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A thumbs up to the International Roundtable’s keynote speaker Janice Gross Stein. At the fireworks-prone panel discussion on Saturday morning there were, ahem, very few fireworks. The shining moment of Roundtable came when Professor Stein gave Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation a quick history lesson after Gardiner implied that the Allies entry into the war as if to end the Holocaust rather than in their own calculated self-interest/defense. Her spirited response reminded us of one of our own: retired DeWitt Wallace Professor of History Emily Rosenberg and her response to conservative Michael Ladeen at 2004’s Rountable. We would be assured that Professor Rosenberg would have had Roosevelt’s intelligence briefings in her back pocket to prove her point to Gardiner along with a history of American historical memory rolling off her tongue. The Mac Weekly gives a nod to you, Professor Stein, and wishes Professor Rosenberg the sunniest of retirements.In a perfect world, tomorrow would be seventy degrees and sunny, the Twins would be heading to the World Series and the library wouldn’t be out close to $12,000 because someone—or something—decided to take a bunch of laptops off their hands at no charge. But it’s not a perfect world. Thumbs down to the douchebag(s) who recently stole nine laptops (and Macalester’s dignity) from a locked case in DeWitt Wallace. I’m sure the prospects of either a) lolling around listlessly for a few weeks waiting for enough people to bid on all nine of your sketchy-looking portable computers on eBay or b) running a counterfeiting/money-laundering operation out of your dorm/apartment sound like a titillating alternative to remaining a healthy citizen of the Macalester community, but taking school property for personal gain is simply a step too far. It’s not like the loss of $12,000 will deal a fatal blow to the college’s finances, but it’s the principle of the thing all the same. Even if the thief wasn’t a Macalester student—although rumors are flying that early evidence points to the incident being an inside job—stealing from an institution dedicated to education is perverse. These laptops don’t contain a bunch of Social Security numbers or some coveted secret recipe—they’re word-processing and internet-access tools that the Administration thoughtfully provides as a service to us students, and as such the person(s) who stole them could not possibly be motivated by anything other than pure petty greed. Shame on them.