There’s a book on my shelf called Your Personal Horoscope 2017. Inside, there’s a glossary of astrological terms—grand trine, karma, retrogrades—followed by personality profiles, horoscopes, and month-by-month forecasts for each sign. The profile for your sun sign, the one that most people are familiar with, will tell you which sign you are most compatible with; particular colors that will promote love, romance, and social harmony in your life; and your strongest virtues. From the horoscopes, the heart of the book, you can learn what’s in store for your career this year or if you’ll encounter any health issues, among other predictions. (Although as author and top astrologer Joseph Polansky is careful to point out, he offers an astrological perspective on health, not a medical one.) The author writes encouragingly, more than willing to welcome neophytes into the world of astrology.

I’m standing in my too-warm room with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil between my teeth. It’s the summer before college, but the woody taste reminds me of being in elementary school––maybe because I haven’t used pencils to do my homework since then, or felt particularly inclined to chew on them. But I’m doing this right now because an eHow article told me that speaking with a pencil in my mouth would help me learn how to roll my R’s.

Welcome to our comics issue! Taking inspiration from this year’s fantastic New York Times Magazine comics issue, we teamed our writers up with our wonderful illustrators to bring you stories from campus as comics. (Don’t worry, though, we’ve got some of our good ol’ narrative pieces for you, too.)

Welcome to our penultimate issue of the semester. If you’re like us, you learned the word “penultimate” from A Series of Unfortunate Events and you are also pretty sad that our semester is coming to a close. (Parth wants to add that he is a nerd and learned it from the “penultimate” shell of an electron.)

Welcome to the Archives issue. Our pieces this week look back; from the history of jazz at Columbia to personal pasts, we endeavour to take you through histories of various scales and impacts.

Absolute is (temporarily) shut down. Hung over first-years haunt the space outside Carman, where they seem to cluster like pigeons. Fall break lies just behind a barbed fence. It’s Halloween time.

Dear kind, careless, caffeinated reader,

This week, we’re talking about space. So many of the problems on this campus are because of a lack of space—for students to learn and play, for new buildings. We’re also thinking about intellectual space and whether there’s enough for thinkers of color at Columbia. We hope that this issue gets you thinking as well.