Where are we going? Where have we been?
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion. But how do we tell stories? How do we hear stories? What part of our minds register them, and what exactly is the connection between the hardware of our brains and the nebulous stories that we store in them? Art and science are uniquely linked. CORTEX wants to be an experimental and electric publication at Yale that engages with these horizons fearlessly. Rather than scientific journalism, we hope to question rather than answer, to explore rather than complete. We focus on creative journalism – using fiction and personal insight to flesh out a non-fictional concept.
at the moment, we are hard at work on our spring 2023 theme, scale.
we are a close-knit collective of twenty-six undergraduate and graduate students at yale whose academic focuses span the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences. we are passionate about the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, and what exploring that intersection can do. we are interested in using science fiction, literature, and philosophy to consider questions that have plagued us since we were children, and will always plague us. together we design alternate futures, build trinkets for spaceships, write poems about oranges, and think about life. a lot.
first and foremost, we are a publication. each semester, we work on crafting a themed issue together that we write and peer-edit and design and print together. we also aim to do projects that bring these publications to life. we love experimentation, innovation, subtlety, grandioseness, beauty, oddness, and the sublime. we want to surprise.
we’re always on the lookout for individuals with a heart for reinventing us. we open up for applications at the start of every spring and fall to all yale students.
pictured: october 2022 reading in the trumbull common room of our first issue.
“Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.” – Margaret Atwood
About Us
EIC | Sarah Feng
Genre Leads | Suraj Singareddy [poetry], Roxana Grunenwald [nonfiction], London Johns [fiction], Sophia Ramirez [fiction], Emily Cai [visual art], Nathan Apfel [visual art], Marshall Adams [music]
Visual Art | Zara Belo, Micah Greyeyes, Cozette Weng, Lilia Chatalbasheva, Ariel Kim
Nonfiction + Science | Meilan Haberl, Adam Tufts, Spencer Greenfield, Maxwell Kiekhofer, Matt Letourneau
Fiction | William Archacki, Mela Johnson, Evelyn Wu, David Garsten
Music | Ilana Zaks, Michael Gancz, Benjamin Card, Everett Tolbert-Schwartz, Minseong Kim, Jack Davisson
Poetry | Leander He, Jessica Yu, Sheyla Rodriguez, Ece Serdaroglu, Mara Klein, Jisu Oh
Emeritus | Hannah Szabó, Anasthasia Shilov, Karen Lin, Sarah Teng, Hailey Schoelkoepf, William Crystal, Lee Ngatia Muita, Jordan Davidson, Katherine Chou
Everyone on staff creates in more than one way. We are a collective with loosely defined roles, and everyone helps out with everyone. Most people cross genres and work with people in different disciplines for our issues.
Our Support
CORTEX was first made possible by a spring 2022 grant award from Yale’s Creative Performing Arts Awards at Trumbull College. We are supported by the following organizations:
Center for Collaborative Arts & Media – CCAM Studio Fellowship
Yale College Dean’s Office – UOFC Awards
Trumbull College – Creative Performing Arts Award
Pauli Murray College – Creative Performing Arts Award
Silliman College – Creative Performing Arts Award
Franke Program for the Science & Humanities – student organization funding
We are also a club registered through Yale Student Organizations.
—
It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars
and then back to the tide pool again
—
John Steinbeck