Greg Johnson

A West African proverb, borrowed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton for the title of her 1996 book on how a community impacts a child’s wellbeing, says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Children are not islands, and cannot thrive in isolation. A collective societal effort is required for them to reach their full potential.

DUNDER MIFFLIN: A junior from Scranton, Pa., Tom Maier is a member of Simply Chaos, Penn’s only stand-up comedy group, which has around a dozen members. Undeclared but leaning toward a major in economics, Maier has been involved with Simply Chaos since his sophomore year.

The Middle East is around 6,000 miles away, on the other side of the world, but the multinational subcontinent influences and impacts American politics and foreign policy as if it were as close as Canada or Mexico. The United States has been a predominant force—covertly and overtly—in the region since the end of World War II.

In the name of the Father, a parade of people, close to 2 million, are expected to flock to Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families, the world’s largest Catholic gathering of families held every three years, and the accompanying visit by Pope Francis.

NEW ENGLAND: Jennifer Yu is a 19-year-old senior from Shrewsbury, Mass. An English major in the School of Arts and Sciences, Yu enrolled at Penn when she was 16 years old, having skipped two grades. “I never learned to write cursive,” she jokes. “It’s a bummer.”

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has called Pope Francis’ forthcoming trip “the largest event in the city’s modern history” and possibly “the second or third largest event in the history of the United States.” An estimated 2 million people are expected to travel to Philadelphia for the visit, more than doubling the city’s population.

Human moles are generally similar in size, color, and shape. Usually absent at birth, they start out as tiny little dots that grow slowly for one to two years to a few millimeters, about the size of a pencil eraser, and then stop. The cells don’t die; they just exist.

PULITZER FELLOW: Farzana Shah, a master’s student in the School of Nursing, was recently awarded a Pulitzer International Student Reporting Fellowship from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit organization

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 23.5 million people in the United States live in food deserts—urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food. More than half of these individuals live in low-income households.

The human imagination has no boundaries. It is capable of traveling at the speed of light to galaxies far, far away, and falling, very slowly, down, down, down the rabbit hole. It has put a man on the moon and in the deepest parts of the ocean. It has built the computer, video games, and the internet. It has made phones that are smart, self-driving cars, and unmanned aerial vehicles.