The Essentials

In a video interview, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54 , discusses Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she studied writing at Cornell. Asked if she had stayed in contact with Nabokov after Cornell, Ginsburg said, “Not after he wrote ‘Lolita,’ and he made a huge success and went off to Switzerland to catch butterflies.”

President David Skorton, during his open-session report to the Cornell Board of Trustees March 7, lauded the Big Red athletics teams, but had a story to tell about the men’s basketball team’s win against Harvard March 1, which clinched the Ivy League championship for Cornell:

“Many of us were there at that slight edging of Harvard by 33 points Saturday. I was swept up in the emotions of the moment to get under the team to lift them up on the court … that guy [Jeff] Foote, the seven-footer, stepped on my shoulder … and then on Monday, I met the team after their practice, both the women’s and the men’s teams – the women’s team is having a terrific year, too – I introduced myself to the team players, and I mentioned to Foote that for the rest of his life, he can tell people, his kids, his grandchildren, that he once stepped on an Ivy League president. And he didn’t even giggle – nothing.”

In the Feb. 5 New York Times, Miyoko Chu of the Lab of Ornithology tackles the issue of “Why do birds sit on telephone wires? What did they do before there were wires?” (They like the vantage point; they probably hung out in trees before the advent of wires, according to Chu.)

Unbeknownst to Times readers, the query originated with Bubbles and Merv Binder, who posed it with a certain urgency: “The question about why birds are always sitting on telephone wires has been puzzling us for years. We make up all sorts of possible answers but we’re ready for an authentic answer. We are in our 80s, so hurry up with a response!”