It is the smell: acidic and biting. It is knowing that the Los Angeles air does not need to be any worse. It is the small number of Occidental students and staff members who blow smoke at the rest of the campus. It is in everyone's best interests that Occidental bans tobacco smoking on campus. The Student Wellness Advisory Committee...

Occidental staff, students and professors alike have puzzled over the small, freestanding new building by the Academic Commons. But today at 5 p.m., the mystery will be over. Students who pay a visit to the building will find that it is actually the award-winning Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), hosting a wooden sculpture exhibit. OxyArts Director Aandrea Stang arranged...

Katie Gibbs is the "iron woman" on the Occidental women's water polo team this year in more ways than one. In a literal sense, she often plays iron woman, which means going an entire game of her physically demanding sport without a sub. Moreover, she is the only captain, and she sets a powerful example in and out of the...

The Occidental women's lacrosse team kicked off the second round of SCIAC regular season play with a narrow win against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) April 2 after having lost their first game against CMS at the beginning of the season. With less than two minutes left in the game, co-captain Alida Beck (senior) scored the winning goal, breaking a tie to bring...

Pedestrians walking along Eagle Rock Boulevard Monday night likely noticed the smell of frying oil, warm cheese and curry wafting from the parking lot of All Star Lanes bowling alley. The band of aromas came from about eight food trucks ringing the lot. In the middle, vendors sold wares including jewelry, cake pops and clothing. A DJ set the tone...

A girl in her late teens lets a boy lead her upstairs at a party. She has had several drinks; she cannot remember how many. She cannot remember checking in with any of her friends for at least an hour. The boy leads her into an empty room and starts touching her in the dark. The girl feels suddenly overwhelmed,...

A new Residential Education and Housing Services (REHS) policy now requires resident advisors (RAs) to perform all three evening weekend rounds of residence halls in pairs, according to a Feb. 20 email from Associate Director for Residential Education Juls White to RAs. White hopes the change will make RAs more comfortable performing this job, which involves walking through and checking...

The universal translator from "Star Trek," the babelfish from "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" and a real human interpreter are a few of the things to which the Skype Translator has been compared. Released to a limited amount of users in December as a prototype, it provides instant audio translation between English and Spanish and text translation between over...

Honor Board voted 3-2 Tuesday against a proposal to increase student body fees by $7 to fund the proposed Diversity and Equity Board (DEB). The board came to the decision after learning that the Associated Students of Occidental College (ASOC) Senate could provide the funding from a savings account it controls, according to Honor Board Chair Siri Guntupalli (junior). Honor...

Languages die in stages. Barring natural disasters and plagues, a dying language slowly becomes a minority in a region, its speakers become bilingual with the dominant language, and finally they stop speaking it altogether. A language is lost somewhere in the world approximately every two weeks. Each takes with it a piece of a culture, and beyond that knowledge that...