June 1983, St. Louis. Two women sit on a rooftop the evening before Sally Ride’s historic launch into space. They take drags of a cigarette together and contemplate the sky under the guise of a “Two Serious Ladies Book Club” meeting. Though they are not astronauts, nobody wants to leave their lives behind more than these best friends.

A free Insomnia cookie. $20 Venmoed to your account. A dollar earned for every upvote on your post. These are some of the incentives to download Sidechat—an anonymous, Reddit-style social media app that has emerged on Columbia’s campus.

Against the backdrop of a projector screen’s swirling colors, silhouettes flitted across the stage as limbs conversed with each other through the language of dance. One moment, dancers unfurled into elegant arabesques; in the next, they bounced along to an electric nightclub beat in jewel-toned crop tops.

“Where were you on the night of December 4th, 2016 at 11:47 pm?” No, this is not an interrogation. Welcome to Datamatch at Columbia, where the algorithm’s quirky questions aim to match students with their new campus crush.

With neon colored fur, gaping painted mouths, and dazzling mirrors adorning their foreheads, the lions in Chinese lion dance are striking figures. A combination of the bizarre and the beautiful, the lion figure is an amalgamation of many animals that, according to legend, saved a village by scaring off an evil spirit. Against a backdrop of booming drums, the dancers inside the lions make the lions rear mightily, bow, and chase away malevolent spirits to begin Chinese New Year.