Your Chatbot Is a Terrible Therapist. Here’s Why.
Columbia clinicians are studying how ChatGPT and other AI tools may reinforce harmful beliefs and endanger vulnerable users
16 ‘Outstanding’ Emmy Winners with Columbia Connections
These acclaimed TV shows with alumni and University ties have won Primetime Emmy awards for outstanding series
Alumni Art and Photography Books for Your Coffee Table
Though they’re often purchased as gifts, souvenirs, or home accents, there’s more to great “coffee table books” than pretty covers
A Child of the Weather Underground Reckons with His Family History
In a new memoir, Zayd Ayers Dohrn ’06GSAS recounts a childhood spent partially on the lam and wrestles with his parents’ ideals
Recent Stories
My Medievalist Mentor
A conversation with Columbia historian Caroline Walker Bynum on writing, mentorship, and the long arc of intellectual formation
How Seriously Should We Take UFO Sightings?
Columbia alien hunter David Kipping on the odds of finding company in the cosmos
Beverly Gage Takes Us on a Historical Road Trip through the United States
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian visits museums, theme parks, battle reenactments, and more in This Land Is Your Land
A Shrink Walks into a Gay Tiki Bar…
How Columbia psychiatry professor Robert Spitzer got homosexuality removed from the DSM’s list of mental disorders
What Will It Take to Prevent School Shootings?
In our desperation to protect children, we’re turning schools into fortresses. Columbia researchers are leading a nationwide investigation to see if these tactics actually work
The Alarming Consequences of Legal Sports Gambling
In his first book, Everybody Loses, journalist Danny Funt ’15JRN explores the astronomical rise of a high-risk vice
How Writer A’Lelia Bundles, Descendant of Madam C. J. Walker, Found Her Subject
Through sweeping biographies of her foremothers, the author shares a dazzling American inheritance. Her own story belongs on the same high shelf
The Columbia-Educated Lawyer Who Helped Write the Declaration of Independence
Robert Livingston 1765KC may have missed the document’s official signing, but his anti-tyranny legal philosophy still resonates today
20 Photos that Capture Columbia’s 2026 Commencement
On May 20, more than 18,000 Columbians capped off their studies and made the transition from students to graduates
Books
Freedom, Religion, and the Strange Case of an American Desert Cult
In The Oracle’s Daughter, Harrison Hill ’19SOA traces the story of the Aggressive Christianity Mission Training Corps (ACMTC), a woman-led paramilitary religious cult
The Fashionable Legacy of the Gilded Age
Elizabeth L. Block ’04GSAS recently published Gilded Age Fashion, a book showcasing over fifty dresses and accessories from the late 1800s
The Mysterious Death of Zac Brettler
In London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe ’99CC investigates the murky circumstances surrounding an English teenager who washed up in the Thames
The Promise and Pitfalls of Psychedelic Drugs
In A Short, Strange Trip, John O’Connor ’03SOA looks at the history, impact, and mystique of magic mushrooms and the psychedelic movement
