As midterms creep up and the winter grows colder, it’s easy to hole up indoors and make everything about studying. Just last week, I had confined myself to a small cubicle on the 4th floor of the Reg; all I thought about was my next assignments, my upcoming exams, and the essays I had yet to write. The mounting academic pressure (mixed with the single-digit temperatures) had started to take their toll. Just as I was about ready to collapse, my phone buzzed with a message from a friend: “Catan t...

The first thing we noticed when we crept into the Ryerson basement was the scent of dry concrete and industrial musk. The old metallic scents are fitting for the basement’s low ceiling crisscrossed with pipes, its dusty floors littered with long-forgotten debris, and the hum of machinery ever-present within its aged walls. Along the corridor, forgotten classrooms hide behind worn wooden doors, and as we peer into their darkened entryways, only empty interiors and repurposed utility rooms stare...

It’s 2 a.m. on a Friday evening, and I stand outside Campus North Residential Commons with two friends. We need to get back to Woodlawn. It’s a 20-minute walk, it’s cold, it’s dark. It’s a trek none of us want to make.
As I pull up the RideSmart by Via app, UChicago’s new free rideshare system, I type in our destination and wait for a car, only to see that the closest Via is more than 15 minutes away. Refreshing the app only shows Vias with longer wait times, and tonight I’m not lucky enough to...