More and more cities around the world are introducing a job at city hall known as the Night Mayor – an official tasked with cultivating nightlife while lessening negatives such as noise, vandalism, or generally rowdy behaviour disturbing residents’ lives and sleep.

Street Law is a program first introduced by Georgetown University in the United States in the early 1970s to boost professional development of its law students while passing on practical knowledge in high schools. Inspired by the project, The Faculty of Law’s Michal Urban founded a Street Law chapter at Charles University in 2009.

If you are one of the two thousand or so people who attended the První republika festival organised by Charles University (and the First Faculty of Medicine) last weekend, you probably caught sight of a poster of T.G. Masaryk, as drawn by Jaz. He is the anonymous author of Opráski sčeskí historje – an irreverent comic strip that has achieved cult status through an unusual take on Czech history and the Czech language.

One thing that most foreign students do when they begin their studies at Charles University is immerse themselves in the local culture - from the arts and live events to seeing historic sites and getting to know the pub scene and more. But another way to learn about local culture, not suprisingly, is through literature.

This August 11, Jan Palach would have been 70 years old. A student at Charles University in January 1969, 20-year-old Palach doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight at the top of Prague’s Wenceslas Square. He took the drastic decision to lay down his life as a form of protest – five months after Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia.

On the 28th of March 2018, Professor Chet Van Duzer from the Stanford University (California, US) presented the guest lecture “With Savage Pictures Fill their Gaps: Cartographer’s Fears of Blank Spaces” at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts‘ central library.

The speaker at one of the literary lecture offered in the series 'Life and Biography in the Middle Ages' on the topic of 'A Heathen King' at the Faculty of Arts on the 29th of March was Dr. Rolf Stavnem, who lectures on Nordic medieval literature and languages at the Aarhus University in Denmark.

On the 16th March 2018, and supported by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University was host to a screening of the 2012 film Peace vs Justice, followed by a Q & A with the director Klaartje Quirijns (NL).

The New Mace and Ceremonial Gown exhibit held from the 19th January until 20th February 2018 in the Cloister of the Karolinum, the central point of Charles University nestled in the centre of Prague, showcased the Faculty of Social Sciences new ceremonial mace and gown. The ceremonial mace plays an important role in the graduation and matriculation of Charles University students; students lay their fingers on the mace to honour their commitment and loyalty to the University.

In the final of a series of lectures on approaches to ‘Classical Hollywood’, Prof. Richard Maltby focussed on the production, distribution and exhibition of entertainment films on an industrial scale. During the lecture Warner Bros film, Jezebel (1938, Director William Wyler), was showed as an example of the role of ‘star vehicles’ in Classical Hollywood’s system.