If you think the probability of a monster hurricane hitting the metro area is slim, think again, says geologist Nicholas Coch. “New York and Miami are acknowledged by the National Hurricane Center as the most dangerous places for a hurricane to make landfall,” says Coch, a professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Queens College. Prof. Coch, who has conducted research in sedimentology, coastal geology, and most recently, in hurricanes and their damage patterns, discusses the havoc caused in New York by past storms, including a Category 2 that swallowed an entire island. “Hog Island existed a thousand feet off the coast of the Rockaways and after August 23, 1893, it had disappeared.”
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Raising backyard chickens for eggs is a growing trend as the locavore movement gains ground in the city. But Declan Walsh is taking the process further. “We had been raising layer hens for six years and raising chickens for their meat seemed like a natural progression,” said Walsh, who, when not tending his brood in his Red Hook backyard, is director of community outreach at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Walsh raises the same breed used by commercial hatcheries — Cornish rock broilers — until they are ready for the local slaughterhouse. Walsh, who is organizing an event at the college in December with Just Food, a non-profit working to unite city residents and local farmers, discusses the pros and cons of raising chickens in the city. “It’s easier to find somebody to take care of them than a dog,” said Walsh, “because there’s a built-in incentive — a great egg.”

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Like others who felt compelled to make something good out of so much evil, Paul Moses turned to religious history after 9/11 as he struggled to make sense of the senseless. As a reporter for Newsday, Moses wrote the main story on that horrific day. Not long after, he read a story about Saint Francis of Assisi that would become the kernel of a book. Eight years later, “The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and St. Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace,” captures a meeting between St. Francis, who crossed enemy lines to gain an audience with Malik al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt, in 1219. “If, in the middle of a Crusade, Francis and the sultan can speak to each other with great respect, than we, today, should be able to sit down and talk to each other, as Christians and Muslims,” said Moses, now a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College. In a discussion about his book, Prof. Moses draws lessons from the past and sees a future where dialogue can triumph over war.
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Public hearing on items on the Board of Trustees Calendar for the February meeting of the Board, November 16, 2009.
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In 1963, as a teenager fresh out of high school, Elizabeth Nunez came to the United States from Trinidad and began to experience the longing many immigrants have felt as they struggled to adapt amid changing traditional values and cultural upheaval. This theme is at the heart of her latest novel, “Anna in Between,” about a young woman returning home to the Caribbean island of her youth as her mother, battling breast cancer, faces her own mortality. “The genesis of the novel came primarily out of a deep sadness and loss that I felt when i started to write it,” said Nunez, Distinguished Professor of English and provost at Medgar Evers College. The author of five previous novels, Prof. Nunez reads from latest book as part of the Provost Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series at York College.
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The American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie believed his steel fortune should be used for the greater good, says David Nasaw, author of the biography “Andrew Carnegie.” At a roundtable discussion of how Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller shaped modern philanthropy, Nasaw, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Professor of History at the Graduate Center, described Carnegie’s outlook: “Without the tremendous rise in the population in the United States there would have been no need for his steel, which was used for the rails to bring Americans west …so the money was not his, it was the community’s.” The event, “Foundations of Modern Philanthropy, Private Wealth to Public Good, 1889-2009,” was sponsored by the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in cooperation with CUNY Graduate Center, and featured Peter J. Johnson, author of “The Rockefeller Century”; Patty Stonesifer, special advisor to the trustees, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Jean Strouse, author of “Morgan, American Financier,” and was moderated by Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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No matter what platforms people choose for communication, the business of public relations essentially remains the same, according to industry experts. “You still need to build a personal brand that stands for something,” says Don Middleberg of Middleberg Communications, whose client list includes American Express, Consumer Reports and Reuters. “Whether it’s personal contacts, bloggers, or journalists, someone still needs to pick up your phone call or answer your e-mail or tweet.” Middleberg was part of a panel discussion at Baruch College that explored ways to meet the unique challenges brought on by the decline in print outlets and the rise in social marketing media tools such as Twitter and YouTube. Other participants included Peter Himler, founder of Flatiron Communications; Bill Southard, founder of Southard Communications; Jeff Gluck of IBM and Dave Armon, past president of PRNewswire, who served as moderator.
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For one of America’s most beloved poets, writing poems is still a leap of faith. “You hope that someone is going to read it,” Billy Collins, who served two terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate, joked at a Book Talk lecture sponsored by City College’s Center for Worker Education. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, where he joined the faculty in 1968, the prolific Collins recently published his eighth volume of poetry, “Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds.” Reading from his 2001 collection, “Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems,” Collins discussed his technique. “It’s all very exploratory,” said Collins. “I think of the pen as an instrument of discovery or a flashlight, which may lead me somewhere.”
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It’s not for everyone, but the rugged mountains of eastern Greenland turned out to be the ideal summer spot for a team of geologists. “Unlike the Himalayas, which is crawling with geologists, Greenland is relatively less explored so there’s a lot to be discovered,” said Hannes Bruckner, professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Queens College. “Also, the glaciers cleared away the cover on the rocks and it’s too cold for vegetation, so it has splendid exposure.” Under a National Science Foundation grant, Prof. Brueckner, his undergraduate college assistant Richard Bubbico, and colleagues from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and University of California at Santa Barbara, spent two weeks exploring the formation — roughly 400 million years ago — of Liverpool Land, part of the North Atlantic Caledonides.

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Constance Rosenblum’s latest book, “Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx”, is a valentine to the neighborhoods around the Grand Concourse, whose distinctive Art Deco buildings were a sought-after address for upwardly mobile families during the first half of the 20th century. A long-time editor of The New York Times City Section, who currently writes the Habitats column for the Sunday real estate section, Rosenblum chronicles the evolution of this iconic boulevard, modeled after the Avenue Champs-Elysees by its French-born engineer Louis Risse, up to its decline in the 1960s. “To talk about what it had been and then what became of it, in subsequent years, seems to be the perfect metaphor to speak about urban change,” Rosenblum said in an book talk at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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