“We have some great examples of what life really was like for the ancients,” said Michael Sheridan, a member of the Class of 2018 double-majoring in history and art history, and one of the 18 students who took the class. “Most universities don’t have anything like this, so we really are lucky to have this collection here.”

The exhibit ran from May 6 through August 15. Students selected the objects—including imperial portraits, luxury household items, coins, and painted pottery—from the 260-plus antiquities in the museum. They researched the objects’ history, wrote the text to accompany them, and helped design the display in a newly created gallery at the museum.

One of the students in the class, Michael Ceraso, even teamed up with another Fordham student, Michael Gonzales, to develop an app for the exhibit that ran on three iPods in the gallery.

“They were involved every step of the way,” said Jennifer Udell, PhD, curator of university art and the seminar’s instructor, who realized her longstanding idea for the project thanks to a gift from Fordham Trustee Fellow Robert F. Long, GABELLI ’63, and his wife, Katherine G. Long.

01
Askos (flask) in the form of a reclining satyr
Roman, ca. 1st century C.E.
Bronze, l: 5¼ in. (13.3 cm)

02
Oil lamp inscribed “The light of Christ shines for all”
Byzantine, ca. 5th century C.E.
Terracotta, l (from handle to nozzle): 3¼ in. (8.25 cm)

03
Terracotta transport amphora
Greek or Roman, ca. 5th century B.C.E. to 1st century C.E.
Terracotta, h: 27 in. (68.5 cm)

“This jar served a concrete, utilitarian purpose from the time it was made until the day that it finally fell prey to the waves of the wine-dark Mediterranean. The barnacles make for an interesting aesthetic that might grab your attention for a moment or two, but [they also] tell us so much about the perils and realities of life and trade in the ancient Mediterranean.”
—Christopher Boland, Class of 2016, math major and theology minor

04
Patera (shallow bowl) with knob handles
Greek, South Italian, Apulian, red-figure, ca. 340 B.C.E.
Terracotta, d: 22 in. (55.89 cm)

“This particular patera is among the largest objects in the collection, and I, like others, am drawn to this sort of scale. It depicts the Amazonomachy, an ancient battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, a fierce race of warrior women emblematic of ancient feminism and girl power.”
—Maria Victoria Alicia Recinto, Class of 2016, art history and anthropology major

05
Fish plate
Greek, South Italian, Campainian, red-figure, Late Classical, ca. 340 to 320 B.C.E.
Terracotta, d: 6¾ in. (17.1 cm)

“This plate conveys the fisherman in an everyday life. It is easy to envision a small enclave of aquatic-based communities along the Mediterranean coast, coming home after a day at sea, and cooking the day’s catch. It is easy to imagine the smell of mackerel, sea bass, octopus, and other marine delicacies grilled and served on this plate with the pungent dressing of fresh olive oil, the scent carried away on a sea breeze after a hard day’s work.”
—Owen Haffey, Class of 2019, English major

06
Kernos (vase for multiple offerings with mold made figural protomes)
Greek, South Italian, Campanian, Late Classical, ca. late 4th century B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 6¼ in. (15.9 cm)

07
Kylix (drinking cup with stem)
Greek, Attic, Late Archaic, red-figure, ca. 520 to 510 B.C.E.
Attributed to the Painter of Berlin 2268
Terracotta, d: 10½ in. (26.7 cm)

“I’ve always been amused by these dishes and how they’re used as drinking cups. … This finely made image of Dionysus shows him in a lunge gazing back at his own (possibly empty) goblet. When you finish your wine and are faced with the god of wine himself, it seems like a pretty good sign to fill up your kylix again.”
—Emma Cleary, Class of 2016, chemistry major and art history minor

08
Kylix (drinking cup with stem)
Etruscan, Archaic, black-figure, ca. 530 B.C.E.
Terracotta, d: 41/8 in. (10.5 cm)

09
Athenian tetradrachm
Greek, Attic, Classical, 430 to 413 B.C.E.
Silver, d: 7/8 in. (2.2 cm)

“What originally attracted me to this coin was the fact that it featured the portrait of the goddess Athena instead of a historical Greek ruler. This fact led me to wonder about both the representation of mythological figures and the representation of women on coins. … I wonder who might’ve used this coin and what they might’ve bought with it. It’s fascinating to think that we still read this piece of metal as a coin, but it now carries the monetary value of an ancient artifact instead of its original value as a circulated coin.”
—Katie Fredericks, Class of 2016, art history major

10
Coin of Lucilla
Struck under Lucius Verus, ca. 164 to 183, C.E., Roman
Bronze, d: 1¼ in. (3.1 cm)

“Lucilla was a Roman empress who was executed after she made a failed attempt to assassinate her brother, who was the Roman emperor at the time. Of course the coin was made before she fell out of favor, but how has it survived this long? I assumed the Romans would’ve melted down many coins depicting Lucilla in order to reuse the bronze as they so often did, and I think it’s amazing that we get the chance to get up close to this ancient scandal.”
—Katie Fredericks, Class of 2016, art history major

11
Lebes gamikos (wedding vase)
Greek, South Italian, Apulian, Late Classical, red-figure, ca. 340 B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 14¼ in. (36.2 cm)

“One of my favorite things to do when I’m interacting with ancient artifacts is to imagine the stories of the objects and the people who used them. How were [they] like me and how were they different? Who has touched and used this object? What was the wedding like? Was it a perfect ceremony or did anything go disastrously or hilariously wrong? What was the couple like? Were they in love or was the marriage motivated by other factors? Asking such questions really brings these objects to life for me and lets me look at them in a whole new way.”
—Sarah Homer, Class of 2016, English major and music minor

12
Engraved mirror
Etruscan, Late Classical, 4th century B.C.E.
Bronze, h: 11 in. (28 cm)

“The engraving on the mirror shows three goddesses: Uni, Turan, and Mea, whose Greek names are Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, respectively. Although the goddesses have Etruscan names, they are the same ones involved in the incident which incited the Trojan War. According to the myth, three goddesses were attending the nuptials of Peleas and Thetis, when a wedding crasher, Eris, threw a golden apple with the label ‘to the fairest.’ The goddesses fought over this apple and thus over who was the most beautiful. So the fact that this engraving is placed on a mirror is very interesting, because it is an object of vanity.”
—Jane Parisi, Class of 2019, classical languages major

13
Torso of Herakles
Roman, Imperial, ca. 1st to 2nd century C.E.
Marble, h: 15¼ in. (38.7 cm)

“When I was younger, the legend of Herakles was always one of my favorite tales from antiquity, and this and the presence of drapery are what initially attracted me to this figure. I am taking my fashion minor at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus and, as a student of fashion, the classic Greek drapery and the beautiful form of the sculpture called to me as soon as I saw it.”
—Hans Singer, Class of 2018, art history major and fashion studies minor

14
Hydria (water jar)
Greek, Attic, Late Archaic, black-figure, ca. 520 to 510 B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 19 in. (48.2 cm)

“This is truly a prime example of high-quality Attic vases. The scenes are brilliant and reflect the tendency of vase painters to encapsulate an entire myth through just a few images. Here we have the most popular myth: the 12 labors of Herakles. … Viewers are shown the beginning and the end of Herakles’ story. It’s one complete beautiful cycle.”
—Masha Bychkova, Class of 2018, double major in classical languages and classical civilizations, with a minor in visual arts

15
Portrait of the Emperor Caracalla as a youth
Roman, Severan, 198 to 204 C.E.
Bronze, h: 11½ in. (27 cm)

“I was first attracted to this portrait because it’s bronze, which is rare in ancient sculpture, and also because there are few portraits of Caracalla as a child. It’s not just a portrait of a child but also effectively a portrait of a mass murderer, a delusional religious fanatic, and a mentally ill person. At the same time, it is a portrait of the emperor who would become responsible for the bath houses in Rome and the Edict of 212, which granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. This sculpture gives insight into the human condition. This is a man who lived thousands of years before our time, yet embodies the same emotionality, conflicts, and mortality of humans in the 21st century: family power struggles, envy and insecurity, murderous rage, religious fanaticism and superstition, and celebrity obsession.”
—Olivia Ling, Class of 2017, classical languages major

16
Portrait of a Severan woman
Roman, Severan, ca. 220 to 222 C.E.
Marble, h: 21 7/8 in. (55.4 cm)

“I was initially attracted to the portrait bust of the Severan woman because of my background in working with Roman imperial commemorative statues that were meant to honor prominent societal women. These statues were representative of the changing atmosphere in ancient times, one in which women possessed the ability to honor their status in society as much as their male counterparts. I was also interested in the statue because of its current location in the museum, since it’s right next to the entrance and it’s one of the first subjects visitors see.”
—Simek Shropshire, Class of 2017, art history and English double major

17
Cylindrical krater (wide mouth vessel) and lid
Etruscan, Archaic, white-on-red ware, ca. 650 B.C.E.
Terracotta, impasto, h: 21 in. (53.3 cm)

18
Ossuary and lid
Etruscan, Archaic, white-on-red ware, ca. 580 B.C.E.
Terracotta, impasto, h: 16 in. (40.6 cm)

19 to 23
Antefixes in the form of a kneeling kore (maiden) and of women’s heads
Etruscan, Late Archaic to Early Classical, ca. 500 to 480 B.C.E.
Terracotta, h: 11 in. to 20½ in. (28 cm to 52 cm)

“These women represent maenads, who are the servants of the god of food and wine, Dionysus. It is said that Dionysus put these women under a drunken spell and, as a result, they became praised and protective, which is the role they play as they watch those who enter temples. This would bother most feminists, because it indicates a man’s power over women. However, I think that they exude the power and fury of women. Their intense eyes and beauty would force anyone to enter with caution and reverence.”
—Madeline Locher, Class of 2018, art history major

24
Ram’s head drinking cup
Greek, South Italian, Apulian,
mold and wheel-made, Late Classical,
5th to 4th century B.C.E.
Terracotta, l: 7½ in. (19 cm)

“The beauty of [this cup]lies in its simplicity. It’s terracotta and unpainted, and to me this draws all the attention to the ram. … If you notice, there’s no way to put this down if it’s filled with anything, so you best be drinking all night!”
—Christos Orfanos, Class of 2018, economics and classical civilization major, and marketing minor

A Fordham scholar shines new light on Christianity’s formative years in Syria, where Islamic State militants are looting and seeking to destroy the country’s past.

To get a sense of how the earliest Christians approached their faith, just look at the art they left behind. In January 1932, an international team of archaeologists unearthed several frescoes in Dura-Europos, an ancient walled city along the banks of the Euphrates River in southeastern Syria, near the Iraq border. The paintings—including some of the earliest-known depictions of Jesus—had adorned the walls of what scholars soon realized was the oldest known house of Christian worship in the world.

Established around A.D. 240, when Christians were still a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, the church didn’t thrive for long. By 256, a Sasanian army had destroyed the border city, leaving the site abandoned for centuries.

A Cultural Heritage at Risk

By the 1930s, Dura-Europos had come to be known as the “Pompeii of the Syrian desert.” In addition to the church, archaeologists found evidence of a multilingual, multicultural society. They discovered one of the world’s oldest synagogues, temples to Greek and Roman gods, shrines to Sumerian and Syrian goddesses, and many well-preserved artifacts of daily life.

Today, however, the city’s ruins lie in territory controlled by Islamic State militants, who loot archaeological sites to generate revenue and attract attention. They’ve also put Christians and others in mortal peril as Syria’s civil war drags on.

For much of the past five years, Michael Peppard, Ph.D., associate professor of theology at Fordham, was working on a book about the excavation and interpretation of the Dura-Europos church—a site he was unable to visit due to the ongoing war. “Until about a year ago, the main question [people asked me] was, ‘What new is there to say about such an old discovery?’” he wrote in America magazine last January, when his book, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria, was published by Yale University Press. “But now the first question everyone asks is, ‘What has happened to the site—did they … destroy it?’”

The answer, he wrote, is “both no and yes.” Many artifacts were removed decades ago, and several panels of the church frescoes are on display at Yale. But satellite photos have shown extensive looting, “which all but destroys [the site] for future archaeological purposes.”

The Cradle of Christianity

The cultural and human tragedies of the war were never far from Peppard’s mind as he worked on the book, which he dedicated to “the people of Syria, the cradle of Christianity.” In the book, he transports readers to Christianity’s formative years, combining theology and art history to prove that there are, in fact, new things to say about “such an old discovery.” He makes the case for a completely different understanding of several images from the site, most notably the image of a woman at a well.

Since the 1930s, almost everyone has assumed that she is the Samaritan woman from the Gospel of John, and that she symbolizes baptism, as represented by the “living water” of the well. Peppard contends that the painting is actually a portrayal of the Annunciation, “when Mary is told she is going to bear a son as a virgin.” He notes that Byzantine images of that scene, though produced much later, bear “an arresting formal resemblance” to the figure from Dura-Europos.

“If the image is the Virgin Mary, then not only is it probably the earliest datable image of Mary, but it’s also going to change the way we interpret the artistic program of this church,” Peppard said. The image of women processing, wearing white veils and carrying torches, has likewise been misidentified as a funeral procession, he said, when in fact it’s a wedding procession.

The Hope of a Spiritual Rebirth

Taken together, the paintings illustrate that these Christians emphasized empowerment, healing, and marriage more than death and resurrection. This isn’t surprising, he said, because “in this earliest Christian church, we don’t have any imagery of the resurrection. I think they certainly believed in it, and that it was part of their faith in who Jesus was and what it meant to be a Christian, but it’s a matter of emphasis.” For Peppard, the frescoes are ultimately about the “hope of new spiritual birth,” particularly in light of the ongoing war in Syria.

They’re “much more than museum pieces,” he wrote last January in a New York Times article on his research. “They illuminate a people and heritage that need salvation.”

Although the collages are striking, the sites themselves seem unremarkable: A hair salon, a burger joint, street corners, churches, and other locales bear little to no trace of their fraught past. Some of the titles, however, underscore Ruble’s concern with the “ways we remember—and forget—the charged events of our country’s turbulent history of race relations,” she writes. A Jersey City sidewalk scene, for instance, is called Everyone here is aware of what has happened but they also want to forget as quickly as possible.

Ruble, who has taught in Fordham’s visual arts department since 2001, created the collages over the past few years. She first showed them last fall at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and again this past winter at the Foley Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She spoke with FORDHAM magazine via email in April.

As you researched these sites, did you learn anything that surprised you or ran counter to your sense of New Jersey’s place in U.S. history?

Oh my gosh, yes! I’d always known that the North’s relationship to slavery was a complicated one, but one thing that really surprised me was that New Jersey was known as the “slave state of the North.” In 1846, it enacted an abolition law that freed all black children born after its passage but designated the state’s remaining slaves as “apprentices for life.” Eighteen of these “apprentices” still remained in 1860, making New Jersey the last Northern state to enslave people. I was also surprised by just how few white Northerners supported the Underground Railroad.

Did you have a hard time finding and getting access to safe-house locations?

It’s ironic—in its day, the Underground Railroad was a highly unpopular movement among Northern whites, and also highly illegal, of course. Participants had to operate in secrecy. Today, on the other hand, it’s held up as evidence of our country’s inherent morality, and everyone with a trap door or passageway in the basement likes to speculate that their home was part of the effort to help fugitives escape. I didn’t have a hard time finding or getting access to the safe-house locations—what was harder was actually confirming that they were genuine. 

Which riot locations did you depict in the series?

The state had five major race riots—in Jersey City, Paterson, Newark, Plainfield, and Asbury Park. They all happened in the 1960s, except for Asbury Park, which took place on Independence Day, 1970. When I first began this series, I’d planned to depict the place where the riots “started.” But that quickly grew complicated as I got further into my research. Was the “start” of the riot the street corner where the first brick or Molotov cocktail was thrown? Or was it where the precipitating event occurred—for instance, where the Newark police arrested and brutally beat a black cab driver who’d done nothing more than pass a double-parked squad car? Identifying where something supposedly began is freighted with judgments about guilt and responsibility. Looking at the longer arc of history, you can easily make the case that all of the riots actually began with the original violence of slavery—there’s a direct line from slavery to Jim Crow to the uprisings of the civil rights era, which were a response to centuries of horrific brutality.

Tell me about Everyone here is aware of what has happened but they also want to forget as quickly as possible. Why did you choose that title for the piece?

All of the pieces that depict riot sites are titled with sentences taken from contemporaneous newspaper reports of the incidents. That particular sentence struck me not only as having an obvious connection to the feelings of the time but also as symbolizing how many have come to view the uprisings of the 1960s, 50 years later—as shameful events better left out of the history books because they threaten the dominant narrative of our country as a land of opportunity and freedom. 

Why are the safe-house locations called Untitled with the name of the town in parentheses?

I left the Underground Railroad sites untitled to allude to the secrecy that shrouded them in their day. I thought a lot about the idea of silence while making this series, and how silence has many different connotations. In the context of the Underground Railroad, silence was used as a tool of protection. But there’s also silence—or more accurately, silencing—that occurs in the context of oppression. Martin Luther King referred to the riots of the civil rights era as “the language of the unheard.” And finally there’s the silence of the landscape itself, which swallows the secrets of its past with every big-box store and parking lot that’s laid down on historically significant ground.

You took the title of your series from the 1965 Flannery O’Connor short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Why did you use those words to unite the collages you created?

These places, both the Underground Railroad sites and the race riot sites, were about rising—rising up, rising against—and about convergence, in both cooperation and conflict. [O’Connor’s story is] about an altercation between a white woman and black woman riding a bus in the South shortly after the desegregation of the transportation system. The fact that the story is about race relations—and about the complicated relationship between forward and backward movement—just underscored the fact that it was the right title for my series. 

The title isn’t original to O’Connor. She took it from the Jesuit scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote about spiritual evolution. Do you feel you’ve transformed the title in some way with your work?

I haven’t studied Teilhard in as much depth as I’d like to, but my understanding is that he believed that creation was not a singular event but rather an ongoing development—that evolution was a spiritual and moral progression toward a point associated with Christ. I think O’Connor recognized that we are only partway through that progression toward convergence with Christ, and I think her story is about the messiness of that trajectory. My adopting of her title 50 years later is not so much a transformation of its meaning as it is an accounting of our progress. How much closer are we to Teilhard’s convergence? Perhaps not as close as we should be. But I don’t see this strictly as a condemning fact. I see it as a call to rise to everything we as a nation have claimed to believe in. As a call to keep struggling toward grace.

You’ve written that the collages depict a “present that’s unmoored from its past but never perfectly free from it.” Is that a good thing? Should we be free from the past? Or have you tried to bring about a kind of artistic convergence of past and present?

I’m tempted to say, yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. But actually I think the collages do just the opposite—they talk about our disconnect from the past. Or maybe they do both. In the course of making this series, I’ve thought a lot about remembering and forgetting, and when each is “better.” Let’s for a second assume that the entire nation could completely forget our history. That we all woke up tomorrow with amnesia. We would presumably recognize difference in skin tone, but what would we make of it? It would be an interesting experiment—maybe we’d all get along better, maybe not.

As a white woman, I’ve also thought a lot about the implications of looking so closely at white-initiated violence against black communities and individuals. Does this focus just ossify modes of oppression and perception that still exist? Does it suppress stories about black achievement and triumph? Or is it a critically needed acknowledgment of the white community’s wrongdoing? An attempt to take responsibility for the past and move forward, in whatever way that may mean?

Has the Black Lives Matter movement influenced your work or your thinking about this project?

I started this series a year before the events in Ferguson, well before the Black Lives Matter movement. Although I came to the series through my earlier interest in conflict in general, the project obviously immediately became one about past and contemporary race relations. It was a subject that wasn’t dominating the national conversation in the same way it is now, and the series was my own small attempt to open up that conversation. The Black Lives Matter movement has moved the conversation forward in much more effective, widespread ways, of course. Last year I participated in a march in New York City for Eric Garner. Along with about a hundred other people, I laid down in a street near Penn Station. After two years of visiting past riot sites on my own, in a very solitary way, it was an incredibly moving experience to be among hundreds with a collective voice strong enough to bring the city to a screeching halt. It felt like stopping the heart of the city and pushing the blood in a new direction, toward extremities that hadn’t been receiving enough of it. 

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson described your collages as being “deadpan cool” but conceptually “loaded” and “painfully hot.” Is that hot and cool combo something you wanted to convey?

Definitely. Conceptually, this is a very loaded topic to address. And I’m an artist, not a scholar, on these subjects—it’s not my place to offer any kind of “authoritative” statement. The only way I personally feel comfortable addressing race relations is by looking in a very objective, “deadpan cool” way at how these sites of historical significance have changed over the years. What gets lost? What gets remembered? To what end? The answers to these questions help give us a sense of where we are today and what we need to work toward.  

What would you like viewers to take away from the project?

I’d love for viewers to come away from it looking more closely at everything that surrounds them—being curious about hidden narratives. Areas that are economically depressed are rendered anonymous—or worse, as “dangerous” or “blighted.” Disconnecting communities from their history in this way is a powerful means of perpetuating their oppression. Regardless of where you live, that place has a history. Maybe a Walmart sits on it. Maybe it’s just an empty lot. The present often obliterates the past. But knowing the past may give you a sense of agency you might not have had otherwise. 

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Zero K by Don DeLillo, FCRH ’58 (Scribner)

Don DeLillo’s haunting 16th novel begins as the narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, a mid-30s New Yorker who spends his “days in middling drift,” approaches the Convergence—a mysterious facility in the steppes of southern Kazakhstan, where the dead and dying are cryogenically preserved in anticipation of a time when their minds and bodies can be “restored, returned to life.” Videos of natural and man-made disasters are shown in the facility’s hallways, reminders of what the techno faithful are leaving behind. Jeffrey’s father, Ross, a billionaire financier, is deeply invested in the utopian project. He’s brought his son to the remote facility to say goodbye to Artis, Ross’ terminally ill second wife, before she makes the “transition to the next level.” When Ross informs a skeptical, increasingly angry Jeffrey that he intends to join his wife on the journey, father and son move toward their own fateful convergence—and readers are moved toward a sense of wonder at the fragile beauty of our daily lives amid the “intimate touch of earth and sun.”

“It’s important you understand my goal,” says Calacanis, a veteran tech entrepreneur and an early investor in Uber and other successful startups. “I like winning. You’ve been picked by us out of all the hundreds of companies that applied—and by us, I mean me—because you can win. You are here to win. We’re going to win together.”

Calacanis started Launch to support entrepreneurs and inspire innovation. In addition to the incubator classes, he hosts the annual Launch Festival, a startup conference that draws thousands of attendees. He claims he might cut back on his involvement with the class this year, since he and his wife recently had twin girls (they also have a 6-year-old daughter). But he doesn’t seem to believe it. Just seconds later, he says he’ll probably come to all the sessions. And besides, it hasn’t been a time of cutting back for Calacanis. He also hosts This Week in Startups, a podcast named by several tech sites as one of the best of its kind, and he’ll soon star in a reality TV show he’s co-creating for Harvey Weinstein’s company about—no surprise—startups.

The show will be authentic, he promises, and different from others on entrepreneurship, such as Shark Tank, in that it will focus on how startups are actually created. He’ll personally pick the participants and judges, he says, and the show will help him achieve his goal of becoming the greatest angel investor of all time, helping others build wildly successful companies.

In class, Calacanis advises the entrepreneurs, often lacing his insights with expletives and exclamations. He decries Silicon Valley “tourists” who just want to get rich quick with “apps no one wants!” And he says there used to be too much money in startups, “now there’s no money!” But he tells his students they’re hard workers with skills and a real product, and he says what venture capitalists need to hear is simple: Who are your customers, how much money do they give you, and what’s your profit margin? Grinning broadly, he says it takes less than 30 seconds to make that kind of pitch, “and it’s everything investors want! Anything else is window dressing!”

A few days later, at his Launch offices in the Tenderloin district, Calacanis says there’s a good reason why he seems to be having the time of his life in his class: He is.

Calacanis has been in the tech world a long time. He started the Silicon Alley Reporter back in the mid-1990s and built it from a 16-page newsletter to a glossy magazine of a few hundred pages, becoming a key player in the internet industry as it was taking off in New York City. He not only published and edited the magazine, he delivered it as well, pulling a luggage cart around Manhattan. On the masthead, he listed himself as “Publisher, Editor, and Delivery Boy.”

The New Yorker called him “the kid who hooked up New York’s wired world,” and Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, and other old-media giants sought the insights of the upstart publisher from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with a bartender father and a mom who worked as a nurse. He says it was a heady time. “All of a sudden you get to pick who’s on the cover of the magazine in the hottest technology sector in the history of mankind. There’s billions of dollars at stake, and you have 75 people working for you at the age of 27. For a kid with no power from Brooklyn who had to hop the turnstile, it’s pretty awesome.”

He displayed that kind of hustle getting into Fordham, a story he recounts fondly. With less-than-stellar grades, he knew Fordham was a long shot. But he was determined to go, so he listened to his taekwondo teacher, a Fordham alumnus, who told him to be persistent. Calacanis stayed in touch with an admission officer, bringing him reference letters from teachers and bosses, and showing him his senior year grades, which had risen significantly. Finally, Calacanis says, the admission officer told him he was leaving Fordham, and his last act at the University would be to grant admission to the most promising nontraditional student. When Calacanis told his father, his dad responded by saying that he’d just lost his bar for nonpayment of taxes. Good luck paying for school, he told his son.

After all that work to get in, Calacanis wasn’t going to let not having the tuition stop him. He went to Fordham full time at night and worked multiple jobs—as a barback, a waiter, and a tech in the University’s computer labs. He says he brought that work ethic to his founding of Silicon Alley Reporter. After it folded in the dotcom crash, he co-founded and built Weblogs Inc., a network of blogs supported by advertising. A few years later, in 2005, he sold it to AOL for more than $25 million.

Calacanis has called his investing success “dumb luck.” But as an early investor in Uber, Thumbtack, and other billion- and multimillion-dollar companies, he doesn’t actually believe that. “I say it as a joke to see if people are paying attention,” he says. “When I tell people I got lucky seven times, I’m trying to make a point to them, whether they get it or not, that I’m not lucky, I’m hardworking.”

Back at his Launch offices, Calacanis is summoned to get made up for his podcast. He continues talking as he walks upstairs. Now that he’s in his 40s, and he’s made his money and has a family, he says he’s outgrown his immature impulses to prove that his successes were more than just luck. And he wants to share his advice with a broader audience. Most reality shows are silly, he says, but if done well, they can teach people something about fashion, say, or cooking. He wants to do that for entrepreneurship—and not just for the ratings but for a fame that’s more lasting.

“I don’t need to be a celebrity or get any more press,” he says. “It all goes back to the grand plan to be the best angel investor of all time.”

—Emily Wilson 

Baum landed the summer job and never left. Now he’s the youth program director at Hudson River Community Sailing (HRCS), where he oversees year-round training for students from nine local high schools. 

On one chilly morning in late April, Baum had his hands full. Students on spring break had arrived for a weeklong training program. He was on the phone booking an evening sail for an adult group. Later, he was interviewing a high school senior looking for an internship. “Our goal is to create a learning space for youth and adults,” says Baum, who grew up sailing on Lake Ontario in Rochester. “They are all part of our sailing community.”

HRCS’s $1.2 million operation is supported by a combination of public school funds, private philanthropy, and the annual fees paid by adult sailing students and the group’s 200 adult members. About 150 teens participate in the after-school program, which combines academics with sailing lessons in the spring and fall, and with boatbuilding in the winter. Students learn about the complex marine life in the Hudson, explore the troublesome issue of marine debris, and develop math skills, calculating how the angle and strength of the wind affects the boat as they ply the river alongside sleek cruise ships, speedy ferries, and heavily laden commercial barges. Students can earn high school credit in science, math, and physical education.

The nonprofit’s executive director is Fordham alumnus Robert Burke, FCRH ’88, GSE ’91, who had worked extensively in outdoor youth development at Outward Bound and  the National Outdoor Leadership School when he joined the board of HRCS at its inception in 2008. When founder Bill Bahen stepped down in 2012, the board turned to Burke to take the helm. 

“I like the way HRCS brings a real cross-section of the community together,” Burke says. “And it’s great to give the kids the opportunity to sail a boat in one of the busiest harbors in the world. They have real responsibilities when they sail, and the kids step up.”

Earlier this spring, Burke led a team at the Harlem Yacht Club on City Island in the Bronx, readying HRCS’s fleet of J/24 keelboats for the 2016 sailing season. The group has 13 of the 24-foot boats, which are among the world’s most popular recreational and racing sailboats, and next year expects to add a 40-foot Beneteau, which will allow for more overnight trips for high school students. “Our model is working,” Burke says. “Our students are graduating from high school and going to college. Some even come back to teach with us.”

At the boathouse, the middle school students who arrived for their spring break training program got to work. One group consulted tidal charts to figure out which way the powerful Hudson was flowing that morning. They learned that the tide was coming in, flooding north at as much as 1.9 knots, a key element in planning their sail. Another group learned how to tie a bowline knot, while others worked on a problem about ocean debris, using an international database of ocean currents to determine where a piece of flotsam came from. 

Assisting in the classes was Dawn Jones, a senior at the New York City Museum School on 17th Street. She recalled meeting Baum on her first day of high school three years ago. She was hooked by his talk and signed up for the afterschool program. She also participated in HRCS’s summer internship programs, and now she gets paid to work there. “It’s like a second family for me,” Jones says. “And I just love getting out on the boat in the fall, when you can watch the sunset from the water.”

Sailors have two options when they leave Pier 66. Both directions provide unparalleled views of Manhattan. If you head south toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, there’s Frank Gehry’s cubist delight on 18th Street, the soaring Freedom Tower, and the Statue of Liberty. 

On a late-afternoon sail north, tourists from France, Lebanon, and Germany sailed in view of the Durst Organization’s 43-story tetrahedron at 57th Street, the Trump towers in the West 60s, and the green belt that wraps the shore north of 72nd Street. On the way back to Pier 66, the team took turns at the tiller, trimmed the sails, cranked the sheets to the foresail, and hung tight when the boat heeled in a gust. Then they motored in to the mooring and took down the sails, just as the sun slipped beneath the horizon over Weehawken, New Jersey.

The Fordham connection runs deep at HRCS. Along with Baum and Burke, Arthur Burns, LAW ’69, chairs the nonprofit’s board of directors, which includes Lauren Sheridan, GABELLI ’98, a senior manager at Deloitte. She was recruited to the board two years ago by Burke after she attended HRCS’s annual Sailing for Scholars benefit. Recent Fordham graduate Olin Paine, FCRH ’16, a California native, parlayed his sailing skills into part-time work, teaching in the group’s adult sailing school. 

Burns says that the sport, which he discovered 25 years ago, creates opportunities to inspire teens while teaching them social skills that they’ll need in life. Sailing along the Hudson River also provides an exhilarating recreational pursuit for adults who yearn to feel the power of the wind and observe Manhattan from an entirely new viewpoint. 

Though it’s viewed as an elite sport, Burns says sailing can be a great equalizer. “It doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like—the social labels all get washed away when you get onboard, and you are working toward the same goal,” he says. “There’s nothing else but to get along, talk, and work together. It can be so calm and quiet, and the next thing you know, all hell is breaking loose. You need to always be on your toes, even when you are relaxing. It’s a great life lesson to learn.”

—David McKay Wilson is a columnist for The Journal News and a frequent contributor to this magazine. 

Jeffery Deaver’s law training and deep knowledge of New York City are on display in his 37th novel, the 12th featuring two of his most popular characters. Former fashion model turned NYPD detective Amelia Sachs is hunting a killer. But her usual partner, Lincoln Rhyme, a famed quadriplegic consulting forensic detective, has retired. As Sachs’ case becomes more and more complicated, Rhyme finds he can’t avoid getting pulled into her investigation, and the two must work together to unravel a web of mysterious connections. The characters’ internal witty asides add a lightness to this psychological thriller that takes readers into the terrifying mind of a killer long before learning his identity and his motives.

The latest novel by the “Queen of Suspense” follows budding young New York City TV reporter Delaney Wright as she covers the trial of a wealthy New Jersey widow accused of murdering her husband. While the trial progresses toward a seemingly inevitable guilty verdict, Delaney is preoccupied by her own search for her birth mother as well as her new relationship with Jon, a newspaper reporter investigating a local drug ring. As their individual searches escalate, Delaney’s world seems to shrink. Clark’s latest whodunit weaves together multiple narratives to bring her readers toward a suspenseful and satisfying ending.

After a one-run loss to Saint Joseph’s University in the opening round of the Atlantic 10 tournament in Washington, D.C., on May 13, the Fordham softball team rallied hard, winning four straight games over 32 hours to clinch their fourth consecutive Atlantic 10 championship.

Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation

Timothy Jorgensen is a scientist with a knack for narrative storytelling.

In Strange Glow, he relates the history of human experience with radiation—from William Roentgen’s 1895 discovery of X-rays to the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident—in a style that’s largely free of scientific jargon and full of subtle humor and practical wisdom. He recounts the “hard-won lessons of how radiation helps and harms our health,” focusing not only on pioneering scientists like Roentgen, Thomas Edison, and Marie Curie but also on victims of the Fukushima disaster and the tragic story of the “radium girls,” factory workers who created glow-in-the-dark watch dials by using a fluorescent paint that contained radium.

Finally, and most practically, Jorgensen, a professor of radiation medicine and the director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Program at Georgetown University, addresses the risks of radiation exposure related to everyday cellphone use, diagnostic X-rays, full-body security scans, nuclear fallout, and the food we eat.

Not all forms of radiation are equally hazardous, he notes. For example, the dose of radiation we receive from a full-body scanner at the airport is extremely low compared to the background radiation at high altitudes. “The time we spend in the scanner results in the same dose that we receive from just 12 seconds of flying at high altitude,” he writes.

To ask whether a form of radiation is safe or dangerous misses the point. The question, Jorgensen writes, is whether or not the risk level is low enough that we shouldn’t be concerned—and not everyone has the same tolerance for risk. So his goal is not so much to dispel our fears of exposure but to present the facts as evenhandedly as possible.

“This book,” he writes, “seeks both to convince people that they can be masters of their own radiation fate, and to empower them to make their own well-informed decisions about their personal radiation exposures.”