With all eyes fixated on her kind but piercing gaze, the overflowing room quieted as 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi stepped to the podium and addressed the audience.

With a crown of tousled grey hair on his head, a shroud of rainbow-stripes on his shoulders, and a large plastic fuchsia ring twisting around his left middle finger, legendary physics professor Walter H. G. Lewin set down his piece of dull yellow chalk for the last time, marking the completion of his final lecture at MIT.

For those of you who are hosed with psets, are busy promenading awesome prefrosh around, or have particularly short attention spans, I can summarize the long-awaited Strokes album Angles with a quick Facebook-centric anecdote, generated in the weeks leading to the album’s official release this past March:

What once was an empty lobby at the Vassar entrance of Stata — a large space, industrial white, washed with natural-light, but shrouded in concrete — is now filled with MIT’s newest addition to it’s public art collection. The new art piece, left untitled, is created by Anish Kapoor, a London-based artist who is most famous for his Chicago piece <i>Cloud Gate</i> (resembling a giant chrome kidney-bean). Filling the once-empty space his new oversized sculpture: a massive sheet of ultra-polish stainless steel, curved like a melted sheet of glass, diffracting light of the nearby skylight. Herds of tourists stop by each day, pausing in front of Kapoor’s piece to photograph their distorted reflections.

With aviator sunglasses hiding her eyes, lips painted fire-engine red, crystals dripping down her neck, and platinum blonde hair whisked to the side, the world-famous pop singer and recording artist Lady Gaga made a guest appearance to the MIT campus last Wednesday.

On June 10, Nora O. Hickey ’12 sent an email to President Susan J. Hockfield and copied all the dormitory lists, urging MIT to take a more active role in the recent BP oil spill.

With bubbles floating through the air and peace signs diffusing through the crowd at a rate that would have impressed even Robert Brown, the flower children of Boston made a comeback at the first of 103.3 WODS’s Free Summer Concert Series on June 19, featuring the wildly popular 70’s funk band, War.

On June 8, President Barack Obama formally nominated MIT School of Engineering dean, Subra Suresh ScD ’81, to act as the next director of the National Science Foundation.

This week, the New York Times reported on escalating unrest among Chinese factory workers, who complain of long hours, miserable management and little pay. Many are striking to demand higher wages, shutting down major factories in what the Times calls a labor “contagion.”

“If anyone asks us what we’re doing,” said Yu-Pu Wang, a first year graduate student studying chemistry here at MIT, “just tell them the truth.”