JPL implemented its third round of layoffs in 2024 on November 13, cutting 325 employees—roughly 5% of its workforce. This latest reduction follows earlier waves: 100 contractors in January and 570 additional employees and contractors in February. As a result, JPL’s workforce now stands at approximately 5,500 employees. These job cuts stem from a funding crisis centered around the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, a flagship NASA initiative designed to retrieve and analyze Martian rock and dust samples on Earth.

Nicholas Winton is an English stockbroker who has a comfortable life in 1930 London but knows that Hitler’s Germany is invading Praga, Czechoslovakia; with a humanitarian group, he helps save 669 children from Nazism. Winton worked quickly to find foster families for hundreds of children—a beautiful and sad biographical story. Winton was a kind of Schindler but an English one. Nicholas saved these children, but always wondered what was going on with them. He kept this story a secret. Only the people who helped save these children knew until his wife found a scrapbook with photos of the children decades later (in 1988) and, talking to her husband, discovered the whole story. Grete, his wife, shared this story with a historian, which led to a British TV show. This widely-watched program interviewed him and allowed him to meet these “children” again, who were already adults at the time, in a very moving encounter that was the film’s climax.

We don’t talk about it. We don’t want to admit it. But racism is still here, still present, and each one of us feels its weight in some way. How can we still believe that a person’s worth can be defined by the color of their skin or where they were born? How many times have I heard, “Oh, you’re Italian? So, the mafia? Pizza? You don’t do much, do you?” Stereotypes. Labels. Concepts created decades ago that somehow still manage to stick. It’s in my bones, this feeling of being judged, of being categorized. I don’t have darker skin, but I was born Italian. I don’t deny it. I embrace it. And yet, I feel the sting of assumptions, of remarks that make me feel misplaced in a world that should have moved past this nonsense already.

I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Parker speak at my astronomy club and was greatly dismayed at how brutally and abruptly he was laid off at your prestigious institution. I worked at JPL as a temporary secretary while working on my software engineering degree in the early 1980s and loved it there.

The U.S. Department of Education issued a letter to universities on February 14th, broadly declaring all race-conscious programs illegal under federal law, including any decision affecting “aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”

In our annual review of the ASCIT Bylaws, ASCIT Board of Directors has decided to propose the following amendments. These propositions have been approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, and we now bring them to the undergraduate students to be voted into action. The Review Committee will send out voting procedures today, Tuesday, February 18th, and we want to take the time to outline the amendments that are being proposed, why they are being proposed, and elicit your vote.

If Plato was the dreamer with his head above the clouds, Aristotle is the realist with his hands in the soil. He’s the philosopher of practicality; the one who took the abstract musings of his teacher, Plato, and said, “Alright, but how does it really work?”

After 14 years as Caltech’s Director of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation, Betsy Mitchell announced earlier this month that she will be stepping down in the spring.

The CGPU-UAW Bargaining Team is a group of eleven Graduate Student Workers and five Postdocs democratically elected to represent their peers in collective bargaining with the Caltech administration.

I have gathered union petition signatures, organized vote parties for union authorization, sent mass emails in support of the union, and spoken in person to most grad students and postdocs in Schlinger, Church, and Crellin for Caltech Grad Researchers and Postdocs United (CGPU). I’m about as pro-union as they come. But right now, CGPU is at best misleading and at worst outright lying about compensation gains in the recent tentative agreement (TA).