I never really pay attention to a movie’s rating. When I see a trailer, I direct my attention to the story or familiar actors, and then determine whether I would be willing to spend seven dollars to go see it. We are all familiar with the ratings system, which was constructed by the Motion Picture Association of America.

Based on the novel by legendary journalist and eccentric Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary could be considered a sort of prequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), which was an adaptation of another Thompson novel. Johnny Depp plays the lead role in both films; in The Rum Diary he plays Thompson’s alter ego, a journalist named Paul Kemp and in Fear and Loathing , he embodied the journalist himself.

As a college student, I find myself not eating out much. It happens on occasion—mostly for a friend’s birthday—but it’s never a spontaneous event. As a senior, I’ve been finding out that I am missing a lot by not occasionally indulging in a night out to eat and that there are tons of restaurants in the Pioneer Valley that I need to try before I graduate in the spring.

Last Friday, local indie rock band Darlingside played their final local show at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton before heading to a studio to record their first official album.

It started out as a favor for a friend who wanted to direct a play for her senior project in high school. Since her first play at Hampshire Regional High School had been well received, Bailly Morse ’14 was more than happy to oblige.

I remember hearing about Mount Holyoke’s production of The Vagina Monologues during the spring of my freshman year. I was weary of attending because I was a naïve, shy first-year, and despite the fact that I was attending a women’s college, I was, frankly, embarrassed. The title in itself was intimidating. For me, I felt like it was as a personal thing. Why would anyone want to make a play about that? So, I decided not to go, but afterwards I felt I had missed out on something important. This spring, I told myself that I would go. I had to see what was behind this cultural phenomenon.

I stumbled upon it almost by accident. While browsing MuggleNet.com, the #1 Harry Potter fan-site in the world, looking for any new clips or behind-the-scenes news about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I, the tagline of a post caught my eye: Follow a new Harry Potter reader experiencing the books for the first time. The link took me to a blog where Mark, a Harry Potter series virgin, blogged about his thoughts as he read the books chapter by chapter. Yes: Chapter. By. Chapter.

On a brisk Friday afternoon on Nov. 5, the peace and quiet of a lovely fall afternoon was broken for those who dared to take a step near the common room of Wilder. From that room, the sounds of shrieking, slapping, singing and Shakespeare verbatim echoed throughout the first floor.

It was about mid-July when I finally gave in and purchased The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Every time I dared to enter a bookstore, the New York Times best-selling trilogy by Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) seemed to attack me from all angles: in hardback copies, paperback copies, and those little travel-size copies, all with their brightly-colored covers—Dragon Tattoo is yellow, Played with Fire is (fittingly) orange, and Hornet’s Nest is a flashy, reflective silver—strategically placed by the entrance of the store so they were the first things you laid your eyes on when you walked in.

The trailer for this summer’s highly anticipated film “Eat, Pray, Love” was irresistible. Its bright colors and shots of everyone’s favorite it-girl Julia Roberts among the backdrops of Italy, India and Indonesia interspersed with philosophical quotes about again-“finding one’s appetite for life” seemed like an infallible recipe for success.