The Carletonian

What was it like to go to college during the Civil War? How did colleges support the war effort? How did colleges change after the Civil War? This past Wednesday, Michael Cohen, a Carleton alumnus who graduated in 2002 gave a talk on the affect of the Civil War on colleges.

Unless you read your program closely, you wouldn’t have realized that the cast of last weekend’s ETB showing of “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” were all first-years. The quartet of young actors showed subtlety and poise in a memorable and haunting production of the Neil Simon play.

You may have noticed a fluorescent presence near the dish conveyors during lunch last week. Carleton’s Clean Plate Club Initiative volunteers were there to promote reducing food waste in the dining halls and to address the problem of food waste.

Renowned political commentator David Gergen opened his convocation address last week by comparing Poskanzer to Gandhi. He characterized the Indian leader as someone who “spent his first year listening,” before becoming the voice of India.

For the second consecutive year, Peace Corps placed Carleton on its list of the top volunteer producing small colleges and universities. Carleton also placed many students into Green Corps and AmeriCorps.

At the beginning of this month all the dormitories competed to reduce their power intake the most. Students were helped along by the Carleton Sustainability’s website, which catalogued the progress of each hall in terms of electric and water consumption.

The Carleton College baseball team got the 2013 campaign started off Tuesday, with a doubleheader sweep of Crown College. Playing at the Metrodome, the Knights prevailed by scores of 26-5 and 17-0, with the second game featuring a three-pitcher, combined no-hitter for Carleton.

Sometimes it is hard to tell how well a track team did purely by looking at the point total at the end of the day. The Knights finished third among the four squads participating in the Meet of the Hearts held at Carleton College’s Recreation Center.

The Carleton College women’s track and field team won six events at the Meet of the Hearts this past Saturday, with the first-years accounting for all five of the individual event victories and encompassing half of the Knights’ record-setting distance medley relay unit.

Emma Purfeerst ‘14 notched a team-high 15 points and six rebounds, as the Carleton College women’s basketball team completed a sweep of the season series against Macalester College with a 61-53 victory on the road.

Senior Scott Theisen ’13 continued his amazing season last week with a trio of tremendous performances and some serious career milestones. The versatile Knights’ wing reached 1,000 points and 500 rebounds in his stellar career last week and notched his second triple-double of the season while leading Carleton to a 3-0 record and the brink of a MIAC Playoff berth.

In a back-and-forth affair that featured eight ties and a dozen lead changes, the Carleton College men’s basketball team came up just short against the visiting squad from Gustavus Adolphus College, 54-52.

I found Convo disappointing. The speaker seemed particularly compelling. The posters in Sayles advertised: David Gergen, adviser to four presidents. And given the larger than usual Convo audience, lots of Carleton students thought along the same lines as me. This was one Convo to crawl out of bed for.

After the Newtown school massacre, people all over the country -- including many Carleton students – grieved for those who were gunned down and the young lives tragically cut short.  And many of us experienced, yet again, anger and frustration that our country leads the developed world in lives lost to gun violence.

Once again, Valentine’s Day has come and gone, leaving everyone with sugar crashes and visions of idyllic amour. While I’m personally against the consumerist culture surrounding this fairly trivial holiday, it is admittedly good at re-enforcing relationships of all kind, whether it’s connecting with your friends, telling your family how much you love them, or finally asking out your long-term crush with chocolate and roses.

Fun.’s “We Are Young” won a Grammy for “Song of the Year” last Sunday, and appropriately so. It’s been played seemingly non-stop since its release, and the chorus—“Tonight, we are young / so let’s set the world on fire / we can burn brighter than the sun”—is undeniably catchy.

From the age of roughly 20 until 26, a period I will call the “twenty somethings,” one is stuck in perpetual, 6-year transition period of self-obsession; an era of modest responsibility, patchy ups and downs, frequent existential crises, blurred lines between romance and friendship, and a white future full of empty promises.

Language is deceptive. Economics hasn’t evolved the same way as etymology. There are roots—”re-” or “anti-” or “endo-”—that don’t mean the same thing intuitively as they do materially. That, I think is what’s at heart of the divestment issue, because “divest” is such a crisp, pure, upstanding word that it’s easy to get confused about what it really means.

This Tuesday was Mardi Gras, and Bon Appétit at Carleton celebrated in style. For breakfast, students could have traditional New Orleans style “donuts” at the Wild Thymes Beignet bar.

Spring flowers are just around the corner - according to the groundhog! Come March, a blast of white will once again ‘spring’ up from the ground all over the Arb. A white that is delicate, fragrant, and seductive (if you happen to be a pollinator).