Dear readers, friends and acquaintances: Welcome back from Spring Break! We hope you had a restful week of sunburn and hangovers. Now that classes are in full swing, it’s time to get back into the rhythm of school. Yeah, we know this sucks, but your professors don’t want to see your face any more than you want to see theirs. Here’s to a week of light work, eh? Now put away your Mardi Gras beads and sack up, this semester is (more than) halfway over and you’ve already made it this far!

Hillel Week
Who: Hillel
When and where: Monday–Friday; all over campus (check link)
Why: It’s a week full of free stuff, noshing and other meshuggeneh activities for the Chosen People and the gentiles that culminates in the Purim Crawl. We can’t promise that you’ll be farshikkert off your tuchus for that, but a few sips from the ole’ jug of Manischewitz never hurt anyone, amirite?

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October’s here and you know what that means – auditions for the Vagina Monologues are almost upon us! Yes, this Friday (4-8 PM), Saturday (12-6 PM) and Sunday (10-4 PM) in the Platt Arts House, you can try out to be part of the Vagina Monologues show, which takes place in February. Although no experience is necessary and you need not prepare anything, sources say that having a vagina will definitely work in your favor. Got questions? E-mail them to upennvday2011@gmail.com.

Our admiration for New York Magazine is well-documented, and when that fondness combines with a topic we are also have a keen interest in (binge drinking), we sit up and take notice.  This week’s magazine contains a thought-provoking feature on women, especially young women, and their drinking habits.  Its thesis certainly gels with what we observe on campus on a regular basis: ladies love their drinks.  And we don’t necessarily begrudge social drinking, but on the other hand, we do worry about the larger implications of it.  To wit:

For many women, heavy drinking might be only a blip on the radar, a youthful folly, if it weren’t for higher education. The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.

Several more illuminating quotes, and our take, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you read Philadelphia magazine?  Unless you are an upper-middle-class Main Line mom, the answer is probably no.  However, if you tore yourself away from gchat for a moment, you would discover that it’s quite a good magazine.  But we know this is unlikely, so we’re here to summarize!

So. Because Philadelphia is geared toward the upper crust of the suburbs, most topics it covers fall broadly under the category of “rich people stuff.”  Lucky for us, dear old Penn is considered a worthy subject for said rich people to read about.  This month’s obligatory Penn shout out takes the form of a roundtable discussion about working and motherhood, in which class of ’08er Katie Motyka participates.  In typical Phillymag fashion, Motyka’s sole qualification for participating in the panel is the fact that she’s 22 and went to Penn.  Because all Penn students are well-to-do future leaders of society! Read the rest of this entry »