Sara Himeles

After the buzz about the 2008 election died down on Locust Walk, nine Penn students followed the excitement to the District of Columbia for the Washington Semester Program - the study-abroad experience only a few states away. According to some program directors and participants, the combination of a new administration and a bad economy is spurring more interest in Washington for the Washington Semester Program opportunities.

This week on Locust Walk, "vagina" is the new "register to vote." As part of a week-long campaign to eliminate a taboo and promote the play, members of The Vagina Monologues have been inundating passersby with the word "vagina" from their table outside the Penn Women's Center.

On a Sunday afternoon last month, members of The Vagina Monologues sat down for a group arts and crafts project. The assignment? Represent the Penn vagina. At the 2009 performance, those posters will be on display for the audience. The designs turned out to be "completely different" from one another, according to College senior Rachel Garber, the producer of the play at Penn.

"If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?" So asks one performer in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues - the popular play that is part of a global movement to stop violence against women and girls, now in its tenth year running at Penn. The name of that global movement is "V-Day," where "V" stands for "Victory," "Valentine" and "Vagina.

Best note-takers, worst note-takers, no-note-takers: take note. You could be making money - or making the grade - on GradeGuru.com, the file-sharing Web site that pays you to upload your notes and allows you to download the notes of your peers for free. If it sounds like an impossible business model, it's because the year-old site isn't bringing in any revenue just yet.

Penn students with internships in New York City this summer will have no guessing to do when it comes to calorie counting. With a new regulation by New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, scheduled to take effect on April 15, all New York branches of national chain restaurants must post calorie counts on their menus.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon on the high-rise fields at 40th and Walnut streets until 15 members of the Middlebury College Quidditch team pulled up in two vans. Out emerged the Quidditch players - broomsticks, bludgers, hoops and quaffles in hand - ready to share their adaptation of the Harry Potter sport, as described in J.

At 8:50 p.m. at Au Bon Pain in Huntsman Hall on March 5, the cafe's last customers watched workers empty full baskets of leftover bagels, croissants, muffins and pastries into the trash. The waste at the cafe two weeks ago was hardly a one-time event. Nursing sophomore Emily Wallhauser said she was "astounded" when she observed the routine for the first time last semester.

It's no secret that the top summer internships are often unpaid. But what's less known is that many students must pay their universities to receive the academic credit that some employers - wary of labor laws governing unpaid internships-require as a condition of the job.

Today is the day to think about love. But this Valentine's Day, some social scholars are taking a new perspective: they want to know what love means and where traditional notions of it have gone, especially on college campuses. What is love at Penn? Hard to define, if anything.