Avery Lawrence is a College senior from Charlottesville, Va. His e-mail address is lawrence@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Fraternity. The word is derived from frater, Latin for brother. In broad terms, it means a collection of similar people joined together by a shared purpose. Most college students have a hazier definition that typically involves beer, chicks, bros and the occasional ho.

The recently restructured graduate student government is raring to get its constituents more connected to Penn. The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly has emerged from a major organizational makeover and is now eager to promote interdisciplinary cooperation among all 10 graduate schools represented by GAPSA and to spearhead new campus initiatives.

Along with at least 1,000 other scholars, Linguistics professor Mark Liberman is part of a recent trend of professors delving into a new, informal aspect of academia: the blog.

What organizers had intended to be an open discussion forum aimed at dispelling misconceptions surrounding atheism quickly turned into support for atheism itself. The Penn Inquiry & Freethought Forum, a new club aimed at discussing secular opinions and ideas, hosted "Ask a Skeptic" last night in Huntsman Hall, hoping for a balance of religious and non-religious attendees who would foster healthy debate.

A war is being waged on hypocrisy. Statesmen will fall, and political empires will crumble. But the adult entertainment industry will live on. Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, is billing himself as a crusader in the fight for public integrity. In June this year, he ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post, offering up to $1 million cash to anyone who could "provide documented evidence of illicit sexual or intimate relations with a Congressperson, Senator or other prominent official.

High-school students who hate the alphabet soup of admissions testing may instead opt to Zinch. Launched in April, Zinch is a Facebook-like Web site that allows students to show prospective schools more than their PSAT and SAT scores. Applicants can create profiles that showcase their accomplishments and extracurricular activities and upload video, images and audio clips.

6-foot-10, 230-pound power forward Andrew Van Nest is seriously considering playing basketball at Penn, according to his father, Jeffrey Van Nest. The Weston, Mass. native, whose mother graduated from the University, has scheduled an official visit to Penn during the weekend of September 29th.

It's hard to believe a man like Jim Steel, Penn football's strength and conditioning coach, would ever consider bulking up unhealthy. But after years of pumping iron for himself, Steel has traded in muscles for clipboards and is back to doing what he loves - coaching others to be bigger and stronger.

Move over, Pennster - but don't leave just yet. Penn's social network for incoming freshmen saw the lowest number of users this summer than ever before in its four-year history. Pennster managers are currently discussing the future of the site - whether to improve it or can it.

Most prized high-school basketball recruits spend the summer before senior year frantically deliberating with parents and coaches about which colleges they should consider visiting and which ones they should cross off their ever-growing lists. But by early July, 6-foot-1 point guard Zack Rosen had already narrowed his list down to one: Penn.

If you believe campus brochures, attending class at Penn is something of a transcendent experience. Wide-eyed students utilize their diverse backgrounds to spar intellectually while a charismatic professor imbues his pupils with the "practical knowledge" they need to become leaders of tomorrow.

I think it started over the summer. Slowly but surely, e-mails I was getting from my friends started looking a little different. Nothing big, just a tagline at the bottom: "Sent from my Verizon wireless Blackberry." Before, I'd only really seen it on e-mails from my dad and a few high-powered professors.

By the end of the month, laundry-service provider Mac-Gray Corporation will have finished installing the last loads of brand-new machines in all college houses.

About 100 alumni rekindled their Penn pride at the annual First September event of the Penn Alumni Club of Philadelphia, held last night at the Triumph Brewing Company in Old City.

"In extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives." So reads the tagline of noted documentary filmmaker Ken Burns' new production, The War, for which there was a preview screening and panel discussion last night in College Hall. Modern European History professor Ronald Granieri, Classics professor Peter Struck and Tom Childers, who previously viewed the entire film and interviewed Burns, comprised the panel.

Going back to my freshman year, Penn has played Villanova three times each in football and basketball. Those six meetings all have two things in common: They were all played here on Penn's campus, and they were all Wildcats victories. That's right; six big, fat losses, right in our own backyard.