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!

Two months ago, on the tucked away 15th floor of Columbia’s International Affairs Building, five women from the Commission on the Status of Women take the floor to present a study on the leaking pipeline at the College of Physicians and Surgeons—the first of its kind.

It always smells like rain at 8 a.m. at Columbia. It’s when campus feels the most sticky: dewy air that hasn’t quite lifted and the ticking of the typing of last night’s essay writing.

At 7 p.m., on the first day of the strike for a department of ethnic studies, there was a candlelit vigil—it moved from the sundial to Low Library Rotunda because of rain and ended with a prayer. More than 40 activists assembled—inclement weather, and all—in solidarity with four students, who at 8 a.m. of April 1, 1996, had declared a hunger strike.

Sometimes, before I go to bed, I like to take a walk.

The Eye—the magazine itself—was named after the author and urban theorist Jane Jacobs’ and her belief that the “eyes on the street” help keep cities safe. The Ear, then, alludes to the stories we’re always listening for.

A bare hallway forks off of Lerner’s fifth floor—it is abruptly narrow, a welcome retreat from the ramp-adorned expanse of raw space that is Lerner proper. At its end, just beyond the freight elevators, is Columbia’s newly expanded Food Bank, the first in the Ivy League.