The Harvard Advocate's Winter 2009 issue, themed Archives, is now available in or around your dining hall. But before you grab a copy with your hangover tomorrow morning, check out this brief rundown.

One of the coolest features is an 8-page spread of selected Advocate covers dating back to 1866. Other offerings include nostalgia-laced reflections on adolescence and pop music, a time-capsulated historical society, stories about longing, and enigmatic, ecstatic verse (would any issue be complete without it?).

Highlights, alternative quotes, after the jump.

"I don't have to sneak out of people's houses anymore, and I don't get grounded for staying out late. But fear and magic are partners, and one disappears with the other. I learned this riding the lawnmower, with headphones." -"Pop Adolescence" by Richard Beck

"The urgency with which the act of preservation had to be approached sets the mission of the Swift River Valley Historical Society apart from other historical societies: if you were confronted with the imminent destruction of everything you knew, what parts would you take away so that the whole could be remembered?" -"Drowned Towns" by Ben Cosgrove

"He began to feel a sense of urgency. At $100, it was a steal. He wished the shop window were made of lead, so that no passing stranger could witness its discounted shame. Someone would realize it was beautiful, someone would take it away. He had exactly fifty dollars." -"The Buddha" by Maria Xia

"'Ten.' Some people started counting down. 'Nine.' Two buttons of his shirt were open at the collar. 'Eight.' He looked professional and clean. He was tan and blond with with lots of gold hair on his arm. 'Seven.' she wondered if he thought they might. 'Six.' She bet she probably could." -"Orchids" by Carolyn Gaebler

"Plato mistook the good for the sun,

that day in Amsterdam the clouds parted,

you leapt up from the war memorial and

the world had been given back

finally. You heard of people lost their eyes this way."

-"South Pole Station" by Abram Kaplan

"It should of course be obvious by now that the cartographic epistemic system functions in a role closely related to the cognitive task of memory, serving in part as an external memory storage system and in part as a system encoding previously completed cognitive actions. The 'memory content' of the map is greater than the knowledge of either the user or the creator...." -"Cartography and Memory" by Alexander Fabry

Fabry, Gaebler, and Xia are also Crimson editors.