As final papers and exams inch closer and closer, we hope this letter finds you well. We’ve prepared our last full-fledged issue of the semester, so if you find some time between cramming and more cramming, give it a read.

The sun is out, or it was… briefly. Curl up inside by the fire if the rain persists, or out on Low Steps if the sun returns—either way, you can spend your weekend leafing through our penultimate issue!

We’ve officially crested Bacchanal, emerging in almost one piece from an excessively long midterm season. We’re nearing the end of the semester, and the end of Volume XXVI, but we still have three more issues in the works. Whether you’re still recovering from a wild Bacchanal weekend (we recommend Advil and water), or an endless week in Ref (we prescribe a night in watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine), we hope this week’s issue provides you with some recovery reading.

This week’s issue deals with entry—in student groups that make up our school’s social fabric, and college bookstores, and trains and big cities, and a little bit of coursework (this is a university, after all). It’s midterms, and we’re feeling a little closed off from it all, so why not talk about it?

It’s been a busy few weeks for us at The Eye, and we know we’re a bit late on this letter, but we have a wealth of articles to show for it. So if you’re in need of a break from midterms studying, you’re in luck. Both issues center around responsibility—of students, administrators, Internet-users, and community members.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day! As the weather shifts from cold to warm to cold again, we hope you’re enjoying it with the ones you love. This week, we’re taking a trip inward and backward, our words spanning both distance and time, and touching, occasionally, on love.

Welcome back to campus and to Volume XXVI of The Eye!

Even after the weekend creeps back into the mundane routine, undergraduates can always count on fraternities to provide spaces to congregate and exhibit school pride, both of which are rare occurrences at Columbia.

Rowan Hepps Keeney pulls back the sleeve of their Barnard admissions office T-shirt to reveal a roughly four-inch tattoo of the tesseract—a cube within a cube; a two-dimensional manifestation of a four-dimensional analogue—from the novel A Wrinkle in Time on their bicep. Hepps Keeney loved the story growing up, but that was only a minor consideration when they decided to get inked; they mainly wanted an epidermal reminder of the time they played Calvin in CU Players’ 2016 adaptation of the novel, a role, they say, that changed the course of their Barnard career. Playing Calvin was how they met their current girlfriend, but it was also the moment they realized there exist places in mainstream theater for nonbinary actors.