Greg Johnson

…And on the 99th day, the political gods delivered Arlen Specter. President Obama received an unexpected gift on the eve of his 100th day in office when Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter announced that he was leaving the Republican Party to join the Democrats.

Photo credit: Mark Stehle FOREIGN SERVICE: Kamanda, a third-year Penn Law student, is the founder and editor-in-chief of

Funding from telecommunications giant AT&T will allow Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships to help more high school students stay in school and prepare for college.

Four members of the Penn community were recently honored with the distinguished Guggenheim Fellowship, an annual award given by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to accomplished men and women who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or extraordinary creative ability in the arts.

Joshua Plotkin, the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Penn, has been a fan of math since his youth. He majored in math as an undergraduate student at Harvard, studied it as a visiting student at Oxford University and also planned to continue studying it in graduate school.

WHEN?: On display from April 24 to Aug. 2 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St.

For more than half a century, the Middle East conflict has been one of the world’s chief foreign policy concerns—a situation that has greatly affected Arabs and Israelis, Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Photo credit: Candace diCarlo For 40 local eighth graders, Penn’s College Day was much more than just a campus tour.

Photo credit: Mark Stehle