Sandy Smith

A new study of Penn’s impact on the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania economy shows that the University is one of the region’s — and the state’s — main engines of growth.

Stashed in closets, utility rooms and other nooks and crannies around campus are equipment and supplies waiting for a new life. Diane McAndrews put them there, and when the time comes, she’ll take them out.

As the School of Arts and Sciences feels its way towards a new curriculum, it might be helpful to learn from earlier efforts to transform undergraduate education. With this in mind, more than 50 students and faculty packed Kelly Writers House Nov. 8 to hear about one of those earlier reforms and review it in a modern context.

World War II was a two-front battle of a different sort for African Americans. Like the rest of the country, they fought Nazism and fascism abroad, but at home, they also fought for the basic privileges of citizenship that were still denied them decades after emancipation.

The game of chess can be described using fewer than a dozen rules. Yet we’ve been playing it for centuries and have yet to exhaust all the possible sequences of moves those few rules permit.

For Witold Rybczynski, it all began with a walk in the park. It ended with a biography of the man who designed it that has won praise from coast to coast. And along the way, the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism learned a lot about not only the man, but also the country and the times he lived in.

Never mind how the mind works. For many of the audience members shoehorned into 17 Logan Hall, the more pressing question was whether the sound system worked on Oct. 20, when Stephen Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, explained to the crowd “How the Mind Works.”

Be careful where you walk these days, lest you bump into a backhoe. Yesterday’s empty lot is now sprouting bricks. And it seems that every time you sneeze, there’s a groundbreaking.

Penn’s Latino students wanted a meeting place they could call their own and an administrator who would look out for their interests. With the opening of La Casa Latina, they -- and the larger Latino community on campus -- now have both.

When we think of ancient Egypt, we generally think of pyramids and pharaohs, sphinxes and sand, obelisks and other monumental stuff. We certainly don’t think of municipal government.