Citing President Obama's intent to strengthen community colleges, "second lady" Jill Biden told the 2009 graduates of Kingsborough Community College the two-year schools are "one of America's best-kept secrets," and "the education gained on campuses like this one will provide the knowledge that will power the 21st century." Dr. Biden, an adjunct pr…

Since 1963, U.S. students have been “very bad at tests and very good at life,” Fareed Zakaria says, noting that during the same period of time the United States has “dominated the world of science, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, economic growth.” The U.S. tradition of students receiving “a broad general education that prepares you not fo…

In this message-oversatuartion era, marketers have to “pick an audience and superserve them,” says branding guru Alan Goodman, who teaches a marketing master class at Macaulay Honors College. At MTV, where he developed the logo and the iconic animation IDs, Goodman says he saw the network as more than just a music video channel, and identified the …

Hashtag politics gives people who don’t have big money to donate to candidates a way to compete with big donors, or so says social media guru Alan Rosenblatt in a talk at Baruch. Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter aggregate conversation and opinion, creating “powerful social capital” to compete with financial capital, Rosenblatt says. The hashtag has …

The cyber currency created in 2009 as “a plaything for hackers,” will be used by governments by 2023 and consumers by 2027 by some estimates, Nathaniel Popper, author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and theInside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, tells a Baruch audience. The digital dough wasn’t worth anything until 2011, add…

Young people can agitate against injustice better than the leader of the United Nations can, or so he says. “I as secretary-general have constraints sometimes, political constraints,” Ban Ki-moon tells his audience at Lehman College, which was the U.N.’s home for five months in 1946. “But young people, you don’t have a limit,” Ban says. “You just r…

Colum McCann’s advice to aspiring writers? Write. The Hunter College creative writing MFA professor reads “A Letter to a Young Writer” and his short story “What Time Is It Where You Are” at the Writing Center. Going against the common advice to write what you know, McCann urges young writers to “write toward that which you want to know. Better stil…

Who is the Neapolitan novelist writing as Elena Ferrante? The world doesn’t know, yet the world has taken notice of such books as The Days of Abandonment and The Story of the Lost Child, the final story of her (or his?) Neapolitan quartet, which place Naples at the center of the universe. Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein and publisher Kent Carro…

Donald Trump is the only pol “who screws up and his poll numbers go up,” says Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, and he seems willing to say anything. “It’s funny how when you’re president of the United States,” says Politico chief political correspondent and Brooklyn College alum Glenn Thrush, that “stuff you say has a tendency to actually hap…

They could starve in India or work like slaves on the sugarcane plantations of British Guiana; that was the choice for thousands of Indians who left home from 1838-1917. One was journalist Gaiutra Bahadur’s great-grandmother Sajuria, who, pregnant and alone, immigrated in 1903. Bahadur seeks her story in Coolie Woman: An Odyssey of Indenture. Inden…