On the morning of Jan. 7, 2015, Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists armed with automatic weapons opened fire in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper. Meanwhile, I drank hot chocolate in flannel pajamas on another continent. 

Human curiosity has recently been defunded. In 2011, the Obama administration cut NASA’s budget by 20 percent. In spite of this, NASA has has achieved many accomplishments in the last year. They discovered running water on Mars this year, and, just last week, they discovered that at one point Mars had an atmosphere capable of supporting life. However, some of the more peculiar projects have been abandoned in the face of budget cuts. One of these oddities was the satellite LISA, which would have been sent to orbit the Sun and look for evidence of other universes.

When we think of movies, we inevitably think of actors first, but they are just the face of the illusion being sold to us. There is a whole crew of people making sure that the illusion around the actor’s performance is up to par.