Whenever Americans recall Somalia, whether considering lofty foreign policy aims or simply reflecting upon the chance encounter with the name, our minds inevitably snap back to October 3, 1993 and the tragedy that was the Battle of Mogadishu. This is a memory of eighteen U.S. soldiers lying senselessly dead and desecrated, one even decapitated, in the streets of a hostile city. Given the striking clarity with which Black Hawk Down has memorialized the chaos and the horror of this battle, it is no surprise that the trauma remains fresh in our collective consciousness. At the time, the shock of this loss and the seemingly intractable and inhuman belligerence and disorder of the nation compelled the U.S. and all other foreign forces to withdraw. Somalia did not fit with the spirit of the times, the notions of how intervention and aid was to be conducted. After 1993, Somalia dropped off the map of U.S. foreign policy, relegated to a distasteful and repressed memory, and no one has been able to make a great case for a return.

Hillary Clinton is a brilliant, paranoid bitch. Barack Obama is clever but arrogant. The less said about John Edwards, the better—ditto for his wife, Elizabeth. Okay, fine: she’s an “abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman.”

With the help of the French, the veil—also known more accurately in various forms as the burqa, hijab or niqab—has conquered both the bra and the bikini as the world’s most contentious piece of women’s apparel.

The headlines make it obvious: banks are now earning record profits while the national unemployment rate hovers near ten percent. The clichéd “Wall Street vs. Main Street” dichotomy has become embedded in our political vernacular.

For those who campaign for stricter limits on how and where guns may be acquired and used, the new legal challenges will create troublesome delays, if not outright roadblocks.

When I moved to New York City last year to attend Columbia University, I knew that finding housing would be a challenge; after three weeks of frustration, I finally managed to find an acceptable studio apartment one mile north of campus. What I didn’t know was that the apartment was available because the previous tenant had recently leapt to his death out of the 15th-story window. That element of surrealism would foreshadow some of my sociological experiences in the new building.

On Jan. 28, in the aftermath of the unprecedented mass demonstrations of late December in which millions of protesters challenged riot police in running street battles, the Iranian government publicly hanged Mohammad Reza Ali-Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour.

It’s on roughly a third of all laptops in any given lecture hall, and one of your suitemates is, I guarantee, playing it right now. A Columbia student recently featured on the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire website revealed to the Spec his study habits: “I just did a lot of Sporcle and hoped for the best.” Welcome to the world that Sporcle has created.

It was morning in America—and Harry Reid was already having a bad day. Below is a day in the mind of the Senate Majority Leader.

By some divine coincidence, we’ve all somehow landed ourselves here in Morningside Heights together. Each of us, once belonging to vastly different worlds, has come to inhabit the same space just a few weeks ago hurling snowballs at each other and now sharing the same anxieties about midterms. But sometimes even the best of friends forget that, even though we share many of the same concerns and inside jokes in the present, every one of us brings our own bizarre pasts to this equally bizarre institution called college.