Essayist John D’Agata read from his latest book, “About a Mountain,” to a crowd of about 60 people in the English department’s McCormack Family Theater Thursday night. D’Agata, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, merges ordinarily separate literary techniques, such as fictional storytelling, reporting and personal anecdotes, together into a book that a Los Angeles Times review described as a “meditation on post-millennial issues.”

While many students feel like they’ve spent their entire undergraduate careers in a library, for Brown librarians such as Gayle Lynch, a senior library specialist at the John Hay Library, the libraries have been home for half their lives.

Last November, Christopher Unseth ‘11.5 made a decision that many Brown students reach at some point — he decided to go off meal plan. Unlike most of his Ratty-weary peers, Unseth decided to document his food forays beyond meal plan. He said his blog was partially inspired by “Ratty Gourmet,” a blog begun last semester by twins Annie Wu ’13 and Connie Wu ’13.

Dow Travers ’12 was competing in a race for the Brown ski team, just days before he headed to Vancouver to compete in the giant slalom — the first athlete to represent the Cayman Islands in the Winter Olympics.

Bourbon is likely to cause worse hangovers than vodka, though both are equally likely to impair cognitive functions in the morning, according to a new study by Professor of Community Health Damaris Rohsenow.

Providence Public Schools recently finished the first round of community meetings to update their Facilities Master Plan, drawing on comments from parents and community members to craft a set of recommendations to improve the school system’s facilities.

The Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education voted last week to increase tuition and fees at state public colleges for the 2010-2011 school year.

The University is working to gain accreditation from the Council on Education for Public Health to expand the current master’s in public health program into a Brown School of Public Health.

Though more than 200,000 heroin addicts are incarcerated every year in the United States, many prisons still lack pharmaceutical treatment for opiate addiction, according to a new study by researchers from Miriam Hospital, Brown University and their cooperative Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights.

Nighttime satellite images of Earth may provide nuanced measurements of economic growth. According to a new working paper by Professors of Economics J. Vernon Henderson and David Weil and graduate student Adam Storeygard, analyzing changes in an area’s “night lights” could be a new means of measuring gross domestic product.