Governor Sununu is considering a run for President. I have nothing bad to say about the Republican governor; in his many visits to campus, he has always treated Student Ambassadors, myself included, well. However, I question the calculus of a potential run. New Hampshire is too small to provide a sufficient donor base like that which Floridian, Texan, or New Yorker candidates can draw upon. Additionally, Governor Sununu’s national media presence is smaller than nearly every other potential candidate; letting the voters “get to know you” during the campaign is a losing strategy. With neither a sufficient donor base nor mass name recognition, I am skeptical that a Sununu 2024 campaign could get off the ground.

Amahl and the Night Visitors, produced by Senior Music Major Natalie Bender, was Saint Anselm College’s cultural life at its very best. A few short days before we began finals last semester, the Dana Center played host to the children’s opera, a story about the three Magi on their way to visit the Christ Child and their encounter with a pure-hearted shepherd boy, Amahl. The opera itself was bright and festive, appropriate for the season, and was performed deftly by students and a few professional musicians. It was great to see the opera pit in use in the college’s first ever opera.

Humanitas Magazine has recently finalized submissions, and I cannot wait to see the final product. The magazine serves a previously unmet need on campus as both a literary magazine and a showcase of student research. Spring 2023 will be Humanitas’ first issue. The magazine is edited by a multi-major team of students: Rachel Poulton, Thomas Donovan, and Emily Pender. The omnipresent James Maloney is directing marketing. Hopefully, the publication will become a SAC staple.

How many UFO sightings were Chinese spy balloons? Over the past several years, numerous “bombshell” reports of mass-UFO sightings have come out of various government apparati. The public has taken these reports as proof of little gray men, but the recent tracking (and destruction) of a Chinese spy balloon as it crossed the US begs the question; how many inexplicable blips on radar screens were wholly terrestrial and wholly explicable? As an alien skeptic, I find it quite likely that a number of Chinese incursions into US airspace were misattributed to Martians. If that is the case, why did the military not identify the incursions as such earlier? If the Chinese government regularly sent spy balloons and planes through US airspace and over our ships without US knowledge, that represents an embarrassing intelligence failure.

We fought the cold, and the cold won. Last weekend Mount Washington enjoyed the coldest windchill ever recorded in the United States. The tallest mountain east of the Mississippi is famously deadly and already holds records for the highest windspeed not attributable to a tornado. Friday night, the peak was a balmy -40 F, but wind chill, a combination of temperature and windspeed designed to approximate how a human experiences the climate, fell to -108 F. Two and a half hours south, Saint Anselm College’s campus sat at -15 F. While students seemed to weather the weather in good spirits, the same cannot be said about our physical infrastructure. A pipe burst in the Lowers laundry, collapsing the ceiling and bringing with the cascade of water, a cascade of insulation that still litters the sidewalk. As of writing, the laundry room has not been repaired, and postdiluvian Lowers is a rather inconvenient place. We have access to the LLC for laundry. Speaking of the LLC, “New Dorm” also saw some flooding. Interior sprinklers froze, inundating rooms and forcing students out at 5 AM Sunday. Lastly, the cold got the better of several apartments at Uppers. They lost heat, and Campo was doing late-night rounds to check on shivering students. I do not know if further winter-proofing is feasible, but what we do have was not quite prepared for this.