Welcome to Volume XXX of The Eye, Spectator’s long-form magazine.

When Jenna Gould answers my phone call, it is with an apology. She is holding her baby as we speak, and while she believes that he won’t make too much of a fuss over the course of the next thirty minutes, she’s sorry in advance if he does. I hear a sleepy murmur behind her voice—the hushed kind that only a child nestling into his mother’s arms makes—and then he falls quiet, just as Gould predicted.

“All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” - C.S. Lewis

Let me first describe the perfect conditions for the viewing of this weekly phenomenon: Stand in the center of 115th Street between Broadway and Riverside, between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., and cast your gaze upward approximately eight flights. You should be able to hear poorly scream-sung Taylor Swift from the early 2000s, and if you happen to catch a glimpse of jumpy legs and jerky arms, know you’re in the right place.

“It’s the mecca,” Desiree Parker, a current sophomore, says of life at Howard University. We are catching up over the phone, and while I sit alone on the barren steps of Low after dark, I hear the laughter of friends waft from behind her voice—reaching my ears all the way from D.C. She is definitely not alone when she says, “It’s a place where people of all walks of life can come together to find a salvation on one common ground.” This is the first taste that I get of life at a historically black college or university, and it leads me to wonder what I am missing out on.

Swiping my MetroCard to enter the 116th St. station is more than a monetary transaction. With it comes my promise to be quiet, to keep to myself, to occupy as little space as possible: all the things that are required of a good passenger on the subway. If the train is more than three minutes away, I wait huddled against the wall, feeling the weight of my hands tucked away in my pockets. Typically, my headphones are in as I attempt to distract myself from the sound of subway cars screeching to a stop like nails on a chalkboard (it’s the one noise I haven’t adjusted to in the city), and all the voices that inevitably follow.

In Butler, everywhere I look, I see sunflowers, albums covers, iconic TV show quotes. I see cityscapes, puns, and unusual designs sprawled across the front of computers. Whenever I attempt to make some progress on my work before my next class, I look around in a sea of laptops. Columbia has it all: MacBooks, HPs, ASUSes, Surfaces, Dells, all decorated—or completely covered—with their own laptop stickers. My MacBook is also home to 10 stickers of its own, including a young Barack Obama, a Stanley quote from The Office, and a fragment of Sappho’s poetry.