On the night of December 1, 2018, S, a black resident of Carman Hall, comes home alone. They take the service elevator at the back of the building.

For days, we sat around the TV. We heard—for the first time, and then over and over again—about the night of November 26, 2008, when 10 attackers, well-armed and well-trained, entered Bombay on a small boat. They stayed for four days.

On the warm days when the sun is out, we cover Low Steps like a blanket. People linger there just after or just before class, drying out the winter in the sun. It is loud, happy—there, a dog bounds after a tennis ball. Maybe the fountains are on, and as you look at people walking slower today in the April light on the checkered floor of Low Plaza—which, in case you didn’t know, has the same design as the floor in Raphael’s School of Athens—you think to yourself that this feels lovely and European, like maybe an Italian piazza.

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.

In honor of the archives issue, we dedicated this week’s Blinks to answering the question: What’s the most interesting story you’ve found in the Spectator archives?

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.