In Of Women and Salt, breakout novelist Gabriela Garcia takes readers from 19th-century Cuba to modern-day Miami, Texas, and Mexico, illuminating migrant mothers’ choices and the fractured legacies they pass on to their daughters.

As much as Gabriela Garcia loved creating stories when she was growing up, she didn’t plan to pursue fiction writing as a career. A Miami native, she studied sociology and communications, graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2007. She worked in the music and magazine industries and as a migrant justice organizer until she realized that writing fiction was all she wanted to do, all the time. She dove in, earning an M.F.A. from Purdue University, as well as several fellowships and awards that helped her turn her thesis project into a highly acclaimed debut novel.

Published in April, Of Women and Salt (Flatiron, 2021) was immediately chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick and soon became a New York Times bestseller. In it, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker amid the bloody stirrings of Cuban nationalists’ fight for independence from Spain, and ending with two of María Isabel’s descendants whose fates converge with those of a Salvadoran mother and daughter in present-day Miami. Jeanette, a first-generation Cuban American, is Carmen’s only daughter. She’s struggling to overcome an opioid addiction when she sees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest her neighbor Gloria. Despite a tenuous hold on her own life, Jeanette decides to take in Ana, Gloria’s young daughter. Of Women and Salt delves into the betrayals and the stories told and untold that shape these women’s lives and legacies.

Of Women and Salt combines your interest in Cuban history, American identity, immigration detention and deportation, addiction, and social privilege. What fueled those interests?
I’d been doing work around detention and deportation for many years, and organizing with a lot of women in detention. I grew up traveling to Cuba most of my life, so that’s something that I’m always thinking about. I was also really interested in writing against the idea of a monolithic Latinx community because I grew up in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and a Mexican immigrant. Miami is a city that’s Latinx majority—one of the few in the U.S.—but there are all of these divisions along racial lines, along socioeconomic lines. I was interested in portraying the complicated version of Miami that I know. All of those things were swirling in my mind, and I wanted to find a way to be able to write into all of those interests.

Which character came to you first? Did you feel that you needed to tell readers more of any one character’s story?
Yeah. It’s been interesting to hear from readers how everyone gravitates toward a different character. Some people really wanted more from the María Isabel story, or wanted to see more of Gloria, or really connected with Jeanette, you know? It’s just been fascinating how people are super invested in different characters. When I started, I wasn’t sure who the hinge was going to be. As I was writing, it sort of became Jeanette.

Why did you choose this multigenerational, vignette format for the novel?
When I sit down for conversations with my family, we’ll start on one thread, and then it’ll go into something else, and then it’ll go into a memory and connect to other things. I wanted the book to have that feeling of stories, of memory, of historical accounting—where there are these spaces of knowing where it shifts kaleidoscopically.

While men hover at the periphery of the novel, male violence and abuse is a central theme. Talk a bit about your decision to have that experience or fear figure prominently.
I was really interested in exploring women navigating these really patriarchal worlds, in the generational echoes, and also in how women navigate male violence. I wanted to center the women and I wanted to write against a lot of tropes that exist, like even the idea of strong women surviving. I wanted to show that, oftentimes, there’s a cost for that survival, and that these expectations of strength are imposed when what a lot of these women deserve is rest or care or healing.

I was also interested in the idea of immigrant mothers as perpetually suffering or sacrificing as the expectation. Not that the women in my novel don’t often sacrifice or suffer, but they’re also so much more than that. There are times when Gloria questions if she even wants to be a mother. I wanted to show the relationship between women as they navigate these worlds.

There’s the expectation that it’s really noble that women should sacrifice everything as a mother, rather than asking why it’s necessary to have to sacrifice so much of yourself. What is there structurally or societally that requires that sacrifice?

A couple of 19th-century literary works figure prominently in your novel. How did you choose which books to feature?
I looked into the actual books that were read to workers in Cuban cigar factories during that time. That’s where the choice of Les Misérables and Cecilia Valdés came in. I sort of imagined this character of María Isabel as finding her world cracking open through literature, through these books that are read to her.

At the same time, I was struck by how most of the books being read to workers were overwhelmingly written by white, European men or white, European-descendant men in Cuba. I was thinking about how everything that she is absorbing is coming through this particular lens. That made me think about stories in general and whether there’s the ability to reclaim some of that story for herself, whether that’s even possible, and how things are passed down and how we absorb things—from what perspective.

I wanted to point to the ways that things can be inherited, but they don’t have an essential meaning. The books come to mean different things to different people throughout generations. Preserving just one meaning through generations feels almost impossible. I wanted to point to some of that impossibility, too, in the way that we pass down stories and histories.

—Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

“My particular mission is to wander the length and breadth of the city in search of different kinds of places: Chinese, African, and Polish, the unexpected and undersold,” she said in her talk, titled “Off the Rails in Hungry City: Confessions of an Accidental Food Writer.”

She said the food she reviews could come from a restaurant, a stall, a cart, or a truck, and, more than likely, it’ll be from an outer borough. It could be a Brooklyn pizzeria with a “sideline” in Egyptian pastry, she said, or Tibetan soup served from the back of a T-Mobile store.

“These are places where you might eat standing up or sometimes there’s only one person at the stove for whom cooking is less art than urgency,” she said.

She added that the “gig isn’t glamorous.” She often spends more time on the subway than on the meal.

“Still, I won’t lie, this job is exactly as cool as everybody thinks,” she said. “What makes it cool isn’t just the food; it’s the stories I hear. When I go to these places I’m getting entrée not only to a cuisine, but to a part of the city and the world that I wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to know.”

She described a journey that began with a childhood in Hawaii drinking Tang and eating Kraft mac and cheese “gussied up with frozen peas and crispy strips of Spam—an underrated meat product.” Her father had a wartime habit of rationing for himself the treat of canned peaches and cottage cheese. Her mother, who survived the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, didn’t know how to make a pot of rice when she arrived in the U.S., which was common for an educated woman in her country. Both her parents were sitting in the front row for the lecture and nodded knowingly; also in attendance were her husband and daughter.

Mishan began her career after graduate school at an ad agency, with no thoughts of food writing. She eventually moved on to become a book synopsis writer at the New Yorker, where she didn’t get a byline. There, she asked her editor if she could write restaurant reviews, a subject that didn’t have the same cachet a decade ago than it does now. Eventually, a New York Times editor contacted her to say, simply, “I like the way you write.”

“If I have any advice to give to you, the students here who are standing at the threshold of your adult lives, it would be this: Whatever your achievements, whatever your talents, you may not yet know what you’re really good at, but whatever path you imagine lies before you … there really is no path.”

As she waxed poetic about skewered beef tenders sold beneath the Manhattan Bridge, audience members took copious notes on their event programs.

The places she reviews are often so overlooked, she said, that when she tells them they are going to be reviewed by The New York Times, they’re often in shock.

“One chef hugged me on the spot, one chef cried,” she said.

The event drew students, members of the Department of English faculty, and University alumni, who participated in a Q&A following the lecture. One student observed that a good review has the potential to change a neighborhood, and not always in the best way for locals. She asked Mishan for her thoughts on the economic opportunities her columns foster, as well as the downside of regulars no longer being able to afford increased prices. Mishan acknowledged the issue. She said she’s written about places and seen them close because of rising rents. She wondered aloud if her column created “pressure” on the market. However, she said, she tends to focus on places so far from central Manhattan that only the diehard food fans show up and that’s good for owners who aren’t making that much money.

“It’s such a benefit for people who run the restaurant to have that crowd, even though they’ve lost their regulars,” she said. “I feel that it’s in their [the owner’s]  court, they need to make people feel welcome and find a way. I don’t begrudge them the higher prices because it’s subsistence.”

Many of New York’s immigrant chefs, she said, have fled war, persecution, and famine. She noted that as many middle-class New Yorkers abandoned the city during the 1970s, they were replaced by 850,000 immigrants who called New York home. The number of sidewalk vendors doubled between 1979 and 1982, she said.

“The government was championing free trade around the globe, but New Yorkers were living it on the curb and at the corner bodega … and we still are.”

What helped him recover, it turned out, was emotions, in particular the sadness and grief he had buried. Once he learned to fully experience them and manage them, he eventually recovered—making friends, making changes in his life, and feeling alive again.

Hendel wrote an article about the technique she had used, and something happened. Published in The New York Times in 2015, it rose to the top of the most-emailed list, prompted a flood of appreciative emails, and drew the interest of a literary agent.

At his urging, she wrote a book that was published this month, titled It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self (Random House and Penguin UK, 2018).

The book describes techniques developed more than 20 years ago by the psychologist and author Diana Fosha, Ph.D., to help people mentally engage with latent emotions and move past traumas that may be stubbornly holding them back.

So far, no one has written a book about these techniques for the general public, Hendel said.

Judging by the response, people are ready for one.

“Depression is a huge problem,” along with treatment-resistant depression, so it strikes a chord when readers learn that “it’s not always depression, that there’s something at the root of it,” she said.

Harnessing Core Emotions

The daughter of a former guidance counselor and a psychiatrist, Hendel grew up with the “mind over matter” idea that emotions are to be mastered “with intellectual insight,” as she puts it in the book.

But in 2004, after earning her master’s degree in social work at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service and preparing to earn her psychoanalysis certification, she learned of a different approach—accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy, or AEDP.

She saw Diana Fosha present AEDP at a conference and wanted to start practicing it as soon as possible. It calls for learning to viscerally experience core emotions—anger, sadness, joy—that are blocked by shame or other defenses. It reflects a view of emotions as biological forces that, when stymied, throw the body and mind out of balance. By showing people how to continually access these emotions, Hendel felt, AEDP could help them permanently heal.

The book is a jargon-free guide to AEDP techniques for anyone. “Basically, I just want to teach [readers]about emotions” and make them less scary and less mysterious, she said.

In the book, she tells of patients (with their consent) who are struggling with social anxiety, irritability, feelings of depression, and other troubles. Typically, patients are encouraged to notice any faint physical reactions—a tightness in the diaphragm, a clenching of fists, a tear in the eye—that signal core emotions linked to trauma, such as childhood neglect or a parent’s verbal abuse.

They learn to get comfortable with the experience of these emotions, exploring them with curiosity and compassion. The emotions may have been buried under shame, guilt, and anxiety during childhood—because of the emotions’ frightening power, and because it was less scary to blame themselves for what they were feeling than to find fault with the adults they were dependent on.

During therapy, a patient might imagine speaking to her childhood self and offering comfort, or rebuking whoever inflicted the trauma. Anger or harsh words may flow, along with copious tears, as with the patient anonymously described in Hendel’s New York Times article.

The goal is to unblock the emotions by growing comfortable with how they physically feel. Patients can also unblock positive core emotions like joy and excitement and gain confidence.

The Change Triangle, Hendel’s own visual model for the AEDP process, is centered on core emotions and the openhearted, authentic self they can help bring out when patients learn to access and control them.

Treatment times vary. Change can come quickly, or it can take years, Hendel said.

“What we’re ultimately trying to do is effect brain change,” she said. “People come to me that have been in traditional talk therapy, and they say, ‘I’m doing talking, I know everything, I have insight, but I still have the same feelings. The same things are triggering me again and again and again.’”

“That’s why AEDP is healing,” she said. “It changes the triggers.”

“It’s Not Always Depression”

The book’s title reflects a view that what seems like depression—“a word that we’ve put on a constellation of symptoms,” Hendel said—may in fact be a more specific problem that stems from an experience that can be addressed.

“The idea is that it’s not an end; [depression is]the beginning of a story,” she said. “It’s the tip of an iceberg, and what’s underneath it is the brain and the mind and why it’s reacting that way. And you change the brain through working at these deep levels of emotion.”

She hopes the book will help create broader awareness of how to manage emotions, something she considers to be a public health issue.

“Emotions, when they’re blocked, cause stress on the mind and body, and we can heal by releasing the emotional energy that’s blocked,” she said. “If we had a culture that taught emotion education from the get-go, we would have all these skills to manage emotions and work with our thoughts in a constructive way.”

In a lecture and Q&A with NPR arts correspondent Lynn Neary, TMC ’71, Cotter took listeners on a decidedly spiritual journey on how he developed his views on art, though he said he prefers the term “emotional” over “spiritual.” The sapientia et doctrina event was sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture.

Cotter said that several religious motifs surfaced as high marks in his experiences with art. He said the highlight of a recent trip to Mexico City was not the galleries, but seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe–as much to observe fellow pilgrims as to view the work of art itself.

Cotter contextualized his views by providing a candid look at his background and growing-up experience. Born in Weston, Massachusetts, not far from where Henry David Thoreau lived on Walden Pond (and where Cotter’s father on worked as a lifeguard), Cotter said the writer became his early hero.

“[Thoreau] liked to be alone, loved animals,” he said. “He was taking the act of seeing and describing very personally and seriously.”

Cotter’s mother read Emily Dickenson to him and his sister at the dinner table on nights when his father worked late, he said. On Saturdays his parents dropped him off at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where he explored on his own everything from the Egyptian mummies to the Netherlandish landscapes to the Japanese galleries, which were “remote and ultra-quiet.”

“Museums in the 1950s were not like today,” he said. “This was before blockbusters and before museums became primarily social spaces,” he said. “No one was saying to me, ‘Look at this because it’s great, but never mind that.’ … I got a sense of a side-by-side existence of all kinds of art from many different cultures. And just as important I got a sense of the equal value of those cultures. I think because of that immersion no art has ever felt foreign to me.”

He said that as he got older he began to seek out the art of Africa, Native America, and the Pre-Columbian art of South America, found in “ethnology” museums, but not in art museums. That separation from so-called “‘real art’ mirrored American racial politics at that time.”

At Harvard College, the English literature major fulfilled a science requirement by taking an anthropology course called “Primitive Art,” he said, at a time when the study of such art was rare.

“I loved everything about it,” he said of his college anthropology course.

He also recalled the first time he saw “art that ‘did’ something”—a video of a masquerade dance in Mali. He said well before performance art “became a vanguard art here,” it existed in other cultures.

After college, Cotter said he got a hospital job as an orderly. That visceral experience left him with a sense of mortality which profoundly influenced the way he looks at art. It clarified his affinity for art that deals in life and death, such as religious artifacts, African sculpture, or art from the AIDS epidemic.

He came to New York City in the 1970s, when the South Bronx was producing significant strides in art through hip-hop and graffiti, he said. He lived downtown where he “cobbled together a freelance base” to begin writing about art.

In the early 1980s, when “caution replaced creativity” in the art scene, a show at the Japan Society inspired Cotter to visit Japan, touring monasteries and escaping the growing commercialization of the art world.

“That trip was almost entirely about looking at great sculptures,” he said. “Sculptures were used as acts of worship. People left fresh food for the images, and I could see how much they were loved.”

He said the trip confirmed for him that, while he may not have a religious temperament, he did have a “pilgrim’s temperament.” On returning to New York, he got a job at the City University of New York’s computer center. The position allowed him to take graduate courses at Hunter College. Later, he attended Columbia University.

“Graduate school was completely different,” he said. “You’re doing something you want to do as opposed to something you’re supposed to do.”

He delved into the art of ancient Greece, the art of Islam, and of Turkey. He recalled one teacher who showed an hour and a half slideshow depicting mosques from Africa to Queens, New York. She said very little during the presentation, which ended with an image of an elderly couple seated on a sofa.

“These are my parents,” Cotter said she told the students; by showing the image after so many artistic treasures, his teacher reminded students of the humanness of art that sometimes gets lost in a gallery setting.

“Art is made by people,” he said.

Sorkin, the author Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (Viking, 2009), headlined the Gabelli School of Business’ International Business Week

His talk, which preceded a lengthy question-and-answer session, dwelled on how he constructed a narrative for his book, which was recently issued in paperback and has been adapted into a film that will air in May on HBO.

The major question surrounding the federal bailout of the nation’s largest banks and the rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008 has always been, “How bad was it really?” Sorkin said.

“I thought it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad it truly was. Frankly, I’m not sure that all of us appreciate how bad it was, either,” he said.

“Some of us wonder, ‘Did we need to spend all this [bailout]money? What did the other side of the cliff look like? Had we not taken all these actions and steps, would it have worked out?’”

After Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and A.I.G. accepted an $85 billion bailout from the federal government, Sorkin said the government’s big concern was the stability of financial services giant Morgan Stanley followed by global investment firm Goldman Sachs.

“The view was that if Morgan Stanley went and Goldman Sachs went, General Electric (GE) would file for bankruptcy that next Friday,” he said. “It’s a company that I would not have thought of for half a second.”

GE was vulnerable because, at the time, its fortunes were heavily tied up with its banking arm, GE Capital.

“When you think about a global company with hundreds of thousands of employees around the world going bankrupt, the implications are almost too big to imagine,” Sorkin said.

According to a model that a former Federal Reserve staffer passed to Sorkin after Too Big to Fail was published, some thought that national unemployment in the three years after the dissolution of these companies would be 24.6 percent.

In addition, Sorkin learned that one of the biggest owners of McDonald’s franchises nationwide was concerned that—because of Bank of America’s troubles—he might not be able to pay his 20,000 employees. So the danger was real.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the crisis was that although it seemed to happen suddenly, many people at big banks and regulatory agencies saw it coming and said nothing.

“There were a lot of people, very sadly, who saw this train barreling down the track, knew what was happening, and didn’t tell us,” he said.

Take the $700-billion Toxic Assets Relief Program (TARP), for instance, which was unveiled by then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in the fall of 2008.

“It seemed like the bailout plan had been created in haste to rescue the system. But we found out later that TARP wasn’t written in September 2008. It was written months earlier and presented to [Federal Reserve Chairman] Ben Bernanke on April 15,” Sorkin said.

“If you look at the public statements that Bernanke and Paulson gave on April 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 and through the summer, not only will you never hear about TARP, they were telling us the economy was great and that the problems were contained.”

The reason he said, was that Bernanke, Paulson and Timothy Geithner—who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—did not want to cause a crisis of confidence. Before Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were allowed to transform into bank holding companies to save themselves, Sorkin noted that Geithner turned down similar requests from the CEOs of Lehman Brothers and A.I.G.

“The reason, oddly enough, was that Geithner believed making them bank holding companies would cause people to say, ‘Something is wrong with the system here,’” he said.

The one thing we learned from all of this, Sorkin said, is that it all stemmed from a crisis of confidence, and much of what happened was no different than a classic “bank run.”

His take on the future was grim, noting that the United States has to create 11 million jobs to return to 2004 levels of productivity.

Banks that were considered “too big to fail” in 2008 are now “too big to fail, squared.” Indeed, the bonuses awarded to upper management are bigger than ever.

Of the recently passed Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, he said that the provision to ensure higher capital requirements was the lone bright spot.

“It’s actually the only thing that can truly save our economy from having another crisis,” he said. “For a period of time, the banks were keeping $1 in the bank, for every $30 that they were gambling with. That was the problem. Ultimately, this book could have been one page. It’s about one thing: debt and leverage.”

Sorkin, the author of Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves (Viking, 2009) will speak at the McGinley Ballroom.

Too Big to Fail, which details the backroom machinations behind the financial crisis of 2008, won the Gerald Loeb best business book of the year award in 2010. It is also the source for a currently in production HBO film starring Paul Giamatti as U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

International Business Week also features the following events:

Meet International Students at Fordham: Sunday, February 6 at 4 p.m. McGinley Ballroom

Social Business Fair Trade Market: Wednesday, Feb. 9 at 4 p.m. O’Keefe Commons

Global Etiquette Dinner: Thursday, Feb. 10 at 6 p.m. Tognino Hall, Duane Library

For more information and registration, visit the Gabelli School of Business blog.

Nicholas D. Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and New York Timescolumnist, discussed his latest book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (Knopf, 2009), co-authored with his wife, correspondent Sheryl WuDunn, to a packed Pope Auditorium at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus as part of the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture Series on Thursday, Jan. 13. After an introduction by Scott Lurding, Phi Beta Kappa’s associate secretary, and Vincent C. Alfonso, Ph.D., associate dean in the Graduate School of Education (GSE), Kristof took the audience back to rural China in 1990, where he wrote about the difficulty of keeping one 13-year-old girl, a star pupil, in school in the tiny village of Yejuao.

Dai Manju, the eldest child, had to drop out of school because her family couldn’t afford the annual $13 in tuition (which included room and board). The per capita income in the Dabie Mountains in central China was less than $60 a year, and Dai Manju’s family of five was much poorer than average, living in a bare mud hut, Kristof reported at the time.

“New York Times readers were very generous. Once we ran Dai Manju’s picture on the front page we were deluged with $13 checks,” he said ruefully.

But there was also a $10,000 donation, a vast sum in rural China, courtesy of a clerical error by Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, which dropped a decimal point on a $100 donation and mistakenly sent the school $10,000 instead (“the bank manager was another Phi Beta Kappa,” Kristof joked). When he contacted the bank about the error and “let slip the topic of my next article,” they gracefully made a $9,900 donation. After that, the village school was able to educate girls at no charge.

“So many girls had to drop out of school because parents didn’t want to pay $13 in school fees for a daughter,” he said. “You should be educated not by your chromosomes, but by your intellectual capacity.”

In much of the developing world girls are not valued as much as boys, according to Kristof. “There isn’t enough food, so you starve your daughter to feed your son.”

Kristof also told the audience about buying two women out of the Cambodian sex trade and helping to set them up in business with NGOs. “One cost $150, and the other just over $200,” he said. “I got receipts. When you get a receipt for another human being in the 21st century, it really brings home the dire circumstances for women.”

He called the oppression of women and girls “the moral challenge of our time,” akin to the problem of slavery in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th century. But despite the often bleak circumstances of the women he’s written about, Kristof is hopeful that their lives can be changed, and that empowering and educating women is a way to transform their societies.

“Men are more likely to spend money on instant gratification,” Kristof said. “On alcohol, cigarettes, gambling and prostitutes. Women are more likely to spend money on their children and on education.” He said if we can shift just a small percentage of income from men to women, we can improve conditions in the developing world.

On a purely pragmatic level, if you want to chip away at global poverty and improve global security, you should invest in women’s education, he said, which will pay enormous dividends. “Women are not the problem, women are the solution,” he said.

He is optimistic about effecting change, not least because helping to do so can transform the lives of the donors. “We have found out that if donors get involved, if they do more than give money, they are uplifted, too,” Kristof said. “When one engages in a cause larger than oneself, it gives one a new perspective.”

The former bureau chief for the Times in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, Kristof’s column appears in the paper on Sundays and Thursdays. He and WuDunn are the first married couple to win a Pulitzer in journalism for their coverage of China as New York Times correspondents. They also received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and the George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards, among other prizes.

The Phi Beta Kappa lecture was hosted by the Graduate School of Education, which held a reception and book signing for Kristof following his talk. The lecture series was established to provide Phi Beta Kappa members with opportunities for intellectual fellowship and to allow the society to participate in a national dialogue about important issues of the day.

Fordham University in the Bronx can also hold its own. The eight students who ended up with E6 of Martyrs’ Court in 1983 learned that they had inherited the third-floor suite once occupied by Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo, later known as Alan Alda. As big fans of his hit television show “M.A.S.H.,” they thought it only fitting to hold a party the night of the final episode with makeshift tenting and drinks poured from an improvised still. Everyone from the BBC to The New York Post was there to chronicle it.

“I went once to the University of Virginia and they had Edgar Allan Poe’s old dorm room blocked off with glass, so you could see it but not use it anymore,’’ said Joe Trentacosta, a host of the farewell party. Being able to live in the famous room, he said, “makes you feel more connected to the school.”

Anyone wanting to live in Mr. Alda’s room now would need an engineer’s help to find it. Seven double rooms numbered L200 to L206 have displaced the eight-man suite on the floor plan. But the shared bathroom — L207 on the map (pdf) — and old plumbing are intact.

(There is no point even looking for traces of the heartthrob from Fordham’s class of 1977, Denzel Washington. University officials confirm that he commuted.)

The article by Alison Leigh Cowan and David Walter will likely appear in tomorrow’s (Friday, May 28) print edition, as well.

The project grew out of Alda’s longtime involvement with the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers, which he hosted with ample curiosity, wit and good humor from 1993 until the show was canceled—much to the disappointment of its loyal viewers—in 2005.

In the new documentary, Alda travels to three continents to interview leading archeologists, primatologists and neuroscientists in an attempt to discover what makes humans unique among species, how a tiny difference in our genes, for example, makes a huge difference in who we are and what we can do.

“I don’t try to explain their work to anyone,” Alda recently told The New York Times, “I just try to understand it.”

He also participates in the research; in one episode, for example, he submits to a highly detailed scan of his brain, which, we’re pleased to know, “is in remarkably good shape for a man in his early 70s.”

The series airs at 8 p.m. on three consecutive Wednesdays: Jan. 6, 13 and 20.

“We can’t promise we’ll find the human spark,” Alda says in a video introduction posted on the project’s website. “But we can promise that looking for it will be fascinating. And it may change the way you think about who you are.”

“This idea that people who write for a paper like [The New York Times] are not suppose to have ideas of their own, or if they do they are suppose to keep them to themselves and somehow that is a good thing, I don’t believe that,” Navasky said. “In fact, I believe, ironically, one of the arguments for journals like The Nation or National Review or The Weekly Standard is that the reader is put on notice about the values that inform the journal that they are reading. So [readers]have a better chance, if they don’t like those values, to look at them more closely. Whereas, if they are told …  that ‘we’re not ideological; there are no values that inform what we do’ they are not put on notice, and to me that is not good for the democratic dialogue.”

Navasky, who was referred to in a New York Times book review as “the avatar of the left,” spent 27 years at the center of that democratic dialogue as the editor and publisher of The Nation, from which he retired in 2005. It is his long love affair with feisty, opinionated magazines (he started his own satirical magazine,Monocle, while still a law student at Yale University) and The Nation, in particular, that animates much of his memoir.

The Sperber award, which was established by a gift from Liselotte Sperber in memory of her daughter Ann M. Sperber, author of a Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Edward R. Murrow, is presented to a writer who has demonstrated exceptional achievement in writing and research and has published a biography in the field of journalism or media studies.

In discussing “The Role of Economics in the Political Arena,” Krugman told the audience that filled McNally Amphitheatre that the president’s plan is too risky, shifting the nation’s fiscal safety net for retirees from a guaranteed payment to an expectation based on stock market performance.

Currently, the average retiree receives annual social-security payments equal to 35 percent  of their income at retirement. Under the private-account proposal expected from Pres. Bush, that guaranteed payment could drop as low as 8 percent for those people who shifted the maximum contribution into a private account.

Krugman admits that social security has financial problems, but the situation is not dire, he said. What many people don’t realize is that the Congressional Budget Office has calculated that social security will be able to pay full guaranteed benefits through 2052, at which point benefits would be reduced to 81 percent. Krugman said it’s possible that a few technical adjustments could address that situation and blames the media for not clearly laying out the problem.

“Broadcast media buys into the crisis idea and is more hostile to social security than the average Republican member of Congress,” said Krugman. “If [private accounts]happen, it will be because the public has not been properly informed.”

The Hazen Polsky Foundation Lecture Series will bring two prominent figures in business and economics to Fordham each year that enhance the student experience as well as enlighten faculty and alumni.