-in-chief, as “an underdog.”

Returning to the more tame and traditional Presidential debate that I tuned into on Thursday, I was bored.