In the Art Gallery, there are rabbits staring at each other, rabbits surrounded by spiky balls, rabbits clustered in a huge group, rabbits staring at plum bobs suspended above their heads, and rabbits arranged in the pattern of the digits of a social security number.

Why did Kelly Connole make these rabbits? Why did she make so many rabbits? And, perhaps equally intriguingly, HOW did she make all those rabbits? She answered some of these questions herself on Friday, at the exhibition's opening...

This summer, I got a grant from the Kolenkow-Reitz fund to study grass mutations at the Plant Gene Expression Center in Berkeley.

More about mutant grass...

This year, Carleton’s opening convocation marked an important landmark: it was the 30th time that the senior class has blown bubbles onto the audience during the processional.  And that is as it should be, since President Oden reminded us that New Year’s Day really should have been in the fall, and what better way to celebrate it than with bubbles?

More inside...

Summer is over: the leaves are turning colors, the days are getting shorter, and the new students have arrived on campus. A warm welcome to the Carleton class of 2013 from the staff of Shout!

View a gallery of photos from new student move-in day...

You’re the student with Northfield Option who can’t find anywhere to park on campus.  You need to get to Target but would rather not spend the entire Saturday evening on the Love Bus doing it.  Or even after begging for a ride in the NNB, you can’t go to a neat concert in the Twin Cities because there’s no way of getting there.  Transportation issues are a problem at Carleton.

There are some changes coming next year...

At Carleton, of course we'd have a tradition in celebration of a squishy white gelatinous cube.  Carleton's annual Tofu Fest has been going on since 1997.

The Tofu Fest...

This time of the year, there is still a great deal of light in the sky at 9:00 in the evening.  On Friday night of 8th week, a group of students met up in front of the Observatory as a pink-and-purple sunset slowly faded from the western sky.  The Bald Spot seemed to glow softly in the growing twilight.

Stargazing...

We’ve all heard the actors speaking seeming gibberish at each other in Lord of the Rings and Star Trek.  And in many movies and TV shows, alien languages really are just gibberish, created to make the place sound more exotic.  But a few creators of imaginary cultures take the time to put together constructed languages (conlangs for short) for their worlds, complete with grammatical rules and vocabulary that people can learn and speak.  Seventh weekend, the brave explorers of Benton House showed us some of the possibilities of where fantasy languages can take us.

To boldly split infinitives that have never been split before...

The Experimental Theater Board recently put on a production of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh- a very tense, very bleak, horrifyingly dark murder play. Weirdly enough, it had the audience laughing uproariously almost every minute.

Why was this? And why make something so dark so funny?

These past few weeks have been good ones for Carleton theater. There have been so many performances, it's barely been possible to go to all of them, and they have all apparently been quite entertaining in one way or another. The ETB production of Don't Dress for Dinner by Marc Camoletti did not disappoint in this respect.

The play...

Spelling bees have a strange combination of intensity and quirkiness that is hard to find anywhere else...

Anywhere except here, of course.  Intense and quirky is what we're all about.  So naturally we needed a spelling bee.

It's not quite the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee- but a few of our competitors were finalists in the National Spelling Bee when they were middle school students, so there was still a pretty heavy competition level.

It all started with a post to Shapely Prose, a blog maintained by the authors of Lessons From the Fat-o-sphere.  Oprah Winfrey had recently received a lot of media attention for gaining weight.  The post said, as Jill Rodde ’09 paraphrased, “Hey, Oprah, 200 pounds isn’t the worst thing that could happen to you.  Please love your body.”

The Body Positivity Discussion Group